Читать книгу Aaron Burr: A Biography - Nathan Schachner - Страница 31

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It was during this battle that Burr laid the seeds of that ill health which was to dog him for a considerable period, and force him eventually to resign from the army. The fatigue, the exertions, and the blazing sun, combined to give a case of sunstroke and a chronic diarrhea that only the severest regimen was able to overcome.

He was ordered immediately, however, to Elizabethtown, to gather intelligence of the enemy’s possible future movements. He was instructed to ascertain “what are the preparations of shipping for embarcation of foot or horse?—what expeditions on hand?—whether up the North river, Connecticut, or West Indies?”^[101]

Burr was already noted as a gallant officer, a disciplinarian and organizer, and a master of Intelligence. His activities in the latter branch of the service furnish the clue to the facility—which appeared almost miraculous to his political opponents in later life—with which he was able to gain complete foreknowledge of their most secret plans and documents, and use that foreknowledge with crushing effect against them.

On the satisfactory completion of this mission he rejoined his regiment in time to receive orders to march at once to the fort at West Point. Almost immediately after, he was detached from regimental service for another very confidential mission. Sir Henry Clinton was in New York City and the patriots of the State were in an uproar over the numerous Tories in their midst, their activities and conspiracies. An oath of allegiance was prescribed by the Legislature under the egis of Governor George Clinton in order to separate the sheep from the goats. Those who refused the oath were to be transferred immediately within the enemy’s lines and their property confiscated. It was no time, thought the patriots, for delicate handling of Tories or those who pretended a neutrality in the struggle.

There was a group of these gathered at Fishkill. It was Burr’s task to convoy them, by sloop, and under a flag of truce, down the Hudson into the City of New York.^[102] Considering that Burr already had “one, two or three trusty persons over to the city, to get the reports, the newspapers, and the truth, if they can,”^[103] is it not conceivable that these convoys were but a blind for more serious work; that thus he might safely get in touch with his agents and obtain the results of their spyings?

On his first voyage on the sloop Liberty to New York City, Burr added in his own handwriting to Governor Clinton’s safe conduct: “Mrs. Prevost and Miss De Visme with one Man Servant in consequence of Lord Stirling’s Leave to pass to N.York and return are admitted on board this Flagg.”^[104]

September, 1778, found Colonel Burr still detached from his regiment and engaged in regular trips out of Fishkill convoying prisoners down to the enemy lines, and, incidentally, establishing contact with his spies in New York.^[105]

Meanwhile Major-General Charles Lee had been court-martialed and suspended for one year from the service for his conduct at Monmouth and for other good and sufficient reasons. Colonel Burr was indignant over the result; he felt that Washington had pursued the General with ill-judged hatred; that Lee was a far better tactician than his superior; and he did not hesitate to express his sympathy to Lee. The letter has been lost, but Lee’s grateful reply is extant. He intends, he declares sarcastically, “whether the sentence is reversed or not reversed [by Congress], to resign my commission, retire to Virginia, and learn to hoe tobacco, which I find is the best school to form a consummate general. This is a discovery I have lately made.”^[106]

Burr’s open advocacy of the deposed General certainly did nothing to better the somewhat strained relations between himself and Washington. The young Colonel was quite sincere in his belief that the Commander-in-Chief was a military leader of limited capacity; honest, it was true, and well-intentioned, but lacking the spark of genius and stubbornly set in his ways. He thought the entire plan of campaign around New York to have been a blunder of the first magnitude, the indecisiveness of the battle of Monmouth to have been due at least equally to Washington’s tactical blunders as to Lee’s disobedience of orders; the slow quiescence of the winter at Valley Forge had roused him to fury. Strangely enough, Burr’s own predictions and suggestions had a remarkable way of becoming justified by the course of later events. He was without question an able officer and leader in his own right, and his actions were always direct, energetic, and carried out with unhesitating decision. Washington himself, in spite of his resentment at the implied and expressed criticism of this forward young officer, appreciated Burr’s capacities as a soldier.

Burr was not alone, either then or now, in his animadversions. Conway, Lee, Gates, among the generals, and a substantial minority of the Continental Congress felt the same way. Nor have modern historians and students of military tactics been disposed to place Washington among the first flight of great military commanders. But what young Burr, too close to the imperfections of the picture, failed to see was that his commanding general possessed other qualities, equally as valuable, which were absolutely requisite to the binding together of the Colonies, and the patient, steady continuance of a disheartening and seemingly lost struggle.