Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 June 1881 — Aaron Burr’s Death. [ARTICLE]

Aaron Burr’s Death.

A few moons ago I took the ferryboat to the north, or rather the northwest, shore of Staten Island, and landed at the village immediately opposite Bergen Point, called Port Richmond, sonamed because it is the water-land-ing to old Richmond court house, at the center of the island. There is not a more animated spot Id the water scenery of New York bay than this. It shows both the bay of New. York and Newark bay, the latter receiving the commerce of Newark City and oi r the Hackensack marshes, and of the Jersey inlets as far down as the Raritan river. They all pass out between Port Richmond ana Bergen Point, through the Kill Von Kull, ‘which is only half a mile wide. A sick man could sit all day long at his window

by this water, watching tugs, propellers, pleasure steamers, sloops and schooners, oyster craft, rafts and barge tows, garbage fleets, yachts and excursion arks filled with music and dancing, go past like processions in a mirror. It was to Port Richmond that Colonel Burr, ex-senator and Vice-Presi-dent of the United States, ex-attorney general of New York, ex-candidate

for governor of New York and for minister to France and once. almost president of the United States, was brought one day in early June, at about this present time of the year upon a Utter, to die. The hotel, now called the Continental, stands nearly as It did at that moment, right in your face as you turn from the water at Port Richmond, and only a few hundred feet distant—a yellowishbrown hotel, with a gambrel roof and six tall, spare, thick, wooden columns rising to the eavesand inclosing, in their piazza three stories. Ascending the steps to this piazza a broad door and hall are right opposite the middle of it, and a broad flight of naked steps rise in the second floor and a similar hall there, and the room to the left, as you look up from the ground, is the room where Aaron Burr died. Under it is the bar-room now. The chamber is a square room, with little carved bits of carpentering about the chimney side, and it is di respectable size, quite a bedroom parlor. Mr. Burr was borne to it ou a litter from the stean>-_ boat, an old, helpless Invalid, persecuted by bodily decay and creditors, >and the fear of dying in the street. He had lost the confidence of man, woman and chil« ■. Politics had spewed him out 30 years before. Family circles had tried him tea often. Women had found that he would not only kiss, but tell. Clients found that he would seU their confidence to the other side. And yet forsaken, friendless and unpitied, such was the mystery of this miserable little man that half the world said the president of the United States, then running for the office before the people, was the son of Aaron Burr. The religious world remembered that the greatest logician and theologian since Paul had been this outcast’s grandfather. The educated class knew that the founder of Princeton college had been Aaron Burr’s father. Lawyers knew that his sister’s husband had founded the first law school in the new world. Once his daughter had led the fashion and beauty of Washington society and married one of the richest planters of the south. He was about to die in sight of his birthplace at Newark and of his orphan home at Elizabeth where his father and grandfather had ministered, and whence he had entered the RevoluWnary army. These two towns of New Jersey are in plain sight and Elizabeth is only about a mile distant. Fifty years before being brought to Staten Island to die, young Burr, while on Washington’s staff, had proposed to the general to head an expedition against Staten Island, every lane find corner of which he knew, having made its hills his rambling ground from -the flat, mosquitoridden plains of Elizabeth. It was perhaps his playmate’s son, Judge Edwards, a resident of Staten Island, who was almost his only visitor at the inn. That island of tories was now about to receive the Fast mould and living shadow of Aaron Burr.