Letters полностью

But this ancient history lies in the future (Have you a timetable for our project? Are the dates and sequence of the several letters to be of any significance? Have you a Pattern of your own in mind?), beginning at this letter’s end, when you shall commence the tale of Andrew Cook IV as told by himself. Meanwhile, in the most summary fashion, here is the line of his descendants from the end of his last letter to his child (dated May 14, 1812; what would your Jacob Horner make of this anniversary of King Henry IV’s assassination, George Washington’s opening of the first Constitutional Convention, the death of Mme de Staël’s mother, Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination, and the departure of the Lewis & Clark Expedition from St. Louis?) to the beginning of this my first letter to you:

My ancestor chose the wrong conjunction. A week into Gemini, just after he closed that long fourth letter, Andrée Castine Cook gave birth to opposite-sex twins, duly named Henry and Henrietta Cook Burlingame V. The old cosmophilist H.B. III must have smiled in his unknown grave! In the time-honored manner of our line, their father lingered on at Castines Hundred until he was assured of his wife’s and children’s well-being — then left at once (but not directly) for Paris, to try to assist Joel Barlow in the business he had lately done his best to obstruct: negotiation with Napoleon concerning the Berlin and Milan decrees.

He will not get there in time: unbeknownst to him, the emperor has already left St. Cloud to lead his army’s ill-fated march into Russia; the Duc de Bassano, unable to stall Barlow further, has produced on May 11 the “Decree of St. Cloud,” falsely dated April 28, 1811, to “prove” that France had rescinded the Berlin and Milan decrees more than a year since, at Barlow’s first request! The old poet is delighted, never mind the chicanery: the more so since on that same May 11 Prime Minister Perceval, a staunch supporter of Britain’s Orders in Council against American shipping, has been assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons, and his successor Lord Castlereagh is known to be amenable to lifting those orders. Barlow has rushed the St. Cloud Decree across the Channel via the U.S.S. Wasp; on May 19 it has reached Lord Castlereagh. Surely the author of the Columbiad is about to score a brilliant diplomatic triumph: no reason now for Britain not to raise her embargo as France has done, and Madison not to revoke in turn his Non-Intercourse Act against Britain. The western war hawks have lost their only casus belli of interest to the eastern states. There will be no War of 1812!

But ah, the mails. Unaware of Barlow’s coup, Madison has delivered on June 1 his Second War Message to Congress, emphasizing the issue of British impressment of U.S. seamen; today 157 years ago he signs the Declaration of War, but the British ministry will not hear of it until well after their tardy revocation (on June 23) of the Orders in Council. Adieu, Joel Barlow, who have but six months more to live and must spend them chasing Napoleon all over eastern Europe! Au revoir, Andrew Cook IV, chaser of wild geese, of whom we shall hear more!

For the next dozen years his good wife remains at Castines Hundred, raising her children. Twice during the first three of those years — that is, during the “Second War of Independence”—her husband returns (once without her knowing it), between his wartime adventures, not to be here chronicled. Andrée herself, once so politically active, seems to take no further interest in the Game of Governments. She is paid a single visit (in mid-September, 1813) by her friend and hero Tecumseh, who has fought so ably for the British along the Great Lakes that the question is no longer whether the U.S. will capture Canada, but whether the western states, so eager for the war, will become new territories of the Crown! Detroit has fallen; Fort Chicago has been massacred, Frenchtown, Fort Miami, Fort Mims. Tecumseh has more than regained the prestige lost at Tippecanoe: he is the undisputed leader of a confederacy that now includes the southern Creeks.

But he confides to “Star-of-the-Lake” that he has ceased to believe in his mission. His Indians are good fighters but not good soldiers; with British encouragement, their ferocity against captured troops and civilians has redoubled; he cannot restrain them. The American retaliation has already begun, and is plainly exterminative. Forts Wayne and Meigs and Stephenson did not fall, and they should have; the Creeks cannot possibly withstand the army that Andrew Jackson is assembling against them; the British general Proctor, Tecumseh’s immediate superior, is a coward and a beast. Most ominous of all, the American Commodore Perry has just defeated the British fleet on Lake Erie: the Long Knives will now control the Lakes, and who controls the Lakes controls the heart of the country.