Eagle's Cry

by David Nevin

  “We’re not the French, Colonel,” Jimmy said. His voice was strong. It was the point he’d made again and again. The French peasant came out of feudalism, but the common man in America has governed himself for two hundred years. He won’t lose his mind.

  For a moment she felt reassured; but then, looking into the old eyes, she saw he hadn’t even heard. “Do you have any idea how frightened people are?” he cried. “They look for mobs, riots, pillaging, burning. They’re building walls, setting out buckets of sand, rigging two-man pumps at their wells. Laying out pistols and shotguns—”

  The son interrupted. It was snakelike, his lips scarcely moving, and this stirred an atavistic fear in her.

  “It won’t come to mobs, because we won’t let it! The army will be ready, cannon loaded with grape and bayonets fixed. We’ll cut rabble mobs down like scything wheat!”

  He whirled on Jimmy. “Take this as warning. You damned Jacobins aren’t going to steal this country from us!”

  “We’re not Jacobins!” Dolley cried. The radical French clubs that led to revolutionary violence were nothing like American Democrats.

  But the whisper went on, harsh as stones rubbing together. “The army stands for order, decency, stability. We destroyed the whiskey rebels, and I promise you we’ll handle your democratic rabble just the same.”

  Oh, the whiskey rebels! Pennsylvania farmers protesting an unfair tax on what they made from their grain. There’d been a rough few weeks, but they’d dispersed in the end. But Federalists had mounted an army and saw the outcome as a great victory.

  The soldier’s hand came up slowly and he pointed a finger at her that was like a pistol. “So let me tell you, madam—and you, Mr. Jacobin Democrat traitor—you go one little notch beyond the straight and narrow and we’ll crush you!”

  She stared into his saurian eyes; her hands were cold and there was an icy flutter in her breast.

  And Jimmy said, “Major, no one is talking mobs except you. Should mobs form, citizens can be deputized to control them. You are a subordinate officer of the U.S. Army, and what you are talking about is using the military to subvert the democratic process. Such action would be high treason, and such talk, sir, is a disgrace to your uniform!”

  That told him—and yet, stating it so baldly increased her own sense of ground opening at her feet into a pit of danger. Now she saw what the stakes before them really were. They turned back toward Swan’s and walked in silence. She clutched her shawl to her throat.

  “Jimmy,” she said after several blocks, “was he serious about the army? That it would come out; he’s an officer after all. Could it block the election results?”

  He hesitated. “Not—not on it’s own, I’d think. But of course, any army is there to support what is, not what could be. It’s conservative, resistant to change—”

  “But would it come out?” she cried.

  “On orders, yes. Soldiers do what they’re told.”

  “Could Alex order it? Override Mr. Adams?”

  “I—I don’t think so. It would be quite illegal.”

  “But if someone tried, it would take a commander of real stature to resist, wouldn’t it? A General Washington. And we’re cursed with General Wilkinson, a rotten traitor.”

  “We don’t know he’s a traitor, not for sure.”

  “Oh, Jimmy, sometimes you carry fairness too far. Everyone says he’s in the pay of the Spanish.”

  “But it’s only suspicion.”

  “Well, when everyone suspects the leader of the army works for the enemy, it’s a disgrace! Anyway, look at him! Gross, slimy, unctuous, obsequious—”

  She had riveting memories of Wilkinson, uniform buttons about to pop over his belly, saber out like a rooster tail, toadying to her because her husband was important—

  “How did such a creature land such a command anyway?”

  “There’s a type of man who’s adept only at advancing himself, but at that he’s very adept—canny as a fox and no more scrupulous, qualities more forgivable in fox than in main.”

  Her hand tightened on her arm. “Darling, let’s keep this on a steady course. Can you imagine having your fate in the hands of General Wilkinson or that nasty major?”

  She clutched the shawl closer. More than danger alone, she had a chilled feeling that something evil lay out there in the dark like a sea monster swimming just beyond sight. They dined in their room, emptied a bottle of wine, and still she was cold. She sat on his lap, her head on his shoulder, and whispered, “Take me to bed, Jimmy. Love me. Hold me. I need to be held … .”

  Still, things were brighter in the morning sun. She decided she was weary of being worried and frightened; after all, they’d won the election.

  And then Rob Mustard banged on their door at the inn, lively as ever. Said he’d left New York and was bound for Charleston and heard they were here. She’d known him since Philadelphia, where he had run a loud, vibrant newspaper that always made sense. Then he’d shifted to New York, still publishing the truth as he saw it, which was as the Madisons saw it.

  He was tall and skinny, fifty or so, with a mop of wild, gray hair, a big laugh, and a ready eye for the humor of human foibles. Nothing made his editorial wit and ardor glow more fiercely than the missteps of government. But as he nursed a glass of Madeira, she saw a difference in his eyes, something haunted.

  “So,” he said, “they smashed my press and I’m wanted in New York.” His smile couldn’t mask hurt.

  “Wanted?” she said.

  “Under indictment. Fleeing arrest. Sedition, you see, which is defined as saying what people in power don’t want to hear.” He laughed without mirth. “So I’m on the run. Learned from poor Jim Callender—he waited till they came and pied his type and wrecked his press and off to solitary he went and lucky they didn’t hang him.” A wry grin. “You remember, I never minded calling a spade a spade when describing Federalist sins, but I’m not crazy brave. I slipped away under cover of night. Peter Freneau promised me a berth on his paper in Charleston, and I’m on my way.”

  “The only good thing about those evil acts was they gave us the election,” she said.

  “Hurrah for the common sense of the common man!” Mr. Mustard cried. “Press side was the worst—imagine, smashing a paper, jailing a man for what he says—but the attack on aliens is about as bad. Friend of mine, John Finney, been here fourteen years, he remembers cheering on the sidewalk the day the Constitution was finished; he had something to say about a Federalist alderman in New York and a week later he was deported—home to Ireland where some folks are waiting to kill him, so he says. Poor devil. Still, attack on the press is the worst.” He gave Jimmy an owlish look. “Pretty well blows your Bill of Rights to the devil, doesn’t it?”

  Jimmy nodded. “Only thing I ever really held against General Washington was his countenancing those acts.”

  Well, she thought, that’s unfair. The general had been back in Mount Vernon by then, and Mr. Adams at the helm.

  “‘Course, the acts have expired,” Mr. Mustard said. “Seems the prosecutor in New York yearns to try me on the law that was. All unconstitutional, isn’t it?”

  She knew the question pained Jimmy—what was the point of a Constitution if the Supreme Court wasn’t strong enough to enforce it?—and to deflect it she said easily, “One good thing, though—those acts told Americans where the Federalists wanted to take them more clearly than reams of Democratic rhetoric.” She glanced at Mr. Mustard and smiled. “All but your rhetoric, of course; it was always potent.”

  She left unspoken her real fear—let a tie throw their victory into the Federalist Congress and they’d be right back in the land of excesses. As if he’d had the same thought, Jimmy asked about their New York visitor.

  “Well, Gelston is a Burr toady, all right,” Mr. Mustard said, “but he’s making some sense too—New Yorkers are pretty sensitive about Virginia. You have to understand, when Aaron swung the state to the Democrats, his boys figured giving him a pla
ce on the ticket was the least Virginia could do; and they’re not sure how willingly it was done. So they’re watching.”

  “You’ve heard such talk?”

  “Oh, it’s real. Would they split over it? Maybe not, but a lot of hotheads are involved.”

  They went down for dinner, and Mr. Mustard drank three bowls of Mrs. Swan’s peanut soup, downed a tumbler of whiskey, devoured a huge slab of roast pork, and called for more. His spirits bloomed and his voice grew stronger, his wit fiercer.

  She was laughing when suddenly she noticed that he was acquiring an audience in the larger parlor for men adjoining the ladies’ parlor. Talk there had stopped and she grew distinctly uncomfortable. Voice rising, Mr. Mustard abused Alexander Hamilton, who, he said, had ordered the arrest that he had barely evaded. She remembered Alex fondly despite everything. Oh, she said, he’s not so bad.

  “My dear lady,” Mr. Mustard cried, “the Hamilton you remember has changed. Fine noble views he and his kind once held, but their vision became pinched and dark and full of fear, and the day came when they aimed no longer at the freeing of mankind to be its best—no, they turned toward control—control!—of the common man, binding him to the interests of his betters, teaching him to pull his forelock and knuckle down and take what pittance those in power might give him and be thankful, hats off, on his knees, thankee milord, thankee …”

  From the adjoining room someone shouted, “You damned blathering fool! Hamilton saved this country when it was bankrupt, got no help from the bloody Democrats either!”

  The editor leaped up, glass in hand. “A toast!” he roared, “to the big-mouthed gentleman of financial genius from whom we’ve been privileged to hear! It’s all in the name of financial efficiency that thinkers like our good friend Mr. Genius feel that folks with money make natural leaders. Now, ‘fess up, Brother Genius, don’t you feel that men with money are a bit better’n anyone else—that God had rewarded them properly with coin of the realm? Eh? Eh?”

  He emptied the glass and slammed it down. “’Course you do! And that’s your precious Mr. Hamilton’s view. And what does that mean? Why it means perpetuating an establishment class, and what does that mean but a hereditary aristocracy, lords and ladies handing down their titles to their rotten offspring, and what’s the natural outcropping of such aristocracy but monarchy?” There was an angry shout from the other room.

  “Jimmy,” she said.

  “That’s enough, Rob,” Jimmy said. “Not another word.”

  The old Mustard smile reappeared. “I do like to bait ’em a bit. Didn’t mean to embarrass you, Miss Dolley.”

  “Never mind that,” Jimmy said. “Now listen. You’re going to Charleston; you’ll connect with Peter Freneau?”

  “Promised me a berth on his paper—going daily, he is.”

  “All right. Suppose I pay you a hundred dollars in gold and send you straight through on the express stage, and you carry a message to Mr. Freneau.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “South Carolina electors will be gathering to vote. You tell him to make sure they hold back one vote for Burr. Eight Jefferson, seven Burr. Understand?”

  Dolley sagged in her chair. After all her fears, Jimmy had chosen the danger of the North-South split over the immediate danger of a tie and hoped to patch it in Carolina.

  “Can Mr. Freneau assure that?” she asked. She heard the anger in her voice.

  “Doubtless,” Mr. Mustard said. “They listen to him.”

  “Of course,” Jimmy said. “Danger is, if they’re not paying attention they’ll vote two for two all the way.”

  “As I gather we will do here.”

  He gave her a very sharp look. “I don’t know what we’ll do here, Dolley. Whatever we do, won’t hurt to drop one in South Carolina.”

  “But you’ve decided. I can tell.”

  “I have not decided—and I’ll thank you not to try to read my mind!”

  She glared, outraged.

  Rob Mustard cleared his throat. “You want me to do that, I’d better get after it.” He didn’t look at her.

  They went upstairs, Jimmy gave him the gold pieces and in five minutes he was gone. She sat on the sofa and opened her novel, her lips drawn tight as string.

  Watching those lips, Madison was irked. She’d made up her mind on the course she favored and that was all very well, but he was the one who must decide. Anyone who’d sat through the writing of the Constitution knew of the raging passions dividing North and South even then—the endless fight over slavery, southern delegates threatening to walk out, more extreme northern delegates shouting at them to go and be damned. Even General Washington’s great weight couldn’t swing them. Abolishing slavery had been his proposal—count on a great man to turn to a great question—and it almost broke the convention. When Madison realized there would be neither Constitution nor country if this kept on, he eased them away from the brutal subject.

  It had been deadly real then, to use Gelston’s phrase, and it still was. He felt a stillness come over him; decision was fixing, not yet set but coming. Dolley sighed. She hadn’t turned a page, and he realized she wasn’t reading.

  He put a glass of Madeira in her hand and sat beside her. “I’ve seen what the North-South split means up close. It can tear us to pieces.” She nodded, but no smile.

  He kissed her cheek. “Suppose you were deciding. What would you choose?”

  “Why, the immediate, of cour——” She stopped in midword, eyes wide. Then, “I—don’t know … .”

  “Then we’re in it together,” he said. “Now give me a smile.” And she did, that brilliant smile that exploded like a ray of light across her face, and then she set down the glass and turned on the couch and kissed him on the lips.

  He decided as she had feared—Aaron would get Virginia’s full twenty-one electoral votes. Jimmy said he relied in part on Gelston’s promise of votes to be shorted in the North, in part on South Carolina, in part on the dangers of the split.

  Her hands were shaking in her uneasiness, but in the end she did have faith in his decisions, which flowed from deep wells of instinct, intellect, and experience. Inner strength was the key to her husband. He was a superb horseman, though not physically strong; the feistiest mount calmed quickly after a moment of dancing and blowing. From her plantation girlhood Dolley knew that horses respond less to size or strength than to the iron they sense in the rider. Jimmy often doubted himself, but he was full of iron.

  On the appointed day in the gleaming Capitol building that Tom in his architectural mode actually had designed—she supposed he was a genius when you got right down to it—the electors gathered to cast their votes. Afterward, Jimmy told her they were hard to convince, insisting that it demeaned the Virginia hero to pair him vote for vote with the slippery New Yorker. It had taken two hours to bring them around, but he’d gotten his way, as he usually did. But as he described it, an image flashed in her mind of Colonel Emberly’s son, cold, saurian, ready to strike.

  Jimmy was very quiet over the next few days as they awaited news. Every time the national count changed, the Richmond Enquirer published another penny extra. State by state the word came in, electors voting in lock step, two by two, Jefferson and Burr, the count standing equal. The last of the northern states reported, still two by two. Gelston’s promise of votes to be held back did not materialize. Tennessee and Kentucky reported, and then only South Carolina remained. The count held equal.

  At midafternoon they heard a newsboy shouting his extra. Jimmy ran down in his shirtsleeves. From the window she saw him toss the boy a copper, snatch the paper, and scan it. He whirled, threw up his arms in exultation, and came at a run.

  Oh, thank God! South Carolina—eight for Jefferson, seven for Burr, one for someone else. Peter Freneau in Charleston had scrawled a hasty letter to the Enquirer. Vote count seventy-three Jefferson, seventy-two Burr, sixty-five Adams.

  He seized her and waltzed her around the room like a boy at a barn dance. S
he had champagne ready and he opened it, the cork putting a dent in the ceiling. Oh, she wished she had a cannon to shoot! They began planning a public party, invite everyone—

  Extra! Extra! Extra!

  They looked at each other. Jimmy went to the window. The same boy was there, hawking fresh copies of the Enquirer.

  Jimmy put on his coat and went slowly downstairs. He bought the paper and returned without looking at it. In the room he unfolded it as if it might be a petard ready to explode.

  Peter Freneau had written a second letter. He said his first letter was based on polling electors in advance; he had reported their promise. But the plan to stagger was forgotten when they voted; eight votes were cast for Tom, eight for Aaron. It was like a lead weight pressing on her heart.

  Seventy-three Jefferson; seventy-three Burr.

  Tie.

  “Your goose is cooked, Mr. Madison,” the fat man said, “and we’re ready to eat it.” He encountered them on the stairs and held up his hand like a traffic warden. “But we been figuring on a tie. Means the Congress will choose—and we have the Congress. You’ll see. We’ll appoint someone, master of chancery or something, keep the government in honest hands. You’ll see.”

  Jimmy smiled as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “No, that’s just dreaming; you’d never get away with stealing the election. But it won’t even come to that. Colonel Burr is an honorable man. He’ll step back, take himself out of contention. They’ll have no choice but Mr. Jefferson.”

  Of course. Aaron would step aside.

  They picked at a light supper without appetite and went upstairs, scarcely speaking because there was nothing to say. Oh, Aaron, so much resting on you. What will you do?

  Slowly her memory of that vivid day when Aaron presented Jimmy took on a different color. She’d been a vulnerable young widow and Aaron was friend, counselor, guardian of her child. One of the most prominent men in America had asked to be presented to her in a way that could only mean intentions both serious and honorable. But before Aaron even mentioned Jimmy, he undertook to seduce her. It had been amusing, even titillating, and after Jimmy’s visit, largely forgotten. But now she saw that if she had yielded to seduction she would never have heard of Mr. Madison’s request. She would have become another of Aaron’s women, to be cast aside in due time. That was not the action of a friend. Aaron Burr looked out for himself.