shmegmilton

[shmegmilton]

Oh yeah. It's the 156th anniversary of that day Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, but you wanna know something that was bonkers about that whole thing?

Between 1863 to 1865 (sources can't seem to agree), a quick-thinking bystander at a train station was able to pull a man out of the path of a train after he had fallen onto the tracks.

The bystander was John Wilkes Booth's brother, Edwin Booth, and the man was Abraham Lincoln's son, Robert Lincoln.

#Abraham Lincoln #John Wilkes Booth #Edwin Booth #Robert Lincoln #u.s. history #Presidents

[shmegmilton]

My favorite part of that story is Burr being apparently so persistent that one of her family members wrote to John like "hey, you better come down here and shut this shit down rn."

Honestly my favorite fun fact about everyone’s favorite human disaster Aaron Burr is that he spent the summer of 1775 trying to flirt with John Hancock’s fiancée.

The history books tend to claim that Dorothy initiated this but I have serious doubts considering she was very much not an idiot and also almost ten years older than him

#Aaron Burr #John Hancock #Dorothy Quincy

[shmegmilton]

I cannot possibly overstate how much opium Burr did as an adult.

There is an entry in his personal diary where he describes having accidentally swallowed a large bit of it and then got so high that he could not sleep. Probably spent the whole night disassociating & staring up at the ceiling.

[shmegmilton]

why the heck was burr so weird?

This is a very loaded question, so i don't really know how to respond.

I'd say it started because he grew up in an incredibly strained religious environment.

Also, he did a lot of opium.

#His near-death heatstroke at 19/20 probably didn't help much either #hamilton the musical #amrev fandom #women in history

[shmegmilton]

#There was also this in my drafts which I mean true #Aaron Burr #My Shitposts

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the worst part of going on hiatus for months & coming back is that i completely lose the context behind what half of my drafts were supposed to mean, or what i was responding to/writing about:

like, what the hell was i meaning to do with this?

[shmegmilton]

I can't give official sources at the moment because I'm away from my personal computer, but Burr actually suffered two strokes.

The first one was in 1833 (which is what this story is describing) where he lost partial mobility. The second one was in either 1834 or 1835, and it effectively made him bedbound.

I don't know if it was ever specified that he was fully paralyzed below the waist, or just didn't have the coordination to hold himself upright anymore, but he never walked again after that & would die in 1836 (which makes sense; being bedbound for extended periods of time in your 70's & 80's is almost always a death sentence.)

Where was Burr "partially paralyzed"? I can't find it anywhere. The sources only say he was "partially paralyzed" after a severe stroke.

Where are you vacationing?

it seems like there was something wrong with his legs at least according to Parton’s story

Lomask says he was temporarily disabled in his right side without clarifying much on the topic

#Aaron Burr

[shmegmilton]

this will never not be funny to me

#Aaron Burr

[shmegmilton]

Burr was an actual living person- what the fuck?

he was also a huge mistake

[shmegmilton]

How Aaron Burr Cut A Man‘s Arm Off [December, 1777]

So, regardless of your opinion on him, Aaron Burr had an impressive Revolutionary War career with a lot of entertaining stories mixed in. He was reportedly one of the youngest (& smallest) senior officers, he was dutiful, disciplined, smart, brave, willing to listen, but also willing to offer his own ideas and take risks.

He was also, arguably, a little crazy. Maybe.

For instance, there is a story that I don’t think is brought up nearly as much as it should where, in December 1777, General Washington on the recommendation of someone else gave Burr the command of a small group that was stationed near the opening of Valley Forge called The Gulph. Burr was a good disciplinarian, who regularly took control of regiment when his senior commander, William Malcolm, was called away to do other things, and this group was reportedly very disorganized & prone to false alarms.

Within 10 days, Burr had trained the men so hard that they were actively threatening to kill him. You wanna know what he does?

At some point during the following day, he commanders all of the guns & empties their ammo because he assumes, correctly, that they’ll attempt to rush him the following night when the drills are called.

Once the lines are all set up, everyone pulls their muskets on him at once and, quickly realizing they can’t fire, start getting belligerent. Burr then WHIPS OUT his sword and strikes one of the offenders in the arm hard enough to cut through to the bone. 

It’s unclear what happens next because the story kind of ends there, but we do know that George Washington was impressed enough to not demote him, or arrest him, and that regiment reportedly never gave him trouble as long as he was there after that.

So, yeah. Aaaron “Good Disciplinarian” Burr. Sure, why not?

#Reblog since this post is popping off all of the sudden

[shmegmilton]

Wow, classes were kicking my butt. Thank God that's over.

Happy holidays, also. I'll get back to posting soon.

[shmegmilton]

The B in LGBT stands for Burrite

BASED and TRUE, Anon.

#Shitposts #(Sorry I'm going through backlogged Asks)

[shmegmilton]

What were some of my possum lookin, senator, alleged treason, swindled everyone for a bank, VP, Almost President bois favorite hobbies of activities ??

Aaron Burr's Hobbies

1. Walking

l didn't really know how to categorize this one, but Burr really loved going for walks. Like, he would walk full-length marathons in a single day.

He was very active up until his late 70s when he had a series of strokes (I think 1833 & 1834). He was able to recover from the 1st, but the 2nd left him bedridden, which ultimately caused his health to go downhill (he died in September 1836).

He was particularly partial to post-meal walks to aid in his digestion because he had chronic IBS-like symptoms that he seemed to struggle with for most of his adult life.

2. Reading

He loved to read; he was well-read on a variety of topics (social justice, religion, philosophy, law, geography, history, language, etc.) and enjoyed having spirited discussions or debates about them.

I recall seeing a post a several months back with a link to Burr's personal "check-out" record with the New York Public Library. I unfortunately can't find it right now, but it was an impressive list; I think he checked out between 60-80 books within a 3-year period.

In addition to renting out books from the library, he apparently had an impressive personal library at Richmond Hill (his home.)

3. Dentistry...?

Burr had bad teeth. The combination of his apparent addiction to black coffee, tobacco and opium--yes, opium--led Burr to losing most of his "good" teeth (which I assume means teeth essential for chewing, like molars and premolars) by the time he was in his late 50s.

We know this because Burr's journal while in Europe details this pretty extensively, as well as his visits to the dentists. I don't believe he mentions this within the journal itself, but he began seeking out dental implants and eventually wound up with a full set of dentures by the end of his life. Based on my research on this particular thing, he is apparently regarded by dentists at the time as having the first "modern" set of dentures in America.

Burr, being both broke and obscenely confident in himself, had proclaimed that he could use his new-found expertise to make dentures for others.

4. Culture/Arts

While not particularly gifted in any liberal arts himself, Burr was known to appreciate and (when he was able to) personally finance the occasional starving artist. John Vanderlyn is his most known He was also a frequent enjoyer of plays, exhibits, galleries, and was even known to appreciate traditional and modern styles of architecture.

5. Masonry? (Stone/Brick Construction)

I forget the exact context of this but, similar to the dentistry debacle, something happened in Burr's life that made him all the sudden obscenely confident that he could make a living doing masonry while he was stranded in Europe.

- Those are the most substantial ones, I think. Burr picked up a lot of weird hobbies while stranded in Europe. I think another one had something to do with sheep? Shearing sheep or... something.

[shmegmilton]

A boy who didn't even WANT the Senate seat to begin with. He was just like "ehhh... sure, I guess."

that time when schuyler said that whatever would have happened he would have kept ruling in New York? it must have been so humiliating to lose a Senate sit to a man 23 years younger than you ✨😭

#Tragic

[shmegmilton]

I haven't even mentioned Vidal in weeks or months, which most likely means Anon is talking about something from forever ago that I forgot about.

Guys, if you're gonna dreg up stuff from months ago that I've already forgot about, provide some damn context because... Who? What? Why?

[shmegmilton]

You stupid ass, did you realize that the Gore Vidal novel is fiction? Why are you treating it like a reliable source?

...Huh? Where? Where did I ever speak about Burr as being a wholly reliable historical source? Are you daft or something?

Are you talking about that one time I accidentally mis-attributed a quote by novel Jefferson as something the real Jefferson said--and immediately corrected myself with the actual quote within the same post?

Are you talking about the fact that I reference it at all? Because I sure as hell have never made a post on here using it as a basis for a historical argument.

Vidal even admits in the closing portion of the book, although he tried to keep things as accurate as possible, in order to keep with story cohesion he had to either rearrange events slightly or wholly make stuff up like he did with Charles' Burdett's interpretation. So, of course I would never use it.

-

But regardless: in case you didn't notice, I'm not (nor do I ever want to be) a historian, and this is just some stupid Tumblr blog I run in my free time, so... I can talk about whatever I want, lol.

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Get a life, weirdo.

[shmegmilton]

Fun Fact: One of John Adams' (who knew he hated John Marshall) last acts as President was to appoint him to the Supreme Court, and then proceeded to pass the Judiciary Act of 1801 changing the number of Justices from 6 to 5 to ensure there was absolutely nothing that he could do about it.

that’s funny, Morris said the same thing about you

#Thomas Jefferson #John Adams #The PETTINESS of it all #The DRAMA