WITH BURR’S TERM now complete, he was free to pursue his dream of sedition in earnest. He added another confederate to his little band—Jonathan Dayton, whom he’d known from Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and the school they’d attended there before Princeton, a locus that bound up the Burrs and the Daytons, and another family, the Ogdens, in the elite. Matthias Ogden married Dayton’s sister Hannah after the war, and Burr had guided Dayton’s speculation in frontier land, chiefly in southwestern Ohio, where he became tight with General Wilkinson. Dayton had gone into politics, although as a Federalist, and helped push Burr’s abortive presidential bid in 1796. Given all this, it was probably inevitable that Burr should bring Dayton into his scheme. Having journeyed to New Orleans in 1803 in advance of the Louisiana Purchase, Dayton had seen for himself that the United States did not have a firm hold on these territories and that the underlying uncertainty would work to the advantage of the French, who could play the eastern states off against the western ones. Dayton, in short, was a believer, and he made Ogden one too.
But it wasn’t always easy to know who would be attracted to Burr’s scheme, who would be helpful, and who would be a risk. Matthew Lyon, the irascible former congressman from Vermont, was a possibility. He’d made a name for himself in Washington for his use of those fireplace tongs. Now relocated to Kentucky, Lyon wanted to persuade Burr to move south too. In 1796, there had been few more staunch backers of Tennessee’s bid for statehood than Burr, and Lyon imagined Burr could easily call in that marker now. He need only set up a nominal law practice in Tennessee, give a few speeches, and Lyon was sure that Burr could be elected congressman before a year was out, and senator shortly after that. He would be back in the game.
Lyon had said as much to his sleazy confederate, General James Wilkinson, in Washington, and Wilkinson claimed to have been overjoyed at the idea, either because he genuinely was pleased to think of a way to get Burr back into a sphere of political influence, or because he was just concealing the true intentions of the man he referred to as “the little counselor.” Lyon recalled, “He clapped his hands on my shoulders, exclaiming with an oath, ‘This will do!—it is a heavenly thought—worthy of him who thought it!’ He rang the bell, ordered his boots, and said he would go instantly and inform the little counselor, and would call on me in the House in the course of two or three hours.”
Lyon went to see Burr at Mr. Wharton’s, an elegant boardinghouse patronized by government men, where it took several pulls on the bell before a servant came, only for Lyon to discover that Burr was deep in company. Lyon was about to leave his card, with plans to return another time, when Burr emerged from the room and said it would be just half an hour more, and please wait. This time, when the door opened, he recognized the voices of Wilkinson and Dayton, which was a surprise since Dayton was not thought to be in town. Burr explained that the meeting was about “some land concern in the Western country,” as Lyon put it. When Lyon revealed to Burr his proposition, he could see immediately that Burr was nowhere near as “enamored” as Wilkinson had been of the project.
Burr did allow that he was planning a western trip that would take him to Pittsburgh and west from there. One imagines a significant pause here, as Burr waited for Lyon to ask the obvious question, “Why?” And that, in turn, would let Burr give the barest hint of his true intention, so as to gauge Lyon’s reaction and determine if it was safe to proceed any further with a conversation that could get him hanged if it went awry.
Either because he couldn’t imagine there was anything more to Burr’s travel plan, or because he could, Lyon said only that he was headed the same way and offered him passage on his boat. If Burr wanted to get into Tennessee politics, he shouldn’t waste any time on western travels.
By now, Burr must have determined that Lyon would be of no particular use to him, for he made clear he had his own boat waiting for him in Pittsburgh. But, leaving the door ajar, he allowed that perhaps they could travel a ways together down the Ohio.
FORTY-EIGHT
Motives of Profound Political Importance
BURR WAS MAKING some progress with his seditious plans, but his was not a pretty situation. “In New York I am to be disenfranchised, and in New Jersey hanged,” he acknowledged to his son-in-law from his Washington boardinghouse. “Having substantial objections to both, I shall not, for the present, hazard either, but shall seek another country.” True enough—but the sentiment was so ironic and roundabout that it amounted to another form of encryption. The short of it was, of course, he was indeed seeking another country—to seize. And what he said next had its own truth too.
“There is no reason to think that I shall this season visit either New-York or New-Jersey,” he teased Theodosia. Then he laid out a detailed itinerary: first to Philadelphia, then west to “Fort Pitt,” better known as Pittsburgh, and down the Ohio clear to Saint Louis, then across to Tennessee, and finally float down the Mississippi to New Orleans. “This tour has other objects than mere curiosity,” he admitted. “An operation of business which promises to render the tour both useful and agreeable.” He did not, however, say what it was. “As the objects of the journey, not mere curiosity . . . may lead me to [New] Orleans, and perhaps further, I contemplate the tour with gayety and cheerfulness.”
If Theodosia had anything to write him, he told her, she should send it to him in Philadelphia, since he would not have any fixed addresses after that. Philadelphia because the alluring Celeste was there. Yes, that Celeste. Burr could not free himself of her. Just the year before she had sent him packing, but since then she had sent some timid feelers that had raised his hopes that she had reconsidered, and he’d made time to renew his suit now.
To Theodosia, he chortled at the thought that everyone in Washington would assume he was going to Philadelphia for politics, when in fact it was for Celeste. “How little is this truth suspected by the hundreds who are at this moment ascribing to the movement motives of profound political importance.” This, of course, is the benefit of secrecy: People misapprehend.
The visit, however, went no better than the previous ones. Once again, Celeste refused to see him. While he must have been perplexed, if not infuriated, Burr professed to take the defeat in stride. “The affair of Celeste is forever closed,” he told Theodosia, “so there is one trouble off hand.”
Thus unburdened, he continued on to Pittsburgh, joined for this portion of the trip by Mr. Gabriel Shaw, a New York merchant eager to do business in the West, and Shaw’s wife, all three on horseback. Burr’s purpose was an unusual one, to take possession of an elaborate houseboat he’d purchased to float down the Ohio. A “floating house,” he called it; sometimes his “ark.” He’d bought it for the relative pittance of 133 dollars, and it was probably paid for by Theodosia’s wealthy husband, Joseph Alston, who was starting to pick up some of Burr’s expenses. Sixty feet by fourteen, it was on the scale of a Philadelphia row house, and it contained a dining room, kitchen with fireplace, two bedrooms, and, as Burr put it, was “roofed from stem to stern,” with a slender staircase up to a widow’s walk that ran the whole length. Flat bottomed and squared off, it was propelled only by the flow of the river and required bargemen to fend off rocks and shore as the house descended. The vessel was ready for him when he arrived, and he boarded it the next day.
He’d hoped to bring General Wilkinson along. There would have been no more private place to discuss their strategy than bobbing along the Ohio. But Wilkinson was on his way to Saint Louis, bound for New Orleans, where he would assume his new appointment from Jefferson as governor of Louisiana. Burr had planned to meet Matthew Lyon, the congressman who was wooing him to Tennessee, and after a day’s float, the ark caught up with Lyon’s barge, and the two men lashed their very different crafts together, and, conjoined, they continued to float down the swift Ohio, sweeping along at eight miles an hour, the rushing river water slowed by the wide ox-bow bends that required some careful pole work by the bargemen to
keep the ark from running aground. On either side, the Ohio’s banks showed no sign of human life; it was as if they had returned to an earlier time. The banks heaped up to hills behind, and some to small mountains, some steep, some rounded, that were a lush green of leaves and grass and vines that grew everywhere. For hundreds of miles, Burr and his three companions could not see a soul.
Finally—Wheeling, a pretty little village where Burr noticed, as he drifted by, that some of the women had a decided “air of fashion” reminiscent of the cities of the Atlantic coast. Farther down, there was a more substantial settlement, Marietta, named for Marie Antoinette. It had been the first in the territories, and it boasted a boat works that built gunboats, highly maneuverable and well-armed ones. Burr couldn’t help noting that it might be fitting to employ a Western firm to free the West. While he was here, he took a contemplative stroll about its prehistoric burial ground of aboriginal Indians, but nonetheless he made time for several gentlemen who were eager to strike up conversation with such an eminence.
With that, Lyon untied his barge from the ark, and, taking the Shaws with him, he went on ahead, leaving Burr to continue downriver alone. Lyon was left scratching his head about Burr’s true intentions. “There seemed to be too much mystery in his conduct,” he wrote later. “I suspected him to have other objects in view, to which I could not penetrate.”
When the bargemen cast off, the ark was soon enclosed in wilderness again, that endless green that was broken only by the blue of the sky and the churning blue-green water. Finally, about twenty miles along, the ark curved around a wide bend, and there, straight before him, was a long but slender strip of island, overspread by tall trees, and bright with gay colors that must have seemed to Burr almost inconceivable in such a wilderness. A fine house stood on it, done of stone, and Georgian in balance and symmetry, one that would not have been out of place in London, its two wings rounded into a perfect semicircle like a pair of arms in greeting. A spreading lawn ran before it, bounded by shrubbery and flowers and interrupted only by the carriage road that served the entrance. Barely visible behind were acres of pretty flower gardens in the English style, as well as long rectangular patches of well-tended vegetables, and beside the house were lovely espaliers of peach, apricot, quince, and pear trees, with walkways snaking all about. An early writer, William Harris Safford, likened it to the sight of “the Moorish palaces of Andalusia,” which conveys the spirit of improbability of finding such a mansion on the Ohio River.
Or of finding Harman Blennerhassett. Tall, with a knobby face, and stooped from a nearsightedness so extreme that a servant had to aim his gun when he shot game, Blennerhassett was Irish by birth, foolish by nature, and immensely rich by virtue of a legacy bestowed on him by his father, an extremely wealthy manufacturer. In midlife, Blennerhassett had set out across the Atlantic to make a name for himself in the New World. For the sum of sixty thousand dollars, he had created this paradise on the sliver of land that became known as Blennerhassett Island, settling here eight years before with his wife, who also happened to be his niece. Here he devoted himself to scientific investigations—chemistry, astronomy, botany; the list was almost limitless—that he hoped would yield him some marketable secrets of life.
But hadn’t. And the bitter truth was, for all the boldness of Blennerhassett’s ambitions, he was not bold at heart. His electrical studies, for example, were compromised by the fact that he was so terrified of lightning that, at the first darkening of the skies, he shut all the doors and windows, rushed into his bedroom, locked the doors behind him, and huddled in the middle of his bed, where he believed any flickers of lightning were least likely to get him. He soothed his nerves with music, playing both the violin and violoncello.
If Blennerhassett had hoped that his scientific discoveries would revive his declining fortunes, the truth was that they had only depleted them further, making him an increasingly desperate man in an increasingly desperate situation. Which is why Burr had come.
After the bargemen secured the ark, Burr stepped out and, rather than making for the house, he took a languorous turn about the gardens to examine the wide variety of flowers, as well as the abundance of ripe fruit hanging off the trees in the orchard. He might have continued his tour for some time, but a servant approached him and told him that Mrs. Blennerhassett would be delighted if he would favor her with a visit to her house. Nonplussed, Burr took out his personal card and wrote a note to say that he regretted he must decline. He’d stopped only for a brief tour of the gardens, and he would soon be on his way. He signed it “A. Burr.” Seeing that, Mrs. Blennerhassett was stricken, sending back a note of her own that she could not bear to be inhospitable to a former vice president, and although her husband was away, she insisted on welcoming him in their house. To that, Burr could do nothing but assent.
The interior proved to be no less magical than the exterior, not least because it brought a cool, high-ceilinged elegance to the hot lushness of West Virginia in late summer. Mahogany tables, gilt mirrors, velvet-cushioned furniture, classical paintings, Chinese vases—it was almost more than Burr could take in.
While Blennerhassett obviously had his limits, it seems his wife did not. Safford, that early writer, does not just term her the most extraordinary woman west of the Alleghenies; he acclaims her one of the finest women in all of history—extolling her fluency in French and Italian, brilliance at Shakespeare, exquisite Grecian features, graceful yet dignified manner, and flowing dark hair swept behind an exotic, richly colored silk headdress worn à la Turque.
Burr was not one to be immune to such charms, and the realization that Mrs. Blennerhassett was married with three children would not likely have held him back either. But the fact that she was married to a man with a sizable fortune—Burr did not know yet just how sizable—that he was attempting to make a little less sizable would certainly have cooled his ardor. And that was the nub of it. Knowing that other people were interested in Blennerhassett for his money made it imperative that Burr make it seem he wasn’t. Hence the charade about his being uninterested in her invitation. He certainly was interested, but his resistance would only encourage his hostess to greater eagerness, which would work to his advantage. Then again, stratagems aside, it was possible that the very fetching Mrs. Blennerhassett could simply not resist someone so bewitching as a former vice president who was wanted for murder.
Whichever, Mrs. Blennerhassett did not demur when, over wine, Burr started to inquire—no, press her—about her husband’s business affairs, and, more pertinent, his financial standing. So attractive to so many, Mrs. Blennerhassett was probably not used to being the one to reveal more than she intended. So she was unable to do anything except to answer the questions he asked, all of them put to her so delicately, with those wide, curious eyes of his, and when their conversation was concluded, she begged him to stay for dinner, which he agreed to only with great reluctance, and it wasn’t until almost midnight that, sated, he quit the house with professions of the greatest gratitude to his hostess. When the door shut behind him, he crossed the lawn and made his way down to the dock, where he boarded his floating house, settled into his bedroom, and slept, the waters of the Ohio sliding gently past.
WHEN BURR CAST off from Blennerhassett Island the next morning, he continued down the Ohio in his ark, gathering backers as he went. It seemed there was no shortage of the prominent who were willing to sign on with a serenely self-confident adventurer who offered the allure of riches beyond measure without actually specifying their form, quantity, or source. In Cincinnati, he collected a twenty-five-thousand-dollar loan from the Indiana Canal Company, which operated as a bank in imitation of Burr’s Manhattan Water Company, and then met two senators, one being Ohio’s mirthless John Smith, a former Baptist minister turned speculator whose land agents had been the fabled Kemper brothers, who’d tried, and failed, to conquer Spanish West Florida; and the other New Jersey’s Jonathan Dayton, Burr’s kinsman from Elizabe
thtown, who had vast landholdings along the Miami River in the Northwest. He revisited the persistent Lyon, who once again tried to persuade Burr to run for office in Tennessee and, failing, fell disenchanted with this man of “too much mystery.” He tried to hit up the canal company’s major backer, Senator John Brown, for funds, and spent nights with Kentucky’s wealthiest insurer in a hunt for further financing. Burr gave every indication his venture was military. He visited shipyards to discuss boats to carry soldiers down the Mississippi. While he never came right out and said that he was planning an assault on Mexico that would seize Spanish gold mines and all its territory, freeing America to expand throughout the continent, few people doubted that was his intention—or at least one of them. And if this was a violation of the 1798 Neutrality Act, and unlawful under the Constitution besides, the audacity was, if anything, all part of the appeal west of the Alleghenies, a corner of the backwoods that was more likely to look for inspiration down the Mississippi than east across the Alleghenies.
War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901) Page 41