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William Van Ness insisted that Burr, “far from exhibiting any degree of levity or expressing any satisfaction at the result of the meeting” with Hamilton, had shown only “regret and concern.”24 Indeed, right after the duel, Burr asked Dr. Hosack to stop by Richmond Hill and update him on Hamilton’s condition. But that about sums up the extent of Aaron Burr’s concern for Hamilton.
he never uttered one word of contrition
Burr was determined to enjoy his quota of fun. He contacted a favorite mistress, Celeste, and then told Theodosia wryly, “If any male friend of yours should be dying of ennui, recommend him to engage in a duel and a courtship at the same time.”35
a grand jury in Bergen County, New Jersey, had indicted him for murder.
At the opening of Congress on November 4, 1804, it was more than a trifle startling for some legislators to see Aaron Burr settling into his chair on the Senate dais.
The senators argued that “most civilized nations” refused to treat dueling deaths as “common murders”
a man under an indictment for MURDER presided at the trial of one of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, accused of a petty misdemeanor!”46
This aging roué sampled opium and seduced willing noblewomen and chambermaids with a fine impartiality.
Burr never lost his sense of humor about having killed Hamilton
Tristram Shandy
“Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”
John Quincy Adams left this epitaph of the man: “Burr’s life, take it all together, was such as in any country of sound morals his friends would be desirous of burying in profound oblivion.”
Eliza and other evangelical women cofounded the New York Orphan Asylum Society, the first private orphanage in New York.
“crime has not been the cause” of the orphan’s misery and “future usefulness may yet be the result of [his or her] protection. God himself has marked the fatherless as the peculiar subjects of His divine compassion.”
William Cissel, a first-class historian and park ranger at the Christiansvaern fort, who identified the prison cell that had held Hamilton’s mother
