Review: The Climax
- cepmurphywrites
- Jun 24
- 6 min read
Aaron Burr is not the most famous of the first generation of statesmen in the USA, but he is one of the most intriguing. The bare bones of his life story bear that out.
He was a soldier during the Revolutionary War who left the service due to ill health and entered law and politics in New York City, where in 1785 he introduced a bill to emancipate the state's slaves, which did not pass, some 42 years before those slaves were actually freed (though he introduced this bill while owning slaves himself). He ran for President in 1796 but received little support, so instead concentrated in building up power in New York. In 1799 he founded his own bank, which allowed him to break the federalist monopoly and lend money to opponents of the presidential regime, but he did this via the ruse of forming a water company, delaying an actual water company being founded. In 1800, he ran for Vice-President under Thomas Jefferson but took advantage of an unclear ruling as to whether votes for Vice-Presidents count the same as votes for President to attempt to block Jefferson's election and become President himself, thus making an enemy of Jefferson. But as Vice-President, he impressed both his enemies and allies as President of the senate, becoming notorious for his even handedness and excellent rhetoric.
In 1804 he ran for New York Governor, but lost thanks, at least partially due to a smear campaign organised by his long-time enemy Alexander Hamilton who said he was a dangerous man who should not be trusted in government. Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel in response and, despite Hamilton apparently aiming high, shot and killed him, something that meant he was charged with murder while still Vice-President, though the charges were dropped. He stood down as Vice-President in 1805 and retired to Louisiana where he assembled a private army, larger than that of the US itself. He apparently told various people that he planned to either invade Mexico, storm Washington DC and place himself in charge, or create a new independent state out of territories belonging to both Spain and the USA based in New Orleans. Whatever his actual plans, he was betrayed before he could carry them out and was tried for treason, though found not guilty due to lack of evidence.
He went into exile to Europe where he hoped to drum up support for Mexican independence and, according to his diary, spent his time there largely drunk and getting into unfortunate misadventures, such as setting his hand on fire while trying to light a candle with gunpowder and being blackmailed by a laundry woman who refused to return his clothes unless he did errands for her. He eventually returned to the USA, where he married a wealthy widow, wasted her fortune on bad investments, and then died in 1836.
This is a man who would make an interesting US President. And I am not the only one to think so. Charles Felton Pidgin published The Climax in 1902, in which he imagines that one of Burr's allies intercepts Hamilton's letters against Burr, preventing them from going out and meaning Burr wins the position of Governor of New York and thus soon becomes President in his own right.
This is one of the first modern AH novels and frankly is not massively different from the sort of thing you'd see in amateur AH in a more modern era, in terms of it being based around the political career of how a man who never gained power would have governed. It's the same concept as SLP’s own A Greater Britain by Ed Thomas, about Oswald Mosley gaining power.
Except Thomas was interested in Mosley but he wasn't an actual supporter of his. Pidgin just thinks Burr is the best.
Pidgin is very clear that Burr was a great man and a great politician and a great soldier and any negative stain on his reputation was down to slander and lies by Hamilton and Jefferson who only disliked him because they were jealous. All you need to do to have success is just let Burr do stuff.
And, boy, does he do stuff. As General under Jefferson he invades Spanish America and conquers from Texas all the way down to Colombia without any serious opposition and brings those lands into the USA, again without any serious opposition (it happens in a paragraph). Later he fights another war against Spain, where he takes all but one of the Islands in the Caribbean (even somehow the ones that Spain doesn't own), again in a paragraph with no difficulty. Having conquered most of North America in about 4 years, Burr then finishes the job by seizing Jamaica and Canada in a war with the British -- though this war is significantly harder in that it takes more than a page for Burr to win. Burr is in fact captured by the Royal Navy and freed only by the bravery of an American ship named the Alexander Hamilton.
The invasion of Canada, led of course by Burr personally, takes up most of the book's page time, though the focus is less on the military action and more on an exiled French Countess in Montreal who Burr allies himself with, in the same way that the fighting in Mexico is only really relevant in that it lets Burr rescue a white female slave held there. That slave turns out to actually be Maria Reynolds, Hamilton's mistress, in disguise and working as a spy. She reappears later pretending to be a Quebecois teenage boy, though Burr doesn't recognise that these two are the same person. These two women's relationships with Burr, the damsel in distress who betrays him and the woman who he loves but can't marry, are what most of the book is about; though Burr doesn't actually have sex with either of these people, which given in his diaries he has sex all the time even when he seems like he's not really keen on it, felt unrealistic.
Bizarrely, in that war against Canada, Burr recruits an aged Benedict Arnold who had faked his death and has him earn his redemption by fighting for the USA again -- because as Benedict explains, he only betrayed the USA because he fell for a hot British girl and wanted to please her, but was very reluctant in his choices while in his heart he still believed in American independence and wished nothing more than to wear the uniform again. I am not sure who this was fan service for but I'm sure somebody wanted it.
Upon having conquered all of North America, Burr promptly partitions it in two. The Northern bit of it (USA and Canada) is designated whites only, while Latin America and the Caribbean is reserved for the (newly emancipated) black population and named the African United States of America. After having served as President for 12 years, he stands down in favour of Andrew Jackson. The book climaxes where he finally marries his French Countess while Hamilton dies in disgrace.
This is a weird, weird book.
On the one hand it does things that modern AH of this type mostly doesn't. For a start it is a book primarily concerned with the relationships between men and women. There's even a subplot about Burr's provincial peasant friend and his romantic pursuit of his neighbour's daughter with Burr's support. Politics are largely off page and seen through the lens of romantic pursuits, and the central rivalry of the book is routed in romantic disappointment on Hamilton's behalf rather than political disagreement. Even Benedict Arnold's decisions are reframed to be entirely about the woman he chooses rather than the country he does. But it's also much more puritanical than the actual characters were. Hamilton doesn't even kiss his mistress; he just uses her to attack Burr. Sexual desire is all over this book but only in a chaste and obsessive way which seems unrelated to the actual action. For all lust and love are central there is a coldness to the emotions here; when a character's beloved husband dies in battle, she just nods and goes 'yes, good way to die'.
On the other hand, as a book about politics fundamentally uninterested in policy (the only things we know Burr does as a politician are change the term limits and fight wars), that views the success and failure of a country entirely by the size of its borders and that handwaves leaders achieving impossible things simply because they're the protagonist, this doesn't feels unlike something you'd see in 2020s amateur AH fiction. The line from here to EU4 fanfic is a straight one.
I cannot remotely claim that this is a well written book, the prose is cumbersome and the dialogue stilted, but it is very entertaining and I quite enjoy it as such. It's got duels and spies and long monologues and revelations about long lost relatives and an evil villain and as such I sped through it. And the fact it came out over 120 years ago makes its failures, and successes, an interesting point of history in a way a more modern book can't be.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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