Reviewed by Jon Kukla

“The specter of Weehawken,” writes David O. Stewart, “was never far from New York politics” in the decades after the American Revolution. Manhattan’s dueling ground was a tiny plateau in the rugged bluffs on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. Accessible only by boat, hidden from view and unapproachable from above, it was a place cloaked in secrecy where dueling gentlemen dispatched the very public mission of vindicating themselves to their peers. The ledge has long since disappeared (probably during construction of the Lincoln Tunnel), but in the aftermath of the Burr-Hamilton duel of July 11, 1804 — as Stewart demonstrates in his thoughtful, stylishly written and splendidly researched American Emperor — the specter of Weehawken loomed over the new republic.

Soon after shooting Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr began the complex intrigues that became his western adventure and flirtation with treason. The larger geo-political background of his schemes derived from the cliff-hanger election of 1801 and the expansion occasioned by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

Stewart offers a persuasive account of Burr’s puzzling conduct when the presidential election went to the House of Representatives after he and Thomas Jefferson tied in the Electoral College. At first Burr deferred to Jefferson’s claim on the presidency, until considerations of personal honor prompted a second statement that seemingly encouraged jockeying for the Executive Mansion (as the White House was then called).

Even without the messy election, Burr was too independent to have enjoyed Jefferson’s full confidence. As events played out, Jefferson excluded his vice president from Cabinet meetings and froze him out of his administration with a practiced disdain aimed at crippling Burr’s political future. In their rare private conversations, the two men seemed unable to comprehend, much less trust, one another. Burr won universal acclaim for his even-handed conduct as presiding officer of the Senate, except from Jefferson, who regarded his fairness toward Federalists as more cause for suspicion.

While Stewart does full justice to all the men and women who cross the stage of American Emperor, his brilliant depiction of the hostile relationships of Hamilton, Burr and Jefferson reminds us of historian Henry Adams’s classic remark about sketching the semi-transparent shadows of character “touch by touch with a fine pencil.” (Adams’s comment was inspired, not surprisingly, by Hamilton’s acid descriptions of Burr and Jefferson in a letter to a Federalist congressman during the election crisis of 1801.)

Despite the bare-knuckle spirit of American politics in the new republic (especially in faction-ridden New York where the hot-tempered Hamilton’s insults led to the fatal duel), Aaron Burr never spoke or wrote disparagingly about his political rivals. Even in private letters to his beloved daughter and confidant, Burr’s comments were sardonic and amusing rather than hostile.

For better or worse in that era of contention, Burr’s reticence shaped other aspects of his public life, serving him well as an attorney and political deal-maker but prompting some misgivings among potential colleagues. Burr never formed effective alliances, Stewart shrewdly observes, with “anyone who might be considered his peer, who might lend heft and stature” to his projects. After he shot Hamilton, Burr surrounded himself with “acolytes and followers, not leaders in their own right.”

James Wilkinson looked like a genuine leader as commander of American forces in the West after the Louisiana Purchase, but he was a master of deception. While Burr made his reputation as a first-rate officer during the Revolutionary war, Wilkinson’s shady involvement in the failed military coup at Newburgh placed him under a cloud of suspicion and gave him the reputation of a general who never won a battle or lost an investigation. When Wilkinson and Burr initially met to plan their western adventure, the general had been accepting secret payments from the Spanish for years.

In American Emperor — a title drawn from the epithet used by many observers who sensed in Burr a capacity for imperial ambitions — Stewart sorts out the confusing possible schemes of Wilkinson and Burr with great skill. At one extreme, their plan might have involved leading the trans-Appalachian states out of the Union, attacking Mexico, assassinating Jefferson, capturing the American government and establishing an empire of the Caribbean. Or maybe not. At another extreme, Burr may have been leading prospective settlers to the Bastrop Tract a few miles west of the Mississippi River on the boundary between Orleans and Louisiana Territories (now the Louisiana-Arkansas line). Until Wilkinson betrayed Burr and accused him of treason, the two men were simply playing the situation for the most advantageous outcome.

An experienced constitutional lawyer himself, Stewart narrates Burr’s 1807 treason trial with precision and clarity. With a keen eye for the constitutional face-off between the distantly related president and Chief Justice John Marshall, as well as the personal and political contest between the two men who steadfastly disliked one another, Stewart guides his readers through weeks of legal proceedings with just the right mix of essential detail and colorful personalities.

After months of seeming indifference, Jefferson leapt into behind-the-scenes activity against Burr. In his eagerness for a conviction, the president revealed an alarming disregard for procedural fairness or the rights of the accused. Although Wilkinson was in many ways equally culpable, Jefferson’s defense of the tarnished general extended even to the dubious legality of Wilkinson’s imposition of martial law and the excesses of military arrests in the round-up of alleged conspirators.

In the end — owing to Marshall’s calm insistence upon a strict adherence to the definition of treason in Article 3 of the Constitution, certain peculiarities of the grand jury indictment and the weakness of the evidence for any overt act against the government — the jury deliberated for only 25 minutes on September 1st, 1807, before it declared Burr “not proved to be guilty under this indictment by any evidence submitted to us.” After a second prosecution for violations of the Neutrality Act failed, Burr set sail for five years of self-imposed exile in Britain and on the Continent. Returning to New York in 1812, Aaron Burr died at 80 on Staten Island on September 14, 1836.

Historical reputations of the American Founders have risen and fallen over the past two centuries for many reasons. F.D.R. elevated Jefferson to fight the Great Depression and World War II. David McCullough seems to have revived John Adams with a single volume. Wall Street capitalists helped the New York Historical Society mark the anniversary of the affair at Weehawken as a celebration of Alexander Hamilton as “The Founder of Modern America.”

Until very recently Aaron Burr has been marginalized if not excluded from the early national story, except in the fictionalized America of Gore Vidal’s Burr: A Novel (New York, 1973). Historian Nancy Isenberg began to rectify that omission with Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York, 2007), which nicely places Burr’s career in the context of American political culture.

Stewart’s closer focus on the newly acquired west territory, the allure of Spanish riches and the implications of the Burr trial add valuable dimensions to our appreciation of the world we inherited from the Founders. And American Emperor is a page-turner as well! It is no wonder that Brown University’s Pulitzer-winning Gordon S. Wood, reigning dean of historians of early America, recently placed David O. Stewart on his short list of “popular historians who dominate narrative history-writing in the United States today.”

Jon Kukla, the author of A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (2003) and Mr. Jefferson’s Women (2007), is completing a reexamination of the founding era for Simon & Schuster with the working title “Mr. Henry’s Revolution.” Dr. Kukla lives in Richmond, Virginia.