In January of that hapless year I was seen entering a theater by one of the Columbia masters. It was, at that time, against the rules to attend such corrupting entertainments. I was sternly warned to mend my ways. Three weeks later, I was espied buying a ticket to The Prince of Parthia and was expelled the next morning.
This disgrace quickly sobered my mind. I removed into the city proper and launched a career as a painter of miniature portraits. When I had exhausted distant relations as clients (mother’s great-aunt Mrs. Gribble, her niece the bovine Fanny Dawes) my commissions grew strangely scarce. Too short of coin now to attend the theaters, I haunted the coffeehouses where raged the political controversies of the day, and attached myself into the Hamiltonian fold—for like the great Bahamian bastard, I believed that a little democracy, like a little knowledge, is a dangerous thing. Had it gone on like this I might have abandoned my easel for the rough and tumble of politics, but a scheme for my rehabilitation had already been set into motion by Papa, and on a rainy March morning I received a letter from his brother, my uncle, summoning me to Owl’s Crossing, where “fruitful employment of a patriotic nature” was promised to “an ambitious and able-bodied young man eager to issue upon the world’s attention.”
Let me sketch for you a portrait of Uncle William as he stood in his garden under the white oak tree (Quercus alba) so many years ago.
He is dictating a letter intended for Professor Doctor Olaf Lagerlöf of Upsala, Sweden, heir to the university chair of the demigod Carolus Linnaeus, father of modern natural science. Why? Because this humble Quaker husbandman is himself the new nation’s preeminent botanist! A charter member of the American Philosophical Society, soldier in the War of Independence, friend of Dr. Rush, Charles Willson Peale, and Ben Franklin, correspondent to all the great scientific minds of his day, founder of the Philadelphia Society for the Recovery of the Recently Drowned, Uncle William is recognized by all the great European citadels of learning—Edinburgh, London, Paris, Leipzig, Upsala. He is the discoverer of no less than 1,488 species of New World plants. Before his death in ’78, the great Linnaeus himself christened three species after Uncle: a spike-leafed dogbane (Apocynum walkerania), a showy pogonia (Triphora walkera), and a downy bladderwort (Utricularia walkerania).
Where Papa is tall and trim, Uncle is five feet, five inches and as stout as a cask. Yet a zest for the labors of botany keeps him stronger than men half his age, which is sixty-one years. At home this first warm day of spring, he wears his linen shirt open at the throat, for he has been working among the plantings of his renowned garden since breakfast. His breeches are buff velvet, once part of a fine suit, now patched and threadbare. His old cocked hat shows the remnant of an egret plume. Now it merely serves to ward off the sun’s chastening rays. His boots are muddy and cracked. None of this should suggest that Uncle has fallen upon evil times, nor that he is any species of sloven. He owns, as a matter of fact, several good French suits. These are work clothes.
In coiffure, Uncle bears a striking resemblance to Dr. Franklin. He is bald—the family curse!—and wears what remains to his shoulder, sans queue. His prominent chin bears a deep cleft. As he smiles, two even rows of teeth are displayed. Uncle has never smoked tobacco (though he grows specimens of Nicotiana in his garden), and likewise avoids sugar, which he claims has a degenerative effect. He is thus better equipped for chewing at sixty-one than myself at nineteen—I having surrendered three inflamed molars already to the surgeon’s terrible tongs!
It was in Uncle’s garden that I learned of our forthcoming interview at Washington City with his friend President Jefferson, upon what business he would not say (for at that time he did not know the reason for his summons). Because I was a Hamilton man, such a prospect for me compared as a meeting with Beelzebub himself, and I said so.
“Thy Papa writes that thou art quite an ardent of the Federalist faction.”
“I read the Evening Post,” I replied coyly, alluding to the newspaper that published my idol’s writings—he owned it. “And you are a Republican, sir?”
Uncle smiled.
“I am as much an admirer of Mr. Jefferson, Sammy, as thee of Publius,” Uncle wryly bandied one of Hamilton’s noms de plume. “Two days hence thee shall meet thy devil in his own sulfurous chamber, ho ho…!”
And so we did.
1
In the year 1803, our nation’s capital was less a city than an idea for a city. Upon a hill at one end stood the one-story brick monstrosity built for the deliberations of Congress. It was dubbed “the Oven” by those condemned to sit in it through the hellish Potomac summer. At the other end of the Columbian District lay Georgetown, described by Abigail Adams as “a dirty little hole.” In between Congress’s hall and Georgetown ran a muddy wagon road, now called Pennsylvania Avenue.
Not far from the brackish tidal swamp that was the Potomac, abode of oysters, gulls, and raccoons, stood the President’s house. It was not only unfinished, but the work was going ahead so slowly that portions had already begun to collapse. The ceiling above the public audience chamber, for instance, had recently caved in. Living in this fashion was nothing new for the great renovator of Monticello. He was well used to life among the scaffolds and falling brickbats and might have felt uneasy in a dwelling that did not admit the seasons as well as the sunlight. But here I revert to the sarcasms of my youth; for though an eccentric, Massa Tom, as he was then disparaged by his Federalist foes, was anything but a fool.
We arrived at the President’s mansion shortly before eleven o’clock in the morning, April 10, after a pleasant walk of several miles from our lodgings at Rupert and MacSneed’s Hotel, near Congress’s chamber. Spring comes earlier to the Potomac Valley than to New York, or even Philadelphia, and was already well under way, botanically speaking. The dogwoods (Cornus) were abloom and the magnolia (Magnolia) buds as big as sugarplums. The air resounded sweetly with the melodies of songbirds. Uncle plucked two new species before we even reached our destination—a creeping pink wood poppy (Stylophorum) and a lance-leafed buttercup (Ranunculus)—and he was therefore in gay spirits when we arrived at the President’s gate.
We entered the mansion via a temporary wooden staircase at the unfinished north front. Inside was a gloomy jumble of furniture covered with plaster dust. Sawdust motes danced in a column of sunlight that came down through a hole in the roof. The thump of carpenters’ hammers echoed from a distant wing. Suddenly there was a rumble, and then a thundering crash, as of falling lumber.
“Listen, Uncle, to the Republican method of house-building, ha ha!”
“Mind thy tongue, nephew!” he rejoined in an amiable, jesting spirit. “Does thee know what the President does with agents of the opposing faction? Eh?”
“No, Uncle.”
“Why, he has a big strapping buck of a slave, fully seven feet and a half, and keeps the brute in an earthen pit back of the mansion, where the wretch is starved and made delirious with hunger. To this forsaken devil, Mr. Jefferson delivers all those who would oppose his schemes for selling the nation to the Spaniards, ho ho.”
“That is dry humor,” I observed. A howl of pain erupted from the distant wing and the hammering stopped.
“Why, there goes one now,” Uncle exclaimed with delight.
“Pshaw,” scoffed I. “’Tis only a carpenter.”
“Vengeful Tom is not choosy,” Uncle drew out the conceit. “A carpenter here, an editor there, every so often a young painting-fellow as thyself. ’Tis all the same to him.”
A servant in the President’s livery took our names and escorted us to a waiting room beside Mr. Jefferson’s office chamber. We were shown chairs. A score of gentlemen (and a few not so gentle) stood gravely or sat around the room. The smoke from their pipes reminded me of the political evenings in the taverns and coffee shops of New York. One whiffed in it the very odor of intrigue, schemes,