by Gore Vidal
I was deeply disappointed, and said so to Madison as we walked away from Congress Hall in Chestnut Street. Conversation was not exactly easy. Fearing a recurrence of fever, we spoke through camphor-soaked handkerchiefs.
Madison was distressed for my sake; but he was also placating. “Monroe has many gifts …”
“Name one.” I was in no mood for the usual amenities.
“He studied law with Jefferson.” Madison could always make me laugh.
“All right. I grant you that all-important gift. But he knows nothing of France …”
“If only he knew less! He loves their revolution even more than Jefferson does. Even more than they do, I should think. He will never be able to represent us properly. The way you could.”
I do not think Madison was flattering me. In any case, two years later Monroe was recalled in near-disgrace. Furious with Washington, he then wrote as unpleasant an account of that paladin’s administration as has ever been published. Washington never forgave him. In fact, I am told that the General used secretly to read and re-read the offending pamphlet, shouting curses and writing in the margins.
Suddenly Jemmy Madison asked me in his little voice, “Burr, you are most attractive to the ladies. Pray, tell me why?”
“Because I treat them as if they were men.”
Jemmy gave me an amused frown. “How then, Burr, does one treat men?”
Madison’s wit was amiably dry, unlike the brilliant humourless Jefferson whose creature, like it or not, he was. I assumed he liked it. Yet Jefferson’s second fiddle, I always thought, made the better music.
I had been living for some time at a boarding-house run by a Quaker lady named Mrs. John Payne. Stopping with Mrs. Payne was her daughter, Mrs. Todd, widowed six months before in the yellow fever epidemic. Mrs. Todd was a pretty if coarse-looking girl with thick brows, an endearing husky laugh and rather too much flesh on her bones for my taste, which often rules me but is no tyrant.
I suppose Mrs. Todd and her mother had designs on me. I was as new a widower as she was a widow. She had a small son; I a daughter. I was a senator and thought to be rich. The two Quaker ladies, in the nicest way, set out to snare me. But I was not for snaring. Yet I liked Mrs. Todd and wanted to be of use to her.
After the Senate sessions I would drink coffee with the two ladies in their parlour, and Mrs. Todd would ask me about the political happenings of the day and I would answer, as brightly as I could, realizing that her interest was not in the politics but in the personalities of the politicians. Yet she was not ignorant. She enjoyed the play of politics; she was also moderately well-connected; her mother was related to Patrick Henry while her fifteen-year-old sister had, scandalously, run off and married a nephew of President Washington. For all practical purposes, however, these relationships were much too tenuous and the ladies themselves much too poor to give them entrée at the Tuesday levees of King George and Queen Martha. Without an important marriage, Mrs. Todd was doomed to obscurity, and not-so-genteel poverty.
At Mrs. Bingham’s house, I stopped, ready to go in.
“Oh, Burr!” Jemmy looked up at me with the saddest expression. “Another voluptuous evening!”
“Share it with me. Come in. Mrs. Bingham will be delighted.”
Madison shook his head. “No one is ever delighted when I join the ladies.”
“Is this self-pity?”
“Of the most profound order.”
Then it was that inspiration seized me. “Come to Mrs. Payne’s boarding-house tomorrow evening.” I gave him the address. “There is someone I want you to meet.”
“He wants to be a postmaster.”
“She wants to meet James Madison.”
Jemmy gave me a look of perfect disbelief. “My dear Burr, no woman has ever wanted to meet me, and at my advanced age it is not likely that any woman will.”
I must say I privately agreed with him. He was forty-three (which I thought old); he was also dwarfish, and shy with women. But I have always enjoyed giving pleasure to others. I was certain that Mrs. Todd would overlook his appearance and manner, and if she were not wise enough to understand the depth of his intelligence, she was clever enough to know that the most powerful member of the House of Representatives (and lord of that fine estate Montpelier) was a bachelor, and lonely.
The evening is now history, and I have not much to add to what everyone knows. My servant Brooks prepared a dinner for four: Mrs. Todd, her duenna Mrs. Lee, Madison and myself. According to legend, Madison is supposed to have asked me to present him to the beautiful Mrs. Todd. This is not true. I simply told Madison that the lady would like to meet him and then I told the lady that he would like to meet her. These two amiable lies got them off to a splendid start and there is some evidence that neither knows to this day that the other did not request the meeting. It was all my work as Eros.
Mrs. Todd glittered at the elegant table Brooks had set up in the front parlour (Mother Payne was presented and then set about her business). At first Madison was shy but Mrs. Todd soon warmed him up, filled his glass again and again with my best claret. She was very much the Quaker girl en fleur that evening (this was long before she took to wearing expensive clothes from Paris, not to mention those exotic turbans which, as Dolley Madison, she has made her emblem).
But Dolley did delight Madison when he asked if he might take snuff and she graciously allowed him to. When he had finished whisking his small mouse nose with a huge lace handkerchief, she said, “And what about me, Mr. Madison?”
To Madison’s astonishment, Dolley took a pinch of snuff, as unheard-of in those days for ladies as now; and with a snort said, “It is to ward off the fever.”
Dolley has always struck a fine balance between the bold and the maternal, and no man can really resist her when she means to charm which is most of the time. Over the years she has proved to be as loyal a friend to me as possible. She was most devoted to my daughter.
The Madisons were as good a couple as ever occupied the president’s mansion. Recently a friend saw them at Montpelier where they now live, age, die. The pale fragile little Madison was stretched out on a sort of day-bed.
“Don’t speak,” said our common friend, wanting to be helpful. “Not while you’re lying down.”
To which Madison replied in a perfectly normal voice, “My dear fellow, I always talk more easily when I lie.”
Sixteen
FOR OVER A WEEK I have had no chance to continue with Colonel Burr’s reminiscences.
On July 12, Madame filed suit for divorce, naming one Jane McManus as his principal mistress. Other adulteries were noted in the interest of verisimilitude. Madame also filed a separate petition requesting the court to keep her property out of the Colonel’s hands. In fact, she has hurled a vast amount of law at the Colonel who is now furiously counter-suing, naming all sorts of lovers. This activity has rejuvenated him to such a degree that he does not require a fire in the office.
“She claims I spent thirteen thousand dollars of her money! If only I had!” The Colonel has every state divorce statute in front of him on the baize-covered table. “I have never taken a penny that was hers. Quite the contrary.” He had obviously forgotten the sale of the carriage and horses, the money from the toll-bridge shares. But then I have noticed that whenever Burr contemplates money—spending it or borrowing it—he becomes irrational.
Madame’s choice of lawyer has particularly incensed him. “What a sense of fitness that woman has displayed!” As all New York now knows, Madame has engaged for counsel the young Alexander Hamilton. “I am half-tempted to name the dead, too. God knows she knew the original Hamilton in the Biblical sense.”
“When was that?” My fingers itched for pen and paper but he no longer has time for the past.
“Madame has led a life even more gallant than my own. Well, the world shall know it!”
After I had helped him draft several indictments of his wife’s behaviour, he set out for Jersey City, leaving me with Mr. Craft who
simply shakes his head and murmurs, “Those who would roll in the gutter …”
Seventeen
TOGTHER WITH LEGGETT I rolled in the gutter last night. For two days the Abolitionist leaders have been attacked by mobs. Leggett wants to know who is inciting them. “I suspect the Whigs.”
“You always suspect the Whigs,” I said. Actually the movement to abolish black slavery in the south is deeply unpopular. It is not that New Yorkers so much like the institution of slavery as they dislike the sort of righteous people who want to abolish it.
We were in Centre Street, the heart of the Negro neighbourhood and close to the Five Points. Just opposite us was the Episcopal African church whose pastor the Reverend Peter Williams came out to greet Leggett.
The pastor feared that his church would be the next to suffer. He is a small black man with an insinuating voice, and a gift for politics. Understandably he was frightened. “They attack us when the ones they ought to be attacking are white radicals.”
“But surely you want slavery abolished in the south.” Leggett was the questioning journalist.
“I want it, Mr. Leggett, but I am not about to lend myself to violence, and that is what it will come to.”
As the streetlamps were lit in the spreading twilight, shutters began to slam up and down the street. Slam only to re-open a crack as the black population kept an eye out to see if the enemy was near. The enemy was. We could hear the sound of a drum’s irregular beat in the Five Points, of Irish voices raised in songs of the most bloodthirsty sort.
Friday evening a meeting of Abolitionists in the Chatham Street Chapel was attacked, and an attempt was made to kill the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan who are the leaders of the movement in New York. Luckily the Tappans were able to escape without injury. Lewis Tappan’s house, however, was burned down.
Last night it was rumoured that the mob was planning to make a clean sweep of every known Abolitionist by setting fire to their houses and their churches (most of these high-minded meddlers are clergymen; I have not Leggett’s enthusiasm for the movement). As it proved, the mob was not so ambitious. But they did attack the Episcopal African church.
The half-dozen policemen who had been called out to guard the church quietly vanished as the now familiar mob (I am beginning to recognise some of those b’hoy faces) came roaring toward us from the Five Points.
As the mob stormed the church, its pastor vanished into an alley. Windows were smashed. The door stove in. The pews thrown out the window and set afire in the street. They do hate the blacks, the poor who are white.
Flames appeared in the empty windows of the church. The bonfire of pews in the street cast a terrible glare over everything and everyone, including Leggett and me who were promptly recognised as not of the mob and so hostile. In an instant we were overturned—there is no other word for it—by a dozen demented-looking youths.
Soaked with mud and bloody chicken feathers (as luck would have it we were rolled in the gutter just in front of a poultry shop), we ran as fast as we could: not even the belligerent Leggett was willing to face that mob.
Since my boarding-house was closest, we went there; and while the landlady got us hot water, she swore that she too had been assaulted the month before—the word “assault” in her loose-toothed mouth carried with it the awful spectre of Sabine lewdness—by rioting stone-cutters.
“If I was the Mayor, I’d shoot every last one of them Abolitionists who is burning down the city.” Hating the Abolitionists, Mrs. Redman has, like so many simple people, confused them with their persecutors.
Leggett and I removed our be-feathered suits and handed them over to Mrs. Redman to clean; then, in our shirts, we washed up as best we could.
Leggett’s hands were not steady as he scrubbed at his shirt front. But then neither were mine. Yet I could not help but notice how heavily he was breathing and how the skin of his stocky bare legs resembled—well, the tallowy skin of a freshly plucked chicken. Chickens are still on my mind.
I found some Dutch gin and we toasted the Abolitionists. The hot night was filled with shouts and screams and the noise of glass breaking while through the open window we could see, over the dark rooftops, the pretty pink glow of a church burning in the next ward.
“The whole city could come to a stop.” By nature I am more alarmed than Leggett by the thought of anarchy.
“Unlikely.” Shirt unbuttoned, Leggett leaned back on the bed; his hairy muscular chest glittered with sudden new sweat. The lungs within are torn past mending. Conscious of the dying body on the bed, I looked away, embarrassed by death. Luckily he had no clue to what I was thinking. He takes for granted the blood he spits, the sudden chills, the sick sweating.
I showed Leggett certain of these pages and explained to him that I was, like it or not, assembling a memoir of Colonel Burr, in his own words. Leggett was delighted by the letter that established Burr’s presence near Kinderhook at the time of Mrs. Van Buren’s impregnation with the future vice-president.
“But that’s it, Charlie! He was there! You have the proof. What more do you need?”
For once I was able to laugh at Leggett. “We lawyers have different standards from you journalists. This is no proof. It is merely circumstantial.”
“But what circumstances!” Unconsciously Leggett was massaging his chest with an odd circular movement, as though trying to help the lungs do their work. “That letter as well as a few reminiscences from Colonel Burr on the subject of his protégé …”
“He hardly ever mentions him …”
“Well, that’s your fault. Be guileful. He wants vindication, doesn’t he? He as much as admits it to you and Davis. And he certainly wants to be thought a power to the end. So get him to tell you how he was the one who launched Matty Van in politics, how he was …” A sudden quick spasm, a contraction of the entire body stopped Leggett in mid-sentence. He gasped. Seemed to hold his breath. “No cause for alarm,” he mumbled at last. “But I will rest a bit.” He fell back onto my bed, and there remained in a drugged sort of sleep the entire night.
I curled up in a chair and wondered if I would find my guest alive in the morning.
Leggett woke me up. He was fully dressed and looked in perfect health. “It’s dawn. My wife’ll be worried. Thanks for the bed. Start on the pamphlet now. Right away. We must have it ready before the convention, before October. If you don’t feel up to writing it alone, we can do it together.”
Leggett was gone. It is July. How can I be ready in three months with so much unknown?
Eighteen
THE COLONEL IS HAVING second thoughts about his counter-suit. “Perhaps it is not the gentlemanly thing to do.”
I give no advice. Not that he wants it; he talks often to himself with me as mute audience.
“Yet it is a blow, that petition, as if I wanted to take her money. But then she thinks the rest of the world like herself. In her day she took money from everyone. From me. From Hamilton. And we never—I never—asked for it back.”
“Did Hamilton?”
But the Colonel did not hear me. “When that first French lover of hers turned her out, I gave her the money to keep her from debtors’ prison, and never asked for a penny back. But she is what she is. I am what I am.”
The Colonel stopped abruptly; pushed aside the various depositions on the baize-covered table.
“Let us turn to less weighty matters. Let us consider the home life of Massa Tom, in the autumn of 1795.”
Memoirs of Aaron Burr–Eight
DURING THE LAST SESSION of the Third Congress I led the battle in the Senate against ratification of Jay’s treaty with England. The treaty was clumsily drawn and to our disadvantage. It actually contained a clause forbidding us to export cotton in American ships. In effect, the treaty made us a colony again. It also revealed for the first time the deep and irreconcilable division between the Republican and the Federalist parties —and they were now actual political parties, no longer simply factions. One was pro-French;
the other pro-British. One wanted a loose confederation of states; the other a strong central administration; one was made up of independent farmers in alliance with city workers; the other was devoted to trade and manufacturing. One was Jefferson; the other Hamilton.
Since Hamilton’s forces in Congress outnumbered ours, the treaty was duly ratified. I was now accepted as not only first among the Republicans in the upper house (the equivalent to Madison in the lower) but also the leader—with Governor Clinton—of the party in New York state. Meanwhile, I had made a series of personal alliances: with Gallatin in Pennsylvania; with various Edwards cousins in Connecticut; with Jonathan Dayton in New Jersey; with Madison and (I thought) Monroe in crucial Virginia. I had also fought hard for the entrance into the union of Tennessee. This won me the friendship of that state’s first representative, who introduced himself to me outside Congress Hall.
“By the Eternal, Colonel Burr, I am your admirer for life!” Andrew Jackson was a handsome, fiery-tempered young man who tended to incoherence when passionate, which was much of the time. He used also to drool at the corners of his mouth, a disagreeable habit since overcome. Jefferson called him “the mad dog.”
I gave Jackson a fine dinner party but I don’t think he enjoyed the company as much as he did the wines. He disliked Congress and Congress reciprocated. Later Jackson resigned his seat, out of boredom I suspect. Although our friendship was to prove most useful to me in the election of 1800, six years later it was nearly fatal to him, poor man, when I was arrested for treason and he was named my accomplice.