Aaron Burr biography

Dromo's Den

Aaron Burr Biography

BURR, Aaron (1756–1836). An American politician, Vice President of the United States from 1801 to 1805. He was born in Newark, N. J., Feb. 6, 1756, and was the son of the Rev. Aaron Burr, and grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the famous theologian. His paternal grandfather, according to Hildreth, was a German who had settled originally at Fairfield, Conn. His father died in 1757 and his mother in the following year, and he, with his sister, was brought up by his maternal uncle, the Rev. Timothy Edwards, at Elizabethtown, N. J. He graduated at Princeton in 1772, studied theology under the Rev. Dr. Bellamy, of Bethlehem, Conn., and then (1774) studied law with Tappan Reeve, his brother-in-law, in Litchfield, Conn. He entered the Continental army in 1775, soon after the battle of Bunker Hill; took part in Benedict Arnold’s Canadian expedition; became in turn a member of Washington’s military family (April, 1776), and an aid to General Putnam (June, 1776); served with distinction as lieutenant colonel at Hackensack and Monmouth (q.v.), where he commanded a brigade; was placed in command of the American lines in Westchester County (N. Y.)—in the so-called Neutral Ground—in January, 1779; and in March of this year resigned from the service. He was involved in the opposition to Washington, and at the time of the more serious friction sided with Lee and Gates. (See Conway Cabal, The.) In 1782 he began the practice of the law in Albany, N. Y. In July of the same year he married Mrs. Theodosia Prevost, the widow of a British officer who had died in the West Indies, and in the following year their only child, Theodosia, was born in New York. (See Burr, Theodosia.) In 1833 Burr, then in his seventy-eighth year, married Madame Jumel, the widow of a French merchant, who had an estate in the northern part of Manhattan Island and who possessed some property. Much of this property was soon spent by Burr, and the couple separated, but were never divorced.

Burr definitely established his home in the city of New York, in December, 1783, soon after his first marriage, and his political activity and advancement there soon became marked. He was a member of the State Assembly in 1784–85 and again in 1797–99 and 1800–01; was Attorney-General of the State in 1789–91; was a member of the United States Senate from 1791 to 1797; and in 1801, just before becoming Vice President, was chairman of the Constitutional Convention of New York. In 1792 he declined a nomination to the Supreme Court of New York. He was an early, zealous, and unscrupulous leader among the Republicans (afterward Democrats), and the especial rival of Alexander Hamilton, the prominent leader of the Federalists. In the presidential struggle of 1800 John Adams (then President), Thomas Jefferson, Charles C. Pinckney, and Burr were the candidates, and the votes for Jefferson and Burr, the two Republican candidates, were equal—73 for each. As the Constitution then provided, the person having the largest number of electoral votes was to be President, and the person having the next largest number was to be Vice President. The equal division threw the election into the House of Representatives, where each State had one vote only, the vote of a majority of all the States being necessary for a choice. After a week of balloting Jefferson was chosen President, and Burr therefore became Vice President. He was charged, unjustly, it seems, with having exerted himself to defeat Jefferson, who was the regular presidential candidate of his party, and his alleged intrigues to this end ruined him politically as a Republican. In 1804, however, he ran as an independent candidate for Governor of New York and received the support of some of the Federalists, but was defeated by Morgan Lewis. For this Burr blamed Hamilton, who had undoubtedly used all of his influence against him, both on this occasion and in 1801, and these disappointments and failures, added to the intensely bitter character of the partisan warfare of the time, led to a duel, at Weehawken, N. J., on July 11, 1804, in which Hamilton, who discharged his weapon into the air, was killed by Burr. In the spring of 1805 Burr started for the western part of the country, bent, probably, among other things, upon the conquest of Mexico and the establishment there of a separate government, with himself as chief. It was in the course of these operations that he brought ruin upon his friend Harman Blennerhassett (q.v.). In 1806 President Jefferson was informed, in part, of Burr's schemes by General Wilkinson, in whom Burr had partially confided, and Burr was soon arrested at Frankfort, Ky. He was defended by Henry Clay and was acquitted after an exciting trial. He was again arrested at Natchez, in January, 1807, but was released by the Grand Jury, and on February 19, in Alabama, he was a third time arrested. After a long and memorable trial at Richmond, Va., first on a charge of treason and then on a charge of misdemeanor, he was again acquitted, and in June, 1808, sailed for Europe to raise means for prosecuting his schemes. Four years of effort in England, Sweden, Germany, and France resulted in nothing but failure, and in 1812 he returned in extreme poverty and opened a law office in New York; but his course had alienated the people, and he met with only moderate success.

Henry Adams, after showing how Burr had "endeavored by the foul means of a Federal alliance to acquire the presidency," goes on to say, with a vehemence which is really partisan, that "a more gross betrayal of confidence could hardly be conceived, even in political life. He had made it clear that his heart was set upon personal aggrandizement and not upon a Republican success. His untrustworthiness appeared the more despicable by comparison with the strictly honorable conduct of. Jefferson, who might have excused endeavors on his own behalf upon the plausible ground that he was only forwarding the avowed will of the party. The antipathy with which many persons had long since learned to regard Burr now became the sentiment of all honest and intelligent men in the nation." Schouler, after referring to the brilliant and captivating manners of Burr, describes him as "one whose restless and romantic ambition was the more dangerous because of his utter want of conscience and generosity. He was socially well connected and had, like Hamilton, won a fair military reputation in the war for a young officer, gaining on its close later distinction as an advocate at the New York bar, where these two were professional competitors under an act which disqualified all Tory practitioners." Hildreth thus sums up the closing years of his life: "Arriving in New York, he found himself, in his old age, and still harassed by his creditors, obliged to resume the practice of the law for support. The death of his only daughter, lost at sea on a voyage from Charleston to meet him, left him without family ties. Yet, amid all this loneliness and embarrassment, his remarkable equanimity did not desert him, and he lived 24 years longer, shrouding himself with that mystery and obscurity which he so much affected, and dying at last (1836) after surviving almost all his contemporaries, at the age of 80—a remarkable example of the mutability of political fortune." He died, Sept. 14, 1836, at Port Richmond, on Staten Island, N. Y., and his body was placed with his father's in the burying ground at Princeton.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. IV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 197-198.