Secretary of State Madison and the Attorney General solicited the help of General Andrew Jackson to the same end in Tennessee. Wilkinson, in New Orleans, sent agents in search of information through Louisiana and Mississippi. This governmental dragnet brought results. Witnesses and depositions combined reached an impressive total of close to 150. Whether they would all be heard was a different matter. They still had to pass an exacting test contrived by counsel for the defense, sufficient to convince the Chief Justice that the admission of their evidence was strictly within the letter of the law. Let the public make whatever deductions it pleased about the trial at Richmond, John Marshall did not intend to deviate one inch from what he considered to be the sacred duties of a judge in the execution of justice. _Chapter_ V Colonel Burr in a letter to Theodosia complained: “The Democratic papers teem with abuse against me and my counsel, and even against the Chief Justice. Nothing is left undone or unsaid which can tend to prejudice the public mind, and produce a conviction without evidence.” His complaint must have included the Richmond _Enquirer_ whose editor, Thomas Ritchie, was coming to be recognized as one of the leading Republican editors of the nation. Ritchie had been born in Tappahannock, Virginia, when that town was a thriving port on the Rappahannock River. His father, Archibald Ritchie, was a Scottish merchant who was charged with being a Tory during the Revolutionary War. His mother was Mary Roane and through her he was related to the best families in that section. Archibald Ritchie died when Thomas was still young and the widowed mother put the lad to the study of law with her kinsman Spencer Roane, the rising lawyer and ardent Republican who, as has been mentioned, was believed to be Jefferson’s choice for Chief Justice if disaster should overtake John Marshall. But Thomas did not like the law. He switched to medicine only to discover that he liked that even less. A spell of school teaching, followed by one of bad health, brought him to Richmond where he opened a small bookstore. Then, at the urging of Thomas Jefferson and his cousin Spencer Roane, he established there a newspaper supporting the Republican cause. The first issue of the bi-weekly _Enquirer_ appeared on May 9, 1804. It was kept alive by party patronage in the rarefied atmosphere of Richmond where most of the prosperous people who could afford the luxury of a $5 per annum subscription were Federalists and subscribed to _The Gazette_. Ritchie was by no means a party hack. If he thought the administration in Washington was at fault he said so. In fact, his occasional outbursts of independence provoked from that indefatigable party regular, William Duane of the Philadelphia _Aurora_, the charge of being “a wolf in sheep’s cloth.”