Читать книгу Aaron Burr: A Biography - Nathan Schachner - Страница 15

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In Burr’s last year at college there occurred one of those periodic frenzies known as “revivals” in which his father, the Reverend Mr. Burr, and his grandfather, the Reverend Mr. Edwards, had rejoiced so heartily. All regular business of the college was suspended, and students and professors alike wallowed in the emotional orgy. A large number hit the sawdust trail, and looked askance at young Burr when he held aloof. He was urged to remember his father, his mother, his grandfather, the entire ministerial line of Burrs and Edwards. Somewhat shaken in his intellectual skepticism by the continual exhortations—remember he was but a lad of fifteen at the time—he consulted in some perplexity the President of the College, Dr. Witherspoon. That canny Scotchman, whose practical good sense was opposed to revivals, though not daring openly to interfere, advised him against plunging into the emotional maelstrom. The raging excitement, he told the young applicant, was purely fanatical, without contacts in true religion. Whereupon Aaron felt relieved, and, thus fortified, was able to resist the call of the herd.^[46]

Already, as a mere lad, Burr was conducting a goodly part of his correspondence in cipher; that practice which was to be maintained through life and was destined to contribute not a little to the tremendous popular clamor against him when the great “Conspiracy” unfolded. Always has this trait of secrecy and sub rosa concealments been held against Burr as pointing to certain dark and twisted convolutions in his being from which anything might be expected. But a little sane reflection should set the matter in its proper frame.

In the beginning, the practice of cipher writing may have been what has been normal to childhood in all ages. Though his friend, William Patterson, warned him almost immediately after graduation, that “the New-England people, I am told, are odd, inquisitive kind of beings, and, when pricked on by foolish curiosity, may perhaps open the letter, which I do not choose should be common to every eye.”^[47]

To a politician, however, or to any one who did not desire his mail to become public property, a cipher in that day and age was a practical necessity. The mails were not sacrosanct, the means of transportation crude, and, as Patterson pointed out, the people—elsewhere as well as in New England—curious. Ciphers were in common use among important men, just as code telegrams are universally used in business today. Time and again men like Washington and Jefferson interrupt their letters with the remark that they dare not entrust more to the insecurity of the mails, but must await a safer moment for further communication.

The students of Princeton were not exactly pampered. They were not permitted a free use of funds with which to indulge in worldly pleasures when their minds should be engrossed with the lovely symmetries of syntax and the noble proportions of ethical principles. Their spending money, given by doting parents or sterner guardians, was required to be deposited with the Treasurer of the College, and doled out by him to the necessitous student in such manner as not to cast undue temptation in his path.

When Aaron, for example, wished to visit in Philadelphia, he sent an humble chit to the purse-bearing Treasurer requesting a modest 4.10, which was happily granted.^[48] But when, on the eve of graduation, he wrote, “As the Class are to be examined the Beginning of next week and I shall be obliged to spend a considerable sum I shall be much obliged to you if you will send me by the bearer George what you think fit,” he committed a tactical error, for the Treasurer saw “fit” to send him the generous sum of four dollars!^[49]