Madison and Jefferson (81 page)

This noteworthy statement signals the president’s comfort with a southern-directed lust for land. It exposes, as well, his readiness to employ U.S. power to take advantage of a fluid situation. Uniquely capturing Jefferson’s zealotry, these few sentences occupy the foreground as we unravel the events of 1807.
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There can be no mistake about it: Thomas Jefferson entertained grand expansionist plans, and James Madison was in favor of them all.
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Neither Jefferson nor Madison was opposed to what Burr was preparing for south of the border. What bothered them, and the president especially, was that Burr, only recently out of government, was already a step ahead. Jefferson, who never doubted Burr’s capabilities, feared that his rejected running mate was in a strong position to reap political gain from his independent efforts.

Recent history offered solid examples of filibusters waiting to happen, proving that Burr’s idea was not original. Other influential men had crossed the line from ordinary land speculation to assemble private armies and conduct foreign policy on their own. Virginia’s George Rogers Clark, the frontier fighter whom Jefferson had consistently supported, once sought French aid to oust the Spanish from Louisiana. During the Adams presidency Tennessee Republican William Blount, Andrew Jackson’s patron, approached the British in a bid to obtain the same result; he was removed from the U.S. Senate when word got out. Even Alexander Hamilton thought of leading troops into Mexico.

War would present opportunities to enlarge America’s borders. And filibustering was not illegal in a time of war. As long as Burr was in a wait-and-see mode, he was not guilty of treason or anything else. And no one really doubted that America would eventually, one way or another, oust the Spanish from the continent. From the perspective of Madison and Jefferson, the only question was the role of diplomacy in setting up the operation.
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Early in 1805 Burr met with General Wilkinson in Washington. Together they discussed the prospects for expansion. When Burr traveled to New Orleans not long afterward, he seeded the ground. He saw opportunities every step of the way and gained support from western politicians. In Nashville he met with a former congressional colleague, Andrew Jackson, a rough-hewn man of definite likes and dislikes who detested the pretentious, overfed Wilkinson but was drawn to Burr. Poised for action as major general of a division of militia, Jackson hoped for assurances that the administration would welcome a force of Tennesseans in the larger effort to oust the Spanish.

On Burr’s second trip west in the autumn of 1806, things suddenly changed. He began to raise eyebrows; rumors were fed to one newspaper after the next. Suggestions that he was forging a third party of disgruntled Federalists and Republicans blossomed into the new charge that he was
plotting treason. Suspicion led from there to exaggerated claims of a massive recruitment effort and an even larger army, whose object—Burr’s object—was nothing less than an empire to rule over. Wilkinson recognized that it was time to disassociate himself from Burr, to save his own skin.
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Jefferson decided to accept whatever General Wilkinson had to say about Burr. He needed Wilkinson to maintain a professional fighting force in the strategic Southwest, and to coordinate, if necessary, a larger campaign to seize all of Florida; he also needed Wilkinson to keep Burr at bay.

In the final two months of 1806 Washington’s
National Intelligencer
reprinted rumors of a “western” conspiracy. Its headline: “A
ARON
B
URR.
” “Two distinguished federalists,” the paper reported, “are parties to the contract for furnishing provisions on the waters of the Ohio.” The tension built: “Rumors have reached us from so many parts of the continent, respecting the transactions of Colonel Burr and others … calculated to excite much curiosity and interest.” Said the
Scioto Gazette
, in Ohio: Burr has “formed an Association for the purpose of making war against Spain.” And finally came a headline in a Massachusetts paper that committed a host of other newspapers to an unretractable position: “
BURR’S CONSPIRACY.
” The story below began: “We have hesitated to believe; because we thought that no man, possessing the cunning and intrigue of Burr, could be so far infatuated by a mad ambition, as to enterprize the seduction of a people from the rational government of their choice.” This remark was followed by a passage in Latin, taken from the
Aeneid
, that was meant to underscore Burr’s infatuation with personal gain: “
Quid non mortalia pectoral cogis! Auri sacra fumes!
” (To what lengths will man’s passion for gold not lead him?) “It is true!” the widely reprinted article asserted. “Burr has conspired to sever the western states from the Union, and join them with Louisiana; and by the conquest of Mexico, to establish a great Western Empire.” Words, in this case, meant more than actions; the absence of hard evidence almost did not matter.
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General Wilkinson did not like being identified as Burr’s main partner in a greedy filibuster. To save himself, he wrote directly to President Jefferson, swearing loyalty as he conveyed knowledge of Burr’s bold intentions. He went so far as to declare that the “arch-conspirator” threatened the security of New Orleans. Trusting in Wilkinson completely, Jefferson announced to the nation in January 1807 that the disreputable Burr was guilty of treason. All that remained was to capture him and put him on trial.
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Whether Burr’s design was in fact a quest to develop and populate western
land, a staging action in case the opportunity arose to seize undergoverned Spanish territory, or a conspiracy to foment a war with Spain, it was an outright conspiracy in the mind of the president. Madison appears to have fundamentally agreed with Jefferson’s assessment of the situation; he gave no one any contrary indication, though the written record is otherwise silent.

Captured in Mississippi Territory and brought east, Burr stood accused. He gathered a stellar defense team that included Luther Martin, who had been a thorn in Jefferson’s side as Justice Samuel Chase’s defense attorney. To make matters worse for the administration, the presiding judge at Burr’s Richmond trial was none other than the circuit-riding chief justice of the United States, John Marshall.

In charge from start to finish, Marshall defined treason as an overt act of military aggression, which would be difficult to prove in this case. Nonetheless the trial dragged on through the spring and summer months of 1807. No one the prosecution brought in to testify could do better than level accusations. Wilkinson was forced to admit that he had tampered with the encoded letter Burr had sent him, altering what it said to make Burr look guilty. General William Eaton, another man of inflated self-importance in whom Burr was alleged to have confided, claimed that Burr was not content to stop with a western empire—he aimed to lead his forces to Washington and overthrow the government! Eaton’s credibility was properly doubted, even by administration partisans.
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Then there was Andrew Jackson, who was subpoenaed from Nashville to testify. Jackson could see that Jefferson had been tainted by his connection to Wilkinson, and that Burr was being unfairly portrayed. The frontier general took to the courthouse steps to broadcast his disgust with the administration. It did his career no harm. At his trial, Burr spoke in his own defense, asking where the war was that he was supposed to have manufactured. As far as he could tell, it existed only in newsprint.

In the end Burr went free, though his public career was finished. The grand jury foreman, none other than Congressman John Randolph, called Wilkinson “the only man I ever saw who was from the bark to the very core a villain.” Luther Martin concluded the case for the defense with a fourteen-hour summation. William Wirt, a Maryland-born Virginia lawyer just beginning work on his Patrick Henry biography, was one of the lead attorneys for the prosecution; while eloquent, he did not present nearly so compelling a case as Martin. From Wirt’s perspective, the “not guilty” verdict was attributable to the chief justice and his narrow definition of treason.
“Marshall has stepped between Burr and death,” he wrote to his friend (and Jefferson’s nephew) Dabney Carr, himself a future judge.
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The president played an active role in the trial as it unfolded. He sent suggestions to lead prosecutor George Hay on how to secure a conviction. He authorized nearly $100,000 in federal funds to bring one hundred or more witnesses to Richmond. Jefferson even had hopes of prosecuting Luther Martin, whom he called a “federal [i.e., Federalist] bulldog.” When a rumor that Martin was aiding and abetting Burr came to Jefferson’s desk, he promptly bought into it.

As the case against his former vice president crumbled, Jefferson gave thought to whether Congress might take action to remove Chief Justice Marshall for twisting the law. His hatred for Marshall was intense—it might be said that Jefferson feared him. Whereas John Jay had considered the position of chief justice inert, Marshall was inclined to challenge executive authority. Allowing his pique to dictate his actions, Jefferson repeated the error of President Washington in the bullying of Edmund Randolph. Seeing political vulnerability through the lens of personal disloyalty caused both to overreact.

The seditious libel trial of Joseph Dennie took place around the same time, though it was a minor sideshow compared to Burr’s trial. Jefferson’s second inaugural, a speech that deliberately lacked specificity, had contained an implied threat: that the executive would go after those in the press who crossed the line from reasonable disagreement into depraved and harmful activity. The cause for the Dennie indictment was a single paragraph in an 1803 issue of the
Port Folio
, but it could have been any one of Dennie’s loose terms of abuse. “A democracy is scarcely tolerable,” he had written, predicting (though no one could possibly construe that he was fomenting) “civil war, desolation, and anarchy.”

The editor, like the vice president, was found not guilty. His prosecution came late anyway, as Dennie’s invective had mostly dried up by 1805. When he died in 1812, his monument would read, in part: “A wit sportive, not wanton.”
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One month into the Burr treason trial, even worse news arrived at the President’s House. The
Chesapeake
, a forty-gun American frigate bound for the Mediterranean, had come under fire a few hours after it sailed from the
port of Norfolk. The captain of a British vessel, the fifty-gun
Leopard
, was under orders to search the
Chesapeake
for deserters, and he blew holes in the American ship when it resisted. The British boarded, and a single deserter was taken off the ship, along with three American sailors who had been impressed into the Royal Navy—improperly taken off another U.S. vessel—some months earlier.

This outrage was as severe an insult to U.S. sovereignty as an American president could imagine. The American flag was meant to be insurance against impressment, both for U.S. citizens and for foreigners aboard an American ship. No international law stipulated otherwise. The
Carolina Gazette
hit the nail on the head when it described the “dogma of Britain” as a mockery of civilized life: “Once a subject always a subject” was ludicrous. How could a nation that called itself free say, in essence, that no man is free to emigrate?
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Jefferson’s reaction to the
Chesapeake
incident was immediate. As the boarding occurred off the Virginia shore, he urged the governor of his home state, William Cabell, to “prevent future insults.” Then on July 2, 1807, he and his cabinet issued a public proclamation ordering all armed British ships from American harbors. The statement reminded the world that ports within the United States had maintained, in times of Anglo-French war, a just neutrality, carrying on “with all the belligerents, their accustomed relations of friendship, hospitality & commercial intercourse.” This being the case, the
Leopard
had acted “without provocation” at Norfolk, hovering about with predatory purpose, scoffing at America’s generosity.

Newspapers exploded with calls for war to avenge the dishonor. The
National Intelligencer
likened the crisis to the immediate causes of the Revolution: “What we did in the weakness of infancy, it will be strange if we cannot repeat in the vigor of manhood.” Rumors circulated that Britain had declared war on America. Many residents of Virginia believed that the British had already invaded.

As unrelenting as Jefferson was in his mistrust of the British, the strongest lines in his July 2 proclamation belonged to Madison, who seems to have wished that the wording could have been made even stronger. His proposed draft contained the accusatory “Jeffersonian” phrase “lawless & bloody purpose” in characterizing the “uncontrouled abuses” and “injuries & irritations” perpetrated by the British. Madison and Jefferson recognized this as a moment when heightened security and bold diplomacy would be equally critical.
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Others sent supportive letters to the secretary of state, urging him to stand up to any and all insults. From Boston, Elbridge Gerry wrote: “The public indignation is universally excited.” It was Gerry whose presence in France during the XYZ Affair had helped to prevent a worse result than “quasi” war. “If redress … cannot be obtained,” he said now, “will not a state of warfare be preferable to such a state of national insult & degradation?” John G. Jackson, a western Virginia congressman who was married to Dolley Madison’s younger sister, brought unrelated imagery of military adventuring into his wide-ranging anti-British comments: “A tame submission to such outrages will be the signal for every species of insult until the national spirit, broken, sunk & degraded, will return with loathing & abhorrence from the Republican system we now so fondly cherish, & take refuge against such wrongs in a military despotism, where another Buonaparte or a Burr will give Law to the Republic.” The congressman was unremitting: “At no period has the Eyes of the Nation—of the World—been more anxiously looking for your decision.”
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