Burr

by Gore Vidal

  “No, he has not.” I made light of the matter. “But it is my fault to see both sides to every matter.” This was demure if not entirely true.

  “Yes. He is a gentleman, you see.” I don’t know what Morris intended for Hamilton to make of that perhaps pointed remark.

  “ ‘We are all republicans, all federalists,’ ” I quoted.

  “But,” said Morris, “we are not all of us Virginians, are we?” Since no response from me was safe, I excused myself, realizing that Hamilton must now redouble his efforts to remove me from the scene.

  Fortunately for Hamilton he had the aid of DeWitt Clinton, as well as of the journalist James Cheetham who was inspired by Jefferson to attack me at regular intervals in the New York Citizen, and from a Republican standpoint. As Jefferson used Callender to bring down Hamilton, he now used Cheetham to destroy me. According to Cheetham I had tried to take the presidency away from Jefferson.

  My friends rallied round. John Swartwout fought a duel with DeWitt Clinton, and was wounded. As “Aristides,” William Van Ness wrote a splendid polemic in my favour. I even allowed friends to bring a suit for libel against Cheetham. New York state was in a turmoil. Yet I did not think my cause hopeless. I was reasonably certain that I could be elected governor at the next election, despite Jefferson and the Clintons on the one hand, despite Hamilton on the other.

  Meanwhile, I presided over the Senate. I also dined quite frequently with the President who continued to delight and fascinate me with his conversation, not to mention his wonderful malice which was positively Shakespearean in its variety.

  Twenty-six

  LEGGETT CAME TO SEE ME and Helen in our rooms just opposite the market. In the evening light the torn wall-paper looked almost new and the dusty furniture (Helen refuses to clean anything except herself) made a good impression.

  “Such opulence, Charlie!” Leggett bowed over Helen’s hand. “Such romance!” She rewarded him with her deepest scowl. I do not think he has been with her. She says not. It is curious that the more I see of her, the more she interests me. Yet the reverse ought to be the case.

  We sat in the small parlour and looked out over the river: a view of ship masts in the foreground and Paulus Hook in the distance. Despite the summer heat, we ate a good deal of roast beef (Helen cannot—will not—cook and so buys her roasts already prepared). For half the dinner she talked most agreeably; then fell silent as a strawberry pie was passed about.

  Leggett got down to business. He has now read all my notes on the Burr–Van Buren connection. “We have more than enough.” He was delighted.

  In the shadowy room I could not make out his face (for reasons of economy we never light more than a single lamp). Flies finished our dinner for us despite Helen’s languorous banishing waves of the hand.

  Leggett made a few notes in the dark: the play reviewer’s knack.

  “You are certain I have enough to go on?”

  “What you don’t have, you must invent. You have studied the manner?”

  “Yes. By the way, did your Senator Johnson really kill Tecumseh?”

  “We always say he did. I advise you to see the new five-act drama Tecumseh in which Senator Johnson is impersonated by an actor who wears the very same uniform Johnson wore when he struck down the turbulent Indian chief. Who is that?” Leggett gave a sudden start as he noticed a tall bosomy figure in the dark corner.

  “Mrs. Cotswold,” said Helen. “It’s her dummy. I’m making her a dress.”

  “Very slowly.” I was incautious. Helen is touchy about her slowness with the needle. She cannot sustain effort for any length of time. But when she does at last finish the work, the result is admirable according to her few but patient customers.

  I gave Leggett a draught of the pamphlet which I have been at work on for several days. “I’ll take it with me. I’ll give it the Leggett touch.”

  “Should we give Van Buren a black mistress to match your friend Johnson’s two black girls?”

  “That would be obvious.” Leggett was amused. “Give him an Indian paramour.”

  “A sister of Tecumseh?”

  “No. Mrs. Tecumseh. The raddled squaw herself.”

  “I knew an Indian girl once.” Helen was dreamy. “She had two scalps she kept under her pillow. One was blond and one sort of brown-colored. She said her father took them off two soldiers. She thought the world of those two scalps. It certainly gave some of her visitors a turn.” Helen chuckled in the darkness.

  I do not allow myself to think of what will happen when the Colonel reads what I have written. Perhaps I should vanish first. Leave Helen. Sail for Europe. Leave Helen? No. Sail for Europe together? Why not?

  Twenty-seven

  THE COLONEL COMPLAINS of the heat. Most unusual for him. “It is Monmouth Court House all over again.” He mops his brow. “And it’s only July. What will August bring?”

  The office is at a stand-still. Madame’s action for divorce moves on its stately way through the courts. Mr. Craft has vanished into the depths of Pennsylvania. We are alone. The city is empty.

  The Colonel is restless. Opens and shuts windows. Arranges papers on his desk. Suddenly goes to a cupboard and takes down a pistol. Is it the one?

  “No. The pistols for our interview were supplied by Hamilton. But this is a close duplicate.”

  I find the pistol heavy but beautifully balanced as it rests on the palm of my hand.

  “I have never liked fire-arms.” The Colonel is unexpected. “In the Revolution I used a sabre.” He takes his seat at the baize-covered table. Moves papers about. Shows me a newspaper cartoon of Jefferson and himself. Jefferson is holding a knife that he is about to thrust into the Colonel’s back. From the Colonel’s mouth appears a balloon containing the words “I have complete trust in Mr. Jefferson’s policies.”

  Burr laughs as he reads aloud the words. “Actually I was not exactly a lamb brought to slaughter. More a snared eagle. And what a trap they laid for me.” He lights a seegar. Puffs smoke furiously. Then he puts down the seegar with an odd expression: “A poor grade of tobacco. It is close in here.”

  I am grateful to be spared the smoke that usually leaves me with aching head and watery eyes.

  Memoirs of Aaron Burr–Fourteen

  BY THE END of 1803, I realized that between the Clintons in New York and Jefferson at Washington, my political career was drawing to a close.

  Madison avoided me, sorrowfully I rather thought. Dolley, however, continued to be friends with Theodosia, and occasionally warned her of what Jefferson was about. Dolley was torn between friendship for me (not to mention gratitude: she was the only woman I have ever known with that cranial bump) and the necessity of pleasing the leader of our party and the fount of honour, for already it was assumed that once Jefferson’s second term was completed, the secretary of state Mr. Madison would succeed to the presidential chair.

  My presence in Washington, though constitutionally necessary, was a source of embarrassment to the Administration. Only Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin had the courage to defend me in Jefferson’s presence. “You are doing yourself great harm, I said to zee President.” Gallatin’s French accent was much imitated by his detractors, among them Hamilton who at one point actually attacked-the Republican party for being led by a “foreigner”—this from the West Indian who had for so long led the Federalists! But Hamilton was quite irrational the last year or two of his life, devoting much of his time to the creation of a Christian Constitutional party dedicated to Jesus and to Federalism, two elements not normally mixed.

  “But zee President is adamant. He wants you gone from political life.”

  “Does he ever say why?”

  “You know him. He never ceases to say why and yet never says anything.” Gallatin’s response to Jefferson was always somewhat ambivalent. He was one of the first to recognise that Jefferson was the master politician of our age. He also realized that Jefferson’s limitations must be minimized in an administration that wanted no army, no
navy, no trade, and no taxes. Wisely Jefferson left to Gallatin anything which had to do with finances. The resulting success of Jefferson’s first term was entirely the work of Gallatin who indeed eliminated taxes, insuring Jefferson’s re-election and the continuance of the Virginia junto. In fact, as the first term ended, the only spectre on the bright horizon of Virginia’s dominance of the nation was Vice-President Burr.

  In January of 1804, I requested a private meeting with Jefferson.

  Through a thin rain, I rode across the ragged yard in front of the President’s House. Gave the reins of my horse to an indolent black boy. Made my way through the red mud which affected to be a carriage drive. Climbed the “temporary” wooden steps to the front door. Pulled the bell; it did not work. Tried the handle. The door was warped. I gave it a satisfying kick and found myself in the freezing entrance hall.

  A black slave in ill-fitting livery greeted me, and led me to the President’s office. The interior of the “palace” was bare and full of echoes, and icy cold. The celebrated East Room was still unfinished, although Jefferson had recently used it to give shelter to the largest cheese ever made in the United States. This odoriferous miracle of American inventiveness most appropriately furnished that noble chamber until the electorate finally ate it.

  The President had made himself a library-cabinet opposite the public dining-room, and here I found him seated at a long table covered with correspondence, books, maps, gardening tools, and a mocking-bird which, despite all of the President’s requests both verbal and whistled, refused that day to emit so much as a single note.

  Jefferson wore a heavy dressing-gown, a red stained waistcoat and much-worn slippers; his shirt front betrayed the breakfast eggs. “It is my fate,” he said, “to live in unfinished houses.”

  “Better to build than to inherit.”

  “I think so. But the inconvenience …” He sighed. Then he motioned for me to sit opposite him at the table. Between us lay an unfurled map of the Floridas.

  Aware that I had seen it, Jefferson declared, “It is our view that the Floridas are an integral part of the recent purchase of Louisiana. Certainly West Florida to the Perdido River is ours.” Jefferson talked for some time of his famous acquisition. He had every reason to be pleased with his remarkable good luck. I say good luck because if the slaves of Santo Domingo Island had not overthrown their masters, Bonaparte would not have been forced to commit a vast amount of money and troops to the pacification of that island at a time when he was on fire to begin the conquest of Europe. Jefferson bought Louisiana for fifteen million dollars from Bonaparte, who was desperate for cash, thus doubling the size of the United States (and blithely violating the Constitution in the process).

  Jefferson unrolled the map of the Louisiana Territory. He was jubilant. “And to think it is only a beginning.”

  “But what a beginning!” I noticed how deep the lines were about his mouth; how the dull red hair was going white beneath the powder.

  “But we must obtain the Floridas. Together with Canada and Cuba our empire will then be safe, and freedom extended.”

  I asked him when Louisiana would be granted statehood.

  Jefferson shrugged. “The people there are not like us, you know. Why, only one in fifty speaks English. And of course they are like children when it comes to self-government.” He tapped a thick despatch. “An agent reports that the lawyers of New Orleans are not only opposed to the principle of trial by jury but to habeas corpus, too.” He shook his head.

  “Are they opposed to union with us?”

  “How could they be opposed? How could anyone not want freedom?” At length Jefferson discussed the constitution he was writing for the lucky “children” whose territory he had just divided in two: the populous southern part to be called Orleans; the empty part Louisiana. We spoke of possible governors for these two territories. At that time a Virginian named Claiborne was governor of Orleans but his appointment was thought to be temporary. Claiborne was one of those representatives who supported Jefferson when the presidential election went into the House; some thought he might have supported me had I offered him high office. The name of the Marquis de Lafayette had recently been put forward as a Louisiana governor but Jefferson thought this “an impractical notion.”

  I proposed Andrew Jackson who had the support of the westerners in Congress. “Jackson? Good God, no! He is much too … contentious a man. Too violent. He would have us at war with Spain in a month.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” After all, Jefferson had once been ready to go to war with Spain in the matter of the Creek Indians.

  “If war comes it must be by design not by blunder.” Jefferson was cautious. “I do not trust Jackson. Any more than I trust the Creoles of New Orleans.” Jefferson made it plain that he was in no hurry to extend to the 50,000 souls he had just bought any of those freedoms which he had once insisted must be enjoyed by all mankind, or at least by the white inhabitants of the eastern American seaboard at the time of the Revolution.

  That seaboard was also on his mind. “I hear most disquieting news from Massachusetts and New Hampshire.” He looked out the window at the gun-metal gray sky, as though the very elements were collusive. “Did you know that there are actually Federalists in those states who would break up the union?”

  “They will make no move without New York.”

  “That is wise of them, isn’t it?” He gave me a side-long glance. When I made no response, he began to fiddle with his copying machine. This was an infamous contraption involving two pens. As you wrote with one pen, the other made an exact copy of what you were writing. In theory, this made a secretary unnecessary. In practice, Jefferson had work not only for a secretary but for a mechanic since the machine was almost always broken.

  Jefferson placed a sheet of paper beneath each pen and, rather gloomily, started scribbling. “You know of New York matters,” he said, knowing rather more than I did through the Clintons. “Does Hamilton support the dismembering of our union?” Eagerness—no other word could describe the expression that passed across his face.

  “No. He is opposed.”

  “Curious.” Jefferson was absently signing his name. To his surprise the machine was now, perversely, making fair copies of that celebrated autograph. He brightened noticeably.

  “Since your acquisition of Louisiana, many New Englanders would prefer two nations. One centred on the Atlantic. The other on the Mississippi.”

  “In principle I quite agree with them.” Jefferson was serene. “After all, both nations would still be American.”

  “Except that one would be slave-holding, and the other free.”

  Jefferson changed the subject. “I am told, Colonel, that you are now a grandfather.” We discussed Theodosia’s son, Aaron Burr Alston, and we discussed the President’s daughters and grandchildren. We discussed old age. Jefferson was then about sixty and did not think it likely that he would survive a second term (assuming that the people would again honour him, et cetera). I said, most sincerely, that he would bury us all. I did not of course let on that I realized it was his intention to bury me as soon as possible.

  I came to the point. “It is plain to me that you have made other arrangements for the vice-presidency next year …”

  “I assure you, Colonel, that I have made no arrangements.” One of the few good things Monroe ever said was “Jefferson’s insincerity is always spontaneous; it is never contrived.”

  “I am passive in these matters as you know.” Jefferson was studying the map before him. “No, that is not absolutely true. I confess that I was active on your behalf during the last election. You had impressed upon me the necessity of Virginia’s support for your candidacy. And so I broke my usual rule and exerted myself on your behalf. But I did nothing elsewhere for you or for myself.”

  I let this nonsense go unremarked. “It is said that you have already decided on a vice-president.”

  Jefferson looked at me with true surprise. “I have arranged nothing,
Colonel. In due course a Republican caucus will meet, and they alone will decide …”

  “… and since public opinion will not allow you to make a fellow Virginian vice-president, it is said that you will replace me with another New Yorker, with Governor Clinton.”

  “I have not discussed this matter with Governor Clinton …”

  “Mr. Jefferson, I am willing to withdraw as gracefully as possible. But we must be candid with one another. Three years ago, I came to this place wanting to support you personally and politically. Yet from the beginning I have been sensible of your … disaffection for me. I do not know its cause. I have been told that you believe I tried to deny you the presidency. Yet I am certain that you cannot believe such a thing to be true for the excellent reason that you know that had I wanted the presidency I could have been elected on the first ballot with the aid of my friend Mr. Bayard of Delaware. Instead I forced him to give me up, and then I forced him to take you up, and here you are, Sir. And here I am.”

  I suddenly realized that it was an old man’s face that looked at me across the maps of empire. Wrinkled and pale with a petulant look about the slit of a mouth—the only relic of youth the amber brilliance of eyes that now glared at me with perfect hatred.

  “Colonel.” The weak voice cracked with emotion. “I do not accuse you of ever being party to any plot to deny me what the people wanted me to have. But at times I have entertained certain doubts as to your republican principles. Your votes in the Senate have made me uneasy while your toast at the Federalist dinner …” Jefferson made his case; and it was nothing, as he knew.

  “My votes in the Senate were based on the merits of certain legislation. My toast ‘to the union of all honest men’ was simply a feeble echo of your own inaugural address.”

  “No doubt there have been misunderstandings on both sides …”