BURR VS. HAMILTON.(The Talk of the Town)(descendants prepare to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr duel with a rre-enactment)

The Inwood Canoe Club is Manhattan's oldest paddling collective. In its hundred-year existence, it has produced several Olympians, though these days, thanks to its new commodore, Antonio Burr, it is a more recreational and democratic organization, made up of various "water people," as Burr says. On a spring morning, there may be no place in the city more serene than the club's boathouse, a red aluminum cabin nestled among the dense trees lining the Hudson, a hundred yards downstream from Tubby Hook and perhaps a mile north of the George Washington Bridge. Burr, who is Chilean, and a forensic psychologist by profession, was standing on the boathouse dock one recent morning, next to a slender, old-fashioned kayak made of canvas--"like an Eskimo boat," he said--and describing what fun it is to surf the wake of the Circle Line tour cruiser as it passes by. He was holding a book, "Duel," by Thomas Fleming, under his arm.

"It tells an interesting tale," Burr said, grinning widely when he was asked about it. This July 11th, he explained, is the two-hundredth anniversary of the famous Burr-Hamilton duel, in which the sitting Vice-President, Aaron Burr, shot and killed his archrival, Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury. The duel took place on the far side of the Hudson, in Weehawken, and Antonio is studying up because he will be playing the part of Aaron Burr, his ancestor, in the official reenactment.

Alexander Hamilton's reputation, never all that low to begin with, is in the midst of a revival. The historian Ron Chernow has just published a flattering Hamilton biography, and this fall the New-York Historical Society plans to launch its bicentennial exhibit "Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America." Antonio Burr, meanwhile, is doing his small part to elevate the foundering reputation of his late cousin Aaron, who in the years following the duel was accused of treason. (He was acquitted, but he fled the country anyway.)

The Burr family legacy is nothing if not complicated. Robert Dimsdall Burr, Antonio's forebear (and a first cousin, once removed, of the former Vice-President), was a Philadelphia physician who packed up one day in 1840 and, with a freed slave by his side, set sail for South America in search of a temperate rain forest. He arrived, finally, in the unsettled southern archipelago of Chile, on an island known as Chiloe, where, according to Antonio, he found "this fabulous virgin forest, untouched and perfect." Robert ...