While states like North Carolina continue to futility live in the dark ages on equality issues like gay rights, Obama has become the first sitting president in history to voice his support for same-sex marriage. While the fringe right and radio hosts have continually blasted Obama over the last four years for being so progressive, yet he waited a rather long time to “come out” about his personal feelings on same-sex marriage. Of course, they’ll no doubt blast him more now.

In any case, it was a bold move with the election looming, and one that was, perhaps, catalyzed by the vice president’s recent show of strong support for equality. That said, I don’t know that I see any negatives for Obama as it relates to the presidential campaign. The gay community in this nation, who may have been hesitant prior to this admission for his persistent silence on the issue, will most likely back him now. For Obama’s base, many of whom already support same-sex marriage, his recent comments won’t make any difference and will probably only be a positive for them.

He may have lost a few moderates or undecided votes, but really, I think, or at least hope, that most people will vote this election on the economy, foreign policy and matters of more import. I seriously see very few voters’ decisions turning on this personal admission from the president.

But back to North Carolina. Six states and D.C. now allow same-sex marriage. Even if it takes another century, I think the other states will follow suit because history shows us that even the most backward areas of the nation, which is still the South, and to a lesser extent, the Southwest (not including California) have always, however, begrudgingly, caught up with the times. This can be seen most immediately in how the South has slowly crawled into the late 20th century (I hesitate to say 21st century) on matters of race. And I say that North Carolina’s recent vote was a futile attempt to oppose gay marriage because gay marriage will happen in the South eventually; it’s just a matter of how long it takes. Older generations and their like-minded progeny will die off, while younger generations will become more accustomed to the idea of gay rights and the necessity of treating every human being, in every case and on every issue, as equal.

The problem, of course, is blind stupidity. Opponents of gay rights apparently don’t see how their opposition is analogous to previous generations’ opposition to black civil rights or women’s rights. And the issue becomes more contemptible in the cases of people like Maggie Gallagher, herself a benefactor of generations of women struggling for equal rights, who adamantly opposes gay marriage as co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage. The stupidity continues: blacks are not equal to rights. Women are not equal to men. Gays are not equal to heterosexuals. In the end, all three dichotomies will fall.

News from The Associated Press.

You know it’s been awhile when, just out of curiosity — I did this 30 seconds ago  —  you have to load your own website into the browser just to make sure you’re still up and running.

Looks like we are still live. That said, I will explain briefly the nature of this much too long hiatus. First, I moved to a different state and to a new job. As such, I wasn’t online for a good portion of that hiatus. As it turns out, AT&T’s promised “self-installation” U-verse package doesn’t quite live up to the billing. Second, and this is the real kicker, I write more, much more, at the new job. Thus, my creative energies get utilized more throughout the day rather than just for 30 minutes or an hour late at night and half-medicated on port. Third, I really enjoy Madden 12. Don’t get me wrong. I suck at it, but I have slowly been climbing my way out of the gutter. Thus, instead of being 20 games behind .500, I am now about 10 back. That’s what we call progress. Fourth, I really enjoy reading long and verbose accounts of the Civil War. And it wouldn’t much matter if I liked it or not at this point. I’m now entrenched in the 2012 office read-off, except this time, Blake and I happen to be in different offices. But I’m sure that won’t stop us from slogging our through one obscure book after another.

So, yes. I’ve been slacking off with regard to this site. Fresher posts are forthcoming. I hope. I never have quite been able to reach my goal of one or more post every single day, and I don’t know if I will. We’ll still call it a goal, but I’m afraid if I commit to it for sure, one hobby will just have to go. Did I mention I’ve been studying some calculations in order to improve my skills at Texas Hold’em? Good use of my time, I know.

To read the Personal Memoirs with a knowledge of the circumstances under which Grant wrote them is to gain insight into the reasons for his military success. — James McPherson

***

The presidency changed neither Ulysses S. Grant’s approach to leadership, nor his character. In the White House, Grant exhibited the same even-tempered ability to guide the nation through eight years of tensions after the Civil War as he did in his most important victories on the battlefield at Fort Donelson, Vicksburg and Appomattox.

His has been, perhaps, one of the most underrated presidencies in American history, as charges of cronyism have rung down through the decades, but the facts remain: Grant kept the nation from certain turmoil during one of its most volatile, postwar periods, when Nathaniel Bedford Forest’s Ku Klux Klan was attempting to wreak havoc in the South, when southern leaders simply traded one form of racial oppression for another and when America was on the brink of war with Spain. As president, Grant signed civil rights legislation, oversaw the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and set up America as an arbitrator on the world stage. After a failed third term campaign, Grant toured the world to much fanfare from Japan and China and Russia, thus serving as a kind of “coming out party” for the nation for which he had fought so nobly years earlier.

Clearly, Grant’s presidency was not without accusations of scandal. Perhaps the most famous affair was Black Friday, in which gold speculators Jay Gould and James Fisk seduced Grant’s brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, and assistant treasurer Daniel Butterfield into the action. While Grant was never directly linked to the scandal to use the government to raise the price of gold for speculative purchasing, Butterfield and Corbin were the real and unsuspecting culprits, with Gould pulling the strings in the background. With the price of gold eventually reaching a little less than $160, Harris Fahnestock of Jay Cooke and Company was among bankers wiring telegraphs to Washington calling for government intervention:

Immediate interference in this gold market is imperative. Exchange of four millions gold for bonds immediately done would change current at once. Otherwise, advance [in the price of gold] is indefinite.

Fully aware of the gravity of the situation, treasury secretary George Boutwell suggested to Grant that the government buy $3 million in gold from the New York subtreasury. In characteristic coolness, one can imagine Grant uttering this terse command:

I think you had better make it five million.

And what of Fisk and Gould? Jennie and Abel Corbin made a special trip from New York to appeal to Grant to help Corbin’s his now-suffering friends who had played too heavy a hand in their speculative ventures. Smith recounts the episode in elucidating detail:

Grant listened politely, puffed on his cigar, and then rose from his chair, cutting his brother-in-law off in mid-sentence. ‘This matter has been concluded,’ the president said. ‘I cannot open up or consider the subject.’ The United States, for the first time, had intervened massively to bring order to the marketplace. It was a watershed in the history of the American economy.

Here is Grant at his presidential best, and Smith at his authoritative best: Grant, displaying the same decisive adroitness that carried many a crucial battle in the Civil War and Smith painting a sharp image of his subject’s calm demeanor and simple logic.

In “This Mighty Scourge, ” historian James McPherson leaves it to Union general John Schofield to give the best account of the driving force behind Grant’s decisiveness under pressure:

It is one thing to describe Grant’s calmness under pressure, his ability to size up a situation quickly, and his decisiveness in action. It is quite another to explain the inner sources of these strengths. Ultimately, as Sherman noted, the explanation must remain a mystery. … Schofield noted that the most extraordinary quality of Grant’s ‘extraordinary character’ was ‘its extreme simplicity—so extreme that many have entirely overlooked it in their search for some deeply hidden secret to account for so great a character, unmindful that simplicity is one of the most prominent attributes of greatness.’ Grant made it look easy.

Grant, who left the active campaigning to others during the 1868 election, did not receive the Republican nomination for a third term. As Smith said, he was relieved, telling John Russell Young that the happiest day of his life was when he left Washington. “I felt like a boy getting out of school,” Grant said. Smith concludes the biography with the words of James Garfield:

No American has carried greater fame out of the White House than this silent man who leaves it today.

As Smith well notes, Grant wrote his memoirs while watching the clock and dying of cancer. Despite Grant’s circumstances while gathering his thoughts, historians have described the memoirs as lucid and engaging. “Action verbs predominate:,” Smith said. ‘move … engage … start … attack.:’”

Grant is generous with praise and sparing with criticism. He admits mistakes: ‘I have always regretted that last attack at Cold Harbor was made …. No advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.’

Further, McPherson wrote about Grant’s work:

To read the Personal Memoirs with a knowledge of the circumstances under which Grant wrote them is to gain insight into the reasons for his military success.

In “Grant” through Smith we see a man who seems void of most, if not all, of the contemptible qualities that we can recognize in less backboned leaders: disloyal, dishonest, fake, egotistical and pompous. For all of his accomplishments in the Civil War and in the White House, perhaps Grant can be granted a notch or two of slack for his one obvious character flaw: loyalty to a fault.

In any case, we can credit Smith for bringing the full breath of Grant’s life into crystal clear view in the most digestible, accessible biography I have ever read.

Rating:

Here is the final version of the book tower picture showing books read in 2011 from our office read-off. The photo on the right now includes “Tried By War.”

Here are eight of the books that are on the docket for this year. I’m planning to continue in Civil War and revolutionary history but also have the urge to venture a little more into literature this year. I’m especially compelled to read some of the works that Christopher Hithens has reviewed in the last five or so years, reviews that were published in his most recent collection, “Arguably.”

Books in 2012

The autobiography of William Butler Yeats: Consisting of reveries over childhood and youth, the trembling of the veil, and dramatis personae	Tom Paine: America's Godfather, 1737-1809
This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War	General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse
Nathan Bedford Forrest's Redemption	Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays: The First and Second Series
The Civil War (American Heritage Books)	Grant

“I can’t spare this man, he fights.” – Abraham LincolnIf biographers may sometimes be accused of treating their subjects with too much bias one way or the other, Jean Edward Smith may perhaps be forgiven in the case of “Grant,” the seminal work about the U.S. Civil War general who can be credited with not only, and most famously, dealing the death blow to the Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia on the eastern front, but with opening the path to Atlanta for Sherman in the west.

One can see this not-undeserved admiration for Grant in Smith’s opening to the chapter titled, “Appomattox,” in which readers learn about Grant’s revolutionary strategy to move his forces around Lee’s main line of entrenchments to the east and then south to cross the James River in an attempt to roll up the Confederacy’s right flank.

In December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, General George Patton broke contact with the enemy to his front, wheeled 90 degrees north, and took the Third Army on a forced march parallel to the line of battle to extricate the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. It was a perilous maneuver and an incredible tactical achievement, and it in no way diminishes Patton’s accomplishment to say that it pales alongside Grant’s withdrawal from Cold Harbor and his crossing of the James in June 1864.

One reason that Smith said it paled in comparison to Grant’s maneuver is likely because the blue coats did it some 80 years before Patton in a far less technologically advanced military era. Grant’s plan was also an extremely risky one. Had Lee moved against Grant as the latter’s forces headed southward, Lee could have nipped at Grant’s heels and took apart Federal troops piecemeal. Lee could not have anticipated what Grant was up to, however, and the Army of the Potomac successfully made it to the James.

This critical point in the eastern campaign, and one that would ultimately decide the outcome of the entire war and save the Union was indicative of Grant’s abilities on the field of battle. Fearless, cool under pressure and relentlessly fixated on the offensive, the general deserves our admiration as a commander exactly because he was a foil to the rather lifeless and immovable likes of McClellan, McDowell and Hooker. “Fightin Joe” Hooker, McClellan and Grant’s other predecessors were mostly failures with only intermittent successes in the east. Only until Grant arrived from the west did Lincoln know that he had a general who would at long last put the fight to Lee. And fight he did. The brutality with which Grant and Lee hit each other in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania and at Cold Harbor is hard to overstate. By that point in the war, both Grant and Lincoln knew that nothing short of all-out war would defeat Lee’s forces, and Grant said in 1864 that

I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.

Smith not only captures Grant’s adeptness in the field and his humble presentation — Grant could rarely be distinguished by his dress from his subordinates — but also the chilling scenes that greeted combatants on both sides that took place in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania. “The slaughter was unrelenting,” Smith said about the battlefield at Spotsylvania:

So too was the rain, turning trench floors into an oozy much where the dead and the wounded were trampled out of sight by men fighting for their lives.

This was the world in which Grant so unflinchingly operated, and this is the world and the life of the man Smith recalls with engaging lucidity and detail. I am as yet a little more than halfway through the work, but if it ends as it began, Smith’s “Grant” may go down as one of the most accessible and enjoyable histories I have ever read. On Grant, it is already the most significant.

OK, so I don’t have an exact page count for both of us — we both teetered out a little toward the end of the year  — but in the office read-off between Blake and myself, we completed somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,500 pages apiece totaling 21 books each. Without further adieu, here are our towers side by side in the order with which we completed them (books on the bottom were read near the beginning of 2011):

My tower on the right is missing “Tried By War” by McPherson because a pal of ours is currently reading it. And to answer the most immediate question that may surface about this post: yes, judging from the rather dense material above, we’ve got problems.

In any case, here is my list for 2011:

- “Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1920″ – Gillis Harp – 264
- “Letter to a Christian Nation” – Sam Harris (reread) – 114
- “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights” – David S. Reynolds – 592
- “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho – 165
- “Middlemarch: A study of Provincial Life” by George Eliot – 794
- “1491″ – 403
- “Thomas Jefferson Vs. Religious Oppression” – 150
- “Night” by Elie Weisel – 120
- “1421: The Year China Discovered America” by Gaven Menzies – 491, finished in spring
- “From Sea to Shining Sea: From the War of 1812 to the Mexican War, the Saga of America’s Expansion” by Robert Leckie – 623, finished in late spring
- “The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson” by Charles B. Sanford – 179, finished in summer
- “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” by James McPherson – 384, finished in summer
- “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South” by Albert Raboteau – 321, finished in summer
- “Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society” by John Andrew III – 199, finished in august
- “Union 1812: The Americans who Fought the Second War of Independence” by A.J. Langguth – 409, finished 9/7/11 = 5208
- “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788″ by Pauline Maier – 489, finished 10/2/11 = 5697
- “The Federalist Papers” by Madison, Hamilton and Jay – 527, finished 10/30/11 = 6224
- “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism” by Susan Jacoby – 370
- “The Theory of the Leisure Class” by Thorstein Veblen – 400 = 6994
- “Erewhon” by Samuel Butler – 260
- “The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the Constitution 1781-1788″ by Jackson Turner Main – 286 = 7540 (21 books)

I nominate “Ratification” as the de facto best book that I’ve read this year, with “From Sea to Shining Sea” coming in second and “Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society” at a close third. My personal favorite was “John Brown: Abolitionist,” and my proudest achievement this year would be, of course, “Middlemarch.” Shew. Looks like I’ll have to bring out the heavy guns this year to top that. Maybe some Edward Gibbon is in order.

In the waning minutes of another year, I highlight the top 20 posts on this site from 2011:

• Jan. 5: Movie review: ‘Agora’ - “Given how beautiful and reasonably-minded Hypatia is thought to have been, I felt intense anger at the end of this film that such a smart and lovely creature had to endure such a hideous death by people who thought they had God on their side. And more than that, the feeling was tinged with the thought that she probably died in real life by a much worse means than suffocation and also that countless women were burned and hung or stoned as witches because of religion and ignorance. That’s not fiction.”
• Jan. 12: Harris on the Ten Commandments - “The need to dismiss religion in polite society still and unrelentingly presses upon us as a species, and this will continue as long as man fails to, in turn, dismiss his fear of death and the dark. “
• Feb. 12: Camus: ‘The point is to live’ - “So, like Sisyphus, in a moment that would shake most anyone to utter despair, Mersault is happy. And here is the consummation for Mersault and for the “Return to Tipasa” quote: Mersault had lived. He had experienced good times and bad, but in both, he found peace.”
• March 6: Why moderate religion is more bankrupt than fundamentalism - “Many, even myself, wholeheartedly agree that “love wins.” Some just don’t feel the need to summon God to make it so. As it turns out, love wins every day without him.”
• March 11: On the genesis of life - “Perhaps every theist agrees that there is an appearance of a design, but when I consider the vast number of failed planets and potential planets in our universe through the eons, the likelihood of a planet like ours eventually arising seems quite high, and in some 12-14 billion years, so high that we should be surprised if such a planet had not eventually formed. We live in that eventuality.”
• April 16: The gospel untruth – “It is, of course, within one’s right to believe something based on scant evidence and from a book steeped in contradictions, faulty science and math, bare bones textual evidence and stunningly primitive ethical codes. Some happily do, and all the better for them. … But even a cursory look at the case for the gospels reminds the rest of us that while Easter eggs, candy, and springtime offer nice pleasantries this time of year, the religious element ever behind the upcoming holiday was built, glorified and crowned on a now teetering house of cards.”
• May 2: 10 basic questions for believers (with sub-questions) – “What kind of loving father demands you love him or face the fire if you don’t? What kind of loving father demands you pass spiritual tests (Job, Abraham) to show your devotion?”
• May 13: Book review: ‘Night’ and the problem of evil – “No book that I have ever read brings these questions to the forefront with such brutal honesty. And I think it may be for that reason that The Times used the words “terrifying power” to describe this short, but seismic cattle car ride through the bowels of man’s darkest hour.”
• June 22: Jefferson’s religion - “To say Jefferson was a Christian in the modern sense of the word, that is, that Jesus was God incarnate, rose from the dead on the third day and will judge mankind on the last day, would be a false statement to make any way you slice it. He was a Christian in this sense only: he argued that to be literally “Christ-like” (the meaning of the word itself) was the highest moral height a person could reach, and that is all. Of everything else modern Christians believe about Jesus, Jefferson rejected without compunction, and this is clear from his letters and correspondence. In the modern sense of the word, Jefferson would not be a Christian and would be bound for eternal fire based on the doctrine of today’s Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Church of Gods and Calvinists.”
• June 30: Book review: ‘Tried by War’ – “Unlike other Lincoln biographies, which typically focus on his stance and political efforts to abolish slavery, his assassination, his humble upbringings and other topics, few, as McPherson points out, have delved specifically into Lincoln’s role as commander in chief.”
• July 3: Response to a recent letter to the editor – “And speaking of snakes, the Bible, with its differing accounts of man’s creation in the Garden, the variant steps by which the universe was made and contradictory details about Noah’s Ark, the Ten Commandments, Christ and, indeed, the very nature of God, the good book does a fine job of disproving itself and provides not even the hint of a “reasonable explanation.”
• Aug. 21: Book review: ‘Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society’ – “The conservative voice, often toeing the religious line, hostile to teaching evolution in the classroom, friendly to interests of corporations and investment bankers, hostile to the interests of minorities and the poor and hostile to change, is too strong in this nation, while the progressive voice, the only voice that demonstrably moves people toward ultimate utilitarianism, is too weak.”
• Sept. 13: Gene therapy to treat cancer - “…  it’s hard to overstate how important research into cell modification, gene therapy and stem cell research could be in treating and curing some of the most destruction diseases of our time, from Lou Gehrig’s, to cancer, immune deficiencies, Parkinson’s and others, yet, most of the evangelical people in this nation are worried about protecting the interests of clusters of undifferentiated cells.”
• Sept. 25: Biblical deconstruction I: In exordium – “The Bible, as much and probably more so than the Koran (since the Bible is older), has been the central cause of more human suffering and misery than I care to contemplate. God himself, if he existed, would be on the hook for at least 2.476 million people, not counting the flood, first-born Egyptians killed, etc. Thousands of his followers have millions more on their hands, from the Crusades, to Native Americans, to Africans dying from not having access to condoms (thanks to the Catholic church), to the Salem Witch Trials, to … it goes on.”
• Sept. 29: Biblical deconstruction II: the garden – “Last, how moral is it that the crimes of a person from, say, the 18th century, be used to convict and imprison someone living in 2011? Yet, the errant choice of two people forever impacts the lives (and apparently the afterlifes) of every single person who has or who ever will live simply because a god in an ancient text penned by superstitious society in Palestine deems it so. Yet still, God doesn’t seem very interested in the “sins” of millions of blasphemers and worshipers of other gods that followed Adam and Eve, except of course, in the pages of the Bible. As it happens, the world outside of the Bible, the only world that matters, hasn’t heard a peep from Big Brother.”
• Oct. 5: Biblical deconstruction III: Cain and Abel – “If God, then, is the author of reason, reason itself must be modified to also include murderous, barbarous, cruel and sadistic, scheming, as well as capriciousness, which is actually one of his least offensive attributes.”
•  Oct. 8: Real inspiration – “Religious folks talk a lot about spiritual inspiration. Well, how about inspiration, made possible by science, that brings a deaf woman to tears?”
• Nov. 20: No, this is not a spoof - “Has the electorate mindset shifted so much that a former establishment politician like Gingrich has to change is tone and amplify his speech to have a chance in 2012?”
• Nov. 30: On Butler’s ‘Erewhon’ – “All things considered, then, the entire text of the book is basically a business proposal that includes some proselytizing ruminations, and hidden behind the plot is Butler’s own cunning way of dicing up elements of Victorian life with the satirical knife edge.”
•  Dec. 23: Josephus and the historical Jesus – “Article 3 is obviously the passage that Christians pull out of context and attempt to claim this is evidence for Jesus outside of scripture. First, an observing Jew would not admit that Jesus was the Christ, much less make laudatory comments about him like: there were “ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him.”

Perhaps no figure in American Revolutionary history has been the victim of vilification more than former U.S. vice president and New York senator, Aaron Burr.

And for some, with good reason. He was, after all, the man who shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, the heralded Federalist who was one of the most outspoken backers of the U.S. Constitution, supported the creation of a national bank and served as secretary of the treasury under George Washington. In his time, no one eclipsed Hamilton in economic and political influence in colonial and post-colonial America. And this brilliant thinker and fellow founder fell to Burr’s bullet in the famous duel in Weehawken, New Jersey.

Even to casual readers of American history, to mention the name of Aaron Burr is to conjure words such as “traitor” and “secessionist.” But is this an adequate picture of the man, or has history done Burr’s legacy a disservice?

Nancy Isenberg in “Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr,” brings this enlightened and progressive man’s life back into view, without — this time — the unsubstantiated claims that have marred nearly every account of Burr up until now. Even modern biographies such as 2005′s “Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernow have largely perpetuated the worst view of Burr, that he held no set of political ideas worth pursuing, that he was an opportunist of the highest degree and that he was sexually frivolous.

While the latter charge is most certainly true, the other two are rather spurious. Tracing the steps of Hamilton’s widow from her life some 45 years after Hamilton’s death, Chernow claims in his prologue that Burr had:

… fired a moral shot at her husband, Alexander Hamilton, in a misbegotten effort to remove the man Burr regarded as the main impediment to the advancement of his career.

This is a dubious claim at best. Sure, Burr possessed his own political ambition, and it’s true that Hamilton and Burr were on different political spectra, but the simple reason behind the duel was Hamilton’s refusal to make an apology stemming from a statement, recorded by Charles Cooper, that Hamilton:

…has come out decidedly against Burr; indeed when he was here he spoke of him as a dangerous man, and who ought not to be trusted.

This was not an isolated statement from Hamilton against Burr’s character, but only one of any many denigrations Hamilton had made about Burr in the lead-up to the duel. This one, for Burr however, necessitated that the two settle their differences under the code duello. Had Hamilton apologized or recanted the statement, admitting that he had gone too far in his criticism of Burr, the duel probably never would have happened. Later in life, Burr admitted that

Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.

In any case, Burr penned an apology dated June 25, 1804 in which he requested Hamilton sign. Hamilton would not, and in a statement written between June 27-July 4, a day before the duel in New Jersey, said:

… it is possible that I may have injured Col Burr, however convinced myself that my opinions and declarations have been well founded, as from my general principles and temper in relation to similar affairs – I have resolved, if our interview is conducted in the usual manner,and it pleases God to give me the opportunity, to reserve and throw away my first fire, and I have thought even of reserving my second fire – and thus giving a double opportunity to Col Burr to pause and reflect.

It is not however my intention to enter into any explanations on the ground. Apology, from principle I hope, rather than Pride, is out of the question.

None of this admits that Burr entered upon the duel to protect his own political career. He was doing just fine for himself at that time in his career. He was vice president of the nation and a gifted lawyer, after all. Rather, it was the other way around. Certainly, Hamilton would have liked to have avoided a duel if he could have, but he was outspoken to a fault, as Chernow admits, and would not retract his comments about Burr. More likely is the case that — and Isenberg makes this point concretely — Hamilton, Jefferson and other political adversaries felt threatened by Burr. The only difference is that whereas Chernow links Burr’s challenge of a duel to his ambition, Isenberg does not, and in my opinion, it is the latter that stands on the right side of history in this particular case. Dueling was a common way to settle scores in those days (It was illegal in New York, and that is why the two traveled to New Jersey), and Burr, amid waves upon waves of Hamilton’s slash and burn hack campaign against him, he had had enough. Political ambition had little, if anything, to do with it.

Chernow makes another point about Burr that seems historically dishonest. He attempts to make the case that Burr did not leave behind any substantial documents that relate his political ideas, and Chernow questions why some consider Burr a founder in the first place. He says that while Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams and other left behind thick and voluminous volumes, “packed with profound ruminations,” only two volumes exist of Burr’s writings. This is certainly true, but unlike some of the other founders, Burr had few living relatives in which to preserve his writings. His intelligent wife, Theodosia, died young; so did his daughter of the same name. Both were women of the enlightenment and carried their studies as far as their sex would take them at the time. Burr was more progressive than any of the founders, and he instilled, with the help of Theodosia the elder, the forward-thinking and high-minded ideals of Mary Wolstencraft and Jean-Jacques Rousseau into the younger Theodosia’s studies. The younger Theodosia, as it happens, disappeared after setting sail on the Patriot ship from Georgetown, S.C. The most common theory is that the schooner was captured by pirates, but in effect, no one knows what happened to Theodosia Burr Alston. The important point is that Burr outlived all of his immediate relatives and few, if any, were left to collect and carry on his legacy. All we are left with, as for Burr’s first-hand writings, are, unfortunately, the dregs, with a few exceptions, as Isenberg highlights.

Isenberg also makes a full account of Burr’s treason trial and his supposed conspiracy to create a new republic, separate from the United States, along with a portion of what was then called the “Southwest.” In reality, however, Burr’s schemes did not include any sort of separatist movement against the U.S., rather, he made plans to expand U.S. territory into Spanish Florida and Mexico (i.e. Manifest Destiny). Probably because he killed Hamilton and because of the political enemies he had made in Washington and elsewhere, many were suspicious of him, and it was actually Jefferson who had Burr arrested and indicted on a charge of treason. Jefferson was so cocksure of Burr’s guilt, and without any apparent reason, other than what he read in the obviously biased newspapers of the day. For all of Jefferson’s acumen in nearly every other subject that matters, I find it hard to rectify his headstrong determination to destroy Burr despite lack of any concrete evidence. Needless to say, no evidence was forthcoming in the actual treason trial because there was no evidence, and Burr was spared his life. But certainly not his political legacy.

Following the trial and still dogged by his detractors, he fled to Europe, suffered some unsuccessful ventures there and eventually returned to the U.S. in 1812 under the name, “Edwards,” which was probably a nod to his grandfather, Jonathan Edwards, and his uncle, Timothy Edwards, the latter of whom helped raise him as a boy.

With Isenberg’s book, readers will get a fuller and more balanced account of Burr’s life than, to my knowledge, has ever been written. Unlike Chernow and many others who have written about Burr, she does not push aside or ignore or fail to investigate the questionable sides of Burr’s character in order to inflate the good. In “Fallen Founder,” readers will be refreshed to read an unfiltered account of the former vice president, with his sexual exploits, filibustering schemes and progressive political ideas about women’s rights and other topics of import intact. One warning here: she is not kind to Hamilton at all. Rightly so? I’m not sure. Of course, we can reward Hamilton with the titles of being a brilliant political thinker and founder. But for whatever reason, he was obsessed with destroying Burr, and seemed to have personal, and more than just political reasons, as his motivation.

In the end and ironically, Burr turned the trump card, not only “winning” the duel against his most fire-penned adversary, but outliving nearly all of his former detractors at the ripe age of 81.
Rating:

Currently listening to audio book titled, “Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr” by Nancy Isenberg, I have become quite interested in the historical legacy — or lack thereof — that has been painted about Burr in the 175 years following his death. Lay people mostly know of Burr by only one facet of his life: as the killer of the more famous founder, Alexander Hamilton, in a duel on the banks of the Hudson River. More inquisitive readers may also equate Burr as a possible traitor to his country, since he later in life was arrested on charges of treason for supposedly wanting to establish some type of exo-United States colony in parts of the Louisiana Territory.

I have yet to reach the halfway point of the audio book (It’s quite lengthy), but Isenberg presents compelling evidence that much of what we know about Burr has been tarred by the biographical accounts that were biased to say the least, not the least of which came from Hamilton himself, who was Burr’s political adversary for much of their careers. To add insult to injury, Burr had few if any relatives to write glowing, or at least less scathing, accounts of his life, while luminaries like Hamilton had legions of able and eager biographers. Now, I’m a fan of Hamilton to the hilt. No one can deny his brilliance. But Burr, seemingly unwilling to play the often “political” role of ass kisser simply for the point of winning friends, presents admirable qualities in my book.

In any case, we have enough evidence at this point, and Isenberg does a good job of presenting much of it, that Burr has been dealt a bad hand by history. John Trumball, the painter perhaps most famous for his depiction of the presentation of the Declaration of Independence to members of Congress, deserves his fair measure of the blame for his painting of the tense moments during the Siege of Quebec, pictured here:

In the siege, colonial troops approach fortifications at Quebec only to come upon heavy fire and get mowed down by Canadian troops defending the city amid a snow storm. The painting actually shows Burr’s good friend, Matthias Ogdon, holding the dead general in his arms, when, in fact, the person holding Montgomery was Burr himself.

Ogdon, as it happens, was in Benedict Arnold’s column, not Montgomery’s. Later commentators have said that Burr actually went back to try to rescue the fallen general in the snow, but this may be an impractical theory, since Montgomery was physically larger than Burr and Burr would have surely had a difficult time hauling the general back to camp, especially since he would have been within the enemy’s line of sight while attempting to life the general on his shoulders. The official British stance is that Montgomery’s body was recovered the next day buried in the snow in the fetal position with one arm above the snow. This does seem to indicate that someone may have tried to rescue Montgomery’s body, but whether that someone was Burr is unknown. I’m inclined to believe the official British record.

In any case, this an interesting topic for inquiry, and perhaps I’ll write a fuller review once I finish the audio book.

For further reading, Here is some helpful information on Trumball’s apparent cover-up of Burr’s involvement in the siege. Even more background here.