Was he not to be excused if, with such impressive evidence of magic power over his fellow men, he was led to imagine that destiny still had great things in store for him?
Yet, for the moment, there were serious defects in his fortunes which called for immediate repair. He was out of political office. The indictments against him in New York and New Jersey made it impossible for him to return home to the practice of law which hitherto he had found lucrative. Always extravagant in his tastes, and chronically living beyond his means, he was now heavily in debt. Soon after the duel he had been obliged to sell Richmond Hill for $25,000 to meet his more pressing obligations. As one of his biographers says of him, he was at this point what is popularly described as “a ruined man.” Under these discouraging circumstances Burr turned his eyes to the West.
Chapter II
The United States census of 1800 showed a population of 5,308,483 persons, of whom one fifth were slaves. The bulk of it was in the states along the eastern seaboard; west of the Allegheny Mountains were fewer than 500,000 settlers, chiefly in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The mountains served as a rugged barrier cutting off the westerners almost completely from the East and giving them a sense of political as well as physical detachment.
The only means of communication overland were three crude highways largely limited to travel by horseback or by the great Conestoga wagons drawn by six horses which carried such commerce as there was between the two areas. One road led from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, another followed the line of the Potomac River through Maryland to the Monongahela, and a third ran through Virginia and crossed the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee.
Once the tributaries of the Mississippi River were reached river craft provided a more luxurious mode of travel and also transported freight. The staple products of the western country were floated downstream on flatboats to New Orleans to be sold there and shipped by sea. Sometimes their owners went along to market their goods in the thriving young cities of the East and returned home across country on horseback.
That was why Spanish control of the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans, involving refusal of the right to deposit goods there, had been so irritating to the people of the West. The westerners with considerable justification considered the easterners indifferent to their problem and felt they were getting precious little in return for the taxes they paid to the central government. During the period of the Confederation when the prospect of a solid, united nation was anything but sure, a separatist movement sprang up in Kentucky and Tennessee. Its object was an independent nation west of the Alleghenies under the protection of Spain, whose colonial officers encouraged the idea. Though the so-called “Spanish Plot” had the support of influential men, it was not accepted by the rank and file. The purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803, with the control of New Orleans, and the granting of statehood to Kentucky and Tennessee, served further to weaken the separatist urge.
Magnificent as the Purchase eventually proved to be, it had serious flaws. The original mission of Livingston and Monroe to France called for the acquisition of the Floridas. Yet the final settlement did not include East Florida and left the claim to West Florida in doubt. Equally vague, and therefore a cause for controversy, was the Texas boundary. These questions, of great moment to the South and West, were little understood or bothered about by the rest of the country. They did, however, give grave concern to President Jefferson. Acquisition of the Floridas became an obsession with him and, until the issue was settled, war with Spain was always an imminent possibility. The Spanish did not help ease the tension when they massed troops on the frontier. Meanwhile in Europe the Napoleonic wars were resumed and Spain, as an ally of France, returned to her irritating practice of seizing American merchant ships that were alleged to be carrying cargoes to Britain.
Thus it came about that in his message to the Ninth Congress in December, 1805, President Jefferson’s charges against Spain were so violent and his warning of retaliation so strong that many interpreted it as being virtually the introduction to a declaration of war. It was so played up by the Republican press throughout the country. This widespread belief in the imminence of armed conflict was to have an important bearing on the activities of Aaron Burr in the West. The general public did not know that the threats in the message were primarily for Spanish consumption and that in a secret communication Jefferson was proposing simultaneously an amicable settlement of the Floridas dispute through purchase.