As Burr’s ark progressed, the excitement over this would-be Napoléon only increased, and when he arrived at Nashville, Tennessee, the city exploded with booming cannons and a festival of flags. “I have been received with much kindness and hospitality,” he wrote Theodosia. “I could stay a month with pleasure.” He spent time with Andrew Jackson and his beloved Rachel at their country mansion, the Hermitage. Not yet the brave heart of his military days, Jackson was known more for his earnestness. “One of the frank, ardent souls I love to meet,” Burr termed him, although his appeal doubtless included the two-thousand-man state militia he controlled.
At star-shaped Fort Massac, a lonely outpost guarding the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, he paid a call on his burly coconspirator, General Wilkinson, and disappeared with him for more than a day and a half, likely to discuss plans to invade Spain, either to the west, past the Louisiana Purchase, or to the east, in Spanish Florida, if not both. Wilkinson raved to his Spanish minder in New Orleans that Burr was “brave, learned, eloquent, gallant, honorable . . . and rich in the affections of the human heart.” Meaning, Spain had nothing to fear from such a paragon. Meaning, it absolutely did. Then Burr traded in his ark for a military barge crewed by ten oarsmen, receiving a “cordial reception,” he told his daughter, wherever he anchored.
Finally, Burr reached New Orleans, the city that would figure in his dreams. Hot, fragrant, mysterious, it was a southern New York, a city into which all rivers emptied, and which all seas touched. Its spicy cosmopolitanism matched Burr’s ambitions perfectly, as he envisioned it the takeoff point for any assault on Mexico and the capital of any western empire he assembled. Through his shifty New York friend Edward Livingston, who’d fled to New Orleans to escape his debts, Burr tried to forge an alliance with the Mexico Association, a three-hundred-member organization that dreamed of liberating Mexico with a mass of troops drawn from Kentucky and Louisiana. They told him of the fifty-five guns abandoned by the French, a prospect that made him almost giddy. He was introduced to the merchant Daniel Clark, who was as eager to see him then as he was to disavow him later. Burr also made an overture to the Catholic Church, whose backing would be necessary, and was a particular hit with the Ursuline nuns he conversed with through a grate.
The trek back was a strain—through several hundred miles of “vile country,” he told Theodosia, “destitute of springs and of running water—think of drinking the nasty puddle-water, covered with green scum and full of animalculai.” Nonetheless, he included a map so she could follow along the route known as the Natchez Trace.
While he was still buried in the forest, word of Burr’s true intentions leaked out in the pages of the Gazette of the United States, the one that had been devoted to Hamilton, and was now, to his memory. It declared that Burr was not Republican, or a Federalist, but the head of a “revolution party on the western waters” that was bent on drawing the western lands under a separate government, those lands to pay off the revolutionaries, to lure further inhabitants, and to raise funds for liberating Mexico, aided by British ships. It was the first of the many published rumors about Burr, and it spread to other papers across the country, many of them Jeffersonian. It was a sufficiently accurate assessment of Burr’s ambitions that it likely came from a person in a position to know, probably the Spanish minister Marqués de Casa Yrujo, who gleaned them from Wilkinson. The rumors did not take hold with the Jefferson administration, or with the public, where the very mystery that hung about Burr seemed to counter any particular suspicions. Burr himself, of course, could never be sure what purchase the newspapers stories might have had. The British were distressed to think that Burr was enacting his plans without them, and the Spanish were outraged to think that Burr might try to seize their land. A follow-up report put Wilkinson on the spot, as it linked him publicly with this Burr conspiracy to seize the western lands, and his Major James Bruff resolved “to watch the motions of General Wilkinson and Burr.” And Bruff was somewhat suspicious, when the two men came calling, to hear Burr tease Wilkinson about his “military notions” with a “consciousness of superiority.” Burr was just a private citizen—but he had put himself above the commander of the army? Wilkinson was obviously not pleased to be teased about his rank, and Bruff right to wonder about the awkward tightness of the relationship between the two men. Later, Burr, through an intermediary, tried to solicit Bruff into heading up a private expedition to Santa Fe, a strategic outpost for any western gambit. Bruff sensibly declined. He’d keep his distance.
Another batch of rumors hit closer to home, as the newspapers were declaring with ever-greater precision the Burr plans to foment secession, focusing on Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, part of Georgia, and Carolina. Burr professed to be unperturbed, focused on what he viewed as the main chance: a war with Spain over its lands in Florida, and, to the west, its boundary with the United States near the Sabine River, which had not been exactly specified in the agreement with Napoléon. Jefferson coveted the territory and had dispatched James Monroe to Madrid to win it, to no avail. To Burr, this raised the wonderful specter of war, which would rouse the nation against Spain, allowing him to steal into New Orleans amid the din and then launch his attack on Mexico from there in the name of liberation. The United States would be broken like crockery. “Once Louisiana and the western country become independent,” he told the fussy British minister, Merry, “the Eastern States will separate themselves immediately from the Southern.” To make this happen, he dispatched Charles Williamson, his man in London, to make a small request of King George III: funds to raise a fifty-thousand-man army that Burr himself would command to march on Mexico, plus British ships to patrol the mouth of the Mississippi. He gave the king a three-month deadline, leaving Burr time to coordinate his battle plan to the east and west once the warships were offshore. If England didn’t help, Burr threatened to turn to France, bringing the specter of Napoléon to sweep over the continent.
To appraise Jefferson’s military intentions, Burr had a remarkable two-hour meeting with him at the President’s House, surely one of the more strained, in which Burr regaled Jefferson with details of western fauna and extracted the bitter news that Jefferson had no plans for war with Spain, even if it might announce to the world that he was a man of “Quaker principles.” Worse still, King George III let the deadline pass, leaving Burr to try to enlist Spain’s help in detaching the western lands from the United States with the promise of securing them for its king. He sent his man Senator Dayton to make the request of Spain’s incredulous American representative Yrujo, while glossing over the small fact, by now widely reported, that Burr intended to steal away the rest of Spain’s North American holdings. Though he professed interest, Yrujo’s offer of support said otherwise. Just three thousand dollars—a small price for intelligence of Burr’s obvious desperation, just enough to keep more Burr information coming. Things were turning farcical.
More humiliating still, a shady South American revolutionary named Miranda was lurking about the United States in an effort to mount an identical mission to liberate Spain’s American possessions and had made far greater headway. He’d actually collected a small force of 180 men to sail off from Philadelphia in the Leander, backed by Burr’s own kinsman Samuel Ogden and William Smith, son-in-law of John Adams. While Jefferson had initially supported the venture, he turned with public opinion and had Smith and Ogden indicted for violating the Neutrality Act, which forbade such adventuring against foreign governments. Nonetheless, the move was grating for Burr, as it showed how little he had to show for his two years of maneuvering. More galling still, the Royal Navy escorted the Leander through the waters of the Caribbean, while the British government wouldn’t even answer Burr’s letters.
The whole thing was maddening, and Burr responded with a rare tantrum that revealed the fire that always burned below the cool demeanor. He let Yrujo know, through Dayton, that if Jefferson would not oblige Burr with war, he would bring war to Jefferson,
a very particular war, assassinating him, kidnapping his vice president and the president pro tem, turning Congress “neck and heels out of doors,” seizing the Treasury and the navy, and declaring himself in charge of the government. It is hard to know how seriously Yrujo took this news, which amounted to nothing, and stands best as a mark of Burr’s towering frustration with the mystery man who had by now eclipsed Hamilton as the bête noire of Burr’s existence. Unfortunately for Burr, he had caught Jefferson on the upward slope of his power trajectory, while Hamilton had been on the downward. By the time he shot Hamilton, he had little to fear from him. Now, of course, was another matter, as Hamilton’s ghost loomed over Burr’s every move as he sought to rebuild his reputation by dismantling Hamilton’s legacy of a thriving, intact country. Jefferson would not be undone so easily.
While Jefferson never got wind of any assassination plan, he was apprised of the hazard that Burr posed to the configuration of the country. He read the newspapers, assiduously, but he valued more a report from the US attorney in Kentucky, Joseph Hamilton Daviess, who wrote on January 10, 1806, that “We have traitors among us,” and went on to describe Burr’s now-familiar plan to detach west from east. Jefferson asked for names.
Throughout the winter, Burr scrambled to mount his insurrection, but it was a castle built on air, like so many of his plans, and nothing that he erected stood up. As always, money woes plagued him. He depended heavily on his son-in-law, Alston, but his fortunes were at a low ebb after a flood had swamped his rice fields. Burr was so desperate that he went crawling back to Jefferson, of all people, to ask him if he could deliver the high-level post he had promised him after the 1800 election. Otherwise, as Jefferson recorded in his Anas, “he could do me much harm.” This was not a winning approach, and Jefferson overlooked the possibility that Burr could dismember his nation, instead declaring that Burr’s days in public office were over, as the people had lost confidence in him. “Not a single voice” urged him to keep Burr on as vice president in 1804, he added cruelly.
Uncaring that his conspiracy had long since gone public, Burr redoubled his efforts to round up coconspirators, with little success. Commodore Truxtun wisely declined to take over any Burr navy, as yet unbuilt, and the swashbuckling soldier William Eaton was put off by Burr’s plans for a coup, plans he forwarded to Jefferson, who was not particularly impressed.
So Burr turned instead to yet another stratagem, likely with money borrowed from the long-suffering Alston, purchasing land in what was called the Bastrop Tract along the disputed Spanish border, in hopes both of stoking a war and of disguising his interest in doing so. Consisting of a million acres along the Ouachita River, which drains, ultimately, into the Mississippi, well north of New Orleans, the tract was named for the dastardly Dutch-born Baron de Bastrop, who claimed to own it. In fact, Bastrop possessed only a concession from the Spanish king to sell farm plots to five hundred families; if he could do that, which it proved he couldn’t, he would be granted the remainder. If he could secure legitimate title, Burr imagined this was a sound real estate investment, or sound enough to look like it was, and convey that Burr was, despite all appearances, a peaceable man who wanted only to settle down. Beyond the possibility of using it to provoke Spain into an overreaction that would mean war, it provided Burr with yet another potential line of attack to confuse his adversaries about his true intentions, and to keep his options open even more widely. There were now five: taking Mexico, seizing New Orleans, detaching the West, grabbing Spanish Florida, and settling in Bastrop. Or some combination. There were so many, and Burr’s known resources so anemic, that the very scale of his ambition, even without a presidential coup, was its best disguise.
FORTY-NINE
A Terrible Whirlpool, Threatening Everything
THROUGH THE SUMMER of 1806, Burr continued to make the rounds of his coconspirators, hoping to expand the roster and shore up any of the wavering. He drew the architect Benjamin Latrobe back into his camp, as he gave him the plum assignment of digging a canal at the Falls of the Ohio; he recruited the German-born Erich Bollman, who’d rescued Madame de Staël from a Parisian mob and tried to free Lafayette from prison. He lavished attention on the flighty Yrujo, loyal Dayton, and standoffish Merry; and he brought his former traveling companion, the young Sam Swartwout, back into the fold. But he gave General Wilkinson his heaviest consideration, since he was the man on whom the great enterprise rested most fundamentally. And with that, toward the end of August, Burr issued the order to put his plans to capture the American West into effect.
He might have announced his intentions directly to the editors of the Western World of Frankfort, Kentucky, so quickly were they to appear in its pages over thirteen installments, which described not only Burr’s venture but named other conspirators, including Livingston and Dayton, and detailed the tangled allegiances of General Wilkinson. Shown the series by an anxious Latrobe, Burr laughed it off as the work of John Marshall, the Federalist whose family owned the paper. Republicans in the state were so outraged that one of them shot one of the paper’s editors, Joseph M. Street, grazing his side. (Undaunted, Street chased after his assailant with a dagger.)
On the strength of the articles, Kentucky’s US attorney Daviess besieged the president again with Burr accusations. He had already followed up with more details on the conspiracy and had even interviewed Wilkinson, who professed he’d never seen anyone so admired as Burr. If he’d been president, “Burr would have had all the country before now.” That sentiment was not likely to please Jefferson. Now Daviess insisted that Burr was planning to invade Mexico and steal the West. Jefferson preferred to ignore these charges too.
Although the publicity was not to Burr’s advantage, developments with Spain were. It appeared that the United States might go to war with Spain after all. Picking up news of Spanish troops rampaging across the Sabine River into America’s Louisiana Territory, the secretary of war told Wilkinson to repel the Spanish king’s advances there and in Spanish Florida as well. It was just what Burr had been waiting for, but, unaccountably, Wilkinson did not move. He remained in Saint Louis, claiming he needed to tend his ailing wife. It wasn’t until the end of August that Wilkinson finally descended the Mississippi bound for New Orleans, and Burr was determined to meet him there with fifteen hundred men, dozens of his hand-picked lieutenants, a veritable armada of boats, and himself in the place of glory at the head. To that end he’d been scouring boatyards, recruiting soldiers, acquiring supplies, assigning tasks.
So far, absolutely nothing had come of it, except that it had brought him back to the place where he had started, on Blennerhassett Island, with the befuddled Harman Blennerhassett and his bewitching wife, Margaret. His dreams were at this point nothing more than fantasies, and the Blennerhassetts’ fantasies had never been anything less. To appeal to them, Burr promised Blennerhassett that when he took the west, becoming Aaron I, Imperator, or some other suitably Roman title, he would in his first act name Blennerhassett his ambassador to England, thereby puffing up his patron’s prestige in two countries. While Alston had supposedly offered to underwrite the expedition, Burr would turn to Blennerhassett for more immediate expenses, like the boats that were still to be constructed for the men who were yet to be recruited to take down the river, and the so-far-unbuilt kilns to dry the unsourced corn to feed them. Burr went beyond this, scouring the nearby territory for volunteers, and did his best to counter the alarms in the newspapers about a Burr conspiracy by offering soothing advisories about the upside of any secession. The locals were not persuaded, and there was talk of mustering the local militia to descend on the island to put a stop to it. To discourage hostility, Burr wrote an open letter to the people of Cincinnati declaring himself unaware of any “design to separate the western from the eastern states” and saying he couldn’t imagine how such a scheme could be advanced if it were not in the interests of the people.
After Burr had taken the island as the base for his ope
rations, he invited Theodosia down with her husband, Alston, and their four-year-old son, Aaron Burr Alston, whom “Gampy” had selected to be his successor. This was the clearest sign that he was preparing his last move. Burr scarcely overlapped with his daughter before he was off down the river again, in hopes of securing the lasting allegiance of Andrew Jackson now that they had a new bond. Jackson had recently killed a man in a duel but had taken a bullet to the chest that would remain there for life. But Jackson would not be won. He had heard the rumors and also learned more about the involvement of the duplicitous Wilkinson, whom he had come to detest. “It rushed into my mind like lightning,” Jackson said, that Burr might be a traitor.
Then the first hammer blows struck. If before the accusations were confined to the press, now they reached the courts. The irrepressible Daviess had seen to that. On November 4, he asked Judge Henry Innes of the US District Court in Frankfort, Kentucky, to issue a warrant for the arrest of the former vice president, accusing him of a “high misdemeanor” by plotting to attack Mexico. Under the Constitution, only a domestic insurrection is considered treason, a felony punishable by hanging; foreign “filibusters” like these are misdemeanors if they do not occur in the context of a declared war. Innes rejected the request, since Daviess had provided only hearsay evidence and his own personal conviction that it was so. Daviess, a devout Federalist, was hoping more for political advantage than any legal victory, and he was inclined to let it go at that. But when Burr got wind of it, he insisted on having his day in court. With future senator Henry Clay his lawyer, Burr made mincemeat of the charges and walked out of the room to the cheers of the faithful. One newspaper marveled at Burr’s “calmness, moderation and firmness.”
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 42