Like Trump, Burr was an outsider politician from New York City whose character horrified his detractors — to the delight of his supporters. During his time in office, Burr regularly ignited political uproars, while being embroiled in constant legal trouble, not the least of which was his other famous crime: the fatal shooting of Alexander Hamilton. When his term ended in 1804, he rushed into the embrace of his largely rural, working-class base, which was historically suspicious of the federal government and shared his grudge against “Virginia dynasty” elitists like President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison — an early-1800s version of the “deep state.”
Over the next two years, Burr exploited the fears and insecurities of these Americans and hatched a plan to create a country of his own from a divided, economically unstable United States. To accomplish this, he solicited the support of military leaders to prop up his designs, including James Wilkinson, who rose to the rank of general and even became the military governor of Louisiana, despite being a double agent on the payroll of Spanish officials in New Orleans.
Once his shock troops were poised to launch their attack, however, Burr was noticeably absent. As authorities raided his headquarters at Blennerhassett Island in the Ohio River, he watched from a safe distance in Kentucky. In keeping physical space between himself and those acting on his behalf, Burr avoided direct placement at the scene of the crime, which would prove to be critical.
Even after his arrest, which sent shock waves through American society, Burr deployed his cult of personality to poison jury pools and threaten witnesses. He used lower courts to score disruptive, if temporary, victories that prolonged and complicated efforts to bring him to justice. A Mississippi grand jury acquitted him of different charges just weeks before his arrest for treason in Alabama, and echoing Burr’s own narrative of victimization, went so far as to accuse the government of bullying him.
When his federal trial began in Richmond in March 1807, he benefited from Chief Justice John Marshall presiding. Marshall’s own hatred of Jefferson — his cousin and political rival — helped insulate Burr from the federal government’s attempts to litigate his broader oeuvre of misdeeds. Marshall even subpoenaed White House documents that Burr claimed to need for his defense, a first in U.S. history. The trial was a melodrama of hearsay and plausible deniability from the start, and even firsthand testimony from co-conspirators such as Wilkinson became suspect because of the partisan narratives looming over the whole ordeal.