The 200-Year Duel

"LOOK AT THIS," said Antonio Burr. "Look at what they're selling." Standing in the gift shop of the New-York Historical Society on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Burr held a magnet to the light. On it were portraits of his ancestor Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States, and Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, whom Vice President Burr killed in a duel 200 years ago. Each man's portrait stared coldly at the other's.

It was a dull gray day in late October, and Burr had just spent an hour walking through "Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America," the blockbuster, $5 million bicentennial exhibition that opened in early September and will close on February 28. The show portrays Hamilton as a giant--a leading champion of the Constitution, the Founding Father of America's financial institutions, the visionary who saw that the United States would one day become an economic and military superpower. To Hamilton's many admirers, all this is beyond dispute. Not to Antonio Burr.

He is a small man, compact and bespectacled, with a graying goatee and pale blue eyes. He is 51 years old. Also, he is Chilean. He often ends sentences with "man." Sometimes he flails his arms wildly to make a point.

"This is what I don't understand," he continued, examining the magnet. "This whole exhibition, it criticizes Burr, it calls Burr a man without principle, it blames Burr for Hamilton's death. But when you get to the gift shop, what do you have? You have them selling Burr and Hamilton together. Look at this."

He motioned to a stack of T-shirts with Hamilton and Burr's portraits on them, to a Hamilton-Burr mug, to a Hamilton-Burr keychain.

"But they still don't give Burr any respect," he said. "They still don't treat him as an equal."