Aaron Burr—grandson of the preacher Jonathan Edwards, distinguished veteran of the War for Independence, and our third vice president—was one of the United States’ great villains, an American Napoleon whose ambition knew no bounds, a lady-thrilling Lothario, a modern Catiline who plotted against the Republic.

Such, at least, was the popular reputation of the man among his contemporaries, and it’s the view that has endured to this day. But, writes University of Tulsa historian Nancy Isenberg, "everything we thing we think we know about Aaron Burr is untrue."

Even granting the author some dramatic license, that’s a provocative statement. Isenberg describes Burr’s rise—from an ambitious young New York lawyer and assemblyman to state attorney general to U.S. senator to vice president—with an eye toward Making a Point. What results is a mix of great biography and special pleading.

To take the special pleading first, flip to the event for which Burr (1756–1836) is best remembered. On the morning of July 11, 1804, Burr and former Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton exchanged gunfire in Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr had challenged Hamilton to a duel in response to defamatory remarks by Hamilton that a third party passed on to a newspaper, and had refused to settle for Hamilton’s half-apologies. Hamilton missed by a mile; Burr did not miss.

Isenberg says that Hamilton may have fired first (most historians say otherwise), that he meant to discharge his weapon, and that to the very end he was minding his reputation (he converted to Episcopalianism on his deathbed and was eulogized as a religious man). That Hamilton had made a show of adjusting his pistol and donning his spectacles before the duel Isenberg trots out as evidence to rebuff "modern historians who see Burr as the aggressor."

But those historians have a good point. Burr was angry at Hamilton for working to deprive him of the presidency. In the election of 1800, Burr received the same number of Electoral College votes as his running mate, Thomas Jefferson, and it fell to the House of Representatives to sort out the mess. (The hastily ratified Twelfth Amendment ensured that this would never happen again.) In part due to Hamilton’s lobbying efforts, Jefferson became president. When Jefferson dropped Burr from the ticket for his 1804 reelection campaign, Burr ran unsuccessfully for governor of New York, with Hamilton again working against him behind the scenes. Burr’s resentment ran deep.

After Hamilton’s death, Burr escaped trial for murder and served out the remainder of his vice-presidential term. He presided over the impeachment proceedings against Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase with distinction, and delivered a farewell address to the Senate so touching that there was "a solemn and silent weeping for perhaps five minutes" after he finished.

Burr then moved west to establish a settlement in the Louisiana Territory whose inhabitants would double as a private army. War between America and Spain appeared likely; Burr and his men would invade and conquer Mexico so that it could be annexed to the United States. But political opponents feared that instead he wanted to found his own breakaway empire. He was soon arrested and put on trial for treason.

Isenberg’s determination to vindicate Burr pays dividends in the courtroom drama. She puts readers in the jury box and walks them through the twists and turns of the legal battles. The government did an awful job of making its case, and Burr’s team calmly but forcefully tore it apart. Reasonable doubt? Of course.

However, in passages about the trial and Burr’s post-acquittal exile in Europe, where he moved to escape creditors and political adversaries, alert readers will get the sense that he was up to something more. Burr did speak of western secession, at least in general terms. And while in Paris, he asked Napoleon to give him a few frigates to challenge the Spanish in North America—using Florida as his base of operations.

Does that make him a traitor? No. But it does raise old suspicions anew, and that’s not all to the bad. Isenberg, for all her attention to the public’s perceptions of Burr, doesn't seem to get that his villainy is the chief reason we find him so fascinating.

"Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr" 

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Historian Nancy Isenberg argues that "everything we know about Aaron Burr is untrue." 

American Black Sheep

The poor we may always have with us, but must they always get a raw deal? That’s the question award-winning journalist Gary Rivlin poses in 

. “Poverty, Inc.,” is the somewhat loaded term he uses to describe financial services firms that cater to the working poor—people in American households making up to about $30,000 a year. Normally these folks scrape by, living paycheck to paycheck. But once a year they are flush with cash. Thanks to the Earned Income Tax Credit, they receive lump-sum payments from the federal government, often equivalent to two or three months’ salary.

There are many reasons for persistent working poverty—from single parenthood to injury and disease to just plain awful luck. But this once-a-year payday has arguably made things worse by encouraging poor habits. Instead of trying to conserve some of their scarce resources to build capital or deal with unexpected expenses, poorer Americans are more likely to spend every penny of their current paycheck before the next one comes. They rely on their income tax “refunds” (an inaccurate term because poor Americans receive back far more than was withheld from their paychecks) to pull them out of the financial sinkhole.

To get by between paychecks or to absorb unexpected expenses (e.g., a broken-down vehicle), they often need to borrow money. Because of their meager incomes and cyclical spending, they can’t get the sort of credit that is available to America’s middle class. That’s where Poverty, Inc., comes in. In Rivlin’s telling, that’s also where the problem starts.

From any one or two poor Americans, there is not a lot of money to be made. But poor people’s numbers add up to a market that is extremely lucrative for lenders willing to take some added risks—Rivlin estimates revenues of roughly $100 billion a year, a figure that has seen a meteoric rise over the last two decades as mom-and-pop operations have given ground to large, publicly traded corporations such as Dollar Financial Corporation and Cash America International. Some of these business models are very old, while others are of more recent vintage: pawnshops, check-cashing centers, payday loan shops, instant refunders, lenders that specialize in “subprime” loans.

These institutions extend credit to the poor, but at a steep price. Big payday lenders such as Moneytree are particularly reviled for the high rates they charge customers. Payday loans are small advances—usually $200 to $500—to people with jobs who need cash right this minute. The customer writes a postdated check for the amount of the loan plus a hefty fee. Voters in Ohio recently chased many payday lenders out of the state after they learned that these fees were the equivalent, in some cases, of interest rates as high as 391 percent per year.

Payday lenders complain about the unfairness of the comparison. These are not long-term loans, they say. If you were to express the rental rate of a $29-a-day compact car on a yearly basis, it would total more than $10,000. Switching back and forth between outraged consumer advocates and outraged businessmen, Rivlin reports scrupulously on both sides of the fight over the ethics of payday lending and other financial services for the poor. Ultimately, however, he concludes that the poor are being exploited, and that the government needs to step in with more regulations that would shut some lenders down.

But exploited compared to what? Rivlin only glancingly considers the question. He quotes the CEO of a credit union as saying that rather than take out a payday loan, “I’d say go get a loan shark. . . . They’re cheaper.” The remark is both telling and damning. Loan sharks are cheaper because they must absorb fewer defaults. They have fewer defaults because, unlike payday lenders, they are willing literally to beat the money out of their customers.

Is it worth a few hundred dollars to avoid the threat of broken arms and busted kneecaps? That’s not an academic question, and I confess a personal interest here. My family is doing fine now, thank God, but we went through economic rough patches when I was growing up and made use of the services of Poverty, Inc. Rivlin might say we were exploited—but it beat the hell out of the alternative.

 is an editor for the Web site Real Clear Politics (www.realclearpolitics.com) and the author of 

Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. How the Working Poor Became Big Business

 by Gary Rivlin, HarperBusiness, 358pp, 2011.

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The poor we may always have with us, but must they always get a raw deal? 

Jeremy Lott