Fallen Founder

by Nancy Isenberg

  The similarity between the two men had to do with politics, not genes. Both men rose in the Republican Party as outsiders, that is, without a powerful family faction to press their careers. They found the art of negotiation and compromise sensible. Van Buren’s support of commercial republicanism was in fact the mantra of the Burrites. That Van Buren was called “the Little Magician” reflected the same unease that Burr’s enemies voiced when they called him a “proteus.” The reason Van Buren succeeded where Burr failed is that by the 1810s there were more men like him—like them—men who appealed to those outside the elite families who so long dominated state politics. This makes the short-lived Burrites a phenomenon destined to thrive in politics: not a disruptive third wheel, as their enemies charged, but the first truly democratic political organization in New York, offering a sensible alternative to the ruling family factions.

  Burr left hints about what he thought of the Madison administration. While he was in Europe, Theodosia had sent reports about the worsening economy, and the turnover in his cabinet. Erich Bollmann had let him know that Madison was endorsing a filibuster takeover of West Florida. Days before he sailed home from England, Burr became aware that war fever had stuck in the United States; but he assessed little would come of it. Belittling the new generation in Congress, he added: “I treat their war-prattle as I should a bevy of boarding-house misses who should talk of making war.” Not only did he scoff at the so-called “War Hawks,” he also felt confident that Madison could never be an effective commander in chief. It is reasonable to conclude that after the war got underway, Burr was not impressed by the administration’s handling of it.79

  As Burr sat out the war, Secretary of War James Monroe envisioned the U.S. forces occupying both East Florida and the full extent of British North America. There was a familiar ring to this expansionist strategy: It was identical to Burr’s proposal to Napoleon for ridding North America of the British. But Madison’s three secretaries of war—William Eustis, James Monroe, and John Armstrong—all failed to create an efficient military bureaucracy. Given his own military experience and organizational skills, it is a safe guess that Burr was thinking that he would have been a better war president than the unmartial Madison.80

  If Burr wrote little about Madison that survives, he certainly did not remain silent after he learned that Monroe was next in line for the presidency. In a November 1815 letter to his son-in-law, Burr launched into a harangue against Monroe, calling the man and his nomination “equally exceptional & odious.” He regarded congressional caucus nominations as “hostile to all freedom & independence of suffrage.” He remembered all too well that in 1804, the Republican caucus had acted as a corrupt clique, an unjust aristocracy, when it stripped him of the vice presidency.81

  Perhaps the best explanation for Burr’s annoyance and impatience was his residual disappointment in the Virginians who, standing with Jefferson, had caused his descent from power within the Republican Party. The Virginians had mastered what he called “one of the principal Arts . . . which has been systematically taught by Jefferson,” the promotion of “state dissensions—not between repub[lican] & federal—that would do them no good, but Sc[h]isms in the repub[lican] party.” In this, Burr was basically correct. Jefferson had employed his “southern” strategy against Burr, just as Madison undermined DeWitt Clinton, his opponent in the 1812 election, by using patronage to strengthen his rivals in New York.82

  But Burr’s real venom was directed at James Monroe. He called the last president in the Virginia Dynasty “naturally dull & stupid—extremely illiterate,” “indecisive . . . pusillanimous & of course hypocritical.” He was unsparing in his criticism of Monroe’s military career, observing that he never “commanded a platoon nor was ever fit to command one.” He pointed out that during the Revolution, Monroe was a sycophant. As the aide-de-camp to Lord Stirling, who was “regularly drunk from Morning to Morning, Monroe’s whole duty was to fill his Lordship’s Tankard and hear with indications of admiration his Lordship’s stories about himself.” This was damning stuff—and Burr was not finished. As a lawyer, Monroe was “far below Mediocrity,” never rising to the “Honor of trying a Cause of the Value of an hundred pounds.” But Monroe’s elevation, despite his lack of ability, was not anomalous, according to Burr. Rather, his was “a character exactly suited to the View of the Virginia Junto,” which maintained itself on sycophancy, instead of recruiting men of “Talent and Independence.”83

  Burr wanted ex-Governor Alston to lead other southern politicians in a surprise attack to outflank the Virginians. Republicans, he insisted, must choose a man of “firmness and decision,” and, he said notably, “That man is Andrew Jackson.” He felt that the hero of the Battle of New Orleans was the best candidate to defeat Monroe and break the stranglehold that the Virginians had on the party. It could succeed, Burr advised Alston, if Jackson’s nomination was kept secret, and only announced at the last moment before the caucus met. Confident that his plan would work, Burr commanded Alston to “emerge from this state of Nullity” and prepare for battle. “You owe it to yourself—you owe it to me—you owe it to your country—you owe it to the Memory of the dead.” These were fighting words.84

  At this moment, Burr was a better prognosticator than even Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s future secretary of state and vice president, who would not support the Tennessean for another decade. In 1815, New Yorkers were divided between two possible challengers to Monroe: their governor, Daniel Tompkins, or Secretary of War William Crawford of Georgia. Jackson ended rumors of his run for the top office only days before Burr penned his letter to Alston. Jackson had just visited ex-President Jefferson, and some have speculated that it was Jefferson who persuaded him to withdraw.85

  Burr did not hear back from Alston until February 1816. Apologizing for his tardy response, the younger man acknowledged that he sympathized with Burr’s position, but lacked the “spirit, the energy, the health” to engage in so desperate a political battle. He had been unable to attend the fall session of the South Carolina legislature, due to sickness and depression. Politics had little interest for him anymore: “I feel too much alone, too entirely unconnected to the world, to take much interest in anything.” As a “miserable remnant” of his former self, Alston was unknowingly bidding farewell to his father-in-law. His condition worsened, and he died in September, surviving his wife by only three years.86

  As for Burr, when he wrote to Alston disparaging Monroe, he had just turned sixty—he was two years older than Monroe. Unwilling to keep his opinions to himself, he had hoped for a political surrogate in Alston of South Carolina. But Alston was dead at thirty-seven, allowing the Virginia “mediocrity” to enter office.

  “A HALO OF GENIUS SHONE AROUND HIM”

  Burr did not lose his interest in Latin America. He joined a circle of South American revolutionary exiles in New York and Philadelphia. José Alvárez de Toledo, a leader of Mexican insurgents living in New York, wrote to Burr in September 1816, asking him to “assume the management of our political and military affairs.” Though this offer might sound as though Burr was being handed the presidency of Mexico (should the revolution succeed), Toledo had no power at this time to make any such offer. He was simply one of many revolutionaries and fellow travelers who were promoting independence for Latin America and looking to the United States for support. And he knew enough of Burr that he would be receptive to his plea.87

  After returning to the United States, Burr’s strongest ties to the Latin American insurgency came by way of two Englishmen: John Alderson and Robert Cartmel. Alderson had established a commercial operation in Venezuela, maintaining close ties to Simón Bolívar, the famed “Liberator” of South America. In 1817, while living in Philadelphia, Alderson established himself as part of a network of Latin American revolutionary refugees, and he brought Burr into the fold. He even supplied Burr with a Spanish tutor.88

  Cartmel was another English merchant who had set up
businesses in Colombia and New York. He became acquainted with Burr in 1817. Two years later, when Cartmel found himself in New York debtor’s prison, Burr acted as his attorney. The two became intimates, not just business partners, exchanging warm letters over a decade.89

  After leaving New York, Cartmel headed for Cuba. But around 1823, he returned to the northern Colombian port of Carthagena. One venture that succeeded in enticing Burr was a steamboat company. With another New Yorker, Samuel Chester Reid, a naval hero of the War of 1812, Burr backed a scheme to sell steamboats to a contractor with exclusive navigational rights along Colombia’s Magdalena River. Burr sent Reid designs of passenger vessels, based on the boats that were being used on the Erie Canal. Clearly, Burr had not yet given up on speculative opportunities, just as he enjoyed the risk—the thrill—of backing revolutionaries whose goals harmonized with his own.90

  He may still have been dreaming about Latin America, but he devoted most of his energy to the practice of law. Here he liked to try new tactics, which, as he told his junior associate Gurdon W. Lathrop, had always brought him “great honor as an attorney,” as well as, he admitted, “much criticism” and “much mirth.” He was drawn into an old battle involving the heirs of George Croghan. Back in the 1780s, he had crossed swords with Alexander Hamilton in protecting the interests of Augustine Prevost—Croghan’s son-in-law and heir—over William Cooper’s claim to the Otsego tract. But now, three decades later, Burr sought a new way to challenge the status of land titles. In what he described as an “extraordinary suit,” he drew up a list of 500 names of actual occupants of the land, preparing a case with “500 defendants.” This tactic anticipated what lawyers later would use in class action suits: the threat of a large numbers of litigants to force some kind of settlement.91

  His most elaborate litigation involved the heirs of Medcef Eden, Jr. Eden was the son of a wealthy brewer in New York City who had owned a large amount of Manhattan real estate. Medcef and his brother Joseph had squandered their father’s fortune after his death in 1798, and according to Burr, had been tricked out of their inheritance. In 1815, Burr tracked down the impoverished Medcef Eden in Westchester County; his brother had died two years earlier. The surviving brother had recently married Rachel Maltbie, a widow with three daughters—Sally Ann, Elizabeth, and Rebecca. So, for the next decade, Burr devoted himself to recovering the lost legacies of this family. He moved the Edens into his home, and when Medcef Eden died in 1819, Burr became the executor of his will and the guardian of his three stepdaughters—now Medcef’s heirs.92

  Initially, Burr took on this case because it offered an impossible challenge. He needed to find a way to weaken the land titles, and began with a small farm owned by one John Anderson, recovering it for the Eden estate. The case created a precedent, in establishing that the Eden brothers had been fraudulently deprived of their land by so-called usurers and money brokers. Burr then issued a series of writs of ejectment against the holders of city lots, reclaiming titles to the Eden estate piece by piece.93

  Burr also mobilized an effective legal team, relying on the same skills that had made him a successful political organizer. He drew in Martin Van Buren and another prominent New York attorney to help transfer the property to Eden’s widow. Burr even recruited one of the great orators of the time, Daniel Webster, to join this fight. In the end, he won several key judgments in this prolonged legal contest. But it was not until 1828 that was he finally able to secure some profits from the estate for Eden’s heirs.94

  His handling of the Eden case confirmed Burr’s reputation as a leader of the bar. He acquired an almost legendary status, as an “old gentleman” capable of astonishing much younger attorneys with his “loftiest eloquence” on points of law. In the New-York Mirror, and Ladies’ Literary Gazette, Burr was still a mysterious “stranger” but he was not a villain—he was instead the incomparable Burr once again, and a “halo of genius shone around him” when untangling some impossible legal problem.

  The Eden matter, however, assumed personal meaning for him, because Eden’s widow and his two younger daughters became part of Burr’s surrogate family. In 1823, Burr wrote affectionately of his growing brood to a friend, describing himself as a “housekeeper with all my Children about me.” As one might expect, he ensured that the two girls received a rigorous education, and that they married well. Rebecca married John Lynde Wilson, a longtime political associate of Burr and a former governor of South Carolina—shades of Theodosia. And when Elizabeth left the roost in 1828, she married Isadore Guillet, a man of taste and breeding, who had once served as Secretaire-Interprete in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.95

  Burr also adopted two sons, both reputed to have been his biological children. Aaron Burr Columbe (who later changed his name to Aaron Columbus Burr) was the son of a Frenchwoman who arrived in the United States around 1815. Though a less impressive student than Burr would have liked, he responded to Burr’s dream of Latin American adventure. In the decade before the Civil War, with the help of none other than Abraham Lincoln, he promoted a plan to colonize freed slaves on a tract of land in Honduras.96

  Burr’s second adopted son, Charles Burdett, born in 1814, benefited from the best educational opportunities. Following in Burr’s footsteps, he joined the senior class at Princeton, and graduated in 1829. Burr relied on old contacts (Captain James Biddle, son of Charles Biddle) to secure Burdett a commission in the U.S. Navy. Burr was hoping he might join the crew of a “polar Expedition.” But his adopted son had little interest in either maritime exploits or the law. He ended up pursuing a literary career, first as a newspaper reporter, and then as a writer of popular fiction. In 1860, he published a quasi-biographical account of Burr’s life, Margaret Moncrieffe: The First Love of Aaron Burr, thus contributing to the romantic mythology that surrounded his stepfather’s private conduct.97

  In his later years, Burr showed that he had not given up his literary aspirations, either. He talked about writing a revisionist history of the American Revolution—a tantalizing notion, a worthy project. He claimed to have lost his notes when Theodosia disappeared at sea, and came to feel that his history would simply be too shocking, and so unlike the “received history” authored by his former colleagues in government, that no one would believe it.98

  He did, however, revive a dramatic piece of his past in 1830, when he lent his assistance to Richard H. Bayard, the son of James A. Bayard. Young Bayard was attempting to clear his father’s name—the elder Bayard having always been associated with the backroom bargaining that secured Jefferson the presidency in 1801. Thomas Jefferson Randolph had published his grandfather’s papers in several volumes during the previous year, and had struck a nerve. In the collected notes called the Anas, Jefferson had flatly denied having made any deal with Bayard to settle the election tie of 1800–01. Richard Bayard found a political ally to defend his father on the Senate floor, and now he wanted conclusive proof. So he sought Burr’s help, asking for a copy of a deposition made by his father, in which the election crisis was detailed. Burr tracked down the deposition, and discussed the matter with his former political lieutenant, Matthew Livingston Davis. Armed with these depositions, Bayard refuted Jefferson’s words in print. Bayard’s defense may be the first documented argument in a scholarly debate, which persists to this day, as to whether Jefferson negotiated with Federalists to end the tie.99

  Jefferson’s papers not only annoyed the younger Bayard but the politically ambitious Davis, too. Davis considered writing his own account of the election of 1800. His notes, which survive, offer a running commentary on his reading of Jefferson. To Davis, Jefferson claimed to disdain parties, yet he diligently enforced party lines; he declared that he never wrote for the newspapers, and then used Madison to do his dirty work. No doubt Davis’s emotionalism served as the catalyst for his eventual decision to edit Burr’s papers. He wanted to vindicate Burr, and to salvage the reputations of men like himself who had rallied to Burr’s c
ause.100

  If Burr had lost his taste for historical revisionism, he still cared about his military legacy, and he still sought to secure his pension. He relied on old friends such as Aaron Ogden and younger allies such as Van Buren to come to his aid. In 1828, at the age of seventy-two, he prepared several declarations of military service, and repeated the procedure after one was lost in a fire in the Treasury Department; he collected testimony from surviving soldiers, and even hunted down General Washington’s letters from the first president’s biographer, Jared Sparks. Still unpaid, but retaining his sense of humor, Burr wrote to Van Buren in 1834: “I have no prospects of growing richer or younger.” Van Buren took action on his behalf, and Ogden played a crucial role in working Burr’s claim through the system. Finally, two years before his death, Burr received his pension from the government. It amounted to $3,300. The money was probably less important to him than the principle of defending his military reputation.101

  Burr’s relationship with Ogden was a telling reminder of his unwavering loyalty to old friends. Even in 1828, when Burr enlisted him to help secure his military pension, Ogden’s finances were in worse shape than Burr’s. His mansion in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, had been repossessed, and his vast wealth had vanished. Burr came to his rescue after Ogden was imprisioned for debt, convincing the New York legislature to pass a law forbidding jail time for veterans of the Revolution.102