The American Chronicle 1 - Burr (14 page)

“My compliments to Mr. Leggett. If you see him, say that I shall meet him Wednesday for our weekly
tête-à-tête
at the Washington Hotel. You must join us.” The hand resting on my shoulder gave a sudden pinch, like a corpse’s fingers going into rigor.

“I am sorry to be so little help to you.” The hand and arm dropped to his side. “I do have the notes I made during the treason trial at Richmond. If you like, I shall have a copy made for you.”

THIS MORNING Mr. Craft and I worked on briefs. Colonel Burr meditated in his office. Creditors came and went—obviously distressed that the Colonel is again without money: everyone in the city still thinks that he is the master of the Jumel fortune. As usual, in his case, the truth is quite opposite.

At noon Matthew L. Davis arrived. He is a gray lean bespectacled man with a secret smile; very much the political mover and shaker; also, very much the newspaper editor—he has almost never been without a partisan newspaper to edit. Mr. Davis went into the smoke-filled lair and shut the door behind him. An hour later, Colonel Burr called for me.

The two ancient conspirators sat facing each other over the open trunk.

“Charlie, do give Mr. Davis my notes on the Revolution.”

“Have you copied them out?” Mr. Davis has the confiding Tammany voice.

“Yes, Sir.” I turned to Colonel Burr. “I hope you don’t mind my copying them?”

“No. Not at all. Look to it, Matt! You have a competitor! And what a task! For both of you. The rehabilitation of a man who has been slandered by both Jefferson and Hamilton. A considerable honour, come to think of it. They never agreed on anything save that
I
was the true enemy of their schemes.” He laughed merrily. I cannot think why. “If it’s true that slander has slain more than the sword, then for all practical purpose I am long—and doubly—dead. But it may yet be possible for you two fine fellows to put it about that no matter how dark my villainies I was at least a good soldier.” The Colonel was unusually elegiac.

“Hamilton was a poor soldier ...”

But the Colonel cut Mr. Davis short. “No, Matt. General Hamilton was always a man of courage—at least when there was an audience.”

The conversation then turned to the affairs of Tammany, which interest me not at all.

Mr. Davis was pleased about the immigrants who almost daily arrive in large numbers from Europe. He expects to enroll them in Tammany, and win elections.

Burr was not enthusiastic. “They will win elections all right, but not for you.”

Mr. Davis did not understand.

The Colonel explained. “I don’t want to sound like Hamilton who used to get white in the face at the thought of the wicked church of Rome, or like Jefferson who was mortally afraid of Jesuits, but I promise you, Matt, when these Catholics outnumber the old stock two to one ...”

“How can they outnumber us when we’ll be making good Americans of them?”

Burr’s laugh was like an organ’s bass note. “Whatever a good American is he cannot be a Roman Catholic at the same time. It is a contradiction. And when there are two of them for our every one, they will divide up the property. You’ll see. And why shouldn’t they? That is true democracy and they—not we—will be Demos.” Burr turned to me. “You will live long enough, Charlie, to see an
elected
judiciary.”

Mr. Craft’s clerk entered with a letter. “Anonymous, Colonel. The author prays that you burn in Hell, Sir. Mr. Craft thought you would be amused.”

“Most tickled.” Burr threw the document into the smouldering grate. Then Mr. Davis left and Colonel Burr sent me on an errand to the Register’s Office. Later I was to meet him at the City Hotel.

As I was crossing Wall Street, I saw my father coming out of the Post Office. He was well dressed and not drunk, though not sober either. “Charlie.” He gave me a vague look. “It is you, Charlie?”

“Yes, it is.” We had not met since he killed my mother three years ago.

“You are still in Colonel Burr’s office.”

“You are still at the tavern.”

Two statements, requiring no answer.

“I’ve been sending letters, you know.” My father indicated the Post Office as though it would corroborate his story.

“I must go meet Colonel Burr.”

“He must be right old, the Colonel.”

“He is.”

“I always voted for the Colonel, you know.” Neither could look the other in the eye. Since we had nothing further to say to one another, we parted.

The Colonel greeted me gaily at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway. I told him of my encounter. He knows I am estranged from my father; does not know why. “Charming gentleman, your father. Kept the finest tavern in Greenwich Village. Such a pleasant place.” Colonel Burr took my arm. Together we crossed Broadway, avoiding a crowd outside the City Hotel.

“Mr. Clay must be stopping here,” said the Colonel.

“No. He’s at the American Hotel.”

Colonel Burr gave me a side-long look. “You have heard of last night’s encounter?”

“Someone mentioned it, yes.”

“There are only two men on this earth who fear me. One is president and the other would like to be.”

“And both were with you at the time of the ...” I have yet to find the proper euphemism for whatever it was that Burr was planning out west. Jefferson called it treason. Chief Justice Marshall and a jury suspected a misdemeanour.

“A most curious man, Henry Clay ...” The Colonel suddenly stopped; stumbled; brown face gone tallowy. “There’s something wrong with my leg.” He looked bewildered. “There’s no feeling in it.” He staggered. “I can’t walk.” He started to fall. I caught him. Propped him against the wall of the hotel.

“I’ll get a carriage.”

Burr nodded, eyes shut—leaning, no, collapsing against the wall.

In Reade Street, Mr. Craft helped me carry him upstairs to a small room with a cot where the Colonel sometimes rests. A doctor was sent for. Once on the cot, Aaron Burr took a deep breath and fainted dead away.

I HAVE JUST COME BACK from two days at the mansion. All is forgiven.

Madame is in her element. “My brave warrior! Light of America! You have come into a safe harbour at last!”

Madame stands at the head of the Napoleonic sofa on which Colonel Burr is stretched out beside a roaring fire. He wears a quilted robe. The face is as smooth and keen as a boy’s. To the doctor’s bewilderment (but not mine), he is making a fine recovery from the stroke. The left leg is still partly paralyzed but he can now hobble about unaided—on the rare occasions when Madame lets him. She spends all day and night with him, assisted by the niece. The traitor Nelson Chase is not in evidence.

I spent two nights in the mansion. Having lived in boarding-houses since I was sixteen and went to Columbia, I found it a remarkable experience to be waited upon by eight servants, with a fire in my bedroom all day and night. I now see why everyone in New York is so eager to be rich.

Madame regales us with anecdotes of her career. At one point, she sends for the cook. “Norah, tell them about your dinner with royalty.”

Norah knows exactly what to tell, and does so. “You see, I was in the kitchen one noon while Madame was away from the house, and I was fixing for us in the house some boiled pork and cabbage ...”

“The best in the world!” Madame drinks to pork and cabbage while Mary Eliza does needlepoint beside me on a sofa and the Colonel reclines languorously, and smiles benignly; the satyr lips unwithered by time.

“... when in comes this nice foreign gentleman, small and dark he was with an accent like one of the waiters at the French taverns in the Bowery. So he says ‘Is Madame here’ and I says ‘No’ and he says can he look about the house and I says he can and he looks about for a while and then he comes down to my kitchen and says kind of sad-like ‘I have to go all the way back to Jersey now’ and I says ‘Well, have a little something to eat’ and he says ‘Pork and cabbage is my favourite’ so I sit him down at the table ...”

“And there I found them!
Dining
à
deux
.
Norah
et son majest
é
le Roi de l’Espagne
.”

I look blank. Madame promptly translates for me. Apparently it was Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother who was king of Spain and now lives in New Jersey.

Madame Jumel waves Norah back to the depths.

“
Le Roi
has all the Bonaparte
force
.”
More anecdotes. My head begins to ache.

“I was in Paris,” said the Colonel, “for two years and never—but once—did a Frenchman ask me into his house.”

“How odd! In Paris I paid calls daily and received callers.” A point for Madame.

“How could they have deprived themselves, my dear Eliza?” Burr shut his eyes. “But then I was remarkably poor. I used to eat two pounds of grapes a day because they were cheap.”

“Exile! What this country has done to you!” Madame is off again, and so am I. On the table beside my bed, I find a packet with a note in Colonel Burr’s handwriting.

“For C.S. Although our merry caper in the Broad Way has had—to date (just before dinner)—a happy ending—or continuing—why am I using so many dashes? Like a schoolgirl. The dash is the sign of a poor style. Jefferson used to hurl them like javelins across the page. Yes. I ramble. Yet I
think
my mind is unaffected by the seizure, and the leg improves with every hour. Nevertheless, it is
possible
that I might, rather suddenly, die. So I give you now the rest of my notes on the Revolution. They are not complete.

“When I was in the Senate, I was briefly given free access to all official documents pertaining to the Revolution. With a clerk to copy documents, I used to work from 5:00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m. at the State Department. I was able to crack many a mystery. But then on the spurious ground that a
U.S. senator ought not to have access to the ‘correspondence of existing ministers,’ the whole archive was denied me. Later what I had managed to collect in the way of documentation was lost with my daughter at sea.

“Sometimes I have written only a paragraph, intending more. Other times, I reconstruct from memory. I doubt if I shall ever add to what I have done. Perhaps you can make something of these fragments. Matt Davis knows that you have them and should I be translated to a higher sphere you are to make them available to him. That is a sacred trust, Charlie, much the worst kind!”

A look at the “fragments.” Some long. Some short. A kaleidoscope of those days. I start to copy them out.

OF ALL THE MEN attached to Washington, Henry Knox was the most truly adhesive. Fat, slow-moving, crafty, an excellent man for the organizing of a headquarters, he lacked, however, the military gift and though he was our chief of artillery from 1776 to the war’s finish he was never entirely certain which end of the cannon you lit. Yet he was a marvel at finding artillery whether cast by us at Litchfield from church-bells or from the remains of the Bowling Green statue of George III or simply stolen in the night from the British.

Knox had been a bookseller in Boston. He was one of the few men familiar with books (or at least their bindings) that Washington was at ease with. He served loyally in the first Cabinet.

I saw Knox in action—if that is the phrase—September 15, 1776, the day the Continental Army enjoyed its resounding defeat at Kip’s Bay and fled (or as Washington put it “withdrew”) to the village of Haarlem.

With two junior officers I was caught in the melee. Thinking to find Washington at Richmond Hill, I rode in that direction. Communication had entirely broken down, and if there were new orders none knew them. It was, as usual, every man for himself.

Half-way across the island we came to a makeshift fort of hastily prepared earthworks behind which cowered an entire brigade. I assumed that they had not known or understood the original order to retreat to Haarlem.

“Who commands?” I shouted to the first sentinel.

“Colonel Knox!” was the answer. Then himself looked above the dirt like a fat mole just flushed from ground. I introduced myself. Asked why the brigade had not moved out.

“Not possible, Major. The British have split the island. But we shall do our duty. We shall hold this fort to the end.” The young voice trembled. The staff officers eyed us nervously. No one wants to hold a fort to the end; particularly a non-fort.

“Sir,” I was respectful but urgent, “you cannot defend these earthworks against one howitzer.”

“We are dug in, Major.” For an instant it occurred to me that Knox might not want to move his brigade quickly because he was, simply, too fat.

I turned to a captain. “Have you water? Provisions?”

“No, Sir. We are only just dug in.”

“Then, Colonel, I propose you obey His Excellency’s orders and withdraw to Haarlem.”

“We cannot!” The usually brazen loud voice was a squeak. “The British are already between us and Haarlem.”

“Sir, they are not.” Knox’s officers had now joined us in that pleasant autumnal glade where yellow leaves diffused bright sunlight. A cool breeze rattled branches overhead; and carried to my nostrils that unmistakable odour men exude when frightened: no one wants to be killed. And death was now at hand.

“My intelligence tells me that since three o’clock this afternoon the British are drawn in a line straight across New York Island, a half-mile to the northeast of us. Listen. You can hear them firing.” Knox did his best to look martial in the presence of his own unimpressed staff. We listened. Heard scattered musketry to the south. Nothing more.

“Sir,” I said, “I cannot tell whose muskets those are but I propose you move out of here as quickly as possible.”

“Sir, I command here.” The round face swelled like a bullfrog’s at mating time.

I turned to the officers. “Gentlemen, if you stay here you will be slaughtered by the enemy. You are outnumbered and out-gunned. Worse, those who are not killed will be taken prisoner and hung as high as Master Hickey.” I was inventing freely but in a good cause. The officers began to talk all at once. Knox was drowned out. A vote was taken. The brigade chose to move on to Haarlem.