Hamilton and Burr: What Is Past Is Prologue

Hamilton

"History is not a bedtime story. It is a comprehensive engagement with often obscure documents and books no longer read--books shelved in old archives, and fragile pamphlets contemporaneous with the subject under study--all of which reflect a world view not ours. We cannot make eighteenth century men and women "familiar" by endowing them and their families with the emotions we prefer to universalize; nor should we try to equate their politics with politics we understand. But this is what popular biographers do, and as a result, everything we think we know about Aaron Burr is untrue."
--Nancy Isenberg "Fallen Founder" 

Isenberg

When I think about Justice Antonin Scalia and his insistence he is an "originalist" simply hewing to the Constitution as its meaning was intended by the founding fathers thought, my mind starts to boil to the point it cannot process rational, considered thought. There is so much wrong with this idea, it is hard to know where to begin. For one thing, it smacks of those Bible thumpers I used to see in the South, fingering worn Bibles, mumbling their half demented phrases about how everything you need to know is right here in this book, don't need to read no others, all the answers right here. 

Why on earth would we care what Hamilton and Madison thought about the Constitution? Even if we had the patience to read The Federalist Papers, why should we bind ourselves in a straight jacket tailored in the 18th century?

And what hubris and folly to think we can actually enter the minds of 18 th century homo sapiens, even if we wanted to? 

Took his pleasures where he found them 

Since listening to the musical and reading the book "Hamilton" (now halfway through) I have been boring my friends with allusions to these works until one, in the kindest way imaginable, suggested perhaps I should consider another point of view. "There are always two sides to every story."  And Nancy Isenberg's work, "Fallen Founder,"  was more or less thrust in my hands.

From the outset, Isenberg tells us, Burr's reputation was never sustained, defended or enhanced by a dedicated bunch of relatives; Hamilton's wife, Eliza spent the 50 years after his death building his reputation. 

Burr 

I'm just at the beginning, but I can already see my image of Burr changing. 

Seeing these men through our modern lenses distorts them. We assume a Puritanical, straight laced morality projected by those oil paintings of them, with their lace collars, their silk stockings and formal poses, but they were a much livelier bunch.  Hamilton, Burr, Franklin, likely all of them save Adams and perhaps Washington, pursued the ladies with manic energy.  How they avoided impregnation, venereal disease and endless child support law suits I am curious to  know.  The colonies sound a lot like the world of New York Hospital, which the nurses often described as a "cauldron" what with all the sexual energy surging through the place; some people considered the summer camp aspects of all this offensive, even reprehensible, but most people shrugged.  There was something about living among the dying that seemed to detonate a sexual charge among the doctors and the nurses. People describe the same phenomenon among people in war zones, the hypersexuality of combat. Maybe it's simply a stress response. Copulate before you die.  And these men were facing the King's justice for treason. They were living through interesting times.

We can only imagine. We cannot know.

For now, it is instructive to consider how human beings reacted in those times 240 years ago so the bizarre behavior of the acolytes of Donald Trump can be understood as nothing unique or new, simply an angry group of intellectually deprived men who prefer to react and rattle the cage to thinking.  They are like the chimps at the zoo, screeching and jumping up and down--and in fact, reading about chimpanzee intelligence in "Are We Smart Enough to Know how Intelligent Animals Are?"  I suspect comparing a trump rally to the chimp compound at the zoo may be a substantial insult to the chimps.