The Counting House No. 9 — The Check on Hamilton's Bank
On July 27, 1796, Aaron Burr drew $5,000 on Alexander Hamilton's bank. I bought the check for $245.
The Check on Hamilton’s Bank
On July 27, 1796, Aaron Burr drew $5,000 on Alexander Hamilton’s bank. The man he paid wrote to Hamilton the same day. Hamilton declined. Eight years later, Burr shot Hamilton at Weehawken. The check sat in a dealer’s drawer for nearly two hundred years. I bought it for $245.
The document is smaller than you expect.
One page, unlined off-white stock, three and a quarter inches by five and a half. The ink has faded to the color of old tea. At the top, in a clerk’s hand, the institution: Cashier of the Bank of Deposit and Discount of the United States at New York. Below that, the amount: five thousand dollars. The payee, abbreviated: J.G. or Bearer.
At the bottom, firm and unhurried, a signature: Aaron Burr.
I bought it in 1992 from a dealer in Concord, New Hampshire, for two hundred and forty-five dollars. It came with a certificate of authenticity typed on letterhead, a handshake, and no further explanation. I framed it. It hung on my wall for thirty-four years. I knew it was old. I knew the name. I did not know what I had.
New York, July 1796
The summer of 1796 was a season of debts coming due.
Alexander Hamilton had left the Treasury Department the previous year, returned to law practice in New York, and was already the most formidable attorney in the city. The bank whose cashier Burr addressed that July morning — the Bank of Deposit and Discount of the United States, New York branch — was Hamilton’s creation. He had conceived it, argued for it before a hostile Congress, designed its charter. It was the cornerstone of his economic program for the young republic: a national bank that would stabilize credit, manage the currency, and give the United States the financial architecture of a serious nation. Enemies called it a British corruption. Hamilton called it civilization.
Aaron Burr understood the bank perfectly. He had fought its creation in the Senate and lost. Now he drew upon it for five thousand dollars, payable to J.G. or Bearer.
The initials belonged to James Greenleaf.
The Man Behind the Initials
I did not know who J.G. was when I took the check off the wall.
It took six weeks to find out — six weeks of evenings with Founders Online, HathiTrust, the papers of Alexander Hamilton at the Library of Congress, and a peer-reviewed legal history from Columbia University Press so dense that I had to request a forty-three-page scan from the Columbia Law Library. The scan cost two hundred and forty-four dollars. I had now spent nearly as much researching the check as I had paid for it.
James Greenleaf was a Massachusetts man who had gone to Amsterdam in the 1780s to borrow money and returned believing himself rich. By 1793 he was one of the largest land speculators in America — a partner with Robert Morris and John Nicholson in vast purchases of Federal City lots in the new Washington, a buyer of hundreds of thousands of Adirondack acres, a man whose notes circulated through the merchant houses of Philadelphia, New York, and London like currency. He had served as United States consul at Amsterdam. He had married the daughter of a Boston senator. He had, by the summer of 1796, total obligations of approximately one million two hundred thousand dollars and no reliable means of meeting them.
The Adirondack connection was how Burr’s name entered Greenleaf’s ledger.
In 1794, a London financier named John Julius Angerstein had sold two hundred thousand acres of wilderness in upper New York State. Angerstein was a remarkable figure — an underwriter at Lloyd’s, a founder of what would become the National Gallery, a man of princely fortune and punctilious financial expectations. The purchasers were Burr and Greenleaf, acting jointly on a tract that became known as the Angerstein purchase. The price was twenty-four thousand pounds sterling. A bond for twelve thousand pounds — the balance — was due to Angerstein on July 1, 1796.
Greenleaf could not pay it.
Twenty-Seven Days After the Deadline
The bond came due on a Thursday. Twenty-seven days passed. Then Burr sat down and drew the check.
Five thousand dollars. Payable to J.G. or Bearer.
The deed to the Angerstein tract had been made out to Greenleaf alone — which is why the check says only J.G. Burr had co-signed the bond as a matter, he later said, of mere form. He paid ten thousand dollars in cash and short-term notes for his share at the time of purchase. The deed was Greenleaf’s. The debt, when Greenleaf collapsed, became everyone’s problem.
I know all of this because Julius Goebel and Joseph Smith spent years in the archives at Columbia University documenting every case Alexander Hamilton ever argued. Volume IV of their monumental series, The Law Practice of Alexander Hamilton, published by Columbia University Press in 1980, devotes sixteen pages to the Angerstein tract. Footnote 37, which I transcribed from the physical volume, runs to three paragraphs and contains Hamilton’s exact words from the 1800 presidential election. Goebel and Smith do not mention the check. They could not have known it existed in a frame on a wall in New Jersey.
The Letter That Changed Everything
On the same day Burr drew the check — July 27, 1796, a Wednesday in lower Manhattan — James Greenleaf sat down and wrote a letter to Alexander Hamilton.
The letter survives in the Hamilton Papers at the Library of Congress. It is printed in volume twenty of The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, edited by Harold C. Syrett, pages 261 through 263. I found it on Founders Online at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday evening.
Greenleaf wrote:
The indispensible necessity of an immediate tho’ short respite from business united with Motives of Interest and an unbounded Attachment to reputation induce me to make a proposition to you of a pretty extraordinary Nature...
The proposition was this: if Hamilton would lend his name, his credit, and his talents to help Greenleaf manage his collapsing affairs — and help raise one million dollars at legal interest over five years to pay off his debts — Greenleaf would give Hamilton one-third of his entire estate, real and personal, after all obligations were settled. Additionally, the remainder would constitute the capital of a new banking house, in both their names, with Hamilton as sole director and profits divided equally.
Greenleaf acknowledged his total obligations. They did not exceed, he said, one million two hundred thousand dollars. His assets, properly liquidated, would produce five millions — or a million annually for five years. The problem was timing. Some important and unexpected delinquencies on the part of others had made his own engagements come due faster than his means could answer without improper operations.
Three days later, Hamilton wrote his reply on the bottom of Greenleaf’s letter. A single manuscript page holds both texts.
Though the data which it presents authorise an expectation of large pecuniary advantage and though I discover nothing in the affair which an Individual differently circumstanced might not with propriety enter into — yet in my peculiar situation, viewed in all its public as well as personal relations, I think myself bound to decline the overture.
Hamilton found nothing improper in the proposal. He simply could not afford to be seen entering a private banking partnership with a distressed speculator while operating as New York’s most prominent public lawyer.
He declined.
What Happened Next
In March 1797 — eight months after Burr drew the check — Angerstein’s attorney filed suit in the New York Supreme Court. Hamilton entered as counsel for Angerstein.
He recorded the event in his own handwriting in his Cash Book: March 10, 1797. $50. Baring v Burr.
The case moved into the Court of Chancery. Hamilton worked it for six years. In December 1802 he recorded three hundred dollars in fees. On February 8, 1803, the case was dismissed — on motion of the complainant, the court minutes record, and with the consent of Mr. Hamilton of counsel for the defendant.
The defendant was Aaron Burr.
Burr knew Hamilton had been working against him for six years. Hamilton knew Burr knew. The case closed sixteen months before the duel.
But Hamilton was not finished with the debt.
The Election of 1800
When the Electoral College deadlocked in November 1800 — Jefferson and Burr each receiving seventy-three votes, throwing the election to the House of Representatives — Hamilton wrote to every prominent Federalist he could reach with arguments against voting for Burr.
His enclosure to John Rutledge Jr. and James McHenry, dated January 4, 1801, is preserved in the Hamilton Papers at the Library of Congress. It lists Burr’s shortcomings in methodical succession. Among them, this:
He is without doubt insolvent for a large deficit. All his visible property is deeply mortgaged, and he is known to owe other large debts, for which there is no specific security. Of the number of these is a Judgment in favour of Mr. Angerstien for a sum which with interest amounts to about 80,000 Dollars.
Rutledge replied on January 10, 1801: My determination to support Mr Burr has been shaken by your communication.
The man Burr had paid five thousand dollars on July 27, 1796 — to cover a defaulted bond obligation to a London financier — had become, four and a half years later, the specific instrument Hamilton used to deny Burr the presidency of the United States. Jefferson was elected by the House on February 17, 1801, on the thirty-sixth ballot.
Sixteen months after the case closed, Burr shot Hamilton at Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804.
The Account Books at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
I did not expect to find Greenleaf’s own records.
The Historical Society of Pennsylvania holds the papers of the North American Land Company — the vast speculative enterprise in which Greenleaf, Robert Morris, and John Nicholson tried to colonize millions of acres with European immigrants and American credit. Buried in those papers is Greenleaf’s Agency Account Book, Volume 38, covering 1796 to 1803.
A librarian named Leroy Arnold searched it. He sent me photographs.
On page 40, Schedule E — Sundry Notes, Acceptances and Debts by Book Entry for which no Security is given — there is an entry: J.J. Angustine [Angerstein] (Bond) — 1st July [1796] — $26,666.66.
The Angerstein bond, in Greenleaf’s own hand, in his own account book, at exactly the moment my check was drawn.
On the Debts of James Greenleaf page, the list of creditors runs to twenty-six names. No. 14 is Aaron Burr, New York.
On page 45, Schedule G — Debts due from Greenleaf’s Estate where no securities have been given — Aaron Burr, New York, appears again.
The dollar amounts are not yet legible in the photographs. Arnold is transcribing them now with the remaining hours of his research time.
What a Piece of Paper Contains
I bought this document for two hundred and forty-five dollars from a dealer in Concord, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1992. I was twenty-something. I had recently read Gore Vidal’s novel Burr and thought the man was underrated. I wanted something with his name on it.
In 2004, I attended the two hundredth anniversary re-enactment of the duel at Weehawken, New Jersey. A man in period costume raised a pistol across the Hudson toward the Manhattan skyline. Someone fired a blank. People applauded.
I put the check back on the wall and forgot about it for twenty more years.
This past spring I took it off the wall and started asking questions. Six weeks later I had found the Greenleaf letter, the Hamilton reply, the Columbia Law scan, the Goebel and Smith footnote, the Hamilton Cash Book entries, the Court of Chancery dismissal record, the Rutledge letter, and the HSP account book. I had established, in primary sources held at the Library of Congress and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, that the check I purchased for $245 is the earliest known surviving financial instrument in the chain of events that placed Hamilton and Burr on opposing sides in court for six years — and that contributed, in ways Hamilton himself documented in his own handwriting, to the accumulation of grievance that ended at Weehawken.
The check is one page, three and a quarter inches by five and a half. The signature at the bottom is firm and unhurried. Burr was forty years old. He was at the height of his powers.
He had no idea what he was signing.
Primary sources: Hamilton Papers, Library of Congress; Greenleaf Agency Account Book, Vol. 38, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Goebel & Smith, The Law Practice of Alexander Hamilton, Vol. IV (Columbia University Press, 1980); The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Vol. 20 and Vol. 25 (Columbia University Press), printed in Founders Online.
The check is authenticated by JSA Letter of Authenticity No. ZZ53322, April 9, 2026.
What a fabulous find…..the story is even better! You purchased a piece of American History!