Memoirs of Aaron Burr, vol 2 | Page 8

I have frequently heard him say, that of all lawyers at the bar, Burr was the most difficult to follow in the way of taking notes. Yet Burr was very concise in his language. He had no pleonasms or expletives. Every word was in its proper place, and seemed to be the only one suited to the place. He made few or no repetitions. If what he said had been immediately committed to the press, it would want no correction.
Yours respectfully,
J. V. N. YATES.

Colonel Burr's style of speaking at the bar was unique, or peculiarly his own; always brief; never loud, vehement, or impassioned, but conciliating, persuasive, and impressive; and when his subject called for gravity or seriousness, his manner was stern and peremptory. He was too dignified ever to be a trifler; and his sarcasm, sometimes indulged in, rarely created a laugh, but powerfully told upon those who had provoked it. His enunciation was slow, distinct, and emphatic; perhaps too emphatic; and this was pronounced, by his early and devoted friend, Judge Paterson, [3] a fault in his mode of speaking while a youth, and seems never to have been fully corrected, as he did that of rapid utterance, attaining the true medium for public speaking in this respect. He spoke with great apparent ease, but could not be called fluent, although he never appeared at a loss for words, which were always so chaste and appropriate that they seemed to, have been as carefully selected before they fell from his lips as if they had been written down in a prepared speech and committed to memory. His manner was dignified and courteous; his self-possession never for an instant forsook him. He never appeared hurried or confused, or betrayed the slightest embarrassment for want of ideas to support his argument, or language in which to clothe it; and possessed a memory so well disciplined as never to forget any thing in the excitement of the legal forum which in the retirement of his study he had intended to use. He has frequently been heard to say that he possessed no oratorical talents; that he never spoke with pleasure, or even self-satisfaction, and seemed unconscious of the effect which he produced upon the minds of his audience.
Colonel Burr accorded the palm of eloquence to General Hamilton, whom he frequently characterized as a man of strong and fertile imagination, of rhetorical and even poetical genius, and a powerful declaimer. Burr's ruling passion was an ardent love for military glory. Next to the career of arms, diplomacy, no doubt, would have been his choice, for which not only his courtly and fascinating manners, but every characteristic of his mind peculiarly adapted him. It is idle now to speculate upon what he might have been had Washington yielded to the importunities of Madison, Monroe, and others, and appointed him minister to the French republic. Our country, before which he then stood in the original brightness of his character, would have been honoured in the choice, both at home and abroad, and his own destiny, at least, would have been widely different.
Notwithstanding oratory was not his forte, and he never spoke in public with satisfaction to himself, still many anecdotes are told of him which would show that the effect of his speeches were sometimes of unequalled power. It is said, that at the close of his farewell address to the Senate of the United States on his retirement from the vice-presidency, there was scarcely a dry eye to be seen among his grave auditors, many of whom were his bitter political adversaries. His manner of speaking was any thing but declamatory, and more resembled an elevated tone of conversation, by which a man, without any seeming intention, pours his ideas in measured and beautiful language into the minds of some small select circle, dislodging all which they may have previously entertained upon a particular subject, and fixing his own there, by the power of a seeming magical fascination, which he could render, when he chose, almost irresistible. To judge him by his success as a public speaker, few men could be called more eloquent.
As a monument of his legal knowledge and talents, his trial at Richmond may be referred to. The two volumes of Reports which contain it exhibit on almost every page the impress of his great mind, in its singular acuteness and perspicacity, and great powers of analysis and argument. On that trial were engaged some of the ablest lawyers of our country, and he manifestly took the lead of them all. But the abilities which he displayed, hour by hour, and day by day, through that long protracted contest, in which the verdict sought for by those who then wielded the political destinies of our country was an ignominious death,