Bry-But: Bryan through Butler

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


BRYAN, George, 1731-1791, Dublin, Ireland, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, abolitionist leader, legislator, businessman, statesman, jurist.  Introduced abolition bills.  Elected the first Vice President of Pennsylvania (Lieutenant Governor), 1777-1779, Second President (Governor), 1778. (Basker, 2005, pp. 76, 82-83; Bruns, 1977, pp. 445-446; Locke, 1901, p. 78; Nash, 1991, pp. 100-105, 107, 110, 113-114, 121, 157, 201; Zilversmit, 1967, pp. 125, 126, 128, 129, 131; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 421; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 189)

BRYAN, GEORGE (August 11, 1731-January 27, 1791), jurist, politician, was born in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Samuel Bryan, a merchant, and his wife, Sarah Dennis. He came to America in 1752, settling in Philadelphia and entering a partnership with one James Wallace in the importing business. In 1755 the partnership was dissolved and Bryan continued in business alone; two years later, on April 21, 1757, he married Elizabeth, daughter of Samuel Smith. As a Presbyterian he early became associated with the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of Philadelphia, who were a distinct political faction, and gradually rose to prominence in their ranks. He was fined five pounds, in 1758, for refusing to serve a s constable (Passages from the Remembrance of Christopher Marshall, 1839, App., p. v) but in 1762 he accepted office as member of a commission to apply receipts from tonnage dues to the improvement of Philadelphia harbor. In 1764, Bryan and Thomas Willing were elected by the conservative party to represent Philadelphia in the Assembly. They defeated Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Galloway, the leaders of the party desirous of substituting Royal for Proprietary government, although the Anti-Proprietary-forces carried the rest of the provinces. In the same year Governor John Penn reorganized the judiciary, appointing new judges from among the conservatives, and Bryan was made judge of the orphans' court and the court of common pleas. He continued at the same time to serve in the Assembly, and in 1765 was a member of the committee which drafted instructions for Pennsylvania's delegates to the Stamp Act Congress to meet in New York on October 1 of that year. On September 11, Bryan, Dickinson, and John Morton were chosen as delegates to the congress. During their absence in New York the Philadelphia elections took place, Franklin's party won, and Bryan was defeated. He returned from the congress, signed the non-importation agreements, and resumed his judicial service. He was recommissioned judge in 1770 and again in 1772, by which time he had retired from a failing business. He was appointed naval officer of the port of Philadelphia in 1776. After the adoption in that year of the new Pennsylvania constitution, with a share in the framing of which-though not a member of the convention- he had been credited (Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of a Life, etc., 1811, p. 266), he was elected to the Supreme Executive Council and by it chosen vice-president. In this capacity he served from March 8, 1777 until October 11, 1779, acting as president between the death of Wharton and the election of Joseph Reed (May 23-December 1, 1778). In 1779 he was a member of a commission to settle the boundary dispute with Virginia.

Elected to the Assembly on October 12, 1779, he was given the chairmanship of several committees on special bills, notably those which framed the "Divesting Act," transferring title in the proprietary estates to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the act revoking the charter of the College of Philadelphia and vesting its property in a new institution, the University of the State of  Pennsylvania, and the act for the gradual abolition of slavery. The authorship of the last-named law is usually attributed to Bryan as his major claim to remembrance. He was commissioned a judge of the supreme court of Pennsylvania on April 3, 1780, and held the office until his death. For some years he acted as trustee of the University of the State of Pennsylvania. In 1784 he was elected to the septennial Council of Censors. A stout (state) constitutionalist, he opposed every tendency toward nationalism, even attacking the Bank of North America. When the Federal Constitution was submitted to the states in 1787 he fought it earnestly, and after its ratification by Pennsylvania was a member of the Harrisburg convention of irreconcilables which met September 3, 1788 to urge a revision of the Constitution by a new federal convention. But resistance, however stubborn, was of no avail against the inevitable; the old order passed, and Bryan outlived it only a little time, dying in 1791, two years after the inauguration of the federal government and five months after the adoption of a new state constitution by Pennsylvania. [The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has five boxes of Bryan MSS., and the Lib. of Congress has several of his letters to Justice Atlee and a "memorandum of events" of the years 1758-64 entered in the back of an almanac. There are letters to and from Bryan in Wm. B. Reed, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed (1847), and official communications in the Pennsylvania Archives. Burton Alva Konkle, Geo. Bryan and the Constitution of Pennsylvania (1922) contains previously unpublished biographical material but overestimates Bryan's importance. An obituary in Dunlap's American Daily Advertiser, January 31, 1791, was copied by other Philadelphia papers.]

E. R. D.


BRYANT, William Cullen, 1794-1874, author, poet, editor.  Wrote antislavery poetry.  (Rodriguez, 2007, p. 326; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 422-426; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 200; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 3) A complete edition of his poetical and prose works (4 vols., 8vo) was published in 1883-'4. See “Homes of American Authors” (New York, 1853); “The Bryant Homestead Book” (1870); “Presentation to Bryant at Eighty Years” (1876); “Bryant Memorial Meeting of the Goethe Club” (1878); Symington's “Biographical Sketch of Bryant” (1880); Godwin's “Life of Bryant” (1883); Wilson's “Bryant and his Friends” (1886, two editions, one on large paper and illustrated). A new life of Bryant, by John Bigelow, is now (1886) in preparation.

BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN (November 3, 1794-June 12, 1878), poet, editor, was descended from Stephen Bryant, who settled in the Plymouth colony in 1632 and became a town officer of Duxbury, Massachusetts. For several generations the Bryants were farmers, but the poet's grandfather, Philip Bryant, and his father, Peter Bryant, were physicians. The latter settled at Cummington, in western Massachusetts, married Sarah Snell, who traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower, and carried on a laborious and ill paid practise. He was a skilful surgeon, who had been trained under the French refugee, Leprilete; he had traveled widely as a surgeon in a merchant vessel; he had musical taste, playing much on the violin; and he was a lover of poetry, possessing a well-stocked library and writing light verse in both Latin and English. His strength was such that he could easily lift a barrel of cider over a cartwheel. The poet's mother was tall, strong, known for her common sense and stern moral qualities, and with certain literary habits; she kept a diary in which she concisely noted the occurrences in the neighborhood. Bryant's health in early childhood was delicate, his head seemed excessively large, and he was of a painfully nervous temperament, but by a stern regimen, including daily cold baths, his father made him a sturdy boy. The mother took pride in his precocity, teaching him the alphabet at sixteen months. The future poet was fortunate in his natural surroundings. His birthplace was a farmhouse surrounded with apple-trees, standing amid fields which sloped steeply down to the north fork of the Westfield River. In his fifth year the family removed to a place of still greater attractiveness, the homestead of his maternal grandfather, Ebenezer Snell, also of Cummington. The boy delighted in the brooks, the river, the rocky hillsides, and the deep forests, as yet only partly invaded by settlement, and enjoyed nutting, gathering spearmint, fishing, and other outdoor pastimes. He was fortunate also in the fact that his father's political interests-Dr. Bryant represented Cummington first in the lower and later the upper branch of the legislature kept the door of the farmhouse partly open upon the wider world of Boston.

Measured in years of formal tuition, Bryant's education was limited. The district schools gave him a training in reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and the Westminster Catechism. At the age of twelve, his parents having decided that he deserved a college education, he was sent to live with the Reverend Thomas Snell, an uncle in North Brookfield, to learn Latin, and the following year was transferred to the care of the Reverend Moses Hallock, to acquire Greek. Both were men of great dignity, elevated moral standards, and austere influence. In the eight months with his uncle, Bryant showed a remarkably acquisitive mind, reading Virgil, the select orations of Cicero, and the colloquies of Corderius, while after two months with the Reverend Mr. Hallock "I knew the Greek New Testament from end to end almost as if it had been English" (Godwin, Bryant, I, 33). Meanwhile poetical ambitions had awakened in the boy. He owed much to his early and ingrained familiarity with the Scriptures, and when he was ten or eleven his grandfather Snell gave him the whole book of Job to turn into verse. A more important incentive came from his father's library, a collection ultimately numbering about 700 volumes. "In the long winter evenings and stormy winter days," Bryant wrote later, "I read with my elder brother . . . . I remember well the delight with which we welcomed the translation of the Iliad by Pope when it was brought into the house. I had met with passages from it before, and thought them the finest verses ever written" (Ibid., I, 24). In childhood he often prayed "that I might receive the gift of poetic genius, and write verses that might endure" (Ibid., I, 26). Before he was in his teens he had scribbled on many subjects, with the encouragement and also the sharp criticism of his father. Taken to Williamstown in September 1810, Bryant passed an easy examination for entrance to the sophomore class of Williams College. The institution was small and poverty-stricken, with a faculty of four who taught a meager curriculum for ill-prepared country lads. Bryant's chief amusements were woodland rambles, participation in the meetings of the Philotechnian literary society, and a course of miscellaneous reading, in which he profited particularly by his study of the Greek poets. Classmates remembered him later as modest, unobtrusive, studious, inclined to choose sober and bookish friends, and competent but not brilliant in the classroom. But his college career was brief. Withdrawing from Williams to prepare himself to enter the junior class at Yale, he worked at his books all summer (1811), only to have his father declare that his means were insufficient for the step.

Already Bryant had appeared, in a way which he later regretted, in print. In 1808, catching the indignant spirit of the Federalists about him, he had written a satire called "The Embargo," which in five hundred lines or more assailed President Jefferson as unpatriotic, a cowardly truckler to the French, an eccentric dabbler in science, and a man of low personal morals. Dr. Bryant unwisely carried this production up to Boston and had it published under the title of The Embargo: or Sketches of the Times, a Satire; by a Youth of Thirteen. It sold well, was praised by some reviewers, and attracted so much attention that in 1809 Dr. Bryant had it republished with several other pieces taken from the Hampshire Gazette, and placed his son's name on the title page. Not a line of the volume was ever included by Bryant in his later writings, and he spoke of the pamphlet with testy disgust as "stuff." But it proved the precursor of a really great poem. The autumn after he left Williamstown witnessed the composition of the first form of "Thanatopsis," a work written under several clearly traceable influences. His father had brought home the melancholy poetry of Henry Kirke White, and Bryant, hanging over it eagerly, read also Blair's Grave, and Bishop Porteus's poem upon Death. Simultaneously he was captivated by the fine blank verse of Cowper's Task. Under these circumstances-imbued with the mortuary meditations of Blair and Kirke White, watching the onset of the dark Berkshire winter, and supplied by Cowper with a superior and fascinating metrical form-he began the poem which was to make him famous; a great Puritan dirge, the first fine poetic expression of the stern New England mind. But after completing the poem he was content to stuff it into a corner of his desk. It was necessary for him to turn seriously to a career, and guided largely by his father, he determined to study for the bar. In December 1811 he entered the office of a Mr. Howe of Worthington, four or five miles distant, and there remained until June 1814, an unhappy period. He had no liking for legal study, and was troubled by the fear that his sensitive nature was unfitted for the controversies of the law courts. Meanwhile he made the acquaintance, momentous for his future work, of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. For the first time he understood the true character of the impulses which had caused him to pray to be a poet, and realized that they were inextricably bound up with his intense love of natural beauty. As yet, however, he was still groping for an authentic poetic expression. An unfortunate and obscure love affair was reflected in conventional verse, much of it callow in thought and hackneyed in imagery. In the late spring of 1814 he transferred his legal studies to the office of William Baylies in Bridgewater, and there completed them, passing his preliminary examination for the bar in August. These were the years of the second war with England, which awakened no enthusiasm in Bryant. His letters attack the conflict vehemently, and show that he, like other New England Federalists, was thinking seriously of the possibility of secession from the Union and of conflict with the Southern States.

Bryant was fully admitted to the bar in August 1815. While the young lawyer would have liked to embark upon practise in Boston, his purse was too thin to support him in a large city, and he somewhat hastily decided to hang out his sign in Plainfield, a village seven miles from his Cummington home. In December 1815 he walked over to make some preliminary inquiries. While striding along the highway he saw in the afterglow of sunset, flooding the western sky with gold and opal, a solitary bird winging along the horizon; his mind was filled with the beauty of the scene, and at his lodgings that night he wrote the finest of his lyrics, "To a Waterfowl." This also went into his drawer. After eight months in Plainfield, he found a larger opening in Great Barrington, in partnership with a young established lawyer whose practise was worth $1,200 a year. Bryant's experience as a lawyer in Great Barrington endured till the beginning of 1825. There were then three grades of lawyers in the state, entitled respectively to plead in the lower courts, to manage cases in the supreme court, and to argue before the supreme court bench; and Bryant by the fall of 1819 had been admitted to the third category. His name appears four or five times in the supreme court reports, indicating a practise larger than that of most young lawyers. But he found the contentious life of the bar uncongenial, while the frequent miscarriages of justice offended him. Tradition ascribes his final decision to relinquish practise to a decision of the state supreme court in 1824 reversing upon a flimsy technical quibble a judgment for $500 which Bryant had obtained for a plaintiff in a libel suit. But the basic reason was financial. On June 11, 1821, Bryant married Frances Fairchild, daughter of a neighboring farmer-the beginning of a union of singular harmony and devotion; and shortly afterward a daughter was born. As head of a family he required a larger income, and fortunately his pen enabled him to find it.

His fame as a poet dates from the almost accidental publication of "Thanatopsis" in the North American Review in 1817. One of the editors, Willard Phillips, had told Dr. Bryant that he wished William Cullen to contribute; Dr. Bryant found in his son's desk the manuscript of "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl," and a briefer piece; and Phillips excitedly carried them at once to his Cambridge associates. "Ah, Phillips, you have been imposed upon," said R. H. Dana; "no one on this side of the Atlantic is capable of writing such verses." When in September the first abbreviated version of "Thanatopsis" was published, its effect was somewhat blunted by four weak stanzas on death which were accidentally prefaced to it; but thereafter Bryant's position in the narrow American literary world was secure. He contributed several other poems and three prose essays, one on American poetry, to the Review. Four years later, in 1821, he was invited to read the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the Harvard Commencement to a distinguished audience, and wrote "The Ages," one of his longest productions, which contains many fine passages but is deplorably uneven. His Boston acquaintances prevailed upon him to publish it and some of his other verse, and the result was a pamphlet of forty-four pages, containing twelve pieces in all (Poems: Cambridge, 1821). Besides the final version of "Thanatopsis," to which he had added a stately exordium and conclusion, it contained three lyrics of unmistakable genius-"Green River," "To a Waterfowl," and "The Yellow Violet"; and it was warmly praised not merely by American reviewers, but by Blackwood' s.

Among the fruits of this literary success were a visit to New York (1824) at the invitation of Henry Sedgwick of Stockbridge, and an engagement to furnish an average of one hundred lines a month to the United States Literary Gazette of Boston for $200 a year. This ushered in a period of unexampled productivity in Bryant's career, for in about eighteen months (1824-25) he wrote between twenty and thirty poems for the Gazette, including some of his finest work-"Rizpah," "An Indian at the Burial Place of his Fathers," "Monument Mountain," "Autumn Woods," and the "Forest Hymn." By 1825 he had clearly emerged as America's one great poet. The result was an invitation (January 1825) to assume the co-editorship with Henry J. Anderson of the monthly called the New York Review and Athen12um Magazine, at $1,000 a year. Bryant accepted, left his wife and baby in Great Barrington, and for a little more than a year was exclusively employed upon a magazine of precarious and declining fortunes. He made the acquaintance of the literary circle of New York-Halleck, S. F. B. Morse, Verplanck, Chancellor Kent, and others; he wrote for the Review a few fine poems, notably "The Death of the Flowers," as well as much hack work. But he was increasingly worried by poverty and had obtained a license to practise law in the city courts when he was rescued by an offer from the Evening Post. Its editor, William Coleman [q.v.], had been injured in an accident, and Bryant stepped in (June 1826) as assistant.

For the next three years Bryant was sub-editor of the Evening Post, and upon the death of Coleman in July 1829 he assumed the editorial chair which he was to hold for almost a half-century. He quickly acquired a one-eighth share in the journal, which in 1830 became one-fourth, and in 1833 one-third. From the standpoint of material gain the step was fortunate. For the first time it lifted Bryant above financial anxiety, giving him an annual income during the first four years of between $3,300 and $4,000, sums then counted large in New York. He became at one step a public figure of prominence and influence, for the Evening Post, founded under the auspices of Alexander Hamilton, had long been one of the country's leading newspapers. But as a poet he unquestionably suffered by the new demands upon his time. Of the whole quantity of verse which he wrote during his long life, about one-third had been composed before 1829. During 1830 he wrote but thirty lines, during 1831 but sixty, and in 1833 apparently none at all. Newspaper staffs were small, and for the first fifteen years of his control Bryant had but one permanent editorial assistant. He wrote editorials, clipped exchanges, reviewed books, and sometimes gathered news. Usually he was at his desk soon after seven in the morning and remained till nearly five. This confining labor irked him, he cared little at the outset for journalism as a career, bracketing it with the law as "a wrangling profession," and his letters show that at first he meant to escape from it to find "leisure for literary occupations that I love better." Meanwhile he gave the Evening Post increased strength as a Jacksonian and free trade organ, enlarged· its news, and improved its format. But he relied more and more heavily upon his able, aggressive, and highly radical assistant, William Leggett, and after 1830 spent much time out of the office. He enjoyed excursions to the Catskills, Berkshires, and Alleghanies; in 1832 he made a journey to Illinois, where the prairies delighted him, and where he is said to have met Abraham Lincoln; and in 1833 he went on a Canadian tour. In June 1834 he sailed for Europe with his wife and children, intending to leave the Post forever and live upon his one-third share. He was absent during the whole of 1835 and was spending the winter of 1835-36 in Heidelberg when news reached him that Leggett was dangerously ill and the Evening Post in financial difficulties. He arrived in New York in March 1836, to find the journal without an editor, its business manager just dead, and its circulation, advertising revenue, and influence disastrously injured by the ill-temper and lack of judgment with which Leggett had asserted a Locofoco Democracy, attacked monopoly and inflation, and harried the Whigs. It was necessary to plunge in and labor with unwearying assiduity to rescue the paper. Leggett's connection with it was severed, and Bryant became half-owner. During 1837 and 1838 he worked again from dawn until dark, alarming his wife by his neglect of his health. As editor he had been taught a sharp lesson, and for three decades thereafter his primary allegiance-at times his sole allegiance was to the Evening Post.

 By 1840 he had become one of the leading Democratic editors of the nation, and had begun to take advanced ground against slavery. He supported Jackson and Van Buren, demanded a low tariff, opposed the use of public money for internal improvements, and advocated a complete separation between government and banking. He vigorously championed the workingman against judges who held that labor unions were a conspiracy to obstruct trade. When J. Q. Adams defended the right of petition against Calhoun and the South, the Evening Post stood with him; it opposed the annexation of Texas; and it assailed Van Buren for pledging himself to maintain slavery in the District of Columbia. Bryant was able in 1840 to wage a whole-hearted campaign against Harrison, and four years later still kept the Evening Post on the Democratic side, though in his revulsion against Polk and the annexation of Texas he considered bolting the ticket. His chief aid during these years was Parke Godwin [q.v.], later his son-in-law, who assisted in a steady expansion of the news features. To the editorial page Bryant gave dignity and moderation; in vivacity, cleverness, and force it was not equal to the Tribune or Springfield Republican, but in occasional bursts of noble eloquence it was far superior, and his stately elevated style was a model for American journalism.

In 1832 he had brought out a collection called Poems containing eighty-nine pieces in all; the most notable additions to his previous work being "To the Fringed Gentian" and "The Song of Marion's Men." It was a slender sheaf to represent the entire production of a man who had written "Thanatopsis" twenty-one years earlier, but the North American Review rightly pronounced it "the best volume of American verse that has ever appeared." So marked was the American success of his work that Bryant sent a copy to Irving, who was then abroad, asking him to find an English publisher. The English edition came out (London, 1832), with a dedication to Samuel Rogers and an introduction by Irving which made in too unqualified terms the,., generally valid claim that "the descriptive writings of Mr. Bryant are essentially American a claim which some reviewers at once challenged. Irving also slightly displeased Bryant by altering a line of "The Song of Marion's Men" from "The British foeman trembles" to "The foeman trembles in his camp." The English reception of the poems was friendly, and John Wilson wrote an extended and for the most part eulogistic review for Blackwood's. This same year Bryant edited a prose collection called Tales of the Glauber Spa, which was published anonymously, and which contained several stories, creditable but by no means distinguished, from his own pen. This line of endeavor, a fruit of his contacts with Robert Sands and others, he wisely abandoned.

After the first heavy labor of restoring the Evening Post was accomplished Bryant resumed his pen, and the half-dozen years following 1838 evinced a partial renewal of his poetic energy. He wrote some fifteen poems in this period, and the fresh material enabled him to issue The Fountain, and Other Poems (1842) and The White Footed Doe, and Other Poems (1844), the former containing fourteen pieces, and the latter ten. A prefatory remark in the first volume shows that he had in contemplation a long reflective and descriptive poem somewhat resembling Wordsworth's Excursion and Cowper's Task; for he says that some of the poems are presented "merely as parts of a longer one planned by the author, which may possibly be finish ed hereafter." His friend R.H. Dana, Sr., had for years been insistently urging him to compose an extended poem; but it is probable that Bryant found when he attempted it that he did not have a sufficiently fertile and broad imagination, and that his art lacked flexibility and variety. The real value of the project was in furnishing him a much-needed incentive to write the brief lyrics which he hoped to fit into a larger scheme. The reason usually assigned for the slenderness of his output, his preoccupation with the conduct of the Evening Post, has partial, but only partial, validity. After the early forties he was free to take long vacations from the office, and did take them. The journal prospered, its annual average dividends during the forties being almost$10,ooo, while in the fifties it rapidly became a veritable gold-mine. From beginning to end of his life the poet-editor lived with a simplicity that was in some respects almost Spartan. But Bryant's growing wealth enabled him to buy in 1843 an old farmhouse and forty acres of land at Roslyn, Long Island, on the shores of an inlet of the Sound. Here, following the outdoor pursuits he always loved, he was able to spend week-ends and even whole weeks together in summer and fall. He delighted to work in his garden, to take long walks, to swim, and to botanize. He collected a large library, in which he spent much time. He could continue, moreover, those extensive travels which he loved, and which he partially described in correspondence to the Evening Post collected under the title of Letters of a Traveller (1850)-a wide tour of the South, four trips in close succession to Europe, and a jaunt to Cuba. Had it been only leisure and peace that were lacking, Bryant might have written as much in these years as Longfellow; and his keen professional interest in current events might, had he possessed a different temperament, have inspired his pen as passing history inspired Whittier's.

Yet despite increased leisure and frequent absences, Bryant devoted much hard labor to the Evening Post and after 1848 gave it a leading place in the national discussion of the slavery question. It broke sharply with the Democratic party in 1848, supporting the Free-Soil candidacy of Van Buren against Zachary Taylor with such ardor as to be the most efficient advocate of the new party. Two years later it opposed Clay's compromise bill, urging the free states not to give up a single principle. In 1852 it reluctantly indorsed the Democratic nominee, Franklin Pierce, but the following year its utterances against slavery were so radical that the Richmond Enquirer called it "abolitionist in fact." Bryant's disgust with the subserviency of Pierce to the South, and his resentment at the Kansas-Nebraska bill, made him quickly and completely dissever the Post from the Democratic party. In 1856 he enthusiastically allied the paper with the new Republican organization, while his assistant editor, John Bigelow [q.v.], was one of the men instrumental in bringing Fremont forward as its candidate. In the four heated years which ensued Bryant made the Evening Post one of the most vigorous of the "Black Republican" organs. He encouraged the despatch of settlers and rifles to Kansas, denounced the Dred Scott decision as an unallowable perversion of the Constitution, and called John Brown a martyr and hero. When Lincoln made his Cooper Union speech in 1860, Bryant introduced him, and the poet-editor was heartily glad to see him defeat Seward for the nomination. After secession began, Bryant never wavered in denouncing all plans for compromise, and in demanding that rebellion be put down by the sword. Many of his editorial utterances for these years display a grandeur of style, and a force and eloquence not to be matched elsewhere in the press of the period, and they produced an effect out of all proportion to the slender circulation of the Evening Post.

Throughout the Civil War Bryant belonged to the radical faction which demanded greater energy in its prosecution and assailed Lincoln for his moderation and his reluctance to emancipate the slaves. He was indignant at the modification of Fremont's proclamation. The Evening Post repeatedly urged the President to act, and pointed out that Antietam furnished a favorable opportunity. In his criticism of many administration policies Bryant was in close contact with Salmon P. Chase, whose appointment to a cabinet position he had urged upon Lincoln; but the editor objected warmly to some of Chase's own fiscal policies, notably the inflation of the currency by the issue of treasury notes as legal tender. For a time in 1864 the Evening Post hesitated to advocate the renomination of Lincoln, but in midsummer Bryant fell into line, and thereafter his praise of the Chief Executive lacked nothing in fervor. After the close of the war he broke from his former radical associates upon the issue of reconstruction in the South, the Evening Post maintaining an unflinching advocacy of President Johnson's mild policy, and attacking the harsh measures of Congress. Bryant regretted the impeachment of Johnson, and rejoiced when the Senate failed to convict him. After Grant's inauguration his active interest in the management of the Evening Post materially relaxed. The death of Mrs. Bryant on July 27, 1865, had been a heavy blow. In 1866 he tried to escape from his depression of mind by beginning a translation of the whole of Homer, completed in 1871, and showing a fine mastery of blank verse; and in 1866-67 he made a dispirited tour, his sixth and last, of Europe. He had been everywhere regarded for many years as the first citizen of New York, and he was unweariedly at the service of all good causes. In civic, social, and charitable movements his name took precedence of all others. But he was never in any sense popular; austere, chill, precise, and dignified, his demeanor made familiarity impossible, and even in small gatherings he was not a clubbable man. Though he was a polished and impressive orator, and spoke often, his immense influence as a public leader was almost wholly an indirect influence; he reached the minds of those who in turn could reach the masses. His volume of original writing in this period was not large, but it maintained the even merit which had usually marked his production since the appearance of "Thanatopsis." In 1876 he harked back to the subject of mortality in the noble poem "The Flood of Years," and followed it by his retrospective meditation, "A Lifetime," the last of all his works. To the end of his life, always athletic and active, he continued to give several hours daily when in town to the Evening Post, walking to and from his home. He was estranged from the Grant Administration by its blunders, its tariff policy, its course at the South, and its low moral tone, and he regarded the Liberal Republican movement with guarded approbation. Had the Liberal Republican convention in 1872 nominated Charles Francis Adams he might have supported him, but he regarded Greeley's candidacy as preposterous. Four years later, associates urged him to side with Tilden (an old personal friend) against Hayes, but he kept the Evening Post Republican. He labored as usual in the office on the day (April 29, 1878) when he delivered an oration under a hot sun at the unveiling of the Mazzini statue in Central Park. Returning after the ceremonies to the home of James Grant Wilson, he fell on the steps, sustained a concussion of the brain, and shortly lapsed from partial consciousness into coma. His death in June was followed by a funeral in All Souls' Unitarian Church and burial in Roslyn Cemetery.

Bryant holds a double place in American history. He brought to his editorial chair some qualities which no editor of his time possessed in equal degree. In culture and scholarship he surpassed Raymond, Bowles, and Greeley, while in dignity and adherence to moral principle he was far in advance of Bennett and Dana. Few men of his time did half so much to lift journalism from a vulgar calling to a place of high honor and national influence. The literary correctness of the Evening Post, controlled by Bryant's fastidious taste-his index expurgatorius is still quoted was famous. But, preoccupied with the great aims of his editorial page, he lacked the faculty of Bowles and Greeley for creating a broad newspaper which would appeal by enterprise in newsgathering and by special features to a great popular audience. He was responsible for few innovations in journalism, and they were not of high importance. His journalistic vein had something of the narrowness which marked his poetic genius, and though the Post's editorials, political news, literary articles, and foreign correspondence were of the highest merit, they were for the few and not the many. As a poet he holds a position in American letters akin to that of Wordsworth in English. He is our great poet of nature, with which more than one hundred of his total of about one hundred and sixty poems deal. He had certain clear limitations : he lacked warmth of emotion, and especially human emotion, while his imagination was restricted in range, and he seldom revealed intellectual profundity. But he possessed a sensitively artistic perception of what was lovely in nature, and a capacity for its imaginative interpretation, which are not equaled by any other American writer. It is not nature in general, but the untouched nature of the New World, and of New England in particular, which his verse pictures with definiteness and accuracy. With this descriptive power are joined an elemental piety, a pervading sense of the transiency of all earthly things, and a meditative philosophy which, while melancholy, is also peaceful and consoling; qualities which give too much of his work a religious depth, and make his poetry as cool and restful as the deep forests he loved. His range was not wide nor high, but within that range he wrought with a classical love of restraint, purity, and objectivity, chiseling his work as out of marble; and he produced a small body of poetry which may be called imperishable.

[The standard life is Parke Godwin's A Biography of Wm. Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His Private Correspondence (1883), in two large volumes. Godwin also edited Bryant's Poetical Works and Complete Prose Writings (1883, 1884). The latter includes a selection of articles from the Evening Post, but the paper's editorial pages contain additional material of value which has never been collected. Godwin also made a selection from Bryant's travel writings, but these are found more fully in Bryant's own Letters of a Traveller (1850), dealing with his European, Western, and Southern wanderings. John Bigelow's brief volume in the American Men of Letters series, Wm. Cullen Bryant (1890), reflects the author's intimacy with the poet, as does also Jas. Grant Wilson's Bryant and His Friends (1886). The aim of Wm. Aspenwall Bradley's Bryant (1905) in the English Men of Letters series is critical rather than biographical. A note by Carl Van Doren on the origin of "Thanatopsis" may be found in the Nation, CI, 432-33. Some light is thrown upon Bryant's work as editor by Geo. Cary Eggleston, Recollections of a Varied Life (1910), and by Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (1922), while a sharply critical sidelight is furnished by a manuscript volume of memoirs by J. Ranken Towse, in the possession of the Evening Post. The best brief critical studies are by E. C. Stedman in Poets of America (1885), and Wm. Ellery Leonard in the Cambridge History of American Lit. (1917), I, 260 ff. The last-named volume contains a full bibliography.]

A.N.


BUFFUM, Arnold, 1782-1859, Smithfield, Rhode Island, Indiana, New York, New York, Society of Friends, Quaker, radical abolitionist, temperance reformer, philanthropist.  Co-founder (with William Lloyd Garrison) and first president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, in 1832.  Manager and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society in December 1833.  Manager, Massachusetts, 1833-1837; Manager, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1835-1837; Vice President, 1834-1836.  Executive Committee, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1846-1855.  Lectured extensively against slavery.  Visited England to promote abolitionism.  Was influenced by English anti-slavery leaders Clarkson and Wilberforce. (Drake, 1950, pp. 137, 157-158, 162-163, 178; Pease, 1965, pp. 418-427; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 218, 401, 433; Van Broekhoven, 2002, pp. 18, 20, 22, 58, 62, 66, 67; Abolitionist, Vol. I, No. XII, December, 1833; Buffum, Arnold, Lectures Showing the Necessity for a Liberty Party, and Setting Forth its Principles, Measures and Object, 1844; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 241; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 320)

BUFFUM, ARNOLD (December 13, 1782-March 13, 1859), Quaker, anti-slavery lecturer, was the grandson of Joseph Buffum, of the second or third generation of his family in America, who moved from Massachusetts to Smithfield, Rhode Island, in 1715. There Arnold, second son among eight children of William and Lydia (Arnold) Buffum, was born. William Buffum was a farmer and merchant, a Quaker, and a member of the Providence Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Fugitive slaves sheltered in his household enlisted his son's sympathies for anti-slavery. Without extensive education, Arnold became a hatter; but having an inventive mind, he conceived and patented various mechanical contrivances. Until he was fifty he was but partially successful at his trade, residing now at Smithfield or Providence, now in Massachusetts or Connecticut. Between 1825 and 1831 business led him twice to Europe, where he met Thomas Clarkson, Amelia Opie, and Lafayette. Returning, he established in Fall River certain "infant schools," based on some foreign educational theory.

As president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society from its organization in January 1832, Buffum was commissioned as its lecturing agent, thereafter devoting what time he could to forwarding emancipation. This meant personal danger and sacrifice of friends and business interests, but his moral courage, eloquence, and telling appeals for the negro's freedom made a deep impression. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia in 1833. Thither he moved about 1834, establishing himself in the hatting industry. In 1840-41 he aroused serious reflection, ripening into antislavery sentiment, throughout Ohio and Indiana by lecturing and by editing at New Garden (now Fountain City), Ind., the Protectionist. Rejecting Garrison's and Phillips's radical principles, Buffum, by voice and vote, supported successively the Liberty, Free-Soil, and Republican parties. He also exerted himself in behalf of temperance.

Buffum married (1803) Rebecca Gould, from near Newport, Rhode Island. His daughter, Elizabeth (Buffum) Chace [q.v.], became a Garrisonian anti-slavery worker, his younger son, Edward Gould Buffum, Paris correspondent of the New York Herald. Muhlenberg, Arnold Buffum's fellow passenger on a European trip (1843), thus describes him: "An Old Hickory Abolitionist ... a tall, gray-headed, gold-spectacled patriarch . . . a very sharp old fellow [who] has all his facts ready, . . . abuses his country outrageously" as being pro-slavery, but still a "genuine democratic American." Buffum was of religious nature, and had high literary tastes. In 1854 he entered the Raritan Bay Union, Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he died.

[Lillie B. C. Wyman and Arthur C. Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1914); W. P. and F. J. Garrison, Wm. Lloyd Garrison (1889); Anne Ayres, The Life and Work of Wm. A. Muhlenberg (1880); information from Mrs. L. B. C. Wyman, Buffum's grand-daughter.]

R.S.B.


BUFFUM, James M., Lynn, Massachusetts, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1845-53


BUFFUM, James Needham, 1807-1887, Mayor of Lynn, Massachusetts, abolitionist, supporter of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.  Vice President, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1845-1848.  (Mabee, 1970, pp. 114, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 210, 211, 221, 225, 250, 342; New York Times obituary: June 13, 1888)


BUFFUM, William, Providence, Rhode Island, abolitionist, American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1837-40, Executive Committee, 1840-41


BURLEIGH, Charles Calistus, 1810-1878, Connecticut, radical abolitionist.  Leader of the Pennsylvania Free Produce Association.  Lectured extensively on evils of slavery.  Edited Pennsylvania Freeman paper of the Eastern Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.  Active in temperance, peace and women’s rights movements.  (Drake, 1950, p. 171; Dumond, 1961, pp. 186, 265, 273; Mabee, 1970, pp. 34, 35, 66, 298, 368; Pease, 1965, pp. 172-177; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 455; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 284; Burleigh, “Slavery and the North” [Anti-Slavery Tract No. 10], New York, 1855, pp. 2-3, 8-10; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 3, p. 959; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II, New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 320)

BURLEIGH, CHARLES CALISTUS (November 3, 1810-June 13, 1878), abolitionist, was a son of Rinaldo and Lydia (Bradford) Burleigh, and a member of a family of reformers. Born in Plainfield, Connecticut, he received his schooling at Plainfield Academy, and while continuing to help with the work of his father's farm, began the study of law. But early in 1833 an attack on the Connecticut "Black Law" which he had published in the Genius of Temperance attracted the attention of the Reverend Samuel J. May [q.v.], through whose instrumentality he became editor of Arthur Tappan's new paper the Unionist, published at Brooklyn, Connecticut, in defense of Prudence Crandall [q.v.] and her negro school. Burleigh later assisted by his brother, William Henry [q.v.],--edited the Unionist for some two years during which he won a reputation for fearless and forceful writing. He had continued his study of law, and in January 1835 was admitted to the bar, but again the Reverend S. J. May and the call of reform intervened, and Burleigh turned his back on a professional career to become agent and lecturer for the Middlesex Anti-Slavery Society. In the same year he was in the company of William Lloyd Garrison when the latter was mobbed in Boston, wrote the account of the mob published in the Liberator (October 24, 1835), and helped conduct that journal during Garrison's absence from the city. His name appeared frequently in the Liberator thereafter, and his long thin figure, "flowing beard and ringlets and eccentric costume" (Garrison, III, 298) became familiar on lecture platforms throughout the northeastern states. In 1838 he was a witness of another mob when Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia was burned. At this time and for some years he was editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman, after 1844 the regular organ of the Eastern Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. As a member of the business committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society he introduced at the meeting in 1840 a resolution stating that the constitution of the society should not be interpreted as requiring members either to exercise or refuse to exercise their political votes; this resolution led to the repudiation by the society of both Harrison and Van Buren as candidates for the presidency. In 1859 Burleigh succeeded Sydney H. Gays corresponding secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and in that capacity prepared its twenty-seventh annual report, published under the title, The Anti-Slavery History of the John Brown Year (1861). He also prepared the introduction to Reception of George Thompson in Great Britain (1836); and an appendix to Discussion on American Slavery between George Thompson, Esq., and Reverend Robert J. Breckinridge (1836); and was the author of Slavery and the North (Anti-Slavery Tracts, No. 10, 1855); and an address, extracts from which appeared in No Slave-Hunting in the Old Bay State (Anti-Slavery Tracts, new series, No. 13, 1859).

Burleigh's zeal in the anti-slavery cause led him indirectly into another crusade. Twice jailed in West Chester, Pennsylvania, for selling anti-slavery literature on Sunday, he plunged into Anti-Sabbatarianism, joining with others in a call for a convention, held in New York in March 1848, at which he was prominent among the speakers. He also dabbled from time to time in other reforms: opposed capital punishment in a pamphlet, Thoughts on the Death Penalty (1845) and on the platform in Philadelphia (A Defence of Capital Punishment by Elder Frederick Plummer in a Discussion of Six Evenings with Charles Burleigh, 1846); and supported woman suffrage, notably by his speeches in the conventions at Cleveland and New York in 1853 and at the first annual meeting of the American Equal Rights Association at New York in May 1867 (Susan B. Anthony and others, History of Woman Suffrage, 1881-82, I, 148,549, II, 194). He later followed his brother William Henry into the field of temperance reform (Centennial Temperance Volume, 1877, p. 83).

Burleigh's personal appearance, his eccentricity of dress and manner, were against him, in the opinion of Samuel J. May, who nevertheless reckoned Burleigh among his ablest associates, characterizing him as "a single-minded, pure-hearted, conscientious, self-sacrificing man," who often "delighted and astonished his hearers by the brilliancy of his rhetoric and the surpassing beauty of his imagery" (May, p. 66). The son of William Lloyd Garrison said that as a close debater Burleigh "was easily first of all the abolition orators" (Garrison, IV, 319). During his later years he made his home at Northampton, Massachusetts, where he died in 1878 from injuries received in a railroad accident at Florence, Massachusetts. On October 24, 1842, he had married Gertrude Kimber of Chester County, Pennsylvania, who bore him three children.

[Chas. Burleigh. Genealogy of the Burley or Burleigh Family of America (1880); Ellen D. Larned, History of Windham County, Connecticut, vol. II (1880), p. 497; Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (1869); W. P. and F. J. Garrison, Wm. Lloyd Garrison (18S5-89); J. T. Scharf and T. Westcott, History of Phi/a. (1884), III, 2015; files of the Liberator (Boston); obituary in Boston Transcript, June 14, 1878.]

E. R. D.


BURLEIGH, William Henry, 1812-1871, Connecticut, journalist.  Active in temperance, peace and women’s rights movements.  Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society. Editor of the anti-slavery newspapers Christian Freeman, newspaper of the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society, and the Charter Oak.  Leader of the Liberty Party.  In 1836, he was appointed a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS).  In 1840-1841, Burleigh was a Manager of the AASS.  As a result of his protesting the war against Mexico, which he felt was being fought for the “slave power,” Burleigh was attacked by mobs and barely escaped being hurt.  (Dumond, 1961, pp. 186, 265, 273, 301; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 455; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 286; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 3, p. 961)

BURLEIGH, WILLIAM HENRY (February 2, 1812-March 18, 1871), journalist, reformer, was the fourth of the six sons of Rinaldo Burleigh, a Yale graduate and a classical teacher until failing sight forced him to retire, and his wife Lydia Bradford, a descendant of Governor William Bradford. He was born at Woodstock, Connecticut, but spent most of his boyhood on his father's farm at Plainfield, Connecticut, where he early became a sharer in the family responsibilities, which meant hard work and few recreations. His education was received at the district. school and the Plainfield Academy, of which his father was in charge until William was eleven. Winter schooling and summer work alternated for a number of years: He was apprenticed to a dyer, then to a printer, in order that he might quickly become self-supporting. In 1830 he became a journeyman on the Stonington Phenix, where he was soon setting up articles of his own composition. In 1832 he was printer and contributor to the Schenectady (New York) Cabinet and in 1833 assisted his brother, Charles Calistus Burleigh [q.v.], in editing the Unionist, Brooklyn, Connecticut, a paper founded to support Prudence Crandall's colored school in which William Burleigh also taught for a time. He was married to Harriet Adelia Frink of Stonington, Connecticut, by whom he had seven children. He early felt interest in reform causes, especially anti-slavery, temperance, peace, and woman suffrage, and in 1836 began lecturing for the American Anti-Slavery Society. At about the same time he was editor of the Literary Journal, Schenectady, but left that in 1837 to become editor of the Christian Witness and afterward the Temperance Banner, in Pittsburgh. In 1843 he went to Hartford at the invitation of the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society, to take charge of its organ, the Christian Freeman, afterward the Charter Oak. In 1849 he was employed by the New York State Temperance Society, with headquarters at Albany and Syracuse, as corresponding secretary, lecturer, and editor of the Prohibitionist. He remained in this position until 1855, when he was appointed harbor master of the port of New York and went to live in Brooklyn. Later he was made a port warden, but in 1870 was displaced for a Democrat. His first wife died in 1864 and in 1865 he married Mrs. Celia Burr of Troy, a teacher, prominent in woman suffrage work, and afterward a Unitarian minister. Burleigh's fiery tilts against the evils of his day often made life hard for himself and his family. He denounced the Mexican War, as waged in the interest of the slave power, and for this and on other occasions narrowly escaped mob violence. Yet he really disliked controversy and preferred purely literary work. Poetry was the form he chose for personal literary expression, apart from editorial and lecture composition. A volume of Poems was published in 1841 and enlarged editions appeared in 1845 and 1850. After his death his wife collected these poems in a new edition (1871). His poetry is not without beauty and vigor and shows his longing for the quiet, studious life which, because of his goading conscience, he was never able to enjoy. This conscience also dictated a certain amount of propaganda verse, such as The Rum Fiend and Other Poems (1871). His picture, taken shortly before his death, shows a worn, kindly face, with high cheek bones, unusually alert dark eyes, heavy, drooping, white mustache, and white hair worn long and brushed straight back. He was brought up by his parents a strict Presbyterian but later became a Unitarian. He died in Brooklyn, New York, as a result of what were called epileptic attacks, and his funeral was held at the Second Unitarian Church, where Samuel Longfellow had preached and where John White Chadwick was then pastor. His old friend John G. Whittier visited him shortly before his death.

[The chief source of information about Burleigh is the memoir by his wife Celia Burleigh, which forms the preface to his collected Poems (1871). A long obituary appeared in the New York Tribune, March 20, 1871, and an obituary notice in the New York Times, March 19, 1871. See also Chas. Burleigh, The Genealogy of the Burley or Burleigh Family of America (1880), p. 141.)

S.G.B.


BURNS, Anthony, c. 1830-1862, fugitive slave, abolitionist, clergyman.  (Mabee, 1970, pp.308-312, 324, 373, 418n31; Pease, 1965, pp. lxxviii-lxxix, 251; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 56, 212-213, 303, 415, 477-478; Stevens, 1856; Von Frank, 1998; Boston Slave Riot and the Trial of Anthony Burns, 1854; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 404, 460; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 308)

BURNS, ANTHONY (May 31, 1834-July 27, 1862), fugitive slave, was born in Stafford County, Virginia. It is said, but without certainty, that his father, who died where the child was very young, had been a freeman and had come from the North. Certainly the boy from the beginning showed unusual independence and character. At six, in return for little services he did them, he learned the alphabet from white children with whom he was thrown in contact. He was converted while a youth to the Baptist faith and two years later became a "slave preacher." As a young man he was sent to take a position in Richmond, for which his master was to be paid. A transfer of positions left him free to escape, and in February 1854 he fled from Richmond on a vessel on which he had a friend. On May 24, he was arrested in Boston on the charge of theft. The excitement in Boston during the following week was said to have been without parallel since the days of the Revolution. The abolitionists and the woman suffragists were holding anniversary conventions at the time, but people poured in also from neighboring suburbs. A mass meeting two days after the arrest was addressed by Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker. An attack was made on the Court House, in which one of the deputy marshals was killed. President Pierce and the Mayor of Boston brought together military forces to prevent a second attack. Burns was defended by R. H. Dana and others, but without success. He had been immediately identified by his master. To prevent his release, he was taken down State St. between armed troops. The Grand Jury was charged by Judge B. R. Curtis to indict Parker, Wendell Phillips, and Higginson for their Faneuil Hall talks on "obstructing the process of the United States," but the indictments were quashed on technical grounds. The cost to the United States of sending this one fugitive back to Virginia was $100,- 000. A sum of money had been raised to purchase Burns's freedom but this was not possible at the time. A few months later he fell into the hands of a friendly master, who sold him to individuals in Boston interested in setting him free. He attended the preparatory department of Oberlin College, 1855-56, and is supposed to have attended Fremont Academy, 1856-57. From 1857 to 1862, through the generosity of a Boston woman, he was able to study at Oberlin College. For a short time in 1860 he was in charge of a colored Baptist church in Indianapolis, but was forced to leave. Later he went to Canada, and became pastor of the Zion Baptist Church at St. Catherines, where he died.

[Boston Slave Riot and Trial of Anthony Burns (1854); C. E. Stevens, Anthony Burns, A History (1856); M. G. McDougall, Fugitive Slaves (1891); Wm. Lloyd Garrison, The Story of His Life, Told by His Children (1885-89); the Liberator, June, July 1854, August 22, 1862; Fred Landon, "Anthony Burns in Canada," in Ontario History Society Papers and Records, vol. XXII (1925).]

M.A.K.


BURR, Aaron , 1756-1836, American politician Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, pp. 4; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. Jas. Parton, The Life and Times of Aaron Burr (1858) Aaron Burr, His Personal and Political Relations with Thos. Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton (1902) The Aaron Burr Conspiracy (1903) and Henry Adams, History of the U.S., vols. II and III (1889-90).

BURR, AARON (February 6, 1756-September 14, 1836), Revolutionary soldier, lawyer, United States senator, and third vice-president of the United States, came of an ancestry remarkable as well for its ecclesiastical eminence as for its intellectual vigor. His father was Aaron Burr [q.v.], scholar, theologian, and second president of the College of New Jersey; his mother was Esther Edwards, daughter of Jonathan Edwards [q.v.], the greatest of the New England divines. Burr and his sister Sarah, or "Sally," were born at Newark, New Jersey, where for some years the elder Burr had acted as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. Shortly after the birth of his son, however, he moved to Princeton, where he died in September 1757. After the death of Burr's mother and of her parents within a few months, a maternal uncle, Timothy Edwards, became guardian of the children, essaying to rear them in the family tradition. Tapping Reeve, who subsequently became judge of the supreme court of Connecticut, and a famous preceptor in law, served for a time as their tutor and later married Sally Burr (Davis, post, I, 25, 26).

From all accounts Burr was an attractive boy, fair of face, sprightly and merry, but not readily submissive to the discipline of his austere uncle. There was always in him a certain independence and audacity of spirit that carried him over or around artificial barriers. Yet he could apply himself to the task that engaged his interest. He prepared for college as a matter of course, ambition here coinciding with the wishes of his family; and he entered the sophomore class of the College of New Jersey at the age of thirteen. Tradition has it that he was a brilliant student but dissipated. Brilliant he was in whatever enlisted his interest, but Parton doubts that he was guilty of serious dereliction in these early years, arguing that part of his dissipation in college was "merely a dissipation of mind in multifarious reading." Be this as it may, Burr graduated with distinction at the age of sixteen. He is described as a youth of winning presence, rather short in stature but graceful in manner, who made friends easily among both sexes. A fondness for adventure and intrigue, however, gave a certain instability to his character, and a degree of waywardness to his life. He hesitated for a time over the choice of a career. During his college course a revival that had stirred many of his mates had awakened his curiosity and led him to consult the president of the college. That conservative mentor, John Witherspoon [q.v.], expressed disbelief in revivals, and thus reassured, Burr did not yield to the zealous expostulations of his fellows. Some months later, however, motivated by curiosity fully as much as by a pious desire to follow in the footsteps of his fathers, he entered upon the study of theology. But his curiosity was too much for his teacher, and in 1774 he left theology for law.

Less than a year later, the clash at Lexington summoned him to arms. After a few weeks with the motley host that beleaguered Boston, he joined the expedition against Quebec. On the difficult march thither, in the unsuccessful attack on the city (during which he is credited with an attempt to rescue the body of the commander, Montgomery), and during the gloomy winter that followed, he showed marked soldierly qualities. In the spring of 1776, having served Arnold as staff officer with the rank of captain, he was sent to New York. Here he served with the rank of major in the official household of General Washington, but Burr's want of regard for military decorum, and perhaps occasional impertinence, antagonized his chief, and the intimacy of a few weeks led only to mutual dislike and distrust. Transferred to the staff of General Putnam, Burr gave a good account of himself in the battle of Long Island and in the evacuation of New York-and had time to indulge in one of his numerous amatory intrigues. In July 1777 he was appointed lieutenant-colonel in the Continental line and assigned to a regiment stationed in Orange County, New York, and as its virtual commander established a commendable reputation for discipline and daring.

Throughout his life Burr displayed an unfortunate tendency to follow impulses which were prompted by personal likes or dislikes, as, for example, at Valley Forge where he narrowly missed inclusion in the notorious "Conway Cabal," and again at Monmouth where he suffered a repulse - a misfortune that led him to sympathize openly with General Charles Lee. Following Monmouth, he spent the winter on patrol duty with his regiment in Westchester County, New York, where he maintained his reputation for vigilance and discipline. The hardships of this service, plus the exertions of the previous summer's campaign, eventually forced him to resign from the army in March 1779 (Ibid., I, ch. V-XI).

He desired to enter upon professional training at once, but ill health forced a long wait. In the fall of 1780 he took up the study of law at Raritan, New Jersey, with William Paterson, an older friend of college days, but later transferred to an office in Haverstraw, New York. By means of this transfer and through the favor of Judge Robert Yates, of the state supreme court, he hastened his training and early in 1782 was licensed as attorney and counselor-at-law. In preparing for a profession Burr, as usual, had preferred to follow his own bent and was not averse to short cuts (Parton, post, 130-34).

In July 1782, he married Mrs. Theodosia (Bartow) Prevost, some ten years his senior, the widow of a former British officer. Though possessed of little fortune and of no great beauty, she was a woman of charm and intellectual vigor, and despite the disparity in their ages, her invalidism, and his exacting temperament, their twelve years of married life were apparently stimulating to both. Burr has been charged with more than one intrigue before his marriage and with many more after his wife's death, but he seems to have been true to her, if not as passionately devoted to her as she was to him, and he was an affectionate and zealous parent to their one daughter, Theodosia [q.v.]. His circle of stimulating regard included his stepsons, Frederick and Bartow Prevost, and numerous proteges, who, like his daughter, were always his devoted admirers.

In the fall of 1783 Burr moved to New York. Here he soon shared with Alexander Hamilton the pick of legal practise and for six years stuck closely to the law. In pleading he was noted for clarity and conciseness of utterance. He never ranted nor lost his temper, but as a contemporary noted, "He is more remarkable for dexterity than sound judgment or logic." Burr's practise brought him a substantial income which he tried to increase by extensive speculations. Generosity as well as self-indulgence made an incurable spendthrift of him. His carelessness in money matters was often a cause of grief to clients as well as to friends.

Burr's attempts to enter politics during his early residence in New York were uniformly unsuccessful. His professional rival, Hamilton, was the leader of one group, and Governor George Clinton, who headed the opposing forces, at first made no bid for his support. But in September 1789 Clinton made him his attorney-general. From that office, after participating in a questionable deal in state lands, he was transferred, in 1791, to the United States Senate. He owed his elevation to his own finesse in fusing the Clinton and Livingston factions in opposition to the financial plans of Hamilton. The coalition defeated the latter's father-in-law, General Philip Schuyler, and thereby gained for Burr Hamilton's persistent enmity.

During his term as senator (1791-97) Burr was twice mentioned for the governorship and in 1797 received thirty electoral votes for president. He took his membership seriously, applied himself to routine tasks, did nothing unseemly, and accomplished nothing of great repute. He attracted public attention and gained some worthwhile friends, including Gallatin and Jackson, but was not really accepted by either of the major party groups then being formed. He was defeated for reelection to the Senate but in April 1797 was elected to the state Assembly. Here he introduced a measure to choose presidential electors by separate districts and was influential in the passage of a bill to aid the Holland Land Company in which he himself had a financial interest (Paul D. Evans, The Holland Land Company, 1924, pp. 180, 212-13). These measures, coupled with efforts in obtaining a charter for the Manhattan Company, a banking corporation disguised as a water company, led to his defeat in April 1799.

For some years past Burr had been gathering about himself a band of enthusiastic young helpers, who by letter urged their leader's claims to high office and directed operations at "Martling's Long Room," where met St. Tammany's Society. Burr did not openly affiliate with the mechanics and small householder5 who largely made up this organization but through henchmen kept informed of their activities and around them built up his political machine. With this, he proposed to make himself a power in local politics and force Jefferson and his associates to recognize his leadership. He first secured his election to the state assembly from Orange County and then in New York City brought about the selection of a strong legislative ticket headed by Clinton, Brockholst Livingston, and his own friend, General Horatio Gates. With this coalition ticket and using the "Martling Men" as a nucleus, he definitely listed and organized the voters of the city and in April 1800 roundly defeated Hamilton. The city returned a Republican delegation which gave that party control of the legislature by a narrow majority, and thus assured it the entire vote of New York in the electoral college. Then through a. clever by-play, Burr procured his own indorsement for vice-president (American Historical Review, VIII, 512) and later journeyed to Philadelphia and secured from the Republican members of Congress a pledge to support him equally with Jefferson.

Owing to this agreement Burr tied with Jefferson for the presidency, each receiving seventy- three votes. The Federalists; who controlled a slight majority in the House of Representatives, determined to vote for him rather than Jefferson. Burr at once disclaimed competition for the office and his letter to that effect was published (Davis, II, 75). He also wrote a vigorous disclaimer to one of the Virginia group (Burr to John Taylor, December 18, 1800, manuscript in the Pennsylvania Historical Society). Later he kept quiet, in part, perhaps, because he learned that his local party associates were preparing to repudiate him and that Jefferson favored them rather than himself in the prospective division of patronage (P. L. Ford, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, VIII, 102). He issued no more disclaimers, but apparently repelled all direct attempts of the Federalists to bargain with him. "Had Burr done anything for himself," wrote one of them in the midst of the balloting to break the tie, "he would long ere this have been president" (Davis, II, u3), and that, too, we may add, despite the bitter secret opposition of Hamilton. But he did nothing and on the thirty-sixth ballot the Federalists permitted the election of his rival. The share of patronage accorded to him was not wholly satisfactory but he helped in the reelection of Governor Clinton and presided over the convention that in 1801 amended the state constitution. He alienated both Republicans and Federalists by his vote when the Senate was evenly divided over the Judiciary Act and further antagonized the Republicans by taking part in the Federalist celebration of Washington's birthday. He was also attacked for suppressing a lengthy scurrilous pamphlet against the administration of John Adams. From this the editors who directed it passed to the more serious charge that Burr had intrigued with the Federalists to supplant Jefferson. Then followed two years of unstinted newspaper abuse. A pamphlet by Van Ness in rejoinder gave the presidential group a pretext for finding another running mate. Accordingly, at the party caucus on February 25, 1804 George Clinton replaced Burr on the Republican ticket.

Burr's friends in the New York legislature had already nominated him on February 18 for the governorship. In this contest there was some prospect of receiving Federalist aid through those New England leaders who were looking forward to a Northern confederacy. Burr refused to commit himself to their disunion schemes, but in spite of his attitude and Hamilton's renewed opposition, the rank and file of the Federalists voted for him and helped him carry the city and some outlying counties. Nevertheless, the regular Republican candidate, Morgan Lewis, supported by the Clinton and Livingston factions and countenanced by Jefferson and Hamilton, defeated him by a heavy majority.

Following this contest came the fatal duel with Hamilton. For fifteen years in contests for the Senate, the presidency, and the governorship the latter had filled his private correspondence with invective against Burr's public and private character. Their personal relations during all this time had generally been friendly. Now Burr regarded himself for the third time as the peculiar victim of Hamilton's malevolence. "These things," he significantly stated in the correspondence that preceded the fatal encounter, "must have an end." In the course of the campaign there had been published three compromising letters in which Hamilton was represented as stating publicly that Burr was a "dangerous man and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government." This ill-considered remark ended with reference to a "still more despicable opinion which General Hamilton had expressed of Mr. Burr" (Wandell and Minnegerode, I, 274). These statements provoked Burr's challenge. They must be interpreted in connection with Hamilton's long-continued secret abuse, which the other had certainly not repaid in kind. The correspondence that preceded the duel favors Burr. His demands were peremptory, and Hamilton's replies were evasive. As the latter was unwilling to repudiate his previous harsh judgments, he reluctantly accepted the challenge (Davis, II, ch. XXI). In addition to settling past grievances, however, Burr may have wished to forestall further unwelcome rivalry, either in a possible Northern confederacy or on the Southwestern border. The latter was the more probable field, for both Burr and Hamilton cherished the ambition to lead an army thither in an effort to free the Spanish colonies. Viewed in this light the duel with Hamilton may be regarded as the opening move in the "Conspiracy," as well as the lurid finale to Burr's local political career. The meeting itself took place on the morning of July 11, 1804, at Weehawken, New Jersey, a circumstance that permitted two states to bring indictments against the survivor. Each man fired a single shot; Hamilton fell mortally wounded and died the next day. Burr fled, first to Philadelphia and thence southward, while his enemies took revenge on his heavily encumbered property and reputation.

Burr's journey was not an aimless one. Both before and after the duel he had conferred with General James Wilkinson [q.v.], a friend of long standing who had just come northward from New Orleans. The two had evidently agreed upon a plan of action in case war should break out with Spain. As a preliminary step Burr was to visit East Florida; but much to the relief of his prospective hosts, a series of destructive tempests prevented him from reaching his destination (East Florida Papers, Casa Yrujo to Enrique White, August 12; Burr to White, September 22, 1804). Apparently he saw enough to convince him that the way to Mexico did not lie in that direction. Before leaving Philadelphia he had requested the British minister, Anthony Merry, to aid financially and otherwise in bringing about the separation of the Western states from the Union. This proposal was distinctly treasonable, but Burr probably never seriously intended to carry it out. Wilkinson may have told him how successfully he had used the lure of separatism with the Spaniards and had suggested that Burr approach Merry with a similar proposal. Merry readily listened to the project, which was broached to him through an intermediary, but his superiors refused to countenance it (H. Adams, II, 395).

At the next session of Congress, 1804-05, it fell to Burr's lot to preside over the impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase of the Supreme Court. Because Jefferson was anxious. to have the latter removed, the administration leaders showed the retiring vice-president unusual attention and gave two of his family connections and his friend Wilkinson lucrative territorial appointments (Beveridge, Marshall, II, 182). Nevertheless Burr conducted the trial "with the dignity and impartiality of an archangel, but with the rigor of a devil," and at the end his most bitter critics commended his rulings and also gave him a genera f vote of appreciation for the "impartiality, dignity and ability with which he had presided over their deliberations" (Plumer, 312; Adams, Memoirs, I, 365; Annals of Congress, 8 Congress, 2 Sess., col. 72). This vote followed his valedictory address to the Senate on March 2, a remarkable address that moved some of the senators to tears.

During this winter in Washington, Wilkinson and Burr frequently conferred over maps of the Floridas, Louisiana, and adjacent regions. Their purpose may be inferred from a letter of John Adair to the former, which ends thus: "Mexico glitters in our Eyes-the word is all we wait for" (Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1812, 1925, p. 62). Burr accordingly planned to journey westward with Wilkinson when the other went to take over his new post in St. Louis. But other projects besides the invasion of Mexico occupied Burr's attention. There was the possibility of being returned to Congress from one of the western districts, or of obtaining a territorial appointment. Moreover he and a number of his friends were concerned in a dubious project to construct a canal around the falls of the Ohio. Inspired by these various possibilities Burr left Washington in the middle of March 18o5 on his westward journey. His first stop was at Philadelphia, where he brought his separatist project once more to Merry's attention, reinforced it with reference to discontent among the French Creoles of Louisiana, and definitely asked for a half million loan and the use of a British fleet at the mouth of the Mississippi. Merry could only transmit these proposals to his government.

In this westward journey Burr touched all the important river towns of the Mississippi Valley from Pittsburgh to New Orleans and coursed over the connecting trails. He everywhere received marked public attentions while his movements continually provoked surmise and inquiry. In the Creole capital his faith in the invasion of Mexico was confirmed by the so-called " Mexican Association"-a loose aggregation of persons that vaguely planned to make that country independent. Press reports spoke of his appointment as governor of Orleans in place of W. C. C. Claiborne and mentioned other projects of pecuniary or political character. But if his journey had any purpose aside from putting himself in touch with those who would be helpful in case of war with Spain, it was apparently a failure. He had aroused in many quarters an unfortunate suspicion as to his own motives and loyalty, which the Spanish minister, Casa Yrujo, fully cognizant of his proposals to Merry, took care to disseminate widely.

Burr passed the following winter and spring in the East. He tried to interest Jefferson in giving him a diplomatic appointment but the President told him that the country had lost confidence in him. Then he sought to persuade either the British or the Spanish minister, or both, to finance his inchoate western plans. When Merry could report no response from his superiors, the conspirators-for Ex-Senator Jonathan Dayton [q.v.] of New Jersey was now actively associated with Burr-approached Casa Yrujo for ready funds and future pensions. The attempt to persuade Spain to finance an expedition that might be aimed at her own colonies came to nothing (Mc Caleb, ch. III).

Early in 1806 Burr asked a dissatisfied and idle friend, Commodore Thomas Truxtun [q.v.], to command a phantom naval contingent. Truxtun later testified that Burr's statements to him were wholly concerned with Mexico, but when he learned that the government was not immediately behind the undertaking he refused to entertain Burr's offer (Pickering Papers, January and February 1807). Far different was the testimony of William Eaton [q.v.], an adventurer then also unemployed, who had both a claim and a grudge against the administration. He later testified-when assured that his claim would be paid-that Burr mentioned in addition to the above invasion, a hare-brained plot to seize the president and cabinet and establish himself as dictator in Washington, or, failing in this, to loot bank and arsenal, seize vessels in the navy yard, and sail for New Orleans, where the independence of the West was to be proclaimed. Burr occasionally gave evidence of mental aberration, but uttered nothing like this drivel.

Unable to get money elsewhere, Burr next approached his friends and family connections. His plan was to take over a part interest in the Bastrop grant, lying on the Washita River, and convey thither young men who might serve as settlers in peace and soldiers in war. To this plan his supporters in New York, his son-in-law, and friends in Kentucky ultimately contributed the modest sums with which he contracted for the building of boats, the gathering of provisions, and for making the first payment on the contract.

Burr and his associates had hoped that the administration would be forced into a war with Spain. When instead it resorted to diplomacy under the "Two Million Act"-an appropriation for the purchase of the Floridas-and when the death of the younger Pitt early in 1806 removed all hope of aid from England, they fell back upon the prospect of hostilities being provoked along the border. Dayton tried to stimulate Wilkinson to precipitate a clash, by warning him that he was to be supplanted in the army, and Burr sent a longer cipher letter to the same effect (Adams, III, 252-55; McCaleb, 73-75).

In the first week in August 1806, Burr again started westward. The simultaneous advance of the Spaniards east of the Sabine seemed to promise a belated chance to realize his dream of conquest, but rumors of the last twelve months had done their work and suspicion everywhere greeted him. Alarming reports of his movements began to rain in on Washington. Harman Blennerhassett [q.v.], a wealthy expatriated Irishman living near Marietta, helped Burr finance the Bastrop speculation, provided for gathering and transporting settlers thither, and also contributed to a local paper a series of articles which frankly discussed the probability of a separation of the Western states from the Union. The cause now became publicly associated with Western separatism and on this basis Burr was twice arraigned before a federal grand jury in Kentucky. Thanks in part to his own frank bearing, he was triumphantly cleared on both occasions. Nevertheless the reiterated charges were now working out their natural result. Jefferson and his advisers were finally convinced that something serious was afoot and late in October had sent an observer on Burr's trail; and on November 27, after receiving alarming communications from Wilkinson, who had made a border settlement with the Spaniards and was preparing to betray Burr, the President issued a proclamation, announcing that a group was illegally plotting an expedition against Spain and warning all citizens not to participate.

Following the two arraignments in Kentucky, Burr went to Nashville and then late in December to the mouth of the Cumberland, where his followers joined him. Hostile manifestations had driven these presumptive settlers from the rendezvous at Blennerhassett Island. With the opening of the new year Burr with his modest array of nine boats and some sixty men recruited at the various stopping points, was on the Mississippi, totally ignorant of the hostile reception that his whilom friend and confederate Wilkinson was preparing for him. That general was now in New Orleans, intriguing to apprehend Burr and his Washita colonists and to send the former eastward as a tangible exhibit of his charges. Burr first learned of this meditated treachery, when on January 10, 1807, he reached the settlements in Mississippi Territory. He immediately submitted to the authorities, was indicted before another federal jury, and was again triumphantly acquitted. This fiasco added to Burr's popularity, but the judge refused to release him from bond. Burr suspected with only too much truth, that Wilkinson was planning to kidnap him and bring him before a pretended court martial, and, after vain attempts to change the court decision, he fled toward Mobile. When within a few miles of the border, he was detected, apprehended, and within a few days was being escorted back to the region he had shortly before renounced forever.

On March 30, 1807, Burr was brought before Chief Justice Marshall in the United States Circuit Court of the district of Virginia for a preliminary examination. After three days of discussion by counsel and deliberation by the court, he was held for a misdemeanor in organizing an expedition against Spanish territory. The question of treason was left for a grand jury to determine, and it proved difficult to select that tribunal. The panel finally obtained consisted of fourteen Republicans and two Federalists headed by John Randolph as foreman. The trial formally began on May 22, 1807. Burr was present with an array of distinguished counsel, and was faced by others, able but distinctly inferior to his own. The audience was generally hostile to the prisoner. The rulings of the court and the influence of the President-unseen but distinctly felt through his constant communication with the district attorney-determined that the proceedings should take on a political character. These were delayed at first by the absence of Wilkinson. Finally, after the General reached Richmond and gave his testimony-upon which he himself narrowly escaped indictment-the grand jury established a charge of treason against Burr. This was based largely upon a mistaken interpretation of Marshall's previous ruling in the hearing of J. Erich Bollman and Samuel Swartwout [qq.v.], Burr's luckless messengers to Wilkinson, who by falling into the General's hands had experienced something of the treatment he had reserved for Burr. The outcome of the trial depended largely upon the article of the Constitution defining treason. Marshall ruled that "levying war" as there mentioned could only be established by an overt act in which the accused actually participated. The assemblage on Blennerhassett's Island was selected to meet this requirement. It was definitely shown that Burr was not present, nor near enough to affect actual proceedings. The theory of "constructive treason" which would have made him "contributory" to that assemblage and equally guilty with those who were present, was rejected. Hence it was impossible to establish the "overt act" necessary to convict. This failure meant the exclusion of much testimony as to collateral events, which, indeed, was mostly hearsay. The jury, on September 1, basing its decision on the "evidence submitted," acquitted Burr and his associates of treason. Jefferson urged the district attorney to press the charge of misdemeanor against him but upon this charge also the jury decided in his favor. Burr and Blennerhassett, however, were remanded to trial in the district court of Ohio, but the prisoners did not appear within the state nor did the government press the suit further.

Late in October 1807 Burr was free but no less a fugitive. In Baltimore a mob hanged him in effigy along with Blennerhassett, Marshall, and Luther Martin, his chief defender, while he and the faithful Swartwout fled to Philadelphia, where numerous creditors besieged him. In June 1808 he sailed for England, still hopefully pursuing his plan to revolutionize Mexico. In England he became acquainted with many of the leaders of thought and letters-notable among them Jeremy Bentham and William Godwin-but failed, through the interference of the American minister and consuls, to gain official support, and was later ordered to leave, perhaps on the request of the Spanish junta, then allied with England (Parton, p. 535).

He spent several months in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, and in February 1810 went to Paris, hoping to lay before Napoleon his projects for freeing the Spanish colonies and Louisiana and inciting war between the United States and England which should result in the acquisition of Canada by France. In March he presented to the Ministry of Relations Exterieures, through an affable young deputy, M. Roux, several memoranda embodying his schemes. In one of the wildest of these (Archives Nationales, no. 37, post) he stated that the people of the United States were discontented with their form of government, but the majority would oppose a.. change. However, he continued, there is "a third party, superior in talent and in energy; they desire something grand and stable, something which in giving occupation to active spirits will assure the tranquillity of reasonable men. This party has a recognized head; they ask only to follow him and obey him." This head was Burr himself, who, as the ministry evidently inferred (Archives Nationales, no. 36, post) "inclines toward monarchy" and was ready to use the 40,- 000 sailors that he had represented as idle on account of the embargo, "to overthrow the republican government. The declaration of war against the English would follow this change." Another proposal according to an anonymous report (December 10, 1811, Madison Papers, New York Public Library), was to bring about a reconciliation between England and France, and to use their combined forces against the United States. These proposals reached the chief of the foreign office who forwarded them to the Emperor with the comment that Mr. Burr apparently could initiate nothing except in Florida or Louisiana and that "he could not be employed without giving great offense to the United States" (Archives Nationales, no. 106, post). Burr, continuing to call upon M. Roux and trying to obtain the interest of other officials, was constantly met by the statement that there was no reply from the Emperor, and after four or five months he abandoned his effort to be heard.. His attention then was given to getting a passport so that he might return to the United States and to Theodosia, but for one whole year his requests were persistently refused, by the French officials and by the American consul and charge d'affaires. He fell into dire poverty--even pawning one after another the books and "pretty things" he had bought for Theodosia and his grandson-but his buoyant spirit remained unchecked, hopefully considering various expedients to gain ready cash or possibly a fortune. In July 1811 he was at last granted his passport, but the French ship on which he sailed was captured and taken to England, he was detained there, and it was not until May 1812 that he reached the United States.

He had little difficulty in reestablishing his legal practise in New York, but before he had been at home two months he received news of the death of his grandson. In December of the same year Theodosia, sailing from Charleston harbor, was lost at sea. For more than a score of years he survived these crushing blows. During the greater part of this period he had a good law practise, but never abandoned his ingrained amatory habits or his carelessness in money matters. He also kept his interest in the Spanish colonies but when asked to take part in their struggle for independence, was unable to accept (Davis, II, 142-45). In July 1833, when he was seventy-seven, he married the widow of Stephen Jumel [q.v.], some twenty years his junior. After four months of domestic wrangling over finances, for Burr threatened to run through her substantial property, his wife brought suit for divorce in July 1834. The decree confirming her request bore the date of his death. The latter occurred at Port Richmond, Staten Island, on September 14, 1836 (Wandell and Minnegerode, II, 323-40). To the bitter experiences of his later years as to the ephemeral successes of his earlier life he had presented the same unruffled serenity that had so often disarmed opponents and captivated followers. Shortly before his death he had again protested that he had never designed the separation of the West from the Union.

[The most important printed sources for Burr are Matthew L. Davis, Memoirs of Aaron Burr (2 vols., 1836-37) and The Private Journal of Aaron Burr During His Residence of Four Years in Europe (2 vols., 1838, repr. 1903, from the MS. in library of Wm. K. Bixby of St. Louis, Missouri). The printed works of many of Burr's contemporaries are important, especially those of Jefferson (Ford, ed.), Hamilton, and King. For the trial consult "Reports of the Trials of Col. Aaron Burr," reported by David Robertson (2 vols., 1808); Annals of Congress, 9 Congress, 2 Sess., 1008-19, and 10 Congress, 1 Sess., 385-778; and American State Papers Misc. (1834), I, 468- 645. Jas. Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Times (1816) is necessary but unreliable. For events in Mississippi and Orleans territories the most significant source is Dunbar Rowland (ed.), Letter Books of Wm. C. C. Claiborne, vols. I-III (1916). For nearly a score of years contemporary newspapers contained frequent references to Burr's political career, some items of which under the names of Jas. Cheetham and W. P. Van Ness appeared also in pamphlet form. Casual but important references to Burr occur in E. S. Brown (ed.), Wm. Plumer's Memorandum (1923), and in C. F. Adams (ed.), Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, vol. I (1874). The manuscript sources are also valuable. Of chief importance are the Papers of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, in the Lib. of Congress, and the Papers of Harry Innes, vol. XVIII, Papers in Relation to Burr's Conspiracy, and the East Florida Papers, in the same repository. The Papers of Jas. Wilkinson in the Chicago Historical Society, the Durrett Papers in the University of Chicago, the Pickering Papers in the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the collections of the Miss. Dept. of Archives and History, and of the Louisiana Historical Society are also worthy of attention. For material in Spanish the Bexar Archives in the University of Texas and the general archives in Mexico City, Madrid, and Seville are especially important. Some MSS. relating to Burr were discovered by Dr. Waldo G. Leland in the Archives Nationales: AF iv, 1681 A, Nos. 36-40 and Nos. 106, 107,110,114,115.

Among the earlier biographies Jas. Parton, The Life and Times of Aaron Burr (1858) is a sympathetic account. The most recent life, S. H. Wandell and Meade Minnegerode, Aaron Burr (1925), is a sprightly narrative that is often too favorable to its subject. It is, however, based on much patient and long continued investigation by the first-named author. Isaac Jenkinson, Aaron Burr, His Personal and Political Relations with Thos. Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton (1902) is likewise an overly favorable interpretation of some disputed phases of his career. W. F. McCaleb, The Aaron Burr Conspiracy (1903) and Henry Adams, History of the U.S., vols. II and III (1889-90), present opposing views of the conspiracy, of which that of the former is the more substantial and convincing. A. J. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall (1916-19), vol. III, ch. VI-IX is the best account of the trial at Richmond. Edward Channing, History of the U.S., vol. IV (1917), is excellent for bibliographic references and John B. McMaster, History of the People of the U.S. (1891), vol. III, presents an unfavorable summary of the events of the conspiracy.]

I. J.C.


BURR, James, 1814-1859 *


BURRITT, Elihu, 1810-1879, reformer, free produce activist, advocate of compensated emancipation (Burritt, 1856, pp. 11-18, 30-33; Dumond, 1961, p. 350; Mabee, 1970, pp. 4, 195, 202, 203, 236, 257, 327, 329, 334, 340, 343, 363, 365, 366, 369, 372, 378, 420n1; Pease, 1965, pp. 200-205, 427; Appletons’, 1888, Vol. 1, p. 469; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. II, Pt. 1, p. 328)

BURRITT, ELIHU (December 8, 1810-March 6, 1879), "The Learned Blacksmith," reformer, linguist, was born in New Britain, Connecticut. Named after his father, an eccentric shoemaker and farmer, he also derived from him an enthusiasm for impracticable ventures. From his mother, Elizabeth Hinsdale, who bore nine other children, he learned self-denial and whole-hearted devotion to the ideal of service. If, as a child, he tried to persuade her to borrow fewer sermons and more histories from the meager church library, he nevertheless made her deep religious feelings his own. Neither the district school nor a term at his brother's boarding-school satisfied his appetite for knowledge, and hence he imagined and solved quaint problems of mental arithmetic and learned Greek verbs while blowing the bellows at the smithy where he was an apprentice. At the age of twenty-seven he made in his Journal this entry, a typical one: "June 19, Sixty lines of Hebrew; thirty pages of French; ten pages of Cuvier's Theory of the Earth; eight lines of Syriac; ten lines of Danish; ten ditto Bohemian; nine ditto of Polish; fifteen names of stars; ten hours' forging." Overwork undermined the health of this narrow-chested, stout-handed youth, and for his entire life he paid the price in acute suffering. Awkward as he was, and in spite of excessive shyness, his clear blue eyes, his broad, sloping forehead, and his fine mouth compelled sympathy. With scarce a dollar in his pocket he set out from his native village in the year 1837 seeking work and a chance to further his self-education. Worcester, Massachusetts, offered both His attainments in all the European and several Asiatic languages reached the ear of Governor Edward Everett, who referred to them in an address and offered him the advantages of Harvard, which Burritt refused. Although chagrined at such undesired publicity, he did, however, bring himself to accept lecture invitations.

While preparing a lecture on "the anatomy of the earth," he was so struck by the unity and interdependency of its parts that he ended by writing a plea for international peace. Into that cause, which had just lost its chief apostle by the death of William Ladd in 1841, Burritt now threw himself heart and soul. With the help of a business partner he founded at Worcester, in 1844, a weekly newspaper, the Christian Citizen. This truly international pacifist publication dragged Burritt deeply into debt before, in 1851, he was forced to abandon it.

During the Oregon crisis, when Burritt was also editing the Advocate of Peace and Universal Brotherhood, he besieged Congress with peace propaganda and cooperated with Friends in Manchester, England, in a picturesque exchange of "Friendly Addresses" between British and American cities, merchants, ministers, and laborers. According to Burritt eight hundred newspapers printed these "Friendly Addresses" (Advocate of Peace and Universal Brotherhood, February 1846, p. 56). He himself carried the "Friendly Address" from Edinburgh, with its impressive list of signatures, to Washington, where Calhoun and other senators expressed much interest in this "popular handshaking" across the Atlantic (Burritt, Manuscript Journal, March 31, 1851).

This cooperation with British friends of peace Jed Burritt to cross the Atlantic in June 1846, and during that autumn he formed there the League of Universal Brotherhood. By 1850 this "world peace society" had, through his efforts, twenty thousand British and as many American signatures to its pledge of complete abstinence from all war. It sponsored a "Friendly Address" movement between British and French cities when war seemed imminent in 1852, Burritt personally delivering the friendly interchange of opinion to appropriate municipal official s in France. He also induced the League to sponsor "The Olive Leaf Mission," through which peace propaganda was inserted in forty influential Continental newspapers. This work was financed by woman Leaguers whom Burritt organized into sewing circles. Between 1850 and 1856 he estimated that the Olive Leaves reached monthly one million European readers.

Almost single-handed this enthusiast organized in 1848 the Brussels Peace Congress, which inaugurated the series held in the following years at Paris, Frankfort, London, Manchester, and Edinburgh. Burritt's Journals exhibit incredible activity which included traveling widely in Germany to enlist delegates and soliciting and gaining the cooperation of Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and distinguished French economists and philanthropists. To bring the American peace movement into this truly international peace organization, Burritt in 1850 organized eighteen state peace conventions, with the result that forty Americans attended the Frankfort Congress that year. These peace congresses wort increasing attention from the European and British press, and Burritt's name was celebrated in popular periodicals like those of Douglas Jerrold, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Chambers, and ridiculed in Blackwood's and the influential London Times. At each Congress Burritt ably pied for such a Congress and Court of Nations as William Ladd had advocated.

The Crimean War interrupted this European peace work, and Burritt devoted more time to the related scheme of cheap international postage, and to plans for preventing civil war in his own country. Urging by pen and lecture the utilization of the public domain for compensated emancipation, he also organized a convention to stimulate interest in this plan, and during one winter traveled 10,000 miles from Maine to Iowa in its behalf.

Burritt, who had identified himself with the thoroughgoing anti-war group, opposed the Civil War on pacifist grounds, but he was appointed by Lincoln in 1863 as consular agent at Birmingham. In several volumes he described industrial and rural England with insight, vigor, and charm. From 1870 until his death in 1879 he lived in New Britain, devoting himself to the improvement of a few stony acres of land, to writing, and to teaching languages. He never married, but his entire life was rich in friendships.

Almost uniquely in the America of his generation, Burritt was capable of thinking in international terms. Deprecating sectarianism, he found solace in Quaker meetings and the Anglican ritual as well as in his own Congregationalism. His sympathies with free trade and labor were intelligent and realistic. Only two years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto (1848) he was advocating, in Olive Leaves printed in the German press, a strike of the workers of the world against war as the only alternative to a Congress and Court of Nations. In his numerous writings in behalf of peace he used statistical evidence skilfully, though his chief appeal was to the brotherhood of man. This maker of horseshoes and a Sanscrit grammar endured the most irksome poverty and physical suffering in order to devote himself to the greatest value he found in life, "the capacity and space of labouring for humanity."

[The chief sources of information about Elihu Burritt are his manuscript Journals, 28 vols. (1837- 60) in the Lib. of the Inst. of New Britain, Connecticut, and his newspaper, the Christian Citizen, Worcester, Massachusetts. (1844- 5), a complete file of which is in the American Antiquarian Society. A small portion of the Journals was included in the uncritical compilation of Chas. Northend, Elihu Burritt: A Memorial Volume containing a Sketch of His Life and Labors (1879). Of Burritt's sixteen published volumes the most characteristic are, Sparks from the Anvil (1846); Thoughts of Things at Home and Abroad, with a Memoir by Mary Howitt (1854); Lectures and Speeches (1866); Wall, from London to John O'Groat's (1864); and Ten Minute Talks (1873).]

M.E.C.


BUSTEED, Richard, lawyer, jurist, Union general, anti-slavery advocate. (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. I, p. 476)


BUTLER, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (November 5, 1818-January11, 1893), Union soldier, congressman, governor of Massachusetts, was born at Deerfield, New Hampshire. His family was largely of Scotch-Irish stock, settled on the New England frontier before the Revolution. His father, John, was captain of dragoons under Jackson at New Orleans, traded in the West Indies, and held a privateer's commission from Bolivar. His mother was Charlotte Ellison, of the Londonderry (New Hampshire) Cilleys, or Seelyes. After Captain Butler's death she ultimately settled, in 1828, at Lowell, Massachusetts, running one of the famous factory boarding houses there.

Benjamin was sent to Waterbury (now Colby) College in Maine to continue the family Baptist Calvinism; but he rejected Calvinism altogether. He graduated in 1838, and returned to Lowell where he taught school and studied law. He was admitted to the bar in 1840 and began a successful practise which continued until his death. At first he was chiefly occupied with criminal cases in which he built up a reputation for remarkable quickness of wit, resourcefulness, and mastery of all the defensive devices of the law. His practise gradually extended so that he maintained offices in both Boston and Lowell. He was shrewd in investment, and in spite of rather lavish expenditures built up a fortune. On May 16, 1844, he married Sarah Hildreth, an actress. Their daughter Blanche married Adelbert Ames, who during the period of Reconstruction was senator from Mississippi, and governor of that state. After the Civil War, Butler maintained residences at Lowell, Washington, and on the New England coast. He was interested in yachting, and at one time owned the famous cup-winner America.

Butler early entered politics, as a Democrat, being elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1853, and the Senate in 1859. He was an effective public speaker. His method, which seems to have been instinctive with him, was to draw attack upon himself, and then confute his assailants. He made friends of labor and of the Roman Catholic element in his home di strict, whose support he always retained. In the legislature he stood for a ten-hour day, and for compensation for the burning of the Ursuline Convent. He took great pains to be in the intimate councils of his party, but was seldom trusted by the party leaders. His talent for biting epigrams, and his picturesque controversies made him one of the most widely known men in politics from 1860 till his death. In the national Democratic convention of 1860 he advocated a renewal of the Cincinnati platform, opposed Douglas, and voted to nominate Jefferson Davis. With Caleb Cushing and other seceders from the adjourned Baltimore meeting he joined in putting forward Breckinridge and Lane. It was characteristic ot him that in thus supporting the Southern candidate, he advanced as his reason for leaving the Douglas convention the fact that the reopening of the slave-trade had there been discussed. As was the case with so many Northern supporters of Breckinridge, Butler was a strong Andrew Jackson Unionist. He had always been interested in military affairs, and to the confusion of the Republican majority in Massachusetts had been elected brigadier-general of militia. At the news of the firing on Fort Sumter he was promptly and dramatically ready, with men and money, and left Boston for Washington with his regiment on April 17, 1861.

Thereupon began one of the most astounding careers of the war. Butler was, until Grant took control, as much a news item as any man except Lincoln. He did many things so clever, as to be almost brilliant. He moved in a continual atmosphere of controversy which gradually widened from local quarrels with Governor Andrew of Massachusetts until it included most of the governments of the world; in which controversies he was sometimes right. He expected the war to advance his political fortunes and the financial fortunes of his family and friends. His belief in the Union and in his own ability were both strong and sincere. He had hopes of the Unionist presidential nomination in 1864. A thorn in the side of those in authority, his position as a Democrat fighting for the Union and his prominence in the public eye, made it impossible to ignore or effectively to discipline him.

At the beginning of the war, his relief of blockaded Washington by landing at Annapolis with the 8th Massachusetts, and by repairing the railroad from that point, was splendidly accomplished. Probably because of his Southern connections, he was chosen to occupy Baltimore, which he did on May 13, 1861, peacefully, with but 900 troops. On May 16 he was nominated major-general of volunteers. His next command was at Fortress Monroe. Here he admirably administered the extraordinary provisions necessary for increased numbers. The problem of how to deal with slaves fleeing from Confederate owners to the Union lines he solved by declaring these slaves contraband; and the term "Contraband" clung to them throughout the war. He undertook a military expedition which ended disastrously in the battle of Big Bethel. On August 8, 1861, he was replaced by the venerable General Wool. He was then given command of the military forces in a joint military and naval attack on the forts at Hatteras Inlet, and took possession of them on August 27 and 28. He then returned to Massachusetts with authority to enlist troops; which led to a conflict with the state authorities. His plan was to use his independent command to reduce the peninsula of eastern Virginia, but he was attached instead to the expedition against New Orleans, again commanding the land forces. On May 1, 1862, he entered the city, which lay under the guns of the fleet. He was assigned the difficult task of the military government of this hostile population.

Butler's administration of New Orleans is the most controversial portion of his career. It is at least evident that he preserved the peace and effectively governed the city, improving sanitation, and doing other useful things. It is equally evident that his conduct of affairs was high-handed. Ignoring the United States government, he assumed full financial control, collecting taxes, and expending monies. He hung William Mumford for hauling down the United States flag. He seized $800,000 in bullion belonging to Southern owners, which had been left in charge of the French consul; thereby bringing upon the United States government protests from practically all the governments of Europe. A portion of the bullion was not turned over to the United States government until the whole country had become excited over its fate. Still more sensational was his Order No. 28. It certainly was true that the women of New Orleans had rendered themselves unpleasant to the occupying troops. To meet this situation Butler ordered that  "When any female shall, by word, or gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation." To the international storm of indignation which this aroused, it could only be replied that no violence was intended. In addition to these overt acts, there hangs about Butler's administration a cloud of suspicion of financial irregularity, popularly characterized in the tradition that he stole the spoons from the house he occupied. That corruption was rampant there can be no doubt. It seems that his brother was implicated. In so far as General Butler is concerned the historian must be content to recognize that if he were guilty, he was certainly too clever to leave proofs behind; a cleverness somewhat unfortunate for him, if he were indeed not guilty. On December 16, 1862, he was removed.

In 1863 he was given command of the districts of eastern Virginia and North Carolina, and was put in command of the Army of the James, consisting of two corps. In this position Grant, the next year, used him as commissioner for the exchange of prisoners, perhaps hoping (it being contrary to Grant's policy to exchange) that the Confederate commander would refuse to recognize him, as President Davis had issued a proclamation declaring that his conduct at New Orleans had placed him outside the rules of war. Butler, however, conducted some exchanges, and forced the Confederacy to recognize the military status of the United States negro troops. He encouraged trade in his districts, almost violating the orders of the government. Having made an independent advance, this resulted in the bottling of his army at Bermuda Hundred, where they remained blocked by a greatly inferior number of Confederates. In November 1864 he was sent to New York to preserve order during the election, riots being anticipated. His adroitness and his popularity with the Democrats prevented all disorders; if any were indeed brewing. On January 7, 1865, he was ordered by Grant to return to Lowell.

He had by this time become identified with the Radical element among the Republicans. In the elections of 1866 he was elected to Congress, as a Republican, serving until 1875. He lived at Washington lavishly, the Radicals were the dominant element, and he became prominent among them. In the management of the Johnson impeachment for the House of Representatives he was, owing to the feebleness of Thaddeus Stevens, the most impressive figure. After Stevens's death in 1868 he seems to have aspired to succeed him as Radical chief, taking a drastic stand on all questions of reconstruction as they came up during the Grant administration. At this stage, his influence with Grant seems to have been strong. In the Democratic wave of 1875 he lost his seat

In. the meantime he h ad been having difficulties with the ruling element in the Republican party in his own state. He was hardly more hated in Louisiana than by the conservative elements of both parties in Massachusetts, because of his radical proposals, his unconventionality, and their questioning of his honesty. This hostility he took as a challenge, and determined to become governor of the Bay State. In 1871 he ran for the Republican nomination for governor, and was defeated. In 1872 he ran again, and was again defeated. After his defeat for Congress in 1875 he actively took up the cause of the Greenbacks, which indeed he had supported from the beginning. In 1878 he was again elected to Congress, as an independent Greenbacker. In the same year he ran for the governorship, with the support of the Greenbackers and a portion of the Democrats. Defeated, he ran again in 1879, as Democratic candidate, but there was a split in the party, and again he was defeated. In 1880 he attended the national Democratic convention and supported General Hancock, who received the nomination. In 1882 he at length succeeded in obtaining the undivided support of the Democratic party of his state, and had the advantage of the general reaction against the Republicans. His persistency, also, appealed to many, who felt that he was unduly attacked and should have a chance. He was elected, alone of his ticket, by a majority of 14,000. His position gave him no power, as in Massachusetts no executive steps could be taken without the assent of the council, which was controlled, as were both Houses of the legislature, by his opponents. He attacked the administration of the charitable institutions of the state, especially the Tewkesbury State Almshouse; but the investigation which he instigated led to no results. He characteristically attended with full military escort the Commencement at Harvard, after that institution had decided to break its tradition and not award a degree to the governor of the commonwealth. His drastic Thanksgiving proclamation created a scandal, until he pointed out that it was copied complete from that of Christopher Gore in 1810, with the addition of an admonition to the clergy to abstain from political discussion. In 1883 he was defeated for reelection. In 1884 he was an avowed candidate for the presidency. He was nominated on May 14, by a new party called Anti-Monopoly, demanding national control of interstate commerce and the eight-hour day. On May 28 he was nominated by the National [Greenback] party. He was a delegate to the Democratic convention, where he sought to control the platform and secure the nomination; but was defeated. In the election he received 175,370 votes, scattered in all but nine states, and most numerous in Michigan, where he received 42,243. This was his last political activity. He died at Washington, January 11, 1893.

[Butler's autobiography, Butler's Book, 2 volumes (1892), is entertaining and valuable as a reflection of the man.

The Private and Official Correspondence of General Benj. F. Butler, during the Period of the Civil War, 5 volumes (1917), is a fascinating collection of all varieties of material, but not complete with respect to any. His speeches and public letters outside of Congress have not been collected, and exist scattered in newspapers and pamphlets. He is constantly referred to in the letters and reminiscences of the men of his time. There is no standard life. Among the sketches are :

Blanche B. Ames, The Butler Ancestry of General Benj. Franklin Butler (1895); Jas. Parton, General Butler in New Orleans (1864); Edward Pierrepont, Review of Defence of General Butler Before the House of Representatives, in Relation to the New Orleans Gold (1865); Life and Public Services of Major-General Butler (1864); J. F. McLaughlin, The American Cyclops, the Hero of New Orleans, and the Spoiler of Silver Spoons, Dubbed LL.D. by Pasquino (1868); M. M. Pomeroy, Life and Public Services of Benjamin F. Butler (1879); T. A. Bland, Life of Benjamin F. Butler (1879); Record of Benj. F. Butler Compiled from the Original Sources (1883).
For Butler's military career see also the Official Records (Army).]

C.R.F.


BUTLER, Ovid, 1801-1881, lawyer, newspaper publisher, university founder, abolitionist.  Founded abolitionist newspaper, Free Soil Banner, in 1849. Helped found Northwestern Christian University in 1855.  It was later renamed Butler University.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.