John Barth - Letters

& Washington!

We review the strategy with Andrew. The British government are convinced from the start that Madison is the tool of his mentor Thomas Jefferson, at whose instruction he has coordinated the 1812 War with Napoleon’s activities in Spain and Russia; while Britain is thus stripped of her allies and engaged in the peninsular fighting, the U.S. intends to add Canada and the Floridas to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. From the time of the emperor’s retreat from Moscow, and more particularly in the first quarter of 1814, the British Cabinet’s strategy becomes not only to retain Canada by sending new forces to Prevost’s aid, but to capture New Orleans as well, and, by tightening the Chesapeake and North Atlantic blockades, to force the secession of New York and New England. The Canadian border will then be adjusted to include a buffer state extending 100 miles south of the Lakes (i.e., most of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, as well as western Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and New England); British jurisdiction will extend from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. The United States will thus be contained effectively by the Hudson and Mohawk rivers on the north, the Allegheny, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers on the northwest and west. The Floridas are perhaps negotiable.

Only the Duke of Wellington is not sanguine. Even from the perspective of southern France, the map of America depresses him: that endless wilderness; the terrific problems of supply and reinforcement. “The prospect in regard to America,” he writes to Earl Bathurst, the prince regent’s secretary of war and the colonies, “is not consoling.’’

Admiral Cochrane, on the other hand, even before Andrew reaches Bermuda with Consuelo and his doctored orders, is so full of ambitious plans that he cannot decide among them. He will kidnap Secretary Monroe, say, maybe even Jefferson, as hostages to be ransomed by “all the country southwest of the Chesapeake”; or he will capture and destroy the Portsmouth Navy Yard and send Wellington’s army across New Hampshire to join forces with Prevost; or he will exceed Bathurst’s instructions and recruit a large cavalry of disaffected Negroes, a kind of black cossacks, to terrify the South into capitulation: the chain of Chesapeake Islands from Tangier up to Bloodsworth will be armed and fortified as their refuge and training base. Or he will seize New York City, or Rhode Island; or he will take Philadelphia, or perhaps Richmond, and either destroy or indemnify them. New Orleans alone, when his black cossacks and Creek Indians win it, ought to fetch four million pounds’ worth of goods and ransom, of which his personal share will exceed £125,000!

As Cochrane schemes, unschemes, reschemes, Byron’s cousin Peter Parker in the Menelaus, together with sixteen other ships and 2,800 of Wellington’s Invincibles under command of General Ross, sail west from Bordeaux to rendezvous with him in Bermuda, and Andrew and Consuelo sail south to that same rendezvous in Prevost’s dispatch boat. La novelista’s confusion makes her cross with her lover and advisor: en route to Bermuda he has pressed upon her Jane Austen’s new Pride and Prejudice as a refinement of 18th-Century realism of the sort that might anticipate what 19th-century novelists will be doing 50 years hence, when the Gothic-Romantic fad has run its course. At the same time he translates aloud for her E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Phantasiestücke. But Consuelo finds Austen’s meticulous interest in money —its sources and the subtleties of its deployment — as exótico as the rites of a strange religion, whereas Hoffmann’s goblins and revenants she accepts as the most familiar and unremarkable reportage, less marvelous by half than the table talk in Colmenar, her native Andalusian village. Mexico, she is now convinced, will be a desert, as inhospitable to romanticismo as La Mancha, and Venezuela a jungle full of monkeys and alligators. As for Bermuda, it bores her in two days: it is not Prospero’s island, but Nova Scotia with more sunshine and fewer booksellers. Most unromantical of all, she brings her Gulf Stream seasickness ashore, cannot eat, yet puts on weight. In her fortune-teller’s opinion, she is with child.

What confidence Andrew has in Andrée, so candidly to acknowledge this news! Which, however, he does not instantly credit. He knows for a fact that Consuelo cannot be more than five weeks pregnant; what’s more, in her pique at his cavils about realismo she has attempted vainly to rouse his flagging ardor by permitting herself a small romance with a junior officer aboard the dispatch boat…

Andrew has been advanced a sufficiency for his mission from Prevost’s secret-service budget. When Admiral Cochrane, on receipt of the (emended) instructions, orders him at once to Chesapeake Bay to report on Cockburn’s black-cossack enlistments and to sound the man out on Cochrane’s own inclination to ransom rather than burn the Yankee cities, Andrew gives Consuelo half of this advance. He informs her that his errand may keep him in the Chesapeake all summer; he declares that she no longer needs his aesthetic counsel, and suggests that New Orleans — with its links to France, Spain, and England as well as to the United States — might be the most romantic and fertile soil available for the future of the Novel. He himself saw and admired the city during his pursuit of Aaron Burr and Harman Blennerhassett some years since; he would be delighted to discover, should he revisit Louisiana with his wife and family after the war, that his brave and handsome friend has restored that poisoned snuffbox to their adventure and become the founder of Cajun Neo-Realism or Gumbo Gothic, whichever.

Consuelo is tearful and excited; Andrew gives her a letter of introduction to a Louisiana legislator he once caroused and swapped pirate stories with, one Jean Blanque, who he is confident can recommend a good physician and midwife if the need arises, or a hoodoo-lady if she wishes to postpone motherhood. ¡Hasta la vista, Consuelo la consolada!

Andrew is happy to be off in the dispatch sloop St. Lawrence. He feels more self-reproach for encouraging his friend’s literary aspirations than for sleeping with her, and Admiral Cochrane’s combination of ambitiousness and irresolution bothers him. George Cockburn, on the other hand, he finds immediately appealing upon their rendezvous at the mouth of the Patuxent, which the rear admiral is already charting for invasion purposes. Prevost, declares Cockburn, cannot see beyond the St. Lawrence River. Cochrane, though no coward, is the sort who will change his mind a dozen times before making it up and another dozen after, with little sense either of real opportunity or real improbability. The kidnapping scheme, for example, is a piece of foolishness: nobody in Madison’s cabinet is popular enough to command a decent ransom! And the “black cossack” business is another chimera: despite their best efforts, Cockburn’s men cannot recruit more than one or two blacks daily. Unlike your red Indians, who in a vain effort to preserve their sovereignty form desperate alliances with either Madison or the Crown, your Negro has no more wish to fight one white man’s battle than another’s. But Cochrane knows neither blacks nor Indians! Moreover, the man is greedy, in Cockburn’s opinion, beyond the permissible prize-taking activities of any responsible commander. In order properly to be feared, one must sometimes destroy instead of ransoming; but the destruction must be calculated for the best psychological effect. It astonishes Cockburn that either Prevost or Cochrane has had wit enough to suggest what he has been urging upon them for above a year, the seizure of Brother Jonathan’s capital city — and he is not surprised that Cochrane is already equivocating on the matter.