Colonel Burr in a letter to Theodosia complained: “The Democratic papers teem with abuse against me and my counsel, and even against the Chief Justice. Nothing is left undone or unsaid which can tend to prejudice the public mind, and produce a conviction without evidence.”

His complaint must have included the Richmond Enquirer whose editor, Thomas Ritchie, was coming to be recognized as one of the leading Republican editors of the nation. Ritchie had been born in Tappahannock, Virginia, when that town was a thriving port on the Rappahannock River. His father, Archibald Ritchie, was a Scottish merchant who was charged with being a Tory during the Revolutionary War. His mother was Mary Roane and through her he was related to the best families in that section. Archibald Ritchie died when Thomas was still young and the widowed mother put the lad to the study of law with her kinsman Spencer Roane, the rising lawyer and ardent Republican who, as has been mentioned, was believed to be Jefferson’s choice for Chief Justice if disaster should overtake John Marshall.

But Thomas did not like the law. He switched to medicine only to discover that he liked that even less. A spell of school teaching, followed by one of bad health, brought him to Richmond where he opened a small bookstore. Then, at the urging of Thomas Jefferson and his cousin Spencer Roane, he established there a newspaper supporting the Republican cause. The first issue of the bi-weekly Enquirer appeared on May 9, 1804. It was kept alive by party patronage in the rarefied atmosphere of Richmond where most of the prosperous people who could afford the luxury of a $5 per annum subscription were Federalists and subscribed to The Gazette.

Ritchie was by no means a party hack. If he thought the administration in Washington was at fault he said so. In fact, his occasional outbursts of independence provoked from that indefatigable party regular, William Duane of the Philadelphia Aurora, the charge of being “a wolf in sheep’s cloth.”

By 1807 Ritchie was firmly established in the editor’s chair and also in Richmond society to which his birth entitled him. In that year he married Isabella, daughter of Dr. William Foushee, first mayor of Richmond and one of the leading doctors. Isabella, before her career as mother ended, was to bear him twelve children, threatening the supremacy of Eliza Wickham who had a brood of seventeen.

Emaciated, sallow, long-nosed, thin-lipped, and unsmiling, Thomas Ritchie looked the part of a crusader. In his treatment of Burr in the columns of The Enquirer he was regular enough to have met the most exacting specifications of Duane. It is true that a few days after Colonel Burr’s arrival in Richmond The Enquirer piously declared: “It is difficult for us to distinguish all those cases in which we ought to speak from all those where we should be silent. Perhaps the editor of the National Intelligencer has nearly struck the proper line of discrimination: like him we shall abstain from all ‘impassioned representations’—and like him—we shall ‘unhesitatingly give all new facts as they offer themselves’ without any regard to the party whom they favor.”

Contrary to this impressive declaration of impartiality The Enquirer had not hitherto shown itself altogether free from bias. On March 13, for example, it had reprinted from the Intelligencer, that other vehement mouthpiece of the administration which was published in Washington, the statement: “That Aaron Burr has formed a treasonable plan leveled at the destruction of every ingredient of our felicity cannot be disputed.”

On March 24, two days before the arrival of the Colonel in Richmond, The Enquirer again quoted the Intelligencer: “Let us not hereafter hear it said that a Republican government is deficient in vigilance.... That it [the conspiracy] was deliberately formed we have reason to believe from the character of its author, and from the deposition of General Eaton, which shows that his mind had long dwelt upon it and had contemplated it in its various aspects.”

Nor did The Enquirer let its impartiality go to the point of withholding from its columns a dispatch from Baltimore quoting an extract from a letter from a “gentleman of unquestionable character,” dated “New Orleans, February 17” and declaring: “I must acknowledge that Burr is the most consummate scoundrel and artful liar that I ever had an acquaintance with.” The Enquirer followed this with a squib from the Philadelphia Aurora, which, under the heading “An Outlaw Emperor,” said in part: “The Federalists have now an opportunity of exhibiting new evidence of their sympathy and attachment to traitors.”

On the other hand the Federalist press could not boast that its hands were altogether clean. As the trial got under way, The Gazette, speaking for the conservative element, presented in its columns an extract from a letter allegedly received from Caroline County, between Richmond and Washington—no doubt penned by a gentleman of as “unquestionable character” as The Enquirer’s gentleman from New Orleans—whose subtle aim was to discredit the Government’s witnesses. It stated that a man on his way to Richmond as a witness for Mr. Jefferson against Colonel Burr had been detected in an attempt to start an insurrection among the Negro slaves in that county. Since the Virginia countryside was still in a state of alarm over an abortive uprising led by a slave named General Israel several years before, no more serious charge against a witness could have been made.

That, warned The Gazette, “ought to make the court and jury extremely cautious in giving credence to witnesses on both sides until characters are examined. Such a man would not scruple to swear away a man’s life for a few dollars.”

In announcing his policy of impartiality Editor Ritchie had reserved to himself the right “unhesitatingly to give all the new facts as they offer themselves.” While Colonel Burr was free on bail an opportunity presented itself such as would delight the heart of any editor.

Richmonders in those days lived well. The farms outside the city provided a varied supply of meats, poultry, vegetables and fruits in season. The town was sufficiently close to salt water to be supplied with oysters and other seafood in spite of primitive methods of refrigeration. Mrs. David Randolph, who conducted a fashionable boardinghouse and was famous as cook and provider, was credited with having devised a cold box that served as a model for the first refrigerator in this country. Ships from abroad that dropped anchor at City Point, below the town, brought in consignments of the finest wines that, along with the rest of their cargo, were poled on flatboats upstream to the city market. In the spring of the year the James was alive with shad which came up to fresh water to spawn. For a naturally hospitable people the temptation to entertain was overwhelming.

A popular custom among the members of the legal profession was “lawyer dinners” at which the lights of bench and bar sat down together to partake of good food and drink and to engage in sparkling conversation. In this form of entertainment John Wickham excelled. He was among the Élite who dwelt on Shockoe Hill and no household there enjoyed a higher reputation for serving the best of food. None boasted more capable servants than Bob, the butler, and Bob’s wife, the cook, who, under the guidance of Eliza Wickham, could prepare the most complicated dishes. No one, except for the most impelling reason, would decline an invitation to attend one of the Wickham dinners.

During the more than seven weeks between Colonel Burr’s commitment and the convening of the court on May 22, time was hanging heavy on the hands of the principals. It was not surprising that Mr. Wickham should have seized the opportunity to give a lawyer dinner and to introduce his distinguished client to this delightful local custom.

No one enjoyed a lawyer dinner more than the Chief Justice, whose wit and good humor made him a welcome guest. His house was within a stone’s throw of Mr. Wickham’s. He and the Chief Justice were good friends as well as neighbors and the Chief Justice had often been a guest of Mr. Wickham. What then was more natural than that Mr. Wickham should extend an invitation to Judge Marshall? Judge Marshall accepted the invitation and attended the dinner.

What none of them seems to have grasped was the obvious impropriety of the judge who was to preside at the trial appearing as a guest at a dinner given by the leading lawyer for the defense at which the defendant also was a guest!

The significance of the incident, however, was not lost on Editor Ritchie. The story of the dinner was soon public property. There appears to have been no attempt to conceal it. So for the issue of The Enquirer of Friday morning, April 10, Mr. Ritchie did not have to rack his brains to find an idea suitable for his acid pen. This issue contained an article signed “A Stranger from the Country.” It did not require a gift of clairvoyance to perceive that the “Stranger” was none other than Mr. Ritchie himself.

Said the Stranger: “In the Argus of the 7th it is stated, and the fact is now too notorious to be doubted, that the Chief Justice has dined with Aaron Burr at Mr. Wickham’s, since he himself solemnly decided that there was probable cause to believe Burr guilty of a high misdemeanor against his country.”

The editor first directed his attack at Mr. Wickham. He alluded to the old charge of Mr. Wickham having been a Tory in the Revolutionary War, indifferent to the fact that the same charge had been made against his own father. The people of Virginia, observed Mr. Ritchie, had generously forgiven that error of his youth. But Mr. Wickham “should modestly have refrained from recalling it to our recollection by entertaining a suspected traitor to the Union as his guest, a report so defamatory to his own fame.”

Having thus disposed of Mr. Wickham, the editor dipped his quill in acid and set to work on Judge Marshall. “I have never,” he confessed, “had any the least confidence in the political principles of the Chief Justice. I have never discovered in his public (for I am ignorant of his private) character, any of that noble candor which his friends have made the theme of such extravagant eulogium. I cannot discern in him, for my soul, those splendid and even Godlike talents, which many of all parties ascribe to him, his book certainly displays none such.” The allusion was to Judge Marshall’s recently published Life of Washington.

The Stranger continued: “But I have always been informed, and until now have believed, that he was a man of excellent judgment, most consummate prudence, and of a deportment highly decorous and dignified. I took his merits upon trust and bountifully gave him credit for good qualities I find he does not possess.” Mr. Ritchie now shook an accusing finger at Judge Marshall. “Let me inform the conscience of the Chief Justice that the public do not view his dining with Burr as a circumstance as trivial as he himself may incline to consider it.... We regard such conduct as a willful prostration of the dignity of his own character, and a wanton insult he might have spared his country.”

The writer then asked several questions that were on the tongues of many Richmonders and which for years after the event were to provide a subject for popular speculation. “I have searched in vain in my own mind for some apology for conduct so grossly indecent.... Was the Chief Justice ignorant that Burr was to be of the party to which Wickham invited him? If so, what are we to think of Mr. Wickham’s delicacy toward his friend? If so, why did not the judge leave the house as soon as he discovered the indignity imposed upon him?”

Then came the peroration: “Has the Chief Justice forgotten or neglected the maxim which is on the mouth of every tyro of the law—that the administrator of justice should not only be pure but unsuspected?”

The editor was not yet through with the Chief Justice. The incident continued to be “news” around the city, for in the issue of The Enquirer of Tuesday, April 28, Ritchie returned to the subject. This time his comments were contained in a column headed “Extract from a letter written by a resident of Richmond Hill to his friend in the country.” The Resident said he had been informed that Judge Marshall had been apprised of the invitation to Colonel Burr. But, commented the Resident, that could not have deprived him of his faculty of locomotion “unless he had been touched by the transforming wand of Circe.” Richmond was full of witty classicists. The reference to Circe’s wand, which turned men into swine, and its application to the magical effect of Mr. Wickham’s dinner on the Chief Justice could not have been lost on them.

“But,” continued the Resident of Richmond Hill, “perhaps the imagination of the judge was stronger than his appetite, and he had not fortitude enough to tear himself away from the prospect before him. In this the judge must pardon me if I am reminded of one of Goldsmith’s dishes of tongue with a small garnish of brains. Many judges have been condemned for the errors of the heart and the head, but I hope, dear F., that the list is not enlarged by errors of the appetite.”

At that point Editor Ritchie brought his torment to a close. As for the Chief Justice, he no doubt thought much, but he said not a word.

Professor George Tucker, Jefferson’s biographer, was present at the dinner and an eyewitness to what went on there. He made a report on what he saw, and what he did not see he said he got “from an authentic source.” According to Professor Tucker’s version, a few days after Colonel Burr had been released on bail Mr. Wickham invited him to dine with a large party, among whom was the Chief Justice, a neighbor and personal friend. But, on the morning of the dinner, realizing that there might be some impropriety in the situation, Mr. Wickham informed Judge Marshall that Colonel Burr would be among the guests.

Judge Marshall, however, being a man of delicate feeling, was afraid that if he were to withdraw at that late hour, after having accepted the invitation, he might be regarded as being unduly fastidious, and that such action might be interpreted as a censure on his friend. So he went to the dinner. “But,” testified Professor Tucker, “he had no communication whatever with Burr, sat at the opposite end of the table, and withdrew at an early hour after dinner.”

One version of the incident had it that the Chief Justice asked the opinion of his beloved wife Molly and that she advised against his going. But it was not like the judge to act contrary to her judgment. At any rate, concludes Professor Tucker, no one was more sensible of the indecorum than the Chief Justice, “but it was not an act of deliberation, but merely inconsiderate.”

As to the effect of the incident on the subject of his biography Professor Tucker remarks: “... it no doubt contributed to increase the alarm and apprehension of Mr. Jefferson, always sufficiently disposed to judge the Federal party with the same harshness that they judged him.” And well he might. Contemporary comments make it clear that then, as today, a judge dining in company with the man he is about to try and at the home of the chief lawyer for the defense is, to say the least, an inexcusable act of impropriety. As Editor Ritchie declared at the time, it is not the sort of thing that would be expected of a man of “excellent judgment, most consummate prudence, and of a deportment highly decorous and dignified.”