By Cole Davis
Riverbend News
On a July morning in 1804, two giants of American political life walked out onto the field in Weehawken, N.J. to have a duel and only one walked back. This affair of honor between Aaron Burr and Hamilton County’s namesake, Alexander Hamilton, was one of the most infamous scandals of the time and it still lives on as one of the most heated events in American politics to this day.
Burr and Hamilton had long been bitter political and social rivals. One had been a Federalist and one a Democratic-Republican. Political differences, scurrilous accusations on both ends, and competing ambition all sewed the seeds of the infamous duel. The most immediate tension rose, however, in the aftermath of one of Hamilton’s journalistic disparagements of Burr’s character.
In a time when one's honor and reputation were paramount, this was a very serious thing. The honor culture in the northern states, though, was less entrenched than ours in the southern states. So, by the early nineteenth century most northern states were undergoing the process of making duels illegal. This made the Burr-Hamilton duel even more infamous. Two popular political figures settling matters of honor through the outdated practice of dueling? That makes for bad press.
And it certainly did. Burr’s reputation as a murderer never truly recovered (although he was legally acquitted of any of those charges). And Hamilton’s death symbolized the end of the Federalist Party. Moreover, and more important to us, it cemented both men as infamous characters from whom many counties and towns across the country got their names.