Meanwhile Humphrey Marshall and his friend Daveiss enjoyed the triumph they had won. In spite of silent opposition from the Republican leaders, Marshall drove the Kentucky Legislature into an inquiry as to the truth of the charge that Judge Sebastian was a Spanish pensioner. Sebastian instantly resigned. The committee took no notice of this admission of guilt, but summoned Judge Innis to testify. Very reluctantly Innis appeared before the committee and began his evidence, but broke down in the attempt, and admitted the truth of what had been alleged.[202] Before the close of the year Daveiss and Marshall drove Burr and Adair out of the State, forced Sebastian from the bench, humiliated Innis, and threw ridicule upon young Henry Clay and the other aggressive partisans of Jefferson, besides placing Jefferson himself and his Secretary of State in an attitude neither dignified nor creditable. Of all the persons connected with the story of Burr’s expedition, Daveiss and Marshall alone showed the capacity to conceive a plan of action and the courage to execute the plan they conceived; but Jefferson could not be expected to feel satisfaction with services of such a nature. A few months later he appointed another person to succeed Daveiss in the office of district-attorney.
CHAPTER XIII.
Samuel Swartwout and Peter V. Ogden, the young men whom Burr and Dayton charged with the duty of carrying despatches to Louisiana, crossed the Alleghanies in August and floated down the Ohio River to Louisville.[203] There they stopped to find Adair, for whom they brought letters from Burr. After some search Swartwout delivered the letters, and continued his journey. Adair never made known the contents of these papers; but they probably contained the same information as was conveyed in the despatches to Wilkinson which came in their company.
Supposing Wilkinson to be at St. Louis, the two young men bought horses and rode across the Indiana Territory to Kaskaskias; but finding that the General had gone down the Mississippi, they took boat and followed. At Natchez they learned that the object of their search had gone up the Red River. Swartwout was obliged to follow him; but Ogden went to New Orleans with despatches from Burr to his friends in that city.
Among the mysteries that still surround the conspiracy, the deepest covers Burr’s relations in New Orleans. That he had confederates in the city was proved not only by Ogden’s carrying letters, but also by Erick Bollman’s arrival by sea, as early as September 27, with a duplicate of Burr’s letter of July 29 to Wilkinson; and above all, by the significant disappearance of Burr’s letters carried by Ogden and Bollman to persons in New Orleans. The persons implicated proved their complicity by keeping Burr’s letters and his secret.
One of these correspondents was almost certainly Judge Prevost, Burr’s stepson, whom Jefferson had appointed District Judge for the Territory of Orleans. That Daniel Clark was another hardly admits of doubt. Swartwout assured Wilkinson of the fact;[204] but apart from this evidence, the same reasons which obliged Burr to confide in Wilkinson required him to confide in Clark. The receivers of the letters, whoever they were, hastened to make their contents known to every one whom they could trust. Immediately after the arrival of Bollman and Dayton about October 1, before any serious alarm had risen in Ohio, the town of New Orleans rang with rumors of Burr’s projects. The news excited more consternation than hope; for although the creoles had been bitter in complaints of Claiborne’s administration and of the despotism imposed upon them by Congress, they remembered their attempt to revolt in 1768, and were far from eager to risk their safety again. Nevertheless, the temper of the people was bad; and no one felt deeper anxiety as to the number of Burr’s adherents than Governor Claiborne himself.
Nearly three years had elapsed since Dec. 20, 1803, when the Spanish governor surrendered Louisiana to the United States, and the history of the Territory during that time presented an uninterrupted succession of bickerings. The government at Washington was largely responsible for its own unpopularity in the new Territory, its foreign and domestic policy seeming calculated to create ill-feeling, and after creating it, to keep it alive. The President began by appointing as Governor of Louisiana a man who had no peculiar fitness for the place. Claiborne, in contrast with men like Wilkinson, Burr, and Daniel Clark, rose to the level of a hero. He was honest, well-meaning, straightforward, and thoroughly patriotic; but these virtues were not enough to make him either feared or respected by the people over whom he was to exercise despotic powers; while Claiborne’s military colleague, Wilkinson, possessed fewer virtues and a feebler character. The French Prefect, Laussat, who remained for a time in New Orleans to protect French interests, wrote his Government April 8, 1804, an interesting account of the situation as seen by French eyes:[205]
“It was hardly possible that the government of the United States should have made a worse beginning, and that it should have sent two men (Messrs. Claiborne, governor, and Wilkinson, general) less fit to attract affection. The first, with estimable private qualities, has little capacity and much awkwardness, and is extremely beneath his place; the second, already long known here in a bad way, is a flighty, rattle-headed fellow, often drunk, who has committed a hundred impertinent follies. Neither the one nor the other understands a word of French or Spanish. They have on all occasions, and without delicacy, shocked the habits, the prejudices, the character of the population.”
Claiborne began his sway, assuming that the creoles were a kindly but ignorant and degraded people, who must be taught the blessings of American society. The creoles, who considered themselves to be more refined and civilized than the Americans who descended upon them from Kentucky and Tennessee, were not pleased that their language, blood, and customs should be systematically degraded, in defiance of the spirit in which the treaty of cession had been made. Their anger was not without an element of danger. England and France could safely defy public opinion and trample on prostrate races. Their empire rested on force, but that of Jefferson rested on consent; and if the people of New Orleans should rebel, they could not be conquered without trouble and expense, or without violating the free principles which Jefferson was supposed to represent.
The colonists in Louisiana had been for a century the spoiled children of France and Spain. Petted, protected, fed, paid, flattered, and given every liberty except the rights of self-government, they liked Spain[206] and loved France, but they did not love the English or the Americans; and their irritation was extreme when they saw Claiborne, who knew nothing of their society and law, abolish their language, establish American judges who knew only American law, while he himself sat as a court of last resort, without even an attorney to advise him as to the meaning of the Spanish law he administered. At the same time that as judge he could hang his subjects, as intendant he could tax them, and as governor he could shoot the disobedient. Even under the Spanish despotism, appeal might be made to Havana or Madrid; but no appeal lay from Claiborne’s judgment-seat.