Letters (60 page)

Thus I found myself, full of misgivings, in the country & state of my birth, for the 1st time since Mother & I had left them in 1783, when I was seven. I crost “glad Chesapeake” to the broad Choptank & Cooke’s Point, half expecting to be greeted by some version of “Henry Burlingame IV.” There were the frozen marshes of my childhood, the geese flown down from Canada to winter, the graves of good Maggie Mungummory & divers ancient Cookes, the tall-topt pines, the house of my ancestors (long since sold out of the family, & in need of repairs), the ice-blue water lapping chillily at the beach. The scene spoke to me of my namesake’s journey north to where those geese came from (I mean my grandfather’s, A.C. III’s), to learn the truth about his derivation & then to deal with it. ’Twas a tale I’d had in mythic outline, so to speak, from Mother, and from “Father” in the opprobrious detail rehearst in my 2nd letter (I had not yet seen all the diaries & other documents). I was nearing 30, sans course or cause or calling; I had not been to Castines Hundred myself since my 10th year. It was time.

Now we move more swiftly, as my life has moved through the eight years since. I spent that winter as a guest of the Pattersons in Baltimore, acquainting myself with American society in that city as well as in Philadelphia &, especially, the new capital town of Washington, still a-building. There Jefferson, friend of Barlow & of France as his predecessor had not been, was in the new President’s House, having been elected by the House of Representatives after a tie vote with Aaron Burr in the electoral college. Tho he opposed the strong navy built under John Adams’s administration (with the help of the Barbary pirates, who had already broacht “our” treaty!), the same amity with Napoleon that put an end to the naval quarrels between France & the U. States had made possible Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana from the First Consul. “America” now extended even
west
of the Mississippi, no one knew how far, some said all the way to the Pacific; Jefferson was sending an expedition from St. Louis to find out. Already nearly a million people had crost the line Pontiac fought for, and settled west of the Appalachians; Jefferson’s purchase would redouble that flow of settlers onto Indian lands, now going for $2 the acre. But as the Burr-Jefferson campaign made clear (and the earlier disputation over where the new capital should be built), the union of states was fragile yet; much, much was in the balance. I convey’d Barlow’s regards to the President, who pleasantly inform’d me that I was “much changed” since he had known me as Joel’s ward in Paris. He instructed me to advise Barlow that building lots, both in the city proper & in Georgetown, were still cheap: B. would do well to buy a few now if he was interested. But he should probably postpone his return to the country (another of my errands was to make this inquiry) until after the coming election, when the Republicans expected to sweep the field. Once reelected with a clear mandate, Jefferson could respond favorably to Barlow’s proposal that a national university be establisht in the capital, as suggested in George Washington’s will. He promist to invite Barlow himself to preside over its establishment.

Before I could sound him out on the question of a free state for Indians & manumitted or escaped African slaves—who since 1795 had been living together peacefully in the refugee Iroquois villages along the Grand River valley—he astonisht me by asking candidly whether I believed my father dead. I replied, I could but hope so, and ask’d him why he ask’d. Because, he said, he had heard from Mr. Alexander Hamilton, who had marshal’d his defeat of Burr in the House elections, that the man he had so narrowly defeated—now Vice-President of the nation!—was scheming with someone known to Hamilton’s informants only as “H.B.,” to promote a war with Spain & lead an expedition to snatch Mexico. Given the prevailing scurrility of the political climate, where Burr’s “low morals” (like John Randolph’s “impotence” & Barlow’s “free-thinking”) were openly lampoon’d, it was perfectly likely that the rumor was a Republican fabrication. On the other hand, given Burr’s energy, competence, unpredictability, & great ambition, together with the fluidity of the international situation, the rumor might be true. There was more America between the Appalachians & the Mississippi than between the Atlantic & the Appalachians, & yet more west of the Mississippi than those two regions combined, all of it up for grabs; plus giant Mexico below & giant Canada above, great prizes both. Bonaparte’s example was infectious: many besides Aaron Burr must be dreaming, not only of empire, but of literal emperorhood. Even Barlow, Jefferson had heard, that utterly unmilitary man (from whom he had the legendary exploits of my father), had petition’d the French Directory to lead an expedition into Louisiana…

Calling on Burr was my last errand in Maryland. The President, tho he could spare me but a quarter-hour, had done so promptly & cordially; the Vice-President did not want to see me. Burr protested his disbelief that I was who I claim’d to be (I was “too much changed”); then he kept me half an afternoon whilst he fulminated against Jefferson, against the Republicans, against the southern states, against the New York Tammany society which he himself had organized politically for the 1800 elections, only to have them turn on him after the contest in the House; against Alexander Hamilton, whose opposition would make it difficult for Burr to win even the governorship of New York, much less the presidency, in the current campaign. Barbarous, impossible, splendid country! Did I know that Hamilton had seriously consider’d leading an army into Mexico and proclaiming himself Emperor of Central & South America? & cetera. I ask’d for news of “H.B.” Burr said he expected me to have brot news
from
him; then he repeated his conviction that George Washington had had my father done away with after his betrayal of poor Benedict Arnold. Finally he mutter’d: “If he is not dead, he has turn’d into an Ohio River Irishman.” This remark he would not amplify. When I prest, he told me crossly I had been too long a Frenchman; that it was a mere idiom of the country. And he bid me good day.

Errands done, come spring I crost the mountains myself (in a wagon train bound for Governor Harrison’s Indian country) thro the Cumberland Gap to Pittsburgh, a brawling city sprung up where Pontiac’s Indians had been “Consuelo’d” with smallpox blankets. Thence up the Allegheny to Chautauqua Lake, where my dear grandparents had schemed & trysted half a century before. Over the portage trail to Lake Erie; by rough boat across to chilly Upper Canada, then again by wagon to Niagara (where I re-met Jérôme Bonaparte & his bride, honeymooning at the Falls), & anon to Castines Hundred. With every additional degree of north latitude and west longitude, my head clear’d. Even before I met your mother (then a fine fifteen) and fell in love with her on the spot, my movement from Napoleon’s France (and George’s England) to Jefferson’s America show’d me what Barlow & Tom Paine had been talking about: I understood I was not European. Moving farther, from the fail’d ideals of the French Revolution, thro the failing ones of the American, to the open country of the Indians, show’d me what my grandparents (and J. J. Rousseau) had been talking about: I understood I was not “American” either. My first adult glimpse of a Canadian village populated by white Loyalist refugees, displaced Iroquois, escaped Negro slaves, French
habitants,
& (a very few) British Canadians, cohabiting uneasily & in poverty but on the whole not unsuccessfully, set me to dreaming the family dream: a harmony not only between man & man, but between men & Nature. Jefferson’s ideal for the Indians—that they should all become little farmers, homesteaders,
settlers
—struck me now as no less grotesque than that they should become shopkeepers or sailors: I understood what Major Rogers had been talking about in his
Ponteach; or, the Savages of America: A Tragedy.
I was yet to meet Andrée’s idol Tecumseh, & do my utmost to advance his cause in the manner of us Cooks & Burlingames, and come to learn what a greater writer than any of these, old Sophocles, was talking about.

But I met
ma belle cousine
& her gentle parents, the lord & lady of Castines Hundred. I fell in love; not so Andrée, still under the spell of her Shawnee hero—her worrisome infatuation with whom led the Baron & Baroness to look favorably on my own attentions to her tho I was unpropertied, footloose, & as much her senior as Tecumseh, without his nobility of character. Being of French rather than English extraction, and part Indian himself thro his ancestor’s marriage to Madocawanda, the Baron was no bigot, but his tastes were those of a country
gentilhomme,
and he had opposed Andrée’s passion for Tecumseh not only on the grounds of her age but because he wisht a more settled life for her. (He was later to oppose our own match on that same sensible ground, when it became clear I was “my father’s son”; but when
you
made your existence known, he put by his objection with the good grace of the Barons Castine.) They had no firm word of my father since his visit of 1793, en route to Chief Little Turtle’s efforts against the American Legion: they had found him much changed; would not have known him but for his knowledge of our history & his characteristic enterprises. One rumor had it he was establisht on an island in the lower reaches of the Ohio, under an assumed name…

I took the occasion to make my filial feelings clear. The Baron & Baroness were taken aback, less by my sentiments (they had gravely mixt opinions of the man themselves, especially in his “Joseph Brant” metamorphosis, and they remember’d sympathetically my mother’s distraction) than by the indelicate vehemence of my expression. But Andrée brighten’d at once; lookt on me thenceforward with real interest, & question’d me endlessly thro the summer upon my theory that her Uncle Henry—& his grandfather H.B. III before him—had been secret Judas Iscariots of the Indian cause at Bloodsworth Island, at the Wyoming & Cherry Valleys, at Fallen Timbers, & the rest. She reminded me that he had made the same sort of charges against
his
father, Andrew Cooke III, vis-à-vis Pontiac’s betrayal. She urged me to meet Tecumseh, “the Shooting Star.” I declined, jealous, & declared the Indian cause already lost. A receding series of betrayals & retreats was their future, I opined: along the Eastern seaboard they were already but a colorful memory; in a hundred years they would be no more than that along the Pacific.

Andrée agreed, so long as the U. States’ westward expansion went uncheckt. And what could check it? Not Tecumseh’s daydream of confederating all the Indians from Florida to the Lakes, I scoft: that was but the tragedy of Pontiac replay’d. So it would be, my young friend conceded—unless, as she & Tecumseh plann’d, the action of the Indians coincided with full-scale war between the U. States & G. Britain!

I was astonisht, not only by the boldness of her suggestion, but by her precocious grasp of history & politics. It was not just to westward the “Americans” were moving, she declared: the U. States merchant fleet was grown prodigious in the Atlantic trade. But since Napoleon had broken the Peace of Amiens last year & gone to war in the Mediterranean, Britain had extended her policy of economic warfare by blockading French & Spanish ports against neutral shipping, & Napoleon must surely retaliate with a similar blockade against Britain. U. States ships & cargoes were being snatcht by both sides for running these blockades, & U. States sailors were being imprest into the Royal Navy. John Adams’s Federalist administration, sympathetic to the ties between old & New England, had come close to war with France in 1798 on these accounts. Jefferson’s Republicans inclined against Britain despite their reservations about Napoleon. My excellent cousin was persuaded that since the U. States could not afford to fight both major powers, it was likely to refight the War of 1776 if peaceful Jefferson—who would surely be reelected this year—were succeeded in 1808 by a less formidable or less pacific Republican. To the Loyalists in Upper Canada the ’76 war was still a rebellion, not a revolution; it was they who had prest Governor Haldimand not to return Fort Niagara to the U. States at the war’s end, and when he was obliged to—but only in 1796—to construct another fort on Canadian soil just across the gorge from it. A quarter-century of exile had dimm’d but not extinguisht their hope that New England, at least, might still secede from the Union, annex itself to Canada, & welcome them home. Young Republicans from the new western & southern states, for their part, were eager to move against the Canadas & the Floridas, on pretext that Britain was arming & inciting Indians against the western settlements. If they gain’d sufficient strength in Congress, especially in the off-year elections of 1806 and 1810, they could surely exploit the maritime issues to ally New England & the mid-Atlantic states to their cause. And if finally, over that same period, Britain & France continued to exhaust each other’s resources in European wars, & “we” were able to turn the western congressmen’s pretext into a fact by organizing Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy (a popular idea in the British cabinet, as it would make western America in effect a royal protectorate), there could be a 2nd Revolutionary War, as it were, as early as 1809 or ’10! To give her projections a little margin, Andrée was already speaking of it as “the War of 1811.” She would be 22 then: “we” had seven years to make our preparations.

I.e.,
herself, Tecumseh, me… and my father, her legendary Uncle Henry, if we could find him & determine once for all his true allegiance. Ten years past, her Indian friend had fought with Little Turtle’s Miamis in their victory over American soldiers on the Wabash & their defeat by Wayne’s American Legion at Fallen Timbers; thus his introduction to my father & subsequent visits to Castines Hundred. But Tecumseh was his own man, and tho he had valued “H.B.‘s” high opinion of Pontiac (his own model & exemplar), he had not always trusted his advice, particularly after Fallen Timbers. Just then, neither’s whereabouts was known.

I reported what I’d heard from Jefferson and Burr, which corroborated the Baron’s last news of “H.B.” I knew too little of American politics to yea or nay Andrée’s complex prognostications, but enough of French & Algerine, & of history generally, to warn her that events have their own momentum, & quickly get beyond the grasp of those who would control them. And if I should ever go in search of my “father,” I declared, it would not be to enlist myself in his cause, or him in mine.