American History Tellers - Insurrection of Aaron Burr | Fears of a Young Republic | 5

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Was Aaron Burr raising an army to invade Mexico? Plotting to break apart the Union? Overthrow the government? Or was his trial for treason – the greatest legal spectacle in our young nation’s history – all much ado about nothing? Kalamazoo College History Professor James E. Lewis, Jr., wrote The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis. He joins host Lindsay Graham to discuss the mysteries that still surround the Burr conspiracy, and what his highly partisan era can teach us about our own.Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersSupport us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's January 1831 and you've just entered a worn-down apartment building in Albany, New York. You're a young state senator and a leading member of the New York Bar, climbing up a narrow set of dusty stairs that leads to the home of Aaron Burr. The aging lawyer and former vice president wants your help reviving a decade-old lawsuit. You're excited to meet such an infamous figure, even though he won't like the news you're bringing. In a small, shabby room, you find a stooped figure huddled in a threadbare

armchair. The once fashionable Burr is wrapped in a coarse wool overcoat. His thin, gray hair is caked with powder and paste, which does little to disguise his advancing age. Burr stands. Thank you for paying me a visit. It's no trouble, sir. You shake his wrinkled and trembling hand, and then take a seat as Burr settles back into his armchair. Well, what do you say? Will you reinstate my client's case? Well, sir, the case has little merit.

It's already defeated the last two lawyers who took it on. I'm not sure why it would interest a man of your stature. Well, those last two lawyers were fools. I'm sure I can succeed where they've failed. The case is difficult, I admit, but I've never backed down from a challenge. So I'm told. But, sir, I must ask, surely you've thought about retirement? You've lived a long life.

I can only imagine the stories you must have. But sir, I must ask, surely you've thought about retirement? You've lived a long life. I can only imagine the stories you must have. To think I'm speaking to someone who fought under General Washington. You know, Washington was a cold and haughty man without a single independent thought. He relied on Hamilton for everything. He couldn't even trust himself to write a dinner invitation. Oh, well, I suppose you did know Hamilton well, too. His papers are fascinating.

I was just reading... You stop midway through your sentence as you remember you're sitting before Hamilton's killer. But Burr is unfazed. Yes, Hamilton had great talent, I'll give you that. But he was a parasite on President Washington. You raise your eyebrows in surprise over Burr's unsparing descriptions. But you can't resist goading him on. And what's your of Thomas Jefferson? You were his vice president, of course.

A weakling. He saw me as a threat. Jefferson would have fled his own home had he heard I was within 100 miles of him. I must say, sir, your descriptions differ from the histories I've read. John Marshall's biography of Washington portrays him as a commanding figure. Burr waves his hand as if swatting a fly. Oh, history books. They don't get anything right. I was there. I wouldn't know. Remember what Napoleon once said. What is history but a fable agreed upon? You smile, but the mention of Napoleon makes you think of Burr's own attempts at empire. The history books have not been kind to him.

Well, indeed, sir. But, Mr. Burr, I am afraid I will not be able to help you. Your client's case reeks of fraud, and it's already been defeated in court twice. You're fighting a losing battle, I'm afraid. Well, that is a disappointment. But it's not my first. You stand and tip your hat to Burr and walk toward the door. You almost pity the man. The bitter creature before you was once a heartbeat away from the presidency, but he lost everything to reckless ambition. And despite all the time that's passed,

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secession in the West, and though he won his treason trial, he was branded a traitor in the court of public opinion. Now Burr was 74 years old, eking out a living as a lawyer. His meager existence was a far cry for the life of power and glory he risked everything to achieve. Here with me to discuss the speculation surrounding Burr's conspiracy and the partisan politics that engulfed his trial for treason is historian James E. Lewis Jr. He's a professor of history at Kalamazoo College and the author of several books examining the founding fathers, including The Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson's Noble Bargain, and John Quincy Adams, Policymaker for the Union.

His most recent book is The Burr Conspiracy, Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis. Here's our conversation. Professor James Lewis, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you for having me. So, of course, at this point in time, most people know Aaron Burr as the person who shot Alexander Hamilton, perhaps to a musical soundtrack. It was a duel between two men, two politicians, two very high-ranking politicians, a sitting vice president, Aaron Burr, and then a cabinet member, Alexander Hamilton. This seems unthinkable

today, perhaps, but was it unusual for something like that to happen at the time? There were certainly a lot of politically charged duels, and it was not at all uncommon for the duelists to be from the opposing party and for there to be a political dimension to it. We also think of duels as being about a woman's honor and things like that. And that could happen. But I think many of the most interesting duels from this period were these politically charged ones. And many duels ended short of death. So one of the stranger things about the Burr-Hamilton duel was that it did end in death. Let's talk about just this idea of a gentleman's honor. What was it worth to a man of stature to have his honor besmirched?

And was that an emblem of class, of privilege, of stature? Or did the common man feel the same about his honor? Well, honor came into play in a lot of areas. And the one that is, I think, most interesting to us are things that lead to duels, right? The affairs of honor and the various ways in which men felt like they had to protect themselves when their honor had been stained or slurred by somebody else, and particularly by another gentleman. But what I also learned as I was researching the book was the centrality of honor to the transfer of information. that finding ways to say something that protected your honor were absolutely crucial.

Finding a language that shifted responsibility for truth from you to somebody else and to somebody else like rumor. Rumor says, right? If I write you a letter and I say, rumor says Burr is up to this, you can't ever come back to me and say, well, Dr. Lewis, you told us that this was what Burr was up to because I haven't, right? I have made it very clear where I'm getting my information from. And so honor is really central to that too. And it's very clear in the newspapers because they don't have reporters. A lot of what they're providing in the newspaper are letters. And they will say things like, in a letter from a gentleman of honor and respectability, we find this. And that's a clue to the reader, right? Okay, I'm going to buy this. But it's very important that a gentleman have honor because they want to be believed, and they want to be respected, and they want to be believed and they want to be respected and they want to have access to political power.

Certainly, there are also economic dimensions to honor and to being trusted, right? So, it's woven into lots of different things. Let's talk about the political dimension of this argument and what political party Burr actually belonged to. In his opposition to Hamilton, you would think that he would be a Jeffersonian Republican, but that might not really be the case. Burr certainly had been a Jeffersonian Republican, and he was elected to the vice presidency as a Republican. But the election of 1800 is one of the, I mean, we just lived through a very fraught election, so I've stopped saying it's one of the most fraught elections in American history. But it was a very fraud election. And it was in part because it was so early. It was one of the very first elections

after Washington. The election process had really alienated Burr from Jefferson himself, the president, and from the main body of the Republican Party. And parties themselves were not always that clear in this period. And the people who were kind of parties themselves were not always that clear in this period. And the people who were kind of running them were not really crazy about parties, and they tended to think that they didn't have a party at all, only the other side had a party, because parties were seen as inherently dangerous to a Republican or Democratic government. So, of course, in the aftermath of the death of Alexander Hamilton, this duel ruined Burr's political career. He became an outcast and even a fugitive, and then looked west to try and find a place to reinvent himself. But let's think about what the West was in this moment. Can you just describe what the Western frontier was to the average American? Sure. When they thought of the West, they thought principally of

everything across the Appalachian Mountains. So all of the areas that would drain into the Ohio River and the Mississippi River, they weren't thinking across the Mississippi River. Louisiana had been purchased just a couple of years earlier, a year earlier than the dual, when they were thinking about the West, they were thinking Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee. The rest of the West at that point was in federal territories, right? The Indiana territory, the Mississippi territory. That's what the West meant to them. It was growing rapidly in terms of population, but it was still far less settled and much rougher conditions than the East, of course. The West seemed very fluid, and what its future was going to be seemed very much up in the air, and really had since the Revolution. So it's this idea of a brand new space with brand new opportunities and an uncertain future that perhaps drew Burr to it? That's certainly the nature of the fears at the time.

People had kind of assumed that it would be impossible to keep the East and the West together in a single nation, a single union. That the difficulties of movement, the difficulties of sharing information back and forth across the mountains were so strong that the West would be inclined to leave. And there had been small-scale separatist movements in southwestern Virginia, in Kentucky, in Tennessee during the 1790s. There was a lingering fear that those could congeal into a real separatist movement in the West. And if you think about it in sort of the ideas of natural boundaries, the Mississippi River was the Western boundary of the United States,

according to the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. But it makes no sense at all as a natural boundary. A river is a highway. Mountains are boundaries. And so it was very easy to see a natural boundary in North America or Eastern North America. It was the line that separated the waters that flew into the Atlantic from the waters that flew into the Great Lakes or the Gulf of Mexico. And they saw that. They were very concerned that that was going to be a very natural line of division between the people of North America, Eastern North America. And this is also at a moment in a very young nation in which the idea of a cohesive federal government is both new and unstable. Absolutely. They're not at all confident that this new experiment in government is going to last. When the crisis really culminated and Burr was put on trial, the Constitution's 20 years old. It has already replaced a different union that was only six or seven years old when it was replaced. So the idea that this is going to be the permanent

solution is simply impossible to imagine at that point. It's far too likely that things are going to continue to change. Now, as we segue here into Burr's conspiracy, his plotting out West, it took a very long time for Jefferson in particular and others in Washington to pay attention to the rife rumors about what Burr was up to. A cipher letter attributed to Burr at the time was finally sent to President Jefferson, although perhaps adjusted, that did shed light on his intentions. Can you tell us how that letter made its way to Washington and what did it say? The letter was one of a number of things that were coming into Washington. It arrived late in the fall of 1806, and it came from General James Wilkinson, who was the commanding general of the army. He was also the governor of the Missouri Territory, So he was based in St. Louis. And he was also, as it turns out, a paid Spanish spy. So he had his fingers in a lot of pies. And Burr thought, apparently, that he could be

convinced, lured into whatever Burr's own plans were. You know, you can only send a cipher letter if you share the cipher, the code. And so they had concocted a couple of different codes, actually three different codes in the cipher letter. They were in common possession of these. Burr used these codes to write a letter to Wilkinson. It's very vague. It doesn't really say what their destination would be, but it's clearly a sort of a boastful letter about, you know, this is going to happen. I want you to be a part of it. You will be second only to me and the place we are going, right? It's that kind of vague language.

The place we are going is ready for us and will accept us. And Wilkinson received that in October of 1806. And he decided that I think his best bet at that point was to cut himself free of any taint of Burr and immediately send this to Jefferson. Now, Aaron Burr, as a man, had a reputation as a charming, intelligent, and capable person. And all sorts of people committed themselves to his cause. How do you think he became so persuasive? There was a lot of talk about this at the time.

There was a lot of interest in what sort of person would follow him. They talked about him as being fascinating. Fascinating was an almost magical quality. It was almost like casting a spell. He got people to do what they knew they shouldn't do by listening to them, by the way he talked to them, by the flash of his eyes, by his reputation as a man who could accomplish something. He came out of the American Revolution as sort of one of the few people who really was seen as somebody who knew what he was doing on the field of battle. I think he also, and this is part of what makes the Burke conspiracy so confusing at times, is he also seems to have said different things to different people and to have reached out to people on grounds that he thought he could meet them and that they would listen. So in this moment in the country, how much of a national crisis is this politically or just in terms of American identity? I do think there was a sense of crisis in the fall of 1806 and into the very early months of 1807. And I think it arose in part from a lack of understanding of what was happening. Information moved very slowly.

It moved in sort of different speeds and different directions. So a lot of the sense of crisis was what is really going on? What is Burr really up to? What is Wilkinson going to do about it? Is he going to bring the army in on behalf of Burr? Or is he going to use the army to oppose Burr? What are the state governments going to do? What are the Western people going to do? Are they going to rise up and support a Burr, or are they going to rise up against the conspiracy? In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island.

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I cannot believe it. Woo! Buy it now. Stream free on Freebie and Prime Video. One of the things that interested me about this conspiracy particularly was the amount of information that was out in the public about this conspiracy, at least the rumors of it. It seemed like the

least well-kept plot ever. In your book, you said it was Kentucky in particular that was the place where this crisis was really made because of the newspapers there. Why was Kentucky an epicenter and how did they latch onto the Burr story and make it bigger than it might have been? Partly it goes back to local politics because Kentucky had had what came to be called the Spanish Conspiracy. This negotiation by some leading Kentuckians, including James Wilkinson, with the Spanish, with the idea that they're going to get special deals, special privileges on the Mississippi River. The Spanish controlled the lower privileges on the Mississippi River. The Spanish controlled the lower end of the Mississippi River. They controlled everything, certainly south of New Orleans and actually south really of Natchez. And they decided in 1784, shortly after the revolution, that

Americans could not use the river, which meant that all these people who were moving into Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio were going to find it very difficult to get their pork and their beef and their corn and whiskey to market because they couldn't use the river to get to the Gulf of Mexico. And so Kentuckians, I think, felt this particularly strongly. What can we get out of Spain? Seemed like a possible step forward for them. Part of this time, Kentucky is still a part of Virginia. It was simply the Western District of Virginia. They were talking about leaving Virginia, possibly talking about leaving the United States entirely, talking to the Spanish in New Orleans about what sort of deal they could make with Spain.

And so there was this reservoir of suspicion of some of the leading men in Kentucky. And Burr arrived in that climate and he started connecting with some of those people. Now, some of those people were actually the leading Republicans in Jeffersonian Republicans in the state. He knew some of these people, right? He knew them, had known some of them for years. But it was very easy to think that, oh, this is some kind of revival of the Spanish conspiracy with a new leader and in a new form. So then in Kentucky and then elsewhere, these stories of conspiracy that perhaps echoed other political controversies begin to swirl around about Burr and spread across the country in different means.

Of course, partisanship is nothing new or modern in American politics. And one of the things I love about studying history is how many times you can point to another period and realize that it was worse then. But your book also reminds us that partisanship is nothing new. The press had an absolute field day with Burr's story. How did these accounts spread, and how did they grow and large, and were they affected by partisan viewpoints? Absolutely, because nearly every newspaper was partisan. And the newspapers that said that they were going to be impartial, I think, probably fueled more suspicion than the ones that were worthrightly partisan because you knew they were trying to hide something. Burr at one point during his trial in Richmond seems to have bought up the newspaper called the Impartial Observer in Richmond, which had already alienated just about everybody because nobody believed it really was impartial at all. So the partisan press is very critical

to the process by which any information could spread because newspapers and personal letters were really how stuff got around, right? This is a media era in which that's pretty much the limit of it. You get news from travelers, you get news from letters, you get news from the newspapers. And the newspapers circulated, they did something that depending on where you live, you may get, or you may not, where I live in Kalamazoo, Michigan, we get a fair bit of this. They clipped stuff from other newspapers. And so you would read an article or an excerpt from a newspaper three, four, 500 miles away, printed in your own newspaper. And of course, because they're partisan, the things that are clipped and reprinted tend to be from newspapers of the same

party, or if they're not, they tended to have a sort of an editorial comment basically saying, boy, look what the other side thinks. Can you believe this nonsense? Right? Everything was filtered through politics. What was so interesting about the Burr conspiracy to me as I was reading these newspapers was that when you looked in different places, the party that was sort of more favorable to Burr or more willing to excuse Burr changed. So in Lexington and Frankfurt, Kentucky in the fall of 1806, it's the Republican newspapers that are assuring everybody that no, Burr's not doing anything bad. He's not a threat at all. He's a good guy. He's a good Republican. And it's the Federalist newspapers and this sort of quasi-independent newspaper called The Western World that are going after him. If you went a few hundred miles up the Ohio River

to Pittsburgh, it's the Federalist newspapers that are convinced that Burr's being needlessly persecuted by Jefferson and the Jeffersonians from Virginia who are in power. And it's the Republican papers that are first to turn against him and say, no, no, no, he's up to something. And he's got all the Federalists in with him on whatever the something is. Now, it was exactly this partisanship behind, or at least suspected to be behind, some of these rumors that led President Jefferson to be wary of the information he was receiving. Eventually, he did take action when the evidence started to mount and issued a strong public proclamation about an illegal military campaign in the West.

He all but accused Burr of treason and was judge and jury right then. What can we learn about Jefferson's political goals in this moment, about how he handled the situation after resisting it for so long? Well, we have to tease apart two moments. In the fall of 1806, he issues a public proclamation, but he's very careful in that he doesn't name Burr. And he actually doesn't say that it's against the United States clearly.

He leaves the possibility that whomever it is who's organizing men and buying supplies and building ships is actually going to target a Spanish possession, and Spain and the United States are at peace. So this would be an act of aggression. By January, he sends this very long message to Congress, the longest message of his entire eight-year presidency. In that, he is very explicit. Burr is at the center of it. The possibility of an invasion of a Spanish colony is still there. But Jefferson is also by that point convinced that the reality probably is that he had a treasonous plot. He was going to divide the Union in the West. So finally, Burr was arrested in early 1807. He was charged with treason and tried in federal court.

And you characterize this trial as the nation's first great legal spectacle. What do you mean by that? Well, one thing I mean is that it captured a tremendous amount of national attention. It was being reported in local newspapers, but the reports in the Richmond newspapers were making it into other newspapers. People were very aware of it around the country. People flocked to Richmond to see it, or at least to be at Richmond. And it was also a spectacle because of who was involved. Even though it's certainly not a Supreme Court

case, right? It's a federal court in Virginia. This is a time when Supreme Court justices rode circuit. And so the presiding judge at Burr's trials in Richmond is Chief Justice John Marshall, the most important jurist in the country. Burr, the former vice president, is one of the accused. Treason, the king of crimes in a sense, is the crime at issue. And the lawyers are seen as not just the best lawyers in Virginia, but some of the very best lawyers in the country on the two sides of this case. The people involved and the crime involved are just so much at the sort of top of their fears and the top of their sense of, these are the key people in the country. Let's talk about the crime of treason. What does the Constitution say about treason? And why was Burr ultimately not convicted?

The Constitution lays out two possibilities for treason. One is to levy war against the United States. And one is to give aid and comfort to the nation's enemies. The nation wasn't at war, so that wasn't a possibility. You couldn't aid anybody because there were no enemies. So the idea was that Burr was levying war against the United States. And this was going to be a hard one to make stick. You had to have two witnesses to the same, what the language is, two witnesses to the same overt act of treason. So somebody had to come forward and say, okay, I saw something that made it clear that overt act was an island in the Ohio River called Blennerhasset Island. And Blennerhasset, Armand Blennerhasset, was one of Burr's leading supporters, and his island was a convergence point for men and boats coming down the Ohio River from western Pennsylvania. The government's case was based on the idea that at the island in early December, Burr's men had raised their rifles against Ohio militia

who had come over to arrest them. This was a highly problematic case because it's not at all clear that Ohio militia are the United States, right? If you have to levy war against the United States, can you really say that raising your guns against the Ohio militia even counts at all? It was highly problematic because Burr simply wasn't there. He was hundreds of miles away at the time in Nashville. Are you in trouble with the law? Need a lawyer who will fight like hell to keep you out of jail? We defend and we fight just like you'd want your own children defended. Whether you're facing a drug charge, caught up on a murder rap,

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vision. To recognize Ghost Story being chosen as the first series essential, Wondery has made it ad-free for a limited time, only on Apple Podcasts. If you haven't listened yet, head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself. So from the beginning then, it sounded like the government's case was tough to prove, but they went to trial anyways. We know the outcome of the trial for Burr, but what were the consequences of such a large-scale early trial? The Byrd trial is significant for a number of things, partly for the kind of legal precedents that were established at the trial. Things like the defense attorneys at one point

wanted to subpoena documents from the president, letters that the president had received and letters that the president had sent. And the court had to weigh in on, can you do that? Can you call a sitting president as a witness in a case? That was not pushed, but that was floating around as a possibility. There were precedents about, you know, how strict are we going to be in defining treason? A lot of states, including the British, the one that mattered the most in sort of thinking about American law, had a much looser definition

of treason. And the constitution was narrow precisely for that reason, so that treason couldn't be made into a political tool. But at one point in an earlier case, Marshall had suggested that Burr didn't have to be there to be guilty of treason. And so the sort of tightening up of the definition to this very limited, it's got to be one of these two things. There have got to be witnesses and they've got to be two witnesses to the same overt act. That's a very significant step, right? A government that has the ability to loosen treason and to haul more and more people in as being treasonous would look very different from the government that came out of the Burr trial. So I think both of those are very important. Jefferson hoped to get a lot out of the trial that he didn't get out

of the trial. He could see early that Burr was going to be exonerated or at least let off. By midsummer, his goal was actually to use the trial to get Americans to make a change in the Constitution that would end the lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices. He thought that that was very undemocratic to have so much power in the hands of people who were not at all responsible to the public, right? The public couldn't do anything about John Marshall. And so for Jefferson, that was going to be the big payoff. We'll use the trial to show that Marshall is using his position of power to protect this man that much of the public knows is a traitor. And now we've got to use that to fix the Constitution and to change the tenure and office of the judges. When we're turning to the young nation that was in this moment, what do you think the ultimate lesson was of the Burr conspiracy? What did we learn about the fears of America in its infancy here? To me, that became the most interesting thing about studying the Burr conspiracy. I learned fairly early on that I was not going to be the one who finally figured out what Burr was really up to, that the sources for that don't exist. And so then the question became,

why did everybody get into such a panic? What was it that made for this sense of crisis in 1806 and early 1807. And that led me to investigate how they talked about what might happen. I think the fears about how uncertain both Republican government and federal union were come through very clearly in their discussion about Burr and why they're worried about Burr. It was imaginable, not even hard to imagine, that Burr, possibly with the support of the U.S. Army, possibly simply with the support of a large number of armed men who had come down the river with him, could get hold of New Orleans and could use its control over the river and over Western trade to draw the West out of the Union and to set up a new nation in the trans-Appalachian West that would be centered on New Orleans and that would be

really connected by all the waterways that flow ultimately past New Orleans. One of the things that's very interesting about how Jefferson handled the situation is that it very much evolved over time. There was a flurry of cabinet meetings in October 1806, and they laid out a very ambitious plan. We're going to try to arrest him. We're going to send a federal agent out after him. And they were sending ships places, and they were going to send the army places. And literally within a week or two, they had backed off of most of those plans except for sending a federal agent after him.

When you look a little deeper, what you see is that Jefferson and Madison, James Madison, his Secretary of State, believed in a very limited construction of the Constitution. And there was nothing in the Constitution that said that the government could do some of these things. They didn't have it in a budget approved by the House of Representatives and the Senate to use money to send ships to New Orleans, for example. So part of what Jefferson wanted to use the Burke conspiracy for over time was to show that his understanding of the Constitution was the correct one. That in fact, and he said this in his inaugural address, we have the strongest government on earth. And it is strong because ordinary people, when asked to by the government, will stand up and defend it because it's in their interest to do so. And the Federalists gave him all sorts of grief about this. What do you mean you're not sending the army after this guy? What do you mean you're just sending one guy on a horse with a proclamation? That's ridiculous. But he wanted

to prove that he was right. And I think part of what made that possible was his growing sense that the danger probably wasn't that great. That doesn't mean that there wasn't a sense of crisis out in the country because a crisis worked for him, right? The sense that there is something so big that we need the people to act. We need the states to act. But when they do, that becomes evidence for him that, look, I was right all along. We don't need a strong central government. What we need are committed citizens and states that understand that they have the right to protect themselves. And this is the perfect example of that. I don't think anyone listening to you, if they were able to subtract out the years and names,

wouldn't be able to hear you describe a contentious election earlier in our conversation, fears that the country might fall apart, a fragility of democracy, and a growing distrust of Republican government, and not suddenly think that this is perhaps a description of our current moment now. Do you think there are large parallels that we can draw between America then and now? Well, I think there are both differences and similarities. I think that the intensity of partisanship now certainly echoes and probably exceeds the

intensity of partisanship in 1806, 1807. Maybe it doesn't exceed what it was like in 1800. If you read some of the commentary from 1800, each side is convinced that the other side is going to destroy the country, want to destroy the country, that it's going to be the end of the constitution, it's going to be the end of the union at the very best. But one thing that does strike me is that a lot of the discussion in 1806 and 1807 especially was about what kind of men would follow Burr. And I think in the context of January 6th insurrection, that has become a real subject of our interest too, right? Who was there and why were they there? And what does it tell us about Trump that these kinds of people would be there?

That was a lot of the talk about Burr. What does it tell us about Burr and Burr's plans? That the kinds of men who actually showed up with him when he kind of abandoned whatever his project was outside of Natchez in early 1807, that they tended to be single young men, often in this case, in his case, well-educated, and in some cases seemingly frustrated with their feeling that the country was changing in ways that were not going to work out well for people like them. And I think a lot of our kind of talking about who was involved in January 6th is it's young men who feel like the country's going in ways that aren't good for them,

right? That are too concerned about other types of people and that they aren't getting their due in America. And that was a lot of the talk in 1806 was 180 1807 was, these are men who feel like the country is not respecting of them. As a final question, let's return to Aaron Burr. He lived for another 30 more years after the trial. That's a long time. And you would imagine, though, that the duel and then the trial is pretty much the end of his adventures. So I'm very curious to know, what did he do with the latter part of his life? Well, shortly after the trial, by the early summer of 1808, he went to Europe. And he spent the next four years knocking around Europe and occasionally getting up to mischief. At one point, he started getting in contact with Napoleon Bonaparte with ideas about how he could help to revolutionize

South America. This is the time when France is interested, at least, in Spain's colonies in the Western Hemisphere. He came back in 1812, right about the time that the United States and Great Britain went to war in what's called the War of 1812. And really from then on, which is another 24 years before his death, he was a New York attorney. I think he became very much a broken man, not so much because of the trial and probably even less because of the duel, but because first his only grandson passed away. And then before he had actually been able to see her again, after coming back from Europe, his daughter died. I think that really shattered him. Well, Professor James Lewis, thank you so much for joining me today on American History Tellers.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. That was my conversation with author James E. Lewis Jr. His book, The Burr Conspiracy, Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis, is available now from Princeton University Press. From Wondery, this is the fifth and final episode of the insurrection of Aaron Burr from American History Tellers. On our next season, after the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, powerful American sugar barons took over. Soon, America would officially annex the islands, transforming them into a tropical tourist destination and a key military outpost in America's growing Pacific Empire. And then, in the wake of the deadly attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941,

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