The American Chronicle 1 - Burr (29 page)

“We are almost exactly contemporary. But no more.”

“Faction! Faction! This place stinks of political faction!” Fisher Ames heard this as he passed us on his unexpectedly democratic way home by foot. “For some,” Ames flung at Adams, “this stench is like attar of roses.”

Adams was joined by his wife, a lady always amiable to me. She spoke of Hamilton with a degree of fondness. “I have the desire to be like a mother to him.” Mrs. Adams was not particularly motherly in manner.

“Well, I have no desire to be his father, and could not!” Adams’ mind was indeed shaped by my grandfather’s puritanism. So much so that John Adams was not, finally, a creature of our century at all but a relic of old New England days, of a wrathful god delighting in the ubiquity of sin and its terrible punishment. Yet Adams’ intelligence, though limited, was profound. What he knew he knew well. Unfortunately what he did not know he did not suspect existed.

Hamilton’s bastardy used to exercise Adams even before they quarrelled (led to the quarrel?). Mrs. Adams reproved her mate. But Adams was not done with the subject. “One day the world will understand that young man you want to be a mother to for what he is: a
natural
orphan.”

“Charity, John.”

“I merely observe. Hamilton needs,
lusts
for fathers and mothers and he picks them up wherever he goes. The President did not adopt him as a son, he adopted the President as a father. He has been attaching himself to older men since he was a boy, an orphan, an outcast from the respectable world and quite rightly, too, considering
how
he was born, and of what blood. Senator Burr, the world is stern but the world is just.”

The vice-presidential carriage arrived, splattering us sternly but justly with mud.

As the groom descended, Adams turned to me. “I trust, Sir, that this Congress will be the better for your attendance.”

“As it is better, Sir, for your presidence of our chamber.”

A wide cold stare raked my face like grape-shot. “I fear this Congress may be like the first, full of faction. I also fear those members who are too attached to France’s vicious revolution.”

“I fear all attachments which are excessive.”

Adams took this ambiguity in stride. “We are in danger of government by professional office-holders ...”

“Come, John.” Mrs. Adams was impatient and uneasy.

Adams was not finished. “By men of party rather than by men of state.”

“It is sometimes hard to tell the difference.”

“
I
can tell.” From inside the carriage Mrs. Adams yanked hard at her husband’s arm which was just inside the door.

“Can you also tell change when it comes, Mr. Adams? And whether it be for good or ill?”

“When it is for ill ...”

Mrs. Adams and the groom had now got the Vice-President by sheer force into the carriage.

Mine was the last word as the groom shut the door. “New occasions, Mr. Adams, require new men and new ideas.”

The carriage started with a jolt. I heard Adams say to his wife in a tone of exasperation, “Look at him, sleek as a duck!” I felt a certain distress. What he said was true. I had gained weight with all the party-going. I vowed a new regimen the next day.

As I waited for my carriage, I noticed James Monroe behind me. He had heard the end of our conversation. He made a face. “They’re powerful enemies, those old Tories.”

“Shall we replace them presently?” Almost casually, I set about the first of my alliances.

“Can it be done, without bloodshed?”

“It can be done, and it will be done, if we are wise.”

“Are you a prophet?”

“No, Sir. But I can see what is in front of me. This faction mistrusts the people. All we need do is let the people know in what contempt their masters hold them, then
they
will do the rest.” I got into my rented carriage.

“Are you with Jefferson?” Monroe called after me.

“In
this
matter, what republican is not?” On that equivocal, as Hamilton would say, note, we parted—with Monroe shouting after me to beware the Philadelphia tradesmen as “sharpers.” In those few minutes on the steps of Washington’s “palace” I had made my first move toward the presidency.

THIS MORNING I found Colonel Burr in his office, much amused by an account of a recent Senate performance by Henry Clay. “Mr. Clay apparently made the rafters ring, denouncing Andrew Jackson. He then turned to the Vice-President who was in the chair. Pleaded with him to bring his friend the President to reason. Listen to this. ‘Entreat him to pause,’ ” Burr caught marvellously Clay’s plangent frontier voice, “ ‘to pause and to reflect that there is a point beyond which human endurance cannot go, and let him not drive this brave, generous and patriotic people to madness and despair!’ ”

Burr even managed the half-sob Clay sometimes works with such effect into his codas. “Then Mr. Van Buren turned over the chair to a senator, made his way down the aisle to where Henry Clay still stood with arms out-stretched in a gesture of pleading and, as everyone stared, said in a soft little voice, ‘Mr. Clay, might I have a pinch of your fine maccoboy snuff?’ ” Burr’s laughter echoed in the stuffy office.

“He sounds like you, Colonel.”

“I was never so superbly deflationary. But then we had no audience in the early days of the Senate. Our proceedings were secret until I insisted on making them public. The level of our debate changed over night. Nothing so improves a senator’s speech as an audience.”

Sam Swartwout threw open the door, unannounced as always. “Colonel—leader!”

“You exaggerate, my boy.”

“I was passing in the street and thought I’d bring you the news straight from the port. Lafayette is dead!”

“One cannot say that he was taken before his time.

We must restrain our grief.” The
Colonel was suitably dry. “He must have been—what, eighty?”

“Seventy-seven. Younger than you, Colonel.”

“Then I shudder at this cold premonitory wind from France. Poor boy! So much to look forward to. I trust he is now in Heaven with General Washington and, side by side, they rest on a cloudy mantle of stars for all eternity, dreaming up disastrous military engagements.”

“News from Washington City.” Swartwout looked conspiratorial. I withdrew.

Later when the Colonel began his dictation, France was on his mind.

IT IS DIFFICULT for people in 1834 to understand to what extent the life and politics of the early republic were governed by the fact of Europe, particularly by France and England. Yet no one preferred it that way; not even the Tories who loved the King wanted us to be embroiled in the problems of Europe. Unfortunately, we had no choice.

At the beginning France was our chief ally. After all, had it not been for the French fleet, there would still be a British garrison on the Battery. But the Revolution in France distressed our Tories—or Federalists as they came to be known; a nice irony since they had not wanted any federal government, preferring the King. But after we forced independence on them, the Tories wanted a strong federal government in order the better to protect their property and to keep the people in their place.

Looking back, we Republicans were not much different. Neither Jefferson nor I fretted particularly over the Constitution’s limited franchise. I recall that in the election of 1789 there were over 300,000 residents of New York state of whom only 12,000 were qualified to cast a vote for governor. Needless to say, no one was allowed to vote directly for president. That was considered much too dangerous a privilege even for our small propertied electorate. They could vote for state legislators who in turn would select a president.

Between the First and Second Congresses, what Adams called “the spirit of faction” emerged. Hamilton was no more monarchist than Jefferson but he did see the American future as being dominated by manufacture and commerce which, in turn, required banks, taxation, cities, an army and a navy. Jefferson saw the whole continent as a kind of Virginia, filled with honest yeomen enjoying the fruits of black labour. Jefferson wanted no cities, no banks, no manufactories, no taxes. Jefferson was wrong and Hamilton was right. Worse, Jefferson was impractical.

The divisions in Washington’s cabinet were exacerbated by the French Revolution. When the Bastille fell in 1789 even the Federalists were for a moment thrilled. Although every American owed a considerable debt to Louis XVI, we were all of us certain that he would be a better and happier king if he presided over a republic. I fear we were a bit simple at the time, interpreting everything that happened in Paris as a sort of Gallic repetition of our own glorious experiment.

Sometime in April 1793 we learned of the execution of Louis XVI. Republicanism had truly triumphed. Pigtails were cut off and hair worn
à
la Brutus. Trousers replaced small-clothes. Everyone started calling everyone else “citizen” and “citizeness,” and the bad manners so many foreign visitors remark upon when they come to our shores (the children who do not respond politely to adults, the surliness of tradesmen and servants) began that spring with the arrival of the French ambassador Citizen Genêt. Over night it was considered slavish for the lower orders to be polite to anyone. Yet before Genêt’s arrival, Americans were considered the politest people in the world—resembling the British but with greater sweetness and less servility. After Genêt they became what they are today—truculent, sullen and envious.

At the time of the execution of the King and Queen, their portraits hung on the walls of our Senate chamber (and everyone, including Mrs. Bingham, remarked how much she resembled Marie Antoinette). After the beheadings, various Republicans—including Freneau—wanted the portraits taken down. Jefferson’s view of the portraits is unknown but he did delight in the executions. “After all,” he said to me, “was ever such a prize won with so little blood?”

I said that from all accounts the prize had cost a good deal of blood.

But Jefferson was hard. “Rather than their revolution fail, Colonel Burr, I would see half the earth desolated! After all, if in every country there was but one Adam and Eve left, one
free
Adam and one
free
Eve remaining, the world would be better than it is now.” I could not believe my ears. Either Jefferson was a fool in his zealotry or an active principle of evil.

Since France was now at war with England, Austria, Russia, Sardinia and the Netherlands, President Washington wisely insisted on our maintaining a strict neutrality. This enraged Republicans and Federalists. The first wanted war with England; the second with France. As a result, there were now two plainly recognisable political parties: the Republican party which was pro-French, anti-British and in tone egalitarian; the Federalist party which was the reverse. The Republican national leadership consisted of Jefferson, Madison, Clinton and myself. The Federalists included Hamilton, Adams, Jay, Knox and, more or less covertly, Washington himself.

On Thursday, May 16, 1793, Citizen Edmond Genêt arrived in Philadelphia to present his credentials to the President. He had already presented his credentials to the American people. Arriving some weeks before in Charleston, South Carolina, he had made a triumphal progress toward our capital, addressing along the way—and in excellent English—cheering crowds. The Federalists were alarmed. Jefferson, however, was benign. Do we not all detest tyrants?

An enthusiastic Philadelphia crowd assembled at Gray’s Ferry to welcome Gen
ê
t. Unfortunately, the ambassador had appeared at the wrong wharf where he delivered a powerful address to a dozen startled loungers whom he took to be the Republican party. But the next few days more than compensated for the comedy of this début.

A splendid dinner was given him at Oeller’s Hotel. Because of the Neutrality Proclamation, those of us who held public office were requested to attend
ex officio
.
Needless to say the entire Republican delegation to the Congress was on hand.

Monroe and I sat together at the end of a long table in the main assembly-room. I confess we spent a good deal of time looking about to see if Jefferson, the enthusiast of the rights of man, would be present or whether Jefferson, the signer of the Neutrality Proclamation, would be absent. Wisely, as it turned out, the apostle of democracy chose not to be present.

Wine was drunk in large quantities, and Citizen Gen
ê
t, a lively fat fellow of thirty with a face somewhat like that of the young Benedict Arnold, made the rounds of the company on the arm of Governor Miflin who solemnly presented Monroe and me to the representative of liberty, equality, fraternity.

“I visit your state soon, Senator Burr.” The Citizen held both my hands in both of his. He had a most histrionic way of talking. “We shall do good work there for freedom.”

“It is an open field, Citizen.”

“I want very much to meet your Governor Clinton.”

“I am sure that he will want to meet you.” That proved to be something of an overstatement. Within a year the Girondins (Gen
ê
t’s faction in Paris) had been slaughtered by the Jacobins and the new government recalled Genêt to Paris in order that his head be cut off. Reluctant to lose such a fine decoration, Genêt chose to marry Governor Clinton’s daughter and to settle down on Long Island; and with her money he became the gentleman-farmer that he is today. “Burr, I despise the French!” The crude Clinton was distraught. “A nation of hair-dressers and dancing masters! And my girl, my own girl has to go and pick a crowing, penniless French cockerel as a husband!”

But Clinton’s cockerel was very much cock of the walk that night at Oeller’s Hotel. There were at least twenty toasts to him or to his country. In fact, I proposed one to “the republics of France and America—may they forever be united in the cause of liberty.”

A cap of liberty was placed upon Genêt’s head. Bellowing the “Marseillaise” at us, he then passed the hat around the table. For a moment each of us put it on while Philip Freneau led the singing of a hymn he had himself composed extolling the rights of man and uneasily set to the tune of “God Save the King.”