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 Vice-Presidential History (Agnew Resigns in Disgrace)

Oct. 10, 1973—Less than two weeks after defiantly vowing that he would not resign as Vice-President even if he was indicted, Spiro Agnew did exactly that, pleading no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the dropping of charges of political corruption.

John C. Calhoun had resigned as Andrew Jackson’s Veep over policy differences, but Agnew was the first to leave the office in disgrace.

The investigation that brought him down, though separate and distinct from the Watergate scandal involving his boss, Richard Nixon, furthered the growing national impression of an administration reeking with corruption, and fed the possibility that, if one of the two highest elected officials in the land could be forced out, so could the other.

Perhaps because he largely faded out of the spotlight after his time in office, perhaps because he increasingly became viewed as a useless occupant of a once-useless office, Agnew and his crimes have been largely forgotten.

Outside of The Baltimore Sun—in effect, during his days as governor of Maryland, his hometown newspaper—hardly any major newspaper has observed the anniversary of the departure of a politician once the proverbial “heartbeat away” from the Presidency.

I am writing this blog post partly to fill this informational gap. 

Fundamentally shallow, ill-informed, unscrupulous, and unworthy of high office, Agnew demands our attention because he tapped into what has become apparent in the years since as some of the worst instincts of the American people: zenophobia, resentment, and alarming credulity about the greatest canards about the press and dissenters.

Only in his second year as governor of Maryland in 1968, Agnew received Nixon’s backing as Vice President after having swerved from a relative racial moderate to an uncompromising champion of “law and order” who requested and used the National Guard after unrest following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

He could facilitate Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to peel white voters away from their traditional Democratic voting patterns—yet did not command conservative allegiance the way that California Governor Ronald Reagan did.

To Nixon’s chagrin, Agnew increasingly built a base in that very voting bloc, largely because he gleefully seized the attack dog role that the President assigned him, in speeches featuring alliterative phrases crafted by speechwriters William Safire and Patrick Buchanan. 

The right-wing contingent of the GOP ignored Agnew’s gaffes and racial/ethnic slurs (e.g., “fat Jap,” If you’ve seen one slum, you’ve seen them all”) and embraced him as its champion.

Even though he had become disenchanted with Agnew’s poor management skills, his predilection for hitting the golf course rather than learning policy, and his lack of seriousness and temperamental steadiness, Nixon ironically found in 1972 that he could not dump the Veep from the ticket without alienating the conservative wing of the party.

Only a couple of months into the following year, just when Agnew had emerged as a strong contender to succeed Nixon at the end of his term, the Vice-President picked up the first hints that he was being investigated for extorting money from contractors while governor of Maryland. Amazingly, he continued to carry out the scheme while Vice President.

Following a script that Donald Trump would follow far more successfully more than 40 years later, Agnew demonized reporters and sought to quash the investigation as a witch hunt (even, as Rachel Maddow revealed in her podcast and book Bag Man, enlisting George Bush—then head of the Republican National Committee—in the effort).

It all came to naught. Agnew’s call for his impeachment before the Senate—where, he calculated, he stood a better chance of surviving than in a court of law—led Nixon to decide that this was a threat to his own political future.

Moreover, Attorney General Elliot Richardson regarded as untenable any scenario in which Nixon, if impeached, could be succeeded by Agnew, himself a crook.

The path was paved for a deal that, even at the time, many (including the young prosecutors investigating Agnew) regarded as what UPI’s Mike Feinsilber called at the time “two standards of justice, one for the powerless and one for the strong.” 

“Accused in 40 detailed pages of having pocketed well over $85,000 in kickbacks," Feinsilber explained, “Agnew was given lighter punishment than others get for stealing a car.” That “punishment” turned out to be a $10,000 fine, a three-years probation sentence, and disbarment by the Maryland court of appeals.

After saying goodbye to Nixon, Agnew never spoke to the President again. When the Veep showed up at his old boss’s funeral in 1994, many in Nixon’s family and inner circle may well have welcomed him as much as a skunk slipping into a perfume factory.

After all, he had charged, in a memoir published seven years after leaving office, Nixon’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, had urged him strongly to resign: “The President has a lot of power—don’t forget that.”

“I interpreted it as an innuendo that anything could happen to me,” Agnew recalled. “I might have a convenient ‘accident.’”

By the way, that memoir was titled Go Quietly…Or Else—a title more appropriate about an encounter with the Mafia than about service to the American people. Altogether in keeping with the undignified, unsavory liar and crook who produced it.

This Day in Vice-Presidential History (Birth of Wilson’s Funny-Sad No. 2)

March 15, 1854—Thomas Marshall, a longtime lawyer who parlayed his amiability into one term as governor of Indiana and two as Vice-President of the United States under the very, very serious Woodrow Wilson, was born in North Manchester in his home state to a country doctor and his sickly wife.

While his upbringing, involving constant movement because of his mother’s ill health, was uncomfortable, it was nowhere near as difficult as the months he spent at the close of his second term as veep, when—underestimated by virtually everyone in the capital—he refused to take personal advantage of the worst crisis of Presidential disability in American history.

Whenever witticisms of America’s Vice-Presidents are compiled, Marshall seems to account for half of the best. He was fully the equal of the far better-known Robert Dole, and he spoke without the Kansan’s sarcasm or gag writers.

The quip for which Marshall is best known—“What America needs is a really good five-cent cigar”—is probably a misattribution. It is characteristic of the Hoosier that the ones he did coin—ones that, in my opinion, are far more humorous—were uttered at his own expense and hopeless political situation.

For years, I have felt, no quote about the Vice-Presidency better illustrated the emasculating aspect of the office better than this routine by Marshall: “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea; the other was elected vice president. And nothing was ever heard of either of them again.” 

Unlike later Hoosier Dan Quayle (or, to be bipartisan, Joe Biden), Marshall was seldom the source of unintentional humor (though he was too good-natured not to enjoy a chuckle at his own expense). Like Quayle, he served a President who, by the end of his first term, was certain he had made a mistake in this selection—then, astonishingly, went on to repeat it.  

This extraordinarily winning personality labored under two handicaps. First, Marshall had little appetite for power, or even particular faith in his own ability. Second, the latter belief was shared by his boss, who scorned him, shut him out of virtually all important administration deliberations—and refused to resign in his favor when a devastating stroke left Wilson unable to perform the duties of his office in any meaningful way any longer. There was, in that sense, something sad, even pathetic, about Marshall’s plight.

Marshall possessed few qualities that would have made Wilson value his work. Like the President a Washington outsider, he could tell him nothing about the ways of the capital. Nor could he even remotely hope to match the President in intelligence, eloquence or determination. Even the one quality Marshall had in abundance worked against him, because it created an image of an unserious person: "An unfriendly fairy godmother presented him with a keen sense of humor," Wilson’s confidante, Col. Edward House, commented. "Nothing is more fatal in politics."

House was, in fact, a prime mover behind an effort to drop Marshall from the ticket before the 1916 reelection campaign, urging the President to replace the veep with Secretary of War Newton Baker. Wilson had as little use for the office as he did for Marshall, but he doubted that he could realign the position’s responsibilities enough to make it attractive to the likes of his able Cabinet officer. Needing to take his wife to a wedding that night, he wasn’t inclined to consider House's proposal seriously. In any case, like Abraham Lincoln, he failed to consider the possibility that his vice-president might be called upon in an emergency to step into his shoes.

It might seem unbelievable to us that someone like Marshall—who stopped attending Cabinet meetings after awhile when he sensed his irrelevance in the eyes of the President—could have ended up as Vice President in the first place. But the last Vice-President with energy and some ability, Aaron Burr, also proved to have such a formidable power base of his own that he nearly swiped the Presidency from the head of his ticket, Thomas Jefferson, when the election of 1800 ended up being unexpectedly thrown into the House of Representatives. Since then, the office had gone mostly to party figures well past their prime—or, in the case of Marshall, represented a constituency that had to be placated.

At the Democratic convention of 1912, the only reason why Wilson did not lose the nomination was that the frontrunner, Speaker of the House Champ Clark, though holding a majority of delegates, did not possess the two-thirds needed according to the rules then in effect. It required a ferocious amount of behind-closed-doors horsetrading to secure the New Jersey governor and former Princeton president his party’s nod. Indiana would be a swing state in the fall, and the state’s political kingpin, Thomas Taggart, desiring to kick the not-always-pliable Marshall upstairs, threw the state delegation behind Wilson at a crucial point in the proceedings, helping to push him over the top.

The Washington establishment came to regard Marshall as provincial, just one more in a line of vice-presidential nonentities. When it came time to write their 1932 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical satire of Presidential politics, Of Thee I Sing, George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind created the ultimate caricature of a century of such lackluster holders of the Vice-Presidency: Alexander Throttlebottom, an innocuous but inept officeholder who has managed to leave so little impression that the party elders can’t even remember who he is.

Marshall shared enough aspects of this stereotype that Time Magazine several years ago labeled him one of America’s “Worst Vice Presidents.” Paradoxically, however, in the intentional fog and confusion created by Wilson’s wife Edith and physician Cary Grayson after his disabling stroke, Marshall turned out to be, in the words of the President’s biographer John Milton Cooper, the closest thing to “an unsung, unlikely hero” in the whole mess. (See my prior post on the elaborate concealment perpetrated by the First Lady and the President's doctor.)

Early on, Marshall had been apprised through an intermediary of the President’s dire condition. As the months dragged on with the President not being seen, he was approached several times—by his secretary, by a pair of Republicans, even, reportedly, by his own state’s two Democratic senators—to take over Presidency.

But the very quality that made so many in Washington despise Marshall—his diffidence—made him reluctant to seize control now. He would only agree to succeed the President at this point if Congress passed a resolution declaring the office vacant—and, more crucially, if Mrs. Wilson and Grayson committed to it in writing. The latter possibility was not forthcoming, and without it Marshall would not risk the chance of a civil war and certain constitutional crisis. (It would take another half-century, the deaths of three more Presidents in office, and heart trouble involving another before the 25th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, stipulating the conditions for Presidential succession.)

Like those who preceded and followed him in the office, Marshall accomplished almost nothing as Vice President, with the one possible exception being a Cabinet meeting over which he presided in his second term—the first time in American history that a veep did so. But his tenure in office had led to one of the more interesting episodes of “alternate history”—i.e., the train of happenings that would have occurred if an initial event turned out differently.

In this case, the precipitating event would have been Wilson’s death from the stroke, rather than his survival in diminished condition and through ambiguity and sleight of hand. Wilson’s death while stumping for the League of Nations would have made the President a martyr, and would have given Marshall a strong hand in carrying out what would be, in effect, a memorial to the departed leader. It would have been similar to what Chester A. Arthur did in pushing through the Pendleton Act after James Garfield was assassinated by a disappointed office seeker, or as Lyndon Johnson did when he cajoled, wheedled, threatened, and pushed through stalled civil-rights legislation after John F. Kennedy’s murder.

Moreover, though Marshall lacked Wilson’s self-confidence, he also did not possess the President’s inflexibility. He had already signaled that he would compromise concerning at least some reservations that Senate Republicans had about the League. Thus, had Marshall stepped into the Oval Office, GOP leader Henry Cabot Lodge would never have been able to depict the President as obstructionist in his pursuit of his dream, and the United States would not have stood on the sidelines in the 1920s and early 1930s, when Europe fractured in the face of economic disruption and the rise of Fascism.

When he departed Washington at the end of his term, Marshall extended his sympathies to his successor, Calvin Coolidge. As usual, the veep was, comparatively, luckless—Harding’s death gave Coolidge the clear chance at the use of power that Marshall never enjoyed.

Nevertheless, it is hard to act condescendingly to a man with such a healthy disregard for his own perquisites or position. How can one not like a man, facing the unenviable occasional task of presiding over the Senate and its ego, who could pronounce that chamber “The Cave of Winds”? And how can one not like a man who, after leaving Washington, could speak so truthfully on what the office he had once occupied really amounted to: “I don’t want to work. I don’t propose to work. I wouldn’t mind being Vice President again.”

This Day in Vice-Presidential History (Sherman Death Forces Reshuffling of GOP Ticket)

October 30, 1912—The death of Vice-President James Sherman while in office wasn’t in itself unusual—he was the seventh holding that sorry position to do so—but the circumstances were: only days before one of the most topsy-turvy elections in American history, with the Republican Party split between a conservative wing that backed Sherman and his boss, President William Howard Taft, and a liberal faction that, as the Progressive Party, nominated Taft’s predecessor and former friend, Theodore Roosevelt.

Sherman’s passing left Taft once again in the midst of an intraparty split. Unable to get the party old guard to go along with his preference, Governor Herbert S. Hadley of Missouri, he simply decided not to name anyone at all—meaning, in effect, that he had a deceased running mate.

In the following January, the GOP--like the President, considering it all a formality anyway—designated as the recipient of Sherman’s electoral votes Nicholas Murray Butler. The latter did not only want to be President of Columbia University, as he had been for the past decade, but President of the entire United States. But not only was he unsuccessful in seeking the GOP nomination in 1920 and 1928, but his last-minute replacement of Sherman did Taft no good, either, as the incumbent won only eight votes, finishing not only behind the winner, Woodrow Wilson, but, to add insult to indignity, T.R. himself.

You could, I suppose, think of Sherman as Dick Cheney with a smile: a man with a disposition genial enough to win him the nickname “Sunny Jim,” but also a conservative darling who consistently tried to steer his boss in a more retrograde direction.

His initial selection as Veep in 1908 was, in a sense, a harbinger of the tensions that would splinter the party four years later. The conservative and liberal wings had been squabbling at the GOP convention in Chicago. Several candidates vied for the party’s nomination, and though the delegates eventually went along with T.R.’s hand-picked successor, Taft, the interests of unity compelled the selection of Sherman, a Congressman from New York and member of the Old Guard, as Vice-President.

Taft and Sherman did not get off on the right foot. When the incoming President suggested that he would use Sherman as a go-between to reactionary Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon, Sherman barked: “You will have to act on your own account. I am to be Vice President and acting as a messenger boy is not part of the duties as Vice President.”

Other Vice Presidents have found themselves dangerously isolated for saying less than that, but Taft—initially distrusted by the Old Guard—found Sherman an increasingly congenial figure. In presiding over the Senate (which was one of his duties as V-P), Sherman displayed utmost fairness, good humor and mastery of parliamentary procedure. In private, he encouraged the President to strike at opponents—including the progressives that Sherman had long opposed at virtually every turn. (When Taft demurred about using his appointive power against liberals livid over passage of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, Sherman growled: “"It is your only club. You have other weapons, but the appointing power is your only club.")

Sherman’s strong support for Taft’s firing of a T.R. favorite, U.S. chief forester Gifford Pinchot, and his nomination as chairman of the New York state convention in 1910 increased Roosevelt’s dismay with his protégé. (The ex-President’s prestige was such that he was able to derail Sherman’s assumption of the chairmanship.) Moreover, the conservatives' threat to nominate Sherman instead of Taft for the Presidency in 1912 helped to keep the incumbent in line.

Because of Bright's Disease, which had afflicted him since 1906, Sherman had grown increasingly uncomfortable because of the Senate’s inability to appoint a president pro tempore who could spell him in his duties. His medical condition became more virulent as Taft sought reelection in his knockdown fight with Roosevelt for the Republican nomination. The conservative wing, left with a shell of a party after the progressives bolted for T.R., renominated Sherman as V-P, but that was just an indication of how despairing they had become about their future prospects.

Sherman was mourned by his longtime Congressional allies. But he had done neither his President nor his party any favors in opposing progressive legislation and candidates. Little-known today, he remains one of the reasons why the GOP has, in the century since his death, engaged in bitter faceoffs between its right and moderate wings.

(Photo of Vice-President James Sherman at a 1912 baseball game is from the Prints and Photographs division of the Library of Congress.)