“The only good thing about those evil acts was they gave us the election,” she said.
“Hurrah for the common sense of the common man!” Mr. Mustard cried. “Press side was the worst—imagine, smashing a paper, jailing a man for what he says—but the attack on aliens is about as bad. Friend of mine, John Finney, been here fourteen years, he remembers cheering on the sidewalk the day the Constitution was finished; he had something to say about a Federalist alderman in New York and a week later he was deported—home to Ireland where some folks are waiting to kill him, so he says. Poor devil. Still, attack on the press is the worst.” He gave Jimmy an owlish look. “Pretty well blows your Bill of Rights to the devil, doesn’t it?”
Jimmy nodded. “Only thing I ever really held against General Washington was his countenancing those acts.”
Well, she thought, that’s unfair. The general had been back in Mount Vernon by then, and Mr. Adams at the helm.
“‘Course, the acts have expired,” Mr. Mustard said. “Seems the prosecutor in New York yearns to try me on the law that was. All unconstitutional, isn’t it?”
She knew the question pained Jimmy—what was the point of a Constitution if the Supreme Court wasn’t strong enough to enforce it?—and to deflect it she said easily, “One good thing, though—those acts told Americans where the Federalists wanted to take them more clearly than reams of Democratic rhetoric.” She glanced at Mr. Mustard and smiled. “All but your rhetoric, of course; it was always potent.”
She left unspoken her real fear—let a tie throw their victory into the Federalist Congress and they’d be right back in the land of excesses. As if he’d had the same thought, Jimmy asked about their New York visitor.
“Well, Gelston is a Burr toady, all right,” Mr. Mustard said, “but he’s making some sense too—New Yorkers are pretty sensitive about Virginia. You have to understand, when Aaron swung the state to the Democrats, his boys figured giving him a place on the ticket was the least Virginia could do; and they’re not sure how willingly it was done. So they’re watching.”
“You’ve heard such talk?”
“Oh, it’s real. Would they split over it? Maybe not, but a lot of hotheads are involved.”
They went down for dinner, and Mr. Mustard drank three bowls of Mrs. Swan’s peanut soup, downed a tumbler of whiskey, devoured a huge slab of roast pork, and called for more. His spirits bloomed and his voice grew stronger, his wit fiercer.
She was laughing when suddenly she noticed that he was acquiring an audience in the larger parlor for men adjoining the ladies’ parlor. Talk there had stopped and she grew distinctly uncomfortable. Voice rising, Mr. Mustard abused Alexander Hamilton, who, he said, had ordered the arrest that he had barely evaded. She remembered Alex fondly despite everything. Oh, she said, he’s not so bad.
“My dear lady,” Mr. Mustard cried, “the Hamilton you remember has changed. Fine noble views he and his kind once held, but their vision became pinched and dark and full of fear, and the day came when they aimed no longer at the freeing of mankind to be its best—no, they turned toward control—
control!
—of the common man, binding him to the interests of his betters, teaching him to pull his forelock and knuckle down and take what pittance those in power might give him and be thankful, hats off, on his knees, thankee milord, thankee …”
From the adjoining room someone shouted, “You damned blathering fool! Hamilton
saved
this country when it was bankrupt, got no help from the bloody Democrats either!”
The editor leaped up, glass in hand. “A toast!” he roared, “to the big-mouthed gentleman of financial genius from whom we’ve been privileged to hear! It’s all in the name of financial efficiency that thinkers like our good friend Mr. Genius feel that folks with money make natural leaders. Now, ‘fess up, Brother Genius, don’t you feel that men with money are a bit better’n anyone else—that God had rewarded them properly with coin of the realm? Eh? Eh?”
He emptied the glass and slammed it down. “’Course you do! And that’s your precious Mr. Hamilton’s view. And what
does that mean? Why it means perpetuating an establishment class, and what does that mean but a hereditary aristocracy, lords and ladies handing down their titles to their rotten offspring, and what’s the natural outcropping of such aristocracy but monarchy?” There was an angry shout from the other room.
“Jimmy,” she said.
“That’s enough, Rob,” Jimmy said. “Not another word.”
The old Mustard smile reappeared. “I do like to bait ’em a bit. Didn’t mean to embarrass you, Miss Dolley.”
“Never mind that,” Jimmy said. “Now listen. You’re going to Charleston; you’ll connect with Peter Freneau?”
“Promised me a berth on his paper—going daily, he is.”
“All right. Suppose I pay you a hundred dollars in gold and send you straight through on the express stage, and you carry a message to Mr. Freneau.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“South Carolina electors will be gathering to vote. You tell him to make sure they hold back one vote for Burr. Eight Jefferson, seven Burr. Understand?”
Dolley sagged in her chair. After all her fears, Jimmy had chosen the danger of the North-South split over the immediate danger of a tie and hoped to patch it in Carolina.
“Can Mr. Freneau assure that?” she asked. She heard the anger in her voice.
“Doubtless,” Mr. Mustard said. “They listen to him.”
“Of course,” Jimmy said. “Danger is, if they’re not paying attention they’ll vote two for two all the way.”
“As I gather we will do here.”
He gave her a very sharp look. “I don’t know what we’ll do here, Dolley. Whatever we do, won’t hurt to drop one in South Carolina.”
“But you’ve decided. I can tell.”
“I have
not
decided—and I’ll thank you not to try to read my mind!”
She glared, outraged.
Rob Mustard cleared his throat. “You want me to do that, I’d better get after it.” He didn’t look at her.
They went upstairs, Jimmy gave him the gold pieces and in five minutes he was gone. She sat on the sofa and opened her novel, her lips drawn tight as string.
Watching those lips, Madison was irked. She’d made up her mind on the course she favored and that was all very well, but he was the one who must decide. Anyone who’d sat through the writing of the Constitution knew of the raging passions dividing North and South even then—the endless fight over slavery, southern delegates threatening to walk out, more extreme northern delegates shouting at them to go and be damned. Even General Washington’s great weight couldn’t swing them. Abolishing slavery had been his proposal—count on a great man to turn to a great question—and it almost broke the convention. When Madison realized there would be neither Constitution nor country if this kept on, he eased them away from the brutal subject.
It had been deadly real then, to use Gelston’s phrase, and it still was. He felt a stillness come over him; decision was fixing, not yet set but coming. Dolley sighed. She hadn’t turned a page, and he realized she wasn’t reading.
He put a glass of Madeira in her hand and sat beside her. “I’ve seen what the North-South split means up close. It can tear us to pieces.” She nodded, but no smile.
He kissed her cheek. “Suppose you were deciding. What would you choose?”
“Why, the immediate, of cour——” She stopped in midword, eyes wide. Then, “I—don’t know … .”
“Then we’re in it together,” he said. “Now give me a smile.” And she did, that brilliant smile that exploded like a ray of light across her face, and then she set down the glass and turned on the couch and kissed him on the lips.
He decided as she had feared—Aaron would get Virginia’s full twenty-one electoral votes. Jimmy said he relied in part
on Gelston’s promise of votes to be shorted in the North, in part on South Carolina, in part on the dangers of the split.
Her hands were shaking in her uneasiness, but in the end she did have faith in his decisions, which flowed from deep wells of instinct, intellect, and experience. Inner strength was the key to her husband. He was a superb horseman, though not physically strong; the feistiest mount calmed quickly after a moment of dancing and blowing. From her plantation girlhood Dolley knew that horses respond less to size or strength than to the iron they sense in the rider. Jimmy often doubted himself, but he was full of iron.
On the appointed day in the gleaming Capitol building that Tom in his architectural mode actually had designed—she supposed he was a genius when you got right down to it—the electors gathered to cast their votes. Afterward, Jimmy told her they were hard to convince, insisting that it demeaned the Virginia hero to pair him vote for vote with the slippery New Yorker. It had taken two hours to bring them around, but he’d gotten his way, as he usually did. But as he described it, an image flashed in her mind of Colonel Emberly’s son, cold, saurian, ready to strike.
Jimmy was very quiet over the next few days as they awaited news. Every time the national count changed, the Richmond
Enquirer
published another penny extra. State by state the word came in, electors voting in lock step, two by two, Jefferson and Burr, the count standing equal. The last of the northern states reported, still two by two. Gelston’s promise of votes to be held back did not materialize. Tennessee and Kentucky reported, and then only South Carolina remained. The count held equal.
At midafternoon they heard a newsboy shouting his extra. Jimmy ran down in his shirtsleeves. From the window she saw him toss the boy a copper, snatch the paper, and scan it. He whirled, threw up his arms in exultation, and came at a run.
Oh, thank God! South Carolina—eight for Jefferson, seven for Burr, one for someone else. Peter Freneau in
Charleston had scrawled a hasty letter to the
Enquirer.
Vote count seventy-three Jefferson, seventy-two Burr, sixty-five Adams.
He seized her and waltzed her around the room like a boy at a barn dance. She had champagne ready and he opened it, the cork putting a dent in the ceiling. Oh, she wished she had a cannon to shoot! They began planning a public party, invite everyone—
Extra! Extra! Extra!
They looked at each other. Jimmy went to the window. The same boy was there, hawking fresh copies of the
Enquirer.
Jimmy put on his coat and went slowly downstairs. He bought the paper and returned without looking at it. In the room he unfolded it as if it might be a petard ready to explode.
Peter Freneau had written a second letter. He said his first letter was based on polling electors in advance; he had reported their promise. But the plan to stagger was forgotten when they voted; eight votes were cast for Tom, eight for Aaron. It was like a lead weight pressing on her heart.
Seventy-three Jefferson; seventy-three Burr.
Tie.
“Your goose is cooked, Mr. Madison,” the fat man said, “and we’re ready to eat it.” He encountered them on the stairs and held up his hand like a traffic warden. “But we been figuring on a tie. Means the Congress will choose—and we have the Congress. You’ll see. We’ll appoint someone, master of chancery or something, keep the government in honest hands. You’ll see.”
Jimmy smiled as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “No, that’s just dreaming; you’d never get away with stealing the election. But it won’t even come to that. Colonel Burr is an honorable man. He’ll step back, take himself out of contention. They’ll have no choice but Mr. Jefferson.”
Of course. Aaron would step aside.
They picked at a light supper without appetite and went upstairs, scarcely speaking because there was nothing to say. Oh, Aaron, so much resting on you. What will you do?
Slowly her memory of that vivid day when Aaron presented Jimmy took on a different color. She’d been a vulnerable young widow and Aaron was friend, counselor, guardian of her child. One of the most prominent men in America had asked to be presented to her in a way that could only mean intentions both serious and honorable. But before Aaron even mentioned Jimmy, he undertook to seduce her. It had been amusing, even titillating, and after Jimmy’s visit, largely forgotten. But now she saw that if she had yielded to seduction she would never have heard of Mr. Madison’s request. She would have become another of Aaron’s women, to be cast aside in due time. That was not the action of a friend. Aaron Burr looked out for himself.
Now, by accident, he stood head-to-head for the presidency of the United States. Would he step back? She had no idea.
“Come to bed, Jimmy,” she whispered. “Today was exhausting and tomorrow probably will be worse.”
NEW YORK CITY, MID-DECEMBER 1800
Aaron Burr was in his law office at No. 3 Wall Street when the news came. It was a small office near the docks, flanked by a bank and an insurance company, room for his two clerks in front with a large room for himself. A master of elegance in his several homes, a dandy in dress, a patron of the arts, a man-about-town whose perfection of manner no one could deny, he chose to make his law office puritanical in its
plainness and attention to serious matters with solid oak chairs, a long table, a desk that in its size scarcely suggested the stature with which he stood before the New York Bar.
He had Hardwick’s deposition in the Ernestine killing, the report from the captain of the
Mary W.
on the night of the collision, the bank’s sworn statement that the failure of certain items to appear on the accounting was a mere slip of the quill … Bah! Who could think of such mundane things when the very future—the future that mattered, his own—hung on the news from South Carolina? How would the electoral vote go?
He heard Matt Davis’s deep voice, always with that raw edge, greeting the clerks outside. Matt wasn’t a gentleman, no other way to say it, but in real as opposed to ideal politics you needed a man who could knock heads together when necessary, and Matt could. And did. Burr put on his wire spectacles and took up the bank statement.
“Gentlemen,” he said when the door opened. He removed the spectacles and blinked, a man emerging from deep concentration. Behind Davis came Peter Van Ness, tall and slender, a pale-eyed Dutchman, self-effacing but a wizard with the written word. Davis was a big man, wide, chest deep, the forty pounds hung on his belly putting weight behind his punch. His hair was black and spikey, his eyes meant for a smaller man, which made them hard to read, and he seemed to fill any room he entered.
“Report from Peter Freneau,” Van Ness said in his precise way. He sat at the long table, carefully arranging his breeches. “The electors, he says they’ll vote eight-seven.”
“Ah.” Not a flicker on his face, Burr was sure, but it were as if a sword had pierced his belly.
“By God, we tried!” Davis expelled his breath with a grunt and slumped against the table. Burr caught a whiff of rum. “Anyway, Virginia held the line. Twenty-one, twenty-one. I’ll take some credit for that. I had Gelston primed for bear when he left here. I can just see little Madison squirming.”
Burr actually was no taller than Madison, though heavier, but he rarely thought of this because he felt himself a giant.
“Madison made it work though,” Van Ness said.
“After we put the wood to him. I met him once, you know—insipid as water. His wife, though—she’s a pretty piece if I ever saw one.” Davis grinned. “Makes you wonder how a man like that keeps her satisfied, know what I mean?”
“All right, Matt,” Burr said. He didn’t like such talk. “She’s a charming woman. I introduced them, matter of fact.”
Davis guffawed. “Eat my hat if you didn’t first have a run at her yourself.”
“That’ll do, sir!” After an uncomfortable silence, Burr said, “You assured Mr. Madison we’d lose a vote elsewhere?”
Van Ness grinned. “Gelston didn’t know where, but we had our people in Rhode Island all prepared.”
Burr nodded. Rhode Island Democrats had a snowball’s chance on a hot griddle, but they’d met the letter of the law, which is the nature of maneuver.
“It mattered too,” Van Ness said. “If Virginia had held back like last time, John Adams would be vice president.”
And Davis said, “Those bastards in South Carolina give eight to eight like they should; we’d have put it over, by God!”
Aye, there was the pain that Burr felt gripping his heart. He smiled. “We weren’t really seeking a tie,” he said. Which was a lie, which he knew and they knew, but a lie that needed to be said. It had been so close too, and now it seemed one rotten vote in Carolina was to unhorse the dream. He sighed. He’d let himself obsess a little, he supposed, about what a tie would mean, how those damned Virginians would scurry around clucking.
It would have been comforting revenge for the grossness of the insult last time. He would never forget the sting when the Virginians spat in his face. His way now had been the more clear because Alexander Hamilton, not as slick as Burr
but very slick nonetheless, had worked a similar effort to try to unhorse Adams back in ninety-six. That’s where Burr had gotten the idea.
It wasn’t anything against the Madisons either. They were friends. No, it was Jefferson, how he repelled with his holier-than-thou manner, his oh, so elegant elegance, letting you know by his very bearing that he felt himself a prince among lesser men. He was able, no doubt about that, but erratic, possessed of odd ideas, charming but vague, and always that maddening superiority. Wanted office but you could tell he looked down on politics and its practitioners. Vulgar, you know. Surely no man was less vulgar than Aaron Burr, the Chesterfieldian gentleman, but Burr understood that politics is practical, one vote at a time … .
“Well,” Van Ness said, “I wouldn’t have minded a tie. They’re reaping when we sowed.
We
won this election.”
“Damn right,” Davis said. “Those lace handkerchief boys from Virginia don’t know a shitting thing. Let ’em go down to Peck’s Slip with me and try to get aholt of those dock wallopers.”
Burr frowned. Matt knew he didn’t like vulgarity, but the point was well taken—go down to Peck’s Slip hard against the East River, where the newest and hence poorest immigrants lived stacked atop each other like cordwood, try to make ’em see the wisdom of voting their interests, try to get them to quit going home with a gutful and beating the wife and kiddies, never forgetting that the wife and kiddies didn’t vote … .
“I bought a plenty of beer around Peck’s Slip,” Davis said.
Van Ness grinned. “Drank one for one yourself, I’d guess.”
Davis forced a belch. “Gotta keep up my strength.”
What did Jimmy Madison know about the reality of things? You wouldn’t catch him buying buckets of beer. Burr had taken Tammany Hall when it was a little social club and made it a power! Law said you had to be a property holder to vote? Fine. He’d bought houses in the names of a hundred owners each, every man a voter. All legal, mind you. Alex
Hamilton and his Federalist pecksniffs would catch him up if it wasn’t; made every owner of record put up a dollar, gave him a participating deed, paid him a bonafide share of rent, and sent him out to vote.
And even then, so loaded against the common man had the Federalists arranged things in New York, it took real guile to carry the election, a quality with which Burr fortunately was well equipped, if he did say so himself. Did the lace handkerchiefs below the Potomac imagine it was their excellence that swung matters? Burr could sing the Democratic song with the best of them, but down at Tammany and all along the wharves they didn’t talk a lot of Constitutional folderol. They wanted to know who was buying. But, by
God
! the boys had turned these louts out on election day, and even then, they’d carried the city by only a few hundred votes.
Put Alex Hamilton’s nose way out of joint too. Burr had waited, letting Alex pick his slate first. Naturally Alex chose nonentities; no one wants someone in office with ideas of his own. But this time Burr dragooned leading Democrats, names everyone knew, prated democracy till he sounded like Madison and Jefferson combined, promised he would do all the work, write all their speeches, and their weight had put the ticket over. He and the boys had bumped into Alex at a polling station on the Battery, and Matt had bellowed, “Stepped in shit, huh, Mr. H.?” Smoke was coming from Alex’s ears.
Strange about Mr. Hamilton. Maybe it was that he took everything so seriously. He seemed to burn with his political passions. That made it a joy to whip him, but in the end when the votes were counted and a new day was born—or wasn’t—it was time to sit down to a bird and a bottle and move along. That was life and politics as well. But Alex seemed to
hate
him. Strange. They’d practiced law in the same city, been cocounsel on a couple of big criminal defense cases, and Burr had supposed them friends. Opponents, of course, that’s the nature of law and politics; but Alex was becoming a humorless zealot.
But clearly it was that day in the New York City spring when they beat Alex to the ground that won the national election. New England was for Adams, South and West for Jefferson, Pennsylvania and Maryland divided, New York in the balance, the legislature split. New York City Democrats swung the state; the state swung the nation. Damned right we won it!
They hadn’t been wrong to seek a tie either, not after the way Virginia had handled him last time. Anyway, was he less the Democrat, less sincere, less able than the sainted Tom?
Well, what the hell … so it hadn’t worked out, but he might as well milk a little good will from it.
“Peter,” he said, “draft me a letter. Make it to … Sam Smith, I guess.” Sam was a Maryland congressman, a pompous fellow sure to enhance his own importance by publishing the letter.
“And it should say?”
“Well, take note there’s been talk of a tie, say something like, oh, that it would dishonor my views and insult my feelings if my friends supposed—make it suspected—I would permit myself to be instrumental in counteracting the wishes and expectations of the nation. Some such.”
He shrugged. What would he have done with a tie anyway? It would have thrilled Theodosia, that was all. His darling daughter, as beautiful as her gorgeous mother whose death remained a wound that couldn’t heal, had dreamed of a tie as no less than their due. That Father could do no wrong in her eyes warmed his heart and suffused him with love. She probably would marry soon, to a fine young man who already regarded him as a father—she had made that a condition—and a tie would have been like a, well, like a wedding present!
Theodosia Burr knew herself to be an accomplished, sophisticated young woman of eighteen, and she knew that much of the polish that made her stand out and that seemed so to attract Mr. Joseph Alston of South Carolina, whom she
might or might not decide to marry in the next few weeks, was the result of her father’s rapt attention to her education. Mr. Alston expected in due time to put aside his rice fields along the Waccamaw River and assume the governorship of South Carolina; and thus, if she were, in fact, to decide that she could stand the ennui of life along the Waccamaw, she would be the governor’s lady. She was comfortably aware that Papa had prepared her for no less.
Yet Burr’s real gift, which she reciprocated in full measure, was the bath of warm, unqualified love in which she’d been immersed since before she could remember. It had cushioned the loss of Mama, for whom she’d been named and whose years of illness and lingering death had been a cloud over her childhood. Papa understood how her world had tumbled in on her in Mama’s last days because the same thing had happened to him when he was a little boy. But like a colossus of old he had stood over her and through sheer strength had thrust her world back into place. She knew objectively from seeing them together in mirrors that she was substantially taller than her father, but she never really thought of this because he so clearly towered.
Now she sat in the projecting bay window of their town house on Fulton Street watching for his sturdy form, knowing he would be along soon. A carriage passing before her house collided, or nearly did, with one entering from Church Street. One of the horses fell, the drivers screamed at each other, and one struck the other; but she ignored this, her gaze fixed on the sidewalk beyond. Ah! There he was, silverheaded stick in hand, his black suit neat as always, hose gleaming white, sun catching the buckles on his shoes.
But then he stepped around a drayman unloading barrels on the sidewalk and she saw instantly from the cast of his shoulders that he had taken a heavy blow. He never revealed anguish, but she knew him so well and loved him so fiercely that the slightest nuance alerted her, and she flew to him as he entered, placing hat and stick on the balustrade.
“Ah, my darling girl,” he cried, as she embraced him, but when she stepped back she saw the sadness in his smile.
“What is it?”
“News from South Carolina.” She gazed at him and he added, “Mr. Jefferson will be president.”
“But what about—”
“It seems the electoral vote will be eight-seven.”
“They
shorted
you?” She felt dizzy with anger. “They
owed
it to you.
You
won the election,
you
put them in, how dare they—oh,
damn
them!”
For a terrible moment she thought he might weep, but then his face cleared. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It would have been like—oh, I don’t know, an honor, I guess.” He shrugged. “After all, presumably I’m no less a leader than the Virginia gentlemen purport to be.”
“Why, you’re more!”
“So—and I’d never admit this to anyone but you—but yes, I suppose I’m a little disappointed.”
“Oh, Papa!”
Someone turned the bell in the door, and when he opened it she saw over his shoulder the dense black beard decorating Mr. Alston’s face. It wasn’t really the best time for Mr. Alston to appear, but then she noticed his vivid smile, the unusual brightness in his eyes, and he was bowing over her hand, to which she dropped a perfunctory curtsey; and he turned to Papa and cried in that slurred accent that still sounded strange, “Have you heard the news, sir?”