Aaron Burr

7 Key excerpts on "Aaron Burr"

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  Frontier Tales of Tennessee

  • Louise Littleton Davis(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Pelican Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Aaron Burr Was Framed

  How a political campaign can ruin a man's life, can hound him across the world and far beyond the grave, is nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in the tragic career of Aaron Burr, the vice-president who missed being president of the United States by one vote.

  Nashville was drawn into that national and international turmoil twice—once in 1805 and 1806 when Burr acted out some of the crucial hours of his stormy life in Nashville, and again twenty-two years later when Andrew Jackson ran for president and his political enemies accused him of having aided the "traitor" Burr.

  Historians are just now digging up the records that indicate how unjustly Burr was accused of treason and show that he was a victim of "frame-ups." In 1807 the Supreme Court acquitted him, but Burr still stands condemned by political gossips and by textbooks that have perpetuated the tales that circulated as part of a bitter political contest.

  Court papers in the possession of Spain, recently made available to historians, show that Burr was actually the victim of an American spy—"Number 13"—in the pay of Spain for almost two decades. That spy was the ear of President Thomas Jefferson, and through him turned all American officialdom in blinding wrath against Burr.

  Documents in the possession of Nashville historian

  Stanley Horn not only testify to the innocence of Burr's colonization plans—later branded as a form of treason—but also indicate the jealous fury of Thomas Jefferson at a man who had almost won the presidency from him. For Jefferson, author of our Constitution and champion of many of the beliefs held dearest by Americans, had an overpowering weakness: an intense jealousy of men who rivaled his leadership of his party.

  Aaron Burr, descended from a family of college presidents, ministers, and scholars who had had a substantial part in shaping New England's development since the early 1600s, was a brilliant man, impatient with plodders. He was more intent on getting a thing done right than on pleasing his superiors.

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  Affairs of Honor

  National Politics in the New Republic

  • Joanne B. Freeman(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  Dueling as Politics On the evening of July 10, 1804, Alexander Hamilton was a man tor-mented. At dawn he would duel Aaron Burr. Hamilton considered himself “strongly opposed to the practice of Duelling,” yet the follow-ing morning he would stand opposite Burr on the heights of Weehaw-ken, New Jersey, pistol in hand, awaiting the command to fire. 1 This day of reckoning had been long approaching, for Hamilton had bitterly opposed Burr’s political career for fifteen years. Charis-matic men of great talent and ambition, the two had been thrust into competition with the opening of the national government and the sud-den availability of new power, positions, and acclaim. Socially and pro-fessionally they had remained friendly and cooperative throughout that time, mingling in the same social circles, eating at the same dinner tables, sometimes serving together on the same legal cases. Personally they remained collegial as well. But Hamilton and Burr were very different men. Burr was the grandson of the great divine Jonathan Edwards, making him the equiv-{ 159 } 160 dueling as politics Fig. 22. Aaron Burr (1756–1836), by John Vanderlyn, 1802. Painted two years before the duel with Hamilton, this portrait hints at Burr’s commanding carriage and piercing dark eyes—his most remarked-upon feature. Burr helped fund Vanderlyn’s studies, ultimately sending him to Paris to complete his training. (Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery, Bequest of Oliver Burr Jennings, B.A. 1917, in memory of Miss Annie Burr Jennings) alent of New England royalty. He viewed politics as a game and en-joyed playing it. More of an opportunist than an ideologue, he was seemingly dedicated to nothing other than the advancement of his po-litical career. Many considered him oblivious even to the restraints of honor and reputation, a man bemused rather than outraged by disap-proval of his lifestyle and appetites (fig. 22). There seemed to be noth-ing holding Burr back from doing precisely as he chose.

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  Historic Adventures

  Tales from American History

  • Rupert Sargent Holland(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  There is a small island in the Ohio River, two miles below the town of Parkersburg, that is still haunted with the memory of a strange conspiracy. In 1805 the island, then some three hundred acres in size, belonged to an Irish gentleman, Harman Blennerhassett, who had built a beautiful home there and planted fields of hemp. For a time he and his family lived there in great content, Blennerhassett himself being devoted to science and to music, but presently he felt the need of increasing his small fortune and looked about for a suitable enterprise. Then there was introduced to him a gentleman from New York, a very well-known man by the name of Aaron Burr. He also was seeking to make his fortune, and he took Blennerhassett into his confidence. Together they plotted a conspiracy. They started to put their plans into action, and many people called them patriots, and many called them traitors. History does not know all the secrets of that small island, but it tells a curious story of the conspiracy.

  Aaron Burr was a very talented and fascinating man, but he was a born adventurer. At this time he was about fifty years old. He had fought in the Revolution, and practiced law in New York City, where he divided honors with Alexander Hamilton, the most brilliant attorney of the period. He had been elected a senator, and then had become a candidate for President of the United States. In the election of 1800 the Electoral College cast seventy-three votes apiece for Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, and these two candidates led all the others. As there was a tie, the choice of President was thrown into the House of Representatives, and there followed a long and bitter fight. Finally Jefferson was chosen President, and Burr Vice-President. In the long campaign Burr made many enemies, chief among whom were the powerful New York families of Clinton and Livingston. These men charged him with being a political trickster, and won most of his followers away from him. When Burr became a candidate for Governor of New York he was beaten, and his defeat was made more bitter by the stinging attacks of his old rival, Alexander Hamilton.

  In that day it was still the custom for gentlemen to settle questions of honor on the dueling field. Burr, stung by Hamilton's criticisms, challenged him, and the two met on the heights of Weehawken, overlooking the Hudson River. Here Burr wounded Hamilton so severely that the latter died a few days later. Hounded by Hamilton's friends, the luckless Burr now found himself cast out by both the Federalists and Republicans, and with no political future. Yet he knew that he had unusual talents for leadership. Still filled with ambition and in great need of money, he saw that there was little opportunity for him at home, and began to turn his eyes outside of the Republic.

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  The Devil's Advocates

  Greatest Closing Arguments in Criminal Law

  • Michael S Lief, H. Mitchell Caldwell(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Scribner

    (Publisher)

  Treason—the crime of betraying one’s own country—violates and compromises the very fabric of society; it is a wholesale betrayal of the traitor’s countrymen. It is also the only crime specifically designated in the U.S. Constitution. Fewer than fifty people have been prosecuted for treason in the history of the United States, and those have merited vast attention and wholesale damnation.

  The Aaron Burr treason trial was the greatest criminal trial in American history—because of the breadth of the conspiracy; the many luminaries associated with the case; the triumph of law over public outrage; and because the judge crafted the law of treason for all such trials to follow.

  The implications were staggering. Burr faced the hangman a mere three years after serving as the vice president of the United States and just seven years after nearly winning the American presidency itself. Burr’s scheme allegedly involved senators, congressmen, commodores, and generals—the commander in chief was a coconspirator, and even future president Andrew Jackson had been consulted by Burr and seemed to approve of his actions. Burr’s chief accuser was President Thomas Jefferson, who declared his guilt “beyond question.” The president directed that charges be brought and was intimately involved in Burr’s prosecution; the trial judge was the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Public sentiment weighed so heavily against Burr during jury selection that he was forced to accept jurors who believed him guilty but said they were open to persuasion.

  Aaron Burr lived a complicated life. He fought the British under Washington; he served as vice president under Jefferson; he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel; and he was alleged to be America’s great betrayer. To fully understand and appreciate his last and most notorious public drama, it is essential to study the man and the events that brought him to the precipice.

  A Difficult Start, a Promising Future

  Burr was born in Newark, New Jersey, on February 6, 1756; his mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, and great-grandfather succumbed to smallpox and other diseases before his second birthday. Custody of the young child went to his twenty-one-year-old uncle, Timothy Edwards, who imposed the strict discipline of his Puritan faith. Burr was often in open rebellion against his uncle, running away from home at the age of ten and securing a position as a cabin boy on an oceanbound ship. Discovered by his uncle just before the ship weighed anchor, Burr climbed to the safety of the masthead and negotiated a resolution: he’d return only if no punishment was imposed.

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  The Life of John Marshall, Volume 3

  Conflict and construction, 1800-1815

  • Albert J. (Albert Jeremiah) Beveridge(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  His personal friends stood true; his strange charm was as potent as ever over most of those whom he met face to face; and throughout the country there were thousands who still admired and believed in Aaron Burr. Particularly in the West and in the South the general sentiment was cordial to him; many Western Senators were strongly attached to him; and most of his brother officers of the Revolution who had settled beyond the Alleghanies were his friends. [758] Also, he was still in vigorous middle life, and though delicate of frame and slight of stature, was capable of greater physical exertion than most men of fewer years. What now should the dethroned political leader do? Events answered that question for him, and, beckoned forward by an untimely ambition, he followed the path that ended amid dramatic scenes in Richmond, Virginia, where John Marshall presided over the Circuit Court of the United States. Although at the time Jefferson had praised what he called Burr's "honorable and decisive conduct" [759] during the Presidential contest in the House in February of 1801, he had never forgiven his associate for having received the votes of the Federalists, nor for having missed, by the merest chance, election as Chief Magistrate. [760] Notwithstanding that Burr's course as Vice-President had won the admiration even of enemies, [761] his political fall was decreed from the moment he cast his vote on the Judiciary Bill in disregard of the rigid party discipline that Jefferson and the Republican leaders then exacted. [762] Even before this, the constantly increasing frigidity of the President toward him, and the refusal of the Administration to recognize by appointment any one recommended by him for office in New York, [763] had made it plain to all that the most Burr. could expect was Jefferson's passive hostility. Under these circumstances, and soon after his judiciary vote, the spirited Vice-President committed another impru dence

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  The Trial in American Life

  • Robert A. Ferguson(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  The now thoroughly misshapen figure of Burr would frighten early republicans into a tighter conception of civic identity. Seduction of the Blennerhassetts had been a timely warning for all to heed. Concepts of evil in a culture identify the blamable other, circumscribe it, and then hold it up as a spectacle for all to see. Aaron Burr, like the Miltonic Satan, had conscripted followers into a false cause. 27 As more and more Americans envisaged a providential continental republic, the trial of 1807 dramatized where fault could be assigned if the preordained expansion of the United States went awry. Early republicans worried a great deal about how they should behave as public citizens in a changing nation. 28 Burr provided the object lesson in how not to behave—a lesson that brought new urgency and definition to westward expansion. The ultimate accusation leveled at Burr in his 100 c h a p t e r t h r e e 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [100], (26 Lines: 220 ——— -3.252p ——— Normal Pa PgEnds: T [100], (26 trial for treason charged him with dividing East against West in sectional strife ( 1 : 447 – 48 ). The demonic image of him at trial, a representation of communal danger, would continue to flourish as the risk of a divided na-tion grew more likely across the antebellum period. In the most graphic account of him ever written, Aaron Burr would come to stand for the horrors of civil war. “the man without a country” Most Americans first encounter Aaron Burr through a short story enti-tled “The Man without a Country” written by Edward Everett Hale in 1863 . Hale’s biographer notes that the “combination of immediate suc-cess and enduring emotional relevance” made the story “unique among American stories written for magazines,” and he doesn’t exaggerate by much when he places its protagonist, Philip Nolan, alongside Rip Van Winkle as a recognizable character in American literature.

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  Famous Affinities of History

  The Romance of Devotion. Volume 2

  • Lyndon Orr(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  The happiness of the newly married pair did not, however, last very long. They made a wedding journey into Connecticut, of which state Burr's nephew was then Governor, and there Burr saw a monster bridge over the Connecticut River, in which his wife had shares, though they brought her little income. He suggested that she should transfer the investment, which, after all, was not a very large one, and place it in a venture in Texas which looked promising. The speculation turned out to be a loss, however, and this made Mrs. Burr extremely angry, the more so as she had reason to think that her ever-youthful husband had been engaged in flirting with the country girls near the Jumel mansion.

  She was a woman of high spirit and had at times a violent temper. One day the post-master at what was then the village of Harlem was surprised to see Mrs. Burr drive up before the post-office in an open carriage. He came out to ask what she desired, and was surprised to find her in a violent temper and with an enormous horse-pistol on each cushion at her side.

  "What do you wish, madam?" said he, rather mildly. "What do I wish?" she cried. "Let me get at that villain Aaron Burr!"

  Presently Burr seems to have succeeded in pacifying her; but in the end they separated, though she afterward always spoke most kindly of him. When he died, only about a year later, she is said to have burst into a flood of tears—another tribute to the fascination which Aaron Burr exercised through all his checkered life.

  It is difficult to come to any fixed opinion regarding the moral character of Aaron Burr. As a soldier he was brave to the point of recklessness. As a political leader he was almost the equal of Jefferson and quite superior to Hamilton. As a man of the world he was highly accomplished, polished in manner, charming in conversation. He made friends easily, and he forgave his enemies with a broadmindedness that is unusual.

  On the other hand, in his political career there was a touch of insincerity, and it can scarcely be denied that he used his charm too often to the injury of those women who could not resist his insinuating ways and the caressing notes of his rich voice. But as a husband, in his youth, he was devoted, affectionate, and loyal; while as a father he was little less than worshiped by the daughter whom he reared so carefully.

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