Читать книгу Aaron Burr: A Biography - Nathan Schachner - Страница 14

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It is from his college days on that the legends begin to cluster thick and furiously around the name of Aaron Burr. Probably of no one else in American history are there more unsupported, and unsupportable, tales in circulation. Some are innocuous; others, superimposed upon the known reserve of his life in those days when his name was already a hissing and a scorn in the mouths of the generalty, were tinctured with retrospective venom. The biographer must perforce tread warily among these fragile tales.

It is recorded that he played at billiards in the tavern and won thereby a certain small sum of money. This, it is said, so shocked the young man’s conscience that he forthwith swore off all games of chance for stakes, and held strictly to his resolution through life.^[41] But his Journal, that extraordinary account of his Continental journeyings, records on at least two occasions that he played cards—and for money. Once even, when literally starving, and without a sou in his pocket, he took the desperate chance and emerged “in possession of cash to the amount of 60 sous.”^[42]

Another legend is not so innocuous. It was the forerunner of a whole battalion of similar tales, all purporting to prove Aaron Burr a rake, a seducer, a scoundrel, a man without morals and without principles, wholly unfit to be invited into any decent man’s home. Though, on analysis, not one of these infamous stories has emerged intact, yet a good deal of the spattering mire has managed to cling to his name down to this very day, with results that are obvious to the most casual observer.

This earliest canard was the touching story of the Lonely Grave. Catherine Bullock, so it went, a young lady of Princeton, was basely seduced by young Burr and as callously abandoned. In despair she committed suicide, and, as an eternal reproach to her betrayer, her outcast body was buried on the site of President Burr’s house, where it still reposes in solitary judgment.

The facts, however, are quite at variance with this dark tale of passion and tragedy. She, it seems, was the niece of Colonel George Morgan, at whose home she was visiting from Philadelphia in a vain attempt to be cured of a tubercular condition. She died undramatically and quite correctly of that disease in the year, marked on her gravestone for all to see, 1792. Aaron Burr graduated from Princeton in 1772, just twenty years before. Actually, the “lonely grave” had been cut off from its respectable mates in the old Morgan burial-ground by the prosaic interposition of a new highway. Nor was the site ever the place of the house of President Burr.^[43]

Of Aaron Burr’s college compositions, several have been preserved for posterity, but they prove to be but the usual academic effusions on set topics that are always the delight of professors and the despair of students. Consider the subject matter. An Essay on Style, in which the youthful essayist condemns the “laboured ornaments of language, the round period, or the studied epithet,” and justly, if platitudinously, proclaims that “there never was a ready speaker, whose language was not, generally, plain and simple.”^[44] He wrote also on Honor, on the Passions, on An Attempt to Search the Origin of Idolatry, and on Dancing. No sign anywhere of the literary art or the authentic fire. But then Burr was never to blossom into the literary life!

In his junior year he won first prize for “reading the English language with propriety, and answering questions on Orthography,” and second prize for “reading the Latin and Greek languages with propriety.”^[45]