The American Chronicle 1 - Burr Read Online Free PDF Page B

Bonaparte. So I began in the Revolution, and became a hero.”
    He stopped. Relit the stump of his seegar. “So a number of us began. But then who finished ?Not I, as we know.” He blew rings of smoke in my face. “At the end the laurels went to a land surveyor from Virginia who became the ‘father’ of his country. But let us be fair. Since General Washington could sire nothing in the flesh, it is fitting that he be given credit for having conceived this union. A mule stallion, as it were, whose unnatural progeny are these states. So at the end, not to the swift but to the infertile went the race.” Burr found this image amusing. I was a bit shocked. Like everyone else I think of Washington as dull but perfect.
    Burr handed me a number of pages of faded manuscript. “I recently came across this description of my adventures in the Revolution. Perhaps they will amuse you.”
    I took the manuscript, delighted that the Colonel has chosen to confide in me, even though I find the Revolution as remote as the Trojan War, and a good deal more confusing since the surviving relics agree on nothing.
    Leggett recently proposed that all those who claim to have fought in the Revolution should be taken to the Vauxhall Gardens and shot—except that not even the vast Vauxhall could hold the claimants. Every American man of sixty was a drummer boy; of seventy a colonel or general.
    “Matt Davis means to write my biography, once I am gone. Of course Matt himself is hardly young.” The Colonel chuckled contentedly at the thought of his old friend’s mortality.
    Matthew L. Davis is a newspaper editor, a Tammany Sachem, and alife-long Burrite, as the press still call the original republican followers of the Colonel—a noun used by many who have not a clue as to its origin, who would be surprised to learn that the progenitor of the Burrites has an office in Reade Street and is not himself a Burrite for that faction is currently opposed to Van Buren while their eponymous hero supports him (because Van Buren is his son?).
    “Matt will no doubt do me fine. But while I am still here I would not in the least object to your having a look at my papers. After all, you are incorrigibly literary. So—who knows? Perhaps we can work out something together.”
    In the outer office a door slammed. Nelson Chase had come to work. I rose, ready to begin the day’s work. “Why is Mr. Davis so opposed to Van Buren?”
    “I am not sure that he is.”
    “But just recently he wrote ...”
    “Politics, Charlie, politics. Those who seem to oppose are often secret supporters. Anyway, Van Buren will be president in thirty-six. And Tammany will support him, which is what I told the Vice-President last time I saw him.”
    “Colonel Burr!” The door opened, letting in fresh air that made me cough, so used was I to devil’s smoke. Nelson Chase’s dull face hung in the middle distance like a jack-a-lantern. “Madame—your wife—Mrs. Burr is downstairs in the carriage.”
    The Colonel was, briefly, flustered. He sprang to his feet. “Charlie, you go down and tell her that I shall meet her, as planned ,at the Tontine, at five. Tell her that I am engaged at the moment. No. Tell her that I am out at the moment. In court.”
    “No court is sitting, Colonel,” Nelson Chase began. But Colonel Burr was on his feet. As he put on his tall black hat, I noticed a thick protuberance in the front of his jacket just over the heart. Then he was gone out the back way and I was able to say, in all honesty, that “Colonel Burr has just left the office.”
    Madame peered at me through the window of her golden carriage. “ Where did he go?” The question could be heard all the way to the water tower.
    “I’m not sure, Madame. I think he said that he had an appointment ...”
    “Get in, Mr. Schuyler. Charlie. No, I shall call you Charlot. Get in. I want to talk to you.”
    “But, Madame ...” On the phrase “get in” one of the grooms, a monstrous black buck in