“What I had myself in contemplation,” the President answered, “was to wait till we get news from Louisville of December 15, the day of Burr’s proposed general rendezvous. The post comes from thence in twelve days. The mail next expected will be of that date. If we then find that his force has had no effectual opposition at either Marietta or Cincinnati, and will not be stopped at Louisville, then, without depending on the opposition at Fort Adams (though I have more dependence on that than any other), I should propose to lay the whole matter before Congress, ask an immediate appropriation for a naval equipment, and at the same time order twenty thousand militia, or volunteers, from the Western States to proceed down the river to retake New Orleans, presuming our naval equipment would be there before them. In the mean time I would recommend to you to be getting ready and giving orders of preparation to the officers and vessels which we can get speedily ready.” Not a trace of confidence in the people of Louisiana was to be detected in this plan of operations. The duty of the government not only to act, but to act with extreme quickness and vigor, before Burr should come within a long distance of New Orleans, was avowed. The idea of calling out twenty thousand men to retake New Orleans showed a degree of alarm contrasting strongly with the equanimity that preceded it, and with the inertness which had allowed such an emergency to arise. The difference of tone between this letter and the President’s public language was extreme. Nevertheless, the Western mail arrived, bringing news that the State of Ohio had seized the greater part of Burr’s boats, that six or eight had escaped, and that Burr had gone to Nashville; and in this partly satisfactory report the President saw reason for further silence. Next came, Jan. 2, 1807, Wilkinson’s letter of November 12 from Natchez, with its pledge to perish in New Orleans, and with messages, not trusted to writing, but orally imparted to the messenger, about Burr’s cipher letters and their contents. Still the President made no sign. For want of some clew his followers were greatly perplexed; and men like John Randolph, who hated the President, and Samuel Smith, who did not love him, began to suspect that at last the Administration was fairly at a standstill. Randolph, with his usual instability, swayed between extremes of scepticism. At one moment he believed that the situation was most serious; at another, that the conspiracy was only a Spanish intrigue. January 2 he wrote to Monroe, in London, a letter full of the conviction that Spain was behind Burr:[240] “I am informed also, through a very direct and respectable channel, that there is a considerable party about Lexington and Frankfort highly propitious to his views, and with strong Spanish prepossessions. Some names which have been mentioned as of the number