CHAPTER XXIII—GRIEF COMES KNOCKING
BUSINESS rushes in upon Aaron; its volume overwhelms him.
“This is too much,” says he, “for a gentleman whose years have reached the middle fifties,” and he takes unto himself a partner.
Later he takes another partner; the work of the firm overflows into a quartette of rooms and keeps busy a dozen clerks.
“Why labor so hard?” asks the stubborn Swartwout. “Your income is the largest at the bar. You have no such need of money.”
“Ay! but my creditors have!”
“Your creditors? Who are they?”
“Every soul who lost a dollar by my Southwestern ambitions—you, with others. Man, I owe millions!”
Aaron works like a horse and lives like a Spartan. He rises with the blue of dawn. His servant appears with his breakfast—an egg, a plate of toast, a pot of coffee. He is at his desk in the midst of his papers when the clerks begin to arrive. All day he is insatiable to work. He sends messages, receives them, examines authorities, confers with fellow lawyers, counsels clients, dictates letters. Business incarnate—he pushes every affair with incredible dispatch. And the last thing he will agree to is defeat.
“Accept only the inevitable!” is his war-word, in law as in life.
Aaron’s day ends with seven o’clock. He shoves everything of litigation sort aside, helps himself to a glass of wine, and refuses further thought or hint of business. It is then he calls about him his friends. The evening is merry with laughter, jest and reminiscence. At midnight he retires, and sleeps like a tree.
“Colonel Burr,” observes Dr. Hosack—he who attended Hamilton at Weehawken—“you do not sleep enough; six hours is not enough. Also, you eat too little.”
Aaron gazes, with comic eye at the rotund, well-fed doctor, the purple of good burgundy in his full cheeks.
“If I were a doctor, now,” he retorts, “I should grant your word to be true. But I am a lawyer, and must keep myself on edge.”
Aaron’s earliest care is to write his arrival to the lustrous Theo. The reply he receives makes the world black.
“Less than a fortnight ago,” she says, “your letters would have gladdened my soul. Now there is no more joy, and life a blank. My boy is gone—forever dead and gone.”
While Aaron sits with the fatal letter in his fingers, his friend Van Ness comes in. He turns his black eyes on the visitor—eyes misty, dim, the brightness lost from them.
“What dreams were mine,” he sighs—“what dreams for my brave little boy! He is dead, and half my world has died.”
Toward the end of summer, Alston sends word that the lustrous Theo is in danger. The loss of her boy has struck at the roots of her life. Aaron, in new alarm, writes urging that she come North. He sends a physician from New York to bring her to him. Alston consents; he himself cannot come. His duties as governor tie him. The lustrous Theo, eager to meet her father with whom she parted on that tearful evening in Stone Street so many years ago, will start at once. He, Alston, shall later follow her.
Alston sees the lustrous Theo aboard the schooner Patriot, then lying in Charleston harbor. It is rough December weather when the Patriot clears for New York. The message of her sailing reaches Aaron overland, and he is on strain for the schooner’s arrival. Days come, days go; the schooner is due—overdue. Still no sign of those watched-for topsails down the lower bay! And so time passes. The days become weeks, the weeks months. Hope sickens, then dies. Aaron, face white and drawn, a ghost’s face, reads the awful truth in that long waiting. The lustrous Theo is dead—like the baby! It is then the iron of a measureless adversity enters his soul!
Aaron goes about the daily concerns of life, making no moan. He does not speak of his loss, but saves his grief for solitude. One day a friend relates a rumor that the schooner was captured by buccaneers, and the lustrous Theo lives. The broken Aaron shakes his head.
“She is dead!” says he. “Thus is severed the last tie that binds me to my kind.”
Aaron hides his heart from friend and foe alike. As though flying from his own thoughts, he plunges more furiously than ever into the law.
While Aaron’s first concern is work, and to earn money for those whom he calls his creditors, he finds time for politics.
“Not that I want office,” he observes; “for he who was Vice-President and tied Jefferson for a presidency, cannot think on place. But I owe debts—debts of gratitude, debts of vengeance. These must be paid.”
Aaron’s foes are in the ascendant. De Witt Clinton is mayor—the aristocrats with the Livingstons, the Schuylers and the Clintons, are everywhere dominant. They control the town; they control the State. At Washington, Madison a marionette President, is in apparent command, while Jefferson pulls the White House wires from Monticello. All these Aaron sees at a glance; he can, however, take up but one at a time.
“We will begin with the town,” says he, to the stubborn, loyal Swartwout. “We must go at the town like a good wife at her house-cleaning. Once that is politically spick and span, we shall clean up the State and the nation.”
Aaron calls about him his old circle of indomitables.
They have been overrun in his absence by the aristocrats—by the Clintons, the Schuylers and the Livingstons. They gather at his rooms in the Jay House—a noble mansion, once the home of Governor Jay.
“I shall make no appearance in your politics,” says he. “It would not fit my years and my past. None the less, I’ll show you the road to victory.” Then, with a smile: “You must do the work; I’ll be the Old Man of the Mountain. From behind a screen I’ll give directions.”
Aaron’s lieutenants include the Swartwouts, Buckmaster, Strong, Prince, Radcliff, Rutgers, Ogden, Davis, Noah, and Van Buren, the last a rising young lawyer from Kinderhook.
“Become a member of Tammany,” is Aaron’s word to young Van Buren. “Our work must be done by Tammany Hall. You must enroll yourself beneath its banner. We must bring about a revival of the old Bucktail spirit.”
Van Buren enters Tammany; the others are already members.
Aaron, through his lieutenants, brings his old Tammany Bucktails together within eight weeks after his return. The Clintons, and their fellow aristocrats are horrified at what they call “his effrontery.” Also, they are somewhat panic-smitten. They fall to vilification. Aaron is “traitor!” “murderer!” “demon!” “fiend!” They pay a phalanx of scribblers to assail him in the press. His band of Bucktail lieutenants are dubbed “Burrites,” “Burr’s Mob,” and “the Tenth Legion.” The epithets go by Aaron like the mindless wind.
The Bucktail spirit revived, the stubborn Swartwout and the others ask:
“What shall we do?”
The popular cry is for war with England. At Washington—Jefferson at Monticello pulling on the peace string—Madison is against war. Mayor De Witt Clinton stands with Jefferson and Marionette Madison. He is for peace, as are his caste of aristocrats—the Schuylers and those other left-over fragments of Federalism, all lovers of England from their cradles.
“What shall we do?” cry the Bucktails.
“Demand war!” says Aaron. Then, calling attention to Clinton and his purple tribe, he adds: “They could not occupy a better position for our purposes. They invite destruction.” Tammany demands war vociferously. It is, indeed, the cry all over the land. The administration is carried off its feet. Jefferson at last orders war; for he sees that otherwise Marionette Madison will be defeated of a second term.
Mayor Clinton and his aristocrats are frantic.
The more frantic, since with “War!” for their watchword, Aaron’s Bucktails conquer the city, and two years later the State. As though by a tidal wave, every Clinton is swept out of official Albany.
Aaron sends for Van Ness, the stubborn Swartwout, and their fellow Bucktails.
“Go to Albany,” says he. “Demand of Governor Tompkins the removal of Mayor Clinton. Say that he is inefficient and was the friend of England.”
Governor Tompkins—being a politician—hesitates at the bold step. The Bucktails, Aaron-guided, grow menacing. Seeing himself in danger, Governor Tompkins hesitates no longer. Mayor Clinton is ignominiously thrust from office into private life. With him go those hopes of a presidency which for half a decade he has been sedulously cultivating. Under the blight of that removal, those hopes of a future White House wither like uprooted flowers.
Broken of purse and prospects, Clinton is in despair.
“He will never rise again!” exclaims Van Ness.
“My friend,” says Aaron, “he will be your governor. He will never be president, but the governorship is yet to be his; and all by your negligence—yours and your brother Buck-tails.”
“As how?” demands Van Ness.
“You let him declare for the Erie Canal,” returns Aaron. “You were so purblind as to oppose the project. You should have taken the business out of his hands. If I had been here it would have been done. Mark my words! The canal will be dug, and it will make Clinton governor. However, we shall hold the town against him; and, since we have been given a candidate for the presidency, we shall later have Washington also.”
“Who is that presidential candidate to whom you refer?”
“Sir, he is your friend and my friend. Who, but Andrew Jackson? Since New Orleans, it is bound to be he.”
“Andrew Jackson!” exclaims Van Ness. “But, sir, the Congressional caucus at Washington will never consider him. You know the power of Jefferson—he will hold that caucus in the hollow of his hand. It is he who will name Madison’s successor; and, after those street-corner speeches and his friendship for you in Richmond, it can never be Andrew Jackson.”
“I know the Jefferson power,” returns Aaron; “none knows it better. At the head of his Virginia junta he has controlled the country for years. He will control it four years more, perchance eight. Our war upon him and his caucus methods must begin at once. And our candidate should be, and shall be, Andrew Jackson.”
“Whom will Jefferson select to follow Madison?”
“Monroe, sir; he will put forward Monroe.”
“Monroe!” repeats Van Ness. “Has he force?—brains? Some one spoke of him as a soldier.”
“Soldier!” observes Aaron, his lip curling. “Sir, Monroe never commanded so much as a platoon—never was fit to command one. He acted as aide to Lord Stirling, who was a sot, not a soldier. Monroe’s whole duty was to fill his lordship’s tankard, and hear with admiration his drunken lordship’s long tales about himself. As a lawyer, Monroe is below mediocrity. He never rose to the honor of trying a cause wherein so much as one hundred pounds was at stake. He is dull, stupid, illiterate, pusillanimous, hypocritical, and therefore a character suited to the wants of Jefferson and his Virginia coterie. As a man, he is everything that Jackson isn’t and nothing that he is.”
Van Ness and his brother Bucktails do the bidding of Aaron blindly. On every chance they shout for Jackson. Aaron writes “Jackson” letters to all whom, far or near, he calls his friends. Also the better to have New York in political hand, he demands—through Tammany—of Governor Tompkins and Mayor Rad-cliff that every Clinton, every Schuyler, every Livingston, as well as any who has the taint of Federalism about him be relegated to private life. In town as well as country, he sweeps the New York official situation free of opposition.
The Bucktails are in full sway. Aaron privily coaches young Van Buren, who is suave and dexterous, and for politeness almost the urbane peer of Aaron himself, in what local party diplomacies are required, and sends him forward as the apparent controlling spirit of Tammany Hall. What Jefferson is doing with Monroe in Virginia, Aaron duplicates with the compliant Van Buren in New York.