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

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Three accounts survive of Aaron Burr's Farewell Address to the U.S. Senate. One account was written by William Plumer, senator from New Hampshire, who kept notes on the activities of the Senate from 1803 to 1807 that were published in 1923 as William Plumer's Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803–1807. This account is a short summary. Another account was written by John Quincy Adams in his diary; it is longer than Plumer's version and gives a sense of the power of Burr's delivery.

The third and most complete account of Burr's Farewell Address was compiled by the Washington Federalist, a newspaper, and was published on March 13, 1805, eleven days after the speech was delivered. This is the account most often reprinted in textbooks and accounts of Burr's life. It is more complete than the other two, and it was the version on which the reputation of the speech rested. Journalists spent about a week interviewing those who had been present in the Senate when the speech was delivered, and from those interviews the speech was recreated. According to the Federalist, those who heard the speech universally regarded it as the most impressive one they had ever heard. Further, the newspaper noted that the entire Senate was reduced to tears for half an hour—though other records disagree somewhat with this, noting that two senators wept for about half an hour but others recovered much sooner. Without doubt, all were deeply moved by Burr's words.

It is likely that Burr had not intended to speak about more than the “rules and orders of the house”—that is, of the Senate—but he ended up speaking extemporaneously about his views on how the Senate ought to conduct itself. He spoke in a dignified manner, as was his custom, but he spoke from his emotions, which elevated his speech far above mere intellectual analysis. It was as if he were having a quiet, honest conversation with each individual senator. Burr's remark that “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” would have called to the minds of his listeners the recent impeachment trial of the associate Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase. Chase's conduct of his duties had occasionally been deplorable, as when he would openly proclaim his political views from the bench, while the Supreme Court as a whole had sometimes thwarted the Jefferson administration's policies by ruling them unconstitutional. The administration hoped to start removing offending justices by beginning with Chase, whose evident misconduct made him vulnerable. Several members of the administration had courted Vice President Burr in the days after the House of Representatives had indicted Chase, probably hoping to influence his opinion because he would be the presiding judge during the Senate's trial of Chase. During the February 1805 trial, Burr conducted himself as a truly impartial judge, not favoring either side and allowing all perspectives to be heard. He won praise for his handling of the trial, which ended on March 1 with Chase's acquittal, and he may very well have helped to preserve the Constitution's balance of powers by refusing to use his position to dictate the outcome of the trial.