Perkins hurried to the cabin of Theodore Brightwell, sheriff of the county, and the two men rode after Burr, overtaking him at the residence of Colonel Hinson, who was away from home and whose wife had prepared supper for the wanderer. Brightwell went inside while Perkins remained in the downpour watching the house from the bushes.
Burr so won the hearts of both hostess and sheriff that, instead of arresting him, the officer proposed to guide the escaping criminal on his way the next morning.[975] The drenched and shivering Perkins, feeling that all was not right inside the cabin, hastened by horse and canoe to Fort Stoddert and told Captain Edward P. Gaines of Burr's whereabouts. With a file of soldiers the captain and the lawyer set off to find and take the fugitive. They soon met him with the sheriff, who was telling Burr the roads to follow.
Exclusively upon the authority of Jefferson's Proclamation, Burr was arrested and confined in the fort. With quiet dignity, the "traitor" merely protested and asked to be delivered to the civil courts. His arrest was wholly illegal, he correctly said; let a judge and jury again pass on his conduct. But seizure and incarceration by military force, utterly without warrant of law, were a denial of fundamental rights—rights which could not be refused to the poorest citizen or the most abandoned criminal.[976]
Two weeks passed before Burr was sent northward. During this period all within the stockades became his friends. The brother of Captain Gaines fell ill and Burr, who among other accomplishments knew much about medicine, treated the sick man and cheered him with gay conversation. The soldiers liked Burr; the officers liked him; their wives liked him. Everybody yielded to his strange attractiveness.
Two weeks after Marshall discharged Bollmann and Swartwout at Washington, Burr was delivered by Captain Gaines to a guard of nine men organized by Perkins; and, preceded and followed by them, he began the thousand-mile journey to Washington. For days torrential rains fell; streams were swollen; the soil was a quagmire. For hundreds of miles the only road was an Indian trail; wolves filled the forest; savage Indians were all about.[977] At night the party, drenched and chilled, slept on the sodden earth. Burr never complained.
After ten days the first white settlements appeared. In two days more, South Carolina was reached. The cautious Perkins avoided the larger settlements, for Burr was popular in that State and his captor would run no risks of a rescue. As the prisoner and his convoy were passing through a village, a number of men were standing before a tavern. Burr suddenly threw himself from his horse and cried: "I am Aaron Burr, under military arrest, and claim the protection of the civil authorities."
Before any one could move, Perkins sprang to Burr's side, a pistol in each hand, and ordered him to remount. Burr refused; and the gigantic frontier lawyer lifted the slight, delicate prisoner in his hands, threw him into his saddle, and the sorry cavalcade rode on, guards now on either side, as well as before and behind their charge. Then, for the first and last time in his life, Burr lost his composure, but only for a moment; tears filled his eyes, but instantly recovering his self-possession, he finished the remainder of that harrowing trip as courteous, dignified, and serene as ever.[978]
At Fredericksburg, Virginia, Perkins received orders from the Government to take his prisoner to Richmond instead of to Washington. John Randolph describes the cavalcade: "Colonel Burr ... passed by my door the day before yesterday under a strong guard.... To guard against enquiry as much as possible he was accoutred in a shabby suit of homespun with an old white hat flopped over his face, the dress in which he was apprehended."[979]
In such fashion, when the candles were being lighted on the evening of Thursday, March 26, 1807, Aaron Burr was brought into the Virginia Capital, where, before a judge who could be neither frightened nor cajoled, he was to make final answer to the charge of treason.
Burr remained under military guard until the arrival of Marshall at Richmond. The Chief Justice at once wrote out,[980] signed, and issued a warrant by virtue of which the desperate yet composed prisoner was at last surrendered to the civil authorities, before whom he had so long demanded to be taken.