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try to free the famous politician. His son-in-law, Joseph Alston, lived in South Carolina, and the Alstons were a powerful force in that state. A wealthy planter, who had served in South Carolina’s House of Representatives, Alston had married Theodosia, Burr’s daughter, in 1801. *
    When Burr and his escort finally reached Chester, South Carolina, Burr made a small and somewhat desperate stab at escape. Jumping from his horse, he shouted to some locals, imploring them to summon a judge. He reportedly declared, sounding more like a lawyer than a dangerous man plotting a coup, “I am Aaron Burr, under military arrest. I claim the protection of the civil authorities.”
    Perkins, surely thinking that his share of the reward money was about to disappear, grabbed Burr and wrestled the smaller man back into his saddle. His friend Malone slapped the horse’s flanks, and the entire party galloped away. Throughout the journey, Burr had maintained a stoic demeanor. But now, with a last chance at freedom lost, he broke. According to the accounts of his guards, Burr wept. Some of his captors joined him. 6
    A little later, Perkins hired a small coach to carry Burr the rest of the way to his date with justice. It would be far more difficult for Burr to bolt from a closed carriage, Perkins reasoned, than from horseback. Initially heading for the nation’s capital, the party learned that Burr would be tried instead in Richmond, Virginia’s state capital. They arrived in Richmond on March 26, the closed carriage accompanied by “eight dusty riders.” 7
    Word of Burr’s approach and the rumored details of his capture had begun to appear in the national press, which by now had turned completely against Burr. Some of the newspapers reported that Burr arrived in Virginia wearing the outfit in which he had been captured. Others speculated that he was wearing a disguise, which he had planned to use when he invaded Mexico. Despite the confusion over his outfit, it was clear that the dapper Burr had taken a precipitous fall from his previous heights.
    In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a greater fall from grace in American history than Aaron Burr’s at this moment in his life. Perhaps the nearest comparison might be Benedict Arnold, betrayer of the Revolutionary cause, and, ironically, Aaron Burr’s first commander during the War for Independence. But Arnold, although a high-ranking officer and an intimate of George Washington, never reached the heights that Burr had visited. And Arnold never had to suffer the consequences of his betrayal. He lived out his years in Canada and London, with considerable success as a shipping merchant. For Burr, it would be a very different story.
    An extremely deft politician, Aaron Burr had skillfully maneuvered through the bellwether presidential election of 1800, becoming an architect of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican * challenge to the Federalist Party of President John Adams and the former secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. A power inNew York politics, Burr was instrumental in bringing this Elector-rich state to Jefferson’s column as his ostensible running mate. But through a quirk of the process in America’s still evolving presidential election system, Jefferson and Burr finished in a tie. The election would eventually be settled in the House of Representatives, where each state would have a single vote. That tie in the voting in 1800 produced America’s first serious political crisis since the Constitution had been ratified.
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    T HE TALE OF Aaron Burr’s rise and fall is a powerful corrective to the familiar, trumped-up view of the “Revolutionary generation” as a knighted and dignified “band of brothers,” a colonial-era Kiwanis Club of glad-handing gentlemen united by a singular cause and ideology. For all their extraordinary accomplishments in creating an independent America out of thirteen