Marshall’s reproof of Executive slowness was not altogether respectful to the co-ordinate branch of government. No doubt treasonable assemblages had taken place in December, and affidavits could have been brought from Marietta or Nashville within six or eight weeks had the government known precisely what would be needed, or where the evidence was to go; but no judge could reasonably require that the Executive should within five weeks obey a hint from the Supreme Court which implied a long correspondence and inquiry at spots so remote as Blennerhassett’s island, Lexington, Nashville, Fort Massac, and Chickasaw Bluffs. Jefferson was naturally indignant at being treated with so little courtesy. He wrote with extreme bitterness about Marshall’s “tricks to force trials before it is possible to collect the evidence.”[315] He returned threat for threat, with something in addition:-- “In what terms of decency can we speak of this? As if an express could go to Natchez or the mouth of the Cumberland and return in five weeks, to do which has never taken less than twelve!... But all the principles of law are to be perverted which would bear on the favorite offenders who endeavor to overturn this odious republic!... All this, however, will work well. The nation will judge both the offender and judges for themselves. If a member of the Executive or Legislature does wrong, the day is never far distant when the people will remove him. They will see then and amend the error in our Constitution which makes any branch independent of the nation. They will see that one of the great co-ordinate branches of the government, setting itself in opposition to the other two and to the common-sense of the nation, proclaims impunity to that class of offenders which endeavors to overturn the Constitution, and are protected in it by the Constitution itself; for impeachment is a farce which will not be tried again. If their protection of Burr produces this amendment, it will do more good than his condemnation would have done; ... and if his punishment can be commuted now for a useful amendment of the Constitution, I shall rejoice in it.”