The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White

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 cuts up such interesting and ingenious capers in historical research. We can even pat that brilliant German on the back who undertakes to set Judas Iscariot on a high pedestal.

      —Newark 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,