In July, 1804, Aaron Burr, Vice-President, murdered Alexander Hamilton at Hoboken. Some biographers have attempted, since the death of the future exile and fugitive from justice, to lighten the heavy burden which he carried for thirty-three years afterwards, but in vain. The public rarely reverses its first verdict. They can seldom be made to believe that its first look at the piece was on the wrong side, and no new napping or glossing will convince it that the other is the right side.
The Presidency took such a fancy to Mr. Jefferson that, at his re-election, in 1804, he received 162 out of 176 votes cast; C. C. Pinckney, Esquire, of South Carolina getting the other 14. South Carolina then had the pleasant little conceit of voting for herself,—a harmless pastime that kept up her peculiar idea of resistance to Federal subjugation, and made a variety for the tellers in counting the contents of the electoral urn.
During 1805 Mr. Eaton, the American consul at Tunis, made an agreeable arrangement with Hamet Caramelli, the legitimate but exiled Bashaw of Tripoli, for his restoration to his seat, badly filled by his brother; and to carry out the plan, he started from Alexandria, in Egypt, in company with the sable Hamet, seventy American seamen and four hundred and thirty Arabs. After traversing a thousand miles of desert sands, he fought two severe battles, took Derne, the capital city of the chief province of Tripoli, and would have deposed the cruel reigning Bashaw, and opened the prison doors shut on hundreds of innocent Christian captives,—Eaton’s principal object in the romantic expedition,—but for a hasty, jealous, and disreputable treaty got up between Tobias Lear, Consul-General of the United States, and the Bey, whereby we agreed to pay the crowned bandit $60,000 in silver, instead of in leaden pieces, for the ransom of our sailors enmeshed, like flies, in the old spider’s web.
The nation never liked that play of Lear. They always thought of this its principal act, with the Earl of Kent:—
“There is division,
Although as yet the face of it be covered
With mutual cunning ’twixt Albany and Cornwall.”
Had these successive and armed protests by America against the Barbary habit of enslaving white Christian captives, taken in war, been properly seconded by the European powers, the dusk Mussulman of Northern Africa would have been then converted from the old Roman practices to which they willingly succeeded,—practices which the author of Don Quixote, himself an Algerine captive for five years, had punctured with his sharp quill over two centuries before, and which Lord Exmouth, with a British fleet, so riddled with shotted logic, in 1816, as to silence forever.
While the play of Lear was so badly acted on the shores of the Mediterranean, Michigan, toddling up from between the lake coasts that bordered her double peninsula, left her ancient name of Wayne County and the protecting hand of Indiana, and assumed an independent territorial status. Her lymphatic temperament enabled her to suck up through her many aquatic ducts an arterial circulation which helped her to stand pretty successfully the dry-cuppings of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. In straits often she has worked her way with moderate success through her Superior Lakes and water-courses to the open paths of seaboard trade. The pictured rocks of her great northern lake illustrate in lithography, rarely copied, some traits which she shares with no others. Fortunately for her future independence, the intervention of Lake Michigan prevents her territory from being laid out in city lots by Chicago.
The American Cain, restless and uneasy, haunted by the pale ghost of Hoboken, set on foot in 1806 an expedition designed either to slice off a piece of American territory west of the Alleghanies, and to give it as a morceau to Aaron the First, to be crowned at New Orleans, his future capital; or to rid Mexico of a part of her troublesome northern possessions and to establish over it the dynasty of the Burrs. Tried at Richmond, Virginia, in 1807, before Chief Justice Marshall, he had the honor of being enclosed in the superb amber vase of Wirt’s rhetoric for immortal preservation, but the misfortune to be dismissed on insufficient proof to the chained companionship of the dreaded ghost.