Today is the birthday of American historical figure Aaron Burr. He was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1756. He fought in the American revolution from 1776 to 1779 and afterward entered politics. His career carried him from the New York State assembly, to attorney general of New York, to US Senator from New York to being the third Vice President of the United States. He was, however, most well known for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1805. His career went downhill after that although he lived until 1836.
He’d always been something of a second or even third tier figure in American history, at least until Lin-Manuel Miranda made him the central character in the smash musical Hamilton.
That may have seemed a curious choice. After all, Miranda was inspired to turn his artistic attention to Hamilton after reading historian Ron Chernow’s wonderful biography of the nation’s first treasury secretary. Aaron Burr certainly wasn’t the main character there.
But Miranda has an artist’s eye and decided to frame the story through the character of Burr, making him the narrator and more, our personal guide through Hamilton’s life. Even if we didn’t know how the story ends, Burr tells us in the prologue that, at the end, he’s kills Hamilton.
What’s going on here? Well, what’s going on is an artistic process as old as Aristotle, that of tragedy. Like Shakespeare’s King Lear, Miranda’s Burr shows us the cost of human pride—of hubris—and of resentment and envy and the way these things ultimately corrode the lives of all who let them. But he’s not purely a villain. He’s a human, with a tragic flaw, and the artistic purpose in reminding us he’s human is to let you see yourself in him.
We’re told repeatedly throughout the musical, often by Burr himself, that Hamilton is remarkable, that he’s exceptional, that he’s one of a kind—a powerhouse of energy and insight and intellect. That’s not us. We naturally identify with the one who sees the genius and maybe comes to resent it.
But then in identifying with this tragic figure we come to understand pity and we develop the ability to put ourselves in the place of someone who has, as we would blandly say, made bad choices. It’s in our development of pity and understanding that we become more human. That’s what art does for us.