Burr

by Gore Vidal

  “We cannot let them go free in their present state.” For the first time I detected a certain tentativeness in Jefferson. “How would they live? Who would look after them?” He sighed. “Yet it is wrong that half the population trample on the rights of the other half.”

  “Do you ever free your slaves?”

  Jefferson nodded. “I am about to lose an excellent cook. I told him I would let him go as soon as he teaches my new cook everything he learned with me in France.”

  “He is superb.”

  “I know. Unfortunately, he’s found an employer in Philadelphia who will pay me for his freedom.” Later I discovered that Jefferson never simply freed anyone. On occasion, however, he would allow those slaves who had found employment to buy their freedom, usually with money advanced by a future employer. But then the hundred or so men, women and children Jefferson owned at Monticello were his capital. Without them, he would have been unable to till the soil or to manufacture nails and bricks, to build and re-build houses, to write the Declaration of Independence. From all accounts, he was a kind master. Yet today I find it hard to reconcile the Jefferson whom the Abolitionist demagogues enjoy quoting with the slave-owner I saw at home in Monticello.

  It was of course Jefferson’s gift at one time or another to put with eloquence the “right” answer to every moral question. In practice, however, he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power. The Jefferson who denounced bills of attainder and outlawry when he prepared a draft for the Virginia constitution in 1783, five years earlier had declared it lawful for any person to pursue and slay one Josiah Philips, on a mere supposition of guilt. Later in life, Jefferson decided that, all in all, such writs were valuable.

  John Marshall once told me that much of the contempt he had for Jefferson derived from the illegal execution of Philips. “Either one respects due process of law,” said Marshall, “and the right of every citizen to a trial, or we live in a lawless jungle where any one of us might be the victim of a mad executive or even of a wrong majority. In a civilised society, you may not kill a man because you think him, as Jefferson thought so many people to be, a bad man.”

  Jefferson also believed that any soldier who used “traitorous or disrespectful words” against the authority of the United States or the legislature of any state was guilty of a crime. The monarchical Adams concurred, and this stern inhibition became a part of our military code in 1776, and was only expunged in 1806.

  Presently I shall deal with the Jefferson who brought me to trial for treason, who fabricated evidence, who threatened witnesses, all on the ground that we could not have won the Revolution “if we had bound our hands by the manacles of the law” and that there are “extreme cases where the laws become inadequate even to their own prosecution, and when the universal resource is a dictator, or martial law.” Startling to think that Hamilton thought of me as an “embryo-Caesar” at a time when Jefferson was that Caesar, born full-grown and regnant.

  But all this was ahead of us. On that pleasant hill-top we were allies. “Madison came to see me—with the bride you found him.”

  “My best work in the Third Congress.”

  “Madison is a new man, and perfectly content—he says—to go home for good.”

  “It will be bad for us if he does. With him gone from the House, and you from the Cabinet …”

  “There is only Aaron Burr to defend our interest at Philadelphia.” We were now at the edge of the slave cabins. Large women in gaudy dresses washed clothes in tubs. Children played in the dust. Over all presided the kindly figure at my side, glancing at me from time to time; yet whenever I tried to fix his hazel gaze, he would look away like some shy creature of the woods.

  It was time now for politics. “You know to what the Federalists owe their recent victory in New York …”

  “Hamilton!” It was a cry.

  “And the incompetence of Clinton,” I continued. “Which is why I leave the Senate after next year.”

  “That is the end of us in Congress!” He played at despair.

  I continued. “I plan to return to the state Assembly where I am certain that in two years’ time I can obtain a Republican majority.”

  “You believe such a majority is possible?” Unconsciously, he was clasping and unclasping his two large freckled hands—Pontius Pilate comes to mind (in retrospect!).

  “Yes. For one thing Clinton lost us New York rather more than Hamilton won it.” I stopped; became direct. “What are your political intentions?”

  “I am retired, my dear Burr. Look about you! I have more than enough work up here to last me the ten, the fifteen years of life left me.” Actually it was to be nearly thirty years. “The last thing I desire is to hold office.” I will not record the familiar speech. Washington, Jefferson and Madison gave it in one form or another at regular intervals throughout their political (and they had no other) lives.

  The retirement speech done with, we both continued as if he had not made it.

  I continued to the point. “Four years ago I stepped aside for Clinton, with Virginia’s assurance that in ’96 I would have their support for the vice-presidency.”

  “It seems to me,” Jefferson picked up from the dust a fallen horse-shoe and examined it with wonder, as if it were the first of its kind, “that Adams will succeed, easily, to Washington.”

  “It may not be such an easy succession.” I was able to tell him something he did not know. “Hamilton is secretly supporting Pinckney of South Carolina. Hamilton believes that Pinckney is manageable. Adams is not.”

  “Pinckney is not electable.” The dreamy tone was now very matter-of-fact.

  “I agree. But Hamilton will split the Federalists. That is our opportunity.”

  “Our opportunity?”

  I assume that you are still interested in the Republican movement.”

  “Yes, yes, but at a distance …”

  “And I assume that you will be our presidential candidate and that I will be—as we agreed—the vice-presidential candidate.”

  Jefferson tried to straighten the horse-shoe. “In all honesty, I would prefer Madison … for president,” he added quickly.

  “But Madison prefers you.”

  A swift bright glance to satisfy himself that Madison and I had indeed been in communication. “So he does. But I mean to be firm.”

  “Then I shall expect you to support Madison and me.”

  The horse-shoe, unstraightened, fell to the ground. “Whatever I can do, Colonel Burr, I will do.” The voice broke with feeling. We shook hands awkwardly.

  I spent a pleasant evening with him and his neighbours. He played his fiddle—not as badly as I had feared. At dawn I departed.

  “Whatever I can do, Colonel Burr, I will do.”

  Yes. Whatever Jefferson could do for himself he did! He was the Republican candidate for president and, as agreed, I was the vice-presidential candidate. In the electoral college Adams was elected president with seventy-one votes. Jefferson was elected vice-president with sixty-eight votes (in those days the man with the second most votes was automatically vice-president). Pinckney was third with fifty-nine votes, and I was fourth with thirty votes. On the face of it this was to be expected. But when I examined the way each state cast its votes, I learned that I had been given by Tennessee three votes, by Kentucky four, by North Carolina six, by Pennsylvania thirteen, by Maryland three, and by Virginia, by my good friends and allies, only one vote.

  “Whatever I can do, Colonel Burr, I will do.” I never trusted Jefferson again. But since we needed one another, I pretended to forgive.

  Later Madison tried to explain Jefferson to me. “Politically, he thinks you too independent. Personally, he fears a rival.”

  “He does not fear you.”

  “Because I am a part of him, and no rival.”

  “I am?”

  “He thinks you are, and so he is afraid of you.”

  “What should I do?”

  Madison simpl
y grimaced. Obviously there was nothing to be done with such a man. I shall never know—who will ever know?—what Madison really thought of his remarkable friend.

  Memoirs of Aaron Burr–Nine

  IN THE SUMMER of 1797 I was involved with Monroe and Hamilton in a curious affair of honour or perhaps it might better be termed an affair of curious honour. Five years earlier when Hamilton was creating his bank and otherwise moulding the republic, Jefferson suspected him of mismanagement at the Treasury. Jefferson persuaded John Beckley, the clerk of the House of Representatives, to conduct a private investigation of his enemy.

  I do not know all the ins and outs of the intrigue. I do know that at about this time an unsavoury speculator named James Reynolds was put into prison for having bought up at discount the arrears in pay of various Revolutionary soldiers. Apparently he knew in advance what value the Treasury planned to set on those arrears. As a result of this information, Reynolds was able to make a good deal of money before he went to prison.

  At Beckley’s suggestion, Congressman Muhlenberg and Senator James Monroe paid a visit on Reynolds who hinted that, once free, he could and would implicate Hamilton.

  The inquisitors next paid a call on Mrs. Reynolds, a good-looking, low woman who wept a lot; then showed them various slips of paper addressed to her husband, purportedly written by Hamilton in a “disguised hand.” So far there was no evidence of any kind. At this point I would have abandoned the chase and I think that Muhlenberg wanted to, but Monroe was dogged. Jefferson used actually to complain of Monroe’s honesty. “Turn him inside out, and you’ll find not a stain, not a stain!” He would shake his head with wonder.

  Monroe, Muhlenberg and a third congressman presented themselves to the Secretary of the Treasury and asked that great minister to explain his connection with James Reynolds.

  “If ever there was a guilty man it was that little Creole!” Even in retrospect, Monroe’s cold gray eyes shone with delight at the thought of Hamilton’s humiliation. “He was speechless. Just think! Hamilton speechless! Finally he said that he would receive us at his house that evening where, in private, he would tell us the truth.” Monroe’s sudden laugh, quite bereft of mirth, was always a chilling thing to hear.

  That evening Hamilton described with remarkable candour how a year and a half before Mrs. Reynolds had come to his house and asked him for aid. Although she was a stranger to him, Hamilton was moved by her story of a cruel husband from whom she wished to flee. Hamilton was also moved by her physical person—all his life he was attracted to women of the lowest class, among them my own dear wife Eliza Bowen. For the record, I was always attracted, when young at least, to older women while Jefferson liked only the sort of pretty woman who was safely married, preferably to one of his friends.

  To Monroe’s astonishment—and disgust—Hamilton then told how he had gone with money to In-Skeep’s boarding-house (a place so obviously devoted to sordid intrigue that one could only assume that it was this very sordidness which made him lustful), and there was received into the bed of Mrs. Reynolds

  “I tell you, Burr, I could not believe my ears! There we were in his wife’s parlour. Children’s toys on the floor …” Monroe shook his head. Hamilton then showed his inquisitors illiterate letters from Mrs. Reynolds. One letter said that her husband had discovered everything and meant to reveal what he knew to President Washington, to Congress, and to Mrs. Hamilton, in that order. The Secretary of the Treasury paid up. At first six hundred dollars. Then four hundred. He was properly bled at regular intervals for almost a year.

  So embarrassed and confused were the congressional investigators that they insisted on bringing to a close the confession.

  “I then made a report which we agreed not to release to anyone. And Hamilton swore the three of us to secrecy.” But of course Monroe immediately told Jefferson what had happened. Jefferson’s response was predictable. “Hamilton is corrupt,” he told me later. “Why else would he be so willing to plead guilty to adultery? He thinks it the greater sin, and so will divert attention from the lesser—which would end his career.”

  As soon as Adams and the Federalists came to power, they dismissed Beckley as clerk of the House. Wanting revenge, Beckley promptly gave to the gutter-journalist Callender his notes on the Reynolds-Hamilton affair.

  In June 1797, the full story of Hamilton’s adultery was published in an anonymous pamphlet, written by Callender from Beckley’s notes and paid for by Jefferson.

  A few weeks later, Monroe appeared at my house in New York where I was camping out. Theodosia was away; Richmond Hill had been stripped of furniture to pay creditors; I was a most lugubrious bachelor.

  Monroe was deeply agitated. “It is to be a duel, a duel!” He thrust his face downwards into mine, and I remarked to myself as always upon the deep cleft in his chin that made his face look so like an apple.

  “Hamilton has called you out?”

  Monroe sat with a heavy crash in a chair. Without asking, Alexis brought him brandy. He drank it down. “Hamilton came to see me yesterday. When I said I was in no way connected with this damned pamphlet, he called me a liar.”

  “Dear God!” Gentlemen do not speak to one another in this fashion unless prepared to die; such was our code of honour in those days. Despite a lifetime amongst the rich and well-born, Hamilton remained to the end a strange wild little boy thrust by his bastardy outside society, forced to rely on his beauty and wit to get himself what he wanted, usually from older duller men. I think this constant serving of others savaged his pride, made him eager to do others damage with pen, tongue—though never sword.

  “I want you to be my second in the duel.” Monroe poured himself more brandy; as Lord Stirling’s aide in the Revolution, he had learned, if nothing else, how to drink. But unlike the noble lord, he had also learned to keep his head since it is the aide who must put to bed the general and see that he is on his horse the next day.

  “I have every confidence,” said Monroe gravely, “in your judgement, honour and friendship to me.” I was deeply moved; quite forgot his role in denying me the vice-presidency five years earlier.

  “I accept, of course. But I think this matter can be resolved without relying on—what are the weapons?”

  “Pistols.” A slight sound, as if Monroe had difficulty swallowing.

  “For one thing, I am certain that Hamilton is not as eager to fire those pistols as we are.”

  Monroe looked at me gratefully as I maintained the myth of our eagerness to risk death on the field of honour. “It strikes me,” I continued, “that we must contrive a statement from you which he can accept …”

  “I have said all that I can say. I even gave him a written statement, reminding him that at the time of his confession we had simply accepted his word—without proof—that he had been guilty of adultery but not of speculation.”

  “In other words, you have practically accused him of lying to you.”

  “Not lying. I simply reminded him that we never demanded proof. We just let the matter drop.”

  I saw the solution. I drafted a message from Monroe to Hamilton, re-asserting his innocence in the matter of the Callender-Beckley (-Jefferson?) pamphlet, and stating plainly that when a gentleman says that he is telling the truth, another gentleman has no choice but to believe him. This was wisely double-edged. “If I know Hamilton, he will be delighted to avoid meeting you.”

  “Do you think so?” Monroe was unconvinced; no doubt saw himself dead on the Jersey Heights. Who does not respond in this way to the prospect of a duel?

  I arranged to meet Hamilton at Captain Aorson’s tavern in Nassau Street. The good “captain” was with me in Quebec and so enamoured was he of our gallant youth that his tavern used always to be nearly empty, for strong men feared his reminiscences and fled rather than hear again how he stormed Quebec, marching between—so he tells it—Montgomery and me. Since I was actually at Quebec, I was spared his memories and so could enjoy the pleasant room undisturbed.

&nbs
p; I arrived first, set myself in a quiet corner of the tap-room; ordered tent, a Spanish claret I was partial to in those days (before I understood true claret).

  Hamilton appeared a few minutes later, bright as always; a trifle plumper than when he had been in office.

  “What a terrible business, my dear Burr! Terrible!” He sat beside me; drank tent, too, with—I noticed—a shaking hand. It was difficult to determine who was the more nervous, Monroe or Hamilton. “You know how much I disapprove of duelling!”

  “No, I did not know. I recall that you challenged Charles Lee and lately Commodore Nicholson, and now you are challenging James Monroe.”

  “But what’s to be done? You’ve seen the libels your Republican friends have written about me.”

  I told him then how Monroe had assured me on his word of honour that he had not broken his promise to Hamilton.

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then who is responsible for what was published?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Massa Tom?” Hamilton’s loathing of Jefferson was palpable in his voice.

  “It is pointless to speculate. My only interest, frankly, is preventing a duel between you and Monroe.”

  “I called him a liar to his face.” Hamilton was unexpectedly remorseful for one who regarded himself as always in the right and thus able to say whatever he pleased, no matter how libellous.

  “That was foolish of you.”

  “You honestly do not think him a liar?” Hamilton had immediately seen his way out of the trap, and I helped him to safety. I showed him Monroe’s statement. He glanced at it (Hamilton read more rapidly than any man I have ever known). He frowned. He smiled. The storm had passed. “I can accept this statement.”

  “I’ll discuss the details with your second.”