Let it be said at the outset that James Lewis’s The Burr Conspiracy is a superb work of contemporary historical craftsmanship. The question for everyone interested in its subject is how to understand it.
Ostensibly, that subject is the supposed conspiracy cooked up by Aaron Burr and some others to sever, so it was alleged, the southwestern part of the United States from the rest of the union in the first decade of the 19th century. The trouble is that, as Burr’s biographers and historians of the era have long concluded, there’s not enough evidence, and probably never will be, to know precisely what, if anything, took place in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys in 1805 and 1806. That in turn means that there is little justification for yet another book on the purported Burr “conspiracy,” a term that has stuck despite Burr’s defenders’ efforts to prove him guiltless of anything more than bad judgment.
Accordingly, James Lewis wisely forgoes trying to give us a new book on the conspiracy. But then what’s a gifted, deeply knowledgeable, evidence-digging historian like him to do instead? One option is simply to turn to an entirely different subject—but then we wouldn’t have this book. So there’s another option: He can stick with his subject by examining what contemporaries thought about the conspiracy that seemed to be unfolding in the southwest rather than by writing about the conspiracy itself. Perhaps this will tell us something new about the crisis. It does.
Lewis’s approach—”focusing more on the crisis and on the efforts to make sense of the conspiracy rather than on the conspiracy itself”—is very much in keeping with current historiographical trends and all very postmodern: You keep events at arm’s length and instead examine how contemporaries reacted to them. Your focus is not on what happened but on events, whether real or supposed, experienced as “texts” that people “read” in different ways. You use events as psychologists use a Rorschach test—to tease out an era’s cultural and political realities.
For all the brickbats thrown at a method drawn from Continental theory and literary studies, in Lewis’s hands this history of what he fittingly calls “sensemaking” is deeply illuminating. It reveals as much about the realities of the early republic as any account that’s limited to the passage of events. In many respects, it reveals more. It does so with a bravura display of the newest kind of political history, the history of “political culture,” of the general context in which politics takes place. It’s a kind of history being practiced nowhere better than in the history of the early nation.
The main figure of the tale, Aaron Burr, was known to contemporaries as a brilliant politician. Historians consider him the first professional politician on the national scene. Grandson of the great theologian Jonathan Edwards, son of a president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), himself a graduate of that institution, and an attorney, Burr was a member of the early nation’s elite. After a distinguished military career during the revolution, he entered politics and carried New York state for Thomas Jefferson in two presidential contests, those of 1796 and 1800. In 1801, already considered by many to be untrustworthy, a womanizer, and lacking the public virtue of a truly disinterested patriot, Burr squandered much of his residual appeal by failing to stand aside during that year’s Electoral College tie in favor of Thomas Jefferson, who became president only after the House of Representatives broke the tie in a marathon series of votes. Then, while serving as Jefferson’s vice president, Burr fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in their celebrated 1804 duel at Weehawken. It was after Burr left office in 1805 that the final notorious set of events of his public life unrolled.
Burr had leased land in the part of the Louisiana Territory that eventually became the state of Louisiana. Journeying through the Ohio Valley toward his holdings in 1805, he probably saw the wisdom of trying to protect them in the event that Spain warred against the United States to regain the Louisiana Territory, the great landmass that France, having earlier bought it from Spain, had ceded to Jefferson’s administration in 1803. Gathering a group of armed men around him, he set out for the southwest—up to what we still don’t know.
The trouble was that among those in on his plans was James Wilkinson, governor of the Louisiana Territory, commander of American forces at New Orleans, a man then in the pay of Spain, and by wide agreement one of the most notorious scoundrels in American history. Whatever Burr’s scheme was or was said to be, Wilkinson, seeking as usual his own advantage, betrayed it to President Jefferson who, fearing the nation’s breakup, ordered Burr’s arrest. Hauled back east after trying to flee, Burr stood trial for treason in Richmond in 1807. Acquitted of the charge in a federal court presided over by none other than Chief Justice John Marshall, Burr—now “Catiline” to his detractors—fled to Europe, his career and reputation in tatters.
Burr’s actions drew in most of the leading figures and opinion-makers of the day. None of them emerged from the affair without political and personal wounds. Even today, none of them is free from suspicion of having acted to hide the truth, gain political and ideological advantage, and protect his reputation. The conspiracy had a happy outcome for none of them.
While Lewis weaves the necessary details of all this throughout his long book, his interest lies elsewhere. In a display of exhaustive research into every conceivable remaining written and published source, an effort that took him 20 years, he examines how contemporaries learned about, reported, and tried to understand a set of events that seemed dizzying to them all.
That takes him into the day’s postal system and the spread of information, how Jefferson and others tried to spin the story to their benefit, and how people made sense of competing accounts, decided who could be believed, and distinguished honesty from skullduggery. He takes readers into how contemporaries struggled, as historians still do, to figure out the veracity of conflicting reports of events, to decide whether Marshall’s acquittal of Burr was warranted, even the way in which people argued over how Burr should be treated socially during his trial in Richmond.
Little escapes Lewis’s gaze—but he must leave readers to decide the most freighted question of all: whether, as so many then believed, the republic was in peril of disunion. Not even Lewis can figure that out.
In the end, the author joins every other historian who has tried to unravel the affair by throwing his hands in the air in the face of “a mass of incomplete, incompatible, and even incredible assertions and explanations” in the surviving sources. In this, he joins the great historian Henry Adams, who gave up on publishing a book about Burr and the conspiracy after losing confidence that he could understand either.
Yet even if warranted, giving up is not a conclusion that brings things satisfactorily to a close. It offends the canons and aesthetics of tale-telling. It leaves us hanging. We want a rounding out, not just a mystery. So what’s a reader to do? Isn’t there more to say, even more to be learned from the book?
An era reveals itself most clearly in its fears and fractures, not in its areas of concord. We see through Lewis’s book how early-19th-century Americans were deeply concerned about their nation’s integrity and about what constituted honorable conduct in their public officials. The Burr conspiracy crisis brought their fears about both to the surface. Only 30 years after its birth, the United States, the world’s first constitutional republic, seemed threatened by secession—and by secession at the hands of someone who had endangered Jefferson’s election to the presidency, as vice president had killed Hamilton, and now stood accused of treason, the greatest civic dishonor.
Should we wonder that what was reported and debated throughout the union was a kind of screen on which the nation’s anxieties were projected and amplified? Read from this vantage, the tale of what Burr and the strange company of his accomplices were said to be attempting is what makes the book so important. It unveils the complex social and cultural ecosystem of early American public life.
But what more is in it for the general reader of history? Not, I think, the luxuriant details of Lewis’s book. After a while, the facts begin to feel precious and baroquely excessive—”too much,” as we used to say. One can however imagine why Lewis piles the details on. His work, like much political history of the early republic, joins a growing number of others in its implied criticism of what the French dismissively call “events history”—the kind of history, especially biographies and tales of elections and military conflicts, that continues to pour from American presses. We surely don’t much need many more of those histories. Lewis implicitly makes that point, even while overdoing it.
Yet we need more of the kind of history that Lewis so brilliantly gives us here, even without such an overabundance of detail. If that’s a danger inherent in the new cultural history written in our purportedly postmodern era, perhaps it’s the price we have to pay for it. It’s surely a price this splendid book makes worthwhile.
James M. Banner Jr.’s second edition of The Elements of Teaching, coauthored with the late Harold C. Cannon, was recently published by Yale.
