The American Chronicle 1 - Burr (32 page)

The Colonel rose, rather fastidiously. “I do believe, Charlie, that poor Mr. Baldwin is dead.” And so he proved to be. “Of
gluttony
.”
The Colonel shook his head solemnly. “There is a lesson here for all of us,” he said at large, and then he led me from the shocked table, as though to preserve my youth from further contagion.

In the street we made a dinner of oysters; and Burr chuckled in a
macabre
way at Charles Baldwin’s unexpected departure. The old are merciless.

Later this afternoon, just before Colonel Burr and I began work, I asked about the Michaux expedition.

“Everything went wrong.” The Colonel carefully shut the dusty window to keep from circulating a most refreshing breeze. “It is a bit chilly in here, isn’t it?” He poked the fire. I sweated in miserable silence.

“You must understand that it was Jefferson’s dream to annex Canada, Cuba, Mexico and Texas. He also favoured some sort of dominion over South America, as did Hamilton, as did I.”

“It seems like a lot of territory for a republic to govern.”

Burr grinned. “Republics can change form quite as rapidly as empires. Look at France under Bonaparte. The only true republican of us all was little Jemmy Madison.” Burr opened a thick file of papers. “Whom we shall consider today. I have been making notes.”

I FIRST MET JAMES MADISON when I was thirteen years old and in my first year at the College of New Jersey (as I continue to style what is now Princeton College). This was in 1769. Madison was five years older than I but somewhat less precocious (that is, neither his father nor grandfather had been president of the college, a fact that had made it possible for me to begin my career as a sophomore).

I graduated in 1772. Madison graduated in 1771 but remained on for another year, preparing himself for the ministry. He belonged to a wealthy Virginia family and, as far as I know, did nothing much beyond desultory study at home until 1775 when he became a member of the Committee of Public Safety for Orange County. A year later he was drafting the state constitution, to which he contributed a “radical” clause insuring religious freedom. It was briskly rejected by the Virginians.

From 1780 to 1783 Madison was a delegate to the Continental Congress where he became a master of parliamentary procedure and able at last to bring his considerable if somewhat eclectic learning to bear on the urgent matter of framing that triumph of the lawyer’s peculiar art, the American Constitution. For good or ill, this document is largely Madison’s creation.

Even more important than the putting together of the Constitution was the ability with which Madison defended it in the so-called
Federalist
papers and the cunning with which he got the reluctant Virginians to accept the federal republic. In fact, so brilliant was Madison’s advocacy (and so bitter his enemies as a result), that he lost a bid to be the first senator from Virginia. But he did contrive to win election to the House of Representatives in 1789, defeating James Monroe.

Because Madison was so small and so insignificant-looking, people tended to ignore him until he began to speak (in a voice nearly as weak as Jefferson’s); then, very gradually, listening to him, one became most vividly aware of what a great little man he was. Yet I confess I never dreamed that he would be president. Neither perhaps did he. His elevation was Jefferson’s work.

When I was thirteen and Madison was eighteen I was as tall as he. Full grown, he was smaller than I. We were not intimate at Princeton. For one thing, he was a strange pale youth, all head and no body, addicted to theology—a subject with which I wanted nothing ever to do. Then I was worldly while he most definitely was not. As far as I know he had no intercourse with a woman until, in his thirties, he became enamoured of a sixteen-year-old girl at New York. Eventually the girl threw him over for a young minister. From that time on Madison was everyone’s bachelor friend, and deeply sad.

After the plague summer of ’93 the government re-assembled at Philadelphia, and though some 4,000 people had recently died, everyone in society was remarkably gay. Between the theatre and Ricketts’ Circus and the receptions
chez
Madame Bingham, Philadelphia was a sort of provincial Babylon, reborn after Jehovah’s wrath and every bit. as impenitent as the original no doubt would have been.

On May 18, 1794, my wife Theodosia died, after a long and vicious illness that destroyed mind as well as body. For her sake, I was glad the suffering was at an end; for my own and that of our daughter, I was much shaken, and could not believe that I would not know her ever again.

At the end of May, while I was still in New York seeing to my late wife’s affairs, James Monroe was appointed minister to France, a post that both Madison and Monroe insisted should go to me. The President said no, at Hamiltonian length; he was willing, however, to appoint either Madison or Monroe. Madison refused. Monroe accepted. Later, at Monrovian length, the new ambassador explained to me that I had been rejected on
regional
grounds. Apparently the post had first been offered New York’s Robert Livingston. When he refused it, the President did not want to offer it to another New Yorker, thus giving the impression that this particular embassy was somehow exclusive to New York. Monroe actually expected me to believe this nonsense.

I daresay I shall never know the actual story. After all, it was years before I discovered the role Monroe played in denying me certain southern votes in the vice-presidential election of 1792. I was, he felt, too young. This no doubt was true but in that case why had he agreed to support me?

It is hard now-a-days when senators are so splendid and ambassadors so obscure to realize what the possession of an embassy meant to us. For one thing it took one away from America, a considerable pleasure (publicly denied by all ambassadors from Franklin to Adams to Jefferson to Monroe to Jay) but no less true despite their solemn patriotic demurs. To represent the American republic at a foreign court was a marvellous thing to do. Also, practically speaking, the existence of the United States depended on playing off the European powers one against the other. To be one of thirty senators was simply to be a single “aye” or “nay” in a chorus. To represent the republic in France was to be the republic personified and decisions made by the ambassador could affect the whole world—witness, Livingston’s manoeuvring that ended with Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana.

I was deeply disappointed, and said so to Madison as we walked away from Congress Hall in Chestnut Street. Conversation was not exactly easy. Fearing a recurrence of fever, we spoke through camphor-soaked handkerchiefs.

Madison was distressed for my sake; but he was also placating. “Monroe has many gifts ...”

“Name one.” I was in no mood for the usual amenities.

“He studied law with Jefferson.” Madison could always make me laugh.

“All right. I grant you that all-important gift. But he knows nothing of France ...”

“If only he knew less! He loves their revolution even more than Jefferson does. Even more than they do, I should think. He will never be able to represent us properly. The way you could.”

I do not think Madison was flattering me. In any case, two years later Monroe was recalled in near-disgrace. Furious with Washington, he then wrote as unpleasant an account of that paladin’s administration as has ever been published. Washington never forgave him. In fact, I am told that the General used secretly to read and re-read the offending pamphlet, shouting curses and writing in the margins.

Suddenly Jemmy Madison asked me in his little voice, “Burr, you are most attractive to the ladies. Pray, tell me why?”

“Because I treat them as if they were men.”

Jemmy gave me an amused frown. “How then, Burr, does one treat men?”

Madison’s wit was amiably dry, unlike the brilliant humourless Jefferson whose creature, like it or not, he was. I assumed he liked it. Yet Jefferson’s second fiddle, I always thought, made the better music.

I had been living for some time at a boarding-house run by a Quaker lady named Mrs. John Payne. Stopping with Mrs. Payne was her daughter, Mrs. Todd, widowed six months before in the yellow fever epidemic. Mrs. Todd was a pretty if coarse-looking girl with thick brows, an endearing husky laugh and rather too much flesh on her bones for my taste, which often rules me but is no tyrant.

I suppose Mrs. Todd and her mother had designs on me. I was as new a widower as she was a widow. She had a small son; I a daughter. I was a senator and thought to be rich. The two Quaker ladies, in the nicest way, set out to snare me. But I was not for snaring. Yet I liked Mrs. Todd and wanted to be of use to her.

After the Senate sessions I would drink coffee with the two ladies in their parlour, and Mrs. Todd would ask me about the political happenings of the day and I would answer, as brightly as I could, realizing that her interest was not in the politics but in the personalities of the politicians. Yet she was not ignorant. She enjoyed the play of politics; she was also moderately well-connected; her mother was related to Patrick Henry while her fifteen-year-old sister had, scandalously, run off and married a nephew of President Washington. For all practical purposes, however, these relationships were much too tenuous and the ladies themselves much too poor to give them entrée at the Tuesday levees of King George and Queen Martha. Without an important marriage, Mrs. Todd was doomed to obscurity, and not-so-genteel poverty.

At Mrs. Bingham’s house, I stopped, ready to go in.

“Oh, Burr!” Jemmy looked up at me with the saddest expression. “Another
voluptuous
evening!”

“Share it with me. Come in. Mrs. Bingham will be delighted.”

Madison shook his head. “No one is ever delighted when I join the ladies.”

“Is this self-pity?”

“Of the most profound order.”

Then it was that inspiration seized me. “Come to Mrs. Payne’s boarding-house tomorrow evening.” I gave him the address. “There is someone I want you to meet.”

“He wants to be a postmaster.”

“
She
wants to meet James Madison.”

Jemmy gave me a look of perfect disbelief. “My dear Burr, no woman has ever wanted to meet me, and at my advanced age it is not likely that any woman will.”

I must say I privately agreed with him. He was forty-three (which I thought old); he was also dwarfish, and shy with women. But I have always enjoyed giving pleasure to others. I was certain that Mrs. Todd would overlook his appearance and manner, and if she were not wise enough to understand the depth of his intelligence, she was clever enough to know that the most powerful member of the House of Representatives (and lord of that fine estate Montpelier) was a bachelor, and lonely.

The evening is now history, and I have not much to add to what everyone knows. My servant Brooks prepared a dinner for four: Mrs. Todd, her duenna Mrs. Lee, Madison and myself. According to legend, Madison is supposed to have asked me to present him to the beautiful Mrs. Todd. This is not true. I simply told Madison that the lady would like to meet him and then I told the lady that he would like to meet her. These two amiable lies got them off to a splendid start and there is some evidence that neither knows to this day that the other did not request the meeting. It was all my work as Eros.

Mrs. Todd glittered at the elegant table Brooks had set up in the front parlour (Mother Payne was presented and then set about her business). At first Madison was shy but Mrs. Todd soon warmed him up, filled his glass again and again with my best claret. She was very much the Quaker girl
en fleur
that evening (this was long before she took to wearing expensive clothes from Paris, not to mention those exotic turbans which, as Dolley Madison, she has made her emblem).

But Dolley did delight Madison when he asked if he might take snuff and she graciously allowed him to. When he had finished whisking his small mouse nose with a huge lace handkerchief, she said, “And what about me, Mr. Madison?”

To Madison’s astonishment, Dolley took a pinch of snuff, as unheard-of in those days for ladies as now; and with a snort said, “It is to ward off the fever.”

Dolley has always struck a fine balance between the bold and the maternal, and no man can really resist her when she means to charm which is most of the time. Over the years she has proved to be as loyal a friend to me as possible. She was most devoted to my daughter.

The Madisons were as
good
a couple as ever occupied the president’s mansion. Recently a friend saw them at Montpelier where they now live, age, die. The pale fragile little Madison was stretched out on a sort of day-bed.

“Don’t speak,” said our common friend, wanting to be helpful. “Not while you’re lying down.”

To which Madison replied in a perfectly normal voice, “My dear fellow, I always talk more easily when I lie.”

FOR OVER A WEEK I have had no chance to continue with Colonel Burr’s reminiscences. On July 12, Madame filed suit for divorce, naming one Jane McManus as his principal mistress. Other adulteries were noted in the interest of verisimilitude. Madame also filed a separate petition requesting the court to keep her property out of the Colonel’s hands. In fact, she has hurled a vast amount of law at the Colonel who is now furiously counter-suing, naming all sorts of lovers. This activity has rejuvenated him to such a degree that he does not require a fire in the office.

“She claims I spent thirteen thousand dollars of her money! If only I had!” The Colonel has every state divorce statute in front of him on the baize-covered table. “I have never taken a penny that was hers. Quite the contrary.” He had obviously forgotten the sale of the carriage and horses, the money from the toll-bridge shares. But then I have noticed that whenever Burr contemplates money—spending it or borrowing it—he becomes irrational.

Madame’s choice of lawyer has particularly incensed him. “What a sense of fitness that woman has displayed!” As all New York now knows, Madame has engaged for counsel the young Alexander Hamilton. “I am half-tempted to name the dead, too. God knows she knew the original Hamilton in the Biblical sense.”