Memoirs of Aaron Burr | Page 2

to my own reputation for correctness. I have aimed
to state facts, and the fair deductions from them, without the slightest
intermixture of personal feeling. I am very desirous that a knowledge of

Mr. Burr's character and conduct should be derived from his
miscellaneous correspondence, and not from what his biographer might
write, unsupported by documentary testimony. With this view many of
his private letters are selected for publication.
I entertain a hope that I shall escape the charge of egotism. I have
endeavoured to avoid that ground of offence, whatever may have been
my literary sins in other respects. It is proper for me, however, in this
place, and for a single purpose, to depart from the course pursued in the
body of the work. It is a matter of perfect notoriety, that among the
papers left in my possession by the late Colonel Burr, there was a mass
of letters and copies of letters written or received by him, from time to
time, during a long life, indicating no very strict morality in some of his
female correspondents. These letters contained matter that would have
wounded the feelings of families more extensively than could be
imagined. Their publication would have had a most injurious tendency,
and created heartburnings that nothing but time could have cured.
As soon as they came under my control I mentioned the subject to
Colonel Burr; but he prohibited the destruction of any part of them
during his lifetime. I separated them, however, from other letters in my
possession, and placed them in a situation that made their publication
next to impossible, whatever might have been my own fate. As soon as
Colonel Burr's decease was known, with my own hands I committed to
the fire all such correspondence, and not a vestige of it now remains.
It is with unaffected reluctance that this statement of facts is made; and
it never would have been made but for circumstances which have
transpired since the decease of Colonel Burr. A mere allusion to these
circumstances will, it is trusted, furnish ample justification. No sooner
had the newspapers announced the fact that the Memoirs of Colonel
Burr were to be written by me, than I received letters from various
quarters of the country, inquiring into the nature of the revelations that
the book would make, and deprecating the introduction of individual
cases. These letters came to hand both anonymously and under known
signatures, expressing intense solicitude for suppression.
Under such circumstances, am I not only warranted in these remarks,
but imperiously called upon to make them? What other mode remained
to set the public mind at ease? I have now stated what must for ever
hereafter preclude all possibility for cavil on one part, or anxiety on the

other. I alone have possessed the private and important papers of
Colonel Burr; and I pledge my honour that every one of them, so far as
I know and believe, that could have injured the feelings of a female or
those of her friends, is destroyed. In order to leave no chance for
distrust, I will add, that I never took, or permitted to be taken, a single
copy of any of these letters; and, of course, it is quite impossible that
any publication hereafter, if any should be made of such papers or
letters, can have even the pretence of authenticity.
THE AUTHOR.
New-York, November 15th, 1836.
* * * * *
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

CHAPTER I.
Ancestors of Burr; his father's birth; preparations for the ministry; the
Rev. Aaron Burr visits Boston; his account of the celebrated preacher
Whitefield; is married in 1752; Nassau Hall built in Princeton in 1757;
the Rev. Aaron Burr its first president; letter from a lady to Colonel
Burr; from his mother to her father; death of his parents; sent to
Philadelphia, under the care of Dr. Shippen; runs away when only four
years of age

CHAPTER II.
Burr is removed to Stockbridge, and placed under the care of Timothy
Edwards, his uncle and guardian; Edwards removes to Elizabethtown,
New-Jersey; Judge Tappan Reeve is employed in the family as a
private tutor to Burr; runs away to New-York at ten years of age; enters
Princeton College in 1769, in the thirteenth year of his age; his habits
there; an awakening in college in 1771-72; his conversation with Dr.
Witherspoon on the subject; selections from his compositions while a
student

CHAPTER III.
Burr's college friends; letters of William Paterson to Burr; he graduates
in 1772, when sixteen years of age; remains in college to review his
studies; amusing anecdote relative to Professor S. S. Smith, in the
Cliosophic Society, while Burr was acting as president; letter from
Timothy Dwight; from Samuel Spring; correspondence with Matthias
Ogden and others, in cipher; anecdote