The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  Contracts were made as well for large supplies of provisions to the amount of $2,000 and Harman Blennerhassett was to cover the cost, boats and all. Of the boats to be built, one for him and his family was to have separate rooms, a fireplace, and glass windows. All was to be ready by December 9, rather late in the year, given the quantity of ice usually gathered on the river by then.

  Speculation and rumors about Burr’s shenanigans increased by the day along the Ohio, and particularly as Blennerhassett Island was so clearly to be the main staging ground. As reported back in Massachusetts, in the Republican Spy, “Letters from Marietta in Ohio state that the public mind is considerably agitated in that quarter by political intrigues, the ultimate object of which is not discerned, nor comprehensible.” In public statements, Burr refused still to say no more than that it was “a laudable undertaking.”

  To Dudley Woodbridge, Jr., and hence to Joseph Barker, Burr confided that his expedition had secret government approval. Only days after Burr’s visit, Blennerhassett confided to a neighbor that “under the auspice . . . of Colonel Burr, a separation of the Union was contemplated.”

  It was that same autumn of 1806 when a gifted, but as yet unknown young doctor from Massachusetts, Samuel P. Hildreth, arrived in Marietta for the first time. He was twenty-three years old. In time to come he was to distinguish himself as one of the outstanding physicians in all the Northwest Territory, but also as the great chronicler of Marietta’s pioneer history and of the principal figures in that history, including that of the Blennerhassetts.

  His first stop the afternoon of his arrival was for something to eat at a new brick tavern house at the upper end of town kept by an elderly Englishman, John Brough—a sign over the door featured the British lion. There, too, at a ball not long after, Hildreth had the pleasure of meeting the Blennerhassetts.

  What struck him particularly about the couple, he recorded in his diary, was that while the husband, who did not dance, only sat and watched, she was “quite the most attractive figure and active dancer on the floor.”

  In little time Hildreth heard much talk and numerous opinions about Burr, the little Colonel, and what he was up to with many of the young men in Marietta and the vicinity. They were being told, Hildreth learned, that no injury was intended to the United States and that President Jefferson was not only aware of the expedition but approved it. Later on, Hildreth was to state with absolute conviction, “Not one of all that number enlisted on the Ohio would have harkened for a moment to a separation of the western from the eastern states.”

  Soon a series of astonishing articles by Harman Blennerhassett began appearing in The Ohio Gazette, and Virginia Herald, a newly established Marietta newspaper, owned by the same Elijah Backus who had sold him the island. Blennerhassett chose to write under a pseudonym, “The Querist.” The pioneers of the frontier west of the Appalachians were being unfairly disregarded, overtaxed, and commercially exploited by the mercantile Atlantic states and the federal government, he insisted at length. The answer was western independence, a break from the Union.

  The article drew much attention far beyond Marietta. “That he [Burr] has formed, and that he is now employed in executing, a scheme highly injurious to the interest, the tranquility, and the well-fare of the U.S. we have the strongest ground to believe,” read an article in the Richmond Inquirer that had already appeared in the New York Commercial Advertiser.

  From information recently received, we have been induced to believe that now powerful efforts will soon be made to sever the western states from the Union, connect them with Louisiana, and form a whole into a distinct empire with Col. Burr at its head.

  Many there were, the article continued, who were “needy, unprincipled and ready at all times to embark in any desperate enterprise that holds out a prospect of accumulating a fortune. If this be the object, it is hoped that the government will be vigilant, and ready to crush with a strong arm any attempt at such a nefarious measure.”

  By November speculations and rumors had turned to a strong sense of alarm nearly everywhere in the country, including the White House. Jefferson had been receiving anonymous warnings for nearly a year. One dated December 1805 began:

  Sir

  Personal friendship for you and the love of my country induce me to give you a warning about Colonel Burr’s intrigues. You admit him at your table, and you held a long and private conference with him a few days ago after dinner at the very moment he is mediating the overthrow of your administration and what is more conspiring against the State. Yes, sir, his aberrations through the Western States had no other object.

  A sentence from Jefferson’s Cabinet Memoranda of October 22, 1806, left no doubt of the seriousness of the Burr intrigue. During the last session of Congress, it read, “Colonel Burr who was here, finding no hope of being employed in any department of the government, opened himself confidentially to some persons on whom he thought he could rely, on a scheme of separating the Western from the Atlantic states, and erecting the former into an independent confederacy.”

  On November 3, 1806, Jefferson himself wrote, “Burr is unquestionably very actively engaged in the western preparations to sever that from this part of the Union.”

  Then came a letter to the president dated November 12 from James Wilkinson, general-in-chief of the armies of the United States and governor of the Louisiana Territory. Wilkinson, a stout, hard-drinking veteran of the Revolutionary War, had, as Burr said, “a propensity for intrigue.” In fact, Wilkinson and Burr, for more than a year, had been conferring privately about possible plots. Now Wilkinson had chosen to turn on Burr, telling the president:

  This is indeed a deep, dark and widespread conspiracy, embracing the young and old, the democrat and the Federalist, the native and the foreigner, the patriot of ’76 and the exotic of yesterday, the opulent and the needy, the Ins and the Outs, and I fear it will receive strong support in New Orleans.

  The letter was hand-delivered to Jefferson by a Quaker merchant chosen by Wilkinson for the mission.

  Why Jefferson, who loathed Burr, had delayed so long in doing much of anything about the intrigues would remain a question. But now he dispatched a trusted Virginian named John Graham, a former ambassador to Spain, who understood relations between Spain and the United States, to investigate what was happening in the west.

  On reaching Marietta, Graham dined with Harman Blennerhassett at a local tavern, where Blennerhassett, under the impression that Graham had come to volunteer for the expedition, talked freely with him about plans to invade Mexico and how he was busy recruiting young men who were single, without families, and how they would be armed. When Graham told Blennerhassett he was an agent for the president to stop the expedition, Blennerhassett got up and walked out the door.

  From Marietta, Graham rode swiftly on to Chillicothe, where he met with the governor of Ohio, Edward Tiffin, and convinced him that immediate action had to be taken against the conspiracy.

  On Tuesday, December 2, the governor went before the assembled legislature, where the lawmakers, after two days of secret sessions of the two houses, unanimously authorized the governor to call out the militia. But as there was still no hard evidence against Burr, the legislature also transmitted a message to the president saying, “We trust that public rumor has magnified the danger, but should the design in agitation be as destructive as represented, we have no doubt that all fears will shortly be dissipated before the indignation of our citizens.”

  In and about Marietta those who had taken interest in the Burr venture all but disappeared. As Samuel Hildreth was to write, “When the act of the Ohio Legislature was passed, to suppress all armed assemblages, and take possession of boats with arms and provisions . . . they, almost to a man, refused to embark further in the enterprise.”

  A six-pound cannon was mounted on the bank of the Ohio at Marietta and every boat heading downriver was examined. Regular sentries and guards were posted with orders to stay on duty until the river froze over and a
ll navigation ceased.

  Numerous jokes were played on the militia all the while, such as setting an empty tar barrel on fire and sending it off on a raft in the dark of night. The sentries, after hailing and receiving no answer, opened fire. Then men went out to board and take possession, only to find it all a hoax.

  II.

  Winter had arrived at Marietta, with several inches of snow, bitter winds, and ice building up on the rivers. On the morning of December 9, an express rider from Chillicothe appeared with orders from the governor for the local militia to “take forcible possession” of the fifteen boats being built for Burr and at dusk the authorities intercepted Joseph Barker and ten of the boats already headed down the Muskingum. The rest were seized at the Barker boatyard.

  What all Barker may have said or done, unfortunately remains unknown.

  News of the seizure reached Blennerhassett almost immediately, as did word that a warrant was out for his arrest. On the Virginia shore the local militia was getting ready to take over the island. Clearly, it was time for Harman Blennerhassett to make his exit.

  It became, as said, a night of acute “hubbub and confusion” on the island with Cajoe and other slaves moving steadily back and forth in the dark from the mansion to load boats at the river’s edge, where a great bonfire blazed.

  Fires, burned too, on the other side of the river, where the Ohio militia was camped and keeping watch.

  A number of Marietta merchants were on hand, settling accounts with Blennerhassett before he got away, including most notably Dudley Woodbridge, Jr. To wind up all he and Blennerhassett had to settle took fully two hours.

  Not until past midnight was all ready for Blennerhassett to push off with a flotilla of four boats carrying at most only thirty men, instead of the thousand or more expected. Not one man from Marietta was aboard.

  Margaret Blennerhassett and the children were to follow after.

  At daybreak the next morning, Saturday, December 13, she made a hurried trip by skiff to Marietta, hoping to persuade the Ohio authorities to release the family houseboat so she and her sons might depart. She was refused.

  On returning to the island, she found her home had been taken over by a horde of Virginia militia raiding the larder and liquor supply, and noisily ransacking the house, while outside still more were tearing up fence rails to build fires and forcing slaves to cook for them or be imprisoned.

  In her absence, only hours before, a number of young men who had been recruited by Burr in Pittsburgh also appeared on the scene by boat and were at once arrested and held captive.

  Margaret angrily protested such an outrage on her property, only to be told by those in charge that as long as they were on the island the property absolutely belonged to them.

  As two of the young men from Pittsburgh would recount, “There appeared to us to be no kind of subordination among the men; the large room they occupied on the first floor presented a continued scene of riot and drunkenness.” The furniture appeared ruined by bayonets, and one of the militia fired his rifle through the ceiling of the large hall, the bullet passing through the chamber upstairs, near where Margaret and the children were sitting.

  In another few days, the adventurers from Pittsburgh were tried in the mansion and acquitted for lack of evidence. On Wednesday, December 17, Margaret and her children departed with them on their boat.

  Her Eden in the wilderness, now a scene of ruin, was to be hers no more. She was granted permission to take only some silver and books of her choice, and a few pieces of furniture. Not for another month traveling down the Ohio and Mississippi was she reunited with her husband at the mouth of the Bayou Pierre, a tributary on the Mississippi north of Natchez.

  At the time of her departure from Blennerhassett Island, in the midst of all the excitement, the slave Cajoe decided the north side of the Ohio was the place for him and so managed to escape across the river and make his way to the home of the English gardener, Peter Taylor, who lived some twenty miles away on Wolf Creek. As a free man, Cajoe stayed on in Ohio, married, had children, became widely popular as a preacher, and lived until well past the age of 100.

  III.

  On February 18, in the village of Wakefield on the Tombigbee River in the Mississippi Territory, Aaron Burr was arrested on the orders from President Jefferson. To disguise himself, Burr was unshaven and wearing a weather-stained, broad-brimmed hat and an old homespun blanket coat, with a tin cup strapped to one side, a scalping knife to the other. But it was the eyes that “sparkled like diamonds” that gave him away.

  For a month, under arrest, Burr traveled by horseback through Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina to Richmond, Virginia, where he was to be tried for treason.

  Harman Blennerhassett, too, was later arrested and would make the journey under arrest to Richmond with the onset of summer, leaving Margaret behind in Mississippi.

  Since Blennerhassett Island, part of Virginia, was considered “the scene” of Burr’s conspiracy, Richmond had been chosen as the proper place for the trial, and there, on March 3, Burr was brought before Chief Justice John Marshall in the United States district court of Virginia.

  Judge Marshall’s first examination of the accused took place in the Eagle Tavern, but so large was the crowd that came to watch the proceedings that the sessions following were held in the Virginia Hall of Delegates, a notably stately structure designed by Jefferson, but which at the time was “bare,” “dingy,” and “dirty.”

  On June 24, Burr was indicted for treason. A free man no longer, he was consigned at first to the vermin-infested Richmond jail, then out of consideration of his having been the vice president of the United States, moved to three-room quarters on the top floor of the state prison, where guests were permitted, then moved again to a private house. When Harman Blennerhassett arrived in Richmond on August 3, he, too, was confined to the three rooms at the state prison.

  The oppressive heat of the Virginia summer bore down heavily as the trial continued week after week.

  Dudley Woodbridge, Jr., was among the many to be put on the witness stand and provided a memorable observation on how the people of Marietta and the vicinity regarded Harman Blennerhassett.

  “Is he esteemed a man of vigorous talents?” he was asked.

  “He is; and a man of literature,” Woodbridge said. “But it was mentioned among the people in the country, that he had every kind of sense but common sense.”

  On the last day of August, Chief Justice Marshall of the United States Supreme Court handed down a lengthy decision. An act of treason, an act of war, “could not be levied without the employment and exhibition of force,” he said. “His intention to go to war may be proved by words, but the actual going to war is a fact which is to be proved by open deed.” The overt act must be proved by witnesses. “It is not proved by a single witness.”

  It took Marshall three hours to read his opinion. The next morning, Tuesday, September 1, 1807, the jury reached its verdict in twenty-five minutes. Burr had been acquitted, due to lack of evidence. It was a landmark decision. He and Blennerhassett were both to go free.

  In the years that followed, Aaron Burr lived for a time in Europe, where he wrote notes to Napoleon, offering to overthrow the American government, then returned to New York where, after more than twenty miserable years he died in 1836, at age eighty, unrepentant to the end.

  The Richmond trial over, Harman Blennerhassett returned to his wife and family in the Mississippi Territory, where with what little money they still had, he purchased a 1,000-acre plantation. There they would remain for ten years during which additional children were born. Forced by ever-mounting debt he had to sell the plantation and move the family to Montreal.

  The governor of the province, an old friend, had led him to believe he might attain a post on the bench. But, as would be said, “Misfortune having marked him for her own,” soon after his arrival his friend died and all Blennerhassett’s expectations died with him.

  He moved o
n again, this time to England and Ireland, in search of almost any kind of employment, only to fail.

  He and the family were saved only when an elderly, unmarried sister, Avice Blennerhassett, took pity and invited them to live with her. They moved to the Isle of Guernsey off the coast of France, where the cost of living was less and the climate more beneficial. It was there Harman Blennerhassett died in 1831 at age sixty-five.

  Margaret remained at Guernsey another seven years, until, following the death of Avice, she returned to New York. She died penniless in a home for destitute Irish women.

  The fate of the two older sons was to be no less bleak. One died of cholera in New York. Another, an alcoholic, disappeared in the wilderness near St. Louis.

  In the meantime, in 1811, the dream home she and her husband so loved on Blennerhassett Island had accidentally burned to the ground.

   CHAPTER SEVEN

  Adversities Aplenty

  Town property, as well as farms, sunk in value; a stop was put to improvements in building and Marietta, the oldest town in the state, retrograded as fast as it had ever advanced.

  —SAMUEL HILDRETH

  I.

  Through the summer of 1807, with the attention of so much of the country focused on the Burr trial in Virginia, the people of Marietta, indeed people along hundreds of miles of the Ohio River Valley, were far more preoccupied with serious trouble there on home ground—an outbreak of deadly fever.

  Only two years before, in 1805, Philadelphia and several other eastern cities suffered a yellow fever epidemic that took about 400 lives, and among those now stricken in the Ohio Valley there were some cases “resembling very nearly the yellow fever of the Atlantic cities.” As young Dr. Samuel Hildreth was to observe, most were bilious fever, or influenza. The symptoms included “pain in the head . . . bad taste in the mouth, pain in the back . . . followed by fever, attended with more or less delirium.” In Belpre, where he was the only doctor in residence, Hildreth suddenly found himself responsible for no fewer than 100 cases.