Annette Ranald's Blog: Annette's History Reads - Posts Tagged "aaron-burr"

Casey Anthony and Jodi Arias are just the latest in a long line of celebrity trials. Sensational murder cases, media hype, legal dream teams, and controversial verdicts are an American tradition that stretches back to the earliest days of the Republic.

In 1793, Nancy Randolph was the daughter of a wealthy Virginia planter and distant cousin to Thomas Jefferson. She fell in love with her handsome brother-in-law, Richard Randolph, and the two began a torrid affair. She became pregnant, and the newborn infant later was found dead near a woodpile on one of the Randolph family's many plantations. Nancy and Richard were arrested and put on trial. Nancy's family hired Patrick Henry and future Chief Justice John Marshall to defend her. The trial played out in the newspapers of the era, as well as in the courtroom. She and Richard were acquitted, partly because the testimony of the black slaves on the plantation was inadmissible at the time. Few people agreed with the verdict. Although Richard's wife forgave him and he got on with his life, Nancy was forced to leave Virginia and ultimately settled with relatives in New York. She later married Gouvernor Morris, a signer of the United States Constitution, and died a wealthy woman.

In December, 1799, the body of Elma Sands was found in a public well in what is now New York's SoHo District. The man suspected was her fiancé, Levi Weeks, a young carpenter. Levi was arrested for Elma's murder and appealed to his brother, Contractor Ezra Weeks, for assistance in hiring an attorney. One of Ezra's projects was The Grange, Alexander Hamilton's new country estate in what is now Harlem. Ezra went to Hamilton, and Hamilton engaged two other attorneys to help him with Levi's defense. They were Henry Brockholst Livingstone and Aaron Burr, soon to become Vice-President of the United States.

The Trial of Levi Weeks: Or the Manhattan Well MysteryUnwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman---and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century AmericaThe trial took place on March 31 and April 1, 1800, in a packed courtroom, and was widely reported by the newspapers. In a dramatic display, Hamilton, who was cross-examining a key prosecution witness, used candles to show how different lighting can affect a person's perception of someone else's features. Levi was acquitted and New York City was in an uproar. Nobody agreed with the verdict. He left New York and later settled in Natchez, Mississippi, where he designed and built Auburn Plantation. Hamilton and Burr's legal reputations were built on this trial, but their political ambitions would lead them, in July 1804, to the bluffs overlooking the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey, and America's most famous duel.

Not only is getting the details right essential in historical fiction, accurate portrayal of any main real characters is a must. George Washington as a hearty, rambunctious frontier type? Nope! Napoleon Bonaparte vulnerable and unsure of his next move? Uh-uh. To get a character right not only includes researching what is known of their personality and characteristics, but also their attitude toward and interaction with other characters. A case in point is Gore Vidal's portrayal of Vice-President Aaron Burr in his novel, named what else, Burr. Even the title speaks volumes about this character. He needed no introduction.

Burr is told from the vantage point of Charlie Schuyler, who by his own admission is not related to THOSE Schuylers. Charlie becomes a law clerk, or apprentice lawyer at the time, in the law offices of Aaron Burr years after the duel between him and Alexander Hamilton. Much like Al Pacino in the movie, Scent of a Woman, Burr sets out to teach his wet behind the ears apprentice a thing or two about life lived his way. Burr is under no illusions about Charlie's ability to be a great lawyer, but over time Charlie earns his trust and he begins to open up about the life he's lived and the places and people he'd seen. And he does it exactly as you'd expect Aaron Burr to tell the story if he were able to do so.

Aaron Burr (1756-1836) was born to a wealthy New Jersey family. His mother's last name was Edwards. Her grandfather, Jonathan Edwards, was the famous Puritan minister who'd given the sermon, 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God'. Esther Edwards Burr died young and Aaron wound up in the care of his uncle, Timothy Edwards, also a minister. And it was assumed in the family that Aaron would enter the family business, but they had reckoned without Aaron. A man with enough brains and ambition to be dangerous, Aaron didn't care whether God got his hands on him or not. Like many of the Revolutionary generation, he was beginning to embrace ideas of Deism. He was good-looking and knew it, with a taste for the ladies and a constant need to be the center of attention and on the cusp of danger.

The Revolution gave him that chance. He was along for Benedict Arnold's ill-fated expedition to Canada and served on Arnold's staff. Burr genuinely liked Arnold. He was a bold, enterprising commander and he also met Aaron's other criteria. Arnold's family had been in Connecticut for several generations, which meant that he was a gentleman worthy of respect. And, Arnold was willing to take Burr under his patronage. That blew up when Arnold was injured and Aaron was taken onto the staff of General Phillip Schuyler, who was also favorable toward Arnold in the beginning. In the politics of Washington's high command, Aaron was beginning to align himself with people who weren't always on Washington's good side. Burr didn't really care about that any more than he cared what God thought of him.

Aaron met a wealthy Loyalist widow, Theodosia Prevost, who fitted his other requirements for good company, beauty and money. They had one daughter, Theodosia, named after her mother. Theodosia died soon after her daughter's birth, leaving Aaron a single father, something he didn't regret long. Women were more fun if they weren't attached. Burr survived the Revolution and settled down to practice law in New York. He soon became rivals with another attorney who'd been a staff officer, Alexander Hamilton. When both men entered politics, the rivalry heated up. Both men saw themselves as a future President and had the sharp elbows to work their way up the ladder. As history shows, both men failed terribly, and by their own doing. Hamilton blew himself out of the water with the Reynolds affair. For a time it looked like Burr, who had attained the Vice-Presidency, would be the rising star. Then the duel happened in 1804.

But Aaron, being Aaron, always had to be up to something and his dream was to conqueror all or part of Mexico and set himself up as a king or emperor a la Bonaparte. To that end, he began to associate with Gen. James Wilkinson, who has been described as the most disgraceful individual ever to wear the uniform. Burr was also involved with an individual named Harmon Blennerhassett. Wilkinson would supply the weaponry and supplies from pilfered army stores and Blennerhassett began gathering a few idiots willing to go along with this scheme. Wilkinson, sensing that the game was up when the duel happened, flipped and Vice-President Aaron Burr found himself accused of treason with his erstwhile accomplice as star witness.

But Aaron's luck held and he was acquitted. He went back to practicing law in New York, and suffered a further blow when his only daughter, Theodosia, drowned in a shipwreck in 1813, and her young son, Aaron Burr Alston, died soon after. Not to be outdone, in 1833, Aaron laid eyes on a wealthy widow, Eliza Jumel, and married her for her money. That is, until she began divorce proceedings, with Alexander Hamilton, Jr. as her attorney. It's these divorce proceedings, and Burr's Oscar Madison-style grumbling about them, that runs throughout the book. Ironically, the divorce becomes final on the day Burr dies with only Charlie in attendance. Charlie realizes that big city life is not for him and neither is the law and he closes the narrative with a hint that he, too, is off to find some adventure worthy of Aaron Burr.

The point being that, throughout the entire narrative, Vidal never loses sight of the personality of the man he's portraying. Opportunistic, ironic, self-centered, yet with a heart beating somewhere under all those delusions of grandeur, Aaron Burr's personality, as much as historians can glean about it, shines through. One of history's villains emerges as a sympathetic old gummer who could've gone far, but for Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, etc., but who managed to survive life's raw deals with his curmudgeon's chip on his shoulder intact. You almost wish he would've carried through on his threat to write his own memoirs because a character like this, with a front-row seat to the Nation's early history, would've had a lot to say.Burr