Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Volume 2. by Davis, Matthew L. (Matthew Livingston), 1773-1850

MEMOIRS OF AARON BURR.

CHAPTER I.

Colonel Burr's study of the law [1] has been already briefly noticed. He brought to that study a classic education as complete as could, at that time, be acquired in our country; and to this was added a knowledge of the world, perhaps nowhere better taught than in the camp, as well as a firmness and hardihood of character which military life usually confers, and which is indispensable to the success of the forensic lawyer. He was connected in the family circle with _two[2] eminent jurists, who were at hand to stimulate his young ambition, and to pour, in an almost perpetual stream, legal knowledge into his mind, by conversation and by epistolary correspondence. The time he spent in his studies preparatory to his admission would be considered short at the present day; but (to use the language of another) "it is to be recollected that at that time there were no voluminous treatises upon the mere routine of practice to be committed to memory, without adding a single legal principle or useful idea to the mind, and which only teach the law student, as has been said of the art of the rhetorician, 'how to name his tools.' Burr, fortunately for his future professional eminence, was not destined to graze upon this barren moor. He spent his clerkship in reading and abstracting, with pen in hand, Coke and the elementary writers, instead of Sellon and Tidd; and learnt law as a science, and not as a mechanical art."

On the other hand, it has been said "that Colonel Burr was not a deep-read lawyer; that he showed himself abundantly conversant with the general knowledge of the profession, and that he was skilful in suggesting doubts and questions; but that he exhibited no indications of a fondness for the science, nor of researches into its abstruse doctrines; that he seemed, indeed, to hold it and its administration in slight estimation. The best definition of law, he said, was '_whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained_.' This sarcasm was intended full as much for the courts as for the law administered by them."