AARON BURR CIRCA 1834.HE DIED TWO YEARS LATER, AT THE AGE OF EIGHTY.
AFTER HE SHOT ALEXANDER, AARON RETURNED home and spent time in his library and ate breakfast with a cousin who’d come from Connecticut for a visit. The cousin had no idea Burr had just shot a man.
Remorseless, Burr cursed the people who sympathized with his victim. After eleven days at home, he fled on a barge during the night. He eventually made his way, by carriage, canoe, and boat, to South Carolina, where his daughter lived with her husband. The journey was a hard one.
The states of New York and New Jersey charged him with murder, but the charges were never prosecuted and were eventually dropped, thanks in part to political influence exerted on his behalf by his friends.
As vice president and leader of the Senate, Burr returned to Washington in November for the start of the legislative session. On the way, he stopped in Petersburg, Virginia, where local Republicans held a public dinner for him and took him to the theater; he received a standing ovation. His last major role in public office was presiding over the Senate’s impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, who was acquitted.
The next day Burr formally left the Senate, two days before Jefferson’s new vice president would be sworn in. In his resignation speech before weeping colleagues on March 2, 1805, he called the Senate “a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here—it is here, in this exalted refuge; here, if any where, will resistance be made to the storms of political phrenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.”
Burr’s daughter and her son—little Aaron—became the principal source of love and light in his life, but he could not see them as often as he wished.
In 1807, he was charged with treason after hatching a military expedition in the western territories, either to attack Spanish possessions and expand the United States or to stir up revolution in the West and found a nation on his own.
Thomas Jefferson believed him guilty. He wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette that Burr’s conspiracy “has been one of the most flagitious of which history will ever furnish an example. He meant to separate the Western states from us, to add Mexico to them, place himself at their head, establish what he would deem an energetic government…. There is not a man in the US. who doubts his guilt.”
Acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence of treason but condemned by the public nonetheless, Burr fled to Europe in 1808, where he thought he might be able to interest either Britain or France in his ambitions. Eventually, he ran out of money. His boots were so worn that there was not enough leather left for them to be repaired. Stuck in France with no money and no passport, he finally received one and set sail for America in 1811. However, the ship was soon boarded by the British and taken to England, where Burr was delayed another five months before he could again secure passage to the United States.
Traveling as Adolphus Arnot, he made it back in 1812. By the time he arrived in New York, he had but one wish: to see his daughter and her son. The first letter he received from his son-in-law, though, informed him that little Aaron had died and that Theodosia was inconsolable.
Grief and poor health prevented Theodosia from visiting her father until the end of the year. The schooner she boarded on December 30, the Patriot, should have arrived in a week. It never did.
AARON BURR CIRCA 1834.HE DIED TWO YEARS LATER, AT THE AGE OF EIGHTY.
Burr married again, but his wife soon left him. His world grew small and dark. He had only a few words at the end of his life for his old nemesis Alexander. They sounded as though something like regret had found him at last.
“If I had read Sterne more, and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”