Review of Aaron Burr: Conspiracy to Treason
I am going to have to differ with my fellow reviewers in their opinions both about Melton's book and about Burr himself.
Melton is an attorney and a law professor. He is also the author of another book that I enjoyed a great deal (and have reviewed also): "The First Impeachment." However, I don't feel that Melton's Burr Conspiracy book contributes much to the existing opinions on Burr, the Burr Conspiracy, or the trial.
While the book is well-researched and well-written -- and as a fellow historian, scholar, writer, book author (and also someone with a law degree), I understand the difficulties in doing that and appreciate Melton's work generally -- I have several complaints about this book, which I think are central to the issue of who Burr was and what he was up to. To be fair, my complaint is not solely against Melton but against his sources -- which, to some degree, is not Melton's fault.
Before I get into my complaints, though, let me mention that the best discussion of the Burr trial I have seen to date is in volume 3 of Albert J. Beveridge's "The Life of John Marshall" (available on Amazon).
Melton, as a practitioner of the discipline of law, knows how to find and use primary and secondary source material. However, in this book he relies heavily on Thomas P. Abernethy's "Burr Conspiracy," while almost completely ignoring Walter F. McCaleb's book of the same name. In my view, this is a huge omission, since I feel that McCaleb's book is the most important book on the conspiracy, unraveling as it does many of the mysteries of Burr's intentions in that period.
Secondly, Melton also relied heavily on Dumas Malone's multi-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson. Malone was a man who excused a great deal of Jefferson's criminal behavior with a virtual wave of the pen and was strongly biased against Burr.
While Melton does also cite to various biographies of Burr (including Parton, Davis, Daniels, Todd, Lomask, Wandell & Minnigerode, and Parmet & Hecht -- nearly all the standard ones) and to Mary-Jo Kline's important collection of "Political Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr" (as well as to much other solid primary source material), he does not cite at all to Roger G. Kennedy's ground-breaking, if rambling, book, "Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character."
The reliance on Abernethy and Malone and the failure to study and include McCaleb and Kennedy constitute, for me, a major flaw in Melton's work. I believe this omission leads to a perpetuation of speculations and misconceptions about Burr, and since Melton has more credibility because of his credentials, this lends more weight to the inaccuracies.
Many Amazon reviewers note (as did Melton) that nobody will ever know what Burr's intentions were, that Burr was brilliant and charismatic, that "the best and the brightest are always fallible," that Burr lacked principles, that the bulk of Burr's letters never surfaced, that public opinion at or after Burr's trial "overwhelmingly concluded" that Burr was "up to no good," that the "evidence strongly indicates that [Burr] was the ringleader in a plot to establish an independent nation" in the West, and so on.
I stand somewhat alone in my disagreement with each of these statements. I believe Burr's intentions are discoverable. I am tired of hearing that Burr was brilliant and charismatic and lacked principles. Burr was intelligent and charming, but the brilliant/charismat ic/unprincipled combination is grossly misleading and is used to justify all manner of unsubstantiated speculation and ill opinion about Burr.
The evidence does not "strongly indicate" that Burr was a "ringleader" in a "plot to establish an independent nation." Burr was merely one in a line of many -- including, by the way, Alexander Hamilton, and many others who were supported by Jefferson (both before and during his presidency) and his successors -- who wanted to "liberate" Spanish Mexico (and possibly even South American states), which included at the time, New Orleans.
Burr's plan was, if there was a U.S. declaration of war against Spain, to invade and liberate. He later said that Jefferson had sanctioned this plan. Absent such a declaration, Burr planned to make a (perfectly lawful) settlement north of New Orleans. The rest of his "intrigues" with agents of Britain and France were mere efforts to obtain funding (see McCaleb on this). He told those people what they wanted to hear.
Many before Burr had sought or obtained foreign funding for such expeditions( including George Rogers Clark, mentioned below, and U.S. Senator William Blount, whose enterprise some say VP Jefferson was secretly supporting). None were brought up on charges of treason. Some Westerners were even in Spanish pay -- including Jefferson's saw, James Wilkinson, and other eminent western citizens who were trusted by several Presidents -- and none were charged with treason.
But even if Burr did want to establish an independent nation, Jefferson himself had once verbally sanctioned the separation of the West from the East and the former's independence from the United States. On this issue, Burr was really on the tail end of a long line of westerners who wanted independence from the U.S. -- or who already felt they were independent. This included George Rogers Clark who was sponsored by then Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson on various covert missions, including an unlawful exploration of what was then the Spanish west. (See Kennedy's book.)
Much of Burr's personal correspondence apparently went down with his daughter at sea, but this was NOT MOST of his correspondence. There are 11 reels of microfilm of Burr's letters and another 16 reels that contain his orderly books, journal, and court documents.
Public opinion about Burr during the trial was not overwhelmingly against him. In fact, he had a tremendous amount of popular support, but with a President as your enemy, few friends will risk their careers to ally with you. Thus, friends who believed in him were afraid to stand up for him.
After all, Jefferson declared Burr guilty and ordered (or supported Willkinson in ordering) him to be taken dead or alive before his arrest or trial occurred.
While Burr may be the most famous of those Jefferson persecuted, Burr was not the only one whose life was ruined by Jefferson (or Wilkinson, for that matter -- and in this case, Burr had both men plotting against him, both knowing they were unjustifiably and illegally doing so). The full story of all Jefferson's victims has not yet been written, but for those interested in exploring the issue, I suggest David Leon Chandler's "The Jefferson Conspiracies: A President's Role in the Assassination of Meriwether Lewis," and Leonard W. Levy, "Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side," as well as Kennedy's book mentioned above. See also Richard Zacks "The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805."
Wilkinson's victims, by the way, included several assassinations and/or attempted assassinations.
Like the story of Jefferson and Wilkinson's many victims, Burr's story has not yet been fully written. While he was certainly a complex man, and while his "conspiracy" confusingly led in several directions at once, both the man and the story are discoverable. I hope one day to contribute further to these understandings, but in the meantime, I hope readers can separate fact from mere speculation or inference, including such as arises out of reliance on biased sources, which is the case in Melton's otherwise well-done book.
Jennifer Van Bergen, J.D.
Author of "The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America" (Common Courage Press, 2004), "Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious" (Michael Wiese Productions, 2007), "Aaron Burr and the Electoral Tie of 1801: Strict Constitutional Construction" (1 Cardozo Public Law Policy & Ethics Journal 92 [2003]), "In the Absence of Democracy: The Designation and Material Support Provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Laws" (2 Card. Pub. Law Pol. & Ethics J. 107 [2003]), and "The Dangerous World of Indefinite Detentions: Vietnam to Abu Ghraib" (37 Case Western Reserve Journal of Int'l Law 449 [2006]).
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