John Barth - Letters

I reported what I’d heard from Jefferson and Burr, which corroborated the Baron’s last news of “H.B.” I knew too little of American politics to yea or nay Andrée’s complex prognostications, but enough of French & Algerine, & of history generally, to warn her that events have their own momentum, & quickly get beyond the grasp of those who would control them. And if I should ever go in search of my “father,” I declared, it would not be to enlist myself in his cause, or him in mine.

“We don’t know his,” Andrée said tartly, “and you have none.”

True enough — till love & Aaron Burr gave me one, that same year. News reacht us of Burr’s duel with Hamilton on the Hudson Palisades, which spoilt his bid for the New York governorship & forced him into a kind of hiding. He was headed, we heard, for the Louisiana territory, where he own’d land, with a band of settlers, perhaps to establish a new state. But there were also rumors of intended rendezvous with a volunteer army that had been training on Blennerhassett Island in the Ohio River, no one knew what for. Napoleon, age 35, was crown’d Emperor of France & Anointed of the Lord, and prepared to make war against Austria & Russia. Jefferson handily won reelection; Republican strength increast in the Congress. I turn’d 28, & proposed marriage to my 16-year-old cousin. The Baron & Baroness said she was not ready; Andrée declared I was not, till I had accomplisht something in “our cause.” She bade me reconnoitre the activity on Blennerhassett Island, determine whether “Harman Blennerhassett” (so we had learnt its owner to be denominated) was my father, & whether whatever was afoot ’twixt him & Burr was an aid or a threat to Tecumseh’s program. I was then to take “appropriate measures,” report to Tecumseh, & ask the Chief’s permission for her hand! If he approved, she was mine whatever her dear parents thot.

Well, I could not stay on at Castines Hundred. In 1805 & ’06 & ’07—whilst Napoleon won at Ulm, Austerlitz, & Jena, lost at Trafalgar, and, just as Andrée had forecast, issued the Berlin Decree against trade with Britain in retaliation for Britain’s Orders in Council against trade with France; and whilst a sea battle was fought off the Virginia Capes betwixt the USS Chesapeake and HMS Leopard, such as she had hoped for (and whilst Jérôme Bonaparte’s marriage was annull’d by his brother, who made him King of Westphalia, and whilst Joel & Ruthy Barlow settled down in Philadelphia to bring out the Columbiad, and Toot Fulton helpt him with the engravings & built the Clermont) —I follow’d Burr’s fortunes from Blennerhassett Island, by flatboat down the Ohio & Mississippi to New Orleans & his arrest for conspiring to separate the western states from the Union; thence to Richmond & his trial & acquittal.

When Burr fled to Europe in perfect disgrace, and Harman Blennerhassett settled down to raise cotton in Mississippi, I came back to make my report (and en route met that 1st uncritical auditor of my Algerine adventure, Midshipman Cooper). Taken separately, I declared to Andrée, neither Harman Blennerhassett nor Aaron Burr was guilty as charged, and Justice Marshall had fairly resisted Jefferson’s pressure to convict. Blennerhassett, an Irish lawyer & adventurer, was in my opinion primarily bent on marching on Mexico, and Burr on bringing a large new state into the Union with himself as governor, tho each was prepared to do both if it should prove feasible. The conspiracy was mainly the invention of Jefferson’s western army commander, General James Wilkinson, a bona fide traitor in the secret pay of Spain, who (again in my opinion, because at my urging) had prest the Western Empire idea on B. & B. to divert them from Mexico; aroused their interest in it as a possibility if their “legitimate” program should fail; and then tattled on them to Jefferson & turn’d state’s evidence to cover his tracks as a Spanish agent!

In the same way, I did not believe that either Blennerhassett or Burr was guilty of being “Henry Burlingame IV,” whether or not that fellow in his latter guises was my sire.

Drawing on what I’d learnt from Consuelo to pose as a fellow agent of the Spanish minister to the U. States, I had enlisted Wilkinson to scotch their plan, not altogether on Tecumseh’s behalf (tho anything but the Mexican enterprise would have meant more encroachment on Indian lands) but principally to thwart two people who — separately or together! — might be H.B. IV. It was my intention to keep an occasional eye on both, especially on Burr, who it pleased me to report had at no time penetrated my disguise. Finally, at 18 my taskmaster was more desirable than before, & would she marry me?

She would be happy to, your mother replied, with Tecumseh’s consent. What had been his judgment of me?

I confest I had been too proud to seek him out & ask it, tho I’d heard his praises sung from Buffalo to New Orleans. A pity, Andrée said, since on the strength of her descriptions of me to Tecumseh during his recentest visit to Castines Hundred, he seem’d favorably inclined to the match. He had agreed in principle, she declared, that a war betwixt the British & the “Seventeen Fires” (as he call’d the U. States) would serve the interests of the Indians if the British won. They had proposed to him already the establishment of an arm’d Indian free state extending south from the Great Lakes. But he had seconded also my caution that events have energies of their own, and he worried that a U. States victory in such a war would be the end of Indian sovereignty. Even more he approved any plan to divide the Union, so long as it did not involve the formation of new white nations on Indian lands, as had Aaron Burr’s. Non-literate himself, Tecumseh was particularly imprest with my reported ability to counterfeit letters & other documents, so important in the white men’s commerce with one another. He had inquired of Andrée whether that talent might be put to use to disunite the Seventeen Fires whilst he tried to unite with his oratory the nations of the Indians.

And why, I ask’d, had Tecumseh paid this call on her? Because, she replied, his younger brother’s assumption in 1805 of the role of prophet & visionary, following upon Tecumseh’s own revival of Pontiac’s plan for an Indian confederacy, had put him troubledly in mind of Pontiac’s association with the Delaware Prophet, whose “vision” he knew to have been influenced by the 1st Andrée Castine. Tecumseh was uneasy about this reenactment; he trusted his brother’s loyalty, but not his judgment; he wanted, Andrée believed, both to reassure himself that she would not be another “Angélique Cuillerier,” & at the same time to learn whether she had any suggestions for improving his brother’s “vision” in the way the first Andrée had improved the Delaware Prophet’s. Your mother tactfully responded that her only vision was of Tecumseh at the head of an Indian empire rivalling that of the Aztecs or the Incas. Then she made the practical suggestion that the Prophet establish a religious center at some strategic location convenient to the principal nations of the confederacy — say, at the confluence of the Wabash & the Tippecanoe in the Indiana territory — to give the proposed union a physical headquarters like that of the Seventeen Fires in Washington. An “official” seat of authority, she maintain’d, might help to counter the Americans’ practice of making treaties to their own advantage with disaffected groups of Indians or self-styled chiefs. And the establishment of an Indian Mecca or Vatican, with the Wabash prophet at its head, would also help distinguish & fix him as the religious leader of the confederacy, & keep him out of Tecumseh’s hair in political & military matters. Tecumseh had thot this an inspired idea, thankt her happily, & urged her to send her intended to him.