The American Chronicle 1 - Burr (41 page)

I invited him to drink with me at a near-by bar. He shouted something to his wife in the upper part of the house. Then he locked up and we crossed the crowded Bowery to a small French café with a sign out in front which said “Marquis de Lafayette.”

At round marble tables, Frenchmen played chess and dominoes; and spoke of home—usually some West Indian island. I find them exotic. Will I ever see France?

Columbus was embraced by the patron who showed us to a table in one corner where we ate bread and cheese and drank harsh red wine, all ordered by Columbus (as I took to calling him at his request) in rapid French. Delicately I mentioned the obvious fact of his Frenchness which appeared to deny the Englishness of his name.

“That is because of my father. You see, he is American. A lawyer. Very old. Very distinguished. My mother is French. They are married in Paris. She likes Paris. He likes New York. When I am very little I am in Paris. When bigger, I come to New York.”

“Burr? I seem to know the name.” I frowned.

But Columbus was not about to be helpful. “He is old, old man. My mother is very young when they marry.” Columbus wanted to talk of girls, and so we did, and I kept pouring him more and more red wine which he kept on drinking. From girls and Mrs. Townsend we moved—naturally—on to religion (he is a devout Roman Catholic: I look suitably awed by this exoticism); then from religion the conversation shifted—almost naturally—to politics.

Yes, he has met Mr. Van Buren. “I meet him on the boat to Albany—oh, when I am first here—maybe ten years ago.” Actually it was six years ago. I have worked out the date to be either May or June 1828. Columbus accompanied Colonel Burr and Senator Van Buren from New York to Albany where—something which I ought to have known but did not—Van Buren appeared as Colonel Burr’s junior associate counsel before the Court for the Correction of Errors in the case of Varick
v.
Jackson (Mr. Craft has promised to find me the record of the case. He recalls that the fee was a good one and that Senator Van Buren argued the case which Colonel Burr had prepared for him).

“It is my first trip on the river-boat. Colonel Burr takes me along because he wants me to go to a school in Albany but I don’t like school and come back here very quick. Mr. Van Buren tries to tell me how important an education is. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘what I would give if I had been to college!’ And Colonel Burr laughs and agrees with him and says if Mr. Van Buren was an educated man, he would be something a lot more than just a senator from New York which is a ridiculous thing to be, he says. He laughs a lot, Colonel Burr.”

I did my best to appear casual. Not to press. To keep Columbus to the subject. “I thought Mr. Van Buren was governor in 1828, not senator.”

Columbus shook his head. He sliced thick bread and ate it with pickled onions. I could almost taste the sourness, and winced as he chewed happily, mouth open.

“Mr. Van Buren is governor soon after because on the boat that’s what they talk about. ‘I must carry the state for Jackson,’ says Mr. Van Buren. ‘Indeed you must,’ says Colonel Burr. ‘But with old Governor Clinton dead we have nobody who can win this year,’ says Mr. Van Buren. ‘There’s you,’ says the Colonel. ‘But I am just elected again to the Senate,’ says Mr. Van Buren. ‘Yes,’ says Colonel Burr, ‘and now you be governor and you make General Jackson president and you will be secretary of state next year.’ And they argue about what to do but by the time we get to Albany Mr. Van Buren says the Colonel is right and he will do just what he says and he does. Very
affreuse
,
Albany is, and the Dutch girls are ugly. You’re not Dutch, are you?”

“No. No. I’m Irish.”

As best I could I tried to discover if Columbus knows anything of Van Buren’s true paternity but he does not or else is more discreet than I give him credit for.

I did acquire one useful detail. Some months before the trip up-river, Van Buren had made a speech in the Senate favouring half-pay for all surviving officers of the Revolution: “ “The best speech I ever wrote for you, Matty,’ says the Colonel. ‘But not,’ says Mr. Van Buren, ‘the last.’ ”

I HAVE GONE OVER this conversation with Leggett who is delighted. “You have enough to start.” He handed me a number of pamphlets from a drawer in his desk. “A few libels for you to study.”

As luck would have it the first was an attack on his own candidate Richard M. Johnson. Apparently the senator from Kentucky has just lost his mulatto concubine, one Julia Chinn, by whom he had two daughters. Although the girls were highly educated, he failed to introduce them to society. He has now bought another mulatto girl, and taken her to bed. I read aloud one of the gaudier passages.

Leggett waves anxiously in the direction of Mr. Bryant’s office. “Don’t! He’s already suspicious enough.”

I desist. “Is this the style I’m to imitate?”

“Yes. With a phrase or two from me, if you like.”

I told him of the meeting with Gower, but did not mention the price I am to get. Leggett is thoughtful. “I’d be wary of anything Matt Davis is involved with.”

“He wants the same result you do.”

“Perhaps.” Leggett shook his head with wonder. “I had no idea Van Buren and Burr were so close. Practising law together as recently as—when?”

“Six years ago. And a forty-minute meeting yesterday at the City Hotel.”

“We’ll have to guess at what went on there.”

“Shall we say that they were planning to restore slavery to New York state?” I grow irritable with my task.

“You can
say
anything as long as it sounds reasonable, plausible. That is the beauty of anonymity.”

“But one ought not to lie, particularly about a man one admires.”

“Burr or Van Buren?”

“Guess?” I found myself disliking Leggett; myself more.

“You cannot hurt your friend the Colonel. He is used to slander. Besides, do your work well and he will never suspect you. Do your work well and we shall have Johnson in the White House.”

“A thrilling prospect. And what will you get out of it? Will you be collector of the port, or ambassador to England?”

“Virtuous, Charlie! I shall be virtuous, and a new world will begin, without slavery, without ...” He made a speech.

THE COLONEL CONTINUES to be in good spirits. As we prepared for today’s session, he remarked upon the death a few days ago of Genêt. “The last time I spoke to him, he told me that it was Jefferson who had convinced him that he should appeal directly to the people; that he should attack Hamilton and Washington openly, and by name. I wonder if Jefferson really gave him such malicious advice.”

The Colonel whittled at a seegar. Before him on the baize-covered table were arranged the usual newspaper cuttings, campaign tracts, letters.

We are now ready to deal with the Colonel’s vice-presidency. I am armed with pencil, pad; and an aching forefinger. I grip too hard the pencil. The true professional holds it lightly, saves himself.

“How is Mr. Van Buren?” I was bold. This business must end soon, one way or the other.

Burr blinked at me; bit his seegar; exhaled smoke. “I told Matty it was too public a place but he had no time to go elsewhere. What a clever man he is! I am continually awed by the
neatness
with which he accomplishes things. If only he could spell, knew grammar, didn’t have that uncouth Dutch accent. Your friend Leggett will support him, won’t he?” The Colonel has got the general range. But I hope no more.

“Well, he thought Mr. Van Buren’s position on slavery weak.”

“Matty will be impeccable on that subject come election day.” Burr put his feet up on the fire fender. “Matty flatters me shamelessly. He asks my legal advice. Imagine!”

And that is all I shall probably ever know about what transpired at the City Hotel. Will I have to invent something suitably sinister? I cannot say I much enjoy the
manner
of the political pamphlet. But at least I am now rich, and have Helen Jewett in a room back of the Washington Market.

She agreed last night to join me, “For a while anyway but we better not let Mrs. Townsend know. I’ve said I’m going to have a baby and leave it with my aunt who wants a baby—funny kind of aunt—but Mrs. Townsend seems to believe me and says she’ll take me back when I’m ‘restored,’ that was her word.”

SIX MONTHS AFTER our inauguration, Jefferson joined forces with the Clintons to eliminate me from politics not only in the nation but, rather more seriously, in New York state.

Young DeWitt Clinton was a formidable antagonist. Clever, drunken, ruthless, there was nothing he would not do to achieve his ends. First, he restored his uncle to the governorship. Then, coolly, through a series of amendments to the state constitution, he removed all power from the governor and bestowed it upon a council which was his creature. “The boy’s strong-minded, Colonel. Strong-minded.” George Clinton’s mouth worked nervously; thick tufted brows arched over small eyes. “There’s times he scares me half to death when he’s on the war-path.”

Clinton was indeed terrified of his nephew, and with good reason. In a matter of months, the young man had secured the state for himself by, among other things, the elimination of nearly every Federalist officeholder: in all, he made some 6,000
appointments, including that of himself to the United States Senate. I know of no conquest quite so total or so rapid as DeWitt Clinton’s annexation of New York. I do not think that it would have happened had I not been removed from the scene by the vice-presidency. No matter. At the age of thirty-three, DeWitt Clinton was master of the Republican party in the state of New York.

I cannot say that I look back on this period as entirely happy. I was in debt. I was trying unsuccessfully to sell Richmond Hill. Theodosia was at the other end of the world in South Carolina. Washington City was a depressing village set in a wilderness, and not even the best efforts of the Madisons to create a salon quite made up for the sense of constriction in that makeshift capital—tribute to Jefferson’s will.

One afternoon in March of 1802, I was at John Marsh’s bookstore in M Street when I heard a familiar voice asking for a novel. I turned and saw Hamilton, swiftly thumbing through a stack of English periodicals; no doubt committing them to memory at a glance!

As I approached him, he looked up; gave a start; then bowed deeply. “The Vice-President himself—and in the flesh.”

“I’m afraid there is too much of the latter ...”

“And not enough of the former?” The response was sharp, as always. He, too, was heavier than in the past. We all were. It is my recollection of those days that we did almost nothing but eat and drink at Washington City.

Hamilton was in the city for “Litigation. What else? How lucky you are to be out of all that!”

“Considering my poverty, I wish I were
into
all of that.”

Mr. Marsh brought Hamilton the novel he had asked for. The commanding general of the American army placed a copy of the
Anti Jacobin Review and Magazine
around the book, hoping I had not noticed the title.

“Do you enjoy yourself?” Hamilton was most amiable, and though we were contemporaries I found myself responding to him the way older men did when he meant to charm: I played Achilles to his buoyant Patroclus.

“Tolerably. I am stern with my flock. I have, this session, forbade the eating of cakes on the floor of the Senate chamber. We already have rats as well as mice at every session. Apples are next for proscription.”

“You are so decorous, Vice-President!”

“Obviously I have found my proper place in life. Decorum is all that the position requires.”

Hamilton invited me to join him at the Union Tavern farther along M Street (are these places still there? it has been thirty years since I have set foot in Washington City).

Shivering in a cold wind, we walked briskly along the muddy Georgetown street. And it was a proper street unlike the cow-paths and uncharted woods of near-by Washington City—a capital, as one tactful foreign minister used to say, “of magnificent distances.”

As always, Hamilton tried to draw me out on the subject of Jefferson and, as always, I was not to be drawn out. I gave him only the idlest gossip. “The roof of the mansion leaks. The walls of the bedrooms are still unplastered. And Mr. Adams forgot to order a proper staircase between the floors, so the President must climb a sort of ladder when he goes to bed.”

“You visit there often?”

“Twice a month we dine and settle all the matters of the universe.”

Hamilton frowned; and wondered if I was lying. But I was not. Jefferson was eager that we maintain—socially—the appearance of amity.

The owner of the Union Tavern arranged two comfortable chairs for us on the stone hearth of the empty bar-room. Slaves worked the bellows; made the fire crackle; brought wine.

This was the first time I had been alone with Hamilton since the election. Before 1800, I had always thought of him as a
friendly
rival. Now I knew otherwise. Letters he had written about me had come my way. It seemed that every thought, whim, fancy that came into his irritable mind was sooner or later put in writing. I ought to have hated him, but did not. Some flaw in my nature has made me indifferent to slander—and thus much slandered? Certainly my indifference seems to excite such attentions.

As I held up my glass, I repeated, somewhat mischievously, the toast I had made at the recent Federalist celebration of Washington’s birthday. “To the union of all honest men!”

Hamilton frowned; and did not drink. “Your attendance at
our
dinner was most ... effective.”

“I merely stated the theme of this administration.”

“Others saw it as a deliberate bid for Federalist support.”

“Support for what?” I was as bland as if I had never seen a copy of Hamilton’s newspaper, the
Evening Post
(so superbly edited today!), nor read a single one of his current attacks on Jefferson, on me, on the entire Republican hierarchy.

“The President must have been startled by your appearance in the enemy camp.”