Ibb the conversation is the talking cure and the feeling connections of the digital age compensation is the talking cure. Its been a recent confusion in peoples minds and big literature between compassion and empathy or even were even saying that empathy is kind of old school and compassion is the new we feel compassion for things that are far away and we are feeling for them that empathy is the ability when you are with someone to really put yourself in their place and that is what you are trying to you can cover distant events by saying my god, a flood, compassion. But really to do your job as a journalist, scholar, citizen i think we need practice in talking to each other and compassion in that sense of understanding of not being judgmental but as students we are training really happened to have that many conversations when they come to us. In theory the need to start talk to each other. With that, please join me in thanking the professor. [applause] [inaudible conversations] many of the programs here at the Society Spring from the wealth of information discovered by researchers in the collection and its amazing what territory people have been over in many things will produce the eyes of a new researcher and interest of any researcher and this is certainly an example tonight. While researching the earlier book about the stanley history the speaker this evening was sent a remarkable letter written by Alexander Hammill ten and said to the great, great grandfather this letter was written in ip for hamilton wrote across the hudson to the dueling ground to the last letter hamilton never wrote it is on display at the front here with other related material and we invite you to see it after the program. While this letter has a little appreciated by historians, a speaker has come to believe that more than any other single document that describes hamiltons recent risk for ending his own life. The weather became the inspiration for the book that we will learn more about tonight. And that book was the war of two and in a recent review the boston globe said he writes eloquently and sketches with great compassion both brilliant, selfcreated hamilton and boundless ambition and equally brilliant and american aristocrat private, composed of contradictions. I think many of you are familiar with the speaker tonight. He spoke here before and has written several books including the memoir in my blood and articles for publications such as the atlantic, gq, newsweek and esquire and he was nominated for a National Magazine award for a story on the countrys finest nonprofit organization. Did we make it into the article . Anyway. [laughter] [applause] thank you very much. The glare of pure is wonderful. [laughter] i feel terrific to be addressing this multitude than to imagine the multitude cspan is going to reach even beyond the walls here is staggering for me. Im also reminded as i see there is a famous adage that they would much rather hear a lecture about having then visited themselves. [laughter] and i think its in that spirit that ive gotten you all to turn out tonight. I hope that this is heavenly lets see. Okay. Dennis of course has stolen all of my thunder. I have really nothing left to say. But i will underscore what peter has asked me to say which is that the letter that is the source and dust out of all of this wisdom of my disappear on the case and you really should look at it. Its just a marble to see and i will talk about it more when i get into what i have to say that its the whole beauty and privilege of this institution is these documents are here to touch and theres nowhere else you can go. The internet just doesnt do this, to actually make contact with the past in this fashion is so rare and wonderful and so inspiring for the writers and scholars that i want to pay tribute to this institution above all others. Its number one in all nonprofits. To elaborate a little bit, it was years ago i was doing the book about the history of my family waiting through a not all that some of the select papers from the sedgwick family that are stored here making it one of the largest family collections in the nations. And at the end of it, he was telling me that there was a letter that i really should see it as outside the scope of what i was working on at the time but he said we have this one on display upfront. Its a sort of whispering way that he said it did of course captured and held my attention and she brought me over to this letter and pointed to it and of course it was the way he told it it was just a letter. So i looked down at this letter with once black ink and not because it was written and grounded because it has turned brown over time so what youre seeing is the age of it by its coloration and so he says take a look and i look at it and to handover the i hand over the keys and beat up new york, july 10, 1804. I have received two letters from you since we last saw each other being the 24th of may. Ive had in hand for some time a long letter to you explaining iv with the course and tendency of our politics and my intentions to my own future conduct of about my plan embraced a larger range but only to so much some in Different Health and a growing distaste for politics the letter is still considerably short being finished. I write this now to satisfy you that regard hasnt been the cause of my silence. [inaudible] but in the night before he was shot by the sitting Vice President aaron burr in 1804, an event henry adams called the single most traumatic moment in the politics of the early republic. A good friend and legislative ally theodore sedgwick. Of course, the name was scrolled and a staggering. Id known about the letter but weather but id never seen it. He was my great, great grandfather, lawyer and politician, the founder of the branch of the sedgwick family. He built a fine federal style house still owned by the family any place i go regularly and have barely been killed in the rebellion that took him as a rich lawyer and one of its more detestable targets. He helped push hamiltons economic agenda through the house when he was a representative from massachusetts to become speaker of the house for the faithful election of 1800 that rested the control away from the Federalist Party and turned it over to Thomas Jefferson as referred to in the antichrist and republican as he thought about it much to hamiltons distrust the door had tried to steer the election to a friend from the berkshires whom he assumed would be more malleable politically. His uncle Timothy Edward had gone to live in stockbridge in the house although strictly across the street. Theodore had been one of the very few politicians that remained a trusted friend of both men which is why hamilton was writing to him and we will get back to that letter but its taken out of context. It would likely High Expectations which is why hamilton crossed the hudson and in a few choice sentences he offered another explanation into better prediction of what was to come. Thats my contention. Ive always been interested in the letter of a dead man because hamilton writes the letter, gets shot, comes back to the guys the dies the next day. What happens to the letter, who mailed it and how was it neil and then when theodore gets it, does he know this has been written by a man that is now dead . Which news traveled faster and we dont know the answer to any of these except we do know this but theodore never responded to the letter and there was no one to respond to the letter. When earlier members encounter that they could see it valued for their worthy underlined quotations. They all conveyed the same message this letter must be preserved. That was the start of it. To be honest, i didnt think my god ive god ive got to write about this. It was just one of those little tidbits that a writer writes away to come back to. The memoir came out and i wrote a couple of her books one of them on why People Choose another great benefit of times and i was starting to get a little bored as if this was all there was and nothing had come before. It was like this glittering pond with the book i had come down to the shore and now i felt i was ready to take a swim. Coming from a historic family and having them the done the memoir i already have a feel for the past. I thought i was ready to take on those federalists and theyre buckled shoes. Ive done many things that im a journalist without a single inclination. To be honest i wasnt interested and history per se but in the stories that collectively make up the past, stories of large personality and dramatic conflict of character expressed through action and if i was lucky to the psychological dimension of my protagonists in. Ive always felt that psychology gets a short drift in history as a great event or not a squirrel of conflicting emotion like everyone else and their deeds didnt come out of these depths as much as by historical circumstance. If history is a mystery to me it wasnt who done it but why. I was intrigued by the notion that politics turn personal. An assassination perhaps . Something explosive. Kennedy, lincoln, garfield, theyve all been done. A terrible to sort through history this way. But then i remembered the letter. For all of the supposed aim it wasnt a shirt memory for anyone i knew of or for a matter easy familiarity. This was the famous musical for Alexander Hamilton lived in some obscurity and aaron burr was worse than that. Many people were not exactly sure who killed who, let alone why or where or how. There are wormholes in history. Little magical chutes that connect the present with the past with extraordinary immediate fee. I think thats the whole purpose of this institution. To make those connections and make it immediate and felt. This is the book for me. It can be easily understood if you look at where he was called danger. They published his remarks in the paper was founded by hamilton himself just three years before. Eventually, they happen upon it. At this point he was the sitting Vice President. He had two illegitimate children. Jefferson had dubbed him as his vp for the next election. In the famous election of 1800 when he took 36 hundred balance. For was able to say what everyone already knew. He didnt say a word about it to anyone. Thats the kind of guy he was. This is the presidency. Hamilton, despite an early advantage, he lost by the widest margin in the short history of gubernatorial elections in new york. He called out hamilton wanting to know what doctor kuebler means. [inaudible] hamilton was in a bind. He could scarcely deny he used the word angst or he meant anything of it. In every election he had been saying so since 1792. He became rather shrill on the subject. He tried to wiggle that away by saying there is despicable and despicable and who is to say . Burr would have none of it. They would resolve their differences and that would be enough. Its interesting that to lawyers are doing this because the hairsplitting on both sides in the fineness of arguments and the gotcha moment is hit with the gotcha counter. They go through one by one by one the slow steady process and each one is a desperate attempt attempt it was quite something to say. I dual is like a romantic courtship in that it has its etiquette too. It just goes the other way. Not adjoining, but a parting. The intimacy and spacing is familiar. The two parties are not sidebyside at the altar but facing each other, close close enough to see into each others eye. To discern any gratifying hints of distress and then instead of i do, it presents what could be the last word of any of them. Bang bang. Or in this case bang, bang. Hamilton is struck on the right side and it hit his liver. He died with his wife and children grieving around his bed. Hamiltons life was over but in some ways it just began. Like christ, he rose again from the dead to assume the place in American History that he never would have attained if he would have died quietly at age 80 as burr did. It was a triumph of political spin. His team was able to sell the idea that bang, bang meant that hamilton was a murder victim, not the loser in a duel. Since this was a political matter, hamilton was assassinated, a martyr. Hamilton had never shot to kill. He fired frantically in the air after he was shot. They even retrieve the branch overhead that claim to have been severed by hamilton. They argued that the whole thing went down quite differently. Hamilton had indeed thrown away his firearm as he said he would in his distaste for doing. Remember, three years years before, hamilton son had been killed in a duel. They use the very same guns that hamilton was using. It could be argued and had been argued that he fell into despond asleep if not outright depression that led to the stool as a suicide by dual rather than just a duel. But in any case, he did not shoot birth. Burr couldnt tell that he tried to miss but the rules said that hamilton could not fire again until burr took his shot. So burr took his time. He aimed and fired. Whatever the explanation, he was not a hero but indicted by murder. He traveled in disguise after he was forced to leave the city. He was escaping the newspaper men who sought to out him. The sitting Vice President , joe biden, hard to picture. I know what youre thinking. Wouldnt it be nice if our present politicians could resolve their differences so easily. [laughter] whether its bang bang or bang, bang, bang, its over quickly without the terrible lingering of our own political controversy like the one going on between marco rubio and jeb bush. Perhaps you been read reading about it. No bickering or tweets, just bang. It has its appeal. The thing thats marvelous about dual is that its very decisive. Its binary, up, up or down, in or out, dead or alive, bang. Its over. In fact, that is one of the reasons why in times of war, the duels are actually welcome between officers because otherwise they would have to go through the judicial process of Court Marshals that could be very elaborate and take forever, and so they duel. They were fairly good at it being soldiers and so on they went, or one of them did. Where you go down one there layer further. Ion is why did thy duel . Thats a matter so long gone from contemporary life that we hardly even recognize it. Like some strange artifact dug up under a subway line for anthropologists to puzzle over. Honor. It all depended on something called honor. Anybody heard of it . Anybody seen honor in this city, any city . Not too much. Its gone. No one has honor anymore, certainly no politician, and certainly not honor he would die to defend. Honor was everything to the Political Class of 18 hundreds. It was pride, masculinity, lineage and a hundred other things. It was their brand except he was a product of a lifetime, not the calculation of marketers. It was everything they imagined and they stood for in life. They would sooner surrender their man hood then surrender their honor. No words can convey how threatening that was when burr called hamilton out on it, he was doing the same. It was time for an interview as they called at the dueling ground. The suspense. Now, how could these two inside players have gotten into such as to sticky situation in the first place. Not why did they hate . Why did they hate so recklessly . They knew where the tripwire was the make stepping closer to it. It took me me almost 400 pages to explain, but the short of it is the two words that point to maximum tension between sameness and differences. Hamilton was an immigrant from the west indian island. For was a near aristocrat. He was the grandson of the most celebrated theologian of the day, Jonathan Edwards and the closest colonial america could come to a rock star. It goes on from there. The differences push them apart at a separate realm but the similarities brought them together. Besides being both short, about 56 5foot 6 inches and short, they were both brilliant and artistic articulate, educated, ambitious, handsome and attracted to the ladies. The differences, hamilton was quick to dash off a 10000 word treatise in the afternoon. He couldnt help himself. He always had to tell the truth. It was crippling. Burr was covert, a man of few wos and few of them written down. Many of them in code. He was the most hidden man imaginable hamilton was a man of powerful ideology. It formed the First Political party and inspired the second then there was this, politically politically the United States was a small place. Its amazing how small it was. If you were to look at america as late as 1800, most of it was green. Little specks of it where this cleared land, urban centers of which there were like four and they were not urban centers that we would recognize. This was little tiny dots in the wilderness. That was america back then. These guys were two of the greatest men in it. For that reason, they couldnt escape each other. Wherever they turned, there they were. In revolution or law or politics , it was all the same story. Because of their talent and ambition, they both rose in power and prominence. The reaches of power are inverted. Eventually, there was not room for both of them. They could not escape each other. They were two wolves in a tight cage. It was all things. Then theres this other part of it. These were men who were, for the first time in their lives, not on the rise anymore. They had tipped. First hamilton and member. Hamilton, he was never a politically successful man for himself. He was elected only to assembly men twice in new york. But he was a kingmaker but he was not a kingmaker anymore. All of his people were leaving. He just had a catastrophic affair revealed to the nation and it was an embarrassment. Then burr had just been dumped as Vice President and fallen as governor. They were both men on the decline. Men who had been rising are dangerous when they start to fall. I think thats another aspect to this. Theres much more to it beyond that. I want to swerve into the present to answer the question that authors face which is who cares . What does this story have to say about us today . The answer of course is, everything, because i dont know if you been reading about this political divide, the republican and democrat t party and its a fractious lot that hamilton wouldve recognized very well. Also we have examples with people without any conviction whatsoever. That is a kind of person that hamilton would recognize as well. These are constant issues in a democracy as to how much to trust the people to make wise choices. How much to insist that the Real Intelligence of the society is concentrated at the top. Its always the few versus the many. For hamilton, it was the few that he trusted. It was the elite that he trusted. He thought they were smarter and better and more sensible, and now of course, in a dry mechanic age that we havent trusted our society correctly to the people, but it seems at times the people can let us down. They can either not vote or vote for others who make things worse. These are similar issues. There is also something called hamilton the musical. I hope you either have seen it or are about to see or promise yourself you will see before the decade is out because they are taking ticket orders for next january. Plan your life accordingly. Its so interesting to see the musical because it shows that hamilton is still very pertinent but its a different hamilton from the one that i recognize. Hes going to show them, thats not really hamilton. Hamilton to me is this ideological person who was running countries and getting them all set up. He was a big thinker and he wasnt quite so scrappy. That said, its wonderful to see the years of t Founding Fathers so invoked as they are in a crazy way by that musical. Its a hiphop musical. Its this incredible inversion by which the founders are portrayed by actors of color but they capture the founders better than any more literal portrait can do. The founders themselves, white was the default color. Everyone they knew was white. Now whiteness is a political statement. Its about entitlement and nostalgia and it takes color to get back to the original normal to the country that was all immigrants. You get the sense of the craziness and the dancing and a period of time where everything was new. Too often we look back at this time and we think this was all done in marvel and everyone had this extreme confidence of the Jefferson Memorial and its and you dont have to read much to understand thats not how it was. One lesson of the duel is that governments are made up of men. Men are not always reliable. The founders were brilliant but they could be foolish and headstrong and narrowminded. Hamilton could be all of these amber even more so. It was largely luck that if the individuals were in balance, the group group was not. I would say one of the reasons why the Founding Fathers were successful was the number of George Washington who is one of the most serene amateur individuals that ive ever run across in history. But for him, all the squabbling children would have torn the place apart. Im always surprised to when i talk about this book how few people ever ask me anything about poor aaron. Its like the hamilton show and theres no burr in it. Measured in hamiltons terms, burr weighs less than zero. There are things we can talk about but not many. I will confess, i found him much more fascinating than hamilton. If there was a dinner party and i had a chance to sit next to burr or hamilton i would huddle up to burr every night. He would tell you stuff that would curl what hair you have. As milton discovered, satan is the one you watch. So remember he did not write hamilton. He wrote burr. Hamilton can be too earnest, too clever, too bright to be too much fun. He can be a slacker and burr can become a welcome relief. I find his last year after the duel to become quite moving. Afterwards, whe isn hen exile in europe and down to his last dollar and trying to decide whether to spend it on bread or a prostitute, and deciding the prostitute. Now that letter to theodore. And then ill love to take some questions. Three things are struggling by all means do look at this. Its striking. Its amazing to me that he couldve written anything was in the least bit coherent about saving his worst enemy with a gun in the morning. Second, its great penmanship. You have to admire that. Third its vitally casual. As the letter goes on, it gets deeper and this is what dennis was referring to. Despite the circumstances, hamilton did not refer to burr by name. But the illusion is unmistakable when he declares that it would break his heart if the country were dismembered. At the time, burr had been linked to the socalled northern conspiracy to break the New England States and free the union as a separate country to be headed up by amber. That never materialized but bird did embark on going after the Louisiana Purchase for a private empire. That was the most Dangerous Campaign up until the civil war. That led to jeffersons charges of treason against burr, placing, placing burr in the opposition of having killed the head of one party and possibly to be killed by the head of the other. Hard to pull off. In the letter to hamilton he had truly an awkward reference from the founder of the republic. The democracy was not the term we have now where universal franchise is revered but contains a specter of an ignorant electorate that was open to manipulation by the unscrupulous. It was closer to Something Like demagoguery. He was the demagogue in question. He believed in nothing. If this was so, it offers an interesting look at the standards of account. It wasnt personal or him matter of honor, it was in first of battle in a war that hamilton was waging against burr and all he stood for to learn about hamilton and burr is to learn about america. Also about emotions that are always teeming under the surface of great leaders. Jealousy, ego insecurity, ambition, these are the passions that make people who they are. And a coward for what they do. To identify them and trace their source and to see their consequence, that is i think the real work of history. Thats what i sought to capture in my book. Thank you so much [applause]. Id be happy if theres time and if youre interested in my doing this to take questions. Easy ones first and the more difficult ones later when im warmed up. Yes you with the wonderful necktie. If you knew that he didnt really want to try to kill burr and he knew burr was a vindictive man, why doesnt the suicide argument meant make a lot of sense . It does make a lot of sense. As you say. I think one of the thing that happened in the duel is that people dont, in the heat of the moment truly think it through. I also think that sometimes what can happen when youre deeply depressed or in morning is that youre incapable of making a sensible choice. That there are many things that hamilton, can people pick up on this if the mic is down here . Is that better i dont want the people in iowa in california not to be able to hear me. I think he wasnt thinking clearly quite honestly. I think in some ways i hadnt thought of it until this moment but theres something delusional about the letter. Hey, i got your letter. I just have a few minutes here and i have to off the letter. Its like he had no idea that this is a important time for him. History is unfair because he doesnt know whats about to happen but he does know its going to be a bad situation with him and burr and two guns. To answer the question, i think there clearly you cant enter a duel without a suicidal impulse because the chances are decent that youre going to get shot. So you have to have that on your mind. I will say, and then i dont want to monopolize this but i find it staggering that anybody could engage in this. If id had a copy of my book which i dont have, i would read a little passage just describing what it was like but the thing is, they stood stood like this. They stood sideways. In order to minimize their outline, they wore a cape to to make it unclear whether actual body was. They put their shoulder up like this to try to protect their chin all to no effect. Theyre just 10 yards apart. Its only out of this wild anxiety which is natural in the moment that people are unable to aim and shoot, but the whole thing is just so strange that its hard to think of it in logical terms. Anything else . You have to use the microphone. Do you think that hamilton giving away his shot thought that burr would give away his shot . You no, i think that is a very good idea but you would think he would Say Something about it. Because it may just look like gunfire to him and it did. Again, its all about the craziness of this set up of honor going berserk and people feeling such a monumental desire to defend something that is abstract to everybody else but them. I think thats the setup for some rather inconsistent behavior. Again, think about it. What standard of honor can you kill somebody . Are they not any actual threat to you . Its really, you cant get in the heads of these people, but, but looking at it from where we do, this is bizarre. Its hard for a bizarre situation like that to untangle its logic because we just cant see it. We cant grasp fundamental motivation, at least i can. I can describe it or discuss it but i cant get it and i could never place myself in that situation. I dont think anybody in this room could either. I use betsy in the book, she was the
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