It is fairly clear why Burr felt this way. His own education had involved long hours of study. In his first year at Princeton, at thirteen the youngest in the class, he had buried himself in books for a seemingly impossible sixteen to eighteen hours. He had followed the same regime when he studied theology with the Reverend Joseph Bellamy, and accomplished all this before he was twenty. After the war, he condensed a three-year apprenticeship in the law into one year of rigorous study. Theodosia was seventeen when he pleaded with her: “The happiness of my life depends on your exertions, for what else, for whom else do I live?”87
Her apprenticeship had its limits, of course. Theodosia could not follow in her father’s footsteps. She could not become a lawyer or politician, though she could educate her own children and serve as a model for other women. She could, in that sense, follow in her mother’s footsteps and become the perfect companion, “maturing for solid friendship.” Burr never imagined that she would enter the male world of politics. Yet he would have felt perfectly comfortable with her voting, or holding political office. He was, by any definition, a feminist.88
In 1793, when Burr had first discovered the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, he called it a “work of genius.” None of his male peers, or the women he occasioned to meet, agreed. He revealed to his wife his frustration with these people: “Is it owing to ignorance or prejudice that I have not yet met a single person who had discovered or would allow the merit of this work?” As Burr conceived the nature of the world around him, unenlightened opinions ultimately did not matter. He knew, and harbored no doubt, that women could contribute to the growth of knowledge—to the spread of liberty—which was essential in a modern republic. This was Burr at his most idealistic and his most progressive: The Enlightenment encompassed a radical transformation of women’s minds. His daughter’s special calling was to prove that Wollstonecraft was right and that women were as capable as men of genius and reflection—that, indeed, “women have souls.”89
A View of Broad Street, Wall Street, and City Hall in New York City (1797)
Chapter Four
AN UNPREJUDICED MIND
I do not see how any unbiased mind can doubt [reasoned arguments], but still do not pretend to control the opinion of others, much less take offense at any man for differing with me.
—Aaron Burr to Jacob Delamater, 1792
The political career of Aaron Burr began with little fanfare and no notoriety. Long before Burr decided, in his wife’s words, to “commence politician,” three dominant factions vied for power in the Empire State. The faction that loomed largest, and for the longest time, was that of George Clinton. Clinton, who held the governorship from 1777 until 1795, gathered around him a patriotic coalition of radical Whigs turned Anti-Federalists (men who opposed the adoption of the federal Constitution). Many of these men, like Clinton himself, had risen from humbler ranks, acquiring wealth and reputation as a result of the Revolutionary War. These men did not have ties to the colonial ruling elite, and saw themselves as defenders of the “middling” class. They were reluctant to cede authority to a strong national government, preferring instead to keep power closer to home in the state, where men of less stature had a voice in politics.1
Robert R. Livingston headed a second major faction. His family’s vast manorial landholdings had given it dominance over several generations. After 1789, he relied on his own pen, and those of his energetic younger relatives, to simultaneously support the Constitution and promote his family’s interests. Appointed chancellor, a position that entailed presiding over the Chancery Court, Livingston also exercised sway over the Council of Revision, which in turn had veto power over all state laws. Thus, from 1777 to 1804, his was the only state office to rival the governor.2
A third faction was that of Philip Schuyler and his son-in-law Alexander Hamilton. The Schuylers were wealthy, and like the Livingstons were members of New York’s landed aristocracy. Before the federal Constitution was ratified, they were conservative Whigs, and as such, they were frustrated by their loss of power to the Clintons, whom they dismissed as men lacking in education, refinement, and elite family connections. Theirs was an aggressively nationalistic faction—and they used their ties to the federal government to challenge Clinton’s dominance over the state. As Washington’s secretary of the treasury, Hamilton was perhaps the most influential figure in American politics in the years after 1789. Through sheer force of personality, he brought the Schuyler faction its prominence in New York. At the same time, his contentious style of partisan warfare provoked unceasing controversy.
The three rival groups occasionally allied. When they fought, however, it was of a highly personal nature, marked by intentional snubs and brash maneuvers. The nineteenth-century biographer James Parton cleverly described the factions this way: “The Clintons had power, the Livingstons had numbers, and the Schuylers had Hamilton.” This was the volatile world that Burr learned to navigate—and he did so successfully up through the election of 1800.3
State politics did not always follow national trends. As the Revolutionary War ended, two groups—conservative and radical Whigs—vied for control in New York. When debate arose over whether to form a stronger national government, two new coalitions emerged: the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. They began as loose coalitions, and only the victors, the Federalists, went on to organize as an official party. Conservative Whigs most easily moved into the ranks of the Federalists, drawing mainly from the Schuyler and Livingston factions, and from former Loyalists, who had supported the British during the war. After the Constitution was ratified, Anti-Federalists abandoned their opposition to the new national government, but they did not lose their critical perspective. In the 1790s, as opposition to the Washington administration grew, a new party formed, the Democratic-Republicans—or Republicans, which attracted both former Anti-Federalists and disgruntled nationalists. In New York, this led to an uneasy alliance between the Livingstons and the Clintons, and gave rise to a new state democratic faction headed by Aaron Burr.
Burr’s support came from a diverse group. His inner circle included former Anti-Federalists who believed in commercial growth. (They were not Jeffersonians, except when it meant thwarting Hamilton’s centralizing policies.) Burr’s men tended to be military veterans who had become land speculators; they were willing to promote him, because he advanced their financial interests. Additionally, Burr was perceived as an intellectual, a man of the Enlightenment, who endorsed liberal legal reforms; this set him apart from other New Yorkers who were scrambling for positions of power.
Four men, older and more experienced than Burr in New York State politics, proved most essential to him. All four were Anti-Federalist merchant speculators, three of them Clinton supporters before coming to recognize Burr as the future of the Republican interest. Former militia captain Melancton Smith headed this intimate circle. He was known as the “Patrick Henry” of the 1788 New York constitutional ratifying convention, because of his plain yet compelling oratory, and because he broke with Clinton and endorsed the Constitution. Second was Marinus Willett, a humble cabinetmaker who had become a wealthy land speculator. As the “Hero of Stanwix” during the Revolution, Willett had played a pivotal role in defending New York’s western frontier. The third man, David Gelston, was a prosperous New York City merchant, who had earned his reputation as a dealmaker in the state assembly and senate. Distinct from the other three, Dutchman Peter Van Gaasbeek hailed from central New York State, not New York City. Though he attended the ratifying convention as an Anti-Federalist delegate, he went on to embrace the Federalists. He proudly hung a portrait of Burr on his mantelpiece.4
ANOTHER “LABORIOUS PIECE OF BUSINESS”
Burr devoted the decade of the 1780s to the practice of law. Then as now, law was a steppingstone into politics, providing a decisive young man with financial independence and a professional reputation. At this moment especially, the legal profession was wide open. Bef
ore the Revolution, Loyalists (also known as Tories) had been dominant at the bar, until legislation of 1781 prohibited Tory lawyers from pursuing their trade anymore. When Burr set up his practice in New York City, in 1783, he discovered that only a handful of attorneys were left. Men with little or no experience in the courtroom—Hamilton, Robert Troup, and Burr—quickly came to prominence.5
New York City was in turmoil when Burr set up his office on Wall Street. The British army had occupied the city for seven years, and two devastating fires had reduced sections to rubble. Buildings that had been used by the British were in desperate need of major repair, and wharves and warehouses essential to commerce were falling apart. In 1783, Burr was part of a mass migration into the city, which doubled the population from 12,000 to 24,000 in two years. Many were former residents, others ambitious newcomers, battling to reestablish New York as a prosperous mercantile city in the new republic.6
New Yorkers were also fighting over the political soul of their city. Hostility toward former Tories was high in the wake of the British evacuation. Encouraged by Governor George Clinton, the so-called “violent” or “radical” Whigs took over the state assembly, and passed legislation that effectively removed Tories’ political and property rights. The wartime measure of the 1779 Confiscation Act had allowed the state to take possession of the estates of known Tories; a subsequent law enabled the land to be sold at auction, creating a windfall for ambitious patriots looking for a sure and profitable investment. The Citation Act of 1782 permitted patriots to delay payment of debts to Loyalists—or to repay them in worthless, depreciated Continental dollars. In the following year, the Trespass Act gave patriot refugees the right to sue Loyalists who had occupied and damaged their property.7
The anti-Tory legislation created what Alexander Hamilton described as a “harvest” for lawyers in settling civil suits. Burr spent much of his time handling cases before the Mayor’s Court, which was located at City Hall, on Wall Street, just two doors down from his law office. From 1784 to 1789, Mayor James Duane presided over the court, a man known as a sound and conservative jurist. Burr must have found it somewhat comical to argue cases before Duane, who had a “sly, surveying eye, a little squint eyed,” which made him look a bit crazy.8
At this early date, before they knew one another very well, Burr and Hamilton looked at the anti-Loyalist climate differently. When Burr appeared before the Mayor’s Court in the politically charged trespass cases, he generally represented patriots, whereas Hamilton almost always took on Tory clients. Though it would be unfair to say that Burr was any less ambitious, his cases involved smaller sums than the £8,000 that was in dispute when Hamilton argued on behalf of a Loyalist in the high-profile 1784 case of Rutgers v. Waddington. Hamilton became, almost immediately, the foremost critic of the Trespass Act, calling it “legislative folly” and the work of “levellers”—he saw control of the city in decidedly class terms. Privately, he lamented the sale of Loyalist lands, which had caused as many as 29,000 Tories (whom Hamilton called New York’s most “valuable citizens”) to sail from Manhattan in 1783 alone. Burr, and many other Whigs, however, viewed the Trespass Act as disaster relief; his clients used the money they recovered to fix up storefronts, replenish merchant stock, and repair homes that had been devastated by the British occupation. In Burr’s mind, trespass suits had less to do with revenge, and more to do with rebuilding a battered city.9
Burr’s client list was diverse, to say the least. The Mayor’s Court was primarily a debtor’s court—and debt touched those of all political persuasions. Burr was hired by one of his wife’s Tory relatives to hunt down a delinquent debtor for unpaid rent. The up-and-coming John Jay hired Burr to sue a man who owed him £30, insisting on twice that amount for damages. One desperate client sent him a heart-wrenching letter from debtor’s prison, claiming that if he stayed in jail much longer he would “starve to death.” As prisons provided no food for debtors at this time, the man was probably telling the truth. By far his most steady client was his former commander, New York merchant and radical Whig William Malcolm, who sued several times for trespass and debt recovery.10
Burr’s political instincts were being shaped by this experience. He was positioning himself as a moderate Whig, who looked at the anti-Tory legislation as a necessary but temporary remedy. His moderation is evident in his response to the Citation Act. It was a law that he opposed because it disrupted the repayment of debts across party lines, hurting Loyalists and patriots alike, and creating havoc for the entire New York economy. The Trespass Act only penalized individuals, and he believed was a just response to the economic hardships of war.11
Burr could see the value of some leveling—unlike Hamilton, who disagreed with all anti-Loyalist legislation. Indeed, Burr felt that the moderate transfer of power away from wealthy Tories was not only the price of war but a commercial boon in peacetime. As someone who saw the worst side of Loyalists in Westchester County during the war, Burr fully appreciated the anger of ardent Whigs. Many of his close friends were radical Whigs—William Malcolm, Marinus Willett, and John Lamb were all former Revolutionary officers and now ambitious merchants looking to speculate in Tory property and move up the social ladder. In 1783, Burr himself was one of those ambitious Whigs, consulting with Malcolm about purchasing a confiscated estate in the southern district of New York. He was practical and sure-footed.12
There was little doubt about Burr’s Whig credentials. Several of his cases in the Mayor’s Court exposed the seamier side of New York during the occupation, including a handful of suits for assault and battery that fell his way in 1784. One of the stranger cases involved a civilian who had been beaten and imprisoned by a Loyalist officer for five months in 1781. He hired Burr to sue his tormentor for £1,000.13 Slave cases were also part of Burr’s diverse legal trade. By 1790, New York City had over 2,000 slaves as well as a considerable free black population. As one British visitor observed, the streets of the city were filled with blacks of “all shades.” In 1784, one of Burr’s clients brought suit against a man for luring away his female slave and, presumably, having sex with her. The damages sought, then, were for both her labor and sexual favors. Burr showed no qualms when he took on this case—and others—that treated slaves as property.14
Yet Burr’s views on slavery were not simple. He represented two manumitted slaves before the New York Court of Chancery in what must have been considered a controversial case: The freedmen were suing for the rightful portion of an estate bequeathed to them by their white slaveholder father. During his short term in the state assembly in the 1780s, Burr went so far as to propose a radical revision of a bill to abolish slavery, calling for the immediate emancipation of all slaves. He opposed three different amendments that restricted the right of free blacks to vote, to serve on juries, or to testify against whites—and he fought a statute that penalized a black £100 for marrying a white. His position seems all the more improbable because Burr himself was a slaveowner.15
There were gradations of support for or protest against slavery at this early date, and so Burr’s views on slavery are hard to put into a single category. One telling vignette involves Burr’s own slave Carlos, a young boy and his body servant. In a letter to Theodosia in 1781, Burr expressed his disappointment with a friend who mocked the idea that Carlos might learn to play the violin. The “insult,” as he termed it, shocked him. He found it hard to believe that someone he knew so well could be so insensitive and so unenlightened. Burr made sure that his slaves were well educated. He insisted that Tom, another house slave, apply himself diligently to his reading and writing lessons.16
How unusual was this? Not very, among the enlightened thinkers of New York’s ruling elite. Burr defended the rights of both masters and manumitted slaves. He appears to have viewed slavery as a temporary condition of servitude rather than a status based on racial inferiority. Many prominent members of the New York Manumission Society owned slaves. Slaveholding was not a par
tisan issue either: future Republican George Clinton and staunch Federalists John Jay and Alexander Hamilton were both slaveholding members of the society. Nor is any of this surprising if we recall that Burr was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose revolutionary theories assumed that children everywhere had the ability to learn. In Burr’s eyes, teaching Carlos the violin was no more daring an experiment than encouraging his own daughter to master the Greek and Roman classics (which, for many men, would have seemed no less radical).17
This was Burr’s workaday world in the 1780s. An ever-expanding caseload covering the gamut of civil suits, some of it extremely complicated, committed him to years of litigation. He went on long trips to Albany, mainly to attend to business before the Supreme Court. His client Alexander Macomb was one who observed at this time—as many others would echo as the years passed—that Burr never gave up on a case and never shirked his responsibility. He constantly reminded clients to hunt down potential witnesses and to forward any documents that could aid their cause. In preparing for a case, he devoted long hours to a review of the paperwork, and then meticulously condensed his argument so that it could fit on a single sheet of paper.18
Burr’s diligence is noteworthy, given that he derived little pleasure from his legal practice. In 1791, he confessed to his wife that he was undertaking yet another “laborious piece of business” simply for money. Tedious legal work was, he felt, a complete waste of his intellectual talents. Only his love of family could induce him, in his words, “to spend another day of my life in objects in themselves uninteresting, and which afford neither instruction nor amusement.” While such testaments were common, there is every reason to believe in Burr’s case that they were sincere.19
His contemporaries reported that Burr spoke with great precision before the court, and would judiciously employ a pointed remark to dismiss opposing counsel’s ponderous arguments. One later colleague at the bar claimed that Burr’s legal style was “persuasive and imaginative” rather than strictly argumentative. The same literary flair that he brought to his journals was displayed in the court of law. Those who bore witness to Burr’s courtroom performances voiced the widespread opinion that his style was “peculiarly his own.”20
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