Cipher/code of dishonor

Alan J. Clark's study looks at the ties between Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, the Corporation of Trinity Church, and the Loyalist community of Manhattan. Its author presents the work as the first to combine previously unreported papers with family genealogy, a method he uses to test the historical record of the Revolutionary era.

A central thread is Clark's reading of Burr's coded letters to his daughter Theodosia. He also revisits Burr's complicated conduct during the war to ask when his Loyalist sympathies first emerged. Alongside this, he tracks land leases that changed hands before, during, and after the conflict, asking whether they were speculative deals or payments from the English Crown for services rendered in the colonies, many of them channeled through Trinity Church.

Clark argues that the church functioned as a kind of land bank for Loyalists and helped shape the economy of early Manhattan and the Atlantic colonies. By following the actions and family connections of Burr and Hamilton, he aims to explain episodes that have seemed scattered or contradictory, presenting early American history at the level of individual lives and relationships.