Читать книгу Aaron Burr: A Biography - Nathan Schachner - Страница 18

Table of Contents

Burr’s thoughts, now that the ministry had been definitely set aside, turned to law. This was the other great profession to which young men of good family and education inevitably tended. And it possessed certain characteristics that must have appealed quite strongly to his particular cast of mind.

The question arose, however, as to his tutelage in the intricacies of Blackstone and Coke. Pierpont Edwards or Tapping Reeve? Both good lawyers and both relatives. His guardian, Timothy, to whom he applied for advice, was grimly resigned. The decision of his obstreperous ward had been a blow to him. It was, he answered coldly, “a matter of indifference to me. I would have you act your pleasure therein.”^[58]

Left thus abruptly to his own devices, Burr chose Tapping Reeve. There were additional attractions at Litchfield besides the tutorial capacity of his brother-in-law. Sally Reeve, for instance, his well-beloved sister. The country, moreover, was pleasant; the young ladies numerous and quite pretty. Summer was just beginning, the sap was rising, and young spirits grew animated in anticipation. It was obviously no time to commence hard and serious work among the crabbed citations of the legists. Time enough for that in the sear of autumn.

But somehow when autumn came he still dallied. For he was feeling his oats, and the process seemed good. In short, he was eighteen! The winter passed, and the spring of 1775. All through the period he conducted a gay, lively correspondence from Litchfield with his friend Ogden in Elizabethtown. It was replete with much high-spirited nonsense and numerous allusions to casual love intrigues. There was an exchange of letters, conceived in anonymity, with a certain young lady, and couched in a phraseology at once sentimental and lofty. Ogden wrote of rumors in Princeton that Aaron had finally fixed his attentions on a single girl. To which Burr retorted that no two of the gossipers could agree on the same girl as the recipient of his favors. Then there was much laughter to be made out of Uncle Thaddeus Burr’s transparent attempts to inveigle Aaron into matrimony with a young lady of fortune. Steady Matthias, himself engaged to be married, and fearing that the machinations of Uncle Thaddeus might finally involve his friend, breathed solemn warning against the proposed marriage with money unless “Love” and “Soul” were likewise involved.^[59]

An idyllic interlude! The outer world seemed completely forgotten in this interchange of youthful exuberances and preoccupations with the lovely face of the youthful god, Eros. Yet that outer world was in a turmoil. The Colonies seethed with discontent and most articulate rage. There had been Navigation Acts and Stamp Acts, Committees of Correspondence and boycotts; Samuel Adams ranged up and down the land inculcating radical ideas and more radical actions; there had been a Boston Massacre and a Boston Tea Party. Events were marching with inexorable tread toward a definite, already visible goal.

It must not be assumed from the evidence of this correspondence alone that the vast issues which embroiled their fellow men left these dallying youngsters untouched. Aaron Burr never, at any period of his life, was to commit his profoundest thoughts or inner emotions to paper. His character, for all his outward fluency, was too essentially reserved, too chary of the power of the printed word, to place himself down thus irrevocably. This it is that makes the task of Aaron Burr’s biographer such a blind groping in the dark. The facts of his life are there for all to read, but more often than not they are double-edged, susceptible of infinite doubt, because he left no clues to the inner motivations, the hidden springs which animated him; such clues as are ordinarily to be found in the unguarded or confidential letters of others.

One letter only of this period betrays an awareness of the parlous state of the times and a very definite insight into Burr’s personal reactions. By August of 1774 passions had raised to such a pitch that a Barrington mob attacked and demolished the house of a man suspected of Toryism. The sheriff arrested eight of the ringleaders “without resistance,” and brought them on to Litchfield for safekeeping. The next day fifty horsemen, armed with clubs, rode into town to rescue the prisoners. Burr sallied forth to join in the prospective fray, but, to his vast disgust, the attempt was not made, and, crowning infamy, “the above mentioned sneaks all gave bonds for their appearance, to stand a trial at the next court for committing a riot.”^[60] The young amorist was rapidly becoming a fire-eater!

He was beginning also to apply himself to the study of the law. It was high time! But his progress was rudely interrupted by the sound of guns at Lexington. The War of the Revolution had commenced!