I reported what I’d heard from Jefferson and Burr, which corroborated the Baron’s last news of “H.B.” I knew too little of American politics to yea or nay Andrée’s complex prognostications, but enough of French & Algerine, & of history generally, to warn her that events have their own momentum, & quickly get beyond the grasp of those who would control them. And if I should ever go in search of my “father,” I declared, it would not be to enlist myself in his cause, or him in mine.
“We don’t know his,” Andrée said tartly, “and you have none.”
True enough — till love & Aaron Burr gave me one, that same year. News reacht us of Burr’s duel with Hamilton on the Hudson Palisades, which spoilt his bid for the New York governorship & forced him into a kind of hiding. He was headed, we heard, for the Louisiana territory, where he own’d land, with a band of settlers, perhaps to establish a new state. But there were also rumors of intended rendezvous with a volunteer army that had been training on Blennerhassett Island in the Ohio River, no one knew what for. Napoleon, age 35, was crown’d Emperor of France & Anointed of the Lord, and prepared to make war against Austria & Russia. Jefferson handily won reelection; Republican strength increast in the Congress. I turn’d 28, & proposed marriage to my 16-year-old cousin. The Baron & Baroness said she was not ready; Andrée declared
Well, I could not stay on at Castines Hundred. In 1805 & ’06 & ’07—whilst Napoleon won at Ulm, Austerlitz, & Jena, lost at Trafalgar, and, just as Andrée had forecast, issued the Berlin Decree against trade with Britain in retaliation for Britain’s Orders in Council against trade with France; and whilst a sea battle was fought off the Virginia Capes betwixt the USS
When Burr fled to Europe in perfect disgrace, and Harman Blennerhassett settled down to raise cotton in Mississippi, I came back to make my report (and en route met that 1st uncritical auditor of my Algerine adventure, Midshipman Cooper). Taken separately, I declared to Andrée, neither Harman Blennerhassett nor Aaron Burr was guilty as charged, and Justice Marshall had fairly resisted Jefferson’s pressure to convict. Blennerhassett, an Irish lawyer & adventurer, was in my opinion primarily bent on marching on Mexico, and Burr on bringing a large new state into the Union with himself as governor, tho each was prepared to do both if it should prove feasible. The conspiracy was mainly the invention of Jefferson’s western army commander, General James Wilkinson, a bona fide traitor in the secret pay of Spain, who (again in my opinion, because at my urging) had prest the Western Empire idea on B. & B. to divert them from Mexico; aroused their interest in it as a possibility if their “legitimate” program should fail; and then tattled on them to Jefferson & turn’d state’s evidence to cover his tracks as a Spanish agent!
In the same way, I did not believe that either Blennerhassett or Burr was guilty of being “Henry Burlingame IV,” whether or not that fellow in his latter guises was my sire.
Drawing on what I’d learnt from Consuelo to pose as a fellow agent of the Spanish minister to the U. States, I had enlisted Wilkinson to scotch their plan, not altogether on Tecumseh’s behalf (tho anything but the Mexican enterprise would have meant more encroachment on Indian lands) but principally to thwart two people who — separately or together! — might be H.B. IV. It was my intention to keep an occasional eye on both, especially on Burr, who it pleased me to report had at no time penetrated my disguise. Finally, at 18 my taskmaster was more desirable than before, & would she marry me?
She would be happy to, your mother replied, with Tecumseh’s consent. What had been his judgment of me?
