The inquest which followed presented many and mixed views.  Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, writing in 1835, and evidently a somewhat prejudiced friend, says that “the jury of inquest at last were reluctantly dragooned into a return of murder.”

Meanwhile, for eleven long black days, Burr stayed indoors at Richmond Hill.  He was afraid to go out, for he knew that popular feeling was, in the main, against him.  Dark times for the household gods!  At last, one starless, cloudy night, having heard of the murder verdict, he stole away.

His faithful servant and friend, John Swartwout, went with him, and a small barge lay waiting for him on the Hudson just below his Richmond Hill estate, with a discreet crew.  They rowed all night, and at breakfast time, he turned up at the country place of Commodore Truxton, at Perth Amboy.

Haggard and worn, he greeted his friend the Commodore with all his usual sang-froid, and suggested nonchalantly that he had “spent the night on the water, and a dish of coffee would not come amiss!”

He never went back to Richmond Hill to live again, though he later returned to New York and dwelt there for many years.  He went, for a time, to Theo in the South, fearing arrest, but as a matter of fact, verdict or no verdict, the matter of Hamilton’s death was never followed up.  Burr came calmly back to the Capitol and finished his term as Vice-president.  In his farewell speech to the Senate he said he did not remember the names of all the people who had slandered him and intrigued against him, since “he thanked God he had no memory for injuries!”

[Illustration:  THE BUTTERICK BUILDING.  A stone’s throw from the site of the once-glorious house of Richmond Hill.]

The year after the duel he evolved his monstrous and hare-brained plan of establishing a Southern Republic with New Orleans as Capital and himself as President.  Mexico was in it too.  In fact, President Jefferson himself wrote of the project:  “He wanted to overthrow Congress, corrupt the navy, take the throne of Montezuma and seize New Orleans....  It is the most extraordinary since the days of Don Quixote!...”

General Wetmore loyally declares the scheme to have been “a justifiable enterprise for the conquest of one of the provinces of Southern America.”  But no one in the whole world really knows all about it.  The sum of the matter is that he was tried for treason, and that, though he was acquitted, he was henceforward completely dead politically.  Through all, Theo stood by him, and her husband too.  They went to prison with him, and shared all his humiliation and disappointment.  Affection?  Blind, confident adoration?  Never was man born who could win it more completely!

But America as a whole did not care for him any more.  Dr. Hosack loaned him money, and, after his acquittal, he set sail for England, and let Richmond Hill be sold to John Jacob Astor by his creditors.  It brought only $25,000, which was a small sum compared to what he owed, so he had another object in staying on the other side of the water:  a quite lively chance of the Debtors’ Prison!