While working on Impeached, my book about the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, I developed a powerful respect and affection for Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, the “Radical” Republican from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  Even though he was never Speaker of the House of Representatives, he effectively ran that chamber through the Civil War and for three years after, until his death in 1868.

Fierce-looking Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania

Stevens is still a controversial historical figure, having never really recovered from his portrayal as the evil, darky-loving political manipulator of the 1915 silent film classic,Birth of a Nation. (We’re hoping for better luck with the version of Stevens in the upcoming Spielberg flick about Lincoln, for which Tommy Lee Jones will portray the man from Lancaster.)

Though we have left the attitudes of 1915 far behind us, along with the pro-Ku Klux Klan enthusiasm that fired that film, Stevens’ reputation still suffers. The fierce look on his face was no illusion:  he was one tough hombre.  Other congressmen dreaded facing him in floor debate. Stevens’ quick wit left many an adversary sputtering in frustration or grinning ruefully.

But there is so much more to celebrate about Stevens:

• As a state legislator, he authored and muscled through legislation establishing that state’s first free public schools.
• He was a true enemy of slavery.  He purchased the freedom of some slaves.  As a lawyer, he represented fugitive slaves for nothing.  Some of that story is told in Steven Lubet’s fine book, Fugitive Justice.
• Stevens fought in Congress against the spread of slavery before slavery and was a champion of abolition until it happened.  Stevens, who limped from a club foot at birth, was said by one friend to act as though “every injustice in the world had been done to him.”  Every underdog could claim his support.
• As ferocious and tenacious as he was, Stevens was also a deal-maker who understood that politics is the art of the possible.  His legislative efforts were critical to the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments — he bemoaned that the Fourteenth Amendment was not stronger in defending the rights of the freed slaves, but admitted that it was the best he could get through Congress — the the first Civil Rights Act and all of three Reconstruction Acts.
• Through all this, he had a wicked sense of humor.  When I give talks on the impeachment trial, I am always grateful to Stevens for leaving behind a couple of wonderful anecdotes that bring a hearty laugh before any audience.  Virtuous, effective AND funny?  People don’t come any better than that.

Because Don Gallagher agrees with me on a lot of these points, he is leading an effort to persuade the U.S. Postal Service to dedicate a “forever” stamp to Stevens.  Mr. Gallagher is no rookie at this business.  He takes credit for the 2002 stamp honoring Olympic champion Duke Kahanamoku and the 2008 stamp for author James A. Michener.

How do we go about this?  We send letters demanding a Stevens “forever” stamp to the US Postal Service (using first-class postage, you bet — put on an extra stamp, just to make a statement).  The address is:

Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee
c/o Stamp Development
U.S. Postal Service
475 L’Enfant Plaza SW, Room 3300
Washington, DC 20260-3501

And the Postal Service– perhaps a bit reluctantly — also has a website with instructions.  Lift a hand, a pen, or just use the keyboard in front of you.  It’s time to honor Thad Stevens.

James Madison, Constitutional Convention, June 29, 1787

Producing a book on James Madison presents a great many challenges.  A major one, I am discovering, is how smart the man was.  I spend days poring over transcripts of his speeches in public bodies, his correspondence, and his published writings, including the Federalist essays.  A few times a day, I frame in all-caps and boldface something he said or wrote, or I jot it down separately just to think about.  When it comes time to write, I will be struggling with how this bookish child of privilege, who never traveled outside of the United States and was physically on the timid side, developed such sharp insights into the human mind and heart, and how people behave in groups large and small.

When I give presentations on the Constitutional Convention, a frequent question is:  What feature of the current government would most surprise the Framers?  I ordinarily say that they would be stunned by the size and breadth of the executive branch of the government.  Through the revolution and its immediate aftermath, state executives had few powers.  The Articles of  Confederation adopted in 1781 created no executive officers at all.  A major goal of the convention delegates in 1787 was to create an executive branch with “energy.”  Still, the modern state dwarfs anything they could have imagined.

James Madison

Several reasons account for this growth of the executive.  First, of course, is the technological sophistication of our communications and information industries, which vastly multiplies the tools of social control that government can call upon.  Also, we expect so much more from government.  In the 1780s, government’s principal responsibilities were to protect national interests from foreign nations, keep the peace internally, and provide a justice system.  Today, we look to the government “safety net” to protect workers and consumers, to provide educational opportunities, to regulate the economy and support economic development, and a thousand other tasks.

But then there is also Madison’s insight above.  Since 1940, the nation has been at war or “in apprehension of war” for at least six of seven decades — perhaps we can exempt the years between the first Iraq War and the World Trade Center attack.  We have grown accustomed to routine government intrusions on our lives that would have driven the Framers to reach for their muskets.  During the debate over ratification of the Constitution, virtually every participant agreed that nothing could threaten liberty so much as having a “standing army.”  Those supporting the Constitution insisted that the intelligent deployment of citizen militias could forestall such a dire development, while their opponents argued that the Constitution would inevitably bring about such an army.

What a contrast, then, to read this week that the CIA wishes to expand its drone campaign in Yemen “to hit targets based solely on intelligence indicating patterns of suspicious behavior” in a location, even when the CIA does not know who will be attacked.  That rule, it turns out, already applies to our drone campaign in Pakistan.

For some reason, this struck home for me though I certainly have ignored dozens of similar arrogations of executive power.  We are claiming the right to attack unknown persons on the other side of the world, based on our surveillance of movements of people and vehicles.  Of course, the attempt to stem terrorism is different from conventional war, and the ultimate goal of these extraordinary measures is to protect Americans and others.  Yet it is difficult not to wonder at the transformations of our society that each such measure must work.  The head, indeed, becomes very large for the body.

Washington Nationals' Presidents Race: TR on the road to another heart-breaker

The genius part of the Presidents’ race, though, is that Teddy Roosevelt ALWAYS LOSES.  Always.  (Lincoln has the best won-loss record; must be the long legs.)  Teddy didn’t even win on the day he seized a huge lead by starting on a zip line from the stadium’s roof.  This has meant that many fans actually look forward to the race, happily wondering whether this will be the time Teddy wins.

But on Opening Day 2012, a new, even more brilliant prospect arose in a conversation between an usher and my friend, Power Lawyer and Power Swimmer Jim Clifford.  Shaking his head, the usher said that the team may have to send Teddy down to the minors for a while.  They then would bring up James Madison to make the races more competitive!

Upon hearing the news, my heart leapt up.  Having embarked on my next historical work about Madison, I have found myself describing him as the Zelig of the Founding Era, always there and always doing the heavy lifting, but often ignored in favor of others who were more charismatic and (not coincidentally) much taller.  At last, a potential moment of popular recognition for Little Jemmy, whose slight stature was noted even by his future wife, Dolley, who called him “The Great Little Madison”!  Imagine how the fans’ loyalties would be engaged by the spectacle of a the hard-charging Madison, half-a-giant-head shorter than the others, legs churning madly to get ahead.  Knowing Madison (as I am coming to), he would probably propose to rewrite the rules of the race, anyway.

James Madison -- ready for a shot at the Big Leagues!

And what about Teddy?  Well, a few weeks or months with the Triple-A club in Syracuse couldn’t hurt him.  He could build attendance down there, work out with 19-year-old phenom Bryce Harper, and then the two of them can return triumphantly to Nationals Park in June or so.

So start your petition drives, the social media campaigns!  It’s time for the Little Man to get his shot at The Show.

Baseball sensation and eye-makeup devotee, Bryce Harper

The government’s allegations include all of the hallmarks of a litigator’s tunnel vision, busily checking off the elements of a cause of action under a statute enacted during the Benjamin Harrison Administration.

Ohio Republican Senator John Sherman, sponsor of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

(No, I won’t tell you when that was.  Look it up on Wikipedia, which you can do until the Justice Department sues them.)  So, the government charges, the five publishers got together in hotel rooms and agreed that they were getting hopelessly hosed by Amazon’s insistence on pricing e-books below the cost of producing them, at about $9.99.  Amazon’s business strategy was to grab the entire e-reader market for its Kindle and then drive down the prices it would pay to publishers for content.

The publishers then went to Apple and proposed to sell their e-books to Apple on terms that specified that Apple would impose a specific markup to its buyers.  With an outlet guaranteed through Apple, the publishers then could insist on similar terms with Amazon.  If Amazon did not accept the terms, then Apple would have exclusive access to the publishers’ books, which would dramatically undermine Amazon’s persistent wet-dream of market hegemony.  So, Amazon accepted the publishers’ terms.

The legal violation in all this is that the publishers allegedly acted together — “concerted action” between supposed competitors is what the antitrust law bans.  Ironically, a single massive business (like Amazon) has considerably greater leeway.  If the five publishers had all been joined as a single company, they could have followed the same business strategy with almost no legal risk.  (The law pretends to bar monopolistic conduct by a single company — such as Amazon’s strategic below-cost pricing of e-books in the past (and presumably in the near future)– but the Justice Department has almost no appetite for taking on such cases; fighting bullies is such a bore.)

So, where does this leave you, the readers, and me, the lonely hero of this sad story?  Well, it leaves us both unhappy and feeling ill-used.  First, and unquestionably, the publishers’ deal with Apple drove up prices, so e-books have been costing more.  Not your first choice; I get it.  There’s even a classic Adam Smith argument that the lower e-book prices will result in higher sales of e-books which will mean greater royalties for me.  At this point, it is even possible that there are enough e-readers and i-Pads out there (25 million sold in 2011) that this might become reality, oh, sometime in the 2020s.

But, please, take a look at where I sit.  With the transition to e-books from physical books, two of the three major participants in the supply chain have dramatically lower costs.  Publishers need not actually produce a book (no paper, glue, ink, binding, warehousing, or shipping).  Retailers need not actually stock a book, put it on the shelf, employ poets as sales staff, and so on.  Yet the third major participant in the supply chain — moi! — has EXACTLY the same costs.  I still must eat, pay the mortgage, and write the damned thing.  Yet my royalty on e-books under the Amazon approach was dramatically reduced, cut in half.  Under the Apple approach that the government is now attacking, my royalty went up to about 3/4 of the royalty on a hardcover book.  Better, but still not great.

I am not, sad to say, a huge fan of the publishers’ actions.  They have artificially suppressed my royalty, and used their market power to do so, at the expense of you, my loyal reader.  Perversely, I am viewed as the monopolist in this economic equation, since I have complete control over my own content, and am granted a monopoly over it by the copyright laws.  This is, of course, a ridiculously abstract concept that does not translate into the real world.  Stephen King and Stephen Covey actually have market power because their “brands” are so powerful in the marketplace.  They can negotiate for a better e-book royalty or e-book deals, and so they do.  I, alas, do not have such market power, though a fellow can dream. . . .

Worse, though, the publishers’ strategy for increasing e-book prices involved plainly illegal actions (meeting together in hotel rooms?  really, guys?) that principally restored publishers’ profit margins, and only incidentally repaired my still-suppressed royalty rate.  They were not, to put it simply, fighting for me.

Yet the Justice Department’s course plays directly into the hands of Amazon’s long-term monopolization strategy.  Three of the publishers (including Simon & Schuster) supposedly have entered into settlements that will tear up their deals with Amazon and Apple and restore us to the old days where Amazon underprices everything.  Now, Apple may be big enough to follow Amazon’s pricing down and prevent monopolization in the long term — good for you as consumers, but there goes my royalty into the dumpster again.  When elephants dance . . . you know the rest.

This is depressing me.  I am reduced to invoking Will Rogers’ observation about inflation.  Although dollars aren’t worth what they used to be, Rogers said, it still seems like the best strategy is to get your hands on as many as possible.  So I suppose I should go work on my next book.

Former House Speaker Gingrich refuses to drop out of the Republican nominating contest even though his prospects shrink daily.

Although House Speakers are national figures, they have faded from view in presidential politics over the last century.  In fact, only one has ever made it to the White House.

That was James K. Polk, a Tennessee Democrat of the Andrew Jackson stripe, who was Speaker for four years in the 1830s.  He gave up his seat in Congress in 1838 to run for governor of his home state.  He won that race, but lost his next two tries for the governor’s chair in Tennessee.

As the Democratic national convention neared in 1844, Polk was a former Speaker, a two-time loser in his home state, and a rather quiet contender for the vice presidential nomination.  But the pre-convention favorite, Martin Van Buren, fell short of the needed two-thirds majority.  The delegates turned to a “dark horse,” Polk, who was embraced as Jackson’s political heir.

Speaker v. Speaker

In the general election, Polk’s Whig Party opponent was a man who had served as Speaker of the House in six different Congresses, Henry Clay of Kentucky.  It was the only time two former Speakers faced off in a presidential contest.

The dynamic Clay had sought the presidency before, losing to John Quincy Adams in 1824 and to Andrew Jackson in 1832.  His luck was no better in 1844.  Polk won narrowly with a margin of 1.5 percent of the votes cast.

James K. Polk is the only former House Speaker to win the presidency.

Some years earlier, Clay had famously said, “I had rather be right than president.”  For a third time, voters granted him the second part of that wish.

Two more Republican Speakers have run as national candidates but both foundered on the corruption that infested Congress in the late nineteenth century.  Schuyler Colfax of Indiana became vice president in 1868, but was dropped from the Republican ticket four years later, tarred in the bribery schemes surrounding the Union Pacific Railroad.

Speaker James G. Blaine, was the Republican nominee in 1884 but lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland, falling victim to the seductively rhythmic slogan, “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, Continental Liar from the State of Maine.”

After Blaine’s loss, the only Speaker to make a credible lunge for the White House was Champ Clark of Missouri, the Democratic frontrunner when his party’s convention began in Baltimore in 1912.  Forty-six ballots later, the convention turned its back on Clark in favor of another dark horse, Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey.

Technicians, Not Leaders

Since 1912, presidential contests have been Speaker-free.  Many Speakers in that period have been powerful figures, yet they mostly focused on the business in their own legislative chamber, mastering often-arcane legislative rules and managing their majorities.  The talents that brought Tip O’Neill and Dennis Hastert into leadership did not serve them well in the sound-bite politics of the electronic age.

When the Republicans captured the House in 1994 for the first time in four decades, new Speaker Gingrich changed the job.  He aimed to use the Speaker’s role as a national pulpit.

Gingrich proclaimed his “Contract with America,” challenging President Bill Clinton for control of the nation’s political agenda.  Gingrich’s ambitions overmatched his ability to deliver, however, and he left Congress after only two terms as Speaker, propelled by widespread dissatisfaction among House Republicans.

This year, with public approval of Congress at nine percent, Gingrich again has sought to use the Speakership as a platform for national leadership.  History has not been on his side.

Trench warfare on the Western Front during World War I

Having just finished the terrific, deeply flawed The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund, about World War I, I find myself wondering if it is possible to write a sensible history of that massive, world-changing conflict.   I hope people keep trying to do so, because I want to try to understand it better, but the task is beyond daunting.

First, the Englund book, which just crests 500 pages in chronicling the wartime experiences of 20 semi-ordinary people who happened to leave memoirs or reminiscences of their experiences.  The cast includes a bloody-minded British soldier who thrived in trench combat, a British nurse who wandered the Eastern Front in search of people to help, a French bureaucrat with a sharp eye for changes in public attitudes, a reluctant but tough Italian mountain soldier, an ethnic Dane in the German army who disliked military service, a Venezuelan aristocrat who somehow ended up fighting for the Ottoman Turks in the Middle East, and a Scot serving in the forgotten conflict in the torrid climes of East Africa.

It’s a great idea for a book and Englund has chosen his protagonists well.  They offer an expansive range of experiences of a conflict that undermined the established order on three continents.  Some of them end up as prisoners.  Some die.  All suffer terribly, sometimes from war wounds, sometimes from illness.  Wisely, Englund does not pontificate or draw Big Lessons for his readers.  He mostly stays out of the way of this astonishing, kaleidoscopic view of an entire world gone mad; it is powerful stuff.

And yet.  And yet.  Aspects of the book drove me wild.  A short list of the most annoying would include:

• A Swede, Englund evidently writes directly in English, since no translator is credited.  Writing in a second language is a remarkable feat; Joseph Conrad wrote in his third language, and did it beautifully.  Englund will not be confused with Conrad.  The writing is distractingly awkward at times.  It’s a shame.
• Englund tells the stories in the present tense, presumably to heighten their immediacy.  It often only confuses, since he quotes from material that is written in the past tense.  It was a bad decision.
• Englund jumps from story to story, moving every few pages to a new narrator as the war unfolds from Palestine to Greece to Flanders to Moscow to Croatia.  That is a good decision, as it reinforces the global nature of the conflict.  But he does not sufficiently remind us of the identity and background of each new narrator as he or she takes the stage.  It’s disorienting.  A “cast of characters” at the beginning of the book is too terse to help the floundering reader trying to remember exactly which Austro-Hungarian officer is the current narrator.
• Englund does not want to interrupt the tales of each individual with background material about the progress of the war, so he drops footnotes in the text which are in (roughly) six-point font.  It is a lazy writer’s solution.  It is more work to fold background information into the narrative, but if the reader needs it, please do it.  And who selected that tiny font!  There should be a special circle in hell for the editors at Knopf who approved it.  History readers trend old.  Our eyes are not good.  Be kind to us.

Yet with all of these complaints, I recommend the book without reservation.  I am increasingly impressed with how central World War I was in molding the world I have known, even though it ended more than three decades before I was born.  The leaders of Europe, then the dominant force in world affairs, melted down their own world in a bizarre form of self-immolation.  Barbara Tuchman strained to explain that heedless rush to oblivion in The Guns of August and The Proud Tower.  Diplomatic historians can chart how Europe tumbled, in slow motion, into war over a two-month period after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, but they cannot really explain why.

But the war’s fallout was immense, even beyond the millions slaughtered and treasure squandered.  The legitimacy of Europe’s rulers and its social order was fundamentally undermined as monarchies toppled.  The war paved the way for Marxist rebellions from Berlin to Moscow, which spawned Communism in Russia.  The German wounds from the war were too terrible to heal yet not quite terrible enough to change a culture of militarism, so Adolf Hitler strode hideously to the fore, harnessing German rage over massive sacrifices that could not be dismissed as meaningless even though they seemed to be.

The high-handed colonial attitudes of the victors emerged at the Paris Peace Conference as men blithely carved up Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, assigning millions of people to governments to which they had no connection.  So many of the conflicts of the 20th century, and even today, can be traced to arrogant, ill-informed decisions proclaimed in that treaty.  I hope to read a fairly recent book that makes this argument — David Andelman’s A Shattered Peace – though I cannot recommend it one way or the other now.  Indeed, last year I saw a Chinese movie, The Beginning of the Great Revival, about the founding of the Chinese Communist Party; though an appalling propaganda flick at one level, it persuasively portrays the development of Chinese communism as the result of the decision in the Paris Peace Treaty to reward Japan with Chinese lands and to ignore the contributions to the Allies of China, which sent 90,000 laborers to help France and Britain.  Who knew?  Not me.

The go-to quote for World War I (which Englund blessedly avoids) is the proclamation by Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Minister as the war began.  “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” Sir Edward intoned.  “We shall not see them lit again in our time.”  It was true for the whole world.  How could a single book possibly capture its enormity?

Do you know a great World War I book?  Please tell me about it.

The exhibition focuses on several of the “privileged” slave families at Monticello.  These included the Grangers, who came to occupy managerial positions at Jefferson’s plantation, and the Hemingses.  The Hemings clan descended from Elizabeth Hemings, who bore several children by Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles.  Her chlidren became highly trusted servants for Jefferson.  And her daughter, Sally Hemings, is widely thought to have been the mother of several children with Jefferson, though the matter is still disputed.

What startled me at the exhibition, though, was that eight male descendants of Elizabeth Hemings fought for the Union during the Civil War.  Okay, that’s not all that startling.  But four of them fought as black soldiers in black units, and four fought as white soldiers in white units.  Col. John Wayles Jefferson, one of the descendants, commanded white troops at the Battle of Vicksburg.

Colonel John Wayles Jefferson, Union Army

Only in America.

But the story about Barnes & Noble in this morning’s New York Times coincides with some of my recent thinking, so I want to get a few points off my chest.

• The survival of B&N stores is really important to those the book industry — people working in it and people who enjoy reading books.  Don’t get me wrong — I love independent bookstores.  I’m a devotee of Politics & Prose in this region.  But B&N has over 700 stores and is the remaining premium retail outlet for books in this country.  It is an unrivaled showroom for new books, which is REALLY important to those of us who write them.  Even with all the space devoted to selling its Nook e-reader, its stores are still a good place to browse.
• I’m not opposed to Amazon.  If I can get something on Amazon that I can’t get anywhere else, that’s fine.  But I am trying to change my habits to make Amazon a last resort when I’m book-shopping.  I can get e-books for my Ipad from B&N.  I can get used books from B&N, also, or from www.vialibri.net, an amazing site for more obscure titles (check it out).  If I shop through B&N, I’m supporting their overall business and those all-important showrooms.
• B&N’s website — as near as I can tell — is collecting tax to pay to state governments for sales into that jurisdiction, which is something Amazon has never done.  At the risk of sounding naive, I think that’s terrific.  No, I’m not crazy about paying taxes, but it is the price of being part of civilized society, and it’s lousy when there’s a glaring example of non-compliance which requires that others pay more.  Individual states are slowly forcing Amazon is to collect sales tax, but I like a business that has decided to comply with the law all on its own.

There are more steps I need to take.  I should put a buy-the-book button for Barnes & Noble on this site, though I’m not sure I’ve actually sold any books through this site . . . ever.  And over at the Washington Independent Review of Books, the online book review that I and some amazing people have been operating for almost a year, we are going to install such a button; we do sell books through that site, and would invite you to use it!

But when you’re looking into e-books, used books, or online ordering of real books, think about B&N.  Even though it doesn’t care about us, it’s important to us.

Your intrepid historical traveler before Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor

The location of the site was itself entirely explanatory.  Plunked down in the center of the mouth of the harbor, with spits of land a few hundred yards to either side of it, I could visualize immediately why the few Union troops under the command of Major Robert Anderson had to surrender the fort at the very beginning of the Civil War.  They were sitting ducks, with no practical way to provision themselves.  (This is all wonderfully recounted in Adam Goodheart’s 1861.)

The location of the fort is no accident.  The land on which it rests is entirely man-made, fabricated in the 1820s and 1830s of rocks (most, ironically, hauled down by ship from New England).

And it is surrounded by history.  To the north stands the remains of Fort Moultrie, the site of Confederate artillery in 1861 but also the site of a battle with the British during the Revolutionary War.  In that shipping channel to the north, the Confederate Navy launched theCSS Hunley, an underwater vehicle powered by human guinea pigs, which used a torpedo to sink the USS Housatonic.  Though it was the first submarine to kill in wartime, the Hunley also killed its three crews by sinking three different times, including after the attack on the Housatonic.  Like many new technologies, there were some kinks to be worked out.

The small submarine CSS Hunley was even more lethal for its own crews than for Union ships during the Civil War

To the south of Fort Sumter lies the site of Battery Wagner, where the now-legendary 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an all-black unit, mounted a bloody and unsuccessful assault on an entrenched Confederate position in July 1863.  Widely celebrated as the moment when African-American troops first demonstrated their courage and bravery under withering fire, the story is retold well in the movie Glory, starring Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman.

Standing on the rebuilt walls of Fort Sumter, which were largely reduced to rubble during months of Union Army bombardment during the Civil War, it seemed like there was too much history from too many different episodes crammed into that narrow space.

But that is a pattern in human history.  John Keegan’s Face of Battle recounts the pivotal battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme,  fought across five centuries apart and all in the same neighborhood of Belgium.  Crossroads of trade and human traffic have always been where our murderous proclivities flare into epic combat.

Some of the men who faced the former vice president were rugged frontier types and able river pilots.  Others were bored schoolteachers and dancing masters.  All had been lured by Burr’s promises of riches and adventure.  They were the material with which Burr and his principal ally, American Army General-in-Chief James Wilkinson, hoped to change history.

View of the Ohio River from Fort Massac State Park in Illinois, close to where Aaron Burr first addressed his adventurers in December 1806. The statue is of George Rogers Clark, not Burr.

But there were so few of them.  Burr had commissioned the building of enough boats to transport 1500 men down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans.  At a time when the entire U.S. Army numbered 3,300, it would have been an immensely powerful force.

But because of sensational reports of his true aims, as well as a Kentucky prosecutor’s attempt to throw Burr himself into jail, popular support for the expedition had fizzled.  No more than 100 men surrounded him.  Burr had to hope that Wilkinson would swell their ranks on the lower Mississippi with a large group of soldiers.

After greeting each of the adventurers personally, Burr mounted a small rise to address his band.  They waited expectantly for inspiring words from the great man before them, who had almost been elected president of the United States just six years before.  The moment was charged with electricity.

Burr noticed that local residents had come down to the riverside to see and hear him.  For frontier residents, the arrival of a group of 100 men, led by the former vice president, was a major event.  Burr, a man who dreamt huge dreams, suddenly had a fit of caution.  He did not want to say something unwise, something that might be used against him,  in front of people who were not part of his expedition.

So Burr made a short statement that had to be deflating.  According to several men who were there, he pointed to the bystanders and said he could not speak of the expedition’s true destination.  The men could ask their captains where they were headed.  And then he stopped.  The men boarded their boats and headed downriver.

Almost a year later, when Burr was facing criminal charges growing out of the expedition, Chief Justice John Marshall zeroed in on that moment on the Ohio River shore.  If Burr’s intentions were innocent, Marshall stressed, he surely could have told his men where they were headed and what his plan was.

But he didn’t.