What none of them seems to have grasped was the obvious impropriety of the judge who was to preside at the trial appearing as a guest at a dinner given by the leading lawyer for the defense at which the defendant also was a guest!
The significance of the incident, however, was not lost on Editor Ritchie. The story of the dinner was soon public property. There appears to have been no attempt to conceal it. So for the issue of The Enquirer of Friday morning, April 10, Mr. Ritchie did not have to rack his brains to find an idea suitable for his acid pen. This issue contained an article signed “A Stranger from the Country.” It did not require a gift of clairvoyance to perceive that the “Stranger” was none other than Mr. Ritchie himself.
Said the Stranger: “In the Argus of the 7th it is stated, and the fact is now too notorious to be doubted, that the Chief Justice has dined with Aaron Burr at Mr. Wickham’s, since he himself solemnly decided that there was probable cause to believe Burr guilty of a high misdemeanor against his country.”
The editor first directed his attack at Mr. Wickham. He alluded to the old charge of Mr. Wickham having been a Tory in the Revolutionary War, indifferent to the fact that the same charge had been made against his own father. The people of Virginia, observed Mr. Ritchie, had generously forgiven that error of his youth. But Mr. Wickham “should modestly have refrained from recalling it to our recollection by entertaining a suspected traitor to the Union as his guest, a report so defamatory to his own fame.”
Having thus disposed of Mr. Wickham, the editor dipped his quill in acid and set to work on Judge Marshall. “I have never,” he confessed, “had any the least confidence in the political principles of the Chief Justice. I have never discovered in his public (for I am ignorant of his private) character, any of that noble candor which his friends have made the theme of such extravagant eulogium. I cannot discern in him, for my soul, those splendid and even Godlike talents, which many of all parties ascribe to him, his book certainly displays none such.” The allusion was to Judge Marshall’s recently published Life of Washington.
The Stranger continued: “But I have always been informed, and until now have believed, that he was a man of excellent judgment, most consummate prudence, and of a deportment highly decorous and dignified. I took his merits upon trust and bountifully gave him credit for good qualities I find he does not possess.” Mr. Ritchie now shook an accusing finger at Judge Marshall. “Let me inform the conscience of the Chief Justice that the public do not view his dining with Burr as a circumstance as trivial as he himself may incline to consider it.... We regard such conduct as a willful prostration of the dignity of his own character, and a wanton insult he might have spared his country.”
The writer then asked several questions that were on the tongues of many Richmonders and which for years after the event were to provide a subject for popular speculation. “I have searched in vain in my own mind for some apology for conduct so grossly indecent.... Was the Chief Justice ignorant that Burr was to be of the party to which Wickham invited him? If so, what are we to think of Mr. Wickham’s delicacy toward his friend? If so, why did not the judge leave the house as soon as he discovered the indignity imposed upon him?”
Then came the peroration: “Has the Chief Justice forgotten or neglected the maxim which is on the mouth of every tyro of the law—that the administrator of justice should not only be pure but unsuspected?”
The editor was not yet through with the Chief Justice. The incident continued to be “news” around the city, for in the issue of The Enquirer of Tuesday, April 28, Ritchie returned to the subject. This time his comments were contained in a column headed “Extract from a letter written by a resident of Richmond Hill to his friend in the country.” The Resident said he had been informed that Judge Marshall had been apprised of the invitation to Colonel Burr. But, commented the Resident, that could not have deprived him of his faculty of locomotion “unless he had been touched by the transforming wand of Circe.” Richmond was full of witty classicists. The reference to Circe’s wand, which turned men into swine, and its application to the magical effect of Mr. Wickham’s dinner on the Chief Justice could not have been lost on them.
“But,” continued the Resident of Richmond Hill, “perhaps the imagination of the judge was stronger than his appetite, and he had not fortitude enough to tear himself away from the prospect before him. In this the judge must pardon me if I am reminded of one of Goldsmith’s dishes of tongue with a small garnish of brains. Many judges have been condemned for the errors of the heart and the head, but I hope, dear F., that the list is not enlarged by errors of the appetite.”