Burr

by Gore Vidal

  “Yes, Sir, I have. But I must warn you that splendour is expensive.”

  “We are in sad accord.”

  So for half an hour the President and I examined tableware, trying to find a truly republican balance between too plain democratic ware and too rich royal plate.

  I have never known a man so concerned with the trifles and show of wealth and position as Washington. But then it was his genius always to look the part he was called upon to play, and it is not possible to create a grand illusion without the most painstaking attention to detail. Much of his presidential day was occupied with designing monograms and liveries and stately carriages, not to mention inventing, with Hamilton’s aid, elaborate court protocols.

  Incidentally, at about this time, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law that anyone moving into the state with full-grown Negro slaves must free them after six months. Although it was a moot point whether or not the President qualified as a Pennsylvanian simply because the capital was located in that state, Washington thought it best to whisk back to Virginia his personal slaves in order that they not get ideas about a freedom he had no intention of granting them. He was the total Virginian.

  We parted on the most friendly terms. The next day when I went to the State Department to consult the archives, an embarrassed clerk told me that Secretary of State Jefferson was obliged to close the archives to me on the flimsy ground that since certain documents might involve current executive matters the constitutional separation between legislature and executive would be breached. Although Hamilton liked to take credit for my exclusion, Jefferson told me privately that it was actually President Washington who did not want me examining too closely his military record. Yet Washington had nothing to fear from me. Although I would have depicted him as the incompetent general he was, I would also have demonstrated how he was the supreme creator of this union; how his powerful will and serpentine cunning made of a loose confederation of sovereign states a strong federal government graven to this day in Washington’s sombre Roman imperial image.

  Twelve

  SOME DAYS later. Colonel Burr goes over what I have written. He makes corrections.

  “How hungry for all credit, all glory, poor Hamilton was! Among his papers they found a note swearing that he had written more than sixty of the Federalist papers when, in fact, he had written at the most fifty. He made claim to some of Jemmy Madison’s best efforts.”

  Burr blows three blue-white rings of smoke at me; becomes suddenly mischievous: “Now let us examine Mr. Jefferson. He is sometimes known as the Great Leveller of society. Actually, the only levelling he ever did was of me!”

  Memoirs of Aaron Burr–Three

  OF ALL THE new republic’s political leaders, I was the most reluctant. Washington, Adams, and Jefferson had spent their lives serving in congresses and assemblies or dealing with them as governors and generals. Hamilton realized from the beginning that only through politics could he make the United States the sort of aristocratic pond in which he would most like to swim and glitter. On the other hand, I was interested chiefly in my wife and daughter, and in the law as a means of providing for them.

  But six months after I settled in New York (April 1784), I was elected to the Assembly. “It will be helpful for your career as a lawyer,” said Hamilton, who dreamed of election but wisely never proposed himself to our small electorate (of the 13,000 men who lived in New York City only 1,300 owned sufficient property to qualify as voters). I thought of Hamilton a few years ago when the franchise was extended to every man twenty-one or over. Had Hamilton lived, he would have been apoplectic at so much democracy, and made Chancellor Kent sound like a sans-culotte!

  After a single term in which I was not only bored but resentful of being separated from my family, I did not stand for re-election. In 1788 I was again put up for the Assembly on an anti-Federalist ticket and, to my relief, I was defeated. I was still largely indifferent to public matters, and took no active part in the making of the Constitution.

  My political career began, properly, with the contest for governor in the spring of 1789. Out of friendship, I supported the Federalist candidate, my old friend Judge Yates. I had warned Clinton that I owed a good deal to the Judge and that, though I was ordinarily a Clinton supporter, this time I must vote against him. “I unnerstan’, I unnerstan’.” The Governor gave me his jovial smile which usually presaged political assassination. But I was not to be assassinated since I did not want any political office. For once I was above the battle, much the best place to be for one who craves the victor’s laurel.

  Clinton was narrowly re-elected. To bind me to him, he offered me the attorney-generalship of the state, a position I did not want. But pressure was brought to bear on me. As Troup said: “You will be the centre of our profession in the state. You will never regret it.” Translated this meant that I was to be useful to my Federalist friends at the bar.

  As it turned out, I was not particularly useful to anyone in a post that for the most part involved steering clear of the various land-selling schemes of the Clintonian faction. Without going into melancholy details, let me simply say that the state administration was as corrupt then as it is now. No doubt this has something to do with the mephitic air of Albany.

  Meanwhile, my friend Hamilton was like a rocket in the ascent. We now had a republic, a congress, a first magistrate and a de facto prime minister—Hamilton himself. He had achieved mastery in New York by getting the state to ratify the Constitution, to the fury of Governor Clinton. Hamilton then selected the first two senators, his father-in-law General Schuyler and his old Massachusetts friend Rufus King. In the process, he enraged his natural allies the Livingstons, denying them what they considered to be their seat in the Senate. The wrath of the Livingstons proved to be the unmaking of Hamilton, and my opportunity.

  During the early months of the Washington administration I travelled a good deal about New York state and occasionally I would stop at Clermont, the Livingston palace on the Hudson where that great disaffected family spent its days brooding and plotting the destruction of my friend Hamilton who had so neatly excluded them from the high offices of the republic.

  It was in the drawing-room at Clermont that I was included in the most audacious of the Livingston plans. My relations with Chancellor Livingston were always good though hardly intimate. For one thing he was stone-deaf. For another he was very much de haut en bas but then he was, in every sense, de haut, and the rest of the world, relatively speaking, en bas.

  At the Chancellor’s request, a dozen of us met on one of those silvery October days when the leaves at Clermont are a most furious red-yellow and skittish deer cast violet shadows on the lawn, and watch us watching them.

  The Chancellor came agreeably to the point. “General Schuyler’s term as senator will end March fourth. I see no reason, Colonel Burr, why you should not replace him.”

  The true politician like the true general is never surprised. I knew that an alliance between the anti-Federalists (that is to say, the anti-Hamiltonians) and the Livingston faction was under way. Governor Clinton had taken to praising the Chancellor at dinner parties. “Wunnerful deep he is, knowin’ so much law!”

  Now I was to be the symbol of this new alliance. I was more curious than surprised. “I am not at all certain, Chancellor, that I want to be a senator.” This was true. In those days the Senate’s function was a mystery to everyone, including its presiding officer John Adams who simply could not fathom the duties of a vice-president. “But what am I to do next?” he would pitifully cry from the chair. To which the only answer was “preside”; and wait for the President’s death or retirement. A seat in the House of Representatives, on the other hand, was most desirable, for that House controls the Treasury. Jemmy Madison much preferred it to the Senate.

  The Chancellor was brisk, once he had understood my shouted demurs. “We have the votes in the state Senate. Governor Clinton assures me you will have the votes in the Assembly, which is his peculiar terr
itory. I see no reason for you not to accept.”

  I saw at least one reason. What was their price? We did the stately minuet of politicians manoeuvreing. “I am curious,” I said, “as to why you chose me?”

  “You are the best-fitted!” This came from a Livingston relation by marriage. I cannot remember which one. But then who can ever get them all straight? There are so many.

  “You are also the most acceptable.” The Chancellor was benign. “Your support of our friend Judge Yates was taken as a sign of independent mind. And though you are no professional anti-Federalist, your relations with our good governor are excellent. In fact, he told me that yours was the best legal mind in the state.”

  “Tactless of him to say so in your presence, Chancellor.”

  “Tact is not that good man’s strongest point. But he has his virtues even if they are not those of a gentleman.” How vigorously the Livingstons used to employ that noun to cast in bold relief the few of us who were born gentlemen and thus in permanent opposition to that shadowy multitude from among whose seedy dangerous ranks Alexander Hamilton had vaulted to our high bright roost.

  “But marrying Elizabeth Schuyler was hardly enough, do you think?” as the mistress of Clermont liked to say. “No wife can entirely change what her husband is.” Make him legitimate, she meant; make him one of us.

  It is ironic that Hamilton who worshipped the aristocrats was never taken seriously by them except as a tool. He might have been president had he turned to the people he came from, to the mechanics who had the vote, to the men in the taverns who could appreciate in him their own selves made large by intellect and cunning. But Hamilton wanted no part of the lower orders. He rejected his own origins and consorted only with the well-born and the rich, serving them truly and himself, at the end, not at all.

  “It would seem to me, Chancellor, that your claim on the Senate seat is greatest of all.”

  “Of course it is.” The Chancellor was bland. “But at the moment no Livingston can be elected. You can. It has been arranged. Will you accept?” Expectantly, he cupped a hand to his ear.

  “Yes,” I bellowed. “But without ties to either faction.”

  The Chancellor stared thoughtfully at the dusty family portraits. The Livingstons think, not incorrectly, of New York as being their personal property, a gift from King Charles forever threatened not only by the democracy but, most bitterly, by their rivals the Schuyler family. The Livingstons of those days would have preferred the tumbril and the guillotine to playing second fiddle to the Schuylers.

  “Of course,” said the Chancellor. And so because of the rivalry between two proud, foolish clans, I was chosen, in January of 1791, the third United States senator from New York.

  The fact that I had not sought the office nor wanted the office gave me strength. Although I was anti-Federalist, I was on good terms with many Federalist leaders and so could act with perfect freedom. I was not thirty-five years old, and from an important region. I accepted my destiny. I would become the president, an office for which I believed that I was by temperament and training uniquely qualified. Why else had fate set me so high on the ladder? All I need do was ascend. I had no fear of Hamilton. His limitations were already apparent to me. The man I should have feared I thought my friend. By allowing Jefferson to deceive me, I lost all.

  Memoirs of Aaron Burr–Four

  THOMAS JEFFERSON has written that he did not meet me until I came to the Senate in Philadelphia (the capital kept moving farther and farther south thanks to the Virginia junto). Although often prone to truth, Jefferson was never a fanatic when his own legend was at stake. We had met earlier than that.

  Since Congress did not meet until the autumn of 1791, I spent the summer at home with my wife and child, knowing that we would soon be separated for long periods. Houses were hard to come by in Philadelphia; and my wife was ill.

  During the summer, Jefferson and Madison made their famous tour of New York and New England. They were interested, they said, in botany as well as the vicious habits of the Hessian fly.

  Actually they were creating support for themselves against Hamilton who now controlled President, Congress and Cabinet. Quite alone in the Cabinet, Jefferson fought to uphold the republic that Hamilton wanted to turn—so Jefferson maintained—into a corrupt replica of the British system, with Commons, Lords and Crown.

  About the middle of June, I was invited by Henrietta Colden to a small dinner for the Secretary of State. Since my wife was ill, I attended alone.

  Henrietta was a great favourite in the society of that era. She had a lively, bright manner that acted like champagne on even the dullest guest. In fact, the widower Jefferson was suspected of being more than just a friend to the widow Colden who was, for a time, Hamilton’s mistress. But then what lively lady in New York had not been, more or less seriously, addressed by Hamilton? I should think that his amative bump was uncommonly large.

  There were a dozen men and women in Henrietta’s flowery drawing-room. When I was announced, she seized my arm; led me to the tallest man in the room.

  “Our new senator!” she cried, assuming that the tall man needed no introduction, that I needed no name to go with my new title.

  A rather large limp hand touched mine. I am not usually conscious of height but with Jefferson I always felt in danger of a crick in the neck as he obliged me—obliged everyone except those few who were at his eye level—to look up into that freckled fox face with the bright hazel eyes, and delicate thin-lipped smile.

  “Colonel Burr, what an honour!” The voice was low but beguiling. Even face to face (or face to chest) one had to strain to hear him, particularly when he slipped into one of his reveries and the words would flow beautifully, inexhaustibly, sometimes interminably, yet never entirely without interest for one always found good things even as he found them in that fine speculative torrent. He was the most charming man I have ever known, as well as the most deceitful. Were the philosopher’s charm less, the politician’s deceit might not have been so shocking.

  We exchanged compliments.

  “Mr. Madison is ill!” Henrietta announced gaily to the company.

  “So you must make do with me.” Jefferson gave her a fond look. “One Virginian is very like another, according to Mr. Hamilton.”

  Henrietta defended Hamilton. She knew nothing of politics but everything of politicians.

  Jefferson discussed at length his recent trip to New England. “A botanical excursion,” he said quite seriously. “Mr. Madison and I have been fascinated by what we have seen and learned, particularly about the mating habits of the Hessian fly.”

  Jefferson affected great interest in my views. Wanted to know my estimate of Governor Clinton whom he had briefly met at Albany. Betrayed a detailed knowledge of my election. Wanted to know my precise relations with the Livingston family. Since the Chancellor was at the other end of the table, my decorous praise of him was no doubt repeated.

  In my view Jefferson wrote rather less well than he talked, but no less copiously. From the colour of Negroes (the result, he felt, of a peculiarly virulent form of leprosy) to the proper building of walls, Jefferson not only had an opinion on everything but was driven to express it. Indiscreet letters of his will one day delight and trouble unborn historians. Certainly his letters to me (most of them lost at sea) were marvels of wit and good sense.

  Unfortunately Jefferson did not always know when to be silent. A few months before our meeting at Mrs. Colden’s, Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man was published, with words of praise from Jefferson on its cover. Since the author had been recently indicted for treason by the British government, it was thought tactless of the American Secretary of State not only to praise the traitor but, gratuitously, to remark upon the danger to the United States from “heresies” of the sort Paine was indicting.

  The Hamiltonian Gazette of the United States promptly published an attack on Jefferson by one “Publicola,” thought to be John Adams. Actually Publicola was the Vice-President�
��s son, John Quincy Adams.

  “I cannot for the life of me think why Mr. Adams should be so distressed.” Jefferson was disingenuous.

  “Possibly because he is a heretic.” This from Philip Freneau who was then writing savage indictments of Hamilton and Adams for the Daily Advertiser.

  I later discovered that Jefferson had expressly asked Henrietta to invite Freneau to dinner. Respecting ideas not men, Freneau was not the sort of prickly person Jefferson usually liked in attendance. But two months after our dinner party Freneau was drawing a good salary as clerk of foreign languages in Jefferson’s State Department at Philadelphia, and editing for Jefferson a new anti-Administration newspaper called the National Gazette. Everyone was shocked. It is not usual to give government money to an editor whose policy is the destruction of that government. Quite sensibly, if maliciously, Hamilton proposed that both Jefferson and Freneau resign if they did not approve of the government which paid their salaries. From time to time, Jefferson would deny that he had any connection with Freneau’s newspaper, but then he had the fortunate gift of believing implicitly anything he himself said at the moment he said it.

  For our benefit, Jefferson spun his version of the quarrel with Adams. “I confess that when I wrote of heresies in my letter—which I never gave the publisher permission to use …” True or false? With Jefferson one could never be certain. “… those heresies I referred to were the ones to which Mr. Adams inclines. He is a monarchist through and through, and has told me as much.”

  This was later denied to me by Adams himself. “I never in my life had a serious conversation with Mr. Jefferson on any subject,” said Adams two years later. “But if I were a secret monarchist, Mr. Jefferson would be the last person I would confide in. He knows of course I am no such thing nor is that Creole bastard. But Mr. Jefferson does know that the surest way for him to rise is to excite the people against Hamilton and me by pretending that we want a king when all we want is a strong federal government.” Of the sort Jefferson himself was to achieve some years later.