THADDEUS
BURR
The mention of these things shows the opinion his fellow citizens had of him, and the confidence they reposed in his integrity and abilities. But in no part of his life did Mr. Burr shine more conspicuously, nor was he more heartily engaged, nor more eminently useful, than in the revolutionary war, when Americans stood on their guard, and an appeal was made to heaven by the just. When the citizens of this town resorted to their arms, he was their counsellor and director, and provoked them on to the contest, and during its progress was all life and activity. During the greater part of the war he was one of the Governor's council of Fifty; he had the bravery to prepare a paper proving the righteousness of the contest. It seemed to all that we could not have done at that time without men of so much ability, influence, and promptitude.
"Until a few years past, he has been constantly in public business. Infirmities pressing upon him, he declined all business except his own private matters. We beheld with concern his tottering frame; we looked anxiously at the prospect of his dissolution; it has at length come upon him preceded by agonizing pain, and attended by loss of reason, which was the most distressing of all. But when an interval of reason took place he expressed to me his firm belief in religion, and when amid excruciating pains he was reminded of his Saviour 5 sufferings, he replied that his own were by no means comparable, and expressed an entire resignation to God's will, and that Christ was his only hope: and then the time came that the earthly house of this tabernacle must be dissolved : his agonies abated and he gently fell asleep, we trust in the arms of that Saviour who died for us."
A writer in the New Yark Evening Post thus writes of Thaddeus Burr's mansion, and of the scenes enacted therein:
"I have dwelt for some weeks near the site of the old Burr mansion house, in this beautiful Connecticut village, and in these few days have become all that the most zealous antiquary could desire. I have passed whole days in delving amid the musty records of the town and parish, religiously preserved in the crypts of the Town Hall. I have held frequent and confidential chats with ancient gentlewomen whose recollections extend beyond the Revolution to the palmy days of their village, and I have enjoyed the friendship and confidence of the 'Oldest Inhabitant,' whose reminiscences go back to the founding of the village itself (which occurred soon after the pious and utter extermination of the Pequots in a neighboring swamp). Most freely has been placed before me family papers and legends sacredly preserved, and the result is a mass of material, legendary and historic, which the public, if it has the least flavor of the antiquary in its composition, will be interested in knowing, and which I shall impart as freely if not as gracefully as it was delivered. Every New England village with any pretensions at all to antiquity has its ancient mansion house, about which local traditions cluster, and whose very walls are permeated with the subtle aroma of the past. Fairfield was no exception to this rule, and its Burr mansion house has as good title to historic fame, perhaps, as any of the old-time mansions of Middlesex. Tradition says that it was built about 1700, by Chief-Justice Peter Burr, one of the earliest graduates from Harvard, Chief-justice of Connecticut, and who once lacked but a few votes of becoming its Governor. The house stood somewhat back from the main street, on a slight eminence, beneath a canopy of elms, and with its dormer windows, its projecting gables and ivy-covered wings, presented quite the appearance of a baronial structure, the effect of which was increased, it is said, on entering its wide hall with its heavy oaken staircase, or in wandering about its ancient chambers with their tiled fire-places and heavy oaken panellings.
"At the time of the Revolution, the period to which our recollections are limited, the mansion was owned by Thaddeus Burr, a grandson of Peter Burr, a gentleman of culture and ample estate, and who, like many of the colonial gentry, exercised a princely hospitality. The ancient chronicles record with pride that General Washington in his journeys to and from Boston was his frequent guest. Franklin, Lafayette, Otis, Quincy, Watson, Governor Tryon, Dr. Dwight, the poet Barlow are on the house's bede-roll of famous guests. There Trumbull and Copley dreamed and painted--the latter doing fullength portraits of his host and hostess, which are still preserved in the family. Governor Hancock was married there ; Madam Hancock died there. Aaron Burr passed many of his youthful days beneath its roof as the guest of his cousin (not uncle, as Mr. Parton has it), Thaddeus Burr. This fact is recorded in the old chronicles with special pride, nor was it difficult to discover the reason. Burr's family was of the bluest blood of New England, and had been seated in Fairfield for generations. His father, the Rev. Aaron Burr, the famous Princeton scholar and divine, was a native of Fairfield. Judge Peter Burr, before mentioned, was his grand-uncle. Colonel Andrew Burr, who led the Connecticut regiment in the brilliant attack on Louisburg in 1745, was a cousin, and his family for generations had filled the various offices of state, from deacon in the Puritan churches to magistrates and judges of the courts. Nor can one of these who believe in the ancient traditions of the village be made to admit that Burr was any other than a bitterly-persecuted man, who, as has been said, 'suffered the fate of those who come into the world a hundred years before their time,' and who was ' crushed by the church of his fathers which he had repudiated, by the Federalists whom his defection had incensed, and by the rivalries in his own party which his elevation to the Presidency had created.'
"To
this mansion of historic fame, in May, 1775, came Miss Dorothy
Quincy, daughter of Edmund Quincy, of Boston, who had moved for three
years as the belle of the polite circles of
that town, and who was now the affianced bride of Governor John
Hancock. A few weeks before, she had witnessed the battle of
Lexington from her chamber window, spiritedly refusing to obey Governor
Hancock's command to return to Boston, but now that her native city had
assumed the aspect of a beleaguered town, she had consented to pass the
summer in Fairfield, beneath the roof of her father's old friend,
Thaddeus Burr. The beauty, wit, grace, and dignity of this lady
the village gossips are never tired of descanting upon, and it is
plainly to be seen that they regard her residence in their village as
an event which added measurably to its historic fame. She was
accompanied on this occasion, we learn, by a chaperone in the person of
her loving aunt, Madam Hancock, by her maid, and by that array of
trunks and band-boxes which are deemed indispensable by young women of
rank and fashion in their travels. Some two
days after Miss Molly's advent a cavelier rode into the village in the
person of Aaron Burr who had come to visit his favorite kinsman
Thaddeus Burr.
When the young people were presented in the parlors of the mansion
house that evening, it is said their surprise and pleasure were mutual,
and it is more than hinted by the gossips that consequences disastrous
to Governor Hancock's peace of mind might have ensued had not the sage
counsels of the elders prevailed over youthful passion and folly.
It is at least true that Miss Dolly wrote a letter to a bosom friend
not long after in which she speaks
of Burr as ' a handsome young man with a pretty fortune,' and complains of
the extreme caution of her
aunt, who would not allow them to pass a moment alone in each other's
society. It has been said of Aaron Burr,
with hundreds of other unkind things, that he never refused a
flirtation, yet his conduct on this occasion was honorable in the
extreme. Whether it was, as Cousin Thaddeus is said to have hinted,
'that he could not afford to have so powerful a man as Governor Hancock
for his enemy,' or whether, as is more probable, thoughts of war
occupied his mind to the exclusion of those of love, certain it is that
on this occasion he fled from temptation, and making a hasty departure
from the mansion house, he set off for Litchfield, where he entered
upon his legal studies with his brother-in-law, Judge Tappan
Reeve. Nor did he revisit the mansion house that summer,
Burr Family Genealogy
Bibliography (a list of resources
used in gathering information for these pages)
comments
home page