I took the occasion to make my filial feelings clear. The Baron & Baroness were taken aback, less by my sentiments (they had gravely mixt opinions of the man themselves, especially in his “Joseph Brant” metamorphosis, and they remember’d sympathetically my mother’s distraction) than by the indelicate vehemence of my expression. But Andrée brighten’d at once; lookt on me thenceforward with real interest, & question’d me endlessly thro the summer upon my theory that her Uncle Henry—& his grandfather H.B. III before him — had been secret Judas Iscariots of the Indian cause at Bloodsworth Island, at the Wyoming & Cherry Valleys, at Fallen Timbers, & the rest. She reminded me that he had made the same sort of charges against his father, Andrew Cooke III, vis-à-vis Pontiac’s betrayal. She urged me to meet Tecumseh, “the Shooting Star.” I declined, jealous, & declared the Indian cause already lost. A receding series of betrayals & retreats was their future, I opined: along the Eastern seaboard they were already but a colorful memory; in a hundred years they would be no more than that along the Pacific.

Andrée agreed, so long as the U. States’ westward expansion went uncheckt. And what could check it? Not Tecumseh’s daydream of confederating all the Indians from Florida to the Lakes, I scoft: that was but the tragedy of Pontiac replay’d. So it would be, my young friend conceded — unless, as she & Tecumseh plann’d, the action of the Indians coincided with full-scale war between the U. States & G. Britain!

I was astonisht, not only by the boldness of her suggestion, but by her precocious grasp of history & politics. It was not just to westward the “Americans” were moving, she declared: the U. States merchant fleet was grown prodigious in the Atlantic trade. But since Napoleon had broken the Peace of Amiens last year & gone to war in the Mediterranean, Britain had extended her policy of economic warfare by blockading French & Spanish ports against neutral shipping, & Napoleon must surely retaliate with a similar blockade against Britain. U. States ships & cargoes were being snatcht by both sides for running these blockades, & U. States sailors were being imprest into the Royal Navy. John Adams’s Federalist administration, sympathetic to the ties between old & New England, had come close to war with France in 1798 on these accounts. Jefferson’s Republicans inclined against Britain despite their reservations about Napoleon. My excellent cousin was persuaded that since the U. States could not afford to fight both major powers, it was likely to refight the War of 1776 if peaceful Jefferson — who would surely be reelected this year — were succeeded in 1808 by a less formidable or less pacific Republican. To the Loyalists in Upper Canada the ’76 war was still a rebellion, not a revolution; it was they who had prest Governor Haldimand not to return Fort Niagara to the U. States at the war’s end, and when he was obliged to — but only in 1796—to construct another fort on Canadian soil just across the gorge from it. A quarter-century of exile had dimm’d but not extinguisht their hope that New England, at least, might still secede from the Union, annex itself to Canada, & welcome them home. Young Republicans from the new western & southern states, for their part, were eager to move against the Canadas & the Floridas, on pretext that Britain was arming & inciting Indians against the western settlements. If they gain’d sufficient strength in Congress, especially in the off-year elections of 1806 and 1810, they could surely exploit the maritime issues to ally New England & the mid-Atlantic states to their cause. And if finally, over that same period, Britain & France continued to exhaust each other’s resources in European wars, & “we” were able to turn the western congressmen’s pretext into a fact by organizing Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy (a popular idea in the British cabinet, as it would make western America in effect a royal protectorate), there could be a 2nd Revolutionary War, as it were, as early as 1809 or ’10! To give her projections a little margin, Andrée was already speaking of it as “the War of 1811.” She would be 22 then: “we” had seven years to make our preparations.

I.e., herself, Tecumseh, me… and my father, her legendary Uncle Henry, if we could find him & determine once for all his true allegiance. Ten years past, her Indian friend had fought with Little Turtle’s Miamis in their victory over American soldiers on the Wabash & their defeat by Wayne’s American Legion at Fallen Timbers; thus his introduction to my father & subsequent visits to Castines Hundred. But Tecumseh was his own man, and tho he had valued “H.B.‘s” high opinion of Pontiac (his own model & exemplar), he had not always trusted his advice, particularly after Fallen Timbers. Just then, neither’s whereabouts was known.

I reported what I’d heard from Jefferson and Burr, which corroborated the Baron’s last news of “H.B.” I knew too little of American politics to yea or nay Andrée’s complex prognostications, but enough of French & Algerine, & of history generally, to warn her that events have their own momentum, & quickly get beyond the grasp of those who would control them. And if I should ever go in search of my “father,” I declared, it would not be to enlist myself in his cause, or him in mine.

“We don’t know his,” Andrée said tartly, “and you have none.”

True enough — till love & Aaron Burr gave me one, that same year. News reacht us of Burr’s duel with Hamilton on the Hudson Palisades, which spoilt his bid for the New York governorship & forced him into a kind of hiding. He was headed, we heard, for the Louisiana territory, where he own’d land, with a band of settlers, perhaps to establish a new state. But there were also rumors of intended rendezvous with a volunteer army that had been training on Blennerhassett Island in the Ohio River, no one knew what for. Napoleon, age 35, was crown’d Emperor of France & Anointed of the Lord, and prepared to make war against Austria & Russia. Jefferson handily won reelection; Republican strength increast in the Congress. I turn’d 28, & proposed marriage to my 16-year-old cousin. The Baron & Baroness said she was not ready; Andrée declared I was not, till I had accomplisht something in “our cause.” She bade me reconnoitre the activity on Blennerhassett Island, determine whether “Harman Blennerhassett” (so we had learnt its owner to be denominated) was my father, & whether whatever was afoot ’twixt him & Burr was an aid or a threat to Tecumseh’s program. I was then to take “appropriate measures,” report to Tecumseh, & ask the Chief’s permission for her hand! If he approved, she was mine whatever her dear parents thot.

Well, I could not stay on at Castines Hundred. In 1805 & ’06 & ’07—whilst Napoleon won at Ulm, Austerlitz, & Jena, lost at Trafalgar, and, just as Andrée had forecast, issued the Berlin Decree against trade with Britain in retaliation for Britain’s Orders in Council against trade with France; and whilst a sea battle was fought off the Virginia Capes betwixt the USS Chesapeake and HMS Leopard, such as she had hoped for (and whilst Jérôme Bonaparte’s marriage was annull’d by his brother, who made him King of Westphalia, and whilst Joel & Ruthy Barlow settled down in Philadelphia to bring out the Columbiad, and Toot Fulton helpt him with the engravings & built the Clermont)—I follow’d Burr’s fortunes from Blennerhassett Island, by flatboat down the Ohio & Mississippi to New Orleans & his arrest for conspiring to separate the western states from the Union; thence to Richmond & his trial & acquittal.

When Burr fled to Europe in perfect disgrace, and Harman Blennerhassett settled down to raise cotton in Mississippi, I came back to make my report (and en route met that 1st uncritical auditor of my Algerine adventure, Midshipman Cooper). Taken separately, I declared to Andrée, neither Harman Blennerhassett nor Aaron Burr was guilty as charged, and Justice Marshall had fairly resisted Jefferson’s pressure to convict. Blennerhassett, an Irish lawyer & adventurer, was in my opinion primarily bent on marching on Mexico, and Burr on bringing a large new state into the Union with himself as governor, tho each was prepared to do both if it should prove feasible. The conspiracy was mainly the invention of Jefferson’s western army commander, General James Wilkinson, a bona fide traitor in the secret pay of Spain, who (again in my opinion, because at my urging) had prest the Western Empire idea on B. & B. to divert them from Mexico; aroused their interest in it as a possibility if their “legitimate” program should fail; and then tattled on them to Jefferson & turn’d state’s evidence to cover his tracks as a Spanish agent!