John Barth - Letters

For so she now declared me, in recompense for my work against the western empire of Burr, Blennerhassett, & General Wilkinson. But if I would have her to wife, I must complete two further tasks, one as it were for Tecumseh & the other as it might seem against him, for herself. She had learnt from her father’s friends in the Canadian Governor-General’s office that that worthy, Sir James Craig, was much pleased with a series of newspaper articles lately publisht by one John Henry of Vermont, attacking the republican form of government in general & the Republican administration in Washington in particular. Craig wanted to know whether this Henry could be hired to agitate in the Federalist press for the secession of New York & New England after the 1808 elections, when another Virginian was expected to follow Jefferson in the President’s House. Andrée had proposed me as one who could not only make that ascertainment, but supply Henry with appropriate copy, if necessary, to publish under his name. Her Quebec associate had offer’d to provide me with expense money & a stipend for this not very difficult assignment, which would serve also as my initiation into the British-Canadian secret service.

The 2nd task was more delicate. Governor Harrison of Indiana was negotiating with minor chiefs of the Delawares, Kickapoos, Miamis, & others of Pontiac’s old confederates to sell some 3,000,000 acres of their prime common hunting territory along the Wabash, for an absurdly small sum. Tecumseh opposed such a sale at any price; had even threaten’d to kill the potential signatories of Harrison’s treaty. My task was to suggest to him that his cause might better be served by permitting the treaty to be sign’d over his protests (but not by the Shawnees) & then enlisting the fierce Lake Erie Wyandots, who so far had held aloof from his confederacy, to aid him in punishing the “degenerate village chiefs” who sign’d it. The action would appeal to the Wyandots; their enlistment would impress the Potawatomis & other reluctant tribes; the elimination of those defectors amongst the minor chiefs would strengthen the Indian alliance & serve as a warning against further such treaties. It would also serve to introduce me to the Indians, whom I did not yet truly know… & to Tecumseh.

I observed to my young fiancée that she was ordering the deaths of some half-dozen human beings. She replied that they were cynical, drunken traitors who would trade their birthright & their people for a barrel of whiskey. If she could, she would perform the executions herself, with pleasure.

The 1st task was both easy & agreeable: it fetcht me in 1808 to Montreal & across the St. Lawrence into Vermont, where I readily enlisted the ambitious & erratic Mr. Henry — a former greengrocer, newspaper publisher, & artillery captain — to go down to Boston & test the air there for secession. I provided him with a simple cipher & instructions for transmitting his reports to the Governor-General’s office. Then, after Madison’s election & inauguration, I went to Boston myself to retrieve the man from the taverns & brothels where he claim’d to be keeping his finger on the pulse of public sentiment, and scolded him for providing “us” with no more than we could read more cheaply in the Boston newspapers: e.g., that the Federalists would oppose any move against Britain and, if Madison yielded to the western war-hawks, would perhaps attempt to set up a Congress of Federalist States in Boston or Hartford & remain neutral. I myself predicted (& still predict) against their actual secession, but felt the question to be of slight importance: there was enough pro-British, anti-French, & especially anti-Republican sentiment amongst the Yankees to guarantee a steady illegal sale of supplies from New York & New England to British forces in Canada. If the war goes successfully for Britain in that theater, annexation of those states to Canada should be negotiable without great difficulty. Whilst in Boston I draughted a few sample letters for Henry to cipher & transmit as his own. It did not trouble me that the man was of no consequence as a spy, for I saw already to what better use his letters could be put. I instructed him to keep copies, for the purpose of documenting his service to the British Foreign Office, and let him back to his tarts & ale.

The 2nd task was another story. Acting on your mother’s suggestion, in 1808 Tecumseh establisht for his brother “the Prophet’s Town” near where the Tippecanoe joins the Wabash: a mixt Indian community dedicated to industriousness, sobriety, the common ownership of property, brotherhood amongst the nations of red men, & repudiation of all things learnt from the “Long Knives,” by which term they call’d us whites. So successful was the town, & the strategy, Governor Harrison mistook the Prophet (who had changed his name from Lalawethika, or “Loud Mouth,” to Tenskwatawa, “Open Door”) for the leader of the confederacy, & invited him in the summer of 1809 to confer at Vincennes, the territorial capital, concerning the proposed treaty. That year I met all three.

Child: I am a Cook, not a Burlingame. You Burlingames get from your ancestor H.B. III a passion for the world that fetches you everywhere at once, in guises manifold as the world’s, to lead & shape its leaders & shapers. We Cooks, I know now, get from our forebear Ebenezer, the virgin poet of Maryland, an inexhaustible innocence that, whatever our involvement in the world (we are not merely Cooks), inclines us to be followers — better, learners: tutees of the Burlingames & those they’ve shaped. If Aaron Burr & Harman Blennerhassett had been one & the same man, as it sometimes seem’d to me they were, that man would be the Burlingame I despise & wish dead. If Tecumseh & Tenskwatawa were one man — a distillation & embodiment of the Indian blood flowing thro our line — that man would be the father I could love, admire, & pity. Of the Prophet I will say little: Jefferson agrees with Harrison that he is a rogue & charlatan, a former brawling drunk who, after a “conversion” as dramatical as Paul’s on the Damascus Road, became a teetotaling faker. I myself believe him to be both authentic & authentically half-mad, nowise to be trusted; I believe further that Tecumseh so saw him too, from the beginning.

As for the “Shooting Star”: what greater expression of my admiration can I make than that Tecumseh is more deserving of Andrée’s love than I? That I had rather be esteem’d by him than by anyone save her? That I think him worth a Jefferson, two Madisons, three Barlows, five Napoleons? I never felt more my grandfather’s son (but remember, I did not yet know that history in detail) than when I first sat at the feet of this successor to Pontiac, whom I pray it will be your fortune one day to meet as the head of a great free league of Indian nations, and to love as I do.

He began our closer connection in July 1810, by saving my life. On the strength of my relation to Andrée & my father’s & grandfather’s to Pontiac, Tecumseh had permitted me to live in the Prophet’s town (over the Prophet’s objections) & practice the Algonkin language thro the summer & fall of 1809, between my embassies to John Henry. He had heard me out carefully, thro an interpreter, on Andrée’s proposal regarding the Wyandots & the Harrison treaty, and had replied that while it did not strike him as the best strategy, it was the course he would probably follow anyhow, inasmuch as he expected the “village chiefs” to sign the treaty despite his threats. He also told me that William Henry Harrison was no villain, but a worthy tho implacable adversary who had champion’d legal justice for the Indians (vainly) in the Indiana legislature in 1807, even whilst dickering to buy their land at 3½ mills the acre—600 times less than the government’s standard selling price! But he would not talk to me further about such important matters as Pontiac’s rebellion, or his opinion of my father & grandfather, or my betrothal to his young friend “Star-of-the-Lake,” until we could discuss them in Algonkin.