andrewjohnson95.substack.com/p/did-john-adams-support-a-coup

The article says Jay "never responded" to Hamilton's May 7, 1800 proposal. But the surviving letter bears John Jay’s own written endorsement rejecting the idea: he described it as Hamilton "proposing a measure for party purposes" that he thought it "would not become me to adopt." Founders Online's editorial note is explicit that no separate reply letter has been located, but Jay nonetheless did record a response on the letter itself. So the accurate formulation is that Jay did not send a known separate reply, not that he never responded at all.

The source this appears to rely on—Thomas McKean’s letter to Jefferson of March 21, 1801—describes three different preparations, not a single resolution doing all of this.

McKean wrote that:

1. a proclamation was drafted ordering obedience to Jefferson as president and Burr as vice president;
2. a resolution was prepared for Pennsylvania’s House to approve that proclamation; and
3. separately, militia arms for “upwards of twenty thousand” were secured, and an order would have issued for the arrest of members of Congress or others involved in the “treason.”

So the article collapses distinct steps into one measure and overstates what the resolution itself did. The documentary record shows a proposed House resolution backing a proclamation, plus separate militia and arrest preparations—not a resolution that itself activated 20,000 militia and empowered them to arrest and try people.

The claim is too absolute. Senate records show that John E. Howard served as president pro tempore from November 21–27, 1800, and James Hillhouse served from February 28–March 3, 1801. The Senate journal for November 25, 1800 is signed by “JOHN E. HOWARD, President of the Senate, pro tempore,” and the journal for February 28, 1801 records that “The Senate proceeded to the election of a President, pro tempore ... and the Honorable James Hillhouse was duly elected.” So Jefferson was not presiding whenever the Senate was in session during the transition.

The article presents this as a direct quotation from Theodore Sedgwick, but the wording is not what the source says. In the surviving text, Sedgwick wrote that Burr’s circumstances had enabled him to appreciate the benefits of “our commercial & other national systems” and that Burr would “not only patronize their support but their invigoration.” The article’s version drops the intervening phrase and mangles the end of the sentence into an ungrammatical quote. That matters because the quote is being used as evidence for how Federalists evaluated Burr.