A Nation Rising (6 page)

One man taking an active interest in the outcome was Alexander Hamilton, who still pulled strings in the Federalist Party. Hamilton disliked both candidates, but he distrusted Burr. He undertook an intense letter-writing campaign designed to undermine his fellow New Yorker.

It took thirty-six ballots before James A. Bayard, a Delaware Federalist, submitted a blank vote, giving Delaware to Jefferson. Bayard's decision, it seems, came after he received a guarantee that Jefferson would strengthen the navy and Federalist officeholders would retain their posts. In other words, horse-trading and patronage were probably more significant than Hamilton's character assassination in giving Jefferson his victory. Other Federalist voters in Vermont and Maryland followed Bayard's lead, and on Tuesday, February 17, 1801, after thirty-six ballots, Thomas Jefferson became America's third president.
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For his part, Jefferson no longer trusted Burr, and the New York power broker who had done more than anyone to ensure Jefferson's
election was effectively shut out of Jefferson's administration and party politics. Their relationship turned frosty. Excluded from the president's ruling inner circle, Burr was left to preside over the Senate, his constitutionally mandated role as vice president.

Almost from the outset of his first term, it was evident that Jefferson would drop Burr from the Republican ticket in the 1804 reelection campaign. So Burr chose to return to his power base and instead run for governor of New York in the election of April 1804. Burr lost the election and blamed the defeat on a savage personal smear campaign. As early as 1801, a pamphlet attacking Burr's politics and personal behavior had appeared. In it, he was accused of “abandoned profligacy,” and there were references to numerous “wretches” he had seduced, many of them since reduced to courtesans; others diseased or dead.
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Initially, Burr had ignored these assaults on his character and reputation. But after his defeat in New York, that changed. He began to focus his anger on Alexander Hamilton, the man who he now believed was behind the campaign to destroy him. Their long-simmering feud came to a boil when Hamilton, speaking at a political dinner, announced that he could express a “still more despicable opinion” of Burr. After an account of this incident was published in the
Albany Register
, Burr sought an explanation from Hamilton.

Unsatisfied by Hamilton's reply, Burr, still the sitting vice president, then issued a challenge under the code duello, the formalized rules of dueling. Although dueling was technically illegal in several states, including New York, these affairs of “honor” were often carried out anyway in a scripted dance. Usually, there was a harmless exchange of shots and both participants could walk away from the
field having avenged their “good names.” But that was not always true, as Hamilton was painfully aware. His eldest son, Philip, had been killed in a duel three years earlier.

On July 11, 1804, the two men and their parties met outside Weehawken, New Jersey (the site is above the Hudson River, not far from where the Lincoln Tunnel's famous Helix now empties into New Jersey). Both men shot. Hamilton missed; Burr's shot entered Hamilton's abdomen above his right hip, piercing his liver and spine. Hamilton was evacuated to Manhattan, where he lay in the house of a friend, receiving visitors until he died in agony the following day.

As with a number of the crucial aspects of Burr's life, what actually happened remains controversial. Almost immediately, Burr was cast as a murderous villain in most of the New York press. In death, Hamilton began to be glorified. Both men clearly fired their pistols, but witnesses could never agree on who shot first. Nor do contemporary historians. Ron Chernow's largely admiring biography
Alexander Hamilton
makes the case that Hamilton did fire first, but missed deliberately, and that Burr fired seconds later, purposefully aiming to kill.
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On the other hand, Isenberg's account questions the presumption that Hamilton intended to miss. She suggests that there is ample evidence to the contrary.
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In his account in
Duel
, Fleming notes, “As for who fired first, the two guns went off almost simultaneously…. After two hundred years of controversy, including some absurd magazine articles portraying Hamilton as a dishonorable sneak who had secretly set his hair trigger when [a witness] was not looking, it seems simplest to assume everyone was
telling the truth as he saw it, with a minor amount of embellishment on both sides.”
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That duel may never be settled.

What is clear is that Burr was indicted for murder, in both New York and New Jersey. New York later dropped the murder charge, but he was still charged with violating the dueling law, though the “crime” had taken place in New Jersey. And the charge in New Jersey came despite the fact that dueling was legal in the state. But Aaron Burr would never be tried in either state. He had already fled south, to take refuge in the home of a friend.

After Burr eventually returned to Washington, his final act in office was to preside, as the sitting vice president and president of the Senate, over the first impeachment trial in American history, that of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. In a case that was clearly political in nature, Chase—a signer of the Declaration—was brought to trial in the aftermath of a series of rulings from the bench against Jeffersonians, including the sedition trial of the journalist James Callender in 1800. During the Adams presidency, Callender had been convicted under the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, one of which made it a crime to publish “false and malicious writings” against the government. As president, Jefferson later pardoned Callender, and Chase was impeached. Burr was then responsible for overseeing the trial of a Federalist justice in an overwhelmingly Republican Senate.

But in spite of Federalists' fears that Burr would allow partisanship to influence the outcome of Chase's trial, his handling of the unprecedented proceedings was widely praised. Chase, who had certainly earned a reputation as an obnoxious justice, was acquitted on
all counts. One Federalist senator later remarked, “I could almost forgive Burr for any less crime than the blood of Hamilton for [the] decision, dignity, firmness and impartiality with which he presides.”
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The Senate's acquittal of Justice Chase established a significant precedent in insulating judges against purely political assaults.

Following Chase's acquittal, Burr left Washington and the Senate, but not before delivering a farewell speech that witnesses said brought many listeners to tears. He concluded it with the words: “May the Almighty bless you and keep you in all that you do together here and separately in your own homes. I ask only that you not forget me, for I of a certainty, shall always remember, with respect and affection, the years I spent here.”

 

O
N
J
ANUARY
22, 1807, Thomas Jefferson delivered a message of his own to the Congress:

When he left the Senate and Washington in March 1805, Burr was politically broken and nearly bankrupt. His law practice was finished. To satisfy creditors, he had been forced to sell off his estate, Richmond Hill, to an enterprising fur trader named John Jacob Astor—soon to become America's first millionaire—who broke the estate into smaller lots and leased them out, surmising correctly that Manhattan was soon going to grow. Out of power, out of friends, and seemingly out of ready cash, Burr began his “western adventure.” Like so many other moments in his biography, the undertaking still confounds historians and generates controversy over his motives. But it was this adventure that brought him to a Richmond courtroom in the spring of 1807, and to the distinct possibility of hanging.

Like many Americans at the time, Aaron Burr saw what Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase of 1803 would mean for the future of America, and he turned his eyes westward. Like Jefferson, Burr anticipated that the transfer of wide tracts of North America from France to the United States, a transfer which left boundaries murky, would result in a war with Spain. At some point, he began to plan for what was then called a “filibuster,” meaning an invasion by a private army to take over another nation's territory.
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Although the national government considered such adventures a violation of the Neutrality Act of 1794, Burr's idea certainly fitted in with American ambitions to eliminate the Spanish presence from the continent and acquire the Spanish-controlled territory in what would eventually become Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. Burr also envisioned liberating Mexico from Spanish rule. Whether he planned, as well, to sever the western states from the Union and establish a new nation is a far murkier question. “Burr's defenders insist that his aims were military” wrote the historian Jean Edward Smith: “to provoke a war with Spain, to liberate Mexico, and ultimately free South America from Spanish rule. From this perspective, Burr was a patriot and his enterprise reflected the expansionist impulses of nineteenth-century America.”
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Illegal, yes. But in a modern context, so was the plan hatched during the 1980s under the Reagan administration to support Nicaragua's contras against the leftist Sandinista government. When Congress made support of the contras illegal, officials in the CIA and in the Reagan administration, including Colonel Oliver North, looked for third-party funding for the contras, and this quest ultimately led to the Iran-contra scandal. Just as North was viewed by many Americans as a patriot who had broken a bad law in service to the country, Burr had many admirers who thought his aims were lofty.

To carry out his plan, Burr enlisted General James Wilkinson, who seemed in sympathy with it. The two had first met during the Quebec campaign in 1775. Despite what was at best a spotty military record, Wilkinson had been chosen by Jefferson to serve as the commander in chief of the U.S. Army at New Orleans and
as governor of the Louisiana Territory. Neither Jefferson nor Burr knew that Wilkinson was already secretly on the payroll of Spain. Ignorant of Wilkinson's duplicity, Burr enlisted the general and others in his plan during a reconnaissance mission to the West in April 1805.

A man seemingly devoid of both competence and conscience, Wilkinson had, during the Revolution, survived several controversies, including his apparent participation in the unsuccessful “Conway cabal” that attempted to unseat George Washington. During the war, Wilkinson was given the role of clothier general of the army, but he was forced to resign that post amid charges of corruption in 1781. A hefty, hard-drinking man, Wilkinson was once described by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner as “the most consummate artist in treason that the nation has ever possessed.”

After the war, Wilkinson moved to Kentucky and began to receive financial support from Spain. In 1787, he had actually sworn allegiance to the king of Spain, and he continued to receive Spanish funds for years. Even when he was returned to an army command during an Indian war in 1791, Wilkinson continued to provide Spain with intelligence about American plans for attacking New Orleans, then a Spanish possession. Astonishingly, in the “Quasi-War” of the late 1790s, he ranked third in the army, behind Washington and Alexander Hamilton. And it was Wilkinson who had the honor of accepting Louisiana from France in 1803; afterward, Jefferson appointed him governor of the Louisiana Territory.

When he was again removed from office for abuse of power, Wilkinson attempted to curry favor with Jefferson—and perhaps with his own Spanish paymasters—by revealing Burr's plans; but he
did not explain to the president that he was himself a party to the “Burr conspiracy,” as Jefferson would call it. Wilkinson's possession of a letter, the famous “Cipher Letter,” prompted Thomas Jefferson to announce in his message to Congress that Aaron Burr was a traitor and his “guilt is placed beyond question.” Jefferson vowed he would bring the full force of the federal government down on his former vice president. But Jefferson did not know that Wilkinson's damning letter was a copy that the duplicitous general had made, altering the text.

Watching with interest from a distance, John Adams thought that Jefferson had overreached and wrote to another signer of the Declaration, Benjamin Rush, that even if Burr's “guilt is as clear as the noonday sun, the first magistrate ought not to have pronounced it so before a jury had tried him.” No admirer of Burr, Adams nonetheless also noted, “I never believed him to be a fool. Politicians have no more regard for the Truth than the Devil [and] I suspect that this Lying Spirit has been at work concerning Burr.”
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B
URR
,
IN THE
meantime, was moving swiftly around the territories, while making contact with members of the British government, and seeking support for his ventures. And if he was truly on the verge of treason, he did little to cover his tracks. Instead he reached out to several prominent and powerful friends, such as his longtime acquaintance and Prince ton classmate Senator Jonathan Dayton, and his son-in-law Joseph Alston.

He also made several overtures to a rising young power from the new state of Tennessee, forty-year-old Andrew Jackson. In May
1805, Burr had spent several days with Jackson and Jackson's wife Rachel at their home outside Nashville. Burr said that he intended to oust the hated Spanish from the Southwest, and Jackson was enthusiastic about the idea. Like many southerners and westerners, Jackson believed Spain was the enemy. The “dons,” as he called them, contributed to two irksome and dangerous problems: Indians and fugitive slaves. Jackson and other southerners with their own ambitions of spreading American control looked upon Burr's plan very favorably.