The adventurers contracted for fifteen boats and enlisted quite a number of people to descend the Mississippi and make New Orleans their rallying-point, supposing that the Western population were dissatisfied with the government and were ready to secede and establish a new republic, or empire, to include Mexico; also relying on the aid of General Wilkinson at St. Louis.  But they miscalculated:  Wilkinson was true to his colors; the people whom they had seduced gradually dropped off; the territorial magistrates became suspicious and alarmed, and the governor of the Territory communicated his fears to the President, who at once issued a proclamation to arrest the supposed conspirators, who had fled when their enterprise had failed.

Burr was seized near Natchez, and was tried for conspiracy; but the trial came to nothing.  He contrived to escape in the night, but was again arrested in Alabama, and sent to Richmond to be tried for treason.  As has been said, he was acquitted, by a jury of which John Randolph was foreman, with the sympathy of all the women, of whom he was a favorite to the day of his death.  The trial lasted six months, and Jefferson did all he could to convict him, with the assistance of William Wirt, just rising into notice.

Although acquitted, Burr was a ruined man.  His day of receptions and popularity was over.  His sad but splendid career came to an inglorious close.  Feeling unsafe in his own country, he wandered abroad, at times treated with great distinction wherever he went, but always arousing suspicions.  He was obliged to leave England, and wandered as a fugitive from country to country, without money or real friends.  At Paris and London he suffered extreme poverty, although admired in society.  At last he returned to New York, utterly destitute, and resumed the practice of the law, but was without social position and generally avoided.  He succeeded in 1832 in winning the hand of a wealthy widow, but he spent her money so freely that she left him.  After the separation he supported himself with great difficulty, but retained his elegant manner and fascinating conversation, until he died in the house of a lady friend in 1836, and was buried at Princeton by the side of his father and grandfather.

Our history narrates no fall from an exalted position more melancholy, or more richly deserved, than his.  Without being dissipated, he was a bad and unprincipled man from the start.  He might have been the pride of his country, like Hamilton and Jefferson, being the equal of both in abilities, and at one time in popularity.  The school-books have given to him and to Benedict Arnold an infamous immortality, comparing the one with Cain, and the other with Judas Iscariot.

The most important measure connected with Jefferson’s long administration was the Non-importation Act, commonly called the Embargo.  It proved in the end a mistake, and shed no glory on the fame of the President; and yet it perhaps prevented a war, or at least delayed it.