Narrow though the loophole might be, Wilkinson squeezed through it. The indictment of Burr was at length obtained. The conspirators, who had at first vehemently averred that Wilkinson would never dare to appear, and who if he should appear intended to break him down before the grand jury, were reduced to hoping for revenge when he should come on the witness-stand. Meanwhile, June 26, Burr pleaded not guilty, and the court adjourned until August 3, when the trial was to begin. Thus far the President had carried everything before him. He had produced his witnesses, had sustained Wilkinson, indicted Burr, and defied Marshall’s subpœnas. This success could not be won without rousing passion. Richmond was in the hands of the conspirators, and they denounced Jefferson publicly and without mercy, as they denounced Wilkinson and every other government officer. “As I was crossing the court-house green,” said an eye-witness,[328] “I heard a great noise of haranguing some distance off. Inquiring what it was, I was told it was a great blackguard from Tennessee, one Andrew Jackson, making a speech for Burr and damning Jefferson as a persecutor.” Hay wrote to the President, June 14:[329]-- “General Jackson, of Tennessee, has been here ever since the 22d, denouncing Wilkinson in the coarsest terms in every company. The latter showed me a paper which at once explained the motive of this incessant hostility. His own character depends on the prostration of Wilkinson’s.” This paper was no doubt Jackson’s secret denunciation to Claiborne. Young Samuel Swartwout, who had some reason to complain of the ridiculous figure he had been made to cut, jostled Wilkinson in the street, and ended by posting him for a coward. John Randolph echoed Luther Martin’s tirades against the President. Randolph was in despair at Jefferson’s success. “My friend,” he wrote to Nicholson,[330] “I am standing on the soil of my native country divested of every right for which our fathers bled. Politics have usurped the place of law, and the scenes of 1798 are again revived. Men now see and hear, and feel and think, _politically_. Maxims are now advanced and advocated which would almost have staggered the effrontery of Bayard or the cooler impudence of Chauncey Goodrich when we were first acquainted.”