Flashback Four #4 Read online

  “I didn’t get it back,” Miss Z told them. “I built two of them, in case of emergency. Let that be a lesson to you. Always back up your work, in case you lose your first copy.”

  Mrs. Vader left the room again and came back in wheeling a computer on a cart.

  “Wait,” said Julia. “Are you . . . going to send us somewhere?”

  “No,” Miss Z replied. “You’re going to send me somewhere. It’s my turn now.”

  The Flashback Four unleashed a flurry of questions. “What? Where? When? Why?”

  “Calm down,” Miss Z told them. “Look, you know my situation. Many wonderful researchers have been working for a long time, but they haven’t found a cure for ALS. I’ve been waiting my whole adult life. Now I’m running out of time.”

  Isabel, David, Luke, and Julia stared at her, in varying degrees of comprehension.

  “Do I have to spell it out for you?” Miss Z finally told them. “They may find a cure for my ALS one day in the future. So that’s where I want you to send me. To the future.”

  “Wow!” Luke said, finally getting it. “So when you get to the future, maybe the doctors there can like, give you a shot or a pill or something and you’ll be all better?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping,” said Miss Z.

  “Let’s do it!” David shouted excitedly.

  “Yeah!” yelled the others.

  The Flashback Four rolled Miss Z’s bed over so that it was as close as possible to the Board. Julia flipped on the switch to warm it up. Mrs. Vader plugged in the computer, turned it on, and checked the connection to make sure the computer and the Board were communicating with each other wirelessly. The Board buzzed, clicked, and flashed random letters and numbers as it warmed up.

  “Let’s make sure there are no screw-ups this time,” Luke said, taking a seat at the computer next to Isabel. “First we need to set the date.”

  “When do you want to arrive?” asked Isabel.

  “I was thinking a hundred years into the future,” said Miss Z.

  “Check,” Isabel said, typing on the keyboard. “Date is set. A hundred years from today.”

  “Next, we need to put in the time of day,” said Luke.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Miss Z told them. “Anytime.”

  “Twelve noon?” asked Isabel.

  “Sure,” said Miss Z. “Maybe they’ll give me lunch when I arrive.”

  “Check,” Isabel said. “Time of day is set. Noon.”

  “Latitude and longitude next,” said Luke. “What should we put in? Where do you want to go, exactly?”

  “Right here, at the hospital,” said Miss Z. “Don’t change a thing.”

  “Let’s hope this hospital is still here a hundred years from now,” said David. “If not, whoever lives here is going to get a big surprise.”

  “Check,” said Isabel. “Current latitude and longitude are locked in.”

  The Board flashed three times, and then five bands of color appeared.

  “You ready?” asked David.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” replied Miss Z.

  “Nervous?” asked Julia.

  “Of course I’m nervous!” said Miss Z. “Wouldn’t you be? I’m going to be starting a new life in a new time.”

  Isabel clicked the mouse a few times.

  “Remember,” David told Miss Z, “you’re not going there to sightsee or get souvenirs.”

  Nobody laughed until David added, “Just kidding!”

  “Okay, do it, Isabel,” instructed Luke.

  Isabel typed the last few commands into the keyboard. When she hit the ENTER key, there was a short buzzing sound. The five bands of color flashed, and then there was an explosion of sound.

  “It’s working!” shouted Julia.

  The five bands of color merged together to form one band of intense white light.

  “Close your eyes, Miss Z!” Luke shouted.

  The light jumped off the Board with a crackle and stretched away from the surface, toward Miss Z in her bed.

  “It’s beautiful!” she shouted.

  Then the humming sound kicked in. Everything in the room was vibrating.

  The band of white light had made a connection with Miss Z’s body. It was pulling her in.

  “This is it!” yelled Luke.

  “Brace yourself!” hollered Julia.

  Miss Z started flickering.

  “It’s happening!” shouted Mrs. Vader. “Good-bye, Miss Zandergoth!”

  “What are you going to do in the future?” asked Isabel.

  “Time will tell,” Miss Z replied.

  There was one last flash of light, and a puff of smoke. The noise, the lights, and the vibrations came to a halt. Everything was quiet.

  Miss Z was gone.

  FACTS & FICTIONS

  Everything in this book is true, except for the stuff I made up. It’s only fair to tell you which is which.

  First, the made-up stuff. The Flashback Four, Miss Z, and the Gunner do not exist. There’s no secret government organization called NOYB (unless, of course, they really do exist but they’re so secret that I don’t know about them). While the Hot Head seems plausible, there’s no such thing as a smartboard that will send people through time or a TTT to send texts through time. At least not yet.

  Some of the dialogue in this book (like Hamilton and Burr on the dueling ground) was invented. Some of it was real, but it took place on the boat heading back to New York. And some of Hamilton’s letters were written in the week before the last night of his life. Just about everything else concerning the Hamilton-Burr duel—the names, dates, times, locations, and so on, is true. Nathaniel Pendleton and Dr. Hosack did try to talk Hamilton out of dueling when they arrived to pick him up that fateful night.

  To research this book, I scoured the internet for websites that discussed the Hamilton-Burr duel, watched videos about it, and went to Weehawken to see the site of the duel with my own eyes. (There’s not much to see. Over the years, a number of monuments there have been vandalized or stolen by souvenir hunters.)

  But mostly, I got the information from reading other books on the subject, for both children and adults. To name a few: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow; War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel that Stunned the Nation by John Sedgwick; The Duel: The Parallel Lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr by Judith St. George; and Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic by Joanne B. Freeman. Hey, you think authors know all this stuff we write about? We look it up!

  If you’re fascinated by the story of the Hamilton-Burr duel—as so many people are—there’s lots more information about it. Go to your local library. And there’s tons of stuff online. I barely scratched the surface in this book. If you want to read all the gory details, well, that’s why they invented Google. And of course, go see the show Hamilton if you can.

  We’ll never know for sure what happened that summer morning in Weehawken. Aaron Burr’s second said Alexander Hamilton fired his gun first and simply missed. Hamilton’s second said Burr fired first, and that Hamilton didn’t shoot until after he was hit.

  By the way, there’s an interesting story about the pistols they used. They were supplied by Hamilton’s brother-in-law John Church and remained in Church’s family until 1930, when his granddaughter sold them to the Bank of the Manhattan—a bank founded by . . . wait for it . . . Aaron Burr! That bank eventually merged to become JP Morgan Chase, and the pistols are still in the company’s archives today.

  This is what we do know: After he was shot, Alexander Hamilton was rushed back across the river, and he survived the night. In the morning, his wife, Eliza, and their seven children were brought to his deathbed. Eliza fanned him and snipped a lock of his hair. Hamilton opened his eyes for a moment, looked at his family, and closed his eyes again. He could barely speak at that point, but he told his family that he had planned from the start to throw away his shot. Just two years earlier, Hamilton had given his son Philip that same advice befor
e his duel. It was the same result both times.

  Alexander Hamilton died at two o’clock in the afternoon on July 12, thirty-one hours after getting shot. The bloodstains on the floor beneath his deathbed were left there for many years.

  The news traveled fast in New York City, and there was an outpouring of grief much like when George Washington had died less than five years earlier. Another Founding Father had fallen, and this time it had been sudden and violent. Along the parade route to the funeral two days later, thousands of mourners lined the streets to pay their respects. Church bells pealed. Flags were flown at half-mast. Guns were fired. Hamilton was buried with full military honors at Trinity Church, not far from where he had lived, studied, and practiced law. (The church is just five blocks from the offices of HarperCollins, the publisher of this book.)

  Eliza Hamilton lived another fifty years and died at the age of ninety-seven in 1854. Eliza crusaded against slavery and helped start the first private orphanage in New York. She is buried next to her husband.

  One good thing that came out of Alexander Hamilton’s death was the decline of dueling in America. He was the most famous person to die in a duel, and the public demanded that anti-dueling laws be enforced. As a result, within a few decades, these “affairs of honor” had pretty much faded away.

  What about Aaron Burr? After the duel, Burr was rowed back across the Hudson to a dock at Canal Street. From there, he went to his home, Richmond Hill, by horseback. It was almost like a day at the office.

  But he hadn’t realized how angry people would be that he had killed Alexander Hamilton. Burr was called an assassin in the newspapers. There were threats to burn his house down. He was indicted for murder by the state of New Jersey.

  Even though he would still officially be the vice president of the United States for another eight months, Burr was forced to leave New York. He fled to Philadelphia, then to an island off the coast of Georgia, and then to Florida. Everywhere he went, he was scorned.

  Burr headed west to Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi. Somewhere along the line, he got the crazy idea to take over the Louisiana Territory (acquired by the United States in 1803) and form his own country there. President Thomas Jefferson found out about the plot, and in 1807 Aaron Burr was arrested and brought to trial for treason. He was acquitted, but he was considered a traitor by the public and a wanted man all over the United States. So he fled to Europe and lived there for four years, sometimes under a different name.

  By 1812, America was at war with England (again!), and the United States government had little interest in pursuing Aaron Burr. So he sailed home to New York City and quietly began practicing law again. But it was one tragedy after another. First his granddaughter died. Then his daughter, Theodosia, died at sea on her way from South Carolina to visit him. She was only twenty-nine.

  Burr became a recluse. Occasionally, he would get recognized on the street and attacked. In 1833, he married a wealthy widow named Eliza Jumel. The marriage didn’t last. (The house Burr lived in with Eliza Jumel and Alexander Hamilton’s home the Grange are both still standing today, one mile away from each other in Upper Manhattan.)

  Burr never expressed much regret or remorse for killing Hamilton. The closest he ever came was at the end of his life, when he was quoted as saying, “I should have known the world was wide enough for both Hamilton and me.”

  In 1836, Aaron Burr died at the age of eighty in a Staten Island hotel. The third vice president of the United States was buried without ceremony in Princeton, New Jersey, a few feet from his father and grandfather.

  Burr died in disgrace while Hamilton is remembered as an American hero, celebrated on our money and in Broadway theater. So historically speaking, it’s fair to say that Hamilton, in fact, was the winner of the duel.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Courtesy of Dan Gutman

  DAN GUTMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of the Genius Files series. He is also the author of the Baseball Card Adventures series, which has sold more than 2 million copies around the world, and the My Weird School series, which has sold more than 23 million copies.

  Thanks to his many fans who voted in their classrooms, Dan has received nineteen state book awards and ninety-two state book award nominations. He lives in New York City with his wife, Nina. You can visit him online atwww.dangutman.com.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  BOOKS BY DAN GUTMAN

  Baseball Card Adventures

  Honus & Me

  Jackie & Me

  Babe & Me

  Shoeless Joe & Me

  Mickey & Me

  Abner & Me

  Satch & Me

  Jim & Me

  Ray & Me

  Roberto & Me

  Ted & Me

  Willie & Me

  The Genius Files

  Mission Unstoppable

  Never Say Genius

  You Only Die Twice

  From Texas with Love

  License to Thrill

  Other Novels

  The Get Rich Quick Club

  Johnny Hangtime

  Casey Back at Bat

  And don’t miss any of the books in the My Weird School, My Weird School Daze, My Weirder School, and My Weirdest School series!

  BACK ADS

  COPYRIGHT

  The author would like to acknowledge the following for use of photographs: NASA, here; Travis Cummeau, here; Nina Wallace, here, here, here, here, the Newberry Library, here; Craig Provorny, here

  FLASHBACK FOUR #4: THE HAMILTON-BURR DUEL. Copyright © 2019 by Dan Gutman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gutman, Dan, author.

  Title: The Hamilton-Burr duel / Dan Gutman.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2018] | Series: Flashback Four ; #4 | Summary: The Flashback Four are coerced by a secret government organization, NOYB, to travel to July 1804 Weehawken, New Jersey, to witness the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018013450 | ISBN 9780062374479 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Time travel—Fiction. | Burr-Hamilton Duel, Weehawken, N.J., 1804—Fiction. | Burr, Aaron, 1756–1836—Fiction. | Hamilton, Alexander, 1757–1804—Fiction. | Photography—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | New Jersey—History—1775–1865—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.G9846 Ham 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013450

  * * *

  Digital Edition APRIL 2019 ISBN: 9780062374486

  Print ISBN: 9780062374479

  Cover art © 2019 by Scott Brundage

  Cover design by Catherine San Juan

  1920212223PC/LSCH10987654321

  FIRST EDITION

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