Treason, page 25
“I can put together men and weapons. I can raise money in New York that you couldn’t hope to do, gather weapons and supplies and fifteen hundred men. Please don’t tell me a hundred men could take Mexico—that’s ridiculous. Do me the credit to remember I have some military experience too. If you had spent more time in the field and less currying favor at headquarters, you wouldn’t say such a thing.”
He paused to see if Wilkinson would react, but the general simply watched him in silence.
“So,” Burr said carefully, “we come to the question. Are you in this or are you not?”
“Meaning?”
“I mean, it takes an army to conquer Mexico! Not a thousand ragtag youngsters out for adventure. The civilian army I can raise will be perfect to seize New Orleans but then we need a real army. The American army, your army, thrown against Spain.”
Wilkinson stared at him, a tic quivering in his right cheek.
Burr took a long liberating draft of porter. He felt good, springy, in command. “I’ll raise fifteen hundred men and we’ll take New Orleans while your army stands by. We jail the officials, rally the people, seize the banks and the ships at the wharves. We load them with your troops and go conquer Mexico. We come back heavy with gold, declare New Orleans the new capital of a new nation that stretches from Ohio to Mexico City. Then Brown and Adair and all our friends along the river rise to say this is just what the region always has needed, and we shut the river to anyone and everyone who resists.”
Wilkinson’s eyes were bright and his mouth hung open slightly. “What about when the army realizes?”
“Well, hell, they’re mostly westerners, aren’t they? Why will they object? And if some do, fine, march ‘em under guard to the Appalachians and tell ‘em to keep on going.”
A smile was growing on Wilkinson’s face. “And if the navy objects?”
“How many capital ships does the navy have? Three? Four? Since the administration has gutted it to save money in the Democratic-Republican philosophy? A few frigates from the Royal Navy should settle that danger.”
Wilkinson laughed out loud. “Call in the British, eh?”
“They’ll be delighted to help. A new country allied with Canada that reduces the United States to a seaboard sliver? They’ll be overjoyed.”
There was a long silence. Burr sat down and put his elbows on the table. At last he said, “Fifteen hundred men, civilians all, they can’t invade a nation and hold it. Need a real army for that. You have the army and you can control it long enough to take Mexico, and after that you can turn it loose. The question is whether you have the courage to use it. You’ve done a lot of talking, Jim; now tell me if you’re real.”
Wilkinson sat motionless, his hands flat on the table like paws. “A man could get his jaws slapped, questioning courage like that,” he said.
Burr didn’t let his gaze waver. Staring at Wilkinson, leaning into him, he said, “The man slaps my jaws will answer on the dueling field. And there I’ll kill him.”
Wilkinson looked aside. He licked his lips. Ignoring the challenge, he said, “This here is dangerous talk, taking over New Orleans and setting it free, using the army.”
“It is.” Burr smiled, feeling better and better. If the next two minutes went his way his future was unlimited, a flower opening to the light. If it went against him his ruin was compounded, for he had nothing else.
“It’s treason,” Wilkinson whispered.
“So it is,” Burr said. “But put the army in and create empire and then it’s not treason, it’s a new country. Call it revolution.”
“Get your neck stretched whatever you call it.”
Burr laughed. “That’s the truth, by God.” Life on the razor’s edge. He threw the dice. “So there you are. Count you in or count you out?”
For a long moment Wilkinson stared. “You surprise me, Aaron,” he said at last. “You’re tougher than I thought. We may get on well together.”
Yet Burr saw something in Wilkinson’s eyes and heard the same thing in his faint hesitation. The man was afraid.
Wilkinson’s whisper fluttered the candle flame. “I’m in.” His face was white, his jaw tight. “You handle the crowds. I’ll deal with the army. And we’ll build an empire.”
He put out his hand and Burr took it.
All that winter, the year 1805 dawning crisp and cold, Burr worked on the West. He studied a stream of military reports that Wilkinson spirited from the War Department, sitting in his rooms with a long clay pipe gone cold in his hands, a candle guttering. He spread maps on a trestle table and weighted the corners with four pistols he’d purchased as part of a traveling outfit. He studied the rivers, the Ohio meandering from the Appalachians, the Tennessee and the Cumberland dipping into Tennessee and entering the Ohio together just short of the father of waters. He memorized both banks of the Mississippi, north to St. Louis and the Missouri’s entry, south to Choctaw Bluffs, the city site-in-waiting ready to rise from campfire ashes at the western end of Tennessee, on to the mighty Arkansas boiling from the mountains, on to the swirling mouth of the Red staining the water for a hundred miles, on to Natchez and Fort Adams and the city on the crescent ringed by lakes and swamps.
Maps of the wild mangrove swamps of Florida that fed Ponce de Leon’s dreams, maps that tracked the plains of Texas to the Rio Grande and on into the mountains of Mexico. Maps of the Red River winding through wild country where Spanish troops drifted, appearing and disappearing. All fanciful, full of guesswork and estimates and shaky lines to illustrate rumors of what might be there or more probably was not. Maps of the vast westward space of the purchase that the explorers were crossing now, big blanks with occasional squiggles marking rivers and mountains that might or might not be there or anywhere. Street maps of New Orleans on which he marked the Cabildo, the cathedral, the fortified places, the old powder magazine, the bridges, the levee, examining every spot vulnerable or optimal for attack or defense. Maps anchored to Vera Cruz, maps of the Valley of Mexico where the stunning City of Mexico lay like a golden prize. The copyist working at the trestle table reproducing these maps on parchment rolls put in ten hours a day while Burr was at the Senate.
Spain was making new threats. Spanish troops were massing to the east in Florida, to the west in Texas. New Orleans was alive with rumors, so said everyone.
“Give an ear to this,” Wilkinson said over a Christmas turkey. He unfolded a letter. “From General Adair.” Burr nodded. John Adair was the man to see in Kentucky. A U.S. senator who’d been elected from the Kentucky bench, he’d been everything. Everyone who looked at the frontier knew him. He shook the paper and cleared his throat. “Says, ‘Kentuckians are full of enterprise and altho’ not poor are as greedy after plunder as ever the old Romans were. Mexico glitters in our eyes—the word is all we wait for.’”
Wilkinson slapped his meaty hands together. “By God! What do you think of that? ‘The word is all we wait for.’ Just what I told you, eh?” He drained his glass and held it out for more. “Let Spain trigger off war and we can strip ‘em bare.” He gave Burr a meaningful look. “‘Course, war with Spain, the U.S. government would welcome help from a party of bravos.” He winked. “I can promise you that.”
The future glowed like sunshine.
“Listen to this,” Jimmy said. Dolley put down her embroidery frame. She saw he was reading that nasty Boston paper she’d learned to hate. Its very words struck her as so many violations. It was late, the streets outside silent. His reading candle and her candle threw flickering shadows around the third-floor sitting room adjoining their bedroom. It was a part of the day she liked, when they were alone and resting and soon would go to bed but now had blessed free time absent all demands.
“‘A democracy,” he said, voice arch as he quoted, “‘A democracy is scarcely tolerable at any period of national history.’” He chuckled. She knew he felt no less strongly than she but showed it differently; he was calm while she was ready to fly up and denounce someone.
“Goes right on,” he said. “‘Its omens’—that’s democracy, understand—‘its omens are always sinister. It is on trial and the issue will be civil war, desolation and anarchy. No wise man but discerns its imperfections, no good man but shudders at its miseries, no honest man but proclaims its fraud and no brave man but draws his sword against its force. A policy so radically contemptible and vicious is a memorable example of the villainy of some men and the folly of others ....’”
“They’re mad dogs, Jimmy,” she cried. “They bay at the moon. They want failure.”
He shrugged. “They want rule by the wise and the good—judges, preachers, the wealthy who must be wise else they wouldn’t be wealthy—those who stand over the vulgar masses.”
“It’s dangerous, isn’t it?” she said softly.
He nodded. “You know, I thought if we settled Louisiana we’d be in the clear, marching on to brilliant new day. But Governor Claiborne tells us New Orleans is full of treasonous talk, and Danny says the same, and there’s precious little we can do about it anytime soon. Meanwhile the Spanish threaten, probably just talk but maybe not, and the Federalists are hitting harder than ever, calling us a mobocracy, saying the whole idea of liberty and equal rights is the mighty mischief.”
He shook his head and drank the last of now cold tea. “It’s narrow.” His voice was a whisper. “So little margin for error. So many doubters, Federalists, secessionists in New England, radicals driving toward extremes, Spanish threatening, British squeezing, French attitude as hard on our commerce as the British. God, it is ironic, you know? Whole world denouncing democracy and in New Orleans people ready to revolt because we were afraid to give them democracy immediately. Maybe that was a mistake, I don’t know. But this revolt talk in the West, I know I don’t like that. Too far away and hard to handle. Wilkinson says he keeps his ears open, but—”
“Wilkinson,” she said, frowning. She detested the man.
Jimmy shrugged. “He’s all we’ve got.”
And to that she had no answer.
Burr made himself a welcome visitor at the British embassy. Mr. Merry was a drudge but Elizabeth Merry had a certain charm, the more because she so offended official Washington. She was handsome, perhaps a bit on the stout side, but then a fleshy woman was not to be discounted. He made no move, of course, and he had a feeling she was disappointed. But they were allies, both shunned by Washington, and it was enough to compare notes on the gaucheries of the village capital.
The ambassador was terribly out of sorts over the Americans. Given that Britain was locked in a death struggle with a tyrant who intended to rule the world, the Americans should see that the Royal Navy could hardly allow its men to desert to American ships. Naturally British warships stopped vessels and took the pick of their crews. If an occasional American was taken it was what America should be volunteering anyway. Yet when a British warship took men in New York Harbor, that contemptible little Madison had acted most insultingly. Merry said he had countered by instinct—America should have discovered and returned the deserters, so the whole thing was America’s fault! His eyes sparkled and he waved his cigar while his wife tittered dutifully. With another rumbling chuckle, Mr. Merry said he was thinking of demanding reparations. He was delighted to find a Democrat who understood reality.
After several such evenings, Mrs. Merry casting warm glances at Burr over stewed mutton, the American judged the time right to make his move. With a poor brandy in hand in the ambassador’s study, he drew his chair close and whispered that he wanted Mr. Merry to know his plans. A greedy complicity shone in the Briton’s eyes as Burr said in so many words that he intended to assume the leadership of revolt in New Orleans, make it an independent principality and revolutionize the entire American West. Everything beyond the Appalachians would become a new nation centering on New Orleans and then expanding westward into the Spanish gold regions. Fueled by that wealth, it would look to an alliance with Canada that would dominate North America.
He said exactly what he intended to say but hearing himself gave him a stunning sense of his own audacity. He had to struggle to keep a waver from his voice. Mr. Merry, however, was delighted. He said he would petition his government with high enthusiasm for what Burr said he would need: a hundred thousand dollars in operating cash and three Royal Navy frigates posted off the mouth of the Mississippi when the time came.
A look of contempt that Merry was too dull to suppress flashed over his face. Burr recognized it as reaction to a man who would betray his country. But walking away, he thought his plans were less betraying the old than inventing the new. In ridding the old country of an unruly tail that threatened to wag it, he would be doing it a favor. Could that be treason?
It was near sunset. Madison sat in the president’s long office watching a single file of sheep moving up the south lawn toward the barn. “Burr has something on his mind,” he said, “flirting with the British ambassador, gathering War Department maps of the West.”
“Maps?” the president said.
“Had a professional copyist in his rooms, apparently.”
The president’s eyebrows raised. “Albert Gallatin said Burr was the great danger, and he might prove right yet.”
“He’ll bear watching,” Madison said. Actually, he thought Tom’s hatred of Burr excessive. Hate’s effect on calm is itself dangerous. But he agreed that Burr was dangerous because he combined unusual ability with total self-focus. The man cared not a fig for the tenderness of the new democracy or the continental concept that Captain Lewis’s expedition embodied. He thought only of himself. Now he was looking at the West, he a polished New Yorker who had never crossed the Appalachians.
Indeed, it would bear watching.
On the last day of the old Congress, the president and a new vice president awaiting inauguration, Burr rapped the gavel for the last time and granted himself the floor. He told startled senators that he rose to say farewell.
For a half hour he spoke on the glories of mankind and of the Senate, making them seem one and the same. Members listened in gripped silence, some touching handkerchiefs to their eyes. When he’d brought them to the heights, he closed with words cast so low they must strain to hear ... farewell and Godspeed and may this great body’s traditions go on forever, and so forth.
He walked out on rapt silence, no raw contumely this time. He had made them yield triumph, he of the golden tongue, and he could do the same for the West and in New Orleans.
He departed the next day. Now he must go west, see the region’s scope, range, splendor. Sense its opportunity. Feel its anguish and unrest. Talk to the men who knew it best. No great enterprise should be undertaken on another’s word; he must see for himself. Within the month he was on the Ohio floating toward the Mississippi.
SIXTEEN
Marietta, Ohio, spring 1805
Aaron Burr floated into Marietta on a spring day when snowmelt was raising the Ohio River and fishing birds were skimming the surface. He was starting a trial run that would take him clear to New Orleans to scout the ground and sound the people and decide for himself if General Wilkinson was talking sense.
Marietta proved to be a fine-looking little town and somehow this reassured him. But his lips tightened at that—he didn’t need reassuring. Really. But he did have a lot riding on this—he stopped himself, blanking off the thought. This was the wrong time for that. No, the point was that Colonel Burr was an intensely urban man and as such was already sick of what he’d seen of wilderness, so that an urban scene was a pleasure. That’s all. He brushed aside an errant thought that might have been a warning: for a man who intended to rule the West he didn’t seem to have much pioneer instinct.
But never mind that—now the great adventure was beginning. It could yield him wealth and power beyond imagination or it could put him in a hangman’s noose. But then, he’d always been willing to dare, and to seek the golden chalice is to dare hugely. Now he dreamed a great dream and of course it carried commensurate risk. But he wasn’t a fool—first he must see that it was real and not a Wilkinson fantasy. And so he traveled to explore for himself. If it were fantasy, the first signals should be evident here in Ohio.
A wharf ran along the riverbank. He saw a rat peering at him from its understructure. Across a dirt street facing the wharf were frame buildings with false fronts and up the hill a grid of streets with log homes. A handsome brick structure of two stories a bit up the hill must be the Marietta Inn. Wilkinson had assured him it was quite a decent place.
When his hired crew threw out lines fore and aft, he tossed a copper to a boy lounging on a bollard. “Run tell Mayor Johnson that Colonel Burr has arrived.”
Marietta was a good three hundred miles down the Ohio from Pittsburgh where he’d taken delivery of his keelboat from a man named Hawkins, who was pleasant enough except for endless denunciations of liquor as the devil’s tool. Said he had made the keelboat that young Meriwether Lewis and his friend Clark were taking up the Missouri right about now, and wasn’t that a fantastic adventure? But—a private thought—no more so than the adventure on which Colonel Burr embarked.
An elegant boat was essential, for he must make a powerful impression. It was sixty feet by fourteen. A cabin with real glass windows ran its length. Atop the cabin was a catwalk where he could pace as they rode the current while miles of riverbank slid past. At first he had seen handsome farms reaching to the water, each with its wharf, but gradually the interludes of forest grew longer, the cleared farms rarer, the log huts meaner, the little towns farther apart and dismayingly rude. He supposed this was the frontier West.
