by Gore Vidal
“No more than I.”
“But then you didn’t have all the time I had to enjoy yourself and watch the devil squirm. Well, then I slowly raised my pistol a second time, the blood by now is streaming down my side and making a puddle at my feet, and so knowing I’d be unconscious presently, this time I fired fast, fired straight at him, and he was dead, Sir, dead, with a screech like a pig’s on butchering day! You should have seen him fall!”
A duelling man, our president, but well suited for his place and this time. Also, a hanging man, as deserters were to discover at the time of the battle of New Orleans.
But I am ahead of my story. It is now the summer of 1805, and I dined for the first time with Jackson and his wife Rachel, a fat pleasant woman with a gentle manner. As everyone now knows, Rachel was married first to a man called Robards. They separated. She then fell in love with Jackson. Believing that Robards had obtained a divorce, Rachel married Jackson, only to discover that she was still married to her first husband. It took two years for a proper divorce to be granted and for Jackson to re-marry her. All this was reasonably innocent, if not exactly intelligent, and hardly immoral. Unfortunately, when General Jackson became a presidential candidate in 1828, our eastern moralists made such a scandal that shortly after the election Rachel simply turned her face to the wall and died of shame. Needless to say, it did not improve the new president’s disposition to lose a beloved wife as a result of our jackal press.
But all was sunny and fine those days I spent at the Hermitage (which was still a-building and put me in mind of my first and only visit to Monticello). I shall now record for history that with my own eyes I saw Rachel, with a shy by-your-leave, prepare, light and smoke a corn-cob pipe.
“Far better than snuff-taking like Dolley Madison!” Jackson deeply disliked the Virginia junto. After all, as a frontier aristocrat, if that phrase has any meaning, he has cause to resent the airs of those Virginia nobles who still regard our westerners as so much refuse swept from their own well-ordered society.
Jackson insisted that a public dinner be given me at Nashville, complete with parade, music, speeches. For an instant I almost regretted not having accepted Lyon’s arrangement and become a congressman from Tennessee. But it is very hard to be a mere congressman when you are amongst a people who regard you as a leader, as one who will give them an empire. I was trapped by my own glory, and by the events of that summer when the west was more than usually aroused by Spain’s various crude iniquities committed on their common, imprecise and so bloody border.
I stayed five days at the Hermitage and Jackson did his best to make me feel at home. “Though damn it, Rachel, we can’t serve him food like this, fit for field-hands!” And he would shove an offending dish into the butler’s hand. “Colonel Burr kept the best table I ever et at in Philadelphia, and with wine, Rachel, not this sour grape-juice!”
“Now, General,” Rachel would murmur, soothing him the way one would a barking dog.
In private, Jackson and I discussed in detail my scheme to liberate Mexico. As commanding general of the Tennessee militia, he was in almost as good a position as Wilkinson to begin the inevitable war with Spain. “And I will, Sir, if you give me the command. I hate the Dons worse than the devil himself—the devil is at least good company they say, and don’t live within spittin distance of the Sabine River, and capture our boys like they just did the Kemper brothers, and on American soil, too, God damn them!”
“Would you come with me, General, if there should be war?”
“You’d have to chain me to the door-post to keep me from killing Dons! And I’ll bring the whole militia with me, too. That’s a vow!”
“But suppose there is no war with Spain.”
“We’ll make one!” With an airy gesture, Jackson waved his pipe, making cottony puffs of white smoke between us, like artillery fire.
“But suppose the Spanish won’t take our bait.”
He frowned. “What you’re asking is what do we do about the Dons if Jefferson loses his nerve.”
“Yes.”
“Well, that takes some thought.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Jefferson’s never been keen for fighting. Remember how he hightailed it all over Virginia with the British chasing him like a fox—no, like a scared rabbit. Most comical! Most cowardly!”
“Do you think it would still be possible for us to cross the Sabine without a war and without Jefferson’s permission?” I knew the word “permission” would distress him; it did.
Jackson damned Jefferson thoroughly. Then: “Personally, I would take the chance. Either you win Mexico and Jefferson writes you a real nice letter as one president to another or you get yourself hanged by the Dons and have no more interest in letters from Washington City.”
Jackson had said what I wanted to hear; and I made my plans.
On June 3, in a boat supplied me by my host, I began the ascent of the Cumberland River to Fort Massac where Wilkinson was waiting. We were together four days. He showed me his list of recruits. I showed him mine. We decided that the following spring was the best time to launch our invasion.
“But we must have a war with Spain first.” I mentioned the sine qua non.
Wilkinson thrust out his huge be-sashed belly. “You have but to say the word, and I will cross the Sabine River. I will force Spain to fight. I will even force Jefferson to fight. Count on me, as you would on the rising of tomorrow’s sun!” Then Jamie gave me letters to various potentates at New Orleans and saw me off aboard a barge he had himself, most imperially, designed, all glittering with bright colours and manned by ten sailors and a sergeant.
I felt as if I was already emperor of Mexico as I glided into New Orleans—to the consternation of the idlers on the water frontage who had never seen anything quite so peculiar as my too exotic bark.
I was not prepared for the delights of the Crescent City. In fact, had I not been driven to do memorable things, forced always to move in a whirlwind, I would have been perfectly happy to settle down then and there, and live the rest of my life in some comfortable galleried house in the Vieux Carré, surrounded by the most attractive women in America as well as by a Creole society which I took to immediately—and I think they were attracted to me. After all, I was one of the few Americans who could speak intelligible French.
I stayed in the house of Edward Livingston who had fled New York City where, as mayor, he had been held responsible for the misappropriation of certain funds by an underling. Like so many easterners who have had a run of bad luck he went west, and did well for himself. In fact, two weeks before I arrived he had married a beautiful and wealthy Creole lady, aged nineteen. Presently he was to be a senator from Louisiana. Currently he is our much admired ambassador to France.
“I was going to ask you if you missed New York,” I said. “Now I don’t need to.” We sat in a tropical garden where the smell of summer flowers mingled deliciously with that all-pervasive odour of roasting coffee that is a characteristic of New Orleans. In his linen suit, Beau Ned looked more like an indolent planter than the beleaguered mayor of New York I had known in earlier days. He was bitter only on the subject of Jefferson and the arbitrary way in which the territory was being governed by Claiborne, a well-meaning but inadequate minion of the Virginia junto.
“Do you think now that you made a mistake in voting for Jefferson?” I teased Beau Ned who had once pledged his vote to me, without my asking. He had been a Republican member of the House of Representatives when Jefferson and I were in contest for the presidency.
Livingston blushed. “I was weak, Colonel. And now we have a weak president who is going to lose us Louisiana. Half the population here wants the Spanish back. The other half wants the French.”
“No one,” I asked, “wants independence?”
“There is always talk of separation out here: some of the westerners—particularly in Kentucky—are almost as bad as our New England Federalists. But the Creoles, quite sensibly, hate all America
ns and who can blame them? They never wanted to become a colony of the United States.”
Livingston had already heard rumours of what I was about and he was willing to be helpful. “You’ll find the key to Mexico is the Catholic Church. Lately the Spanish have taken to taxing church property. As a result, every priest in Mexico wants independence. And what those priests want, they get!” He then arranged for me to meet the Roman Catholic Bishop of New Orleans. The Bishop so favoured my scheme that he assigned to me three Jesuit priests to act as agents. I was even received one afternoon by the Mother Superior of the Ursulines, and in her convent garden, over wine and cake, I met the sisters (two were quite presentable) and I was assured of the whole-hearted support of their order.
Although I never had any plan to separate the western states from the rest of the union, I did ally myself with a number of political figures like the senators Brown and Adair and General Jamie Wilkinson—who had in earlier times been involved in the Spanish Conspiracy. But that was all past. In the summer of 1805 there was no movement for disunion anywhere in the United States, outside of New England. I did believe—and still believe—that in time the various sections of the country will go their separate ways but not with any help from me. I should prefer the future disintegration of the United States to be laid to the man who most believed in the individual sovereignty of the states and their right to join and disjoin at will, Thomas Jefferson.
That summer I travelled from New Orleans to Natchez to Nashville (and a second visit with Jackson); from Nashville to Lexington to Frankfort; from Frankfort to Louisville to St. Louis, the capital of the territory of Louisiana where my confederate Wilkinson reigned supreme as governor.
I arrived at Jamie’s capital September 12, my mind a confusion of parades and speeches, of feasts and thunderous vows to drive the Dons into the sea! Oh, Aaron Burr was a mighty conqueror that triumphant summer—if only in the floury back rooms of grocery shops or upon the shady verandas of those spacious houses that face so proudly upon the thick-watered Mississippi. The west was mine. So why not Mexico?
“We are recruiting every day!” Wilkinson was his usual exuberant self. He gave me the names of various army officers who would join us; and of others who might join us. I cautioned him not to reveal too much to anyone but his nature was to reveal everything, or so I thought at the time. He also tended to attack Jefferson in company—something I tried never to do. Unfortunately, Wilkinson was (rather surprisingly for a compulsive scoundrel) a true Federalist. “Jefferson is going to divide all property. You see if he don’t.” This speech was regularly made after the second bottle of claret. “He’ll take away our money. He’ll level us all, if”—and here the red eyes would pop and the voice lower with melodrama—“we do not stay the tyrant’s hand!”
Wilkinson also talked altogether too freely of the desirability of separating west from east. I warned him not to give a wrong impression of what we were about but his reasoning was perfectly sound. “My friend, leader, Roi …”
“In Spanish, Rey.”
“No matter!” For one who had been so long involved with Spain, Wilkinson never deigned to learn a word of the language of his other nationality. “Our project depends on keeping the Dons in a good mood. Now they’re not fools. They know we’re up to something. Well, I want them to think we’re reviving the old Spanish Conspiracy. And I’ve succeeded, let me tell you.”
Indeed he had! To the end Don Carlos believed that we had no designs on Mexico. Unfortunately, in tricking the Spanish minister we fell—or rather I fell, as a result of Jamie’s pushing—into Jefferson’s trap. The rumour was now being spread that I was involved in a scheme to dismember the union, and anyone listening to Wilkinson’s hints and winks and talk of the tyrant Jefferson would have thought the rumour true.
In August, the U.S. Gazette of Philadelphia wondered aloud (the query is a nice journalistic way of slander without legal risk) if Colonel Burr was contemplating summoning a convention of those states along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in order to declare them independent? The editor also “wondered” how long it would be before I seized New Orleans as a base for the reduction of Mexico. The first “query” was what the Administration wanted the world to believe was my plan. The second was nearly true.
From St. Louis I moved east to Vincennes where I stayed with the governor of the Indiana Territory. William Henry Harrison was then a slight, horse-faced young Virginian in his early thirties. I delivered a letter to him from Wilkinson which he read, rather slowly, and said, as slowly, “Well, Colonel, he says the fate of the union depends upon your being returned to Congress as Indiana’s delegate.”
“General Wilkinson never exaggerates. I am sure he is right. But happily for your territory my fate takes me in another direction.” That was the end of that “promotion.”
Harrison is a most amiable man but his early rise in the world is as mysterious to me as his subsequent fall must appear to him. I am told that he is now clerk of the court of common pleas at Cincinnati after a career which took him from the governorship of Indiana to the United States Senate. Along the way he engaged in a small skirmish with the Indians which was exaggerated by the press into a great victory, rather on the order of Monmouth Court House. But that seems to be the American pattern. Despite our numerous heroic generals and colonels and coon-skin Indian fighters, Americans are almost always defeated in battle whether it be by the British or by the Indians or even by the Spanish. Since 1775 we have had only three proper victories: Gates at Saratoga, Lee at Charleston, and Jackson at New Orleans (a battle fought after we had already lost that particular war to the British). Yet so formidable is the national conceit that any man who has ever heard so much as a bullet’s hiss is acclaimed a hero, no matter how fast he might have run from the enemy.
At Vincennes all that Harrison could discuss was Indians. “I write Mr. Jefferson almost daily, warning him against the tribes, but all I get from him is imprecise theories.”
“My husband is most attached to Mr. Jefferson. As was his father before him.” Mrs. Harrison was protective.
“Yes, yes.” General Harrison poured us more cider (he neither drinks nor smokes nor takes snuff while the dozen or so children he has had by his wife testify to his moral straitness in the Paphian sphere).
“Presently Mr. Jefferson is advising me to lend the Indians money against their lands. When they default in their payments, as he says they always do, I am to occupy their territories. But there is a flaw in this policy. We have no money to lend them. Oh, I tell you, Colonel, even while we sit here, comfortable beside the fire” (I was freezing in that draughty cabin), “the tribes are plotting our ruin. There will be a war out here such as the world has never seen. And why?” This was the only moment he displayed the slightest enthusiasm or passion during my stay. “Because conscienceless men sell them spirits! Sir, I would hang any white man who sold an Indian so much as a teaspoonful of whiskey!”
“But we’re not allowed to hang anyone.” Mrs. Harrison was sad.
I got no support in that quarter. Harrison hardly knew where Mexico was. Worse, he disliked Andrew Jackson and it has been a rule with me to measure people by what they think of Jackson. Anyone who does not appreciate that frank and ardent spirit is an enemy to what is best in our American breed—by the Eternal!
I returned to Washington in November, and called upon Merry who said, “You have been betrayed, Colonel,” and showed me a copy of the Philadelphia Gazette.
I put as good a face as I could on it. “It is not possible to set something like this in train without a thousand tales being told and of the thousand one is apt, by the law of averages, to be true.”
Merry then made his confession. “I have received no instructions from London. I cannot think why.”
“What of Colonel Williamson?”
“He is still in London.”
“So we are where we were last summer.”
“I fear that is the case.”
I was dis
appointed to say the least. I needed British military aid. I also needed British money (the New York gamblers were not as generous as I had hoped). Since British gold could only be got by appearing to serve British interests, I was obliged to re-kindle Merry’s enthusiasm. I told him what he wanted to hear: that the westerners were anxious to separate from the east. As for the people of Louisiana, “they detest the Administration,” which was the exact truth, “and will fight, if they must, to break away,” which might have been true. “They want me to lead them.” Again the truth. “To set up a republic under the protection of England.” This could be made true. At that time the people of New Orleans were desperate to rid themselves of the back-country American barbarians. If England would do this for them, then English they would become. “Otherwise they will apply to Paris.” This had the desired effect.
“His Majesty’s government would take a most grave view if that were to happen.” I could do no more at this point. I had inspired him to write again to London. Now all depended upon Prime Minister Pitt’s response.
The day after my arrival at Washington, Mrs. Merry insisted that I accompany her to the race track where each November from Tuesday to Saturday there were—are?—all sorts of horse-races culminating in the annual Jockey Club Ball, held at a near-by tavern. This was the event of the “season.”
We stood beneath a canopy on a brilliant ice-clear day, and enjoyed ourselves tremendously. All around us the exuberant blades of Washington were having a fine time, swigging rum against the chill, and betting on the races. As always Mrs. Merry managed to surround herself with pretty women and intelligent men. I had quite forgotten my imperial dreams until, just before the last race of the day, a large lumbering bear-like figure came toward me from the far end of the track. It was the new vice-president George Clinton, looking old and uncomfortable.
“Burr!” he exclaimed, as though he loved me. “Good to see you here.”
“My successor! My … son. I do feel like your father. No, like your father’s ghost! Avenge me!”