They may serve, however, as
beacon-lights for those who are now figuring or may hereafter figure
on the great political theatre of our country. Through life, Colonel
Burr committed an error, if he did not display a weakness, in
permitting his reputation to be assailed, without contradiction, in
cases where it was perfectly defensible. His enemies took advantage of
the sullen silence which he was known to preserve in regard to
newspaper attacks. Under these attacks he fell from the proud eminence
he once enjoyed to a condition more mortifying and more prostrate than
any distinguished man has ever experienced in the United States.
Different individuals, to gratify different feelings, have ascribed
this unprecedented fall to different causes. But one who is not
altogether ignorant of the springs of human actions; whose
partialities and prejudices are mellowed by more than threescore years
of experience; who has carefully and laboriously, in this case,
examined cause and effect, hesitates not in declaring that, from the
moment Aaron Burr was elected vice-president, his doom was unalterably
decided, if that decision could be accomplished by a combination of
wealth, of talent, of government patronage, of favouritism and
proscription, inflamed by the worst passions, and nurtured by the hope
of gratifying a sordid ambition. The contest in Congress fixed his
fate.
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