Letters

by John Barth

  He was not pleased by the coincidence of my birth (a little premature) and the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. I was duly dubb’d Andrew Cooke IV and charged to redeem that name: a great charge, my mother thot, for so delicate a babe.

  The truth was, I was not expected to survive. When Washington lost Long Island in August & evacuated New York, my father decided he must tarry no longer: Burr had distinguisht himself in the retreat from Long Island by saving a brigade from capture (young Joel Barlow, on vacation from Yale, was in that brigade), but he had been obliged to disobey his superiors to do it, and they were not pleased. Arnold had had to withdraw from Montreal, so expensively won, and was building a flotilla on Lake Champlain to meet the superior British force there. Guy Johnson (Sir William’s nephew & successor as His Majesty’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New York, whom Father had befriended at Castines Hundred) wrote that the Six Nations had so far been successfully bribed into neutrality, but were “spoiling for action.” That their likeliest leader, Johnson’s Mohawk secretary Joseph Brant, was so gone into English scholarship & English religion that nothing could rouse him from his translation into Mohawk of the Book of Common Prayer. The iron was hot, Father declared, and must be struck ere it cool’d: he bade Mother join him at Castines Hundred as soon as she was able, “with or without the child, as fate will have it,” and went on ahead to stir this Joseph Brant to action, whose motives he believed he understood.

  Against all odds, Mag Mungummory & her clever company kept me this side of death, even nurst me toward robustness, but we were obliged to remain in Maryland thro the winter. In October Father wrote (in the family cipher, here decipher’d): “B[enedict] A[rnold] has lost, albeit brilliantly & against great numbers, the 1st naval engagement betwixt Crown & Continentals. I am stirring up charges against him of misconduct in Montreal, to incline him uswards.” In January: “A[aron] B[urr]‘s disgust with Washington is dangerously weaken’d by C[ornwallis]‘s defeat at Princeton, alma mater to us both and, to B, pater as well.” (Burr’s father was its 2nd president.) In March, as we were leaving for the hazardous journey north: “Cannot stir B[rant] from his books. He is much like Yrs Truly of a few years back, discovering his other self, & hates the memory of having fought in ’63 with the renegade Iroquois against Pontiac, whom too late he much admires. His sister Molly is the warrior in the family: B & I are like as twins, she declares, and she urges me to do in his name what he will not.”

  That name, in Mohawk, was Thayendanegea. The deeds associated with it, and their attributions, are a house built on the sands of my mother’s love for & faith in my father, whom she saw thenceforward rarely, and always in equivocal circumstances. Hers was a harder fate than Anna Cooke’s, I think, whose Henry Burlingame never convincingly reappear’d to her. If Father’s letters are to be believed—I mean the letters in his hand, over his initials, which, never doubting them herself, Mother kept at Castines Hundred with the Journall & the Secret Historie—on my 1st birthday anniversary he assumed the role of “Joseph Brant” to head 500 Senecas & Cayugas in the St. Leger expedition against Fort Stanwix on the Mohawk, a siege not unlike the one of his boyhood. It was a siege soon lifted, not by the battle at Oriskany (which, tho costly to both sides, was indecisive), but by secret agreement between my father & the leader of the Continental relief force sent up after that battle: “Major General B[enedict] A[rnold] is still embitter’d that his new commission came so tardily, after the promotion of his juniors & inferiors & so many brave exploits of his own. Only Washington’s personal entreaties keep him in the rebel service. By giving him the victory at Stanwix (at small expense to us), I have put his dunderhead superior in such a passion of jealousy as B will find intolerable—when we shall meet again.”

  Another letter has him rejoicing at “A’s” being relieved of command by that same jealous superior, General Gates. He laments the staunch, “misguided” patriotism that leads his friend to serve bravely even so, without command, at the 2nd Battle of Saratoga. He rejoices again when in June ’78 Washington puts Arnold in command of Philadelphia, “where everyone that matters, save Ben Franklin, is a Loyalist.” Burr too, he complains, “is grown a hopeless patriot since last winter at Valley Forge. The pass he guarded was the very door to the place, and for all his old contempt for Washington, he would not tender us the key. Now he fights like the Devil in New Jersey. With the British out of Philadelphia, and the French (thanks to Franklin) assembling a fleet at Newport to move against us in Canada, our position is not as certain as it was last year. ’Tis time my Mohawks bloodied their hatchets.”

  They did, on my 2nd birthday. Sweeping down into Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, John Butler, “Joseph Brant,” & Molly Brant, with the Butler Rangers & the Brant Mohawks, join’d forces with a 2nd great Amazon, “Queen Esther” Montour, to capture Forty Fort. The massacre was egalitarian as their leadership: above 300 men, women, & children were tortured & kill’d by the “Devils of the Mohawk.” In August & September they burnt German Flats & other “Continental” settlements in the Mohawk Valley; in November, having captured the fort at Cherry Valley, my father & his warriors alone murder’d 30 women, children, & old people. When “her husband” return’d to her that winter at Castines Hundred, “hardly recognizable” in his Mohawk paint & dress & haircut, my mother ask’d him hopefully, Whether these atrocities were meant to avenge Lord Amherst’s smallpox campaign against the besiegers of Fort Pitt in ’63? Not particularly, he admitted: their fourfold object was to rouse the real Joseph Brant from his studious reclusion (alarm’d at my father’s excesses, Brant had indeed assumed command of the Mohawk warriors; hence Father’s return to us); to recommit the Iroquois to their traditional ferocity; to provoke enough indiscriminate reprisal to bring the more neutral of the Six Nations into the war—and to slake the personal bloodlust of Molly Brant and Esther Montour, whose appetite for mutilation, disembowelment, impalement, flaying, cannibalism, & the like was truly savage.

  Our host, Baron André Castine II, observed that Madocawando’s Tarratines, while brave, had been peaceful trappers & hunters, like most Indians north of the St. Lawrence & the Lakes, who fear’d & despised the barbarous practises of the Iroquois. All he himself could say in defence of such barbarisms was that the Iroquois themselves had not perpetrated them wholesale until prest by the economics of the French & English fur trade, which had turn’d them into greedy, alcoholic middle-men. But tho savagery was savagery, the Baron maintain’d that all were not tarr’d with the same brush. Loyalists imprison’d by the Continentals in the Connecticut copper mines were being beaten & tortured about the privates in the customary ways; British regulars were stifling & abusing Continentals in the infamous jails & prison-ships of New York. Neither were yet routinely dismembering & flaying alive, or prolonging torture for the sake simply of extracting the greatest possible pain from a living body, or tying live people to trees by their own entrails, or impaling children on pointed stakes—had not so done, routinely, since the Middle Ages. Differences in degree were important; this was the 18th Century, not the 12th; the fragile flower of humanism, of civilization—

  “It is your 18th Century,” my father is said to have replied. “We do not reckon time from the same events, or by the same units.”

  We Princeton alumni, the Baron politely inquired, or we Yale tutors? Or perhaps we child-murderers?

  “We Ahatchwhoops,” said my father, “who ever regarded the Tarratines as a tribe of old women.”

  The Baron replied with a sigh that according to his grandmother, Princess Madocawanda, it was the elder women of the tribe who, like Molly Brant, were always the most ferocious when unleasht. Their conversation then ended uncomfortably, if short of an outright break in the family. And it seems not to have been without effect on my father, who soon after shaved his scalp-lock, doft his paint, beads, & buckskins, & donn’d a short wig & English dress—nor, to our knowledge, ever took a full-fledged Indian role thereafter. Unless it was he who sa
t for Romney’s portrait of Joseph Brant in ’86.

  Thro that winter & spring (the last extended period when my mother knew fairly that the man representing himself as her husband was truly the man she’d married), he was in close communication by letter with Loyalist leaders in Philadelphia, certain British officers in New York, & the staffs of Canadian Governor Haldimand and Sir Henry Clinton. His friend Burr, now commanding the Continental line above New York from the Hudson River to Long Island Sound, was on the verge of resigning & taking up his interrupted study of law: his health was not the best, his competency as an officer had not been duly rewarded, and he was bored. In Philadelphia, as Father had hoped, Arnold had found the most agreeable & civilized society amongst the old Tory families of the city; he was already betrotht to the daughter of one of their number, and was being accused in Congress by the Executive Council of Pennsylvania (on information from anonymous sources) with eight items of misconduct. In April, four of those charges were actually referr’d to court-martial; furious, Arnold married the Tory heiress and demanded immediate trial to clear his name. But the court found reasons for delay, and my father cheerfully bade us goodbye, promising to write from New York.

  “André,” he said to my mother. “Remember André.”

  She thot he alluded to the Baron’s mild reproof. But cipher’d letters, in a style very like Father’s, exulted not long thereafter in his new connection to Major John André, a young adjutant of Sir Henry Clinton’s in New York who in ’75 had been imprison’d by the “Americans” (as the Continentals now began to call themselves), and exchanged in ’76. “A[ndré] is a civilized fellow,” Father wrote, “with a better talent than J[oel] B[arlow]‘s for comical verse, in the refinements whereof I am become his tutor. He & I are like enough for twins—save that, tho brave, he has no stomach for intrigue. There also I am his tutor, inasmuch as poor B[enedict] A[rnold], in a rage over the lingering insult of his court-martial, has on his bride’s advice begun a secret correspondence with us, concerning a commission in His Majesty’s service. And C[linton] has delegated A[ndré] to pursue the matter.”

  He reaffirm’d his hope to bring “A” & “B” together to “his” side. The tide had turn’d severely against the Iroquois. In reprisal for the massacres of Wyoming & Cherry Valleys, the “Americans” in May burnt the castles of the Onondagas. In August the Butler Rangers & the Mohawks were badly beaten at Newtown, near Elmira. And in the autumn, “American” troops swept thro the Finger Lakes & Genesee Valley country, destroying the castles, livestock, & orchards of the Cayugas & the Senecas, some 3,000 of whom, including the Brants, fled to Fort Niagara for refuge. The only hope now for the Six Nations, in Father’s view, was absolute British control of New York from Long Island to Lake Erie. And the best way to that control was the capture of the American post which dominated the Hudson Valley: West Point. But the post was heavily defended, if indifferently commanded; Clinton was sensibly reluctant to try it by storm…

  Burr’s loyalty proved, if not unshaken, still immoveable: if he felt any attraction at all to the British side (so he replied to my father’s inquiry) it was the chance to live in New York with such clever company as Major André, the comical poet; but he expected to be able to move there as an American before very long. Arnold, on the other hand, was altogether disaffected when the court-martial, tho dismissing all the substantive charges, directed Washington to reprimand him on the two smallest counts, not to offend the Executive Council of Pennsylvania. As hundreds of Iroquois starved at Niagara, and as my father & Major André together readied for the New York press a topical parody of the old Scottish ballad of Chevy Chase (call’d “The Cow-chase”), my father was urging Arnold to demand from General Washington command of West Point by way of vindication of his honor, and negotiating with André, on Arnold’s behalf, the terms of that post’s betrayal!

  By summer, when Arnold took command, the three of them had workt out the details of the proposal; little more was needed save signatures on the relevant documents & ground-plans of the fortifications.

  A meeting was arranged at Haverstraw on the night of the autumnal equinox. John André, fetcht to the site on a British vessel, met Benedict Arnold under a flag of truce, deliver’d to him safe-conduct papers to New York, letters of commission, & details of the British attack to be made within a few days; he received from Arnold the plan of the fortress and disposition of the garrison. Before he could return to his ship, it was fired upon desultorily in the dark; my father, who had come ashore with André, signal’d the captain to drop downriver & await them; that worthy mistook the signal & return’d toward New York, leaving the two men stranded behind American lines. My father left André with Arnold & went ahead to scout safe passage overland. Next day the Major set out, in civilian disguise, carrying a false passport given him by Arnold. He got as far as Tarry town, almost out of danger, when my father, hurrying to rendezvous with him, fell in with two American militiamen on routine highway-watch, and to cover his own identity was obliged to show forged papers establishing himself as a New York state militiaman, one Van Wart. Minutes later they spotted André and, despite my father’s encouraging them to let the stranger pass, decided on a thoro search. In his stockings they found the incriminating plans.

  The best Father could do was insist on taking the papers immediately to General Arnold, “to warn him of the impending attack.” Major André, no hand at intrigue, doubtless assumed that Father would destroy the evidence en route and thus put Arnold in position to order him releast. He did not betray “Van Wart’s” identity even when, to their chagrin, the militiaman in charge decided to hold the papers himself whilst my father notified General Arnold of the spy’s capture & the plann’d assault. He could then do nothing for poor brave André, only make good his own & Arnold’s escape to the British sloop-of-war Vulture.

  When the treason came to light, Washington, embarrast by his earlier defence of Arnold, felt obliged to show no mercy to André, who was hang’d as a spy on 2 October. The whole British army went into mourning; in recognition of his poetical talents, a plaque in André’s honor was placed in Westminster Abbey. Joel Barlow, the newly-ordain’d Chaplain of the Massachusetts Brigade, preacht a fiery sermon on the treason of his former acquaintance, a sermon so aflame with patriotic indignation & literary ambition that its author was invited to witness his fellow poet’s execution at West Point on the following day and, shortly thereafter, to dine with General Washington & his staff. Of André, Barlow wrote in a letter home that he had never seen “a politer gentleman or a greater character of his age,” and that the Major died “with an appearance of philosophy & heroism.” But he was altogether more moved by the literary prospects which his chaplaincy appear’d to be opening: he seized the occasion of Washington’s dinner to lay upon the company Book I of The Vision of Columbus & a prospectus of the books to come.

  I mention this coincidence, & this letter, because it argues against the notion entertain’d in some humors by my mother: that the man hang’d as John André was Henry Burlingame IV. Mother came to this notion out of mere despair, for we had no word from Father for a long while after André’s capture. Indeed, our subsequent communications were all of a less reliable character than those before; likewise Mother’s testimony, as unhappiness took its toll upon her judgement. Soon after Major André’s execution, the picaroon Joseph Whaland reappear’d down in the Maryland marshes and renew’d his piratical depredations on behalf of the British. We went down there in ’81 and ’82, my 6th & 7th years, and sometime during our stay my mother was visited by this Whaland. Him too she imagined in some weathers to be her lost husband. But Joseph Whaland, while elusive, resourceful, & ubiquitous, was more uncouth than Pontiac and could scarcely read, far less make verses. If he was perhaps my mother’s occasional lover, he was not her husband.

  A likelier candidate is the anonymous author of the “Newburgh Letters” of 1783. Cornwallis had surrender’d at Yorktown; we had lost the war to the Americans; the two armies h
ad disengaged whilst Ben Franklin negotiated with George III’s ministers in Paris. Burr had married the widow of a British officer and was preparing to move his law practice from Albany to New York as soon as the British evacuated that city; General Arnold, having burnt Richmond & attack’d New London for his new employers, was isolated & unhappy in England; Barlow, married & settled in Hartford, was grinding out Columbus’s vision and, having the good business sense to dedicate it to Louis XVI, was successfully drumming up an eminent list of subscribers. The back of the Iroquois was broken: they linger’d hopeless about Niagara, waiting for permission to relocate in Canada. Only Whaland’s picaroons, marauding freely all over the lower Chesapeake, still fought the war. Washington’s army, which he was holding in the Hudson Highlands until New York had been evacuated, was restless. The war was over; their pay was in arrears; Congress had no money; the Constitution had not yet been written; the political situation was in a flux. Colonel Nicola, in army headquarters at Newburgh, had already suggested that Washington assume the title of king, and the General’s famous letter of rebuke (27 May 1782) assured his leadership of whatever form of government the new nation adopted. Then appear’d in print, also at Newburgh, two unsign’d letters exhorting the army to depose Washington, march on Philadelphia, force Congress to pay their arrearages, & establish a triumvirate of military officers to govern the country.

  The prime mover of this call to sedition was that same General Horatio Gates who had so tried Arnold’s patriotism after the victory at Fort Stanwix; Gates had delegated to his aide-de-camp, John Armstrong, the drafting of a call to mutiny. But Armstrong was no penman, and the texts of the letters are replete with signals from his & Burr’s old friend from Princeton, Henry Burlingame IV. And while Joseph Whaland’s last-ditch piracies cannot be construed in any way as strategic (on the contrary, they led Maryland gunboats into Loyalist hideouts on Tangier & Deal Islands, and dangerously close to Bloodsworth Island), the Newburgh proposals, regardless of their issue, were clearly in keeping with Father’s declared strategy of dividing & weakening the infant nation. Unfortunately, Washington exercised restraint, declared his sympathy for the grievances voiced in the letters, declined to seek out & punish their author & instigator, and successfully persuaded his officer corps to patience until the army could be demobilized.