The Devil Designs a Career: Aaron Burr and the Shaping of Enterprise

The restraints on self-interest imposed by an earlier generation of Revolutionary fathers, it is argued, were simply swept away in an irresistible tide of land hunger and diminished prospects at home, conditions that stimulated an authentic American liberalism. Burr's Conspiracy, the confusing, year-long national spectacle involving a welter of newspaper accounts, published correspondence, trial transcripts, balls, toasts, speeches, and public assemblies, suggests that the passage to modernity was not the effortless, rational excursion that Appleby's "imagined enterprise" implies.