Читать книгу Aaron Burr: A Biography - Nathan Schachner - Страница 24

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Of young Burr’s association with General Washington during this period—he was only twenty—there has been considerable ado. It is known that Burr wrote to John Hancock expressing a desire to retire from the army, and that on June 22, 1776, Hancock obtained for him an appointment as aide-de-camp to General Putnam instead. Accordingly the presumption has arisen—and has been accepted as true down to the present—that the General and his hot-headed young aide had quarreled, that Burr had become disgusted with Washington, that there had been constant irritation between the two—not to speak of a certain dark and nefarious amour which the General had uncovered.

The time element, hitherto overlooked, however, must effectually dispose of such suppositious imaginings. According to all previous accounts, Burr was with Washington for six weeks, during which period a good many untoward events might have taken place. Actually, with Burr at Lake George on June 5th, it was impossible for him to have reached New York much before June 12th. Assuming a decent interval before he entered upon his duties, it must have been at least June 14th before he joined Washington’s household. And on June 22nd he received his new appointment. Which brings his total service as Washington’s aide-de-camp to not over eight days! Eight days—during which time he had already communicated his dissatisfaction to Hancock, who in turn was able to overcome the necessary red tape and furnish Burr with his commission.

On this calculation, Burr had barely been installed in Washington’s household a day before he was evincing disgust and Washington was discovering illicit love affairs. Another explanation is much more satisfactory and credible, even though it does violence to hoary tradition. The appointment on Washington’s staff had been a temporary one, a mere stopgap until a more satisfactory one could be found. Burr had left Canada because he desired active service. Staff Headquarters, with its routine of clerical work, was not to his taste. He came to the Colonies expressly, “by personal interview, to answer purposes which I scarce hoped the cold medium of ink and paper could effect.”^[82] This was undoubtedly an interview with Hancock, then President of the Continental Congress. The meeting must have taken place and the letter have been sent immediately on Burr’s arrival, and before he had any personal acquaintance with Washington, to have achieved such quick results. Whatever ill-feeling or dislike there may have existed between the two necessarily arose at a later date.

Early in July, 1776, Aaron Burr entered upon his new duties with the rank and perquisites of a Major. He was eminently contented with his new post. Israel Putnam was Commander of the American forces in and about New York and, as such, was in a position to permit his warlike young aide to see real service very shortly. They got along very well together. Putnam had a real regard for Burr, and Burr was always to call the indomitable, if somewhat illiterate warrior, “my good old General.”

Headquarters were established in the Warren House, at the corner of Broadway and the Battery, where Mrs. Putnam and her daughters presided in happy domesticity and mothered the handsome young aide.

For a while there were only clerical duties, the writing and revision of the General’s orders with a due regard for the niceties and spelling of the English language, which Putnam was so often led wholly to disregard. Nor were the social amenities overlooked. Besides the manifold attractions of New York for a handsome young officer, aged twenty, with a reputation already achieved for bravery in action, there was a new diversion. This was no less than the sudden appearance in General Putnam’s household of a young beauty of the tender age of fourteen, cousin to the late General Montgomery and the daughter of a British officer stationed with the enemy forces on Staten Island. She was Margaret Moncrieffe, afterward to achieve a certain reputation in the courts of Europe as Mrs. Margaret Coghlan. Much, much later, she was also to publish her memoirs—an interminable catalogue of amours and escapades.

Friendless and alone at Elizabethtown, the young girl had thrown herself upon Putnam’s mercy, and that kindly old man offered her at once shelter and succor in his own home where she “was received, with the greatest tenderness by Mrs. Putnam and her daughters.” But, she goes on naively, “I seldom was allowed to be alone, although sometimes, indeed, I found an opportunity to escape to the gallery on the top of the house, where my chief delight was to view, with a telescope, our fleet and army on Staten Island.”^[83]

There was another delight, also. A certain young American officer about whom she rhapsodizes at length with the retrospective glow of later years. Aaron Burr! “Oh!” she cries rather self-consciously, and with due attention to the literary effect, “May these pages one day meet the eye of him who subdued my virgin heart, whom the immutable, unerring laws of nature had pointed out for my husband, but whose sacred decree the barbarous customs of society fatally violated. To him I plighted my virgin vow, and I shall never cease to lament, that obedience to a father left it incomplete.... I had communicated, by letter to General Putnam, the proposals of this gentleman, with my determination to accept them, and I was embarrassed by the answer which the general returned; he entreated me to remember that the person in question, from his political principles, was extremely obnoxious to my father, and concluded by observing ‘that I surely would not unite myself with a man who, in his zeal for the cause of his country, would not hesitate to drench his sword in the blood of my nearest relation, should he be opposed to him in battle.’ Saying this, he lamented the necessity of giving advice contrary to his own sentiments, since in every other respect he considered the match as unexceptionable.”^[84]

She does not name this “conqueror of my soul,” except that he was an “American colonel.” Yet Davis considers it a matter of common knowledge that Burr was the “gentleman” in question, even though he was only a major at the time. Perhaps he was! In any event Davis, by the deliberate omission of the above pertinent portions of the Memoirs, so garbled the text that it lent itself readily to his outright accusation that Burr had seduced the charming young ward of his General, and placed her errant feet on the path of later and more notorious years.^[85]

There is also another story in connection with the youthful Margaret Moncrieffe. It appears that the young lady’s frequent sessions on the roof with a telescope and her passion for painting flower pictures excited Burr’s suspicion that the fair charmer might be nothing more or less than a British spy. These suspicions he communicated to his superior, and one day she was quietly removed to closer confinement at Kingsbridge, there to remain until she was sent back to her father within the British lines with a most ingenuous note, composed by the General himself.

“Ginrale Putnam’s compliments to Major Moncrieffe,” it read, “has made him a present of a fine daughter, if he don’t lick her he send her back again, and he will previde her with a good twig husband.”^[86]