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After the expiration of his term as Vice President on March 4, 1805, broken in fortune and virtually an exile from New York, where, as in New Jersey, he had been indicted for murder after the duel with Hamilton, Burr fled to Philadelphia. There he met Jonathan Dayton. Burr and Dayton together created a conspiracy, the goal of which is unclear. At its grandest, the plan may have been for Burr to make a massive new nation in the west, forged from conquered provinces of Mexico and the states west of the Appalachian Mountains. Burr was to have been the leader of this Southwestern republic.
General James Wilkinson, a conspirator, betrayed Burr's plans to the president, who issued a proclamation for Burr's arrest. Burr read this in a newspaper in the Orleans Territory on January 10, 1807. He turned himself in to the authorities, but soon jumped bail and fled for Spanish Florida; he was intercepted in Alabama on February 19, 1807.
Another member of the Burr conspiracy was the Anglo-Irish aristocrat Harman Blennerhassett. After marrying his niece, Blennerhasset had been forced out of Ireland. He came to live as a quasi-feudal lord on an island in the Ohio River. It was there that he met Burr and agreed to help finance the imperial ambitions of Burr's group.
(The objects of Burr's treasonable correspondence with Merry and Yrujo, the British and Spanish ministers at Washington, were, it would seem, to secure money and to conceal his real designs, which were probably to overthrow Spanish power in the Southwest, and perhaps to found an imperial dynasty in Mexico.)
Burr was arrested in 1807 on the charge of treason, was brought to trial before the United States circuit court at Richmond, Virginia. Burr was arraigned four times for treason before a grand jury. The fourth time, May 22, sufficient evidence was found to indict him. His trial, which was run by Chief Justice John Marshall, began August 3.
Due to lack of the constitutionally required two witnesses, Burr was acquitted on September 1, in spite of the fact that the political influence of the national administration was thrown against him. Immediately afterward he was tried on a charge of misdemeanor, and on a technicality was again acquitted.
Burr was at this point without a hope of a comeback in politics, and fled America and his creditors for Europe, where he tried to regain his fortunes. He lived abroad from 1808 to 1812, passing most of his time in England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden and France; trying to secure aid in the prosecution of his filibustering schemes but meeting with numerous rebuffs, being ordered out of England and Napoleon refusing to receive him.
He returned quietly to New York in 1812, when he wanted to see his daughter, but the ship his daughter had been travelling in was lost at sea. Burr lived in New York as a moderately successful attorney until his death in 1836. He maintained an interest in Western expansion until his death, and he lived to see the Texas Revolution. He noted it with pleasure: "What was treason in me thirty years ago, is patriotism now."
Burr could be unscrupulous, insincere, and somewhat amoral, but toward his friends, he could be pleasing in his manners and generous to a fault. Although he proved irresistible to many women, few historians doubt Burr was intensely devoted to his wife and daughter. When his first wife died, Burr lost whatever stabilizing influence he had in life. Thereafter, Burr's character took a turn for the worse. He once said he considered it an honor if a woman claimed him as the father of her child, even if the claim were false. Burr lived by the Enlightenment codes of conduct, which seem corrupt by our standards, but were practiced by many great men in this era.
In 1833, he married Eliza B. Jumel (1769-1865), a rich New York widow with her own scandalous past; the two soon separated, however, owing to Burr's having lost much of her fortune in speculation. He died at Port Richmond , Staten Island, New York in 1836.
Late in life Burr reportedly went by Aaron Edwards (Edwards being his mother's maiden name) because it was less associated with past scandals.
by Gore Vidal is an oblique biographical take on the politician, but it should be taken as historical fiction.
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