Meanwhile exaggerated accounts of the size of Burr's following were filtering to Washington, together with circumstantial rumors of the disloyalty of his designs. Yet for weeks Jefferson did nothing, until late in November his alarm was aroused by a letter from Wilkinson, dated the 21st of October. On the 27th of November the President issued a proclamation calling upon all good citizens to seize "sundry persons" who were charged with setting on foot a military expedition against Spain. Already Burr, realizing that the West was not so hot for disunion as perhaps he had supposed it to be, began to represent his project as a peaceful emigration to the Washita, a precaution which, however, came too late to allay the rising excitement of the people. Fearing the seizure of their equipment, thirty or forty of Burr's followers under the leadership of Blennerhassett left the island in four or five flatboats for New Orleans, on the night of the 10th of December, and a few days later were joined by Burr himself at the mouth of the Cumberland. When the little expedition paused near Natchez, on the 10th of January, Burr was confronted with a newspaper containing a transcription of his fatal letter to Wilkinson. A week later, learning that his former ally, Wilkinson, had now established a reign of terror at New Orleans directed against his followers, and feeling no desire to test the tender mercies of a court-martial presided over by his former associate, Burr surrendered himself into the custody of the acting Governor of Mississippi Territory. But the refusal of the territorial grand jury to indict him suggested the hope that he might still escape from the reach of the law. He therefore plunged into the wilderness, headed for the Spanish border, and had all but reached his destination when he was recognized and recaptured at Wakefield, Alabama.