A clandestine meeting, set up without preliminaries, indicated that Burr and Wilkinson already knew each other’s mind, but that their thoughts needed to be kept secret. Since Burr’s house in Richmond Hill lay on the road from Charleston to Washington, it was easy for Wilkinson to break his journey unobserved. The nature of their discussions was never divulged, but they must have concerned the opportunities that Burr might find in the west. In particular, Wilkinson wanted the youthful Claiborne replaced as governor of Louisiana, and his eagerness to meet Burr suggested that the vice president was his preferred candidate as successor.
The timing of their encounter was significant. Burr had another ten months before his term of office ended, but no obvious political future. He had just been defeated in the race for governor of his home state, New York, a result he blamed on the scurrilous allegations about his financial probity made by his bitter political rival Alexander Hamilton. Burr was in a dangerous mood when he met Wilkinson. As Charles Biddle reported, the vice president was ready “to call out the first man of any respectability concerned in the infamous publications concerning him.”
The provocation came just six weeks after his meeting with Wilkinson Hamilton’s comment that Burr was “a dangerous man unfit to be entrusted with the reins of power” was enough for the challenge to be issued, answered, and shots exchanged on the hillside of Weehawken, New Jersey, overlooking the Hudson River. What destroyed Burr’s political career, in the north at least, was the report that Hamilton had intentionally fired wide before the colonel deliberately shot his opponent in the gut.
With a warrant issued for his arrest in New York, Burr took refuge with Charles Biddle in Pennsylvania. Lacking any obvious outlet for his energies, he returned to the topic that Wilkinson had raised. During the rest of the year, they exchanged ciphered messages and held occasional meetings From these emerged the outline of what became known as the Burr conspiracy.
THE CONSPIRATORS MADE AN INCONGRUOUS PAIR. The general growing stouter, increasingly rosy and swollen in the face, and addicted to ever more Ruritanian uniforms; the colonel, tall, elegantly dressed, an eighteenth-century aristocrat, who took it as a truth that “a gentleman is free to do whatever he pleases so long as he does it with style.” John Adams wrote that he had “never known, in any country, the prejudice in favor of birth, parentage, and descent more conspicuous than in the instance of Colonel Burr.” Marriage had made Wilkinson part of the Biddles’ influential circle, but Burr, grandson of the great Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards, “was connected by blood,” as Adams put it, “to many leading families in New England.” Wilkinson had never been to college, and most of his life had been spent on the frontier or in the coarse world of licentious soldiery, while Burr, the successful New York attorney and brilliant politician who came within a single vote of being the third president, had been educated at Princeton and had never strayed far from the Atlantic coast, rarely even beyond its law courts and drawing rooms.
Yet they shared some notable characteristics. Both grew up fatherless and indulged by wealthy relatives. Each displayed a mesmerizing ability to win influential friends, outstanding initiative and courage during the Revolutionary War, and in peacetime a taste for extravagance that drove them to stretch morality to the point of illegality in the pursuit of money. In Burr’s case, he sold political favors and made a flagrant attempt to turn the credit-issuing powers of the Manhattan water company into a full banking service. And by the time they began discussing operations in Mexico, both were facing a bleak future, according to one astute observer, the French ambassador, General Louis-Marie Turreau.
“Mr. Burr’s career is generally looked upon as finished; but he is far from sharing that opinion, and I believe he would rather sacrifice the interests of his country than renounce celebrity and fortune,” Turreau told Talleyrand in March 1805. Wilkinson, he wrote, “complains rather indiscreetly, and especially after dinner, of the form of his government, which leaves officers few chances of fortune, advancement, and glory, and which does not pay its military chiefs enough to support a proper style.”
Nevertheless, those who had dealings with Burr and Wilkinson made a sharp distinction between the two. Both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, natural opposites in other matters, shared a visceral antagonism to Burr and his ambitions. Jefferson expressed his dislike circumspectly, noting that from their first encounter in the 1790s “his conduct very soon inspired me with distrust” because Burr had no principles and “was always at market” for political gain. Hamilton, on the other hand, did not mince his words, writing, “[Burr] loves nothing but himself. He is sanguine enough to hope every thing—daring enough to attempt every thing— wicked enough to scruple [at] nothing.” By contrast, despite their doubts about Wilkinson’s financial dealings with the Spaniards, both were ready to entrust him with power, Hamilton by recommending his promotion to major general in 1799, and Jefferson by confirming him as army commander in 1801. If either of the conspirators at Richmond Hill were to betray the other, everything suggested it would be Burr.
WILKINSON’S MAPS AND NOTES SHOWED two obvious ways of entering Mexico from the United States. The first was championed by the French general Victor Collot, who explored the Mississippi Valley in 1796. In his book, Voyage dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, Collot selected Santa Fe as the most desirable point of access. Troops could either descend from the Missouri River in the north, following a line that would become the Santa Fe Trail, or ascend the Arkansas River from the Mississippi. Because the final approach “presents neither mountains nor rivers which might be serious obstacles,” Collot concluded, “one may easily appreciate how important it is for Spain that these two passages be closed.”
Much of Collot’s geography was wrong, but his military instinct was right. So long as a commander chose the right rivers to follow through the dry land that lay beyond the Mississippi, Santa Fe could be reached without overwhelming difficulty. And from Santa Fe, the royal road, El Camino Real, led due south to Chihuahua and Mexico City. The route left New Orleans more than one thousand miles to the east. The city could be ignored in any advance through Santa Fe.
The alternative was to sail directly to Veracruz on the coast of Mexico and march less than two hundred miles inland to Mexico City. In every way it was simpler than the Santa Fe route, except that the commander would have to decide what to do about New Orleans, the port where his army had to be assembled for embarkation to Mexico. If it could not be cajoled into giving its support willingly, New Orleans would have to be captured.
After his first discussions with Wilkinson, Burr contacted the British ambassador, Anthony Merry, to enlist Britain’s aid. The plan, Merry tersely informed London, was “to effect a separation of the Western Part of the United States from that which lies between the Atlantick and the Mountains, in its whole Extent.” What Burr wanted, as he soon made clear, was a squadron of British warships from the West Indies to prevent the United States navy from reaching the mouth of the Mississippi. This would stop New Orleans from being reinforced from the sea and allow a force bound for Veracruz free passage to the coast of Mexico.
From an early stage, therefore, the colonel favored a plan for, directly or indirectly, the secession of the western states, and an invasion of Mexico through Veracruz. The general’s interests, by contrast, were always drawn toward Santa Fe. Nor was his name mentioned in Merry’s report, even though the secessionist plan outlined there was essentially the Spanish Conspiracy in British colors. Long experience had inoculated Wilkinson against any scheme that involved detaching the western states from the Union.