Letters

No Cooke or Burlingame has ever disprized book learning; the Burlingames, however, are the scholars. “Alexis Cuillerier,” 21 years old, broke jail in Detroit in 1767 and disappear’d before he could be convicted, on Pontiac’s original testimony, of drowning the child Betty Fisher. In the autumn of that same year, Henry Burlingame IV matriculated at the College of New Jersey in Princeton. Upon his graduation, he went up to Yale College in New Haven, staying on as a tutor in history after taking a Master of Arts degree there in 1772. His life in this interval, in great contrast to his adventuresome youth, was austere, even monastic. By Mother’s report, he was still much shock’d by what he took to be his parents’ successful duplicity: he even imagined that they had bribed Pontiac with rum to give his damaging testimony, and subsequently arranged his assassination, to the end of further “covering their tracks”! (Was it in some rage against his mother that “Alexis” drown’d the poor beshitten Fisher girl? But we have only Pontiac’s word that he did, together with the rumors that had led to his arrest.) This shock, no doubt, accounts for his reclusion. And there was another factor, as we shall see.

H. C. Burlingame IV thus became the 1st of our line not merely to doubt his father (we have all, in our divers ways, done that) but to despise him. I was the 2nd; and am perhaps the 1st to pass beyond that misgrounded, spirit-wasting passion, to spare you which is the end & object of these letters.

The study of History was Father’s sanctuary from its having been practised upon him in the past, and his preparation for practising it upon others in the future. From the present — the revolutionary fervor which was sweeping the colleges of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, even William & Mary in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s — he remain’d aloof. His student friends from Princeton (John Armstrong & Aaron Burr are the two we shall remember) were ready by 1774 to fight for American independence; his Yale tutee Joel Barlow was already making plans, at Father’s suggestion, for an American Aeneid (but Father had in mind a satire!); and his closest friend in New Haven, Mr. Benedict Arnold — a bright young merchant in the West Indies trade whose boyhood had been as adventurous as Father’s — had organized a company of Connecticut militia. But while he did not dismiss as specious the arguments for independence, Father was skeptical enough (and Canadian enough) to see two sides to the matter: a prerequisite to the tragical view, tho not its equivalent.

His chief concern, however (so he claim’d), was not the inevitable misunderstandings & conflicts of interest betwixt governors & govern’d 3,000 miles apart; it was the invasion of white settlers across the Appalachians into Indian lands, in despite of George III’s proclamation. He could not believe that the confederated state governments being proposed by the Committees of Correspondence & the Continental Congress would be inclined to check that invasion. Exempt from patriotism, he saw the self-interest & bad faith on both sides of the Atlantic, and a dozen routes to peaceful compromise, none of which bade especially well for the Indians. If, on the other hand, war were actually to break out betwixt the British & the colonials, each would scramble to use the Indians against the other — in particular the Six Nations of the Iroquois, whose situation once again would be, for better or worse, strategic.

In April of ’75, when the shooting commenced at Lexington & Concord, Father was in nearby Cambridge, poring thro the library of Harvard’s old Indian College for references to the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy, and deciding that he had had enough of Yale’s Congregationalist orthodoxy, perhaps of the academical life. His friend Arnold rusht up from New Haven to add his company of militia to George Washington’s army, assembling on the Common. His friend Burr hurried over from law school in Litchfield to join that army. Father introduced them. They could not persuade him to enlist, nor he dissuade them.