"There is an infinite difference between floating down to New Orleans in your delightful barge, and jogging homeward a thousand miles on horseback. That interminable stretch of dreary wilderness from Natchez to Nashville, along the Indian trail, over sandy wastes, through pine woods, was intolerable. I was glad enough to reach Tennessee and old Kentucky. The people of Frankfort treated me very handsomely, as did those of Lexington. I paid my respects to the local idol, the young Virginia orator and rising lawyer, Henry Clay. That man is a prodigy—he will make his mark. I wish he were hand in hand with us, like Jackson, and ready to embark his fortune at our prompting."
"So do I. Clay is a rising power, notwithstanding his conceit. He will make a stir in Congress some of these days."
"That he will," said Burr, and proceeded with his story, at the close of which he exclaimed,
"I wish you could attend one of the meetings of the Mexican Society in New Orleans. Its object is to discuss means of emancipating Mexico. You should hear, as I have heard, the outspoken discontents of the creole population. They adore the institution of African slavery. They hate New England. They will not buy even a Yankee clock if it is adorned with an image of the Yankee Goddess of Liberty. But they are mine, every mother's son of them, and what is more important, every father's daughter of them. I took the city by storm, and the outlying provinces belong to us. We have a people and, virtually, an army. The moral conquest is complete. When the hour strikes for extending the borders of our conceded realm, you are the chosen Cæsar."
"Can we depend on David Clarke's co-operation?"
"Why not? His interests are bound up in ours. We have a host of stanch adherents, in all parts of the country and on the high sea, and in Europe, soldiers, statesmen, capitalists. I need not name them to you. All these are to be kept in mind and treated with due consideration. Our enterprise is in its preliminary stage. The shrewd work of enlisting recruits must be intrusted to carefully selected captains. I have the ways and means clearly in my head. Every detail must be worked out in practice."
"Burr, you are more circumspect than I gave you credit for being. There is always danger in the dark. Have you entertained the possibility of defection?"
"I have measured my ground, and calculated the curve of my leap. I shall not fall into an abyss, or dash myself upon a rock. If we fail to sever the Union, and do not succeed in the conquest of Mexico, I have so masked our designs as to make them appear in the guise of innocent land-speculations on the Wachita river."