Aaron Burr: The Dueling Vice President

On the 219th anniversary of the infamous duel, Author Ben Thompson and Professor of History Dr. Pat Larash discuss Aaron Burr, the American Vice President who was surprisingly quite a bit more badass than most people like to give him credit for.

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Episode Transcript:

It is a cool, misty morning on the placid shores of Weehauken New Jersey, on the morning of July 11th, 1804. Decades of animosity, of political intrigue, lies, jealousy, and treachery will now be settled – here, on a lonely dueling field just across the river from New York City. A well-dressed man – a former United States District Judge – opens a leather case containing a matching pair of 56-caliber flintlock pistols.

Two men take their weapons. Each is a veteran of the Revolution. A war hero, hardened by battle, who each laid their lives on the line for the cause of American Independence.

They stand back to back. One of these men is Alexander Hamilton, the country's first Secretary of the Treasury and a founding father who helped frame the Constitution. But I’m not telling his story.

This is about the other man, Aaron Burr, the sitting Vice President of the United States.

The small crowd watches anxiously as the two men walk ten paces, find their appointed marks, and turn to face each other.

The next six seconds will change America forever.

The judge calls for the duelists to "present". Each man lowers his weapon, takes aim….. and fires.

Ben: Hello and welcome back to Badass of the Week. My name is Ben Thompson, and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Pat LaRoche. Pat, welcome back.

Pat [00:01:48] Hey, Ben. And howdy, badasses.

Ben [00:01:50] How was your 4th of July?

Pat [00:01:52] You know, it was it was pretty cool. It was, you know, a lot of food, a lot of friends, a lot of loud noises that scare pets at night.

Ben [00:02:01] But a lot of it was very patriotic, a lot of patriotism happening.

Pat [00:02:04] A lot of patriotism happening. Yes. If by patriotism you mean eating veggie hotdogs with lots of condiments.

Ben [00:02:10] Sure. That can be considered patriotic as far as I'm concerned.

Pat [00:02:12] Yeah. Yeah. There we go. How was.

Ben [00:02:14] Yours? Oh, it was great. It was great. And we had our episode come out on the 4th of July that we did on the Great American Badasses. And that was a really fun one to do. I really enjoyed it.

Pat [00:02:26] Was.

Ben [00:02:27] Yeah. And this week we decided kind of a couple of things. One, we had had so much patriotism last week with all of our, you know, hamburgers and flame grilled steaks and Coors Light and veggie dogs.

Pat [00:02:42] Fireworks.

Ben [00:02:44] And fireworks and all of that good stuff. This week we thought maybe we would do something a little different. Maybe we would talk about a guy who was famous for a number of things, but one of them being suspicions of treason. We're going to go from full patriotism to suspicions of treason. But we bet it's not just because we are contrarians. There's like a significance to why we're going to do this episode today, right?

Pat [00:03:12] Yeah, It's because today, on the day this episode comes out, it's the 219th anniversary of an important historical event, which is.

Ben [00:03:22] The the duel, the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. And Aaron Burr is an interesting guy because he is actually way more badass than you'd think. And he has so much more. There's so much more to his character than just that he shot the former secretary of the Treasury, and yet we're going to talk about that today. Yeah.

Pat [00:03:47] Yeah. And, you know, badasses are human beings, and the things that make them badass are the things that make them badass and the things that make them flawed. Human beings might be different, things they might be related to the things that make them badass. And I think Aaron Burr is someone who is famously badass, but then in a moment of rage, kind of torpedo their entire career and legacy. And that's kind of a thing in this episode.

Ben [00:04:14] Yeah, yeah. And, and allegedly torpedoed his entire career and tried to create his own empire in New Mexico. And we'll get to that, I think. Yeah. Stardom. Let's start, I guess, up here at the beginning. So there's there's one thing that I most remember Aaron Burr for before Hamilton I guess.

Pat [00:04:36] Way before Hamilton.

Ben [00:04:38] Yeah. You probably remember also the milk commercial.

Pat [00:04:42] Mm hmm. Got milk? Yup. Yeah. There's this. This was back when milk commercials started being a thing. And the guy in the Got Milk commercial says Aaron Burr.

Ben [00:04:54] Aaron Burr.

Speaker 3 [00:04:57] Go for $10,000. Who? Oh, whoa. Excuse me.

Pat [00:05:02] Horan. Burr. Okay. Yes. He was famous for being the topic of a Got Milk commercial. And in that commercial, there's a guy listening to a radio station. They have a call in show. And the trivia question is, who shot Hamilton in that famous duel? And this was before Hamilton, the musical. So not everyone on the street knew this particular fact.

Ben [00:05:22] Right. Yeah. It was like, you know, the million dollar question on the radio and then it cuts to the dude. And he's basically lives in an Aaron Burr museum. He's got the bullet in the glass case, and he's eating a peanut butter sandwich and his milk cup is empty and he can't if he'd had milk, he could have drank the milk and washed out the peanut butter and said Aaron Burr correctly, but with a mouthful of peanut butter, he can't get it out and he doesn't win the prize.

Pat [00:05:46] So, yeah, that was what Aaron Burr was famous for back when that commercial came out. And these days he's famous not for the Got Milk commercial, but for being in Hamilton the musical.

Ben [00:05:56] But our portrayal of Aaron Burr for this podcast will be entirely based off of the historical literature that we've come across during our research.

Pat [00:06:06] Indeed, indeed. Maybe a little bit our own imaginations.

Ben [00:06:10] I mean, and also there is the fact that he's kind of like one of the most famous murderers in American political history. So, you know, that kind of is going to warm its way into the conversation a little bit.

Pat [00:06:21] So before we get too far, let's pause for a moment to hear a few words from our sponsors.

Ben [00:06:36] And we're back and let's just pick up right where we left off.

Pat [00:06:39] So, yeah. So who is this guy? Who's this guy? Before the famous duel. He was bad ass from a young age. He's got kind of a hard luck story. His parents died when he was two, so he was an orphan. On the other hand, that didn't prevent him from getting into Princeton at age 13. I suspect they were a little more flexible with ages back then. He didn't have to take the SATs, for example. They hadn't been invented yet. And, you know, in college.

Ben [00:07:07] Maybe, I mean, I don't know. But I think you did go to college earlier. I don't know, about 13. That does sound kind of Doogie Howser like. But, I mean, I guess for a lot of people, they were basically going to die in a war somewhere between 18 and 25. So all the life expectancy kind of life expectancy was like 25 years or something like that.

Pat [00:07:26] Yeah, Yeah. Different expectations, different life paths. And I also think what they called college might have overlapped a little bit with what we might consider more of a high school. But yeah, be that as it may, he was admitted at age 13 as a sophomore, and so by whatever standards he was pretty advanced. He graduated at age 16 summa cum laude with a law degree.

Ben [00:07:48] That's the big one, right? Summa That's the top of the class one.

Pat [00:07:52] Yes.

Ben [00:07:52] I get the magna is in the Sumo's mixed up. Magna. Seems like it should be bigger, but I guess summa is.

Pat [00:07:57] Well, the highest. Yeah. Magna means with big praise. Summa is with highest praise. Like the summit of a mountain.

Ben [00:08:06] I forget. I forget that you speak Latin.

Pat [00:08:10] So. Yeah. So summa cum laude. It's a big deal. You know, it's. It's a big deal.

Ben [00:08:14] Summa cum laude at Princeton is a big deal. And we should say that he's from New Jersey, So Princeton's kind of the local school. I don't know if that's like it was probably still pretty hard to get into, especially for a 13 year old. But it was kind of down the street from where he grew up.

Pat [00:08:29] He managed to get in, he managed to succeed. And at age 16, he graduated with his summa cum laude and his law degree in hand. And he starts a career as a lawyer in New York at age 19. Yeah, overachiever. So when Aaron Burr is 19, that's around the time when in the world, well, okay, in the American colonies, you start having the, shall we say, tensions between the colonists and England. And these tensions get to a point where, okay, oh, yeah, there's a war and the Battle of Lexington and Concord happens and the shot heard around the world is indeed heard around the world. Okay, not literally. What does Aaron Burr do? He says, I'm going to enlist. So he marches on over and he signs up to fight against the British.

Ben [00:09:17] So far, this is sounding very patriotic and very 4th of July. Appropriate?

Pat [00:09:21] Yeah, exactly. Or 11th of July, as the case may be. Right. And, you know, he has a meteoric rise through the ranks of the Army. He becomes one of the youngest colonels in the Continental Army. This is like a pattern forming here, right?

Ben [00:09:33] Yeah, Colonels. A high rank, too.

Pat [00:09:35] Yeah. And he gets involved in the American assault on Quebec City. Now, this is a New Year's Eve thing, and this is Quebec in the middle of winter.

Ben [00:09:46] Yeah, And the Battle of Quebec is interesting, right? We don't talk about it enough, but like, you know, the Americans invaded Canada during the American Revolution, and it was this whole endeavor that maybe we'll talk about at some point on the podcast in the future. But yeah, like Benedict Arnold, that guy, maybe you've heard of him, like he leads he leads an army up north to invade Canada and they attack they like launch a full on assault of Quebec City on New Year's Eve in the snow, in the cold, all of that. And Arnold is wounded during the battle. And Aaron Burr is credited as being like one of the three guys who ran to the front to personally drag the wounded general out of the battle, out of the gunfire and and get him to safety.

Pat [00:10:27] And that's our boy, Aaron Burr. And also Benedict Arnold, who most people know is like the treason guy.

Ben [00:10:32] Yeah, but he's he's more than that. And oh, yeah, we might talk about him at some point, too, because he didn't want to leave the battlefield when he he got shot in the leg attacking the city. And Aaron Burr had to basically wrestle him off the battlefield because Arnold wanted to get up and run back out there. And Burr was just like, No, you're done. You got to you got to take a break. You can't you can't even walk. You're going to bleed out. If you go back out there.

Pat [00:10:54] Don't be a hero. You got to live for the next day. So this is what's happening in Quebec City. This is how they're ringing in the New Year. And only about a few hundred American soldiers actually survived from this. Aaron Burr obviously is one of them.

Ben [00:11:07] Yeah, because they marched from they marched from New York all the way up through Canada using like canoes and stuff. And. Yeah, and then they attacked and it's a defeat and they have to kind of walk all the way back, being chased by the British the whole time. And a lot of Americans end up being captured or killed during this expedition. But it speaks a lot to Aaron Burr that he's survived this and and that his commanders, Benedict Arnold. But it makes a lot of I mean, it's it's a credit to Burr that Arnold gets out of this too.

Pat [00:11:34] Because totally Burr's.

Ben [00:11:35] Basically. Like acting commander for the most, like he's a senior officer. Now, after the general goes down and he's got to kind of help his guys escape and, you know, they do and they get they get out of there and he gets back and he continues fighting in the war. This guy is an American hero So far.

Pat [00:11:50] So far, yeah. He actually gets transferred to George Washington's command for a while. You've heard of George Washington?

Ben [00:11:57] I've heard of him, yes.

Pat [00:11:59] And Aaron Burr led a regiment in the Battle of Monmouth, and he later fought off the British in the amphibious invasion of Manhattan and amphibious here. We're not talking toads and frogs. We're talking an invasion by land and by sea. I think it's safe to assume this was not an invasion by air, because invasions by air had not been invented yet. So this is Aaron Burr. He's under the command of George Washington. And this sounds like it could be cool, but this is a motif that comes up from time to time in the life of Aaron Burr. He did not get along with George Washington and he was transferred again. So our boy, Aaron Burr, finds himself in southeast New York and garrison duty, but he kept on with his badassery.

Ben [00:12:42] I mean, it's kind of awesome that at some point Aaron Burr probably told George Washington to get lost. Right. And he probably said something along the lines of go f yourself to George Washington, because it seems like like Washington was kind of hurting for experienced officers and talented soldiers. Really, any warm bodies that could fill out a uniform. So for him to like anger George Washington enough to be transferred out of frontline duty and this guy is an experienced vet. He's an experienced leader of soldiers. He's he's led troops in Quebec City. He's led troops during the retreat. He led troops at Monmouth.

Pat [00:13:18] He's no slouch.

Ben [00:13:19] Yeah, You don't demote a regimental commander or put him out into into garrison duty in southeastern New York without him angering you in some way. And I just want to say that maybe that could be an argument made. It's kind of bad us to piss off George Washington. You have to have some serious guts, I think.

Pat [00:13:40] Yes, serious guts, maybe a little bit of recklessness.

Ben [00:13:45] He was kind of like a famous asshole, from what I understand. He pissed off a lot of people in his life. He espoused a lot of the things we talk about for bad asses that he just went all out and was like, Yeah, that kind of attitude, that kind of like ambitious, like empire building attitude sometimes rubs people the wrong way.

Pat [00:14:03] So he somehow managed to get on George Washington's bad side. He finds himself in southeast New York and garrison duty, and he nevertheless managed to keep on with his badassery. So there were loyalist guerrilla fighters here and there and British loyalists, and he dealt with that. And in addition to the guerrilla soldiers, there was also a group of about 2000 well-trained British soldiers outside of New Haven in Connecticut. And Aaron Burr did what apparently one could do in those days, and he threw together a bunch of people. A lot of these were Yalies. This is a Princeton guy putting together a bunch of Yalies is a New Haven. Of course, he joins forces with a ragtag bunch of about a thousand volunteer citizen soldiers. They are just people pulled together to form a makeshift militia and they fight off the 2000 or so well-trained British soldiers.

Ben [00:14:52] Yeah, And that's that is a thing that happened in the days you just raised the militia. Like, I don't know how you manage this before social media. Like, I can't consistently coordinate like five people to get together for Dungeons and Dragons every week. But yeah, Aaron Burr's just like, Hey, let's do a militia. Who are these people that kind of just come out there and they're like, All right, cool. I'll, you know, take the weekend off from my studies at Yale to, like, fight the British while I'm outnumbered 2 to 1, you know? But then when the battles over, they just go home. They're like, okay, well, that was it. Later, guys. I'm going, I got to go back to school. Yeah, I'm not going to be marching around fighting, doing this more than once.

Pat [00:15:28] Yeah. I wonder if for some of them it was like defending your particular little hometown or your particular little area. You know, like you were more motivated to do that. And so one thing leads to another and do do do do do the Americans gain their independence from the British crown? And Aaron Burr restarts his law career. Remember how he had that law degree at Princeton Law?

Ben [00:15:48] Yeah. Princeton doesn't even have a law school anymore because they consider it a trade school. Yeah, they don't do trade schools.

Pat [00:15:54] Oh, no.

Ben [00:15:55] I'm not making that law school. My wife went there.

Pat [00:16:01] So Aaron Burr restarts his law career. He gets into politics. We'll get back to that a little bit later. He marries a woman named Theodosia, Bato Prevost, and she is the widow of a British officer and she's ten years his senior. And that's.

Ben [00:16:16] Impressive. Yeah. I mean, yeah, go Aaron Burr, right?

Pat [00:16:19] Yeah. Yeah. So he marries Theodosia. There's nothing wrong with that. But in those days, it was highly unusual for the woman to be much older than the man in marriages like this. He was attracted to her intelligence, her wit, maybe her political leanings also. And how did the. The two of them meet. Well, back when the War of Independence was going on for Utopia was married to this guy, Jack Marcus Prevost. That's the British officer. But even though she was married to a British officer, she was actually on the American Patriots side. And this is interesting, right?

Ben [00:16:53] Aaron Burr must have been very convincing. Actually, this is a theme we're going to keep seeing from Aaron Burr in the future.

Pat [00:16:58] Yeah, he's charming.

Ben [00:16:59] He was very charming. He was a charming guy. And the 18th century women liked him.

Pat [00:17:04] Yeah. Yeah, he was charming in a certain way. And I know earlier we said he had a way of putting people off, but when he could be charming, he was very, very charming. So how did they actually meet? Theodosia Barton Prevost is lending her house to secret meetings. Who shows up there? Alexander Hamilton, the Marquis de Lafayette. And they're all big names in the American struggle for independence. Her house was briefly headquarters for George Washington and three guesses who else was present at these secret meetings. Aaron Burr. Yes. Yes. And she must have found him charming. More charming than Lafayette or Washington or Hamilton.

Ben [00:17:46] I mean, maybe not over Lafayette. I don't know. Maybe she didn't.

Pat [00:17:49] Willa. But after the war, they get married. Their daughter is also named Theodosia and Aaron Burr. Honestly, by the standards of his day, he was. Well, we could consider him a kind of a proto feminist. He got his daughter Theodosia, a great education. I'm talking like a male level education. She went to an all boys school. I guess it technically wasn't all boys when she was there. And she learned to speak four languages. She learned how to shoot rifle from horseback.

Ben [00:18:17] Pretty red, right? And like, yeah, he wanted to make sure that his kid was bad ass and had all of the appropriate skills of being.

Pat [00:18:24] Badass, helped pass on the badassery to the next generation. So anyway, Aaron Burr is doing his thing, working on his law career, his political career. He works his way up to New York state attorney general, and he actually promoted racial and gender equality in his day. He publicly advocated for giving people who were formerly enslaved the right to vote. He was an abolitionist and he was elected to the Senate in 1791.

Ben [00:18:51] All men are created equal, right? Like, it was kind of the thing they were fighting for, it sounds like. Yeah.

Pat [00:18:56] Now, keep in mind, this is Aaron Burr, and he doesn't always get along with other people. And one of the people that he was currently not getting along with was the first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, whom you might know from such great hits as the guy on the $10 bill.

Ben [00:19:14] Yeah. Here's the story with Hamilton. Hamilton's a federalist. The Federalists were looking for a strong centralized government, which at the time meant something different than it does today, just meant like, let's have a United States of America instead of letting all the states do their own thing. But Burr is a Democratic Republican, which is the party that broke into both the Democrats and the Republicans. A little bit more decentralized than what Hamilton was envisioning, a little bit weaker. And he didn't like federal banks, you know, that kind of stuff. And Burr and Hamilton ran against each other. So Burr ran against Hamilton's father in law in the 1791 Senate election. Burr won, and Hamilton was mad about it. But Hamilton's brother in law, the son of the guy who was defeated, was also mad about it. And that guy challenged Burr to a duel pistols at dawn. It was Aaron Burr's first duel. The one with Hamilton was not his first rodeo. He had one before that. And so Aaron Burr is going to duel Alexander Hamilton's brother in law and dueling the pistols, that darn thing that's illegal in the United States at this time. You weren't allowed to do it was forbidden. But Burr, who it's worth mentioning, had just been elected US senator, was like, Yeah, I'm in like, let's do this. Like, I beat your dad in the election and now we're just going to go, Let's do it. Pistols at dawn, let's duel. That seems like an appropriate response to this. And so they get together and, you know, the whole back to back ten paces, turn and fire with the flintlock pistol, which was not incredibly accurate. But, you know, you had to do it. You had to defend Your Honor, if somebody challenged you to a duel and this time you couldn't just walk away. You had to retain Your Honor in this scenario.

Pat [00:21:08] Yeah, it was part of the culture.

Ben [00:21:10] Yeah, right, exactly. In this day, it wasn't like a John Wick gunfight, right? You had a flintlock pistol that took you about 20 to 30 seconds to reload, and you didn't reload it. You took the ten paces, you turned, you shot your shot, and it hit or it didn't hit, You didn't reload. The door was over. Your Honor was satisfied. Be your opponent's honor was satisfied. Everybody was happy, I guess, in the sense that anybody can be happy and in a gun. Fight. Yeah. We didn't just stand there and keep shooting until somebody was dead. You fired one shot?

Pat [00:21:39] Yeah. You let off some steam. There's a non-zero chance that both people walk away. Okay? Yeah.

Ben [00:21:45] And at the end of the day, you were. You were brave, and you did the thing that you had to do. Yeah. So they do the ten paces, they turn and fire the first shot. Mrs. Hamilton's brother in law, that shot is so close that it clipped the button off of Burr's jacket. Whew. It was a close call, but he lived. He was uninjured. There was no damage. Mm hmm. Yeah, no blood drawn. And that's Aaron Burr's first duel. And that's how it ends. That's it. We both have done our thing, and, you know, now we can shake hands and have a beer. And I'm not mad at you for beating my dad in the U.S. Senate election anymore, I guess.

Pat [00:22:21] I guess. And that was the first Aaron Burr duel. And Aaron Burr, aside from his button, survives. Both of the men survive. But the Burr Hamilton rivalry doesn't go away. And remember, we had to specify that this was the first duel of Aaron Burr.

Ben [00:22:38] Right. And we kind of know where this is going. And I want to say that this first duel must have been in his mind at some point. Right. Burr and Hamilton's father in law run against each other for election. Burr wins the father in law. His son gets mad, challenges Burr to a duel and shoots Blake. I mean, because in this day you could they called it throwing your shot away. But we've talked about a lot of people walked away from these duels. You could just shoot your gun up in the air or shoot it in general vicinity of your opponent and basically miss on purpose. And you guys would both miss each other on purpose. And then you could go back to your friends and be like, Yeah, we had a fight and like, it was fine, you know, like, I imagine this kind of like those high school fights where nobody really wants to actually hit each other and they just kind of stand around and push each other and stuff. But you got to do it because if somebody challenges you to a fight, you got to fight them. Yeah, it was kind of like that.

Pat [00:23:33] Yeah, you need to save face, right?

Ben [00:23:35] It was kind of like that. And Burr misses. Yeah. Or is a war hero. Maybe he wouldn't have missed if he didn't feel like missing.

Pat [00:23:42] Yeah, he knows his way around a gun, even a flintlock, right?

Ben [00:23:44] I mean, that's all he had was flint locks, and so he knew what he was doing with that gun. And he didn't. He didn't hit. And maybe. Maybe he was trying to kill this guy, and he missed. We don't know. But what we do know is that this guy put a bullet so close to him that it knocked off one of his buttons. And I think Burr was like, whoa, what is that? Like, what was that all about? You know?

Pat [00:24:04] Yeah.

Ben [00:24:06] It is a hothead. And he does not forget stuff like that.

Pat [00:24:09] No, no. And it all comes back to Alexander Hamilton. He's the secretary of the Treasury. He's a powerful banker and he owns the Bank of New York. This happens to be the oldest bank in the United States. But the bank was well, they were kind of discriminatory. Well, they tended to favor people who were rich. They tended to favor federalists. And what Aaron Burr did was maybe as a service to more people, maybe as a way to troll Hamilton. Aaron Burr, like you do, creates a rival bank, and Aaron Burr's bank is Chase Manhattan. And yeah, I've heard of them. I mean.

Ben [00:24:48] I have a chase card in my wallet right now.

Pat [00:24:51] Uh huh, yeah, they've got my mortgage, so yeah, actually. Well, I'm doing the math on that. Anyway, so Aaron Burr founded Chase Manhattan.

Ben [00:25:00] I love that. I love that he founded a bank just to troll Alexander Hamilton. Yeah, I think that's amazing.

Pat [00:25:07] Okay, so we were talking about the whole Aaron Burr vice presidential thing, and he ran as Thomas Jefferson's vice presidential candidate. So what happens here involves figuring out how the Electoral College worked before. It works the way it does now, and the Electoral College is pretty screwy even now.

Ben [00:25:24] It's designed that way on purpose. Like they that's why they do it.

Pat [00:25:27] Yeah, it was not designed to be simple. And in the Electoral College in these days, they wind up splitting their votes and okay, even though people went into it thinking Burr was going to be the vice president and Jefferson was going to be the president, the votes were actually split for president. They were tied for president. And Jefferson was kind of hoping that Burr would be chill about it.

Ben [00:25:49] The Burr's nutshell Burr is not a chill guy was an ambitious guy.

Pat [00:25:53] No, he's not a chill guy. He's an ambitious guy. He's a hothead. And then Alexander Hamilton starts badmouthing Burr, and Alexander Hamilton basically gets people, you know, his Federalist buddies to support Jefferson for president.

Ben [00:26:07] Yeah. Okay. So the Electoral College vote is tied Burr in Jefferson. And the idea at the time was that because they were on the ticket as Jefferson Burr when they tied for presidential votes, it would be the way it was on the ticket. Jefferson President Burr Vice President But when they were going and kind of doing the thing that the Electoral College, Burr was like, yeah, I mean. Whatever. Let's like, let's take this to the House of Representative. Let's have the vote off. Let's have the tiebreaker. Because at the time, that's how the Constitution worked. And Burr was like, actually, if we're going to be tied for presidential votes, like, why don't I push my luck? I either become president or I lose and I become vice president, which is what you guys all want me to be anyway. Why not? Mm hmm.

Pat [00:26:53] Yeah, why not? Why could that not happen? And in the way the rules were written back then, these are the possibilities. But on paper, fine. But in practice, this did nothing good for the relationship between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson. And so Aaron Burr is vice president to a president who. Well, okay. These two guys just mutually hate each other.

Ben [00:27:17] Yeah. And so that was like, what's the worst that can happen is that Alexander Hamilton jumps on to Thomas Jefferson's side because he for a number of reasons, we have already annunciated he he hates Aaron Burr. And so he gets all of his guys to back Jefferson. Jefferson, when they go to the tiebreaker, wins by a humongous landslide. And Burr blames Hamilton. And it's just one more thing, one more log on the fire. You're the reason I'm not president, even though I wasn't supposed to be president originally. Mm hmm.

Pat [00:27:50] And this is why we have the 12th Amendment. Because that amendment makes sure nothing like this happens again. And so thanks to Aaron Burr, we've got that particular constitutional amendment.

Ben [00:28:01] I love it. I love that this guy, like it was such a pain in the ass. They had to make a constitutional amendment to get around his trolling. It's amazing.

Pat [00:28:09] And the thing is, Aaron Burr wasn't the only troll at the time, though, because remember, we've also got Alexander Hamilton. He's still there and he continues to trash talk. Aaron Burr, she runs newspaper columns, which was about as close as you could get to Twitter in those days. And the two of them basically say, okay, we're going to take it outside. So they want to meet in a field in New Jersey, Dynamic, Weehawken, New Jersey. It's across the river from New York City. But why New Jersey? Well, dueling is illegal in New Jersey, but the legal penalties for dueling were not quite as severe in New Jersey as elsewhere. It was slightly less illegal than some other places because.

Ben [00:28:54] Doesn't nobody cares if you die in New Jersey.

Speaker 3 [00:28:56] Oh.

Pat [00:28:57] Okay. On behalf of my co-host, I apologize to all of our excellent listeners from New Jersey.

Ben [00:29:03] And that's okay. I grew up in New Jersey. I lived there until I was eight or nine. Anyway, they're taking it outside now.

Pat [00:29:08] Yeah, they take it outside. They take it outside specifically to New Jersey. And this is July 11th, 1804.

Ben [00:29:15] Hey, 219 years ago today upon the release date of this episode.

Pat [00:29:19] Yes. Because you always want to celebrate the 219th anniversary of events.

Ben [00:29:24] Yeah, it's a happy anniversary. Yeah. What's ones would choose paper? I don't know what 219 is?

Pat [00:29:30] Styrofoam. I don't know.

Ben [00:29:31] Plastic explosives.

Pat [00:29:32] Yeah. There you go. So they're getting ready to duel and someone has to provide the pistols that a duel with Alexander Hamilton is the one who actually provided the pistols.

Ben [00:29:43] How do you decide on that?

Pat [00:29:45] I don't know actually.

Ben [00:29:46] That the requester of the duel or do you guys just have to get together before and be like, I don't know why I haven't maintained my pistols pretty well. I've got to get new ones like, Yeah, yours are much nicer. We should use yours.

Pat [00:29:57] Yeah.

Ben [00:29:57] Or maybe here's a crappy or we should use yours because we'll be less likely to hate each other.

Pat [00:30:00] Yeah. Or yours? Yours are? I don't know. Do you? Do you want pistols that aim badly or do you want pistols that aim well, like.

Ben [00:30:10] I mean, I think if you're providing the pistols, you want one that aims well and when the is badly, you just need to make sure you get the good one.

Pat [00:30:15] Yeah. And so you do that thing like what is it designing the Princess Bride where except instead of like poison drinks, it's like good pistol versus bad pistol. AK How do you psyche your opponent into choosing the bad pistol?

Ben [00:30:29] Clearly, I could not have put the good pistol in front of you.

Pat [00:30:32] Yeah, yeah. And I guess it also depends on how good an aim you think your opponent is. Because like Bennett, in this highly unlikely scenario where you and I have a duel, I would want you to have the bad pistol with bad aim. Unless that's assuming you're a good shot. Like, if you're actually aiming for me, I would want to go wide. But if you're actually really bad at shooting, maybe. I don't know.

Ben [00:30:54] Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how you would do this. I don't know how you decide this. And I don't know if the guns you're going to bring with you anyway.

Pat [00:31:00] Anyway, it's. It's like the prisoner's dilemma, except different. Anyway, so back to Dynamic Weehawken, New Jersey. They, one way or another selected their pistols. And Hamilton and Burr did the thing where they stood back, back like ten paces. You stop, you take aim and you fire. And the pistols provided by Alexander Hamilton were, well, okay, So Alexander Hamilton's own pistol that he was using was, as you were describing earlier, not necessarily great. It was about average compared to the average accuracy of the guns in the pistols at this time. In other words, not very good. That's what happened with Alexander Hamilton's pistol. Just totally missed the mark. Burr was unscathed. However, a tree 12 feet away did receive a mild injury from a bullet and the pistol that Burr used, which was provided by Alexander Hamilton, ironically, was okay. So either the pistol was more accurate or maybe Aaron Burr somehow managed to compensate or maybe he just got lucky, or one way or another, Aaron Burr's bullet did find its home. And, you know, R.I.P. Alexander Hamilton.

Ben [00:32:14] Yeah, I mean, Aaron Burr was a trained soldier, as we said before, and he did have a very close life and death encounter in a duel previously. So, I mean, he might have had a might've had a motive.

Pat [00:32:28] Yeah. Yeah, He had the experience. He had the training. He had adrenaline going through his veins or something. And yeah.

Ben [00:32:37] There's a lot of conversation about this, right? Because we will never know Alexander Hamilton's intent in this duel. We talked about throwing away your shot, which was where you shoot and you miss on purpose in order to. To satisfy Your honor. Mm hmm. And. And Hamilton missed by 12 feet. And so there's a chance that he did throw away his shot. Yeah. We'll never know for sure, because we. We can't ask him. But these guns were also not particularly accurate. A flintlock pistol at this time period is very rare for it to be rifled. And so it's just a metal ball kind of bouncing around a tube and shoot now. Yeah, they weren't extremely accurate, especially at the distance where you would normally have a duel. So it wouldn't be that weird. And even today, with your adrenaline going and you know, the barrel shaking and you pull the trigger funny or whatever, like, yeah, you know, if you've ever been to a pistol range, it is hard to put one into the red from 20 paces away if you don't have a little bit of training and experience in using a firearm. Yeah. So we don't know. Did he miss it, his gun malfunction, Was he missing on purpose because he was just trying to satisfy his honor? Mm hmm. We don't know. And we'll never be able to ask him.

Pat [00:33:47] Yeah. And Aaron Burr, she had a lot of experience as a soldier. He had training. Maybe some combination of accuracy. Maybe a little bit of luck. Maybe not. Maybe it was all him. Be that as it may, she did not throw away his shot. Yeah.

Ben [00:34:05] And look, this is like the most famous duel in American history, right? Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. And, you know, it's easy to think of Hamilton because he's the guy on the $10 bill. But one of the things that we can't overstate here is that Alexander Hamilton was the former secretary of the treasury. And when this duel happened, Aaron Burr was the vice president of the United States. He was still in office. Like, he didn't have much to do because Thomas Jefferson hated him and just didn't give him any work to do or anything. But he was still technically the sitting vice president when he killed this guy. Yeah.

Pat [00:34:43] These are high ranking public officials.

Ben [00:34:46] Out there in Weehawken, New Jersey, having, like, an unsanctioned gunfight.

Pat [00:34:49] Huh? Yeah. It's not. Later in their careers, this is while they are in office. These are different days, man, you know? But before we get into that, let's hear a couple of ads from our sponsors. Okay. So, Ben, if you were Aaron Burr and you found out that you just oh, my goodness, you just shot Hamilton, what would you do? Would you hang your head in remorse and say, oh, no. Oh, no. I mean, I hated his guts, but I wanted to keep on butting heads for decades, like Megamind and Metro Man or.

Ben [00:35:29] Oh, no, I was trying to throw my shot away. I'm just such an awesome shooter that I couldn't not hit. I don't know what happened.

Speaker 3 [00:35:35] Oh, no.

Pat [00:35:36] Oh, no. Oh, no. Yeah. So what did Aaron Burr do? Did he preserve his honor and turn himself in?

Ben [00:35:44] Aaron Burr does not seem like a turn yourself in kind of guy, from what I understand of him so far.

Pat [00:35:49] Nope. He left town.

Ben [00:35:51] Of course.

Pat [00:35:52] Of course. Yeah. And did he leave town to say the uncharted wilds of Canada or. I don't know, international waters? No. He went right back to Washington, D.C., and he just kept vice president thing all over the place.

Ben [00:36:08] He went back to being the vice president, to a president that hates him because, you know, you tried to usurp the presidency from him at the last minute. Why not? Why not continue surrounding yourself with people that you hate, that hate you and that you hate?

Pat [00:36:22] Hmm. And in addition to usurping the presidency, remember, he also shot and killed the former secretary of the Treasury. So, you.

Ben [00:36:30] Know. Yeah. Perfect. Look, you walk back into D.C. like a boss, like, Dude, I killed the founding father. What are you going to do to me? Right. What's the House committee going to do to me now?

Pat [00:36:39] Yeah, and there was stuff going on. Burr was in the House of Representatives. There was a case going on where Jefferson was trying to impeach serial chase, who was at the time the chief justice of the Supreme Court. And it really was just a political thing. They didn't like each other's political leanings. And Burr was like, No, no, not cool dudes. He called bullshit. And as it turns out, that set a precedent for limiting the president's ability to pick a Supreme Court nominee for purely political reasons. I mean, I don't know. It's 2023. I don't know how well that's held up, but whatever. Or is it getting too political?

Ben [00:37:18] No, I mean, that definitely still happens. I don't think anybody's going to debate that. But it's it is nice in principle that Aaron Burr didn't want Supreme Court people to be, like, politically motivated. I can totally get behind that.

Pat [00:37:34] Yeah. So back to 1804. Aaron Burr's term comes to an end. He's done vice president thing and okay, so you might think, well, okay, maybe he'll go on to have a spectacular career doing something else. He is a little bit limited in his options. He did kill a political rival and yes, it was technically illegal in the state of New Jersey. It was also frowned upon by society. So his political career was actually kind of tanked.

Ben [00:38:03] He was still a lawyer. He still had a law degree. So graduated Princeton, he might be something to do.

Pat [00:38:08] Okay. So is that the path that he chose?

Ben [00:38:12] I'm going to guess. No.

Pat [00:38:14] No. This is where he supposedly, allegedly tried to conspire with the U.S. Army chief of staff to basically break off the Louisiana Purchase and turn it into his own little thing, an empire led by Aaron Burr, allegedly, and also allegedly maybe try to, you know, invade Mexico, because why not?

Ben [00:38:36] Sure, Why not? Right. You hate Thomas Jefferson and he hates you. He just bought a humongous chunk of land from Napoleon. Why don't you install yourself as the emperor of it and attack and attack Mexico? Why not?

Pat [00:38:48] Why not? I mean, this is a guy who participated in an invasion of Canada earlier in his career, so maybe he's just trying to collect the whole set.

Ben [00:38:56] Yeah, that didn't have to happen after.

Pat [00:39:00] The night set. Yeah. Yeah. And it wasn't really a successful invasion of Canada, but still, you know, details. And so he went, I don't know how you do this. How do you go about trying to create an independent Louisiana or what or whatever? He wrote to various European nations allegedly requesting troops. He requested money. Didn't get much of a result. And in all of this, he just kind of manages to be okay. Eventually, he does get caught and brought back to Washington, D.C. for a guess what? Treason. But the thing is, at the trial, do you know who testified against him?

Ben [00:39:36] I don't. Probably all Alexander Hamilton's dead. Maybe Jefferson.

Pat [00:39:40] No one.

Ben [00:39:41] Hmm.

Pat [00:39:41] Trick question. No one testified against him. There was no evidence. So that's why I kept saying allegedly earlier it wasn't just a joke. And is this something made up at the time by people who didn't like him? Cough, cough, Thomas Jefferson? Or was it just God level trolling anyway? Thomas Jefferson level trolling, which is pretty high quality trolling.

Ben [00:40:01] Alexander Hamilton from beyond the grave. Oh, you know, the Federalists, they weren't happy with Jefferson. Didn't like him. He killed Hamilton that kind of some of the federalist the wrong way. You know, basically everybody kind of hated him at this point. And they're like, yeah, he wants to become the emperor of Texas and attack Mexico. Okay. So, you know, there's two ways we can go with this. If we're looking at this from the badass of the Week perspective. Number one is that he didn't do it. He pissed off all these people, and they were just trying to find an excuse to kick him out of the country. It's kind of cool that all of Congress can unite in the presidency and and everybody eventually unites to just kind of eject you from the country because you've pissed off that many people. On the other hand, maybe he did try to do it. And I think I could make a convincing argument as to why it would be bad as to try to singlehandedly, like unite all of the American lands west of the Mississippi to create their own empire and invade Mexico. We don't know the truth, but it seems like he didn't do this right now.

Pat [00:41:06] And whatever the actual truth seems like, one way or another, he qualifies as bad ass. Yeah.

Ben [00:41:12] And then that's kind of the end of the Aaron Burr story, right? He was, you know, Princeton at 13, a Revolutionary War hero. He was the vice president. He killed the former secretary of the Treasury in a duel. And after this, he kind of goes off to Europe. You know, at some point, his wife passes away and after that, he's in Europe and he just basically, again, allegedly goes around sleeping with every woman in Europe. And, I don't know, like we can't prove that or anything. But I do want to say and this is very weird and this is a very weird twist to this story, is that there is like a weird erotic novel that was written in the 1800s, a couple of decades after Aaron Burr was dead. And it's called The Amorous Intrigues and Adventures of Aaron Burr.

Pat [00:41:56] That's such a 19th century title.

Ben [00:41:58] Yeah, and it's terrible. I mean, I read it. It's it was written anonymously, probably.

Pat [00:42:03] So you then you've read this.

Ben [00:42:05] I looked through it when I was working on my bad ass article on Aaron Burr. And, you know, it was maybe somebody who was bitter about Aaron Burr. Maybe it's entirely just garbage. Maybe it's just, you know, erotic fan fiction about vice presidents, as you do back in the 1800s.

Pat [00:42:22] As you do.

Ben [00:42:22] Yeah, but, you know, you see, regardless of how much truth is behind this, he was a very charming guy, apparently, and so much so that they wrote a trashy beach novel about him. And there was a trilogy of erotic novels about Aaron Burr that were written in the seventies. But I didn't get my hands on. You mean.

Pat [00:42:42] The ninth? You mean the 1970s and 1970s?

Ben [00:42:45] Yeah, probably also not very good.

Pat [00:42:47] Well, but either way, I mean, they don't need to be good. Yeah.

Ben [00:42:51] And, you know, that's it's just the principle of the idea that a sitting vice president of the United States managed to inspire such things. There's something about that, I guess, huh? Yeah. So an excellent comment on one of the articles I was reading about the amorous intrigues and adventures of Aaron Burr, and it said that apparently Rule 34 predates the Internet. I love to that comment so much. I feel the necessity to include it here.

Pat [00:43:16] If something exists, someone somewhere has written an erotic novel about it.

Ben [00:43:20] So this, as you know, it's humanity for you.

Pat [00:43:26] The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Ben [00:43:29] Apparently, it's very true. Some of the earliest art. He eventually goes back to the United States. After all, the drama kind of blows over with the treason and the murder and all that stuff. And he does settle down and become a lawyer in New York. And he lives happily ever after. He dies in 1836. He's old, rich, happy. And, you know, he made some bad decisions. He made a bunch of people really mad. And at the end of it, he lived to be an old man and retired. So I don't know. Okay.

Speaker 3 [00:43:57] Yeah.

Pat [00:43:58] Sometimes that happens.

Ben [00:43:59] Sometimes that happens. Yeah. Not that we're endorsing murder or treason, but no. You know, 219 years ago today, there was a dual fight between the vice president of the United States and the former secretary of the Treasury. And. Yeah, Vice President one.

Speaker 3 [00:44:18] Yeah. Yeah.

Ben [00:44:20] So that's the story of Aaron Burr. He's he's a really interesting character. He kind of went from being an American hero to being run out of the country as a traitor. But thank you guys so much for listening to this story today. We really appreciate you sticking with us and and and listening to this. And we'll be back next week with hopefully something less treasonous.

Pat [00:44:40] Hopefully. Yeah.

Ben [00:44:42] All right. Thanks so much.

Pat [00:44:46] Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen and tell your friends and your enemies if you want, as we'll be back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.