By Kurt Thometz

“You have heard me speak of a Miss Wollstonecraft, who has written something on the French Revolution; she has also written a book entitled The Vindication of the Rights of Women.  I had heard it spoken of with a coldness little calculated to excite attention; but as I read with avidity and prepossession every thing written by a lady, I made hast to procure it, and spent the last night, almost the whole of it, in reading it.  Be assured that your sex has in her an able advocate.  It is, in my opinion, a work of genius.  She has successfully adopted the style of Rousseau’s Emilius; and her comment on that work especially what relates to female education, contains more good sense than all the other criticisms upon him which I have seen put together.  I promise myself much pleasure in reading it to you.  Is it owing to ignorance or prejudice that I have not yet met a single person who had discovered or would allow the merit of this work?”

Aaron Burr to his wife, Theodosia Edwards Prevost, February 16, 1793.

He was the bête noire of the Founding Fathers, the virile young Revolutionary War hero who’d be American aristocracy if he hadn’t stood with the opposition.  She was a widow with children, ten years senior, that he married for love then honored and respected for her intellectual acumen and principled manner:

“It was a knowledge of your mind which first inspired me with a respect for that of your sex, and with some regret, I confess, that the ideas which you have often heard me express in favor of female intellectual powers are founded on what I have imagined, more than what I have seen, except in you.”

Aaron Burr to Theodosia Edwards Prevost, Feb. 14, 1794.

They were radical revolutionaries practicing a doctrine few preached.  The children of Calvinist theologians shaken by the Second Great Awakening, Theodosia and Aaron found each other where Reformation Protestantism was being transformed by the Enlightenment’s liberal humanism into Romanticism.  America, at the time, exemplified Romantic ideals: “With liberty and justice for all.”

The Burrs asserted the road to Heaven was open to all alike.  As disciples of both Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, they are in the front lines of the Common Weal’s inclusive cause.   They’re among the country’s first abolitionists and considered the first feminists in America.  As such they lived their beliefs by raising their daughter, also Theodosia, “to convince the world [of] that [which] neither sex appear to believe – that women have souls.”

Whether owing to ignorance or prejudice, very few agreed with them.  Despite Abigail Adam’s admonition to “Remember the ladies,” the American Revolution did little for women.  The property of women and children were the property of men.  If they were a cut above slavery, it was with grudging consent.  When they were not loved, they could not buy their way out of marriage and they could be bought.  Women and blacks have souls?  They were property.

In Jefferson’s republic, nearly all white men were created equal.  Beyond his vested interest, he didn’t venture.  For the Federalist Alexander Hamilton, white men and some black men with money were equal.  Not women.  Hamilton’s complicated, labored and compromised.  But in Burr’s unappreciated democracy, Jefferson’s stated autonomies included all men and women in a common cause.  As simple as it is elegant.

What democracies and republics share in common is the right of the people as opposed to the right of the sovereign.  A democracy differs from a republic in being based on the best interest of the Common Weal, the average man – not the privileged.  Common Sense, Paine called it.  Burr, the Romantic among the anti-colonialist Revolutionaries, seems to have grasped the principle of universal equivalence at the heart of democracy as an act of style.  In that style, the goal of equal opportunity, the civil rights that eluded so many of the founding oligarchs, is the golden mean a democracy means to attain.

Most of this country’s founders never intended it to be a democracy.  Most presumed a republic wherein “businessmen could conduct business freely.”  That would fairly characterize Hamilton’s rather exclusive economic policies, with their preference for privilege.   The boom of industrial capitalism in post-revolutionary America brought about a bust in living standards for the great majority: women, blacks, and everyone other to Jefferson’s chosen few invulnerable to the inequitable equation.

Burr preferred a more inclusive democracy, one that included everyone.  If Burr was contrary to the oligarchy of money, it could hardly be attributed to a lack of entrepreneurial ambition.  Neither was he pious in his beliefs.  Like everyone, he is as much an opportunist as an idealist, a pragmatic if not a very successful capitalist.  He had this in common with so many of the founding fathers, who were prone to marrying well and living well off their wives’ money.  He had this in common with everyone trying to make it in a system, if not perfect, in keeping with the times.

The pursuit of happiness isn’t entirely material.  It can be spiritual and it can be animal.  It can even be both.  If Burr was successful with the ladies it was for being a gentleman amongst a lot of misogynists and womanizers.  And his reward was to be mentored by and to mentor the extraordinary women represented in this exhibition: his family, his friends and his mistresses.  He loves each in their own way.  No rogue, no lascivious libertine, as Burr has been misrepresented, would have had the love and respect he enjoyed from all save perhaps the last of his women, our hostess here at the Mansion, our artist’s inspiration and Burr’s last match.   The exception.  There’s always one.

“Aaron Burr was more than doubly unhappy in his fates.  He lived too long – into the querulous years of senility.  He made mistakes.  He killed in a duel Alexander Hamilton, a man destined to be the idol of that huge section of the nation enamored of wealth, the founder of the party of Webster, Lincoln, McKinley and Coolidge.  The code of honor among gentlemen at the time did not forbid dueling, but Burr shot the wrong man.  Had he laid low Tom Paine, many a page of history that now condemns him would glow with praise.  Burr’s second great error was to be outwitted in negotiation by one of the most astute politicians and influential leaders in American history, Thomas Jefferson.  Thus Burr was condemned by both powerful political parties.  As Senator Beveridge once remarked to the present writer, republics will forgive men for mistakes, but parties, never.”

Charles A. Beard, intro.  The Aaron Burr Conspiracy and A New Light on Aaron Burr. Walter Flavius McCaleb. NY: Wilson-Erickson, 1936.

The Morris-Jumel Mansion is where Gore Vidal’s rehabilitation of Burr begins with a cameo by the venial widow and bride, Madame Eliza Jumel.  She, her much celebrated beauty fading at fifty-nine, is the richest, arguably the most liberated woman in America and the lately acquitted murderer of her first husband. Her second husband, Burr, is still living down his own bad rap as Hamilton’s “assassin”, seventy-eight penniless and her legal counsel.

Jefferson’s conspiracy culminates here, on Harlem’s Heights with slavery intact, women in their place and businessmen conducting their business freely.  Hamilton game’s played out, Burr is compelled to put him out of his misery.  The historian Roger Kennedy makes a compelling argument that in Jefferson’s conspiracy for slavery’s destiny to manifest, Hamilton’s suiciding in the duel eliminates one abolitionist and exiles the other.  In this he advances his Imperialist cause by fifty years.

Still, Burr’s democracy stood in Jefferson’s way.  There’s nothing theoretical about the conspiracy to tarnish Burr’s reputation regards women.  Less Jefferson than his acolytes went straight for the libido.  Burr’s chosen biographer, the executioner of his estate, a supposed friend, furthers the damage to the man, compounded by his daughter Theodosia’s being lost at sea with their correspondence and the manuscript of his account of the Revolution.  Matthew L. Davis’s burning of Burr’s letters to the women in his life, purporting them obscene, could be said to advance the same cause Isabel Burton accomplished in burning her feminist husband Richard’s.

From even this cruel editing we can still divine a man who loved women.  By what has survived we can read of his relationships with of several of the most liberated American women of the revolutionary and antebellum eras.  Certainly, his relationship with his wife and daughter, the Theodosia, are exemplary – particularly regards the daughter’s education.

Some of these women’s stories have been as pushed aside and as vilified as Burr’s.  The notorious 14 year old British spy, highlife author Margaret Montcrieffe, who credits Burr with her rebellion against “the barbarous customs of society.”  Leonora Sansay, who writes one of the twelve first hand accounts we have of the Haitian Revolution as letters addressed to her confidante, Burr.  His protégé, Jane McManus Cazneau, the pioneering journalist who coins the term ‘Manifest Destiny, who’s 50 years Burr’s junior when Eliza Jumel names her correspondent to their adulteries, suffers unduly from the false accusation.

As for Eliza herself, had Defoe wholly set Moll Flanders in the New World he might have been entitled it Eliza Jumel.  For that matter, she bares a striking resemblance to his other grand horizontal, Roxana.  Less competent hands have embraced the fictional biographical history she inspired; a slattern to riches story involving several founding fathers with a good deal of bodice ripping, as often exposing inconvenient truths that are sometimes referred to as “dirty laundry”.

In Harlem Heights gossip she seems less a creation of Mary Wollstonecraft than of Mary Shelly.  She’s been as slandered as Burr and likely for as good reasons.  Like his, hers is a case of the facts not adding up to the truth.  With so many of the court histories of our democracy fixing their attention on the sunny freedoms of a darkening legacy, these stories from the receiving end of our inequities may not be as pretty as many of their subjects were but they are never the less truths.

And truth, in all its complexity, is beautiful.

I was adjudicated in 1978 for the crime of murder committed in 1976.  I was 16 and senseless.  Yet belief in my eventual rehabilitation factored in the 6-18 plea bargain I was offered soon after my arrest and I just as soon declined because I lacked the courage and decency to confess with an apology that may not have consoled but would have resonated louder than silence.  Consequently, I received a 22-life sentence follwing a trial.

Time passed and I matured from irrational adolescent to sensible adult.  Neural stimuli and electrical impulse sparked the cognitive development that set the contours of character.  I transformed the way H.G. Well’s invisible man does after he gets shot and lay dying.  With death approaching, life ignites one last time as the viscera, skeleton, and skin imperceptibly appear, until the scientist lay restored in body and mind long enough to rue the experiment that occasioned the madness and drew the end.  Having died to life in prison, I gradually experienced a rebirth and became the person I wish I had been before the onset of delusion led me to the abyss.

Rehabilitation worked the way my adjudicating court believed it could but I had left the court system long ago and was about to enter the parole system.  Leniency was out of the picture and retribution was coming into focus.  Fine tuned by the hand of a parole board that brings its brand of adjudication to prisons in the manner that Mississippi’s traveling electric chair brought its concept of justice to towns in the 1940s.  In the past as in the present there is a thin line between retribution and annihilation and race often obscures the boundary.

I submitted my first application for parole in March 2000 and felt that my exemplary prison record and order of deportation  to Britain would result in release.  Additionally, my case is one of youth and emotion and the trouble presented by both.  A fact I thought parole officials would consider along with letters of support and records of achievement verifying an elevation of character and perspective.  Certainly 22 years in maximum security prison haad satisfied the interest of justice.  Yet my application then as now was rubber-stamped NO PAROLE with ink that appeared to glow like neon.

I had been naïve to the punitive nature of America’s criminal justice system in general and th Old Testament retribution wielded by New York’s parole board in particular.  An image of my youth had become the focal point of revenge.  I was trapped in the amber of adolescence.  Adulthood had been erased, discredited, subsumed by the past and consigned to yesteryear.  While the vengeance sustaining my imprisonment is an empty imperative, I understand that reason can no more placate revenge than remorse.

If I put my ear close enough to one of those rejected parole applications I can hear a phone ringing.  The telephone in mind sat on an end table in the living room of my father’s house in Southern Illinois.  I had gone to live there in early 1977.  Thought I could board a plane and fly above and beyond the destruction I had wrought.  Distance myself from ruin.  The self ultimately trying to escape the self.  In the small town of Joppa I enrolled in high school, made new friends, and sought to disappear amid grazing cows, crowing roosters, and old gray barns sitting weathered and enduring in their alliance with earth and sky.  Tried hard to settle in that verdant town but the effort was futile.  I had inadvertently self-exiled from the human community with no way back.

On a Sunday afternoon in March 1978 the phone rang.  I walked into the living room and picked up the receiver and heard my mother’s voice.  She had called to tell me the police were questioning my friends about a murder and asked if I had anything to do with the crime.  My heart raced as I said no.  We spoke a while longer before I replaced the receiver with a wet hand.  I stood and stared out the window while the distress in my mother’s voice lingered in my ear like the immensity of the sea booming in the hollow of a shell.

I continued gazing out the window until I saw a day when my friends and I were in the back of a furniture store in the Staten Island Mall, sunk low in recliners with only our sneakers visible on the raised footrests.  We were talking a mile a minute and laughing our heads off because we were young and silly and as carefree as bluebirds in spring.  I desperately tried to comprehend how I had lost that day and found the one in which I stood immobilized by guilt and wildly wishing I could resurrect life through the alchemy of fear and regret.  The house was quiet save the languid tick tick tick of the wall clock suspending, bending, extending time forward and backward, illuminating the past and compromising my ability to think in the present.  The day had faded into dusk, faded into bruised layers of twilight, faded into lament.  Many years later I read a poem by Wordsworth that spoke to that day of all days.

Action is transitory, – a step, a blow

The motion of a muscle – this way or

That—

‘Tis done, and in the after vacancy

We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,

And shares the nature of infinity.

The words form the narrative of a tragedy and sorrow I can never quite articulate despite the endless possibilities for expression.  I imagine judges also find it difficult at times to adequately convey thought and sentiment in those moments before they strike their gavels and bring finality to crimes and actions with unbound dimensions.

Dempsey Hawkins 7980609

Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility

1000 Mt. McGregor Rd., Box 2071

Wilton, New York 12831