Soon after our meeting at Oeller’s Hotel, Colonel Williamson left for England to report to Prime Minister Pitt that I was willing to lead an expedition against Mexico. Meanwhile, I kept what company there was in Philadelphia, and Charles Biddle gave me a dinner party. By design, one of the guests was my old friend the Spanish minister Don Carlos Yrujo. He was well-liked—particularly on his wife’s account for she was the daughter of Pennsylvania’s Governor McKean. Until the purchase of Louisiana, Don Carlos had been close to Jefferson. Now relations were strained. Don Carlos maintained that France had no right to sell Louisiana since it was a territory of Spain. He protested to Secretary of State Madison who was peremptory: “Since France has been ceded Louisiana by its ally Spain,” said Madison, “France can certainly do what she pleases with what is entirely her property.” A blunt way of saying that Bonaparte was Spain’s master. Then Jefferson signed into law a congressional bill maintaining that West Florida was part of the Louisiana Purchase when, of course, it was not. Don Carlos was understandably furious. A mercurial man, he spoke English without accent and most kindly shared with friends superb seegars.
“Has Your Excellency been enjoying Philadelphia?” Don Carlos lit the seegar he had given me.
I puffed happily. Said that I always enjoyed seeing my Philadelphia friends, old and new. In fact, “I have been talking to your colleague Mr. Merry.” I knew that sooner or later Don Carlos would hear of our meeting. “We discussed the war of protocol at the President’s palace.”
“It was terrible!” Don Carlos was genuinely upset; or affected to be. “The President was standing between my wife and Mrs. Merry before dinner. Then when dinner was announced, he left both of them and took in Mrs. Gallatin, leaving the diplomatic ladies stranded. Such an insult to England, to Spain, to us!”
I was surprised that Don Carlos seemed to take the matter quite as seriously as Mr. Merry who would have surprised me had he not. “I fear that our president really does believe that all white men are created equal.”
“Merde,” said the Spanish minister to the United States. We then had a pleasant conversation in the course of which I told him that I considered Mr. Jefferson’s claim to West Florida was specious. I also suggested that it might be worth-while for me to visit there during the course of the summer.
“Whenever you like, I will give you a passport.” Don Carlos was most friendly. If he was curious about my future he made no reference beyond wondering whether or not he would have the honour of my company when the next session of the Congress sat in the wilderness. I said that he would see me at Washington City and that I would be happy to give him my view of how I had found things in the Floridas.
“General Wilkinson tells me that you are a good friend to Spain.” Was Don Carlos suspicious at this point? I think not.
“Who cannot be sympathetic to Spain now that she suffers so much at the hands of Bonaparte.” I thought that sentiment agreeable. So did he; so much so, apparently, that he did me a good turn. “The governor of New Jersey has just asked my father-in-law the governor of Pennsylvania to extradite you for murder.”
“When was this?”
“The message came this morning. So I had better give you a passport first thing tomorrow.”
“You are most kind.”
“My father-in-law is your admirer, Colonel. We all are.” A courtly bow, and I knew that I had been warned to flee Philadelphia as quickly as possible.
Thirty-three
IT TOOK ME SEVERAL DAYS to obtain this last installment of the memoir. The Colonel has taken to repeating himself, to losing his train of thought. But then this morning he was once again his usual self and insisted on going over the text to change, add, refine. “After all, this is crucial evidence. One wrong word and I shall be indicted for treason all over again.”
“How,” I asked, “does Mr. Jefferson’s version of what happened vary from yours?”
“According to him, I proposed myself to Merry as a would-be British agent, ready to break up the union.” The Colonel shook his head. “You know, people extract from what one says only what they would like to hear. Poor Merry wanted so much for me to agree to his plan to divide the union that he finally thought that I had. But all I ever wanted from him was a single British flotilla at Vera Cruz—and a hundred thousand pounds.”
This evening we had a caller. “A Mrs. Keese.” Mr. Craft announced the lady with the air of one who did not wish to assist at a seduction.
“I don’t believe I know a Mrs. Keese.” The Colonel was smoking a seegar. “I also doubt the propriety of receiving a lady this late at night and en déshabille. Nevertheless, prepare her for the worst, Mr. Craft. Charlie, stand by! She may be a creature of Madame—intent on compromising me, on black-mail of the direst sort.” He was enjoying himself. He enjoyed himself even more when the lady in question appeared, carrying a large hamper.
“Mrs. Overton!” The Colonel was delighted. “Overton, Mr. Craft, not Keese.”
“It is Keese, Colonel.” She was a good-looking old woman of fifty, with naturally red cheeks and a Scots accent. “I am re-married.”
“Mr. Overton …?”
“Dead!” She sounded happy; but that is her manner. “I have brought you a proper supper because, Colonel, I know the stroke. Oh, I know the stroke as well as I know how to roast a turkey …”
“She does that best of all.” The Colonel explained the lady to us. “I met Mrs. Keese’s father during the Revolution …”
“Oh, what a dramatic meeting!” Mrs. Keese began to slice a turkey still warm from the oven. “Like a ballad!” She roared a verse or two of Sir Walter Scott in Scots. We did not understand a word.
“Near the Heights of Quebec,” continued the Colonel, “I had gone down to drink from a stream, my pistol at the ready, when there at the water’s edge was this British officer …”
“Scots, Colonel.”
“This Scots officer who was your father. Well, neither of us knew quite what to do. There is no protocol for enemy officers meeting like that. So her father offered me some water from his hunting-cup, and I put down my pistol and drank. Then he gave me a bit of horse’s tongue, and I shared with him my last onion, and we chatted of this and that for half an hour and vowed that when the war was over we would meet and continue our acquaintance.”
“And meet they did, thirty-six years later at my father’s place in Scotland …”
“Now here we are some sixty years later … Oh God!” The Colonel indeed looked pained. “Sixty years later! What am I doing alive? This is absurd. Everyone is dead but me.”
“President Madison is still alive,” I said.
“Chief Justice John Marshall is still alive.” Mr. Craft intoned that great name reverently.
“Well, I must outlive them, mustn’t I?”
“So you shall, if properly fed!” Followed by another booming unintelligible quotation, this time from Burns.
We had a splendid supper during which we learned that Mrs. Keese had been ruined financially by her first husband. Now, with her second husband, she ran a boarding-house in Broadway on the Bowling Green. “And there are two fine rooms for you, Colonel, in the basement but full of light because they’re at the back, and look onto the dearest, greenest yard.”
“Dear girl, I fear the prices in that neighbourhood …”
“Whatever you want to pay!”
Mr. Craft and I exchanged a glance. Once again the Colonel had fallen on his feet; if one could use an expression that does not quite fit.
“Tell me,” the Colonel asked, “whose house it was? I used to know every house from the Bowling Green to Wall Street.”
“Why, it was the home of the old Governor John Jay.”
“My joy is complete.” The Colonel looked very happy. “Mr. Jay’s cadaver will turn at least once in its grave at the thought of me in his cellar.”
Thirty-four
SO FAR IT HAS BEEN a cold depressing autumn. An election is in progress. On every wall one read
s “Down with the Aristocracy.” This Democratic slogan is said to be the invention of the elegant Mr. Van Buren whose candidate for governor is expected to defeat the Whig candidate. Mr. Davis and Leggett are deeply involved in the campaign, and so I avoid them.
Helen gives me trouble. She will not leave the house. I think of her all day long. I hate the world.
Fortunately Colonel Burr maintains his high spirits, even in the two small rooms Mrs. Keese has given him. Although not as full of light as she promised, they are as warm as the oven she roasts her turkeys in and our old salamander is happy.
The Colonel has so crowded his furniture, books, pictures into the two rooms that a visitor must hollow out a place for himself if he wants to sit next to the sofa where the Colonel reclines, the portrait of Theodosia on a table beside him. He has, incidentally, acquired a black man-servant who went to fetch me tea on my first visit.
“Most congenial fellow,” the Colonel said. “Used to work for DeWitt Clinton of all people! Poor old fellow. I fear he is a bit addled. There are times when he thinks that I am DeWitt Clinton, and brings me a bottle of whiskey which I pretend to drink, simply to keep his respect.”
The Colonel asked me about the office. Although he still works at briefs, it is tacitly accepted that he will never again visit Reade Street or set foot in a court-room. Aaron Burr is, at last, incredibly, invalid.
“I have been preparing myself for you.” Piles of documents and newspaper cuttings littered the floor beside the sofa. “I’ve also consulted Sam Swartwout. Not that he’s much help. His memory is rather worse than mine. But Sam did find the letters that he wrote his brother John from the west, and they are helpful.”
Mrs. Keese burst in, wanting to feed her lodger who declined feeding. “You don’t know, Mr. Schuyler, what an honour it is, having him here!” Then she was gone, with a Scots war-cry.
Burr’s response to her is—well, quizzical. “Women have played a considerable role in my life, and I wish I could discuss them freely but my code does not allow it. I could never be like Hamilton who kissed and published.”
The Colonel then showed me a miniature of himself at the age of about thirty. “The property of a lady recently dead. Her son sent it to me.”
The Colonel was remarkably handsome if the miniature is accurate: full mouth, straight nose, huge dreaming black eyes. Of what was he dreaming?
I asked him. He was taken aback. “Dreaming? Am I? Was I?” He put on his glasses; studied the miniature closely. “No. It is merely the artist’s interpretation. Or yours.” He took off his glasses. “No, I don’t dream. It is not my nature. I … act. Take risks. Could never stay for long in one place. Wanted always to be moving, to be doing.” He stopped. Touched the painting of Theodosia. “I used to think when I was away from her mother, who was sick, why, she’ll soon be dead. Go home, I’d tell myself, be with her while you can. But I could not stop what I was doing, and when she died I was not there. Yet I might have had a half-dozen more years of her company if I’d not been—in motion.”
The Colonel put the miniature of himself on the table face down before his daughter’s portrait. “Now for that great American comedy: ‘The Treason of Aaron Burr.’ ”
Memoirs of Aaron Burr-Seventeen
WITH SAM SWARTWOUT and a servant, I left Philadelphia in August 1804, and disguised as one R. King (tribute to the good Tory Rufus King who owned the Heights at Weehawk), I went to Georgia.
I pretended to be a London merchant (to explain my accent which the natives could not understand). Then I penetrated East Florida almost as far as St. Augustine. I talked to the inhabitants. Got the feel of the country. Made fascinating discoveries. For instance, did you know that even the finest Spanish ladies openly smoked seegars? Kept a journal for my daughter, which was lost with her. Made maps. All in all, the time was agreeably spent despite near-death during a hurricane that devastated the plantation where I was stopping, killing nineteen blacks and blowing out to sea the piazza where my host and I had been sitting. It was all like a bad dream, or the continuation of the terrible dream that I had had only the night before, a result of eating broiled alligator.
On the way back to Washington, I dropped my incognito and, to my amazement, was everywhere hailed. But then the southerners have no squeamishness about duelling, and Hamilton was not their hero.
At Savannah I dined with the governor of Georgia. Suddenly a band played music beneath the window.
“It is for you, Governor,” I said.
“No, Colonel, it is for the Vice-President.” And so it was.
At Raleigh, North Carolina, I was received with delight by the Negro population of the town. I can only attribute their enthusiasm for me to the fact that after travelling some 400 miles in a canoe, my ordinarily dark complexion had been turned by the sun to a truly luminous quadroon yellow.
By the end of October, I was at Richmond, capital of enemy territory, the mother to the Hydra-headed—no, that is an exaggeration—the many-limbed Virginian junto, the octopus with but a single Jeffersonian head and a thousand tentacles, all named James!
During a theatre performance in Richmond, I was recognised and applauded at the entr’acte by the (white) gentry. I daresay this ovation was reported to the chief octopus.
At the beginning of November, I appeared at Washington City, ready to preside over the Senate. Some people thought it indelicate of me to assume my constitutional duties as I was under indictment for murder in New Jersey. But I was a conscientious public servant. I was also a responsible citizen determined to go back to New Jersey and stand trial; until I was told that the judge for Bergen County had declared publicly that if I was not immediately hanged, there would be famine in Bergen and pestilence in Hoboken. New Jersey lost its magic for me. Meanwhile, I was gratified to learn that, at Jefferson’s prompting, a group of senators were petitioning the governor of New Jersey to drop proceedings against me. Why was Jefferson so sympathetic? Love for me? A sense of justice? of honour? None of these things. He was in trouble and needed my help.
I got my first summons to the President’s House two weeks after the Senate convened on November 5. The President’s messenger tracked me down at the British minister’s house—or rather houses. Merry had taken two brick buildings on K Street and transformed them as best he could into a fashionable embassy.
Mrs. Merry presided over tea before the fire. She was in good form and we were all much amused by the latest symptom of her Jeffersonitis (as usual, I pretended not to hear anything unpleasant that was said of my sovereign).
But Mrs. Merry had other subjects. That afternoon she told us the fabulous story of old Mr. Collins and young Mr. Roper. Collins was an eccentric old Federalist who had a large estate near Alexandria. He was known to be mad, though I never saw any sign of it other than a tendency to quarrel with his rib in public; but if quarrelling with one’s wife is to be mad then there are not asylums enough for us all. Roper was a young lawyer in Alexandria who was courting a favourite niece of Collins. Roper had an eye on the girl’s money but to get at it he must first contrive to have old Mr. Collins confined to the madhouse.
“Well, young Mr. Roper has been foiled!” Mrs. Merry’s harsh amused voice was like a parrot’s. “He called yesterday on old Mr. Collins who said to him, ‘They tell me you are mad!’ Poor young Mr. Roper who had come to say the very same thing to his host was astonished! ‘But I am not in the least mad, Sir.’ ‘But, Sir,’ said old Mr. Collins, ‘it is plain to everyone that you are quite mad. Fortunately there is a capital cure which did the King of England himself a world of good, and that is whipping.’ Whereupon two large slaves appeared, pulled down young Mr. Roper’s breeches and beat him unmercifully!” As Mrs. Merry wept with laughter, the President’s messenger appeared, accompanied by the butler who intoned, “From His Excellency, the President, to Colonel Burr.”
The messenger gave me a note and withdrew.
“It would appear, Colonel Burr, that you are soon to be pell to Mr. Jefferso
n’s mell.” Mrs. Merry was right. But this particular pell-mell was not social but political.
I dined alone with Jefferson the next day (he always took his main meal at three o’clock). I had not seen him for almost a year and thought him somewhat haggard-looking—hair white, eyes tired and dull, the tip of his vulpine nose oddly translucent, like alabaster. The “palace” was still unfinished—cold, draughty, empty. But the private dining-room was comfortable, and original: Jefferson had installed a series of dumb-waiters from which one served oneself.
“Life without servants,” observed my host, “is the last luxury … as well as the first privation,” he quickly added.
“They listen,” I agreed.
“They also talk. Not that there is ever anything said here which I would not be happy to see published.” Jefferson tended to strike the self-righteous note in much the same way as a clock strikes the hour and like a familiar clock one does not hear the sound unless one is anxious, as I confess I was, to tell, as it were, the time.
I recall nothing of our excellent dinner except that the French wine was not only good to drink but promptly produced a lecture on the making of wine. I herewith note for history that this lecture had in no way changed its form from the last time I had been honoured with it. Jefferson played his mind rather the same way he played his fiddle, being especially fond of the old tunes.
There was also a miraculous dessert that I had not encountered before; it consisted of ice-cream served in a shell of hot pastry.
No mention was made of the election I had lost in New York. No mention was made of Hamilton except for a rather tentative “I am told that your problems in New Jersey will soon be resolved.” He affected to find the Merrys entertaining. “I understand from one of my agents at London that Mr. Merry is known to the Foreign Office clerks as Toujours Gai.” Jefferson knew from experience that this sort of thing was amusing and so, dutifully, repeated it to me, knowing I would respond. If I had been Jonathan Edwards, he would have quoted from “Samuel.”