The jury preferr’d his original version & found against my father, who promptly escaped custody & disappear’d — as Alexis Cuillerier. One “Antoine Cuillerier,” then in his 70’s, lived a few more years in the role of habitant in the Fort Detroit area, and there died. Of Andrew Cooke III we know no more. Pontiac himself, two years after his trial, was clubb’d & stabb’d (so reports one Pierre Menard, habitant) in the village of Cahokia by a young Illinois warrior bribed “by the English” to the deed. The assassin’s tribe was almost exterminated in the reprisal by the nations Pontiac had endeavour’d in vain to bring together: that was a kind of fighting they understood.
Oh child, how I am heavied by this chronicle — whose next installment must bring my father to rebirth, myself to birth (you too, perhaps!), & be altogether livelier going.
Pontiac, Pontiac! Andrew, Andrew! How near you came to succeeding!
And Henry, Henrietta! We will come nearer yet, you &
Your loving father,
A.B.C. IV
O: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The history of H. C. Burlingame IV: the First American Revolution.
At Castines Hundred
Niagara, Upper Canada
Thursday, 9 April 1812
My Darling Henry or Henrietta,
On this date 100 years since, there was bloodily put down in New York a brave rebellion of black slaves, instigated three days before — so my father chose to believe — by his grandfather & namesake, Henry Burlingame III, after the failure of the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy. Six of the rebels committed suicide, 21 were executed. One “Saturnian revolution” later, he maintain’d, in 1741, my own grandfather & namesake, Andrew Cooke III, successfully spiked a 2nd such revolution in the same place, with even bloodier result: 13 hang’d, 13 burnt, 71 transported.
I did not believe him.
Neither did I believe, when I came of age, what he had told me in my boyhood of his mother, Andrée Castine: that she betray’d Pontiac to Major Gladwin & thus undermined, with my grandfather’s aid, the great “Indian Conspiracy” of 1763-64.
Henry Cooke Burlingame IV, at least in the brief period of his official life (1746–1785), lack’d Pontiac’s tragical vision. The most I will concede to his slanderous opinion of my grandparents is the possibility of their having realized, around 1760, that their grand strategy had misfired: that the French might never regain control of the Canadas, much less link them with Louisiana & push east across the Appalachians to the Atlantic; that “successful” Indian resistance would lead only to their extermination by the British. In short, that the sad sole future of the red man lay in accommodation & negotiated concession, to the end of at least fractional survival & the gradual “reddening” of the whites. Pontiac’s one victory, on this view, was Major Rogers’s verse tragedy Ponteach: as Lord Amherst infected the Indians with smallpox, Pontiac infected white Americans with Myth, at least as contagious & insusceptible to cure.
More simply, we have the testimony of Andrée’s diary that she & Andrew believed it necessary for the Indians (who, as we have seen, would not take the calculated loss of storming operations) at least to master the art of protracted siege — which interfered only with their seasonal rhythms, not with their famous individualism — if they were to conduct successful large-scale campaigns against white fortifications & artillery. Sieges were a repeatable discipline; Pontiac’s tactic (to enter the fort as if for a conference & then fall on the unsuspecting officers) was a one-time-only Indian trick which would make legitimate conferences difficult to arrange in the future. Its “betrayal” (she does not directly either admit or deny betraying it herself) did not undermine the general plan; it only made necessary a change of tactics.
“She made that diary note a full year later,” my father observed. “She was covering their tracks. She knew how I loved old Pontiac.”
It is true that such entries, especially belated ones, can be disingenuous. But my father, like the rest of us, chose by heart as much as by head which ones to put his faith in.
No Cooke or Burlingame has ever disprized book learning; the Burlingames, however, are the scholars. “Alexis Cuillerier,” 21 years old, broke jail in Detroit in 1767 and disappear’d before he could be convicted, on Pontiac’s original testimony, of drowning the child Betty Fisher. In the autumn of that same year, Henry Burlingame IV matriculated at the College of New Jersey in Princeton. Upon his graduation, he went up to Yale College in New Haven, staying on as a tutor in history after taking a Master of Arts degree there in 1772. His life in this interval, in great contrast to his adventuresome youth, was austere, even monastic. By Mother’s report, he was still much shock’d by what he took to be his parents’ successful duplicity: he even imagined that they had bribed Pontiac with rum to give his damaging testimony, and subsequently arranged his assassination, to the end of further “covering their tracks”! (Was it in some rage against his mother that “Alexis” drown’d the poor beshitten Fisher girl? But we have only Pontiac’s word that he did, together with the rumors that had led to his arrest.) This shock, no doubt, accounts for his reclusion. And there was another factor, as we shall see.
H. C. Burlingame IV thus became the 1st of our line not merely to doubt his father (we have all, in our divers ways, done that) but to despise him. I was the 2nd; and am perhaps the 1st to pass beyond that misgrounded, spirit-wasting passion, to spare you which is the end & object of these letters.
The study of History was Father’s sanctuary from its having been practised upon him in the past, and his preparation for practising it upon others in the future. From the present — the revolutionary fervor which was sweeping the colleges of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, even William & Mary in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s — he remain’d aloof. His student friends from Princeton (John Armstrong & Aaron Burr are the two we shall remember) were ready by 1774 to fight for American independence; his Yale tutee Joel Barlow was already making plans, at Father’s suggestion, for an American Aeneid (but Father had in mind a satire!); and his closest friend in New Haven, Mr. Benedict Arnold — a bright young merchant in the West Indies trade whose boyhood had been as adventurous as Father’s — had organized a company of Connecticut militia. But while he did not dismiss as specious the arguments for independence, Father was skeptical enough (and Canadian enough) to see two sides to the matter: a prerequisite to the tragical view, tho not its equivalent.
His chief concern, however (so he claim’d), was not the inevitable misunderstandings & conflicts of interest betwixt governors & govern’d 3,000 miles apart; it was the invasion of white settlers across the Appalachians into Indian lands, in despite of George III’s proclamation. He could not believe that the confederated state governments being proposed by the Committees of Correspondence & the Continental Congress would be inclined to check that invasion. Exempt from patriotism, he saw the self-interest & bad faith on both sides of the Atlantic, and a dozen routes to peaceful compromise, none of which bade especially well for the Indians. If, on the other hand, war were actually to break out betwixt the British & the colonials, each would scramble to use the Indians against the other — in particular the Six Nations of the Iroquois, whose situation once again would be, for better or worse, strategic.
In April of ’75, when the shooting commenced at Lexington & Concord, Father was in nearby Cambridge, poring thro the library of Harvard’s old Indian College for references to the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy, and deciding that he had had enough of Yale’s Congregationalist orthodoxy, perhaps of the academical life. His friend Arnold rusht up from New Haven to add his company of militia to George Washington’s army, assembling on the Common. His friend Burr hurried over from law school in Litchfield to join that army. Father introduced them. They could not persuade him to enlist, nor he dissuade them.