The Chronicle of Higher Education
  September 14, 2001

SECTION: RESEARCH & PUBLISHING; Pg. 16

HEADLINE: 'I Was a Teenage Hamiltonian'

BYLINE: JEFF SHARLET

DATELINE: New Haven

BODY:
True loves and also-rans have come and gone in Joanne Freeman's life, but there has really only ever been one man: Alexander Hamilton.

When she was a girl, Ms. Freeman's father, a marketer for the movies, often took her and her siblings onto sets to see Hollywood in action. The young Ms. Freeman could hardly be bothered. America's first secretary of the treasury was to her far more fascinating than movie stars. At age 12, she had encountered Hamilton in a kids' biography of John Adams. Not long after, she saw him embodied in a PBS miniseries (also about Adams), as a caricature of villainy. "He wore a black cape, and he stared at himself in the mirror," remembers Ms. Freeman, now a historian at Yale University and the author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press, September), a landmark study of Hamilton and the founders. "They made Hamilton look like Snidely Whiplash,"she says. Even as an adolescent, Ms. Freeman recognized character-typing when she saw it. She wanted the real story. So she read one biography after another until she had exhausted the resources of her local library. They had only one more thing to offer her, certainly too dull for a little girl: Hamilton's complete papers, in 27 volumes. They misjudged her. One by one, throughout junior high, then high school, Ms. Freeman took the books home, telling no one of her obsession lest they think her, well, obsessed. At times, she read under the covers. When she wasn't reading, she hid the books beneath her bed.

Petite, pretty, with curly brown hair and a propensity for biting the tip of her tongue when she smiles that makes her even now seem like a member of a high-school pep squad, Ms. Freeman was never marked as a history geek. She had friends and she dated boys, and she could talk about movies with insider knowledge. No one ever knew about her true leading man. "It was just between him and me," she says. "I was a teenage Hamiltonian."

If founding-father mania were to be understood as akin to Chinese astrology, with this the year of Adams (as brought to us by the best-selling author David McCullough), preceded by that of Jefferson, Ms. Freeman was born under the sign of Hamilton. She feels destined to labor on behalf of the memory of a man who disdained democracy, admired kings, longed for a standing army, and believed that the business of government was helping businessmen.

Conservatives consider Hamilton a hero, and despite her vaguely liberal politics, Ms. Freeman is happy to keep company with them. But she does not intend her book as a defense of Hamilton. "If anything," she says, "it's a bit of a rehabilitation of Burr." As in Aaron Burr, the former vice president who shot and killed Hamilton in a duel at dawn on July 11, 1804. The contest between Burr and Hamilton, both of whose political careers were then in sharp decline, has long been characterized as the irrational behavior of angry men, Burr intent on killing Hamilton, who had insulted him and whom he blamed for his failures, and Hamilton motivated by an embittered death wish. "The logic of both men's actions," she writes, has largely eluded historians.

In part because historians have taken men of honor at their word. That is, they have accepted the code of honor as a system of decent behavior for gentlemen, who, while not always living up to their own standards, had nothing but good intentions. Ms. Freeman argues otherwise. Honor, she says, did indeed rest on being seen as someone who could be trusted. Less important was actually being trustworthy. Honor was as much about not getting caught as about doing the right thing.

It was also about doing the politically savvy thing. "The culture of honor was a source of stability in [a] contested political landscape," she writes, one in which the nation's continued existence was always in doubt and at the mercy of a few hyper-competitive elites who had somehow to find a way to get along. Absent a formal system of political parties, in which politicians could retreat behind the shield of a unified front, honor provided rituals that -- usually -- allowed elites to carry out disputes without bloodshed.

Hamilton, for instance, had been party to nine "affairs of honor" -- the phrase for the entire process, from insult to face-off -- before meeting Burr on the heights of Weehawken, pistol in hand. In every one of the nine affairs, the conflict was settled in the negotiations that almost always preceded for weeks an actual exchange of shots.

The action in an affair of honor, says Ms. Freeman, was as much in the rumors and "paper wars" that led up to and followed it as in the event of facing down a rival at 10 paces. One public figure might attack another in a pamphlet or a newspaper (the former intended to persuade an audience of other elites, the latter designed to sway the masses), and the offended man might either reply in kind, via a "defense pamphlet," or shift the battleground. If the offended man deemed the attacker beneath his contempt, he might "post" him -- that is, pin up fliers decrying the man's character, an effective means of destroying a political career. But if the attacker was a gentleman, the offended party might, by demanding the "satisfaction" of a duel, improve his own standing as well as take the life of an enemy.

Such may have been the case in the Burr-Hamilton battle. Hamilton had long fought Burr in the political sphere, but at the time of Burr's challenge there was scant evidence that Hamilton had lobbed a direct insult. Rather, having recently lost his bid for the governorship of New York, Burr may have hoped to stage a media event that would keep him in the public eye. It was an offer Hamilton couldn't refuse. If he had, Burr would surely have leaked the news of his cowardice to the press. Since Hamilton was a political chief, not only he but all his Federalist supporters would have been shamed.

Instead, Hamilton came up with a strategy that suited his personal opposition to dueling, and his political aims: He would not aim at all. In a letter he wrote the night before the duel, Hamilton stated his intention not to fire -- long interpreted as evidence of his desire to die. But Ms. Freeman points out that while firing guns at one another at 10 paces was surely a frightening experience, duelists had a reasonable expectation of survival: Most people missed, and based on a database of more than 900 duels she compiled, she concludes that the high incidence of leg wounds suggests that many duelists had little intention of killing their opponent.

Burr's aim, alas, was true -- much to his chagrin. As the saying goes, he won the battle, but lost the war. Dying for the Federalist cause, Hamilton brought glory to it. Burr, meanwhile, had to flee or face the law. Scholars have long interpreted his actions as those of a particular kind of coward, physically brave but morally craven. According to Ms. Freeman, that's because they haven't read the documents. For instance, while scholars were aware of a post-duel pamphlet published by a Hamilton supporter, it never occurred to them to look for the almost certain reply. Ms. Freeman did, and found it: "A Correct Statement of the Late Melancholy Affair of Honor, Between General Hamilton and Col. Burr," published anonymously by Burr's second (the man responsible for arranging a duel). The pamphlet paints a pro-dueling logic that redeems Burr as a man of honor who was simply trying to advance his cause according to the rules. By branding him a killer, the author argued, Hamiltonians -- and thus, Federalists in general -- proved the inconsistency of their beliefs.

How could such evidence have remained unstudied for so long? Perhaps, says Ms. Freeman, who has unearthed similarly revelatory documents for each chapter of her book, because the historians who have traditionally studied dead white guys have been living white guys who have ignored the culture of honor, too stuffy to imagine that the emotional lives of their subjects might be relevant. Not that Ms. Freeman is part of a multicultural radicalization of early American history (that already happened; they call it social history). Rather, she is part of a small movement of young historians who are sometimes referred to as the New New Political Historians." They apply the insights of cultural studies to the topics of traditionalists. Now that social historians have filled out the picture of the early Republic with less-powerful actors, the New News are turning back to the dead white guys. They tend to do so, however, with affection rather than the sharpened knives of Deconstructionists. New News like their subjects.

None more so than Ms. Freeman. "Joanne is what most amateurs think historians are: people passionate about the past," says Catherine Allgor, another New New Political Historian who teaches at the University of California at Riverside. "She is a buff incarnate, in the best way. She never lost the passion of the amateur."

The benefits of such an approach show in Affairs of Honor, says Ms. Allgor. "Joanne knows the sources better than anyone. She doesn't need to prove anything. It's true that she doesn't do a bunch of stuff other historians do -- she doesn't talk about women, or poor people -- but she does stuff no one else does. She shows more clearly than anybody that this period isn't a time of inevitable American destiny, but an age of anxiety."

Jan Lewis, a historian at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, agrees.

"That's incredibly hard to get across to students," she says, in part because historians were never before so aware of the veins of discord buried in anonymous newspaper attacks and the compilations of gossip that Ms. Freeman mines not just for juicy bits, but for the shape of early political culture. "She's started a whole new way of looking at politics," says Ms. Lewis. "I predict that there'll be a lot more work building on this in the future."

Even Bertram Wyatt-Brown, a historian at the University of Florida at Gainesville who has long pled the case of honor's importance in understanding history, says that Ms. Freeman has charted new ground. "I'm delighted," he says. "This confirms my own work on honor and takes it into the arena of politics."

And yet, Ms. Freeman cares little for the political hurly-burly. Despite her parting line in Affairs of Honor -- "history is a story that we tell about ourselves" -- Ms. Freeman shrugs her shoulders when asked what story her book tells about herself, or politics, now. Her fascination with Hamilton is neither political nor emotional; it is too big, too encompassing of her whole life, to be categorized. Ms. Freeman has, for instance, never stopped reading those 27 volumes of Hamilton's papers. These days, she has her own edition, lining the shelves of her basement office. On the first floor of her apartment stands her shelf of "Dumb things Hamilton did" -- a defense pamphlet in which he refutes charges of theft by laying claim to the sin of adultery, an entirely too-vituperative attack on Adams, and many other miscalculations -- all purchased in the original, at Ms. Freeman's own expense.

Her devotion to her subject was so great that for years she resisted sullying Hamilton with academe. In college she took no history courses, lest they "ruin it." When she lost one of her first jobs, in advertising, she recovered by spending five weeks communing with the spirit of Boy Hamilton on the Caribbean island of Nevis, his birthplace. Since then, she has practiced with dueling pistols -- her bull's eye hangs in her office -- learned to ride a horse, and purchased a hickory cane, to be used for beating those not worthy of dueling. "I've trained myself as an 18th-century gentleman," she says.

With considerable 21st-century rewards. Affairs of Honor is her first book; sources say that Yale University Press broke spending records to acquire it. Her tenure-track position at Yale is her first academic job. And even before Affairs of Honor came out, she found herself courted by high-powered literary agents, eager to learn what her next book would be.

As if they had to ask. First, a greatest-hits compilation of Hamilton's papers. Then, she says, with the relish of a kid who has managed to save dessert for last, her life's calling: a biography of Hamilton, of course.