Letters

Thus the messages we Cooks & Burlingames amuse one another by sending with our left hands, as we play the Game of Governments with our right and undo, as far as is in us possible, the Vision of good Joel Barlow!

So then, dear child in the making: the fat is fairly in the fire since my letter of last month. Whilst you have been growing hair & toenails, and opening your eyes (What do you see, little Burlingame? That most of the world’s eyes are closed?), Wee Jamie Madison has sent the Henry Letters to Congress — that is, my fair paraphrase of the fourteen cipher’d originals, plus John Henry’s nattering Proposal for the Final Reunion of His Majesty’s Dominion in North America with the States of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York. Now Henry Clay & the War Hawks are making the most of them to embarrass the New England Federalists, to justify their own Anglophobia, & to push gentle Jamie ever closer to a “Second War of Independence”—their pretext for snatching the Canadas & the Floridas.

More anon, more anon, of

The Henry papers, bought & sold,

And paid for with the nation’s gold,

when I come to my own & your mother’s histories. This is to apprise you of your great-grandfather’s, the 3rd Andrew Cooke’s, whereto your genealogy had got when I closed my last. I pray you, review the chart of it, overleaf.

There are, all over this tree, other fruits, to be sure: brothers, sisters, by-blows on nearly every branch & twig. With a few exceptions, I have enter’d only those in the main line of your descent. And the wives of all those Barons Castine are not really nameless, but (always excepting Madocawanda) they made vocations of being their husbands’ wives, and are of no individual interest here. That fellow in the box, my grandfather, was, you recall, sired out of wedlock on the “Maryland Laureate’s” twin sister by the 3rd Henry Burlingame, who then disappear’d into the Dorset marshes with the avow’d intention of thwarting the “Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy” of escaped African slaves & displaced Indians. To cover the scandal, Grandfather was given the surname Cooke and raised as the son of the poet Ebenezer, whose wife had died still-bearing their own child.

A.B.C. III thus never knew his father, tho thro his childhood he was retail’d stories by Eben Cooke of the mysterious “Uncle Henry” who, for aught they knew, might dwell among them incognito, looking after the welfare of his “favorite nephew.” How else explain the anonymous gifts of money & goods that from time to time appear’d as from Heaven, addrest either to Anna Cooke or to the boy?

So far did the aging poet fall into this folly, in 1730 he composed a sequel to his major work, The Sot-Weed Factor, call’d Sot-Weed Redivivus, or, the Planter’s Looking-Glass, which, in the guise of an economic tract in verse, incorporates to the knowledgeable eye broad signals to Henry Burlingame III, of the “Édouard de Crillon” variety. The opening words of Cooke’s preface, for example—

May I be canoniz’d for a Saint, if I know what Apology to make for this dull Piece of Household Stuff, any more than he that first invented the Horn-Book…

— allude to the once-popular belief that Cecil Calvert, the 2nd Lord Baltimore & 1st Lord Proprietary of Maryland, had struck a bargain with Pope Urban VIII to make Maryland into a Jesuit colony in return for posthumous sainthood. Cooke 1st learnt of this presumable slander from Burlingame, who of course had also, as his childhood tutor, “invented the Horn-Book” for his little charges. Similarly, a few lines farther on—

… one Blast from the Critick’s Mouth, would raise more Flaws in this Looking-Glass, than there be Circles in the Sphere…

— we are reminded that Burlingame was ever Cooke’s severest literary critic. That his political intrigues led him into mirror-like reversals & duplications (he also posed as Baltimore’s enemy John Coode, & cet., & cet.). That Cooke’s “inventor of the Horn-Book” was also his instructor in geometry & astronomy. In the poem itself, such allusions swarm like bees (themselves a reduplicated image, punning on Burlingame’s initial): the most obvious is the poet’s not only re-meeting but re-sleeping with a tobacco-planter (“cockerouse” in the argot of the time, & a naughty pun too) with whom he had dealings in the original Sot-Weed Factor, & who was Burlingame “much disguis’d”:

I boldly crav’d his Worship’s Name

And tho’ the Don at first seem’d shy,

At length he made this smart Reply

I am, says he, that Cockerouse

Once entertain’d you at his House,

When aged Roan, not us’d to falter,

If you remember, slipt his Halter;

Left Sotweed Factor in the Lurch,

As Presbyterians leave the Church…