What Burr meant to do I know no more than you, dear reader.  It is none of our business just now.  Only, when the grand catastrophe came, and Jefferson and the House of Virginia of that day undertook to break on the wheel all the possible Clarences of the then House of York, by the great treason trial at Richmond, some of the lesser fry in that distant Mississippi Valley, which was farther from us than Puget’s Sound is to-day, introduced the like novelty on their provincial stage; and, to while away the monotony of the summer at Fort Adams, got up, for spectacles, a string of court-martials on the officers there.  One and another of the colonels and majors were tried, and, to fill out the list, little Nolan, against whom, Heaven knows, there was evidence enough,—­that he was sick of the service, had been willing to be false to it, and would have obeyed any order to march any-whither with any one who would follow him had the order been signed, “By command of His Exc.  A. Burr.”  The courts dragged on.  The big flies escaped,—­rightly for all I know.  Nolan was proved guilty enough, as I say; yet you and I would never have heard of him, reader, but that, when the president of the court asked him at the close whether he wished to say anything to show that he had always been faithful to the United States, he cried out, in a fit of frenzy,—­

“Damn the United States!  I wish I may never hear of the United States again!”

I suppose he did not know how the words shocked old Colonel Morgan, [Note 6] who was holding the court.  Half the officers who sat in it had served through the Revolution, and their lives, not to say their necks, had been risked for the very idea which he so cavalierly cursed in his madness.  He, on his part, had grown up in the West of those days, in the midst of “Spanish plot,” “Orleans plot,” and all the rest.  He had been educated on a plantation where the finest company was a Spanish officer or a French merchant from Orleans.  His education, such as it was, had been perfected in commercial expeditions to Vera Cruz, and I think he told me his father once hired an Englishman to be a private tutor for a winter on the plantation.  He had spent half his youth with an older brother, hunting horses in Texas; and, in a word, to him “United States” was scarcely a reality.  Yet he had been fed by “United States” for all the years since he had been in the army.  He had sworn on his faith as a Christian to be true to “United States.”  It was “United States” which gave him the uniform he wore, and the sword by his side.  Nay, my poor Nolan, it was only because “United States” had picked you out first as one of her own confidential men of honor that “A.  Burr” cared for you a straw more than for the flat boat men who sailed his ark for him.  I do not excuse Nolan; I only explain to the reader why he damned his country, and wished he might never hear her name again.

He never did hear her name but once again.  From that moment, Sept. 23, 1807, till the day he died, May 11, 1863, he never heard her name again.  For that half-century and more he was a man without a country.