Letters (25 page)

Alas, we know the Angel who had flown! In Act V, Rogers sounds a pair of Shakespearian notes that (so testified my father) Andrew Cooke had taught him to admire: the Indians having been betray’d by British & French alike and the uprising collapsed, “Ponteach’s” son “Philip” remarks on the “game of governments”:

And when characters thot dead vengefully reappear, his other son “Chekitan” (Pontiac had no such sons; he was more father to my father than to his own offspring, of whom we know nothing) wonders in best Elizabethan fashion:

Deadly juggling it was. In the aftermath of the war, “Alexis Cuillerier” was arrested in Detroit and charged with the 1764 murder of one Betty Fisher, the seven-year-old daughter of the 1st white family kill’d in the rising. “Angélique” did not appear at the trial—in fact, after 1763 Andrée Castine Cooke vanishes from the family records as if flown bodily to heaven—but “Antoine Cuillerier” did, and by some means prevail’d upon Pontiac to testify in my father’s defence. The Chief 1st declared that the Fisher child, afflicted with the fluxes after her capture, had so anger’d him by accidentally soiling his clothes that he had thrown her into the Maumee & order’d young Cuillerier to wade in & drown her. Not exactly an exoneration! After further conference with my grandfather, who reminded him that the Oswego treaty made him immune from prosecution on any charges dating from the war, Pontiac changed his testimony: He himself, he now declared, had done both the throwing & the drowning, driven by his general hatred of white females after his betrayal by one of their number in May 1763. And the river had been the Detroit, not his beloved Maumee, which he would never have so defiled.

The jury preferr’d his original version & found against my father, who promptly escaped custody & disappear’d—as Alexis Cuillerier. One “Antoine Cuillerier,” then in his 70’s, lived a few more years in the role of
habitant
in the Fort Detroit area, and there died. Of Andrew Cooke III we know no more. Pontiac himself, two years after his trial, was clubb’d & stabb’d (so reports one Pierre Menard,
habitant)
in the village of Cahokia by a young Illinois warrior bribed “by the English” to the deed. The assassin’s tribe was almost exterminated in the reprisal by the nations Pontiac had endeavour’d in vain to bring together:
that
was a kind of fighting they understood.

Oh child, how I am heavied by this chronicle—whose next installment must bring my father to rebirth, myself to birth (you too, perhaps!), & be altogether livelier going.

Pontiac, Pontiac! Andrew, Andrew! How near you came to succeeding!

And Henry, Henrietta!
We
will come nearer yet, you &

Thursday, 9 April 1812

My Darling Henry or Henrietta,

On this date 100 years since, there was bloodily put down in New York a brave rebellion of black slaves, instigated three days before—so my father chose to believe—by his grandfather & namesake, Henry Burlingame III, after the failure of the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy. Six of the rebels committed suicide, 21 were executed. One “Saturnian revolution” later, he maintain’d, in 1741, my
own
grandfather & namesake, Andrew Cooke III, successfully spiked a 2nd such revolution in the same place, with even bloodier result: 13 hang’d, 13 burnt, 71 transported.

I did not believe him.

Neither did I believe, when I came of age, what he had told me in my boyhood of his mother, Andrée Castine: that she betray’d Pontiac to Major Gladwin & thus undermined, with my grandfather’s aid, the great “Indian Conspiracy” of 1763-64.

Henry Cooke Burlingame IV, at least in the brief period of his official life (1746-1785), lack’d Pontiac’s tragical vision. The most I will concede to his slanderous opinion of my grandparents is the possibility of their having realized, around 1760, that their grand strategy had misfired: that the French might never regain control of the Canadas, much less link them with Louisiana & push east across the Appalachians to the Atlantic; that “successful” Indian resistance would lead only to their extermination by the British. In short, that the sad sole future of the red man lay in accommodation & negotiated concession, to the end of at least fractional survival & the gradual “reddening” of the whites. Pontiac’s one victory, on this view, was Major Rogers’s verse tragedy
Ponteach:
as Lord Amherst infected the Indians with smallpox, Pontiac infected white Americans with Myth, at least as contagious & insusceptible to cure.

More simply, we have the testimony of Andrée’s diary that she & Andrew believed it necessary for the Indians (who, as we have seen, would not take the calculated loss of storming operations) at least to master the art of protracted siege—which interfered only with their seasonal rhythms, not with their famous individualism—if they were to conduct successful large-scale campaigns against white fortifications & artillery. Sieges were a repeatable discipline; Pontiac’s tactic (to enter the fort as if for a conference & then fall on the unsuspecting officers) was a one-time-only Indian trick which would make legitimate conferences difficult to arrange in the future. Its “betrayal” (she does not directly either admit or deny betraying it herself) did not undermine the general plan; it only made necessary a change of tactics.

“She made that diary note a full year later,” my father observed. “She was covering their tracks. She knew how I loved old Pontiac.”

It is true that such entries, especially belated ones, can be disingenuous. But my father, like the rest of us, chose by heart as much as by head which ones to put his faith in.

No Cooke or Burlingame has ever disprized book learning; the Burlingames, however, are the scholars. “Alexis Cuillerier,” 21 years old, broke jail in Detroit in 1767 and disappear’d before he could be convicted, on Pontiac’s original testimony, of drowning the child Betty Fisher. In the autumn of that same year, Henry Burlingame IV matriculated at the College of New Jersey in Princeton. Upon his graduation, he went up to Yale College in New Haven, staying on as a tutor in history after taking a Master of Arts degree there in 1772. His life in this interval, in great contrast to his adventuresome youth, was austere, even monastic. By Mother’s report, he was still much shock’d by what he took to be his parents’ successful duplicity: he even imagined that they had bribed Pontiac with rum to give his damaging testimony, and subsequently arranged his assassination, to the end of further “covering their tracks”! (Was it in some rage against his mother that “Alexis” drown’d the poor beshitten Fisher girl? But we have only Pontiac’s word that he did, together with the rumors that had led to his arrest.) This shock, no doubt, accounts for his reclusion. And there was another factor, as we shall see.

H. C. Burlingame IV thus became the 1st of our line not merely to doubt his father (we have all, in our divers ways, done that) but to despise him. I was the 2nd; and am perhaps the 1st to pass beyond that misgrounded, spirit-wasting passion, to spare you which is the end & object of these letters.

The study of History was Father’s sanctuary from its having been practised upon him in the past, and his preparation for practising it upon others in the future. From the present—the revolutionary fervor which was sweeping the colleges of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, even William & Mary in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s—he remain’d aloof. His student friends from Princeton (John Armstrong & Aaron Burr are the two we shall remember) were ready by 1774 to fight for American independence; his Yale tutee Joel Barlow was already making plans, at Father’s suggestion, for an American
Aeneid
(but Father had in mind a
satire!);
and his closest friend in New Haven, Mr. Benedict Arnold—a bright young merchant in the West Indies trade whose boyhood had been as adventurous as Father’s—had organized a company of Connecticut militia. But while he did not dismiss as specious the arguments for independence, Father was skeptical enough (and Canadian enough) to see two sides to the matter: a prerequisite to the tragical view, tho not its equivalent.

His chief concern, however (so he claim’d), was not the inevitable misunderstandings & conflicts of interest betwixt governors & govern’d 3,000 miles apart; it was the invasion of white settlers across the Appalachians into Indian lands, in despite of George III’s proclamation. He could not believe that the confederated state governments being proposed by the Committees of Correspondence & the Continental Congress would be inclined to check that invasion. Exempt from patriotism, he saw the self-interest & bad faith on both sides of the Atlantic, and a dozen routes to peaceful compromise, none of which bade especially well for the Indians. If, on the other hand, war were actually to break out betwixt the British & the colonials, each would scramble to use the Indians against the other—in particular the Six Nations of the Iroquois, whose situation once again would be, for better or worse, strategic.

In April of ’75, when the shooting commenced at Lexington & Concord, Father was in nearby Cambridge, poring thro the library of Harvard’s old Indian College for references to the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy, and deciding that he had had enough of Yale’s Congregationalist orthodoxy, perhaps of the academical life. His friend Arnold rusht up from New Haven to add his company of militia to George Washington’s army, assembling on the Common. His friend Burr hurried over from law school in Litchfield to join that army. Father introduced them. They could not persuade him to enlist, nor he dissuade them.

“We must have Canada!” they declared. Father understood, with a chill, that “we” already meant
The United States of America.
If Canada were not among those states, they argued, the British could crush the unborn republic betwixt its armies to the north & west and its navies to the east & south. The key to Canada was old New France, never easy under British rule: Arnold’s strategy, in which General Washington & the Massachusetts Committee of Safety concurr’d, was a three-prong’d attack: one force (General Montgomery’s, say) should move down the St. Lawrence from Maine to take Quebec; a 2nd (Arnold’s own, he hoped) up thro Lake Champlain to take Crown Point, Ticonderoga, and Montreal; a 3rd thro the Mohawk Valley to Niagara. “We” would then control the St. Lawrence &: the Lakes; Canada would be “ours.” The French would surely help, in hopes of regaining New France for themselves; the
habitants
could be relied upon at least not to aid the British. The great uncertainty was the allegiance of the Six Nations: Could my father not be prevail’d upon to accept a commission & persuade the Mohawks to remain neutral, the Senecas to lay siege to Forts Erie & Niagara?

He could not, tho he affirm’d the soundness of the strategy. He urged young Burr to enlist with Arnold instead of Washington if he wanted action, and caution’d Arnold to beware the jealousy betwixt the Massachusetts & Connecticut Committees of Safety, which, together with the rivalry & reciprocal sabotage common to generals, was bound to make joint operations all but impossible. He himself, Father declared, was withdrawing to another Cambridge: not the one on the river Cam in Mother England, where his grandfather had gone to school with Henry More & Isaac Newton, but the one in tidewater Maryland. Not his fatherland (Heaven forfend!), but his
grand
fatherland, where that same ancestor had made certain decisions respecting his own deepest loyalty.

Burr & Arnold had not heard of this Cambridge, nor were they much inclined to hear. Was it in the neighborhood of Annapolis? One day’s sail, my father replied, but a world away, and the last white outpost before the wild & trackless marshes. Above this Cambridge the river-names were English: Severn, Chester, Wye, Miles—it was a wonder the Chesapeake itself had not been dubb’d the Wash, or the Bristol. But at this Cambridge it was the Great Choptank, larger than Cam & Charles together, with the Thames at Oxford thrown in; and after the Great Choptank the Little Choptank, the Honga, Nanticoke, Wicomico, Manokin, Annemessex, Onancock, Pungoteague, Nandua, Occohannock, Nasswadox, Mattawoman—

Enough, cry Burr & Arnold: ’tis the beat of savage drums! To which my father replies: ’Tis the voice of the one true Continental, his vanisht forebears, in whose ranks he was off come morning to enlist.

All this my mother told me—your grandmother Nancy, who is about to enter the story. Andrew III’s investigation of his latefound father had led him from Annapolis to Castines Hundred; my own father’s re-investigation of that same ancestor reverst that route, as he was determined to reverse his father’s judgement of the 3rd Henry Burlingame. From Castines Hundred, where he paid his respects to the incumbent Baron (sire of the current one), he made his way 1st down to Annapolis, to search the records of the province and dig thro the library at St. John’s College; then over the Bay to Cambridge & Cooke’s Point, once the seat of the family, to consult more local records & the memories of old inhabitants.

From one of these latter—an aged, notorious former whore named Mag Mungummory, he learnt three valuable things. 1st, that Ebenezer & Anna Cooke’s childhood nurse, Roxanne Russecks,
née
Édouard, had had a romance with their father, Andrew Cooke II, and borne him a daughter named Henrietta Russecks (as shown on the family tree, or thicket, in my last), who herself later bore a daughter named Nancy Russecks McEvoy. 2nd, that Mag Mungummory’s mother, Mary, call’d in her prime “the Traveling Whore o’ Dorset,” had once known Henry Burlingame III himself, in various of his guises, & fear’d him—tho of his disputed role in the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy, Mag knew nothing. 3rd, that about the same time when Ebenezer Cooke regain’d his lost estate by marrying the whore Joan Toast, and Henry Burlingame III left Cooke’s Point for Bloodsworth Island, and Henrietta Russecks married one John McEvoy, this Mary Mungummory had purchased from Roxanne Édouard Russecks a tavern own’d by the miller Harry Russecks, Roxanne’s late husband. She had establisht a brothel in its upper storey and flourisht with the common-law husband of her old age, the miller’s brother, Harvey Russecks. Mag herself, the fruit of this autumnal union, had inherited the business on her parents’ death and, tho nearly 80 at the time of this interview, continued to operate both tavern & brothel with the aid of a young woman she’d taken in as an orphan’d relative four years past.