The American Chronicle 1 - Burr (33 page)

“When was that?” My fingers itched for pen and paper but he no longer has time for the past.

“Madame has led a life even more gallant than my own. Well, the world shall know it!”

After I had helped him draft several indictments of his wife’s behaviour, he set “out for Jersey City, leaving me with Mr. Craft who simply shakes his head and murmurs, “Those who would roll in the gutter ...”

TOGETHER WITH LEGGETT I rolled in the gutter last night.

For two days the Abolitionist leaders have been attacked by mobs. Leggett wants to know who is inciting them. “I suspect the Whigs.”

“You always suspect the Whigs,” I said. Actually the movement to abolish black slavery in the south is deeply unpopular. It is not that New Yorkers so much like the institution of slavery as they dislike the sort of righteous people who want to abolish it.

We were in Centre Street, the heart of the Negro neighbourhood and close to the Five Points. Just opposite us was the Episcopal African church whose pastor the Reverend Peter Williams came out to greet Leggett.

The pastor feared that his church would be the next to suffer. He is a small black man with an insinuating voice, and a gift for politics. Understandably he was frightened. “They attack
us
when the ones they ought to be attacking are white radicals.”

“But surely
you
want slavery abolished in the south.” Leggett was the questioning journalist.

“I
want
it, Mr. Leggett, but I am not about to lend myself to violence, and that is what it will come to.”

As the streetlamps were lit in the spreading twilight, shutters began to slam up and down the street. Slam only to re-open a crack as the black population kept an eye out to see if the enemy was near. The enemy was. We could hear the sound of a drum’s irregular beat in the Five Points, of Irish voices raised in songs of the most bloodthirsty sort.

Friday evening a meeting of Abolitionists in the Chatham Street Chapel was attacked, and an attempt was made to kill the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan who are the leaders of the movement in New York. Luckily the Tappans were able to escape without injury. Lewis Tappan’s house, however, was burned down.

Last night it was rumoured that the mob was planning to make a clean sweep of every known Abolitionist by setting fire to their houses and their churches (most of these high-minded meddlers are clergymen; I have not Leggett’s enthusiasm for the movement). As it proved, the mob was not so ambitious. But they did attack the Episcopal African church.

The half-dozen policemen who had been called out to guard the church quietly vanished as the now familiar mob (I am beginning to recognise some of those b’hoy faces) came roaring toward us from the Five Points.

As the mob stormed the church, its pastor vanished into an alley. Windows were smashed. The door stove in. The pews thrown out the window and set afire in the street. They do hate the blacks, the poor who are white.

Flames appeared in the empty windows of the church. The bonfire of pews in the street cast a terrible glare over everything and everyone, including Leggett and me who were promptly recognised as not of the mob and so hostile. In an instant we were overturned—there is no other word for it—by a dozen demented-looking youths.

Soaked with mud and bloody chicken feathers (as luck would have it we were rolled in the gutter just in front of a poultry shop), we ran as fast as we could: not even the belligerent Leggett was willing to face that mob.

Since my boarding-house was closest, we went there; and while the landlady got us hot water, she swore that she too had been assaulted the month before—the word “assault” in her loose-toothed mouth carried with it the awful spectre of Sabine lewdness—by rioting stonecutters.

“If I was the Mayor, I’d shoot every last one of them Abolitionists who is burning down the city.” Hating the Abolitionists, Mrs. Redman has, like so many simple people, confused them with their persecutors.

Leggett and I removed our be-feathered suits and handed them over to Mrs. Redman to clean; then, in our shirts, we washed up as best we could.

Leggett’s hands were not steady as he scrubbed at his shirt front. But then neither were mine. Yet I could not help but notice how heavily he was breathing and how the skin of his stocky bare legs resembled—well, the tallowy skin of a freshly plucked chicken. Chickens are still on my mind.

I found some Dutch gin and we toasted the Abolitionists. The hot night was filled with shouts and screams and the noise of glass breaking while through the open window we could see, over the dark rooftops, the pretty pink glow of a church burning in the next ward.

“The whole city could come to a stop.” By nature I am more alarmed than Leggett by the thought of anarchy.

“Unlikely.” Shirt unbuttoned, Leggett leaned back on the bed; his hairy muscular chest glittered with sudden new sweat. The lungs within are torn past mending. Conscious of the dying body on the bed, I looked away, embarrassed by death. Luckily he had no clue to what I was thinking. He takes for granted the blood he spits, the sudden chills, the sick sweating.

I showed Leggett certain of these pages and explained to him that I was, like it or not, assembling a memoir of Colonel Burr, in his own words. Leggett was delighted by the letter that established Burr’s presence near Kinderhook at the time of Mrs. Van Buren’s impregnation with the future vice-president.

“But that’s it, Charlie! He was there! You have the proof. What more do you need?”

For once I was able to laugh at Leggett. “We lawyers have different standards from you journalists. This is no proof. It is merely circumstantial.”

“But what circumstances!” Unconsciously Leggett was massaging his chest with an odd circular movement, as though trying to help the lungs do their work. “That letter as well as a few reminiscences from Colonel Burr on the subject of his protégé ...”

“He hardly ever mentions him ...”

“Well, that’s your fault. Be guileful. He wants vindication, doesn’t he? He as much as admits it to you and Davis. And he certainly wants to be thought a power to the end. So get him to tell you how he was the one who launched Matty Van in politics, how he was ...” A sudden quick spasm, a contraction of the entire body stopped Leggett in mid-sentence. He gasped. Seemed to hold his breath. “No cause for alarm,” he mumbled at last. “But I will rest a bit.” He fell back onto my bed, and there remained in a drugged sort of sleep the entire night.

I curled up in a chair and wondered if I would find my guest alive in the morning.

Leggett woke me up. He was fully dressed and looked in perfect health. “It’s dawn. My wife’ll be worried. Thanks for the bed. Start on the pamphlet now. Right away. We must have it ready before the convention, before October. If you don’t feel up to writing it alone, we can do it together.”

Leggett was gone. It is July. How can I be ready in three months with so much unknown?

THE COLONEL IS HAVING second thoughts about his counter-suit. “Perhaps it is not the gentlemanly thing to do.”

I give no advice. Not that he wants it; he talks often to himself with me as mute audience.

“Yet it is a blow, that petition,
as
if I wanted to take her money. But then she thinks the rest of the world like herself. In her day she took money from everyone. From me. From Hamilton. And we never—
I
never—asked for it back.”

“Did Hamilton?”

But the Colonel did not hear me. “When that first French lover of hers turned her out, I gave her the money to keep her from debtors’ prison, and never asked for a penny back. But she is what she is. I am what I am.”

The Colonel stopped abruptly; pushed aside the various depositions on the baize-covered table.

“Let us turn to less weighty matters. Let us consider the home life of Massa Tom, in the autumn of 1795.”

DURING THE LAST SESSION of the Third Congress I led the battle in the Senate against ratification of Jay’s treaty with England. The treaty was clumsily drawn and to our disadvantage. It actually contained a clause forbidding us to export cotton in
American
ships. In effect, the treaty made us a colony again. It also revealed for the first time the deep and irreconcilable division between the Republican and the Federalist parties—and they were now actual political parties, no longer simply factions. One was pro-French, the other pro-British. One wanted a loose confederation of states; the other a strong central administration; one was made up of independent farmers in alliance with city workers; the other was devoted to trade and manufacturing. One was Jefferson; the other Hamilton.

Since Hamilton’s forces in Congress outnumbered ours, the treaty was duly ratified. I was now accepted as not only first among the Republicans in the upper house (the equivalent to Madison in the lower) but also the leader—with Governor Clinton—of the party in New York state. Meanwhile, I had made a series of personal alliances: with Gallatin in Pennsylvania; with various Edwards cousins in Connecticut; with Jonathan Dayton in New Jersey; with Madison and (I thought) Monroe in crucial Virginia. I had also fought hard for the entrance into the union of Tennessee. This won me the friendship of that state’s first representative, who introduced himself to me outside Congress Hall.

“By the Eternal, Colonel Burr, I am your admirer for life!” Andrew Jackson was a handsome, fiery-tempered young man who tended to incoherence when passionate, which was much of the time. He used also to drool at the corners of his mouth, a disagreeable habit since overcome. Jefferson called him “the mad dog.”

I gave Jackson a fine dinner party but I don’t think he enjoyed the company as much as he did the wines. He disliked Congress and Congress reciprocated. Later Jackson resigned his seat, out of boredom I suspect. Although our friendship was to prove most useful to me in the election of 1800, six years later it was nearly fatal to him, poor man, when I was arrested for treason and he was named my accomplice.

In 1792 the Virginians had promised me that if I stepped aside as vice-presidential candidate for George Clinton they would support me in that position four years later. In politics, as in life, one ought to do what one has promised to do. This has been my Quixotic code. The Virginians, however, were not so—I search for a word. Punctilious? Therefore I thought it time to remind the chief Virginian of the junto’s promise.

Yellow fever had broken out in New York City when I left Philadelphia by stage on September 18, 1795. I was accompanied by my valet Alexis. Why is it that a man’s servants figure not at all in his story, as told by himself or others? and yet our lives are mostly spent in the company of such true intimates. I have never had a friend as true as the black Santo Domingan Alexis who once—but that is for a different memoir.

By the time I arrived at the “city” of Washington I was feeling curiously stupid. There was a ringing in my ears. I was feverish. Nevertheless, I was taken in by a Miss Duncanson who displayed the courage of which martyrs and saints are made. Anyone else would have turned me out of the house to die in the woods as so many did die during the summer of ’93 when, fleeing the contagion in Philadelphia, they were kept at bay with rifles by the country-folk. Even President Washington when he left Philadelphia for Mount Vernon was not allowed to stop in several villages, and His Mightiness was obliged to sleep not surrounded by adoring subjects but beneath indifferent trees.

When Alexis drew the curtains the next morning and saw my face, he realized that his term of employment was practically at an end.
“Diable!”

“Qu’a-t-il?”
I could hardly speak. He brought me a mirror. My face and neck were swollen and the whites of my eyes were as scarlet as those poor Dr. Hutchinson surveyed me with for the last time. Worst, I could hardly swallow, speak.

Miss Duncanson was tact itself. The fever was never mentioned and—not mentioned—amiably did not go to its next phase. I ate nothing; allowed no doctor to bleed me; sprang a new man from my bed a few days later and in perfect health explored the new capital of our country.

I confess that I have never seen such a disheartening wilderness. Parts of the Capitol and presidential mansion were going up, but nothing else. The builders lived in shacks which, at the time of my last visit to the city in 1806, were still intact, still occupied.

I speculated in land like everyone else, including General Washington who had just bought two lots near the Capitol. I put a down payment on a lot near the White House. We were a mad sight! Grown men on horseback riding through dark woods, consulting maps in order to be able to point knowledgeably to this or that section of marshy soil and say, “Now that is the corner of such-and-such a street. Most convenient to the Capitol. I shall build a house—no, an hotel—there.” Yet those who persevered in that wilderness made vast fortunes. As usual I did not.

I then rode on to Monticello through a perfect wilderness crossed by some of the most treacherous streams and fords that I have ever encountered.

At about ten in the morning toward the end of September, I stood below the hill on which the mansion Monticello was a-building. All was confusion. A large forge manned (or rather boy-ed) by a dozen black children was turning out nails. The apostle of the agrarian life gaily admitted to now being a wholesale manufacturer.

“I have no choice,” said Jefferson who greeted me at the smithy. “The crops pay for re-building the house. The nails pay for groceries. I calculate at my present rate of production I shall be out of debt in four years.” I complimented him. I too have had my nail manufactories which were to get me out of debt. But somehow the nails never do the trick.

Jefferson mounted his horse and rode with me up the hill, chattering all the while. He was then about fifty, beginning to go gray, and very stiff with the rheumatism which he was gloomily certain was heralding his life’s end.

I was complimented for my opposition to Jay’s treaty. “Yours is the finest legal mind in the Senate.”