Letters

by John Barth

  (And here I too break off, to resume in his fashion, quoting our forefather quoting himself, when I take up his second letter on the anniversary of its composition one week hence—by when surely you will have interrupted

  Your loving father)

  ABC/ss encl

  cc: JB

  &: A. B. Cook VI to his son. A. B. Cook IV’s second posthumous letter: Washington burned, Baltimore threatened.

  A. B. Cook VI

  Dept. of English

  Marshyhope State University

  Redmans Neck, Md. 21612

  July 16, 1969

  H. C. Burlingame VII

  (address pending)

  Dear Henry,

  &*‡;364)5$!

  Thus (missing, silent son) our ancestor opens this second of his “posthumous letters” in “Legrand’s cipher,” the first of which closed with his forged—and interrupted—alteration of Governor-General Prevost’s order to Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane to destroy, not “Castine in Maine, Boston in Massachusetts,” etc., but Baltimore in Maryland…

  &NOTGNIHSAW!

  (Where are you, Henry? Better your suspicions, your rude interrogations, your peremptorosities, than this silence. Why can I not share with you my amusement at writing this from my new and temporary office—formerly tenanted by that historian I mentioned in my last, now mine as “Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English” at this newly christened university—to be transcribed, as was my last, by my new and formidable secretary? My appeal to you last week, to join me here in Maryland for good and all after so many years, nay generations, of strained and partial connection; to take up with me the formulation and direction of our Second 7-Year Plan—seems to have been as futile as Andrew IV’s postdated postscript to his “widow” [from Fort Bowyer, Mobile Bay, February, 1815] imploring her to join him there at once with the twins, now that the War of 1812—whose most memorable event he will rehearse for us today—is ended. The second letter is dated a year and a week after the first: 154 years ago today. It is headed [without immediate explanation] Aboard H.M.S. Bellerophon, Off Rochefort, France, 16 July 1815. Napoleon, his 100 Days done, has just surrendered there to Commander Maitland; Apollo-11, after a flawless countdown and a 9:32 A.M. lift-off from Cape Kennedy, has left its earth orbit to land the first men on the moon; my father has been vaporized at dawn in and with a certain tower in Alamogordo, New Mexico; your father feels ever more deeply, though he understands no more clearly, the Anniversary View of History. Et cher fils, où es tu?)

  & Washington!

  We review the strategy with Andrew. The British government are convinced from the start that Madison is the tool of his mentor Thomas Jefferson, at whose instruction he has coordinated the 1812 War with Napoleon’s activities in Spain and Russia; while Britain is thus stripped of her allies and engaged in the peninsular fighting, the U.S. intends to add Canada and the Floridas to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. From the time of the emperor’s retreat from Moscow, and more particularly in the first quarter of 1814, the British Cabinet’s strategy becomes not only to retain Canada by sending new forces to Prevost’s aid, but to capture New Orleans as well, and, by tightening the Chesapeake and North Atlantic blockades, to force the secession of New York and New England. The Canadian border will then be adjusted to include a buffer state extending 100 miles south of the Lakes (i.e., most of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, as well as western Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and New England); British jurisdiction will extend from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. The United States will thus be contained effectively by the Hudson and Mohawk rivers on the north, the Allegheny, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers on the northwest and west. The Floridas are perhaps negotiable.

  Only the Duke of Wellington is not sanguine. Even from the perspective of southern France, the map of America depresses him: that endless wilderness; the terrific problems of supply and reinforcement. “The prospect in regard to America,” he writes to Earl Bathurst, the prince regent’s secretary of war and the colonies, “is not consoling.’’

  Admiral Cochrane, on the other hand, even before Andrew reaches Bermuda with Consuelo and his doctored orders, is so full of ambitious plans that he cannot decide among them. He will kidnap Secretary Monroe, say, maybe even Jefferson, as hostages to be ransomed by “all the country southwest of the Chesapeake”; or he will capture and destroy the Portsmouth Navy Yard and send Wellington’s army across New Hampshire to join forces with Prevost; or he will exceed Bathurst’s instructions and recruit a large cavalry of disaffected Negroes, a kind of black cossacks, to terrify the South into capitulation: the chain of Chesapeake Islands from Tangier up to Bloodsworth will be armed and fortified as their refuge and training base. Or he will seize New York City, or Rhode Island; or he will take Philadelphia, or perhaps Richmond, and either destroy or indemnify them. New Orleans alone, when his black cossacks and Creek Indians win it, ought to fetch four million pounds’ worth of goods and ransom, of which his personal share will exceed £125,000!

  As Cochrane schemes, unschemes, reschemes, Byron’s cousin Peter Parker in the Menelaus, together with sixteen other ships and 2,800 of Wellington’s Invincibles under command of General Ross, sail west from Bordeaux to rendezvous with him in Bermuda, and Andrew and Consuelo sail south to that same rendezvous in Prevost’s dispatch boat. La novelista’s confusion makes her cross with her lover and advisor: en route to Bermuda he has pressed upon her Jane Austen’s new Pride and Prejudice as a refinement of 18th-Century realism of the sort that might anticipate what 19th-century novelists will be doing 50 years hence, when the Gothic-Romantic fad has run its course. At the same time he translates aloud for her E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Phantasiestücke. But Consuelo finds Austen’s meticulous interest in money—its sources and the subtleties of its deployment—as exótico as the rites of a strange religion, whereas Hoffmann’s goblins and revenants she accepts as the most familiar and unremarkable reportage, less marvelous by half than the table talk in Colmenar, her native Andalusian village. Mexico, she is now convinced, will be a desert, as inhospitable to romanticismo as La Mancha, and Venezuela a jungle full of monkeys and alligators. As for Bermuda, it bores her in two days: it is not Prospero’s island, but Nova Scotia with more sunshine and fewer booksellers. Most unromantical of all, she brings her Gulf Stream seasickness ashore, cannot eat, yet puts on weight. In her fortune-teller’s opinion, she is with child.

  What confidence Andrew has in Andrée, so candidly to acknowledge this news! Which, however, he does not instantly credit. He knows for a fact that Consuelo cannot be more than five weeks pregnant; what’s more, in her pique at his cavils about realismo she has attempted vainly to rouse his flagging ardor by permitting herself a small romance with a junior officer aboard the dispatch boat…

  Andrew has been advanced a sufficiency for his mission from Prevost’s secret-service budget. When Admiral Cochrane, on receipt of the (emended) instructions, orders him at once to Chesapeake Bay to report on Cockburn’s black-cossack enlistments and to sound the man out on Cochrane’s own inclination to ransom rather than burn the Yankee cities, Andrew gives Consuelo half of this advance. He informs her that his errand may keep him in the Chesapeake all summer; he declares that she no longer needs his aesthetic counsel, and suggests that New Orleans—with its links to France, Spain, and England as well as to the United States—might be the most romantic and fertile soil available for the future of the Novel. He himself saw and admired the city during his pursuit of Aaron Burr and Harman Blennerhassett some years since; he would be delighted to discover, should he revisit Louisiana with his wife and family after the war, that his brave and handsome friend has restored that poisoned snuffbox to their adventure and become the founder of Cajun Neo-Realism or Gumbo Gothic, whichever.

  Consuelo is tearful and excited; Andrew gives her a letter of introduction to a Louisiana legislator he once caroused and swapped pirate stories with, one Jean Blanque, who he is confident can recommend a good physician and midwife if the need arises, o
r a hoodoo-lady if she wishes to postpone motherhood. ¡Hasta la vista, Consuelo la consolada!

  Andrew is happy to be off in the dispatch sloop St. Lawrence. He feels more self-reproach for encouraging his friend’s literary aspirations than for sleeping with her, and Admiral Cochrane’s combination of ambitiousness and irresolution bothers him. George Cockburn, on the other hand, he finds immediately appealing upon their rendezvous at the mouth of the Patuxent, which the rear admiral is already charting for invasion purposes. Prevost, declares Cockburn, cannot see beyond the St. Lawrence River. Cochrane, though no coward, is the sort who will change his mind a dozen times before making it up and another dozen after, with little sense either of real opportunity or real improbability. The kidnapping scheme, for example, is a piece of foolishness: nobody in Madison’s cabinet is popular enough to command a decent ransom! And the “black cossack” business is another chimera: despite their best efforts, Cockburn’s men cannot recruit more than one or two blacks daily. Unlike your red Indians, who in a vain effort to preserve their sovereignty form desperate alliances with either Madison or the Crown, your Negro has no more wish to fight one white man’s battle than another’s. But Cochrane knows neither blacks nor Indians! Moreover, the man is greedy, in Cockburn’s opinion, beyond the permissible prize-taking activities of any responsible commander. In order properly to be feared, one must sometimes destroy instead of ransoming; but the destruction must be calculated for the best psychological effect. It astonishes Cockburn that either Prevost or Cochrane has had wit enough to suggest what he has been urging upon them for above a year, the seizure of Brother Jonathan’s capital city—and he is not surprised that Cochrane is already equivocating on the matter.

  Andrew takes a gamble; confesses that he himself has altered Prevost’s instructions; demonstrates on the spot his knack for forgery. He volunteers his opinion that the capital should be seized first and briefly, just long enough to destroy the public buildings, with no discussion of ransom whatever; then a joint land and sea attack should be made on Baltimore, the economically more important target, whose privateering harbor should be destroyed and the rest of the city indemnified. If the Americans do not then sue for peace, the two cities should be garrisoned as a wedge between North and South while campaigns are mounted against New England and New Orleans. He Andrew knows the capital fairly well and is acquainted with several high elected officials, including the President and the secretary of state; he will be happy to serve Cockburn as guide, spy, or whatever.

  The gamble pays off: Cockburn is as charmed by the counterfeit as by Andrew’s further proposals for exploiting sectional distrust among the Americans. Compromising documents should be forged, for example, to confirm the rumors that Secretary of War Armstrong has deliberately neglected the defenses of Washington because he wants the capital relocated further north—perhaps in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—to weaken the influence of the Virginia Combine. Letters should be written to Madison by “a spy in Cockburn’s fleet,” warning the President of the attack—and found later in War Department files. A well-timed sequence of false and true reports, from false and true double agents, ought totally to confuse the already divided Americans. Above all, the operation should be decisively executed, to point up as demoralizingly as possible the Yankees’ disorganization. To this end both Admiral Cochrane and General Ross—the one irresolute, the other reputedly overcautious—will need a bit of managing if they are not to spoil the essential audacity of the plan.

  That word carries the day: it is audaciousness, exactly, which Prevost & Co.—even Wellington himself!—are short on, and which Cockburn and his friend the prince regent admire even in their adversaries. Old Bonaparte, damn him, has it aplenty; likewise the Yankee Commodore Joshua Barney, whose Baltimore flotilla of scows and barges has effectively hampered Cockburn’s Chesapeake activities this season. He Cockburn fancies himself not altogether without some audaciousness too, and is encouraged to fellow feeling, if not to unreserved trust, by the plain evidence of that trait in our ancestor.

  To the audacious man, Andrew ventures further, the settling of old scores is as agreeable as the taking of prizes. He himself has a little grudge against Josh Barney (at whose house in Baltimore their mutual friend Jérôme Bonaparte was introduced to Miss Betsy Patterson) for nearly capturing the St. Lawrence en route to this present conversation. Like the picaroon Joseph Whaland before him, Barney strikes quickly and then runs his shoal-draft boats up into creeks too shallow for his pursuers to follow. Moreover, the fellow has good tactical sense: the current presence of his flotilla in the upper Patuxent argues that he anticipates an attack on Washington. Let him then be hoist with his own petard: along with other diversionary maneuvers, let the main landing force go ashore at Benedict on the Patuxent and strike first at Barney’s boats, which Cockburn’s fleet will prevent from escaping. The Americans thus will be kept from guessing until the last possible moment whether Baltimore, Washington, or Annapolis is to be attacked first (and indeed the target can be changed if unforeseen defenses should arise), or whether Barney’s flotilla is the sole objective.

  Cockburn is now clapping Andrew about the shoulders like dear dead Barlow, eager to be on with it. July is running like the tide; Cochrane will have changed his mind seven times since Andrew left Bermuda; the Americans have captured Fort Erie and won so decisively at Chippewa, just above Niagara Falls, that their gray uniforms worn in that engagement have been officially adopted by the military academy at West Point. It is time to move. The St. Lawrence is redispatched to Bermuda with detailed plans for the operation: one small diversionary force to be sent up the Bay to feint at Baltimore and the upper Eastern Shore; another to move up the Potomac and take Fort Washington and Alexandria; the main force to ascend the Patuxent, land at Benedict, march on upriver between Washington and Baltimore—and then swing left to assault the capital. By the time the dispatch boat reaches Bermuda, the convoys from France and the Mediterranean ought to be there too; unless Cochrane in the meanwhile has dreamed up some harebrained alternative, Washington can be theirs by the time of the Perseid meteors in August.

  Shall Andrew fetch the plan to Cochrane himself, to insure its effective delivery? Cockburn smiles: Mr. Cook will remain where he is, to insure its accurate delivery. Once the St. Lawrence is safely out of the Chesapeake, he may either begin his campaign of sowing the Eastern Seaboard with doctored letters, or join the Royal Marines in their sporting raids upon the Maryland tobacco crop.

  Andrew opts to do a bit of both: on July 27 he drafts an anonymous letter to President Madison, informing him plainly of the British plan (the same classical tactic used by my father in 1941 vis-à-vis Pearl Harbor), and with Cockburn’s approval “smuggles” it ashore to be mailed.

  Your enemy have in agitation an attack on the capital of the United States. The manner in which they intend doing it is to take advantage of a fair wind in ascending the Patuxent; and after having ascended it a certain distance, to land their men at once, and make all possible dispatch to the capitol; batter it down, and then return to their vessels immediately…

  (Signed) Friend

  A few days later he lands with a foraging party from H.M.S. Dauntless near the village of Tobacco Stick (since renamed Madison after the addressee of the foregoing), thinking to make his way to the place where in 1694, having escaped death at the hands of the Bloodsworth Island Ahatchwhoops, his ancestor Ebenezer Cooke was reunited with his twin sister. Andrew wants to review his own position from that perspective, to reassure himself that he really means to aid the destruction of Washington rather than its preservation. His woolgathering separates him from Lieutenant Phipps’s party, who are guided by a liberated slave woman. The tender leaves without him, runs aground in the Little Choptank, and is captured by the local militia, who jail the 18 Britishers and return the black woman to the mercies of her former owner. Andrew must make his way back to the fleet via Bloodsworth Island and a stolen bateau.

  He confides to Andrée that Cockburn
’s confidence in him is not increased by this episode, and while he does not report any change in his own attitude, he sees that he must do something to reestablish his credibility. Cockburn grants his request to make an intelligence-gathering visit to the capital, charging him specifically to report whether Madison and Monroe have managed to prod Secretary Armstrong into any real measures of defense since the receipt of Andrew’s letter: if not, then either the Americans still doubt that Washington is the target, or they plan not to resist its capture, or their plans mean nothing. If on the other hand real defense measures are at last being taken, their strength must be expertly assessed before Ross and Cochrane’s arrival.

  Where are you, Henry?

  On August 1, as Andrew’s false true warning is postmarked from New York, Madison’s Peace Commission (now in London) are being depressed by the tremendous joint celebration there of Napoleon’s exile to Elba, the 100th anniversary of the Hanoverian accession, and the 16th of Lord Nelson’s victory on the Nile: in the mock naval battles accompanying the festivities, the “enemy vessels” ignominiously vanquished include a significant number of “American” along with the customary “French.” On August 3, while Andrew broods at Tobacco Stick, Admiral Cochrane’s reinforced Bermuda fleet weighs anchor for the Chesapeake. On the 8th, as Andrew makes his way unchallenged into Washington, the British and American treaty negotiators meet for the first time in the Hotel des Pays-Bas in Ghent, each to confront the other with unacceptable demands, and each hoping that news of fresh successes in the fighting will weaken the other’s bargaining position. Why do you not appear, and we make plans together?