Sweet last summer! Mme de Staël wrote me from Coppet of her troubles with Napoleon; of her friend Schlegel’s narrow rescue of her manuscript De l’Allemagne; of her current affair with a Swiss guardsman half her age, très romantique mais peu esthétique. She wonder’d whether I thot it safe for her to move to her New York property if Napoleon hounded her from Coppet; surely “we” were not going to war with Britain, Europe’s only hope against the bloody Corsican? I was obliged to reply that unlike Paris in Year III, which appear’d dangerous but was safe, upstate New York in 1811 appear’d safe but would soon be dangerous. To convince her, I attacht a copy of a letter I’d forged with Andrée’s help for the purpose of inflaming the American press against the British: based on a real one sent from Major James Crawford at Niagara to Governor Haldimand in Quebec on January 3, 1782, it itemized eight boxes of scalps lifted by the Senecas & presented to the Governor-General for bounty payment: 43 “Congress soldiers,” 93 “farmers kill’d in their houses,” 97 farmers kill’d working in their fields, 102 more farmers of which 18 scalps were “markt with yellow flame to show that they were burnt alive after being scalpt,” 81 women, “long hair, those braided to show they were mothers,” 193 boys’ scalps “various ages,” 211 girls’ scalps big and little, “small yellow hoops markt hatchet, club, knife, & cet,” 122 “mixt scalps including 29 infants… only little black knife in middle to show ript out of mothers body,” & cet. Joel Barlow wrote from Kalorama, his house in Washington, that he was sailing reluctantly from Annapolis aboard the Constitution as Madison’s minister to France, to deal with Napoleon’s foreign minister in a final effort to prevent war betwixt the U. States & G. Britain. He recall’d fondly my assistance in his dealings with the Dey of Algiers, & wisht I could be with him now. Toot Fulton, he was sad to report, had married soon after the Clermont’s success; Ruthy was disconsolate. The war-hawk American Secretary of State, Barlow’s friend James Monroe, had instructed General Mathews in Georgia by secret letter on January 26 to move against the Floridas “with all possible expedition, concealing from general observation the trust committed to you with that discretion which the delicacy and importance of the undertaking require.” In May the U. States frigate President crippled the British sloop-of-war Little Belt off Sandy Hook, to the delight of Henry Clay & his fellow hawks, much increast in strength since the 1810 congressional elections. Surely the 12th Congress would declare Andrée’s War of 1811 when it convened in the fall! Tecumseh inform’d Governor Harrison early in the year that he would not only remain neutral, but fight on the side of the Seventeen Fires in the coming war if President Madison would set aside Harrison’s false treaty & make no future ones without consent of the chiefs assembled at the Tippecanoe. White citizens’ committees from Vincennes to St. Louis petition’d Madison to move against the Prophet’s town, disperse the confederacy, & drive out the British Indian traders who were “behind it.”
At Castines Hundred, whilst the Baron tiskt & tutted, your parents kiss’d & coo’d — and made plans. Barlow himself believed that inasmuch as the Westerners & Southerners were hottest for the war, my friend Tecumseh was of more immediate moment in the matter than Napoleon & George III together (that latter so sunk into madness now that a Regency bill was expected daily, but still urging in his lucid moments that troops be sent to recover his lost America). Joel could but hope that if France & England were persuaded to lift their decrees against American merchant shipping, the Indian issue itself would not be a sufficient casus belli; he implored me to use whatever influence I had to keep Tecumseh neutral. I had not seen fit to tell him that I was become a hawk myself, tho at the time of Burr’s trial in Richmond, when I had visited Barlow in Philadelphia to aid him with the new Columbiad, I’d spoken warmly of Tecumseh’s plan for an Indian nation, and tried to work into Joel’s epic a denunciation of “Manifest Destiny” by Columbus himself.
