Volume III Part 35 (1/2)
His fine ancestry now counted for nothing with the reigning politicians of either party. None of them cared that he came of a family which, on both sides, was among the worthiest in all the country.[755] His superb education went for naught. His brilliant services as one of the youngest Revolutionary officers were no longer considered--his heroism at Quebec, his resourcefulness on Putnam's staff, his valor at Monmouth, his daring and tireless efficiency at West Point and on the Westchester lines, were, to these men, as if no such record had ever been written.
[Ill.u.s.tration: AARON BURR]
Nor, with those then in power, did Burr's notable public services in civil life weigh so much as a feather in his behalf. They no longer remembered that only a few years earlier he had been the leader of his party in the National Senate, and that his appointment to the then critically important post of Minister to France had been urged by the unanimous caucus of his political a.s.sociates in Congress. None of the notable honors that admirers had a.s.serted to be his due, nor yet his effective work for his party, were now recalled. The years of provocation[756] which had led, in an age of dueling,[757] to a challenge of his remorseless personal, professional, and political enemy were now unconsidered in the hue and cry raised when his shot, instead of that of his foe, proved mortal.
Yet his spirit was not broken. His personal friends stood true; his strange charm was as potent as ever over most of those whom he met face to face; and throughout the country there were thousands who still admired and believed in Aaron Burr. Particularly in the West and in the South the general sentiment was cordial to him; many Western Senators were strongly attached to him; and most of his brother officers of the Revolution who had settled beyond the Alleghanies were his friends.[758]
Also, he was still in vigorous middle life, and though delicate of frame and slight of stature, was capable of greater physical exertion than most men of fewer years.
What now should the dethroned political leader do? Events answered that question for him, and, beckoned forward by an untimely ambition, he followed the path that ended amid dramatic scenes in Richmond, Virginia, where John Marshall presided over the Circuit Court of the United States.
Although at the time Jefferson had praised what he called Burr's ”honorable and decisive conduct”[759] during the Presidential contest in the House in February of 1801, he had never forgiven his a.s.sociate for having received the votes of the Federalists, nor for having missed, by the merest chance, election as Chief Magistrate.[760] Notwithstanding that Burr's course as Vice-President had won the admiration even of enemies,[761] his political fall was decreed from the moment he cast his vote on the Judiciary Bill in disregard of the rigid party discipline that Jefferson and the Republican leaders then exacted.[762]
Even before this, the constantly increasing frigidity of the President toward him, and the refusal of the Administration to recognize by appointment any one recommended by him for office in New York,[763] had made it plain to all that the most Burr could expect was Jefferson's pa.s.sive hostility. Under these circ.u.mstances, and soon after his judiciary vote, the spirited Vice-President committed another imprudence. He attended a banquet given by the Federalists in honor of Was.h.i.+ngton's birthday. There he proposed this impolitic toast: ”To the union of all honest men.” Everybody considered this a blow at Jefferson.
It was even more offensive to the Administration than his judiciary vote had been.[764]
From that moment all those peculiar weapons which politicians so well know how to use for the ruin of an opponent were employed for the destruction of Aaron Burr. Moreover, Jefferson had decided not only that Burr should not again be Vice-President, but that his bitterest enemy from his own State, George Clinton, should be the Republican candidate for that office; and, in view of Burr's strength and resourcefulness, this made necessary the latter's political annihilation.[765] ”Never in the history of the United States did so powerful a combination of rival politicians unite to break down a single man as that which arrayed itself against Burr.”[766]
Nevertheless, Burr, who ”was not a vindictive man,”[767] did not retaliate for a long time.[768] But at last to retrieve himself,[769]
he determined to appeal to the people--at whose hands he had never suffered defeat--and, in 1804, he became a candidate for the office of Governor of New York. The New York Federalists, now reduced to a little more than a strong faction, wished to support him, and were urged to do so by many Federalist leaders of other States. Undoubtedly Burr would have been elected but for the attacks of Hamilton.
At this period the idea of secession was stirring in the minds of the New England Federalist leaders. Such men as Timothy Pickering, Roger Griswold, Uriah Tracy, and James Hillhouse had even avowed separation from the Union to be desirable and certain; and talk of it was general.[770] All these men were warm and insistent in their support of Burr for Governor, and at least two of them, Pickering and Griswold, had a conference with him in New York while the campaign was in progress.
Plumer notes in his diary that during the winter of 1804, at a dinner given in Was.h.i.+ngton attended by himself, Pickering, Hillhouse, Burr, and other public men, Hillhouse ”unequivocally declared that ... the United States would soon form two distinct and separate governments.”[771] More than nine months before, certain of the most distinguished New England Federalists had gone to the extreme length of laying their object of national dismemberment before the British Minister, Anthony Merry, and had asked and received his promise to aid them in their project of secession.[772]
There was nothing new in the idea of dismembering the Union. Indeed, no one subject was more familiar to all parts of the country. Since before the adoption of the Const.i.tution, it had been rife in the settlements west of the Alleghanies.[773] The very year the National Government was organized under the Const.i.tution, the settlers beyond the Alleghanies were much inclined to withdraw from the Union because the Mississippi River had not been secured to them.[774] For many years this disunion sentiment grew in strength. When, however, the Louisiana Purchase gave the pioneers on the Ohio and the Mississippi a free water-way to the Gulf and the markets of the world, the Western secessionist tendency disappeared. But after the happy accident that bestowed upon us most of the great West as well as the mouth of the Mississippi, there was in the Eastern States a widely accepted opinion that this very fact made necessary the part.i.tioning of the Republic.
Even Jefferson, as late as 1803, did not think that outcome unlikely, and he was prepared to accept it with his blessing: ”If they see their interest in separation, why should we take sides with our Atlantic rather than our Mississippi descendants? It is the elder and the younger brother differing. G.o.d bless them both, and keep them in union, if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better.”[775]
Neither Spain nor Great Britain had ever given over the hope of dividing the young Republic and of acquiring for themselves portions of its territory. The Spanish especially had been active and unceasing in their intrigues to this end, their efforts being directed, of course, to the acquisition of the lands adjacent to them and bordering on the Mississippi and the Ohio.[776] In this work more than one American was in their pay. Chief of these Spanish agents was James Wilkinson, who had been a pensioner of Spain from 1787,[777] and so continued until at least 1807, the bribe money coming into his hands for several years after he had been placed in command of the armies of the United States.[778]
None of these plots influenced the pioneers to wish to become Spanish subjects; the most that they ever desired, even at the height of their dissatisfaction with the American Government, was independence from what they felt to be the domination of the East. In 1796 this feeling reached its climax in the Kentucky secession movement, one of its most active leaders being Wilkinson, who declared his purpose of becoming ”the Was.h.i.+ngton of the West.”[779]
By 1805, however, the allegiance of the pioneers to the Nation was as firm as that of any other part of the Republic. They had become exasperated to the point of violence against Spanish officials, Spanish soldiers, and the Spanish Government. They regarded the Spanish provinces of the Floridas and of Mexico as mere satrapies of a hated foreign autocracy; and this indeed was the case. Everywhere west of the Alleghanies the feeling was universal that these lands on the south and southwest, held in subjection by an ancient despotism, should be ”revolutionized” and ”liberated”; and this feeling was shared by great numbers of people of the Eastern States.
Moreover, that spirit of expansion--of taking and occupying the unused and misused lands upon our borders--which has been so marked through American history, was then burning fiercely in every Western breast. The depredations of the Spaniards had finally lashed almost to a frenzy the resentment which had for years been increasing in the States bordering upon the Mississippi. All were anxious to descend with fire and sword upon the offending Spaniards.
Indeed, all over the Nation the conviction was strong that war with Spain was inevitable. Even the ultra-pacific Jefferson was driven to this conclusion; and, in less than ten months after Aaron Burr ceased to be Vice-President, and while he was making his first journey through the West and Southwest, the President, in two Messages to Congress, scathingly arraigned Spanish misdeeds and all but avowed that a state of war actually existed.[780]
Such, in broad outline, was the general state of things when Aaron Burr, his political and personal fortunes wrecked, cast about for a place to go and for work to do. He could not return to his practice in New York; there his enemies were in absolute control and he was under indictment for having challenged Hamilton. The coroner's jury also returned an inquest of murder against Burr and two of his friends, and warrants for their arrest were issued. In New Jersey, too, an indictment for murder hung over him.[781]
Only in the fresh and undeveloped West did a new life and a new career seem possible. Many projects filled his mind--everything was possible in that inviting region beyond the mountains. He thought of forming a company to dig a ca.n.a.l around the falls of the Ohio and to build a bridge over that river, connecting Louisville with the Indiana sh.o.r.e. He considered settling lands in the vast dominions beyond the Mississippi which the Nation had newly acquired from Spain. A return to public life as Representative in Congress from Tennessee pa.s.sed through his mind.
But one plan in particular fitted the situation which the apparently certain war with Spain created. Nearly ten years earlier,[782] Hamilton had conceived the idea of the conquest of the Spanish possessions adjacent to us, and he had sought to enlist the Government in support of the project of Miranda to revolutionize Venezuela.[783] Aaron Burr had proposed the invasion and capture of the Floridas, Louisiana, and Mexico two years before Hamilton embraced the project,[784] and the desire to carry out the plan continued strong within him. Circ.u.mstances seemed to make the accomplishment of it feasible. At all events, a journey through the West would enlighten him, as well as make clearer the practicability of his other schemes.
Now occurred the most unfortunate and disgraceful incident of Burr's life. In order to get money for his Mexican adventure, Burr played upon the British Minister's hostile feelings toward America and, in doing so, used downright falsehood. Although it was unknown at the time and not out of keeping with the unwritten rules of the game called diplomacy as then played, and although it had no effect upon the thrilling events that brought Burr before Marshall, so inextricably has this shameful circ.u.mstance been woven into the story of the Burr conspiracy, that mention of it must be made. It was the first thoroughly dishonorable act of Burr's tempestuous career.[785]
Five months after Pickering, Griswold, and other New England Federalists had approached Anthony Merry with their plan to divide the Union, Burr prepared to follow their example. He first sounded that diplomat through a British officer, one Colonel Charles Williamson. The object of the New England Senators and Representatives had been to separate their own and other Northern States from the Union; the proposition that Williamson now made to the British Minister was that Burr might do the same thing for the Western States.[786] It was well known that the break-up of the Republic was expected and hoped for by the British Government, as well as by the Spaniards, and Williamson was not surprised when he found Merry as favorably disposed toward a scheme for separation of the States beyond the Alleghanies as he had been hospitable to the plan for the secession of New England.
Of the results of this conference Burr was advised; and when he had finished his preparations for his journey down the Ohio, he personally called upon Merry. This time a part of his real purpose was revealed; it was to secure funds.[787] Burr asked that half a million dollars be supplied him[788] for the revolutionizing of the Western States, but he did not tell of his dream about Mexico, for the realization of which the money was probably to be employed. In short, Burr lied; and in order to persuade Merry to secure for him financial aid he proposed to commit treason. Henry Adams declares that, so far as the proposal of treason was concerned, there was no difference between the moral delinquency of Pickering, Griswold, Hillhouse, and other Federalists and that of Aaron Burr.[789]
The eager and credulous British diplomat promised to do his best and sent Colonel Williamson on a special mission to London to induce Pitt's Ministry to make the investment.[790] It should be repeated that Burr's consultations with the shallow and easily deceived Merry were not known at the time. Indeed, they never were fully revealed until more than three quarters of a century afterward.[791] Moreover, it has been demonstrated that they had little or no bearing upon the adventure which Burr finally tried to carry out.[792] He was, as has been said, audaciously and dishonestly playing upon Merry's well-known hostility to this country in order to extract money from the British Treasury.[793]