A Wilderness So Immense (51 page)

By the end of January Senator Plumer had written some four hundred letters rallying his friends to the separatist banner, and he was working closely with Pickering as well as Connecticut senators Uriah Tracy and James Hillhouse and congressmen Roger Griswold and Calvin Goddard. “My hopes,” Plumer told his friends, “rest on the union of New England.”
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Another key participant in the separatist reaction to the Louisiana Purchase was the distinguished jurist Tapping Reeve, who had tutored Aaron Burr after his graduation at Princeton and married Burr’s sister after leaving the Princeton faculty to practice law. Now settled in Litchfield, Connecticut, where he had established the first law school in the United States, the sixty-year-old Reeve perhaps made the disgruntled Federalists’ first informal approach to the mercurial Democratic-Republican vice president, Burr.
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The New Englanders agonized over their doubts about Burr’s character—“his spirit of ambition and revenge”—but an effective northern confederacy needed the commercial State of New York, where the vice president was contemplating a run for the governorship. Although the party of the rich and the wise and the good had no hope of electing a Federalist governor, factional rivalries among New York Republicans gave them leverage at the polls “if Colonel Burr is elevated in New York to the office of Governor by the votes of Federalism.” Congressman Roger Griswold outlined the pros and cons of this tactic in a long letter to Connecticut congressman Oliver Wolcott. He admitted that

“As unpleasant as the thing may be,” Griswold concluded, supporting “the election of Colonel Burr [w]as the only hope … of rallying in defence of New England.”
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Griswold had met Burr in December at the private dinner at which Senators Pickering, Hillhouse, Plumer, and Tracy broached their northern confederacy plan to the vice president. “Mr. Hillhouse unequivocally declared that it was his opinion that the United States would soon form two distinct and separate governments,” Plumer recorded in his diary. “On this subject Mr. Burr conversed very freely,” creating the impression
“that he not only thought
such an event would take place
—
but that it was necessary it should.
” Later that evening, as he analyzed Burr’s “every sentiment and even expression,” Senator Plumer had doubts about the vice president’s candor. Burr “possessed the talent of making an impression of an opinion … without explicitly stating or necessarily giving his sentiments,” Plumer realized. “In every thing he said or did, he had a design—and perhaps no man’s language was ever so apparently explicit, and at the same time so covert and indefinite.” Since Congress was about to adjourn, Griswold and Burr agreed to meet in New York on Wednesday, April 4—about three weeks prior to the gubernatorial election.
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Although Griswold and Pickering’s group promoted Burr’s candidacy in New York, they were opposed by the formidable voice of Alexander Hamilton. Early in February, when the state’s Federalist leaders met in Albany for a strategy session, Hamilton denounced Burr as “a man of irregular and insatiable ambition” whose “elevation by the aid of federalists” would only “give him fair play to disorganize New England” by joining forces with the separatists to become “chief of the Northern portion” of the nation. And again in April, at a private Federalist meeting in New York City, Hamilton warned his compatriots that the New Engenders supporting Burr contended “that a dismemberment of the Union is expedient.”
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As the election drew near, Burr was optimistic and the New England Federalists began planning for an autumn meeting—a November convention in Boston. But the New York election was becoming unusually mean-spirited. With ten days to go the
New York City Commercial Advertiser
quoted Burr’s opponent, New York’s chief justice, Morgan Lewis, to the effect that “had he known how the election would have been conducted” he would have let the government go to hell rather than be a candidate. As yet unnoticed in the metropolis, however, were two angry letters printed in the pages of the
Albany Evening Post
and the
Albany Register
describing Hamilton’s warnings about the dangers of Aaron Burr.
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The balloting, expected to be close, was spread over five days. Aaron Burr carried Manhattan by a margin of one hundred votes, but by Monday, April 30—the first anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty—upstate election returns buried Burr’s political career in a landslide. In the previous gubernatorial election, “Governor [George] Clinton, the most popular man in the state,” one editor crowed, “had a majority of 3,945 only.” By Saturday, May 5, everyone knew that Morgan Lewis had crushed Aaron Burr by 30,829 votes to 22,139—a margin of almost nine thousand. “So much for Burrism and Federalism in 1804!”
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Burr was humiliated. And then someone sent Burr a couple of week-old newspaper clippings. The first—published in the
Albany Evening Post
—was the complete text of a private letter written by Dr. Charles Cooper about Hamilton’s comments at a private dinner after the Federalist meeting in Albany back in February. Hamilton “has come out decidedly against Burr,” Cooper had written, “indeed when he was here he spoke of him as a dangerous man [who] ought not to be trusted.” The second clipping was worse. Angered that Burr supporters had published his letter, and outraged when they accused him of exaggerating Hamilton’s comments, Cooper had fired off a letter in defense of his veracity that found its way into the
Albany Register
on April 24. The good doctor protested that he had exercised restraint in his description of Hamilton’s comments, “for really sir, I could detail to you a still more despicable opinion which Gen. Hamilton has expressed of Mr. Burr.” The second clipping—with its reference to Hamilton’s despicable opinion—was the one that Burr enclosed with a note demanding from Hamilton “a prompt and unqualified acknowledgment or denial” of his reported remarks. The note was the first step toward a duel.
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Burr regarded Hamilton’s response—“that I could not, without manifest impropriety, make the avowal or disavowal which you seem to think necessary”—as a further insult. Although Hamilton claimed that nothing he had said “exceed[ed] the limits justifiable among political opponents,” Burr disagreed. More angry notes were exchanged until the date of their fateful “interview” was set for Wednesday, July 11, 1804. Citing religious and moral principles—as well as the possibility that his remarks may, in fact, “have injured Col. Burr”—Hamilton confided to a piece of paper his resolve

Many duels ended without bloodshed when both adversaries shot wide of the mark—vindicating their reputations on the field of honor by risking mortal combat without actually taking a life. Had Burr known of Hamilton’s decision to throw away his first shot, both men might well have survived their interview at Weehawken.
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Hidden by foliage below and virtually inaccessible from above, there was a small ledge in the rock palisades below Weehawken, New Jersey, a five-minute boat ride across the Hudson River from Greenwich Village. There, at about seven o’clock on Wednesday morning, July 11, the heavy
544 caliber ball from Hamilton’s gun snapped off a tree limb twelve feet above the ground. Had Hamilton thrown away his first shot? Or did his pistol discharge as he fell mortally wounded by Burr’s shot, which struck above his right hip, tore through his liver, and lodged in his spine? Only Burr and two men attending as seconds knew, and the two witnesses disagreed about who shot first. At two o’clock the next afternoon, Alexander Hamilton died.
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After putting his personal affairs in order the night before the fatal “interview,” Hamilton had written two final letters. The second was to his wife. The first had gone to his Federalist friend Theodore Sedgwick, stating that “Dismembrement of our Empire” offered “no relief to our real Disease; which is DEMOCRACY.”
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Burr’s defeat in the gubernatorial election and Hamilton’s death on the field of honor at Weehawken disrupted the movement for a northern confederacy in reaction to the Louisiana Purchase. The Boston separatist meeting planned for November 1804 was put off for years—but the impulse toward separation only lay dormant. New England separatism surfaced again in 1808–1809 in response to Jefferson’s embargo, and it culminated during the War of 1812 in the Hartford Convention of 1814. John Quincy Adams regarded the separatist reaction to the Louisiana Purchase as “the key to all the great movements of… the Federal party in New England, from that time forward, till its final catastrophe in the Hartford Convention.”
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As late as the third week of January 1815, the inveterate separatist Timothy Pickering was still eager with anticipation. “With regard to the admission of new States into the Union,” Pickering wrote on January 23,

“By taking and holding New Orleans,” and by gaining command of “the whole Western country,” Senator Pickering wrote the next day, Great Britain

The New England separatist reaction to the Louisiana Purchase had been mortally wounded on the palisades overlooking the Hudson River at Weehawken in 1804. It was ultimately destroyed—a thousand miles away from Senator Pickering’s desk in Washington—by Andrew Jackson’s cannon on January 8, 1815, at Chalmette, on the east bank of the Mississippi River below New Orleans.

The Federalists were not alone in their contention that the Louisiana Purchase went against the Constitution. President Thomas Jefferson, champion of limited government and a strict construction of the Constitution, had his own doubts about its constitutionality—doubts that he discussed openly with New Hampshire senator William Plumer, a subsequent participant in the separatist reaction, and many others. “The general government has no powers but such as the constitution has given it,” Jefferson explained in letters to Pennsylvania statesman John Dickinson, Kentucky senator John Breckenridge, and others, “and it has not given it a power of holding foreign territory, and still less of incorporating it into the Union.” The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was an act “beyond the Constitution,” Jefferson believed. He saw the adoption of a suitable amendment as the way for “the nation to sanction an act done for its great good, without its previous authority”
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For seven weeks, from June 30 when the news had reached him in Washington through August 17, Jefferson tinkered with an amendment to set things right. The language to authorize the purchase itself came easily. The difficulty for Jefferson and his New England critics lay in the implications of Article III of the treaty, which provided “that the inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States and admitted … to the enjoyment of all these rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States.”
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Civilized New Englanders wanted no truck with “the half savage
omnium gatherum
of Louisiana,” with its “Frenchmen, Spaniards and Indians,” with the prospective immigration of “United Irish and rogues,” or with any “red, yellow or black brethren beyond the Mississippi.” The
Columbian Centinel and Massachusetts Federalist
complained that “the treaty changes the identity of our nation—the United States are no longer the same.”
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President Jefferson was more concerned about the Indians.
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Jefferson’s admiration for American Indians was rooted in his boyhood encounters with the Cherokee at Shadwell, his father’s home in Albemarle County, near Monticello, and in the eloquence of Chief
Outacity, which he witnessed as a student at the College of William and Mary. Admiration and optimism permeated his comments about Indians in his
Notes on Virginia,
and for years Jefferson had advocated Indian relations based on both justice and fear. “Fear to keep them from attacking us,” he wrote from Paris in 1786, for

Seventeen years later, the view from the White House was different. While Livingston and Monroe were negotiating the Louisiana Purchase in Paris, President Jefferson was advising William C. C. Claiborne, governor of the Mississippi Territory, that it was “all important to press on the Indians, as steadily and strenuously as they can bear.” American settlements, the president informed General William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory,