Fallen Founder

by Nancy Isenberg

  Blennerhassett would eventually become closely involved in Burr’s adventure. Burr did not find him the foolish eccentric as others have portrayed him. The tall, lanky, nearsighted Irishman may have been eccentric in his tastes and demeanor, but he was also a westerner (by choice, if not by birth) who would have looked to Mexico as an exciting prospect.67

  From Blennerhassett Island, Burr made his way to Cincinnati. There he met with Jonathan Dayton and Senator John Smith of Ohio. They were backers of the Indiana Canal Company, which planned to construct a canal to bypass the Falls of the Ohio River, a dangerous series of rapids near Louisville, Kentucky. Burr was one of the directors of the canal company. This speculating venture was little different from the various bridge, road, and land investment schemes he had dabbled in before. His old friend Dayton, a key player, had secured 25,000 acres of land between the Big and Little Miami Rivers. The canal promised to introduce a thriving commercial traffic to the Ohio that would increase the value of this real estate. Wilkinson was involved in this project, too, as was John Brown of Kentucky, who had just retired from the U.S. Senate. The canal venture connected Burr to like-minded men—western power brokers and risk takers, ambitious men interested in commercial growth and expansion. The canal was Burr’s first step in starting life over after the vice presidency. Forging a western network, a new base of operations, would enable him to add supporters to his prospective filibuster campaign against Spanish territory.68

  Burr toured leisurely through Kentucky in May 1805, visiting Eddyville, the home of Matthew Lyon, now a Kentucky congressman. From here, he visited Frankfort, where John Brown entertained him at his home, Liberty Hall. At Lexington, he appears to have crossed paths with John Adair, another U.S. senator who was corralled into Burr’s circle. Like Burr and Dayton, Adair had been an officer in the Revolution. In the early 1790s, he served under Wilkinson in a campaign against Indians. He was a ready-made filibusterer. It was Adair who had written to Wilkinson, “Mexico glitters in our Eyes.”69

  On May 29, Burr arrived at Nashville, where he was given a hero’s welcome. He stayed at the home of Andrew Jackson, whom he had met in the mid- to late 1790s, when the Tennessean served in both houses of Congress. They seemed natural allies. Jackson admired Burr for championing Tennessee statehood during his time in the Senate. Though the rough-hewn frontiersman and future president would go on to distinguish himself in the Battle of New Orleans, and then in 1818–19 by invading Spanish territory and forcing the Dons to hand over Florida to the United States, he had yet to accomplish anything militarily in 1805. Still, he held the rank of major general in the state militia, and itched for an opportunity to prove himself. His combativeness was linked to personal feuds, and unspecified threats against Indians yet to be pacified. He was already known for his intense likes and dislikes. At the top of his list of “villains” was General James Wilkinson, who had mistreated a Jackson friend. In 1806, Jackson would shoot and kill a man in a duel; and from that encounter he carried a bullet in his chest for the rest of his life. On some level, he enjoyed violence, and was ready for an adventure that promised him a chance to display courage, defend honor, or just win.70

  Adding up these western-based allies, Burr was cultivating a formidable following: Smith, Dayton, Adair, Brown, and Jackson were all senators or ex-senators, state leaders, and major speculators; they had military experience and broad connections. Smith and Lyon had contracts to build gunboats for the U.S. Navy. At Jefferson’s request, Smith made a special trip to West Florida in 1805, asking residents how they felt about the possibility of becoming part of the United States. Obviously, then, there were no political novices in Burr’s widening circle; most were Burr’s age, or a bit younger. Collectively, they saw nothing wrong with “revolutionizing Mexico,” as they described ridding the West of the “Dons” and making a profit from war. They saw the West as Burr did: the next theater of operations for an expansive young republic, ready to face down any European threat to a destiny they already considered “manifest.”71

  Burr eventually met up with Wilkinson on June 6, at Fort Massac on the Ohio, and the general encouraged Burr to continue on to New Orleans. When he arrived there, he met another old friend, Edward Livingston. Ned Livingston had been the mayor of New York when Burr was vice president; he had defended him against Cheetham’s charge that he had tried to steal the election from Jefferson. By 1805, Livingston had remade himself as a distinguished citizen of the new U.S. Territory of Orleans. His importance to Burr had to do with his connection to the Mexican Society of New Orleans. This political club (similar to the democratic societies of the 1790s) advocated the liberation of Spanish-held territory. Burr naturally saw the members of the society as potential boosters and recruits for his filibustering campaign.72

  “Cheerful, gay, and easy”—that is how Burr described the people of New Orleans. Even the cloistered Ursuline nuns requested an interview with the former vice president, and they entertained him with wit, wine, fruit, and cakes. But this multiethnic city of Creoles, French, Spanish, and Americans was riddled with political factionalism. The Mexican Society was often at the center of controversy. Rumors circulated that the group was planning its own coup of Spanish Florida and Mexico. Many of its members were at odds with the new governor of Orleans Territory, former Tennessee congressman William C. C. Claiborne. Wilkinson despised Claiborne for his relative youth and inexperience and had lobbied against his appointment. In a letter of introduction Wilkinson prepared, which Burr was to present to a Louisiana ally, the general insulted the governor without self-censoring, saying that Burr could be of assistance in relegating that “Idiot black guard . . . to the Devil.” Needless to say, Claiborne distrusted Burr for spending too much time with his enemies. Burr also made a misstep during this visit by snubbing the Spanish official the marqués de Casa Calvo. Whether intentionally or not, Burr ruffled the wrong feathers, obliging the Dons to watch him more closely.73

  He left New Orleans on July 14, traveling through West Florida and along the Natchez Trace. Over the next two months, he retraced his steps, visiting Nashville, Lexington, Frankfort, and Louisville once more. In September, he had one last conference with Wilkinson, in St. Louis. The general dispatched Burr with a glowing letter of introduction to Indiana’s territorial governor, William Henry Harrison, pleading with Harrison to arrange Burr’s election to Congress. Matthew Lyon had already tried to convince Burr to run for Congress in Tennessee. But neither office seems to have appealed to the reluctant candidate. Burr took an instant liking to Harrison, at any rate, telling Wilkinson that the Virginia-born future president was “fit for other things.” He meant, of course, that Harrison was yet another convert to their Mexican venture. By October, Burr was back in Ohio, heading east, and arriving in Washington after one more month on the road. The filibuster idea was still very much alive, as he made his way around the nation’s capital in the waning months of 1805.74

  THE “NEW CATALINA”

  It would have been impossible for Burr not to have aroused curiosity and suspicion as he made his way through the West. In early August 1805, the Federalist Philadelphia newspaper United States Gazette had published a startling set of queries beginning with “How long will it be before we shall hear of Col. Burr being at the head of a revolution party on the western waters?” The article insinuated that Burr was already recruiting “adventurous and enterprising young men from the Atlantic states” for his project. Why would they join him? One inducement was that Burr’s “revolution party” would soon be forming a convention in order to establish a “separate government” among all the “states bordering on the Ohio and Mississippi.” And that was not all. The writer went on to predict that Burr would seize all the public lands in the West, divide the spoils among the new states, and generously reward his followers with whatever land remained. He would somehow create a prosperous country, and be able to offer tempting land bounties to attract new settlers from the East. Then he would swiftly m
ove southward, liberating Mexico with the help of the British. And he would do it all “in one summer.” True, Burr had long been thought capable of extraordinary things; but a scenario this improbable was beyond even Burr’s wildest expectations.75

  In the tantalizing newspaper report, most remarkable is the depiction of Burr’s revolution as if it were the launching of a new third political party—a party of the West. He was mobilizing a force of young men and, in this amorphous reconstruction, somehow calling a convention and working within the existing political system; or, at least, willing to do so until his “revolution party” could form a new country.76

  The writer assumes that Burr could constitute a new version of the old New York Burrites. In the same way that Jefferson would call his electoral defeat of Federalism the “Revolution of 1800,” a western party under Burr’s direction evoked a whole new political order. Burr’s “revolution party” could thus be termed partisan and secessionist at once.

  The West was already considered a place ripe for political convulsion, but the Gazette article created a different kind of obsession. It did not allude to western separation strictly in terms that easterners were accustomed to reading about—that is, a homegrown rebellion tapping into the “natural” discontent of toughened frontiersmen, living at immense distances from the seats of power, who might respond to Burr’s message. Rather, Burr’s so-called revolution would come to the West from the East, as the result of an influx of ambitious, political informed young men who would carve up the frontier and impose an eastern machine there—Burr’s country, with all the built-in instability (moral and managerial) that this implied. The Gazette inferred that the former vice president was riding the wave of a radical and dangerous new revolutionary movement. Though exiled from Jefferson’s party, and seemingly ruined in New York, Burr still had a constituency: an Atlantic constituency primed to overrun the frontier.77

  At the time, Burr claimed that the marqués de Casa Yrujo, the Spanish minister to America, wrote the Gazette article. But there is no way to be certain; indeed, it seems far more likely that a knowledgeable American insider was the author. One reason why this makes more sense is that Burr was attacked as a third party leader before he went west.78

  The evidence lies in the meaning of the word “quid.” On March 26, 1805, the Aurora observed that the vice president was in Philadelphia, where he was “received with more than common cordiality by the quids.” The Quids (a reference to the Latin tertium quids, meaning a “third something”) initially described a third party movement in Pennsylvania, within the Republican Party. But the label was to appear over and over again during the next two years, expanding in meaning and accusing Burr of engaging in conspiratorial activities in the West. There were many variations: he was, alternatively, “the father of the quids,” the “Little Quid Emperor,” “emperor of the Quids,” and “Quid emperor.” The main organ of Jeffersonian Republicanism in Virginia, the Richmond Inquirer, later declared that the only men to be found in Burr’s conspiracy were men of a “third party” persuasion. To be a third party man was to one of the “adherents of Burr.”79

  The Quid label made sense to impassioned Jeffersonians. Burr had already been smeared as a traitor to his party for supposedly trying to steal the election of 1800 from Jefferson, so it was not much of a leap to imagine him heading a “revolution party” in the West. Moreover, Quids were defectors from both parties, who aimed to create a hybrid party, and this served to reinforce Burr’s earlier reputation (invented by his enemies) as a faux Republican. Burr’s fateful toast to a “union of honest men,” which he gave at the Federalist celebration of George Washington’s birthday in 1802, and which was revived by Cheetham to tarnish his name during the 1804 governor’s campaign, reappeared in the press to condemn him as a conspirator in 1806.80

  Here is a plausible scenario: Burr goes west—attracts attention—word gets around—newspapers surmise things—and before anything is really known, his designs are blown out of proportion by self-appointed agents and protectors of the administration. To wit, in an attempt to blame the conspiracy on the opposition party, Republican newspapers remarked on the prominence of Federalists in Burr’s camp, such as Jonathan Dayton. This is significant. Despite their hold on the President’s House, many Jeffersonian Republicans still imagined themselves in a fight to the finish; if it was not a Federalist plot they feared, it was schism within the party. Burr inspired fears of both at once. What could be worse than a nervy alliance of Federalists and errant Republicans? It was clear that Burr had some big-name Republicans backing him, too: John Smith, Andrew Jackson, and John Brown, to name a few. The Quid theme tapped into existing concerns, equating party dissolution and national disunion.81

  The “Emperor” label is equally revealing. As early as September 1804, Burr had been mocked in the American Citizen when news reached New York of his trip to Pierce Butler’s secluded island and Florida. “Does he mean to become emperor of the Island of St. Simons?” Cheetham or some other critic asked. The piece went on to suggest that instead of becoming the “Kemper of St. Simon’s” (Kemper was an American who had organized a rebellion in Spanish Florida), Burr would set his sights on Louisiana:

  New Orleans and its vicinity seem to be the load-stone to the intriguing, the dangerous, the discontented, and worthless of our city. Thither they flock like so many Vultures. To raise a rebellion in this quarter against the government would complete Mr. Burr’s Catalinian character.82

  Calling him “Catalinian” was nothing new, but adding the title of “Emperor” likened him, of course, to Napoleon, the most formidable conqueror of this era. Not long before, Americans had feared that Napoleon’s army would take control of New Orleans and the Mississippi—indeed, of the entire West, as then conceived. The title conjured what his enemies felt was Burr’s audacity, what Hamilton had called his “dashing projecting spirit.”

  Was he Napoleonic? To his enemies, he was at once aloof and audacious, mysterious and fascinating, a man capable of inspiring inexplicable yet passionate loyalties. Something sexual, something seductive about him attracted vulnerable young men. Similar charges to those raised against Burr in New York by Cheetham, objectifying the Burrites as his soft, womanish, childlike pawns, followed him west. It was typical of the press at this time to recycle old stories and old rumors, if they could be associated with a classical or biblical model of good versus evil. So, with a twist here, a turn there, the exaggerations circulated during the governor’s race were converted into a usable model to characterize Burr as a Catalinian conspirator against the American union.

  Burr’s first trip to New Orleans had caused rumors to swirl, and the gossip did not end when he returned to the east coast in the late fall of 1805. For the next nine months, before returning to the West, Burr spent most of his time traveling between Washington and Philadelphia. After dining with Burr at the executive mansion—on the surface, at least, a completely friendly meeting—Jefferson received two anonymous letters in early December 1805 from an unnamed informant, calling Burr the “new Catalina,” who planned to “overthrow the administration.” In January 1806, a U.S. district attorney in Kentucky, Joseph Hamilton Daveiss, warned the president about a dangerous conspiracy brewing in the West. Then in February, Daveiss forwarded a more urgent letter, naming Burr as the chief conspirator. Hearing this, Jefferson did nothing. He seemed unconvinced, especially after Daveiss, a Federalist, drew up a list of Burr’s accomplices. The list only included prominent Republicans from the western states.83

  In light of what was to follow—Jefferson’s complete acceptance of the notion of a “Burr Conspiracy”—we need to examine this moment carefully. Evidence exists that Burr was interested in working with Jefferson, and in fact that he was thinking of abandoning, or at least delaying, the implementation of his western scheme. Because, at the same time as Daveiss was sounding his alarm to Jefferson, Burr was attempting to get an appointment to the Pennsylvania Supreme Cour
t; and his old allies in New York were trying to resuscitate his political career in that state by muscling in at an opportune moment as the two other Republicans factions—Clintonians and Lewisites—found themselves in a new tug-of-war. At first, Burr’s people seized the chance to make an alliance with Governor Morgan Lewis. When that failed, they approached Burr’s former (and one might say “natural”) antagonist, DeWitt Clinton. This unlikely alliance collapsed almost as quickly as it was formed, but it proved once again that New York electoral politics made strange bedfellows. Finally, amid all the uncertainty, we know that Burr appealed directly to Jefferson for an appointment of some kind (the evidence is in Jefferson’s private papers). The president, however, showed no inclination to assist his former vice president.84

  There are several reasons why Burr might have changed his plans with respect to the West. He learned in Washington that there would be no war with Spain—this was crucial intelligence. Though Jefferson rattled his saber in his annual address to Congress in December, he seemed inclined to avoid military confrontation: secretly, he was pushing a deal to buy the Floridas from the Spanish for $2 million. Burr’s hopes for British ships and financing also seemed tenuous. Burr had several meetings with Merry, but the British minister could offer him no assurances that the British cabinet was in any way interested in his project. Nor had Burr heard anything definite from Charles Williamson, his London agent.85