American Catiline
By Morgan Kim
Chapter 1
“He is truly the Cataline [sic] of America…”
Alexander Hamilton, 1800
“Dear Theodosia,
I must confess that news pertaining to you—or the lack thereof, namely—concerns me greatly. Three weeks have passed since your departure on the Patriot from the ports of South Carolina, and yet, no word of either you or the vessel. Your husband Joseph is beside himself with worry, and to be frank, so am I. Many a great gale has swept over the seaboard lately, as the turbulent tides of the Atlantic are wont to do, and yet, barring a wreck, a schooner as celeritous as yours ought to have reached my shores five or six days ago.
I know the death of our young Aaron—your child, my grandson—was a great blow to you, as well as to your health. It was a blow to me also. I’m in the hopes that once we reunite, I will be a diversion to your loss, and you to mine. I look forward to strolling along the banks of the Hudson with you, reminiscent of better days, finding consolation within the arms of each other.
I look forward to hearing from you soon; I’ve missed you dearly, ma chere amie. Adieu.
New-York, January 20, 1813.
A.Burr.”
Even as he lifted the pen from the letter, Aaron Burr had a sinking feeling, a premonition of sorts, for his daughter. Her husband had sent him one frenetic letter after another, each word brimming with trepidation for his wife’s extended silence; and while Burr assuaged the worst of Joseph Alston’s fears—a faulty courier is all there is to it, I am sure—he’d failed to convince himself, as day by day passed from the date Theodosia was meant to set foot upon New York’s shores.
He sealed his letter, wrote the return address on the envelope; he rose from his chair, he walked to the door, and grabbed the knob. He stood still like that, with his hand still grasping the metal, until he forced himself to turn back and shelve the envelope away. What use was there to it? It was paranoia, was all.
He grabbed the bunch of other envelopes stacked in a disorderly pile upon his shoddy escritoire—a far cry from the varnished walnut he’d sported in his prime, which had since been pawned to keep the creditors at bay—and disposed them, unceremoniously, into the dying hearth sputtering below the mantel. He watched without interest as the flames consumed the paper bearing the initials of the men who threatened debtors’ prison for his continual refusal—as they framed it—to reimburse. Taking on the surname of his late mother, Edwards, was supposed to buy him time to scrounge up even more loans from family and friends (or what little of them he had left)—loans, a thinly veiled polite fiction for charity. No man in New York desired to associate with the man who had killed their beloved Federalist—and a traitor to his nation, at that —no less employ him as their representative in court. His financial prospects were gone, next to none.
Burr watched as the last sparks in the mantelpiece fizzled out. He set on drafting a letter to Alston, asking for scraps of news, if any, he caught wind of concerning Theodosia—Madison neglects the issue, no doubt on account of Jefferson’s enmity towards myself—, stopping himself in the postscript from giving his grandson his greetings, as little Aaron—named after his grandfather—was now laid below a cold column of dirt and a tombstone. Alston’s letter spoke of typhoid fever. The boy’s body lay enclosed by the earth in eternal, premature rest.
(But what of the child’s mother? Was she to lie in the depths of the sea for eternity, with no body to bury?)
Burr banished such melancholy thoughts from his mind as he sealed the letter and pushed it to a corner of his desk. It was futile. No myriad of missives would effect a safe return for Theodosia, or excise some new piece of intelligence that Alston had not already, laboriously informed him of. Burr set down his quill and screwed his inkwell shut. He resolved his mind against writing any more of these fruitless, futile dispatches. He could only wait.
He set on passing time via a worthy divertissement; even in arrears and insolvency, he retained his extensive collection of vellum-bound books. Some of them were heirlooms, bequeathed to him when his father had passed from malaria; others were bought with his own money, before he’d fallen into his present financial straits. Among them was a sermon by his very own grandfather; his mother had read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God aloud to him before she’d passed—of malaria, as well—and its promises of fire and brimstone had frightened him as a child, and unsettled him now. He passed over it in favor of a more familiar, dulcet volume.
The Aeneid was a favorite of his during his days as a schoolboy—although Theodosia did not share his love for it, scorning its poet’s treatment of the heroides of the play—especially the fate of poor Lavinia, she protested to her father, who did not receive a single line to speak. He would laugh and agree with her. Burr opened the front cover of the book, and was greeted with the classic opening line, arma virumque canō—I sing of arms and a man—and Theodosia’s scribbled annotations on the margins, meticulously delineating conjugation and declension. How long ago, Burr wondered, was it—when she’d just finished reading her Sallust and Cicero?
Theodosia possessed a natural penchant and talent for Latin and Greek since she was a girl. The way the languages of the ancients required a steady, patient hand to be mapped and puzzled through: they taught Theodosia to be meticulous, methodical, never impetuous, to never pigeonhole a word for the ablative case too quick, lest it be a dative in disguise. As her father, he was proud of her analytical mind, her constant curiosity of the world around her and in her books—even after she’d surrendered her books after the birth of her child, when the pain from the complications of the birth grew too great.
He read a meter, and then another; scanned the dactylic hexameter, noted the elisions, marked the caesura. It was pleasurable. He’d forgotten to read, during these past few years—especially during his travels in Europe, when he’d had barely a penny to scrape by, reduced to selling the watch he’d meant to gift Theodosia to buy his ferry ticket back to America. Now Aelous, lord of the winds, tore the Trojan ships asunder; now Neptune calmed his seas and granted the people of Ilium safe haven, upon the shores of Libya. Burr, having read and translated the Latin an innumerable number of times, passed through the passages with ease: now Aeneas met his mother, the goddess Venus, in disguise; now he met Dido, the tragic queen of Carthage, both of them yet innocent to their fates.
Now the hero recounted to the queen the fall of the city of Troy. Wily Odysseus had thrown open the gates through his sleight of hand, his wooden horse. The victorious Achaeans swarmed the city like a plague. Many Dardanians were reduced to headless, nameless corpses that night the citadel fell, King Priam being one of them, decapitated by the hands of cruel Pyrrhus, Achilles’ son. These were well familiar to Burr, having acquainted him in grammar school. But he found himself inexplicably stricken, at a loss, upon as he came across the passage of Creusa, as Aeneas began his lament in seeing his wife deceased. The city burned around them both. The remnants of her shade tethered to the living world—her spirit already fleeing to Hades—sought to comfort her grief-stricken husband trying in vain to clutch onto her dissipating form:
quid tantum īnsānō iuvat indulgere dolori,
o dulcis coniunx? non haec sine numine divum
eveniunt;
What good comes of it to indulge in such insane grief,
my sweet husband? Such things as these happen,
not without divine will.
Such things as these happen, not without divine will. Some variation of this was what his dear Theodosia—mother and namesake of his daughter—had said to console him as he grieved to see her increasingly bedridden, and what he’d tried to comfort himself with after her illness took her.
lacrimas dilectae pelle Creusae.
Cast away these tears for your beloved Creusa.
It was so sudden. The prospect of recovery, new medicine viz. hemlock and laudanum; the letters that Doctor Bard had sent him while he attended Congress. They’d sounded so promising; they left him ill-prepared to have her gone.
iamque vale et nati serva communis amorem.
Now farewell; save your love for the son we share.
He’d known of his wife’s affliction before their marriage; of the pain from her stomach that at their most severe, incapacitated her for days on end. He married her in spite of it, and placed his trust in Providence for a speedy recovery—or at least, an amelioration. He’d always been a religious man. His grandfather was a fire-and-brimstone preacher. And truly, for the briefest of moments, he’d considered his prayers answered. It seemed so fleeting now.
Ter conatus ibi collo dare brachia circum,
ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,
par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.
Thrice I tried there to put my arms around her neck,
Thrice her image fled my hands grasping out in vain,
Like the lightest winds, or a featherweight dream.
After her death, their daughter was all that remained of her to Burr. Little Theodosia became all he had, in terms of what constituted kin—his father and mother had passed from malaria early in his childhood, his grandfather from smallpox—but he’d never imagined himself to be left bereft of his wife so soon. The little reverie they’d found in the companionship of each other seemed often like a distant dream.
Sic demum socios consumpta nocte reviso.
So at last, with the night spent, I returned to my friends.
That dream was over; there was little use in its reminiscence. Burr relit the candle, wiped his glasses clean with a handkerchief, then carried on reading the rest of the book. The winter sun, having reached its zenith, began its decline and fall.
* * *
From J.Alston to Col.Burr.
Charleston, January 31, 1813.
I have in vain endeavoured to build upon the hope of long passage. Thirty days are decisive. My wife is either captured or lost. A short time since, and the idea of capture would have been the source of painful, terrible apprehension; it now furnishes me the only ray of comfort, or rather of hope, that I have. Should you hear aught relative to the object of this our common solicitude, do not, I pray, forget me.
February 25, 1813.
My boy—my wife—gone, both! This, then, is the end of all the hopes we had formed. You may well observe that you feel severed from the human race. She was the last tie that bound us to the species. What have we left?
I visited the grave of my boy. The little plans we had all three formed rushed upon my memory. Where now was the boy? The mother I cherished with so much pride? I felt like the very spirit of desolation. If it had not been for a kind of stupefaction and confusion of mind which followed, God knows how I should have borne it.
A compendium of epistles had compounded into an unsightly pile upon his desk. Letters addressed to him from the isles of the West Indies providing no further information on Theodosia; letters from the same motley of irate investors, better left unopened; letters reopened from the distant past written in the flowing cursive of his wife, or peppered by the miscellaneous spelling errors his daughter used to make when she was still a child. They formed a mound to bury Alston’s most recent round of dispatches informing Burr of her end.
Or perhaps, not an end, not yet; his friends offered him their encouragement, exhortations for him to retain his grasp on hope—or faith. His enemies offered condolences. Strangers in the streets looked at him with knowing sympathy. Bouquets made their way into his desk: a flurry of floriography in hyacinth, anemone, asphodel, their scent redolent. The press feasted on the mystery of the disappeared daughter of the disgraced vice president, relished and revelled in the drama of it all; Theodosia Alston Burr’s name and likeness graced every headline and cover.
Burr took it all with due grace. He vased the flowers. He shelved the papers. He accepted the pity. In a dreamlike trance, he wandered on the streets of New York, along the promenade by the Hudson; cycled through the motions and divided his time between his legal practice and his tenement. The days blurred into each other indistinct. When the papers and the news did not give him the answers he sought, Burr turned to the Bible. But he learned he was no Job; no Jemima, Kezia, nor Kerenhappuch would ever suffice to replace his own Theodosia. He turned to Greek, to Latin; pored over the dealings of the ancients with the same kind of bitter veil that had descended upon his life. Leafed through Phaedo and Eudemus, Ovid’s Tristia. The search for monodies became a hunt consuming his waking life.
Catullus’ funerary elegiacs: mūtam nēquīquam alloquerer cinerem, I speak in vain to silent ash. Atque in perpetuum, frāter, avē atque valē; thus forever, my brother, hail and farewell. Fragments of Cicero’s lost Consolatio buried in Lactantius:
M. Tullius in sua Consolatione pugnasse se semper contra fortunam loquitur…ne tum quidem se ab ea fractum, cum domo pulsus patria caruit: tum autem, cum amiserit charissimam filiam, victum se a fortuna turpiter confitetur.
Cicero says in his Consolation that he had always fought against fortune, that he was not subdued by her even when he was driven from his home and deprived of his country in exile. But after losing his dearest daughter, he concedes with shame to have been finally overcome.
Burr read of Tullia, the apple of her father’s eye; of her death in childbirth, the devastation which followed. Her father, the famously eloquent Cicero, left at a loss of words from the shock and the grief: cedo et manum tollo. I yield and surrender. If the Gospels promised an eternal paradise too saccharine, too panacean for him to find worldly comfort in, the ancients in all their wisdom seemed to offer him nil.
The world moved on with or without him. James Madison swore in for his second term as president as the war against Britain went on as the backdrop. Burr himself became increasingly entrenched in his legal work. More people started to flock to his practice as time buried his past scandals and disgrace; paperwork filled his days as black ink in his ledgers replaced the red. His creditors lessened their hounding; the cards and flowers in sympathy had long ceased. Bulk of his nights passed by in his office, working on cases or some kind of other busywork that kept his mind at bay. The year 1813 anno domini passed him by in such a daze; and before his mind had registered it, Burr found himself gazing down at his drink on the one-year anniversary since the death—or disappearance—of his beloved Theodosia.
The whiskey most likely wouldn’t be enough to drown out his sorrows—it was cheap, after all—but he could try. Burr had never been an alcoholic; he’d spent his time in childhood and college mostly sober. This one night, he planned to surrender himself to Bacchus. There’d be time for soda water the morning after. The first shot burnt his throat, a far cry from the expensive, imported wine he’d enjoyed in the days of his heyday. But his aim was inebriation, not refinement; and in terms of the former, hard liquor worked as fine as Bordeaux.
Drink number four. The evening now a tolerable blur. Stupor, torpor, languor: vices as sweet and heady as Merlot. The Aeneid, calling to him once again: as beckoning and unresistible as the Box of Pandora. He acquiesced, consigned to the whims of that capricious master, alcohol; deigned to draw from the sortes Virgilinae, Virgilian lots, in which Roman emperors and British monarchs of years past would open the Aeneid at random, then divine their futures from the resulting line. One rumored attestation to King Charles I. Rather pagan, if one were to ask Burr—but on this godless January night, bibliomancy did appeal to him.
The shield of Aeneas was the auspice greeting him: prophesying the future history of Rome, Aeneas’ descendants yet unborn. His augury lay somewhere within its ekphrasis. The fratricidal twins, the seizure of the Sabines. The rock of Tarpeia. Below them, Actium, and Augustus’ aurea saecula, Golden Age. Glory and effulgence. Were they his for the taking? The whiskey was blurring his vision.
Tantareas sedes. Scelerum poenas. Those were where his lots were laid: the seats of Tartarus, the punishment for wickedness. He took a breath, and read the exact doublet his finger had landed upon:
et scelerum poenas, et te, Catilina, minaci
pendentem scopulo Furiarumque ora trementem.
And thou, Catiline, hung on a threatening cliff and
trembling before the sights of the Furies.
That name, Catiline. It took him back to that fateful day in July, Weehawken, New Jersey. Catiline—or “Cataline,” as he’d spelt it—was the byword Alexander Hamilton had branded him with in his private correspondence, which he’d then published for the pleasure of all Congress to behold.
“He is truly the Cataline of America.”
“Every step in his career proves that he has formed himself upon the model of Catiline.”
Hamilton had misspelled the name, as he was often wont to. An education in the West Indies had failed to provide the bastard child with his ars grammatica, Burr had joked in society dinners and gatherings, later—but the blow to his honor was evident to all, including himself.
Catiline, the senator-turned-conspirator of the Roman Republic. Born the scion of a once-great patrician line; reared as the next consul in line to restore honor and nobilitas, renown, to his family name. From such exalted heights did he fall, then; and what a spectacular fall it was. Pride goeth before the fall.
Catiline, who turned to conspiracy when he’d fallen one step short of the grand prize in the cursus honorum. Drinking the blood of butchered slave boys in some obscure ritual; planning arson, murder, coup d’etat. When those grander schemes were foiled in turn, he fled the city; in his self-imposed exile, he plotted one last insurrection in the outskirts of Pistoia, where he fell in battle with little fanfare as a disgrace to his forefathers. Immortalized in his infamy, or ignominy—and just barely, at that.
“The man considers himself a Tully!” Burr had mocked. The nouveau riche—they all yearned to put on the air of a philologist, as if to compensate for the want of classical education in their earlier years. Nevertheless, the error in spelling notwithstanding, Hamilton had put out something like a prophecy, that day, or a curse. A malediction to dog his life with whispers of conspiracy, real or rumored, for the rest of his days—even after, especially after, he’d shot and killed Hamilton that fatal day in Weehawken.
Vertigo, delirium. The Aeneid cast aside, now strewn across on the floor—no matter, thought Burr. The verses bespeaking his lot were engraved in his mind: thou, Catiline, hanging onto a threatening cliff and trembling before the Furies—or some rendition of that. What was it to him, the minutiae of the English? The Latin spoke clear enough to him, of what awaited the likes of him: the fiery pits of Hell, or Tartarus. Eternal damnation. That wasn’t what had incensed him so, no; he’d long harbored the suspicion whether the pearly gates would be what really greeted him, upon his death. He’d made his peace with it. No, what maddened him so was that his life, his living life—or what meagre years remained of it—had cast over it the shadow and spectre of that man.
When he killed Hamilton, Burr thought he was freeing himself from the influence of that man from his political career. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. That singular act came to define him. Become him. It granted Hamilton the apotheosis he’d always wished for; it reduced Burr to a thing lurking in the shadows. As the moon is entrapped in perpetuity in orbit about a mass greater than itself—so did confine himself into the bonds of a satellite, bound to a dead man for the rest of his life.
His political career was over the moment Hamilton expired. Or perhaps, the moment he fired the pistol with the intent to kill. Burr knew that. He fled west, and when he was caught, he fled across the Atlantic— aware the whole time of some malevolent presence hanging over him like a bad omen, or ill-will. He’d not made peace with it, no; but he’d come to accept it at least. His bit of penance to carry. Consummatum est.
But the ghost had taken a rather vindictive turn lately; no longer appeased with only the ruin of his public life, it now seemed to demand the perdition of his private one as well. Blood sacrifice to exact satisfaction. Altars stained red. His grandson. His daughter. Yes, this was to be his lot.
Burr stood up; the world spun around him. The bottle of liquor he’d had beside him was curiously empty and the air felt stiflingly stale. Fresh air, that’s what he needed. He decided to step outside his quarters. Into the inky depths of the January night, armed with the page of the Aeneid bearing his sors Virgiliana (as a talisman of sorts? periapt?), Burr set forth.
The midnight sky shone radiant with moonlight. The streets of New York beckoned him forward. The lamp-lights in the sleepless city cast a hallucinatory glow as he roved beneath them. When he reached the banks of the Hudson River, he felt it churn. Directed by some sense of duty—less obligation and more resignation, perhaps—Burr called over a ferry, paid his Charonian obols, and crossed what his rational mind knew to be the Hudson—yet to his addled eyes, seemed like the Styx.
When he disembarked, the vista that stretched before him was one of endless green. Not the verdant, lush green that decorated countrysides and called for pastorals and eclogues, but the dull green recalling the fields of asphodel, of yore. New Jersey was a backwoods as undeveloped as all those years ago. The promontory upon which he found himself roaming listlessly was as they’d left it that day: the looming cedars, the towering blank rocks of the Palisades.
Tempus fugit, he thought.
There was a piece of marble that he did not recognize, he realized. The lurid rays of the moon illuminated its face; though it was badly cracked and in considerable disrepair, Burr could make out the words of the slab, faint but barely legible:
INCORRUPTA FIDES NUDAQUE VERITAS QUANDO ULLUM INVENIENT PAREM?
MULTIS ILLE BONIS FLEBILIS OCCIDIT.
Uncorrupted faith and naked truth. Burr fought the compulsion to laugh. Horace, what perverted irony. Somebody must have come by and placed the monument in some year past—a forlorn, lonesome cenotaph. Death had made a martyr out of him, if not a saint. He dies, lamented by many good men. When shall they ever find an equal to him?
He was mistaken in coming to this accursed place, Burr thought. In the fog of alcohol, he’d followed the whims of baseless fears—superstition, that was their base—and erred and wandered through the dead of the night, to somewhere he ought never to have returned. This was folly, this was madness. He turned away from the piteous slab of marble on the ground. May you rest in peace, he offered, an empty placation and vain. Requiescat in pace. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Standing in the distance, he saw, was a hazy figure—that of a man, but emanating a faint light, and flickering into existence only when the moon caught on the waves of the river and lent it a reflection of its light. A figure too great in size, yet too formless in matter to be human. It was enshrouded on all sides save for the waterfront by cedar trees reaching towards the skies, and beckoned him towards the water’s edge—and as Burr made his across the bluff’s length with staggered steps and hastened breaths, he recalled, seeing the branches enveloping them both, that the object that Hamilton’s wayward bullet had struck was a cedar branch, out of all things. The day after the man died, their seconds—both his and Burr’s—had revisited this cursed place, and found a branch fallen a way off from where Burr had stood on that day—four feet wide from where he had stood, Hamilton had never intended to kill him, had he?—with a hole burrowed right through, the unmistakable bore of a flintlock. But Burr wanted to stand before the jury, as he had in Virginia before and Marshall (who would be his arbitrator now? God? the figure before him?) and plead: was this better, having lived?
Was he to demand satisfaction, clasp its knees in supplication? He would never know. A stretch of cloud obscured the moon overhead, and darkness enveloped them both; as light as the wind, as fleet as a dream, the image fled from his hands that were grasping out in vain.
Morgan Kim is a current junior at Memorial High School, Houston, Texas. She finds the history and mythology of the ancient world fascinating---particularly that of ancient Rome, and some of ancient Greece. She writes, reads, and occasionally speaks Latin somewhat well. She is trying to learn Classical Greek to some success. Her favorite author is M. Tullius Cicero. She has previously won the National Silver Medal from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.
