—Eudora Welty, “First Love,” 1943
Burr’s letter’s like, “You dissed me!” And then, Hamilton writes back like, “Dude lighten up.” . . . The thing I love about writing about history and, especially historical reenactments is that . . . no one ever says what it’s about, they never say the thing, which is like: They’re morons. These are two of the smartest guys in the history of the country being total idiots. . . . Yeah, [the reenactment] was totally accurate, like Burr was a black woman.
—Sarah Vowell, interviewed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on July 14, 2004
You can call me Aaron Burr from the way I’m droppin’ Hamiltons.
—Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell, “Lazy Sunday,” 2005
Cheney’s shooting of his friend is a lot easier to explain than Burr’s shooting of Hamilton: the Vice President was drinking while “hunting” semi-domesticated birds, and got so excited when he heard a quail fluttering for its life that he whirled and fired with complete disregard for the human beings standing around him. . . . Quite un-Burr-like, you see.
—Unitary Moobat (blog), November 18, 2007
Biden thinks Cheney is the most dangerous vice president we’ve ever had? What about Burr? —Ramesh Ponnuru, 2008
Until I was reading this snotty novel called “Burr,” by Gore Vidal, and read how he mocked our Founding Fathers. And as a reasonable, decent, fair-minded person who happened to be a Democrat, I thought, “You know what? What he’s writing about, this mocking of people that I revere, and the country that I love, and that I would lay my life down to defend—just like every one of you in this room would, and as many of you in this room have when you wore the uniform of this great country—I knew that that was not representative of my country.”
—Michelle Bachman, Michigan speech, 2010
“Fortunately his name is not Alexander Hamilton, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson,” he said. “That’s helped my budget.”
—Brian D. Hardison, quoted in “Making a Case to Remember Burr,” 2012
Introduction
Ancient historians compiled prodigies, to gratify the credulous curiosity of their readers; but since prodigies have ceased, while the same avidity for the marvelous exists, modern historians have transferred the miraculous to their personages.
—Charles Brockden Brown, “Historical Characters Are False Representations of Nature”
In November 1807, six years into retirement from the presidency, John Adams spelled out for his regular correspondent Benjamin Rush his thoughts about the tremendous and mysterious popularity of George Washington. He ventured to outline ten qualities that explained Washington’s “immense elevation above his fellows”: his “handsome face”; his height; his “elegant form”; his grace of movement; his “large, imposing fortune”; his Virginian roots (“equivalent to five talents,” he added parenthetically); “favorable anecdotes” about his earlier years as a colonel; “the gift of silence”; his “great self-command”; and finally the silence of his admirers about his flaws, particularly his bad temper.1 “Here you will see,” he concluded, “I have made out ten talents without saying a word about reading, thinking, or writing. . . . You see I use the word talents in a larger sense than usual, comprehending every advantage. Genius, experience, learning, fortune, birth, health are all talents” (107).
This was far from the first time Adams had tried to explain Washington’s status, a topic that had arisen regularly since Adams and Rush began their correspondence in early 1805. At one point he stressed the hypocrisy of those “who trumpeted Washington in the highest strains” but who “spoke of him at others in the strongest terms of contempt” (January 25, 1806, 49).2 Later he emphasized a public complicity in certain fictions of Washington’s life, such that his professed “attachment to private life, fondness for agricultural employments, and rural amusements were easily believed; and we all agreed to believe him and make the world believe him” (September 1807, 101). At another point he stressed the class-motivated theatrics “played off in the funerals of Washington, Hamilton, and Ames,” which are “all calculated like drums and trumpets and fifes in an army to drown the unpopularity of speculations, banks, paper money, and mushroom fortunes” (July 25, 1808, 123–24). Washington’s acting abilities deserved mention too, for “we may say of him, if he was not the greatest President, he was the best actor of presidency we have ever had,” even achieving “a strain of Shakespearean and Garrickal excellence in dramatical exhibitions” (June 21, 1811, 197). So too the clever financial maneuverings beneath Washington’s alleged “sacrifices,” such that “he raised the value of his property and that of his family a thousand per cent, at an expense to the public of more than his whole fortune” (August 14, 1811, 201). As late as 1812, Adams was stressing Washington’s special status as a “great character,” “a Character of Convention,” explaining, “There was a time when northern, middle, and southern statesmen and northern, middle, and southern officers of the army expressly agreed to blow the trumpet of panegyric in concert, to cover and dissemble all faults and errors, to represent every defeat as a victory and every retreat as an advancement, to make that Character popular and fashionable with all parties in all places and with all persons, as a center of union, as the central stone in the geometrical arch” (March 19, 1812, 230, emphasis in original). A similar process was under way in France with Napoleon, and “something hereafter may produce similar conventions to cry up a Burr, a Hamilton, an Arnold, or a Caesar, Julius or Borgia. And on such foundations have been erected Mahomet, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Kublai Khan, Alexander, and all the other great conquerors this world has produced” (ibid.).
This range of observations should illustrate the uncertainty and inconsistency of Adams’s speculations, which were by no means confined to Washington. Indeed, the topic of reputation and mystique seems to have been prompted by comments exchanged in 1805, about the Spanish American adventurer Francisco de Miranda. Adams had written Rush of “a concurrence, if not a combination, of events” that struck him (December 4, 1805, 47). “Col. Burr at Washington, General Dayton at Washington, General Miranda at Washington, General Hull returning from his government, General Wilkinson commanding in Louisiana, &c., &c.” (ibid.). Rush answered that Miranda had in fact recently paid a visit and had reminded him, “in his anecdotes of the great characters that have moved the European world for the last twenty or thirty years, of The Adventures of a Guinea, but with this difference—he has passed through not the purses but the heads and hearts of all the persons whom he described” (January 6, 1806, 48). “I never had the good fortune to meet General Miranda nor the pleasure to see him,” answered Adams:
I have heard much of his abilities and the politeness of his manners. But who is he? What is he? Whence does he come? And whither does he go? What are his motives, views, and objects? Secrecy, mystery, and intrigue have a mighty effect on the world. You and I have seen it in Franklin, Washington, Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson, and many others. The judgment of mankind in general is like that of Father Bouhours, who says, “For myself, I regard secret persons, like the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see, and which make no noise; or like those vast forests, whose silence fills the soul, with I know not what religious horror. I have for them the same admiration as men had for the oracles, which never suffered themselves to be understood, till after the event of things; or for the providence of God, whose conduct is impenetrable to the human mind” (January 25, 1806, 49).
A few months later, Adams returned to these observations with this outburst: “Secrecy! Cunning! Silence! voila les grands sciences de temps modernes. Washington! Franklin! Jefferson! Eternal silence! impenetrable secrecy! deep cunning! These are the talents and virtues which are triumphant in these days,” he concluded, quickly adding, “When I group Washington with Franklin and Jefferson, I mean only in the article of silence” (July 23, 1806, 64).
How are we to read these exchanges? Let us start by considering two likely responses of contemporary readers.