Fallen Founder; The Life of Aaron Burr

New York, NY: Viking, 2007. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Adrian Kitzinger. xiii, [7], 540 pages. Includes Preface, Acknowledgments, List of Illustrations, Illustrations. Epilogue: He Used no Unnecessary Words, Notes, and Index. Chapters include A Man of Promising Parts; To Concert with my Brother Officers; Such are the Letters I Love; An Unprejudiced Mind; A Certain Little Senator; The Statesman and The Soldier; The Ruin of the Vice President; Little Quid Emperor; Will O' Wisp Treason; That Stranger was Aaron Burr. Best known for her 2016 New York Times bestseller WHITE TRASH, Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University. She received her Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990, studying with Gerda Lerner. Her first book, SEX AND CITIZENSHIP IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), examines the origins of the women's rights movement. It was awarded the annual prize of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) in 1999. Her second book, FALLEN FOUNDER: THE LIFE OF AARON BURR (Viking, 2007), undertook to correct the many biased accounts across two centuries that have too easily portrayed as a villain, Thomas Jefferson's vice president and the victor in the duel that ended Alexander Hamilton's life. FALLEN FOUNDER received critical acclaim, was a Main Selection of the History Book Club, won the 2008 Oklahoma Book Award for non-fiction, and was a runner-up for the Los Angeles Times book prize in biography. Her widely praised third book, MADISON AND JEFFERSON (Random House, 2010), coauthored with Andrew Burstein, was a New York Times ebook bestseller and named one of top five non-fiction titles of 2010 by Kirkus. Isenberg and Burstein have joined together to write THE PROBLEM OF DEMOCRACY: THE PRESIDENTS ADAMS CONFRONT THE CULT OF PERSONALITY (Viking, 2019). Professor Isenberg has been featured on C-SPAN2 "Book TV," and on various NPR programs over the years. She and Andrew Burstein have been regular contributors to Salon and continue to write history-accented pieces about modern political and cultural affairs for a variety of national news outlets. Nancy Isenberg provides a serious, deeply researched biography to replace the anecdotes and innuendo that have defined this essential early American for far too long. She skillfully paints a portrait of a leader who was complicated, sympathetic, even heroic--fair from the villain of textbooks and tradition, challenging comfortable assumptions about the founding generation. This book marks the first time a professional historian has undertaken to tell Aaron Burr's life story. Despite all the vitriol thrown at Burr, he had many reliable friends and a large number of supporters, something that detractors still find difficult to explain. During his lifetime, friends and foes alike recognized that Burr was a skilled politician and an enlightened think; this underscores why he was considered a genuine national leader and a dangerous opponent, and why he rose to the U.S. Senate and the vice presidency. Derived from a Kirkus review: Persuasive reconsideration of possibly the most scandalous figure in American history. Washington distrusted him. Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton, despite disagreements among themselves, all loathed him. Is it possible to rehabilitate the historical reputation of Hamilton's killer, the vice-president indicted for murder, the adventurer tried for treason, the mysterious Aaron Burr? Isenberg skillfully submits a brief that her subject, himself an innovative and eloquent attorney, would have been proud to author. From a lineage more distinguished than any other Founder's (his mother was the daughter of noted Puritan Jonathan Edwards, his father president of the college that became Princeton), Burr was a Revolutionary War hero and later established a thriving legal practice. From the cauldron of New York's tribal and contentious politics, he emerged as a charismatic leader and an unparalleled organizer whose thoroughly moderate political convictions raised suspicions about his loyalty. Traduced by both Anti-Federalists and Federalists as an "intriguer," he appears, as Isenberg ably demonstrates, only to have been more forthright in his machinations than his contemporaries. His mastery of the savage politics of his day, she argues, not the invented personal vices reported in the defamatory press and earned him the scorn of thwarted rivals whose names are among the most glittering in American history. In some ways ahead of his time, Burr supported women's rights and pushed for reconciliation of the new nation's agrarian and commercial interests. He was, however, distinctly 18th-century in his insistence on points of personal honor that led to the infamous duel at Weehawken and in his enthusiasm for speculation, a fever shared by Washington and Hamilton. This last partially explains his Mexican adventure, the consequent 1807 treason trial and his self-imposed European exile following acquittal. Amazingly, he returned to New York to practice law for many years before dying in 1836. This splendid biography is a necessary and overdue corrective.