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major formative member of the Democratic-Republican party in New York. He is remembered not so much for his tenure as the third Vice President under Thomas Jefferson as for his duel with Alexander Hamilton and his trial and acquittal on charges of treason.
After the expiration of his term as Vice President on March 4, 1805, broken in fortune and virtually an exile from New York, where, as in New Jersey, he had been indicted for murder after the duel with Hamilton, Burr fled to Philadelphia. There he met Jonathan Dayton. Burr and Dayton together created a conspiracy, the goal of which is unclear. At its grandest, the plan may have been for Burr to make a massive new nation in the west, forged from conquered provinces of Mexico and the states west of the Appalachian Mountains. Burr was to have been the leader of this Southwestern republic.
General James Wilkinson, a conspirator, betrayed Burr's plans to the president, who issued a proclamation for Burr's arrest. Burr read this in a newspaper in the Orleans Territory on January 10, 1807. He turned himself in to the authorities, but soon jumped bail and fled for Spanish Florida; he was intercepted in Alabama on February 19, 1807.
Another member of the Burr conspiracy was the Anglo-Irish Aristocrat Harman Blennerhassett. After marrying his niece, Blennerhasset had been forced out of Ireland. He came to live as a quasi-feudal lord on an island in the Ohio River. It was there that he met Burr and agreed to help finance the imperial ambitions of Burr's group.
(The objects of Burr's 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.)
Burr was arrested in 1807 on the charge of treason, was brought to trial before the United States circuit court at Richmond, Virginia. Burr was arraigned four times for treason before a grand jury. The fourth time, May 22, sufficient evidence was found to indict him. His trial, which was run by Chief Justice John Marshall, began August 3.
Due to lack of the constitutionally required two witnesses, Burr was acquitted on September 1, 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 misdemeanor, and on a technicality was again acquitted. From Wikipedia/ 1911 Britannica
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Full text of Memoirs of Aaron Burr from Project Gutenberg: Vol. 1 (http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/7850), Vol. 2 (http://www.gutenberg.net/etext/7851)