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Like Hamilton, William Duer was a newcomer who needed no introduction to New York. Born in England and educated at Eton, Duer had served briefly as an aide to Lord Clive in India before making his way to the West Indies, where his family owned plantations on Antigua and Dominica. In 1768 he came up to New York to buy lumber and was introduced to General Schuyler, a. prominent Hudson Valley landowner as well as Hamilton’s father-in-law. On Schuyler’s advice, Duer purchased a tract on the east side of the Hudson near Saratoga, took up permanent residence there, and over the next half-dozen years did a handsome business supplying masts to the Royal Navy and speculating in land. By 1776, now a prominent Whig, Duer had become the main supplier of the Continental forces in New York, raking in profits of a thousand dollars per month. He married Kitty Alexander, daughter of General William Alexander, and with his father-in-law outfoxed their mutual creditors by paying off prewar debts with depreciated Continental paper. Unfazed by the occupation of New York, he arranged to sell flour, cattle, and other provisions to His Majesty’s army under flags of truce and bragged of regularly making 500 percent profits on his investment. When Congress balked at the price General Alexander asked for iron shot manufactured at his New Jersey ironworks, Duer coolly sold it to the British army instead. In another scheme, he took money appropriated to buy food for Continental troops, funneled it into his private account, then bought 6 percent Loan Office certificates—i.e., loaning the money back to the government at a tidy, risk-free profit to himself.

Long before the war ended, radical patriots everywhere had come to regard Duer as the kingpin of corruption among military suppliers and a perfect illustration of the self-seeking that, if unchecked, would sooner or later destroy the republic. In New York, Duer’s wheeling and dealing made him a ready target for radical critics and fed widespread resentment against “mushroom gentlemen” who prospered while their fellow citizens did without. Contemptuous of public opinion, like so many of his associates, Duer brushed off such criticism as the carping of “Paine lovers.” During the spring or early summer of 1783, now very rich and heavily engaged in the business of supplying provisions to the army, he shifted his residence down to the city.

New Jersey-born Richard Varick, another of Washington’s wartime aides, had been admitted to the New York bar on the very eve of independence, but he too didn’t settle permanently in the city until after Evacuation Day. Neither did Varick’s better-known compatriot, Aaron Burr. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Burr, like Hamilton, had made a name for himself as a gallant young officer in the first years of the war, rising to the rank of major at the age of twenty and joining Washington’s military entourage. Unlike Hamilton, Burr soon broke with Washington, resentful of the commander-in-chief’s dependence on Hamilton and alleged opposition to his, Burr’s, further advancement. Transferred to the staff of General Israel Putnam, Burr subsequently won a promotion to lieutenant colonel and, for a few months, commanded the West Point defenses and the American forces patrolling Westchester County’s Neutral Zone. The Zone’s muchabused civilians praised his diligence and honesty; his men respected him as a fair yet quick-tempered disciplinarian (he once allegedly lopped off the arm of a mutinous soldier with a single stroke of his saber). By 1779, however, in ill health and believing his prospects still clouded by the rift with Washington, Burr resigned his commission to study the law. He was admitted to the bar in Albany in 1782 and moved down to New York the next year, launching his practice from a house on Wall Street near Hamilton’s residence and only two doors from City Hall. In no time at all he was making ten thousand dollars a year and setting his sights on a political career.

Melancton Smith