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.

Quote of the Day (Alexander Hamilton, on a Leader ‘Despotic in His Ordinary Demeanour’)

“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 nonsense 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.’”—Founding Father Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), “Objections and Answers Respecting the Administration of the Government,” Aug. 18, 1792

This week 231 years ago, Alexander Hamilton pondered seriously what it would take to introduce a monarchy or aristocracy into the nation he had joined with others, at grave risk to themselves, to bring into being.

For the most part, he dismissed the notion of a threat to liberty coming from a government that continually changed hands in the normal process of a transfer of power. “A people so enlightened and so diversified as the people of this Country” could never allow it, he believed—unless after a “long series of time,” and brought about by “convulsions and disorders, in consequence of the acts of popular demagogues.”

This week, in Fulton County, GA, conspirators who had acted at the behest of such a “popular demagogue,” will begin the slow process of being held to account for what Hamilton called “flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.”

For the past seven years, many politicians felt that this “popular demagogue” would inevitably wear out his welcome with voters. That has proven to be wishful thinking. It is now up to ordinary jurors, working within the criminal justice system, to hasten the departure from the public scene of the man I called six years ago “a petulant libertine terrifyingly possessed of unmatched economic, political and military power.”

TV Quote of the Day (‘Veep,’ With Jonah on Alexander Hamilton, ‘Our First Puerto Rican President’)

Jonah Ryan [played by Timothy C. Simons]: “You know what we really need? A cool name.”

Guy #1: “Libertonians. It says what we're about.”

Jonah: “No, it sounds like a gay a cappella group.”

Bill Jaeger [played by Seth Morris]: “I got it: ‘The Beltway Boys’!”

Jonah: “Jesus Christ, are you tag teaming this? Those are awful. I got it! How about ‘The Jeffersons’?”

Jeager: “That's pretty good but it also—you know this—happens to be the name of a—"

Jonah: “President, yeah, that's exactly why I like it, Jaeger. Tommy J, he's not all played out like George Washington or Hamilton."

Woman #1: “Hamilton wasn't a president.”

Jonah: “Then why the f--- did they write a musical about him? No, he was our first Puerto Rican president.”

Jaeger: “ 'The Washingtones.’”

Jonah: “No, I am the white Hamilton of the Jeffersons and that's our name. To The Jeffersons!”

Everyone else: “To the Jeffersons!”

Jonah: “That's right. No one's going to keep us down because we are moving on up!”—Veep, Season 6, Episode 6, “Qatar,” original air date May 21, 2017, teleplay by Steve Hely and Armando Iannucci, directed by Becky Martin

Quote of the Day ('Hamilton' Scribe Ron Chernow, on How He Treats His Subjects)

"Great historical figures carry the weight of their own defects. It's not my job to pretty them up."—Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow quoted in Alexandra Wolfe, “Weekend Confidential: Ron Chernow,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 16-17, 2017

Quote of the Day (Alexander Hamilton, on ‘Malignant Passions,’ Demagogues and Despots)

“A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”— Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist No. 1,” The Federalist Papers (1787)

I wish that I were more in the mood to celebrate the Fourth of July in the traditional mode, with fireworks, flag-waving, and other outbursts of gratitude for liberty. But, more than ever before, I feel the need to issue a storm warning on what can happen—and that day does not seem so far off—when those freedoms are curtailed. I can think of few warnings more relevant than the one by Alexander Hamilton as the campaign to ratify the Constitution began in earnest 230 years ago.

The first Secretary of the Treasury has not always been cited in a way that truly accounts for the contradictions in his life. Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the mega-hit musical Hamilton, recently released a video that riffed off one of his songs, "Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)" as a contribution to one of the most contentious debates of recent American history.

As the son and grandson of immigrants, I would love to enlist this Founding Father as a prophet of the energy and patriotism displayed by newcomers to America. But the Revolutionary War soldier who saw the French as comrades in his nation’s war of independence came to see them 20 years later as threats to American life.

But Hamilton remained consistent throughout his shortened life on the profound threat to republics posed by disorder, manifested in “a torrent of angry and malignant passions.” Like many of the other leaders of the Revolution and early republic (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison), he had received a thorough grounding in Greek and Roman classics. He knew, from the example of Rome, how easily a republic could degenerate into an empire.

From the ancient Roman historian Suetonius, Hamilton would have learned how Julius Caesar  maneuvered within a Rome wracked by war and class divisions until he was left alone at the top of the state—and how Caesar’s increased appetite for power sparked further unrest (through his assassination on the Ides of March) and the effective end of the republic. According to biographer Ron Chernow, Hamilton’s papers are filled with “pejorative references” to Julius Caesar—and he likened Cabinet rival Thomas Jefferson to Caesar as a populist demagogue. (In time, of course, Hamilton saw Aaron Burr as an even more profound threat to American liberty.)

Fearing the lack of “a sound and well-informed judgment” among non-property owners, Hamilton foresaw dangers in a democracy. In particular, Chernow observes, “Hamilton fell prey to lurid visions that the have-nots would rise up and dispossess the haves. Men of property would be held hostage by armies of the indebted and unemployed.”

The American political system has evolved as a means of addressing that concern through a Jeffersonian education for all citizens, while still retaining a Hamiltonian “enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government.”

But the constant unrest of the last generation—and the daily outrages from candidate and President Donald Trump—have resurrected Hamilton’s fear of someone given to “paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” In seeing a system where no legislation gets passed or problems dealt with—where “the energy and efficiency of government” hailed by Hamilton has evaporated—voters last year chose someone completely outside the system, a billionaire blowhard with an unjustified reputation for getting things done.

Hamilton might have been dismayed, but not necessarily surprised, by this turn of events. From Suetonius, he would have known that Julius Caesar had solidified power by corrupting “all Pompey's friends…, as well as the greater part of the senate, through loans made without interest or at a low rate.” When it comes to political bribery, contemporary Washington exceeds ancient Rome--not to mention the Britain that Hamilton rebelled against--in ingenious new uses.  

Those seemingly least immune to the power of gold had yielded to the temptation with an even more sickly avidity than the lower classes, according to another ancient Roman historian, Tacitus: “In the decline of the Roman Republic, the consular, patrician, and equestrian orders, rushed headlong into servitude; the more illustrious the family, the more corrupt and eager was the individual.”

Octavian (later Augustus) Caesar, nephew of Julius and the ultimate victor in the power struggle after his death, institutionalized this neutering of the powerful by speaking respectfully to the Roman Senate while ensuring that little if any real power ever returned to it. His successor, Tiberius, with none of Augustus’ velvet fist, engaged in sexual perversity and paranoid pursuit of enemies, resting on a base of contempt for a Roman senate fatally addicted to its privileges.

“Ah, the wretches!” Tiberius gloated about his senators at one point, according to Tacitus. “They are eager to court their own servitude! They cry royalty, God bless it!”

Tacitus was scathing about this state of affairs: “Thus, even the enemy of public liberty was himself disgusted with the excessive subserviency of his base slaves.” He—and Hamilton—would have grasped the dangers of a political order that, in a time of uncertainty, remains blissfully supine before a petulant libertine terrifyingly possessed of unmatched economic, political and military power.

Quote of the Day (Alexander Hamilton, on Voters’ ‘Reflection and Choice’)

“[I]t seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” —Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers: No. 1 (1787)

This Day in Economic History (Birth of Robert Morris, Revolutionary Financier)

January 31, 1734—Robert Morris, commonly regarded as the “financier of the American Revolution” for keeping George Washington’s army intact through crucial financial transactions in the American Revolution, was born in Liverpool, England.

Reputedly the richest man in Philadelphia at the height of his influence, Morris was one of the most reluctant signers of the Declaration of Independence, but once he joined his colleagues at the Second Continental Congress in committing to separation from England, he threw his weight into the effort in a way that few others could match, with all his financial resources. He went on to sign the other two principal documents of the young republic, the Articles of Confederation and Constitution—one of only two people (Connecticut’s Roger Sherman being the other) to do so. He turned down Washington’s offer of the position of Secretary of the Treasury in the first Cabinet in favor of being one of the first two U.S. Senators from Pennsylvania.

Washington’s offer was not only an acknowledgement of Morris’ acumen, but the general’s appreciation for the merchant’s friendship and constant support during and after the revolution. Morris, along with other conservatives in the Continental Congress, had stood behind Washington when the “Conway Cabal” formed to supplant him as commander of the Continental Army with Horatio Gates. Throughout the war, whenever Washington put out an SOS, Morris had somehow found enough money to make sure that American soldiers were at least minimally fed and clothed—and that the small cadre of intelligence operatives who reported on enemy activities was funded. 

From 1780 on, when the republic's currency was, for all intents and purposes, worthless, it was Morris' personal credit, gained from three decades as a shipper and early global capitalist, on which the Continental Army's depended. When Washington needed to make his final move toward Yorktown to trap Lord Cornwallis' army, Morris managed to secure cattle from Connecticut and flour from Pennsylvania and Virginia--all while continuing to supply the Continental soldiers with gunpowder that he had managed to shp past British authorities in Europe and the Caribbean.

In the spring of 1787, as preparations for the Constitutional Convention got underway, Washington stayed as a guest at the moneyman’s home, which an awed French visitor observed was not exceeded “by any commercial voluptuary of London.” When Washington came to Philadelphia as the first President of the republic, Morris put at the disposal of his friend this home—one formerly occupied by occupying British General Sir William Howe in the war, then, after its burning, rebuilt and enlarged by the financier—as the first executive mansion.

In a prior post, I discussed one of Morris’ other significant post-Yorktown services: his advocacy of a national mint as Superintendent of Finance. In the same post, he established the Bank of North America with a combination of his own private funds and a loan from France.

Perhaps even more than his friend Alexander Hamilton (whom he recommended to Washington as the first Treasury Secretary), however, Morris brought controversy on himself. During the war, he barely survived charges of war profiteering because he so freely mixed his official duties with his private transactions. This self-made man—large and florid, with a taste for conviviality—set about furnishing a mansion where he could entertain on the lavish scale he desired, a project that became known as “Morris’ Folly.”

Worst of all, he became caught in a perfect storm of forces—not just the punitive laws toward debt in the federal republic, but also his involvement in the first financial “bubble” of the nation. Specifically, he became the biggest land speculator in the country (including in the District of Columbia, once that was designated as the new capital). He counted on a population explosion (principally emigrants such as himself) to drive up land prices. It was a good theory, but decades ahead of time.

Morris, disregarding the advice of his mercantile partner not to overextend himself, had left the firm to concentrate on these investments.  Thus, he had nothing to count on when he began to be pressed hard by creditors. He sold off his properties piecemeal until he could stave off ruin no longer, serving three years for debt beginning in 1798. His plight led his supporters to pass a bankruptcy reform act that secured his release. He died in 1806, his affairs still a wreck.

(The image accompanying this post comes from a 1785 oil-on-canvas painting by Robert Edge Pine.)