Fallen Founder

by Nancy Isenberg

  Ogden and Dayton—and Burr—had all been friends since childhood. It had come to this: Though Ogden was a Federalist most of his life (serving under Alexander Hamilton as deputy quartermaster general during the Quasi-War of 1798–99), he switched parties in 1828, voting for Andrew Jackson. It may have been Burr who persuaded him. While Burr never asked for or received any patronage from Old Hickory, the new president made Ogden the revenue collector for Jersey City.103

  Burr tried to make amends with certain other people from his past. After Luther Martin suffered from a paralytic stroke in 1819, losing his intellectual rigor and his mental focus, Burr took him in and cared for him during the last three years of his life. He also provided a piece of property to the son of Benjamin Botts, another of Burr’s earlier counselors, who had perished in a fire in a Richmond theater in 1811. And in 1834, Burr was still helping Rebecca Blodget by giving her advice on how she might collect information on his husband’s military career so that she could secure her widow’s pension.104

  “MADAME OF THE HEIGHTS”

  Burr’s generosity is demonstrable, but so is his poor judgment. He was seventy-seven when he made a decision he would soon regret. On July 1, 1833, he married Eliza Jumel, a wealthy widow, in New York. Theirs was a match that contained all the ingredients of a scandal; there probably were not two people in New York whose lives (independently of one another) provoked a comparable amount of gossip, and whose legacies would be so tarnished by half-truths.

  “Madame Jumel,” as she was known, was fifty-eight at the time of her marriage to Burr. One archivist summed up her life this way: “born a bastard, in youth a prostitute, in middle age a social climber, died an eccentric.” It is difficult to get a clear picture of who she really was because most of the information about her early life comes from a legal battle over her estate that took place in 1865, in which interested parties did everything possible to paint her in an unflattering light. Yet it must also be said that Jumel contributed to the problem, unsubtly manipulating the truth in an effort to improve her image.105

  To rise in society, this ambitious woman had to rewrite her past. Born Betsey Bowen in Providence, Rhode Island, she was in fact not illegitimate, though her father’s death when she was eleven plunged the family into poverty. There is credible evidence, however, that Betsey worked as a prostitute, giving birth to a child out of wedlock in 1794. (She later tried to conceal this by claiming to have married a French sea captain.) At some point, she made her way to New York, pursuing a career as a “supernumerary,” or extra, on the stage. Described as a blond beauty, she became the mistress of the prosperous wine merchant Stephen Jumel, and lived with him for several years before they married in 1804.106

  This marriage was at no point a conventional one. Beginning in 1815, the couple took an extended tour of France, where Madame Jumel gained notoriety as an art collector as she hobnobbed in royal circles. The marriage grew into a business partnership; the couple spent many years apart, and after Eliza secured her husband’s power of attorney, she took an active role overseeing his business interests in the United States. She was unmistakably ambitious, and displayed business savvy. But she was also capable of malice, and was known for telling insulting stories about her husband. In sum, she was neither a mere gold digger nor a loving wife. By the time Burr met the widow Jumel, she had successfully transformed herself into a grande dame of the Old World, riding through Manhattan in an elegant carriage, decorating her home with the finest in European furnishings, and establishing herself as a connoisseur and patron of the arts.107

  Eliza and Burr met when she was settling her estate, after her husband died, in 1832. They had another connection, too, because Nelson Chase, the husband of her adopted niece, worked in Burr’s law office. Their marriage began pleasantly enough. Burr received letters of congratulations, and to one of these he replied that he considered the well-wisher’s amusing letter a “sort of Epithalamium,” or love poem. But given the couple’s advanced years, he lightly added that no one was summoning the “loves or graces” to their marriage feast. They went on a honeymoon to New England, visiting Burr’s Connecticut relatives, also attending to business while in the neighborhood—Jumel owned stock in a toll bridge company in Hartford. What happened next is a matter of dispute. Six months after they wed, the Burrs separated, and a year after that, Jumel sued for divorce.108

  The divorce action was nothing short of a circus, the classic “He said, she said” affair. Jumel charged her new husband with adultery (with various females, she alleged, but with one woman in particular, Jane McManus). Burr countered, accusing Jumel of carousing with several different men, including a coachman. Both parties rounded up witnesses of questionable character to testify, and charges of perjury were made.109

  The adultery complaint was both necessary and ludicrous. It was virtually impossible to get a divorce in New York without proof of adultery. And it is clear, in this instance, that Jumel was able to bribe a former servant of Burr to testify against him. Mariah Johnson claimed to have witnessed at least two specific encounters between her employer and McManus. The first time, she said, she accidentally walked in on the pair, and caught Burr with his hand under her clothes, his trousers down—and saw McManus’s “nakedness.” The second time, Johnson had to climb onto the roof of a shed in order to peer through a window as the two engaged in “their mean act.” If the story of her spying was not comical enough, Johnson also testified that McManus had screamed, “Oh la! Mary saw us.”110

  Johnson’s testimony was neither objective nor ultimately persuasive. She admitted to calling McManus a whore, and she acknowledged that Madame Jumel and her niece had consulted with her about the divorce action. This is not to say that, at seventy-seven, Aaron Burr could not have been a sexually active man; but the idea that he was bedding a twenty-six-year-old woman seems far-fetched—except for a man with Burr’s reputation.111

  And who was the other woman? She was a bookkeeper with a passion for filibustering that matched Burr’s. Her father was a land agent for Samuel Swartwout, Burr’s adventure-bound friend from his days as a candidate for governor, who carried messages for Burr the filibusterer. The McManus clan had devised a scheme to settle German immigrants in Texas, a plan not unlike what Burr had tried with the German Company in Canada in the 1790s. Burr was impressed with Jane McManus’s courage and daring; he wrote to her in 1832 that her “enterprise has something of the air of Romance and Quixotteism.” These words were not meant to deter her, however. He told her to keep a journal of everything that happened, and he gave her a bit of history besides. There had been another young woman who, in 1785, established a colony on Seneca Lake, 100 miles from the nearest white settlement. The colony flourished, she became wealthy, and, as Burr explained, it had since become “a monument of her intelligence her courage and her discretion.” But at the same time, he told McManus to be careful, for the woman in question had become mildly despotic (his words) in directing an enterprise of this kind. He hoped that McManus would “do better!”112

  Jane McManus was no fool, nor was she a prostitute. She had valid reasons for visiting Burr: she needed a letter of introduction, which he provided. He wrote to Judge Workman, a supporter of Mexican liberation whom Burr knew from his time in New Orleans—a letter that reveals the real nature of his relationship with the young female adventurer. Burr told Workman that he had been friendly with McManus’s father, giving him advice on where to buy land in Texas. McManus was not a woman interested in “gallantry,” he explained. “She is a woman of business.” He praised her for her judgment and discernment, “a talent peculiar to her sex,” and claimed that she possessed something “more rare” among women: “courage, stability and perseverance.” For such a woman to be throwing herself at an old man—and others signed affidavits during the divorce proceedings attesting to the fact that she was at Burr’s home all hours of the night—was to risk a reputation that she cared about deeply. It seems unlikely tha
t she would trade sexual favors for a pair of shoes, or a side-saddle, as Mariah Johnson testified. McManus was named by Jumel as a correspondent because as the divorce proceedings began, she was in New Orleans and unavailable to defend herself.113

  Burr finally relented, agreeing not to contest the divorce. But he did not admit to the charges. He also refused to pay any alimony. Therefore, this divorce could hardly have been about anything other than money and power; sex was immaterial. Jumel had charged in the bill that Burr was attempting to defraud her of property, rents, and profits, and pay off his debts, “without her consent.” Burr countered that he did nothing without her approval, and that he had left her home simply to escape her “violent and ferocious temper” and her “abusive and insulting conduct” toward him, which she persisted in even when he was in “low health.” To suggest that Burr was stripping her of her fortune, or foolishly wasting her money by making bad deals, was merely the gossip that Jumel spread about him. It is more likely that “Madame of the Heights,” as Burr called her, was unwilling to surrender any piece of her authority as a woman of business. She expected him to play the consort, and when he challenged an opinion, she became abusive and ill-tempered.114

  When the Chancery Court finally ruled on the case, it approved of the divorce. Burr was not at all pleased and made one last attempt to refute the ruling. He noted that the evidence presented (i.e., the sexually related charge) was “inconsistent” and full of contradictions, and that because of his “great age . . . being nearly of the age of about 80 years,” what she accused him of was “according to the law of nature impossible.” He was no prude, of course; he had been open about his sex life with his daughter. He had adopted several children, among whom may have been his biological children, or they could have just as easily been orphans he took in. In preparing his will in 1835 (amid the divorce proceedings), he recognized as heirs two daughters, Frances Ann, age six, and Elizabeth, age two. If he had been adulterous, he surely would have acknowledged the facts. In this case, though, he simply refused to be bullied. Jane McManus felt the same way and saw to it that the state of New York indicted Mariah Johnson for perjury.115

  He died, as it happened, on the day of the final divorce decree, September 14, 1836. Months earlier, he had suffered a major stroke, which paralyzed his legs. Indeed, during those last two years, under the cloud of Madame Jumel’s divorce action, he showed signs of decline. He lived for a time in a Manhattan boardinghouse, and in 1836 was moved to another, on Staten Island, so that he could be close to his Edwards cousins. As a divorced man, Aaron Burr was not to receive justice. He did not live to see his name cleared.116

  Burr got justice in one sense. He outlived all of those who attacked and defeated his political chances—Hamilton, Jefferson, DeWitt Clinton, William Wirt, even James Cheetham. Returning to New York, where his career began, he lived out his life as a successful attorney. He was not alone in his last years, or even in his last days; but in the larger sense this astute political thinker and strategist had long since disappeared from the political scene, if not the social register as well. He remained, perhaps, a curiosity, but he never again influenced national affairs. His time was a hallowed time in the minds of those who led the government of the United States in the mid-1830s, for they looked back on the old revolutionaries, sentimentally, as a superior breed. Yet Aaron Burr would only live on through his contested legacy, over which he exercised no control.

  Epilogue:

  HE USED NO UNNECESSARY WORDS

  Aaron Burr, Jr., was buried where his signs of promise were first displayed, at Princeton, beside his greatly respected father, Aaron Burr, Sr., a former president of that university. As a youth at Princeton, Burr had exhibited many of the characteristics that would attach to him in later years: he was cool, adroit, and confident. Certainly there was nothing in his background to suggest that he would be vilified in history as a plotter and a murderer.

  In these pages, no attempt has been made to excuse anything that Burr did, but rather to clarify the conduct of politics in the early republic. In that sense, he was no better, no worse, than those with whom his name is most commonly linked, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. In moral terms, it is arguable that he behaved with greater honesty and directness than they did—something that is often overlooked in such comparisons. Hamilton and Jefferson were notable as statesmen, but their treatment of Burr as a rival shows unmistakably that they felt threatened by him; not by any discernible immorality, as they pretended, but by his potential popularity, detrimental to their ambition. Politics, then as now, causes “great” men to speak irrationally and act deviously.

  Hamilton and Jefferson have always had their defenders. Burr did not have a protective posterity to project his “greatness” through the ages. Many of his personal records went down with the Patriot when Theodosia drowned. So the historical record is incomplete. Jefferson’s writings presently occupy thirty-three modern volumes (in a project that commenced in 1950), and are still being compiled and edited, down to the last detail. Hamilton’s writings are contained in twenty-seven published volumes. Burr’s in two. Historians, as a result, have found Burr to be a man of mystery, and many (nearly all) have insisted that he had no political philosophy to compare with, or rank alongside, Jefferson, Hamilton, and the other traditional “founding fathers.”1

  The record clearly shows that this assumption is ridiculous. Minimizing Burr’s achievements, or the quality of his mind, merely reminds us how imperfect historical memory is. Burr not only possessed political genius, he was a popular organizer and active thinker, a busy legislator, and a man of progressive ideas. But he was also a man of his time, which meant that his financial speculation was what we would call unsound. Both Hamilton and Jefferson, with all their advantages, died in debt, leaving their families to fend for themselves. This is the light in which we must view Burr’s filibustering activity as well. Filibustering does not comport with modern mythology about the founders, and so his efforts are too easily dismissed as signs of unpredictable behavior. Too little attention is paid to the passion for territorial expansion. From the time of the American Revolution, political leaders embraced conquest, generally under the guise of liberating the colonial possessions of Canada, Louisiana, and Mexico. Burr’s thinking on the West was little different from Hamilton’s, Jefferson’s, or Madison’s. To ignore the western ambitions of the founders is an ahistorical reading of Burr’s world, where efforts to expand the size of the nation were widely endorsed by many Americans.

  One who knew him after his star had faded, after he had returned to the practice of law in New York, spoke of Burr with authority. He was John Greenwood, Burr’s law clerk from 1814 to 1820, speaking as a judge in 1863. He knew Aaron Burr as a man who could never be idle, a man who rose early and worked conscientiously through the day and often into the evening; a man of “courtly” manners, but equally adept as a storyteller, with few unpleasant memories (or so it appeared); a man who possessed an infectious laugh and who would “go any length to serve a friend.” He knew Burr, too, for his personal habits: as a constant cigar smoker, for instance—he had extra long cigars made especially for him. He credited Burr for his “quick, penetrating, and discerning” mind, which the smoke that swirled about him did not cloud.

  Burr, he said, did not speak of Hamilton. He did not try to justify himself in this or any other matter deriving from his years in the political limelight. He was frequently noticed, and sometimes accosted, and though he knew he was spoken ill of, he withstood it all without ever flinching. Similarly, as a courtroom performer, Aaron Burr was not loud or demonstrative, but thorough and effective. He could not be cowed by another attorney; he was “never submissive, and he used no unnecessary words.” Greenwood was impressed by this—by Burr’s extraordinary self-possession—in that “under the most trying circumstances . . . he probably never knew what it was to fear a human being.”2

  It is hard to match this characteri
zation. When we speak of Thomas Jefferson, we automatically recur to such texts as the Declaration of Independence. For Jefferson’s fame resides in his ability to persuade, or inspire, with his pen. But Jefferson, though he had a rich legal mind, was not a noteworthy courtroom attorney; there he found no inspirational message. In most of his letters and all of his public texts, he made multiple drafts before thoughtfully releasing them to public scrutiny. Alexander Hamilton, whose passions and intelligence were equally in evidence, lost control of words all too often—even his staunch defenders have acknowledged this as a decided weakness.

  In the case of Aaron Burr, however, Greenwood captures a critical facet of the politician as well as the attorney, when he states that “he used no unnecessary words.” He did not go public, as Hamilton did, attempting to defend himself from attack by spilling words in the newspapers or in self-serving pamphlets. He did not write a partisan history, as Jefferson attempted, though unsuccessfully, by repeatedly soliciting sympathetic political writers during and after his presidency. Burr’s chief talent—indeed, one reason why he might have made a highly effective, distinctly moderate national executive in a time of political passions—was his clarity of purpose, as expressed in rational, dispassionate words. Though for 200 years he has been accused of fomenting disorder, his actual restraint with language is the Burr missing from modern historical narratives.

  “THE ODD MAN OUT”

  Incredibly, much of the image of Burr that we know today is taken from rhetorical attacks of enemies and fiction. For those who hated him, Burr was a satanic figure, the fallen angel, narcissistically driven by ambition, inherently evil and congenitally cursed. The Federalists were the first to compare Burr to Satan, but it was William Wirt who gave literary force to this notion in his famous oration during the 1807 treason trial, painting Burr as the foul fiend who despoiled Blennerhassett’s Eden. A devilish Burr reappeared in the first drama about his treasonous plot, The Conspiracy; or the Western Island (1838), and it made numerous curtain calls, the most famous being the 1931 Broadway rendition of Booth Tarkington’s Colonel Satan, or a Night in the Life of Aaron Burr. A twist on the same concept came in Gertrude Atherton’s novel The Conqueror (1902), a fictional biography of Hamilton which supplies the damning indictment of Burr. As a kind of Dorian Gray, Burr was corrupted by what Atherton called “congenital selfishness,” and his evil so chillingly cold and glacial in scale that he could be seen as the visible part of a “dazzling and symmetrical” iceberg, “its deadly bulk skulking below the surface.” Acknowledging Burr’s allure among susceptible women, Atherton noted that he was “handsome, magnetic, well-bred, and polished.” But like Lucifer or the “Great Imposter” (and as a possible precursor to the infamous Jack the Ripper), Burr knew how to adopt a gentlemanly pose that concealed a monster’s desire. Again in Atherton’s words, he “studied women with the precision of a vivisectionist.” As late as 1955, in Aaron Burr’s Dream for the Southwest, playwright Thomas Sweeney could still imagine Burr as a hypersexualized and insane genius (with twenty or more bastard children), a weird blend of Dr. Frankenstein and Hugh Hefner.3