Читать книгу Aaron Burr: A Biography - Nathan Schachner - Страница 57

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It is obvious that Aaron Burr’s expenses were enormous. Besides Richmond Hill, which he treated as a country estate, he retained his town house at No. 30 Partition Street. The upkeep of both establishments, the lavish entertainment, the largesse and patronage, the education of his daughter, Theodosia, imposed a drain on his resources with which not even his tremendous earning capacity could keep pace.

He was always in debt, always borrowing, always having notes falling due without the wherewithal to make payment. Throughout his life finances were to be a monotonous refrain, coloring his thoughts, engrossing his energies, weaving a pattern that was eventually to enmesh him in an impenetrable web. Yet never for a moment did he consider the possibility of reducing his expenses, of living on a less lavish scale. In the darkest days of his exile, he was to spend the last poor sou he possessed for some trinket that had engaged his fancy, and which, he thought, might brighten the face of far-off daughter or grandson. Then he would tighten his belt cheerfully against hunger and cold. It was something inherent, ineradicable.

As far back as 1791 there are constant references in his letters to notes of hand. He borrowed money from his friends, from usurers at exorbitant rates of interest. He paid as high as 15 percent per annum. His friends endorsed for him. And they were to rue their kindness; not because Burr was dishonest, but because his affairs had become so involved that, struggle as he might, he could never escape the nightmare multiplication of overdue notes. He had reared for himself a veritable inverted pyramid of paper, and the structure was toppling.

He borrowed from his clients too, because he could not help it. He and Hamilton had acted as joint counsel for Le Guen in a very complicated mercantile litigation against Gouverneur and Kemble. After several years’ tortuous progress through the courts, the matter ended in victory for their client. On June 2, 1795, Burr received a fee of $2500 for his services, of which $1750 had already been assigned to two of his creditors. Both Hamilton and Burr borrowed heavily from Le Guen. Burr obtained several loans, one of which, for some $6000, was to end in a dispute over alleged repayments, and was to drag acrimoniously for almost thirty years. Marinus Willett, General John Lamb, Le Guen, Pierpont Edwards, Colonel John Nicholson, Peter Van Gaasbeck—all friends—appear again and again in his correspondence as endorsers who are involved in his whirlwind of extensions and renewals.

“When I took your last endorsement payable at twenty Days,” Burr mournfully confessed to the disgusted Marinus Willett, “I expected that the Sale of my property would have been completed before the expiration of that time. It has happened otherwise and the Note becomes payable to day which obliges me to ask for a further endorsement.”^[222]

By 1796 the clouds were gathering ominously. “As to pecuniary matters,” he informed a friend, involved with him by the usual endorsements, “I am very sorry both for your sake and my own that I can say nothing agreeable. I have met with the most vexatious and ruinous disappointments, and it is I assure you with extreme difficulty that I keep along.”^[223]

And in 1797 the storm was crashing about his ears. Robert Troup, his old-time personal friend and present bitter political enemy, was writing to Rufus King, now Minister to England, that Burr has “during the present session paid little or no attention to his duties in the Senate. It is whispered that his money engagements are embarrassing to him.”^[224] The matter had become common knowledge.

It was General Lamb who bore the brunt of Burr’s financial legerdemain. The correspondence between them is staggering in its proportions. Their transactions commenced back in 1795. They began modestly with a direct loan of $3500 and by the end of 1796 had reached a total of over $22,000, of which approximately $5000 was still unpaid. Besides which, Lamb was endorsed on a considerable amount in outstanding notes.^[225]

By 1797 his affairs with General Lamb had reached the desperate stage. On December 9, 1796, Burr asked for “the other 2000 before three oclock”; on December 10th, “it is with reluctance that I ask your endorsement to the enclosed”; on December 17th, he had reduced certain notes by $2400 and was sending the renewal notes along for endorsement—this time without reluctance. Day by day the notes passed back and forth in bewildering succession.

Finally, in desperation, Burr offered to sell all his possessions at Richmond Hill to Lamb in settlement of their mutual accounts, and Lamb agreed. But another creditor pressed, and Lamb, on March 29, 1797, wrote magnanimously, “However desireable it might be to me to have your house on the terms you proposed, Yet if it will as you say enable you to settle with the holder of one of your Notes, I consent to release you from your offer. At the same time I must intreat you to provide in some other Way for the balance due me.”^[226]

And, on June 17, 1797, Burr did sell to Sir John Temple, English Consul General, “all and singular the household goods furniture and things mentioned and expressed in the Inventory or Schedule hereto annexed, and now remaining in the Mansion house and on the Farm and piece of Land belonging to the said Aaron Burr.”^[227]

The glories of Richmond Hill had departed. The place in which Theodosia Prevost Burr had spent the last years of her life, the graceful mansion over whose festal board young Theodosia had presided with dignity and astonishing aplomb, the walls that had echoed to laughter and brilliant conversation and the tread of a distinguished company, were now vacant and bare—stripped ruthlessly of mahogany armchairs, Turkey carpets, mirrors, satin haircloth sofas, Venetian blinds, fluted-post bedsteads, Dutch liquor cases—all the luxurious furnishings in which Burr had taken such pride—sold now for a pittance of $3,500 to pay a single debt!

Nor did the empty walls of Richmond Hill last much longer. They were pawns in the desperate game he was playing with creditors. Later Burr was compelled to mortgage his leasehold, and much later, after his trial for treason, John Jacob Astor, with his hawklike eye for valuable land, took advantage of Burr’s necessitous condition, and purchased the leasehold, subject to the mortgage, for the sum of $32,000. It was this parcel that Astor was to cut up into lots, to be leased out at heavy rentals, and which contributed mightily to the foundation of his millions.^[228]

All these were but drops in the endless ocean of Burr’s tangled finances. He would sit at home whole days in anxious expectation of promised funds, heartsick and weary. When he could write Lamb that “you perceive by the enclosed, that I am nearly through with your endorsements ... In truth I could not see you with pleasure while these matters were unsettled,”^[229] his volatile spirits rebounded.

But these canceled endorsements were evidently of only a single series of notes, because in 1798 Lamb was calling on him frantically for immediate aid. The creditors had tired of pressing Burr and were now concentrating on Lamb. Judgments had been obtained and executions were impending. Burr’s property—whatever could be found—had also been seized.

Burr, then in Albany, felt the matter keenly. “I will return to N York,” he advised by post, “and superintend the Sales of my own property untill you shall be exonerated. That your peace of mind should be disturbed or personal safety endangered by an act of friendship and generosity to me is the most humiliating event of my life—and I shall be most wretched untill I hear the Course the business has taken. Though a writ of error can at any time be procured in an hour, yet the possibility of any inattention by which you might be for a moment exposed to indignity from people who would delight in torturing me through you, leave me no rest or peace.”^[230]

And finally, on May 6, 1799, General Lamb was actually arrested by Richard Harison, as counsel for impatient creditors, on executions primarily against Burr. Burr went frantically to work to help the innocent victim of his own difficulties. He proffered himself and David Gelston as bail; Harison insisted on additional security—certainly Burr’s signature was no inducement—and suggested either Colonel Rutgers or Alexander Robertson.^[231] Burr managed to satisfy Harison, and Lamb was released, to disappear out of the records of Burr’s finances.

Eventually the whole precarious structure of notes and mortgages was to come toppling about Burr’s ears, and was to be primarily responsible for that last desperate venture on the Washita and at Blennerhassett’s Island which led to ruin and disgrace.