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My last three letters have traced the history of your forebears down to Andrée & myself, and have shown (what your mother first discover’d to me) how each has honor’d his grandsire as a fail’d visionary, whilst dishonoring his sire as a successful hypocrite. Each Cooke the spiritual heir of the Cooke before; every Burlingame a Burlingame! Not even your mother quite escaped this dismal pattern, tho by discerning it thus early in her maturity, she finds herself with less history than I to be rewrit. But I, I am steept & marinated in the family error, to the confession whereof we now are come. In this letter — surely my last to an addressee unborn! — I must rehearse my own career, complete the tale of what Andrée has taught me, & set forth our changed resolves with respect to the coming war, together with our hopes for you.
Bear in mind, little Burlingame — what I have ever to remind myself — that Aaron Burr in Paris may not be Henry Burlingame IV! If (as Mother at her best believed, despite those late cruel letters) Father died in 1783, or ’84, or ’85—if, for example, he was the man hang’d by Washington as Major John André—then of what a catalogue of crimes against us he stands acquit! Every one of his earlier friends who thot they recognized him thereafter — Benedict Arnold, Joel Barlow, Joseph Brant, Aaron Burr, Baron Castine — acknowledged that he was much changed, and their descriptions of him differ’d greatly. Who knows better than I that letters can be forged, knowledge pretended, ma
In either case, I thereby spurn’d the declaration in that letter: that my father’s great aim & life’s activity had been 1st to prevent, and later to subvert, the American Revolution. It was Arnold had 1st put the contrary bee in my bo
Thro this new lens, so to speak, I now perceived in a different light my father’s other alleged efforts in the cause of the Loyalists & the Indians. His activities in Maryland with the Marshyhope Blues against Joseph Whaland, supposedly to keep the Picaroon inform’d in advance of the attempts to capture him, had led in fact to Whaland’s only arrest. Most painful of all to acknowledge, the Mohawk massacres led by “Joseph Brant” in Pe
All this I saw, & pisst & pisst. Mme de Staël’s attendant, a boy my age who had stood courteously & curiously by, inquired whether I had any further reply to his mistress, who hoped I would wait upon her that afternoon, as upon a friend of both my father & Mr. Barlow. I bid him good day; but Barlow said I ought to go, and I would not disoblige one who had been so kind to Mother & to me. He was full of praise, was Barlow, for the young baro
Good Joel Barlow: if only his poetical talents had been capacious as his heart! For the next five years I stay’d in Paris, completing my schooling in the Lycée, in the avenues of the Terror, on the margins of Mme de Staël’s salon, and — he being, as always, good as his word—chez Barlow, once “Ruthy” had settled in.
A
She liked my father — I mean the man who had represented himself to her, to her own father, & to Barlow as Henry Burlingame IV. She call’d him, & me, américain… Indeed, she spoke of him in the same breath with the late “Monsieur Franklin,” as entrepreneurs de la révolution! “We” were, she declared, l’avant-garde du genre humain.
My protest — restrain’d indeed, considering my feelings — that I did not regard myself as a citizen of anyplace, much pleased her: To be sure, she said, “our kind” are citizens of the world: but the new idea of political nationality, much in vogue since “our revolution,” was in her opinion the wave of the future, & not to be snift at. For my observation that, whatever his talents as diplomatist or spy, my father had been less than exemplary as a husband & parent, she took me spiritedly to task. Quite aside from such possibilities as that my father’s secret & dangerous work might truly have made a proper family life out of the question, despite his best efforts; that he himself might have been heartbroken at the deceptions & disguises he was forced to; that he might have been acting in our best interests, given for example our value as hostages to his adversaries — had I not consider’d the possibility that he had simply outgrown his wife? Or that his enemies had forged those cruel letters of invitation & promist reunion? In any case, was I still child enough not to forgive parental negligence in one whose gifts were, of their kind, comparable to Gibbon’s or Rousseau’s?