The American Chronicle 1 - Burr (36 page)

“I accept, of course. But I think this matter can be resolved without relying on—what are the weapons?”

“Pistols.” A slight sound, as if Monroe had difficulty swallowing.

“For one thing, I am certain that Hamilton is not as eager to fire those pistols as
we
are.”

Monroe looked at me gratefully as I maintained the myth of
our
eagerness to risk death on the field of honour. “It strikes me,” I continued, “that we must contrive a statement from you which he can accept ...”

“I have said all that I can say. I even gave him a written statement, reminding him that at the time of his confession we had simply accepted his word—without proof—that he had been guilty of adultery but not of speculation.”

“In other words, you have practically accused him of lying to you.”

“Not lying. I simply reminded him that we never demanded
proof
.
We just let the matter drop.”

I saw the solution. I drafted a message from Monroe to Hamilton, re-asserting his innocence in the matter of the Callender-Beckley(-Jefferson?) pamphlet, and stating plainly that when a gentleman says that he is telling the truth, another gentleman has no choice but to believe him. This was wisely double-edged. “If I know Hamilton, he will be delighted to avoid meeting you.”

“Do you think so?” Monroe was unconvinced; no doubt saw himself dead on the Jersey Heights. Who does not respond in this way to the prospect of a duel?

I arranged to meet Hamilton at Captain Aorson’s tavern in Nassau Street. The good “captain” was with me in Quebec and so enamoured was he of our gallant youth that his tavern used always to be nearly empty, for strong men feared his reminiscences and fled rather than hear again how he stormed Quebec, marching between—so he tells it—Montgomery and me. Since I was actually at Quebec, I was spared his memories and so could enjoy the pleasant room undisturbed.

I arrived first, set myself in a quiet corner of the tap-room; ordered tent, a Spanish claret I was partial to in those days (before I understood true claret).

Hamilton appeared a few minutes later, bright as always; a trifle plumper than when he had been in office.

“What a terrible business, my dear Burr! Terrible!” He sat beside me; drank tent, too, with—I noticed—a shaking hand. It was difficult to determine who was the more nervous, Monroe or Hamilton. “You know how much I disapprove of duelling!”

“No, I did not know. I recall that you challenged Charles Lee and lately Commodore Nicholson, and now you are challenging James Monroe.”

“But what’s to be done? You’ve seen the libels your Republican friends have written about me.”

I told him then how Monroe had assured me on his word of honour that he had not broken his promise to Hamilton.

“Do you believe him?”

“Yes.”

“Then who is responsible for what was published?”

“I have no idea.”

“Massa Tom?” Hamilton’s loathing of Jefferson was palpable in his voice.

“It is pointless to speculate. My only interest, frankly, is preventing a duel between you and Monroe.”

“I called him a liar to his face.” Hamilton was unexpectedly remorseful for one who regarded himself as always in the right and thus able to say whatever he pleased, no matter how libellous.

“That was foolish of you.”

“You honestly do not think him a liar?” Hamilton had immediately seen his way out of the trap, and I helped him to safety. I showed him Monroe’s statement. He glanced at it (Hamilton read more rapidly than any man I have ever known). He frowned. He smiled. The storm had passed. “I can accept this statement.”

“I’ll discuss the details with your second.”

“This is very good of you, Burr.”

“Yes, I know it is.”

Hamilton gave me his beautiful boy’s smile. “We must not let others come between us.” He spoke with what was, for the moment at least, affection.

“How can they?” I asked innocently. “When we are both retired from political life.”

“You are a most witty man, Burr. Come. Walk me to the City Tavern.”

Together we made our way down Nassau and then across Pine to the Broad Way. It was a slow progress, because half the town wanted to pay homage to the leader of the Federalist party (even though his hold on that party was loosening due to the enmity of President Adams) while the other half found me interesting as a leader of the Republican forces in the state (I had been returned to the Assembly a few months earlier). Although we were political rivals, we were also practising lawyers who had to deal with one another in court and out. I think we actually were, to a point, friends in those days.

Hamilton tried to draw me out on Jefferson, but I took no bait from him. “Obviously I suspected Monroe of publishing the story. But if he is innocent—which we have agreed he is,” he added quickly, “then Jefferson is responsible. And I know why, don’t you?”

“I don’t know that Jefferson has anything to do with it.” I was wary.

Hamilton was reckless. “Because of Mrs. Walker.”

“And who is Mrs. Walker?”

“Plainly she is the wife of Mr. Walker who was once a friend of Jefferson.”

I recalled the gentleman. He had received an interim appointment as senator from Virginia.

“Mr. Walker was angry with Jefferson for not keeping him on in the Senate. As you know, politics for those Virginians is entirely a family affair.”

Since Hamilton’s father-in-law had only just replaced me as senator, I could not resist, “Unlike New York?”

Hamilton burst out laughing. “Well, let us say there are good and bad families. Anyway, Mr. Walker has disliked Jefferson ever since, and is now putting it about that Jefferson tried to seduce his wife.”

“Unsuccessfully?”

“There are always two versions in such a matter. Of the two, the one version that never varies is that of the wife. In her husband’s absence, Mrs. Walker virtuously resisted Massa Tom on a number of occasions.”

“How long have you known this story?” We were standing in front of Trinity Church.

“Several years.”

“Would you—would one of your newspaper writers use it against Jefferson?”

The storm returned to that bright face. We stepped off the busy Broad Way into the shady churchyard. Then, as now, those who wished to speak privately to one another strolled in pairs amongst the tombs.

“I am convinced that, to protect himself, Jefferson struck first at me—a sort of
tu quoque
.”

In the green shade we stopped close to the church wall, and Hamilton said something most odd. “I wonder sometimes if this is the right country for me.”

“You would prefer to live under the British crown?” I played with him.

“Of course not! But there
is
something wrong here. I sense it everywhere. Don’t you?”

I shook my head and said what I believe to be true. “I sense nothing more than the ordinary busy-ness of men wanting to make a place for themselves. Some are simply busier than others, and so will take the higher ground. But it is no different here from what it is in London or what it was in Caesar’s Rome.”

Hamilton shook his head. “There is more to it than that, Burr. But then I have always thought we might be able to make something unique in this place.”

“Our uniqueness is only geographical.”

“No, it is moral. That is the secret to all greatness.”

“Are great souls
ever
moral?”

“They are nothing else!” So spoke the seducer of Mrs. Reynolds. I should make it plain that I am not one to think such an intrigue of any
moral
importance—rather it was the way in which Hamilton revealed (revelled in?) a sordid seduction in order to cover up what Jefferson and Monroe went to their graves confident was dishonesty at the Treasury. Hamilton demonstrated a perverse—to say the least—morality. But of course his use of the word “moral” was practically theological in its implications; and mine is a secular brain.

Hamilton again thanked me most warmly for my good offices and we left the churchyard together, crossing the exact spot where seven years later I was to place him.

Hamilton’s response to the Callender attack was to publish an extraordinary pamphlet in which he revealed to the world his adultery with Mrs. Reynolds while proclaiming his honesty as a public servant.

When Monroe showed me the pamphlet I was certain that someone else had written it but Monroe assured me that it was Hamilton’s work. “He has put an end to himself politically,” was my first response.

“I would not count on it.” Monroe was cautious.

“But he can never be elected to office.”

“Why should he want to be elected? He already controls Adams’ cabinet.”

“But not Adams.”

“He does not need him. He also has the support of that vain old man in Virginia.” So Monroe referred to the founder of the Virginia dynasty that would, in time, give to him the crown.

Four or five years ago, crossing William Street, I saw an aged man getting into a carriage. I was struck by the powdered hair, the cocked hat, the black velvet small-clothes. He looked as out of his time as Rip Van Winkle. Then, with a shock, I realized that it was my one-time friend James Monroe. Yet at first glance what had struck me most forcefully was the uncanny resemblance he bore to his old enemy George Washington. I am sure that the resemblance was deliberate: the last of the Virginia dynasty chose to imitate the first whom he had detested and traduced—no doubt this elegant performance was a form of expiration.

A few months later Monroe died in the house of his son-in-law. Like the rest of us, insolvent!

COLONEL BURR HAS DETERMINED not to contest Madame’s suit. “It will be too costly in time, and we must conserve what’s left of my brain.” He sat in the centre of ledgers, newspaper cuttings, packets of yellowed letters tied with faded silk ribbons (
“love letters,”
Mr. Craft unexpectedly told me with a most disagreeable smirk).

Day after day I take down the Colonel’s narrative which now flows so rapidly that I have developed a huge corn on my right middle finger from the pen’s chafing.

This afternoon, before we started work, Burr suddenly mentioned Hamilton. “Somewhere in the text we must make the point that Hamilton and I continued friends for the next three years until I became vice-president. We even worked together to create the Manhattan Company ...”

“Hamilton was involved with
you
?”
This is not the usual version.

“Oh, yes. The Manhattan Company was most respectable. In those days the city’s principal water supply was in the Collect, a large pond that had become foul. Most people felt that the yellow fever was, in some way, caused by bad water. After the epidemic of ’98 it was agreed that the city must tap the Bronx River. I favoured a private company. Others wanted the city to pay for the new system but even Hamilton admitted that this could not be done without unpopular taxes—and he was an expert on that subject! So I persuaded a Federalist legislature to accept my bill creating such a company, with a most distinguished board of directors. In fact, at Hamilton’s request, I made his brother-in-law a director. And so we brought fresh water to the city.”

Burr suddenly laughed. “I understand that at Jefferson’s request his tombstone tells us that he was the founder of the University of Virginia. Well, let mine declare that Aaron Burr with his rod struck the rock Manhattan and the waters flowed. Drink, O Israel, of Aaron’s water! And drink they do to this day.”

Then the Colonel poured himself strong tea, opened a ledger in which he had made a series of notes, and for the first time gave his version of what happened when he and Jefferson were both elected president.

BY THE TIME of the presidential election of 1800 it was plain to everyone except John Adams that he would not be re-elected. His administration had been a disaster, equalled in our history only by that of his son John Quincy. It is odd that two such brilliant men lacked so entirely the ability to conduct the public business with any degree of intelligence or justice. Perhaps it was true that my grandfather had shaped their characters. If he had, their careers become explicable, for to the Puritan mind Hell is pre-ordained; therefore it is impious to tamper with God’s earthly arrangements; better to sing hosannas to His celestial arbitrariness.

The Adams
débâcle
—and our opportunity—began with the various Alien and Sedition Acts. They are too well known to describe here other than to note that fearing war with France, the Adams administration pushed through Congress four measures: one, empowering the president to arrest foreigners in time of war; two, to make it legal to deport them at will; three, to lengthen the resident requirement for citizenship from five to fourteen years (this was known privately as the Gallatin Act—Albert Gallatin had come to the United States from Geneva, been elected to the Senate from Pennsylvania, and then unseated by the Senate, despite my best efforts to save him). Four, the Sedition Act: forbidden was the publication “of any false, scandalous and malicious writing” aimed at the government and its officers.

I was with Hamilton in July of ’98 when the Sedition Act was published. He affected despair. “I have spent my life trying to prop up the frail and worthless fabric of our Constitution and now that fool Adams wants to establish a tyranny.”

“Don’t worry. He won’t have the opportunity. He has given us the presidency.”

“I would not be so certain of that.” The rosy face was suddenly mischievous. “After all, deporting foreigners is a popular thing to do.”

“What about arresting editors?”

“Personally I would draw and quarter them, and so would you. But all may yet be well for us.”

A week later I understood what he meant. At the President’s request, Washington took charge of the army. Hamilton was made second-in-command, with the rank of major-general. President Adams then proposed that I be promoted to brigadier-general, but Washington turned me down on the ground that as a friend of Jefferson I was the sort of crypto-democrat who would try to overturn the government!

It was Hamilton’s intention to promote a war with France. Then the American army (together with the British fleet) would attack not France directly but the Spanish empire, annexing Latin America to the United States, presumably with Britain’s connivance—a most unlikely prospect.