Burr impressed Merry with the idea that West Florida was also to be taken within the scope of his scheme. “The overture which had been made to him at New Orleans from a person of the greatest influence in East and West Florida, and the information he had otherwise acquired respecting the state of those countries,” were among the reasons which he pressed upon the British government as motives for aiding the conspiracy with a naval force. England was then at war with Spain.
One more argument was pressed by Burr, for no one knew better than he the use to which New England might be put.
“He observed—what I readily conceive may happen—that when once Louisiana and the Western country became independent, the Eastern States will separate themselves immediately from the Southern; and that thus the immense power which is now risen up with so much rapidity in the western hemisphere will, by such a division, be rendered at once informidable.”
Whatever may have been Merry’s sympathies or wishes, he could do no more than report Burr’s conversation to Lord Mulgrave with as much approval as he dared give it. Meanwhile Burr was thrown into extreme embarrassment by the silence of Mulgrave. Burr’s report showed that the creoles in New Orleans, with Daniel Clark as their financial ally, were induced to countenance the conspiracy only because they believed it to be supported by England. Without that support, Burr could not depend on creole assistance. Had he been wise, he would have waited; and perhaps he might in the end have brought the British government to accept his terms. If Pitt intended to plunder American commerce and to kidnap American citizens, he must be prepared to do more; and Burr might calculate on seeing the British Tories placed by their own acts in a position where they could not afford to neglect his offers.
Burr stayed a week in Washington; and although the object of his Western journey was so notorious that even the newspapers talked about it, his reception at the White House and at the departments was as cordial as usual. About Dec. 1, 1805, he returned to Philadelphia, where he began the effort to raise from new sources the money which till then he hoped to provide by drafts on the British treasury. The conspirators were driven to extraordinary shifts. Burr undertook the task of drawing men like Blennerhassett into his toils, and induced Dayton to try an experiment, resembling the plot of a comic opera rather than the seriousness of historical drama.
Dec. 5, 1805, as Miranda was leaving New York to entrap Madison, three days after Burr had returned to Philadelphia from his unsatisfactory interview with Merry, the Marquis of Casa Yrujo, as yet innocent of conspiracy, and even flattering himself upon having restored friendly relations with the Government, received a secret visit at his house in Philadelphia from Jonathan Dayton, whom he had known at Washington as the Federalist senator from New Jersey. Dayton, in a mysterious manner, gave him to understand that the Spanish government would do well to pay thirty or forty thousand dollars for certain secrets; and finding the marquis disposed to listen, Dayton recited a curious tale.
“This secret,” said he,[163] “is known at the present moment to only three persons in this country. I am one of them; and I will tell you that toward the end of the last session and near the end of last March Colonel Burr had various very secret conferences with the British minister, to whom he proposed a plan not only for taking the Floridas, but also for effecting the separation and independence of the Western States,—a part of this plan being that the Floridas should be associated in this new federative republic; England to receive as the price of her services a decisive preference in matters of commerce and navigation, and to secure these advantages by means of a treaty to be made as soon as she should recognize this new republic. This plan obtained the approval of the British minister, who sent it and recommended it to his Court. Meanwhile Colonel Burr has been in New Orleans, in the Mississippi Territory, in the States of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio, to sound and prepare their minds for this revolution. In all these States he has found the most favorable disposition, not only for this emancipation, which the Western States evidently desire, but also for making an expedition against the kingdom of Mexico. This is an idea that occurred to us after sending the first plan to London; and having given greater extension to the project, Colonel Burr sent to London a despatch with his new ideas to Colonel Williamson,—an English officer who has been many years in this country, and whose return he expects within a month or six weeks. The first project was very well received by the English Cabinet, and more particularly by Mr. Dundas, or Lord Melville, who was the person charged with this correspondence; but as he had reason to fear dismission from office for causes well known through the debates of Parliament, this plan has suffered some delay; but Mr. Pitt has again turned his attention to it.”
On the strength of this information Dayton seriously proposed to terrify Yrujo and Don Carlos IV. into paying the expenses of Burr’s expedition. An idea so fantastic could have sprung from no mind except Burr’s; but, fantastic as it was, he pursued it obstinately, although by doing so he betrayed to Spain the followers whom he was striving to inveigle into an imaginary assault on Spanish empire. Dayton asserted that the revolution would begin on the appearance of the British squadron off the coast of West Florida in February or March, 1806; that to make this revolution more popular, after the Floridas were taken, the expedition against Mexico would be attempted; that they feared no opposition from a government so weak as the Federal; that the United States troops were all in the West, and that Colonel Burr had caused them to be sounded in regard to the expedition against Mexico; that they were all ready to follow him, and he did not doubt that there existed in them the same disposition to sustain the rights of the Western States, in which they lived, against the impotent forces of the Federal government; that Mexico was to be assailed, in co-operation with the English fleet, by troops to be disembarked at Tampico or thereabout; and that the revolutionized Spanish possessions would be made republics.
To reveal such a plan was to destroy its chance of success; and in thus presenting himself before the Spanish minister Dayton appeared as a traitor not only to the Union, but also to the conspirators with whom he was engaged. Such a character was not likely to create confidence. Yrujo instantly saw that Burr stood behind Dayton; that England could not have encouraged the conspiracy, for, had she done so, the conspirators would never come to beg a few thousand dollars from Spain; and that the Mexican scheme, if it ever existed, must have been already abandoned, or it would not have been revealed. Dismissing the ex-senator with civility and a promise to talk with him further, Yrujo wrote to his Government a long account of the interview. He pointed at once to Clark as the person through whom Burr drew his information about Mexico. Yrujo was perplexed only by Jefferson’s apparent blindness to the doings in the West. The marquis was a Spaniard; and for twenty years the people of the United States had talked of Spaniards with contempt. Even Jefferson freely assumed their faithlessness and paltriness; but surely if Yrujo had cared to concentrate in a few words his opinion of American political character, no American could have wondered if these few words, like a flash of lightning, left no living thing where they struck.
“I am sure,” he wrote to Cevallos, “that the Administration will not let itself be deceived by Colonel Burr’s wiles; but I know that the President, although penetrating and detesting as well as fearing him, and for this reason, not only invites him to his table, but only about five days ago had a secret conference with him which lasted more than two hours, and in which I am confident there was as little good faith on the one side as there was on the other.”