correspondence intensified. A coroner's jury pronounced him a
murderer, the grand jury instructed the district attorney to
prosecute, and the Vice President found it necessary to take refuge in
concealment until the first fury of the people had subsided.
Cheetham's pen, following him remorselessly, charged that he ransacked
the newspapers for the grounds of a challenge; that for three months
he daily practised with a pistol; and that while Hamilton lay dying,
he sat at the table drinking wine with his friends, and apologising
that he had not shot him through the heart.

[Footnote 150: "Orators, ministers, and newspapers exhausted
themselves in execration of Burr."--Henry Adams, _History of the
United States_, Vol. 2, p. 190.]

Within two years Burr was arrested for treason, charged with an
attempt to place himself at the head of a new nation formed from the
country of the Montezumas and the valley of the Mississippi, and,
although he was acquitted, his countrymen believed him guilty of a
treasonable ambition. In the State where he had found his chief
support, he ever after ranked in infamy next to Benedict Arnold.
Thenceforth he became a stranger and a wanderer on the face of the
earth. His friends left him and society shunned him. "I have not
spoken to the damned reptile for twenty-five years," said former
Governor Morgan Lewis, in 1830.[151]

[Footnote 151: _Autobiography of Thurlow Weed_, p. 370.]

For the moment, one forgets the horrible tragedy of July 11, 1804, and
thinks only of the lonely man who lived to lament it. He was in his
eighty-first year when he died. On his return from Europe in 1812,
only one person welcomed him. This was Matthew L. Davis, his earliest
political friend and biographer. Burr made Davis his literary
executor, and turned over to him the confidential female
correspondence that had accumulated in the days of his popularity as
United States senator and Vice President, and that he had carefully
filed and indorsed with the full name of each writer. The treachery,
falsehood, and desertion with which these letters charged him, seemed
to this unnatural man to add to their value, and he gave them to his
executor without instructions, that the extent of his gallantries, his
power of fascination, and the names of the gifted and beautiful
victims of his numerous amours might not become a secret in his grave.
One can conceive nothing baser. The preservation of letters to satisfy
an erotic mind i