The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr

4 Burr’s Formation, 1800–1804

102 4 Burr’s Formation, 1800–1804 The opposite Party too are divided into many Sects, as the World will see, if they succeed in their Choice. Their Man will not be found to be the Man of all their People: No nor a Majority of them. He is not thorough going enough. He is not daring and desperate enough. In short one half the Nation has analyzed itself, within 18 months, past and the other will analyze itself in 18 months more. By that time this Nation if it has any Eyes, will see itself in a Glass. I hope it will not have reason to be too much disgusted with its own Countenance. —John Adams to Abigail Adams, November 15, 1800 The Empty Ballot We turn now to the moment when that thing called Aaron Burr emerged on the scene of US politics, its coordinates so well mapped and anticipated by the likes of Charles Brockden Brown and Tabitha Tenney. We must resist several historicist impulses here—for instance, giving the story of how Burr’s life and career unfolded, bringing him to the vice presidency, or the political, “behind-the-scenes” narrative that reveals the true machinations the public could not perceive. This is particularly true with our somewhat arbitrary starting point, the election of 1800. It is all too tempting to immerse oneself immediately in the details: Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr found themselves tied at seventy-three electoral votes apiece, the victory to be decided by the House of Representatives; in Congress, the states split their votes eight to eight, and the politicking for a changed vote began to unfold. But we would do much better to view the event from the clarifying distance of the newspapers, which struggled to report what was happening. In Pittsburgh, for example, the Democratic-Republican newspaper, the Tree of Liberty, only published news of Jefferson’s election at the end of February, and while there were a few short accounts of balloting , it was only on April 11 that the local bookseller Zadok Cramer began Burr’s Formation, 1800–1804 103 advertising the sale of Proceedings of Congress While Balloting for a President of the United States, Which Continued for 6 Days, with the Speech of Thomas Jefferson, on His Inauguration as President, of the U.S.1 This delay reflected not only the slowness of communication but also a very different perception of the election controversy itself. For through the months preceding the election, the victory or even significance of Aaron Burr was never imagined or acknowledged, and it was assumed that Jefferson ’s election could only be thwarted by Federalist perfidy. When the tie occurred, it was again assumed that under normal circumstances, it would be resolved by the election of Jefferson as president, Burr as vice president—unless the Federalists conspired to thwart the outcome. Republican newspapers accordingly carried stories about a conspiracy hatched in “Sam[uel] Chase’s house in Baltimore,” to maintain the tie until the resolution of the election became, of necessity, extraconstitutional .2 In the event, John Jay was to be declared “a perpetual President or Dictator.”3 In the same vein, the anti-Federalist polemics continued, detailing John Adams’s last-minute appointments, a mysterious fire in the Treasury and War Departments (where, it was alleged, papers detailing illegal arms deals and shady Treasury transactions were destroyed), and the election results coming in from other parts of the country. Burr was absent, a nonentity, in all this reportage. We might even say that, outside New York, he barely even existed in public discourse. As early as October 25, 1800, advertisements began to appear for a special print of Thomas Jefferson, to be mass produced as “a match for [Gilbert] Stuart’s print of General washington”—a logical project, given Jefferson’s firm establishment within the semiotics of the Founders.4 It was not until January, by contrast, that this same advertiser, “by the advice of several citizens,” published an accompanying notice for a portrait of Burr, “as a companion to that of thomas jefferson.”5 To repeat: Burr barely existed at the moment, especially when viewed alongside the extensive and rich semiotic portrait of Jefferson, by supporters and enemies alike. We might usefully compare the two verbal portraits presented by Morgan J. Rhees, delivered as an Inauguration Day oration and again widely reprinted in Republican newspapers.6 Addressing the charges of Jefferson’s deism or atheism, Rhees begins with a detailed...