It was fortunate for me that his indictment included your mother, for while Tecumseh forbade torture, he believed in the swift execution of spies. But the Chief knew of my facility with documents & other credentials; he chided his brother, veto’d my execution, praised my improvements in their tongue, & subsequently took me as his interpreter — with 400 fine young warriors, for effect — to the 1st of a series of conferences with Harrison in Vincennes. It was my 1st experience of his statesmanship: the man was magnificent, both as orator & as tactician: always eloquent; tactful & forceful by turns; & so possest of memory & information that he could recite the provisions & violations of every Indian treaty made & broken by the Long Knives “since the Seventeen Fires had been Thirteen & had fought for their sovereignty, as his people were now conjoin’d to fight for theirs.” The pretenders who had sign’d the last of those treaties, he declared, were dead men. The confederacy would no more accede to Madison’s order to disband than would the Seventeen Fires to such an order from himself. & cetera. Harrison was enough imprest with Tecumseh to delay moving settlers onto the treaty lands—& to request troops from the War Department. Tecumseh was enough imprest with my services, & my Algonkin, to speak to me now on those matters he had tabled earlier.

What he vouchsafed me, in effect, over the following year, was a clear tho fleeting glimpse of what Andrée has since seen to be the pattern of our family history; more generally, he re-introduced me to the tragical view. Tecumseh understood to the heart Pontiac’s dilemma at the siege of Detroit (as explain’d in my 3rd letter); for that reason he would always attack, attack, preferably at night & hand-to-hand, & leave siege operations when necessary to whatever white allies the confederacy might enlist from time to time. The confederacy itself he view’d as a necessary evil, contrary to the Indians’ ancient pluralism, & for that reason he thot its central authority best left more spiritual than political. Thus his willing dependency on his undependable brother. Farther down the white man’s road toward a central government he would not go, tho he was not at all certain the Indians could prevail without one. He pointed out to me that my father & grandfather had had a common esteem for Pontiac, whatever their other motives & differences. Perhaps one or both of them had thot to aid him in the long run by misleading or impeding him in the short, as one strengthens a child by setting obstacles in his path, or tells him simple myths till he can grasp the hard true ones. But Tecumseh question’d both my father’s conviction, that his parents had betray’d Pontiac, & mine, that my father had betray’d, for example, the Iroquois under Joseph Brant. If he believed that, he declared, he would have permitted Tenskwatawa to tomahawk me, & would himself put a knife thro the heart of Star-of-the-Lake, whom he still loved, ere we could betray him. As it was — and since he had little time for a wife & children nor any wish to leave behind a young widow & orphans — he gave his blessings to our match, hoped it would be fruitful, & pray’d that we would set no helpful obstacles in his path, as he was no child.

I rusht to Castines Hundred with these tidings. To Andrée (now 22, & I nearing 35!) they were not news: she came to me smiling, & soon after wed me privately in the Iroquois ceremony, as my grandmother & grandfather had been wed. Andrée had just commenced her research of the family history; she was fascinated by our likeness to our grandsires. And tho she knew I had not the peculiar defect of male Burlingames (which they have always overcome), she follow’d the example of Andrée I in declining to marry me Christian-fashion till I had got her with child.

Sweet last summer! Mme de Staël wrote me from Coppet of her troubles with Napoleon; of her friend Schlegel’s narrow rescue of her manuscript De l’Allemagne; of her current affair with a Swiss guardsman half her age, très romantique mais peu esthétique. She wonder’d whether I thot it safe for her to move to her New York property if Napoleon hounded her from Coppet; surely “we” were not going to war with Britain, Europe’s only hope against the bloody Corsican? I was obliged to reply that unlike Paris in Year III, which appear’d dangerous but was safe, upstate New York in 1811 appear’d safe but would soon be dangerous. To convince her, I attacht a copy of a letter I’d forged with Andrée’s help for the purpose of inflaming the American press against the British: based on a real one sent from Major James Crawford at Niagara to Governor Haldimand in Quebec on January 3, 1782, it itemized eight boxes of scalps lifted by the Senecas & presented to the Governor-General for bounty payment: 43 “Congress soldiers,” 93 “farmers kill’d in their houses,” 97 farmers kill’d working in their fields, 102 more farmers of which 18 scalps were “markt with yellow flame to show that they were burnt alive after being scalpt,” 81 women, “long hair, those braided to show they were mothers,” 193 boys’ scalps “various ages,” 211 girls’ scalps big and little, “small yellow hoops markt hatchet, club, knife, & cet,” 122 “mixt scalps including 29 infants… only little black knife in middle to show ript out of mothers body,” & cet. Joel Barlow wrote from Kalorama, his house in Washington, that he was sailing reluctantly from Annapolis aboard the Constitution as Madison’s minister to France, to deal with Napoleon’s foreign minister in a final effort to prevent war betwixt the U. States & G. Britain. He recall’d fondly my assistance in his dealings with the Dey of Algiers, & wisht I could be with him now. Toot Fulton, he was sad to report, had married soon after the Clermont’s success; Ruthy was disconsolate. The war-hawk American Secretary of State, Barlow’s friend James Monroe, had instructed General Mathews in Georgia by secret letter on January 26 to move against the Floridas “with all possible expedition, concealing from general observation the trust committed to you with that discretion which the delicacy and importance of the undertaking require.” In May the U. States frigate President crippled the British sloop-of-war Little Belt off Sandy Hook, to the delight of Henry Clay & his fellow hawks, much increast in strength since the 1810 congressional elections. Surely the 12th Congress would declare Andrée’s War of 1811 when it convened in the fall! Tecumseh inform’d Governor Harrison early in the year that he would not only remain neutral, but fight on the side of the Seventeen Fires in the coming war if President Madison would set aside Harrison’s false treaty & make no future ones without consent of the chiefs assembled at the Tippecanoe. White citizens’ committees from Vincennes to St. Louis petition’d Madison to move against the Prophet’s town, disperse the confederacy, & drive out the British Indian traders who were “behind it.”

At Castines Hundred, whilst the Baron tiskt & tutted, your parents kiss’d & coo’d — and made plans. Barlow himself believed that inasmuch as the Westerners & Southerners were hottest for the war, my friend Tecumseh was of more immediate moment in the matter than Napoleon & George III together (that latter so sunk into madness now that a Regency bill was expected daily, but still urging in his lucid moments that troops be sent to recover his lost America). Joel could but hope that if France & England were persuaded to lift their decrees against American merchant shipping, the Indian issue itself would not be a sufficient casus belli; he implored me to use whatever influence I had to keep Tecumseh neutral. I had not seen fit to tell him that I was become a hawk myself, tho at the time of Burr’s trial in Richmond, when I had visited Barlow in Philadelphia to aid him with the new Columbiad, I’d spoken warmly of Tecumseh’s plan for an Indian nation, and tried to work into Joel’s epic a denunciation of “Manifest Destiny” by Columbus himself.