Henry W. Brands - The Heartbreak of Aaron Burr

The big stories of history unfold over decades and touch millions of lives; telling them can require books of several hundred pages. But history has other stories, smaller tales that center on individual men and women at particular moments that can peculiarly illuminate historys grand sweep. These smaller stories are the subjects of American Portraits: tightly written, vividly rendered accounts of lost or forgotten lives and crucial historical moments.

H. W. Brands is the Dickson Allen Anderson Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and for Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

www.hwbrands.com

ALSO BY H. W. BRANDS

The Reckless Decade

T.R.

The First American

The Age of Gold

Lone Star Nation

Andrew Jackson

Traitor to His Class

The Murder of Jim Fisk
for the Love of Josie Mansfield

American Colossus

AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, MAY 2012

Copyright 2012 by H. W. Brands

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Illustrations credits: Wikimedia Commons: ;
New-York Historical Society: ; New York Public
Library: (bottom).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brands, H. W.
The heartbreak of Aaron Burr / H. W. Brands.
p. cm.(American portraits)
eISBN: 978-0-307-74328-2
1. Burr, Aaron, 17561836. 2. StatesmanUnited StatesBiography. 3. Vice-PresidentsUnited StatesBiography. 4. SoldiersUnited StatesBiography. 5. United StatesHistoryRevolution, 17751783Biography. 6. United StatesPolitics and government17831865. I. Title.
E302.6.B9B73 2012
973.46092dc23
[B] 2011044372

Author photograph Marsha Miller
Cover design by W. Staehle
Front cover drawing: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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v3.1

Patience, my dear children, and you shall hear all.

The old man sits at a cramped table in a spare room overlooking a narrow street in lower Manhattan. He writes clearly but swiftly, in the practiced hand of one who has written much in the course of an accomplished life conducted often on the run.

He tells his daughter and her son of his recent arrival from abroad. The ebb carried us up to Rikers Island, one mile from Hell Gate, and here, being met by the flood, we cast anchor to wait for the ebb, which would make at half past seven. In the meantime came up a breeze from S.E. Nothing could have more perfectly accorded with my wishes, as we must now necessarily arrive in New York about ten in the evening.

The old mans absence from his home city has been forced, and he fears retribution from the law, which is why he hoped to arrive after nightfall. However, as the hour approached, the captain began to doubt whether it would not be too dark to go through Hell Gate, and thought it would be more prudent to wait till morning. I combated this childish apprehension, but without effect.

He sought another vessel to complete his journey. There hove in sight a very small sailboat, standing down. He paid two men to row him over. The sailboat proved to be a pleasure boat belonging to two young farmers of Long Island. They were not bound to New York but to the Narrows, but very kindly agreed to put me on shore in the city. The wind failed, though, and the sailboat succumbed to the seaward pull of the tide. It seemed inevitable that I must make a voyage to the Narrows. But luck, in the form of another vessel, intervened again. When we were nearly opposite the Battery I heard the noise of oars, and hailed, was answered, and I begged them to come alongside. It proved to be two vagabonds in a skiff, probably on some thieving voyage. They were very happy to set me on shore in the city for a dollar, and at half past eleven I was landed.

He recalled the Water Street address of a trusted friend. A decade earlier he had counted many friends in New York and many more admirers across America. But nearly all had abandoned him. Many thought him dead; not a few wished him so. Yet his friend in Water Street remained. Thither I went cheerfully, and rejoicing in my good fortune. The rejoicing soon ended. I knocked and knocked, but no answer. I knocked still harder, supposing they were asleep, till one of the neighbors opened a window and told me that nobody lived there.

The news was sobering, perhaps fatal. Was there no one in the city who would take him in? A murder charge looms over his head; after all he has risked to return home, to see his beloved daughter and darling grandson, will he face instead the sheriff and the hangman? He considered his options. To walk about the whole night would be too fatiguing. To have sat and slept on any stoop would have been no hardshiphe had suffered much worse during his exilebut, then, the danger that the first watchman who might pass would take me up as a vagrant and carry me to the watchhouse was a denouement not at all to my mind.

He paced the sidewalks for an hour. He saw a lamp in a house fronting an alley. The house looked disreputable and consequently, under his peculiar circumstances, comparatively safe. He woke the owner and asked if he might sleep there the rest of the night. He was led to a small garret where five men were snoring. I threw open the window to have air, lay down, and slept profoundly till six.

He paid his host twelve cents for the floor space and reentered the alley. He returned to Water Street, for lack of a better idea, and was greatly relieved to discover that the neighbor was wrong; his friend still lived there. He had merely been gone awhile. The friend greeted him warmly but cautiously. He said he could not stay in that house but might lodge briefly with his brother, Sam, in a house around the corner.

And here I am, the old man writes his daughter, in possession of Sams room in Stone Street, in the city of New York, on this eighth day of June, anno domini 1812, just four years since we parted at this very place.

Aaron Burrs great love begins amid the violence and confusion of the Revolutionary War. He is a colonel in the Continental Army; she, the widow of a British officer killed in the West Indies. He encounters Theodosia while protecting her home from American raiders who impute the Toryism of the deceased to his widow. She admires the dark-eyed, black-haired young officer, a common reaction among Burrs female acquaintances. Less predictable is the affection