So relieved was Barlow to see me go, all his natural affection came to the fore. He was old enough now, he declared (nearing 60), & the times parlous enough, that he could not bid a friend good-bye without wondering whether they would meet again. He misst Toot Fulton & Benjamin West, Tom Paine & Jefferson, Jim Monroe & Dolley Madison; he even misst that old Yale fossil Noah Webster, who’d been so unkind to the Columbiad; aye, & Joseph Bacri, & my father, of whom I was now the very spit & image. And he would miss me, tho not my work against his peaceable aims, which he could excuse only because so many of his countrymen shared my belligerence. It was a snowy forenoon, one of 1811’s last. Barlow was reminded of his earliest satirical verses, written for my father even as I was being conceived: “And Jove descends in magazines of snow.”
Using my Canadian credentials in London, I learnt that British elements opposed to a 2nd American war had gone so far as to plot the assassination of Prime Minister Perceval, a staunch defender of the Orders in Council, knowing that Lord Castlereagh, his likely successor, was inclined to revoke them. Also that the King was in strait-waistcoat, pissing the bed & fancying that England was sunk & drown’d, himself shut up in Noah’s Ark with his Lady Pembroke (a Regency bill was expected momently). Also that the Foreign Office had rejected John Henry’s claim for £32,000 and a good American consulship in reward for his espionage, on the grounds that his reports were valueless: they referr’d him for emolument to his employer, the Canadian Governor-General’s office. But Sir James Craig was by then gone to his own reward, & Sir George Prevost was not inclined to honor his predecessor’s secret debts. Embitter’d & out of funds, Henry had left London to return to farming in Vermont.
I overtook him at Southampton and (in the guise of le Comte Édouard de Crillon) won his sympathy on shipboard by declaring myself to be a former French secret agent temporarily out of favor with Napoleon by reason of the machinations of my jealous rivals. When Henry confided his own ungrateful treatment by the British, & prepared to post into the North Atlantic those copies of his letters which “a friend” had advised him to make, I suggested he permit me to do the two of us a service by engaging to sell them to the Americans via the French minister Sérurier & Secretary of State Monroe, both of whom would be pleased to present to the Congress such clear evidence of British intriguing with the New England Federalists. There should be $100,000 in it for Henry, I maintain’d, & for myself the chance to regain the Emperor’s favor. Delighted, Henry entrusted the letters & negotiations to me. I was at first dismay’d that his “copies” were but rough summaries in an unimpressive notebook, & that he’d neither named the New England separatist leaders by name nor invoked such useful embarrassments as the Essex Junto of 1804, which had plotted with Burr to lead New England’s secession if he won the New York governorship that year. I consider’d dictating to Henry a fuller & more compromising text, but decided it were better not to reveal overmuch knowledge of such details. The holograph letters from Lord Liverpool & Robert Peel were enough to implicate Britain & serve our purpose; relieved not to be directly incriminated, the Federalists could retaliate against Madison by declaring Henry’s notebook a forgery, and we could have it both ways, promoting war & disunity at once.
All went smoothly. My apprehensions were that M. Sérurier would hesitate to vouch for me before making inquiries of the Duc de Bassano, or Madison to buy the letters before making inquiries of Joel Barlow (whose Washington house Sérurier was renting); also that Monroe might see thro my disguise. But I was enough alter’d by nature & by art since my last interview with Monroe, and enough conversant in the gossip of St. Cloud & the family affairs of the Ducs de Crillon, and they eager enough to put the letters before Congress as a prelude to Madison’s appealing for a declaration of war, that the only hitch was financiaclass="underline" I ask’d $125,000, hoping for $100,000; Monroe agreed, but Albert Gallatin declared that the Treasury’s whole budget for secret-service payments of this kind was but $50,000. Fearing Henry might renege, I threw in for my part the (forged) title to an (imaginary) estate of mine at “St. Martial” & an additional $10,500 worth of (counterfeit) notes & securities negotiable in Paris, thus further demonstrating my good faith to Sérurier & Monroe. By February the deal was closed: Henry gave me $17,500 of his $50,000 & set out for Paris, as Eben Cooke had once done for Maryland, to claim his estate. I then successfully coaxt another $21,000 from the Secretary of State, & might have got as much again from the French ministry had I not fear’d discovery of my imposture & yearn’d above all else to rejoin your mother (before she should become your mother) at Castines Hundred, to put right if I could our great disservice to Tecumseh, to watch over your wombing, & to learn what my beloved might have learnt.
Et voici! Tecumseh, Andrée tearfully reported, would have none of us. Publicly he deprecated the loss at Tippecanoe as a mere imprudency by rash young warriors indignant at Harrison’s trespass, but he was in fact enraged; had seized his brother by the hair & banisht him from his sight. He was constrain’d from making a treaty with Madison (in order to gain time to reunite the scatter’d tribes) only by Harrison’s insulting stipulation that he go to Washington alone instead of with the 300 young warriors he wanted to comprise an effective retinue. Now he was off to Fort Malden & Amherstburg, at the farther end of Lake Erie, overseeing General Brock’s re-arming of the confederacy & directing minor raids against American settlements to restore his authority & the Indians’ morale. He rejected angrily Andrée’s suggestion that the Tippecanoe fiasco had, after all, purged his camp of some of its less reliable members. He had not accused us outright of treachery, only of being “our grandparents’ grandchildren.”
Which was enough. For (having re-married me in the Christian tribal ceremony to appease her parents) Andrée review’d for me, & enlisted my aid in the completion of her inquiry into, what in these three months & four letters I have set forth to you, & can now conclude: the history & pattern of our family error. Halfway thro life’s journey & about to become a father, I can now no longer properly despise my own, whoever he was, whyever his neglect of me. I wish only he had vouchsafed me some account—of his motives, his confusions, false starts, illuminations, mixt feelings, successes, failures, final aims, net values — that I might have understood & believed when my mind was ready, however much I had spurn’d it in my younger cynicism. We have tried to help Tecumseh, & fear we have undone him (we shall try again); surely our grandparents did not intend to be Pontiac’s undoing, as my father declared. Whence then my confidence that H.B. IV workt with Little Turtle to undo him, or my grandfather’s confidence that H.B. III workt with the Bloodsworth Island conspirators to undo them? Oh, for an accounting! We have misspent, misspent our powers, Cookes & Burlingames canceling each other out. May we live, Andrée & I, to be the 1st of our line to cancel out ourselves, to the end that you (guided by these letters, which must be your scripture if aught should take us from you) may be the 1st to be spared the necessity!