The Wages of Fame Page 5

  Caroline found Taylor’s labyrinthine prose almost impenetrable. But she had no difficulty getting the message John Sladen wanted her to receive. No woman who claimed to be a champion of more freedom for her sex—and for people in general—should consider marrying that quintessential aristocrat George Stapleton.

  John descanted to her on what he considered the most important turning point in American history—when the Republicans, the disciples of Thomas Jefferson, fought the Federalists, the followers of Alexander Hamilton, and apparently won a great victory in the year 1800, thanks to Aaron Burr’s political wizardy in New York. Only to have President Jefferson announce in his inaugural address, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”

  This fatal Jeffersonian compromise left America adrift between aristocracy and democracy, John told her. “It’s up to our generation to rescue democracy.”

  Sladen was by no means the only man who harbored such violent thoughts in 1828. People were bewildered by the rapid rise of factories and financial markets. Down on Wall Street men were making and losing fortunes speculating on stocks in textile and steamboat and turnpike companies, while the cities filled up with immigrant laborers and ex-farmers who could no longer make a living on the land.

  On their walks, John Sladen showed Caroline the other New York that existed beside the glittering houses of the rich—people living in cellars and attics, often without heat during the bitter winters. He pointed out the prostitutes prowling even respectable streets such as Broadway, desperate women who had been reduced to selling their bodies for a few dollars a night. He took her to his mother’s boardinghouse on Maiden Lane, where two dozen workingmen lived, some trying to save enough money to marry, others with a wife and a child crammed in one room, hoping for promotion or a windfall that would enable them to buy a house. He introduced her to his sad-faced, harassed mother, her hair gray, her back stooped from making too many beds. She was a stunning contrast to Angelica Stapleton’s sleek haughty resplendence.

  One day John took Caroline to a rally organized by the Democrats of Tammany Hall. She heard orators call for a ten-hour day for every laborer instead of the current sunup to sundown. She heard other speakers denounce the smug superiority of the rich. “Did Thomas Jefferson write all men were created equal or didn’t he? How is it that some people eat prime beef off fine china while others live on stale bread and soup?” roared a red-faced man named Samuel Swartout.

  After the rally John introduced Swartout as his “second father.” A barrel of a man with a booming voice and a nose that seemed to have spent too much time in a liquor glass, Swartout told her “Johnny” was the cleverest young man in all New York. That was why he and Colonel Burr had taken up a collection among the Tammany faithful to create a scholarship fund to send him to Columbia.

  “He’s the last of the Burrites,” John said as Swartout turned to greet other listeners.

  “How does he live?” Caroline asked. Swartout’s clothes were threadbare.

  “He was a customs inspector until recently. The aristos have turned him out. I fear he’s now depending on the generosity of friends.”

  Sometimes they sat in St. John’s Park and read the newspapers. John knew the story behind all the political headlines. Each paper had its own bias, which he expertly explained. He was equally well informed about personal stories. He pointed to a description of an elaborate funeral for a businessman at Brick Presbyterian Church.

  “They say he died of overwork, but the real killer was laudanum,” John said. “He’d gone bankrupt last month.”

  This painkiller, mixed with liquor, was often used by suicides. One of the oddities of Young America, with its furious pursuit of profits and prosperity, was the sharp rise in suicides as a side effect of the numerous bankruptcies.

  Caroline said she could not imagine taking her own life. How could any person do it?

  Sladen glowered at her. “It can be an honorable choice for a defeated man. I don’t believe my father fell off that Ohio steamboat.”

  Once more John Sladen stirred that dangerous emotion, pity, in Caroline’s heart. Pity not only for the fallen and forlorn and struggling in New York but for him, who could so easily tepple back into that squalid world. It was essentially the same emotion that had stirred George Stapleton and Jeremy Biddle to offer John their friendship. But with Caroline, the emotion had a different, far more ominous timbre. She saw Sladen’s essential loneliness and it stirred a response in her own lonely heart. She too had tasted the darkness of poverty and a dismal future. Finally there was the physical man, the slim angular body, so different from George Stapleton’s huge muscular frame, the harsh bony face with its perpetual semiscowl, on which an occasional smile was like a burst of light.

  Suddenly Caroline wanted to share her most painful secret with him: “My father died a terrible death too. He was captured by Indians during the War of 1812 in Ohio. They dug a deep pit and made him stand up in it while they packed dirt all around him. Then they scalped him. He lived for another three hours, begging them to kill him. Finally they built a fire behind his head and kept it going until there was nothing left but a whitened skull.”

  John lifted her hands to his heart and held them there in a wordless gesture of sympathy. Tears streamed down Caroline’s cheeks. “That’s why I don’t believe in God,” Caroline said. “Why I’ll never believe in Him.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” John said.

  George Stapleton waged a totally different campaign for Caroline’s love. On weekends he took her to dinner in the dining rooms of the best hotels. He invited her to balls at these glittering emporiums, or at private houses. One afternoon they went to John Vanderlyn’s art gallery, where the popular painter displayed immense panoramas of London and Paris. George talked casually of visiting these great cities as a boy with his mother. He pointed out the palaces, the museums, the famous restaurants.

  “How I yearn to show these things to you,” he said.

  “How I yearn to see them,” Caroline said. Silently she added, But must I marry you to get there? More and more, she disliked the way George seemed to think he could bribe her into capitulation. George did not think of it that way, of course. He was doing what came naturally to a rich young man. But he badly misjudged the depth and intensity of Caroline’s pride.

  A month or so after taking Caroline to the Tammany meeting, John Sladen played his trump card. He arranged a meeting with Aaron Burr. He led her down Frankfort Street to a narrow, rather ramshackle three-story building. Beside its door was a faded sign: A. BURR, ATTORNEY AT LAW. Mounting dusty wooden stairs, they knocked on the door and found a clerk toiling over a piece of foolscap. “Is Colonel Burr free?” John asked.

  In a moment Caroline was being greeted by an affable, gray-haired man whose coat sleeves were frayed and his shirt faded from too much washing. “This is Caroline Kemble from Ohio, Colonel,” John said. “The young woman I mentioned to you. Her father signed up with you in 1806.”

  “Sit down, Miss Kemble,” Aaron Burr said. “I remember your father as one of the most enthusiastic members of my little band. John has told me about your extraordinary interest in history and politics. Some of the books he’s loaned you came from my shelves. But he utterly failed to convey a true estimate of your beauty.”

  It was hard to believe this sad-eyed shabby old man had once been vice president of the United States and hobnobbed with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. His voice was remarkably youthful, and the sadness diminished in his eyes as he talked about his passionate belief in the education of women. He told Caroline how he had taught his daughter, Theodosia, to speak French at age four. He described the course of studies he had given her—Latin, Greek, mathematics—which equaled anything taught at Princeton or Columbia. Caroline found herself charmed, even fascinated, by the strange authority Burr emanated. She could see why her father and John Sladen’s father had believed in him.

  “Read the best books, my dear Miss Kemble, the old ones
and the new ones,” Burr said. “Only by acquaintance with our greatest minds can you live without illusions.”

  “Do you equate that with happiness?” Caroline asked.

  “Of course not. Happiness is a gift of fate. But the best writers—above all the historians—will enable you to accept what fate disposes.”

  Caroline was touched by the elegiac tone. She knew from John Sladen that she was seeing a man in the wreckage of his life—his daughter, Theodosia, drowned at sea, his name synonymous with treason in most circles. She found herself admiring Aaron Burr’s mournful dignity.

  “Mr. Burr, what were you doing on the Mississippi in 1806? Were you simply hoping to get rich? My father always defended you against that charge.”

  Aaron Burr sat back in his chair for a moment, gazing at Caroline with new admiration. “She is extraordinary,” he said to John Sladen.

  Burr paused for another long moment and began, “I was pursuing fame, Miss Kemble. The same prize I was pursuing when I looked down the wrong end of Alexander Hamilton’s pistol. It’s a prize that your generation no longer understands. You tend to confuse fame with notoriety, thanks to our ubiquitous newspapers. But for the men of my era, fame was the greatest honor a man could wrest from history. Ultimate fame belonged to those who were conditores imperiorum, founders of states and empires. Men like Cyrus of Persia, Julius Caesar, Napoleon.”

  “You were going to found a new country in Texas?”

  “In Texas—and Mexico. That was our ultimate goal. Texas was the vast emptiness it remains today. But Mexico was a nation waiting to be born, a seething mass of Indians and mixed bloods and criollos oppressed by a thin veneer of rulers from Spain. Its gold and silver mines alone had the wealth to make it a major power. Texas would have been our American province, from which we ruled the entire region to the Isthmus of Panama.”

  “This is what you told my father?”

  Burr nodded.

  “He died when I was barely three years old. I’ve only overheard scraps of his dreams—from my mother.”

  “Texas still awaits its Americans,” Burr said. “They may yet become the rulers of Mexico. That country will be nothing but a barely organized chaos without American leadership. I was too early, too impatient to seize fame—too desperate for money to pay the debts I’d accumulated playing American politics—”

  He caught himself before anguish completely dominated his tone. After a brief inner struggle he regained his air of cool detachment. “We’re not here to catalog my misfortunes—but to salute the future that you and John represent. May you both devote yourselves to fame! Why shouldn’t women share it with men? They can do as much, perhaps more, to create it!”

  He leaned forward, talking almost exclusively to Caroline now. “Women by their very natures understand more of life’s paradoxes and contradictions. Perhaps they can help unravel the knottiest problem in an American search for fame. We want to be powerful—and good. Only a few of us understand we can’t be both things. At some point we must choose—and let fate decide the rest.”

  Caroline did not speak until John Sladen had returned her to the Stapleton town house on Beekman Street. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll never forget this day.”

  By this time spring was thawing the landscape—and George Stapleton played his trump card. He invited Caroline to spend the weekend with him in Bowood, the mansion that his grandfather had built on the banks of the Passaic River, not far from the family’s textile factory, Principia Mills. The bustling city of Hamilton had grown up around this industry, but Bowood remained an island of green peace in its hundred-acre park. The mansion was in the classical mode, somewhat resembling the White House in Washington, with a white-pillared portico over the entrance and two substantial wings of whitewashed brick. From Bowood, for the first two decades of the republic, the Congressman, as everyone called Hugh Stapleton in memory of his years spent in the Continental Congress of the Revolution, had ruled the political landscape of New Jersey.

  The death of his older son, George’s father, in the War of 1812 had deprived public life of much of its savor. In most of the country, because they failed to support the war, his Federalist party had been obliterated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison’s Republicans. Hugh Stapleton had retired from the U.S. Senate in 1818. But his wealth and political connections still made him a kind of paterfamilias to the state’s politicians. He was growing somewhat feeble as he approached his eighty-sixth birthday, but his mind remained clear and his judgment keen.

  He also quickly demonstrated he had not lost his eye for beautiful women. “My God!” he said as George escorted Caroline into Bowood’s main parlor. “It’s the goddess Athena in the flesh, come down to hector us petty mortals.”

  The comparison was apt. There was something goddesslike in the way Caroline moved and spoke. That day her regal beauty was enhanced by a new outfit, with an embroidered, colored-silk bodice and a white muslin skirt finished by more yards of brilliant embroidery. A straw hat with a half dozen soaring ostrich plumes added to her majesty.

  “I’m not wise enough to be a goddess,” Caroline said. “If I have to choose a woman out of old mythology, I prefer Helen of Troy. How glorious it must have been to have tens of thousands of Greeks and Trojans fighting to decide your destiny.”

  “I like a woman with large ambitions,” the Congressman said. “My daughter-in-law tells me this big lummox is madly in love with you.”

  “He hasn’t so much as mentioned it to me,” Caroline said, giving George a sly look.

  “How can I be more explicit?” George said.

  “How many times have I told you, George, poetry doesn’t get you anywhere,” the Congressman said. “American women want the offer stated in prose. They’re simultaneously the most romantic and the most realistic women in the civilized world. Would you agree with that, Miss Kemble?”

  “Absolutely,” Caroline said, liking the old man more and more. He still wore the knee breeches and tight waistcoats of the revolutionary era. But his eyes sparkled with shrewdness and gaiety. Here was a man who had won the crucial battles of his life and seemed unburdened by regrets.

  “I’m embarrassing you both with my salacious curiosity,” the Congressman said. “I’m afraid I’m anxious to see George get a running start in life. He has a certain tendency to indolence.”

  “Grandfather, I haven’t failed a single course at Columbia.”

  “I mean moral indolence, George. You seem to enjoy not being able to make up your mind about a career. Regrettable at a time when the country is crying out for leadership. What do you think, Miss Kemble?”

  “We seem to be adrift between aristocracy and democracy. I didn’t realize how adrift until I came to New York.”

  “A perfect analysis!” the Congressman said.

  For a moment Caroline felt guilty, remembering she had acquired this political wisdom from John Sladen. But why couldn’t women put a new twist on the adage that all was fair in love and war?

  “I want this young man to go into politics,” Hugh Stapleton said. “But he seems to flinch from the toil and trouble.”

  “Grandfather, it no longer seems to be a profession where a gentleman is welcomed—much less respected.”

  “Then stop being a gentleman!” the Congressman said. “Gentleman! That’s your mother’s starchy old New York nonsense. The Van Rensselaers have never gotten over owning half the Hudson River valley. The Stapletons were in business, politics, trade, from the start. Gentleman! My God, I wish you’d known my father. He was as big as you but he didn’t have a genteel bone in his body. He drank like a shipful of sailors and was happiest in the North woods with a bunch of Senecas, painted for the warpath. He was a bona fide member of their tribe. As for my mother, she sent gentlemen to bankruptcy court year in, year out because they didn’t read the fine print in the contracts they signed with her. When it came to ‘improving some moneys,’ as she liked to put it, Catalyntie Van Vorst Stapleton was the most dangerous business
woman in America.”

  Caroline listened to this marvelous monologue with amazement—and elation. This old man touched something important in her soul. She did not understand what it was, but she liked it. Did he know exactly what he was doing—imparting a vision of what she could achieve as George Stapleton’s wife? If George’s mother could fill his head with nonsense about being a gentleman, why couldn’t she fill it with this fascinating alternative? Why couldn’t she manage Congressman—Senator—yes, even President George Stapleton’s ascent to fame?

  FIVE

  THE CONGRESSMAN SEEMED TO SENSE the electric communion he had created with Caroline. He talked more to her than to George for the next hour as they sipped Chateau Y’Quem, Hugh Stapleton’s favorite wine. First he wanted to know what she thought of New York.

  “I adore it,” Caroline said.

  “I thought you might—from that letter your grandmother wrote me, describing you as a ‘woman of spirit.’ My dear wife had the same reaction, though with her it was complicated by her Quaker background. She was very beautiful and I bought her dresses by the dozen. When her mother came for a visit, she took one look at Hannah’s wardrobe and said. ‘Oh, my dear girl, I fear for thy salvation.’”

  They all laughed heartily at this quaint memory of a vanished America. The Congressman asked Caroline’s opinion of Miss Carter’s Female Seminary. “Abominable,” she said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Hugh Stapleton said. “The education of women in this supposedly progressive country is one of our chief disgraces. My wife never ceased drumming that idea into my head. We often regretted never having a daughter. We would have made sure she had first-class schooling, even if she turned into Mary Wollstonecraft.”