including Wilkinson, unheard, and when the jurors were called upon to give their verdict, they did so with heavy qualification: “We of the jury say that Aaron Burr is not proved to be guilty under this indictment by any evidence submitted to us. We therefore find him not guilty.”
The wording implied that a fuller hearing might have produced a different verdict, and on the street there was little doubt about Burr’s guilt. Half of those called for jury service in the next trial admitted to entrenched opinions against him, and no one thought him innocent. Jefferson’s fury was unrestrained. Marshall’s handling of the trial, he told Wilkinson, amounted to “a proclamation of impunity to every traitorous combination which may be formed to destroy the Union.”
Unhampered by the judge’s narrow interpretation, Burr’s second trial, beginning in September, for the misdemeanor of planning to attack Mexico, came closer to revealing the true nature of the conspiracy. From its opening debate about the failure of the president to respond to a subpoena duces tecum that required him to produce two letters from the general sent on October 21 and November 12, the defense had Wilkinson in their sights. “We shall prove that he turned traitor to Colonel Burr,” Luther Martin rasped in his brandy-roughened voice, “and violated his engagement with him, by endeavoring to sacrifice him to the government.”
The documents that Wilkinson sent the president on October 21 following Swartwout’s surprise appearance provided the defense with their opening. In his copy and translation of Burr’s ciphered letter, the general was shown to have omitted the opening sentence, “Yours postmarked 13th May is received,” and to have doctored other passages to make them less compromising. In the accompanying letter to Jefferson, Wilkinson had stated, “I am not only uninformed of the prime mover and ultimate objects of the daring enterprize, I am ignorant of the foundation on which it rests, of the means by which it is to be supported,” although Swartwout had told him that it was led by Burr and Mexico was its target. Finally, a postscript on the back of the letter suggested that “some plan be adopted to correct the destination of the associates.” Read together, the inference was clear— that the general was closely associated with the traitor and at least half inclined to collaborate with him, and, as Luther Martin caustically observed, “that he has placed himself in such a situation, he must hang Mr. Burr or be himself eternally detested.”
But in their eagerness to bring down the general, the defense went too far. Martin put Bruff on the stand to give evidence that Wilkinson had privately confessed his involvement in a conspiracy, only to see his story rendered unbelievable when the general produced a letter from Governor Harrison of Indiana warning him, before he even arrived in St. Louis, that Bruff was so unreliable no one in the city trusted him: “The bare idea of his being in your confidence would frighten some of them [the inhabitants] out of their senses.” Nor did Wickham do any better with Thomas Power, who had been brought unwillingly from New Orleans to testify to delivering dollars from Carondelet to Wilkinson. In near hysteria, Power flatly refused as a Spanish citizen to say anything derogatory about the general.
Nevertheless, watching Wilkinson being assailed by his attorney’s unrelenting cross-examination, Harman Blennerhassett noted with satisfaction, “He exhibited the manner of a sergeant under courtmartial rather than the demeanor of an accusing officer confronted with his culprit. His perplexity and derangement, even upon his direct examination, has placed beyond all doubt ‘his honor as a soldier and his fidelity as a citizen.’ ”
The general’s case was not helped by the decision of the government’s lead attorney, George Hay, to throw him to the wolves. “My confidence in him is shaken, if not destroyed,” Hay admitted to Jefferson. “I am sorry for it on his own account, on the public account, and because you have expressed opinions in his favor.” As a result, the prosecution rarely challenged the defense’s use of unsupported allegations, leading questions, and hearsay evidence to indict Wilkinson.
In his summing-up, Marshall accepted the central thrust of Burr’s defense that the two men were inseparable: “It is obvious that Col. Burr, whether with or without reason, calculated on his co-operation with the army which [Wilkinson] commanded, and that on this co- operation, the execution of his plan greatly, if not absolutely depended.” When the jury found Burr not guilty, they also implicitly cleared Wilkinson. But in popular opinion, both were judged to be treacherous to the core.
THE PRESIDENT’S EXTRAORDINARY efforts to see Burr convicted, and his endorsement of Wilkinson’s unconstitutional regime in New Orleans, suggest how gravely he viewed the threat presented by the conspiracy. It was the ultimate test of the republican democracy he had tried to foster in the Mississippi Valley, where central government was denuded of power in favor of the states and the citizen. Addressing Congress on January 31, 1807, he declared that the conspiracy had been defeated by “the patriotic exertions of the militia wherever called into action, by the fidelity of the army, and energy of the commander- in-chief.” In reality, however, these were not the vital ingredients.
Apart from the small detachment of Ohio militia that descended on Blennerhassett’s island, and the thirty men of the Mississippi militia who arrested Burr at Natchez, the citizens’ army was conspicuous by its absence. The fidelity of the regular army was unquestionable, but the soldiers would have marched to war with Spain as readily as they patrolled the streets of New Orleans. Equally the commanding general would have given the same bravura display in an attack across the Sabine as in his role as savior of the nation. What makes the Burr Conspiracy a pivotal event in American history lay in the evidence given by every witness who was invited to aid Burr in his enterprise. Sooner or later, each one made it plain that he was prepared to join the expedition only if it was part of the United States’ war with Spain.
That was the transformation in the western settlers that Burr, the easterner, never appreciated. Trying to recruit Colonel George Morgan’s family, Burr had told the old man “that our taxes [in the west] were very heavy, and demanded why we should pay them to the Atlantic parts of the country?” as though he were talking to the whiskey rebels of the eighteenth century. But in the Mississippi Valley the border mentality that had allowed Rogers Clark, Blount, Sevier, and especially the younger Wilkinson to switch loyalties to serve their own advantage had gone. The certainty of the national frontier drawn by Andrew Ellicott in 1798, the pride in the sudden doubling of the U.S. landmass through the Louisiana Purchase, and the guarantee of property rights under U.S. law that each settler depended upon had created something new, a clear attachment to the nation.
The change was unmistakable in the response of the Morgans because Burr specifically told them of his efforts to recruit men “who had been engaged in the western insurraction,” meaning the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. Not only did the son, John, advise his father “to apprize the President of the United States that something was going forward,” but the old colonel, who in 1788 had been ready to become a Spanish subject, went out of his way to express to Burr his pride in “our fine country.” He was not alone. Time after time, those that Burr and Blennerhassett tried to recruit made it clear that they regarded the exploitation of their country as unpatriotic.
Andrew Jackson expressed the emotion in histrionic fashion: “I would delight to see Mexico reduced, but I will die in the last ditch before I would yield a foot to the Dons, or see the union disunited.” More soberly, Lieutenant Jacob Jackson, in command of the garrison at Chickasaw Bluffs, said that he had agreed to join Burr “provided I found him patronized by the United States.” Even Maurice Belknap, one of Blennerhassett’s messengers, who had nothing to lose by enlisting, refused to do so because, as he testified, “I stated to him that I believed that the expedition was an unlawful one.”
That was the dilemma that faced James Wilkinson from the moment Swartwout entered his camp. Would he side with the past or the future? At that point, the fate of the United States had hinged on his choice. John Adair was surely correct in assuming that an attack across the Sabine would have triggered the cascade of volunteers that Burr counted on. No one, perhaps not even Burr himself, knew what he would then have done with thousands of men at his back, money needed, New Orleans at his mercy, and Veracruz beyond. However disreputable Wilkinson’s motives, his decision to oppose Burr was crucial in determining whether the American states remained united or not, whether they moved into the future or not. It was, in consequence, the depth of irony that after twenty highly successful and rewarding years of treachery, one single act of loyalty and patriotism should have plunged the rest of his life into ignominy.
27
THE WAR WITH RANDOLPH
ICAN DISTINCTLY TRACE the source of my persecutions to the celebrated John Randolph of Roanoke,” James Wilkinson wrote in his
