Aaron Burr

Based on Wikipedia: Aaron Burr

On a cold morning in July 1804, two of America's most powerful men stood facing each other across a narrow stretch of grass in Weehawken, New Jersey. One would walk away. The other would die within thirty-six hours, a bullet lodged near his spine. The man who pulled the trigger was the sitting Vice President of the United States.

This was Aaron Burr.

But reducing Burr to the man who killed Alexander Hamilton is like reducing Benedict Arnold to a man who switched sides. It misses the full arc of an extraordinary life—one that included genuine Revolutionary War heroism, the creation of a political machine that shaped American democracy, and an alleged conspiracy so audacious it aimed to carve out an independent nation from American and Spanish territory.

An Orphan from American Aristocracy

Burr was born into what passed for American royalty in 1756. His father, Aaron Burr Senior, served as president of the College of New Jersey—the institution we now call Princeton University. His mother, Esther Edwards, was the daughter of Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most influential American theologian of the eighteenth century. Edwards preached "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a sermon so viscerally frightening that it sparked religious revivals across the colonies.

Then, in a span of eighteen months, this gilded world collapsed entirely.

Burr's father died when Aaron was barely a year old. His grandfather Jonathan Edwards took over the college presidency and moved in with the family—only to die himself within three months. Then Burr's mother and grandmother died in the same year. By age two, Aaron Burr was an orphan.

He and his sister Sally were shuffled between households before landing with their twenty-one-year-old uncle, Timothy Edwards. The arrangement was miserable. Edwards was physically abusive, and young Aaron made repeated attempts to run away. This pattern—Burr's willingness to reject authority figures and chart his own path, regardless of consequences—would define his entire life.

A Prodigy Goes to War

At thirteen, Burr entered Princeton as a sophomore. He joined the college's debating societies—the American Whig Society and the Cliosophic Society—where students honed the argumentative skills that would later power constitutional conventions and courtroom battles. By sixteen, he held his bachelor's degree.

Burr initially followed the family tradition into theology, studying for two years under Joseph Bellamy, a prominent Presbyterian minister. But something shifted. He abandoned religious studies and turned to law, moving to Litchfield, Connecticut, to apprentice with his brother-in-law Tapping Reeve at what would become America's first law school.

Then the Revolutionary War arrived and derailed everything.

In April 1775, British troops clashed with colonial militiamen at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. Word spread through the colonies like fire. Burr, nineteen years old and still reading law books, enlisted in the Continental Army.

His first assignment was genuinely brutal: Benedict Arnold's expedition to Quebec. This was not a march down well-traveled roads. Arnold's force of over a thousand men hacked their way through more than three hundred miles of unmapped wilderness in what is now Maine, dragging boats through rivers and portaging across mountain passes as winter approached. Men starved. Men deserted. Men died.

Burr impressed Arnold with what he called his "great spirit and resolution." When the expedition finally reached the Saint Lawrence River, Arnold sent Burr upriver to make contact with General Richard Montgomery, who had captured Montreal and was bringing reinforcements. Montgomery was so impressed by the young officer that he promoted Burr to captain and made him an aide-de-camp—essentially a personal assistant to a general, but one expected to ride into battle alongside him.

That battle came on New Year's Eve, 1775. The American assault on Quebec City was a disaster. Montgomery was killed in the opening minutes of the attack. Burr, showing the physical courage that would mark his military career, tried to retrieve his general's body from the snow-covered battlefield. But Montgomery was a large man, the weather was savage, and Burr was forced to abandon the attempt.

The Washington Question

In the spring of 1776, Burr's connections helped him secure a position on George Washington's staff in Manhattan. He quit within weeks.

Why would anyone leave a prestigious staff position with the commanding general? Because Burr wanted to fight, not push papers. He found a patron in General Israel Putnam, and during the chaotic British invasion of Manhattan, Burr proved his worth dramatically. When British forces landed and threatened to trap an entire American brigade, Burr's quick thinking and leadership during the retreat from lower Manhattan to Harlem saved the unit from capture.

Washington never acknowledged this in his General Orders—the primary mechanism for recognizing outstanding service and accelerating promotions. Burr was already becoming a nationally known figure, yet he received no commendation. According to Burr's relative Matthias Ogden, this slight infuriated him and may have planted the seeds of lasting enmity between Burr and Washington.

Burr publicly defended Washington's decision to evacuate New York as "a necessary consequence" of military reality. But something had curdled between them. They would find themselves on opposite sides of American politics by the 1790s.

A curious episode from this period involved a fourteen-year-old girl named Margaret Moncrieffe. Her father was a British major stationed on Staten Island, and she had somehow ended up in Manhattan behind American lines. Major Moncrieffe asked Washington to arrange her safe return. Washington assigned the task to Burr, who was then twenty years old.

Burr fell in love with her. Margaret apparently attempted to stay with him rather than return to her father. She did not succeed. The episode hints at Burr's lifelong pattern: he was charismatic, attractive to women, and willing to pursue what he wanted despite social conventions.

The Hard Years of War

By July 1777, Burr had risen to lieutenant colonel and taken effective command of Malcolm's Additional Continental Regiment. Colonel William Malcolm was technically in charge, but he was frequently assigned elsewhere, leaving Burr to run things. The regiment's job was to defend central New Jersey against British raiding parties that would sail over from Manhattan under cover of darkness.

That winter, Burr commanded a contingent at Valley Forge—the legendary encampment where Washington's army nearly froze and starved to death. Burr's specific assignment was guarding an isolated pass called "the Gulph" that controlled one approach to the camp. When some of his freezing, hungry soldiers attempted mutiny, Burr suppressed it.

The following summer brought the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey. British artillery devastated Burr's regiment. Burr himself collapsed from heatstroke and exhaustion. He requested medical leave without pay—a remarkable sacrifice, given that he had no family wealth to fall back on—but Washington denied it. Instead, Washington gave Burr temporary command of the garrison at West Point while he recovered.

By March 1779, Burr's health was broken. He resigned from the Continental Army at age twenty-three. His military career had lasted less than four years, but he had risen from private to lieutenant colonel, fought in multiple major engagements, and earned a reputation for bravery and leadership.

Even after resignation, Burr couldn't entirely stay away. That July, when British forces approached New Haven, Connecticut, Burr rallied a group of Yale students and local militia to help repulse the attack. The British were forced to enter the town from a different direction, through nearby Hamden.

Theodosia

In August 1778, while still serving at West Point, Burr met a woman named Theodosia Bartow Prevost. She was married to a British officer named Jacques Marcus Prevost, who was away serving with his regiment. She was also ten years older than Burr.

None of this stopped them.

Burr began regularly visiting Theodosia at her New Jersey home, called The Hermitage. The visits were frequent enough to generate gossip. By 1780, with her husband still away at war, they were openly lovers. When Jacques Prevost died of yellow fever in Jamaica in December 1781, the path was clear. Burr and Theodosia married in 1782.

They were, by all accounts, genuinely devoted to each other. They moved to a house on Wall Street in Manhattan, and Theodosia became Burr's intellectual partner and confidante. When she died in 1794 from what appears to have been stomach or uterine cancer, Burr was devastated. She was only in her forties.

Their only child to survive to adulthood was a daughter, also named Theodosia, born in 1783. Burr lavished attention on her education, determined that she would be as intellectually accomplished as any man. She would later marry Joseph Alston, who became governor of South Carolina. Her fate—she disappeared at sea in 1813, her ship likely captured by pirates—was another tragedy in Burr's tragedy-laden life.

Lawyer, Politician, Party Builder

Burr resumed his legal studies in 1780 and passed the bar in 1782. He opened a law practice in Albany, then moved to New York City after the British evacuated. He quickly became one of the most successful lawyers in the city, which meant he was operating in direct competition with Alexander Hamilton.

The two men were alike in many ways. Both were brilliant, ambitious, charismatic lawyers. Both had distinguished themselves in the Revolutionary War. Both would shape early American politics. And they despised each other.

Burr's entry into serious politics came in 1789, when New York Governor George Clinton appointed him state attorney general. He also served as Commissioner of Revolutionary War Claims. In 1791, the New York legislature elected him to the United States Senate, defeating the incumbent Philip Schuyler—who happened to be Alexander Hamilton's father-in-law.

This was not a coincidence. Burr was building power deliberately, and Hamilton noticed.

In the Senate, Burr aligned himself with the emerging Democratic-Republican Party, the faction coalescing around Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in opposition to the Federalists led by Hamilton and John Adams. The central dispute was over Hamilton's financial system: a national bank, federal assumption of state debts, and policies that generally favored commercial and banking interests concentrated in northern cities.

Burr made enemies. His opposition to Hamilton's financial plans was noted. During debates over the Jay Treaty of 1795—a controversial agreement with Britain that Democratic-Republicans viewed as too favorable to the former mother country—Burr publicly aligned himself with Jefferson's party. He opposed Washington's foreign policy in the president's Farewell Address. After a single term, he left the Senate in 1797 rather than seek reelection.

The Machine

Burr's most lasting contribution to American politics may be something that gets little attention in the history books: he transformed the Tammany Society from a social club into a political machine.

Tammany Hall, as it became known, would dominate New York City politics for over a century. It was both a marvel of democratic organization and a byword for corruption. Burr was present at its creation.

The basic principle was simple: use patronage and social services to build loyalty among voters, particularly immigrants and working-class New Yorkers. Deliver votes in blocks. Extract political power in return. The machine Burr helped build would eventually be associated with figures like Boss Tweed and scandals that would make national headlines. But in the 1790s, it was simply a highly effective way to win elections.

Burr also founded a bank. This seems unremarkable until you understand the context.

In the 1790s, banking in New York was a Federalist monopoly. Hamilton's Bank of New York and the federal Bank of the United States controlled credit in the city. If you were a small businessman—a shopkeeper, an artisan, a trader—and you needed a loan, you went hat in hand to institutions controlled by wealthy Federalists. They could deny you credit for any reason, including your political views.

Burr saw an opening. He proposed a water company. Manhattan desperately needed clean water—the existing supply was inadequate and disease-prone. Burr solicited support from Hamilton and other Federalists for this worthy civic project. He got the state legislature to grant a charter.

Then he sprung the trap.

The charter, as written, allowed the company to invest surplus funds "in any cause that did not violate state law." Burr had inserted this clause quietly. Once the charter was approved, he dropped any pretense of actually providing water. The Manhattan Company became a bank—a Democratic-Republican bank that could extend credit to Democratic-Republican businessmen and farmers.

The water company angle was not entirely a fiction. Burr did dig a well and build a water storage tank on the bank's premises. The tank was apparently still functioning in 1898, over a century later. But the primary purpose was always banking.

Hamilton and his allies were furious. They believed Burr had deceived them—and they were right. The writer Ron Chernow, Hamilton's most prominent biographer, argues that the delay in building proper water infrastructure for Manhattan may have contributed to deaths in subsequent disease outbreaks. Whether those outbreaks were malaria or yellow fever is disputed by historians, but the accusation stands: Burr prioritized political power over public health.

The Manhattan Company survives to this day. Through a series of mergers, it eventually became part of JPMorgan Chase, one of the largest banks in the world. Every time you see a Chase branch, you're looking at the distant descendant of Aaron Burr's political operation.

The Election of 1800

Burr ran for president in 1796 and finished fourth, receiving only thirty electoral votes. It was a humiliating result, partly because many Democratic-Republican electors who voted for Jefferson had deliberately voted for someone other than Burr for their second choice.

By 1800, however, Burr had proven his value. His political machine delivered New York for the Democratic-Republicans, which was critical to Jefferson's victory. This time, the party made sure all their electors voted for both Jefferson and Burr.

This created an unexpected problem.

The Constitution, as originally written, did not distinguish between votes for president and votes for vice president. Each elector cast two votes, and whoever received the most became president, while the runner-up became vice president. When all seventy-three Democratic-Republican electors voted for both Jefferson and Burr, the two men tied.

The election was thrown to the House of Representatives.

What followed was one of the strangest crises in American political history. Federalists, who despised Jefferson, saw an opportunity. Some hoped to make Burr president instead—reasoning that Burr, whatever his faults, was not an ideological revolutionary like Jefferson. Others, including Hamilton, argued vehemently against Burr. Hamilton considered Jefferson dangerous but principled; he considered Burr dangerous and unprincipled.

"I trust the Federalists will not finally be so mad as to vote for Burr," Hamilton wrote. "I speak with intimate and accurate knowledge of his character. His elevation can only promote the purposes of the desperate and the profligate."

The House deadlocked through thirty-five ballots over six days. Burr did not publicly campaign for the presidency during this period, maintaining that he supported Jefferson. Whether he was secretly maneuvering behind the scenes remains disputed. Finally, on the thirty-sixth ballot, enough Federalists abstained to give Jefferson the majority. Burr became vice president.

The crisis led directly to the Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, which required electors to cast separate votes for president and vice president. The amendment exists because of Aaron Burr.

A Vice Presidency in Exile

Thomas Jefferson never trusted Burr after the 1800 election. Whether this distrust was justified or paranoid is debatable. What's certain is that Jefferson systematically excluded Burr from his administration.

The vice presidency was already a weak office—John Adams had famously called it "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived." But most vice presidents at least maintained cordial relations with their presidents. Burr was frozen out entirely. He had no role in policy. He had no influence over appointments. He was not consulted on decisions.

By 1804, it was clear that Jefferson would not keep Burr on the ticket. Burr ran for governor of New York instead—and lost, in part because Hamilton campaigned vigorously against him.

This was the backdrop to the duel.

Weehawken

The immediate trigger was a letter published in a newspaper. Dr. Charles Cooper had written to Philip Schuyler claiming that Hamilton had expressed a "despicable opinion" of Burr at a dinner party. When the letter was published, Burr demanded an explanation.

Hamilton's response was lawyerly and evasive. He could not recall specifically what he had said. The term "despicable" was too vague to respond to. If Burr could identify specific statements, Hamilton would address them.

This was not good enough for Burr. The correspondence escalated. Burr eventually challenged Hamilton to a duel.

Dueling was technically illegal but widely practiced among gentlemen of the era. The code duello—the formal rules governing such encounters—was well established. Both men chose the same location: a narrow ledge along the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey, just across from Manhattan. This spot was popular for duels precisely because it was technically in New Jersey (where enforcement was lax) but easily accessible from New York.

They met on July 11, 1804, at dawn. Each man brought seconds—witnesses who would handle logistics and, if necessary, provide testimony about what had happened. They stood ten paces apart, pistols raised.

What happened next is disputed. Some accounts say Hamilton fired first and missed, either intentionally or because of poor aim. Others say Burr fired first. What's certain is that Burr's shot struck Hamilton in the abdomen, passed through his liver and lodged near his spine. Hamilton was taken back across the river to Manhattan, where he died the following afternoon.

Burr was indicted for murder in both New York and New Jersey. Neither indictment was ever prosecuted—partly because the legal status of dueling was ambiguous, and partly because Burr still had powerful friends. But his political career was destroyed. He remained technically vice president until his term expired in March 1805, but he was a pariah.

The Conspiracy

What Aaron Burr did next remains one of the great mysteries of early American history.

After leaving the vice presidency, Burr headed west. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 had doubled the size of the United States, and the new territory was chaotic, poorly governed, and full of opportunity. Spain still held Florida and Mexico, and its grip on both was weakening. Burr saw possibility.

What exactly he planned to do remains unclear because Burr was secretive and because he told different stories to different people. To some, he suggested he wanted to establish a settlement in the newly purchased Louisiana Territory, perhaps colonizing land and creating wealth the honest way. To others, he hinted at something more dramatic: possibly fomenting a rebellion against Spanish Mexico, or possibly encouraging western states to secede from the United States and form an independent nation with Burr at its head.

He recruited followers. He sought financing. He made contact with the British minister to the United States, apparently soliciting British support. He also corresponded with General James Wilkinson, the commanding general of the U.S. Army—who was, unbeknownst to most Americans, secretly on the Spanish payroll.

In 1806, Burr assembled a small flotilla of boats and about sixty men and began moving down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Where he was going and what he planned to do when he got there remain subjects of scholarly debate.

Wilkinson, perhaps fearing exposure of his own treasonous dealings with Spain, denounced Burr to President Jefferson. Jefferson issued a proclamation warning citizens against Burr's conspiracy. When Burr learned he had been betrayed, he fled toward Spanish Florida.

He was captured in Alabama in February 1807.

The Trial

Burr was charged with treason—the only crime specifically defined in the Constitution. Article III states that treason consists of "levying war" against the United States or "adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." Crucially, it requires either confession in open court or testimony from two witnesses to the same overt act.

The trial, held in Richmond, Virginia, was presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall, sitting as a circuit judge. Marshall was a Federalist and no friend to Jefferson, which added political complexity to an already explosive case.

The prosecution faced a fundamental problem: there was no clear evidence that Burr had actually levied war against the United States. His flotilla of sixty men hardly constituted an army. No battle had been fought. No territory had been seized. Burr's alleged plans, however grandiose, had never been executed.

Marshall ruled that the prosecution had to prove Burr was personally present at an overt act of war, or that such an act had definitely occurred. The government could not demonstrate either. Burr was acquitted.

He was tried again on a misdemeanor charge—organizing an expedition against Spanish territory, which would have violated American neutrality laws—and acquitted again.

The Burr conspiracy, whatever it was, had ended with a whimper.

Exile and Return

Acquittal did not mean rehabilitation. Burr was finished in America. He sailed for Europe in 1808, hoping to find support for his schemes—or simply to escape his creditors.

He spent four years wandering through England, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and France. He sought audiences with Napoleon and other European leaders, trying to interest them in various plans involving the Americas. Nothing came of it. He lived in poverty, dependent on occasional loans from friends.

In 1812, Burr returned to New York. The War of 1812 had begun, and America had other things to worry about than a disgraced former vice president. Burr quietly resumed practicing law, rebuilding a modest career from the ashes of his grand ambitions.

In 1833, at age seventy-seven, he married Eliza Jumel, a wealthy widow twenty years his junior. The marriage was miserable. Eliza accused him of squandering her money, and she filed for divorce. The divorce was granted on September 14, 1836.

That was the day Aaron Burr died, at age eighty, from complications of a stroke he had suffered two years earlier. The man who had killed Alexander Hamilton, plotted to create an empire, and nearly stolen the presidency from Thomas Jefferson died alone in a boarding house in Staten Island.

The Burr Legacy

What do we make of Aaron Burr?

His admirers point to genuine accomplishments. He was a brave Revolutionary War officer. He championed the abolition of slavery in the 1780s—while still owning slaves himself, a contradiction typical of his era. He believed in women's education and raised his daughter to be as intellectually formidable as any man in America. He built political organizations that, whatever their later corruption, genuinely expanded democratic participation.

His critics see a man without fixed principles, a pure opportunist. Hamilton called him "unprincipled both as a public and private man." Jefferson considered him dangerous. Washington refused to give him a general's commission because of doubts about his character.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Burr is how thoroughly he defied the norms of his era while working entirely within its structures. He fought duels because that's what gentlemen did. He built political machines because that's how power was won. He sought to carve out a western empire because, in the early republic, such things were at least imaginable.

He was, in many ways, a man who understood exactly how power worked—and pursued it with a ruthlessness that made his contemporaries uncomfortable. In another country, or another century, he might have been a king. In the early American republic, he was something more troubling: a reminder that the democratic experiment could produce men who wanted power for its own sake.

Aaron Burr lived eighty years. He outlived Hamilton by thirty-two years, outlived Jefferson by ten, outlived most of the founders he had known and fought alongside. He died nearly forgotten, his schemes in ruins, his reputation destroyed.

But we remember him—the vice president who killed his rival, who conspired to build an empire, who came within a few votes of seizing the presidency itself. In the story of American democracy, Aaron Burr serves as both a warning and a mystery: a man whose ambition had no limits, and whose fall proved that even in a young republic, there were some limits after all.