By Stuart Mitchner

My first Princeton job was helping the University’s secretary emeritus Alexander Leitch complete his encyclopedic work A Princeton Companion. It was the Bicentennial spring of 1976, and my limited knowledge of Princeton history was about to expand beyond F. Scott Fitzgerald and Albert Einstein to Aaron Burr Jr. (Class of 1772) and Light-Horse Harry Lee (Class of 1773), the subject of one of the first entries I worked on.

It was refreshing to get past the stereotype of Princeton as an Ivy League Ivory Tower by picturing barefoot kids playing war during the time of the Revolution, fighting to see who would get to be “Light-Horse Harry.” Dial the magic TV forward a few hundred years and I’m picturing cynical, headstrong kids who had never heard of Lee fighting to play Aaron Burr, the quintessential “bad guy of early American history,” as historian Nancy Isenberg puts it in Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (Penguin 2008). A review in The Wall Street Journal says, “Isenberg offers justice to a maligned man” while The Washington Post credits her for revealing “a gifted lawyer, politician, and orator who championed civility in government and even feminist ideals.”

Rise and Fall

Although there’s a relatively recent biography of Lee — Ryan Cole’s Light-Horse Harry Lee: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Hero (Regnery History 2019) — I’m revisiting the facts I found the first time I read the Princeton Companion entry: that Lee came to the College of New Jersey (as Princeton was then known) with his younger brother Charles in the summer of 1770; that he was a good student, won prizes in classics, and read widely in English poetry, spending one vacation making a line-by-line comparison of Pope’s translation of the Iliad with Homer’s original; that he first came to prominence as a 23-year-old major leading a “daring capture” of the British fort at Paulus Hook (now in Jersey City); and that he composed and delivered the eulogy, “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,’’ for the state funeral service in Philadelphia held for President Washington.

Now it’s the Semiquincentennial spring and I’m consulting A Princeton Companion for information about Princeton’s central role in the American Revolution, which actually extended to the Civil War, thanks to the fact that Robert E. Lee was Harry Lee’s fifth child by his second wife. In fact, the “fall” suggested by the title of Cole’s book refers to Light-Horse Harry’s later years, during which he lost heavily in land speculations and spent a year in debtor’s prison.

Genius and Passion

Given my limited knowledge of Princeton history, all I knew about Aaron Burr Jr. when I moved here from New Brunswick was that he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. I didn’t know that his father, Aaron Burr Sr., had been the second president of what was then the College of New Jersey. And until I read his entry in A Princeton Companion, I didn’t know that he’d been left an orphan at the age of 2, his father and mother and both maternal grandparents having “died within a year.” What stirred my interest even more was reading that he “did not respond well to the discipline of his austere uncle … several times running away to sea.” Yet he entered Princeton “at the age of 13 and graduated with distinction at 16 in 1772,” a year after future president James Madison and the poet Philip Freneau. Eight years later Burr ran for president against Thomas Jefferson, received the same number of votes, and after the House broke the tie in Jefferson’s favor, became vice president. The July 1804 duel with Hamilton at Weehawken was followed by his “errant political adventures in the West, his trial for treason, and his acquittal.”

Yet the quintessential bad guy’s Companion entry ended with his burial in 1836 with full military honors in the Presidents’ Lot at Princeton Cemetery after a procession that included members of the faculty, students, alumni, a military band, and the Mercer Guards. Another reason I wanted to know more about Burr was the quote from Woodrow Wilson that was deemed for some reason unworthy of a place in the Companion, that Burr had “genius enough to have made him immortal, and unschooled passion enough to have made him infamous.”

Immortal, infamous, mysterious, controversial — Burr inevitably overshadows the following sampling of books about Princeton and New Jersey during the Revolution.

Biography of a Town

According to the publisher’s statement, William L. Kidder’s Revolutionary Princeton, 1774-1783: The Biography of an American Town in the Heart of a Civil War (Knox Press 2022) “combines social history with the better-known military and political history of the Revolution. It does not just deal with amorphous groups and institutions, but rather with individuals working with and affected by various groups on both sides of the conflict.”

Mark Edward Lender, author of Cabal! The Plot Against General Washington, comments that Kidder “has given us a piercing view of a town caught up in an international and a civil war. For a time the town was at the epicenter of both, with dramatic consequences for the region and the wider conflict. The struggles of Princetonians — Patriots and Tories — will disabuse any notion that the War for Independence at the local level was an easy time. Cogently written, Revolutionary Princeton is a good read and a welcome contribution to the literature of the American Revolution.”

Money

Presenting Money and the Making of the American Revolution (Princeton University Press 2025), the publisher writes: “American money and American democracy have always been in tension, pitting political equality against economic inequality. Andrew David Edwards shows how this struggle emerged in America’s founding era. Everyone knows that the founders waged a revolt against taxation without representation. Edwards shows that the dispute over taxes was really a dispute over money: what it was, who could make it, and how to keep it from being used at the expense of the colonists in North America.”

Edwards’s narrative “spans four continents, linking the problems of money and revolt in early America to the transatlantic slave trade, the disastrous mismanagement of the East India Company in India, and violence against Native Americans.” He “argues that as the republican vision of an agrarian, independent monetary system faded, the leaders of the Revolution tied the nation to capitalism and imperialism at its founding. The colonists may have won the battle for representation, but the money that underpinned European empire had established a stronghold in the
new republic.”

Social Change

The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement: 100th Anniversary Edition (Princeton University Press 2025) by J. Franklin Jameson, with contributions by Michael A. Blaakman and Sarah Barringer Gordon, was among the first books to look at American history through the lens of social change, arguing that “the most salient feature of the American Revolution was not the war for independence itself but rather the struggle between aristocratic values and those of the common people.” Jameson “shows how American revolutionaries sought to change their government, not their society, but how, in destroying monarchy and establishing a republic, they changed their society profoundly. He examines the transformative effects the American Revolution had on business, intellectual and religious life, slavery, land ownership, and interactions between members of different social classes. Looking beyond the political and probing the social aspects of this pivotal event, Jameson forces a reconsideration of revolution that still resonates today.”

Loyalist vs. Patriot

Maxine Lurie’s Taking Sides in Revolutionary New Jersey: Caught in the Crossfire (Ceres: Rutgers Studies in History 2022) focuses on the eight long years of the American Revolution in New Jersey, during which “many were caught in the middle of a vicious civil war. Residents living in an active war zone took stands that varied from ‘Loyalist’ to ‘Patriot’ to neutral and/or ‘trimmer’ (those who changed sides for a variety of reasons). Men and women, Blacks and whites, Native Americans, and those from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, with different religious affiliations, all found themselves in this difficult middle ground.”

Lurie analyzes the difficulties faced by prisoners of war, the refugees produced by the conflict, and those Loyalists who remained, left as exiles, or surprisingly later returned. Their stories include examples of those literally caught in the crossfire. Taking Sides uses numerous brief biographies to illustrate the American Revolution’s complexity, quoting from documents, pamphlets, diaries, letters, and poetry.

Back to Burr

I’ve never seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, although I quoted from it in my May 25, 2016, Town Topics article (“Theatricals and Time Travel on the Princeton Battlefield”) concerning Princeton’s mention in the second number, “Aaron Burr, Sir,” when Hamilton tells Burr, “I heard your name at Princeton…. I wanted to do what you did. Graduate in two, then join the Revolution.”

Nancy Isenberg found a Byronic image of Burr for the cover of Fallen Founder. A Library Journal reviewer was not impressed, however, calling the book “an unconvincing and highly subjective portrait that raises more questions than it answers.” Recommended instead are Roger G. Kennedy’s Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character (Oxford University Press 2000) and Milton Lomask’s two-volume biography of Burr (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1982).

An article in the Smithsonian Magazine (“Before There Was ‘Hamilton,’ There Was ‘Burr’”) refers to Isenberg tracing the history of Burr-Lit, wherein she notes that as early as 1838 — two years after his death — the “devilish Burr” made an appearance in a novel about his alleged schemes in the West. While he would have his defenders in print over the subsequent years, most depictions of Burr were ugly. Isenberg notes that even as late as 1955, playwright Thomas Sweeney, in his “Aaron Burr’s Dream for the Southwest,” depicts the former vice president as “a hypersexualized and insane genius … a weird blend of Dr. Frankenstein and Hugh Hefner.”

Vidal’s Version

No doubt the most popular book ever written about Aaron Burr is Gore Vidal’s 1973 bestseller, simply titled Burr (Random House 1973, Vintage paperback 2000). So small was my interest in the subject, at least before moving to Princeton, that I actually avoided Vidal’s novel even though I’d once collected his early fiction, virtually all of which was out of print at the time I discovered it in a secondhand bookstore. Asked about Burr in an interview reprinted in Writers at Work, Fifth Series (Penguin 1981), Vidal gave a characteristic reply: “I had assumed that Burr would be unpopular. Happily, … Watergate so shook the three percent of our population who read books that they accepted a book that ordinarily they would have burned while reciting the pledge of allegiance to the flag.”

Finally, I’m amending a list that illustrates the range of books (titles only) inspired by Aaron Burr: The Burr Conspiracy; American Emperor: Aaron Burr’s Challenge to Jefferson’s America; The Heartbreak of Aaron Burr; The Treason Trials of Aaron Burr; The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr; and The Great American Rascal, not to mention books devoted primarily to the duel with Hamilton, including, for example, Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take On America’s First Sensational Murder Mystery.

Note: I recently discovered another biography of Light-Horse Harry — The American Partisan: Henry Lee and the Struggle for Independence 1776-1780 by John W. Hartmann (White Mane 2000; Kindle edition 2014).