"History Is the Stream We All Go Fishing In"

Peter Charles Hoffer is Distinguished Research Professor and professor of early American history and legal history at the University of Georgia. A former student of Bernard Bailyn's, he has himself become a prolific and highly respected historian, writing across a broad range of fields and prodding us to rethink some of the most contentious issues in American history: slave rebellions, witch trials, treason trials, abortion, infanticide, professional ethics, even the philosophy of history itself. His Sensory Worlds in Early America (2003) is often considered the founding manifesto for the new field of sensory history and his Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion has just been published (2010). He is a fine writer, with a lucid, lively prose and a novelist's feel for character and setting. The two books under review here nicely reflect the range of his interests, the kinds of questions he brings to the past and, most important, his clear-eyed sense of the challenges facing the profession. Whether his proposals for dealing with these challenges will help us do so is another question, to which we will turn at the end of this review.

The Treason Trials of Aaron Burr is a bright and brisk account not only of the trials themselves but also and more especially of the famous and flamboyant personalities that swirled around them with what seemed at the time—and still seems today—an almost hydroelectric force. At the center of all this noisy, rushing, impetuous energy was Burr himself, Revolutionary War hero, New York politician, U. S. Senator, vice-president and very nearly president of the United States.¹ His infamous duel with Alexander Hamilton in 1804 left Hamilton mortally wounded and all but finished Burr's political career, at least in the East. His subsequent and somewhat fishy filibustering expeditions in Kentucky and his apparent plans for an invasion of Spanish-held Mexico led to his arrest and trial in 1807 on charges of high treason (for allegedly violating the Neutrality Act of 1794). Though formally acquitted, he never quite escaped a sneaking suspicion of having assembled "a small army of desperadoes and cool-eyed adventurers from the frontier" to incite secessionist passions, foment insurrection, incite war with Spain, dispossess that country of its New World possessions, and erect a dynasty of his own along the western borders of the young republic. For most contemporaries—and indeed for most historians, including Hoffer—"Aaron Burr was nothing less than a would-be Napoleon of the West" (p. 49).

Hoffer is a literary stylist and in Treason Trials he uses all his skills to bring this more-than-twice-told tale back to life in living color. He gives us nicely compacted biographies of Burr, Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall (the four principals in the trials); describes Burr's curious and still somewhat cryptic adventures in the west; takes us through a brief history of treason law and treason trials in Britain and the U.S.; recounts the pre-trial maneuverings of prosecution and defense; and then seats us in the front row of the courtroom in Richmond, Virginia, for "The Trial of the Century": United States v. Aaron Burr.²

As for Burr himself, Hoffer is unquestionably right: after all these years, his life still "begs for explanations" (Treason Trials, p. 10). But it's not at all clear that the explanation Hoffer gives us will quiet the begging. In his preface he promises "an explanation for Burr's otherwise bizarre conduct that no one has yet proposed, but in light of the circumstances, one that cannot be ignored" (Treason Trials, p. viii). And in a brief "Afterword" he does indeed provide an explanation no one seems to have thought...