This Day in Vice-Presidential History (Indicted Burr Presides Over Senate)

Nov. 5, 1804—On what was supposed to be the opening day of the second session of 8^th Congress, so few Senators attended—13 in all—that those present quickly met and adjourned. But, though activity was slim to nonexistent, the spectacle on display at this early point in the history of the American republic was extraordinary: the official presiding over the proceedings, a member of the Executive Branch, was under indictment.

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.

This Day in Presidential History (Jefferson Calms Tensions After Disputed Election)

Mar. 4, 1801—In the newly constructed capital of the nation he had helped bring into being, Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated as the third President of the United States—and, after a bitterly disputed election, the first to take office in a peaceful transfer of power between rival political parties.

In his own assumption of the Presidency in 1981, Ronald Reagan pointed out the remarkable nature of such an event: “In the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”  

That “miracle” has continued without disruption except twice since Jefferson took the oath of office:  In 1861, when Southern states seceded rather than accept their recent electoral loss to a Republican Party committed to containing slavery, and this past January 6, at the Capitol riot that interrupted the formal acknowledgement of Electoral College results, leading to five deaths.

The author of the Declaration of Independence took the oath of office after an election that threatened to tear the United States asunder before it had barely begun. With a Constitution that did not envision party tickets or even political parties, the two Democratic-Republican candidates, Jefferson and Aaron Burr, ended up with the same number of electoral votes.

In spite of the fact that it was clearly understood that Jefferson headed the ticket, the election ended up, for the first of only two times in U.S. history, in the House of Representatives, where the rival Federalist Party seriously considered electing Burr rather than the candidate they abominated, according to historian Richard Hofstadter’s The Idea of a Party System, as “an atheist, a French fanatic, a libertine, a visionary, and a political incompetent.”

Tensions were at the breaking point, with some Federalists scheming to avoid ceding the election to the Republicans at all, while the Republican governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania prepared to mobilize the state militia in case of Federalist usurpation. In the end, with the Federalists accepting the conclusion of the informal party leader, Alexander Hamilton, that even the hated Jefferson was preferable to the unprincipled and dangerous Burr, the House voted to accept the Virginian as the winner.

In his landmark History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams depicts, with wonderful irony, the men around whom controversy swirled that March 4:

*a “retiring President” (his great-grandfather, John Adams) too angry to show up at the inauguration of the former friend who had defeated him in this last general election (John’s son, son John Quincy Adams, reacted similarly in 1829 when an opponent he despised, Andrew Jackson, assumed office);

*a Chief Justice (John Marshall) only appointed six weeks before but already on record as despising Jefferson;

*a Vice-President (Burr) now regarded by Jefferson and his associates as “the certain centre of corruption” for his ambiguous responses to Federalist attempts to sound him out before the recent vote in the House; and

*Jefferson himself, who, unlike later occupants of the White House, arrived with minimal ceremony: on foot, in ordinary dress, accompanied only by militia from a neighboring state and a few close political associates.

In private correspondence, among trusted confidants, Jefferson fulminated against the recent “reign of witches,” or period of political intolerance among the Federalists, and nearly two decades later he remembered the “revolution of 1800.” But publicly, in 1801, he began what has been a tradition of newly inaugurated Presidents since then: a reminder of the unity that exists among Americans despite strongly held political opinions.

Jefferson’s first inaugural address is among the most famous of all his public documents. Indeed, in a 2017 blog post, James M. Lindsay of the Council of Foreign Relations included it on a list of the seven best inaugural addresses.

Similarly to England’s theorist of conservatism, Edmund Burke, Jefferson delivered the most memorable public utterances in a voice devoid of volume or even noticeable expression. So it was with this address. Though many in his small audience that day could barely make out what he had to say, it has reverberated in all the years since, including in this appeal to bipartisan harmony:

“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

As with all later occupants of the White House, Jefferson would encounter storms of contention. But on this occasion, he succeeded in calming an anxious nation, including through his assurance—which has gained even greater relevance in light of recent events—to preserve “absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.”

This Day in Legal History (Burr Acquitted of Treason)

September 1, 1807—Aaron Burr, former Vice-President, dodged a danger greater than his infamous duel with Alexander Hamilton when a Richmond jury acquitted him of treason against the United States. For President Thomas Jefferson, who had thrown the full machinery of the government in the prosecution of his onetime running mate, the acquittal stung even more because the case was tried by his cousin and enemy, John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

One might well ask why Jefferson was at such pains to continue a case that a grand jury had previously decided was without merit. But the scheme, as set out, was extraordinary:  Burr, it was alleged, in a desperate attempt to revive his dead political career, wanted to lead an army south, separate the Western United States (just acquired in the Louisiana Purchase), then proceed to Mexico, where he would set up a separate nation with him as king, emperor, or some other potentate. It struck the Virginian as the same sort of conniving that almost made Burr, the Vice-Presidential candidate in the election of 1800, almost beating out the man who was supposed to be his boss when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives.

The question also arises as to whether the President wanted to bag an additional prize besides Burr. For the past four years, when the Federalist Marshall served notice on the Democratic-Republicans, in Marbury v. Madison, that the power of judicial review gave the Supreme Court the right to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, Jefferson had eyed every opportunity to catch his cousin Marshall in a mistake. Marshall hadn’t provided that chance at the time, but the stakes in the Burr trial were enormous and, consequently, anything could happen.

Over the years, some observers wondered why the Jefferson Administration would try such an important case in Richmond, where Marshall held jurisdiction as presiding judge in the federal circuit (Supreme Court justices heard cases on the circuit until the late 1890s), in a conspiracy case stretching from Kentucky down to New Orleans.

But, in a case with such high stakes, every opinion of its magistrate would be closely watched and itself judged. Jefferson was counting on public opinion to surge against Marshall, in the event of an adverse ruling or rulings: “They will see that one of the great coordinate branches of the government, setting itself in opposition to the other two and to the common sense of the nation, proclaims impunity to that class of offenders which endeavors to overturn the Constitution, and are themselves protected in it by the Constitution itself; for impeachment is a farce which will not be tried again,” he wrote Virginia Senator William Giles.

In History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams (great-grandson of the President’s longtime friend, then bitter enemy, John Adams) aptly summarized Jefferson’s feelings in that last sentence: “In substance Jefferson said that if Marshall should suffer Burr to escape, Marshall himself should be removed from office.” Indeed, the principal government attorney in the case, George Hay, made that very threat amid the trial.

Everybody wanted to come to the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond for the proxy battle that Burr had unwittingly furnished Jefferson and Marshall. Among those who did come were Andrew Jackson (whom Burr had tried to enlist in his scheme); Winfield Scott, then a 20-year-old soldier embarking on the career that would make him the greatest American general between the Revolution and the Civil War; and Washington Irving, already attracting notice as a witty observer of his country.

Irving was among those offended by one of Marshall’s actions early in the proceedings. The Chief Justice had shown up at a dinner also attended by one of Burr’s attorneys and the defendant himself. The New York author, judging this attendance “grossly indecent,” wondered if Marshall had forgotten one of the elementary tenets of the law: “that the administration of justice should not only be pure but unsuspected” (emphasis in the original).

That incident outraged Democratic-Republicans, but Burr’s sympathizers were no less angry about Jefferson’s initial announcement about the discovery of the conspiracy: “Of [Burr’s] guilt there can be no doubt,” he had written.

It might be said, then, that the idea of impartiality, in what Henry Adams called “the most important and difficult State prosecution ever tried under Executive authority,” had gone missing by both sides.

It is doubtful whether the early American republic had witnessed so many famous or well-connected people representing the prosecution and the defense. Caesar Rodney, just confirmed as Attorney-General, was immediately thrown into this complicated case. With so many of his duties keeping in Washington, he farmed out the day-to-day running of the case to William Wirt (himself a future Attorney-General); Alexander McRae, lieutenant-governor of Virginia; and George Hay, son-in-law of Jefferson’s protégé, James Monroe.

The lackluster ability of McRae and Hay would prove no match for the high-powered talent representing Burr. Edmund Randolph had served as Washington’s Attorney General and Secretary of State. His gravitas was balanced by the suavity of John Wickham and Benjamin Botts. Last was the flamboyant, alcoholic Luther Martin, a brilliant opponent of Jefferson’s who had already saved one enemy of the President, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, at his impeachment trial.

The prosecution faced several obstacles that, in the end, proved fatal:

*The Constitution’s insistence on what the presence of two witnesses to treason. There was one problem with the alleged crime that landed the Burr case in Marshall’s circuit to begin with: It took place on an island in the Ohio River owned by the Irish immigrant Harman Blennerhassett. The only trouble was that, though the men Burr had recruited had all shown up, Burr was hundreds of miles away.

*Delays in gathering materials. The “conspiracy,” the government alleged, occurred in places such as Lexington, Nashville, Fort Massac, and Chickasaw Bluffs, along with Blennerhassett’s island. This required that materials and testimony had to be gathered in these places, then brought back to Richmond—all at a time when transportation was not well advanced. (Robert Fulton had only just demonstrated the value of his steamboat that year.)

*The government’s star witness had serious credibility problems. Of all the famous people connected to the case, the most stunning might have been General James Wilkinson, the governor of the Louisiana Territory who, it was said, Burr had tried to draw into his scheme. Only one problem: Many wondered what Wilkinson himself was up to. They were right to be skeptical. At the time, Wilkinson—then commander in chief of the U.S. Army—had barely managed not to be indicted himself for his part with Burr. What nobody knew at the time was that, for two decades, he had also been a paid, secret double agent in the employ of the King of Spain.

A couple of Marshall rulings during the case would have serious implications for two Presidents in the late 20^th century, as they found themselves in legal trouble. Martin, passionately disputing Jefferson’s prejudgment of the case, pointedly asked if his client did not have all the more right for any and all materials to save himself from the death penalty. Couldn’t he require the President to yield up all important documents in the case? Couldn’t he even require the President’s testimony?

Hay had claimed that the President could be required to do so as a private citizen, but not as President. Marshall disagreed. To claim a special exemption from the President would place him on the level of a king (a charge guaranteed to rankle the anti-monarchist Jefferson). Moreover, the President’s business in Washington was not so pressing that he could not testify (raising Jefferson’s fury to even greater heights, at the implication that he really was not terribly busy, even at Monticello). There was one way that Jefferson could avoid the need to testify in person, Marshall explained: Simply provide the necessary materials requested by the defense. Accordingly, Marshall sided with Jefferson’s motion for a subpoena duces tecum to be issued to Jefferson.

The faceoff between Marshall and Jefferson over what the President could be compelled to provide at trial formed an important precedent in the issue of executive privilege. That issue would reach its most dire points when Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were required either to yield materials or testify themselves in the Watergate and sexual harassment trials that threatened their Presidencies.

On August 30, only three days after the jury had been sworn in and a dozen witnesses had testified, Burr’s defense team moved to exclude any testimony that went beyond the main point of the treason charge, that Burr chose to levy war on Blennerhassett's Island on December 10, 1806.This was the heart of the indictment, and it would be gutted if Marshall upheld the motion. On August 31, that is exactly what the Chief Justice did.  

The next day, Hay told the court that he could not move ahead with the case, and the jury, after deliberating a mere 20 minutes, gave the prosecution its expected drubbing. But, as with so much else in this case, it was more complicated than that. The jury returned a finding of “not proved to be guilty under this indictment by any evidence submitted to us.” It was as if they smelled something fishy going on at Blennerhassett's Island and wanted to state so somehow. Marshall, for the sake of the record, had the verdict changed simply to “not guilty.” Burr would have to do with a misdemeanor charge for the next couple of months, but the main threat to him from the capital charge was over.

Burr had escaped a guilty sentence, but he had to leave the country for several years, waiting for tempers to cool before he could come home. He would live for nearly another 30 years, but his career as a public man was effectively over. As usual with him, nobody can be quite sure if he was simply being his old opportunistic self in separating some of Spain’s lands in the Southwest or if he also wanted to include new lands from the Louisiana Purchase in the bargain.

Jefferson, who was close to the pinnacle of his power and influence when Burr had first been seized, had, by the fall, gotten Congress to pass an Embargo Act that shut down trading with Britain and France, in an effort to avoid the impressment seizures by British forces. The legislation, hugely controversial, dampened any influence he might have exerted against Marshall.

Marshall, having rendered an opinion that would form part of the Supreme Court’s set of precedents concerning treason and Presidential power, would survive his cousin Jefferson’s rage to stay on the court for another 28 years. His opinions went a long way toward establishing the cohesion of the Union. But he had already established conclusively, in the Burr case, that he was not to be intimidated, even by a district attorney arguing the President’s case hinting strongly that he could be impeached.

 
Marshall’s response to that not-so-veiled threat, on August 31, would ring through the next two centuries as the court’s own declaration of independence from the other two branches: “That this Court dares not usurp power is most true; that this Court dares not shrink from its duty is not less true.”

This Day in NY History (Former VP Burr Dies Dies in Disgrace)

September 14, 1836—On the same day his second wife was granted a divorce from him, 80-year-old Aaron Burr died at a hotel in Staten Island. The former Revolutionary War colonel, lawyer, U.S. Senator, and Vice President, who had moved with a rapidity through politics that startled and even angered his contemporaries, had, in the end, been stilled by a stroke suffered two years before.

It was characteristic of Burr that the last public episode involving him would be controversial. It was uncharacteristic that it would bear all the hallmarks of a Restoration comedy.

Burr had married Eliza Jumel while he was in his late 70s. He had lost his first wife nearly a half century before, charming a succession of women since then. Perhaps he hoped that Madame Jumel, believed to be the wealthiest woman in New York, would provide him an element of safe harbor.

As so often happened with this too-clever-by-half man, he was badly mistaken. He had grabbed onto a tigress, a woman described in this way: “born a bastard, in youth a prostitute, in middle age a social climber, died an eccentric.“ The marriage foundered within a year, as the couple quarreled over how rapidly Burr was running through her money.

Madame Jumel gave him a strong legal kick on the way out the door. A simple divorce wasn’t enough for her: she charged him with taking a 26-year-old woman as his mistress. She did so because the woman in question, Jane McManus, was at that point in New Orleans and, therefore, unable to appear in court to contest the charge.

At first, Burr had pleaded that he was too old to be guilty of adultery. It could be called a tribute to his virility that so many refused to accept that as an excuse.

At last, exhausted by the legal struggle, Burr did not contest the adultery charge, but he refused to admit it and declined to provide alimony.

Burr had as much intelligence and charm as any leader in the early American republic. But now, in the declining days of his life, he had set tongues wagging again.

This time, people asked how a smart lawyer such as himself could get into this kind of mess. Thirty years before, they had asked how he had fallen from power so precipitously. If his enemies were hardly the paragons of virtue posterity long believed, it remains the case that his own character, not their excesses, is why his legacy is so radically different from theirs.

None of this is to say, though, that he left no mark on the future republic. It just so happens that his DNA runs through methods rather than words or institutions.

''He is as far from a fool as I ever saw,'' Andrew Jackson said, ''and yet is as easily fooled as any man I ever knew.''

By the same token, it can be said, no man was in a better position to understand Burr than Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory had also killed a man in a duel. Moreover, Burr laid the groundwork for Jackson’s destruction of the deferential style of politics in which Americans had continually turned to aristocrats to lead them, from George Washington to John Quincy Adams.

But Jackson had survived his involvement in dueling. For all political intents and purposes, Burr had not. I think much of it had to do with the fact that most people judged, correctly, that Burr was too clever by half.

In a syndicated column from the 1970s, Garry Wills disputed President Richard Nixon’s comparison of himself with British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, instead likening him to Burr. The parallels that Wills underscored were strong, including that:

· Both men served in the U.S. Senate before ascending to the Vice-Presidency;
· Both men attracted enemies early on because of their no-holds-barred tactics;
· Both men, when out of public office, were highly skilled attorneys;
· Both men served as Vice-Presidents under older men regarded as national heroes;
· Both men, after losing their chance to go directly from Vice-President to the Presidency, entered close, bitterly fought, unsuccessful statewide races;
· Both men fell from power and spent the rest of their lives in disgrace.

In the years since the column appeared, other historians have also pursued this historical analogy, though perhaps in not the way Wills intended.

Most notably, both men have become the poster boys of historical revisionism, with their causes advanced, oddly enough, by the liberals who once despised them. The likes of Gore Vidal, Tom Wicker, and Howard Dean have praised Nixon for his foreign-policy prowess (especially in his overtures to Communist China) and even for a more benign attitude toward big government than his GOP successors would display. Burr is now praised not only for believing in the equality of women (he provided his beloved daughter with an education equal to any learned man's), but for opposing the hegemony of the “Virginia Dynasty” of the Democratic-Republicans Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe.

But there was a reason why the odor of disreputability clung so strongly, despite his best efforts, to this antic, elfin (he was hardly taller than our smallest President, Madison) figure: the meanings and intentions behind words were fungible to Burr. He did not like to openly commit to strategems lese his freedom of action be inhibited. Thus, he gave one set of people one thing to believe, another group something else.

After all these years, it is still impossible to say exactly what Burr was up to in the chain of events that landed him before the U.S. Supreme Court in a trial for treason. Burr escaped with his life at that point because Chief Justice John Marshall insisted on more legally rigorous evidence for treason than that favored by the Jefferson Administration.

Before he had alarmed Jefferson with his ambiguous adventures in the Western states and the Louisiana Territory, or disgusted the Virginian with his opportunistic, equivocal positions on whether he’d let the Federalists vote for him over Jefferson in the House of Representatives in the disputed election of 1800, Burr had proven that he could be very useful indeed to the Democratic-Republicans in New York, where he had used newly formed Tammany Hall to move the state out of the grasp of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists.

It was Burr's genius to see the potential for a benevolent association to be refashioned into a political machine--one that, under later leaders, would be epitomize the boss system in the United States.

Burr represented “a new power in the government,” according to Henry Adams’ epic History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson: “for being in public and in private life an adventurer of the same school as scores who were then seeking fortune in the antechambers of Bonaparte and Pitt, he became a loadstone for every other adventurer who frequented New York or whom the chances of politics might throw into office. The Vice-president wielded power, for he was the certain centre of corruption.”

As discussed in Gustavus Myers' history of Tammany Hall, Burr's top lieutenants, who continued to worship their old chief, remained in power well into the late 1830s. Martin Van Buren, an early admirer of the Vice President, would use and expand on Burr's methods in forming his own version of the machine, the Albany Regency. Finally, once Irish emigrants took power in Tammany, they took the machine to its ultimate level.

Joseph J. Ellis' American Creation includes less than a page on Burr, but in the methods he used to build Tammany Hall, the little colonel helped create the democratic process we know so well in America today--one in which participation in voting and even public office is open to a wider range of people than simply the elites contemplated at the time of the Constitution. That same process, of course, has also left the system for more open to corruption and demagoguery.

This Day in Literary History (Washington Irving Leaves for Life-Changing Trip to Europe)

May 19, 1804—Funded by his merchant brothers, who hoped a transatlantic voyage might clear up his lungs, 21-year-old Washington Irving sailed for Europe.

The trip ended up doing more than preserve his health, however: it also fired the burgeoning creativity and cosmopolitan spirit of America’s first professional writer—and confirmed his belief that the United States had no reason to feel inferior to those abroad who he felt were immoral, class-ridden, and, for all their pretensions, woefully ignorant of the New World.

William and Ebenezer Irving had other reasons for worrying about their beloved younger brother, the baby in the family of 11: he wasn’t showing much interest in commercial pursuits, such as the family’s then-thriving import business. Moreover, though he’d been clerking at a couple of law offices for a few years, he was showing little flair and even less interest in that profession. Though he’d eventually squeak by in his bar exam, he was showing no more than a desire to please his family by pursuing this.

What Washington (named, in a burst of parental patriotism, for the Father of His Country) did like was writing—an avocation to which he could give full vent to his charm and good humor.

Some letters he’d written for his brother Peter’s journal, The Morning Chronicle, under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle, had attracted much favorable attention, with many readers—including Aaron Burr—not only passing it along enthusiastically to friends and relatives but engaging in a guessing game as to the author’s true identity. (Just before the young man sailed for Europe, the Vice-President—increasingly a marginalized figure in national and state politics, but not yet the pariah he’d become after his duel with Alexander Hamilton—had sat down to dine with him.)

After more than two centuries of Americans living abroad—including such literary giants as Henry James, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—creative types have instinctively sensed the catalytic effects this can have on their work. More recently, as reported in the May 16, 2009 issue of The Economist, a psychological study in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has proved that there is in fact a link between creativity and dwelling abroad.

All of this was not so well-established when Irving toured France, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, and England. His exposure to the lore of other lands would, years later, affect his work directly.

When he visited the small Italian town of Cogoletto, he soaked up impressions of the birthplace of Christopher Columbus that would come in handy when he wrote his biography of the explorer a quarter century later. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was influenced by German folktales, including the Brothers Grimm’s “Karl Katz.”

In certain ways, Irving’s exposure to foreign sources has probably hurt him in the eyes of critics who would like something more allegedly original and American. Nearly two decades ago, for instance, I attended a lecture by the critic Alfred Kazin at my local library in which he spoke about James Fenimore Cooper. I asked why Cooper tended to be taught more in colleges and universities than Irving. “When was the last time you read Irving?” he asked.

If I had not been so surprised by the question, I might have replied that it was right about the same time that I’d read Cooper. When Kazin actually got around to answering my inquiry, he continued that with the Leatherstocking Saga, Cooper had, in effect, created a whole new genre—the western—while Irving remained indebted in form to European sources.

I’m not sure that I buy this argument. After all, Cooper started out writing novels with a pale imitation of Jane Austen, The Precaution. Even when he moved on to a métier that was arguably more native to him—The Spy and The Leatherstocking Saga—he still remained influenced, to some extent, to the reigning master of historical fiction, Sir Walter Scott. And you simply cannot compare Cooper's clumsiness (expertly captured in Mark Twain's sendup, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses") with Irving's deft use of language.

The preference for Cooper over Irving in American English departments is a trifle bit perverse, if you ask me—sort of like English courses that include Samuel Richardson’s godawful Pamela and Clarissa simply because they began the novel in the British Isles. These courses should be encouraging people to enjoy reading, maybe even take English as a major—not sending them to the bar to drown their frustration in Jack Daniels.

Andrew Burstein’s biography The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving goes a long way toward reclaiming the writer’s reputation as an American original—someone whose 1809 burlesque, A History of New York, gave birth to the terms “Knickerbocker” (named after a character in that book) and “Gotham,” and who later wrote acclaimed biographies of Washington and Columbus that made use of original sources. (More recently, Elizabeth Bradley of the New York Public Library appeared on WNYC-FM's "Leonard Lopate Show" to discuss how Irving’s “Knickerbocker History” provided the template for Jon Stewart by combining real fact and fake news.)

In later years, like Benjamin Franklin, Irving’s celebrity would stand him in good stead in a diplomatic stint—in this case, as an ambassador to Spain—and he would live for 17 consecutive years without returning home. Much of his later success might have been due to his penchant for holding his tongue and maintaining an amiable surface even as foreigners excited his disgust.

The French brought out his critical side the most—something that would bring nods of agreement not only from Fox News but from President Clinton’s Secretary of State, Warren Christopher (who, in his memoir, Chances of a Lifetime, took an uncharacteristic shot at the French foreign minister for putting the “gall in Gallic” with a contemptuous parting birthday gift).

Irving was shocked at the French sexual openness—not only dancers’ “shameless exposure of their persons,” but also an older man’s urging that he take a mistress for himself. He was also annoyed that the nation—then coming, in earnest, under the thumb of Napoleon Bonaparte—acted so suspiciously toward anyone (Americans included) who might be British agents, and that at least one person he met wondered if America “was not in the neighborhood of Turkey or somewhere there about!”

One other matter that might interest in today’s Americans: Irving had a close encounter at sea, between Corsica and the Italian shoreline, with a pirate crew who boarded the American vessel, the Matilda. (The pirates were only able to secure wine and brandy from the ship.)

Irving stayed in Europe until early 1806. As he reflected on his encounters, he not only displayed, as Burstein observes, “an honest curiosity about people and places,” but also a greater attachment to his native country:

“I shall, I think, never complain against government when I return to America. My fellow countrymen do not know the blessings they enjoy; they are trifling with their felicity and are in fact themselves their own worst enemies.”

This Day in New York History (Hamilton Attacks Burr in Governor Race)

Feb. 10, 1804—In Albany to argue a case that presaged a bright new future as an influential constitutional lawyer, former Secretary of the Treasury and Federalist chieftain Alexander Hamilton couldn’t resist the opportunity to involve himself in the most bitter controversy of the day, as he’d been doing for the last 30 years. 

This time, though, his decision began a long, complicated train of circumstances that resulted in his fatal duel at Weehawken, N.J., with Aaron Burr only five months later.

Faithful reader, if you thought the Spitzer and Paterson follies of the past year contained enough twists to cause permanent whiplash, you need to go back more than 200 years, when the skullduggery involving the gubernatorial race was really something to behold. The consequences of the election were completely out of proportion to the pettiness displayed.

Historians, novelists, and even playwright (Sidney Kingsley, in The Patriots) have long weighed in on the Hamilton-Burr feud. But I’m afraid that it would take a psychiatrist to make sense of the two New Yorkers. The truly amazing thing about the whole affair, after all, lies not in the two men’s differences but their similarities:

* Both men were born within a year of each other;

* Both suffered devastating personal losses in childhood—Hamilton had to live down being, in John Adams’ immortal if nasty phrase, “the bastard son of a Scotch pedlar,” while Burr, before the age of three, had lost both parents, a grandmother, a grandfather (Jonathan Edwards), and a great-grandfather;

* Both enjoyed classical education at Ivy League schools: Burr at Princeton, Hamilton at King’s College (later Columbia University);

* Both rose to become colonels in the American Revolution, serving with great distinction and displaying conspicuous bravery;

* Both became lawyers at the same time, and were considered among the ablest men of the bar;

* Both lived for a time in the 1780s on Wall Street, and even visited each other’s houses from time to time;

* Both were strongly anti-slavery;

* Both were short dandies with a roving eye, with Hamilton becoming ensnared in the American republic’s first sex scandal, the Maria Reynolds affair, while Burr’s second wife, Madame Jumel, successfully sued her septuagenarian husband for divorce on grounds of adultery.

But ever since the early 1790s, when Burr had defeated Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, in a race for the U.S. Senate, the friendly rivalry between Hamilton and Burr had, bit by bit, become less cordial.

During the election of 1800, Hamilton had become so disturbed by what he regarded as Burr’s demagogic tendencies that he even persuaded Federalists in the House of Representatives to back his onetime enemy in Washington’s Cabinet, Thomas Jefferson, when the House was called on to break the Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Burr.

If you want a shorthand description of Burr, you can’t do better than the phrase “too clever by half.” That tendency led him to play footsie with possible Federalist voters in the House, neither requesting nor disdaining their vote. The Virginia leaders of the Democratic-Republican Party—Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—did not soon forget his political opportunism.

By the end of Burr’s first year as Vice-Presidency, Jefferson had made sure he had lost out on patronage in New York State to a faction led by Governor George Clinton. As 1804 dawned, it became increasingly clear that Burr had no future in the White House as an heir apparent to Jefferson.

Now something extraordinary happened. Clinton notified Jefferson that he was going to step down as governor because of age (64) and ill health (chronic rheumatism). Amazingly, however, instead of seeing in Clinton an ex-governor, Jefferson saw him as a future Vice-President serving under himself. Having Clinton as his running mate for his second term, Jefferson decided, would accomplish three aims:

* it would shove Burr out of the way;

* it would put in the Vice Presidency someone who posed no threat to the person that Jefferson really wanted to succeed him, Madison; and

* it would preserve the Southern-New York alliance that had helped the Democratic-Republicans gain the Presidency in the first place.

Just as amazingly, Burr saw an opportunity in the suddenly open gubernatorial seat, too: the chance to become a political player again.

So Burr tossed his hat into the ring. In the free-floating New York state politics of the time, the Federalists had become so emasculated that they could not run a candidate of their own for governor—all they could do was help decide which of the Democratic-Republicans would win.

Enter Hamilton, in Albany to appear in one of the landmark cases in state history. The Federalist, bruised from his Cabinet fights with Jefferson as well as from the bitter clash with President John Adams that split the Federalists in 1800, was now concentrating his efforts on the law. 

His advocacy would allow him to piece together his family life together again while also enabling him to begin making a dent in the mountain of debts he’d accumulated.

At this time, Hamilton was probably unrivaled as a constitutional lawyer. He had already demonstrated his piercing insights into the Constitution through the pamphlets he’d contributed to The Federalist Papers during the struggle over ratification. 

Service in the Cabinet had given him practical acumen in government, and two decades of arguing cases had honed his ability to sway juries through the relentless force of his arguments and passionate oratory. 

With James Wilson dead and Daniel Webster just starting out in public life, there probably was no other lawyer in the land at that time with so much potential to influence constitutional theory before the Supreme Court.

In fact, he was now in Albany for just such a case. Jefferson had announced in his first inaugural address, “We are all Federalists; we are all Republicans,” but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t above driving into the political wilderness the party that had made his service as Washington’s Secretary of State a form of hell. To that end, he was now pursuing prosecutions of Federalist editors.

One of these editors, Henry Croswell, enlisted as his attorney Hamilton. Croswell’s first trial had ended with the jury finding him guilty.

Now, in Albany, Hamilton was readying a six-hour address to the courtroom pleading for a new trial. In it, he called for freedom of the press and listed criteria for libel that have become commonplace in American press law ever since: i.e., that to be libelous, writing must be false, defamatory and malicious.

That speech, Hamilton’s friend James Kent remarked, was “the greatest forensic effort that he ever made,” and even political foes were inclined to agree.

But Hamilton couldn’t stick to the bar, a practice he venerated. Ever since he’d been a student at King’s College, he couldn’t miss an opportunity to make his mark on the burning political issues of the day. This time, the issue was Burr.

The deep suspicions Hamilton already harbored toward Burr’s advocacy of “democracy” became all the more pronounced because of rumors going around about a Federalist scheme in New England to secede from the Union. Leading Federalists in Massachusetts had become so disenchanted with slaveholding Virginia leaders of the Democratic-Republican Party that they were talking about breaking up the Union. Several of these secessionists saw in the disaffected Burr a potential ally.

Like much else with Burr, it’s hard to determine the extent, if any, of his involvement with this conspiracy. His invariable advice to anyone who received correspondence from him was that they burn his letter. That makes it difficult to reconstruct what he promised or didn’t promise people.

But Hamilton, convinced of Burr’s involvement, now brought it to the attention of the Federalists. He couldn’t oppose Burr’s bid for governor on purely personal grounds, so he had to find something. The New England confederacy became part of his political brief against Burr.

So opposed was Hamilton to Burr’s bid that, in a speech to Federalists gathered in Lewis’ Tavern in Albany, he even backed a longtime foe, John Lansing, a fellow New York delegate that he had opposed at the Constitutional Convention. Lansing's character, Hamilton argued now, was not as bad as Burr’s, and his lack of strength as a leader might actually revive Federalism in the state.

In the end, Lansing decided not to run, and the anti-Burr forces among the Democratic-Republicans turned to State Chief Justice Morgan Lewis. Hamilton now threw his support to him. When the votes were counted in late April, Lewis had, against all odds, beaten Burr handily.

At this point, Burr reminds me of nobody so much as Richard Nixon. After his 1960 loss of the Presidential race to John F. Kennedy, the Vice-President had decided, like Burr, to revive his political fortunes by running for governor of his state, California. 

Nixon’s loss in this second race then led him to lash out at the press with the famously bitter comment, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

As he licked his wounds that spring, Burr’s characteristic sangfroid evaporated. Normally the most charming of men, his feelings turned as rancid as Nixon's would more than a century and a half later. He needed someone other than himself to blame. 

His feelings crystallized when he received in the mail an account that noting “a still more despicable opinion which General Hamilton has expressed of Mr. Burr.”

Burr’s attempt to find out directly from Hamilton what that “opinion” was led to the correspondence that produced Hamilton’s death and Burr’s permanent ostracism from American politics.