This caution reflected Burr’s principal quality as a politician: he was a chameleon who evaded clear-cut positions on most issues and was a genius at studied ambiguity. In his wickedly mordant world, everything was reduced to clever small talk, and he enjoyed saying funny, shocking things. “We die reasonably fast,” he wrote during a yellow-fever outbreak in New York. “But then Mrs. Smith had twins this morning, so the account is even.”26 By
