Burr

by Gore Vidal

  Thirty

  I TOOK SAM SWARTWOUT at his word and went to him for help. He received me at the Tontine Coffee House where he holds court every afternoon. With him was Mordecai Noah, recently his aide at the Port of New York.

  Noah recalled me pleasantly. Spoke at length of the Indians who are, he maintains, a lost tribe of Israel.

  “Why else would I—of all people—have joined Tammany?” On this fantastical note, he departed.

  “Well, how do you like poking about in our old cupboards?” Swartwout drinks Spanish wine by the hour; and is not always coherent. Worse luck for me.

  “He’s a great man, the Colonel is. And his life has been the greatest waste. You ought to hear General Jackson on the subject. ‘By the Eternal, the ablest man in all our political life!’ ”

  “Then why doesn’t the President pay the Colonel the money owed him from the Revolution?”

  “He don’t dare. Don’t dare do anything for the Colonel. Told him so quite frankly when he came through town last year.”

  “They met?” The Colonel has never so much as hinted at a meeting with the President.

  “I was in the room.” Swartwout winked. Called for more wine. “You see, Old Hickory—like me—is by way of being a protégé of the Colonel.”

  “Out west?”

  “Out west. And before. Ever since Tennessee came into the union, thanks to the Colonel who was in the Senate then. Old Hickory was the first congressman from the state and the first call he made when he got to Philadelphia was on Senator Burr.”

  Is this true? I don’t know. I am simply taking it all down.

  I asked what the Colonel’s intentions were in Mexico but all that Swartwout would say was, “They arrested me. Did you know that? I was dragged around in chains for months. Massa Tom wanted to prove us all traitors. But if there was any traitor it was him not us.” Swartwout’s reminiscences then became somewhat disconnected. Finally, I asked him if we might meet some morning, and he said that he would be delighted. “Anything to be useful—to the Colonel, that is.”

  Before I left, I asked, “What was it that General Hamilton said of Colonel Burr that was so ‘despicable’? That made him fight the duel?”

  Swartwout gave me a long look from bloodshot eyes. “Don’t you know?”

  “No. And the Colonel won’t tell me.”

  “I suppose he would not. An ugly story, and it was typical of Hamilton to spread it about.”

  “What did Hamilton say of the Colonel?”

  “Why, he said that Aaron Burr was the lover of his own daughter, Theodosia.”

  Not until I was half-way home did I begin to wonder whether or not what Hamilton had said might, after all, be true.

  “He loved no one else!” Madame’s voice was shrill in my memory.

  Thirty-one

  YESTERDAY AFTERNOON MR. CRAFT and I were sent for by Mrs. McManus, “as I am most worried,” she wrote. “The Colonel has had the stroke, and cannot move.”

  We took the ferry across to Jersey City. The day was cloudy, windy, prematurely equinoctial.

  “He has a strong frame,” observed Mr. Craft.

  “But he is seventy-eight,” I said.

  I stared at the gulls. Mr. Craft stared at a group of Irish workmen. Though it was not eight o’clock in the morning, they were passing round bottles of whiskey. I wish I could regard them with the same long view the Colonel does. One day we were standing outside the court-house with a group of lawyers who were arguing a constitutional point. Finally, a lawyer appealed to Colonel Burr who was watching with his usual delight a near-by building site swarming with Irish workmen. The Colonel gave his opinion.

  The lawyer disagreed. “Your view, Sir, is not that of the current expounders of our constitution …”

  “My dear Sir,” and the Colonel pointed at the Irish, “they are the current expounders of our constitution.”

  One of them, Jane McManus, opened the door of a small frame-house not far from the Jersey City landing. She was plump with a good-humoured face soiled by recent weeping.

  “Oh, gentlemen, I thought he was good as dead, I did, when I came in with some tea for him and he was lying on the floor with his eyes wide open and not breathing. Well, then I called for our doctor, and he wasn’t to be found. Are they ever? Then at sundown the Colonel opens his eyes—he’s on the sofa now where the new maid and I put him—and he opens his eyes suddenly and he says, ‘Am I dead?’ and I says, ‘No, Colonel, you are alive and with me here in Jersey,’ and he says, ‘my native shore’ or something like that, always that little smile of his and then he tells me he can’t move … can’t move!”

  She wept for a time and Mr. Craft looked at her sternly until she stopped. I looked at an engraving of—yes, George Washington and his mother! Could the Colonel have bought it to remind himself of the conversation with Hamilton? Or does he perhaps spin his web of memory from the sights about him?

  Done with her sobbing, Jane McManus showed us into the parlour where the Colonel reclined on a horsehair sofa, a blanket drawn up to his chin. He seemed cold despite the heat of a Franklin stove. On the table beside him was a stuffed bird beneath a dirty glass bell (a mocking-bird?). I grow suspicious.

  “Gentlemen.” The voice was weak. “It seems that I am paralyzed below the waist.”

  “But in good health, Colonel!” boomed Mr. Craft.

  Burr winced—with pain? or simply at the idiocy of Mr. Craft. “Yes, Mr. Craft, I am in tip-top shape, saving the fact that I cannot walk.”

  “But, Colonel, you will, you will! Remember last time?”

  “It’s different this time,” said Miss McManus. “The doctor said he’s had a proper stroke. And he’s not our usual doctor but one from across town who I found at the chemist’s by chance.”

  “Most lucky,” murmured the Colonel. “A natural healer who told me that at my age and with my medical history I should have been translated to a higher sphere at the first sign of headache.”

  “What was it like?” I fear that this was my first response. At least it amused him.

  “Ever the alert biographer! Well, Charlie, it was like nothing at all. I was reading. I had a mild headache. Nothing unusual. Then I suddenly felt dizzy. Got to my feet—apparently for the last time …”

  “Colonel, don’t say that!” cried Jane McManus.

  “Then I found myself falling comfortably through the air. Such a pleasant sensation, I thought to myself, as slowly the carpet rose to gather me to its cheerful Persian bosom. I go out just like a light, I thought. And so went out. Now I’ve been turned on again, at half-flame.”

  “What shall we do?” Miss McManus appealed to us as if the Colonel was not there.

  “I shall tell Mrs. Burr …” Mr. Craft began.

  “You will do no such thing!” The old voice was firm. “What you will do is find me lodging in New York. Near the office. I intend to go on as before.”

  “Yes, Colonel. And we have a lot of work to do.” That was my tonic for him; it had a good effect.

  “Indeed we have. That is why I want to be moved to the other side no later than Sunday.”

  “Oh, no!” wailed Miss McManus.

  But the Colonel’s “Oh, yes” settled the matter. We were commissioned to find him rooms in a boarding-house. Meanwhile, his cases pending would go forward as if nothing had happened.

  “In fact, I would appreciate it if you were not to mention that I have had a stroke. Simply say that an old war-wound confines me to a chair.”

  So that is what we have been saying for several days now. But Leggett knows the truth and to-night told me I had best hurry up and extract what I can on the subject of Van Buren. Leggett is uncommonly cold-blooded. But then he is dying, too.

  Thirty-two

  TODAY WAS THE COLONEL’S first day in New York. Since we have not yet found him a proper lodging, he stops for the present at Reade Street. Mr. Craft has found a German woman to act as nurse, and a cot has been made up for her in the room next to tha
t of the Colonel, who regards her sombrely: he would prefer a man to look after him for the stroke has made him incontinent, but Mr. Craft’s enthusiasm for Frau Witsch has so far carried the day.

  Until noon the Colonel received clients, and for a time we thought that our fiction about the old war-wound was a success. But just as Frau Witsch was helping the Colonel to eat a heavy vegetable soup, a large thin figure appeared in the doorway. Dressed in sooty black and clutching an equally sooty book, our visitor pointed a bony finger at Burr and screamed, “Repent! Repent! Greatest of sinners! Murderer and traitor! Repent for thy moment of judgement is now at hand!”

  The demented dominie was treated to the Colonel’s most benign and courtly manner. “So good of you to be concerned, my dear reverend …”

  “On your knees, sinner! Pray! Pray with me that God save your infamous soul!”

  “It is my daily prayer.”

  “On your knees, sinner!”

  “That is not, alas, practical.” The Colonel turned to me. “I do believe, Charlie, that the reverend father has forgot where the door is.”

  Frau Witsch and I then seized the maniac and hustled him out of the office. He resisted us like one inspired by God but by a so-so Mormonite kind of God: one got the sense that he had been ejected rather easily from more than a few sinful places.

  Colonel Burr sighed. “It is the same as the last time I was ill. Every preacher in the city wants the honour … no, the glory, the heavenly glory of helping me out of this vale of tears and into Heaven—or worse. Apparently their fee is paid no matter how my case is disposed of.”

  Done with eating soup, the Colonel sends Frau Witsch away with a speech of appreciation in Dutch. She responds in German, and leaves us alone.

  The Colonel is philosophic. “I can face death with some ease. I believe that I shall be able to face God with equanimity. But deliver me from his earthly agents!” Burr shudders; then motions for me to re-arrange his legs on the sofa where he half-reclines, pillows at his back. From the waist up the Colonel is fully, even formally dressed; below he wears only his long shirt, and the blankets that swathe his disabled limbs.

  Memoirs of Aaron Burr–Sixteen

  AFTER HAMILTON’S DEATH, I remained at Richmond Hill for ten days. I confess that I was not prepared for the response to our interview. Apparently no one had ever fought a duel in the whole history of the United States until Aaron Burr invented this diabolic game in order to murder the greatest American that ever lived (after George Washington, of course). Over night the arrogant, mob-detesting Hamilton was metamorphosed into a Christ-like figure with me as the Judas—no, the Caiaphas who so villainously despatched the godhead to its heavenly father (George Washington again) at Weehawk, our new Jerusalem’s most unlikely Golgotha.

  I confess that I was deeply and permanently disgusted by the extent and the variety of my countrymen’s hypocrisy. Ninety per cent of our newspapers were Republican and so had devoted the better part of two decades to the vilification of Alexander Hamilton. Therefore, it was with some wonder that I read in their pages of the saintly Hamilton’s martyrdom at my wicked hands. I confess that during those days immediately following Hamilton’s death, I ceased to want to live amongst such a people.

  I did receive encouraging messages from a number of gentlemen who could not be regarded as friends. Among them was George Clinton who despatched a verbal message to me by way of Matt Davis. “You are perfectly innocent of any crime since the bastard Hamilton was under no obligation to meet you.”

  This was the private view of every gentleman in the country. How could it be otherwise? From DeWitt Clinton to Andrew Jackson, from Henry Clay to John Randolph, a large number of our leaders have been involved, like it or not, in similar affairs of honour. But no gentleman came to my defence in public. Hamilton had seen to that, for he had most shrewdly written a number of letters for posterity (where, apparently, one is never under oath: ab mortuis nihil veritas). So incensed was public opinion that a New York coroner’s jury indicted me for murder—in New Jersey!

  On July 21, I ordered a barge to take me from Richmond Hill. As my trunks were put on board, I said good-bye to The Little Band. We did our best to keep up our spirits, despite rumours of a mob with a rope in near-by Greenwich Village.

  Suddenly we were startled by a loud cry. Then a black woman appeared from behind the slave cabin nearest the water’s edge (where Martha Washington kept ice). It was Old Mary, a fixture at Richmond Hill.

  “You won’t ever come back, Colonel! Ever!” Old Mary wept and kissed my hand as she had kissed the hands of the two previous tenants Washington and Adams. But she was wrong. I came back to Richmond Hill last year and for fifty cents sat in the gallery and watched an indifferent tragedy. But, in a way, Old Mary was right. I never did come back to her Richmond Hill—or to mine. Today nothing but the shell of the house is left. The Minetta Brook, the farm, the park, the leafy river-side—all are now built-up and thoroughly John Jacob Astorized.

  But I had no such presentiments when the barge finally departed for Staten Island at about ten o’clock in the evening. I recall only a marvellous summer night. Huge stars in a black sky. The soft slow sound of the Hudson River all about me. Despite the danger I was in, I was at peace—like a ghost released from an unwanted body, or like an image freed from a shattered mirror: Hamilton was dead, and I was not.

  I stopped the next day with a friend at Perth Amboy, and then moved on to Philadelphia where I was remarkably well-received, despite the ferocity of the newspapers.

  I stayed at the house of my friend Charles Biddle, and a pleasant time we had, living the life of two bachelors (his family had left the city for the summer).

  Presently we were joined by the husband of Charles Biddle’s cousin Ann: the illustrious commanding general of the army of the United States, Brigadier-General James Wilkinson. Yes, it was my old friend from Cambridge and Valley Forge and, most recently, New York City where Jamie had come to see me in May in order to convince me that now that my career in eastern politics had been so thoroughly disposed of, glory awaited me at the west. Combined with him, I might again be what I was before the fatal contest with Jefferson and the Virginian junto.

  Wilkinson and I sat up late one night in the comfortable library of the Biddle house (our host had tactfully withdrawn), and as Philadelphia’s famous flies buzzed in the summer night, occasionally immolating themselves in the bright lamps, Jamie described to me the situation at the west. “Our people hate the Spanish. They want to drive them out of Mobile, out of the Floridas, out of Mexico. They’re sick of Massa Tom, too. Sick of the easterners. Sick of having to truckle to the Dons. All they lack is a leader, Burr. All they lack is you.”

  Jamie guzzled port. He bore not the slightest resemblance to the boy general I had known at Valley Forge. For one thing he had designed himself a uniform calculated to make a Napoleonic marshal look drab as a Jesuit. For another the stocky youth of the Revolution was now being impersonated by a fat, soft man with loose jowls and a concentrated fierce gaze, rather like that of a sow about to cannibalise her piglets. The once clear voice had grown harsh from drink. Yet the boy general’s exuberant charm continued. Jamie was as adroit at flattering others as he was at praising himself. For a politician—and that is what Jamie was—this is a gift of the gods. He used it well. But then he had no choice. After the Revolution, his army career ended somewhat confusedly and upon the dying fall (his accounts as clothier-general to the army never quite added up). It was as a civilian that he went west in order to make money at the rich Spanish port of New Orleans.

  Some time in 1787, Wilkinson took a secret oath of allegiance to Spain in the presence of his friend Miró—the Spanish governor of Louisiana. This was usual for those Americans who wanted to trade in Louisiana without paying heavy duties. But Jamie could never be usual. Excited as always by intrigue (and making money), he proposed that Spain support him in a scheme to detach the western states from the rest of the United States and join them
to Louisiana, either under the Spanish crown or as a neutral state. This ill-starred scheme (known later as the Spanish Conspiracy) had a good deal of western support, and Jamie took to calling himself, rather prematurely, the “Washington of the West.”

  I cannot think why Jamie was always so plausible to others, including me. If ever any man looked and acted the part of a scoundrel it was he. He was forever whispering “secrets” in his hoarse voice. He was forever trying to undo someone—from George Washington at Valley Forge to Governor Claiborne at New Orleans to, alas, one Aaron Burr. Yet for a time he managed to trick us all.

  “I have been devoted to the independence of the western states for nearly twenty years.” This was true. But that evening in Philadelphia I did not know why or in whose interest he was so dedicated. “I know every inch of Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana. I know the leaders.” Although it was unlikely that Charles Biddle was hiding behind the black lacquer Oriental screen, Jamie lowered his voice. “I went back to the army in 1791 so that I would be in a position to continue my work. Our work, Burr. Because a word from you and tomorrow morning every man in the west will rally to our standard!”

  I was surprised. It had been my impression that the “Spanish Conspiracy” was a dead issue ever since the Louisiana Purchase gave the westerners New Orleans. Although the frontiersmen disliked the easterners, it was war with Spain they wanted, not separation from the Atlantic seaboard.

  “Now I have also maintained good relations with the Dons.” Indeed Jamie had! It was to take me three years to sort out his various intrigues. Fascinated, I watched as more and more wine went down his gullet. “With the Dons …” he repeated; blinked his eyes; was for an instant disoriented.

  Jamie belched. Sighed. Complained. “Did you know that the Wilkinson family owned most of the land where the city of Washington now stands? and that my father sold that land for nothing, for nothing! My God, Burr, the money I would have had!” He struck his huge stomach a blow, as though that part of him had somehow collaborated with the feckless dead parent.