lower abdomen above his right hip. The bullet ricocheted off Hamilton's second or third false rib, fracturing it and causing considerable damage to his internal organs, particularly his liver and diaphragm, before becoming lodged in his first or second lumbar vertebra. The biographer Ron Chernow considers the circumstances to indicate that, after taking deliberate aim, Burr fired second, while the biographer James Earnest Cooke suggests that Burr took careful aim and shot first, and Hamilton fired while falling, after being struck by Burr's bullet. The paralyzed Hamilton was immediately attended by the same surgeon who tended Phillip Hamilton, and ferried to the Greenwich Village boarding house of his friend William Bayard Jr., who had been waiting on the dock. On his deathbed, Hamilton asked the Episcopal Bishop of New York, Benjamin Moore, to give him holy communion. Moore initially declined to do so on the grounds that participating in a duel was a mortal sin and that Hamilton, although undoubtedly sincere in his faith, was not a member of the Episcopalian denomination. After leaving, Moore was persuaded to return that afternoon by the urgent pleas of Hamilton's friends. Upon receiving Hamilton's solemn assurance that he repented for his part in the duel, Moore gave him communion. After final visits from his family, friends, and considerable suffering for at least 31 hours, Hamilton died at two o'clock the following afternoon, July 12, 1804, at Bayard's home just below the present Gansevoort Street. The city fathers halted all business at noon two days later for Hamilton's funeral. The procession route of about two miles organized by the Society of the Cincinnati had so many participants of every class of citizen that it took hours to complete and was widely reported nationwide by newspapers. Moore conducted the funeral service at Trinity Church. Gouverneur Morris gave the eulogy and secretly established a fund to support his widow and children. Hamilton was buried in the church's cemetery. Religion Hamilton's birthplace had a large Jewish community, constituting one quarter of Charlestown's white population by the 1720s. His degree of respect for Jews was described by Chernow as "a life-long reverence". He came into contact with Jews on a regular basis, having been tutored by a Jewish schoolmistress. As a small boy, he learned to recite the Ten Commandments in Biblical Hebrew, and he believed that Jewish achievement was a result of divine providence. Some evidence suggests