He was also scheming to draw the United States into the Napoleonic Wars when Adams finally cut him off and cleared out his cabinet of the Hamilton loyalists. The previous 2 year "reign of witches," as Jefferson accurately dubbed it, had shown everyone what Hamilton's real vision of America was all about: the Alien and Sedition Acts, the attempted mobilization of a standing army to invade Spanish and French North America, a new federal Stamp Tax that was virtually identical to the one that sparked the rebellion against Britain, new federal land and property taxes spawning Fries' Rebellion in Pennsylvania, the arrest and imprisonment of opposition newspaper editors for "sedition," and the early stages of a scheme to forcibly purge the Jeffersonians from government.
Hamilton was an ambitious autocrat with a hot temper and even signs of insanity. When Burr shot Hamilton, it was the inevitable result of decades of recklessness and blustery on Hamilton's part. Despite his disingenuous claim to detest dueling in the note he wrote before his death, Hamilton had been involved in some form or another with at least 10 threatened duels that were averted at the last minute. Among his intended targets were sitting President John Adams in 1800 and future President James Monroe in 1797. That he got himself into a duel with sitting Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804 was thus neither out of the ordinary for him nor unsurprising when it happened.
Hamilton only lasted as long as he did by playing Wormtongue to Washington's Theoden. But practically every other founding father of any significance detested the guy, and with good reason.