Aaron Burr: Farewell Address to the U.S. Senate

About the Author

Aaron Burr was more a man of deeds than a man of letters. He had no overarching political theory by which his political views were organized; one of the reasons he and Thomas Jefferson clashed when Burr was vice president of the United States was that Burr treated politics as a game of strategy, whereas Jefferson regarded politics as among the most serious concerns of human life. Thus, when Burr wrote, he rarely discussed his views about the experiment of American democracy or about serious issues of national survival. He rarely thought far ahead, preferring to focus on immediate activities. He proved himself a brilliant political organizer when focusing on an election to occur in the near future, but he rarely contemplated organizing for the distant future. It was for his ability to direct such basic tasks as getting out the vote for his political party that he was chosen by the Democratic-Republicans to be Jefferson's vice president.

In his writings Burr sometimes seems to be two different men, and the contradictions are part of what make him a mysterious personality. In some instances he calls the Constitution too fragile to survive, while in others he hails the importance of the Constitution's protection of civil rights. When given the opportunity, he argues eloquently for the import of the application of those rights to all Americans at all times, as he does in his courtroom arguments from his trial for treason. In many of his writings, he suggests that he ought to be a monarch ruling a vast territory in North America—he is not picky about where in America, just so long as he would be a strongman ruling a nation. He even invites Spain, Britain, and France, in different instances, to aid him in taking land from the United States. Yet in other writings, he speaks of the robust vitality of American democracy and of how people are free to participate in the running of government and society. He is a pessimist one moment, stating his certainty that the United States is doomed to fall into fragments, but then in another moment he is an optimist, envisioning his grandson's future as one of unlimited possibilities because of American democracy. He may well have advocated treason in some of his writings, but he also applied the Constitution to the practice of law in a way that enhanced the rights of all Americans.