Prologue - A Mind-Jostling Trial

Summary

“There never was such a trial from the beginning of the world to this day!”

George Hay

“The far famed trial of Aaron Burr…has jostled the public mind from one end of the Union to the other…”

Richard Bates, September 20, 1807

Americans in 1807, proud of their hard-won status as a nation among nations, were prone to exaggerate their own importance. Thus could George Hay, President Jefferson’s chief prosecutor in the Burr treason trial, make his extravagant claim. The world at large, of course, took no notice of what was transpiring in Chief Justice Marshall’s circuit court in Richmond. Such was decidedly not the case, however, with the several thousand people who swarmed into town to catch the action. Nor was it true of the tens of thousands across the country who followed the sensationalist coverage of the trial in the partisan newspapers of the day. What Americans saw and read about – what “jostled the public mind” – was in fact one of the most dramatic trials in American history, one that pitted the president against the chief justice of the United States, that saw some of America’s finest lawyers locked in seven months of legal and personal combat, and featured a defendant whose fall from grace remains an enduring mystery.