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Aaron Burr was born in Newark, New Jersey., on Feb. 6, 1756. Of distinguished ancestry, he was the son of the Reverend Aaron Burr, the cofounder and second president of the College of New Jersey , which is now Princeton University, and Esther Edwards Burr, the daughter of the New England theologian Jonathan Edwards. Both parents died before he was three years old, and his early training was assumed by an uncle, the Reverend Timothy Edwards. A precocious …

…but was unsuccessful. In June 1812, he returned almost unnoticed to New York. In quick succession he received two crushing blows, the death of his grandson and then of his daughter. He spent the remaining years of a long life as a moderately successful New York attorney. In 1833, at the age of 77, he married Eliza Jumel, a wealthy widow. Eliza was granted a divorce on the day that Burr died in Staten Island, New York., Sept. 14, 1836.