Andrew Jackson (21 page)

Wilkinson also wrote to Jefferson, less straightforwardly. He sent the president a document describing “a numerous and powerful association extending from New York through the western states to territories bordering on the Mississippi.” This association hoped to raise “eight or ten thousand men in New Orleans at a very near period.” The ostensible aim of the irregular army was to attack Spanish Mexico at Vera Cruz, to which end its leaders had arranged the cooperation of the British navy. But Wilkinson was certain that more was involved. In a letter accompanying the document he told Jefferson, “I have no doubt the revolt of this Territory”—Louisiana—“will be made an auxiliary step” in the attack on Mexico. Wilkinson didn’t identify Burr by name, but he knew he didn’t have to, given everything that had been rumored of the former vice president.

Several weeks later Wilkinson forwarded to Washington what was intended to be the most damning evidence yet of Burr’s perfidy. Burr had written Wilkinson a ciphered letter asserting that the plans were rapidly taking shape. “Everything internal and external favor our view,” Burr wrote, in code. “Naval protection of England is secured. . . . Final orders are given to my friends and followers. It will be a host of choice spirits. . . . Our project, my dear friend, is brought to the point so long desired. I guarantee the result with my life and honor, with the lives, the honor and the fortune of hundreds, the best blood of our country. . . . The gods invite us to glory and fortune.” Wilkinson sent this letter on to Jefferson, decoded but edited in a way that removed signs that Wilkinson was involved.

The mere fact of the ciphering, as much as the letter’s contents, made it politically explosive. “Burr’s enterprise is the most extraordinary since the days of Don Quixote,” the president declared. “It is so extravagant that those who know his understanding would not believe it if the proofs admitted doubt. He has meant to place himself on the throne of Montezuma, and extend his empire to the Allegheny, seizing on New Orleans as the instrument of compulsion for our Western states.”

The encrypted letter finally drove Jefferson to action. Stories about Burr were rifer and more lurid than ever in Washington, and the president’s enemies taxed him for tolerating treason. Jefferson’s Republican allies fretted that all their party’s gains might be lost if Burr weren’t brought to justice.

But catching Burr wasn’t easy. Wilkinson had guessed it wouldn’t be. “He might be hid in a greatcoat pocket,” the general said, referring to Burr’s slipperiness as well as his small stature. A manhunt began and encompassed much of the West. After several leads failed, the searchers tracked their quarry to Mississippi Territory, where Burr was run to ground and forced to surrender. But he lulled his captors into complacency and escaped. The hunt resumed, with a large bounty offered for the capture of the fugitive. In February 1807, Burr was retaken. He was transported east under armed guard. In South Carolina he again attempted escape but failed. He and his guards arrived at Richmond in late March.

T
he treason trial of Aaron Burr was the sensation of the summer of 1807. Jefferson weighed in heavily, bringing to bear all the power of the executive branch to ensure conviction. The prosecution, led by the United States attorney for the Virginia District, George Hay, compiled a list of 140 witnesses to testify against Burr. To encourage useful testimony, Jefferson sent Hay a sheaf of blank pardons for those who turned state’s evidence.

Jefferson had reason to believe he’d need help, for the judge in the trial was John Marshall, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who had been appointed by John Adams and had crossed swords with Jefferson more than once. Supreme Court justices in those days rode the circuit, and Marshall’s circuit included Richmond, his hometown. Marshall was no friend to traitors, but he was only marginally more friendly to Jefferson and had no intention of letting the courts be coerced by a chagrined and vindictive president. Marshall’s life goal was to establish the independence of the judiciary and its coequality with the executive and legislative branches. The Burr trial became an early battlefield in that struggle.

Jackson played a bit part in the Jefferson-Marshall fight. Summoned from Tennessee to testify before the grand jury, he explained that Burr had visited Nashville a number of times, inquiring about speculative opportunities in the West and talking of the likelihood of war with Spain. Jackson said he had told Burr that before he—Jackson—would ready the militia to march, he needed orders from the federal secretary of war. “Burr said surely he would produce the orders of the secretary,” Jackson told the grand jury. Jackson recounted his interview with John Fort and explained that the army captain had implicated not Burr alone but Wilkinson too.

To Jackson’s annoyance, the prosecution—which was to say, the president—heeded only part of his testimony. Jefferson spared neither effort nor expense to convict Burr yet ignored what seemed to Jackson the equal guilt of Wilkinson. In fact, the more Jackson considered the matter, the more he came to believe that Wilkinson, not Burr, was the one who needed to be punished and that the president was engaged in a vendetta that had nothing to do with national defense. “I am more convinced than I ever was before that
treason
was never intended by Burr,” he wrote a friend. “If it ever was, you know my wish is, and always has been, that he be hung.” But if Burr was guilty, so was Wilkinson. “Whatever may have been the projects of Burr, General Wilkinson has and did go hand in hand with him.” Politics—between Republicans and Federalists, between Jefferson and Marshall—had fatally intruded on the sphere of justice. “I never deemed it just, nor never shall, to make the sacrifice of any individual as a
peace offering
to policy, and especially when others are permitted of equal guilt to pass with impunity.”

Against inclination, Jackson found himself agreeing with the Federalist Marshall against the Republican Jefferson. And it was Marshall who triumphed in this test of will and savvy. Marshall so sifted the evidence and so instructed the jury as to render conviction impossible. He ruled that intent to commit treason—if in fact Burr had so intended—wasn’t the same as treason itself. And he held the prosecution to the strict constitutional standard of two eyewitnesses to the treasonable act. After the prosecution failed to produce the witnesses, the jury deliberated less than half an hour before acquitting Burr.

The result was a signal victory for Marshall and the courts and a stinging defeat for Jefferson and the presidency. It was also an education for Jackson. Jackson muttered against Jefferson the whole way back to Nashville. The Republican president, the man who was supposed to represent the people, had shown himself to be no better than other politicians. In some respects he was worse, for the prosecution he perverted to politics touched the most sacred responsibility of any president: to preserve the Union. In obsessing about Burr, Jefferson disregarded Wilkinson, the greater threat. This wasn’t how presidents were supposed to act.

J
ackson devoted his public life to battling birth and breeding as requisites for personal advancement. But in a critical realm of his private life he placed as much store in bloodlines and pedigree as the haughtiest émigré from Bourbon France.

Jackson began racing horses long before he could afford to purchase thoroughbreds. As a boy in the Waxhaw he tested himself and his mounts against other boys and horses, and the distinction he earned was what led to his selection as a courier for the patriot forces in the Revolutionary War. At sixteen he was an authorized appraiser of horseflesh. The earliest surviving document bearing Jackson’s signature is a 1783 appraisal of “one bay horse, brands unknown to the appraisers, value £150.” Charleston racehorses galloped away with his inheritance after the war and turned his face back toward the West. As an apprentice lawyer and then a novice practitioner he lacked the funds to purchase horses or even wager much on their speed, but no one in Nashville could ignore the races. And as Jackson acquired capital and standing in the community, he became a pillar of what even rabid democrats didn’t blush at calling the “sport of kings.”

In fact, though, the democrats were taking control of the sport. Organized horse racing in America had begun in the Northeast, particularly on Long Island, where a seventeenth-century British colonel indulged his passion for racing by building a track patterned after and named for the famous Newmarket course in England. Gradually the epicenter of equine activity shifted south, to Maryland and Virginia, with their milder winters and lusher pastures. Wealthy planters became the patrons of the sport, which knit the upper classes of America to those of the mother country by threads of affinity and selective (horse) breeding. The Revolution severed the threads, and though after the war turfmen on both sides of the water strove to restore them, they were never the same. Meanwhile the opening of Kentucky and Tennessee to settlement brought new and cheaper pastures to the sport. In time Kentucky would claim preeminence with its shimmering bluegrass, but in Jackson’s day Tennessee, particularly the Cumberland, was where the serious racers and breeders took their animals and their business.

Until the first decade of the nineteenth century, racing in Tennessee was conducted on a casual, though hardly nonserious, basis. Proud owners matched their steeds against those of others equally prideful, and they and the spectators who gathered for the races laid bets on the outcome. But in 1804 the racing community staged its first organized trial, at Gallatin, an easy ride from Nashville. Jackson took part, entering his mare Indian Queen. The horse didn’t win, yet the loss whetted Jackson’s appetite for racing, as did the appearance that season of one of the most famous horses in America. Truxton (apparently named for the navy captain, whose swift ship
Constellation
was called the “Yankee Race Horse”) had been sired by an English champion, Diomed, that upon crossing the Atlantic became the most important and valuable stud in American history. Truxton’s owner in 1804, John Verell, brought the horse to Tennessee for the races, only to discover that he couldn’t take the horse back out of the state due to a lien levied against him for an old debt. Jackson solved Verell’s financial problem by assuming Verell’s debt in exchange for Truxton. The debt was fifteen hundred dollars; Jackson threw in three geldings and promised two more if Truxton performed well in the next round of races.

Until this point Jackson had been one horseman among many, but with the purchase of Truxton he became the leading force in the Nashville racing community. He acquired another champion, Greyhound, and an interest in a racetrack at Clover Bottom. He organized races, with Truxton the favorite and principal attraction. And he looked forward to a long career for Truxton at stud, which would make his owner the foremost breeder in Tennessee.

T
ruxton’s reputation naturally attracted the fastest and strongest challengers. To defeat Jackson’s stallion would heighten any horseman’s stature—and increase the value of his animals. Joseph Erwin judged his Ploughboy the equal of Truxton and was willing to back his judgment with money, or what substituted for money in the cash-short West. He scheduled a race with Jackson for November 1805. The wager was two thousand dollars, but side bets would multiply that amount several times. As warrant of his seriousness he posted an appearance bond: eight hundred dollars, payable to Jackson in the event Ploughboy failed to make the starting line. Several promissory notes covered the bond and the wager.

As race day approached, Erwin grew nervous. Ploughboy’s training runs were slower than he had hoped and weren’t getting faster. At the last moment Erwin decided to forfeit the eight hundred dollars rather than risk the entire two thousand. He informed Jackson, who matter-of-factly required delivery of the promissories.

What happened next occasioned dispute. Erwin wanted to substitute different notes for the promissories Jackson had inspected and approved at the time of the original agreement. Because promissories ranged drastically in their reliability and liquidity, such a switch could amount to reneging on the debt. By the testimony of the principals—Jackson and Erwin—the matter was settled to the satisfaction of both. But rumors circulated that Jackson had impugned the integrity of Erwin and his partner and son-in-law, Charles Dickinson, whose name was on some of the notes. Thomas Swann, a young man new in Nashville and trying to make an impression, insinuated himself into the dispute. Swann told Erwin and Dickinson that Jackson had accused against them of double-dealing. Jackson responded by declaring that anyone who said such a thing was “a damned liar.”

Swann seems to have been setting Jackson up, for he immediately wrote Jackson a letter claiming injury and demanding satisfaction. “The harshness of this expression has deeply wounded my feelings,” Swann said. “It is language to which I am a stranger, which no man acquainted with my character would venture to apply to me, and which . . . I shall be under the necessity of taking proper notice of.”