The Blount Conspiracy

Did former President Trump’s remarks to the crowd that subsequently stormed the Capitol in January cross the legal boundary that separates speaking intemperately and unwisely from actually fomenting insurrection?  I myself am not a lawyer, but fifty-four out of our hundred senators actually do have law degrees and should therefore be more than qualified to answer that question…and especially since they were all present to witness the events under consideration! So, assuming the senators vote honestly and without allowing political affiliation to cloud their vision, we should have the answer soon enough.

In an obvious way, the President’s trial begs to be compared with the three previous presidential impeachment trials our country has seen: the trials in the Senate of Andrew Johnson in 1868, of Bill Clinton in 1999, and of President Trump himself in 2020. But less well known is that the House has in the course of our nation’s history voted, not four times, but twenty-one times, to impeach individuals and thus to send them over to be tried in the Senate for “treason, bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” They were a varied lot, the accused: three presidents, fifteen federal judges (of whom, one Supreme Court justice), one cabinet official, and one senator. That’s twenty…and President Trump’s trial this week makes twenty-one. And these trials, which ended up with eight guilty verdicts and eight acquittals, together constitute the real precedent for this week’s proceedings. (Those verdicts add up to sixteen because in one instance—see below—the charges were dismissed and in three cases the accused individuals chose to resign from office before they could be tried.)

Given the degree to which impeachment has been a topic for discussion in our nation for the last two years, it’s amazing to me how rarely anyone mentions the impeachments not involving presidents. (The only exception would be the 1876 impeachment of William W. Belknap, the Secretary of War under President Ulysses S. Grant who was charged with accepting payments in exchange for official appointments and whose case was actually mentioned several times this week on the floor of the Senate.) This week, I would like to write about the first of them all, however, and in my usual way to invite readers to look into the future by looking into the past and considering the strange case of Senator William Blount of Tennessee (1749–1800).

The whole matter had to do with something now called the Blount Conspiracy, a huge to-do in the last decade of the eighteenth century and now yet another important event in American history more or less completely forgotten by almost all. It was, however, a very big deal in its day. When Abigail Adams, our nation’s second First Lady, suggested in public that she regretted that Congress lacked the ability to resolve the matter with a guillotine, she clearly had Senator Blount’s neck in mind as she spoke.

William Blount was not a nobody. He signed the Constitution. He was the sole governor of the “Southwest Territory” that later joined the union as the State of Tennessee. He was one of Tennessee’s first two senators, coming to the Senate in 1796. He was also heavily into real estate, eventually owning about 2.5 million acres in his home state and in the adjoining territory then known as Trans-Appalachia and today covering parts of Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. (That there were native Americans on the scene to whom the land belonged in every sense except the strictly legal one invented by the Colonials themselves seems to have occurred to no one at all.) The problem—for Blount and his brothers—was that much of the land had been purchased on credit. That, in and of itself, wouldn’t have been a problem if the price of land hadn’t collapsed when war broke out between Great Britain and Spain the same year that Blount entered the Senate. The crucial detail here is that the Treaty of 1783 that ended the American Revolution guaranteed that Americans would henceforth be able to navigate the Mississippi freely, a commercial boon that was obviously going to collapse if Britain was defeated by Spain, which eventuality would have made the Blounts’ real estate dramatically less valuable. And so Blount, eager to avoid bankruptcy, chose to act daringly and wholly extra-legally by conspiring on his own with the British to assist the latter in defeating Spain. Part of the plan involved invading Spanish Louisiana. And another part involved abetting British plans to invade Spanish Florida.

There is a lot here to digest. For one thing, who ever heard of Spanish Louisiana? Didn’t our nation acquire Louisiana (along with another 750,000 square miles of what today is most of the American Midwest) as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, one of President Thomas Jefferson’s greatest accomplishments while in office? So the answer is that, yes, that is what happened. But Louisiana itself went through different colonialist phases  and was indeed part of the Spanish Empire after Spain acquired it from France in 1762 as part of the Treaty of Fontainebleau that was signed towards the end of the Seven Year’s War (another conflict remembered today by none). But Spain didn’t hold onto Louisiana for long, ceding it back to France in 1802, just in time for the United States to purchase it—and another roughly half billion acres—for all of fifteen million dollars. But when Senator Blount was trying to keep the price of land from collapsing even further, Spain was in control of present-day Louisiana.

Blount’s extra-legal negotiations with the British came out in in July of 1797 when a letter written by Blount was discovered and read aloud in the Senate. When Thomas Jefferson, then the nation’s Vice President under John Adams, asked for an explanation, Blount asked for some time to consult his papers. The Senate gave him twenty-four hours. That happened on July 3. On July 4, the twenty-first anniversary of American independence, Blount failed to appear and it became known that he had fled Washington. On July 8, the Senate voted 25 to 1 to expel him from the Senate for acting contrary to the nation’s best interests by secretly negotiating with a foreign power. Later that month, a federal district court judge issued a warrant for Blount’s arrest.

And then, on January 28, 1798, the House approved five articles of impeachment against Blount, including conspiracy to violate both the Neutrality Act of 1794 (that made it illegal for an American citizen to wage war against a country at peace with the United States) and the Treaty of San Lorenzo, also called Pinckney’s Treaty, that defined the border between the United States and Spanish Florida. (The plan Blount hatched with his British handlers involved, among other things, invading Pensacola.) Seven “managers” were duly chosen to argue the case in the Senate. Almost a year of in-house wrangling followed, during the course of which Blount steadfastly refused to return to Washington. And then, finally, the Senate convened as a Court of Impeachment on December 17, 1798. (In the meantime, Blount, clearly taking his expulsion from the Senate as a done deal, ran for and was duly elected to the Tennessee Legislature.) For its part, the Senate debated whether it could proceed in the absence of the accused, then decided that it could.

And now we get to the interesting part. Blount’s lawyers argued on two different grounds that the Senate lacked the jurisdiction to try Blount: one, because the phrase in the Constitution allowing for the impeachment of the “President, the Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States” did not mean to include senators (and, indeed, Blount was and is the only member of either the Senate or the House ever to be impeached); and, two, because even if it did have the theoretical right to try a senator, Blount, by virtue of having been expelled from the Senate, was specifically no longer a “civil Officer” of the United States government and was therefore no longer under their jurisdiction.

They apparently made their case effectively. On January 10, the Senate failed to approve a resolution declaring that Blount’s prosecution fell within the Senate’s jurisdiction. Then, on January 11, the Senate voted formally to dismiss Senator Blount’s impeachment, whereupon Vice President Jefferson formally dismissed the case against him.

Blount died a hero to his fellow Tennesseans, but the precise reason his impeachment was dismissed remains a matter of debate. Did the Senate feel that having made him a hero was enough, that they hardly needed to go all the way to making him a martyr? Or was the sense of the Senate simply that the impeachment process exists to remove criminals from positions of authority in the government and that there cannot be any real reason to undertake proceedings against someone no longer holding office? Both arguments are cogent. And both are highly relevant in that both could easily be applied to President Trump. How it can be that William Blount’s name is not on the nation’s tongue these days as the very same issues are debated in the very same Senate—now that, at least to me, is even more of a mystery than the “real” reason, whatever it was, that James Blount was able to break the law with impunity without suffering any consequences at all!

(The portrait reproduced above of Senator Blount is by Washington Bogard Cooper, one of the greatest American portrait painters of the nineteenth century and also a son of Tennessee.)