Confusion will be my epitaph

To his credit, Hamilton does no such thing. He only lets out a quiet snore every now and then, though they are more like sharp inhales. It gives the impression that he is always just on the verge of waking. 

The hot summer air also allows less modesty than Laurens would have hoped. Their bare chests are exposed; the slight sheen of sweat reflects the dying candlelight. He tries not to stare. Hamilton had been the first to strip himself bare, and Laurens followed soon after, unable to pretend he was above the heat when his would-be superior was not. They’d both kept their breeches on.

“I am accustomed to sleeping exposed.” Hamilton had said, tossing his sweaty garments across the room. Amusement seeped into his words. “You are in your right to complain about my state of dress if you so desire.”

Laurens had suppressed a grimace. “I have no complaints.”

Hamilton untied his hair, curls just grazing his bare shoulders. His blasted eyes caught the movement. Hamilton smirked, an ugly pretty thing. “I’m sure.”

He’d removed his own shirt out of spite then, but it took no genius to understand he’d already been exposed. 

Laurens thumbs the page of his sketchbook.

Any chance he had of sleep had been dashed the moment he’d entered this camp. The excitement in his chest had settled and hardened, leaving only the weight of his felled expectations. He knew this position was the farthest from the heart of the war, an honorable responsibility at best and a desk-job at worst. This position was so far removed from what he’d intended, but it was this or nothing at all. He could accept that. He would have, at least. 

Hamilton inhales sharply. 

Laurens waits, anticipating his awakening. It never comes, and Hamilton exhales into the open air. His lips are parted, ever so lightly, lashes fluttering.

Laurens dips his pen into the inkwell. Next to the woodpecker and right below the wild bergamont, he begins to sketch a face. The ink bleeds into the fiber of the page, a sharp contrast to the dark, charcoal lines of his previous work. He keeps his attention split between the subject and his own quickening lines.

If his second thought, the quiet amusement at Hamilton’s expense, had been all, he would be in bed at this moment. However, it was his first involuntary response that was the source of his late-night troubles. The thought that Hamilton would be fit to model. The thought of sketching his downturned eyes, his bumped nose and slight figure, and making a masterpiece of him. The thought of knowing what was behind that attractive face, seeing the best and worst of him, most of all.

Perhaps it showed on his face. Hamilton had turned to him and paused for so long, the stillest Laurens had ever seen. He’d looked at him from top to bottom, eyes narrowing on his face. A quirk of the lips—a frown? a smile?— was all he gave. It was uncomfortable. Invasive, even. Laurens felt a thrill crawl up his spine nonetheless.

It was the thrill of simply knowing. He knew next to nothing about Hamilton at that moment, but that one look exposed a trove of fundamental truths. Deficiencies as well. Flaws that marked them both. Flaws that had been his burden to carry since as long as he could remember. Hamilton knew. Laurens knew. It was exhilarating. It was terrifying. All it took was one movement of those pretty lips.

Laurens pauses his strokes. The handsome face on the page stares back at him, despite its eyes being permanently closed. It lacks a mouth, voiceless. He swallows.

At the root is a simple political utility. In the volatile party culture of the early Republic, sex and gender were weapons. Aaron Burr’s enemies repeatedly deployed sexual innuendo to wound his reputation. Journalists and pamphleteers accused him of “seducing a youthful band of followers” and otherwise painted him as morally loose in order to delegitimize his claim to public virtue. Nancy Isenberg’s work on Burr makes this instrumental use of sex plain: the sexualization of Burr began as partisan slander and stuck in the public imagination for generations, a smear that functioned to emasculate and discredit a dangerous political rival.

The effect is important: once a public figure has been sexualized in print, any later account of his conflicts—including the duel—is likely to be read through a sexual lens.

Sexual metaphors are especially seductive when applied to rituals of masculine honor like dueling, because duels are already charged theatrical performances of power, shame, and humiliation. Duel protocol presented male reputation as something that could be punctured, bought back, or defended with a pistol at dawn; in other words, the duel materializes a kind of bodily threat that lends itself easily to sexualized readings. Psychoanalytic and Freudian framings find this readily available symbolic content irresistible: pistols become phallic objects, wounds become penetrative acts, surrender becomes sexual submission. Arnold Rogow’s psychobiographical account exemplifies this move, suggesting that Hamilton’s obsession with Burr could be read through repression and projective identification and that the duel’s ritualized violence can be interpreted as erotically coded drama.

The event’s obvious physicality—two bodies at close range, two weapons pointed, the act of taking aim and yielding space—is irresistibly legible as a scene of domination and surrender, even a grotesque, fatal parody of sexual intercourse.

Rogow’s hypothesis was framed as psychologically compelling in contemporary reviews, but critics have (rightfully) pointed out that it leans heavily on conjecture. It reads sexual meaning into ambiguous acts and rumors rather than into clear, documented sexual behavior between the two men. Still, once psychoanalytic vocabulary is introduced, the duel’s imagery (guns, aim, who fires first, who “takes” and who “receives”) becomes narratively available as sexual metaphor, and subsequent retellers often deploy it without the caveats Rogow’s critics demanded.

The persistence of fringe sources like J. Michael Mahoney’s Schizophrenia: The Bearded Lady Disease points to an appetite for the sensational and symbolic over the documentary. Mahoney’s grotesque psychoanalytic reading—wherein Hamilton’s posture at Weehawken is interpreted as a “passive, feminine homosexual undertone” and the pistol as a stand-in for penile penetration—reveals the power of metaphor to override method. There is no possible way for me to explain what is being said without sounding ridiculous, so here are excerpts:

“ Alexander Hamilton's obsessive hatred of Aaron Burr was based on a powerful, unconscious homosexual attraction to him, as is always the case in such examples of paranoid and obsessive behaviour. The fact that Hamilton was known by his peers to be suffering from “recurring illnesses” i.e. manic-depression, which name is interchangeable with the term schizophrenia, adds further proof to this diagnosis. ” “ Furthermore, there was clearly a passive, feminine homosexual undertone in Hamilton’s actions at the duel, as he presented himself in a totally helpless physical posture to Burr and waited for the latter to shoot him with a gun, symbolically representing being penetrated by the issue of Burr’s penis i.e. gun. Basically what Hamilton’s actions were telling Burr was “Here, take me, and do what you will with my body.” ”

I was not lying, by the way.

Popular satire also played its own role. Burr laughing at the waxwork duel tableau in a New York museum, quoting the doggerel—“O Burr, O Burr, what hast thou done? / Thou hast shooted dead great Hamilton. / You hid behind a bunch of thistle, / And shooted him dead with a great hoss-pistol”—turns the supposedly solemn ritual into burlesque. Audiences snickered because they already understood the duel as theater, and theater is easily sexualized. The image of Burr “hiding behind a thistle” and then shooting Hamilton “with a great hoss-pistol” is not subtle. Caricature works by exaggerating bodies, by making them grotesque, by turning violence into a kind of slapstick innuendo. The duel as dirty joke is as old as the duel itself.

Queer theorists later returned to this material with different aims. The problem, they suggested, was not whether Hamilton and Burr “were” or “weren’t,” but that the intensity of masculine rivalry often reads as homoerotic because it uses the same language of obsession, fascination, and betrayal. Eve Sedgwick’s model of homosocial desire, for example, explains how bonds between men in eighteenth-century political culture were always triangulated through rivalry, and political rivalry itself becomes the site of desire. Hamilton and Burr as mirror images—short, debonair, ambitious, dazzling to women, gallant in public—are easy to cast as doubles whose confrontation must finally tip into something intimate (as explained in “The Erotic Charisma of Alexander Hamilton,” Journal of American Studies). The duel is then read not as the breaking point of political careers but as the climax of a relationship.

Even Burr’s late-life comments feed the myth. When he encountered a bust of Hamilton in Boston decades after the duel and reportedly murmured, “A remarkable man—a very remarkable man,” later retellers frame it as wistful, reverent, almost lover-like. Touching the contours of Hamilton’s sculpted face becomes, in their hands, a caress, especially as he once remarks how “There was poetry!” as he caresses Hamilton. Whatever Burr meant by this action (most likely it was a mockery), the interpretive frame was already set: every gesture could be read as proof that underneath the rivalry there had always been something else.

Hamilton and Burr do not escape sexualization because the duel itself—ritualized, spectacular, performed at dawn with pistols raised—is too much like theater, too much like a staged intimacy between two men who cannot exist without reference to each other.