A Nation Rising (3 page)

Word of Burr's approach and the rumored details of his capture had begun to appear in the national press, which by now had turned completely against Burr. Some of the newspapers reported that Burr arrived in Virginia wearing the outfit in which he had been captured. Others speculated that he was wearing a disguise, which he had planned to use when he invaded Mexico. Despite the confusion over his outfit, it was clear that the dapper Burr had taken a precipitous fall from his previous heights.

In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a greater fall from grace in American history than Aaron Burr's at this moment in his life. Perhaps the nearest comparison might be Benedict Arnold, betrayer of the Revolutionary cause, and, ironically, Aaron Burr's first commander during the War for Independence. But Arnold, although a high-ranking officer and an intimate of George Washington, never reached the heights that Burr had visited. And Arnold never had to suffer the consequences of his betrayal. He lived out his years in Canada and London, with considerable success as a shipping merchant. For Burr, it would be a very different story.

An extremely deft politician, Aaron Burr had skillfully maneuvered through the bellwether presidential election of 1800, becoming an architect of Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican
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challenge to the Federalist Party of President John Adams and the former secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. A power in
New York politics, Burr was instrumental in bringing this Elector-rich state to Jefferson's column as his ostensible running mate. But through a quirk of the process in America's still evolving presidential election system, Jefferson and Burr finished in a tie. The election would eventually be settled in the House of Representatives, where each state would have a single vote. That tie in the voting in 1800 produced America's first serious political crisis since the Constitution had been ratified.

 

T
HE TALE OF
Aaron Burr's rise and fall is a powerful corrective to the familiar, trumped-up view of the “Revolutionary generation” as a knighted and dignified “band of brothers,” a colonial-era Kiwanis Club of glad-handing gentlemen united by a singular cause and ideology. For all their extraordinary accomplishments in creating an independent America out of thirteen disparate colonies in 1776 and then forming “a more perfect Union” in the summer of 1787, the men called Founding Fathers or Framers were human beings.

And they were politicians, with all the baggage that the word implies. They were ruled by many of the same forces that rule modern American politics—greed; self-interest; regional and commercial interests. They were quite practiced at the “politics of personal destruction.” And of course, they were capable of grave personal misconduct. They had affairs. They kept slaves. They dissembled and brokered deals. Perhaps these very human failings and contradictions make their achievements all the more remarkable. Some of their names and faces grace America's currency. Others have fallen into ignominy. And some were turned into villains by historians in
tent upon fashioning a comfortable American mythology. Deserving or not, Burr made a perfect candidate for villainy. And that is how he has been depicted for much of the past 200 years.

 

B
ORN ON
F
EBRUARY
6, 1756, in Newark, in what was then colonial New Jersey, the man whose behavior would later scandalize New York in the early days of the new nation was welcomed into the world of two of the most influential, important, and conservative ministers in America. In fact, Aaron Burr was supposed to follow in their paths. His father, also named Aaron Burr, was a respected Presbyterian preacher who helped found, and then became the second president of, the College of New Jersey (later renamed Prince ton University). His mother, Esther Edwards Burr, was the daughter of the famous and highly influential American preacher Jonathan Edwards, the noted Calvinist theologian who was among the leaders of the religious movement known as the Great Awakening.

The first of several waves of fundamental, orthodox Protestantism that periodically swept over America, the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s spread like wildfire from New England into the other colonies. It was largely a response to what colonial American clergymen viewed as a slackening of religious values in the increasingly prosperous young America. As the colonial economies improved, many Calvinist ministers watched with dismay as their congregations, once fully devoted to the Sabbath practices of their Pilgrim and Puritan forebears, turned to such earthly pursuits as real estate speculation, slave trading, the rum business, and other
equally profitable enterprises. This initial Great Awakening also came as Enlightenment ideas about reason and science were shaking the ancient traditions of religious philosophy. A decade later, those Enlightenment ideas would burst through in the form of deism and a new belief in the rights of man, which contributed powerfully to the Revolutionary mood in an America on the road to independence.

One of the intense sparks behind this dynamic revival of old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone Calvinism was the arrival in America, in 1739, of an Anglican preacher, George Whitefield, whose reputation as an orator brought thousands to his outdoor meetings, large-scale revivals that might be likened to the modern “crusades” of Billy Graham. In Philadelphia, then America's largest city, Whitefield's “born again” evangelism drew 6,000 listeners, nearly half the city's population of about 13,000. In his powerful, emotionally charged sermons, Whitefield chastised his listeners and then offered them the promise of salvation. Surprisingly, Whitefield even won the admiration of Benjamin Franklin, who eventually published forty-five of the sermons in his newspapers, eight of them on the front page of the weekly
Gazette
.

For Franklin, himself a deist and Freemason whose appetite for orthodox religion was meager, Whitefield's appeal lay in his powerful admonitions to do good works. America's great apostle of philanthropy, Franklin was singularly impressed by the fact that Whitefield raised more money than any other cleric for orphanages, schools, libraries, and almshouses across Europe and America.
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Whitefield's Christian principles, however, left plenty of room for African slavery, which he advocated and which Franklin himself only gradually came to oppose later in his career.

Franklin's esteem made Whitefield what some have called America's “first celebrity.” There is a notion that the saturation tactics of Madison Avenue media and marketing are a contemporary American invention, but Whitefield pioneered the development of “multiplatform” marketing strategies. As the historian Larry Witham points out, “He achieved this celebrity by a canny use of letters, news accounts, advertising, advance teams, strategic controversies, and dramatically staged events—in a word, the first mass-media campaign in America.”
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As Ecclesiastes tells us, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

The other great force occupying an American pulpit at this time was Jonathan Edwards, a Congregational preacher born in Connecticut in 1703. Having entered Yale at age thirteen, Edwards was head tutor at the college by age twenty. He later took the pulpit at the Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts, where his grandfather had been preacher. A Calvinist of the old school, Edwards believed that grace or salvation was given only to the “elect,” those predestined at birth. But he also gave a nod to the thought of the day by acknowledging science and the philosophy of men like John Locke and Isaac Newton. As he sought to separate the wheat from the chaff, the elect from the hopeless sinners, his preaching had an enormous impact on colonial America.

Unlike the theatrical Whitefield, whose voice was dramatic and booming, Edwards spoke blandly and without gestures. But his words sent his audiences into paroxysms of wailing and horror. Perhaps his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” conveys some of the sense of dread his congregations must have felt:

This first Great Awakening provoked a controversy over theology that divided many American Protestant denominations of the time into groups called the “New Lights”—followers of Edwards and other Great Awakening fundamentalists—and “Old Lights,” who opposed the emotionalism of the revival movement. The schism eventually split some of these denominations, spawned new ones, and created divisions within some of the prestigious colleges, such as Harvard and Yale, where the faculty and student body were soon choosing sides. Jonathan Edwards himself wore out his welcome, alienating his own flock. Turned out by his congregation, Edwards left Northampton in 1750, and set out to become a missionary to the Indians.

In the meantime, his son-in-law Aaron Burr (Senior) and his fellow clergyman Jonathan Dickinson, another “New Light” leader, had departed from Yale in a dispute over these differences between “Old Light” and “New Light” and founded the College of New Jersey in 1746. The school was first established in Dickinson's home in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and Dickinson was elected as its first president. But when he died less than six months later, a victim of smallpox, Burr replaced him as president. Under Burr's leadership,
the College of New Jersey grew to much greater prominence. Moving the school to its permanent home at Prince ton, New Jersey, Burr supervised construction of Nassau Hall, the largest building in British North America at the time of its completion in 1756.
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But the world of the Edwards-Burr family soon came crashing down in an astonishing series of tragedies that unfolded like one of Charles Dickens's grimmer novels and serve as reminders of the frailty of life in colonial America. In September 1757, Aaron Burr Senior died after a three-week illness. His father-in-law, Jonathan Edwards, emerged from the wilderness and moved to Prince ton to replace Burr as head of the college. But within six months, Edwards himself succumbed to smallpox, the great killer of colonial America. In March 1758, young Aaron Burr's mother, Esther Edwards Burr, also fell ill, although she and her two children had been inoculated against the disease. She died on April 7, 1758, a few months after her son Aaron's second birthday. The children's grandmother, Sarah Edwards, Esther's mother, then came to Prince ton to collect the orphaned Aaron and his older sister, Sarah (also called Sally). But Sarah Edwards fell ill, too, of dysentery, and was dead by October.

Suddenly, young Aaron Burr and his sister Sarah were without family. For two years, the children were raised in the Philadelphia
home of a family friend, Dr. William Shippen, later one of the founders of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.
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In 1760, the two children were taken into the Sturbridge, Massachusetts home of their uncle, Timothy Edwards, their mother's younger brother, who was a minister like his father, Jonathan. Young Aaron Burr was raised in the midst of an extended family of aunts, uncles, and other orphaned cousins.

Timothy Edwards eventually moved the entire clan to Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and gave up the “cloth” for the law, becoming a successful attorney.
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Like many children of the time, Aaron Burr was expected, from childhood, to follow in his father's footsteps. But chafing under the discipline of his uncle, young Aaron bolted from home several times, once signing on as a cabin boy on a merchant sailing ship. He was collected before the ship sailed.
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When he was eleven, Aaron Burr's application was submitted to the College of New Jersey, initially established to train young men for the ministry, just as Harvard and Yale were. The college, like many colonial-era American “colleges,” was more like a prep school than a modern university. Despite his familial connections to the school, Burr was initially rejected as too young. He was tutored at home by a Prince ton graduate, Tapping Reeve, and reapplied two
years later. This time Burr was admitted as a sophomore, four years younger than most of his classmates. Owing to his youth, his much-admired father, and his diminutive stature—Burr was about five feet six inches when fully grown—his Prince ton classmates dubbed him “Little Burr.” Among those fellow students were Jonathan Dayton, a childhood friend and future delegate to the Constitutional Convention; Light Horse Harry Lee, future Revolutionary War hero and father of Robert E. Lee; and Luther Martin, another delegate to the Constitutional Convention who would become a famous trial lawyer—and defend Aaron Burr.

These were extraordinary times in colonial America, with the winds of change blowing, especially in places like Prince ton. The college was by then under the direction of John Witherspoon, an influential Presbyterian clergyman who had arrived from Scotland and was destined to have a profound impact on the Revolutionary generation. As the historian Arthur Herman describes Witherspoon:

To young Aaron Burr, such talk of “happiness” was surely far removed from the dangling, barbecued spiders of his departed grandfather, Jonathan Edwards.