Letters

Dear colleague, esteemed collaborator, fellow toiler up the slopes of Mt. Parnassus: what a mighty irony here impends! My voice falters (I am dictating this by telephone, from notes, into my secretary’s machine across the Bay, whence she will transcribe and send it off to you posthaste). Poor Cooks! Poor Burlingames! And poor suspense, I admit, to leave you thus hanging on their history’s epistolary hook: Did my namesake’s letters reach their addressee? Did “Henry or Henrietta” take to heart his heartfelt counsel? And Andrew himself: did he achieve his self-abnegatory aims? If so, by what revision of his revised program, since we know the outcome of the War of 1812?

Those earlier two questions I shall return to: they are the body of this letter, whose head nods so ready a yes to your invitation. The latter two I shall answer in detail in letters to come — five, by my estimate, though four would be a more appropriate number, to balance the four hereunto appended. The fact is, sir, my major literary effort over the past dozen years — that is to say, since I gave you my “Sot-Weed Factor Redivivus” material as the basis for your novel — has been the pla

Alas, the practice of literature has, as you know, never been more than my avocation. The practice of history is my métier (I do not mean historiography!); my muse — who is not Clio — is too demanding to leave me time for dalliance with Calliope; I shall not write my Marylandiad. Instead, I reply in kind to your invitation by here inviting you to write it for me — incorporate it, if you like, into your untitled epistolary project! Thus my determination to supply you (in the form of letters, after his own example) with my researches into the balance of A.C. IV’s life. I will follow them with a one-letter account of my own activities on behalf of the Second Revolution, and that with an envoi to my son Henry Burlingame VII, whose relation to me — you will by now have guessed — follows inexorably the classic Pattern.

Seven letters in all: you see how readily I adapt my old project to your new one!

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?), begi

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 ma

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 Cha

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 ca

It is to confirm rumors of this defeat, about which Proctor has lied to him, that Tecumseh has come secretly from Bois Blanc Island, his camp on the Detroit River, to the other end of Lake Erie; having confirmed them, he has stopped at Castines Hundred to say good-bye to his friend forever. His old enemy General Harrison is assembling an army of vengeful Kentucky riflemen on the Ohio shore of the lake; Perry’s fleet will carry them unopposed to the Detroit river forts. Somewhere thereabouts, and soon, the decisive battle will be fought. He Tecumseh is not sanguine of its issue; in any case, he knows — though he ca