A Nation Rising (5 page)

Burr first encountered Theodosia while serving as a military escort for three prominent Loyalists in August 1778. What began as friendship changed with Burr's offer to assist Theodosia in dealing with some of her legal matters, including protecting the Hermitage—which was officially viewed as “Loyalist property”—
from being appropriated by American authorities. Their friendship soon became much more. By the time Theodosia's husband died in the West Indies in 1781, the rumors and wagging tongues of the day seem to have been borne out.

Burr's relationship with Theodosia was unusual if not extraordinary for its time. Despite his reputation, deserved or not, as a licentious womanizer, Aaron Burr might be called a “proto-feminist.” Not only was Burr an early abolitionist in a state that had more slaves than any other in the North; he also proposed legislation in the New York state assembly that would give women the vote. He believed in the equality of the sexes and treated his wife accordingly. “Burr distinctly pursued a marriage based on a very modern idea of friendship between the sexes,” writes Isenberg. “He found such advocacy in the writings of John Witherspoon, president of his alma mater, Princeton,…and in Mary Wollstonecraft's
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
.” This feminist manifesto of 1792 argued that women were not inferior to men but were simply denied opportunity and education. Burr was “practicing its egalitarian marital principles ten years before its publication.”
¹⁵

In addition to Theodosia's children, the couple had two daughters who survived birth. Theodosia, named after her mother, was born in 1783. A second daughter, Sally, died at age three; and three more stillbirths followed—another harsh reminder of the infant mortality rate in early America.

Burr and his wife were devoted to their only surviving daughter, and she received an education that few girls of her day could dream of. Clearly a prodigy, the young Theodosia studied mathematics, geography, Latin, Greek, and French. “Believing that she was the
equal of any man, Burr educated her as he would have a son,” Joseph Wheelan writes. “His advocacy of women's education was rare in an age when girls were taught little beyond simple reading and writing. As he once declared to his wife, Burr wished to ‘convince the world what neither sex appear to believe—that women have souls.' Burr believed that women's education was of paramount importance because children received their first impressions almost exclusively from their mother, the ‘repositories of all the moral virtues' that went into the making of men of ‘excellence.'”
¹⁶

Burr began his political career in earnest in 1782, when he was elected to the New York state assembly. When the war finally ended with the Peace of Paris in 1783, he moved from Albany to New York City. His extended family, including his wife, her children, and Theodosia, moved through a succession of homes as Burr's legal practice and reputation flourished. Joining the group of young Patriot lawyers establishing themselves in New York, Burr had begun to build a reputation as a brilliant trial lawyer known for his “cogency, precision and quiet sarcasm.”
¹⁷
His career in ascendancy, Burr was able, by 1791, to purchase the 6,000-square-foot house, Richmond Hill, that had been Washington's staff office and John Adams's home when Adams was vice president during the brief period that New York was the nation's capital. The estate included twenty-six acres of grounds that sloped down to the Hudson River. By then Burr, who had purchased the Hermitage from Theodosia's family, had begun to sell off the estate, to raise money.

At the same time, Burr began to exercise considerable influence in New York politics. In 1789, at thirty-three, he had become New York's attorney general, and two years later he was elected to
the United States Senate from New York by the New York state legislature.
*
Burr defeated the incumbent, the Revolutionary War general Philip Schuyler, who also happened to be the father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton, another lawyer of the Patriot generation.

Burr continued his progress through New York state politics just as the lines were becoming clearer between the two emerging national political parties. On one side were the Federalists, whose tenet was a strong central government. President John Adams and Alexander Hamilton led this party. However, they neither agreed on every policy nor especially liked each other.

On the other side were the Democratic-Republicans (or “Republicans”), whose philosophy was inclined toward letting the states retain more power and limiting the powers of the federal government. In foreign affairs, the Federalists tended to view Great Britain as an ally, while the Republicans, including Thomas Jefferson, preferred France—England's chief continental enemy—as America's truest ally.

Even in his Senate victory over Schuyler, Burr had remained aloof from either party. But once in the Senate, he was drawn toward the emerging Democratic Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson. When the national government later moved to Philadelphia during the Washington administration, Burr and Jefferson roomed at the boardinghouse of a Mrs. Payne, where Burr met the land lady's attractive daughter Dolley, who had been widowed when yellow
fever struck Philadelphia in 1793. In 1794, Burr played matchmaker, introducing Dolley Payne to his former schoolmate at Prince ton, James “Jemmy” Madison, then a forty-four-year-old bachelor, and the two were married that year.

But Burr's own domestic happiness would soon be shattered. In May 1794, while Burr was attending Senate sessions in Philadelphia, he was stunned by the death of his wife Theodosia at age forty-eight. Although she had been ill for years—most likely with cancer—and was being treated with laudanum, an opiate, her death was unexpected and crushing. By all accounts an extraordinarily progressive, intelligent, well-read woman, she was not only Burr's very loving wife but an excellent political adviser as well. During the war, she had navigated through the sharp rocks between the Loyalists and Patriots and would have been useful as Burr dealt with his political storms. Burr would later say that the loss, “dealt me more pain than all sorrows combined.”

When Washington chose not to run again after his second term, Vice President John Adams succeeded the “father of the country” as the second president. In that first contested election of 1796, the political lines were already being drawn more sharply. The “factions” or party politics that Washington had warned against and scrupulously tried to avoid were clearly emerging. And Burr's image and reputation as a power broker were also being more sharply defined, fairly or not.

By this time, Alexander Hamilton had suffered his own fall from grace. His downfall came from the political press he had helped create. Americans had become increasingly literate, and the press was becoming increasingly powerful, a reality that was reinforced in the
new republic as America witnessed an explosion of partisan newspapers and political journals and pamphlets. Benjamin Franklin Bache, Franklin's grandson, published a paper, known popularly as the
Aurora
, which became an outspoken organ of the anti-Federalist cause. Sponsored by Alexander Hamilton, the
Gazette of the United States
, published by John Fenno, was a powerful voice of Federalism.

But Hamilton would himself be attacked in print by the early republic's equivalent of the Drudge Report. Working as a political propagandist for Jefferson's party, the Scottish-born scandalmonger and pamphleteer James Callender wrote
History of 1796
, a pamphlet in which he exposed Hamilton's adulterous affair with a woman named Maria Reynolds. When word got out that Maria Reynolds's husband was blackmailing him, Hamilton was forced to resign as secretary of the treasury early in 1795. Hamilton would not hold public office again. With incidents like these to illustrate the poisonous power of the pen, politicians like Jefferson, Hamilton, and Burr knew full well the impact of a partisan press, and the newspapers would play an increasing role as Aaron Burr's drama unfolded.

In a sublimely ironic footnote to this story, Hamilton blamed the revelation of the affair on James Madison, once his closest colleague in framing the Constitution. Madison was now increasingly linked with his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans. As Hamilton and Madison contemplated a duel, none other than Aaron Burr stepped in to conciliate and play peacemaker.

Whatever the previous relationship between Burr and Hamilton, by the time Hamilton returned to New York, he increasingly came to despise Burr. What is more, Hamilton still had Washington's ear. It may have been Hamilton who derailed Burr's appointment as
minister to France. And when a possible war, the “Quasi-War,” with France was brewing in 1798, George Washington was appointed commander of the U.S. forces and quashed Burr's application for a commission. According to President Adams's later recollections, Washington had told him, “By all that I have known and heard, Colonel Burr is a brave and able officer, but the question is whether he has not equal talents at intrigue.”
¹⁸

Bored by a fairly inactive Senate, Burr returned to New York, where he was elected to the New York state assembly, serving from 1798 through 1801. Associating loosely with the Republicans, Burr still maintained contacts with moderate Federalist allies, including his old friend, now a senator, Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey. Still on Burr's legislative agenda was a plan to emancipate New York's slaves and protect its free blacks, not a popular platform in the 1790s.

But he was also quickly moving to assert control over political events in New York. Burr worked through the Tammany Society, later to become the infamous Tammany Hall, which he converted from a social club into one of the first organized urban political machines. At around the same time, Burr demonstrated his skills at manipulating the process when he used a bill in the state legislature that established a water utility to help start the Bank of the Manhattan Company (which in later years evolved into the Chase Manhattan Bank, now JPMorgan Chase.) John Steele Gordon explains in his history of American economic power,
An Empire of Wealth
: “At the turn of the century, obtaining a bank charter required an act of the state legislature. This of course injected a powerful element of politics into the process and invited what today would be called
corruption but then was regarded as business as usual. Hamilton's political enemy…Aaron Burr was able to create a bank by sneaking a clause into a charter for a company called the Manhattan Company, to provide clean water to New York City. The innocuous-looking clause allowed the company to invest surplus capital in any lawful enterprise. Within six months of the company's creation, and long before it had laid a single section of water pipe, the company opened a bank.”
¹⁹
Hamilton had already founded the Bank of New York in 1784, and now he and Burr were competing in the world of finance as well.

Their increasingly heated rivalry came to a head in the election of 1800, when Burr emerged as a “kingmaker,” with unexpected results. Burr had now aligned himself firmly with his old friend James Madison behind the candidacy of Thomas Jefferson, who had lost the election of 1796 to John Adams. Under the existing electoral process, in which the second-place finisher became vice president, Jefferson had become Adams's very unhappy vice president. The two revolutionaries who had worked together to draft the Declaration of Independence had gone in separate political directions. Adams was an unapologetic Federalist. Jefferson led the Democratic-Republicans. The Framers had not foreseen the evolution of parties, or “factions,” so quickly—nor the prospect that two men of such differing views could wind up as president and vice president.

In the spring of 1800, Burr was able to swing the New York state legislature to a Republican majority. He could now deliver the state's rich lode of Electors to Jefferson. Recognizing that power, Burr was placed with Jefferson on the Democratic-Republican presidential ticket in 1800. Unexpectedly, the two men finished in a tie for the
presidency, with seventy-three electoral votes each. The election of 1800 would be decided in the House of Representatives, in a special session, which began on Wednesday, February 11, 1801.

The election of 1800 was a crucible in the life of the young republic. There was talk of disunion in the air. There were threats that a Federalist army was being organized to march on Washington and assassinate Jefferson in a bloody coup. Federalists who were certain to lose the presidency spoke of the stalemate allowing Adams to continue as president and of calling a new election. It was a dangerous and uncertain moment with the nation's future at stake as the powers of Europe—Great Britain, France, and Spain, all still holding enormous portions of North America—watched and waited.

That there were intrigues and dealings behind the scenes is small wonder. Some Federalists thought that a Burr presidency would be preferable to seeing Jefferson—the “atheist”—as president. But here is another point on which historians still argue: Did Burr maneuver secretly to become president? Or did he honor his commitment to Jefferson and plan to accept the vice presidency? Many think that Burr and his associates actively campaigned for Federalist votes, attempting to “steal” the office from Jefferson, the “sage of Monticello” and make Burr president.

In her generally admiring biography of Burr, Nancy Isenberg convincingly argues that the idea of a Burr “conspiracy” makes no sense: