Ida Tarbell
McClure’s/March, 1902
THE town of Richmond was in a fine bustle of curiosity. The cause of it was the news of the arrival the day before (March 26, 1807) of a prisoner on whom the Government of the United States had been trying to get its hand for some four months. This man was Aaron Burr, and the charge on which he had been arrested was that of setting “unlawful enterprises” on foot in the Western States.
It was evident from the excited talk of the people who crowded the street corners of Richmond that day, and filled the great court of the old Eagle Tavern, where Burr was confined, that nine-tenths of them believed him to be so despicable a traitor as to deserve no trial. There was perhaps a tenth of the crowd, however, who were outspoken in the prisoner’s favor, who declared loudly that his schemes in the West were legitimate and such as they themselves would gladly enough have helped in, that his arrest was a piece of Democratic injustice and Jeffersonian jealousy. A stranger would not have listened long, indeed, to the talk without discovering that it was quite as much a case of Federalist vs. Democrat as of Burr and treason, and that while the mass believed Burr guilty because the President had declared him so, the remnant affected to believe him innocent for the same reason.
But politics aside, Richmond knew quite enough of the man, of his career, and particularly of the series of adventures which had ended in this arrest, to justify the commotion his presence had aroused. He was as well born as any of them, being a son of the first President of Princeton College and a grandson of Jonathan Edwards; and there was not a man in Virginia more thoroughly versed in the law and in literature, or whose mind had been more rigorously trained to brilliant and effective action. He had been a good soldier, a successful lawyer, and when he had tried politics, he had risen to the Vice-Presidency, his term having ended only two years before. They remembered with bitterness, most of them, that he had been more or less interested, in 1804, in the intrigues of the New Englanders for breaking up the Union and establishing a Northern Confederacy. They still discussed heatedly over their wine the duel in which, in the summer of 1804, he had killed Alexander Hamilton—a duel which they all knew had driven him from his home stamped as a murderer, and had forced him to seek a new country and a new career.
Of his adventures in the two years he had been seeking his fortune they knew something and surmised more. They knew that in the summer of 1805 he had made a long journey in the West, where he had been honored as a hero. Rumors had come back that he was using his popularity to obtain aid in some sort of a buccaneering expedition against Mexico, and there were people who said that he was trying to persuade the territories west of the Alleghanies to set up for themselves. They remembered that he had come to Washington in the winter of 1805-06—and although the newspapers had hinted that his business in the East was to obtain aid for the treasonable plans he had set on foot in the West, the President had seemed to have no fear, for he had received him cordially enough at the White House.
They had heard little of Burr through the summer of 1806; then suddenly, in the fall, a Kentucky paper—the “Western World”—began charging him with conspiracy. This disturbance in Kentucky finally led to Burr’s arrest in that State, on the charge of violating the laws of the United States by setting on foot a military expedition against Mexico, and attempting to create a revolution in the Western Territories. The ease with which Burr, aided by young Henry Clay, had triumphed in the trial everybody remembered, though nobody felt sure whether it was the triumph of innocence or audacity. This was early in November. Before the end of the month the President had startled the country into the conclusion that the rumors of treason which had been circulating for so long must be true, by issuing a proclamation that the “unlawful enterprises” must be stopped at once, and the persons interested in them brought to punishment. Then had come the disquieting news that a great expedition had set out from Blennerhassett’s Island, near Marietta, Ohio, and that it was growing as it advanced, until 7,000 men. Burr at their head, were descending the Mississippi to capture New Orleans. They had waited long for the attack, but it did not come. The next news had been that the expedition, alarmed by the vigor with which the commander-in-chief of the army. General James Wilkinson, had prepared to receive it, had disbanded, and that its leaders had fled.
For two months Burr had disappeared. In that period stories of his treasonable plans had accumulated until the country, for the most part, had come to feel that it had escaped warfare and dissolution only because of the watchfulness of its President, Jefferson, and the energy of the commander-in-chief of its army, Wilkinson.
Now that the cause of the alarm was in their own town, and that they were soon to know what there was in it all, it is not to be wondered at that Richmond was excited, or that the neighboring country gentlemen and the politicians of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York came flocking to town as fast as their horses or the stage coaches could carry them.
It was on March 30th, four days after his arrival, that Burr was conducted across the crowded court of the Eagle Tavern to a room where the Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall, was waiting to examine him. It is rare in the world that two men so able are confronted as judge and prisoner. Marshall and Burr were almost of an age, and both had been nurtured in the greatest school our country has provided—the War of the Revolution. When it began, both were studying law, one in Virginia, the other in New York. They had flung their books away at the first gun, and joined the army, and both had done honorable service. Returning to the law, they had risen to distinguished places, Marshall being ranked in Richmond as the peer of Patrick Henry, Benjamin Botts, and Edmund Randolph, while Burr in New York had become the rival of and frequently the victor over Alexander Hamilton. They had been drawn into political life, and John Marshall had been appointed Chief Justice of the United States by John Adams only a month before Aaron Burr had taken the oath as Vice-President. Equally successful to this point, an observer might say, and many who watched them from afar felt with reason that Burr would go farther than Marshall. He was a prodigious worker, while Marshall was rather indolent by nature. His knowledge of books, of men, of the world was greater. Burr probably had more even of legal learning than Marshall; and as for his judicial power, it was most impressive. Someone who watched him as he presided over the trial of Judge Chase declared that he exercised “the dignity and impartiality of an angel and the rigor of a devil.”
Marshall’s advantage over Burr—the reason the one now sat as judge of the other as prisoner—was moral. The chief justice was the embodiment of integrity—integrity of intellect, of feeling, of conduct. Burr was a past-master of worldliness, and he practised his creed with ardor. Many men had found it out; among them were dangerous enemies—men of eloquence and sentiment and more or less pretensions. They might have let him pass had he not taken every opportunity to prick their bubbles of rhetoric and tumble them from their poses. That they could not forgive, and they used the character Burr had developed so deliberately to create popular distrust of him. Their success had been admirable. Aaron Burr, at that moment, was regarded as the most dangerous man in the United States, just as John Marshall was looked upon as the most trustworthy.
Three days after Burr’s examination the chief justice was ready with his decision. When it came, it was a surprise to the crowd and a disgust particularly to the Administration. The chief evidences of Burr’s guilt which the Government had turned over to Marshall were the affidavits of General William Eaton, declaring that in the winter of 1805-06 Burr had laid before him a plan for seizing Mexico, revolutionizing the Western Territories, and establishing an independent state with himself at its head, and had tried to persuade the witness Eaton to join him; and of General James Wilkinson, commander-in-chief of the army, that Burr had revealed the same plans to him, and had offered him second place in the new state if he would come over to the conspiracy with his officers and men.
But what of it? said Marshall. According to the Constitution of the United States, a man must do something more than make plans and try to persuade others to join in them to be a traitor. There must be an overt act. There was no proof here that Burr had collected a great expedition on Blennerhassett’s Island, as the prosecution declared, or that he had attempted to take New Orleans. “Several months have elapsed since this fact did occur, if it ever occurred,” said the chief justice. “Why is it not proved? To the executive government is intrusted the important power of prosecuting those whose crimes may disturb the public repose or endanger its safety. It would be easy in much less time than has intervened since Colonel Burr has been alleged to have assembled his troops to procure affidavits establishing the fact”; and he committed Burr for misdemeanor, charging him to appear May 22d, at the next Circuit Court at Richmond. His bail was fixed at $10,000, a sum promptly raised by Richmond friends.
Free, but knowing that a big fight was coming, Burr set himself with all the eagerness of a man in whom the zest for struggle is keen, and who feels himself master of his weapons, to make ready his defense. He decided to direct his case himself, but he engaged as counsel the strongest lawyers of the country: Edmund Randolph, Luther Martin, John Wickham, Benjamin Botts, Charles Lee, and John Baker. With them he was, from that time on, “busy, busy, busy,” as he wrote his daughter. Not all his time was given to legal matters, by any means. He put in no small amount in preparing a sort of claque to support him in the coming scenes. As soon as set at liberty, Burr had taken a house in Richmond and prepared to entertain generously. The town was a pleasure-loving place, famous for its conviviality—when the legislature was in session, a five-gallon bowl of toddy stood ready for all comers every afternoon at the governor’s house—for its horse-racing, and its beautiful women: exactly the place to appreciate the address, the wit, the accomplishments of a man like Aaron Burr. His imperturbable attitude in face of all his difficulties, the smiling confidence with which he talked of his coming trial, appealed deeply to men like these of Richmond, who loved a daring spirit, in whatever cause engaged in, and as for the women, they were always his friends. Burr was a gallant of unmatched charm, if of none too much scruple, and rarely in his life did he fail to make a champion of a woman whom he chose to notice.
He soon had about him in Richmond as gay and devoted a circle as a man could wish. Luther Martin with his daughter, afterward famous as Mrs. Richard Raynal Keene, was in town much of the time, and they used all their influence to crowd Burr’s house with the best of Richmond Federalist society. One of the many who sat at his table at this period has left an account of what he saw. “The dinner was superb,” he writes, “abounding in all the luxuries which Virginia’s generous soil yields in lavish abundance. Twenty ladies and gentlemen of rank, fortune, and fashion graced the festive board. . . On this occasion Burr’s fascinating flatteries were lavished indiscriminately on the sex in general.”
The time passed quickly to the meeting of the Circuit Court on May 22d. Before the day arrived, the town was filled by as motley a crowd as was ever brought together on American soil. They came at the command of the Government to testify against Burr, or of their own free will to add the support of their presence to his defense. There were raftsmen from the Ohio, planters and politicians from Kentucky and Tennessee, Spaniards from New Orleans, rich young men from New York, adventurers from everywhere. There was General Eaton, “strutting about the streets under a tremendous hat, with a Turkish sash over colored clothes.” There was Commander Truxton, who said he had been promised the head of the navy which Burr hoped to raise to aid in taking Mexico. Most conspicuous of all, there was General Andrew Jackson, of Tennessee, who from morning until night stamped up and down the corridors of the tavern and over the sandy hillside on which the court-house stood, damning Jefferson and extolling Burr.
The court met in those days in the house of delegates, a big barren room without galleries, around which the benches ran in circles, leaving a clear place in the center for the prisoner. There was scant room here for the hundreds who gathered on May 22d to witness the opening of the trial. Every inch of space was soon filled, and one young man, Winfield Scott, to be heard from later as a soldier, even got a footing on the huge lock of the doors, where, towering above the crowd, Burr himself noticed him and told long afterward of the impression of splendid strength the young man made on him.
It was worth some crowding to see such a court as gathered there. On the bench were Chief Justice Marshall and Cyrus Grifiin, Judge of the District of Virginia; at the bar for the prosecution, U. S. District Attorney Gecrge Hay, William Wirt, and Alexander McEae; for the defense were the lawyers already mentioned. The difficulty of the prisoner’s position was apparent as soon as the court opened, for it was found that the Grand Jury to a man believed him guilty. Indeed, it was only by the prisoner declaring that he could not and did not expect an impartial jury, and would take any candid man, that work could proceed. This matter was no sooner arranged than a more serious hitch came. The prosecution was not ready to go on with the case—its most important witness, General James Wilkinson, had not arrived. The delay gave Burr and his friends a fine opportunity to complain. Why was General Wilkinson not there? The Government had had months to get him there. Was this not another evidence that Jefferson was simply persecuting Burr, that he had no proof of his guilt? When day after day passed and the same plea for delay was made, the cry of persecution began to extend beyond Richmond to the country, which had already waited so long to know what there was in the Burr conspiracy that it was beginning to get disgusted. Was the President afraid to present Wilkinson? People began to ask. “Virginia was probably supposed the place where, of all others, he would stand the least chance,” said the New York “Evening Post.” “At the rate things go on, it will probably be the place where he will stand the best.”
Neither side was idle during the delay. From morning until night the most passionate wrangling went on. An effort was made to have Burr put in jail; it failed, and then the prosecution fought to raise his bail, also without success. Hours were taken in discussing why Wilkinson did not arrive, and other hours in trying to find out what kind of evidence the chief justice would admit. Altogether the most dramatic episode came when Burr moved that the court issue a subpoena to President Jefferson, requiring him to appear before the court and furnish certain papers. The prosecution was overwhelmed that Burr knew of these papers. Hay afterward declared that the devil must have helped him. After a long argument, Marshall read one of his clean, convincing opinions, deciding that a President of the United States might be subpoenaed. Jefferson would not appear, but, much to his disgust, he had to furnish the papers.
It was on June 13th that Wilkinson, finally, did arrive, and witnesses were immediately rushed before the Grand Jury, which announced on the 24th that it was ready to report. To the great satisfaction of Jefferson, two indictments were found against Burr: one for treason and one for misdemeanor. At the same time Harman Blennerhassett, on whose island in the Ohio the hostile force was declared to have gathered, and from which it had set out, was indicted for the same offenses.
No bail was allowed for a prisoner charged with treason, and Burr was ordered to jail. He came down smiling and serene through the great silent crowd which surrounded the court-house, and as he entered the carriage with the marshal he bowed pleasantly, and said to those nearby that his friends would always find him at home now.
The jail to which Burr was taken was not an agreeable place. His counsel complained to the court that he had to share a room ten feet square with a man and his wife. It was June and warm, and the chief justice consented to a change of residence. Three pleasant rooms in the penitentiary were put at his service, and here he was soon receiving as great and as gay a company as ever. Indeed, his friends were even more demonstrative in their attention than before, and his rooms were kept filled with offerings of all sorts. “Every day as I rode along the street,” says the young man who served him as amanuensis, “my curricle was freighted with cake, confectionary, flowers redolent with perfume, wreathed into fancy bouquets of endless variety.”
A few weeks after Burr entered the penitentiary his daughter Theodosia came from South Carolina with her husband, Joseph Alston, governor of his State, and one of the richest men of his day, to remain through the trial. She came prepared to match her father in courage and serenity. Indeed, it was the condition on which he allowed her to join him. “Remember,” he wrote her, “no agitations, no complaints, no fears or anxieties on the road, or I renounce thee.” The presence of Theodosia was not only a great joy to Burr; her beauty, her vivacity, her charm, gave new life to his circle, and the penitentiary became a gayer center than ever. While Theodosia was adding to Burr’s strength in Richmond, an act of Jefferson helped him without. Among his confederates in the West had been a German doctor, Erich Bollmann, who, at the time Wilkinson was fortifying New Orleans against the supposed horde from Blennerhassett’s Island, had been arrested and sent East for trial with other agents of Burr. Here he had been promptly released by Chief Justice Marshall’s decision that no overt act of levying war was proved or even alleged against him, and without proof of such an act no man could be held for treason. After his release Bollmann had gone to Jefferson with information concerning Burr’s Western enterprise, which on Jefferson’s promise that he would regard it as confidential he had put on paper. Contrary to his promise, the President showed Bollmann’s testimony. The latter thereupon published Jefferson’s written promise to keep the thing secret. “What shall we say,” cried the New York “Evening Post,” “when dishonor, open, palpable dishonor, is thus fixed on the Chief Magistrate? Is it not a wound inflicted in the character of the nation itself?”
It was nearly six weeks after the indictment that the trial began—August 3d. In spite of the long delay and the intense heat, excitement was as great in Richmond now as it had been when the Grand Jury met, and the hall of delegates witnessed the same struggle for a place to see and hear. The bench, the bar, the witnesses were practically the same as in May, though Burr’s support had grown materially. He now had Theodosia and Governor Alston at his side, as well as an increased backing of sympathizers. In no degree had the long confinement or his hard work worn on him. No trace of anxiety was on his face, no uneasiness in his manner. Arrayed in faultless black, his hair and queue powdered, his smooth-shaven, high-bred face firm, his brilliant black eyes fixed unwaveringly on each speaker, he was the last man in the court to look guilty. The extent of the popular belief that he was guilty was overwhelmingly demonstrated, however, as soon as an attempt to secure a jury was made. There were forty-eight men in the venire called, and they all believed Burr guilty. Many of them seemed to think hanging too good for him. Four jurors were accepted from this first lot, and a second forty-eight called about equally unanimous against the prisoner. Finally twelve were secured, but fourteen days had been consumed in the operation, and it was August 17th before the charge of the prosecution was read and witnesses began to be called.
The charge was explicit and picturesque. It affirmed that Aaron Burr, not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the devil, had assembled a great multitude of armed men on Blennerhassett’s Island in the Ohio River, with the purpose of descending the Mississippi and taking possession of New Orleans by force.
From the start it was evident that much of the testimony the Government had been depending upon was, under the ruling of the chief justice, irrelevant. For instance, General Eaton, who was, after Wilkinson, their chief dependence, was able to give no testimony to show that any act of treason had been committed. His story showed that Burr had indulged in the most extravagant schemes, any one of them treasonable if carried out, and that he had used all his persuasion to secure Eaton’s aid, but it proved nothing more than intention. Indeed, of all the 140 witnesses whom the Government had assembled, there were only about half a dozen who could testify to an overt act on Blennerhassett’s Island, and the sum of their testimony was so meager as to be ludicrous when compared with the gravity of the charge and the alarm into which the Administration had thrown the country. It showed that Burr had been on the island in the early fall of 1806, and that while there he had ordered at Marietta some fifteen boats ten by fifty feet in size, and that ten of these had been built and paid for. At the same time he had bought 100 barrels of pork to stock them with. He had left the island then, and had not returned. But though he was absent, Mr. and Mrs. Blennerhassett were shown to have been very active in preparing for an expedition, which they said they were going to undertake in company with Colonel Burr. When narrowed down to facts, these preparations of theirs were not formidable. They seem to have consisted chiefly in drying corn. A Lancaster Dutchman, who was hired to build a kiln, testified that Mrs. Blennerhassett told him that they were laying in provisions enough for an army for a year. All that the witness did toward this was to work four weeks in carrying corn to the mill to be ground after it was dry. Mr. Blennerhasset urged this Dutchman to join the expedition, explaining that they were going to settle a new country.
There was testimony to show that perhaps thirty men gathered on the island in November; but though provisions were collected, nobody ever saw any bayonets or powder, or any bullets, beyond what was customary at a time when every man carried some sort of weapon. These thirty men, with small supplies, left the island hastily one night early in December in four boats. Blennerhassett’s gardener, who described their precipitate departure, said they left so suddenly because the people had got it into their heads that Colonel Burr wanted to divide the Union. And this was all that had happened on Blennerhassett’s Island, according to the witnesses of the Government.
As the testimony which was now introduced referred to Burr’s acts outside of the island, he promptly held up the prosecution. The defense which he and his counsel had been preparing so carefully throughout the summer now developed in full. Its most vital point was that the Government could not legally introduce any further testimony as to his intentions until they had proved his acts treasonable. As to the acts on Blennerhasset Island already proved, why, they amounted to nothing anyway. It was absurd to call that little assemblage a “multitude,” or to suppose that it intended to take New Orleans. Its real purpose was perfectly legitimate. Burr contended. The men were a portion of a colony which he and Blennerhassett were about to settle on lands which they had bought on the Wachita River. Colonization, not war, was what they were about. And granting that the assemblage looked suspicious, Burr could not be held responsible, since he had been 200 miles away when it was gathering. Besides, the men who started out from Blennerhassett’s were there not by Burr’s invitation, but upon that of the owner of the island. It was Blennerhassett who had sheltered them, Blennerhassett who had ground the corn. How, then, could Burr be held as the principal in the affair?
It was on the first point of this defense that the struggle between counsel came. For ten days an argument, perhaps the most splendid for legal learning in the history of our courts, went on. It was enlivened by at least one burst of passionate eloquence; the speech of William Wirt, familiar to every American schoolboy, in which Burr and Blennerhasset are contrasted:
“Let us put the case between Burr and Blennerhassett. Let us compare the two men and settle this question of precedence between them. It may save a good deal of troublesome ceremony hereafter.
“Who Aaron Burr is, we have seen in part already. I will add, that, beginning his operations in New York, he associates with him men whose wealth is to supply the necessary funds. Possessed of the mainspring, his personal labor contrives all the machinery. Pervading the continent from New York to New Orleans, he draws into his plan, by every allurement which he can contrive, men of all ranks and descriptions. To youthful ardor he presents danger and glory; to ambition, ranks, and titles, and honors; to avarice, the mines of Mexico. To each person whom he addresses he presents the object adapted to his taste. His recruiting officers are appointed. Men are engaged throughout the continent. Civil life is indeed quiet upon its surface, but in its bosom this man have strived to deposit the materials, which, with the slightest touch of his match, produce an explosion to shake the continent. All this, his restless ambition has contrived; and in the autumn of 1806 he goes forth for the last time to apply his match. On this occasion he meets with Blennerhassett.
“Who is Blennerhassett? A native of Ireland, a man of letters who fled from the storms of his own country to find quiet in ours. His history shows that war is not the natural element of his mind. If it had been, he never would have exchanged Ireland for America. So far is an army from furnishing the society natural and proper to Mr. Blennerhassett’s character, that on his arrival in America, he retired even from the population of the Atlantic States, and sought quiet and solitude in the bosom of our western forests. But he carried with him taste and science, and wealth; and lo, the desert smiled! Possessing himself of a beautiful island in the Ohio, he rears upon it a palace, and decorates it with every romantic embellishment of fancy. . . .
“Yet this unfortunate man thus deluded from his interest and his happiness, thus seduced from the paths of innocence and peace, thus confounded in the toils that were deliberately spread for him, and overwhelmed by the mastering spirit and genius of another—this man, thus ruined and undone, and made to play a subordinate part in this grand drama of guilt and treason —this man is to be called the principal offender, while he, by whom he was thus plunged in misery, is comparatively innocent, a mere accessory! Is this reason? Is it law? Is it humanity? Sir, neither the human heart nor the human understanding will bear a perversion so monstrous and absurd! so shocking to the soul! so revolting to reason! Let Aaron Burr then not shrink from the high destination which he has courted, and having already ruined Blennerhassett in fortune, character and happiness forever, let him not attempt to finish the tragedy by thrusting that ill-fated arm between him and punishment.”
It was August 29th that the lawyers ended their arguments, and two days later the chief justice read his elaborate decision, one of the ablest of his many able papers, it is generally conceded. Its conclusion ran: “No testimony relative to the conduct or declarations of the prisoner elsewhere and subsequent to the transactions on Blennerhassett’s Island can be admitted; because such testimony, being in its nature merely corroborative, and incompetent to prove the overt act in itself, is irrelevant until there be proof of the overt act by two witnesses.
“This opinion does not comprehend the proof by two witnesses that the meeting on Blennerhassett’s Island was procured by the prisoner. On that point the Court for the present withholds its opinion for reasons which have been already assigned; and as it is understood from the statements made on the part of the prosecution that no such testimony exists. If there be such, let it be offered; and the Court will decide upon it.
“The Jury have now heard the opinion of the Court on the law of the case. They will apply that law to the facts, and will find a verdict of guilty or not guilty as their own consciences may direct.”
Marshall’s decision paralyzed the further action of the Government; the next day the district attorney threw up the case, and the jury retired to return promptly with a verdict of “not guilty.”
The trial for treason was over and Burr was free, but for nearly eight weeks longer the exasperated Government kept up the fight. The great crowd of witnesses present, who had known more or less of Burr’s acts in Tennessee, in Kentucky, on the Mississippi, were now one after another examined. Chief of these was General Wilkinson. His testimony was more damaging to himself than to Burr. No one could hear the general without being convinced that he had been familiar with Burr’s scheme from the first, and had only revealed it to Jefferson at the end because he feared it would miscarry, and because he saw a good chance of posing as the savior of his country by betraying his friend. The contempt he inspired in all those who had to do with him in the trial was extreme. John Randolph declared he was the only man he ever saw who was “from the back to the very core a villain.” In the Grand Jury there was scarcely a variance of opinion as to his being as guilty as Burr. Even Hay, the district attorney, who was conducting the case for Jefferson, wrote the President toward the end that his confidence in Wilkinson was gone. Burr was too clever not to profit fully by this suspicion of the general.
It was the end of October before the last word of the Burr trial was pronounced—it was a commitment for a new trial in Ohio—a prosecution which the Government probably never had any intention of making, but which in justice to its own dignity it felt it must order. Burr was free—no overt act of treason had been proved against him—the Administration was discomfited. And yet the feeling throughout the country that in intention Burr was a traitor was even stronger than the day when he was first brought a prisoner to Richmond. With this conviction was mingled a certain contempt because of the fiasco he had made. To have planned to seize Mexico and make himself an emperor, and to have been able to raise no more than fifty or sixty men to carry out his purposes, showed inefficiency as well as disloyalty; to have planned disunion, and to have only landed himself and a few rash admirers in jail, proved him an adventurer without the first qualities of a leader.
And in this feeling the people were undoubtedly right. Burr went west in 1805 as a soldier of fortune. “In New York I am to be disfranchised and in New Jersey hanged,” he wrote Theodosia. “Having substantial objections to both, I shall not for the present hazard either, but seek another country.” He knew vast opportunities lay in the West for the man of brains and daring. There are lands to be colonized, and he goes into a huge speculation on the Wachita River. War with Spain threatens. It will open the way for filibusters to revolutionize Mexico, and he lays plans for a Mexican Empire with himself on the throne. The West is dissatisfied and talks separation. He makes it known he will head a revolution if he has the chance. We know now that in the interests of his Mexican scheme Burr plotted with the English minister, with the Spanish minister, with members of the army and navy, with the rich wherever he found them, with the young and adventurous, with Creoles and French; that, even after he knew there was no hope of foreign aid—that he could expect no help from any of the men of position and influence he had tried to seduce, save from Wilkinson, in whom he believed to the end—after he saw the force and equipment he had planned to concentrate at Blennerhassett’s Island a failure, after his funds were exhausted, he plunged ahead, lying to those still under his spell, pretending confidence, playing the game of an impudent adventurer to the very finish. He went free at his trial because he had accomplished none of the things which he had planned. His trial, far from proving that he was no traitor, proves that he tried to be one, but had not the patience, the discretion, the generalship to achieve it. Burr’s vindication was not a proof of his innocence of treason, but of his failure to work out treason.
His punishment, like his condemnation, came from the people. It was, perhaps, the most terrible of which society is capable—contemptuous ostracism. When first at liberty, he was obliged to conceal himself in the East. He could not endure the inaction which this concealment forced on him, and after a few months of hiding he fled to Europe under an assumed name. Here he hoped to interest the cabinets of England and the Continent in his scheme for liberating Mexico. Everywhere he went his social success was amazing. His surprising intelligence, his delightful wit, his charm of manner, made him friends among the ablest men and women of every country; but his filibustering ambition was too dangerous for statesmen to encourage, and he saw his hopes fall again and again. His money gave out, and often he went without a fire. In Paris he had no overcoat all one terrible winter; and as for food, he calculated many a day whether he could afford to add a glass of cheap wine to his bread and cheese. But he was as gay and undaunted in his garret, with his last sou in his pocket, as he had been in the Richmond penitentiary, facing a trial for treason.
Burr spent four years in Europe in fruitless efforts to secure aid for his plans, and then returned to America. After a few weeks of hiding in New York, he suddenly announced himself as about to begin again the practice of the law. Although his debts were enormous, and the hostility of the community unabated, he managed to keep out of jail, and in a few months was earning large sums of money. A man who has the reputation of never losing a suit is sure of employment, even from those who might refuse to take his hand in a drawing-room. For twenty-four years Burr lived a busy, cheerful life in New York. He was not without influence outside of the bar, but it was exercised secretly. No public man who valued his popular reputation dared counsel with him openly, for to the day of his death Aaron Burr suffered that ostracism which the people practises when its faith in a man is shattered.
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