by Gore Vidal
“Six years ago. And a forty-minute meeting yesterday at the City Hotel.”
“We’ll have to guess at what went on there.”
“Shall we say that they were planning to restore slavery to New York state?” I grow irritable with my task.
“You can say anything as long as it sounds reasonable, plausible. That is the beauty of anonymity.”
“But one ought not to lie, particularly about a man one admires.”
“Burr or Van Buren?”
“Guess?” I found myself disliking Leggett; myself more.
“You cannot hurt your friend the Colonel. He is used to slander. Besides, do your work well and he will never suspect you. Do your work well and we shall have Johnson in the White House.”
“A thrilling prospect. And what will you get out of it? Will you be collector of the port, or ambassador to England?”
“Virtuous, Charlie! I shall be virtuous, and a new world will begin, without slavery, without …” He made a speech.
Twenty-five
THE COLONEL CONTINUES to be in good spirits. As we prepared for today’s session, he remarked upon the death a few days ago of Genêt. “The last time I spoke to him, he told me that it was Jefferson who had convinced him that he should appeal directly to the people; that he should attack Hamilton and Washington openly, and by name. I wonder if Jefferson really gave him such malicious advice.”
The Colonel whittled at a seegar. Before him on the baize-covered table were arranged the usual newspaper cuttings, campaign tracts, letters.
We are now ready to deal with the Colonel’s vice-presidency. I am armed with pencil, pad; and an aching forefinger. I grip too hard the pencil. The true professional holds it lightly, saves himself.
“How is Mr. Van Buren?” I was bold. This business must end soon, one way or the other.
Burr blinked at me; bit his seegar; exhaled smoke. “I told Matty it was too public a place but he had no time to go elsewhere. What a clever man he is! I am continually awed by the neatness with which he accomplishes things. If only he could spell, knew grammar, didn’t have that uncouth Dutch accent. Your friend Leggett will support him, won’t he?” The Colonel has got the general range. But I hope no more.
“Well, he thought Mr. Van Buren’s position on slavery weak.”
“Matty will be impeccable on that subject come election day.” Burr put his feet up on the fire fender. “Matty flatters me shamelessly. He asks my legal advice. Imagine!”
And that is all I shall probably ever know about what transpired at the City Hotel. Will I have to invent something suitably sinister? I cannot say I much enjoy the manner of the political pamphlet. But at least I am now rich, and have Helen Jewett in a room back of the Washington Market.
She agreed last night to join me, “For a while anyway but we better not let Mrs. Townsend know. I’ve said I’m going to have a baby and leave it with my aunt who wants a baby—funny kind of aunt—but Mrs. Townsend seems to believe me and says she’ll take me back when I’m ‘restored,’ that was her word.”
Memoirs of Aaron Burr–Thirteen
SIX MONTHS AFTER our inauguration, Jefferson joined forces with the Clintons to eliminate me from politics not only in the nation but, rather more seriously, in New York state.
Young DeWitt Clinton was a formidable antagonist. Clever, drunken, ruthless, there was nothing he would not do to achieve his ends. First, he restored his uncle to the governorship. Then, coolly, through a series of amendments to the state constitution, he removed all power from the governor and bestowed it upon a council which was his creature. “The boy’s strong-minded, Colonel. Strong-minded.” George Clinton’s mouth worked nervously; thick tufted brows arched over small eyes. “There’s times he scares me half to death when he’s on the war-path.”
Clinton was indeed terrified of his nephew, and with good reason. In a matter of months, the young man had secured the state for himself by, among other things, the elimination of nearly every Federalist officeholder: in all, he made some 6,000 appointments, including that of himself to the United States Senate. I know of no conquest quite so total or so rapid as DeWitt Clinton’s annexation of New York. I do not think that it would have happened had I not been removed from the scene by the vice-presidency. No matter. At the age of thirty-three, DeWitt Clinton was master of the Republican party in the state of New York.
I cannot say that I look back on this period as entirely happy. I was in debt. I was trying unsuccessfully to sell Richmond Hill. Theodosia was at the other end of the world in South Carolina. Washington City was a depressing village set in a wilderness, and not even the best efforts of the Madisons to create a salon quite made up for the sense of constriction in that makeshift capital—tribute to Jefferson’s will.
One afternoon in March of 1802, I was at John Marsh’s bookstore in M Street when I heard a familiar voice asking for a novel. I turned and saw Hamilton, swiftly thumbing through a stack of English periodicals; no doubt committing them to memory at a glance!
As I approached him, he looked up; gave a start; then bowed deeply. “The Vice-President himself—and in the flesh.”
“I’m afraid there is too much of the latter …”
“And not enough of the former?” The response was sharp, as always. He, too, was heavier than in the past. We all were. It is my recollection of those days that we did almost nothing but eat and drink at Washington City.
Hamilton was in the city for “Litigation. What else? How lucky you are to be out of all that!”
“Considering my poverty, I wish I were into all of that.”
Mr. Marsh brought Hamilton the novel he had asked for. The commanding general of the American army placed a copy of the Anti Jacobin Review and Magazine around the book, hoping I had not noticed the title.
“Do you enjoy yourself?” Hamilton was most amiable, and though we were contemporaries I found myself responding to him the way older men did when he meant to charm: I played Achilles to his buoyant Patroclus.
“Tolerably. I am stern with my flock. I have, this session, forbade the eating of cakes on the floor of the Senate chamber. We already have rats as well as mice at every session. Apples are next for proscription.”
“You are so decorous, Vice-President!”
“Obviously I have found my proper place in life. Decorum is all that the position requires.”
Hamilton invited me to join him at the Union Tavern farther along M Street (are these places still there? it has been thirty years since I have set foot in Washington City).
Shivering in a cold wind, we walked briskly along the muddy Georgetown street. And it was a proper street unlike the cow-paths and uncharted woods of near-by Washington City—a capital, as one tactful foreign minister used to say, “of magnificent distances.”
As always, Hamilton tried to draw me out on the subject of Jefferson and, as always, I was not to be drawn out. I gave him only the idlest gossip. “The roof of the mansion leaks. The walls of the bedrooms are still unplastered. And Mr. Adams forgot to order a proper staircase between the floors, so the President must climb a sort of ladder when he goes to bed.”
“You visit there often?”
“Twice a month we dine and settle all the matters of the universe.”
Hamilton frowned; and wondered if I was lying. But I was not. Jefferson was eager that we maintain—socially—the appearance of amity.
The owner of the Union Tavern arranged two comfortable chairs for us on the stone hearth of the empty bar-room. Slaves worked the bellows; made the fire crackle; brought wine.
This was the first time I had been alone with Hamilton since the election. Before 1800, I had always thought of him as a friendly rival. Now I knew otherwise. Letters he had written about me had come my way. It seemed that every thought, whim, fancy that came into his irritable mind was sooner or later put in writing. I ought to have hated him, but did not. Some flaw in my nature has made me indifferent to slander—and thus much slandered? Certainly my in
difference seems to excite such attentions.
As I held up my glass, I repeated, somewhat mischievously, the toast I had made at the recent Federalist celebration of Washington’s birthday. “To the union of all honest men!”
Hamilton frowned; and did not drink. “Your attendance at our dinner was most … effective.”
“I merely stated the theme of this administration.”
“Others saw it as a deliberate bid for Federalist support.”
“Support for what?” I was as bland as if I had never seen a copy of Hamilton’s newspaper, the Evening Post (so superbly edited today!), nor read a single one of his current attacks on Jefferson, on me, on the entire Republican hierarchy.
“The President must have been startled by your appearance in the enemy camp.”
“But I was simply there as a guest, as the eminently neutral presiding officer of the Senate.”
“Neutral!” Hamilton had finished one glass of wine. He poured himself a second, and drank it down quickly. I noticed how unhealthy he looked. The usual rosy brightness looked curiously glazed while the small body was so unwholesomely bloated that the brass buttons of his waistcoat looked ready to burst free; in fact, one had broken its mooring and swung like a pendulum on the frayed thread. He, too, had been going through a bad time personally as well as politically.
I said what I had to say. “I was most sorry to hear of your son Philip’s death.”
Hamilton rubbed a hand across his features, as though to re-arrange them. But into what? For he looked no more sad, no more misty-eyed than before.
“Political faction …” He began; did not go on. Philip Hamilton had challenged a friend of mine at a theatre in New York. In the subsequent duel my friend shot and killed young Hamilton whose sister, Angelica, had gone mad. The girl had been a good friend to my Theodosia: at so many points did our lives touch one another in that small society.
“Do you not wish at times that you were free of political faction?” I could not resist the question.
“I am!” The answer was swift, and disingenuous. “I have got myself a farm some eight miles from the Bowling Green. For a disappointed politician, there is nothing like growing cabbages. Why, I would not give up my cabbages for an empire. I am like Domitian.”
“Diocletian.” I fear that Hamilton had only glanced at Gibbon while I had made the mistake of reading the master’s every word.
“What a scholar you are!” Hamilton looked to see if the novel he had set down on the table was still discreetly wrapped in the Anti Jacobin Review. Aware that my eye had followed his, he provided a distraction. He pointed to a print of General Washington and his mother, a popular engraving of the day. “That look of pain on the General’s face is most accurate.”
“I think the artist meant it to be one of filial devotion.”
“Then his error was on the side of accuracy. Poor General! How that woman made him suffer.” Hamilton regaled me with several anecdotes about the stormy relations between George Washington and his mother who attempted, on several occasions, to extort money from her glorious son. Then, quite carried away by indiscretion, he told me the “true” story of Jefferson’s resignation as secretary of state.
“You will recall that summer at Philadelphia, when the yellow fever struck and I nearly died?”
“I recall it most vividly.” Saw again Dr. Hutchinson’s bright red lips, bloodshot eyes, shambling gait, the noise of his retching beside my carriage.
“Shortly before I took ill, the President and I were discussing how best to eliminate Jefferson from the Cabinet …”
“Washington wanted him gone?” I had not known this.
“Most fervently. But most privately. It was our strategy that Washington must always appear above the battle, trying to mitigate the excesses of his two ministers. Actually Washington was a most bitter partisan. Particularly that summer. The Genêt business infuriated him …”
“And he thought that Jefferson was conspiring with Genêt?”
“How could he not? For months we had only one dream, the two of us, how best to restore Jefferson to the tranquil beauties of Monticello.”
“I should not have thought that hard to do. Jefferson wanted to go.”
“He had no intention of ever going home if I remained in Philadelphia. So it was then that the President and I devised our intrigue—oh, yes, Colonel, in a good cause even I will intrigue.”
“Do you mean to astonish me, General?”
Hamilton was amused. “Note how I said ‘good’ cause.”
“Duly noted.”
“After a Cabinet meeting where I had managed to distress Jefferson by attacking his democratic societies, the President took Jefferson aside and said, most sadly, in that grave tone with which he used to memorialize fallen comrades of the Revolution, ‘You know that we are to lose Mr. Hamilton at the end of the year. And you must help me to persuade him to remain. Otherwise I shall resign my office, and let Mr. Adams succeed to this dreadful place.’ Jefferson was horrified at the thought of Adams succeeding but delighted that I was going. He then ‘persuaded’ the President to remain in office, and promised to appeal to me. But of course he did not. He simply told me that he, too, was leaving.” Hamilton drank more wine. “The General was thrilled, if such a word can be used to describe so phlegmatic a man. ‘Naturally,’ he said to me, ‘I must now do my very best to persuade Mr. Jefferson to stay.’ To which I replied ‘Naturally’ and so the President drove out to Gray’s Landing and gave a splendid performance of a man deserted by his two principal supports. This, in turn, delighted Jefferson for whom any sort of betrayal is always a kind of ecstasy.” A swift look at me to judge response; none was visible. “So it was that Jefferson resigned as secretary of state and I remained in the Cabinet for one more year.”
“During which time Mr. Jefferson and I were able to create a republican party and win the late election.”
“During which time I was able to set this nation on sound financial principles. Now rapidly being undone.” I was treated to a discourse on Jefferson’s folly in abandoning the ‘sinking fund.’ When I pointed out that any leader who reduces taxes as Jefferson had done is apt never to be replaced in a republic, Hamilton’s response was, “Demagoguery! And as for that ridiculous speech of his …”
I am afraid that I, too, had laughed at Jefferson’s address to Congress (read by a clerk because Jefferson thought it “monarchical” to speak from the throne, as it were; actually, he simply dreaded speaking in public). Displaying a more than usual infelicity of style, Jefferson had written of “a conscientious desire to direct the energies of our nation to the multiplication of the human race, and not to its destruction.” This produced (for the wicked Vice-President at least) a vision of constant Dionysian revelry, interrupted only by much-applauded pregnancies.
Then Hamilton complimented me for my part in the debate on the Judiciary Bill. The Republicans had wanted to repeal the National Judiciary Act, thus eliminating those Federalist judges John Adams had created his last day in office. Although I disagreed with the Federalists who took the absurd line that Congress could not undo what it had done in the creating of judges, I did find it immoral, to say the least, to eliminate a score of judges simply because a new and hostile majority existed in Congress.
On a move to submit the bill to a vote, the Senate tied: fifteen Republicans to fifteen Federalists. As vice-president, I broke the tie in what appeared to be the favour of the Republicans. I wanted the bill to come to a vote because, with my friend Jonathan Dayton (the Federalist senator from New Jersey), I thought the whole matter should be referred to a select committee whose task it would be to review the entire judiciary system. I was aiming at reconciliation. When Dayton’s proposal came to a vote, the Senate again tied, and this time I broke the tie in a way that many thought favoured the Federalists. I sent the bill to committee for further review.
“I cannot imagine Jefferson forgiving you easily.” Hamilton’s voice was somewhat blurr
ed. He was never a heavy drinker yet at times drink seemed to go more rapidly to his head than to that of other men. Perhaps he was constitutionally frailer than any of us knew. I have often found that those who “recover” from the yellow fever are seldom again whole.
I was relieved when I heard the familiar clatter of Senator Gouverneur Morris’s wooden leg behind us. That exquisite gentleman was always most civil to me, although he hated the French Revolution and its American supporters. As our minister to France he had actually conspired to free Louis XVI. When this adventure failed, he consoled himself by buying up at bargain prices furniture from the royal palaces. Reverently, he would show his visitors the Queen’s fauteuil, the King’s chamber-pot.
“Dear God, the two of you in one room! I smell sulphur, brimstone. Excellence!” He gave me a mock court bow; gave his hand to Hamilton. “Mon Général.”
“We were reliving old times.” Hamilton had quite recovered himself.
Morris looked at the two of us most shrewdly. “You could do a lot worse, General. And you probably will.”
Hamilton was genuinely puzzled. I was not. I knew what Morris meant. “I don’t think,” I said, “that I am ever apt to be the Federalist candidate for president.” I was mild, realizing that every word I said would soon be repeated from one end of the country to the other.
“Is that what you intended, Mr. Morris?” Hamilton stared at the senator as if he had at that moment recognised in him the first sign of plague.
Morris sank into a chair beside the fire and I thought for a moment how like to one of the burning logs was his wooden leg. “Yes, General, that is just what I meant. We have no one. No one at all. And I will say this.” He looked at me. “If Colonel Burr had cast his first vote, breaking the tie vote in our favour, he would have been the unanimous choice for president of all the Federalists in Congress. As it is, thanks to the second vote, you have support, Sir. You have important support from our side.”
Hamilton’s face was—well, not a mask. One saw everything. The possibility that I might now become the leader of his party was a nightmare he could not wake up from fast enough. “Surely Colonel Burr has not changed so rapidly his Republican principles.”