Mother heard no more from Joseph Whaland after the Treaty of Paris was sign’d in the autumn of ’83. In lower Dorchester, the watermen still report hearing screams & gibbers across the wastes, and to this day attribute them to Whaland, gone mad in his solitary hideaway, wandering the marsh like Homer’s Bellerophon, “far from the paths of men, devouring his own soul.” We return’d to Castines Hundred. Thousands of dispossest Loyalists, refugee Iroquois, & escaped or manumitted Negroes were swarming across the river from New York into Canada to avoid reprisals by the “Americans,” amongst them Joseph & Molly Brant and “Queen Esther” Montour; “Upper Canada” was founded as their temporary homeland until the new Union of States fell apart & they could safely return. Against that happy day, Governor Haldimand declined to surrender Britain’s Great Lakes forts (he call’d them Canada’s Great Lakes forts) to the Americans, as stipulated by the Treaty of Paris. The Baron’s estate was a refugee campground, his house a waystation, where Mother hoped in vain my father might turn up. Burr (now a state assemblyman in New York) was sympathetic, but had no news. Arnold, idle & brooding in London, was not answering his mail. Barlow, by this time an establisht “Hartford Wit,” was preening on the subscription list for his still-unfinished Vision: King Louis, 25 copies; General Washington, 20; M. Lafayette, 10; B. Franklin, 6; A. Burr, 3; & cet. The Union of States was unfinisht, too, tho already a convention in Annapolis was calling for a larger one in Philadelphia to write a constitution & select a national President. White settlers freely crost the Appalachians and prest toward the Mississippi: the Joseph Brant who stopt at Castines Hundred was not my father, but a white man’s Indian playing peacemaker for the Six Nations by urging them to sign away most of their homeland to the Americans, who occupied it anyhow. Not even my mother could imagine that he was her husband. In 1785 she told me that my father must surely be dead, and herself donn’d widow’s weeds.
We linger’d here thro that winter. Then in ’86, having just begun to reconcile herself to her bereavement, Mother received from London a remarkable love-letter from the man she mourn’d! To be sure, the letter was sign’d B, not H.B. IV, and declared itself to be from “Joseph Brant,” in England officially to raise money for the erection of an Episcopal chapel in Upper Canada. But it was so “unmistakably” my father’s epistle — his early handwriting, his pet names for her, allusions to their brief time together, inquiries after me — that we set out at once for London.
The prospect of “reunion” with the shadowy figure I had scarcely met & never known, & who had caused my mother such distress, gave me no pleasure. My uncle the Baron was all the father I needed, Castines Hundred the one real home I’d had. Only the sea-voyage, and the anticipation of a foreign land, reconciled me to the journey.
Sing now, Calliope, in minor key, & Clio in mournful numbers, our shock & confusion when, having settled in a boarding house in King Street, London, on my “father’s” written instructions, we discover’d that the “Joseph Brant” being given a Captain’s commission (and pension) by the Court, & received by George III, & painted by Romney, and feted everywhere, was neither the pusillanimous prayerbook-scholar of Canajoharie & Upper Canada, nor the “Devil of the Mohawks” who had butcher’d Forty Fort & Cherry Valley, nor yet the New Haven tutor who had begot me in the Maryland marshes with the Secret of the Magic Eggplant, but an icy & indifferent stranger who scarcely acknowledged our existence face to face (and never deign’d to sleep in King Street), whilst sending us the warmest letters in the post, with money for our support & my education: letters whose authorship this same “Joseph Brant” neither admitted nor denied!
Unhinged, Mother fled for comfort across town to our old acquaintance Benedict Arnold, who sympathized but could not help us. He made plain, however (just before leaving London for Canada to try the West Indies trade again), his conviction that Father had betray’d him into betraying Washington & himself. He declared further — planting in my boyish mind a seed which was to bear much subsequent fruit — that this betrayal had been not in the interest of the Crown at all! On the contrary: having arranged for him to betray West Point to the British, Father had (so Arnold swore) then betray’d him & Major André to Washington, to shock the emerging republic into unity and weaken the hand of Washington’s rivals, such as General Gates! The Newburgh Letters, he avow’d “on good authority,” had been dictated by my father to John Armstrong with Washington’s approval, for a similar purpose. Letters! It was those that kept us in London, even after “Joseph Brant” departed to claim his new estate on Lake Ontario. They still arrived, almost regularly, at King Street; but in 1788 they began to be deliver’d from Paris, and tho the initial was the same, the name it named was now Joel Barlow’s!
He was just arrived in France, these letters said, on secret business involving Louisiana, “which must not fall into American hands.” The “Joseph Brant” subterfuge, they said, had been a heartbreaking necessity to disguise from Parliament his dealing with George III’s ministers; thank heaven he could now put it by, “at least for the most part,” and come to us in propria persona…
In July we were paid a call by Mr. Barlow, who turn’d out to be — Joel Barlow! He had indeed come from Hartford to Paris less than a fortnight past, he confirm’d, on behalf of the Scioto Company, speculators in Ohio real estate. He acknowledged further that he had encounter’d his old tutor Henry Burlingame IV at dinner at the Marquis de Lafayette’s a few days since, whither he’d gone with the American minister Mr. Jefferson; and he was come to us at King Street at that gentleman’s request, to urge us to join him, Burlingame, at his Paris lodging. But he disclaim’d with alarm having written any letters to us over his name, and trusted we would not excite the jealousy of his own wife (whom he was entreating to leave Hartford & join him) with that story. Could Burlingame’s letters be going to Mrs. Barlow & his to us? My mother produced one: the handwriting was not Barlow’s. He left as dismay’d as we, promising to press Burlingame on the matter when his business in London & the Low Countries was done & he return’d to Paris. Mother took to bed.
More letters came, all in the same hand, all tender, solicitous, intimate: from “Brant” in Upper Canada, from “Barlow” in Antwerp, from “Benedict” in St. John’s, even from “Burr” in New York, now attorney-general of that state. In the spring of ’89, after a particularly touching letter from “Barlow,” we removed to Paris: not only did the author of The Vision of Columbus deny writing the letter; he inform’d us, astonisht, that Burlingame had left Paris for Baltimore some months hence, presumably to rejoin us there!