A Nation Rising (4 page)

Witherspoon encouraged the study of modern philosophers, including Locke and Hume, as well as the classics. He transformed Prince ton's student clubs into venues for rigorous intellectual discussion, and two of his best and most enthusiastic students were Aaron Burr and a Virginian, James Madison, Burr's senior by five years. Increasingly drawn to the burning political questions of the day, Witherspoon later wrote an influential essay, “Thoughts on American Liberty.” And in May 1775, after the battles of Lexington and Concord, as the Continental Congress began the process of declaring America's independence, Witherspoon preached a sermon later published as “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men.” In it, Witherspoon invoked a divine blessing on the righteous ness of the American cause. In June 1776, he joined the New Jersey delegation to Philadelphia and the Continental Congress. He was there to help pass the Declaration of Independence, which he later signed.

It was against this backdrop, with growing talk of independence, the rights of man, and resistance to the crown, that sixteen-year-old Aaron Burr graduated from Prince ton in 1772. Expected to follow his father and grandfather into a pulpit, he briefly trained for the ministry in Connecticut before writing to inform his uncle that he preferred to pursue a career in law. When his sister Sally married Tapping Reeve—their former tutor, now an eminent legal scholar who would open one of the first law schools in America—Burr
moved into the couple's home in Litchfield, Connecticut, and began to study law.

But the world was about to be turned upside down. After the fighting broke out in Concord and Lexington in April 1775, Aaron Burr joined the thousands of other idealistic, adventurous, and starry-eyed young men who trooped off to Cambridge, on the outskirts of Boston, where some 20,000 very undisciplined Americans had collected to become the ragtag Continental Army. By the time Burr arrived, they were under the command of General George Washington, to whom Congress had presented the unenviable task of creating an American army. Washington's mission was to take this motley band of mostly undisciplined, untested vagabonds, back-woodsmen, farm boys, and out-of-work laborers and train them to fight the most powerful force on the face of the earth, the combined British army and navy.

At age nineteen, with no military experience but considerable enthusiasm, the preacher's son turned law student learned that an expedition was being formed to invade Canada by traversing the wilderness of Maine, just as another expedition to be led by General Philip Schuyler moved on Canada from upstate New York. George Washington hoped to win French-Canadian support for American independence and perhaps create a “fourteenth state” to America's north. Washington gave command of the mission to the man who brought him the idea—Benedict Arnold.

Largely responsible for the successful assault on Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in June 1775 that had been a boon to the patriot cause, Arnold believed that a two-pronged assault on Montreal and Quebec could possibly force the British to abandon
Canada and bring them to the peace table. Washington agreed and, along with his blessing, gave Arnold a letter to the people of Canada hoping to inspire a little revolutionary fire, and orders to respect the religion of the predominantly Catholic French Canadians. Washington also sent along some of the best troops he had, the handpicked riflemen led by Daniel Morgan, Daniel Boone's cousin, and another hero of the Revolution.

Burr and his cousin Matthias Ogden, who had also grown up in the extended Edwards household, were able to join the expedition. Arnold welcomed both young men, perhaps because of their family connections. In Revolutionary America, what you knew was still considerably less significant than who you were.

After a brief pilgrimage to visit the crypt of George Whitefield in nearby Newburyport, Massachusetts, Arnold's battalion set off in October to surprise the British at Quebec. The 350-mile trek through the backwoods of Maine proved disastrous, one of the most horrendous in American military history. Rain-flooded rivers swept away the company's hastily and poorly built boats, and with them many supplies. In short order, Arnold's men were reduced to eating dogs. Their boots were worn away, leaving many of the men barefoot in the Maine winter. Matthias Ogden wrapped his feet in a flour sack. Some men ate their own shoe leather. Starvation and, with it, rampant diseases like smallpox, the ever-present Revolutionary-era killer, took a grievous toll on Arnold's force.

After the six-week march, more than one-third of the 1,100 men who had left Boston with Arnold were sick, dead, or missing. When Arnold's emaciated and exhausted troops arrived on the outskirts of Quebec in November 1775, they were a far cry from a well-prepared
strike force capable of taking one of the British strongholds in Canada. But as Thomas Fleming records, “Arnold's half-starved men amazed the British when they emerged from the Maine wilderness before Quebec…. The French were ready to open the gates to Arnold and his 675 ragged scarecrows. Many of the habitants (French Canadians) thought only beings with miraculous powers could have survived the privations of their 350-mile march.”
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But a sudden deathblow to British Canada was not to be. Quickly reinforcing the fortress city, the British forced any Frenchmen sympathetic to the American cause out of Quebec, and Arnold was left to settle in and await reinforcements.

Young Aaron Burr had endured the dreadful forced march with flying colors. Upon arriving at Quebec, the very green but very enthusiastic officer was dispatched to meet with General Richard Montgomery, who had captured Montreal and was a day's march away. An Irish-born veteran of the British army, Richard Montgomery had fought in the French and Indian War (or Seven Years' War) and was one of the most battle-tested commanders in the relatively untested Continental Army. After marrying into New York's influential Livingston family, Montgomery had joined the American cause; he was leading the second front of the assault on Canada in place of General Philip Schuyler, who had fallen ill. Having captured Montreal with relative ease, Montgomery was planning to link his forces with Arnold's troops for the assault on Quebec. In dispatching Burr to meet Montgomery, Arnold's note to Montgomery recommended the teenage officer: “He is a young gentleman of much life and activity, and has acted with great spirit and resolution on our fatiguing march.”
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Montgomery took an instant liking to Burr, promoting him to captain, and choosing him as an aide-de-camp, so Burr was at Montgomery's side on the fateful night of December 31, 1775. In a daring, perhaps reckless, attempt to take Quebec, the combined forces of Montgomery and Arnold assaulted the fortress city in a howling snowstorm. Using ladders to scale the city walls, some Americans led by Daniel Morgan actually breached Quebec's walls. They were to be augmented by assaults from two other directions: one led by Montgomery, the other by Arnold. But through a combination of bad luck, bad weather, and superior British firepower, the tide quickly turned.

In the hand-to-hand fighting within the city walls, Daniel Morgan was captured, along with more than 300 Americans. Wounded in the leg, Benedict Arnold was forced to withdraw. More disastrously for the American cause, General Montgomery was killed by a burst of grapeshot fired by a Loyalist who had left Boston for Canada. When Montgomery fell, some of the American fighters took to their heels.

Aaron Burr was present when Montgomery died, and his actions later led to controversy. In the widely accepted version of the day, Burr had tried to rally Montgomery's troops, who retreated instead. Then, Burr attempted to lift the general, who had reportedly died in his arms, and carry the body from the field. This scene would be depicted thirteen years later in John Trumbull's painting of 1758,
The Death of Montgomery at Quebec
, which became an icon for patriotic Americans, with copies hanging in schoolrooms around the country. That painting alone was one reason why many Americans, including some of his later captors, deemed Aaron Burr a hero. The
British recovered Montgomery's body, and he was buried with full military honors.

In later years, as Burr's reputation came under attack during the political and personal controversies that dogged him, the truth of what happened that night in Quebec also got buried. Burr's critics attempted to blacken his name with whispers that Burr had retreated from Quebec.

But there was no question that this stunning defeat, as the epochal year of 1776 dawned, was critical. Had it succeeded, the siege of Quebec might have changed the course of the war. Instead, Benedict Arnold withdrew his men and took up positions around Quebec, awaiting reinforcements. After a bitter winter of disease and starvation, Arnold finally retreated from Canada in the spring of 1776. In recognition of his service, Aaron Burr, now twenty, was promoted to major, and in June 1776 he joined the staff of General George Washington in New York City. Washington had moved the army to New York after the British evacuated Boston a few months earlier. Washington's staff was occupying a mansion and large property known as Richmond Hill, in what is now Greenwich Village. (The building, which no longer stands, was located at what is now the intersection of Charlton and Varick streets, and was later purchased by Aaron Burr as his New York residence.)

Confronting the British in New York proved one of Washington's most disastrous decisions. Even as the Continental Congress was voting for independence on July 2, 1776, and adopting Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence two days later, the British were moving one of the greatest armadas ever seen into New York harbor. Over the course of the next two months, more than 350
British warships arrived in New York, delivering some 30,000 well-trained and well-equipped British soldiers and German mercenaries. Washington had about half that number—most of them ill equipped and inexperienced.

Later accounts of the relationship between Washington and Burr would paint a picture of immediate mutual disdain. But those reports were probably colored by events long after the war, when Burr's reputation began to take a beating. Eager for a more active role, Burr was assigned to the staff of General Israel Putnam before even encountering Washington. One of the heroes of the Battle of Bunker Hill, “Old Put” was a Connecticut Yankee who had fought with distinction in the French and Indian War, and once survived a near roasting at the hands of his Indian captors. According to Revolutionary lore, he left his plow at the first word of fighting at Lexington and Concord, and drove his own cattle to Cambridge to feed the troops. It was Putnam who supposedly uttered the famous—but possibly mythologized—“Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes” at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

When the battle of New York finally came in mid-September 1776, it proved a rout. Washington was fortunate to get most of his army out of New York to fight another day. Burr helped oversee the successful retreat of troops from lower Manhattan to Harlem. And on September 16, in the midst of an otherwise general disaster for the Americans, Burr won a battle in Harlem Heights, further burnishing his reputation as a decisive, courageous leader.

Washington's reputation, on the other hand, began to suffer the first of many setbacks after the debacle in New York. The near-destruction of his army and the heavy losses of men and ma
tériel he had absorbed set off the first round of whispers that he should be replaced. The whispers grew to a movement as several congressmen wondered if they had chosen the right man in George Washington. And it was a sort of dividing line in terms of loyalty to the commander. You were either with Washington or against him. As Burr's biographer Nancy Isenberg recounts, “This was the start of an obsession among Washington's staff, talk of ‘cabals' or secret plots, which in turn fueled the ‘party business' that Burr assiduously wished to avoid. In his yearlong tenure as Putnam's aide, Burr clearly saw the worst side of Washington, yet the historical record gives no evidence that he ever reproached the embattled commander.”
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Only later, after the war, did Washington view Aaron Burr as a member of the “opposition,” and it was only then that Burr's name became attached to these anti-Washington conspiracies.

Burr was initially passed over for promotion, and this peeved him—much as it did Benedict Arnold when he was similarly passed over, with much more disastrous results. But eventually Burr was given a command of his own and served with distinction, suffering through the Valley Forge winter of 1777–1778 as a commander who won high praise for the discipline of his men. By 1779, however, Burr's health—worsened by years of exposure and poor diet—did him in. Bedeviled by debilitating migraine headaches, and exhausted by the internal politics of the army that have frustrated many a soldier, he tendered his resignation to George Washington in March 1779. At age twenty-three, Burr was a retired soldier. During the war years, he again won praise as he took the field in defense of Connecticut during some British attacks. But as the focus of the fighting moved
south, Aaron Burr was far removed from the eventual American victory at Yorktown in October 1781.

Having resumed his legal studies, Burr passed the New York state bar exam in April 1782. A few months later, the young attorney's life was again greatly altered—by marriage. On July 2, 1782, Burr wed Theodosia Bartow Prevost, the widow of James Marcus Prevost, a British army officer who had succumbed to yellow fever while posted in the West Indies during the war. Ten years Aaron Burr's senior and the mother of five children, the French-speaking Theodosia was cultivated, articulate, and alluring. She apparently attracted both young Patriots and British officers.

Burr and Theodosia had met when she made her expansive New Jersey estate near Paramus available to George Washington as a headquarters in July 1778. Despite being the daughter of one British officer and having married another, Theodosia moved easily between the worlds of Patriots and Loyalists. But her instincts seemed to favor the American cause. One hint of her political leanings was the fact that she had named her estate the Hermitage, after the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's celebrated cottage—though Theodosia's Hermitage was anything but a “cottage.” With ninety-eight acres and two elegant homes, the Hermitage offered a taste of polite European aristocratic society set down in the midst of a war zone.