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Aristocracy, Aaron Burr, and the Poetry of Conspiracy

When Aaron Burr was captured and brought to trial for treason in 1807, the account of his ‘‘filibuster’’ in the Mississippi Territory instantly became one the great episodes of conspiracy and intrigue in American history. Once a rising star in the Democratic-Republican ranks, whose political career came to an ignominious end with the killing of Alexander Hamilton, the former vice-president was accused of leading a conspiracy of American and foreign agents for the purpose of, among other things, inciting a rebellion of territorial citizens against the American government, raising an army to ‘‘liberate’’ Mexico from Spanish control, even creating an independent nation in the Southwest (to be ruled by Aaron Burr). Yet while the Burr Conspiracy of 1805–1807 has long been a favorite topic of historians,1 what is not generally remembered is that this was not the first time Burr was publicly charged with conspiracy and treason. More than a decade earlier, in 1795, he had been accused in print of plotting against his country, of conspiring to establish himself ruler of a vast American empire, and of entering into a clandestine agreement with a foreign agent. Almost universally forgotten among students of Burr’s life and career, moreover, is that these accusations came in the form of a poem. The work that first accused Burr of plotting against his country was the anonymous verse satireAristocracy, a work that stands not only as the earliest major political attack against Burr but more remarkably as an uncanny foreshadowing of the most notorious events of his later life. Published in two parts in January andMarch of 1795, the poem appeared amid a period of bitter satiric warfare in which poets representing both parties were engaging elected officials, newspaper editors, and each other, over a variety of issues: the implications of the French Revolution for American politics, the emergence of Democratic societies, the Whiskey Insurrection in Pennsylvania, and the unresolved diplomatic tensions between the United