At 7 a.m. On the Hudson River Palisades, Vice President Aaron Burr raised his pistol and fired a single ball into Alexander Hamilton, the architect of the American financial system. The two men had nursed a decade of bitter rivalry, personal insults, clashing Federalist and Democratic-Republican visions, and a contested New York governorship race that Burr had just lost, largely because Hamilton worked against him. Hamilton fell mortally wounded on the dueling ground at Weehawken, New Jersey, and died the following day at a friend's home in Greenwich Village. He was 49. Burr, still sitting Vice President, faced murder charges in both New York and New Jersey, effectively ending his national political career. The duel silenced the man who built the U.S. Treasury, the Coast Guard, and the Bank of New York, and it crystallized a national revulsion against dueling that would slowly drive the practice out of American public life.