Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg

From Barnes & Noble

Founding Father, Revolutionary War hero, vice president, businessman, political strategist, adventurer, alleged murderer and traitor: The public personas of Aaron Burr (1756-1836) are almost too numerous to assess. In recent biographies, Ron Chernow, Joseph Ellis, and Gordon Wood have all disparaged him. Nancy Isenberg's Fallen Founder uses primary documents to restore the image of this complex man whose story has been mainly told to us through the words of his enemies. A major biography of a most vilified man.

From the Publisher

A controversial challenge to the works of Ron Chernow and David McCullough

With Fallen Founder , Nancy Isenberg plumbs rare and obscure sources to shed new light on everyone's favorite founding villain. The Aaron Burr whom we meet through Isenberg's eye-opening biography is a feminist, an Enlightenment figure on par with Jefferson, a patriot, and—most importantly—a man with powerful enemies in an age of vitriolic political fighting. Revealing the gritty reality of eighteenth-century America, Fallen Founder is the authoritative restoration of a figure who ran afoul of history and a much-needed antidote to the hagiography of the revolutionary era.

Washington Post

Isenberg's meticulous biography reveals a gifted lawyer, politician and orator who championed civility in government and even feminist ideals, in a political climate that bears a marked resemblance to our own.

Boston Globe

[A] sterling biography.

New York Times Book Review

Full of insight and new research. It is an important and engaging account.

The New York Times - Jill Lepore

Isenberg’s call for a better, less fetishistic history of the founding fathers is eloquent and inspiring. And her study of Burr is full of insight and new research. It is an important and engaging account.

Publishers Weekly

Does Burr belong in the pantheon of founding fathers? Or is he, as historians have asserted ever since he fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel, a faux founder who happened to be in the right place at the right time? Was he really the enigmatic villain, the political schemer who lacked any moral core, the sexual pervert, the cherubic-faced slanderer so beloved of popular imagination? This striking new biography by Isenberg (Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America) argues that Burr was, indeed, the real thing, a founder "at the center of nation building" and a "capable leader in New York political circles." Interestingly, if controversially, Isenberg believes Burr was "the only founder to embrace feminism," the only one who "adhered to the ideal that reason should transcend party differences." Far from being an empty vessel, she says, Burr defended freedom of speech, wanted to expand suffrage and was a proponent of equal rights. Burr was not without his faults, she concludes, but then, none of the other founders was entirely angelic, either, and his actions must be viewed in the context of his political times. As this important book reminds us, America's founders behaved like ordinary human beings even when they were performing their extraordinary deeds. Illus. (May 14)

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Table of Contents