A Treasury of Great American Scandals by Farquhar Michael

Author:Farquhar, Michael [Farquhar, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2003-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Aaron Burr: “ Embryo - Caesar”

Under the American system of justice, in which a man is deemed innocent until proven guilty, Aaron Burr was no traitor. A jury of his peers acquitted him of that high crime in 1807. But by the same standard, he was no killer either—even if he did shoot Alexander Hamilton clean through the gut.20 Because he was never tried for the murder, he was legally innocent of it.

Yes, the law was doubly kind to the nation’s second vice president, and, except for a brief stint in debtor’s prison, he remained a free man. History, on the other hand, has not been quite so benevolent, and today Burr would stand as a pillar of the American Hall of Shame. The slaying of Hamilton alone would probably not be enough to secure his place here—after all, lots of esteemed Americans lived and died by the Code Duello2—but his grandiose scheming afterward made him a shoe-in.

Aaron Burr had a crafty brilliance about him that he used to his best advantage. No one was ever quite sure what he was up to—only that, whatever it was, in all probability it was self-serving. “I found he possessed a talent of making an impression of an opinion upon the subject, on the person with whom he conversed, without explicitly stating or necessarily giving his sentiments thereon,” noted Senator William Plumber of New Hampshire. “In everything he said or did, he had a design—and perhaps no man’s language was ever so apparently explicit, and at the same time so covert and indefinite.”

Because Burr was so adept at masking his intentions and shading the truth, the full extent of his mischief in the years following Hamilton’s death—when the former veep was a reviled fugitive seeking his fortune in the American West—remains a mystery to this day. Thomas Jefferson, among others, believed he was engaged in treason, seeking to establish for himself a vast western empire based on the conquest of Mexico and the forced separation of the trans-Appalachian states from the Union. The president called this alleged enterprise, in which Burr reportedly intended to declare himself Emperor Aaron I, “the most extraordinary since the days of Don Quixot[e].” And though Jefferson was sharply criticized for publicly proclaiming Burr’s guilt “beyond question” before he was ever tried, the president certainly had plenty of reason to believe his former vice president was up to no good.

Before leaving office, Burr confided his plans to Anthony Merry, Great Britain’s minister to the United States, hoping for British financial and naval assistance in his schemes. In a letter dated August 6, 1804, Merry dutifully reported this delicious bit of intelligence to his boss back home: “I have just received an offer from Mr. Burr, the actual Vice President of the United States (which situation he is about to resign), to lend his assistance to his Majesty’s Government in any Manner in which they may think fit to employ him, particularly in an endeavoring to effect a Separation of

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