Washington Irving

by Brian Jay Jones

  Although Irving was not offered a position, he was still a regular in the Hoffman household. He stayed with the family when the Judge was away on business, acted as the surrogate head of the household, and wrote chatty letters to the Judge reporting on his family's activities. During Irving's absence in Europe, Mrs. Hoffman had given birth to a son, Charles, and Irving spent the early months of 1807 doting over the child. While in Europe, Irving had tried to keep tabs on Ann, asking one correspondent to “write me an account of her, and what effect the nunnery has had in altering & improving her—She promised to make a charming girl when I last saw her.”26 Sitting in the Judge's parlor, he wasn't disappointed; sixteen-year-old Ann was becoming a dark-eyed beauty who bantered with Irving more and more freely.

  Despite her blooming charms, however, Ann Hoffman couldn't compete with Irving's newest female friend and correspondent, a vivacious young woman named Mary Fairlie. Attractive, witty, and a “declared belle,” Mary was the daughter of Revolutionary War veteran Major James Fairlie, who, it was rumored, had distinguished himself by making George Washington laugh out loud.27 Mary certainly had a similar effect on Washington Irving, and the two began a flirtatious correspondence in early spring 1807, just as Irving was basking in the initial glow of Salmagundi’s success.

  “The Fascinating Fairlie,” Irving called her, and he chattered, punned, and flirted with her like a smitten suitor. He filled his letters to her with eye-rolling jokes, self-deprecating humor, and dashes of erudition, making literary allusions that, more often than not, were incorrect. “The good folk of this city have a most wicked determination of being all thought wits and beaux esprits,” Irving playfully wrote to Mary during a visit to Philadelphia, “and they are not content with being thought so by themselves, but they insist that every body else should be of the same opinion—now this in my humble opinion is the very Devil, as Chaucer says, and it has produced a most violent attack of puns upon my nervous system.” It didn't matter that Chaucer had said no such thing—Irving was playing his role as the gentleman to the hilt. And if he couldn't impress her with his banter, he would flatter her in print. In the fifth issue of Salmagundi, he introduced a new character, “Miss Sophy Sparkle, a young lady unrivaled for playful wit and innocent vivacity, and who, like a brilliant, adds luster to the front of fashion.” The portrayal was flattering and obvious; Irving was practically waggling his eyebrows at Mary from the printed page.28

  Salmagundi had earned Irving a bit of repute in Philadelphia, an opportunity on which he was quick to capitalize. He spent a good deal of that spring in the city, and as he had noted in his letter to Mary Fairlie, the town was indeed brimming with “wits and beaux esprits.” Even New Yorkers grudgingly admitted that Philadelphia was the place to be. The “intellectual centre of the nation,” Henry Adams called it, matched only by Europe for its fashionable, literary company—and the Europeans agreed. “It would be no exaggeration to say, in numerous assemblies of Philadelphia it is impossible to meet with what is called a plain woman,” wrote an admiring duc de Liancourt. “As to the young men, they for the most part seem to belong to another species.”29

  It was no wonder friends had difficulty prying Irving away. “I have so many engagements on hand,” he told Mary, “—am so intolerably admired and have still so much money in my pockets that I really can fix no time when I shall return to my New York insignificance.” New York was calling, and Irving dutifully obliged, but not before he made an impression on the Philadelphia ladies, some of whom tearfully begged him not to leave. “Half the people exist but in the idea that you will one day return,” one female admirer told him. “When will pleasure return to these wretched beings? They have no philosophy, and ages will not reconcile them to the loss of your society.”30

  Irving's presence was needed in New York in late April. There was an election in Manhattan, and Judge Hoffman was standing as a Federalist candidate for a seat in the state assembly. Despite his earlier vow to “never meddle any more in politicks,” Irving threw himself into the campaign with gusto, only to see Hoffman and his fellow Federalists drubbed by the Republicans after three days of elections and hard campaigning. “Never were poor devils more intolerably beaten and discomfited than my forlorn brethren the Federalists,” Irving reported to Mary. “What makes me the more outrageous is that I got fairly drawn into the vortex and before the third day was expired I was as deep in mud and politics as ever a moderate gentleman would wish to be.”31

  Irving staked out a spot in the city's Seventh Ward, one of the rowdiest in Manhattan, where the election was marked by marches and demonstrations—“such haranguing & puffing & strutting among all the little great men of the day,” Irving snorted. Votes in 1807 New York were certainly earned through campaign literature and speeches, but they were equally as likely to be purchased with alcohol, or scrounged up in the city's underbelly. Irving reported it all to the Fascinating Fairlie with a mixture of disgust and amusement: “I drank beer with the multitude, and I talked handbill fashion with the demagogues, and I shook hands with the mob—whom my heart abhorreth…. Oh my friend, I have been in such holes and corners; such filthy nooks and filthy corners, sweep offices and oyster cellars… faugh! I shall not be able to bear the smell of small beer or tobacco for a month to come.” Even more shocking to Irving was the treatment of black voters, who were corralled and compelled to vote Federalist. “I almost pitied them,” he wrote, “for we had them up in an enormous drove in the middle of the day waiting round the poll for a chance to vote. The Sun came out intolerably warm—and being packed together like sheep in a pen, they absolutely fermented.” It hadn't been the Federalists’ finest hour. “Truly,” he concluded, “this serving ones country is a nauseous piece of business.”32

  Reading his letter in Boston, Fairlie—who was not only witty, but also Republican—couldn't resist giving Irving a good poke in the ribs. “How my heart joyed to hear of your defeat! Never did I receive a letter which gave me so much pleasure,” she teased. “I cannot say, however, that this was unexpected, as I am too good a Republican to have thought of leaving New York without being perfectly sure of our victory.”33

  Irving may have fumed, but he was more loyal to conviction than party. His own politics were, by today's standards, progressively conservative, favoring business, nonregulation, and individual rights, while valuing older traditions—all convictions that appealed to a proper gentleman. If his political party drifted too far from his core values, Irving simply abandoned the party. He didn't lack for conviction, merely the stomach for the fight. His own political style was decidedly nonconfrontational, a trait that served him well.

  Still, arguing about politics was always a good excuse for chatting with or writing Mary Fairlie, whose letters continued in the same playful vein. He was still talked about as one of the authors of Salmagundi, she told him. “A cute young man,” she started one letter, knowing the stress on the word cute would shake up Irving, “asked me the usual question of ‘who was the author of Salmagundi?’ I told him that it was absolutely not known, but that you were shrewdly suspected; he said he thought so; that he had seen you in Italy; that the instant he saw the likeness of Launcelot in [Salmagundi] No. 8, he perceived it bore a strange likeness to you, indeed very striking.” After teasing him with the mention of another young man, she reeled Irving back in. “I forthwith determined to have it [the likeness] set in pearl, and shall evermore wear it next to my heart, in token of the great love and kindness I bear the original!”34

  Irving was just as flirty. “I have read of heroes and heroines of novels, when separated, looking at the moon at the same time and thus in a manner holding ‘sweet converse’ with each other,” he wrote at the close of a May 13 letter. “I leave to these lovesick gentle-folk all such lunatic speculation as mere matters of moonshine; but I will improve upon their idea, and while writing to you, will fancy that you are the same time scribbling an answer.”35

  What Mary likely found most surprising about the letter
was not the sentiment itself, but rather the postmark at the top of the first page: Fredericksburg, Virginia. “I did not so much as dream of this jaunt four and twenty hours before my departure,”36 he explained to Mary, but he had been asked to come south to attend the trial of fellow New Yorker Aaron Burr, who had been indicted in early April on charges of treason and high misdemeanor.

  Aaron Burr's lone term as Jefferson's vice president had unceremoniously expired on March 4, 1805. Since then, he had been a busy man, gazing at the newly acquired Louisiana Territory with an emperor's eye, and making plans. With its borders in turmoil, Burr believed Louisiana could be pried away from the United States with a minimum of force or fuss. He approached British minister Anthony Merry about providing him with $500,000 in cash and a British squadron that Burr could lead up the Mississippi. Merry made reassuring noises but no promises, leaving Burr to improvise a means for raising funds and forces on his own. The Burr conspiracy, as it was called, was under way.

  Joining Burr in the plot was a fat, drunken blowhard named James Wilkinson, the commanding general of the U.S. Army whom Burr, as vice president, had managed to get appointed as governor of Louisiana. “Ambitious and easily dazzled, fond of show and appearance,” French minister Louis Turreau described Wilkinson to Talleyrand. “General Wilkinson is the most intimate friend, or rather the most devoted creature, of Colonel Burr.”37 Burr had also found another willing accomplice in an Irishman named Harman Blennerhassett, who offered Burr his island home on the Ohio River as a base of operations.

  In no time, people were talking openly about the conspiracy—and the biggest mouth was Aaron Burr's! “He or some of his agents have either been indiscreet in their communications, or have been betrayed by some person in whom they considered that they had reason to confide,” a nervous Minister Merry wrote to his government, “for the object of his journey has now begun to be noticed in the public prints.”38

  By January 1806 the conspiracy was so well known that even U.S. District Attorney Joseph Daveiss had caught wind of it, and warned President Jefferson. Jefferson dismissed Daveiss's concerns; he didn't take Burr and his swaggering seriously. Still, Daveiss had Burr hauled in front of a U.S. court in Kentucky several times to respond to charges that he was planning an armed expedition against Mexico, and instigating revolution in the western states and territories.39 With Henry Clay serving as his counsel, the charismatic Burr was acquitted, to thunderous applause.

  Over time, the details of the conspiracy leaked. According to one of Burr's coconspirators, the plan included an outrageous plot to kidnap the president, vice president, and president pro tempore of the Senate, seize public money in Washington and Georgetown banks, and burn all the vessels in the navy yard.40 Burr put his plans in a coded letter to Wilkinson—the infamous Cipher Letter—then set out for the western frontier, openly badmouthing the U.S. government to anyone who would listen, and blustering and bullying accomplices as he tried to raise money and troops.

  Despite Burr's confidence, Wilkinson was getting cold feet. He decided the best way to save his own skin was to blow the lid off the entire affair and plead his own innocence. On November 25, 1806, President Jefferson received a letter from Wilkinson that detailed the terms of the conspiracy and hung the entire affair around Burr's neck. Jefferson issued a warrant for Burr's arrest, and in early December Ohio militiamen captured most of Burr's boats and supplies at a Marietta boatyard. Nearly two months later, after a mad pursuit down the Mississippi, federal agents finally nabbed Burr. The disgraced vice president was dragged to Richmond, Virginia, for indictment and trial.

  The U.S. attorney general, Cesar Augustus Rodney, and George Hay, his primary prosecutor, indicted Burr for treasonable acts committed under his direction at Blennerhassett's Island. For his defense, Burr engaged a team of legal heavy hitters, including überloyalist John Wickham; Edmond Randolph, a former member of George Washington's cabinet; prominent Virginian Benjamin Botts; and Luther Martin, a formidable jurist who had helped write, but ultimately did not sign, the U.S. Constitution. Interestingly, Burr also requested the assistance of a rookie lawyer from New York named Washington Irving.

  The precise nature of Irving's service to Burr remains tantalizingly unclear. Irving had no great legal reputation, and it's doubtful that his connections with Hoffman would have done Burr much good. However, Burr had been a fan of Irving's writing since the Oldstyle letters, when he had passed on clips from the Chronicle to his daughter, and likely appreciated the work Irving had done on his behalf in the pages of the Corrector. Perhaps Burr hoped that having Irving on hand as an official observer might result in some favorable press, but he never made his intentions entirely known, even to Irving. “Burr was full of petty mystery; he made a mystery of everything,” Irving said. Even years later, Irving still had no idea why he had been sent for. “From some sounding of his, I suspected he wanted me to write for the press in his behalf,” he recalled, “but I put a veto on that.”41

  Burr's trial began on May 22 in the Hall of the Virginia House of Delegates, crammed to capacity with gawkers and onlookers from all walks of life, with dusty frontiersmen jammed alongside nattily dressed southern gentlemen. The streets were packed with spectators hoping for a glimpse of Burr as he was bustled into the great hall for what they were sure would be “the trial of the century.” The inns were so jammed that those without rooms simply slept in wagons or in tents by the James River. Through his connections, Irving had managed to land a room in the Eagle Tavern on Main Street at the base of Richmond's Capitol Hill.42

  Amid the buzz, the two calmest people in the courtroom were Burr and Chief Justice John Marshall. Dressed entirely in black silk, his hair powdered, Burr was every inch the deposed emperor he had endeavored to be—and Irving, ever the romantic, felt sorry for him. “Though opposed to him in political principles,” Irving admitted, “yet I consider him as a man so fallen, so shorn of the power to do national injury, that I feel no sensation remaining but compassion for him.”43

  By early June both sides were still arguing over definitions of treason—a critical matter, to be sure, but Irving found it boring. “You can little conceive the talents for procrastination that have been exhibited in this affair,” he told Mrs. Hoffman. The prosecution was still waiting for its star witness—the blustery James Wilkinson—to arrive, but he was taking his time. “Day after day,” Irving sighed, “have we been disappointed by the non-arrival of the magnanimous Wilkinson; day after day have fresh murmurs and complaints been uttered; and day after day we are told that the next mail will probably bring his noble self, or at least some accounts when he may be expected.”44

  The trial ground to a halt in anticipation, Irving wrote a bit testily, even as he took a jab at the southern mentality: “We are now enjoying a kind of suspension of hostilities, the grand jury having been dismissed the day before yesterday for five or six days, that they might go home, see their wives, get their clothes washed, and flog their negroes. As yet we are not even on the threshold of a trial, and if the great hero of the South does not arrive, it is a chance if we have any trial this term.”45

  On June 10 Wilkinson finally arrived, striding confidently into the courtroom amid a sea of important-looking aides.46 “The first interview between him and Burr,” Irving wrote Paulding, “was highly interesting, and I secured a good place to witness it.”

  Burr was seated with his back to the entrance, facing the judge, and conversing with one of his counsel. Wilkinson strutted into Court, and took his stand in a parallel line with Burr on his right hand. Here he stood for a moment swelling like a turkey cock, and bracing himself for the encounter of Burr's eye. The latter did not take any notice of him until the judge directed the clerk to swear Gen. Wilkinson; at the mention of the name, Burr turned his head, looked him full in the face with one of his piercing regards, swept his eye over his whole person from head to foot, as if to scan its dimensions, and then coolly resumed his former position, and went on conversing with his counse
l as tranquilly as ever.47

  Irving was impressed. “The whole look was over in an instant, but it was an admirable one… a slight expression of contempt played over his countenance, such as you would show on regarding any person to whom you were indifferent, but whom you considered mean and contemptible.”48

  Wilkinson, naturally, remembered the encounter differently, claiming that he had smugly “darted a flash of indignation at the little Traitor… [who then] made an Effort to meet the indignant salutation of outraged Honor, but it was in vain.” Wilkinson's pomp did nothing to endear him to either the jury or the public. Popular sentiment, in fact, was beginning to lean toward the roguish Burr, who was treated like a rock star. He ushered visitors laden with gifts into the rooms Luther Martin had rented for him near the posh Swan Tavern—at least until complaints about preferential treatment required him to be moved to the new penitentiary outside town, where he continued to receive family and guests. Wilkinson, meanwhile, comported himself badly before the grand jury, and barely escaped indictment. Irving told Paulding that he had learned that the grand jury was “tired enough of his verbosity”—a rumor supported by jury foreman John Randolph, who called Wilkinson “the most finished scoundrel that ever lived.”49

  In the meantime, Irving was trying to conduct a little business with Paulding, who was working on the twelfth issue of Salmagundi in New York. Irving informed his friend that he had no time to write anything for this issue, but pressed his collaborator for any buzz he might have heard on issue eleven. “I wish to know all the news about our work, and any literary intelligence that may be in circulation,” wrote Irving, who was always eager for his own reviews. Of more pressing concern was money. “What arrangement have you made with the Dusky for the profits?” Irving asked, perhaps oblivious to the fact that Dusky Davey now owned their discarded copyright. “I shall stand much in need of a little sum of money on my return.”50