458 THE BURR-HAMILTON DUEL. sustained an irreparable loss. Burr lived to an advanced age, but the shadow of the great disaster followed him to his grave. He never attempted. to remove the stigma. Those who knew him best esteemed him most; nor least of all, perhaps, for the proud disdain with which he looked down upon the cabal who had first plotted his death, and whose foiled malice followed him to his tomb with unrelenting bitterness. The first justice ever done to him by the pen of history was by James Parton. Burr's True Character.-The stars fought against Aaron Burr, or he would have laid the capstone to the summit of his ambition. From the time that he was achieving his brilliant feats of chivalry in the expedition to Canada, his eye was fixed upon nothing less than the acquisition of the highest fame. He rose gradually from point to point, until he remained almost without a rival; and had there been one single element more in his composition with which Jefferson was so munificently supplied-appearance of sympathy for the masses-every obstacle would have given way before him, and he would have triumphantly reached the Presidency. No man has flourished under the American Republic who was gifted with such rare and commanding abilities. His immense faculty of analysis; his keenness of satire; his all but incredible self-control; his power of comprehension, generalization, and crystallization of thought and principle; his wealth of illustration; the fervid power of his fancy; the artistic delineations of his nomenclature; his arrangement of words; his construction of sentences; the darting fierceness with which he shot his bolts of fire; and the imposing awe which his satire inspired in the forum,—were but a few of his more common attributes. But the secret of his real power has never been understood, and never will be, except by those who comprehend the subtle elements that enter into the constitution of genius. Aaron Burr had the keenest and most sensitive appreciation of woman. There is little doubt that his vices have been exaggerated, for contempora neous history has always been characterized by superfluous tintings of every quality which the mass of mankind could understand, because they belong to their own sympathies and feelings. Burr was doubtless a man of great gallantry; he swayed an almost omnipotent sceptre over the passions of woman. He was an eminently handsome man; his manners were more courtly than those that are ever contracted in scenes of nobility, royalty, and imperial splendor. He had around him the atmosphere that emanates from the most gifted and brilliant genius. High-born and graceful women are proud to be loved by those who draw forth all their admiration, and inflame all the fire of their fancy. Take him all for all, Aaron Burr was the most gifted, brilliant, and chivalrous man that has flourished in this country. He was mixed up with all the heated passions of his age; his reputation was dragged through the streets as the body of Hector was dragged around the walls of Troy. His collision with Hamilton, ending in the death of the champion of the Federalists, the intimate friend, secretary and minister of Washington, rolled upon him the odium of a great political party. He en THE TRUE MERITS OF THE COMBATANTS. 459 countered it wherever he went. At that time the press of the country was in the hands of Burr's enemies, and it rang out in broad, clear, high-sounding notes the infamy of 'the murderer of Alexander Hamilton.' This latter epithet should in any event have been spared, since Hamilton and his friends held as firmly to the 'Code of Honor' as Burr and his partisans. But now, when the mists of contemporaneous passion have passed away, and we look calmly upon the men and the events of those times, we are disposed to pay a slight tribute of justice to a man who, till recently, had found no vindicator.' 1 The following estimate of the Hamilton-Burr case was made up many years ago by a gentleman perhaps as thoroughly informed as almost any man, of the circumstances, and signally qualified to pass a judgment on the characters of these two extraordinary personages. He was the only man I ever knew who always seemed to speak without prejudice against either, his admiration for both being diminished only by his thorough contempt for the duellist's code. As it differs very widely from the judgments passed by most of the contemporaries of Hamilton and Burr, I have thought it might be read with some interest. I prepared it with great care from verbatim notes of many conversations, stretching through a period of over twenty-five years. 'The merits of the case as between Hamilton and Burr are very readily summed up. They began as rivals; and well they might be, for each had a foeman worthy of his steel. They were the two most gifted and brilliant men in America. All that nature could do for them had been done. Profusely endowed with her priceless gifts and graces, and petted and spoiled as both of them were by the maddening applause of the world; both fairly entitled to it by deeds of valor in the field, by eloquence in the forum and the Senate, but in all other things as wide asunder as earth and heaven, they could not meet on equal terms, any more than two suns can shine in one hemisphere. It was plain enough that one of them must give way. Backed by two parties which constituted the whole nation, in which not a man or woman stood indifferent; beloved and admired alike by their partisans who were nearly matched in numbers, the entire country was lashed into passion, and it raged wilder among the people than it did in the breasts of those rivals themselves, each of whom was absolutely master of himself, except in this: The one was brought up in the school of Washington, under restraints as severe, and a discipline as merciless as the master-spirit and founder of the Company of Jesus ever devised or enforced; he had, unconsciously to himself perhaps, learned to have no absolute will of his own; while Burr never had learned, and never could learn how to have a master. He was born not to obey, but to command. He made public opinion; Hamilton borved to it. The one spent his whole poliical life in a cage—an eagle, if you will; the other never knew what such fetters were. He breathed the atmosphere of the wildest liberty; the freedom of the primeval woods themselves was not freer than the world where Aaron Burr lived, and moved, and had his being. 'Besides, Hamilton had erected propriety, rather than virtue, into a divinity. Burr had a keener sense of beauty; his whole nature was suffused with the glow of passion; and yet he was more completely master of himself than Hamilton ever learned how to be. Duelling was becoming disreputable; but not in the school of chivalry where Burr belonged, nor in the school of chivalry where Hamilton had been trained; but still, as Hamilton's friends had always put him forward as the champion of virtue and propriety, and Burr as exactly the opposite, the virtues of the one being as shamelessly exaggerated as the vices of the other, Hamilton did not dare disobey the behest of public opinion which required the challenged man to go out. It was all the work of their adherents and partisans."-There is no doubt that either wished the other one out of the way. But Burr was well enough satisfied in measuring his lance with his antagonist in the Senate, or before the bar of supreme tribunals. Burr's faith in his own superiority was so much stronger than Hamilton's, that the latter felt there was no resource left for his reputation for courage, except to take the field. 'But the press of the country, then limited in numbers and circulation, but unscrupulous to the last degree of decency, honor, or truth, was under the supreme control of Hamilton and his friends. They had provoked hostilities; they had maligned and assailed Burr in every relation of life; they had goaded his friends to desperation by their meanness and atrocious assaults; nothing was sacred from the pens of the writers of these journals: not a single issue of their sheets would to-day be read aloud, or admitted to any decent family in America. Libel was no name for these assaults. And all this was done under the garb of superior sanctity, that was claimed for Alexander Hamilton; a man whose personal deeds became by his own voluntary consent, the property of mankind, and an honest recital of which would bring a blush to the face of any decent woman in America. 'That press which had provoked the quarrel, and which was supposed to have expended its last drop of venom upon the personal character of Aaron Burr, was now fired by the spirit of a deeper malignity-intensified by the bitterness of baffled hopes. Their hero was dead; his antagonist was living. And when they could no longer plot for his blood, they determined to pursue him with unrelenting malignity, and they did. They made him an outcast, an exile; the leader of their party, from the Presidential office, was made the tool of their passions; and from that seat he sent malign orders to our representatives in Europe, and even asked as a favor from the rotten thrones of the Old World that Burr should there find no city of refuge. 'But time at last makes all things even. Burr 460 REAL OBJECTS OF BURR'S EXPEDITION. Another War Cloud Rising.-This country seemed again upon the eve of hostilities with France and England. Both, in their collisions with each other, had carelessly and wrongfully intrenched upon the field of our legiti mate commerce. England had swept the ocean-the victories of the Nile waited long for justice; it was meted out to him in some measure, at last, and in a candid and manly spirit, by James Parton, in his exhaustive and captivating Life and Times of Aaron Burr-Two vols. Osgood & Co., Boston. This same gentleman used to listen with a smile of peculiar derision to the slurs cast upon Burr's patriotism, by those who had not the merit of knowing even in what the crime-if it were one-for which he was indicted, had consisted. 'But for the same motives of political ambition and personal animosity,' said he, 'no prosecution for treason would ever have been brought against Aaron Burr. Nobody who knew anything about the case at the time, had any belief that Burr meditated any scheme hostile to the Union of the United States; while those most in his confidence were satisfied of exactly the contrary. They doubtless understood that his real intentions were, if, after surveying the ground, he should find that the scheme was practicable to revolutionize the political condition of the Spanish possessions north of the Isthmus, and organize them into a new and powerful political confederation-to drive out the Spanish power from North America, and from the whole West Indian Archipelago, and bring those vast dominions and their degraded population into the light of civil and religious freedom. So far as purity of political motives went, I know not why he was not to be credited with as high an inspiration in behalf of liberty as was Lafayette; nor have I ever had any doubt that if he had not been interfered with by that silly trial in the District Court of the United States, he would have carried his great purpose into effect. He was a man of infinitely grander political conceptions than Lafayette, or even Jefferson. In fact, there was no American of his time, nor has there ever been one since, who had so vast an idea of what might have been accomplished by a few bold and gallant spirits to lead the way in rescuing those mighty regions from the control of so degrading and besotted a power as Spain. As for any shallow notions of the establishment of an empire on this side of the Atlantic, Burr was a man of too much learning and political sagacity to entertain any such cloudy dream. He was a man of sharp perceptions; he entertained no fancies when business was on hand. He was most merciless in his analysis of facts; he had least faith in moonshine; he had no confidence in the strength of the monarchical principle in the future. He believed in the supremacy of mind; and so far as that sway went, he was born to control in a higher sense than Jackson, or Jefferson, and had always accoinplished whatever he had undertaken, with more ease, with less machinery, and with more directness, than any of the successful leaders of our Revolution, or of o'r politics after we had established a government. * Burr had infinite faith in the ultimate triumph of democracy. He was a better and a stronger democrat than even Jackson himself. He never, at any moment of his life, had any doubt about the success of our arms in the Revolution, or of our political polity. He saw the result clearly from the beginning. He was a born soldier, but he cared more for what the sword could achieve as the pioneer of statesmanship, than for all other reasons. Filled with a spirit of chivalry and lofty pride in his ideal of manhood, with its graces, its accomplishments, and its gallantry, he deemed that the complete gentleman should be a complete soldier. 'But all this was the gloss on the mere surface of his nature; below all these shining qualities lay the depths of a broad and profound statesmanship; too broad and too deep to be comprehended by many of the men around him. In fact, it is doubtful whether he did not make a mistake in withholding from his friends a fuller explanation of his designs. He left them, perhaps, too much shrouded in mystery-he was too reticent. He had a thorough contempt for Spain, Spanish politics, and Spanish politicians; and he had unbounded faith in the ability of a few leading Americans, if guided by wise counsels, to advance from New Orleans,—as the base of operations,-into Mexico and Central America, and ultimately into Cuba and the circumjacent islands, and make a confederation of states that, if carried out. would either have given an early and tremendous impetus to our young Republic, or else have reared another friendly state engaged in the same great business of founding free institutions on a broad scale. But nobody who knew anything on the subject, ever believed he had a shadow of a purpose of diverting a single state from its allegiance. At most he would only have been a filibuster, which only meant a prophet. 'The whole West being thrown into a spasm of terror lest some great and treasonable scheme for dividing the American Union should be carried into effect, on the 25th of November, 1806, Jefferson issued his proclamation denouncing the alleged enterprise, and warning the West against it. Burr was indicted and brought to trial for treason. The indictment would have been sustained had there been any grounds for it, for the prosecution was conducted by the ablest talent of the American bar. Henry Clay was not a man easily deceived, and that a single unpatriotic hair ever lay over his glorious head no man has ever been base enough to assert. He was a man of honor himself, and he had absolute faith in the chivalric honor of Aaron Burr. Before he undertook his case, he asked him, in confi. dence, to make to him a statement that would fully jus tify him before the world, in reposing in him that confidence which he should repose, if such a pledge were made. This pledge was promptly given by Burr, in language the most broad, comprehensive, and particular. "He had no design,” he said, “to intermeddle with or disturb the tranquillity of the United States, nor its territories, nor any part of them. He haa neither issued, nor signed, nor promised, a commission to any person for any purpose. He did not own a single musket, nor bayonet, nor any single article of military stores, nor did any other person for him, by his authority or knowledge. His views BURR IN HIS HOME. 461 and Trafalgar had already been proclaimed. She assumed the right of excluding all neutral vessels from the ports of France; and the emperor had published his decrees-retaliatory decrees-of the same character, against Great Britain. Both powers were guilty of the grossest violation of the same recognized principles of international law. Two powerful sovereigns were fighting against each other; but they had no right to interfere with neutral and friendly nations. Both, however, seized, and condemned as prizes, every American vessel they could capture, that did not respect their arbitrary and unjust orders and decrees.' Jefferson recommended and enforced an had been explained to several distinguished members of the administration, were well understood and approved by the government. They were such as every man of honor and every good citizen must approve. He considered this declaration proper as well to counteract the chimerical tales circulated by the malevolence of his enemies, as to satisfy Mr. Clay that he did not become the counsel of a man in any way unfriendly to the laws, the government, or the well-being of his country." 'Of course the whole thing ended in smoke, but leaving an additional shadow hanging over Burr, who seemed to be destined to find no escape from political persecution until he found peace in the grave. *As for myself, I have always regarded it as one of the greatest calamities that ever happened to this nation, that Burr's great scheme was nipped in the bud. It may, possibly, not have been as well for us in the long run, to have had the Spanish power blotted out at so early a period along our border; but I am convinced that it delayed for a long time the emancipation of the Spanish colonies, and postponed indefinitely their advance to civilization.' This gentleman from whom I am quoting so much in extenso, knew all about the domestic relations of Colonel Burr, and the private affairs of his household. He said that he had never known nor read of an instance of such pride and affection in a father, as he displayed to the day of his death for his charming daughter Theodocia. In tenderness of affection, in the assiduity and care he displayed in her education, in the aspirations he breathed into her beautiful soul for that wonderful intellectual supremacy which she reached, and for the completeness and symmetry with which she ripened into womanhood; and the earnest, truthful, and almost idolatrous love with which that daughter returned all this affection, constituted, he often used to say, the most beautiful sight he ever witnessed in domestic life. 'No man,' he once exclaimed with uncontrolled enthusiasm, 'could pass an evening in Burr's house, when young Theodocia, scarcely yet some to womanhood, presided over its hospitalities with the grace of a queen, and witness the tenderness and exquisite beauty of those relations between the father and child, and watch the appreciation of his great qualities, as adoration for them beamed forth from the illuminated face of Theodocia, and ever afterwards doubt that there was a fountain of parental af fection, and manly honor, and purity in his great soul, which would at once silence all the clamor that was raised against his personal character. Whatever may be the views people now take of those matters, society is its own mistress-it will dictate its own laws, and prescribe its own maxims and modes. Certain it is that in those days gallantry, while not classed among the necessary virtues of society, was not considered, as it now is, the total demoralizer of the heart, the debaucher of honor, and the underminer of integrity. I have known most of the shining men and wo men of the early times of our country, but I have never known a man whom I regarded so pre-eminently quali fied to bring up a pure and brilliant child like Theodo. cia; nor in the highest sense in which the word honor is known among men, do I believe that any man of his time stood higher in the estimate of those who knew him best, than Aaron Burr.' 1 To the embittering grievance of impressment was added in 1806 and 1807, a series of paper blockades, by means of which, not only American seamen, but American merchandise afloat, became subject to seizure and confiscation upon the high seas, under circumstances which left the American government no choice but to abandon the ocean entirely, or submit to a wholesale plunder upon the seas, destructive to their prosperity, and intolerable to national pride. By these Orders in Council the whole French empire, with its allies and dependencies, then embracing nearly all of Europe, were declared to be in a state of blockade. Any American vessel bound to or returning from any port in any of these countries, without first stopping at an English port and obtaining a license to prosecute the voyage, was declared a lawful prize. This was in retaliation of Napoleon's Berlin and Milan decrees, wherein he had declared the British islands, their de pendencies and allies in a state of blockade, and had rendered every vessel liable to confiscation, which either touched at a British port, or was laden, in whole or in part, with British produce. This decree, however, was in retaliation of a previous decree, passed imperial coast, from Brest to the Elbe, was declared in by the English government in 1806, whereby the whole a state of blockade. All these decrees were haughty and high-handed violations of national law, which allows of no mere paper blockades, and requires the presence of a sufficient force to render them legal. Between these haughty belligerents, no American vessel could be free from liability to confiscation. If they were bound on a voyage to any European port, they must touch at an English port and obtain a license, or become a lawful prize to some one of the thousand British cruisers which vexed the ocean. If they touched at an English port, or were laden, in whole or in part, with British merchandise, they were confiscated by the imperial edicts as soon as they reached a continental port. Both decrees were equally hostile to American commerce: but the English had set the first example, and the practical operations of their Orders in Council was far more destructive than Napoleon's decree. One thousand American vessels, richly laden, became the prize of the British cruisers; irritating cases of impressment were constantly occurring; the language of American diplomacy became daily more angry and impatient, that of England daily more cold and haughty, and in June, 1812, the American Congress declared war.-Collins' History of Kentucky, vol. i. pp. 296, 297. 462 MADISON ELected JeffeRSON'S SUCCESSOR. embargo, which Congress enacted. The question was ultimately adjusted with France without much difficulty; but there were more deeply-seated causes for ' complaint against Great Britain. Here we encounter again the question of the Right of Search.' Instances were constantly occurring, in which our unprotected merchant vessels were overhauled and searched, and numbers of their crews seized and carried on board the armed ships of Great Britain. Things went on so far that the American ship-of-war Chesapeake was attacked by the British vessel Leopard, and four men were taken from her crew. This outrage inflamed feelings which finally found vent only in the war which occurred five years afterwards. Madison Elected Jefferson's Successor.-Another presidential election was drawing near; and Jefferson, who had served eight years, was regarded as out of the question. Washington's example had established a precedent; and had he not, Jefferson was known to look unfavorably even upon a second term, while a third term nowhere found an advocate. Mr. Madison, 1809, one of the illustrious men of the times, and the one to whom we are perhaps more indebted than to any other for his great agency in framing the Constitution, was chosen to succeed Jefferson, while George Clinton, of New York, was re-elected Vice-President. One of the early acts of the Madison administration was to repeal the embargo which had been laid by Congress during Jefferson's term. It was regarded, and justly too, as unnecessarily severe-embarrassing friends as well as foes. A wiser measure was proposed as a substitute. In repealing the Embargo Act, a law was enacted prohibiting all intercourse with Great Britain and France; with a provision that this system of non-intercourse should cease in respect to either of those nations, when they should annul their odious and unjust decrees. This course seemed, for the time, to be effectual on England; for in April, 1809, assurances were given by Lord Erskine to the American Secretary of State, pledging the repeal of all British Orders in Council affecting the United States. In the meantime the British ministry had changed their policy with their varying fortunes in the European struggle with Napoleon. That ministry alleged that Erskine had exceeded his powers, and he was recalled. His successor-a Mr. Jackson- imprudently accused the Secretary of State of being cognizant to the alleged fact. It was honorably and frankly 1 Being the second maritime power in the world, the United States became the carrier on the ocean of a large portion of the commerce of Europe. Many Englich seamen, tempted by the high wages given by American merchants, were employed in our commercial manne; and England claimed and exercised the right of impressing her own seamen wherever they might be found. The enormous navy which she maintained required to be supported by constant impressment; and under color of seizing her own citizens, she was constantly in the habit of stopping American merchantmen, and selecting from the crew such men as her subordinate officers chose to consider English, Irish, er Scotch, and who were frequently native American citizens. Redress could seldom be obtained, and never, except after interminable delay and vexation. All Amer cans upon the ocean thus became liable to be seized at the discretion of any British officer, and forced, under the discipline of the lash, to waste their lives in the most unhealthy climates, and in the most degraded stations. This grievance was the subject of protracted and bitter remonstrance, from the administration of Washington to the opening of the war; but Great Britain constantly refused to abandon the right, or rather the exercise of the power. In truth, her extraordinary efforts by land and sea called for all the resources of men and money which could be made available in any part of the world; and the sixty thousand splendid and unequalled seamen, which manned the American marine, totally unprotected, save by diplomatic remonstrances, afforded too rich a resource to be abandoned.-Collins' History of Ken tucky, vol. i. p. 296. |