VICTIM OR VILLAIN? - The Trials of Aaron Burr

WILLIAM F. SWINDLER

One dark night in the summer of 1804 a brooding figure, swathed in a cloak to avoid recognition, boarded a small boat on the Hudson above New York City and made his way to the New Jersey side. After a hurried visit with friends, the traveler was off again, keeping to back roads where he was less likely to encounter patrols, until he reached Philadelphia. In due course, from New York, the fugitive took to sea, on a vessel which slipped down the Chesapeake and after learning a warrant had issued for his arrest and fearing that extradition papers were en route into the Atlantic, where it made its way to St. Simon's Island off the Georgia coast. There he remained, with wealthy friends, until late in the fall. Finally he returned to the mainland, traveling through South Carolina for a visit with his daughter, the wife of the governor, and on to the nation's capital to preside over the United States Senate during the final session of the Seventh Congress.

Thus did Aaron Burr, who came within a single vote of winning the Presidency itself in 1801, begin a saga unequalled in romance, mystery and tragedy in American political history. Under indictment in New York and New Jersey for the slaying of Alexander Hamilton in a duel the previous July, there was no hope of returning to his successful law practice. As for a continuing career in national politics, that possibility seemed to be closed as well; Thomas Jefferson had chosen his own running mate for the second term, taking advantage of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution which had been adopted after the deadlock of 1800, and which got rid of the anomalous procedure in the original Constitution which permitted the new President's strongest rival automatically to become his Vice-President.

By March 4, 1805 Burr would be a 49-year-old political outcast–virtually a man without a country. Yet he would end his term in a characteristically spectacular fashion, presiding for the last month over the impeachment trial of Justice Samuel Chase. Indeed, Jefferson had been confident that Burr's presence would insure the conviction and removal of the cantankerous Federalist from the Supreme Court and thus open a breach in the solid ranks of his political opponents in the judiciary. Certainly the theatrics of the trial were readymade for Burr; his colleagues of the Senate flanked him on either side of a semi-circle, and there were temporary galleries, draped in blue cloth, for the swarms of spectators. A part of these galleries, wrote a biographer, "the vice-president, with his usual gallantry, reserved for the ladies." But as to the trial itself, Burr–one of the nation's leading lawyers–was reported to have presided "with the dignity and impartiality of an angel, but with the rigor of a devil."

Burr earned no debt of gratitude from Jefferson; Chase was acquitted, in this penultimate act of the third Vice-President. The final act–fully as theatrical–came on March 2, when Burr delivered his farewell address to the Senate. The speech was all that the most lurid melodrama could have called for a reporter declared that all the Senators "were in tears, and so unmanned that it was half an hour before they could recover themselves sufficiently to come to order and choose a vice-president pro tem." With this ultimate flamboyance, Aaron Burr moved out of history into legend.

He came, as the saying used to have it, of good stock. His father, the first Aaron Burr, was a scholar, theologian, and the second president of the College of New Jersey '(later Princeton); his mother was the daughter of Jonathon Edwards, the great New England religious leader. The Edwards family reared young Aaron and his sister Sally after the death of their parents, and the children were later tutored by Tapping Reeve, founder of one of the early American law schools, who prepared Aaron to read for the bar and married Sally.

Burr's rivalry with Hamilton began during the Revolution, when both served in the headquarters of General Washington. Hamilton rose in Washington's favor, while Burr was transferred to another command. Although he apparently proved himself a good officer, Burr resigned after two years of service, began reading for the bar under New Jersey and New York jurists, and in 1782 was admitted to practice and–in a typically unconventional act–married the widow of a former British officer, a woman ten years older than he. The following year the one supremely joyful event of his life occurred, with the birth of a daughter, the precocious and beautiful Theodosia.

The Burr-Hamilton rivalry continued in the eighties, with both men dividing the leadership of the New York bar and then the struggle for control of New York politics. In the next decade, Burr seemed to gain the advantage, serving as United States Senator from 1791 to 1797. With a growing following of young zealots, Burr maneuvered the united anti-Hamilton factions in New York and thus threw the state, in the elections of 1800, to the anti-Federalists. In the process he adroitly arranged for his own endorsement as Vice-President, and then, in the deadlocked election results, found himself tied with Jefferson for the Presidency itself. So close did his abilities and ambitions take him. It was too much to expect that in the prime of life, despite the disasters which then began crowding in on him, Aaron Burr was prepared to retire to a lesser role than that to which, he was convinced, destiny would eventually call him.

The duel was provoked by Hamilton's lifelong suspicion of Burr's motives, and his imprudent comments on them, which in the code of the day could not be permitted to pass unchallenged. When the former Treasury Secretary was reported to have said in public that his rival was "a dangerous man and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government," the Vice-President sent a peremptory demand for an apology. The ritual required rejection of the demand, and thus led inexorably to the field of honor–in the improbable vicinity of Weehawken, New Jersey.

From the summer of 1804 until March 1805, the plot began to thicken. The Hamilton-Burr rivalry had extended even to the interests of both men in the Spanish borderlands to the south and southwest, and imperialist adventures to conquer them. Burr's first stop on his flight from New York had been at the home of a naval officer, Commodore Thomas Truxton, with whom he made big talk about a seaborne attack upon Florida or Mexico; and for some time previously Burr had also been meeting with General James Wilkinson, a career army man with whom the Vice-President had a long acquaintance. In his stop in Philadelphia, Burr had also approached the British minister, Anthony Merry, with a suggestion that Great Britain finance a project to separate the western states and territories from the rest of the Union.

Neither Burr nor Merry made any serious effort of record to pursue this subject, but when he returned to Washington in December, Burr and Wilkinson began frequent meetings over maps of Florida, Louisiana and Mexico, and shortly after his valedictory speech in the Senate, the former Vice-President set out for the west. Wilkinson had been posted to St. Louis, from where Jefferson would soon send him to take command of American forces in New Orleans. Burr's itinerary took him first to Pittsburgh and thence down the Ohio and Mississippi, calling at all the river towns and traveling the wilderness trails overland.

The conversations with Merry came quickly to the attention of the Spanish minister, Casa Yrujo, who found it to his country's advantage to leak the information to other government circles, foreign and domestic. For the ensuing year, however, nothing seemed to come of Burr's various plans; he returned to Philadelphia after his tour of the West, and even broached with Jefferson the subject of a possible diplomatic appointment. There were rumors that Burr might become the civil governor of Louisiana, although these seem to have been started by Burr's own followers. Always a charismatic personality, he was understood to be assured of a new seat in the United States Senate from any of the western states, whose leaders had fallen under his spell. During this period there was even an approach to Yrujo by Burr and a new associate, ex-Senator Jonathon Dayton of New Jersey; since their proposals for Spanish financing of some hypothetical adventures in the West could hardly have included a threat to Spain's own colonies, it seems likely that instead the men held out the prospect of separation of the trans-Appalachian region from the rest of the Union.

Such talk was common enough, and Spain was well aware that it alternated with plans for attacks on her own territories. Andrew Jackson had more than once indicated his readiness to liberate Florida for the United States, while Wilkinson, as later evidence would prove, had been talking a Spanish pension for years to insure his relative loyalty. The "Citizen Genet" excitement of the French Revolutionary era, which had prompted passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, had seen a number of French agents fanning out through the west to test the interest of the frontier in breaking away from the older states. Senator John Brown of Kentucky had conversed sporadically with French, English and Spanish representatives; and although the opening of the port of New Orleans by the Louisiana Purchase had presumably disposed of much of the western discontent over means of shipping their produce abroad, the fact remained that there were large numbers of persons who felt that a government in Washington would always be too remote to accommodate their interests.

By the summer of 1806, Burr's prospects for bringing all of these discontents to a head suddenly began to assume alarming proportions. In his first trip to the Ohio Valley, Burr had made the acquaintance of a wealthy Irish immigrant, Harman Blennerhasset, whose elaborate feudal estate on an island in the river near Marietta, Ohio comported with Burr's own grandiose ideas. (There was also Blennerhasset's accomplished and attractive wife, whom the chronically philandering ex-Vice President doubtless did not fail to notice.) In any event, Burr now arranged to have the island become a staging area for boats, men and supplies which were intended for an expedition downriver. He had spent the previous months raising modest sums from friends in New York, his son-in-law, Governor Joseph Alston, in South Carolina, and supporters in Kentucky. All had been for the announced purpose of developing a large tract of land on the Washita River on the western border of Louisiana, known as the Bastrop grant. This area was to be settled by a group of adventurous young men capable of serving as troops in any military uprising.

The communications with Wilkinson now grew more portentous. For a number of years, the two men had occasionally corresponded in a cipher code which Wilkinson had devised, and in this code Burr wrote to his longtime associate when he was ready to leave for New Orleans. The two men were alike in many respects, the former Vice-President brilliant and quite possibly mentally unbalanced at times, the career general pompous and impatient for public recognition of his own greatness. All of the bits and pieces were now being put together by Burr's enemies: the conversations with Truxton, Merry and Yrujo; the raising of funds for an assembling of men, boats and materiel at Blennerhasset's Island; and the availability of the entire military resources of the nation under Wilkinson at New Orleans. Given the circumstances, and the knowledge of the chronic proposals for separatism in the West, the Jefferson administration was now aroused, and in late November 1806 the President issued a public proclamation warning against giving aid and comfort to Burr and his activities.

Burr, Dayton, and probably Wilkinson, all had anticipated that growing British bellicosity toward Spain would distract Madrid's colonial administrators from New World affairs sufficiently to permit American adventures along the entire Gulf Coast. But the death of William Pitt the Younger that spring, and the decision of Congress to seek to buy Florida as it had recently bought Louisiana, left it to the tyro empire builders to provoke their own incidents. Meantime, Blennerhasset took it upon himself to publish a series of local newspaper articles renewing the proposals to separate the Western states from the rest of the nation. The situation smelled sufficiently of treason to prompt United States attorneys in Kentucky to seek, in two separate instances, grand jury indictments of Burr. By appearing personally before both grand juries, the former Vice-President cleared himself without difficulty.

Meantime, after Burr had proceeded to Nashville, Andrew Jackson's stronghold, federal authorities led a raid on Blennerhasset's Island to break up the grand conspiracy. They netted a few boats, fewer men, and scarcely any weapons; these, along with such trophies as Blennerhasset's violin–the lord of the manor having fled–constituted the meager evidence on which government prosecutors, at the later trial in Richmond, would have to attempt their proof of treason. By late autumn the remaining flotilla had made its way to a rendezvous with Burr at the mouth of the Cumberland, and Burr had dispatched to Wilkinson a summons to glory and great deeds.

But the Presidential proclamation had reached the general ahead of the letter from Burr, and frightened him off any plans he might have had to join in Burr's quixotic schemes. Jeffersonian newspapers throughout the West were busy denouncing the former Vice-President, and such surviving sentiment as there was for separatism was now prudently hushed. The time had come to cut losses; Wilkinson elected to play the loyal soldier, and arrested the two youthful supporters of Burr when they reached New Orleans bearing the cipher letter. The two– Samuel Swartwout and Dr. J. Erich Boll-man–were roughly handled, and thrown on board a ship for a stormy passage to Washington to stand trial for treason. Meantime, the letter–with Wilkinson's own version of the translation of the code–was sent by faster overland courier to the President.

By January 1807 the Burr flotilla had reached the settlements on the Mississippi above Natchez, where the ex-Vice President learned of Wilkinson's treachery and the trap now prepared for him in New Orleans. Burr at once "put himself on the country"– appearing before a third grand jury and being absolved of criminal actions for a third time. But the judge–Thomas Rodney, father of Jefferson's Attorney General Caesar Rodney–refused to release him from his bond; and Burr suspected that there was a conspiracy with Wilkinson to get him into the general's clutches. Accordingly, he fled into the wilds of the Mississippi Territory, disguised as a rough frontiersman; but he was recognized and captured near Mobile, and marched under guard to Richmond, Virginia where the United States Circuit Court had jurisdiction over Blennerhasset's Island.

The great treason trial under Chief Justice John Marshall, sitting as Circuit Justice with District Judge Cyrus Griffin, is portrayed in the two films and described in the article on the films which follows. It sufficeth here to note that on March 30 a preliminary investigation began which satisfied Marshall that there was sufficient evidence to hold Burr on a charge of misdemeanor–planning an expedition against Mexico-while the question of treason was left for a fourth grand jury. After much maneuvering by an array of distinguished counsel for the defendant, and Burr's own bold motion for a subpoena duces tecum to issue to Jefferson himself, the grand jury of fourteen Jeffersonians and two Federalists indicted Burr for treason.

The government's case was exceedingly tenuous; aside from the sparse evidence from the raid on Blennerhasset's Island, there was the personal appearance, for the prosecution, of General Wilkinson himself, in full dress uniform, and his own narrow escape from indictment when the jurors grew suspicious of his apparently intimate knowledge of Burr's plans. Another witness, General William Eaton, was shown to have been paid off by the government, as to some long-standing claims, before his own testimony. Finally, the government was unable to deny that Burr was nowhere near Blennerhasset's Island at the time of the raid, and thus it was impossible to prove an overt act of levying war against the United States as required by the constitutional definition of treason. By early September, Burr was. found not guilty "on the evidence submitted," both as to the treason and misdemeanor charges.

The saga of Aaron Burr was far from over, however. He and Blennerhasset were remanded for trial in the District of Ohio, but neither man ever appeared in that jurisdiction, and the Jeffersonians at length abandoned their efforts to convict them. Burr, together with Swartwout, whose petition for habeas corpus had freed Bollman and himself, skirted Baltimore–where pro-administration mobs hanged him in effigy as in Richmond they hanged both Burr and Marshall–and proceeded to Philadelphia. But throughout the winter Burr was hounded by creditors, besieging him for satisfaction on their advances to finance his great projects which had come to naught.

In June 1808 Burr sailed for England, still pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp of a Mexican military project. The American ministers prevailed upon the British not to lend him official encouragement, and the Spanish junta, which had come to power in Madrid and made peace with England, eventually persuaded London to expel him. But in February 1810, having wandered through northern Europe in the interim, Burr showed up in France, convinced that Napoleon Bonaparte would be interested in his final and most fantastic project. This called for a revolt in Louisiana and Mexico and the simultaneous provoking of a war between Britain and the United States, during which the French could regain Canada. The real hope of the West, wrote Burr in one of his many memoranda to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, depended upon a leader "superior in talent and energy"–which Burr obviously assumed was a readily recognizable description of himself–who could provide the American people with "something grand and stable"–the latter a quality which few friends or foes would attribute to him.

Again, all of this came to naught. While the correspondence in the French archives is far better evidence of treason than Jefferson had ever been able to find for the trial in Richmond, the simple fact was that by now no one was taking Burr seriously. By the winter of 1811 he himself saw the end of the dream of empire, and began to think of returning to the United States, and particularly to Theodosia.

Theodosia, after all, had been the one constant point of reference for him. Since the age of eleven, she had been his pupil and confidante, the belle of New York society at sixteen, the bride, at seventeen, of a rising South Carolina political and social leader, the mother, at nineteen, of Aaron Burr Alston. In 1806 she and her son had been guests at Blennerhasset's Island; in 1807 she and her family had taken up residence in Richmond for the duration of the trial; in 1808 she was with her father when–once more in disguise–he set off for his exile.

The blows of fate rained down remorselessly. Burr returned to New York in May 1812–the murder indictments for the Hamilton duel having been quashed. But in July came word that Theodosia's son had died. By December there was hope of a reunion, and Governor Alston put his wife, in the company of an attending physician whom Burr had sent from New York, aboard the clipper Patriot out of Charleston harbor. The ship was never heard from; it probably went down with all aboard in a terrible January storm off the Outer Banks of North Carolina, or–as legend suggests–it may have been overtaken by pirates and crew and passengers murdered. To the end, the real love affair was between father and daughter; at the height (or depth) of his exile, Theodosia had written him with characteristic adulation: "I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man."

For another quarter of a century, Burr himself lived on, his talents as a lawyer as undimmed as his personal magnetism for both men and women–and particularly women. At the age of seventy-seven (1833) he married for the second time–a wealthy widow, Eliza (or Betsy) Jumel, twenty years his junior. Within a year, his new wife brought suit for divorce, as Burr threatened to run through all her property. The divorce decree was granted September 14, 1836–the date of Aaron Burr's death.