News, 1903
Since a child, forty-five years ago, I have been interested in Colonel Burr’s character, and in spite of all the prejudiced flings by writers, I have held and maintained that he was not a traitor to our Government, but one of its patriots. I read Parton’s “Life of Burr” when a boy, and before I enlisted in the Confederate Army. It is the only book in Burr’s favor that I have ever read. When will the memorial volume be issued? I wish to get one. I am a Mississippian and know very well the vicinity in which he resided when arrested.
—W. W. Mangum in The Aaron Burr Memorial, 1903
The Aaron Burr Legion is devoted to the rehabilitation of Aaron Burr. It probably wants to vote him in the primaries with the dead dogs and four-year-old negroes.
—Memphis Commercial Appeal, 1903
New Jersey has an “Aaron Burr Legion” whose object is to “clear the name of Colonel Burr” and to erect a monument to him at Newark, where he was born. That is, they talk about the monument after the “clearing” has been done. Funny what fads folks will foster just because they have nothing else to do. The Legion should have for a motto: “The devil isn’t as black as he’s painted.”
—Brooklyn Standard Union, 1903
As the transports began to arrive and the eleven hundred disembarked, Captain Howard, commandant of Fort Westward, came up from the landing with the most notable of the guests. It was upon the reckless, dashing Arnold that all eyes were turned. Jacataqua’s Abenakis stood in the same stolid silence, still a group apart, but the maiden herself, for once yielding to the wild pulses of her heart, stepped between the sturdy squires to a point of vantage whence she might gaze upon the warrior whom all men seemed to honor. One swift glance she gave the hero, then her black eyes met a pair as dark and flashing as her own, met and were held. She turned to the man at her side. “That, that Anglese! Who?” “Thet? Thet’s young Burr, the one Cushing said got off a sick bed to come.” Startled, she stepped back among her people.
—William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain, 1925
But where are the facts?
His enterprise in Mexico.
Not yet. That one thorn on which they did impale him was a later growth. It did not come until the end of years of vicious enmity by Hamilton and might well be called a deed of desperation.
It proved the soundness of their logic.
They hounded him to it to prove their logic.
—William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain, 1925
He might have talked in another language, in which there was nothing but evocation. When he was seen so plainly, all his movements and his looks seemed part of a devotion that was curiously patient and had the illusion of wisdom all about it. Lights shone in his eyes like travelers’ fires seen far out on the river. Always he talked, his talking was his appearance, as if there were no eyes, nose, or mouth to remember; in his face there was every subtlety and eloquence, and no features, no kindness, for there was no awareness whatever of the present. Looking up from the floor at his speaking face, Joel knew all at once some secret of temptation and an anguish that would reach out after it like a closing hand. He would allow Burr to take him with him wherever it was that he was meant to go.
—Eudora Welty, “First Love,” 1943
Burr’s letter’s like, “You dissed me!” And then, Hamilton writes back like, “Dude lighten up.” . . . The thing I love about writing about history and, especially historical reenactments is that . . . no one ever says what it’s about, they never say the thing, which is like: They’re morons. These are two of the smartest guys in the history of the country being total idiots. . . . Yeah, [the reenactment] was totally accurate, like Burr was a black woman.
—Sarah Vowell, interviewed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on July 14, 2004
You can call me Aaron Burr from the way I’m droppin’ Hamiltons.
—Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell, “Lazy Sunday,” 2005
Cheney’s shooting of his friend is a lot easier to explain than Burr’s shooting of Hamilton: the Vice President was drinking while “hunting” semi-domesticated birds, and got so excited when he heard a quail fluttering for its life that he whirled and fired with complete disregard for the human beings standing around him. . . . Quite un-Burr-like, you see.
—Unitary Moobat (blog), November 18, 2007
Biden thinks Cheney is the most dangerous vice president we’ve ever had? What about Burr? —Ramesh Ponnuru, 2008
Until I was reading this snotty novel called “Burr,” by Gore Vidal, and read how he mocked our Founding Fathers. And as a reasonable, decent, fair-minded person who happened to be a Democrat, I thought, “You know what? What he’s writing about, this mocking of people that I revere, and the country that I love, and that I would lay my life down to defend—just like every one of you in this room would, and as many of you in this room have when you wore the uniform of this great country—I knew that that was not representative of my country.”
—Michelle Bachman, Michigan speech, 2010
“Fortunately his name is not Alexander Hamilton, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson,” he said. “That’s helped my budget.”
—Brian D. Hardison, quoted in “Making a Case to Remember Burr,” 2012
Introduction
Ancient historians compiled prodigies, to gratify the credulous curiosity of their readers; but since prodigies have ceased, while the same avidity for the marvelous exists, modern historians have transferred the miraculous to their personages.
—Charles Brockden Brown, “Historical Characters Are False Representations of Nature”
In November 1807, six years into retirement from the presidency, John Adams spelled out for his regular correspondent Benjamin Rush his thoughts about the tremendous and mysterious popularity of George Washington. He ventured to outline ten qualities that explained Washington’s “immense elevation above his fellows”: his “handsome face”; his height; his “elegant form”; his grace of movement; his “large, imposing fortune”; his Virginian roots (“equivalent to five talents,” he added parenthetically); “favorable anecdotes” about his earlier years as a colonel; “the gift of silence”; his “great self-command”; and finally the silence of his admirers about his flaws, particularly his bad temper.1 “Here you will see,” he concluded, “I have made out ten talents without saying a word about reading, thinking, or writing. . . . You see I use the word talents in a larger sense than usual, comprehending every advantage. Genius, experience, learning, fortune, birth, health are all talents” (107).
This was far from the first time Adams had tried to explain Washington’s status, a topic that had arisen regularly since Adams and Rush began their correspondence in early 1805. At one point he stressed the hypocrisy of those “who trumpeted Washington in the highest strains” but who “spoke of him at others in the strongest terms of contempt” (January 25, 1806, 49).2 Later he emphasized a public complicity in certain fictions of Washington’s life, such that his professed “attachment to private life, fondness for agricultural employments, and rural amusements were easily believed; and we all agreed to believe
