Treason, page 26
A tall, heavily built man fifty or so with long gray hair and a bushy gray mustache came striding across the wharf to welcome Burr to the new state of Ohio. He proved to be the mayor, Rank Johnson. Behind him Burr saw three old friends, all powerful figures in the West and, oddly, each named John. They were longtime associates of Wilkinson who had said he would alert them to Burr’s coming.
John Adair of Kentucky and John Smith of Ohio were sitting U.S. senators; John Brown had just stepped down from Kentucky’s other senate seat. As a senator from New York Burr had helped the Kentucky men through many a parliamentary snarl. When Ohio won statehood in 1802 and sent Smith to Washington, Burr as president of the U.S. Senate had made it a point to guide him through the Senate’s arcane rules, spoken and unspoken. Burr liked men of the West for their open manner but he also had sensed their coming importance and as an investment had cultivated them and helped ease their legislative burdens. Wilkinson said Burr’s name was well known and highly respected west of the Appalachians. If he could trust anyone he could trust these three. They had stood with him against the administration when he was being abused and had done so publicly. Sympathy behind the hand isn’t worth much but in the open it counts for a lot.
Furthermore, they had come hundreds of miles to be here when forty miles was a good day on a horse, eighty in a coach. Now, on a wharf in Marietta where he had come to start putting western men to the test, the three senators apparently offered respect and affection, their very presence an endorsement of mutual plans. He drew each into an embrace. It was a good start.
Mayor Johnson had organized a celebration and by midafternoon the crowd in the square was dense. A brass band played, militiamen marched in close order drill with guidons flying, a cannon saluted the guest and three damsels in flowing white delivered patriotic effusions. The mayor introduced the three senators, and Senator Smith, Ohio’s own, introduced the guest. Smith lavished praise on the vice president as a man of honor, intellect, wisdom, rich experience and broad understanding. Above all, Aaron Burr was a friend of the West, a man who recognized equally the inherent virtue of the western American and the shabby treatment dealt him by the East.
It was late afternoon when Burr rose to speak, by now well warmed with praise. The sun was breaking on the false-front buildings, so half the square was in shadow. Men, women, children, and dogs gathered in audience with a holiday air. He started with his voice cast low so they must strain to hear, then let his enthusiasm for the West swell, voice rising until it soared. He’d heard the American West was the garden spot of the world and here he was in Marietta to swear that all the reports were understatements. How dismal was the cloudy East compared to Marietta in the sun! How could folks back East fail to understand or like or trust the blooming West? He had heard, they all had heard, the hard talk in the East— cut those worthless western folks loose, let ‘em go, what good is the West to us? Well, Aaron Burr was here to tell them the West was the future, the hope, the glory of the American continent!
Burr had been making political speeches since he’d rallied troops as a stripling lieutenant in the Revolution and he knew how to hold an audience. You must reach beyond their minds to their hearts, you must strike a vision and then lift them and make them part of it, make them bigger, better, kinder, more noble than they knew they were, show them their best and let them know you understand even better than they how exemplary they are. And then remind them of their grievances, make them realize that you not only understand, you feel their anguish, for after all, even given their glories, they are victims too, and you are on their side. Then, very subtly, nothing at all specific, he set about conveying the sense that he was thinking in terms of doing something about it.
And they loved him! It was beyond his wildest expectations. It was what Wilkinson had promised but Burr couldn’t have imagined the impact, the swelling in his heart, the sheer animal joy of their love. Women were laughing and crying and men were cheering and waving their hats and wiping their eyes. So you handle the crowd and sweep them along, you take their hands, you lead them toward a golden future and you have them laughing and crying and cheering all at once and then you bring it down to close, low, serious, from your heart, and end it while they still hunger for more.
Subtly, gracefully, his words actually chosen with great care, he let them know that this was important, that it was a start, that the best lay ahead, that he would be among them and beside them, that together he and they would be part of a future that shone like sunrise. He set the idea, passing on when he knew it was firm. Nothing definite, no one could say what it meant in so many words, but he saw the comprehension on their faces, saw them nod, yes, and then a growing eagerness, yes, they had heard him.
In the moment of rapt silence that followed he plunged into the crowd, using both hands to grasp the hands reaching for him with such eager yearning. A young woman in a blue bonnet thrust a baby into his arms. He smiled and held it high and kissed its cheek and the little thing had the good grace to smile instead of cry, and the crowd howled its pleasure.
And it warmed something in him that had been chilled, seemed to flow into if not fill a place that had been empty. He felt a momentary shiver of alarm at having such need that yearned to be filled, but he thrust it aside and raised his arms again to a new and thrilling cheer.
“Mr. Vice President, welcome as you are, I guess it ain’t entirely clear why you’re in Marietta, you don’t mind my saying so.” Alexander Henderson had a mud-spattered boot crossed on a knee. It seemed he was a militia captain. A hank of black hair fell across his forehead; he said he came from Upstate New York. His actual tone was polite enough but there was a tightness about his eyes that Burr didn’t like, the suggestion of challenge in his manner.
Still, this wasn’t the place to react. “Good question,” Burr said. He looked around. The dinner with a dozen select Marietta men was in Rank Johnson’s home, and they were down to brandy and cigars. Burr rolled his cigar in his fingers, looking judiciously at the coal.
“Well, I can only say so much, and I’ll have to count on your discretion.” He paused, looking around the room, letting that set in. “But you know the Spanish are talking war. You know West Florida certainly was part of the purchase, bought and paid for, and that probably includes the Florida peninsula and Texas as well.”
“That’s an article of faith hereabouts,” someone said.
“Now, the Spanish empire is moribund.” He saw some didn’t know the word and added easily that it was collapsing of its own rot. “Meanwhile, its arrogant officers are thwarting honest American aspirations.” He said the East wasn’t concerned but he cared for the West. As long as West Florida was in Spanish hands, the people of Marietta were in jeopardy.
“There’s a strong feeling that something should be done about that.” He watched comprehension flash on faces at different rates and let the silence grow, waiting.
“I’m meeting General Wilkinson downriver. Of course, the army, its hands are more or less tied. But I think there are ways to have West Florida at the least.” He sighed and shook his head and drew on the cigar. “Now, I think I’ve said quite enough ....”
“Mr. Vice President,” Henderson said, “you go against the Spanish and you have my support. For a minute there I feared you had something more in mind, like the old days—well, I reckon I’m a pretty good patriot. But the Spanish, they’re bastards. Last run I made to New Orleans, you know how you have to go right past Baton Rouge, and that’s the west end of West Florida, right up against the river? The Spanish soldiers, they run out their guns ready to blow me to pieces, me with naught but a load of tobacco in a flatboat. Honest Americans shouldn’t have to put up with such disrespect on our own river. Taking Florida? Count on me!”
There was a loud murmur of approval. The dinner broke up soon after. As Burr was leaving, the mayor caught his arm.
“Mr. Vice President.”
“Oh, Rank—do call me Aaron,” Burr said.
“Thank you, Aaron.” He hesitated and swallowed. “Well, this afternoon and again this evening, I had a feeling there might be a little more to this than even you’ve hinted.” Burr stared at him, waiting. “I just want to say, if that time comes I’d be honored were you to call on me ....”
“I won’t forget that, Rank,” Burr said, putting a quiver of sincerity into his voice.
When Burr and the three senators returned to the Marietta Inn he suggested a pipe and a nightcap. It was time to get down to real business, and he saw from their expressions that they understood him. He had the Inn’s only two-room suite; the fact that Marietta even had a suite marked it as an up-and-coming town likely to star in the future. Most inns slept two or three to a bed with overflow on the floor.
They gathered around a table in shirtsleeves, cravats pulled loose. The room had a worn carpet under the table, a mirror in a plain frame, a bad painting of a man in buckskin watching the sun setting behind improbable mountains. A sperm oil lamp hanging from the ceiling cast a harsh light and an empty oaken bookcase had a forlorn look for lack of books.
Jack Adair put a square bottle on the table with a clatter. “Kentucky sour mash,” he said. “Best whiskey ever made.” He slapped the table for emphasis as if daring argument. He was a smallish man, sixty or so, gray hair and heavy eyebrows over oddly guileless blue eyes, his mouth tightened into a grim expression quite at odds with his usual good humor. Brown, who had just given up Kentucky’s other senate seat, was a seemingly mild and gentle man, a bit older than Jack Adair. He and Burr had worked together in the old days in the Senate; his flowing hair had gone white now, but he still looked able to ride a hundred miles in any weather and function when he got there. The Ohio senator, Smith, coal black hair and heavy beard framing dark brown eyes, was younger. He had a rough-handed manner. Burr liked him; Smith had brooked no nonsense in ramming Ohio into statehood three years before and had carried the same manner to the Senate; he’d been downright refreshing. Trust might be too strong a word, but Burr had known these men long enough and had close enough dealings so that he was comfortable, if still wary.
He took a good sip from his glass, planning that as his last. He already was tired; this was no time to let liquor dull him further. But he smiled at the taste: by God, it was good whiskey. He raised a glass to Jack in tribute. Adair extracted a worn corncob from an inside pocket. Burr had ordered clay pipes and soon the room was dense with smoke. He waited to see how things would unfold.
“That was a hell of speech,” Adair said at last. You could sense his vigor in the way he talked. “Had ‘em eating out of your hand. Struck just the right note.”
“Oh?” Burr said, still waiting.
Looking discomfited as if having opened the subject he knew he had to say more, Adair said, “Told ‘em something was up but didn’t tell ‘em what.”
Brown, voice a rumble, said around his glass, “But that question from Henderson, so direct. I didn’t like that. He’s a troublemaker, you know, but you handled him just right.”
“I told him what Jack just summed up: that something’s up but I’m not saying what, at least not to the crowd.”
Adair glanced at Brown. “That’s it,” he said, and clamped his pipe in his mouth as if to stop himself from saying more.
So now it was time to rein them in and find out where he stood—on the road to glory or on the edge of a cliff? “Now, gentlemen, I want to know just what you think that something is.”
He watched their faces close. At last Adair said, “Better not to talk in so many words. We all know—”
“No, we don’t,” Burr said. “I know what Wilkinson has told me. He’s told me that you support him. That the plan is mature, makes sense, will work. Good. But I want to hear from you that we’re all talking of the same thing.”
Again a long silence. Burr was beginning to wonder if there really was nothing here but wild imaginings and Wilkinson’s dreams. If he’d come on a wild goose chase he must know right now, before he got in any deeper. The image of the hangman’s noose, hemp raw and rough, was in his mind. But the alternative, debtor’s prison, was there too. This needed to work.
The silence held. Then Jack Adair pushed back his chair. He went softly to the door and jerked it open. No one was there. He looked up and down the hall, then closed the door and hung a coat over the knob. “Well, boys,” he said as he resumed his seat, “we’re counting on Aaron for a lot. We can’t do it ourselves, not without a leader, and he’s our leader.”
Brown’s voice was low. It carried a phlegmy rattle. “Well, I ain’t sure where to start. But we’re already in this too deep to get out so I figure you can count on us. But personally, it would help me to hear just how you see this thing laying out. How it’ll all work.”
Wanted him out front. But that was fair enough, too.
“Here’s the skeleton,” Burr said slowly, and then let his voice take on a rhythm and a depth designed to carry them in his train. “I raise money in New York and bring down a small army, a thousand men armed and supplied. New Orleans treats us as liberators when we arrive. Governor Claiborne goes in a cell. Wilkinson has incited a Spanish attack in Texas and is moving to meet it. He calls a truce and comes to New Orleans, ostensibly to deal with us. He sets up martial law. Seizes banks and ships. There are several millions of dollars in the banks there, incidentally—might as well put it to use.”
All three men laughed at that. “We sail across the Gulf,” Burr went on, “seize Mexico and make it our own. Then back to New Orleans to declare Louisiana an independent nation with gold mines in Mexico its treasury. We urge soldiers to switch to the new country but those who want to go we turn loose with a handful of gold but no weapon. And we tell westerners that they are part of a new country in which they are paramount instead of adjunct, a country that honors what they are. Those not interested are free to move unmolested back to the mother country, the United States, in the same way loyalists moved back to Canada a quarter century ago. And we announce that the river is closed to all who have not adopted the new nation, open to those who have. Leading men—you three and all your associates—throw yourselves into a roaring campaign to accept this new largesse from a new independent nation that is all their own.”
“Hear! Hear!” Smith banged on the table. “By God, if that don’t say it perfect!” He reached for his glass.
“Sounds good, doesn’t it?” Burr said. He smiled. “That’s because I made it sound easy. But I don’t think it’ll be easy.”
They watched him, not answering.
“So,” he said, “let’s take it element by element. First off, assume for the moment that I can get a thousand men down the river and into New Orleans. How will New Orleans respond?”
“Throw flowers under your feet,” Adair said. He laughed a little too loudly and Brown looked alarmed.
“So I hear,” Burr said. “New Orleans sent a delegation to Washington to protest the denial of democracy— they’d never had it, you see, sneered and laughed, but now they want it. Power of democracy, you think, or the perverseness of human nature?”
Brown smiled. His eyes had a weary look. “Both, I expect. Democracy’s easy enough to honor long as you don’t go any further than talk. I expect that covers New Orleans folk.”
“This delegation, it got the cold shoulder from officialdom. Madison and his crowd of Virginians. But I spoke to them at length. In French, of course, which that idiotic governor, the fatuous Mr. Claiborne, refuses to learn. And they seemed delighted. Now, they insisted they were loyal but said the United States was rapidly alienating them. I suggested I might look in someday and they were beside themselves. You could own New Orleans, I remember one of them saying. They seem to be waiting for liberators; do you think that’s true?”
“Of course,” Adair said. He laughed. “Anyone who ain’t representing the American government gets a king’s welcome. Crown you in laurel.”
“And follow us to war?”
“Aaron, they’re angry. Looking for someone to fight, actually. They just haven’t been focused yet.”
“Now,” Burr said, “Wilkinson implied he can put the U.S. Army behind this transaction. Can he?”
It was Smith who took this one. “Can he? Yes, indeed. He’s very autocratic, even his assistants know little of what he’s doing. Arrogant devil, really. He snaps orders for others to obey and he doesn’t entertain questions. Doesn’t have a deputy or even a close assistant because that would shift a little power from him. He holds it all in his fat hands. Means he can come and go as he pleases, no one the wiser. Now, assume Spain is attacking, he can shift to meet it and then invading Mexico becomes defensive.”
“Spain attacking—that’s a big assumption.”
“But Jim can arrange it.” He was laughing, but sobered under Burr’s stare. “You gotta see, Aaron, he handles the Spanish like a sheep dog handling sheep. Funny thing is, apparently they pay him well for keeping them perpetually in a fearful lather that the United States intends to eat them up. He’ll handle the Spanish, tell them the U.S. is mobilizing to attack, advise them to get their troops into Florida and Texas. They’ll send battalions from Cuba and before you know it we’ll have whatever kind of war Wilkinson wants to have.”
“And the army will go along?”
“Same situation, really,” the Ohio senator said. “The army’s loyal, start with that. I know a lot of officers and there’s hardly a bad apple among them. But Jim takes no one into his confidence; it’s like he’s always ready for some illicit move. Probably his nature but the end result is that if your people seized banks and ships Jim would have those men aboard and Mexico-bound before you could shake a stick.”
“But the U.S. Navy might give some trouble,” Brown said. “Wilkinson doesn’t control them.”
“No,” Burr said, “but a couple of Royal Navy frigates lying off the mouth of the river will settle that.”
They looked at him with sparkling eyes. “My,” Adair said, “you’ve already arranged that, have you? Excellent!”
