Letters

Making use of his earlier co

Her collaborator and translator, as he privately prepares to avenge Tecumseh’s death, amuses himself with certain problems raised by the manuscript. He has persuaded Consuelo that a new realismo must inevitably succeed the current rage for the Romantic; to buy into this growth-stock early, so to speak, she has reworked her story to include all ma

Consuelo agrees, the Allies enter Paris, Napoleon abdicates and is banished to Elba. Admiral Cockburn returns to the Chesapeake and renews his subscription to the National Intelligencer; General Ross in Bordeaux receives orders to take Wellington’s brigades to Admiral Cochrane in Bermuda for the purpose of “chastising Brother Jonathan” in some as yet unspecified way; Andrew Cook completes his strategy. As soon as Lake Erie is free of ice, he is certain, the Americans will re-retaliate in some fashion for the burning of Buffalo. Prevost himself waits for that occasion to prod Admiral Cochrane into action (the letter to Madison has not been sent, though Andrew has offered the governor-general numerous drafts). Sure enough, in May a raiding party from Erie, Pa., crosses the lake to Ontario and pillages the Long Point area. Prevost, into whose confidence our ancestor has by now entirely made his way, sends him at once from Halifax to Bermuda with orders for Cochrane both to demand reparation from Madison and, without waiting for reply, to initiate forthwith his proposed schedule of retaliation. Aboard the dispatch boat, as Consuelo prays to Maria Stella Maris to preserve them from sea monsters, ca

(And here I too break off, to resume in his fashion, quoting our forefather quoting himself, when I take up his second letter on the a

Your loving father)

ABC/ss encl

cc: JB

&: A. B. Cook VI to his son. A. B. Cook IV’s second posthumous letter: Washington burned, Baltimore threatened.

A. B. Cook VI

Dept. of English

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Md. 21612

July 16, 1969

H. C. Burlingame VII

(address pending)

Dear Henry,

&*‡;364)5$!

Thus (missing, silent son) our ancestor opens this second of his “posthumous letters” in “Legrand’s cipher,” the first of which closed with his forged — and interrupted — alteration of Governor-General Prevost’s order to Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane to destroy, not “Castine in Maine, Boston in Massachusetts,” etc., but Baltimore in Maryland…

&NOTGNIHSAW!

(Where are you, Henry? Better your suspicions, your rude interrogations, your peremptorosities, than this silence. Why can I not share with you my amusement at writing this from my new and temporary office — formerly tenanted by that historian I mentioned in my last, now mine as “Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English” at this newly christened university — to be transcribed, as was my last, by my new and formidable secretary? My appeal to you last week, to join me here in Maryland for good and all after so many years, nay generations, of strained and partial co

& Washington!

We review the strategy with Andrew. The British government are convinced from the start that Madison is the tool of his mentor Thomas Jefferson, at whose instruction he has coordinated the 1812 War with Napoleon’s activities in Spain and Russia; while Britain is thus stripped of her allies and engaged in the peninsular fighting, the U.S. intends to add Canada and the Floridas to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. From the time of the emperor’s retreat from Moscow, and more particularly in the first quarter of 1814, the British Cabinet’s strategy becomes not only to retain Canada by sending new forces to Prevost’s aid, but to capture New Orleans as well, and, by tightening the Chesapeake and North Atlantic blockades, to force the secession of New York and New England. The Canadian border will then be adjusted to include a buffer state extending 100 miles south of the Lakes (i.e., most of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, as well as western Pe