But I’ll let someone else fill you in on the
background, a sharp-eyed witness who wrote in his diary about what brought
matters to this pass, Senator John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts:
“The Vice-President, Mr. [Aaron] Burr, on the
11th of July last fought a duel with General Alexander Hamilton, and
mortally wounded him, of which he died the next day. The coroner’s inquest on
his body found a verdict of wilful murder by Aaron Burr… The Grand Jury in the
County of New York found an indictment against him, under the statute, for
sending the challenge; and the Grand Jury of Bergen County, New Jersey, where
the duel was fought, have recently found a bill against him for murder. Under all
these circumstances Mr. Burr appears and takes his seat as President of the
Senate of the United States.”
Don’t let the matter-of-fact tone of Adams’ account
fool you. The court cases, juxtaposed with Burr’s appearance in his usual spot
in the chamber, could only have left the son of the prior American President
shaking his head as he scribbled down his thoughts at the end of the day—a
practice he had begun 25 years before, and would continue doing for another
four decades.
Four words in Adams’ account especially made me sit up
and take notice: “Bergen County, New Jersey.”
More specifically, less than two weeks before the
senator wrote these lines, in modern-day Hackensack, only a few miles from my hometown,
the consequences of the first bitterly contested Presidential election in
American history—with Jefferson triumphing in the House of Representatives over
Burr only after unexpected help from Hamilton—were being played out, in a way
that few if any participants or observers could have foreseen.
I am writing this post on a day filled with its own
tension between two rival political parties, with a former President trying to
reclaim the office, even after being convicted on 34 felony counts. I confess
that it gives me comfort to get away from the TV, radio, and Internet and
revisit a time when the young United States managed to survive its own crisis,
generated by an earlier politician seeking desperately for a way out of his own
self-generated dilemma.
The politician that Adams balefully eyed lacked a
political base but not swirling intrigue around him. Federalists abominated him
for killing their de facto leader, Hamilton. As for the Democratic-Republicans,
though Thomas Jefferson was dining with him a good deal more often in
hopes he would deliver favorable rulings in the upcoming impeachment trial of
Federalist Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, Burr's too-clever-by-half maneuvers
for the Presidency four years before left the President and the other Virginia leaders of the party profoundly distrusting the
northerner.
Over 50 years ago, a syndicated column by Garry Wills
compared Burr to Richard Nixon, a more recent Vice President (and eventual
President) whose career was truncated by scandal. But many observers have
noticed uncanny similarities with another New Yorker, Donald Trump.
One quote they frequently cite came from a letter by
Hamilton 12 years before his appointment with Burr in Weehawken. Glimpsing the
rise of a fellow Revolutionary War veteran in his state’s politics, George Washington’s
Treasury Secretary did not like what he saw:
“When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in
his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the
advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have
scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to
mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to
take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it
under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of
the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into
confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”
Except for that phrase about “military habits,” this
description of Burr as a potential American Caesar sounds an awful lot like
Trump.
Not that the Vice President has been without
advocates. Over 220 years after his political career effectively ended, Burr critics
and revisionists among historians still debate his intentions and legacy.
Controversy lingers over Burr partly because of lack
of documentation about his life, as discussed in this June 2019 American
Scholar article by Penelope Rowlands. Some of his papers were lost
while he was in transit as a kind of Flying Dutchman of the young republic;
others, in the December 1812 shipwreck that took the life of his beloved daughter,
Theodosia.
But, even when correspondence and diary entries are
available, their content is often cryptic.
Burr could switch to writing in a
different language in the middle of a document if he suspected it was being
secretly read by someone else. He employed ciphers, but even when these
messages were decoded, their actual meaning might only be understood by the
recipient.
For example, in a letter written by son-in-law Joseph
Alston in July 1804, as Burr awaited the results of grand jury investigations
in New York and New Jersey, even his decoded message is not necessarily easy to
infer:
“Immediately on the receipt of your letter
on finance, I put the thing in a train of inquiry – The person employed has not
yet met with success – your name is not used –
The jury Mentioned in my last
have adjourned over to Monday Eveg (23d.) – The result will determine my
Movements –.”
The Burr quality admitted by both detractors and admirers, charm, won to his side people who thought they discerned his ambiguous plans, and disarmed and confused those predisposed against him.
Even the likes of Senator
Adams and his wife Louisa, as related in this 2021 blog post by Gwen Fries of the Massachusetts Historical Society, ended up “fallen under his spell”
on a March 1805 boat ride from Baltimore to Philadelphia.
Adams’ grandson, historian Henry Adams, right after
introducing the “quiet, gentlemanly, and rather dignified” Vice President into
his epic narrative of the administration of Thomas Jefferson, swerved toward
assessing him, in the most scathing terms, as “a new power in the government…an
adventurer of the same school as scores who were then seeking fortune in the
antechambers of Bonaparte and Pitt…[and] the certain centre of corruption.”
A little over three years after Adams’ November 1804 diary
entry, the New Jersey Supreme Court quashed the Bergen County indictment
because, though shot in the state, Hamilton had died across the Hudson River in
New York.
Another legal escape came that same year (much like
Trump a few months ago) via the U.S. Supreme Court, when Chief Justice John
Marshall, narrowly construing the Constitution’s
definition of treason, ruled in Burr's favor when Jefferson’s Department of
Justice brought charges related to the disgraced politician's attempt to separate the
Western states and the Louisiana Territory from the Union.
Shortly afterward, Burr fled for Europe, dodging
creditors, courts, and all manner of rumors (including that he was planning an
assassination attempt against Jefferson). But, two years after this
controversial acquittal in the conspiracy case, Burr’s travel plans and schemes
had become the subject of speculation again.
Adams, now out of the Senate and back into a more
congenial role as America’s greatest diplomat, was informed by Czar Alexander I’s
Chancellor, Count Romanoff, that while in Gottenberg, Sweden, Burr had applied
for a passport to Russia.
In February 1810, Romanoff told Adams of another Burr
attempt to go to Russia, and asked the American minister if the former Vice
President had violated any laws. Adams responded, “as well as its complicated
nature would admit in the compass of a short conversation.”
Recent biographers of Burr have thoroughly examined
aspects of his life formerly given relatively short shrift that now deserve
more attention, including his challenge to the politics of deference that
allowed the Virginia Dynasty to enormously influence the Presidency in the
first four decades of the nation’s founding.
But these revisionists have a harder time explaining
why Burr, as noted by Henry Adams, “made himself intimate with every element of
conspiracy that could be drawn within his reach.” The United States was fortunate
that, for all his energetic conspiracy-spinning, his implementation was
maladroit. The republic may not always be so blessed.
