He Misunderstands the Western Situation.

There was thus every chance that Burr would be favorably received by the West, and would find plenty of men of high standing who would profess friendship for him and would show a cordial interest in his plans so long as he refrained from making them too definite; but there was in reality no chance whatever for anything more than this to happen.  In spite of Burr’s personal courage he lacked entirely the great military qualities necessary to successful revolutionary leadership of the kind to which he aspired.  Though in some ways the most practical of politicians he had a strong element of the visionary in his character; it was perhaps this, joined to his striking moral defects, which brought about and made complete his downfall in New York.  Great political and revolutionary leaders may, and often must, have in them something of the visionary; but it must never cause them to get out of touch with the practical.  Burr was capable of conceiving revolutionary plans on so vast a scale as to be fairly appalling, not only from their daring but from their magnitude.  But when he tried to put his plans into practice, it at once became evident that they were even more unsubstantial than they were audacious.  His wild schemes had in them too strong an element of the unreal and the grotesque to be in very fact dangerous.

    The West Had Grown Loyal.

Besides, the time for separatist movements in the West had passed, while the time for arousing the West to the conquest of part of Spanish-America had hardly yet come.  A man of Burr’s character might perhaps have accomplished something mischievous in Kentucky when Wilkinson was in the first flush of his Spanish intrigues; or when the political societies were raving over Jay’s treaty; or when the Kentucky legislature was passing its nullification resolutions.  But the West had grown loyal as the Nineteenth Century came in.  The Westerners were hearty supporters of the Jeffersonian democratic-republican party; Jefferson was their idol; they were strongly attached to the Washington administration, and strongly opposed to the chief opponents of that administration, the Northeastern Federalists.  With the purchase of Louisiana all deep-lying causes of Western discontent had vanished.  The West was prosperous, and was attached to the National Government.  Its leaders might still enjoy a discussion with Burr or among themselves concerning separatist principles in the abstract, but such a discussion was at this time purely academic.  Nobody of any weight in the community would allow such plans as those of Burr to be put into effect.  There was, it is true, a strong buccaneering spirit, and there were plenty of men ready to enlist in an invasion of the Spanish dominions under no matter what pretext; but even those men of note who were willing to lead such a movement, were not willing to enter into it if it was complicated with open disloyalty to the United States.