The town had been laid out many years before by Col. William Mayo, a friend of the second William Byrd, its founder. The Colonel adopted a checkerboard plan, the streets running east and west paralleling the river, each on a higher level than the other, and intersected at right angles by streets running north and south. The capitol sat in the middle of an open space of several acres known as Capitol Square, whose steep slopes were scarred with unsightly gullies. Behind the capitol the ground leveled off into a plateau whose north side, bearing the name of Shockoe Hill, served as the fashionable residential section of the town. The Eagle Tavern to which Burr had been conducted stood on Main Street, an east-west thoroughfare at the foot of Capitol Hill occupied chiefly by shops and other business establishments. A trifle less refined than the Swan Tavern at the top of the hill, it catered to a wide variety of guests, including sportsmen, legislators, and planters who came up to Richmond periodically for a brief respite from the monotony of their plantations. The hostelry was identified by a sign, eight feet by five, displaying a golden eagle. This was no ordinary bird. It had been painted by the artist Thomas Sully, who in his later years was to become one of the leading portraitists of his day and to number among his subjects the young Queen Victoria of England. Sully got $50 for the eagle, not an insignificant sum according to 1800 standards of value. At the tavern Colonel Burr remained under informal arrest over the weekend waiting to be handed over by the military to the civil authorities. The warrant, issued by the Chief Justice of the United States and written in his own hand, was based on the charges of treason against the United States and of a high misdemeanor in preparing a military expedition against the dominions of the King of Spain, with whom the United States was at peace. In the early days of the Federal judiciary there were no judges of appeal, the appellant functions being performed by the justices of the Supreme Court to each of whom was assigned a circuit. Virginia, in which state Burr’s crimes were alleged to have been committed, lay in the circuit assigned to the Chief Justice. The Judiciary Bill of 1801, rushed through the Congress by the Federalists, provided for appeals judges. But it had been repealed by the Jeffersonians. Thus the presence of Chief Justice Marshall in Richmond on this occasion was attributable to Jefferson’s counterattack on the Federalists, unmindful though he may have been of the particular effect it was going to have on the trial of Aaron Burr.