Rival Caesars

by Desmond Dilg

  Boom!

  Then came the citizens, the merchants, the bankers, the great importers, the officials and aldermen of the city. On foot and on horseback they come; interminable, solemn, all dressed in black, crape on their hatbands, heads bowed in the dust, sympathetic, fearful in the presence of death—the grim shadow they had been taught to dread. Their hearts shook. “In the midst of life we are in death,” they were thinking. Over all the burning sun glared down like a ball of blazing brass.

  Boom!

  On they came, the mourners, thousands and thousands of them. Member of the State Legislature, members of Congress, Senators, Governors of States, Ambassadors from afar, ward politicians, patriots of the press, Caesars of the caucus, judges, priests, ministers, rabbis, barristers, surgeons, sailors from the fleet, men of great renown, men of no renown, brethren of the Iron Cross, the Supreme Seven, all were there to pay their last respects to the distinguished Fighting Man—the dead warrior.

  Boom!

  Then came the powerful Secret Societies; the Order of the Cincinnati; the Knights of the Wild Rose; the Order of St. Tamanend from Columbia Hall; the Society of Mechanics; the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons; the Brotherhood of Saint Andrew; the Brothers of the Black Chapter; the Knights of the |Red Cross; and the students of Columbia college (where the dead man began his career.)

  Boom!

  Six sable horses drew the hearse (with nodding black plumes)—a gun carriage from Monmouth. The coffin wrapped in a shot-ripped battle-banner, the banner of azure blue and scarlet red, gemmed by the silver stars. Then moved by the dead general's favorite charger, saddled and bridled, led by two slaves dressed in white.

  Boom!

  The casket! Ah!—in there lies all that is left of Colonel Aaron Burr's mortal foe.

  From off that small shiny, silver plate, let us for one moment draw back the folds of the enwrapping starry standard. What do we read thereon? (Ah! What secrets in that coffin lie hid?)

  ALEXANDER HAMILTON.

  Major General United States Army,

  Born Danish Island of Nevis, West Indies, Jan. 11, 1757, died New York City, July 12, 1804.

  Boom!

  Open coaches, crowded with personal friends of the great constitution-builder pass by. Then a closed carriage from which, ever and anon, ebbed and flowed the sobs and laments of women. The widow of the Stricken One, the warm-hearted heroine of the Iron Cross, sat in there, her head (streaked with grey) buried in her hands in a state of nervous collapse and mental desolation. Her heart swelled with tribulation, and with mingled memories her soul was overflowing. Ah! the tears of women are water, but the tears of men are clots of blood—for man must fight and women must weep till earth has ceased its rolling.

  Boom!

  More carriages. More horsemen. More soldiers. (Burr's old regiment is there.) More clubs and societies. More bands and drums and trumpets. More glittering uniforms and reversed muskets. Behind closed doors and windows stand the wives and daughters of the city, their tears falling in sympathetic rain. “What could he hope in other years, if longest life had crowned him; than thus to die, with a nation's tears and a world's applause around him?”

  Boom!

  It was an elegant mansion! It stood at the intersection of Broadway and a lesser street. In the front parlor, gazing out upon the funeral, sat the gay and fashionable Young Widow. Jewels gleamed around her neck. By her side sat the slayer of the Major General. She was a glorious woman to behold, with great orb-like brown eyes, a lithe, undulating, voluptuous form. It was she of the “Tigress Beauty.”

  Boom!

  “Aaron,” she said, bewitchingly, caressingly laying her jeweled hand upon his arm, and looking tenderly into his great black eyes. “Are’nt you sorry for him? Poor dear Hamilton. And he loved me so.”

  “Charlotte,” replied the middle-aged widower, stroking her head with its wavy mass of bright auburn hair, that gleamed like showers of newly minted gold in a stray sunbeam that came through the shutters. “In life he was my mortal foe. All the injury, public and private, man could do unto man, he did unto me. Why then should I be sorry?”

  Boom!

  “O, Aaron dear, how hard you are? And yet how kind to me?” and a tear arose in the corner of her big oriental eyes. Then she wound her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately as the wail of the dead march sounded faint in the distance.

  “Charlotte, you mistake me,” he replied. “You do not understand that men are made to strive and must not hope to live forever. I am not hard; I am only frank. My worst enemy I have slain, but I’ve slain him like a gentleman. I met him on the level. I smote him on the square. I gave blow for blow. I did not seek to stab him in the back. No! I fought him without subterfuge and without fear. He was in all things my match. I fought him fairly, face to face, weapon to weapon, and I am neither sorry nor repentant.”

  Thereupon he put his left arm around her yielding waist, wiped the tears from her eye and kissed her again and again behind the closed blinds, as the dirge of the piercing flutes and muffled drums went wailing by.

  Boom!

  Two superb warriors were they—two hurtling egos—two great elemental powers personified—two rival theories of empire. Armed they stood, and calmly gazed into one another's souls at ten paces. How grand, how splendid they looked, those two bold, strong men, weapon in hand, haughty, terrible, world- defiant; appealing to Eternal Nature's iron code. “Where the white skull-bone of the dead horse lay; two brothers fought at dawn of day; 'neath the cedar tree that swayed above, they strove and bled for power and love.”

  Boom!

  Before the draped porch of the gray old ivied temple —the temple of the Prince-of-Peace—the hearse halts. From the square tower (wherein a bell tolls) of the temple, floats and flaps fitfully a banner of the Lord of War. Upon the shoulders of the living, the coffin of the dead is slowly, reverently, raised and borne into the Holy Hall. By the Altar of the Crucified Jew, on the great black catafalque in the center aisle it rests between two columns, and under a shining arch of Sabers—the sabers of the Cincinnati and the Iron Cross. (“Blessed are the departed who in the Lord are sleeping, henceforth and for ever more.”)

  Boom!

  Over aisle and altar flows the soft, magic, luminosity, the mystic, hypnotic light, the light that comes through painted saints. Into the farthest corner of the vast temple (like a black tide) flows the human multitude, feeling itself as it were, on enchanted ground. Not every day do they entomb one who lived grandly, who loved grandly, who fought grandly, and who DIED GRANDLY. Verily, few and full of wonder are the death and births of the Great-of-Soul.

  Boom!

  All heads are bowed low. By the altar of the God stands the High Priest, that mystic Book, the Ritual of the Dead, in his two hands. A venerable, a benign, a sanctified looking man is he, a good, a benevolent man. With the white robe of his office hanging gracefully from his shoulders he bends silently and invokes his God. Then he steps slowly towards the black box that contains the bones of the mighty dead.

  “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”

  Boom!

  The High Priest intones the Ancient Ritual, and retires to the Holy Altar. He straightens himself up. He speaks; he orates; the spirit of the Higher Law is upon him. He is an orator of surpassing power over the minds of men. Words flow from his mouth in an enchanting stream. His voice is solemn, deep, doleful, even as the voice of some magic organ moaning over mountain tops. It is the voice of the masterful preacher searching into every listening heart. It rolls and echoes through pillar and dome. He is an eloquent man, a Binder of the Mighty Spell; a Divine Harper; a Harper of the Soul. Gradually his beautiful voice grows louder; it is an hypnotic voice, resonant and beautiful, like the funeral bells that tolls aloft in the steeple.

  Boom!

  One hand rests on the Holy Volume that lies on the Altar before him; the Volume bound in Purple and Gold. With the other hand he
points to the coffin, then, away through the walls towards the Hoboken shore. (To memory another scene arises: “Friends, Romans, Countrymen. I come to bury Caesar; not to praise him.”)

  Boom!

  Hark! Hear the words of the Famous Preacher, he of the Silver Tongue.

  “Oh I tragic shores of Weehawken! Crimsoned art thou with the heart's blood of our most lustrous citizen. How can I gaze upon thy woody heights without tears and pain?”

  Then raising his eyes to the ceiling and lifting up his voice he continued: “O strife, O strife, why dost thou persist in this world? Why, O God, cometh not the time when wars shall cease and sadness and slavery be no more?”

  Boom!

  “O, God of mercy, love and peace, why dost thou permit the ferocity of man? Why, O Lord, doth the bloody man triumph and the godly perish upon Thine Altars? Can it be true, O Power Eternal, and Immortal, that thou art neither merciful nor just?”

  Then turning to the multitude of mourners he said (while minute by minute the rythmic roar of the death guns continued to punctuate his oration):

  “We must calm our agitation before the Throne of the Most High, while we weep over the bier of our unequaled citizen who is no more; him whom the remorseless, ungodly duel has suddenly removed from our midst.

  “Words cannot express the hatred with which I regard that word 'Duel,' that infamous, that unholy word, that ungodly word. Yet cruel and absurd as the practice of dueling is, it has, strange to say, its advocates among the highest in the land.

  “Had not a preponderance of opinion been in favor of it, never, O, lamentable Hamilton, hadst thou fallen in the midst of thy days before thou hadst reached the zenith of thy fame, thy glory, and thy power.

  “Oh! That I possessed the talent of eulogy, that I might be permitted to indulge the tenderness of friendship in paying the last tribute to thy majestic, thy immaculate memory.

  “Oh, that I were capable of placing this magnanimous, this noble, this heroic, this disinterested man before you. Could I do this, I should furnish you with an argument, the most practical, the most plain, the most convincing; except that drawn from the mandate of God, 'Thou shalt not kill,' that was ever furnished against dueling; that horrid practice, which in an awful moment, has robbed our country and the sorrowing world of such exalted worth.

  “I know he had failings. I see in the picture of his life; a picture rendered awful by greatness, and luminous by virtue and honor, some dark shades. On these let the pity of heaven, the pity that shelters human weakness fall; on these let the veil that covers human frailty rest.

  “As a hero, as a patriot, as a warrior, as a statesman, he lived nobly. Would to God he as nobly fell. * * * * *

  “It was a moment in which his great wisdom forsook him; a moment in which Hamilton was not himself. He yielded to the force of imperial custom; and yielding he sacrificed a life, in which all had an interest, and he lost. * * * In all coming years men shall seek to fathom the enormity and the wickedness of that crime. * * * For this act, because he was penitent. * * * I forgive him. But there are those whom I cannot forgive. I mean not his antagonist, Over whose erring steps, if there be tears in heaven, a pious mother looks down and weeps. * * *

  “Far from attempting to excite your emotions, I must here repress my own; and yet I fear instead of the language of a public orator, you will hear only the lamentations of a bewailing friend. But I will struggle with my bursting heart to portray the heroic spirit that has flown to the mansions of bliss—while admonishing the bloody custom and the vengeful spirit that sent him there. * * *

  “If the Vice President of the United States is capable of feeling, he suffers already all that humanity can suffer; and wherever he may fly, he will suffer with the poignant recollection of having taken the life of one whose unsullied integrity is known to the world; of one who was too magnanimous in return to attempt his own. Had he but known this, it might have paralyzed his arm, while it pointed at so incorruptible a bosom the instrument of death.

  “Does the Vice President know this now? If his heart be not adamant it must soften; if it be not ice it must melt. * * * Ah, my brethren, my brethren, was that shot fired at him who sleeps in that cold coffin, or at our war-born republican institution? * * * Stained with blood as the Vice President is, if he be penitent, I forgive him; if he be not penitental and humble before those Altars (before which all of us are suppliants), then I wish not to excite your vengeance, but rather, on behalf of an object rendered wretched and pitiable by crime, to awaken your prayers—when flames of the pit engulf and roll over his soul forever, and the world vanishes from his sight.”

  BOOM.

  Meanwhile from out the North a thunder cloud swept down. The sky became obscured, and great drops of rain (like unto tears) began to fall, while the stifling heat remained.

  Then (while the drums and trumpets and guns and bells still sounded) four Brethren of the Iron Cross lifted the black coffin and solemnly bore it out into the Old Churchyard. There they lowered it reverently with sobs and with weeping, with prayer and chant and three musket volleys, into an open grove.

  And as the clods rattled down on the coffin lid of the hero, bugles and the kettledrums sounded the “Last Call.”

  Then they filled up the grave, saying “Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes” and “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.”

  And over the grave thereafter men built a monument of stones which standeth until this day.

  Then from out the murky cloud that threateningly swung aloft, broad blinding sheets of clear red-lightning streamed, followed swiftly by the terrific roar and crash of a thunder clap that seemed to shake the world.

  The artillery of heaven and earth boomed forth their dirge in mutual concert. Men looked up in afright, hurried off home or sought shelter in their carriages.

  Grandly the music of gods and men mingled in one last rolling requiem above the half filled grave of the nation's ideal—the Mighty Man of Power—the lofty and ambitious warrior who fittingly died in war.

  Reverberating far and near wild waves of music surged, while overhead, a radiant rainbow arched the sky, lending applause and splendor to the burial and the storm. * * * * *

  And the days and the years rolled on—and other things befell. * * * * *

  Sound, sound the trumpet, blow the fife

  To all the listening world proclaim

  One crowded hour of glorious strife

  Is worth an age without a name.

  XX

  “The Plains of Mexico”

  Come all ye men of valor,

  Who wish to change your lot;

  Who've pluck enough to venture—

  Beyond your native spot.

  And come ye dashing gallants,

  With Colonel Burr we'll go,

  To fight for gold and glory,

  On the plains of Mexico.

  There's mines of gold and silver

  And lands and flocks to share,

  And maids with swelling bosoms,

  And health blows always there.

  Leave your dull tasks unfinished,

  Put fortune to the test—

  Wealth waits for men to win it

  Out on the Boundless West.

  And leave behind the village

  (Where things are going slow)

  Join Colonel Burr, and conquer

  The Plains of Mexico.

  —Old Song, 1806

  * * *

  [*]

  Readers desirous of obtaining printed copies of these most extraordinary and remarkable speeches—speeches not hitherto known to exist—are hereby invited to communicate by letter with the Author, in care of publishers. The original manuscripts now lying before us are in the handwriting of Aaron Burr's only daughter and dated “St. Iago, Island of Cuba, 1814.” In the year 1812 Theodosia Burr sailed from Charleston with her father's private papers in an armed privateer, bound for New York. Though never again publicly heard of in the United States, she nevertheless
lived until the year 1861. But that is another story hereafter to be told.

  [*]

  The responsible leaders of the revolution were all wealthy men. Today they would be called millionaires. Hancock & Adams were the two richest men in Mass., Washington & Jefferson, the two richest in Virginia.—Livingston & Schuyler, were two of the most opulent in New York. Morris of Philadelphia and Bayard of Baltimore were rich men. A longer list could be given, but this is sufficient.

  [*] General James Montgomery. “The Princely Montgomery.” Son of Sir Thomas Montgomery. M. P. for Londonderry.

  [*]

  From 40,000 to 100,000 royalist exiles, men, women and children, sailed away at the end of the war to Canada and other British Colonies. Their property was seized by the conquerors under the Confiscation Act of 1783. Isaac Roosevelt, an ancestor of President Theodore Roosevelt, obtained some of the De Lancey lands, situated on the Bowery.

  [*] In 1800 there was a strong reaction against “Democratic” principles on account of the recent French revolution. A few years before, Louis the XVI had been guillotined, Mirabeau poisoned; and Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Tinville & Co. raged in Paris. Fear of similar events was strong in 1801 on this side of the Atlantic, and lent a very bitter feeling to all political conflicts.