Undoubtedly some readers are already impatient at the delay in dealing
with Aaron Burr. There was a time when it was the fashion to refer to
Colonel Burr as sufficiently infamous to prove that heredity was of no
appreciable value. As a matter of fact it is rather refreshing to have
one upon whom the imagination can play. It simply intensifies the white
light of the rest of the record.

Colonel Burr was not a saint after the model presented by his father,
the Rev. Dr. Aaron Burr, the godly president of Princeton; by his
grandfather, Jonathan Edwards; or by at least 1,394 of the other members
of the family of Mr. Edwards. There is no purpose to give him saintly
enthronement, but it may not be amiss to suggest that the abuse of him
has been overdone.

Colonel Aaron Burr died at eighty after thirty years of the worst
treatment ever meted out to a man against whom the bitterest enemies and
the most brilliant legal talent could bring no charge that would stand
in the eyes of the law. I have no purpose to lessen the verdict of
prejudice, for the study of the Edwards family is all the more
fascinating because of one such meteor of error. It must be confessed,
however, that a study of the last thirty years of Colonel Burr's life
makes one more exasperated with human nature under a political whip than
with Colonel Burr's mistake.

At forty-nine Aaron Burr was one of the most brilliant, most admired,
and beloved men in the United States. For thirty years his had been a
career with few American parallels. He had but one real and intense
enemy, and that man had hated him all those years. Alexander Hamilton
had never missed an opportunity to vilify Mr. Burr, and his attack had
never been resented. Calmly had Aaron Burr pursued his upward and onward