Letters

In the absence of any documentary evidence — for which he scour’d the colonies as tenaciously as had his father before him in search of his—A.B.C. III hearken’d to the verdict of his heart: he decided that while his grandfather Chicamec, the originator of the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy, had been an unsuccessful idealist, his father Henry Burlingame III had been a deplorably successful hypocrite, betraying his own aboriginal blood in the venal interest of the British Crown. Anna Cooke’s insistence that her lover’s motive had been her own & their son’s welfare he dismist as romantical, given the absence of any word from Burlingame himself to this effect, or any manifest attempt on his part to communicate with her & their natural child. That my Grandfather apparently did not allow for the possibility of Burlingame’s having been discover’d & put to death before he could make any such communication, tells us something about the state of heart of this “old bachelor orphan,” as he refers to himself in his diary of the period.

This hard judgement upon his lately-discover’d, long-dead father profoundly changed Grandfather’s life. The course of his researches up & down the country had brot him into contact with Indians of various nations as well as with officials of the several colonies & the British & French provincial authorities. His eyes were open’d to thitherto-unsuspected dimensions of a history he had largely taken for granted. It surprised him (and surprises me) that a man of early middle age, practicing law all his adult life in the seat of a colonial government, could have remain’d politically innocent for so long. But a certain naivety, together with extraordinary complication, is a family curse that dates from the mating of Cookes & Burlingames.

They had also & no less importantly, these researches, led him here: to the newly-raised seat of the half-breed Baron Henri Castine II, son of André Castine & the Tarratine princess Madocawanda. His object was to learn what he could of that ubiquitous “Monsieur Casteene” whose name haunts the archives of the English colonies. In pursuit of it he spent a season at Castines Hundred as a guest & hunting-companion of its owner, who like all the Barons Castine (including my present host, Andrée’s brother), was an hospitable, gregarious, anti-political sportsman. And here, like Yours Truly two generations later, he lost his heart to & won the hand of the daughter of the house, whom we must call Andrée Castine I to distinguish her from your mother.

For in other respects, grandmother & granddaughter are like as twins: the fine-edged physiognomy of the Gascoigne Castines, the dark eyes & hair & skin of Madocawanda’s people — and the audacity, political passion, & disregard for convention of “Monsieur Casteene”! She it was, Andrée I, who relieved Grandfather of both his political & his carnal innocence, which he seems to have preserved as remarkably as did his Uncle Ebenezer, the virgin poet. And she it was who insisted he 1st get her with child if he would have her to wife. So scrupulous was Grandfather on this point — and on the irregularity, of which Andrée was contemptuous, of the two-decade difference in their ages — that no less than another dozen years pass’d before (in 1746) they finally conceived my father and became man & wife, when Andrew was 50 & Andrée 30 years of age! But thro those decades they were faithful, if intermittent, lovers, as often together as apart, and not uncommonly travelling as husband & wife (or father & daughter) to appease Grandfather’s curious decorum & avoid attracting undue attention as they pursued their political objective.

This objective, if Andrew III’s own declaration is to be believed, was not the victory of the French in America, but the defeat of the British, for which in the existing circumstances the French & Indians were the obvious instrumentality. Having decided that his father had been a British anti-insurgent, Andrew III set about in the 2nd half of his life to be an anti-British insurgent; Andrée (still in the 1st half of hers) to be an organizer of the Indian nations 1st against the British, whom she saw as the greater menace to aboriginal integrity, and ultimately against the French, who had ever been less ruthless in displacing native populations, less interested in despoiling the land, and less disdainful of intermarriage betwixt the races. To the extent that their theatres of concern can be distinguisht, Andrée’s was to resist the extension of British hegemony northward above the Great Lakes & St. Lawrence River, Andrew’s to resist its extension westward across the Appalachians toward the Mississippi. These concerns came together in the period of the French & Indian War, along the frontier betwixt Fort Niagara & Fort Detroit.