| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr. By Nancy Isenberg. (New York: Penguin, 2007. xx, 540 pp. Cloth, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-670-06352-9. Paper, $17.00, ISBN 978-0-14-311371-3.)
If both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson are your enemies, you are going to have a tough time in your political career and your reputation in history will suffer accordingly. So it has always been with Aaron Burr. But Nancy Isenberg, establishing herself as the premier Burr biographer, demonstrates that Burr's negative reputation was largely the result of his crossing powerful enemies rather than any egregious wrongdoing on his part.	1
Isenberg's book is the first biography of Burr since Milton Lomask's two-volume Aaron Burr (1979–1982) and the first to make full use of Mary-Jo Kline's compilation of Burr's papers, not just the two published volumes, Political Correspondence and Public Papers of Aaron Burr (1983), but the full twenty-seven reels of microfilm. The result is a fresh, fascinating look at Burr, not as a schemer and opportunist, as he has so often been portrayed, but as a farsighted lawyer and politician whose actions brought about much needed reform, especially in New York politics, both city and state, and whose ideas, especially on feminism, were ahead of his time.	. . .

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