by David Nevin
Now, by accident, he stood head-to-head for the presidency of the United States. Would he step back? She had no idea.
“Come to bed, Jimmy,” she whispered. “Today was exhausting and tomorrow probably will be worse.”
4
NEW YORK CITY, MID-DECEMBER 1800
Aaron Burr was in his law office at No. 3 Wall Street when the news came. It was a small office near the docks, flanked by a bank and an insurance company, room for his two clerks in front with a large room for himself. A master of elegance in his several homes, a dandy in dress, a patron of the arts, a man-about-town whose perfection of manner no one could deny, he chose to make his law office puritanical in its plainness and attention to serious matters with solid oak chairs, a long table, a desk that in its size scarcely suggested the stature with which he stood before the New York Bar.
He had Hardwick’s deposition in the Ernestine killing, the report from the captain of the Mary W. on the night of the collision, the bank’s sworn statement that the failure of certain items to appear on the accounting was a mere slip of the quill … Bah! Who could think of such mundane things when the very future—the future that mattered, his own—hung on the news from South Carolina? How would the electoral vote go?
He heard Matt Davis’s deep voice, always with that raw edge, greeting the clerks outside. Matt wasn’t a gentleman, no other way to say it, but in real as opposed to ideal politics you needed a man who could knock heads together when necessary, and Matt could. And did. Burr put on his wire spectacles and took up the bank statement.
“Gentlemen,” he said when the door opened. He removed the spectacles and blinked, a man emerging from deep concentration. Behind Davis came Peter Van Ness, tall and slender, a pale-eyed Dutchman, self-effacing but a wizard with the written word. Davis was a big man, wide, chest deep, the forty pounds hung on his belly putting weight behind his punch. His hair was black and spikey, his eyes meant for a smaller man, which made them hard to read, and he seemed to fill any room he entered.
“Report from Peter Freneau,” Van Ness said in his precise way. He sat at the long table, carefully arranging his breeches. “The electors, he says they’ll vote eight-seven.”
“Ah.” Not a flicker on his face, Burr was sure, but it were as if a sword had pierced his belly.
“By God, we tried!” Davis expelled his breath with a grunt and slumped against the table. Burr caught a whiff of rum. “Anyway, Virginia held the line. Twenty-one, twenty-one. I’ll take some credit for that. I had Gelston primed for bear when he left here. I can just see little Madison squirming.”
Burr actually was no taller than Madison, though heavier, but he rarely thought of this because he felt himself a giant.
“Madison made it work though,” Van Ness said.
“After we put the wood to him. I met him once, you know—insipid as water. His wife, though—she’s a pretty piece if I ever saw one.” Davis grinned. “Makes you wonder how a man like that keeps her satisfied, know what I mean?”
“All right, Matt,” Burr said. He didn’t like such talk. “She’s a charming woman. I introduced them, matter of fact.”
Davis guffawed. “Eat my hat if you didn’t first have a run at her yourself.”
“That’ll do, sir!” After an uncomfortable silence, Burr said, “You assured Mr. Madison we’d lose a vote elsewhere?”
Van Ness grinned. “Gelston didn’t know where, but we had our people in Rhode Island all prepared.”
Burr nodded. Rhode Island Democrats had a snowball’s chance on a hot griddle, but they’d met the letter of the law, which is the nature of maneuver.
“It mattered too,” Van Ness said. “If Virginia had held back like last time, John Adams would be vice president.”
And Davis said, “Those bastards in South Carolina give eight to eight like they should; we’d have put it over, by God!”
Aye, there was the pain that Burr felt gripping his heart. He smiled. “We weren’t really seeking a tie,” he said. Which was a lie, which he knew and they knew, but a lie that needed to be said. It had been so close too, and now it seemed one rotten vote in Carolina was to unhorse the dream. He sighed. He’d let himself obsess a little, he supposed, about what a tie would mean, how those damned Virginians would scurry around clucking.
It would have been comforting revenge for the grossness of the insult last time. He would never forget the sting when the Virginians spat in his face. His way now had been the more clear because Alexander Hamilton, not as slick as Burr but very slick nonetheless, had worked a similar effort to try to unhorse Adams back in ninety-six. That’s where Burr had gotten the idea.
It wasn’t anything against the Madisons either. They were friends. No, it was Jefferson, how he repelled with his holier-than-thou manner, his oh, so elegant elegance, letting you know by his very bearing that he felt himself a prince among lesser men. He was able, no doubt about that, but erratic, possessed of odd ideas, charming but vague, and always that maddening superiority. Wanted office but you could tell he looked down on politics and its practitioners. Vulgar, you know. Surely no man was less vulgar than Aaron Burr, the Chesterfieldian gentleman, but Burr understood that politics is practical, one vote at a time … .
“Well,” Van Ness said, “I wouldn’t have minded a tie. They’re reaping when we sowed. We won this election.”
“Damn right,” Davis said. “Those lace handkerchief boys from Virginia don’t know a shitting thing. Let ’em go down to Peck’s Slip with me and try to get aholt of those dock wallopers.”
Burr frowned. Matt knew he didn’t like vulgarity, but the point was well taken—go down to Peck’s Slip hard against the East River, where the newest and hence poorest immigrants lived stacked atop each other like cordwood, try to make ’em see the wisdom of voting their interests, try to get them to quit going home with a gutful and beating the wife and kiddies, never forgetting that the wife and kiddies didn’t vote … .
“I bought a plenty of beer around Peck’s Slip,” Davis said.
Van Ness grinned. “Drank one for one yourself, I’d guess.”
Davis forced a belch. “Gotta keep up my strength.”
What did Jimmy Madison know about the reality of things? You wouldn’t catch him buying buckets of beer. Burr had taken Tammany Hall when it was a little social club and made it a power! Law said you had to be a property holder to vote? Fine. He’d bought houses in the names of a hundred owners each, every man a voter. All legal, mind you. Alex Hamilton and his Federalist pecksniffs would catch him up if it wasn’t; made every owner of record put up a dollar, gave him a participating deed, paid him a bonafide share of rent, and sent him out to vote.
And even then, so loaded against the common man had the Federalists arranged things in New York, it took real guile to carry the election, a quality with which Burr fortunately was well equipped, if he did say so himself. Did the lace handkerchiefs below the Potomac imagine it was their excellence that swung matters? Burr could sing the Democratic song with the best of them, but down at Tammany and all along the wharves they didn’t talk a lot of Constitutional folderol. They wanted to know who was buying. But, by God! the boys had turned these louts out on election day, and even then, they’d carried the city by only a few hundred votes.
Put Alex Hamilton’s nose way out of joint too. Burr had waited, letting Alex pick his slate first. Naturally Alex chose nonentities; no one wants someone in office with ideas of his own. But this time Burr dragooned leading Democrats, names everyone knew, prated democracy till he sounded like Madison and Jefferson combined, promised he would do all the work, write all their speeches, and their weight had put the ticket over. He and the boys had bumped into Alex at a polling station on the Battery, and Matt had bellowed, “Stepped in shit, huh, Mr. H.?” Smoke was coming from Alex’s ears.
Strange about Mr. Hamilton. Maybe it was that he took everything so seriously. He seemed to burn with his political passions. That made it a joy to whip him, but in the end when the
votes were counted and a new day was born—or wasn’t—it was time to sit down to a bird and a bottle and move along. That was life and politics as well. But Alex seemed to hate him. Strange. They’d practiced law in the same city, been cocounsel on a couple of big criminal defense cases, and Burr had supposed them friends. Opponents, of course, that’s the nature of law and politics; but Alex was becoming a humorless zealot.
But clearly it was that day in the New York City spring when they beat Alex to the ground that won the national election. New England was for Adams, South and West for Jefferson, Pennsylvania and Maryland divided, New York in the balance, the legislature split. New York City Democrats swung the state; the state swung the nation. Damned right we won it!
They hadn’t been wrong to seek a tie either, not after the way Virginia had handled him last time. Anyway, was he less the Democrat, less sincere, less able than the sainted Tom?
Well, what the hell … so it hadn’t worked out, but he might as well milk a little good will from it.
“Peter,” he said, “draft me a letter. Make it to … Sam Smith, I guess.” Sam was a Maryland congressman, a pompous fellow sure to enhance his own importance by publishing the letter.
“And it should say?”
“Well, take note there’s been talk of a tie, say something like, oh, that it would dishonor my views and insult my feelings if my friends supposed—make it suspected—I would permit myself to be instrumental in counteracting the wishes and expectations of the nation. Some such.”
He shrugged. What would he have done with a tie anyway? It would have thrilled Theodosia, that was all. His darling daughter, as beautiful as her gorgeous mother whose death remained a wound that couldn’t heal, had dreamed of a tie as no less than their due. That Father could do no wrong in her eyes warmed his heart and suffused him with love. She probably would marry soon, to a fine young man who already regarded him as a father—she had made that a condition—and a tie would have been like a, well, like a wedding present!
Theodosia Burr knew herself to be an accomplished, sophisticated young woman of eighteen, and she knew that much of the polish that made her stand out and that seemed so to attract Mr. Joseph Alston of South Carolina, whom she might or might not decide to marry in the next few weeks, was the result of her father’s rapt attention to her education. Mr. Alston expected in due time to put aside his rice fields along the Waccamaw River and assume the governorship of South Carolina; and thus, if she were, in fact, to decide that she could stand the ennui of life along the Waccamaw, she would be the governor’s lady. She was comfortably aware that Papa had prepared her for no less.
Yet Burr’s real gift, which she reciprocated in full measure, was the bath of warm, unqualified love in which she’d been immersed since before she could remember. It had cushioned the loss of Mama, for whom she’d been named and whose years of illness and lingering death had been a cloud over her childhood. Papa understood how her world had tumbled in on her in Mama’s last days because the same thing had happened to him when he was a little boy. But like a colossus of old he had stood over her and through sheer strength had thrust her world back into place. She knew objectively from seeing them together in mirrors that she was substantially taller than her father, but she never really thought of this because he so clearly towered.
Now she sat in the projecting bay window of their town house on Fulton Street watching for his sturdy form, knowing he would be along soon. A carriage passing before her house collided, or nearly did, with one entering from Church Street. One of the horses fell, the drivers screamed at each other, and one struck the other; but she ignored this, her gaze fixed on the sidewalk beyond. Ah! There he was, silverheaded stick in hand, his black suit neat as always, hose gleaming white, sun catching the buckles on his shoes.
But then he stepped around a drayman unloading barrels on the sidewalk and she saw instantly from the cast of his shoulders that he had taken a heavy blow. He never revealed anguish, but she knew him so well and loved him so fiercely that the slightest nuance alerted her, and she flew to him as he entered, placing hat and stick on the balustrade.
“Ah, my darling girl,” he cried, as she embraced him, but when she stepped back she saw the sadness in his smile.
“What is it?”
“News from South Carolina.” She gazed at him and he added, “Mr. Jefferson will be president.”
“But what about—”
“It seems the electoral vote will be eight-seven.”
“They shorted you?” She felt dizzy with anger. “They owed it to you. You won the election, you put them in, how dare they—oh, damn them!”
For a terrible moment she thought he might weep, but then his face cleared. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It would have been like—oh, I don’t know, an honor, I guess.” He shrugged. “After all, presumably I’m no less a leader than the Virginia gentlemen purport to be.”
“Why, you’re more!”
“So—and I’d never admit this to anyone but you—but yes, I suppose I’m a little disappointed.”
“Oh, Papa!”
Someone turned the bell in the door, and when he opened it she saw over his shoulder the dense black beard decorating Mr. Alston’s face. It wasn’t really the best time for Mr. Alston to appear, but then she noticed his vivid smile, the unusual brightness in his eyes, and he was bowing over her hand, to which she dropped a perfunctory curtsey; and he turned to Papa and cried in that slurred accent that still sounded strange, “Have you heard the news, sir?”
“We’ve heard, Joseph,” she said, not bothering to disguise a certain tartness. For Joseph to discuss this disaster in terms of good news seemed more than she could bear.
She watched the gentleman’s smile fade. “Excuse me,” he said. “I thought Mr. Freneau’s second report was good news.”
“Second report?”
“Of the actual electoral vote in South Carolina; it came in only an hour ago. Eight-eight. Seventy-three for Mr. Jefferson; seventy-three for Mr. Burr. It’s a tie, sir.”
“Oh!” She felt she might faint.
“Thank you, Joseph,” Papa said. “That’s most interesting.” He looked as unruffled as if he’d been given the time of day, but she saw the lift in his shoulders, the sudden brilliant flash of eye, something wild and joyous tumbling in its depths … .
But perhaps Mr. Alston had caught it too, for there was a knowing quality in his smile as he said, “It faces you with a bit of a decision, doesn’t it, sir?”
Of course he couldn’t display the wild elation he felt, not even to Theodosia, let alone to her young man, so shortly he was on the street, walking swiftly up Fulton toward Broadway, stick swinging, heels tapping on brick walks … .
By, God! He’d done it—nailed it down, matched that pompous gentleman from Virginia! Let no one—no one!—look down on Aaron Burr. He spun left at Broadway, the day chill but sunny, stepping along at almost a trot, feeling as he did when the jury walked in and gave him the smile that told him he’d won.
He saw the Aubreys ahead, John and Matilda, ready to congratulate him, John reserved as always, Matilda gushing. He bowed over her hand, squeezed it more than necessary, felt her answering pressure, looked into her eyes, and saw what he wanted to see, shook John’s hand and walked on. The next time he heard John had gone to Albany he’d send Matilda a note … .
At Park Row he turned into the green on impulse and marched along gravel walks, new little maples banked against the cold, the hurdy-gurdy and the puppet show shut down … .
“Aaron! Aaron, darling!” It was Gertrude Heinz, much too heavy and much too loud, who burned with unrequited hope that he had every intention of keeping unrequited, walking with her grim old maid sister, both draped in fur.
“Ladies,” he said, bowing, not quite stopping until Gertrude caught his arm.
“It’s so thrilling! I can’t believe I know someone of such position. Vice president! And the tie! Oh what an honor! Of course you’ll step aside for Mr. Jeffers
on, but just to think—”
Burr bowed. “Good day, ladies.” He marched on, aware of their startled expressions as they gazed after him.
How dare they! At the moment of his triumph when he’d had but an instant to savor the wild elation of it all, this cretinous puddle of lard should—oh, certainly, he can’t wait, just can’t wait, to step aside for the sainted Mr. Jefferson … .
His mood now darkening, he frowned when he saw Simmons McAlester ahead. Simmons was walking with that rolling gait he seemed to feel appropriate for a man who owned ships, though he never actually went to sea. An ass, really, but useful. Burr owed him almost three thousand dollars.
“Sim, my friend,” he said, shaking the other’s hand. “How are you? Heard the news, have you?”
“Absolutely delightful—a great honor for New York too. Goes to your image of yourself, I’m sure, patron of the arts like you. A regular Medici, supporting painters when no one wants their stuff.” Burr ignored a tinge of mockery in his smile. “Warms my heart to have been of some little assistance; makes me a patron of the arts once removed!”
“And you know how grateful I am too,” Burr said. That was the trouble with debt, a problem he understood very well, you had to express gratitude so often to so many.
“Now, Aaron, you’ll have expenses and I know you’ve been neglecting your practice on behalf of this election; I’d be more than happy to help.”
“Sim, you’re a wonderful friend. Yes, now that you mention it, I’ve been a bit concerned—”