Aristocracy, Aaron Burr, and the Poetry of Conspiracy

When Aaron Burr was captured and brought to trial for treason in 1807, the account of his "filibuster" in the Mississippi Territory instantly became one the great episodes of conspiracy and intrigue in American history. Once a rising star in the Democratic-Republican ranks, whose political career came to an ignominious end with the killing of Alexander Hamilton, the former vice-president was accused of leading a conspiracy of American and foreign agents for the purpose of, among other things, inciting a rebellion of territorial citizens against the American government, raising an army to "liberate" Mexico from Spanish control, even creating an independent nation in the Southwest (to be ruled by Aaron Burr). Yet while the Burr Conspiracy of 1805–1807 has long been a favorite topic of historians,¹ what is not generally remembered is that this was not the first time Burr was publicly charged with conspiracy and treason. More than a decade earlier, in 1795, he had been accused in print of plotting against his country, of conspiring to establish himself ruler of a vast American empire, and of entering into a clandestine agreement with a foreign agent. Almost universally forgotten among students of Burr's life and career, moreover, is that these accusations came in the form of a poem.

The work that first accused Burr of plotting against his country was the anonymous verse satire Aristocracy, a work that stands not only as the earliest major political attack against Burr but more remarkably as an uncanny foreshadowing of the most notorious events of his later life. Published in two parts in January and March of 1795, the poem appeared amid a period of bitter satiric warfare in which poets representing both parties were engaging elected officials, newspaper editors, and each other, over a variety of issues: the implications of the French Revolution for American politics, the emergence of Democratic societies, the Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania, and the unresolved diplomatic tensions between the United States and Great Britain. Against this backdrop, the author of Aristocracy would present Burr largely as he has been remembered in our own time, as an unprincipled politician who had aligned himself with the Democratic Republicans merely as a strategy to further his political ambitions. More insidiously, however, the poem portrays Burr as the leader of a "dangerous Coalition" that seeks to "destroy the general influence of the people" (Aristocracy I. iii) and usurp absolute power for himself and his accomplices.

As a poem promising to uncover a secret plot to reverse the political outcome of the American Revolution, moreover, Aristocracy announced itself as belonging to a specific subgenre of "conspiracy" poems that had appeared during the early 1790s as a literary and ideological protest against the administration of George Washington. Usually the work of writers representing the Democratic-Republican opposition, such as Philip Freneau and St. George Tucker, such poems purported to expose the secret ambitions of men like Hamilton and John Adams to eradicate the present republican government and replace it with one more closely resembling monarchy or aristocracy. For the Federalist author of Aristocracy to use Aaron Burr—the very emblem of an American patrician—to turn the charge of "aristocracy" back onto the Democrats themselves was itself something of an ingenious tactic, and one that would contain important implications concerning the meaning of aristocracy and the question of what actually constituted an aristocratic threat to the American republic.

Yet the real satiric brilliance of Aristocracy arises from the fact that it was never meant simply as a work of political satire. Rather, it was also the occasion for an elaborate practical joke designed by a Federalist wit to pass off a satire against Burr in the guise of a Democratic exposé of a Federalist conspiracy. This was no simple trick, but one that involved using the Democratic press as an unwitting participant in a literary game of bait-and-switch. Advertising the poem in the Philadelphia Aurora as nothing less than a scourge against American aristocrats, the author published the first installment of the poem as a deliberate misrepresentation of its satiric project, presenting...