by Desmond Dilg
* * * * *
The night of terror was over, a memorable night to Aaron Burr, to Alexander Hamilton, to Mrs. Provost, and to all concerned. The soldiers instructed by Burr took their prisoners back to camp, but Burr himself rode away with the ladies to the neighboring farm.
There he lay for a month unable to move, while Mrs. Provost attended his wound. Thus the future Vice President of the United States became first acquainted with Mrs. Provost, “the charming Widow Provost” of ballad and story. She fell madly in love with him, and thereby hangs a tale, nay half a dozen tales and—a tragedy.
As they drove away the sound of artillery could be heard in the distance.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The roar of heavy guns came rumbling down the wind. The battle was on again somewhere.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The future Conquerors of the World were busy training each other. It was the snarling of the lions.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The proper price of freedom was being fairly paid —BLOOD! In blood is the salvation of man. The despot and the revolutionist were in mortal grips—and why shouldn’t they?
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The struggle for existence was proceeding tumultuously, just as it proceeded a million years ago, even as it shall proceed a million years hence
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
May the best man and the bravest man ever win, and may fortune and fame and love ever smile upon the Strongest.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Weapon against weapon, brain against brain, to the pitiless end. “Love and women and war.” The lion in man, the tiger in man, verily they are in him for evermore. A monster would he be if made otherwise.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The battle thundered. The cold rain drizzled down. The wind snarled. The Men of the Hammer and Anvil were beating out red-hot hearts. And all was well.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The whinging of the bullets, the whizzing of the shells, the flash and whorl of the red-conflagrations; are they not directed by the same impulse that spins the spheres? Is it not all for the Best?
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Is not the sword of conquest the Scythe of Selection? Is not the leaping forks of fiery light the Signal of the True? And, is not the Crash of Cannon the actual Voice of the Gods?
XI
“It Was Not To Be”
And louder still and louder,
Rose from the darkened field,
The braying of the war-horns,
The clang of Sword and shield;
The rush of squadrons sweeping
Like whirlwinds o'er the plain,
The shouting of the slayers
And Screeching of the slain.
And the days and the years rolled-on. And other things befell.
The revolution was working out its mighty destiny. The Iron Cross was busy. Battles and sieges were being fought all along the Atlantic coast—and throughout the Thirteen States. There were few pitched battles, but innumerable engagements.
England gradually tired of the war—Parliament even refused to vote supplies—whereas the Continentals everywhere gained heart and courage by their successes.
A French army—a French fleet, and a French loan, came to their aid—in the nick of time. Also loans from Spain and Holland.
The heroines and heroes of our tale were all bearing their due part in the eventful conflict—each one with a different mind and a different purpose—yet all unconsciously evolving one great destiny.
They were building better than they knew—even amid jealousies, heart-burnings and some disillusionments.
The brethren of the Iron Cross had (on scores of bloody fields) proved their patriotism and their valor. Hamilton, Burr and General Schuyler were specially conspicuous, for, as all men should, they had an indomitable faith in their own proposition.
Washington, Putnam, Gates, Greene, etc., all had their difficulties and dangers—their ups and their downs—their struggles, failures, triumphs and successes—“even as you and I.”
Margaret Moncrieffe after her marriage (by compulsion) to Captain Coglan went to Ireland. On the trip over, he was forced to fight a duel with the commander of the packet about her, in which the captain of the ship was badly wounded. The captain of the ship, named Kidd (nephew of the famous buccaneer) had threatened to confine Coglan as a lunatic. At Cook Haven, Ireland, they fought a second duel with pistols, and Coglan was laid up for fourteen days.
Mrs. Coglan was studiously insulting to her husband in front of the other passengers. She neglected him systematically and never wearied of relating the tale of her forced marriage and her hatred of him.
Nearly every one on the ship took her part and thus Captain Coglan was ostracized. Being a splendid shot, however, and a first-rate fighting man he was not insulted.
At last the vessel arrived in the Cove of Cork, and there Margaret was taken to her relatives residence in the suburbs. She journeyed from thence (by-way of Killarney) to Dublin in a closed carriage, and was there hospitably entertained by her rich uncle, who was Lord Mayor.
Here the quarreling between Mrs. Coglan and her hated husband became intense and almost scandalous. She attempted to run away, but failed. She was forcibly brought back (handcuffed) to her husband's house and kept in a state of domestic imprisonment and espionage.
Then Capt. Coglan bought an old castle in Wales (it once belonged to Owen Glendower) and proposed taking her there to live—threatening that he would break her spirit or break her heart.
However, she escaped from him (at Bristol) and went to reside with relatives on the Isle of Man, named Agnew.
Afterwards she journeyed to London and became a fashionable actress. Here she gave birth to a daughter, who became in after years the mother of a renowned Confederate general.
Pursued by the law and the hired myrmidons of her husband she eluded them again and again—for wherever this remarkable woman went, her splendid beauty and the pathetic story of her sufferings and unnatural marriage, ever won to her side most ardent and powerful friends.
She had lost in Aaron Burr the only man she could ever admire or look up to—the man who was by nature designated to be the lodestar of her life, and— the father of her children.
“Whoever says that love is not the chief of the gods, either lacks of experience or perception. He knoweth not that which is real from that which is illusive.”
Verily of all instincts and passions of the human heart, love is the strongest and most overmastering. For it men slay their own brothers, women abandon their children, and kings desert their thrones.
The old romances repeat themselves ceaselessly. Love and ambition are always and ever the same. And better is a dinner of herbs, where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. So they say.
Burr lost in Mrs. Coglan the woman of all women —the only one that could have made his future happier and perhaps more successful.
Their forcible separation had a lasting embittering and evil effect upon both their lives. It made him cynical. It made her reckless.
He had lost the only woman who could ever have bound him down, and she lost in him, the man alone in whom she could absolutely place all her faith and trust—the only man her powerfully passionate nature could ever love.
Gradually she broke loose from all conventions—she spurned her husband openly and laughed at her own relatives who vainly protested at her course.
In despair and shame Capt. Coglan fled from England and went to Russia. There he fought and died bravely as a soldier of fortune. To the end of his days, however, he never regretted his action in marrying Margaret. “I would do it again,” he said on his death-bed. “I loved her beyond all things. I would have sold my very soul to possess her. I only regret my want of power to coerce her. Alone I could not control her. My strength was not equal to my will. Would that I had been an absolute monarch. Then! Ah, then she should not have defied and escaped me.”
During his life he f
ought seven duels in defense of her reputation—including one with Lord Thomas Clinton of London, a relative of Sir Henry Clinton the General, and of George Clinton, Governor of New York.
From 1780 to 1795 Mrs. Coglan made no inconsiderable stir in the court and fashionable circles of London and Paris—but all the time her heart was over the seas.
She became the reigning beauty—her name was on every lip. Painters vied with each other for the privilege of transferring her beautiful face and voluptuous figure to their canvas.
Lords and Dukes—Princes and Kings and Great Emperors—ambassadors and veteran generals were among her innumerable “conquests.”
George IV. bestowed on her a necklace of pearls, and thereafter everybody who counted for anything in society, politics, or diplomacy, was happy to do her honor.
She was known to dictate the fate of statesmen with a nod—she drove high ladies and queens to despair and suicide—she even ruled the destinies of nations; made treaties, and broke ambassadors with the glances of her glorious eyes.
She was on intimate terms with such men as Fox, Pitt, Napoleon, Talleyrand, etc.
But sorrow and anger—deep, bitter implacable resentment against “the world and all its works” was in her heart. She inwardly cursed the kings and the queens—the presidents and the statesmen—the glitter and the show—for all these things were as mockery to her, since she had failed to become the wife of the dashing black-eyed American Colonel.
In the midst of all her ups and downs his memory and his words were never once forgotten.
“O,” she would say to herself in the privacy of her chamber, O that I could be as I was before, O that my Aaron could be mine.”
Numberless duels were fought on account of her—and the banks of the Seine and Thames were oft reddened with the hearts blood of competing noblemen and great soldiers, because of her smile, her word, or her frown. The dagger of the assassin—the lie of the editor, and the cup of the poisoner—performed their deadly mission, upon nobles and kings—upon admirals and generals—upon women and upon menials because of her.
Alternately Mrs. Coglan was reveling in wealth as the mistress of a nobleman, a prince or a king. Again she would be sunk in poverty, homeless and forlorn.
She bore children and raised them to manhood and womanhood—but gave them not her name—she wrote books and published them with the money of men she loathed and despised—and with her love-songs of passion and tragedy she delighted and charmed the most fastidious audiences in the world.
Thirty years passed away before she again saw Aaron Burr—he, a widower and a refugee from “Justice” and she the wife of another. Again the wand of romance waved above them—again “the old old story” was re-enacted.
In 1793—ten years after Colonel Burr had been married—when he was still in the height of his fame and power—when his house at Richmond Hill, N.Y., was the center of fashion and politics—intrigue and hospitality—Mrs. Coglan published her “MEMOIRS”—to the astonishment and rage of governments and princes and presidents.
Now Aaron Burr was at all periods of his life a voracious reader. The thoughts of the world's best writers were familiar to him. He kept himself thoroughly informed of all the latest and all the rarest publications. He never was a mere provincial.
As soon then as the “Memoirs of Mrs. Coglan” appeared a copy was immediately mailed to him by his London bookseller. Sitting at breakfast one day, with Theodosia, his 12 year old daughter, by his side, he received the book; and opening its pages thus he read:
The writer of the following sheets, nursed in the lap of Tenderest Indulgence, sprung from a father whose attachment to a king even surpassed the duties he owed to his country; she who once basked in the sunshine of Fortune has lately herself struggled with all the miseries she has here endeavored to describe.
Affliction cuts deeper than the recollection of former enjoyments; the memory of past joys sharpens the sense of her present sufferings; she once little dreamed of those scenes of horror through which she has passed; she little anticipated, that whenever she should have occasion for the world's assistance, the world would withhold it from her. She had fondly imagined, that every one was her friend; nor was the veil of deception withdrawn, till alas,—she had occasion for its friendship. Then the very persons who had been most anxious to court her smiles, who had beguiled her with their delusive flatteries, who had encouraged her errors and soothed her vices, were the first to keep aloof and shun the wretchedness they had helped to accomplish. They who had been the bosom friends of her father, refused even to hear the hapless tale of his ill-fated child; nor did his unshaken zeal in the cause of his sovereign ever produce to his daughter the recompense of a shilling from the English government. (Major Moncrieffe lost all his possessions in the American war.) . . . . These are the reflections of a woman, chastened in affliction’s school, restored to reason by the wholesome lessons she has received from the most instructive of all monitors, Adversity.
“Want, wordly want, that hungry meagre fiend, Is at her heels. . . .”
To drive off this fiend, alas, she has no other hope, than the problematic advantage she may derive from the faint productions of her pen.
The perspective which the world now presents to view is gloomy indeed; nevertheless, it would be greatly brightened, if she conceived that her example might serve as a beacon to others of her sex.
O, what is friendship but a name
A charm that lulls to sleep
A shade that follows wealth and fame
And leaves the wretch to weep.
In America, the land of my birth, my heart received its first impression, that amidst the subsequent shocks which it received, and which has rendered me very unfit to admit the embraces of an unfeeling, brutish husband.
Oh, may these pages one day meet the eyes of him who subdued my virgin heart, whom the immutable, unerring laws of nature had pointed out for my husband, but whose sacred decree the barbarous customs of society fatally violated. To him I plighted my virgin vow, and I shall never cease to lament that obedience to a father left it incomplete.
When I reflect on my past sufferings, now that alas my present sorrows press heavily upon me, I cannot refrain from expatiating a little on the inevitable horrors that ever attend the frustration of natural affections; I myself, who, unpitied by the world, have endured every calamity that human nature knows, am a melancholy example of the truth; for if I know my own heart, it is better calculated for the purer joys of domestic life, than for that hurricane of extravagance and dissipation on which I have been wrecked.
Why is the will of nature so often perverted? Why is social happiness forever sacrificed at the alter of prejudice? Avarice has usurped the throne of reason, and the affections of the heart are not consulted.
We cannot command our desires, and when the object of our being is unattained, misery must necessarily be our doom. Let this truth, therefore, be forever remembered: when once an affection has rooted itself in a tender, constant heart, no time, no circumstance can eradicate it.
Unfortunate, then, are they who are joined, if their hearts are not matched.
With this conqueror of my soul, how happy should I now have been—what storms and tempests should I have avoided, (at least I am pleased to think so) if I had been allowed to follow the bent of my inclinations and happier, Oh, ten thousand times happier should I have been with him in the wildest deserts of our native country, the woods affording us our only shelter, and their fruits our only repast, than under the canopy of costly state, with all the refinements and embellishments of courts, with the royal warrior who would fain have proved himself the Conqueror of France.
My Conqueror was engaged in another cause, he was ambitious to obtain other laurels; he fought to liberate, not to enslave nations. He was a colonel in the American Army, and high in the estimation of his country; his victories were never accomplished with one gloomy, relenting thought; they shone as bright as the cause which inspired them.
/>
I had communicated, by letter, to General Putnam, the purposes of this gentleman, and I was embarrassed by the answer which the general returned; he entreated me to remember, that the person named, from his political principles, was extremely obnoxious to my father, and concluded by observing, “That I surely would not unite myself with a man who, in his zeal for the independence of his country, would not hesitate to drench his sword in the blood of my nearest, should he be opposed to him in battle.”
Saying this, he lamented the necessity of giving advice contrary to his own sentiments, since in every other respect he considered the engagement, as unexceptional—nevertheless, General Putnam, after this discovery, appeared. . . . extremely reserved; nor did he ever cease to make me the object of his concern to Congress; and after various applications he succeeded in obtaining leave for my departure.
Next she describes her arrival at Lord Howe's head- quarters, with a letter to her father.
Then she told of the marriage in these pathetic words:
Captain Coglan, my present husband, saw me at an assembly, when, without either consulting my heart, or deigning to ask my permission, he instantly demanded me in marriage, and won my father to his purpose.
In a savage mind which only considered sensual enjoyment, affection was not an object, for I told him at the time he had not my affection and conjured him in the most persuasive terms, to act as a man of honor and humanity; his reply was congenial to his character; he valued not any refusal on my part so long as he had the Major's consent; and with a dreadful oath, he swore, ‘that my obstinacy should not avail me.’ Indeed my refusal signified nothing; he insinuated himself so far in my father’s confidence, as to draw upon me the anger of a parent, to whose displeasure I had never been accustomed, and whose rebukes I had not the resolution to resist.