Two weeks later, Daviess was at it again, this time with three witnesses to support his charges, although unfortunately only one showed up for the grand jury. Eager for details, the grand jury subpoenaed the two editors of the Western World for their personal knowledge of the case, but they admitted they had none beyond what had been told them by their correspondents. With that, the Daviess case against Burr collapsed again, Burr emerged from the courthouse to a roar of approval, and a great ball was held in his honor. His good name temporarily restored, Burr returned to the business of conspiracy. Whatever he had been able to assemble in boats and men and material, now was the time to deploy it and move on New Orleans at last. Wilkinson would be waiting, and their armies would be joined.
For a public man, Burr was always strangely solitary, a conundrum to everyone but his daughter. It meant that people never fully knew him, leaving them to be surprised by his mercurial shifts in mood and ambition. But it also meant that he rarely knew others. No one did he know less than the puffy, grandiose General Wilkinson, the man upon whom he depended most in this grand misadventure. Given that nearly everyone else (Jefferson excepted) considered Wilkinson a walking hazard, it is a wonder that Burr didn’t. Every aspect of his person and character may have shouted that he was untrustworthy, but Burr gave him his trust time and again.
For Wilkinson, it was less a question of whether he would betray Burr than when. For a man who traded on information, he had some material on Burr that was far too valuable not to cash in. The moment of crisis for him came on October 8, 1806, when Wilkinson was with his army a hundred miles west at Natchitoches, in the Red River valley near Louisiana’s western border, where he was leading his army against the Spanish insurgents that were proving to be a constant irritant along the Sabine. But not pushing his men too hard, of course, lest he offend his Spanish keepers. That evening, a boat docked on the river shore, and Burr’s enthusiastic young emissary Swartwout hurried to Wilkinson’s quarters, delighted finally to have located the general. He fumbled in his pack to pull out a sealed letter for him that Burr had written at the end of July. Wilkinson waited until nightfall to open it, alone. The letter was written in three different codes, one of them relying on a key drawn on the 1800 edition of Entick’s New Spelling Dictionary, by which a pair of numbers referred to the page and position of each word. That was supplemented by a set of preassigned numbers to refer to individuals (Burr was 14, 15, and 16), and an array of symbols represented key elements such as England, France, and Spain.
The decipherment was such a labor that Wilkinson couldn’t piece out the whole thing right then, but he got enough of it to know that Burr said he had the funds and the participants to move ahead. On to New Orleans and Mexico, sweeping up the western lands along the way. Or so it seemed to say; between the code and Burr’s natural reticence, it was hard to tell. But Burr clearly expected to meet Wilkinson in Natchez, 250 miles up the Mississippi, by December 15, for an assault on New Orleans. Brimming with confidence, the missive ended with a rousing huzzah Burr passed on from Dayton: “Are you ready?” he nearly shouted. “Are your numerous associates ready? Wealth and glory, Louisiana and Mexico.”
It must have made Wilkinson’s heart sink. Which side was he on? Was he a wholehearted coconspirator of Burr’s? Or a dutiful agent for Spain? Or an American patriot? Or was he simply a Wilkinsonian, for lack of a better term, who would do whatever best advanced his personal interests? The answer was: whichever was better for Wilkinson, full stop. But here was the dilemma: If Wilkinson went at the Spanish, he could create the smokescreen war Burr craved and leave New Orleans wide open for Burr, or he could go to New Orleans himself and arrest Burr as a traitor. With the first, he would antagonize his patron and be known forever as Burr’s coconspirator, which would be an issue only if Burr failed. With the second, he stood a chance of emerging as a national hero, increasing his standing for further deceptions. In the balance hung his own fortune, and also Burr’s, not that that mattered, particularly.
He was torn and might have remained so but for one line in Burr’s message—“Wilkinson shall be second to Burr only.” It reminded him of the slur with Bruff. Wilkinson would be second to no man. That tipped the balance decisively from Burr to himself, and he immediately set about to act on it. He made peace with Spain, and he did his best to drain the obliging Swartwout of everything he knew of Burr’s plans. The respiratory illness of Wilkinson’s wife that had delayed him over the summer had turned fatal, but as she lay wheezing beside him, he stabbed Burr in the back. He wrote two letters to President Jefferson laying out all the particulars of the plot and included a copy of Burr’s cipher letter, albeit one that he slightly altered to disguise his own involvement. To conceal them, he had his courier, a lieutenant named Thomas Smith, sew them into the soles of his boots for the grueling fifteen-hundred-mile overland journey to Washington City.
By then, Burr’s movements were starting to create havoc. Some essays that the hapless Blennerhassett had written to defend a western initiative were raising alarms, which were not allayed by Blennerhassett’s efforts to sell some land in the Bastrop Tract. Some of his neighbors threatened to torch his house, sending his wife into a frenzy of anxiety. Benjamin Latrobe reported that Burr was having military bateaux built to rush down the Ohio to the Mississippi. But for every potential recruit, it seemed that countless more were appalled by the prospect of Burr’s military adventure, whatever it proved to be.
Burr had meanwhile enlisted Blennerhassett to go ahead with plans to make his island a staging area for his military assault, in whatever direction it might go. He loyally went about erecting kilns to dry corn for the journey, but did little more. He stockpiled no weapons or agricultural tools that would presumably be needed for any new settlement, and he failed to oversee the boatbuilding. By December 9, eleven boats were finally at hand, each one a good fifty feet long, and most of them covered against the elements. They were built for fifty men, so there were nowhere near enough soldiers to fill them all. By then, the Ohio militia, alarmed by the developments on the island, was mustering to stop them. Their authority ended at the eastern shore. On the Virginia side, it was worse: Vigilantes were swarming there to administer even rougher justice. Even Blennerhassett could see it was now or never, so he had slaves load on his five trunks, and, after midnight on December 10, ordered all the men, who numbered little more than thirty, to board the boats and shove off, the rapturous Mrs. Blennerhassett distraught behind him.
Vigilantes descended on the island at dawn and tore through the house, but they came too late to catch Burr’s men. By then, they were well down the Ohio and would continue for more than two weeks, watched only by an occasional curiosity seeker, docking along the way to take on supplies and some men, until the numbers swelled nearly to eighty, far short for an invasion of just about anything, as they felt their way toward Burr, whose location was still unknown, but nearly ubiquitous in the public imagination, which was on fire over this man who’d been accused of treason and remained wanted for murder in two states. By then, Burr had joined up with his men where the Cumberland flows into the Ohio. There were only a hundred, a far cry from the seven thousand he’d pledged Wilkinson, and which the newspapers had announced. When the men were billeted onshore, Burr went about to each of them to shake hands and say a few words. But this would-be Washington said no more, no grand inspiring speech or statement of purpose.
When, on November 25, Lieutenant Smith arrived in Washington City, much bedraggled, Jefferson ushered him into his private study and watched in some fascination as Smith plucked off his boots, now well worn, ripped open the soles, and handed him the secret documents on which Jefferson’s legacy would turn. While Wilkinson could be pompous, he could also sound the right note when necessary, and he began with a clarion call: “A numerous and powerful association, extending from New York through the Western states to the territories bordering on the Mississippi, has been formed with the design to levy and r
endezvous eight or ten thousand men in New Orleans.”
This did it. Two days later, Jefferson delivered a proclamation to the nation, warning of an unnamed conspiracy against Spain. He soon followed it with an address to Congress in which he declared that the conspiracy was led by Aaron Burr. He directed that Burr be indicted and arrested for the hanging offense of high treason. Having killed the leader of one party, Burr now risked being killed by the leader of the other.
Back on the very day that Jefferson received Smith, Wilkinson marched into New Orleans, a city on edge with the uncertainty about Burr’s plans. To reassure them, and to establish his bona fides, Wilkinson immediately strengthened the city’s defenses, and he soon crowed to Jefferson that despite “stupendous” difficulties, and his “time short,” he was working “wonders.” He offered a federal Indian agent five thousand dollars to capture Burr and strung along Burr’s henchmen, feigning sympathy to the cause, before he pounced, ordering the arrest of two of Burr’s men, Sam Swartwout and Peter Ogden, even though this required releasing a copy of the heavily ciphered Burr letter as evidence—with those critical emendations to conceal his own complicity. Upon arrest, Swartwout wanted a sword to dispatch himself, a request that was denied. And then Wilkinson arrested two more Burrites who were already in the city. When the grounds were questioned, Wilkinson argued the point in court in full military dress, “his scabbords rattling along the floor,” which made for an argument all of its own. After he won that one, Wilkinson arrested two Burr lawyers, the editor of the Orleans Gazette, and Burr confidant General John Adair, the former senator who was now head of the Kentucky militia. Wilkinson had him held in a swamp for three days and then dispatched to Baltimore to stand trial. Altogether, Wilkinson had twenty men arrested for the crime of being friendly to Burr.
On January 10, Burr was in the settlement of his friend Judge Peter Bryan Bruin in the Mississippi Territory, inland from the river. It was so fiercely cold that blood oozed from the fingertips of his rowers. It was there that he finally caught up with the newspapers and realized that the great game was up. No war with Spain, Jefferson in a fury, New Orleans under military occupation. All he could think of was Wilkinson. “The greatest traitor on the face of the earth,” he rasped. His fellow adventurers were drifting away daily, and now he put it to them: Who would like to go on with him? The men saw little choice but to see the project through, but before they could cast off again, the Mississippi militia showed up, three hundred strong. Burr had his men row to the New Orleans side and tried to sweet-talk the Mississippi Territory’s acting governor, Cowles Mead, out of posting any charges, but Mead insisted on riding to the town of Washington, near Natchez, to discuss the matter with federal judge Thomas Rodney.
That required a few days’ wait, and Burr was placed under house arrest at Windy Hill Manor, where he spent most of his time courting his comely neighbor Madeline Price, a widow’s daughter. According to one account, Burr practiced “his witchery night after night, and [she] loved him with all the fervor of a Southern nature.”
Unfortunately for Burr, he was not able to snow Rodney quite so effectively. As in Kentucky, the grand jury had declined to charge Burr with any crime, but Rodney, a Jefferson appointee, insisted on holding Burr’s bond all the same, guaranteeing his return to face any further indictments. Burr thought it best to leave. He returned to his men, explained the situation, and advised them all to divide up what property they could and to disperse. Sixty of them were soon arrested by territorial authorities, although all of them were freed. All but the unlucky Blennerhassett, who was sent to Richmond to stand trial.
Burr disappeared on horseback into the pine barrens of central Mississippi. Exactly where he went is not known. Possibly he returned to Price: according to lore, the two exchanged marriage vows, leaving her pining for him for years after. But he was wise not to stay, for Wilkinson had dispatched five rough men, four of them soldiers and all of them armed to the teeth, to capture him. He remained in hiding for two weeks, before emerging on February 18 outside the little town of Wakefield two hundred miles west of Natchez. According to Wilkinson, Burr was “disguised in an old blanket coat begirt with a leathern strap, to which a tin cup was suspended on the left and a scalping knife on the right.” Also a beaver hat with a broad brim pulled down low over his forehead. Burr had a companion with him, a Major Robert Ashley, and they paused for a moment to ask directions of a local man to the Hinson place, a homestead some two miles distant. The local proved to be Nicholas Perkins, the land commissioner, and he had seen the governor’s offer of a two-thousand-dollar reward for the fugitive vice president, which had mentioned that Burr’s eyes “sparkled like diamonds.” The brim of Burr’s beaver hat was not pulled low enough that Perkins couldn’t see the preternatural shine of Burr’s eyes. Perkins told the two men that the bridges were out and they’d do better sleeping at the local tavern. The two ignored the advice and pressed on. That confirmed it: No honest man would pass up a bed close by for one more distant. Perkins hurried to the sheriff, rousting him out of bed to pursue the two strangers. The two tracked the men to the Hinson place, and then Perkins split off to borrow a canoe to paddle to Fort Stoddert for reinforcements. There, Lieutenant Edmund Gaines immediately provided a file of soldiers to gallop back with Perkins to the farmhouse. By then, the two strangers had already set out, but the soldiers caught up to them on a hill a few miles distant. It was there that Lieutenant Gaines placed Burr under arrest. Seeing all the soldiers, the former vice president accepted his fate quietly, ending any hope of a western empire.
After a brief stay at the fort, Perkins was selected to lead an eight-man team to escort Burr to the courthouse in Richmond, fifteen hundred miles north, much of it along a narrow track through dark wilderness said to be thick with Indians. At night, Burr was awarded the only tent. It was a grueling journey of more than a month, covering more than forty miles a day regardless of the brutal winter weather. Burr was flanked by escorts on every side. He wore the ridiculous frontier getup the whole way, humiliating as it must have been. In the town of Chester in South Carolina, Burr finally jumped down off his horse, cried out to the local citizens who he was, claimed he’d been abducted illegally, and begged for their protection. But no one moved to save him, and Perkins lifted the little man up and dropped him back down on his saddle once more. At that, Burr burst into tears. President John Adams called Burr’s ill-fated expedition “a kind of waterspout, a terrible whirlpool, threatening everything.” But it was over.
FIFTY
A Slight Expression of Contempt
WHEN BURR ARRIVED in Richmond, he was billeted at Mr. Epps’s hotel on Main Street while he awaited trial. He put aside his tattered, homespun clothing and moved to black silk, with his queue fashionably tied, as if he were to appear in a ballroom rather than court. It was an appearance of sangfroid that would henceforth never leave him, no matter how dire the circumstances. Right now, those circumstances could hardly be worse, as he was on trial for his life, mired in debt, hounded by creditors, a subject of ridicule throughout the country. Still, he counseled Theodosia, always his proxy, not to give in to self-pity. “I beg and expect it of you that you will conduct yourself as becomes my daughter, and that you manifest no signs of weakness or alarm.”
It would be a criminal trial, a case of treason, pitting a coolly vengeful Jefferson against his nefarious vice president, a man who had personally threatened to do him harm and nearly did. The two men, once linked in office, were each distant yet intimate. As Jefferson’s powers had grown, so had his prickliness, and he took personally Burr’s plans to dismember his empire. If Jefferson had once viewed Burr’s activities with an airy unconcern, now he was a man obsessed. “I never indeed thought him an honest, frank-dealing man,” he wrote of Burr, “but considered him as a crooked gun, or other perverted machine, whose aim or stroke you could never be sure of.” He dispatched agents to interrogate witnesses, from New York State down to Nashville, with for
ty-six questions, sought loyalty tests of soldiers possibly drawn to Burr’s gambit, directed the prosecution in packet after packet of detailed instructions, and had Burr’s confederate Erich Bollman taken from prison directly to the President’s House for a personal interview.
But it was a political trial too. The divisions that split the country over banks and wardrobe did not stop at the courts, and Jefferson was convinced that no Federalist judge would ever see anything his way. As if to confirm his worst fears, the Burr trial would be presided over by the brilliant, folksy John Marshall, Supreme Court chief justice who had been appointed by Adams solely for the purpose of tormenting his successor, or so Jefferson believed.
Treason is the only crime defined by the Constitution, and the framers were careful to do so because they didn’t want the president to follow European monarchs and invoke loose notions of treason to slaughter their political opponents in the name of the state. The Constitution delineates treason narrowly: It requires an overt act of war against the nation, not just the creation of a conspiracy or the formulation of a plan, and any act must be witnessed by at least two people. So the law wasn’t helpful to Jefferson’s desire to see Burr swing.
And John Marshall wasn’t either, as he quickly revealed in his ruling on the case of the two Burr functionaries, Bollman and Swartwout, who’d been caught up in the Burr hysteria. To him, treason had to be “visible,” and when he saw that the only evidence against the two men were vague affidavits from Wilkinson and his ally Eaton and a copy of the cipher letter from Burr, Marshall had the men released, since none of that indicated any witnessed overt act against the United States. This boded ill for the president, who redoubled his efforts to scour the countryside for two people who could testify to seeing an overt act of treason by Aaron Burr.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 43