Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr

This definitive biography of the revolutionary era villain overturns every myth and image we have of him

The narrative of Americ‛s founding is filled with godlike geniuses—Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson—versus the villainous Aaron Burr. Generations have been told Burr was a betrayer—of Hamilton, of his country, of those who had nobler ideas. All untrue. He did not turn on Hamilton; rather, the politically aggressive Hamilton was preoccupied with Burr and subverted Bur‛s career at every turn for more than a decade through outright lies and slanderous letters.

In Fallen Founder, Nancy Isenberg portrays the founders as they all really were and proves that Burr was no less a patriot and no less a principled thinker than those who debased him. He was an inspired politician who promoted decency at a moment when factionalism and ugly party politics were coalescing. He was a genuine hero of the Revolution, as much an Enlightenment figure as Jefferson, and a feminist generations ahead of his time. A brilliant orator and lawyer, he was New Yor‛s attorney general, a senator, and vice president. Denounced as a man of extreme tastes, he in fact pursued a moderate course, and his political assassination was accomplished by rivals who feared his power and who promoted the notion of his sexual perversions.

Fallen Founder is an antidote to the worshipful biographies far too prevalent in the histories of the revolutionary era. Bur‛s story returns us to reality: to the cunning politicians our natio‛s founders really were and to a world of political maneuvering, cutthroat politicking, and media slander that is stunningly modern.

"Does Burr belong in the pantheon of founding fathers? Or is he, as historians have asserted ever since he fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel, a faux founder who happened to be in the right place at the right time? Was he really the enigmatic villain, the political schemer who lacked any moral core, the sexual pervert, the cherubic-faced slanderer so beloved of popular imagination? This striking new biography by Isenberg (Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America) argues that Burr was, indeed, the real thing, a founder 'at the center of nation building' and a 'capable leader in New York political circles.' Interestingly, if controversially, Isenberg believes Burr was 'the only founder to embrace feminism,' the only one who 'adhered to the ideal that reason should transcend party differences.' Far from being an empty vessel, she says, Burr defended freedom of speech, wanted to expand suffrage and was a proponent of equal rights. Burr was not without his faults, she concludes, but then, none of the other founders was entirely angelic, either, and his actions must be viewed in the context of his political times. As this important book reminds us, America's founders behaved like ordinary human beings even when they were performing their extraordinary deeds. Illus." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Painting Aaron Burr as a hero of the Revolutionary War, this definitive biography overturns every myth and image people have of him. 16 photos. 4 maps.

Nancy Isenberg, a New Jersey native, is the Mary Frances Barnard Chair in 19th- Century American History at the University of Tulsa. She is the author of Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America, which was chosen as the“best book in the field of the early American Republi” for 1999 by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.