in 1801, and was lost at sea in 1813. Burr was a member of the state assembly (1784–1785), attorney-general of the state (1789–1791), United States senator (1791–1797), and again a member of the assembly (1798–1799 and 1800–1801). As national parties became clearly defined, he associated himself with the Democratic-Republicans. Although he was not the founder of Tammany Hall, he began the construction of the political machine upon which the power of that organization is based. In the election of 1800 he was placed on the Democratic-Republican presidential ticket with Thomas Jefferson, and each received the same number of electoral votes. It was well understood that the party intended that Jefferson should be president and Burr vice-president, but owing to a defect (later remedied) in the Constitution the responsibility for the final choice was thrown upon the House of Representatives. The attempts of a powerful faction among the Federalists to secure the election of Burr failed, partly because of the opposition of Alexander Hamilton and partly, it would seem, because Burr himself would make no efforts to obtain votes in his own favour. On Jefferson’s election, Burr of course became vice-president. His fair and judicial manner as president of the Senate, recognized even by his bitterest enemies, helped to foster traditions in regard to that position quite different from those which have become associated with the speakership of the House of Representatives.
Hamilton had opposed Burr’s aspirations for the vice-presidency in 1792, and had exerted influence through Washington to prevent his appointment as brigadier-general in 1798, at the time of the threatened war between the United States and France. It was also in a measure his efforts which led to Burr’s lack of success in the New York gubernatorial campaign of 1804; moreover the two had long been rivals at the bar. Smarting under defeat and angered by Hamilton’s criticisms, Burr sent the challenge which resulted in the famous duel at Weehawken, N.J., on the 11th of July 1804, and the death of Hamilton (q.v.) on the following day. After the expiration of his term as vice-president (March 4, 1805), broken in fortune and virtually an exile from New York, where, as in New Jersey, he had been indicted for murder after the duel with Hamilton, Burr visited the South-west and became involved in the so-called conspiracy which has so puzzled the students of that period. The traditional view that he planned a separation of the West from the Union is now discredited. Apart from the question of political morality he could not, as a shrewd politician, have failed to see that the people of that section were too loyal to sanction such a scheme. The objects of his treasonable correspondence with Merry and Yrujo, the British and Spanish ministers at Washington, were, it would seem, to secure money and to conceal his real designs, which were probably to overthrow Spanish power in the South-west, and perhaps to found an imperial dynasty in Mexico. He was arrested in 1807 on the charge of treason, was brought to trial before the United States circuit court at Richmond, Virginia, Chief-Justice Marshall presiding, and he was acquitted, in spite of the fact that the political influence of the national administration was thrown against him. Immediately afterward he was tried on a charge of misdemeanour, and on a technicality was again acquitted. He lived abroad from 1808 to 1812, passing most of his time in England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden and France; trying to secure aid in the prosecution of his filibustering schemes but meeting with numerous rebuffs, being ordered out of England and Napoleon refusing to receive him. In 1812 he returned to New York and spent the remainder of his life in the practice of law. Burr was unscrupulous, insincere and notoriously immoral, but he was pleasing in his manners, generous to a fault, and was intensely devoted to his wife and daughter. In 1833 he married Eliza B. Jumel (1769–1865), a rich New York widow; the two soon separated, however, owing to Burr’s having lost much of her fortune in speculation. He died at Port Richmond, Staten Island, New York, on the 14th of September 1836.
The standard biography is James Parton’s The Life and Times of Aaron Burr (first edition, 1857; enlarged edition, 2 vols., Boston and New York, 1898). W. F. McCaleb’s The Aaron Burr Conspiracy (New York, 1903) is a scholarly defence of the West and incidentally of Burr against the charge of treason, and is the best account of the subject; see also I. Jenkinson, Aaron Burr (Richmond, Ind., 1902). For the traditional view of Burr’s conspiracy, see Henry Adams’s History of the United States, vol. iii. (New York, 1890).
BURRIANA, a seaport of eastern Spain, in the province of Castellón de la Plana; on the estuary of the river Séco, which flows into the Mediterranean Sea. Pop. (1900) 12,962. The harbour of Burriana on the open sea is annually visited by about three hundred small coasting-vessels. Its exports consist chiefly of oranges grown in the surrounding fertile plain, which is irrigated with water from the river Mijares, on the north, and also produces large quantities of grain, oil, wine and melons. Burriana is connected by a light railway with the neighbouring towns of Onda (6595), Almazóra (7076), Villarreal (16,068) and Castellón de la Plana (29,904). Its nearest station on the Barcelona-Valencia coast railway is Villarreal.
BURRITT, ELIHU (1810–1879), American philanthropist, known as “the learned blacksmith,” was born in New Britain, Conn., on the 8th of December 1810. His father (a farmer and shoemaker), and his grandfather, both of the same name, had served in the Revolutionary army. An elder brother, Elijah, who afterwards published The Geography of the Heavens and other text-books, went out into the world while Elihu was still a boy, and after editing a paper in Georgia came back to New Britain and started a school. Elihu, however, had to pick up what knowledge he could get from books at home, where his father’s long illness, ending in death, made his services necessary. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a blacksmith, and he made this his trade both there and at Worcester, Mass., where he removed in 1837. He had a passion for reading; from the village library he borrowed book after book, which he studied at his forge or in his spare hours; and he managed to find time for attending his brother’s school for a while, and even for pursuing his search for culture among the advantages to be found at New Haven. He mastered Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian and German, and by the age of thirty could read nearly fifty languages. His extraordinary aptitude gradually made him famous. He took to lecturing, and then to an ardent crusade on behalf of universal peace and human brotherhood, which made him travel persistently to various parts of the United States and Europe. In 1848 he organized the Brussels congress of Friends of Peace, which was followed by annual congresses in Paris, Frankfort, London, Manchester and Edinburgh. He wrote and published voluminously, leaflets, pamphlets and volumes, and started the Christian Citizen at Worcester to advocate his humanitarian views. Cheap trans-oceanic postage was an ideal for which he agitated wherever he went. His vigorous philanthropy keeps the name of Elihu Burritt green in the history of the peace movement, apart from the fame of his learning. His countrymen, at universities such as Yale and elsewhere, delighted to do him honour; and he was U.S. consul at Birmingham from 1865 to 1870. He returned to America and died at New Britain on the 9th of March 1879.
See Life, by Charles Northend, in the memorial volume (1879); and an article by Ellen Strong Bartlett in the New England Magazine (June, 1897).
BURROUGHS, GEORGE (c. 1650–1692), American congregational pastor, graduated at Harvard in 1670, and became the minister of Salem Village (now Danvers) in 1680, a charge which he held till 1683. He lived at Falmouth (now Portland, Maine) until the Indians destroyed it in 1690, when he removed to Wells. In May 1692 during the witchcraft delusion, on the accusation of some personal enemies in his former congregation who had sued him for debt, Burroughs was arrested and charged, among other offences, with “extraordinary Lifting and such feats of strength as could not be done without Diabolicall Assistance.” Though the jury found no witch-marks on his body he was convicted and executed on Gallows Hill, Salem, on the 19th of August, the only minister who suffered this extreme fate.
