chemes and a starting
point for his own extended expeditions, which took him during the
latter part of this year to Natchez, Nashville, St. Louis, Vincennes,
Cincinnati, and Philadelphia, and back to Washington.

* An account of the Burr conspiracy will be found in "Jefferson
and his Colleagues," by Allen Johnson (in "The Chronicles of America").

In the summer of 1806 Burr turned westward a second time and with the
assistance of Blennerhassett he began military preparations on the
latter's island for a mysterious expedition. On the 29th of July, Burr
had dispatched a letter in cipher to Wilkinson, his most important
confederate. The precise terms of this document we shall never know,
but apparently it contained the most amazing claims of the successful
maturing of Burr's scheme: "funds had been obtained," "English naval
protection had been secured," "from five hundred to a thousand men"
would be on the move down the Mississippi by the middle of November.
Unfortunately for Burr, however, Wilkinson was far too expert in the
usages of iniquity to be taken in by such audacious lying as this. He
guessed that the enterprise was on the verge of collapse and forthwith
made up his mind to abandon it.

Meanwhile exaggerated accounts of the size of Burr's following were
filtering to Washington, together with circumstantial rumors of the
disloyalty of his designs. Yet for weeks Jefferson did nothing, until
late in November his alarm was aroused by a letter from Wilkinson, dated
the 21st of October. On the 27th of November the President issued a
proclamation calling upon all good citizens to seize "sundry persons"
who were charged with setting on foot a military expedition against
Spain. Already Burr, realizing that the West was not so hot for disunion
as perhaps he had supposed it to be, began to represent his project as
a peaceful emigration to the Washita, a precaution which, however,
came too late to allay the rising excitement of the people. Fearing the
seizure of their equipment, thirty or forty of Burr's followers under
the leadership of Blennerhassett left the island in four or five
flatboats for New Orleans, on the night of the 10th of December, and
a few days later were joined by Burr himself at the mouth of the
Cumberland. When the little expedition paused near Natchez, on the
10th of January, Burr was confronted with a newspaper containing a
transcription of his fatal letter to Wilkinson. A week later, learning