Читать книгу Aaron Burr: A Biography - Nathan Schachner - Страница 49

Table of Contents

In the meantime the prospects were fair and the skies unclouded. Burr wound up his duties as Attorney General and put his personal affairs in order. Theodosia admonished him anxiously that “it is ... of serious consequence to you, to establish your health before you commence politician; when once you get engaged, your industry will exceed your strength; your pride cause you to forget yourself.”^[186]

Congress then met in Philadelphia, and Burr established himself in that city of Quakers, politicians and financiers sometime in October, 1791. He found lodgings in a house “inhabited by two widows. The mother about seventy, and the daughter about fifty.... The old lady is deaf, and upon my [Burr’s] first coming to take possession of my lodgings, she with great civility requested that I would never attempt to speak to her, for fear of injuring my lungs without being able to make her hear. I shall faithfully obey this injunction.”^[187]

The Second Congress of the United States opened on October 24, 1791. The First Congress had been the scene of much tumultuous debate, of the forging of a new nation. Hamilton had pushed his schemes for assumption of State debts, for payment of all governmental securities at par, for a National Bank, through Houses that were divided almost equally into enthusiastic supporters and bitter opponents. The great measures of government had been passed. President Washington heaved a sigh of relief and Hamilton permitted himself to relax. The Second Congress was a period of comparative quiet, of marking time. Within its halls parties had not yet fully crystallized. The loose appellations of Federalist and anti-Federalist still held their original meaning, based as they were on the Constitutional fight of 1787. Actually Congress voted on the basis of approval or disapproval of Hamilton’s operations. Within a few years, however, as the depression that commenced in 1792 deepened, the issues were more baldly stated, and party lines became fixed and unalterable.

Already the fight between Jefferson and Hamilton in the Cabinet had assumed the stage of a dangerous, if smoldering, fire. Hamilton’s principles had been definitely and logically formulated. Jefferson’s, if still a trifle inchoate, were steadily crystallizing. The great planting interests of the South had nothing in common with the mercantile, bond-holding classes of the North. Virginia led the Southern States, Massachusetts those of the North. The South could not hope to make successful headway on its own; it was therefore necessary to seek alliances.

Accordingly, in the summer of 1791, Jefferson and Madison made a leisurely trip through New York, ostensibly on a botanizing excursion. But apparently, as S. E. Morison has felicitously put it, they were in search of a certain rare plant, the Clintonia-borealis. They saw George Clinton—quite casually, of course—they met the Livingstons, who had just given Philip Schuyler his coup de grâce; and they spoke to Aaron Burr. An understanding was arranged—the beginning of the political alliance of New York and Virginia—that was to ripen slowly and bear considerable fruit.

Burr threw himself into his new duties with unremitting energy. He now saw clearly the path ahead. Law was to be discarded in favor of politics as the ultimate career. He was too keenly analytical and appraising to hold any particular illusions about the matter. He was not swayed by violent hatreds or dogmas; he did not believe that political opponents were necessarily rascals. In an era when invective and diatribe were almost the sole political arguments, he was amazingly urbane and courteous. He ran neither with the hares nor with the hounds, nor suffered himself to be overwhelmed and blinded by party passions and prejudices. He considered the exercise of public office in the nature of a career, even as the “careerists” in the British civil offices consider it to this day. It was a life-work, not as lucrative as the law perhaps, but offering its own peculiar rewards in the feeling of power, of satisfied ambition, of the efficient smoothness of geared wheels to be set in operation, of public service even. In short, politics was a profession, and Burr determined to treat it as such.

It was this attitude which set Burr apart from the others of his time, and made him an enigma to them and to the following generations as well. It was too cool-headed, too analytical an attitude. They could not understand his complete objectivity, his utter contempt for the innumerable dogmas that aroused the emotions and clouded sheer reasonableness, his steady, unswerving, unhurried movement toward a clearly developed objective. They were amateurs in politics—even Jefferson, Hamilton, John Adams, Madison and the rest. Amateurs, that is, in the sense that politics was not their life-work, a science to be studied calmly and mapped in accordance with certain intellectual rules. To them it was an avocation, something inextricably involved with their passions and instinctive economic reactions. They theorized, and philosophized, and rationalized what they did with subtle generalizations. Burr never generalized. Each political problem stood on its own feet. He studied it unemotionally, determined on the appropriate means to secure the desired end, and unhesitatingly put them into motion.

Not that Jefferson or Hamilton or the others were not practical politicians. They were, and immensely skilful at the job indeed. The distinction is one between practical and professional. Burr was the latter. The term has now, and had then, certain vaguely distasteful connotations. There is no reason for this, any more than its use in any other field. The political field requires skill, training and the development of orderly technique, even as the law or engineering or medicine. Other nations have recognized this simple principle; America perhaps has not even yet.

But Burr was a new phenomenon on the American scene. His contemporaries did not understand him; there is no clear understanding of him today. He fought political battles as he fought law suits, as he had disposed of his forces in war—as though they were problems in chess, intellectual exercises. In a day when party passions reached an unbelievable pitch, when pamphlets and the press frothed at the mouth, when physical warfare threatened, Burr rode serenely above the storm, appraising, marshaling his forces, hewing to a predetermined line. It accounts in great part for his brilliant upswing; it accounts in still greater part for his abrupt downfall. His own associates were uneasy, distrustful of him, instinctively hostile to his methods, though employed on their behalf. They preferred the bludgeon to the rapier; they preferred the ecstasy of aroused emotion to the smooth working of a geared and irresistible machine. Burr was a portent of a new force in American politics and they did not like it. They feared what they could not fathom; they sensed a danger to their own positions in his Old World urbanity and polish.

Yet though Burr was admittedly ambitious—which is no crime—and though he treated politics as an intellectual exercise, he was an immensely valuable force in the growing nation. The whole Jeffersonian campaign pivoted on his tactics; admittedly the agrarian revolt would not have triumphed when it did had it not been for him. Now that he had entered politics as a definite field of endeavor, he was on the side of the masses, of the popular discontent. Yet it must not be conceived that this was a matter of demagoguery.

He was as far removed from the demagogic as it was possible to be; he disdained exhortations, tub-thumpings, appeals to the emotions; he disdained even to defend himself when attacked in personal terms. Essentially his was an aristocratic nature, whose ideal was the Chesterfieldian gentleman, reserved, impenetrable, proud. Nor was the popular side necessarily the vote-getting side. The masses were disfranchised, inarticulate at the ballot-box. The property qualifications saw to that. New York State, his own bailiwick, in 1789 had a population of 324,270, yet the voters numbered only 12,353. The rest of the country followed the same general proportions. And this handful of the electorate comprised the men of means, of property, of respectability, the men who inevitably were conservative and chary on behalf of their vested interests. They would naturally—in most sections—gravitate to the party of Federalism.

Burr’s choice of Republicanism must then be laid to an intellectual conviction, not to motives of personal interest. He could have gone as far, perhaps even farther, as an avowed Federalist. Most of his friends were of that persuasion—Robert Troup, Judge Yates, William Patterson, Jonathan Dayton. The ever-present fear that Burr might some day turn suddenly and wrest the scepter of supremacy from his hands may have had considerable to do with Hamilton’s persistent sniping.

Burr was the true aristocratic liberal. He followed the fortunes of the French Revolution with enthusiastic admiration and careful analysis, a combination that only he could compass. “From an attentive perusal of the French Constitution, and a careful examination of their proceedings,” he wrote, “I am a warm admirer of the Essential parts of the plan of government which they have instituted, and of the talents and disinterestedness of the members of the National Assembly.”^[188] To this admiration he steadily adhered. In later life he became a student and ardent disciple of Jeremy Bentham, the great English economist and liberal. He helped disseminate Bentham’s ideas in America, and sought his close friendship when in exile. His was the Continental spirit. In Europe he had his fellows; in America at this time he was alone. Therein was his strength and his tragedy.