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Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr
Feb. 23rd, 2013 06:00 amHere we have an interesting point of contrast between Hamilton and Aaron Burr.
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Throughout his career, Hamilton was outspoken to a fault, while Burr was a man of ingrained secrecy. He gloried in his sphinxlike reputation and once described himself thus in the third person: “He is a grave, silent, strange sort of animal, inasmuch that we know not what to make of him.” As a politician, Burr usually spoke to one person at a time and then in confidence. Starting in college, he wrote coded letters to his sister and classmates and never entirely discarded the self-protective habit. Senator William Plumer remarked, “Burr’s habits have been never to trust himself on paper, if he could avoid it, and when he wrote, it was with great caution.” As Burr once warned his law clerk, “Things written remain.”
This caution reflected Burr’s principal quality as a politician: he was a chameleon who evaded clear-cut positions on most issues and was a genius at studied ambiguity. In his wickedly mordant world, everything was reduced to clever small talk, and he enjoyed saying funny, shocking things. “We die reasonably fast,” he wrote during a yellow-fever outbreak in New York. “But then Mrs. Smith had twins this morning, so the account is even.” By contrast, Hamilton’s writings are so earnest that one yearns for some frivolous chatter to lighten the mood.
-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”
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Throughout his career, Hamilton was outspoken to a fault, while Burr was a man of ingrained secrecy. He gloried in his sphinxlike reputation and once described himself thus in the third person: “He is a grave, silent, strange sort of animal, inasmuch that we know not what to make of him.” As a politician, Burr usually spoke to one person at a time and then in confidence. Starting in college, he wrote coded letters to his sister and classmates and never entirely discarded the self-protective habit. Senator William Plumer remarked, “Burr’s habits have been never to trust himself on paper, if he could avoid it, and when he wrote, it was with great caution.” As Burr once warned his law clerk, “Things written remain.”
This caution reflected Burr’s principal quality as a politician: he was a chameleon who evaded clear-cut positions on most issues and was a genius at studied ambiguity. In his wickedly mordant world, everything was reduced to clever small talk, and he enjoyed saying funny, shocking things. “We die reasonably fast,” he wrote during a yellow-fever outbreak in New York. “But then Mrs. Smith had twins this morning, so the account is even.” By contrast, Hamilton’s writings are so earnest that one yearns for some frivolous chatter to lighten the mood.
-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”
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