In the early twilight, the swollen waters of the Ohio River swept a wooden flatboat up to a landing on a small, tree-covered island. On the river’s east bank lay the western reaches of the state of Virginia; on the west, the shores of the state of Ohio, now, in the spring of 1805, barely two years old. The flatboat was much grander than the normal river craft that floated by or landed here. Indeed, its owner had commissioned its recent construction in Pittsburgh, and he himself described it as a “floating house, sixty feet by fourteen, containing dining room, kitchen with fireplace, and two bedrooms, roofed from stem to stern….”1
The flatboat belonged to Aaron Burr. With jet-black eyes, a silken tongue, and the refined dress to match the accoutrements of his vessel, Burr cast a larger shadow than his diminutive height suggested. For four years, he had been the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency, but once he had also been just one particular heartbeat away. Why the recent vice president of the United States came to make this journey down the Ohio River evidences just how tenuous the American union still was in 1805, and that the very last thing it should have come to contemplate was another war with Great Britain.
In the presidential election of 1800, there were as yet no strictly organized political tickets. Prior to the Twelfth Amendment, the Constitution merely ordained that the person receiving the highest number of electoral votes be declared president and the second highest, vice president. Party electors were supposed to withhold a vote or two from the agreed-upon vice presidential candidate, thus assuring the election of their presidential favorite.
Such informality didn’t work very well. In fact, so many Federalist electors withheld votes from John Adams’s running mate in 1796 that Republican Thomas Jefferson ended up with the second highest number of votes and the vice presidency. (Jefferson’s Republicans were the liberal predecessors of the Jefferson–Jackson Democrats and not the “Grand Old Party” of Abraham Lincoln.) To avoid such a result in 1800, Republican vice presidential candidate Aaron Burr obtained Jefferson’s assurance that no southern elector would drop a vote for Burr, but that Burr would arrange for a Republican elector from Rhode Island—supposedly a solid Jefferson state—to withhold one vote for Burr. That strategy backfired when the Federalists proceeded to win Rhode Island, and the remaining Republican electors cast the identical number of votes for president and vice president.
Thus in only the nation’s fourth presidential election, Thomas Jefferson handily defeated incumbent John Adams, but imagine Jefferson’s surprise when his vice presidential running mate received the same number of electoral votes as he, and the election was declared a tie. With Jefferson and Burr each receiving seventy-three votes, the election went to the House of Representatives, where the contest was suddenly not between Federalist and Republican, but between Republican and Republican.
Vice presidential candidate Burr professed allegiance to Jefferson, but made no outright disclaimer of the higher office. Indeed, there were plenty of whispers in Burr’s ear to suggest that the higher office was his for the taking. New England Federalists, who were rarely as unified in anything as they were in their opposition to Thomas Jefferson, actively courted Burr, vastly preferring the New York lawyer—Republican though he might be—to the Virginia planter.2
Not all Federalists felt that way, of course. Alexander Hamilton for one was appalled at the possibility of Burr becoming president. Four years before he would die by Burr’s dueling pistol, Hamilton wrote: “There is no doubt but that upon every virtuous and prudent calculation Jefferson is to be preferred. He is by far not so dangerous a man and he has pretensions to character.”3 Among other things, Hamilton probably feared that Burr might come to take over the Federalist Party that Hamilton clearly viewed as his own exclusive route to the presidency.
In the House of Representatives, the Federalists controlled six states, the Republicans eight. Two states were undecided. A simple majority of nine was needed to elect either Jefferson or Burr president. For a turbulent six weeks, the electoral balloting and the intra-party intrigue continued. Certain Federalists and Republicans friendly to Burr clung to the hope that they might be able to swing three states into the Federalist column and make Burr president. Finally, after some backroom concessions obtained from Jefferson through Alexander Hamilton, James A. Bayard of Delaware—the undecided state’s lone vote in the House of Representatives—voted for Jefferson to give him the required nine states. Aaron Burr would spend four years being a heartbeat away from the presidency, but he lost it by the single heartbeat of James Bayard.
Both Jefferson and Burr were quick to say that each bore no hard feelings toward the other, but more than a few Republicans noted how far Burr had been tempted to stray to the Federalists, and, likewise, the Federalists knew how close they had come to getting him. The result was that both sides came to view Burr as something of a leaf willing to be blown by whatever political winds offered the promise of greater glory. For Jefferson’s part, he would soon prove that he hadn’t meant that line about “no hard feelings” after all.4
So Aaron Burr became vice president of the United States in March 1801. By most accounts he served a distinguished term, taking seriously his charge to preside over the United States Senate and tarnishing his reputation only through his duel with Alexander Hamilton. Even by the standards of 1804, it is difficult to grasp that a sitting vice president of the United States should fight a duel, let alone kill his opponent, but in truth Thomas Jefferson had been determined to rid himself of Burr long before the public uproar over the duel.
On February 25, 1804, before the days of political conventions, congressional Republicans met to nominate Jefferson for a second term. New York Governor George Clinton received the lion’s share of vice presidential votes ahead of Kentuckian John Breckinridge and a handful of favorite sons. The incumbent vice president, Aaron Burr, received none. Four years before, Burr had been a single heartbeat away from the presidency; now he could not muster the support of a single heart that thought him worthy of the vice presidency. It was a humiliating repudiation.5
Burr’s first thought was to redeem himself by winning the governorship of New York. When he failed miserably in that attempt, there was little to do but finish out his term as vice president and head west. His direction was chosen with a great deal of forethought.
At the time, the ink was scarcely dry upon the Louisiana Purchase treaty. Louisiana was a vast chunk of territory—roughly the western drainage of the Mississippi River—that France had ceded to Spain in 1763 as part of its North American concessions following the Seven Years’ War. Four decades later, Napoleon managed to bully Spain into returning it, but Spanish administrators in Louisiana retaliated by revoking the “right of deposit” enjoyed by the fledgling United States. Negotiated by the Washington administration in 1795, the right of deposit permitted Americans to export farm products and other goods through New Orleans. When the right of deposit was revoked, it was tantamount to choking the commerce of all of the United States west of the Appalachians.
By 1803 Jefferson wanted Louisiana in part to resolve the right of deposit issue. Napoleon desperately needed American cash to fund his European conquests. Even if Napoleon sold Louisiana, a steady stream of clandestine reports seemed to suggest that he might be able to have his cake and eat it, too. The very acquisition of Louisiana by the United States might, wishful thinking suggested, prompt the split of the still tenuous American union between the New England and mid-Atlantic states more interested in European commerce, and the western states more in tune with Napoleon’s swaggering militarism. Then Louisiana and all of the Mississippi Valley might be persuaded to become a French ally. With fifteen million American dollars in his vaults, Napoleon might still be able to retain effective control of Louisiana. Now there was a touch of Napoleonic optimism of the sort that would find him at the gates of Moscow a decade hence!6
In this early period of American history, the idea of states seceding from the Union was not nearly as cataclysmic as it would be deemed two generations later. Indeed, people in all parts of the country maintained an intense, first-line loyalty to their respective home states. As early as 1792, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson warned President George Washington that southern states might secede in opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s national banking system. And even as the Senate debated the ratification of the Louisiana Purchase, Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky threatened that if the treaty was rejected, “the western states would immediately secede and form a separate country.”7
While some hailed Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana a diplomatic masterpiece, others argued that the United States should simply have seized the territory over the right of deposit issue. There were others who were convinced that no matter the present transaction, should Napoleon be victorious in Europe, the United States would be called upon to defend the new acquisition from his rapacious territorial appetite. But when Jefferson dispatched 450 troops under the command of Brigadier General James Wilkinson to occupy New Orleans in the wake of the purchase, it was not out of fear of the French, but rather that the Spanish who still controlled the city might resist. Nonetheless, Wilkinson and newly appointed Governor William Claiborne took possession of the Crescent City without incident on December 20, 1803.8
James Wilkinson was either the most despicable scoundrel in American history or the victim of the worst press ever. Most accounts support the former. Wilkinson had known Aaron Burr for more than a quarter of a century, ever since their paths crossed as young officers serving under Benedict Arnold during his ill-fated 1775 attack on Quebec during the opening round of the American Revolution. Two years later as a deputy adjutant general, Wilkinson helped to draft the terms of surrender for Burgoyne’s British army at Saratoga—a fact that Wilkinson was always quick to relate.
Despite his long tenure in the United States Army, however, Wilkinson took an oath of allegiance to Spain as early as 1787. To the Spanish, he was known as “Agent 13.” Such duplicity aside, by 1792 Wilkinson was a brigadier general, and the following year commanded a wing of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s army at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. When Wayne died in 1796, James Wilkinson was left as the ranking general in the U.S. Army, a position he would occupy for the next fifteen years.
But Wilkinson was seldom happy. In May 1802 Wilkinson wrote Aaron Burr of his disillusionment and bitterness over lack of congressional support for the military in general and machinations with his rank and salary in particular. Small wonder Wilkinson was disposed to line his pockets with Spanish gold. Burr may not have known of that, but he certainly knew Wilkinson to be disgruntled by the actions of eastern politicians while envisioning himself as the guardian of the young nation’s frontier.9
Another to whom Wilkinson complained was Alexander Hamilton. Wilkinson assured Hamilton that he had explored “with military eyes…every critical pass, every direct route, & every devious way between the Mexican Gulph [sic] & the Tennessee River.” Wilkinson intimated that he was tired of President Jefferson’s pacifism and that to wear his sword “without active service is becoming disreputable.”10 Despite such criticisms, Wilkinson somehow managed to remain Jefferson’s favorite solider. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he wrote Jefferson lengthy letters filled with descriptions of flora and fauna.
Over the objections of Secretary of War James McHenry, who would soon have a fort near Baltimore named after him, Hamilton had previously recommended Wilkinson’s promotion to major general. In doing so, Hamilton urged McHenry that “we ought certainly to look to the possession of the Floridas and Louisiana—and we ought to squint at South America.”11
Wilkinson had scarcely settled into New Orleans when he had a series of late-night conversations with Vincente Folch, the governor of Spanish West Florida. Agent 13 gave the Spaniard helpful suggestions about how to keep the Americans out of the Floridas and lessen American influence in newly acquired Louisiana. Shortly afterward, Wilkinson—with his most recent Spanish retainer payment jingling in his pockets—set out on a trip back east.12
On May 23, 1804, in the wake of his repudiation as vice president and would-be governor of New York, Aaron Burr received a late night caller, who made a point that no one should know of his visit. Never mind the fact that Burr and his secretive guest were old friends. With Burr’s political power apparently destroyed, what could he and James Wilkinson possibly have to talk about?
No record remains of their conversation. Subsequent events, however, suggest that the man who had just told the Spanish how to keep American influence at bay in the Louisiana Territory was now on Aaron Burr’s doorstep suggesting to the disgruntled politico a way to steal an empire away from both American and Spanish influences. Louisiana also meant Mexico and the entire Southwest, and Wilkinson had with him maps of Texas and the Spanish Southwest.13
Because he was a man determined to be on the winning side at all costs of honor, Wilkinson had also written to Alexander Hamilton a few weeks before his clandestine meeting with Burr. The “destinies of Spain” in the entire Southwest, Wilkinson assured Hamilton, were in “the hands of the U.S.”14 Several months later, Hamilton was dead, the consequence of a bullet fired by Aaron Burr in the culmination of a quarter of a century of political rivalry. Hamilton’s friends demanded a criminal indictment. Burr kept a low profile, but he was not without a plan.
On August 6, 1804, the British ambassador to the United States, Anthony Merry, sent a report of an astonishing communication to the British foreign secretary. “I have just received an offer from Mr. Burr the actual vice president of the United States (which Situation he is about to resign),” wrote Merry, “to lend his assistance to His Majesty’s Government in any Manner in which they may think fit to employ him, particularly in endeavouring to effect a Separation of the Western Part of the United States from that which lies between the Atlantick [sic] and the Mountains, in it’s [sic] whole Extent.”15
Meanwhile, the rightful owner of that territory appointed General James Wilkinson—who had suggested to anyone who would listen or grease his palm with gold that all of Louisiana was ripe for the picking—governor of Upper Louisiana. Significantly, as he moved upriver to St. Louis and assumed his gubernatorial duties, Wilkinson continued to hold his military rank. Despite criticisms in Congress that civil and military authority should not repose in the same person, the general/governor would be waiting for Aaron Burr to pay a return visit.
Such was the background to the journey that found Aaron Burr touching shore at the landing on Blennerhassett Island in the spring of 1805. If Burr was a particularly distinguished visitor to the island, his host and hostess were themselves rather extraordinary. Harman Blennerhassett traced his roots to English nobility. His ancestors immigrated to Ireland during the fourteenth century, and Harman was born there on October 8, 1764, or perhaps 1765, the youngest of three sons and six daughters. “My father and mother,” Harman later wrote, “were never agreed as to which year I was born.”16 As the third son, he chose law as his profession, but the death of his father and two older brothers soon made him heir to a considerable fortune.
In 1796, while visiting Captain Robert Agnew, the lieutenant governor of the Isle of Man, Blennerhassett was dispatched aboard to escort Agnew’s daughter home from school. He was thirty-one, tall, learned, but somewhat awkward. Margaret Agnew was a captivatingly beautiful eighteen. She, too, was tall. With blue eyes and auburn hair, she was a skilled horsewoman and spoke and wrote both French and Italian. Enough said. Blennerhassett cast aside all notion of his fiduciary role and persuaded her to marry him on the spot. There was only one problem: she was also his niece. Upon their return to the Isle of Man, the reception was less than cordial, and Blennerhassett promptly sold his estate in Ireland for a reported $160,000—then a considerable sum—and sailed for New York with his elegant bride, arriving there on August 1, 1796.17
The newlyweds spent some time first in New York and then in Philadelphia, but soon headed west across the Alleghenies. They found their way via keelboat down the Ohio to Marietta, then the gateway to much of the Northwest Territory. From the heights above Marietta, Blennerhassett discovered an island in the Ohio River that at once boasted both the lushness of Ireland and a regal setting from which to command an empire. In March 1797 he purchased two hundred acres on the island and was soon ensconced there with Margaret, who quickly bore him three children. By the time of Burr’s arrival, the centerpiece of Blennerhassett Island was a fifty-four by thirty-eight-foot mansion with two thirteen-foot-wide and thirty-seven-foot-long porticos that connected to symmetrical wings. Perhaps Burr mused that not even Thomas Jefferson’s executive mansion in Washington City had such fine appendages as yet.18
On this spring evening, Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett greeted their guest warmly. While Burr was an anathema to many easterners who still mourned the loss of Alexander Hamilton, here in the West men viewed such matters as dueling quite differently. Burr was treated as the celebrity he certainly was. Once again, there is no complete record of the conversations that took place that evening, but subsequent events suggest that Burr appealed to Blennerhassett’s ego as well as his pocketbook.
Burr soon continued down the Ohio bound for New Orleans, but he called again at Blennerhassett Island on his return upriver. Afterward Blennerhassett wrote Burr looking for money in exchange for a sale or lease of his island. “In either way, if I could sell or lease the place, I would move forward with a firmer confidence in any undertaking which your sagacity might open to profit and fame,” suggested Blennerhassett. “Having thus advised you of my desire and motives to pursue a change of life, to engage in any thing which may suit my circumstances, I hope, sir, you will not regard it indelicate in me to observe to you how highly I should be honored in being associated with you in any contemplated enterprise you would permit me to participate in.”19
That desired association almost left Blennerhassett high indeed—swinging high from the end of a rope. Blennerhassett would later testify that he had no clear understanding of what venture Burr had in mind, but he nonetheless agreed to assist Burr in the construction of certain boats and to permit a company of men to gather on Blennerhassett Island.
Another stop Burr made in May 1805 and again in August upon his return from New Orleans was with Andrew and Rachel Jackson in Nashville. The Jacksons welcomed Burr as a man of the West. Jackson himself had fought his share of duels, and he could well relate with talk of driving the Spanish from not only the Floridas but also Texas. Jackson viewed such talk as just good American boosterism—the sort of thing that would come to be called “manifest destiny.” If Jackson saw Burr’s dark side and suspected his true motives, he gave no inkling of it until November 10, 1806, an uncomfortable week or so after Jackson, too, had accepted money from Burr for the construction of two boats.
On that date Captain John A. Fort arrived in Nashville from New Orleans and stayed with the Jacksons. Over the course of the evening—apparently thinking Jackson more of the insider than he was—Fort went on at some length about Burr’s plans to seize New Orleans and make it the gateway to a great southwestern empire. Suddenly disturbed, Jackson sent a series of letters, including one to President Jefferson, suggesting that something was amiss along the Mississippi. Jefferson at first was confused by Jackson’s missive. Was the belligerent frontiersman merely suggesting a war with Spain, or was there in fact something treasonable behind Burr’s actions?20
Initially Burr was arrested and arraigned before a grand jury in Frankfort, Kentucky, on charges of raising troops for illegal purposes. Burr’s lawyer was a young up-and-comer named Henry Clay. Finding that “no violent disturbance of the Public Tranquility or breach of the laws” had occurred, the grand jury dismissed the charges. Nonetheless, Jackson wrote Burr of his suspicions, and Burr hastened to Nashville to reassure Jackson. Whatever he said, it must have mollified Jackson, because on December 22, 1806, Burr left Nashville with the two boats he had purchased from Jackson and floated down the Cumberland, planning to rendezvous with the boats and men coming from Blennerhassett Island.21
Scarcely had Burr disappeared downstream, however, than a presidential proclamation reached Nashville announcing that President Jefferson believed a vast military conspiracy was under way in the West and calling for the arrest of all those involved, principally his former vice president. Jefferson was at least partly correct, of course, but the man who had urged him to take such action and the man to whom Jefferson now turned to save the Union was none other than James Wilkinson.
Much has been written about Wilkinson’s true motives. His detractors far outnumber his supporters. Why he chose to double-cross Burr, when Wilkinson himself had first sung the siren’s song of empire in Burr’s willing ear, is debatable, but in no small measure it was motivated by Wilkinson’s desire always to be on the winning side. Perhaps he saw the futility of a handful of men in flatboats stealing an empire. Undoubtedly he bemoaned the potential loss of his regular Spanish retainer. Going to great pains to cover his own conspiratorial tracks, Wilkinson wrote a subordinate: “By letters found here, I perceive the plot thickens; yet all but those concerned sleep profoundly. My God! What a situation has our country reached.”22
The upshot was that Aaron Burr was arrested again and taken to Richmond, Virginia, to stand trial for treason. He was acquitted only because Chief Justice John Marshall chose to preside over the trial himself and narrowly define treason under the Constitution as requiring an overt act of war. Marshall had political debts to Burr, and it was not his most shining moment as a jurist. General Wilkinson was a star witness for the government and played the self-righteous defender of America’s frontier. Agent 13’s reputation emerged from the trial as muddled as ever.23
While Burr was on trial, Harman Blennerhassett spent fifty-three days in a Richmond jail awaiting his own fate and ruing the day that he and Margaret had welcomed such a wily guest to Blennerhassett Island. With Burr’s acquittal, all charges were dropped against Blennerhassett, but his beloved mansion overlooking the Ohio River had been overrun and damaged by local militia in the wake of his arrest.24
Meanwhile, Andrew Jackson, who had himself come uncomfortably close to Burr’s web, wrote a friend: “I am more convinced than ever that treason never was intended by Burr, but if ever it was you know my wishes that he may be hung.”25
So Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley still belonged to the United States. The fledgling American union remained intact, but the plotting of a disgruntled politician and an unscrupulous general had shown how tenuous it was. Within a short time, growing pains along its entire border from British Canada to Spanish Florida, as well as on the high seas, would push the country into war. When that war came, Aaron Burr had faded into the shadows, but many of the others who had played a role in the machinations of what came to be called the “Burr Conspiracy” would be center stage, including Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and the nefarious General Wilkinson.