by David Nevin
Pleased and relaxed, he returned to Washington for the final weeks presiding over the Senate. He felt his future was as assured as it can be in politics. As governor of New York he would wield the state as a club in national politics. By 1808, the Virginia cabal would have shot its bolt and exposed its emptiness to everyone, and it would be New York’s turn on the carrousel. The beaten Virginian would step down; the New Yorker would step up. He would say something about his old rival in his inaugural remarks, something gracious but neatly condescending—he would have to craft the remark with careful thought, but he had plenty of time to work out something brilliant.
And should perchance something go awry in all this, there was always Senator Pickering and his friends waiting in the wings. All told, Burr had every reason to feel at the top of his form.
46
WASHINGTON, JANUARY 7, 1804
Jimmy came home exhausted but elated. He had walked he said, his cheeks stung from the cold. He threw off his coat and stood with his back to the glowing fireplace, bouncing on his toes and looking ready to laugh. Dolley sat in her Queen Anne chair, a shawl pulled around her shoulders. Sukey brought in the tea tray and Jimmy took a cup, holding it against his palms to warm them.
“Message from New Orleans came in today,” he said, beaming. “It’s done. Louisiana is ours—stars and stripes aloft.” He said the message had been written the same night and sent by special messenger, who’d made it in seventeen days flat, horseback all the way, up the Natchez Trace, over the Knoxville Pike, up the Great Valley.
She felt a surge of relief. “No trouble then?” That had been the question. Would the Spanish, enraged by the French move and still in control, actually surrender the territory? Would the people, French to the core and even by Danny’s admission having no love for Americans, accept this change in status without question? Or would it trigger revolt?
They had sent General Wilkinson with four hundred troops to be sure matters didn’t get out of hand, and doubtless that accounted for some of the quiet, but Jimmy said the letter made it clear there was no real opposition. In a fit of peevishness, Spanish officials insisted on turning the province over to the French prefect who had been sent to receive it in the first place; an hour later the prefect surrendered it to the Americans and up went the flag. Next, in six weeks or so, a similar ceremony would pass St. Louis to the United States and the great transaction would be complete.
“The tightrope walker in the circus?” Jimmy said, drawing an ottoman close to the fire and sitting with elbows on knees. “Don’t you suppose that when he’s on the rope he just goes ahead with his balance by feel and doesn’t think about where he is? And afterward, well, he’s a professional, so maybe not, but you’d think he’d look at that wiggling rope and the distance down and he’d think, Oh, my word, what was I doing? Or at least, I would, and Dolley, that’s how I feel about this Louisiana thing too. Calling in Pichon every week, conceiving of new ways to tell Napoleon we’d beat him while not admitting that to do so we’d had to destroy ourselves or close to it, change the whole nature of our history anyway and our very concept of ourselves.”
He threw out his arms, swelling his chest. “How wonderfully it’s all worked out, but it wasn’t complete, you know, things could still have gone wrong, till the actual transfer.”
Apparently he and Tom had talked at length. Everything seemed to be going splendidly. Maggie’s husband at the National Intelligencer said papers coming to his office from across the country were uniformly lauding the Democrats. Even New England Democrats were gaining strength, and papers from Massachusetts and Connecticut made that clear, even if in the form of editorial denunciation. The party couldn’t yet carry either state, but in both it grew stronger every day. Jimmy said even the Essex Junto seemed to be drawing in its horns; day by day young Mr. Adams distanced himself further from the Federalist radicals.
Of course the West was delighted and throbbing with new activity. Possession of the river solved the West’s deepest concerns for the future; Senator Ross reported that hordes of people were pouring through Pittsburgh and launching themselves down the Ohio. Said he himself had new status; he could do no wrong in his people’s eyes. And as for the president, why, in Pittsburgh they figured Mr. Jefferson walked on water. After the final transfer at St. Louis, western settlement would be as an arrow released from the bow.
Nor was this just from Ross. Reports flowed in from all over, a merchant in Lexington who appeared to be a militia commander too, that volatile Tennessee general and an equally volatile judge, maybe one and the same, the covey of Americans in the Natchez colony, Captain Lewis reporting from his winter camp near St. Louis that folks on both sides of the great river were delighted.
But if success hadn’t come, if the pressure Jimmy had applied to the Frenchman hadn’t been enough, if Napoleon had decided to skip European war in favor of western empire—if, in short, we had had to fight, everything would have changed in a finger snap. Then Federalists would have been triumphant and Democrats condemned as weak, clumsy, unfocused, without strength or power, lovely in theory but failing before the world’s brutality.
“To think,” she said, “it could have died in its infancy, written off as one of those wonderful ideas that aren’t strong enough to stand on their own, and we’d never have known for sure if we’d even been right at the start.” She hesitated and then spoke her mind. “I think God was watching over democracy.”
Jimmy smiled. “You do, eh?” Well, Jimmy was an eighteenth-century rationalist; his view of God was somewhat remote. “Think He shines on Democrats too? We’re the personification of democracy?”
Nettled, she said, “Yes, I do!”
“Apparently the president does too,” Jimmy said. He had moved to a chaise and tossed a throw over his legs. He was favoring a cough she didn’t like. She heard a touch of asperity in his voice. “Seems he’s a rationalist but not that much of a rationalist.”
“Really? What did he say?”
“We were talking about how well the Democrats are doing after Louisiana, the West all enthusiastic, the East almost as eager, commerce picking up, not a cloud in the skies—suddenly it seemed a little too euphoric. Just as that thread of uneasiness tickled at me, he fired a cannon. Said we were so strong that he didn’t need to run again. You know he hates the job and can’t wait to get back to Monticello. What with all this popularity, says anyone can win: why does he have to endure another four years?”
Her stomach lurched. “Who—whom did he have in mind?” She thought her voice sounded like a croak.
He looked at her. “Me,” he said. “Said I should stand in his place.”
She felt a mad surge of joy even as every instinct shouted that it wouldn’t work. And at once she realized as she had not quite realized before, not fully, just how ambitious she really was—for him and for herself and for what they could do in this country. And she knew it wouldn’t work. She stood to put another stick on the fire and stir it with the poker.
“What did you tell him?” Her voice was nicely even.
“That it was madness. That it would destroy all that we’d gained. That the people associate him with the revolution we’ve worked and him with the Louisiana Purchase, him and no one else.”
“You had as much to do with both,” she said.
“Oh, yes. He agrees with that, you know, doesn’t deny me an ounce of credit. But the people, they see these things as his doing, with a bit of assistance from his lieutenants; and in the midst of adulation, if he stepped down they would be disoriented and God knows where they might turn.”
That was the cold fact of it all right.
“Might well turn to Monroe,” he said.
Now, that was an infuriating thought! Even now Monroe was fighting bitterly with Livingston, trying to seize credit for the great purchase. It seemed ridiculous to her since the agreement was struck the very day he arrived, but he claimed it was his coming that made the French see that now they must toe the line
because the Americans were sending in their heavy artillery, and so they had timed their offer to his arrival. Livingston was fighting hard, drawing on his wide strength in New York and his connections with Governor Clinton and his nephew, DeWitt, the same whom it appeared Aaron was preparing to challenge right now. Tom and Jimmy were carefully staying out of the fight.
But what disturbed her most was that the radical Democrats were talking to Monroe as their candidate for the presidency, and he was listening! He was the darling of Sam Smith and John Randolph and the rest of the radicals, who felt that Tom and Jimmy were knuckling under to Federalists they should have cleaned from the government in one wild sweep, their prime example that Mr. Wagner hadn’t been fired even though Federalists now denouncing the poor man as an apostate were outshouting the radical Democrats. Yet Monroe had just stepped down as governor of Virginia, he was well-regarded in the West, he was staking a claim, valid or not, on the Louisiana triumph—yes, just at the moment he might be a formidable candidate.
“What did Tom say?”
Madison tossed off the throw and crossed the room to pour two glasses of their best Madeira and then positioned himself, standing before the fire again. “You know,” he said, “I couldn’t tell how serious he was in the first place. You never quite know with Tom. Maybe he just threw it on the table the way he does so many things, though we know he does hate the job and can’t wait to go home. He’s never equivocal on that. Maybe the sheer brutality of the dusky doxy story made him hate it even more. But I’ll tell you, the idea of Monroe taking over sobered him in a hurry. Said with the radicals in control, the Federalists would win everything back at the next election. No question—we all see that extremes won’t work. That’s why the Essex Junto is in trouble—perceived as extremes that only prosper in desperate times.”
Yes, yes, Jimmy did natter on sometimes.
“So what did he say?”
“Oh, he agreed readily enough. Said all right, he’d stand for another term. But he said he was putting me on notice now—next term will be his last. Says I must be ready to take over then.”
There! That was what she’d been waiting to hear. What she’d been dreaming of for years. In fact, truth be known, she’d had this in her mind before Tom was elected, back in Virginia when she was imagining the future unfolding.
Her lips were dry. “And what did you say?”
“That I didn’t think I was the right man for it.”
“Jimmy! You didn’t!”
“Well, yes—”
“Whatever possessed you? Of course you’re the right man for it. Who else is there? Monroe? Aaron Burr? Hamilton? Who—young Adams? Some illustrious senator wise as Solomon? Who, for goodness sake?”
“I’m not a leader, Dolley. I’m just not.”
“Then you must become one. Anyway, you are. You are! You led the whole Louisiana campaign, you worked it like a field general, you made the most powerful man in the world come to you, who in the devil are you to tell me you’re not a leader!”
He had to laugh at that. “But all the same, darling,” he said, “I don’t feel it.”
“Oh, Jimmy,” she cried, and let the tears flow. They were real but not without calculation. This was madness, and he had to be brought to see it.
Tears didn’t work this time. “Now, Dolley,” he said, “let’s not get carried away. We’ll see. Maybe in time I’ll develop some leadership. Meanwhile, war is blazing in Europe and we are sure to be caught in its backwash, impressment by the Royal Navy, Napoleon trying to force our support. That’ll keep me busy—”
“I don’t doubt you’ll be busy—”
“Well,” he said with an air of ending the conversation, “there’s no rush. I have four more years to decide—”
“No!” Danger loomed as an open pit ahead. “No, that’s just it. You can’t wait. If you don’t decide you want it right now, that you can do it, that no one else could do it as well, that you’ll fight and fight, then …” She let her voice trail off; she thought she’d never felt anything so passionately.
“Then what?” He was glaring at her.
“Then you won’t get it.”
He didn’t answer and she said, “It’ll be denied you, be taken from you, some miserable lesser person whose only asset is that he really wants it—Mr. Monroe, for example, or Aaron—will get it. And you’ll be out.”
“Dolley, that’s not—”
“Jimmy, think about it! Don’t answer me for a moment. Just think. Then tell me you think I’m wrong.”
He sat still on the ottoman, watching her. The French clock of brass on the mantle ticked loud in the silence. She heard a carriage drawn by a team go by with a clatter of hoofs. Snowflakes clicked against a window glass. The silence stretched. Would he see it? Could she be wrong? But she knew she wasn’t wrong, and in a moment she knew that he knew too. You can’t reach for the heights without wanting the heights with all your soul. Even under the most favorable conditions, the climb is too arduous and painful, pitfalls lurking at every turn.
He smiled slightly and sighed and tension seemed to flow from him in a stream. His very shoulders relaxed and at once he looked comfortable, less with the idea than with himself. “Well,” he said, “that’s the question, do I want it or don’t I? Because you’re right—if you don’t know what you want, you send signals—and others do know what they want. Aaron, for example—in his sly, sleek way he thinks of nothing but what he wants for himself.” He stood and poked at the fire, still looking very relaxed.
“Cast against some abstract ideal, General Washington or even Tom, I don’t feel much like a leader. But against Aaron or James Monroe or Colonel Hamilton or Rufus King or anyone I can think of, I’d choose myself. Honestly, I know no one who would do it better than I, and it would break my heart to watch someone throw it all away.”
“Abstract ideals aside, then, you do want it,” she said.
“I do.” Then, with gathering force, standing straighter, hands on hips, “I do. I really do.”
“So?”
“So we’ll see, four years from now, but I don’t think I can be beaten if I start now. It’s a matter of posture and positioning; that’s your idea and I think it’s right.”
He had it now—not campaigning, of course, to present himself as hungry for office would be fatal, even Aaron up in New York insisted he was merely willing to serve on the people’s call. But letting those who count, those on the inside, know that he is the natural successor. Let him stand ready, the goal always in mind; if he knows it, everyone will know it.
Then he laughed out loud, rubbing his hands together. “And the mansion will be yours, and you can repair it to your heart’s content. I’ll authorize anything and everything.”
She jumped up and into his arms. “You are a darling,” she said, and kissed him. She felt their future was settled.
They had dinner, whatever the cook had prepared in the separate kitchen out back, and were well into the second bottle of wine before they went upstairs. There was a lot of laughter and reminiscence and easy talk about easy things and snippets of gossip interworked with observations on the foibles of their friends, and in the whole time Dolley didn’t mention what she would do with the big white house in which the president lived and worked.
Jimmy was tired and went to bed, but Dolley was boiling with energy and she donned a blanket robe and fur slippers and kissed him and pinched out the candle and sat in the alcove formed by the bay window in their bedroom, where moonlight was bright enough to read by and the stars were a glittering swath across the sky.
It would be unseemly to talk overmuch of the great house’s possibilities, perhaps even courting misfortune in the future. But Dolley had a new friend, one Benjamin Latrobe, an architect from England whom Tom had engaged to design a drydock that would lay up the Federalist frigates. She thought the frigates hadn’t really gone out of service and the dock probably hadn’t been built or at any rate finished and she wasn’t interested enough to ask.
She had found herself next to him at a presidential dinner one afternoon. He was rather a handsome fellow with tousled brown hair and light eyes and a very English look, whatever that meant, and in fact she wasn’t sure except that he fitted her sense of the English, who were pleasant enough when they weren’t impressing our seamen and coercing our trade. There was something poetic in his speech and she liked him.
She’d scarcely noticed him until she turned to him out of courtesy and he said in his soft voice, pleasing her with the use of the honorific, “Doesn’t madame think this gorgeous building deserves more attention?” She stared at him as he spoke her thoughts aloud. “The walls, so shabby. Water damage not recent—the roof’s been fixed, I take it, but the interior ignored. In fact, you know, the interior rivals the exterior in importance, in meaning—a building’s soul is on the inside.”
He paused, wide-eyed. “But perhaps madame does not agree, perhaps she thinks a foreigner’s criticism rude and unseemly, which indeed it is, and yet—”
She put her hand on his to quiet him. “Perhaps you are a treasure, sir. Tell me, you seem conversant with the interior arts—is that a matter of taste or of experience?”
He drew himself up. “I am primarily an architect, but I have decorated some of the great homes of England.”
She made up her mind. “Why don’t you come here for tea tomorrow. Mr. Madison and I will give you a tour.” Mr. Madison so no errant thoughts would strike the architect and because it would do Mr. Madison a world of good to see the house’s faults through a professional eye.
Mr. Latrobe rose fully to her hopes, discussing wainscoting styles with much expertise and moving on to the blending of colors and their multiplicity of shades and the use of their contrasts, the technique of faux marble, the use of rough stone for effect, the kind of windows that made a plain room gracious, a gracious room glorious. On the spot she decided that he would be her consultant and confidant when the time came. Since then he had worked on the Capitol and other buildings, but he had never lost his interest in her project.