A Treasury of Great American Scandals

by Michael Farquhar

  After Saratoga, Arnold was made military commander of Philadelphia, the nation’s new capital after a British evacuation. It was an easy post for the disabled general, and although the revolution continued, he was no longer preoccupied with maintaining the appearance of supreme patriot. His sole concern was to use his position to his best economic advantage. He developed a lavish life style and, having fallen in love with a socially ambitious eighteen-year-old, Peggy Shippen, he needed cash. He found the solution in a series of enterprises that, if not outright illegal, were highly questionable. He made little effort to hide any of them.

  Arnold married Shippen, twenty years his junior, in April 1779, but a cloud loomed over the festivities. Earlier the same month, Congress had ordered him court-martialed. His questionable financial schemes, it turned out, had not gone unnoticed. Among the charges was that he had issued an illegal permit to unload a captured enemy ship, The Charming Nancy, requisitioned twelve army wagons to transport its cargo to Philadelphia for sale, and received a large cut of the proceeds. When the allegations were aired, he immediately fired off a letter to George Washington: “If your Excellency thinks me criminal, for heaven’s sake let me be immediately tried and, if found guilty, executed. I want no favor; I ask only justice.”

  Within days of writing the letter, however, the audacious Arnold opened correspondence with the British and offered them his services. The court-martial found Arnold guilty on two of eight charges, and Congress demanded that Washington reprimand him. Washington obliged, writing that issuing a permit for The Charming Nancy was “peculiarly reprehensible” and using army wagons “imprudent and improper.” Meanwhile, Arnold’s new relationship with the British was well under way.

  Now considering Washington a personal enemy, Arnold was only too happy to get back at him by giving the British what they really wanted—the fort at West Point, Washington’s pride and joy. But he needed a plan. Still maintaining the appearance of loyalty, Arnold lobbied Washington relentlessly for command of West Point. The unsuspecting commander in chief gave it to him. Complete ruin of the American cause was now imminent.

  By 1780, only an infusion of French money, ships, and men gave the revolution its pulse. King Louis XVI, however, was beginning to fear that the American Revolution was doomed and was looking for any excuse to withdraw. Loss of West Point would have been a lethal blow to the Americans and would have provided Louis with the perfect excuse. A French withdrawal, ironically enough, would have been precipitated by the same man whose victory at Saratoga had convinced France to join the uprising in the first place.

  But the plot failed. Arnold and his contact, Major John André, an adjutant to Sir Henry Clinton, the commander in chief of the British forces, met on the banks of the Hudson at midnight, September 22, 1780. Arnold handed over plans for West Point’s defenses. But André, carrying the papers to the base of British operations in New York City, was captured by three militiamen. Arnold, who was awaiting a visit from Washington, learned of André’s capture the next morning and fled in panic. He raced to the banks of the Hudson and ordered a boat to row him to a waiting British ship, the Vulture, which carried him to safety in New York. “One vulture . . . receiving another,” as Thomas Paine later described it.

  Word of Arnold’s treachery spread rapidly through the states, inciting spite and derision. “Whom can we trust now?” Washington asked upon his arrival at West Point. “Judas sold only one man,” Benjamin Franklin remarked, “Arnold three million. Judas got for his one man thirty pieces of silver, Arnold not a halfpenny a head. A miserable bargain!”

  Arnold served the rest of the war as a brigadier general for the British. General Clinton put him in charge of a marauding expedition in Virginia, where Governor Thomas Jefferson offered a reward of 5,000 pounds for his capture. He forever sealed his infamy when he later led a raid against his former neighbors in Connecticut, burning to the ground the town of New London.

  After the war ended in 1783, Benedict Arnold sailed with his family to England and spent the remaining twenty years of his life in bitter exile. A master of self-delusion, Arnold convinced himself—and pronounced publicly—that his switch of allegiance was noble and justified. Offering his services to Britain in the Napoleonic Wars, he was ignored and scorned as a traitor by his adopted country no less than by the country he betrayed. The British even gave him a lower military rank than had the Americans. Destitute, he did what would be expected of him: He whined and badgered King George III and his government for compensation for valiant services rendered. Defeated and ignored, Arnold died in 1801.

  2

  Aaron Burr: “ Embryo - Caesar”

  Under the American system of justice, in which a man is deemed innocent until proven guilty, Aaron Burr was no traitor. A jury of his peers acquitted him of that high crime in 1807. But by the same standard, he was no killer either—even if he did shoot Alexander Hamilton clean through the gut.20 Because he was never tried for the murder, he was legally innocent of it.

  Yes, the law was doubly kind to the nation’s second vice president, and, except for a brief stint in debtor’s prison, he remained a free man. History, on the other hand, has not been quite so benevolent, and today Burr would stand as a pillar of the American Hall of Shame. The slaying of Hamilton alone would probably not be enough to secure his place here—after all, lots of esteemed Americans lived and died by the Code Duello2—but his grandiose scheming afterward made him a shoe-in.

  Aaron Burr had a crafty brilliance about him that he used to his best advantage. No one was ever quite sure what he was up to—only that, whatever it was, in all probability it was self-serving. “I found he possessed a talent of making an impression of an opinion upon the subject, on the person with whom he conversed, without explicitly stating or necessarily giving his sentiments thereon,” noted Senator William Plumber of New Hampshire. “In everything he said or did, he had a design—and perhaps no man’s language was ever so apparently explicit, and at the same time so covert and indefinite.”

  Because Burr was so adept at masking his intentions and shading the truth, the full extent of his mischief in the years following Hamilton’s death—when the former veep was a reviled fugitive seeking his fortune in the American West—remains a mystery to this day. Thomas Jefferson, among others, believed he was engaged in treason, seeking to establish for himself a vast western empire based on the conquest of Mexico and the forced separation of the trans-Appalachian states from the Union. The president called this alleged enterprise, in which Burr reportedly intended to declare himself Emperor Aaron I, “the most extraordinary since the days of Don Quixot[e].” And though Jefferson was sharply criticized for publicly proclaiming Burr’s guilt “beyond question” before he was ever tried, the president certainly had plenty of reason to believe his former vice president was up to no good.

  Before leaving office, Burr confided his plans to Anthony Merry, Great Britain’s minister to the United States, hoping for British financial and naval assistance in his schemes. In a letter dated August 6, 1804, Merry dutifully reported this delicious bit of intelligence to his boss back home: “I have just received an offer from Mr. Burr, the actual Vice President of the United States (which situation he is about to resign), to lend his assistance to his Majesty’s Government in any Manner in which they may think fit to employ him, particularly in an endeavoring to effect a Separation of the Western Part of the United States from that which lies between the Atlantick and the [Appalachian] Mountains, in its whole extent. . . .”

  Some historians believe that Burr’s secret dealings with Britain, and later Spain, were a clever ruse—“a consummate piece of imposture,” in the words of one—designed not to aid in the dismemberment of the United States, as he told the ministers of those nations, but to raise funds for an invasion of Mexico. And though such an unauthorized attack on a foreign power certainly would have been illegal, Burr defenders note, it would not be treasonous.

  In the spring of 1805, after leaving office,
Burr embarked on a tour of the West that took him as far south as New Orleans and as far west as St. Louis. The excursion left some suspicious of his agenda, and led to the publication of a series of anonymous “Queries” that were reprinted in newspapers across the country. “How long will it be before we shall hear of Col. Burr being at the head of a revolution party on the western waters?” went one pointed question. Others suggested that the former vice president might be seeking to form his own empire in the West, the reduction and despoiling of Mexico, or both. At the time of their publication, however, the “Queries” were viewed by many as a baseless partisan attack. William Duane, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, wrote that the perfidious designs alleged of Burr were unfairly associated with him because he was “exactly such a character as would be open to the suspicions of all parties,” and that his low state might be presumed “to render him fit for any enterprise, however desperate.”

  Just what Burr was doing on this trip out West remains unclear. He may simply have been speculating on land, or sniffing out the possibility of a political resurrection, or even planning an invasion of Mexico. And though President Jefferson received information that something far more sinister was in the works, he did not appear overly concerned. In fact, he had Burr to dinner soon after his return in the fall of 1805. What is certain, though, is that upon his return Burr was once again entreating with Britain, assuring Anthony Merry that he had found the West ripe for revolution, and that money and ships were still urgently needed to get the enterprise started.

  When Burr learned that British assistance would not be forthcoming, he turned to Spain. Through his fellow conspirator, former senator Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, he informed the Spanish minister, Marqués Casa Yrujo, that his separatist schemes in the West were to be preceded by an attack on the federal government. The plan, as recorded by Yrujo, was “by degrees” to introduce into Washington “a number of men in disguise, well armed.” These desperadoes were to seize President Jefferson and other top officials, plunder the local banks, and take possession of the federal arsenal. If there was no resistance to this coup, Burr would “negotiate with the individual states” an arrangement under which he and his confederates would rule the country. If, on the other hand, resistance arose, they would burn the Navy Yard, saving only enough ships to carry them and their plunder to New Orleans. There they would at once “proclaim the emancipation of Louisiana and the Western States.”

  Though Thomas Jefferson had dismissed a number of earlier warnings he had received concerning Burr’s schemes, thinking them politically motivated and unreliable, he later said that he got the “very first intimation of the plot” to divide the Union in a letter from Colonel George Morgan, which he received on September 15, 1806. Burr had visited Morgan’s farm outside Pittsburgh on a second and final trip to the West, and tried to enlist his sons in a military expedition he was planning. He also spoke of the future independence of the West, according to Morgan, while disparaging the federal government.

  About a month after Morgan’s report, Secretary of State James Madison received a letter from General Presley Neville and Judge Samuel Roberts repeating what Morgan had told them about his discussions with Burr. “In short,” they wrote, “the whole tenor of [Burr’s] conversation was such as to leave a strong impression on the minds of those gentlemen with whom these conversations were held that a plan was arranging or arranged for effecting the separation of the Union, in which Colonel Burr seemed to have no ordinary interest.”

  Jefferson got additional information about a conspiracy over the next month, the most damaging of which came from General William Eaton, a hero of the Tripolitan War, who claimed that Burr had offered him a top position in the planned quest to attack Mexico and dismember the West. Eaton, who declined the offer, would later be the first witness for the prosecution at Burr’s treason trial.

  Now thoroughly convinced of Aaron Burr’s treachery, the president ordered confidential letters to be written to the governors and district attorneys in the West to have the former vice president “strictly watched, and on his commanding any overt act unequivocally, to have him tried for treason, misdemeanor, or whatever other offence” his actions might amount to. No immediate action was to be taken, though. “We give [Burr] all the attention our situation admits,” Jefferson wrote; “as yet we have no legal proof of any overt act which the law can lay hold of.”

  Burr, meanwhile, was keeping himself quite busy out West, preparing for an expedition that would make him either a criminal (if he merely invaded Mexico), or a traitor (if he invaded Mexico and tried to sever the Union). Among his many visits was one to perhaps his most gullible supporter, Harman Blennerhassett, whose private island in the Ohio River Burr intended to use as the launching ground for his assault. In August 1806, he and Blennerhassett contracted for the construction of fifteen bateaux, “ample enough to convey five hundred men,” along with “a large keelboat for the transportation of provisions,” and other supplies. Blennerhassett happily footed the bill, and as a reward for all his services, Burr offered him the post of ambassador to Britain if his planned empire ever came to be. Blennerhassett hardly needed the inducement. He was already Burr’s faithful ally, and worked tirelessly to recruit others to the cause. According to later testimony, he told two possible recruits, brothers John and Alexander Henderson, that “under the auspices of Col. Burr, a separation of the Union was contemplated;” that New Orleans was to be seized, its “bank or banks” emptied, its military stores requisitioned, and the city itself and the country around it “revolutionized in the course of nine months.” Blennerhassett also told the brothers, according to their testimony, that “if Mr. Jefferson was in any way impertinent, . . . Burr would tie him neck and heels, and throw him into the Potomac.”

  The activities of Burr, Blennerhassett, and others associated with them did not escape notice, generating all manner of rumor and speculation, inflammatory press reports, and the unwelcome attention of Kentucky’s district attorney Joseph Hamilton Daviess. The federal prosecutor was eager to bring down Burr and thwart whatever enterprise he was planning, but he lacked the evidence to do it. A grand jury was impaneled at his request, but Daviess had to move for its discharge when a key witness failed to show. Undeterred, he renewed his motion for a grand jury inquiry two weeks later. Burr retained Henry Clay, recently elected to the U.S. Senate, to represent him, and wrote to the senator to reassure him of his innocence: “I have no design, nor have I taken any measures to promote a dissolution of the Union.” Although Clay agreed to represent Burr, he later became convinced of his client’s guilt. The citizens of Kentucky sitting on the grand jury remained unconvinced, however, and on December 5, 1806, found no cause against the former vice president. Burr was to remain a free man for the time being.

  It was around this time that one of Burr’s chief cohorts, General James Wilkinson—commander in chief of the U.S. Army, governor of the northern part of the Louisiana Territory recently purchased from France, and notorious double-dealer (he was a secret agent for Spain)—decided to betray Burr and cooperate with the government. In a letter to President Jefferson, Wilkinson claimed to be staggered by “the magnitude of [Burr’s] enterprise, the desperation of the plan, and the stupendous consequences” it held. Perhaps Wilkinson, described by one historian as “the most skillful and unscrupulous plotter this country has ever produced,” turned on Burr because he realized the Western schemes with which he had been so closely involved were doomed to failure, and he wanted to be on the winning side. Though Jefferson had rightly been suspicious of Wilkinson in the past, and believed he exaggerated the size and scope of Burr’s plot, the president heeded his warnings.

  Several days after receiving Wilkinson’s reports, Jefferson issued a proclamation alerting the nation to a conspiracy. Without naming Burr specifically, he lumped together the “sundry persons” whom he had been informed were fitting out and arming vessels, collecting military equipment and provisions, and “deceiving and seduc
ing honest and well-meaning citizens, under various pretences, to engage in their criminal enterprises.” The president warned all citizens against participating in such activities, under penalty of prosecution, and enjoined all public officials to help prevent a criminal uprising.

  Although Jefferson never mentioned the forced separation of the Western states in his public proclamation, or in his address to Congress a month later—intentionally limiting his comments to any plan to invade Mexico—he later said he interpreted Burr’s plot this way: “It appeared that he contemplated two distinct objects. . . . One of these was the severance of the Union of those States by the Allegany [sic] mountains; the other an attack on Mexico.” In reference to some 350,000 acres Burr had purchased on the Western frontier, Jefferson said, “This was to serve as the pretext for all his [military] preparations, an allurement for such followers as really wished to acquire settlements in that country, and a cover under which to retreat in the event of a final discomfiture of both branches of his real design.”

  Jefferson never wavered in his belief that Aaron Burr was a traitor with dangerous designs against the U.S., but it was never borne out under the law. After Burr was arrested and indicted for treason in early 1807, a trial was held in Richmond, Virginia. Burr’s defenders claimed he was a victim of Jefferson’s personal animosity and of the government’s relentless persecution. “Never, I believe, did any government thirst more for the blood of a victim than our enlightened, philosophic, mild, philanthropic government for the blood of my friend,” wrote Luther Martin, one of Burr’s more flamboyant attorneys.

  For his own part, Jefferson believed that the law would benefit Burr because of the strict definition of treason it provided. “Burr’s conspiracy has been one of the most flagitious of which history will ever furnish example,” he wrote. “Yet altho’ there is not a man in the U.S. who is not satisfied of the depth of his guilt, such are the jealous provisions of our laws in favor of the accused, and against the accuser, that I question if he can be convicted.” The president was rather astute in this observation, as events would show.