Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (review)

With Fallen Founder, Nancy Isenberg has provided a fresh and engaging look at one of the most complicated and most maligned figures of the founding generation, Aaron Burr. It is certainly the best of the many Burr biographies—clearly argued, nicely paced, extensively researched, amply footnoted, and generally well written. Isenberg shows Burr to be a man more sinned against than sinning. And she is unsparing in her criticisms of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, whom she presents as the principal authors of the destruction of Burr's political influence and good name. Still, redeeming Burr's reputation at the expense of these more favorably remembered contemporaries does not, for the most part, seem to be her driving concern.

Instead, Isenberg strives to situate Burr in the political and cultural contexts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. She offers sharp insights on the era's political culture, locating Burr's political ideas and actions in the first two decades under the federal constitution in the distinct, if overlapping, worlds of New York state and national politics. In the process, she presents Burr as a man of real political principles, not one who would sacrifice all to his own ambitions. But perhaps the most intriguing and certainly the most novel aspect of this project is her rich discussion of shifting gender ideas and roles. Isenberg sees Burr as both an exemplar of existing views of masculinity and an advocate of new ideas about women's intellectual abilities and political rights. His relations with women—not only his sister, wives, and daughter, but also those he courted, those he bedded, those he served as an attorney, and those he essentially adopted—make up a substantial and significant part of this work. The ultimate result of this contextualization of Burr's actions and attitudes is to show that he was similar to his better respected peers, particularly Hamilton and Jefferson, on many of the issues on which they attacked him—his financial speculations and debts, his political maneuvering, his romantic and sexual liaisons, and his expansionist dreams. Conversely, Burr was far ahead of these men, at least from a modern perspective, on such issues as women's education and rights and popular participation in government.

Like most biographies of Burr, beginning with that written by Matthew Livingston Davis under Burr's direction in the 1830s, Fallen Founder devotes much of its coverage to the four great controversies of his life—the Revolutionary War, the election of 1800, the duel with Hamilton, and the Burr Conspiracy. In each case, Isenberg defends Burr against his contemporary detractors and the historians who, in her view, have been unduly influenced by their charges and accounts. In the first three cases, this defense generally seems justified and often echoes, elaborates, or extends arguments made by other scholars working on early republican politics and political culture. She shows Hamilton as a man of vaunting ambition and "poison-tipped pen," who was willing to do almost anything to destroy his rival during the quarter century before their fatal encounter at Weehawken, New Jersey, in July 1804 (vii). While other historians will certainly dispute her portrayal of the Federalist leader, it is in the final case, the Burr Conspiracy, that Isenberg runs into the biggest problems, in terms of both factual errors and interpretive issues.

As Isenberg recognizes in the preface, there are inherent difficulties in reconstructing Burr's life and ideas, resulting from the dispersal and destruction (deliberate and accidental) of his papers. But the sense of epistemological uncertainty with which she begins ebbs as the book progresses and disappears almost entirely by the time she reaches the Burr Conspiracy, the very moment when it is most essential. Answers to the most basic and most important questions about the conspiracy have eluded historians for two centuries. It seems unlikely that we will ever know exactly what Burr intended as his thinking evolved. The surviving evidence, though voluminous, is incomplete, biased, and...