called conspiracy which has so puzzled the students of
that period. The traditional view that he planned a separation of the West
from the Union is now discredited. Apart from the question of political
morality he could not, as a shrewd politician, have failed to see that the
people of that section were too loyal to sanction such a scheme. The
objects of his treasonable correspondence with Merry and Yrujo, the British
and Spanish ministers at Washington, were, it would seem, to secure money
and to conceal his real designs, which were probably to overthrow Spanish
power in the Southwest, and perhaps to found an imperial dynasty in Mexico.
He was arrested in 1807 on the charge of treason, was brought to trial
before the United States circuit court at Richmond, Virginia, Chief-Justice
Marshall presiding, and he was acquitted, in spite of the fact that the
political influence of the national administration was thrown against him.
Immediately afterward he was tried on a charge of misdemeanour, and on a
technicality was again acquitted. He lived abroad from 1808 to 1812,
passing most of his time in England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden and France;
trying to secure aid in the prosecution of his filibustering schemes but
meeting with numerous rebuffs, being ordered out of England and Napoleon
refusing to receive him. In 1812 he returned to New York and spent the
remainder of his life in the practice of law. Burr was unscrupulous,
insincere and notoriously immoral, but he was pleasing in his manners,
generous to a fault, and was intensely devoted to his wife and daughter. In
1833 he married Eliza B. Jumel (1769-1865), a rich New York widow; the two
soon separated, however, owing to Burr's having lost much of her fortune in
speculation. He died at Port Richmond, Staten Island, New York, on the 14th
of September 1836.

The standard biography is James Parton's _The Life and Times of Aaron Burr_
(first edition, 1857; enlarged edition, 2 vols., Boston and New York,
1898). W.F. McCaleb's _The Aaron Burr Conspiracy_ (New York, 1903) is a
scholarly defence of the West and incidentally of Burr against the charge
of treason, and is the best account of the subject; see also I. Jenkinson,
_Aaron Burr_ (Richmond, Ind., 1902). For the traditional view of Burr's
conspiracy, see Henry Adams's _History of the United States_, vol. iii.
(New York, 1890).

BURRIANA, a seaport of eastern Spain, in the province of Castellon de la
Plana; on the estuary o