Secretary of State Madison and the Attorney General solicited the help of General Andrew Jackson to the same end in Tennessee. Wilkinson, in New Orleans, sent agents in search of information through Louisiana and Mississippi. This governmental dragnet brought results. Witnesses and depositions combined reached an impressive total of close to 150.
Whether they would all be heard was a different matter. They still had to pass an exacting test contrived by counsel for the defense, sufficient to convince the Chief Justice that the admission of their evidence was strictly within the letter of the law. Let the public make whatever deductions it pleased about the trial at Richmond, John Marshall did not intend to deviate one inch from what he considered to be the sacred duties of a judge in the execution of justice.
Chapter V
Colonel Burr in a letter to Theodosia complained: “The Democratic papers teem with abuse against me and my counsel, and even against the Chief Justice. Nothing is left undone or unsaid which can tend to prejudice the public mind, and produce a conviction without evidence.”
His complaint must have included the Richmond Enquirer whose editor, Thomas Ritchie, was coming to be recognized as one of the leading Republican editors of the nation. Ritchie had been born in Tappahannock, Virginia, when that town was a thriving port on the Rappahannock River. His father, Archibald Ritchie, was a Scottish merchant who was charged with being a Tory during the Revolutionary War. His mother was Mary Roane and through her he was related to the best families in that section. Archibald Ritchie died when Thomas was still young and the widowed mother put the lad to the study of law with her kinsman Spencer Roane, the rising lawyer and ardent Republican who, as has been mentioned, was believed to be Jefferson’s choice for Chief Justice if disaster should overtake John Marshall.
But Thomas did not like the law. He switched to medicine only to discover that he liked that even less. A spell of school teaching, followed by one of bad health, brought him to Richmond where he opened a small bookstore. Then, at the urging of Thomas Jefferson and his cousin Spencer Roane, he established there a newspaper supporting the Republican cause. The first issue of the bi-weekly Enquirer appeared on May 9, 1804. It was kept alive by party patronage in the rarefied atmosphere of Richmond where most of the prosperous people who could afford the luxury of a $5 per annum subscription were Federalists and subscribed to The Gazette.
Ritchie was by no means a party hack. If he thought the administration in Washington was at fault he said so. In fact, his occasional outbursts of independence provoked from that indefatigable party regular, William Duane of the Philadelphia Aurora, the charge of being “a wolf in sheep’s cloth.”
By 1807 Ritchie was firmly established in the editor’s chair and also in Richmond society to which his birth entitled him. In that year he married Isabella, daughter of Dr. William Foushee, first mayor of Richmond and one of the leading doctors. Isabella, before her career as mother ended, was to bear him twelve children, threatening the supremacy of Eliza Wickham who had a brood of seventeen.
Emaciated, sallow, long-nosed, thin-lipped, and unsmiling, Thomas Ritchie looked the part of a crusader. In his treatment of Burr in the columns of The Enquirer he was regular enough to have met the most exacting specifications of Duane. It is true that a few days after Colonel Burr’s arrival in Richmond The Enquirer piously declared: “It is difficult for us to distinguish all those cases in which we ought to speak from all those where we should be silent. Perhaps the editor of the National Intelligencer has nearly struck the proper line of discrimination: like him we shall abstain from all ‘impassioned representations’—and like him—we shall ‘unhesitatingly give all new facts as they offer themselves’ without any regard to the party whom they favor.”