Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 3.djvu/336

324 him the offer; and he was supposed to be already at Natchez. The city had been kept for a month in a state of continual alarm, distracted by rumors, and expecting some outbreak from day to day, assured by Wilkinson that Burr with seven thousand men might appear at any moment, with a negro insurrection behind him and British ships in the river, when suddenly John Adair rode into town, and descended at the door of Madame Nourage's boarding-house. Judge Prevost, Burr's stepson, was so indiscreet as to announce publicly that General Adair, second in command to Burr, had arrived in town with news that Burr would follow in three days, and that it would soon be seen whether Wilkinson's tyranny would prevail. The same afternoon Lieutenant-Colonel Kingsbury of the First Infantry, at the head of a hundred and twenty men, appeared at the door of the hotel and marched Burr's second in command to prison. Adair afterward claimed that if he had been allowed forty-eight hours no one could have arrested him, for he had more friends in New Orleans than the General had; but even he must have seen that the conspiracy was dead. For a moment his arrest, and a few others made at the same time, caused excitement, and Wilkinson ordered detachments of troops to patrol the city; but thenceforward confidence began to return and soon the crisis passed away, carrying with it forever most of the discontent