. The most improbable stories were told
about him, even by his friends. As to his enemies, they took boundless
pains to paint him in the blackest colors. According to them, no woman
was safe from his intrigues. He was a perfect devil in leading them
astray and then casting them aside.

Thus one Matthew L. Davis, in whom Burr had confided as a friend, wrote
of him long afterward a most unjust account--unjust because we have
proofs that it was false in the intensity of its abuse. Davis wrote:

It is truly surprising how any individual could become so eminent as a
soldier, as a statesman, and as a professional man who devoted so much
time to the other sex as was devoted by Colonel Burr. For more than
half a century of his life they seemed to absorb his whole thought. His
intrigues were without number; the sacred bonds of friendship were
unhesitatingly violated when they operated as barriers to the
indulgence of his passions. In this particular Burr appears to have
been unfeeling and heartless.

It is impossible to believe that the Spartan Burr, whose life was one
of incessant labor and whose kindliness toward every one was so well
known, should have deserved a commentary like this. The charge of
immorality is so easily made and so difficult of disproof that it has
been flung promiscuously at all the great men of history, including, in
our own country.

Washington and Jefferson as well as Burr. In England, when Gladstone
was more than seventy years of age, he once stopped to ask a question
of a woman in the street. Within twenty-four hours the London clubs
were humming with a sort of demoniac glee over the story that this aged
and austere old gentleman was not above seeking common street amours.

And so with Aaron Burr to a great extent. That he was a man of strict
morality it would be absurd to maintain. That he was a reckless and
licentious profligate would be almost equally untrue. Mr. H. O. Merwin
has very truly said:

Part of Burr's reputation for profligacy was due, no doubt, to that
vanity respecting women of which Davis himself speaks. He never refused
to accept the parentage of a child.

"Why do you allow this woman to saddle you with her child when you KNOW
you are not the father of it?" said a friend to him a few months before
his death.

"Sir," he replied, "when a lady does me the honor to name me the father
of her child I trust I shall always be too gallant to show myself
ungrateful for the favor."