The Play is ended; now succeeds the Farce.
And when characters thot dead vengefully reappear, his other son “Chekitan” (Pontiac had no such sons; he was more father to my father than to his own offspring, of whom we know nothing) wonders in best Elizabethan fashion:
May we believe, or is this all a Dream?
Are we awake?…
Or is it Juggling, Fascination all?
Deadly juggling it was. In the aftermath of the war, “Alexis Cuillerier” was arrested in Detroit and charged with the 1764 murder of one Betty Fisher, the seven-year-old daughter of the 1st white family kill’d in the rising. “Angélique” did not appear at the trial — in fact, after 1763 Andrée Castine Cooke vanishes from the family records as if flown bodily to heaven — but “Antoine Cuillerier” did, and by some means prevail’d upon Pontiac to testify in my father’s defence. The Chief 1st declared that the Fisher child, afflicted with the fluxes after her capture, had so anger’d him by accidentally soiling his clothes that he had thrown her into the Maumee & order’d young Cuillerier to wade in & drown her. Not exactly an exoneration! After further conference with my grandfather, who reminded him that the Oswego treaty made him immune from prosecution on any charges dating from the war, Pontiac changed his testimony: He himself, he now declared, had done both the throwing & the drowning, driven by his general hatred of white females after his betrayal by one of their number in May 1763. And the river had been the Detroit, not his beloved Maumee, which he would never have so defiled.
The jury preferr’d his original version & found against my father, who promptly escaped custody & disappear’d — as Alexis Cuillerier. One “Antoine Cuillerier,” then in his 70’s, lived a few more years in the role of habitant in the Fort Detroit area, and there died. Of Andrew Cooke III we know no more. Pontiac himself, two years after his trial, was clubb’d & stabb’d (so reports one Pierre Menard, habitant) in the village of Cahokia by a young Illinois warrior bribed “by the English” to the deed. The assassin’s tribe was almost exterminated in the reprisal by the nations Pontiac had endeavour’d in vain to bring together: that was a kind of fighting they understood.
Oh child, how I am heavied by this chronicle — whose next installment must bring my father to rebirth, myself to birth (you too, perhaps!), & be altogether livelier going.
Pontiac, Pontiac! Andrew, Andrew! How near you came to succeeding!
And Henry, Henrietta! We will come nearer yet, you &
Your loving father,
A.B.C. IV
O: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The history of H. C. Burlingame IV: the First American Revolution.
At Castines Hundred
Niagara, Upper Canada
Thursday, 9 April 1812
My Darling Henry or Henrietta,
On this date 100 years since, there was bloodily put down in New York a brave rebellion of black slaves, instigated three days before — so my father chose to believe — by his grandfather & namesake, Henry Burlingame III, after the failure of the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy. Six of the rebels committed suicide, 21 were executed. One “Saturnian revolution” later, he maintain’d, in 1741, my own grandfather & namesake, Andrew Cooke III, successfully spiked a 2nd such revolution in the same place, with even bloodier result: 13 hang’d, 13 burnt, 71 transported.
I did not believe him.
Neither did I believe, when I came of age, what he had told me in my boyhood of his mother, Andrée Castine: that she betray’d Pontiac to Major Gladwin & thus undermined, with my grandfather’s aid, the great “Indian Conspiracy” of 1763-64.
Henry Cooke Burlingame IV, at least in the brief period of his official life (1746–1785), lack’d Pontiac’s tragical vision. The most I will concede to his slanderous opinion of my grandparents is the possibility of their having realized, around 1760, that their grand strategy had misfired: that the French might never regain control of the Canadas, much less link them with Louisiana & push east across the Appalachians to the Atlantic; that “successful” Indian resistance would lead only to their extermination by the British. In short, that the sad sole future of the red man lay in accommodation & negotiated concession, to the end of at least fractional survival & the gradual “reddening” of the whites. Pontiac’s one victory, on this view, was Major Rogers’s verse tragedy Ponteach: as Lord Amherst infected the Indians with smallpox, Pontiac infected white Americans with Myth, at least as contagious & insusceptible to cure.
More simply, we have the testimony of Andrée’s diary that she & Andrew believed it necessary for the Indians (who, as we have seen, would not take the calculated loss of storming operations) at least to master the art of protracted siege — which interfered only with their seasonal rhythms, not with their famous individualism — if they were to conduct successful large-scale campaigns against white fortifications & artillery. Sieges were a repeatable discipline; Pontiac’s tactic (to enter the fort as if for a conference & then fall on the unsuspecting officers) was a one-time-only Indian trick which would make legitimate conferences difficult to arrange in the future. Its “betrayal” (she does not directly either admit or deny betraying it herself) did not undermine the general plan; it only made necessary a change of tactics.
“She made that diary note a full year later,” my father observed. “She was covering their tracks. She knew how I loved old Pontiac.”
It is true that such entries, especially belated ones, can be disingenuous. But my father, like the rest of us, chose by heart as much as by head which ones to put his faith in.
No Cooke or Burlingame has ever disprized book learning; the Burlingames, however, are the scholars. “Alexis Cuillerier,” 21 years old, broke jail in Detroit in 1767 and disappear’d before he could be convicted, on Pontiac’s original testimony, of drowning the child Betty Fisher. In the autumn of that same year, Henry Burlingame IV matriculated at the College of New Jersey in Princeton. Upon his graduation, he went up to Yale College in New Haven, staying on as a tutor in history after taking a Master of Arts degree there in 1772. His life in this interval, in great contrast to his adventuresome youth, was austere, even monastic. By Mother’s report, he was still much shock’d by what he took to be his parents’ successful duplicity: he even imagined that they had bribed Pontiac with rum to give his damaging testimony, and subsequently arranged his assassination, to the end of further “covering their tracks”! (Was it in some rage against his mother that “Alexis” drown’d the poor beshitten Fisher girl? But we have only Pontiac’s word that he did, together with the rumors that had led to his arrest.) This shock, no doubt, accounts for his reclusion. And there was another factor, as we shall see.
H. C. Burlingame IV thus became the 1st of our line not merely to doubt his father (we have all, in our divers ways, done that) but to despise him. I was the 2nd; and am perhaps the 1st to pass beyond that misgrounded, spirit-wasting passion, to spare you which is the end & object of these letters.
The study of History was Father’s sanctuary from its having been practised upon him in the past, and his preparation for practising it upon others in the future. From the present — the revolutionary fervor which was sweeping the colleges of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, even William & Mary in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s — he remain’d aloof. His student friends from Princeton (John Armstrong & Aaron Burr are the two we shall remember) were ready by 1774 to fight for American independence; his Yale tutee Joel Barlow was already making plans, at Father’s suggestion, for an American Aeneid (but Father had in mind a satire!); and his closest friend in New Haven, Mr. Benedict Arnold — a bright young merchant in the West Indies trade whose boyhood had been as adventurous as Father’s — had organized a company of Connecticut militia. But while he did not dismiss as specious the arguments for independence, Father was skeptical enough (and Canadian enough) to see two sides to the matter: a prerequisite to the tragical view, tho not its equivalent.