Martin, in defense of Aaron Burr, 1807
The rebellion had been crushed, it was said, in the womb of speculation; the armies of Colonel Burr were defeated before they were raised.
—Edward Livingston, A Faithful Picture, 1808
And there was the fascinating colonel Burr. A man born to be great—brave as Cæsar, polished as Chesterfield, eloquent as Cicero. Lifted by the strong arm of his country, he rose fast, and bade fair soon to fill the place where Washington had sat. But alas! lacking religion, he could not wait the spontaneous fall of the rich honors ripening over his head, but in an evil hour stretched forth his hand to the forbidden fruit, and by that fatal act was cast out from the Eden of our republic, and amerced of greatness for ever.
—Mason Weems, Life of George Washington, 6th ed., 1808
Of Burr I will say nothing, because I know nothing with certainty.
—John Adams to James Lloyd, 1815
For more than thirty years Colonel Burr has been assailed and abused in public journals, at home and abroad. Some of them have misrepresented him from ignorance of the facts; others from party purposes or malicious feelings. It is sometimes amusing to read some of these misrepresentations. It is not Mr. Wirt alone who has gained fame by indulging the imagination on the wonderful sorceries of Colonel Burr. Others have given him the eye of the basilisk, from whose glance it was impossible to recede, and that when once fixed on an object the destruction of it was certain. They have represented his voice as sweeter than that of the Sirens, and that he used this charm as successfully as the fabled enchantresses. Even his gait had something of necromancy about it, and reminded these lovers of the wonderful of the stealthy step of Tarquin approaching the couch of the chaste Lucretia. In their legends, he was more successful in his intrigues than Apollo, for no Diana could interfere between him and the object of his pursuit. These exaggerations and fictions often reached his ear, but did not disturb him. He took no pains to make explanations or excuses. When asked in a proper manner for his opinions, he always gave a direct and prompt answer to the inquirer, but never permitted any one to put a supercilious interrogatory to him.
—Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, The Life of Aaron Burr, 1835
Remembering what has been said of the power of Burr’s personal influence, his art to tempt men, his might to subdue them, and the fascination that enabled him, though cold at heart, to win the love of woman, we gaze at this production of his pen as into his own inscrutable eyes, seeking for the mystery of his nature. How singular that a character, imperfect, ruined, blasted, as this man’s was, excites a stronger interest than if it had reached the highest earthly perfection of which its original elements would admit! It is by the diabolical part of Burr’s character, that he produces his effect on the imagination.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, “A Book of Autographs,” 1844
Sprang from the best Puritan blood of New England, identified with the only genuine Pilgrim aristocracy—that of the clergy—and, with this prestige, ushered into active life at the close of the French and opening of the American War, with that band of select heroes and statesmen now idolized as the purest constellation in the firmament of history; he, who called Jonathan Edwards grand-father, in whose fraternity fell the gallant Montgomery, who had been domesticated with Washington, and Vice President of the United States,—who had extended manorial hospitality to a king,—hunted as a felon, sleeping on a garret floor in Paris, and skulking back to his native land in disguise—offers one of those rare instances of extreme and violent contradictions which win historians to antithetical rhetoric, and yield the novelist hints “stranger than fiction.” —review of James Parton’s Life and Times of Aaron Burr, in the Southern Literary Messenger, May 1858
He was one of those persons who systematically managed and played upon himself and others, as a skillful musician on an instrument.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister’s Wooing, 1859
His eyes were of a dark hazel, so dark, no sign of a pupil could be seen, and the expression of them, when he chose, was wonderful—they could be likened only to those of a snake, for their fascination was irresistible.
—Charles Burdett, Margaret Moncrieffe: The First Love of Aaron Burr: A Romance of the Revolution, 1860
What Burr meant to do I know no more than you, dear reader. It is none of our business just now.
—Edward Everett Hale, “The Man without a Country,” 1863
My material is enormous, and I now fear that the task of compression will be painful. Burr alone is good for a volume.
—Henry Adams to Henry Cabot Lodge, July 1880
If I find [John] Randolph easy, I don’t know but what I will volunteer for Burr. Randolph is the type of a political charlatan who had something in him. Burr is the type of a political charlatan pure and simple, a very Jim Crow of melodramatic wind-bags.
—Henry Adams to John T. Morse, Jr., April 1881
The idea implied a bargain and an intrigue on terms such as in the Middle Ages the Devil was believed to impose upon the ambitious and reckless. Pickering and Griswold could win their game only by bartering their souls; they must invoke the Mephistopheles of politics, Aaron Burr.
—Henry Adams, History of the Jefferson Administration, 1889
I regard any concession to popular illusion as a blemish; but just as I abandoned so large a space to Burr—a mere Jeremy Diddler—because the public felt an undue interest in him, so I think it best to give the public a full dose of General Jackson.
—Henry Adams to Charles Scribner, May 1890
“What a head!” was the phrenologist’s first whisper. . . . “His head is indeed a study—a strange, contradictory head.”
—James Parton, The Life and Times of Aaron Burr, 1892
Aaron Burr, whose homicidal (?) and treasonable (?) deeds have been thrown into the shade by more splendid achievements of the kind in our day, was certainly in advance of the men of his time in his ideas on the capacity and education of women.
—Grace Greenwood in The Aaron Burr Memorial, 1903
Some time ago, I received a letter, presumably from an admirer of Alexander Hamilton, in which I was informed that if I did not cease publishing books reflecting upon General Hamilton, his friends would publish some secret memoirs which would reflect more seriously upon the character of Colonel Burr than anything which had yet been published.
—Charles Felton Pidgin in The Aaron Burr Memorial, 1903
Burr was a typical man, the beginning of a new species, destined to become a, if not the dominant one in the future of civilized people.
—Thaddeus Burr Wakeman in The Aaron Burr Memorial, 1903
The Aaron Burr Legion, which has just had a gathering in Newark, the birthplace of Aaron Burr and the old home of his family, was organized to clear the fame of this notable personage, who is one of the betes noirs of American history, from the alleged scandals which blackened his career, and brought it to an ignominious close. The motive of such reconstructive ambition must always be deemed worthy of laudation, and it is a satisfying set-off against the spirit of iconoclasm, which also
