John Barth - Letters

Seven letters in all: you see how readily I adapt my old project to your new one!

But this ancient history lies in the future (Have you a timetable for our project? Are the dates and sequence of the several letters to be of any significance? Have you a Pattern of your own in mind?), beginning at this letter’s end, when you shall commence the tale of Andrew Cook IV as told by himself. Meanwhile, in the most summary fashion, here is the line of his descendants from the end of his last letter to his child (dated May 14, 1812; what would your Jacob Horner make of this anniversary of King Henry IV’s assassination, George Washington’s opening of the first Constitutional Convention, the death of Mme de Staël’s mother, Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination, and the departure of the Lewis & Clark Expedition from St. Louis?) to the beginning of this my first letter to you:

My ancestor chose the wrong conjunction. A week into Gemini, just after he closed that long fourth letter, Andrée Castine Cook gave birth to opposite-sex twins, duly named Henry and Henrietta Cook Burlingame V. The old cosmophilist H.B. III must have smiled in his unknown grave! In the time-honored manner of our line, their father lingered on at Castines Hundred until he was assured of his wife’s and children’s well-being — then left at once (but not directly) for Paris, to try to assist Joel Barlow in the business he had lately done his best to obstruct: negotiation with Napoleon concerning the Berlin and Milan decrees.

He will not get there in time: unbeknownst to him, the emperor has already left St. Cloud to lead his army’s ill-fated march into Russia; the Duc de Bassano, unable to stall Barlow further, has produced on May 11 the “Decree of St. Cloud,” falsely dated April 28, 1811, to “prove” that France had rescinded the Berlin and Milan decrees more than a year since, at Barlow’s first request! The old poet is delighted, never mind the chicanery: the more so since on that same May 11 Prime Minister Perceval, a staunch supporter of Britain’s Orders in Council against American shipping, has been assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons, and his successor Lord Castlereagh is known to be amenable to lifting those orders. Barlow has rushed the St. Cloud Decree across the Channel via the U.S.S. Wasp; on May 19 it has reached Lord Castlereagh. Surely the author of the Columbiad is about to score a brilliant diplomatic triumph: no reason now for Britain not to raise her embargo as France has done, and Madison not to revoke in turn his Non-Intercourse Act against Britain. The western war hawks have lost their only casus belli of interest to the eastern states. There will be no War of 1812!

But ah, the mails. Unaware of Barlow’s coup, Madison has delivered on June 1 his Second War Message to Congress, emphasizing the issue of British impressment of U.S. seamen; today 157 years ago he signs the Declaration of War, but the British ministry will not hear of it until well after their tardy revocation (on June 23) of the Orders in Council. Adieu, Joel Barlow, who have but six months more to live and must spend them chasing Napoleon all over eastern Europe! Au revoir, Andrew Cook IV, chaser of wild geese, of whom we shall hear more!

For the next dozen years his good wife remains at Castines Hundred, raising her children. Twice during the first three of those years — that is, during the “Second War of Independence”—her husband returns (once without her knowing it), between his wartime adventures, not to be here chronicled. Andrée herself, once so politically active, seems to take no further interest in the Game of Governments. She is paid a single visit (in mid-September, 1813) by her friend and hero Tecumseh, who has fought so ably for the British along the Great Lakes that the question is no longer whether the U.S. will capture Canada, but whether the western states, so eager for the war, will become new territories of the Crown! Detroit has fallen; Fort Chicago has been massacred, Frenchtown, Fort Miami, Fort Mims. Tecumseh has more than regained the prestige lost at Tippecanoe: he is the undisputed leader of a confederacy that now includes the southern Creeks.

But he confides to “Star-of-the-Lake” that he has ceased to believe in his mission. His Indians are good fighters but not good soldiers; with British encouragement, their ferocity against captured troops and civilians has redoubled; he cannot restrain them. The American retaliation has already begun, and is plainly exterminative. Forts Wayne and Meigs and Stephenson did not fall, and they should have; the Creeks cannot possibly withstand the army that Andrew Jackson is assembling against them; the British general Proctor, Tecumseh’s immediate superior, is a coward and a beast. Most ominous of all, the American Commodore Perry has just defeated the British fleet on Lake Erie: the Long Knives will now control the Lakes, and who controls the Lakes controls the heart of the country.

It is to confirm rumors of this defeat, about which Proctor has lied to him, that Tecumseh has come secretly from Bois Blanc Island, his camp on the Detroit River, to the other end of Lake Erie; having confirmed them, he has stopped at Castines Hundred to say good-bye to his friend forever. His old enemy General Harrison is assembling an army of vengeful Kentucky riflemen on the Ohio shore of the lake; Perry’s fleet will carry them unopposed to the Detroit river forts. Somewhere thereabouts, and soon, the decisive battle will be fought. He Tecumseh is not sanguine of its issue; in any case, he knows — though he cannot say how he knows — that he will not survive it, and that the cause of Indian confederacy will not survive him.

But this is not Tecumseh’s history, any more than it is Andrew Cook’s (who, we shall learn in another letter, is observing this fateful tête-à-tête from a place of concealment on the grounds of Castines Hundred). During the British invasion of Chesapeake Bay late the next summer — specifically, during the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore following the burning of Washington — my great-great-grandfather will officially die. The news will reach Andrée (still in mourning for Tecumseh) a week or so later — along with the rumor that her husband has merely faked his death in order to mislead certain authorities; has changed identities and set out for New Orleans, the next destination of the British fleet. The “widow” considers the news, the rumor, his long silence, her familiar position. After the destruction of Jean Lafitte’s Baratarian stronghold by the American navy that same September and the American victory at New Orleans the following January — the war of course is over by then, but the mails, the mails! — the expected letter arrives at Castines Hundred, purportedly from her husband but in a fairly suspicious hand, as if penned with difficulty by either a wounded Andrew IV or a moderately artful forger: She is to join him at once in Mobile to help reorganize the surviving Creeks and Negroes enlisted by the British and now abandoned by them. She is to bring the twins…

Andrée makes the painful choice: she resolves to disbelieve, and holds fast to that resolve for the rest of her recorded life, though four more “posthumous” letters follow this first over the next several years, comprising the body of my Marylandiad. She remains a widow; the twins grow up fatherless. Napoleon abdicates, is exiled to Elba, returns for the Hundred Days, is defeated at Waterloo, surrenders aboard H.M.S. Bellerophon, appeals to the prince regent for a passport to America, and is transported instead to St. Helena by Admiral Cockburn, the erstwhile scourge of the Chesapeake. The Rush-Bagot Treaty neutralizes the Great Lakes forever. Mme de Staël dies in Paris of liver and hydrothoracic complaints, George III at Windsor of intermittent hematuria, inguinal hernia, hemorrhoids, bedsores, and terminal diarrhea; the prince regent becomes George IV. Henry Clay’s Missouri Compromise prohibits slavery in all the new territories except Missouri which open up west of the Mississippi; the Indians are resettled and re-resettled. The state of Indiana considers naming its new capital city Tecumseh after their late great adversary, but decides on Indianapolis instead. Schemes are concocted to spirit Napoleon from his second exile to New Orleans, to Champ d’Asile in the Gulf of Mexico, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland.