An American Patrician, or The Story of Aaron Burr

Van Ness is wonder-smitten.

“Your enmity to Hamilton,” he says tentatively, “strikes deeper then than mere politics.”

“Sir,” returns Aaron slowly, the old-time black, ophidian sparkle flashing up in his eyes, “the deepest sentiment of my nature is my hatred for that man. Day by day it grows upon me. Also, it is he who furnishes the seed and the roots of it. Everywhere he vilifies me. I hear it east, north, west, south. I am his mania – his ‘phobia’. In his slanderous mouth I am ‘liar,’ ‘thief,’ and ‘scoundrel rogue.’ In such connection I would have you to remember that I, on my side, give him, and have given him, the description of a gentleman.”

“To be frank, sir,” returns Van Ness thoughtfully, “I know every word you speak to be true, and have often wondered that you did not parade our epithetical friend at ten paces, and refute his mendacities with convincing lead.”

Aaron’s look is hard as granite. There is a moment of silence. “Kill him!” he says at last, as though repeating a remark of his companion; “kill him! Yes; that, too, must come! But it must not come too soon for my perfect vengeance! First I shall uproot him politically; every hope he has shall die! I shall thrust him from his high places! When he lies prone, broken, powerless! – when he is spat upon by those in whose one-time downcast, servile presence he strutted lord paramount! – when his past is scoffed at, his future swallowed up! – when his word is laughed at and his fame become a farce! – then, when every fang of defeat pierces and poisons him, then I say should be the hour to talk of killing! That hour is not yet. I am a revengeful man, Van Ness – I am an artist of revenge! Believing as I do that with the going of the breath, all goes! – that for the Man there is no hereafter as there has been no past! – I must garner my vengeance on earth or forever lose it. So I take pains with my vengeance; and having, as I tell you, a genius for it, my vengeful pains shall find their dark and full-blown harvest. Hamilton, for whom my whole heart flows away in hate! – I shall build for him a pyramid of misery while he lives; and I shall cap that pyramid with his death – his grave! I can see, as one who looks down a lane, what lies before. I shall take from him every scrap of that power which is his soul’s food – strip him of each least fragment of position! When he has nothing left but life, I’ll wrest that from him. Long years after he is gone I’ll walk this earth; and I shall find a joy in his absence, and the thought that by my hand and my will he was made to go, beyond what the friendship of man or the favor of woman could bring me. Kill him! There is a grist in the hopper of my purposes, friend, and the mill stones of my plans are grinding!”

Aaron does not look at Van Ness as he thus brings the secrets of his soul to the light of day, but wears the manner of one preoccupied and in the spell of self. Van Ness shudders as he listens; and, while the slow words follow one another in hateful swart procession, a chill creeps over him, as from the evil monstrous nearness of something elemental, abnormal, fearsome. A sweat breaks out on his face. Neither his wits nor his tongue can frame remark for either good or ill. The brooding Aaron seems not to notice, but falls into a black muse.

CHAPTER XIV – THE TRIUMPH OF AARON

IT is the era of bad feeling, and the breasts of men are reservoirs of poison. Jefferson and Adams, while known admitted rivals, deplore these wormwood conditions and strive against them. It is as though they strove against the tides; party lines were never more fiercely drawn. Some portrait of the hour may be found in the following:

Adams gives a dinner; and, because he cannot get over the Jonathan Edwards emanation of Aaron, he invites him. Also, Van Ness being with Aaron, the invitation includes Van Ness. Hamilton and Jefferson will be there; since it is one of the hypocritical affectations of these good people to keep up a polite appearance of friendship, by way of example, if not rebuke, to warring followers, who are hopefully fighting duels and shedding blood and taking life in their interests. On the way to the President’s house Van Ness, to whom Adams is new, queries Aaron:

“What sort of a man is Adams?”

“He is an honest, pragmatic, hot-tempered thick-skull,” says Aaron – “a New England John Bull! – a masculine Mrs. Malaprop whom Sheridan would love. You can have no better description of him than was given me but yesterday by a member of his Cabinet. ‘Adams,’ says the cabineteer, ‘is a man who whether sportful, witty, kind, cold, drunk, sober, angry, easy, stiff, jealous, careless, cautious, confident, close or open, is so always in the wrong place and with the wrong man!’”

“Is he a good executive?”

“Bad! By nature he is no more in touch with the spirit of a democracy than with the maritime policies of the Ptolemies. His pet picture of government is England, with the one amendment that he would call the king a president. As to his executive labors: why, then, he touches only to disarrange, talks only to disturb. And all without meaning to do so.”

The dinner is neither large nor formal. Aaron sits on the right hand of Adams, while Jefferson has Van Ness and Hamilton at either elbow. In the cross fire of conversation comes the following: The topic is government.

“Speaking of the British constitution,” says Adams, “purge that constitution of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would be the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man.”

Hamilton cocks his ear. “Sir,” says he, “purge the British constitution of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would become an impracticable government. As it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most powerful government that ever existed.”

Presently, the currents of converse shift, and the torrid heats of party are considered. It is now that Jefferson is heard from.

“The situation is deplorable!” he exclaims. “You and I, sir” – looking across at Adams – “have seen warm debates and high political passions. But gentlemen of different politics would then speak to each other, and separate the business of the Senate from that of society. It is not so now. Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way lest they be obliged to touch their hats. Men’s passions are boiling over; and one who keeps himself cool, and clear of the contagion, is so far below the point of ordinary conversation that he finds himself socially cast away. More; there is a moral breaking down. The interruption of letters is becoming so notorious” – here he looks hard at Hamilton, whose followers are supposed to peep into letters not addressed to them – “that I am forming a resolution of declining correspondence with my friends through the channels of the post office altogether.”

Even during Aaron’s short stay at the Capitol, fresh fuel is heaped upon the fires of his Hamilton hates. A cloud blows up in the sky; war with France is threatened. Washington at Mount Vernon is commissioned commander in chief; Hamilton – the active – is placed next to him. Aaron’s name, sent in for a general’s commission, is secretly vetoed by Hamilton whispering in the Adams ear.

Adams does not like the veto; he thinks he should name Aaron, and says so.

“If you do,” declares Hamilton warningly, “it will defeat your reelection.”

Adams groans and gives way. It is the argument wherewith Hamilton never fails to drive him or curb him as he will. Aaron hears of this new offense; he says nothing, but lays it away with the others.

Candidate Jefferson and Manager Aaron are far apart in their hopes and fears, the former taking the gloomy view. They come together confidentially.

“I have looked over the field,” says Jefferson, “and we are already beaten.”

“Sir,” returns Aaron with grim point, “you should look again. I think you see things wrong end up.”

“My hatred of Hamilton,” observes Aaron to Van Ness, as their coach rolls north for home, “is the good fortune of Jefferson. I shall be fighting my own fight, and so I shall win. If I were fighting only for Jefferson, I can well see how the strife might have another upcome.”

The campaign draws down; it is Adams against Jefferson, Federal against Republican. Hamilton leaves the seat of government, and comes to New York to take personal charge. At that his designs are Janus-faced. He says “Adams,” but he means “Pinckney.” He foresees that, if Adams be given another term, he will defy control. Wherefore he is publicly for Adams, and privately for Pinckney – he looks at Massachusetts but sees only South Carolina. This collision of pretense and purpose, on Hamilton’s false part, gets vastly in the Federal way. That it should do so will instantly occur to curious ones, if they will but seek to go south by heading north.

As Hamilton sets out to take presidential possession of New York, he has no misgivings. He knows little or nothing of Aaron’s designs or what that ingenious gentleman has been about.

“There is the Manhattan Bank of course; but what can it do? There are the Bucktails – who are vulgar clods! There are the Livingstons and the Clintons – he has beaten them before!”

Thus run the reflections of the confident Hamilton. No; he sees only triumph ahead. He gives Aaron and his candidate Jefferson – with their borrel issue of Alien and Sedition – not half the thought that he devotes to ways and means by which he hopes finally to steal the electors from Adams, and produce Pinckney in the White House. That is Hamilton’s dream of power – Pinckney!

Everything pivots on the legislature; since it is the legislature which will select the electors.

Hamilton, bearing in mind his intended steal of the State, prepares his list of candidates for Albany. He does not pick them for either wisdom or moral worth; what he is after are legislators whom he can certainly manhandle to match his designs, and who will give him electors – he himself will furnish the names – of a Pinckney not an Adams complexion. He makes up his slate to that treasonable end; and the swift Aaron gets a copy before the ink is dry.

Aaron smiles when he runs down the ignoble muster of Hamilton’s boneless nonentities.

“They are the least in the town!” he mutters. “I shall pit against them the town’s greatest.”

Aaron with his Bucktails, now makes ready his own legislative ticket. At the head he places old North-of-Ireland Clinton – a local Whittington, ten times governor of the State. General Gates – for whom Aaron, when time was, plotted the downfall of Washington, and who received the sword of the vanquished Burgoyne and sent that popinjay back to England to fail at play-writing – comes next. After General Gates the wily Aaron writes “Samuel Osgood” – who was Washington’s postmaster general – “Henry Rutgers, Elias Neusen, Thomas Storms, George Warner, Philip Arcularius, James Hunt, Ezekiel Robbins, Brockholst Livingston, and John Swartwout” – every name a tower of strength.

Hamilton cannot repress a flutter of fear as he reads the noble roster; but his unflagging vanity, which serves him instead of a more reasonable optimism, rushes to his rescue. None the less it jars on him a bit strangely, albeit, he laughs at it for a jest, that the best regarded of the town should make up the ticket of the yeomanry and the crude Bucktails, while the aristocratical Federals and the equally aristocratical Cincinnati – that coterie of perfume and patricianism! – search the gutters for theirs.

Seeing himself on the Jefferson ticket, old North-of-Ireland Clinton makes trouble. He sends for Aaron and his committee, and notifies them that he cannot consent to run.

“If you, Colonel Burr, were the candidate,” he says, “I should run gladly; but Jefferson I hate.”

In his hope’s heart, old North-of-Ireland Clinton – who, for all his North-of-Ireland blood, was born in America – thinks he himself may be struck by the presidential lightning, and does not intend to place any deflecting obstruction in the path of such descending bolt.

Aaron has forestalled the Clinton refusal in his thoughts, and is not surprised by the high Clintonian attitude. He tries persuasion; the old ex-governor and would-be president only plants himself more firmly. Under no circumstances shall he agree to run; his honored name must not be used.

It is now that Aaron shows his teeth: “Governor Clinton,” says he, “when it comes to that, our committee’s appearance before you, preferring the request that you run, is a ceremony rather of courtesy than need. With the last word, regardless of either your plans or your preferences, the public we represent is perfect in its right to name you, and compel you to run. And, sir, making short what might become long, and so saving time for us all, I must now notify you that, should you continue to withhold your consent, we stand already determined to retain and use your name despite refusal, as a course entirely within the lines of popular right.”

In the looks and tones of Aaron, the old North-of-Ireland governor reads decision not to be revoked, and for once in his obstinate life surrenders gracefully.

“Gentlemen,” says he, with a bland wave of the hand to Aaron and his Bucktail committee, “since you put it in that way, refusal is out of my power. Also let me add, that no man could take a nomination from a higher, a more honorable, a more patriotic source.”

The campaign, on in earnest, goes forward with a roar. Not a screaming item is omitted. Guns boom; flags flaunt; bands of music bray; gay processions go marching; crackers splutter and snap; orators with iron throats sweep down on spellbound crowds in gales of red-faced eloquence; flaming rockets, when the sun goes down, streak the night with fire; the bold Buck-tails, cidered to the brim, cause Brom Martling’s long-room to ring again, and make the intersection of Spruce and Nassau a Bedlam crossroads.

This is well; yet Aaron desires more. The issue is Alien and Sedition; he yearns for an overt expression of what villain work may be done by that black statute.

Aaron’s strength, as a captain of politics, lies in his intuitive knowledge of men. He is never popular – never loved while ever admired. Men may no more love him than they may love a diamond, or a Damascus sword blade, or a tallest, sun-kissed, snow-capped mountain peak. Still that innate grasp of men, and what motives will move them, is as an edged tool in his hands wherewith to carve out triumph. This gift of man-reading comes in play when now he would exhibit Alien and Sedition in its baleful workings.

There is a Judge Yates; his home is in Otsego. As though he had builded him, Aaron is aware of Yates in his elements. That honest man is of your natural-born martyrs. Is there a headsman’s block, there he lays his neck; given a scaffold, he instantly mounts it; into every pillory he thrusts his head and hands, into every stocks his heels; by every stake he takes his stand as soon as it is put up; and he would sooner meet a despot than a friend. And yet – to defend Yates – that bent for martyrdom is nothing less than a bent to be noble; for a martyr is but a hero reversed. The two are brothers; a hero is only a martyr who succeeds, a martyr only a hero who fails.

Aaron sends for the oppression-thirsty Yates. “Here is a pamphlet flaying Adams,” says he. “It is raw and ferocious. Take it home and circulate it.”

“Why?” asks Yates.

“Because the Federalists will arrest you. They are fools enough to do it.”

“Doubtless!” – this dryly. “But what advantage do you discover in having me locked up?”

“Man! can’t you see? It will illustrate their tyranny! Your seizure will be on a United States warrant. That means they must bring you from Otsego to New York. Think what a triumph that should be – you, the paraded victim of the monarchical Adams!”

Yates goes home to Otsego with a gay, elate heart, and publishes Aaron’s blood-raw pamphlet. He is seized and paraded, as the astute Aaron has foreseen. The flocking farmers fringe the captive’s line of march. Yates is a martyr, and makes his journey through double ranks of sympathy for himself and curses for the despotic Adams. The martyrdom of Yates is worth a thousand votes.

“It is the difference between the eye and the ear,” says Aaron to his aide, Swartwout. “You might explain the iniquities of Alien and Sedition, and never rouse the people. Show them those iniquities, and they take fire. It is quite natural enough. I tell you of a man crushed by a falling tree; you feel a conventional shock that lasts a minute. Should you some day see a man crushed by a falling tree, you will start in your sleep for a twelvemonth with the pure horror of it. Wherefore, never address the ear when you can appeal to the eye. The gateway to the imagination is the eye.”

The campaign wags to a close; the day of the ballot has its dawning. To the amazed chagrin of Hamilton, Aaron and his Bucktails go over him at the polls with a rousing majority of four hundred and ninety; he is beaten, Aaron is dominant, New York is Jefferson’s. The blow shakes Hamilton to the heart, and for the moment he can neither plan nor act. In the face of such disaster, he sits stricken.

Presently, as though the bad in him is more vivid than the good and quicker at recovery, that old instinct of larceny struggles to its feet. He will steal the State; not from Adams as he planned, but from Jefferson. He scribbles a note to Jay, who is in town at his home, urging him as governor to call a special session of the legislature, a Federal Legislature, and go about the crime. He feels the necessity of justification; for Jay is of a skittish honor. This on his mind, he closes with: “It is the only way by which we can prevent an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of government.”

Jay reads, and draws down his brows in a frown. Hamilton’s messenger is waiting.

“Governor,” says the messenger, “General Hamilton bid me get an answer.”

“Tell General Hamilton there is no answer.” Jay rereads the note. Then he takes quill, writes a sentence on the back, and files it away in a pigeonhole. Years later, when Jay and Hamilton and Adams and Jefferson and Aaron are dead and under the grass roots, hands yet unformed will draw the letter forth and unborn eyes will read: “Proposing a measure for party purposes which I do not think it would become me to adopt. J. J.”

CHAPTER XV – THE INTRIGUE OF THE TIE

HAMILTON writhes and twists like a hurt snake. Helpless in that first effort before the adamantine honesty of Jay, when the breath of his courage returns, he bends himself to consider, whether by other means, fair or foul, the election may not yet be stolen for Pinckney. He sends out a flock of letters to the Federal leaders, whom he addresses loftily as their commander in chief of party.

It is now he receives a fresh stab. By their replies, and rather in the cool tone than in the substance, the Federal chiefs show that his bare word is no longer enough to move them. Washington is dead; that potential name no more remains to conjure with. And now, to the passing of Washington, has been added his own defeat. The two disasters leave his voice of scanty consequence in the parliaments of the Federalists. He finds this out from such as Cabot of Massachusetts, Cooper of New York and Bayard of Delaware, who peremptorily decline a Pinckney intrigue as worse than hopeless. They propose instead – and therein lurks horror – that the Federal electors be asked to abandon Adams for Aaron. They can take the Adams electors, they argue, and, with what may be coaxed from the Jefferson strength, make Aaron President – their President – the President of the Federalists.

The suggestion to take up Aaron shocks Hamilton even more than does his discovered loss of power – which latter, of itself, is as a blade of ice through his heart. It is bitter to lose the election; more bitter to learn that his decree is no longer regarded; most bitter to hear of Aaron as a possible President, and by Federal votes at that. Broken of heart and hope, the deposed king retires to his country seat, the Grange, and sits in mourning with his soul.

Meanwhile, Aaron, as though a presidency in his personal favor possesses but minor interest, devotes himself to the near nuptials of baby Theo, who is to marry Joseph Alston, a rich young rice planter of South Carolina.

Having turned the shoulder of their disregard to Hamilton, the Federal chiefs confer among themselves by letter and word of mouth. Their great purpose is to save themselves from Jefferson, whom they fear and hate. They would sooner have Aaron, as not so much the stark democrat as is the Man of Monticello. There be folk to whom nothing is so full of terror in a democracy as a democrat; and our Federalists are white at the thought of Jefferson. Aaron would suit them better; they think him less of a leveler. Still they must know his feelings. They will bind him with promises; for they, cautious gentlemen, have no notion of buying a pig in a poke. They seek out Aaron, who has left off politics for orange wreaths and is up to the ears in baby Theo’s wedding. As a preliminary they send his lieutenant, Swartwout, to take soundings.

“If the presidency be tendered, will you accept?” asks Swartwout.

“Assuredly! There are two things, sir, no gentleman may decline – a lady and a presidency.”

Aaron sobers a bit after this small flippancy, and tells Swartwout that, should he be chosen, he will serve.

“There can be no refusal,” he says. “The electors are free to make their choice, and he on whom they pitch must serve. Mark this, however,” he goes on, warningly; “I shall lift neither hand nor head in the business; the thing must come to me unsought and uninvited. Also, since you, yourself, are of those who will select the electors for our own State, I tell you, as you value my friendship, that New York must go to Jefferson. We carried the State for him, and he shall have it.”

Following Swartwout’s visit, Federalists Cabot and Bayard wait upon Aaron. They point out that he can be President; but they seek to condition it upon certain promises.

“Gentlemen,” returns Aaron, “I know not what in my past has led you to this journey. I’ve no promises to make. Should I ever be President, I shall be no man’s president but my own.”

“Think of the honor, sir!” says Federalist Bayard.

“Honor?” repeats Aaron. “Now I should call it disgrace indeed if I went into the White House in fetters to you. Believe me, I can see my own way to honor, sir; you need hold no candle to my feet.”

Although rebuffed by Aaron, the Federal chiefs – all save the broken Hamilton, eating out his baffled heart at the Grange – none the less go forward with their designs. They call away from Adams what electors will follow them, and gain a handful from Jefferson besides. The law-demanded vote is finally taken and the count shows Jefferson seventy-three, Aaron seventy-three, Adams sixty-five, Jay one.

No name having received a majority, the ejection must go to the House. The sixteen States, expressing themselves through their House delegations and owning each one vote, are now to pick the world a president. At this the campaign is all to fight over again. But in a different way, on different ground, and the two candidates Jefferson and Aaron.

In the weeks which pass before the House convenes, Federalist Bayard, in the heat of the pulling and hauling among House men, makes a second pilgrimage to Aaron. The latter, baby Theo being by this time safely married and abroad upon her honeymoon, has leisure to talk.

Federalist Bayard lays open the situation, “As affairs are,” he explains – he has made a count of noses – “Jefferson, when the House convenes, will have New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and his home State of Virginia. You, for your side, will have New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, South Carolina, and my own State of Delaware. The delegations of Maryland and Vermont, being evenly divided between yourself and Jefferson, will have no voice. The tally will show eight for Jefferson, six for you, two not voting. None the less, in the face of these figures the means of electing you exist. By deceiving one man – a great blockhead – and tempting two – not incorruptible – you can still secure a majority of the States. I – ”