by H. W. Brands
“The plan of summer operations is to go from Philadelphia to Fort Pitt (Pittsburg),” he writes Theo. “Thence through the states on each side of the Ohio. To visit St. Louis and the mouth of the Missouri; thence through Tennessee (where pass a month) to Orleans.” He understands that she frets for his future, after the reverses he has suffered; he assures her that things will work out. “This tour has other objects than mere curiosity—an operation of business, which promises to render the tour both useful and agreeable.” He may speculate in land, an occupation ubiquitous in the West and one that has created more fortunes for the canny than all others combined. He may seek a position in the territorial government of Louisiana. “Just at the moment of writing the last word I receive a message from the president informing me that Dr. Browne may have the office of secretary of the government of Louisiana (which means the upper district, whereof St. Louis is the capital). General Wilkinson is appointed governor of that territory.” Burr has heard encouraging reports about St. Louis. “It contains about two hundred houses, and some very wealthy people. The inhabitants are French; retain the French manners of the last century; are said to be hospitable; gay to dissipation; the society polished and fashionable. All accounts represent the country as remarkably healthy, fertile, and beautiful. The salary of secretary is, I think, but eight hundred dollars per annum. Certain contingences, however, will make it worth about double that sum. Wilkinson and Browne will suit most admirably as eaters and laughers, and, I believe, in all other particulars.”
He worries less for himself than for Theo. “I contemplate the tour with gayety and cheerfulness,” he writes her. “The most weighty solicitude on my mind is your health and that of your boy.” Northerners often suffer on moving to the South; Theo certainly has. She survives the Carolina winters well enough, but summers bring their variety of complaints. Burr has researched remedies, and he shares the results with his daughter. “You will want stimulus of some kind. For this purpose something is used in all warm countries. In the West Indies they drink rum and they die. In the East Indies and China, ginseng is the panacea. Try ginseng. Some decoction or (bitter) infusion. When my stomach is out of order or wants tone, nothing serves so effectually as a cup of chamomile tea, without sugar or milk. I think this would give you an appetite. Make the experiment. Bathing in seawater is a grand preservative. If your bath be in the house, the best time is an hour or two before dinner. Tepid bath; none of your cold baths for such a machine as yours. If you have no convenience for a warm bath in the house, set a mason to work to-morrow and make one in each of your country houses. It is a high evidence of the barbarism of our Southern states that, in an extent of three hundred miles, filled with wealthy people, and in a hot climate, there should not be, in any one private family, a convenient bathing-room.”
He sets off in early April and reaches Pittsburgh at month’s end. Boatwrights have been working per orders he has sent ahead; the craft greets its master. “My boat is, properly speaking, a floating house,” he tells Theo. “Sixty feet by fourteen, containing dining-room, kitchen with fireplace, and two bedrooms; roofed from stem to stern; steps to go up, and a walk on the top the whole length; glass windows, &c. This edifice costs one hundred and thirty-three dollars, and how it can be made for that sum passes my comprehension.”
The boat becomes his base for the next several weeks. It drifts down the Ohio, moved by nothing but the springtime current and occasional nudges from the boatmen’s poles. A skiff carries Burr to shore, letting him walk around Wheeling, Virginia—“a pretty, neat village, well situated on the south bank, containing sixty or eighty houses, some of brick, and some of a fine free stone found in the vicinity,” he writes. “Saw several well-dressed women, who had the air of fashion and movements of vous autres on the coast.” He samples the archaeology of the region near Marietta, Ohio. “We have been walking several miles to see the mounds, parapets, squares, and other remains of unknown antiquity which are found in this neighbourhood,” he tells Theo. “I am astonished and confounded; totally unsatisfied with the conjectures of others, and unable to repose on any plausible one of my own.” At Cincinnati he meets with fellow veterans of the Revolutionary War; they drink to the memory of General Washington and other departed comrades.
He leaves the “ark,” as he has christened the boat, at the Falls of the Ohio, where the town of Louisville is growing up. While the boatmen maneuver the craft around the falls, he travels overland to Lexington and Frankfort before entering Tennessee. Near Nashville he visits the plantation home of Andrew Jackson, the rising star of Tennessee politics, a man who, like most westerners, has nothing against dueling and applauds the demise of Hamilton. “I have been received with much hospitality and kindness, and could stay a month with pleasure,” Burr writes Theo. But he presses on, accepting Jackson’s offer of a small boat that carries him down the Cumberland to its junction with the Ohio, where the ark is waiting.
Good luck, apparently, causes his path to cross that of James Wilkinson, who is traveling to St. Louis. Wilkinson is a legend in the West, but not all who know him agree on the particulars or significance of the legend. A year younger than Burr, he served with Benedict Arnold during the Revolutionary War, and though he eschewed Arnold’s treason he tested the patience of some other superiors until he was forced to resign. After the war he went west to Kentucky and then Louisiana, when the latter was Spanish territory. He developed close ties to Spanish officials at New Orleans—so close, some said, as to cast doubt upon his loyalty to the United States, even after Spain relinquished Louisiana to France, which sold it to the United States. Then and now Wilkinson has always seemed to have great plans, without revealing what those plans comprise. To Burr in 1805 he is most helpful. “The general and his officers fitted me out with an elegant barge, sails, colours, and ten oars, with a sergeant, and ten able, faithful hands,” Burr tells Theo.
The Ohio enters the Mississippi and the ark heads more directly south. “Natchez is a town of three or four hundred houses; the inhabitants traders and mechanics, but surrounded by wealthy planters, among whom I have been entertained with great hospitality and taste,” Burr writes Theo. “These planters are, many of them, men of education and refinement; live as well as yours, and have generally better houses. We are now going through a settled country, and, during the residue of my voyage to Orleans, about three hundred miles, I shall take breakfast and dinner each day at the house of some gentleman on shore. I take no letters of introduction; but, whenever I hear of any gentleman whose acquaintance or hospitalities I should desire, I send word that I am coming to see him, and have always met a most cordial reception.”
New Orleans is equally hospitable. “This city is larger than I expected, and there are found many more than would be supposed living in handsome style. They are cheerful, gay, and easy.” Even the least likely go out of their way. “The mark of attention with which I have been most flattered is a letter from the holy sisters, the Ursuline nuns, congratulating me on my arrival. Having returned a polite answer to this letter, it was intimated to me that the saints had a desire to see me. The bishop conducted me to the cloister. We conversed at first through the grates; but presently I was admitted within, and I passed an hour with them greatly to my satisfaction. None of that calm monotony which I expected. All was gayety, wit, and sprightliness. Saint A. is a very accomplished lady—in manners and appearance a good deal like Mrs. Merry”—the wife of the British minister in Washington, whom Theo knows. “All, except two, appear to be past thirty. They were dressed with perfect neatness; their veils thrown back. We had a repast of wine, fruit, and cakes. I was conducted to every part of the building. All is neatness, simplicity, and order. At parting, I asked them to remember me in their prayers, which they all promised with great promptness and courtesy—Saint A. with earnestness.”
Burr is as pleased with the residents of New Orleans as they are with him, and he thinks he could take up residence if the city were not so far from where Theo and young Aaron
live. “These will control my fate,” he says of the two. He conducts a thorough reconnaissance of the area and several more interviews with the leading men and women. They talk of border troubles with the Spanish, who still control Florida and Texas, and where these troubles might lead. He inquires of the prospects for speculation in land. After three weeks he turns his face finally back toward the East.
As he does he is reminded of the cardinal fact of western geography: that once travelers and emigrants from the East cross the Allegheny Mountains, gravity pulls them inexorably west and south. New Orleans commands the entire valley of the Mississippi and Ohio, clear to Pittsburgh. Traffic of persons and cargo flows effortlessly down the river to the city near its mouth. Threads of sentiment and patriotism knit the western states to the eastern part of the Union, but stouter cords of physics and commerce bind the western states to one another and perhaps to territory still farther west.
Burr has to fight gravity and perhaps destiny the whole way back east. Travelers going east and north avoid the rivers, with their westerly and southerly currents and winding courses. Many attempt the Natchez Trace, the overland shortcut from Natchez to Nashville. Trace is the frontier term for trail, and Burr finds it appropriate. “On the map you will see laid down a road from Nashville to Natchez as having been cut by the order of the minister of war,” he writes Theo. “This is imaginary; there is no such road.” But there is the trail, which has to suffice.
Its five hundred miles test the stamina of any traveler, and Burr takes time to recuperate at its northern terminus even as he improves previous acquaintances. “For a week I have been lounging at the house of General Jackson, once a lawyer, after a judge, now a planter; a man of intelligence, and one of those prompt, frank, ardent souls whom I love to meet,” he tells Theo. “The general has no children, but two lovely nieces made a visit of some days, contributed greatly to my amusement, and have cured me of all the evils of my wilderness jaunt.”
Jackson and the other principal men of Nashville throw a dinner for Burr—“given not to the vice-president,” he tells Theo, “but to A.B.” Those present concur that the West counts insufficiently in the councils of American national politics; some wonder whether it will ever receive its due. Nearly all despise the Spanish as monarchists, Catholics and a hindrance to expansion; many endorse military measures to oust the “dons” from North American soil.
Burr rides north to Kentucky, where he meets a young man of talent and ambition named Henry Clay. He turns west again, to St. Louis, for a longer meeting with General Wilkinson, who joins Jackson and the other westerners in believing that a war against Spain ought to be waged, and soon.
A long horseback journey returns him to Washington in November. Jefferson’s fascination with the West has prompted him to send Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Pacific; the explorers and their expedition have subsequently fallen off the map and haven’t been heard from in over a year—which makes Jefferson the more curious to learn what Burr thinks of the West. The president and the former vice president spend two days at the executive mansion discussing what Burr has discovered of the region beyond the mountains. The cordiality of the conversation can’t disguise the distrust each feels for the other. Jefferson assumes Burr is plotting something and wonders what; Burr believes Jefferson wishes to complete the ruin he has laid for him thus far.
18
With no home, Burr has to keep moving. He has survived on the kindness of strangers for a year; now he seeks the fondness of family. He joins Theo in South Carolina. He tells her and Alston of the wonders of the West and says a man might build a new life there. He doesn’t detail his plans, for they haven’t congealed into a form he can count on. But he imagines himself a great man in that rising country, and his vision makes Theo admire him more than ever.
He spends the late winter and spring of 1806 shuttling between Washington and Philadelphia. The latter city was the nation’s political capital during the 1790s; it remains the country’s financial capital, and along Chestnut Street and lesser thoroughfares Burr pursues financial support for the project he is gradually putting together. He raises forty thousand dollars to purchase a large tract of land on the Washita River in Louisiana Territory, convincing the investors they’ve made a sharp speculation. Other funds outfit an expeditionary force comprising boats, firearms and provisions. What the purpose of the expeditionary force might be, Burr declines to say, at least for the record. Quite possibly he doesn’t know himself, not in detail. But the borderlands between the United States and the Spanish holdings in Mexico and Florida are chronically turbulent, with outlaws and raiders crossing in both directions, and turbulence affords opportunity to men of ambition and backing. Till lately Burr’s ambition has been political, but the Hamilton duel and his falling-out with Jefferson have closed that route. His backing is building; with money, men and arms at his disposal he might become a national hero—if not to the nation he helped create in the Revolutionary War, then perhaps to some newly formed one.
Burr hints at his plan to men with experience of war. Thomas Truxton commanded privateers during the Revolution; the success of his licensed raiding vessels vaulted him to a captaincy in the regular navy. He climbed to commodore and subsequently smashed the French in the undeclared naval war of 1798. But he bickered with his civilian superiors and resigned in a dispute over rank. He still bristles at Jefferson and the Republican administration.
William Eaton distinguished himself leading a band of mercenaries in the lately ended Barbary Wars against North African pirate principalities. Like Truxton, Eaton was a hero of the rank and file and a thorn to the administration. His irregulars required compensation, for which he applied to the government in Washington, but his claim for reimbursement was rejected. Like Truxton, he feels ill used.
Burr also talks to Anthony Merry, the British minister at Washington. They speak of the state of the hemisphere, of the slipping hold of Spain on Florida and Mexico, of the ambitions of France in the Caribbean, of the manner in which Americans and Britons might constructively collaborate against the Latin powers. Merry is pleased at Burr’s approach, not least since Jefferson and the secretary of state, Madison, make Britain their whipping boy in matters political and diplomatic.
By August Burr has accomplished all he can in the East. With a small entourage he sets out again for the West.
19
Theo goes with him. Her husband might join her later—but then again he might not. Stories have circulated of difficulties between Theo and Alston. As with most such stories it is impossible for outsiders to know the truth in the tales, but some suggest cruelty on Alston’s part, others an unwillingness in Theo to place her husband ahead of her father in her affections. It must grate on Alston that their son is named for her father rather than for his; the boy will grow up a Burr, before an Alston, if she has her way. Her father needs her, she doubtless tells Alston as she heads north to meet him. And she needs him, Alston certainly thinks as he bids her farewell.
Once more Burr drifts down the Ohio, but this time Theo stands beside him. He continues the lessons he has been conducting since her infancy. He points to the places where settlers have cut back the forests and planted crops, and predicts that many more will follow them. He notes the likely locations for villages and towns—some already taken and built on, others striving, still others merely aspirational.
They land at one of the most striving, most aspirational and most unlikely of the new settlements. Blennerhassett Island is a three-mile-long sliver in the Ohio River a bit below the village of Marietta, Ohio. Boatmen and hunters have long visited the island, which splits the river into two narrow channels, but not until the arrival of Harman Blennerhassett in 1798 did anyone think to make it a permanent home. Certainly no one thought to make it such a home as Blennerhassett proceeded to build on the island. Blennerhassett is an Anglicized member of the Irish gentry who got caught on the wrong side of the nationalist troubles of 1798 and decamped to America. He arrived
with dreams of Eden, which he sought to implement on the wilderness island to which he gave his name. He built a curiously semicircular mansion surrounded by lawns and gardens that attempted to improve on nature’s arrangements; visitors differed as to the extent of his success, as well as on the attractiveness of the house.
The master of the island was away when Burr made his initial reconnaissance, but Burr met and charmed Mrs. Blennerhassett and has subsequently corresponded with her husband. Burr intimates that Blennerhassett’s gifts might yield more to their possessor in pursuits beyond his little island. The North American West is not too grand a stage for him. Burr echoes the western sentiment that war with Spain is inevitable and desirable, and he hints that the treasures of Mexico are available for taking by the bold.
Blennerhassett is flattered that such a great man as Burr thinks well of his prospects. “I hope, sir, you will not regard it indelicate in me to observe to you how highly I should be honored in being associated with you,” he writes. “Viewing the probability of a rupture with Spain and the claim for action the country will make upon your talents in the event of an engagement against, or subjugative of, any of the Spanish Territories, I am disposed in the confidential spirit of this letter to offer you my friends and my own services to cooperate in any contemplated measures in which you may embark.”
