Censure him all you choose, and then look at the conditions of his childhood and wonder that he lived to fifty years of age before the lack of early care brought forth its fruit.  Aaron Burr received as good an intellectual and moral legacy as any one of the 1,400 of the Edwards family.  His father and mother, grandfather and grandmother would have given him as good an environment and training as any one of them enjoyed, but—­his father died before he was two years old, and his mother, grandfather, and grandmother died when he was two years old, and he and his sister, four years old, went to live with his oldest uncle, Timothy Edwards, who was only twenty.  This uncle was also bringing up two younger brothers aged eight and thirteen, and three young sisters.  While Timothy Edwards made an eminently worthy citizen and reared a family of noble sons and daughters, he was not prepared at nineteen to support so many younger children and give a two-year-old boy the attention that he needed.

At twelve years of age Aaron Burr went to college, and after this time he never had even the apology of a home, indeed he never had a home such as his nature demanded.  There are three pictures of the child which satisfy me that the right training would have enabled Aaron Burr to go into history as the noblest Roman of them all.

At four years of age he was at school, where the treatment was so severe that he ran away from school and home and could not be found for three days.

At seven years of age he was up in a cherry tree when a very prim and disagreeable spinster came to call, and he indulged in the childish luxury of throwing cherries at her.  She sought “Uncle Timothy,” who took the seven-year-old child into the house, gave him a long and severe lecture, offered a long prayer of warning, and then “licked me like a sack.”

At ten years of age he ran away from the severity of his uncle, and went to New York and shipped as cabin boy.  His uncle followed him, and when the little fellow saw him he went to the top of the masthead and refused to come down until his uncle agreed not to punish him.  It is easy to see that his uncle aroused in him all the characteristics that should have been calmed, and gave him none of that care which father or mother would have provided him.

At twelve he entered Princeton, and graduated with honors at sixteen.  College life had its temptations, but he conducted himself with unusual decorum, and upon graduation went to study with an eminent clergyman.  Apparently he expected to enter the ministry, but the theology of Dr. Bellamy did not commend itself to him, and even less did the spirit with which the theologian met his queries, so that for the remaining sixty odd years of life he would not talk about theology.  Here was a brilliant lad, fresh from college, with the inheritance of Burr and Edwards, who might have been led into a glorious career, but was instead repelled, and went back to his uncle’s home, with no profession and no plan for life, with no one to advise him.