Aaron Burr, whom he had met several times before, had greeted him like a long lost son: “Why, Nathan, my boy. What brings you to New York City?”
There was something repellent about the tiny old man propped up in his bed, surrounded by his books. Burr was embroiled, as usual, in controversy and notoriety; this time, his own divorce at seventy-eight from his fifty-eight-year-old bride of one year for infidelities and fraud.
“You’re not related to her, are you?” Burr asked as he pushed his spectacles down from his forehead onto his sharp nose and peered through them.
Irritated at himself, Nathan Langdon felt a blush coming on. Aaron Burr always did have the famous knack of smelling out a motive. Now, he was zeroing in for the kill.
“Don’t tell me you’re a son of Thomas Jefferson!”
“Colonel Burr, sir!”
“How am I to guess,” he replied crankily, “when one side of the blanket inevitably resembles the other … and I should know.”
“I have met … two of her sons, and I believe that there is a third somewhere in New York. I would hope to find a trace of him, for his mother’s sake.”
“For his mother’s sake? Then you know Sally Hemings? I had heard that she had been sold on the auction block, along with her daughter, after Jefferson died bankrupt.”
“No, she was freed in 1826 and remained in Virginia, where she still resides with two of her sons. I … I met the family in my official capacity as census taker of Albemarle County.”
“Really? How old is she now?”
“She was fifty-six when I first met her, so that makes her sixty now.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“My God! How old would Thomas Jefferson be now?”
“Ninety-three.”
“The age I feel today.”
“You look very well, sir.”
“And you are the worst liar I’ve met. How do you ever get your clients off?”
“Usually I don’t, sir.” Langdon laughed. Despite himself, he was beginning to warm to the old man who had an aura, even now, of brimstone and danger.
There was something in the way he had said Sally Hemings’ name that made Langdon hesitate to go any further into his relationship with her. Aaron Burr was not, after all, John Quincy Adams. The quick elflike face, the thin wasted body, the still undiminished reputation gave him an indisputable power of intimidation.
Langdon had delivered a packet of letters from Burr’s friends in Washington yesterday, and had spent the better part of this afternoon with him as well.
Burr had told Langdon, when the ex-census taker had guided him onto the subject that still obsessed him, that he had only seen Sally Hemings once in Philadelphia at Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration as vice-president. He had never been intimate enough with the president (to say the least) to have been invited more than once or twice to Monticello, and there she had not been in evidence.
“But with all the clutter I found upon entering the house, I could have missed her in between the stuffed moose and the statue of Cleopatra. Walking into his entranceway was like walking into the inside of his head. Everything a confusion of relics, of conjecture about things he knew nothing about, loose ends and solid marble. There were Indian relics; bad paintings, including a crucifixion owned by a man who didn’t believe Jesus was divine; heads and horns of an elk, of a deer; a map of Missouri drawn by Indians (before he and Meriwether Lewis stole it from them); buffalo hides, bows and arrows, poisoned lances (better than treason trials), peace pipes, wampum belts, several Indian dresses and cooking utensils; and a colossal bust of himself on a truncated column which made him ten feet tall and gave me a good mouse-eye’s view. The column, I remember, had the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve signs of the zodiac upon it; and besides the full-size reclining statue of Cleopatra (after she had applied the asp), there were busts of Voltaire, Turgot, John Paul Jones, George Washington, General Lafayette, and a model of one of the pyramids!
“In the salon, I remember, were busts of Alexander the Great; Napoleon, whom he professed to despise; and, quite aptly, a ‘Sleeping Venus’ (white, not black). This was, of course, when I was his vice-president. But if I didn’t see her at that time, I certainly witnessed several interesting happenings! The guest next to me practically fell off his chair when the spitting image of Thomas Jefferson came in carrying the soup! But this couldn’t have been the famous Tom,’ for he was too old. I think I heard him called James or Jamey. At any rate, the place was crawling with white slaves, literally, since many of them were very young children who seemed to have the complete run of the house. As you know, after that time, the president and I had a slight disagreement. . . .”
Nathan Langdon was shocked even now. To refer to charges of treason as “a slight disagreement. . . .”
“You look shocked, my boy.” Aaron Burr loved to shock people and then console them. “If you look at it from my point of view, I was simply twenty years before my time. We must kick the Spanish out, annex half of Mexico, and fight a war to make it stick. All begun by our illustrious President Jackson, twenty years later … after I planned it. And not a word of credit … or thanks!”
Nathan Langdon laughed. He was irresistible, this old man!
“I wouldn’t call a trial for treason a ‘slight disagreement’!”
“It was a trial, not a conviction, my boy. The jury returned a verdict of ‘not guilty because not proven guilty’ the first time, and the second trial for the misdemeanor was a straight ‘not guilty.’ People seem to forget that! The government had no case, and they knew it. Even Hay admitted he couldn’t hang me. He sought further treason indictments in Ohio. At any rate, sooner or later Jefferson, with the aid of a complacent and well-rewarded judge, would have gotten his verdict of guilty. After all, John Marshall couldn’t follow me through the seventeen states trying me. So, fearing Jefferson’s pertinacity in my pursuit, I went into hiding and eventually made my way back to Europe, coming home during the war to resume my law practice. I ran into John Trumbull, the painter, and his poor wife while I was in London.”
John Trumbull, Nathan thought. The one man who had made drawings of Sally Hemings as a young girl.
“Is he in New York now?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, you know he became quite a staunch Federalist. He’s the president of the American Academy, and he has managed to get his paintings in every federal building in Washington.” Aaron Burr pushed his spectacles back up on his high-domed forehead. “Would you like to meet him?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Langdon, “if it’s not too much trouble.”
Aaron Burr would be quite content to give the young man a letter of introduction. The talk about Sally Hemings had brought back his undying hatred of Thomas Jefferson, and had reminded him of the one great mistake of his life: trusting Jefferson to keep his word as a gentleman. What he had always hated about Jefferson was his hypocrisy. It had cost him, Aaron Burr, the presidency, he thought. Jefferson would lie with the whore politics, then rise from her bed, scream that he had been infected with syphilis, and refuse to pay. . . .
“What do you really want to know about Sally Hemings, and why?”
“Everything. Nothing. It is something I stumbled onto, and now—” Nathan Langdon stopped, disconcerted.
“Strange, I had a beloved sister called Sally … who protected me from many a beating at the hands of my guardian. When I ran away from home the first time, I was four and she six. She threw herself between me and the rod, a pattern which was to continue all our lives. We had only each other, having lost both our parents and grandparents by then. But, if ever a woman left me cold, and there are not many who did, Sally Hemings was one. Beautiful, yes. I saw her in her prime.” Aaron Burr gazed at Langdon, who was hanging on his every word. “She was possibly the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, black or white, slave or free, duchess or maid, with the exception of my daughter Theodosia. But there was a cloying self-satisfaction about her that I det
ested. A hypocrisy that matched her lover’s. Leave it to Thomas Jefferson to find the only woman in the South capable of being self-righteous about concubinage. . . .”
“Sir, being an ascetic, Jefferson can’t have relished the role of a debauchee.”
“My dear sir, scratch an ascetic and you unearth a sensualist! He loved words and used them like an artist; he loved wine, music, food, flowers, beautiful objects, luxurious surroundings, fine books, tapestries, paintings, horses, land. What is eliminated from that classic list of the sensualist? If you count his love affairs with buildings, gardens, scientific instruments, and his own written word, I would say that he, not I, is the profligate. I may go down in history remembered only with the smoking dueling pistol in my hand; but, really, I am a most dispassionate individual. Behind that cold façade he was the passionate one. His hatred for me and all his political enemies was uncontrolled, almost feminine. You could say he was an inconsummate politician, rather than a consummate one. And all this … this ardor was consummated, if you like, in the most extraordinary political document of the century: the Declaration of Independence. This, not Sally Hemings, nor any other woman, was his great moment of passion. His pathological hatred for the English and everything English, including the English in himself, impregnated him with a felicity of language he never again achieved. Reread it, Nathan. In the original version, that document grips you like a woman. It is pure passion. That’s why it sings, and that’s why it moves people. What red-blooded American could resist such a ravishing and virile image of himself?
“Pure genius, my boy. I rather unimaginatively stuck to women. As for Sally Hemings … she came with the plantation.”
“Sir, you forget she was a slave. She had no choice.”
“Oh, come now, Nathan. This was Virginia, not Mississippi. And this was a Virginian gentleman, not some redneck overseer. Even token resistance would have been enough. If she was her mother’s daughter, she probably seduced him. Now, there was a woman, Elizabeth Hemings. She must have been close to fifty when I saw her, and she looked twenty-five: superb, a Nefertiti with real traces of Africa on her brow, and a carriage worthy of a queen. She made you glad you had them, though I would have been trembling in my boots if I had had to prove it to her! No, Sally Hemings was too snobbish, too glacial, too busy playing Joan of Arc and putting on airs to suit me. How old was she in Paris?”
“Fifteen,” answered Langdon.
“Then she definitely seduced him. What forty-year-old man in his right mind can resist a healthy fifteen-year-old girl?” Aaron Burr smiled to himself. The profound shock on Nathan Langdon’s face told him all he wanted to know. This young man had become involved with Sally Hemings in an emotional way, probably having to do with Thomas Jefferson, maybe as a father figure. He had that hangdog look of a rejected lover. Why? if she had accepted him in the first place. Aaron Burr was intrigued. What would somebody as proud and haughty, as jealous of her prerogatives as Sally Hemings, and as famous, want with a pip-squeak like Nathan Langdon? He decided to try another technique.
“She’s in no danger or difficulty because of what happened so many years ago? Surely there is someone to protect her?”
“That’s just what I tried to do! Protect her! I was not even sure she was in Virginia legally, and that’s why I declared her white … you see—”
Aaron Burr didn’t see at all, but he intended to. He raised himself up on his pillows in the disordered, book-strewn bed to which he had been confined since his second stroke. How had he managed to get her declared white? Or had he done it himself? To absolve the great man from the “crime” of miscegenation, he assumed. This was fascinating! This cipher had been playing God, and Sally Hemings (knowing a lot about a god, having lived with him for thirty-eight years) had found him out. Fascinating!
Bastards Aaron Burr knew quite a bit about, he thought, having fathered several, but this was a special kind of bastardy. Something deeper than mere illegitimacy. Many great men, including himself, had illegitimate children, yet the special loss of a son or daughter to an entire race had something mythical about it. How fatal and touching this story was, and how ironic that it should be Jefferson, the image-maker, the definer of America, the nation’s most articulate voice!
Aaron Burr lay back on his pillows. Nathan Langdon was silent. They sat staring at each other for what seemed like a long time. “Was it Voltaire, dear lad, who said ‘There is no history, only fictions of varying degrees of plausibility’?
“Here is a true fable. If only we could unravel the beauty of it from the obscenity and disgrace that has surrounded its revelation. . . . I remember the papers.”
“You find it beautiful?”
“Yes,” said Aaron Burr. “I can forgive Thomas Jefferson a lot of things because of it.”
Nathan Langdon gazed into the large dark eyes which had always been famous for their intensity, and were now, in their twilight, somehow more terrible than ever. Sally Hemings had spoken of them: “What I remember most of him,” she had said, “were his eyes, of such size and darkness as to strike terror in the hearts of anyone except the very brave. There was something lewd about their power.” Now Burr looked narrowly at the young Washington lawyer.
“Yes,” Burr said, “he was lucky in a way. If a man arrives at love, no matter how, when, or why—love beyond convention—then he has already lived well. Does not every man dream of some overwhelming, unfathomable love? But few have the courage to risk it, to keep it, or to honor it. If he did, then Jefferson has once more amazed me.”
Nathan Langdon turned from the wistful, smoldering eyes and bowed his head. Lucky. He had never thought of Thomas Jefferson as “lucky.” Nathan’s own sense of failure oppressed him. He was appraising, not without bitterness, his lack of wealth, his mediocrity as a lawyer, and, yes, as a man as well. Had he not lost the two women he really cared about? Had he not lost all sense of proportion, he thought? For the sake of erasing miscegenation from the crimes of a famous man, he had annihilated his own sense of worth as well. He repeated to himself that Jefferson’s biographers were already at work. He would emerge two hundred years from now, spanking clean, shorn of even the few shreds of humanity that had managed to cling to him despite all his efforts to conceal them from the public eye. . . . As for the Hemings family, half of which had already sunk into the unwary arms of white America, no one would ever know how they really felt about their lives. . . .
Nathan promised to pay his host another visit, but Aaron Burr knew he would not. It didn’t matter.
“Tell my friends I am in a position to deliver any messages they may have for any of their departed loved ones, as long as they are in the same location that everyone is sure I’ll be repairing to quite soon. …”
Nathan Langdon smiled.
“As soon as I get there I’ll give your best to Thomas Jefferson,” he added with a wry smile.
CHAPTER 23
NEW YORK CITY, 1834
“MR. NATHAN LANGDON to see Colonel Trumbull, sir.”
Nathan Langdon, fresh from his meeting with Aaron Burr, was introduced into the company of the now famous and fashionable “artist and patriot,” John Trumbull. The announcement had been made by a gray-faced, gray-liveried servant, who bowed out as if he were in the presence of royalty.
Nathan almost stood at attention as he introduced himself to the formidable personage that appeared before him. Trumbull was handsome, erect, and slim, with a military bearing, radiating a bitter but unmistakable arrogance and self-confidence. He could better say that he had introduced himself into the company of the Founding Fathers, since flanking John Trumbull were copies of two of his most famous paintings: The Declaration of Independence and The Resignation of Washington. He found himself staring not only at Sally Hemings’ old friend from the Hôtel de Langeac, now himself transformed into a national monument, but at George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and all the other illustrious names. John Trumbull seemed to blend into and arrang
e himself as if he were part of the famous assembly of his paintings, and in the glow of the immense skylights that bathed his rooms at the academy, the effect was impressive and not at all coincidental. John Trumbull felt, in fact, that he was well placed in the company of his paintings. He had devoted his long life to painting the glorious deeds and the famous names of the Revolution, he reminded himself every day. Although he had spent only a total of eighteeen months in the Revolutionary Army, and nineteen days as aide-de-camp to General Washington, he had cashed in on his military career since his return to the United States. He had insisted on being addressed, Virginia style, by his military title, a title he had come by belatedly and not without considerable vexation and humiliation, he remembered. Nathan, who had only Sally Hemings’ description of Trumbull as a gentle romantic portrait painter, was completely taken aback.
“Colonel, please excuse my staring … but I pass the originals of these paintings every day in the Rotunda of the Capitol. They are so familiar to me they seem part of my life. To come across them in New York is quite a shock.”
“Well, Mr. Langdon, when one enters the atelier of an artist, one can expect to find the unexpected. Otherwise it is a mediocre artist that you have come in contact with.” John Trumbull fixed his dark, peculiarly asymmetrical gaze on his visitor. “I have done several versions of my large painting in the Rotunda. By the way, how are they holding up? I haven’t seem them in several years.” He went on without waiting for Langdon’s reply. “Yes, indeed, I have devoted fifty-five years of my life and my entire artistic career to memorializing our glorious Revolution, and those who took part. I was, of course, in an extraordinarily fortunate position to do so, being General Washington’s aide-de-camp. . . .”
Nathan Langdon thought, even at the risk of seeming rude, he had better come quickly to the point, as it was obvious John Trumbull’s career as aide-de-camp to General Washington was about to be recounted as part of the tour of his painting studio.
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