Thus one Matthew L. Davis, in whom Burr had confided as a friend, wrote of him long afterward a most unjust account—­unjust because we have proofs that it was false in the intensity of its abuse.  Davis wrote: 

It is truly surprising how any individual could become so eminent as a soldier, as a statesman, and as a professional man who devoted so much time to the other sex as was devoted by Colonel Burr.  For more than half a century of his life they seemed to absorb his whole thought.  His intrigues were without number; the sacred bonds of friendship were unhesitatingly violated when they operated as barriers to the indulgence of his passions.  In this particular Burr appears to have been unfeeling and heartless.

It is impossible to believe that the Spartan Burr, whose life was one of incessant labor and whose kindliness toward every one was so well known, should have deserved a commentary like this.  The charge of immorality is so easily made and so difficult of disproof that it has been flung promiscuously at all the great men of history, including, in our own country,

Washington and Jefferson as well as Burr.  In England, when Gladstone was more than seventy years of age, he once stopped to ask a question of a woman in the street.  Within twenty-four hours the London clubs were humming with a sort of demoniac glee over the story that this aged and austere old gentleman was not above seeking common street amours.

And so with Aaron Burr to a great extent.  That he was a man of strict morality it would be absurd to maintain.  That he was a reckless and licentious profligate would be almost equally untrue.  Mr. H. O. Merwin has very truly said: 

Part of Burr’s reputation for profligacy was due, no doubt, to that vanity respecting women of which Davis himself speaks.  He never refused to accept the parentage of a child.

“Why do you allow this woman to saddle you with her child when you know you are not the father of it?” said a friend to him a few months before his death.

“Sir,” he replied, “when a lady does me the honor to name me the father of her child I trust I shall always be too gallant to show myself ungrateful for the favor.”

There are two curious legends relating to Aaron Burr.  They serve to show that his reputation became such that he could not enjoy the society of a woman without having her regarded as his mistress.

When he was United States Senator from New York he lived in Philadelphia at the lodging-house of a Mrs. Payne, whose daughter, Dorothy Todd, was the very youthful widow of an officer.  This young woman was rather free in her manners, and Burr was very responsive in his.  At the time, however, nothing was thought of it; hut presently Burr brought to the house the serious and somewhat pedantic James Madison and introduced him to the hoyden.