By 1807 Ritchie was firmly established in the editor’s chair and also in Richmond society to which his birth entitled him. In that year he married Isabella, daughter of Dr. William Foushee, first mayor of Richmond and one of the leading doctors. Isabella, before her career as mother ended, was to bear him twelve children, threatening the supremacy of Eliza Wickham who had a brood of seventeen. Emaciated, sallow, long-nosed, thin-lipped, and unsmiling, Thomas Ritchie looked the part of a crusader. In his treatment of Burr in the columns of _The Enquirer_ he was regular enough to have met the most exacting specifications of Duane. It is true that a few days after Colonel Burr’s arrival in Richmond _The Enquirer_ piously declared: “It is difficult for us to distinguish all those cases in which we ought to speak from all those where we should be silent. Perhaps the editor of the _National Intelligencer_ has nearly struck the proper line of discrimination: like him we shall abstain from all ‘impassioned representations’--and like him--we shall ‘unhesitatingly give all new facts as they offer themselves’ without any regard to the party whom they favor.” Contrary to this impressive declaration of impartiality _The Enquirer_ had not hitherto shown itself altogether free from bias. On March 13, for example, it had reprinted from the _Intelligencer_, that other vehement mouthpiece of the administration which was published in Washington, the statement: “That Aaron Burr has formed a treasonable plan leveled at the destruction of every ingredient of our felicity cannot be disputed.” On March 24, two days before the arrival of the Colonel in Richmond, _The Enquirer_ again quoted the _Intelligencer_: “Let us not hereafter hear it said that a Republican government is deficient in vigilance.... That it [the conspiracy] was deliberately formed we have reason to believe from the character of its author, and from the deposition of General Eaton, which shows that his mind had long dwelt upon it and had contemplated it in its various aspects.” Nor did _The Enquirer_ let its impartiality go to the point of withholding from its columns a dispatch from Baltimore quoting an extract from a letter from a “gentleman of unquestionable character,” dated “New Orleans, February 17” and declaring: “I must acknowledge that Burr is the most consummate scoundrel and artful liar that I ever had an acquaintance with.” _The Enquirer_ followed this with a squib from the Philadelphia _Aurora_, which, under the heading “An Outlaw Emperor,” said in part: “The Federalists have now an opportunity of exhibiting new evidence of their sympathy and attachment to traitors.”