Transcripts For CSPAN3 History Bookshelf H.W. Brands The Heartbreak Of Aaron Burr 20240713

Remembered for killing treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Recounting his political rise and downfall. This was recorded at the gallery of art in washington, d. C. In 201 2012. Thank you for having me back. Im delighted to speak here. I always like to speak in washington, where the audiences are well informed and engaged, but having just finished teaching a semester and for the year at the university of texas, im always delighted to speak to an audience of people who dont have to be here. There will be no test. I say this sincerely. Im very flattered that you took the time and took your evening to come listen to me. And i try to i think that my student, by and large, are interested in the subject but i know perfectly well that if they didnt have tests, if they didnt have papers, that they werent held accountable, then most of the seats would be empty. So none of you have to be here, but you did come. I find that to be very flattering. I could, i suppose, give you a test at the end. The title of my talk, which i had forgotten until it was just mentioned, the unknown aaron burr. Im going to tell you about aaron burr and why i wrote about a book about aaron burr. The heartbreak of aaron burr. I will tell you a little bit about the heartbreak of aaron burr but i cant tell you the whole story without giving away the ending and i dont want to give away the ending. Ill tell you why. Its not just because i want you to buy the book and read it and enjoy it, and hang around till the end, but it has to do with the reason i wrote the book in the first place. This goes back to my experience of writing, my experience of reading and, in particular, my experience of listening to a question that my mother has been putting to me for the last 23 or four years. And the question i will get to in a moment. But it goes to the heart of why people write and why people read. I teach history at university of texas. I also teach writing. And i teach writing to graduate students. The graduate students in my writing seminar also just completed a couple of days ago come from history. They come from communications, journalism. They come from the english department. They come from fine arts. They are students, they are apprentice writers. And they are working on developing their craft, their skill, their art, in various genres. Some of them, the historians, are going to write nonfiction. The journalists are going to write nonfiction of a somewhat different view. But i also have novelists. I have poets. I have playwrights and screen writers, and theyre trying to accomplish Something Else. Well, except that theyre trying to accomplish one of the things we talk about is what it is were all trying to accomplish. And this gets to the question of why people write and why people read. I could put the question to you. Youre all readers, i assume. You probably wouldnt come to an event like this if you werent readers. And i could ask you, why do you read . In fact, take that question and hold on to it, because there will be a question and answer time at the end. Typically, the questions come from the audience and the answers are supposed to come from the speaker, but we could turn that around. So, if you care to volunteer why you read later, i would be happy to hear what it is. But i will tell you what kind of reactions ive gotten over the years, and i pose this question to various audiences, including my students and including my mother, whom i will get to. I will just add i had some time waiting for the lecture. I just talked to my mom, who im pleased to say is doing very well. Shes 86 years old. Thank you, yes. I will tell her that you applauded, at least a couple of you did. Is that applause for the fact that she reached 86, in good health, still interested in my writing . All of the above. Okay. Anyway, about 15 years ago, i was teaching an undergraduate history seminar. It was for seniors, history majors. It turned out that the 15 students in the class were all history majors, but half of them were english majors as well. They were double majors. And it just so happened that thats the way it fell out. The students were reading various sort of great works of history, but the particular genre i chose for that semester was great biographies, including autobiographies. And so they read selections from boswells life of johnson and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, augustine and julius caesars commentaries on the war. One work that particularly caught their attention was the autobiography of ben vanuto fenccini. It is a work of supreme egotism. Chellini is convinced that he was the greatest artist that god ever put on the earth, and it comes through on every page, but he tells the story in a charming enough fashion that youre not really put off by this. Youre willing to go along with it. So i have the students read a selection where he becomes very frustrated with the technicians. He has cast the original mold and now its left to the technicians to melt the bronze and pour it in. Its a very complicated mold and its his statue of hercules with the head of medusa in his hand. And its real complicated because they have to go from the heel to the tip of the arm, through the snakes coils and everything. He is on his death bed. Hes sick. But the technicians arent getting it right. He has to come up off of his death bed. They cant get the fire hot enough to melt the metal enough. They start tearing the paneling off the walls and throw that in. Hes developing this fever is raging and he wakes up four days later, not knowing if hes dead or alive. He realizes hes alive and it occurs to him eventually. How did it turn out . And they knock the mold off and it turns out theres this brilliant masterpiece and the end of the story is, no one could have done it but me. The students dont quite know what to make of this. So i ask the students any time theres a work presented to you as being true, you have to ask yourself whether its in something you read, something you encounter in daily life or some political speech that a candidate gives. Do you believe them . You dont have to take things at face value. Do you believe this story . And i ask them, how would you corroborate a story like this or any story. Any time you encounter anything, you have to ask, is it true . This is especially true these days when my students get so much of their information off the internet. It has always been an issue when you pick up a book out of the library. Just because its in the book, do you believe it . I will tell you one of the lessons my students learn this is a very good lesson for them, is that after a while, most of them come into my class. Im their teacher. And for the purpose of the semester. Eventually, some of them catch on that i have written some books. And its an interesting lesson for them to realize that the person who is standing in front of them most of them havent confronted an author before. And that i say stuff, and then im the guy who wrote this stuff in the book, and they recognize that when im talking i mean, i try to get it all as accurate as i can, but ordinary people, you know, you get try to get things right, but some of the stuff you get wrong. They realize its just an ordinary person who wrote this book. Now i will tell you that some of them are mild ly impressed when they discover that ive written a book, one book or another, but what really gets street credibility with my students is when they see me on tv. All of a sudden, oh, okay, hes somebody. So the students all agreed that this was a fascinating story, great story, good drama, great characterization and all of this. It occurred to me at that point to ask a question that had never occurred to me to ask before, because i thought i knew the answer. I said, suppose you had read this story. Suppose i had erased the name of the author. Suppose i hadnt told you whether this was a true story or a fictional account, whether this was something that actually happened or something that Somebody Just made up. You didnt know this. You just read the story and you all agree, great story, great story. Now, suppose after having read the story, i presented you with one additional piece of information, and the additional piece of information was, you know what . That great story you read, it actually happened. Its a true story. What would that do to your evaluation of the story . Would it make it a better story or no different . Well, i was flabbergasted by the response. And i was flabbergasted by the response because i didnt give the third alternative, which hadnt even occurred to me to ask them, and the third alternative is, it makes it a worse story to know that it was true. Now i guess i hadnt really confronted the degree to which im sort of a nonfiction kind of person, but it simply seemed to me, you know, if you go to a movie and it was a great story and you say based on a true story that, seems to be a marketing pitch. The Marketing Department thinks that makes it better, because they certainly advertise it. Of this group, when i asked the question, how many of you think it would make it a better story, about half of the students raised their hand. And i was surprised at only half. And then so i think that was 7 out of the 15. Then of the other eight, i think five of them said that, no difference. Good story is a good story. But then three of them were the ones who really amazed me by saying it made it worse. And i was trying to figure out why in the world, how in the world it could be worse. And i thought about this for a long time. And i will tell you the answer i came up with. The answer i came up with is related to the question that my mother has been posing to me all these years. I mentioned that i teach writing, and i one of the things that i convey to my students, my apprentice writers, is that above all, writing is an act of communication. And if you are going to communicate effectively with your readers, you have to have some idea of who your readers are, what expectations they have, what knowledge they bring to the subject. Unless you have a reader in mind, you cannot hope to convey whatever youre trying to convey effectively. So, every reader excuse me, every writer has to have a model reader. You know, the reader in the back of your mind, the reader that sits on your shoulder, the reader that you are imagining is going to read your stuff, so youll know, is this too much information . Is this too Little Information . Is the reading level about right . You know, its quite a difference if youre writing for young adults than if youre writing for mature adults. So anyway for years and years i had the very good fortune to have the best possible model reader, namely my father. When i say the best possible model reader, the first couple of books i wrote were written for the purposes of getting a job at the university and then getting tenure. So the audience there was the academic community, the specialists who wanted to know that this was cutting edge in the particular subdiscipline i was writing it. After i accomplished that i realized i wanted to reach out to a larger audience, an audience, i suppose, very much like you, people who are not probably specialists in history, people who have a general interest in the world, who come with some experience, who come with some background in reading, but just want to know more about their world. My father fit this category very well. He was a selfemployed businessman. He had run a business for his entire working life, but then he retired and in his retirement, he started reading more than he had. While he was working, he rarely read books. He read the wall street journal. He read fortune magazine. Cutlery business. He read iron age i grew up reading iron age, interesting magazine. I dont know if it still exists. He liked to read history. He liked to read biography. He liked to read the kinds of books that i was writing. And he read every book that i wrote. And i know this, because he would offer his critique of my books. And he was pretty candid when he looked something. He would say, billy, i think you did a good job on that one. When he didnt like it, he would say, billy, not your best. Not your best. I learned my fathers standard from watching him eat the meals that my mother would cook for him. A traditional relationship. My mother cooked my father died four years ago. And for the entire 60 years of their marriage, my mother would cook breakfast for my father and dinner for my father. She refuse d to cook lunch for y father. He was expected to be out working and find his own lunch. As she put it, i married your father for better or for worse, but not for lunch. Anyway, i will just add upon my fathers death, my mother announced that she was retiring from cooking, and she has not cooked ever since. Shes out. Anyway, but my father would read my books excuse me, and with and he showed me how to deal with the meals that he wasnt particularly fond of. He was very diplomatic about this. If my mother made something that he liked, he would say, honey, that was great, wonderful. If she cooked something, she tried something new that didnt work out so well, he just wouldnt say anything. And my mom understood from that that, okay, no comment means dont do it again. And it worked out very well. Anyway, my father was somewhat more forthcoming with me. He would tell me, well, the first three chapters were okay, but it bogged down after that. Okay, great. My father read every book that i wrote. My mother tried to read each book that i wrote. She says that she finished two of them. One was on Benjamin Franklin. The other one she said she finished was on the California Gold rush. Now, im not really sure she finished those, but as a dutiful son, far be it from me to cast aspersions on the integrity of my mother. She says she did, she did. But it was very clear getting through a work of nonfiction was a task for my mother. She readout of some sense of duty to me, and every time after i wrote a book and she either well, she usually she used to say she had it by her bedside and she would pick it up and read a few pages and put her right to sleep. Anyway, after each such experience and after she gave up trying to finish it, she would say, bill, when are you going to write a novel . And i tried to explain, mom, you know, i like good stories. I write history because i think historys stories are well, theres stuff that happens in history that you just couldnt make up. And then her reaction to that made me realize, that was the point. The point of novels is quite different in one basic way. Im going to contend in an even more basic way its the same, but its quite different from the writing of history. And this gets at because i would ask my mom, so what is it about novels that you like, that makes them preferable to history . And she said, well, one of the things i like is that i get inside the heads of the characters in a way that i dont when i read works of history. And i had to grant that that is generally true, because if you adhere to the typical standards of history where we dont get to make this stuff up, we cannot impute thoughts, motives, ideas to our characters unless somehow we can get them to say it, unless they write it down. So we cant just, out of the blue, say that on the morning of july 4th, 1863, Abraham Lincoln woke up in a fine mood unless he told somebody, who wrote it down, unless he wrote a letter or Something Like that to that effect. When you write novels, of course, thats exactly what you do. But i said, mom, i have been working my way around that problem by writing biographies, because with biographies, theyre all about character. And i do get inside the heads of my subjects because they do tell me what theyre thinking. They write letters. They write diaries and so on. She said, okay, yeah. But theres Something Else that i like about novels, and that is theres a romantic interest in novels. We can find out about the love lives of our characters. And i said, yeah, thats true, too. But, you know, with certain works of nonfiction, with certain biographies, you do get right to the heart of the matter. Ah, well, not entirely. Because, once again, we are constrained by what our characters say, what they write down. And here is where the paths start to part, because and i would ask you, do you write down your deepest thoughts . Do you write down your candid emotions . Some of you do. But i would bet that most of you dont, and even those of you who do probably dont do it in a form thats going to survive 100 years, so historians coming along in the next century can have access to it. So it is, indeed, true that its hard to write about the love lives of our characters in a nonfiction form, without injecting ourselves into their imagination in a way that history writers dont get to. And i will say that i tried to do this in a well, the last biography that i wrote, which was about franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. In fact, a very large part of the story is about the relationship between the two. A complicated relationship, a relationship that involved all sorts of things besides and in addition to love. One that was fascinating, but one again, i dont think you could make this up. And this gets to the heart of the difference between novels and nonfiction. And here i will throw in the category of movies. Feature movies. Movies that arent documentaries. And that is precisely this. That the whole idea of a novel is to pull the world together in a way that makes sense, in a way that has a particular story art, that has a form. Novels arent just any old thing written down on the page. Novels have characters. They typically have a protaganist. Novels have conflict. Theres usually an ascending arc in the conflict or the drama. Novels, like most movies, have a resolution of the conflict. At the end of the book, the end of the two hours of the movie, you know how it turned out. Now, nearly everybody who reads novels recognizes that thats not exactly the way the world is. The world isnt quite so tidy. The world is much messier than that. And im going to throw out something to you, and you can agree with it or disagree with it. And if you disagree with it vehementally, please say so at the time of questions and well talk about it some more. But i would suggest that people who im going to get pretty inflammatory here in a moment. People here who prefer novels to history are people who like their stories tidied up. They like their stories to come to some kind of conclusion. Doesnt have to be a happy ending, but it has to be an ending. Whereas, most history doesnt really have an end. I mean, real life, it doesnt have conclusions. We strive for closure, but most of the time, we dont get it. Life kind of goes on, and you go to the next thing. Well, thats part of what my mom admitted to. But what she really said i said, mom, how about historical novels . How about, you know, the novels that are connected to history . Oh, she liked those okay, but she said no, the best novels i like are the ones that just dont have any connection to reality at all. And i scratched my head over that until she said i get enough reality in my daily life. The whole reason i read books, the whole reason i go to movies is to turn off the real world for a while and go to some place thats not at all connected to the real world. And it was this that finally made me realize what those students in my seminar were talking about it when they said it made it worse to know it was true, because they really wanted the separation between their stories, their entertainment and the world. Thats not really fair to students to say entertainment as merely entertainment. People have been justifying novels for years, for centuries. Although i teach the graduate writing seminar i was talking about, students read great works of history. And one of the things they discover is and some of you already know this that novels werent invented until about 400 years ago. And before then there wasnt this distinction between what really happened and what was clearly made up. So ive been thinking about this distinction between novels and history. Ive been listening to my mother all the years saying, bill, when are you going to write a novel . I wanted to please my mom, at least one. Shes not going to live forever. And i have actually tried to write i finished a couple of novels. Theyre sitting in my drawer at home. I havent done anything with them yet. But meanwhile, i thought, theres got to be a way to take what attracts readers to novels and apply it to real historical tales. So the book that im supposed to be here promoting the heartbreak of aaron burr is the second installment in whats projected to be a series that im writing, published by random house called american portraits. The first book came out a little over a year ago and it was called the murder of jim fisk for the love of josie mansfield. It was a story about a gildedage love triangle gone wrong. The second is the heartbreak of aaron burr. If you should choose to buy the book, you will see ill sign it for you, by the way. Youll see that it has the appearance of a novel. Theres no index, theres no chapter names, its one, two, three, four and so on. However, you might think in fact, if you hadnt come tonight and you picked this book up unsuspecting, i would be delighted if you read, at least the first part of it, thinking it was, indeed, a novel. If that was the case, then presumably you would have been drawn into this world that you thought i created but, indeed, it actually exist. I dont use the techniques of making up dialogue. Every bit of dialogue in there was really spoken or written by the characters. Now, you cant do this about every character. What you need is the Raw Materials of history. And in this case, i was fortunate well, its one of the reasons i chose this topic but the existence of correspondence letters between aaron burr and his very remarkable daughter, theodosia, whom he called theo. And these letters began when theo was a young girl, and they continued until well, this is why i dont know if i should tell you about the heartbreaking end. I wont tell you exactly what happened but eventually the correspondence was broken off by her death. Anyway, so i had a chance to use this correspondence. It is some of the most candid correspondence ive encountered in all the years ive been working on and writing history. And so it does allow me to accomplish that one aspect of what my mom was looking for in novels. Namely, get inside the heads and the hearts of the characters. Theres another reason that i chose to write on this subject, and same reason that i chose to write on the murder of jim fisk for the love of josie mansfield. Those of us who write American History face a daunting challenge in one regard particularly, and that is its really hard to write about women in American History, in the following sense. Its hard to write about women who play a large role in public life, because the nature of American Public life has been, until fairly recently, that women did not play a large role. I have been writing a series of biographies, fullblown biographies that started with Benjamin Franklin. The next installment thats coming out is ulysses s. Grant, coming out in the fall, from the 18th century to the 21st century. The last installment will be the biography of ronald reagan. And every one of the subjects is male. And the reason for this is the books are conceived as a history of the United States, sort of as told through biographies. And i was looking for a woman subject for one of these. And, in fact, i found one, but my publisher wouldnt let me do it. Can you guess what woman i was looking for and found . Eleanor roosevelt. I mean, just the fact that its a very short list of women who played a large role in American Public life on whom i can hang a tale of four or five decades of American History. Women have had, of course, their roles in private life, but its in the nature of private life that it usually doesnt survive in historical record. Why did people start saving the letters of Eleanor Roosevelt . Because she was important. Do your correspondents save your letters that you write to them . Then do they deposit them in the local Historical Society . Well, maybe. And if they do, you will become, and i use my words advisedly here. You will become literally immortal. Youll become immortal in letters, because future historians will find those letters and theyll say, ahh, so thats what life was like at the beginning of the 21st century. But anyway, so i wanted to write about women. After all, women have been half the population and women have been a very large part of what happened even if it was hard to find them in the public record. So i decided that i could get at the story of women by not looking at the big issues of public life, but looking at some of the smaller issues. And so this is when i ran across the subject of my murder of jim fisk for the love of josie mansfield. A woman who had no particular tam enter talents other than her one could say her beauty but im going to tell you a problem i had with this. Josie mansfield clearly was very attractive to the men who knew her, and men lost their senses when they got around josie mansfield. And they did crazy things, like one murdering another for the love of josie mansfield. And so i wrote this book about josie mansfield. The book is really about josie. Its less about jim fisk. But because its nominally a history book my publisher wanted to include a photograph of josie mansfield. After all, if theres a photograph of this femme fatale, lets see it. I didnt want to use the photograph. I didnt want to use the photograph because two reasons. One is, if you look at the photograph of josie, its pretty the camera does not capture that essence that drove men crazy. You look at her and say, really . The other thing is that novels dont have photographs. Novels dont have illustrations of the main characters. The whole point of writing is to create a word picture. And so if i wrote a description of josie and then had a photograph of josie, either the writing would be it would either be wrong or it would be redundant. Either way, it would lose its force but my editor insisted and so theres a picture of josie. Any how, josie was one story. Theo burr was another. And i knew the end of the theo burr story. Ill go ahead and tell you. Many of you already know. Theodosia burr disappeared at sea when 1812 turned into 1813. She got on a packet boat, coastal ship from south carolina, heading for new york, where her father was waiting for her. Her father had not seen her in years. Her father was living under an assumed name in new york, aaron burr, and theo was coming to see him. And the ship disappeared. Nothing was ever heard of or found of the ship or of theo. And, to this day, no one knows what happened. Its assumed the ship went down in a storm, but nobody knows. In fact, fairly recently, within the last couple of years, somebody wrote a novel based on the idea that theo had survive ed and wound up on an island somewhere. Any how, this was my entry into writing about aaron burr. But the heart of the story, in fact, once again, the title of the book was going to be my proposed title and my thinking the whole time was the disappearance of theodosia burr. I thought thats intriguing. People just dont disappear. But my publisher thought that aaron burr had more cache. The name aaron burr was a name people knew. It became the heartbreak of aaron burr. Its the story of aaron burr, who is considered generally to be one of the great scoundrels, villains of American History. And ive always thought that the villain villains, the scoundrels, are far more interesting than the heroes. And i also thought that anybody who was despised by Alexander Hamilton, john adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison had to be somebody who had something going for him. And so i thought i would try to tell the story. But i would tell the story through the relationship between aaron burr and his daughter. Because the story of aaron burr is fairly well known, and i wasnt going to include any revelations on what exactly was burr up to when he traveled out to the west. Was he engaged in what Thomas Jefferson announced to the world, even before an indictment came down, was treason. Was he trying to destroy the United States . Well, im going to tell you that you will not find a definitive answer to that question in my book, because like so many important questions in history, it has no definitive answer. Im pretty sure that aaron burr himself didnt know exactly what was intended. Now here, im going to im going to cite a distinction. You remember several years ago when Donald Rumsfeld was often lampooned, certainly criticized for drawing distinctions, he was talking about the known knowns and the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns and all of this . And jon stewart and the late night, jay leno, they got a lot of mileage. They thought it was great fun becaufun. I thought rumsfeld had it exactly right. William casey used to distinguish between secrets and mysteries. And in the intelligence business, both of these are of interest if they involve something that your enemy or somebody else is going to do. But theres a fundamental difference between secrets and mysteries. Secrets have a concrete existence. A secret is how many missile launchers did the soviet union have in 1985, and the cia spent a lot of time, effort and money trying to figure out what the answer to that question was. But it had an answer. But then a mystery is, will israel bomb iran next week . Well, that doesnt have an answer. Not at this point in time, because it hasnt happened. And, likewise, what was aaron burr going to do in the west . That falls in the category of a mystery. Im quite sure that he, himself, didnt know, but what took him out to the west . Well, briefly ill tell you the story of how he got there. Aaron burr was a soldier, an officer in the continental army. He was a capable enough officer. He was also a lawyer, a very gifted lawyer. He was a man who, against the expectations of his friends, fell in love with a woman named theodosia, who was the widow of a british officer. Now the officer had died in the west indies years earlier. And he fell in love with theodosia and married her. Now there was an odd aspect to this. And the oddness lay in the fact that theo, theodosia, excuse me, was ten years older than aaron burr. I should mention that aaron burr was quite a dashing, relatively young man. Handsome, charming. Theodosia was ten years older than he was. She was neither beautiful nor rich, but he fell in love with her, and theyn married. Now, one asks across the centuries, what did he see in theodosia . Plenty of people married rich widows and this was the way ones fortune was often made. He didnt. He married her, quite clearly, out of love. But love for what . Well, love for her mind. Love for her character. And they had a child, the daughter, whom they named he insisted she be named after his wife, theodosia. Aaron burr was decades, centuries ahead of his time in believing that women were fully the intellectual equal of men and that it was only their lack of education that prevented them from attaining the intellectual accomplishments of men. So, he decided that his daughter, theo, was going to have the best education that his money could buy. The education was conducted by tutors brought n it was conducted by him in letters, when he was home, he would quiz theo. They would talk about subjects of public affairs, history, of literature, of the classics, the whole thing. And theo became his close friend, became something of his educational project, became his protege. And to read the letters is to see a father spending a great deal of time and effort on the education of his child, and watching her mature, watching her grow, watching her achieve the intellectual accomplishments that he was sure she could achieve. Theodosia, the mother, contracted cancer and died after a painful illness when young theo was 11 years old. And she became the first lady of the household. Burr had a mansion in manhattan. Richmond hill was its name. And she, even when burr was not around, she would host elaborate dinner parties for diplomats for the Business Community of new york, for distinguished visitors, for indian chiefs who happened to be in town. And everyone was quite amazed and wonderfully impressed by the self possession, by the maturity of this 14yearold girl. Anyway, burr meanwhile begins his career in politics, and he delivers new york state for the republican party. This is the Jeffersonian Republican Party in the election of 1800. And hes on the ticket and jefferson is on the ticket. But you know the story of the well contested, yes, election. It was contested by accident because burr and jefferson tied. This was under the original constitution where each of the electors got two votes. And it was at this point that some of the innuendos began to swirl around burr and it was almost certainly due to the mischief of the federalists, who realized they had lost the presidency, but they thought maybe somehow they could weaken their political foes. I would remind you all, this was in an age when political parties, per se, were still considered illegitimate. The founders wanted no part of political parties. The founders thought that in a republic, as opposed to a monarch, in a republic, loyal, patriotic citizens would always put the interests of the country ahead of the interest of party, and they thought that parties would be the downfall of the republic, but parties emerged despite the best efforts of the founders, despite the dissatisfaction of George Washington, who never admitted that he had any party affiliation, but Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton formed their parties very quickly. Well, anyway, jefferson did win the election of 1800 with burr as his vice president. But jefferson, jefferson, a wonderful individual, who could say the most philosophically highminded things and then do the most pragmatically lowminded things, jefferson was as dismissive of legitimacy of parties as anyone, and he was also the first and one of the most effective political bosses in American History. And he decided that burr had to be pushed aside, that the presidency the next time around, after jefferson left office, would go to another virginian, James Madison. So, burr got pushed to the side. Meanwhile, Alexander Hamilton had been pushed to the side because he had fallen out with the mainstream of the federalists. So both of these men were in a position where their prospects were not quite living up to their ambitions. And so they got afoul with each other because hamilton had said some very nasty things about burr in one of the political campaigns and burr asked him to retract, at least to acknowledge and to corroborate or to retract. And hamilton got stiff necked about this and said no, no. You have no business asking me this sort of thing. And one thing led to another, and then to that fatal duel in new jersey in 1804. Now, hamilton was killed. Burr was burr was not disgraced by the duel per se. It was really the machinations of Thomas Jefferson that madegb very clear that burr had no political future. So, burr decided, whats he going to do . Hes an ambitious man. And he did what generations and generations of ambition young men have been doing, and that was he went to the west. What was he going to do in the west . Ah, this is the question. Well, it almost certainly included either inciting or exploiting a war between the United States and spain. Spain was then in control of florida and then in control of mexico. And spain was bottling up the United States from territorial expansion, which burr, like most everybody else in the United States, including Thomas Jeffers jefferson, believed was inevitable and a good thing. I live in texas. I wasnt born in texas. I grew up on the west coast. But ive been living in texas since the 1980s. And i can tell you that what burr was accused of doing was what one of the Founding Fathers of texas, sam houston, actually did 30 years later. Namely, go off into mexican territory by then it was mexican rather than spanish territory and foment a war and seize part of this foreign territory for the United States. This is what made Andrew Jackson famous in the wake of the war of 1812. He, without authorization, rode into spanish florida and drove the spanish away. Burr lived long enough to appreciate the irony of this. Burr didnt get accolades for what jackson and houston did. Burr, instead, got an indictment for treason. And the treason trial forms a large portion of my book. Why do i spend time on the treason trial . In part, because it allows me to bootleg some of the big stories of history into this little story and also because in writing this book, after writing that book about the murder of jim fisk for the love of josie mansfield, at the heart of which are three murder trials, i realize what dick wolf discovered years ago. Dick wolf is the inventor of the franchise of law order or whoever created the original perry mason show. Trials are naturals for telling stories. Whether its in a novel form as john grisham, in movie form or in nonfiction. Why are novels excuse me. Why are trials such an attractive form for the reader . Im not sure for the reader. Ill tell you why theyre an attractive form of the author. In the first place, trials have dialogue. And this is something that you dont find a lot of in nonfiction. And this is one of the appeals of novels. People talk to each other, back and forth. Its rare that you find a work of nonfiction where you get much in the way of dialogue unless its writing about a trial, because in a trial, you get dialogue. And, furthermore, unlike the order conversation of you and me, where you Wander Around the topic and do this and that and start over and all of this, in trials the conversation, the dialogue always has a point. And theres a builtin conflict. Theres a protaganist, an antaganist and theres a resolution. Theres either a conviction or an acquittal. Large part of this story is a treason trial. I get to weave in not only aaron burr, but Thomas Jefferson, who had taken up the role of prosecutor in chief and he put the full weight of the federal government into the prosecution of aaron burr. But he was frustrated by burr, who defended himself. He had very distinguished help. He was also assisted by the judge in the trial, and the judge happened to be that other of Thomas Jefferson, john marshall. The last of the federalists in the days that Supreme Court justices were also Circuit Court judges, and marshall sat for the Circuit Court in richmond, and the treason that burr was alleged to have committed occurred in kentucky which excuse me, when kentucky was still im sorry. On West Virginia. When West Virginia was still part of virginia. And so it was john marshall, who presided over the trial and who was not going to let Thomas Jefferson get a wway with any sloppy prosecution for treason. And, in fact, the burr trial became very important in american juris prudence. Under the constitution, treason is very narrowly defined. It consists of waging war against the United States or abetting those countries at war with the United States, and it has to be witnessed by two eyewitnesses. Well, the prosecution couldnt get the eyewitnesses, because the stuff that burr was said to have done actually happened when burr was far away. And, secondly, there was no war. And marshall ruled on this. He instructed the jury, you have to acquit. Anyway, the rest of the story is i cant tell the rest of the story, because i want you to read the book. In fact, im going to stop there and ask a question if you have questions. By the way, if you have any answers to the questions ive thrown out, i would be happy to listen to those f you have any questions, raise why your hand. Since we have the cspan group in the back, i will repeat the questions for the audience. Yes, sir . [ inaudible question ] okay. The question is, since i said i had a hard time coming up with women, how about the suffragettes . Here is a basic problem. I write books for the purposes of expanding knowledge of history and, i will say quite candidly, i write books that i hope people will buy. And you could name susan b. Anthony, Elizabeth Katie stanton and i could tell you i have run names like that by my publisher and i get a yawn, because compare that to, i dont know, lets say Abraham Lincoln. Theres a huge market for all things lincoln. Theres quite a small market for studies of the suffrage. An historical colleague of mine who had written was trying to come up with a subject for his third book. Written the first book, second book, got tenure, faculty member at one of the colleges in the philadelphia area. He wanted to write for a broader audience. He was trying to come up with some general that he could write about. And his area was world war ii. So he presented joseph stillwell. And the editor hes talking with said, eh, not that many people know the name of stillwell. I dont think theres much of a market in that. He mentioned a couple of other secondranked generals and then sort of at a loss and his field was in particular the Pacific Theater of the war. He couldnt think of anything else. He threw up his hands and said in a tone a throwaway line, he said well, i mean i guess i could write another biography of douglas macarthur, but there had been a dozen biographies of douglas mcarthur. And the editor said yeah, thats because people are interested i interested. Maybe i could elevate a relatively obscure woman, for that matter, a man, too, to a level that would grab peoples attention and make that person famous. Maybe. But its a i will say its a tough sell, especially in this market. Other questions . Yes, maam, in the middle. About the letters. Did she save them all . [ inaudible [ how did the letters come out . A very good question. How is it that the letters were saved . Before i answer that question, im going to give you sort of a broader reflection. And this actually gets at the question asked here, how about the sufferage or people that are not so famous . It is almost a truism of history that it is possible to write about Extraordinary People or extraordinary times. More precisely. Can you write about Extraordinary People in ordinary times. So we can write a biography of George Washington. Because George Washington is one of the extraordinary individuals, by extraordinary here i mean famous. To the extent that people saved his letters. If somebody is famous, finding the record of the famous people is not a problem. I wrote about Benjamin Franklin. First 30 years of Benjamin Franklins life go by like this in my book, why . Because there are no sources on it. The one source is franklins own autobiography. You can measure this in a wonderful published collection of the franklin letters. It is about 37 or 38 volumes and the american philosophical society. Now volume one, volume one goes from franklins birth until the age of 30. And its about that thick. It is equally thick and it covers three months. Not three decades. But three months. You can write about the civil war because it was sufficiently extraordinary that people wrote down what they were thinking and feeling. Soldiers went off to war for very many of this in both the Union Confederate armies. They had never been away from home before. She want to share that experience with the folks at home or else they kept a diary or journal. I wrote a book about the California Gold ruch. There is no lack of information about ordinary people that went to california. Why . She knew this was a once in a lifetime thing n those days, before cameras, before cell phones with cameras, how did people record the adventures that they encountered, the things they saw in a new place . They wrote them down. I dont know what is going to happen. Because people arent saving photos, i guess, from their cell phones and everything else. That is a different matter. We can talk about emails and what that means for future historians. But anyway, so but for some reason, a great many of the letters between aaron berr and his daughter were saved. I dont clearly not all of them. Because there are gaps in the correspondents. Its really hard to reconstruct why some of the letters were saved and some were not. There was a moment, in fact, when i saw a letter that he thought might be his last tloer theo. It was written on the night before his duel with Alexander Hamilton. He knew he may the no sur five the next day. So he wrote a letter to him explaining what she should do with his letters and papers and this is one of the reasons for the negative opinions that developed over time regarding him. Burn all the letters. Specially the ones bound up in the red ribbon. He survived but the letters didnt. And whether theo did away with them, whether they were lost at sea with theo, i dont know. But there is one interesting aspect about all this. And that is that relationships like berrs with theo are a rich source for historians but only when the individuals in the relationship are far apart. I bet many of you in this room red the biography of john adams. And youll know that his secret weapon in that book was abigail adams. In fact, i was at a conference or meeting or something and somebody asked him, well, now you wrote about john adams. Are you going to write about abigail adams. He said i already did. That is what i really did with eleanor and franklin. The book is called its only Franklin Roosevelt in the title but it is a duel biography of the two. One of the interesting things about that particular book is that best parts of the book of the relationship, they occur when they are far apart. Its a wonderful love story. Its a wonderful story of a marriage but it only works because they were apart for a very large part of the marriage. When they were together, they simply spoke. And what they said to each other over the dinner table at night, no one knows. So that is a case where its true with my book. I dont make a big deal of it in the book. I have to pass over those sections where theyre not writing to each other. But i cant offer a good explanation as to why some letters survived and others did not. Yes . Thank you. Your description of the story as a part of a way to present the nakts facts of a trial is a theme in the american presidency. Franklin roosevelt, for example, used a fireside chat as an effective tool to tell the story of what is happening in the United States. And the current president , obama, has been accused of being too legalistic or not telling a story. The question is how does the nature of story and how stories are told and how it has related times to american politics and in particular how american president s have cast their times as part of the on going american story . How does that fit into my storey. You gave me an opportunity to tip my hand about a project that ive been working on for years and its based on the title of this book. Its going to be a book one day. The title of the book is the best story wins. And the whole point of the sbook that we as humans are well, i guess i will say were suckers for stories. At least there is something in the wiring of our brain, maybe it is hard wire or soft wire, but we respond to stories. What are stories . Ill put it this way, stories are simplifications of complicated reality that give us some kind of purchase, some kind of grip on the world. And the stories can be creation myths. The they also maybe explain at the heart of every religion is a story, a very powerful story that tells us why we are here and perhaps where we are going. Roosevelt could tell a story that would grip the American People and make them believe that their government was taking action, was taking their side. Although roosevelt hardly ended the great depression, he lifted a great deal of the despair that had settled in on the country. Barack obama was one of the greatest story by the way, when i say stories, im not weighing in at all on whether the stories are true or not. I mean there are certainly true stories. If i say that barack obama spun great story in the campaign of 2008, i dont mean to say he was making this stuff up. But what he did was to convince voters or at least 53 of them that a vote for barack obama was a vote for a better vision of america. And it was i never seen in my observation of political candidates that goes back to john kennedy and my study of candidates goes back to George Washington, ive never seen a better political candidate than barack obama in large part because he was well, he was a little bit like aaron berr in this respect. He was able to allow voters ordinary americans to project on him their hopes for what the country could become. And so, you know, if the message is hope, if the slogan is yes, we can, thats very attractive, especially given the context of 2008. And its also, well, its a reminder that being a candidate is different from being president. Its one of the reasons that many of obamas liberal supporters have been quite disappointed because he didnt live up to, well, the projections that they put on him. And a lot of it has to do with the distinction being a candidate. That is powerful and appropriate phrase. But when youre president , the operative phrase is, no, you cant. Because president s have to decide. Condition candidates dont have to decide. The they can promise the world. Once you get in office, you have to say one thing or another. Anyway, yes, maam . I want to answer your question about why i read. Okay. History. I get into the story. Like its a novel. And ive been there hollering at like that cavalry guy that sent the vermont person during the third day of gettysburg. But the horse thing after pickets charge, okay. You need a sister. Ill be your sister. Ill just jump into this book and punch that guy in the nose interesting. Im not sure i can do justice to that. The essence of the statement was she reads history because she likes to get involved. She likes to get in the middle of the story. I try to avoid that. I dont always succeed. When writing about Benjamin Franklin, i try to keep my distance. I make a real point and i do succeed in this. In not massing judgement on my characters. So i will tell you, i tell readers in the book on roosevelt, i will tell you that he was great president but great in the specific sense of having a great effect on the world around him. I wont tell you whether he is good or bad president. Woinlt tell whether you i think the new zeile a good deal or bad deal. I leave that to readers to decide. I lay out what it was. I lay out the reactions and the justification. I lead it to the readers to draw their own conclusions. I think that not all historian dozen it this way. I would say the most successful dont do it this way. I once asked david if he would write about somebody he didnt admire or like. He looked at me and said why would i do that . A lot of people go to history to be able to cheer for somebody. And so its a lot easier, sort of like, you know, the rule of thumb is did that Broadway Musical work . Well, if people come out of the theater whistling, then it worked. Okay . Sort of the same way. But i for some reason i dont like to do that. I want readers to form their own opinions. I wrote this book called trader to his class. I pulled various audiences. That title, do you think its a thumbs up on roosevelt or a thumbs down . Traitor, thats a bad word. But its not traitor to his country. Its traitor to his class. Anyway, i try to keep my opinions, ever so often i cant n last years of Benjamin Franklins life, he was coming back from paris. He was in paris for nine years. He had been estranged from his son william by the revolutionary war. And his grandson williams son wanted to get the two men temple was the grandsons name. Wanted to get the father william and grandfather back together. He arranged a meeting to ship and go stop in southampton and head off for america. It was going to be the last chance for Benjamin Franklin to see William Franklin living in exile. William, the son, full grown man, he has decided that his father will not live forever, not much longer. And so william holds out his hand to make amends with his father, benjamin. And im sitting there writing this part of the story and trying to keep my distance. But trying to imagine whats going through Benjamin Franklins head . I have three children. And i cannot imagine anything that any of those children would do that would cause me to permanently write them out of my life. Especially, even if they had done something and then afterwards said lets let by gones be by gones. And so i wanted i had found myself without wanting to sort of rooting for ben franklin. Get him to do the right thing. Most of the time he did the rightn thing. He went back to america and never forgave his son for doing what his conscious told him to do, side with his king. And i had a particular reason, part of it was the father in me saying, come on. Your son is holding out his hand to you. But i will confess that there was another part of it and that is that it was one of the very few acts of franklins life that i couldnt explain. Because he was on the whole a very reasonable person. And he had fallen out with many in england during the revolutionary war. But one by one he made up with them. And i could not figure out what was going through franklins head and through his heart at the time. This was a big part of his life. I realize i dont know why he did this very important thing. And its toward the end of the book. Maybe i snowed me all along. Maybe there is this dark franklin character that im just not getting. So i had to quickly write the end of that scene and get to the end of the book. I still dont know the answer. Yeah, other questions . As former student of history former student. Are there such things . The students will be very lucky, you told us a lot about what berr did. Most of us are used to thinking of the villian. Without giving away all of your book, what wases n. His heart . I know that berr was ambitious. I think he saw the path to political achievement was closed in the east. Because both of the major parties were dead set against him. And so he wanted to go west. He recognized something that we have forgotten. And that that is before the age of steam boats and the age of railroads, once you got west of the appalachian mountains, gravity pulled you to the west. There was very little that said a continental republic could survive. And its worth noting that theyre remembering there was no particular reason to think the republic should survive. Just a few years before. Five years before. Thomas jefferson himself had been an author of the kentucky resolutions. That in essence laid the groundwork for nullification and succession. If you believe in selfgovernment, especially when the American Republic was no more than a generation old, it was entirely consistent with that view that if the people of kentucky and louisiana and tennessee decided that their political interest, their selfinterests were better served by independence from america from the United States, then by sticking with the United States, that that was exactly the logic of, well, the declaration of independence he went to sound people out. Andrew jackson first of all celebrated the fact he killed Alexander Hamilton. Everybody in the west thought he was a great man. And when berr talked about its hard to know what he talked about. But when he talked about a possible indpunt future for the west, it was entirely consistent with american philosophy of politics including that of Thomas Jefferson. But even more importantly, it was the almost inevitable outcome of geography. Because once you crossed the mountains, the rivers all ran down stream and the rivers were the essence of commerce. They were the avenues of transport. Jefferson himself wondered if the fate was with the United States. So berr was simply i dont know if he was articulating or simply letting people articulate what they thought the future might be. Because if you lived in new orleans in 1805, it took forever to get to washington or new york. And you could well ask yourselves, how can those people in the east govern us . Would he have waged war against the United States . I doubt it. Only had 50 guys. Did you want have an army you could wage a war with. He did hope that a war would break out between spain and the United States. So did Andrew Jackson. Wilkinson for decades was on the pay rolf the spanish government. Unbeknownst to his superiors in the u. S. Army. And in the u. S. Government. General way, so berrs logic strikes us, perhaps, assuming that he did what he was alleged to have done, to have plotted this scheme to separate what is well, the Mississippi Valley or texas and beyond, from the rest of the United States. It hardly seemed heinous crime to most of those People Living in the west at the time. And i will simply add that there are plenty of People Living in the states of the former confederacy today who think the confederacy lost the argument on the battlefield. So thats what i can make of it. Yes, yes, i cant let you get out of here without the possibility. Youve been a wonderful audience. Thank you very much. Youre watching during the week, members of congress are in the district. American history tv and the Health Issues beginning with md international. 1958 american medical association. March of medicine program. Highlights american doctors working at Health Clinics and hospital as broad and includes aint duction by richard nixon. Thats tonight at 8 00 eastern. American history tv now and over the weekend on cspan3. Every saturday night, American History tv takes you to College Classrooms around the country for lectures in history. Why do you all know who lizzy borden is and raise your hand if you ever heard of this murder, the gene harris murder trial before this class . The deepest cause. Were going to talk about both sides of the stories, the tools and techniques of power. Watch history professors and the topics ranging from the American Revolution to september 11th. Lectures in history. On American History tv and lectures in history available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. Next on American History tv, political economy professor and author Robert Wright discussions Alexander Hamiltons views on national debt. The Alexander Hamilton Wellness Society and museum of American Finance cohosted this event. Its just over an hour. Welcome, everyone, as the commemoration of Alexander Hamilton