Aaron Burr Quotes

Never put off for tomorrow, what you can do today.

Life doesn't discriminate Between the sinners and the saints It takes and it takes and it takes And we keep living anyway We rise and we fall and we break And we make our mistakes

I am the one thing in life I can control. I am inimitable. I am an original

This was the way into Burr. I knew he and Hamilton circled each other all their lives, I knew they went from friends to frenemies to foes, but it wasn’t til I read this detail online—that Theodosia was married to a British officer when Aaron Burr met her, and he waited until she was available—that the character of Burr came free in my imagination. Imagine Hamilton waiting—for anything. That’s when I realized our task was to dramatize not two ideological opposites, but a fundamental difference in temperament.

The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.' ... And what we leave here is more than class; it's the whole heritage of youth. We're just one generation-- we're breaking all the links that seemed to bind us her to top-booted and high-stocked generations. We've walked arm and arm with Burr and Light-Horse Harry Lee through half these deep-blue nights.' 'That's what they are,' Tom tangented off, 'deep-blue-- a bit of color would spoil them, make them exotic.' Spries, against a sky that's a promise of dawn, and blue light on the slate roofs-- it hurts... rather--' 'Good-by, Aaron Burr,' Amory called toward deserted Nassau Hall, 'you and I knew strange corners of life.

Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done.

What separates history from myth is that history takes in the whole picture, whereas myth averts our eyes from the truth when it turns men into heroes and gods.

Aaron Burr was probably a cold man.

I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.

If Hamilton had shot first, he had wasted his fire, exactly as foretold. And if Burr had fired first, as Pendleton alleged, then Hamilton seems to have squeezed the trigger in a reflexive spasm of agony and shot involuntarily into the trees. In neither scenario did Hamilton aim his gun at Aaron Burr.

Such madness was strictly prohibited in New York, but not in New Jersey.

Things written remain.

We do not want to old to be sharper than we. It is bad enough that they were there first, and got the best things.

America’s oldest debating union, founded in Princeton by James Madison, Aaron Burr, and others, is called the Cliosophical Society in her honor.

Do you know much about Aaron Burr? There's a man, now, who is only damned and damned again in history and yet who had his parts. I have always designed writing something about him to show I did not stand in the jam of his vilifiers. I had a piece on him which should have gone into this book. You don't know (I guess I never told you) that when I was a lad, working in a lawyer's office, it fell to me to go over the river now and then with messages for Burr. Burr was very gentle--persuasive. He had a way of giving me a bit of fruit on these visits--an apple or a pear. I can see him clearly, still--his stateliness, gray hair, courtesy, consideration.

History is not a bedtime story. It is a comprehensive engagement with often obscure documents and books no longer read—books shelved in old archives, and fragile pamphlets contemporaneous with the subject under study—all of which reflect a world view not ours.

AFTER HAMILTON’S DEATH, I remained at Richmond Hill for ten days. I confess that I was not prepared for the response to our interview. Apparently no one had ever fought a duel in the whole history of the United States until Aaron Burr invented this diabolic game in order to murder the greatest American that ever lived (after George Washington, of course). Over night the arrogant, mob-detesting Hamilton was metamorphosed into a Christ-like figure with me as the Judas—no, the Caiaphas who so villainously despatched the godhead to its heavenly father (George Washington again) at Weehawk, our new Jerusalem’s most unlikely Golgotha. I

To the union of all honest men.

Talk Less, Smile More

I am the only thing in my lige I can control. I am inmitable, I am an origianl

But this much is known: Hamilton shot into the trees. Burr, leveling his pistol at his foe, did not.

Back then, Manhattan was the infant country

coffee biggins”—the last being the latest fad from France, involving the boiling of coffee rather than merely drinking it as a dissolved

I been brought up a hatter,” he sighed, “people would have come into the world without heads.

New York was the swing state in the upcoming presidential election—and Manhattan was the swing district in New York State. Control the city, and you controlled the 1800 presidential race.

Even the few streets with unobstructed brick sidewalks were comically narrow—just wide enough, as one chronicler put it, to accommodate “two lean men to walk abreast or one fat man alone.

It is puzzling that Aaron Burr is sometimes classified among the founding fathers. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton all left behind papers that run to dozens of thick volumes, packed with profound ruminations. They fought for high ideals. By contrast, Burr’s editors have been able to eke out just two volumes of his letters, many full of gossip, tittle-tattle, hilarious anecdotes, and racy asides about his sexual escapades. He produced no major papers on policy matters, constitutional issues, or government institutions. Where Hamilton was often more interested in policy than politics, Burr seemed interested only in politics. At a time of tremendous ideological cleavages, Burr was an agile opportunist who maneuvered for advantage among colleagues of fixed political views.

Napoléon Bonaparte. The new leader had no immediate fight to pick with America; some thought he might actually bring peace to Europe. Hamilton’s endless demands for more funding and troops were beginning to look foolish.

You could expect bread, cheese, preserved apples, eggs, and a solid draft of warm beer. Tea and coffee were only slowly taking hold at breakfast in the finer houses, and the city’s old Dutch families still drank cocoa at breakfast

For more fortunate readers, it reminded them that “the action of the clytoris in women is like that of a penis to man,” and the key to “brifk and vigorous” enjoyments—especially with “cares and thoughts of business drowned in a glafs of rofy wine.

The main thrust of Burr’s argument was that citizenship came from consent. Drawing on his favorite writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burr defended the basic premise of the social contract: citizens were not born, but made, through their participation in civil society. Gallatin

death doesn´t discriminate between the sinners and the saints, it takes and it takes and it takes and we keep livin´ anyway we laugh and we cry and we break and make our mistakes but if theres a reason im still alive when everyone who loves me has died im willing to wait for it

Much of Hamilton’s previous two years had been spent building up an “additional army,” justified by stoking fears of a French invasion of godless radicals. That country’s revolution, Hamilton warned, exposed America to a veritable “volcano of atheism, depravity, and absurdity … an engine of despotism and slavery.

The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.

And yet something unsettling remained about the notion of John Pastano as a willful murderer: the recollection, perhaps, that after murdering Mary Castro, he had filled his hat with her blood and wandered out into the street with it. When he was collared over by the Tea-Water Pump, broken English had spilled out from the man. “Why you catch me?” he asked innocently. “Me not do

Positive and direct proof of fraud is not to be expected.… The nature of the thing itself, which is generally carried out in a secret and clandestine manner, does not admit of any but circumstantial evidence; and therefore, if no proof of actual fraud were allowed in such cases, much mischief and villainy would ensue, and pass with impunity. Circumstantial evidence is all that can be expected, and indeed all that is necessary to substantiate such a charge.

THE YOUNG carpenter miserably regarded his fellow inmates. Some had been confined for so long that nobody even knew why they were there anymore. One wild-looking blind and insane man known as “Paul from New Jersey” snored quietly on the floor, with only a block of wood as his pillow. When awake, he wandered around naked and filthy. An appalled visitor, asking why the man had been left naked, found the staff unconcerned: “The keeper explained that when furnished with a shirt, the rats soon eat it off.

On paper, at least, none of this would necessarily stop us from getting a stimulus bill passed. After all, Democrats enjoyed a seventy-seven-seat majority in the House and a seventeen-seat majority in the Senate. But even in the best of circumstances, trying to get the largest emergency spending bill in history through Congress in record time would be a little like getting a python to swallow a cow. I also had to contend with a bit of institutionalized procedural mischief—the Senate filibuster—which in the end would prove to be the most chronic political headache of my presidency. The filibuster isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Instead, it came into being by happenstance: In 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr urged the Senate to eliminate the “motion to proceed”—a standard parliamentary provision that allows a simple majority of any legislature to end debate on a piece of business and call for a vote. (Burr, who seems never to have developed the habit of thinking things through, reportedly considered the rule a waste of time.) It didn’t take long for senators to figure out that without a formal way to end debate, any one of them could bring Senate business to a halt—and thereby extract all sorts of concessions from frustrated colleagues—simply by talking endlessly and refusing to surrender the floor. In 1917, the Senate curbed the practice by adopting “cloture,” allowing a vote of two-thirds of senators present to end a filibuster. For the next fifty years the filibuster was used only sparingly—most notably by southern Democrats attempting to block anti-lynching and fair-employment bills or other legislation that threatened to shake up Jim Crow. Gradually, though, the filibuster became more routinized and easier to maintain, making it a more potent weapon, a means for the minority party to get its way. The mere threat of a filibuster was often enough to derail a piece of legislation. By the 1990s, as battle lines between Republicans and Democrats hardened, whichever party was in the minority could—and would—block any bill not to their liking, so long as they remained unified and had at least the 41 votes needed to keep a filibuster from being overridden.

People talk about Eisenhower's golden age.... It all happened without me. What is the vice presidency? The Constitution dictates only two duties: casting the deciding vote if the Senate is deadlocked and replacing the president if he dies or is impeached. apart from waiting for those two things to happen, you made the rest up and were duly forgotten by history. The exception being Aaron Burr, who shot someone, decisively lowering the bar for the rest of us. What I remember is small pieces of the world: the West Wing, the insides of planes and hotel lobbies and conference rooms. My life was dinners with Pat and the children; airplane flights; placeholder meetings with foreign dignitaries during which I nodded and reminded them I had no power to make and agreement but would speak to the president. Stomach-turning formal breakfasts, speeches to party elders and tradesmen. I opened factories in Detroit and Akron, breathing the various stinks of canneries, slaughterhouses, or rubber plans and bestowing that vice presidential combination of glamour, flattery, and the tacit reminder that they didn't quite rate a visit from the top guy.

History abounds in and around New York City, however much of it is buried in the concrete of newer construction. The downtown financial district from Battery Park to Wall Street is such a historical district. Trinity Church at Wall Street and Broadway and the Churchyard surrounding it is where Alexander Hamilton and his wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton along with other notables are buried. The story of Alexander Hamilton is an important part of New York City’s history and has become a Broadway musical. At the top of the Palisades in Weehawken is a small park known as the Dueling Grounds. This Revolutionary War site, overlooking New York City to the east, and what had been Half Moon Bay to the north and directly beneath it, is where Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the United States, was mortally wounded by a single shot from Aaron Burr’s dueling pistol. He died the following day in Greenwich Village at the home of his friend William Bayard Jr.

Jefferson was no friend of Aaron Burr, and he had no intention of going lightly on Aaron Burr. Certain of Burr’s guilt despite the murky nature of the scheme and evidence, he convened his Cabinet and alerted members of Congress about the matter.  Jefferson, with resolute support from his Cabinet and the Congress, thus ordered Burr’s arrest on the charge of treason, the nation’s highest crime.

One of the first trials he assisted with dealt with the conspiracy charges leveled against Aaron Burr, the former Vice President under Thomas Jefferson.

her meanness had been able to creep right into me through the weakness of my own disappointment.

Because a rumor floating around during the mid-1800s said that President Martin Van Buren was in fact the illegitimate son of former Vice President (and traitor and murderer, but we’ll get to that later) Aaron Burr.

The British landed troops in Brooklyn on August 22, and the subsequent Battle of Brooklyn was a major defeat for the Americans. Washington pulled off a daring escape across the East River to Manhattan on the night of August 29, but only managed to hold New York for another two weeks before retreating up to Harlem. Hamilton’s company at Bayard’s Mount barely made it out. It was only because Aaron Burr knew a way through enemy lines did they make it to safety.

to produce. As John Adams wrote, “Property monopolized or in the Possession of a few is a Curse to Mankind. We should preserve not an Absolute Equality.—this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all others from extravagant Riches.”1 Here are ten steps that I think might help put us more on the course intended by the Revolutionary generation, to help us move beyond where we are stuck and instead toward what we ought to be: 1. Don’t panic Did the founders anticipate a Donald Trump? I would say yes. As James Madison wrote in the most prominent of his contributions to the Federalist Papers, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”2 Just after Aaron Burr nearly became president, Jefferson wrote that “bad men will sometimes get in, & with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind & principles. This is a subject with which wisdom & patriotism should be occupied.”3 Fortunately the founders built a durable system, one that often in recent years has stymied Trump. He has tried to introduce a retrogressive personal form of rule, but repeatedly has run into a Constitution built instead to foster the rule of law.4 Over the last several years we have seen Madison’s checks and balances operate robustly. Madison designed a structure that could accommodate people acting unethically and venally. Again, our national political gridlock sometimes is not a bug but a feature. It shows our system is working. The key task is to do our best to make sure the machinery of the system works. This begins with ensuring that eligible citizens are able to vote. This ballot box is the basic building block of our system. We should appreciate how strong and flexible our Constitution is. It is all too easy, as one watches the follies and failings of humanity, to conclude that we live in a particularly wicked time. In a poll taken just as I was writing the first part of this book, the majority of Americans surveyed said they think they are living at the lowest point in American history.5 So it is instructive to be reminded that Jefferson held similar beliefs about his own era. He wrote that there were “three epochs in history signalized by the total extinction of national morality.” The first two were in ancient times, following the deaths of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, he thought, and the third was his own age.6 As an aside, Trump’s attacks on immigrants might raise a few eyebrows among the founders. Seven of the thirty-nine people who signed the Constitution were themselves born abroad, most notably Hamilton and James Wilson.7

Aaron Burr, after being arrested near Natchez on the orders of President Thomas Jefferson,

Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley, who wrote the first and most persuasive feminist tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. “Women are every where in [a] deplorable state,” she would write; “for, in order to preserve their innocence, as ignorance is courteously termed, truth is hidden from them, and they are made to assume an artificial character before their faculties have acquired any strength. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Burr held to the heretical belief, shared only by John Adams in the circle of Founding Fathers, that women were fully the equals of men, just as capable in intellect, just as sensible, and just as deep in feeling.

Much of the country cursed Aaron Burr. He never recovered his political reputation. He wandered Europe for several years. When he was an old man, a thoughtful Aaron said, 'I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.

the inoculation did not confer immunity. It gave him the full-blown disease.

Marquis de Lafayette,

The day after the Manhattan Company inaugurated business on Wall Street, two of its directors, Aaron Burr and John Barker Church, celebrated the event in idiosyncratic fashion: with a duel.

So intense was the partisanship of the day, so much did the Federalists hate and fear Jefferson, that they were ready to turn the country over to Aaron Burr. Had they succeeded and made Burr the president, there would almost certainly be no republic today. Fortunately for all, Hamilton was smart enough and honest enough to realize that Jefferson was the lesser evil. He used his influence to break the deadlock. On the thirty-sixth ballot, February 17, 1801, Jefferson was chosen president and Burr was elected vice-president. It was an age marked by

Vice-President Aaron Burr was full of plots and schemes and conspiracies to break the west loose from the United States and form a new nation. Jefferson

Burr founded the Whig and Cliosophic Societies, which both focused on Burr’s favorite activity: debate.

At the top of the Palisades in Weehawken, New Jersey is a small park known as the Dueling Grounds. This Revolutionary War site, overlooking New York City to the east, and what had been Half Moon Bay to the north is where Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the United States, was mortally wounded by a single shot from Aaron Burr’s dueling pistol on the morning of July 11, 1804. He died the following day in Greenwich Village, across the river in New York City. The duel was because Hamilton, the former secretary of the treasury, interfered with Aaron Burr’s bid for the presidency of the United States and again, by successfully opposing his candidacy for governor of New York. Burr’s vindictive retaliation cost Hamilton his life.

talk less, smile more.

In 1804, Alexander Hamilton was shot and mortally wounded by Aaron Burr in a duel in the same location that his eldest son was shot and mortally wounded in a duel three years earlier in 1801.

Sometime in March 1804, Hamilton dined in Albany at the home of Judge John Tayler, a Republican merchant and former state assemblyman who was working for the election of Morgan Lewis. Both Judge Tayler and Hamilton expressed their dread at having Aaron Burr as governor. “You can have no conception of the exertions that are [being made] for Burr,” Tayler had told De Witt Clinton. “Every artifice that can be devised is used to promote his cause.”1 This private dinner on State Street triggered a chain of events that led inexorably to Hamilton’s duel with Burr. Present at Tayler’s table was Dr. Charles D. Cooper, a physician who had married Tayler’s adopted daughter.

thoughts. After a vicious election in which he had challenged the incumbent president, John Adams, it turned out that while Jefferson had defeated Adams in the popular vote, the tall Virginian had received the same number of electoral votes for president as the dashing, charismatic, and unpredictable Aaron Burr of New York, who had been running as Jefferson’s vice president.16,17 Under the rules in effect in 1800, there was no way to distinguish between a vote for president and one for vice president. What was supposed to have been a peaceful transfer of power from one rival to another—from Adams to Jefferson—had instead produced a constitutional crisis. Anxious and unhappy, Jefferson was, he wrote to his eldest daughter, “worn down here with pursuits in which I take no delight, surrounded by enemies and spies catching and perverting every word which falls from my lips or flows from my pen, and inventing where facts fail them.”18 His fate was in the hands of other men, the last place he wanted it to be. He hated the waiting, the whispers, the not knowing. But there was nothing he could do.

I imagine it is because you can lead him to a story for his newspaper, and if it is for his paper, it must be something to make Hamilton look poorly.

When Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr needed an attending physician for their 1804 duel, they both chose David Hosack.

the Federalist caucus decided to back Burr. In other words, the Federalists would not accept the outcome of the election, in which the people’s choice of Jefferson was clear. So intense was the partisanship of the day, so much did the Federalists hate and fear Jefferson, that they were ready to turn the country over to Aaron Burr. Had they succeeded and made Burr the president, there would almost certainly be no republic today.