September 14, 1836. In his final hours, AB was being attended to by the Reverend Dr. P.J. Van Pelt. When asked if he expected to find salvation upon expiration, AB, fully in possession of his faculties, and in classic AB style, replied:
“On that subject I am coy.”
In 1810, AB found himself in Paris, what was then the latest state of refuge for the disgraced former Vice President. Acquitted of treason, but guilty of naked ambition, he was eventually shunned whever he went – England, Sweeden, Germany, etc. In writing to his daughter, he had this to say of “modern” Paris.
“No sidewalks. The carts, cabrioles, and carriages of all sorts run up to the very houses. You must save yourself by bracing flat against the wall, there being, in most places, stones set up against the houses to keep the carts from injuring them. Most of the streets are paved as Albany and New York were before the Revolution, with an open gutter in the middle. Some arched in the middle, and a little gutter each side, very near the houses. It is a fine sport for the cabriole and hack drivers to run a wheel in one of these gutters, always full of filth, and bespatter fifty pedestrians who are braced against the wall. The gutters or conduits for the water from the eaves of the houses are carried out a few feet from the roofs, and thus discharge the rainwater over your head. In most places there are no such pipes, and then you have the benefit of the water from the eaves. This was a great ridicule against the city of Albany about twenty years ago; but Albany has reformed the evil.”
In 1799, NY Senator Burr debated the virtue of an amendment designed to prohibit naturalized citizens from obtaining elected office.
“America stood with open arms and presented an assylum [sic] to the oppressed of every nation; we invited them with the promise of enjoying equal rights with ourselves, and presented them with the flattering prospect of presiding in our councils and arriving at honour and trust; shall we deprive these persons of an important right derived from so sacred a source as our constitution[?]”
“…when a lady does me the honor to name me the father of her child, I trust I shall always be too gallant to show myself ungrateful for the favor!”
After his acquittal for treason, he lived a life of an outcast, constantly tarnished in the press and dragged through the mud. He rarely, if ever, made public statements defending himself or his actions. (He mistakenly thought his “friends” would do that for him…)
“What a lot of rascals they must be, to make war on one whom they do not know; or one who never did harm or wished harm to a human being! Yet they, perhaps, are not to be blamed, for they are influenced by what they hear.”
Closing remarks from Vice-President Aaron Burr Jr.’s farewell address to the US Senate in 1804:
“This house is a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; it is here-it is here in this exalted refuge-here, if anywhere, will be resistance made to the storms of political frenzy and the silent arts of corruption. And 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.”
Aaron Burr’s wit and wisdom live through the ages. He called it like he saw it and was a great friend of irony.
“Every man likes his own opinion best.”
“I learned in the Revolution, in the society of gentlemen, and I have since observed for myself, that a man who is guilty of intentional bad manners, is capable of crime.”
Aaron Burr Speaks 