By the same post Wilkinson wrote to Senator John Smith a letter bristling with italics: "I shall assuredly push them [the Spaniards] over the Sabine ... as that you are alive.... _You must speedily send me a force_ to support our pretensions ... _5000 mounted infantry ... may suffice to carry us forward as far as Grand River_ [the Rio Grande], _there we shall require 5000 more to conduct us to Mount el Rey ... after which from 20_ to _30,000 will be necessary to carry our conquests to California_ and the _Isthmus of Darien. I write in haste, freely_ and _confidentially_, being ever your friend."[859]
In Kentucky once more the rumors sprang up that Burr meant to dismember the Union, and these were now put forward as definite charges. For months Joseph Hamilton Daveiss, a brother-in-law of John Marshall--appointed at the latter's instance by President Adams as United States Attorney for the District of Kentucky[860]--had been writing Jefferson exciting letters about some kind of conspiracy in which he was sure Burr was engaged. The President considered lightly these tales written him by one of his bitterest enemies.
With the idea of embarrassing the Republican President, by connecting him, through the Administration's seeming acquiescence in Burr's projects as in the case of the Miranda expedition, Daveiss and his relative, former Senator Humphrey Marshall--both leaders of the few Federalists now remaining in Kentucky--welded together the rumors of Burr's Mexican designs and those of his treasonable plot to separate the Western States from the Union. These they published in a newspaper which they controlled at Frankfort.[861]
The moss was removed from the ancient Spanish intrigues; Wilkinson was truthfully denounced as a pensioner of Spain; but the plot, it was charged, had veered from a union of the West with the Spanish dominions, to the establishment, by force of arms, of an independent trans-Alleghany Government.[862] The Federalist organs in the East adopted the stories related in the _Western World_, and laid especial emphasis on the disloyalty of the Western States, particularly of Kentucky.
The rumors had so aroused the people living near Blennerhassett's island that Mrs. Blennerhassett sent a messenger to warn Burr that he could not, in safety, appear there again. Learning this from the bearer of these tidings, Burr's partner, Senator John Smith, demanded of his associate an explanation. Burr promptly answered that he was "greatly surprised and really hurt" by Smith's letter. "If," said Burr, "there exists any design to separate the Western from the Eastern States, I am totally ignorant of it. I never harbored or expressed any such intention to any one, nor did any person ever intimate such design to me."[863]