America and the Long 19th Century
General Editors
David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
Elizabeth Young
Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel
Edlie L. Wong
Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line
Gretchen Murphy
Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded-Age America
James B. Salazar
Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines
Meg Wesling
Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature
William A. Gleason
Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights
Robin Bernstein
American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary
Jacob Rama Berman
Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century
Kyla Wazana Tompkins
Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth-Century America
Andrew Lyndon Knighton
The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr
Michael J. Drexler and Ed White
The Traumatic Colonel
The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr
Michael J. Drexler and Ed White
New York University Press
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New York University Press
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ISBN: 978-1-4798-7167-4 (cl.)
ISBN: 978-1-4798-4253-7 (pap.)
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A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
To Amisha
To Kimberley
There is no subject so interesting and important to the real lovers of their country, as that of slavery, because there is none which involves the happiness, prosperity and glory of our country in so great a degree—none attended with so many difficulties in remedying. It is admitted by all parties, slave-holders or not, that slavery is the greatest curse our country is afflicted with—it is a foul stain upon our national escutcheon—A canker which is corroding the moral and political vitals of our country. There is but one voice on this subject, and that is the voice of condemnation, as an enormous, and an alarming evil.
—Daniel Raymond, The Missouri Question
It has been made a question among the learned, whether most good or evil has resulted to mankind, from the discovery of America. That the munificent gift of a new world, should have given rise to such a question, is of itself a melancholy proof of human depravity.
Although there may be no serious difficulty in deciding this question, yet, when we consider what oceans of blood have been shed—how many human beings have been butchered—how many nations of brave, high-minded men have been exterminated; and when we add to this the mass of human suffering which has been already caused by negro slavery, the philanthropist is almost ready to drop the tear of regret, and exclaim, alas, that America was ever discovered!
—Daniel Raymond, Thoughts on Political Economy
Contents
Acknowledgments
Burrology—Extracts
Introduction
1. The Semiotics of the Founders
2. Hors Monde, or the Fantasy Structure of Republicanism
3. Female Quixotism and the Fantasy of Region
4. Burr’s Formation, 1800–1804
5. Burr’s Deployment, 1804–1807
Conclusion
Notes
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
Portions of this project were presented at the Bucknell University English Department and Faculty Colloquium, the University of Florida English Department’s Americanists’ Colloquium, the Aaron Burr Association, Indiana University’s Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Research Center for Urban Cultural History at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the University of Texas at Austin, Emory University, the University of Glasgow, Rutgers University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison,
