Eagle's Cry

by David Nevin

  “I want this to be a great house for the people of America,” she told him one day. “I want it to stand for the richness of our democracy.”

  She remembered how he had bowed. “It will be a great honor to assist.” Now the day when she might tell him to start seemed measurably nearer.

  So she gazed out into the starry night, comfortable, warm, wine still swirling in her head, and let her imagination soar. If she could fly to the glittering carpet above or even over the trees and the houses gleaming all around in the moonlight, if she could soar high over the Appalachians and pick out the Ohio, a silver ribbon winding through the dark, if she could go on and on and spy the great silver streak running southward down the center of the continent and draining east and west, and on over the ground across which Merry and his men soon would march, what would she see?

  She smiled, enjoying the fantasy the more because it was so unlike her. If she could fly into the future, what would she see? Farms replacing forests, towns with churches and schools rising along the rivers, southbound flatboats dark specks on the rivers from the Appalachians to what Merry called the Stony Mountains, and it would all be American. They always had known that ultimately American settlers would control the West, but now the process had been wildly accelerated. But out beyond, still further … Jimmy said we would be a continental nation, different oceans washing our shores east and west and maybe you could say the south, except she guessed the Gulf really was part of the Atlantic … .

  Well, no matter. A two-ocean nation, that would do. A continental nation. Merry’s expedition surely would make what had been hope become real expectation. Already the public folklore had leaped to the assumption that the purpose of the exploration was to explore the new possession. Of course, maybe out in the future the British and the Spanish would have something to say about our west, but then, the French had thought to take a hand in the American game and we dealt with them. We’d deal with the others too.

  Because we were strong. We had come through a great crisis. We had settled forever—or at least, for as long as the blank future allowed you to guess—the issue of democracy. Anyway, freedom is for each generation to preserve and protect, each generation facing the risk of its loss. We were the only democracy in the world, but we wouldn’t be the last. For we had just proved the strength of the democratic form, proved it against all the naysayers and sad doubters.

  And we had opened the West as it never had been opened before; the continental dream beckoned with the glittering stars.

  We’ve done well by the country, she thought, she and Jimmy and all the others. We’ve done well.

  She was riding the dream now, eyes shut, and the edge of sky behind her went pale and the sun rose and glinted against the river and far overhead, above her, below her, she didn’t know and it didn’t matter, an eagle wheeled, its harsh warrior’s cry that of a king, lord of all it surveyed … .

  She opened her eyes onto the blanket of stars, the image of the great bird vivid in her mind. She was supremely happy.

  Cold had overtaken the room. The fire was down, and she stood and gazed once more at the sweep of stars brilliant as daisies crowding a field. Then she slipped off her robe and kicked off the slippers and slid into the warm bed. Jimmy muttered something, and she touched his cheek and he sighed and was gone again in sleep.

  Also by David Nevin from Tom Doherty Associates

  1812

  Dream West

  Treason1

  Praise for David Nevin

  “An intriguing overview of the fractious early days of the American public … brimming with personal and political tension, the gripping narrative, vividly recreates a seminal moment in the infancy of the U. S. An intelligent, wellcrafted drama featuring a cast of authentically rendered historical characters.”

  —Booklist

  “David Nevin’s colorful novel brings together all the figures, plus James Madison and Napoleon Bonaparte … and explains how the new nation survived discord and discontent, but also flourished.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “What a book! It is a panorama of five crucial years in American history … told in David Nevin’s inimitably personal style, giving readers fascinating and emotional insights into the great names of American history … hearts as well as heads were at risk yet the ending could not be happier. This is a book to treasure, to reread, to give to friends and relations.”

  —Thomas Fleming, New York Times

  bestselling author of The Officer’s Wives

  “The stirring story of a young America’s battle to remain a democracy … Nevin gives human faces to historical icons, Jefferson and Madison, Meriwether Lewis; Andrew Jackson and his beloved Rachel, and most noticeably Madison’s charming, courageous, incomparable Dolley.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  On Methods and Sources

  Eagle’s Cry is a novel. Yet it is in general accurate both as to the history of the events it chronicles and as to the character, personalities, and conflicts of the historical figures. To sum up in a phrase, this is the imagined inside of a known outside story.

  So I believe that with a few exceptions, most listed below, the novel is a close account of what happened and why, and of the individuals involved. I base the words I put in their mouths on the records they and their contemporaries left and my own estimate of how reasonable men and women might reasonably respond. One immediate variance from rigid fact, however, is that I frequently put people together for direct dialogue when in fact they communicated by letter; what I have them say, however, is fully consistent with their positions and attitudes.

  History strives for what is documentable and provable. My books strive for the story that underlies reality, what I see as an imagined reality. To clarify that reality, and to give the reader information not readily delivered through a historical character, I have used a few fictional characters to interact with real characters and thus illuminate their views. The biggest fictional additions are Danny and Carl Mobry and their servants, Samuel and Millie Clark. But all that I have them say and do accurately reflects the historical events in which they were involved. In matters such as the Louisiana Purchase or the Jefferson-Burr tie, it must be assumed that much of what passes is not laid out in the record. An example of this is the contact I postulate between Madison—through Dolley and Danny—with Bayard of Delaware; some contact was made, and I supply a version that could have happened but that would never have been recorded. In my view, the important point here is that all that I have Bayard and the two women saying accurately reflects the situation and attitudes.

  Danny’s contact with Mrs. Pichon is fictional but clearly represents Pichon’s position. Though John Quincy Adams and Pichon were friends and their conversation represents historical truth, it is not documented. General Wilkinson is an odd figure, thought then and known now to have been a traitor—the Spanish listed him as Agent #13. His connection to Burr is well documented.

  Meriwether Lewis’s trail adventure when we meet him is fictional but consistent both with the times and with his nature. His seizure of command is accurately presented. Dolley’s sister Anna was a real person, but her flirtation with Lewis is fictional; it accurately reflects, however, the trouble that Lewis did have with young women who drew his attention. The reasons I advance for that trouble are not documented, but I believe they are reasonable speculations fully consistent with the known biographical facts. Mary Beth Slaney is fictional, as are the other young women whom I show Lewis meeting. His application to Jefferson for command of a transcontinental expedition when he was nineteen is factual. Mr. Lemaire is a real figure, and Dolley’s relationship with him is accurately portrayed; an initial clash is assumed but not documented.

  The strange tale of Andrew Jackson’s marriage and the scandal that followed is fully accurate. The violent response to scandal he presented, and his wife’s crushed nature, are accurately portrayed. The quarrel with Governor Sevier is prese
nted almost word for word as those who were there recorded it. I believe my account of Jackson to be highly accurate, both as to events and as to his personality and nature; the only place I have purposely exceeded the record was in bringing him to Washington when the disaster of the Spanish closing of the Mississippi inflamed the West. The story is accurate as to the West’s violent reaction, but I have no knowledge that Jackson left Tennessee at this time.

  Did Aaron Burr plot to bring about the election tie? He denied it, but Madison was convinced to his death that it was true, and this is Madison’s story. My portrayal of Burr’s character may offend his ardent apologists, who are numerous even today, and while offending anyone distresses me sorely, I do believe a case can be made for my portrayal. Burr’s bitterness over being excluded after the tie is well documented.

  General Washington’s last hours were as I portray them, and he was being importuned to return to the helm. Danny’s lover, Henri, is fictional, but her uncle, Daniel Clark, is a famous figure in New Orleans history who did, in fact, undertake a mission to Paris. How the U.S. government recruited him for this mission is not recorded. His mistress, Zulie, is a historical figure. The DuPont family, in the process of starting the great firm we know today, played exactly the role I describe. Senator Ross’s part in persuading Napoleon is accurately stated, but the extent to which and the means by which he and Madison communicated are not documented. I find it impossible to believe that his great speech, put so neatly into Napoleon’s hands, had not been arranged. A splinter party led by Timothy Pickering did for years lead a secession movement in New England which the Adamses, father and son, rejected. The personality of the Adams family and its bitterness are accurately drawn. The Sally Hemings story is accurately drawn, as is, I believe, the character of James Callender, who shortly after this book’s period fell drunk into a shallow ditch in Richmond and drowned. Federalists’ stunned disbelief at losing the 1800 election is accurately portrayed. The unfolding French decision to sell Louisiana is well documented.

  Language in the early nineteenth century was more formal than we use today, but I’m sure thoughts were as fluent, tempers as quick, analyses as surefooted as they are today, and that all were rendered from person to person just as fluidly. My aim is to create for modern readers the intimacy of decisions and pressures then affecting these individuals, and so, while avoiding modernisms, I have chosen language that sounds more formal than modern usage but that probably is somewhat less formal than what actually was used then.

  Political parties can be confusing to modern ears. As the opening chapter makes clear, at the start there were no parties. As the democratic spirit rose, reaction to elitism took the form of the first Republican Party under Madison, Jefferson, and others. Almost immediately, this opposition group became known as Democrats, and I have used that term to avoid confusion with the modern Republican Party, which was formed in the 1850s with John Charles Frémont its first presidential candidate. Adams and the old guard took the Federalist label.

  The sequel to this novel, now in preparation, will undertake to finish stories that could only be started here. We see that Burr clearly was destroyed by the tie that we chronicle in Eagle’s Cry as we watch him play out his fate—the deadly duel with Hamilton, the flight, the attempt to steal the West, the trial, exile.

  Meriwether Lewis, set on the path to greatness in this book, makes his monumental trek to the Pacific and returns to his own tragedy. Madison and Dolley persevere against the machinations of radical Democrats and the challenge from Monroe here set up, ending in triumph with election to the presidency in 1808. Dolley can begin her ardent and quite famous refurbishing of what a few people by then had started calling the White House.

  The trouble with the British becomes increasingly volatile and dangerous. The possibility of war with England becomes a constant pressure. Madison must walk a narrow path resisting that pressure and holding national pride and position while staving off a war we were too weak to fight, a war that holds off until 1812, which story I have already chronicled in my novel 1812.

  Of course, Eagle’s Cry depends heavily on research; this is to express my appreciation to the Butler Library at Columbia University, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the library of the Century Association, and the library of Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the finest and busiest community libraries in the country.

  I relied heavily upon Irving Brant’s six-volume treatment of the Madisons and Ralph Ketcham’s single volume. Dumas Malone’s wonderful six volumes on Jefferson are superb, and so is Merrill Peterson’s single volume. The Age of Federalism, by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, sums up the 1790s beautifully. For General Washington, I relied on James Flexner’s fine four-volume treatment and on the more recent treatment by Willard Randall. Stephen Ambrose’s treatment of Meriwether Lewis is definitive, but earlier works by David Lavender and Richard Dillon are useful. Robert Remini’s three-volume treatment of Andrew Jackson is excellent, following Marquis James and James Parton. I relied on Milton Lomask’s two-volume work on Aaron Burr, though my impressions of Burr are different from his very favorable treatment. My portrait of Robert Livingston is drawn from George Dangerfield’s fine biography. Finally, of course, there is the brilliant History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, by Henry Adams, its ten volumes available in full today in a magnificent two-volume edition from the Library of America. Adams is splendid, sometimes biased, sometimes off-base in the view of some modern scholars, but unfailingly interesting and often very wise.

  In the end, however, I based much of my estimates of how politics and human nature really work (they are, of course, intertwined) on my own substantial experience with politics, Washington, and the White House as a national journalist.

  —DN

  Look for

  David Nevin’s

  TREASON

  Available October 2001

  from Forge Books

  1

  WASHINGTON CITY, FALL, 1803

  This was the way she remembered it—memories cherished across thirty-five tumultuous years when the world turned upside down and she moved to the center of the nation’s affairs—this was her story:

  She was born in ‘Sixty-eight and that meant she was—let’s see—eight when the trouble started. She remembered her father’s distress there on the Virginia plantation. He was a Quaker strong in his faith and he held against war. But Millie Esterbridge, who was a year older and lived on the plantation next to theirs, said General Washington would lead the American troops and everyone knew—well, everyone in Virginia—that he was a great man. It would be all right with General Washington in command. Of course, at eight you take a lot for granted and later she’d marveled at how ignorant they were of war. Everyone, grown-ups, too. At first it had just been the awful splitting between patriots and loyalists, Millie’s father selling out and moving her best friend off to Canada. Later they understood that dislocation and dissolved loyalties hardly mattered against the deaths and the aching widows, the hunger and pain of folks at home and men in the field alike, the men who returned absent arms and legs, their eyes hollowed out like melon husks, and the men who didn’t come home at all. Maybe it was in reaction to the war that Pa decided that his faith required him to free their slaves, sell the plantation and move to Philadelphia, the Quaker center that only incidentally was America’s largest city.

  She was fourteen when the Revolution ended and the last British soldiers boarded ships lying against the wharves in New York City and went home. General Washington mounted a big white horse and led his ragged troops into the city the enemy had held so long and the whole country erupted in joy, bonfires and parades and martial music and speechifying to numb the senses.

  The nation was free. There were people who said it would sink right out of sight without British leaders to direct it or war to hold it together, but that made no sense to her. She said so, too, plain and clear, and presently the Qu
aker elders called to tell her it was unseemly for a mere lass to talk so. But she snorted when the trio departed, austere and unsmiling in their black garb and coarse woolen hose and flat hats—she had a mind of her own and didn’t need anyone telling her how to use it.

  She was fifteen and then sixteen and when she turned to the mirror she liked what she saw, and from the way young men looked at her and boys stared and Quaker matrons frowned, she came to understand she was not just beautiful but fetching as well. Bright colors weren’t the Quaker way but she managed always to have a red ribbon in her glossy black hair or a sash of vivid green on a white gown or the bootlaces of purple silk she once wore, creating a minor stir.

  By then everyone in Philadelphia was talking about the way the post-revolutionary government was falling flat, imploding, no head and no real body, no resources and no authority, no direction and no aim or intention or purpose, every state in the confederacy standing alone and for itself. Seemed we weren’t Americans at all but Pennsylvanians or Virginians or what-have-you. But shoot, she was both Pennsylvanian and Virginian!—and hence hardly could be one or t’other. By 1785 when she was seventeen and fresh as a rose in bloom, Pa said the country was going to ruin and the elders blamed the slight attention paid the Lord’s word and she thought it was high time someone did something and wasn’t backward about saying so.

  And sure enough, as if he’d been listening, General Washington called a meeting for right here in Philadelphia over to the State House that aimed to straighten it all out so the blood and pain of the war wouldn’t be wasted. Every day she got out her parasol against the sun—oh, it was hot that summer of 1787!—and put a ribbon in her hair and with a half-dozen Quaker girls went to stand along the brick sidewalks and watch the delegates enter and leave. Ah, frivolity! —the girls along the sidewalk like so many flowers wanting to feel part of a great day, or at least to be noticed. The delegates looked toilsome and dour and they danced on the hot brick because the slippers they wore with snowy silk hose were so thin. It was said that they were talking themselves blue, sitting at little tables covered in green felt while General Washington looked on from a small dais. He hardly said a word, so it was remarked, but his stem look held them to the task.