WILLIAM EATON’S HORSE trudged up Breakneck Hill, the final three hundred yards into Brimfield. Eaton was yet again returning home from Washington City with no money.
Burr, Bottle, and Six Feet Under
I am Eaton no more.
—WILLIAM EATON TO AN OLD FRIEND IN TUNIS, M. HUMBERT, 1810
WILLIAM EATON’S HORSE trudged up Breakneck Hill, the final three hundred yards into Brimfield. Eaton was yet again returning home from Washington City with no money.
Within days, he would be dunned for his wife’s debts racked up in his absence. A country store, Munger & Wales, sent him a note on May 28, 1806. “You will not take it unkind if we state to you that we are now making a settlement of all our old matters.” The family’s trifles over three years tallied about $20 and then a stove, recently bought, had added another $15. To Eaton, this kind of nuisance was like being nibbled to death by minnows.
He tried to reconcile with his family, enjoy his children, and slow down to the pace of small-town life, but for a man who had led a charge down the wadi in Derne, it wasn’t easy. “Tea parties, turkey suppers, apple bees, husking bees, spinning bees, quilting bees furnished almost the only amusement,” wrote a local minister.
Perhaps William and Eliza weren’t at complete loggerheads during this six-month stay because by late fall, Eliza became pregnant again (for her fifth time via William and eighth overall); and that signals at least moments, or a moment, of matrimonial bliss.
In Brimfield, with a population of 1,324, he was the town’s greatest military hero since Eliza’s previous husband, General Danielson. He bestrode the burgh like a colossus, so much so that some locals called him “The Great I” behind his back.
One Joseph Williams of nearby Springfield, Massachusetts, pitched him to run for Congress. Eaton declined. “I have already refused to be named as a party candidate,” he wrote. “The names Fed. & Demo, which at this moment, split the affections of our countrymen ought to be lost in the proud name of American.”
Thomas Jefferson, his Founding Father status notwithstanding, was despised throughout large swaths of New England for a pro-South bias. And in Brimfield, General Eaton made certain that everyone knew that he remained unrewarded and that his accounts remained unsettled because of Jefferson. He was the war hero, wronged.
Since Eaton was land rich, but cash poor, most merchants gave the hero the benefit of the doubt. However, to satisfy his most pressing creditors, he tried to mortgage or sell some properties. Eaton owned land in the western wilderness of Ohio from his army days, and his wife had inherited extensive Danielson acreage in the Brimfield area.
While sorting through various real estate transactions, some with the aid of his stepson Timothy, a remarkable letter fell into Eaton’s hands around early October, one that would have enormous implications for the United States and for Jefferson.
A prospective buyer, Morris Belknap, mentioned in passing that he had personally witnessed Aaron Burr beginning to put his vast conspiracy into action. He reported that Burr was secretly building boats on the Ohio River and signing up mercenaries to join his Spanish Expedition, and that American men were pledging allegiance to Burr. Eaton suddenly faced a huge dilemma. He had already vaguely warned the president in person about Burr, with negative results to show.
Roaming about his unpaid mansion, with his toddler son squalling and his daughters running here and there, Eaton pondered his options. Jefferson was surely the puppeteer who had manipulated Congress not to pay him, not to grant him a sword or a medal. Eaton’s name was never bandied about by the Cabinet for a command in the U.S. Army.
What should he do with this information about Burr’s actions to split the union and create a Jefferson-free western America?
Eaton, a patriot first, decided to send Belknap’s letter to the Department of State, and he contacted the postmaster general, Gideon Granger, to rush all information directly to the president about Burr’s activities. Granger’s letter, dated October 16, 1806, with Eaton’s signature on it, provided “the first formal intelligence received by the Executive on the subject of the conspirator being in motion.” (A decade later, Jefferson confirmed that fact in a letter to Granger.)
Eaton’s patriotism had trumped his personal animosity.
Jefferson received the news and authorized additional troops to go to Louisiana. He also sent confidential letters about Burr to the governors of Ohio, Indiana, and Mississippi, as well as to the district attorneys in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana “to have him strictly watched and on committing any overt act unequivocally, to have him arrested and tried for treason, misdemeanor or whatever other offense.”
Around Thanksgiving, word leaked to the newspapers about Eaton’s role in exposing Burr. The Boston Repertory printed a long account of what Eaton told the president. William Eaton, hero of the Mediterranean, was now point man for thwarting Burr. His name, in certain circles, rose higher and, among Jefferson Republicans, regained some luster.
Fame was one thing: Eaton was still broke, Hamet was still unrewarded, Lear was still unpunished; Eaton was still unemployed; liquor still helped start the day. Sip by sip, he dulled the pain, and nothing went unobserved in tattletale New England. When he made a business trip to Boston, the wife of John Quincy Adams wrote to her senator husband: “Wm Eaton . . . was frequently in a state of intoxication—that the better sort of people avoided him—& he was going out of fashion there.” That story spread in the rooming houses of the nation’s capital.
Meanwhile Eaton tried to settle into small-town life at Brimfield and bury the Tripoli war, but he just couldn’t do it. Projects such as building a new meetinghouse and picking the route for a state road occupied his time, but he was still very restless. He wrote to Senator Bradley that once he sorted out “the deranged state” of his affairs at home, he planned to head back down to Washington City to tend to unfinished business.
So, after Christmas, the forty-two-year-old ex-general departed Brimfield, and two weeks of slow travel later he moved into the Frost & Quinn, an elegant new boardinghouse in Washington City. Overstuffed chairs by the fireside welcomed the guests; the host placed a complimentary half pint of gin and of brandy every morning in the center of the dining room table. (New resident Senator Plumer was not happy to see Eaton arrive at the door.)
On February 6, 1807, a couple of inches of snow fell on Washington City, and around noon the storm gathered such force that one senator described it as a “hurricane” and “the strongest wind I ever witnessed.” The gale plucked the roofs off buildings, tipped carriages, and flung several elderly politicians to the ground.
That weather matched Eaton’s mood as he drafted yet another letter to Congress to demand a settlement of his claims.
“You cannot bring back to me nine years of active life—you cannot restore to me the strength of an arm but for actual disbursements for the benefit of our common country, whether voluntary or extorted, I have a right again to resort to your justice, and to believe that this justice will be no longer delayed.”
He summed up his misery: “The heavy expenses incident to an appeal to this Chancery for such a length of time . . . and at so great a distance from my home . . . have necessarily laid me under pecuniary responsibility to my friends. The suspense of another year must lodge me in prison.” With his penchant for drama, he asked the committee to pay him the money so that he could “ransom” himself.
Around this same time, Jefferson was trying to tighten the noose around Aaron Burr. A post messenger riding breakneck, exchanging horse after horse, reached Washington City and informed the president that the acting governor of Mississippi territory, with just thirty militiamen, had captured Burr near Natchez. Jefferson was extremely anxious to convict his former vice president of treason, because if Burr shook free and attacked Spanish territories, he might provoke a war.
With Burr alive and in custody, Jefferson now needed witnesses to help gain a conviction, and very few men had more firsthand knowledge of Burr’s schemes than William Eaton. Jefferson also feared that the courts—with their Federalist leanings—would probably slip every benefit of the doubt to Burr. Jefferson needed Eaton.
On the very same day—February 18—that news of Burr’s capture arrived, a congressman introduced a resolution to have the secretary of state settle William Eaton’s accounts “on principles of equity.” The timing of the resolution, after four fruitless years, certainly seems to confirm some kind of nod from Jefferson. It was a stunning turnaround. Also, that ornate phrase, “on principles of equity,” might very well represent a windfall for Eaton. A judge, or an auditor, usually evaluates a case on the grounds of justice, that is, on his interpretation of legal precedent or of laws enacted by government. “Equity” is a much vaguer concept, something akin to fairness and common sense, and offers great leeway for selective interpretation. An old legalism is that “Equity is in the eye of the beholder.”
A week later, the House passed the Eaton bill; now all that remained was for the Senate to vote on a similar resolution. Around this time, Jefferson was shocked to learn that a jury in Mississippi terrritory, showing frontier tolerance and a hatred of Spain, had refused to charge Burr and had released the man. The president, quite agitated, now hoped that a party of federal soldiers would capture Burr and bring him to Washington. With Burr slipping through the justice system, the president needed Eaton even more.
The Senate waited until the last day of the session, Tuesday, March 3, to bring up the Eaton settlement bill for a vote. That frantic afternoon, two dozen bills clogged the lectern, from compensation for Lewis and Clark to salt taxes.
Sometime toward evening, Eaton’s settlement bill came to a vote. The vote was close, with New England Federalist senators Plumer and John Quincy Adams both voting against Eaton. However, Jefferson’s Republicans pushed the final tally to 16 to 12 in Eaton’s favor. Thomas Jefferson signed the bill about an hour before Congress adjourned at midnight.
Eaton had finally won a round in Washington City. While congressmen rushed to board stages in the snow, Eaton was quite pleased to linger to await his final settlement. The following week the federal auditor shaved every number and tilted every calculation in Eaton’s favor. The justified expenses based on “principles of equity” added up to the weighty sum of $51,019; to which was added $2,420 of interest, dating back to April 9, 1803. Included in the figures approved by the auditor was $4,837 for the “Acco.t of the Chev. Porcilla for the redemption of his daughter.” In effect, the United States under Thomas Jefferson had agreed to pay for the purchase of the beautiful Italian slave girl, Anna.
This $53,439 of newly approved expenses was offset against Eaton’s last balance sheet, in which he owed $40,803, leaving the U.S. government to pay William Eaton $12,636. That was a princely sum, a lifetime of wages for many Americans.
Would the money make him whole? Would he accept it as a vindication of his actions in Tripoli?
He boarded stagecoaches and hired carriages and returned home. A coachman asked him for a tip. Eaton tossed him an American Eagle ten-dollar gold piece, and told him to keep the change.
He returned to Brimfield in April 1807, and Eliza soon after gave birth to Nathaniel Sykes Eaton. Now he was a moneyed war hero. Brimfield voted him to represent the district in the state legislature, placing him instead of his friend Stephen Pynchon.
However, before Eaton could attend the Massachusetts Legislature in Boston, with its five-hundred-plus delegates, he was summoned to testify at the Aaron Burr trial in Richmond, Virginia.
Eaton arrived in Richmond during the summer of 1807 ranking as one of the nation’s leading—and most controversial—citizens. The elite of the United States were converging there for this extraordinary trial in which the president was aiming to convict his former running mate of treason. Richmond’s population doubled to more than 10,000 as frontiersmen tipped their beaver hats to New York society dames, and farmers rubbed elbows with swells. A man could easily find a drink and a card game; man-to-man bets abounded on the outcome of the trial.
William Eaton fell right into this thrum of conviviality; he played cards and drank while lawyerly motions delayed the start of the trial for weeks. Eaton believed Burr, with whom he had spent many hours, guilty of treason. Never shy, he laid wagers, some perhaps as high as $500, on the outcome of the trial.
And Burr’s lawyers and friends—to bolster the defense and discredit a witness—attacked Eaton’s character, even planting articles in the local newspapers. They accused him of wanting to join Burr on his expedition, and then betraying Burr to save himself. They also bad-mouthed Eaton’s exploits in Barbary as an overrated tale.
Eaton could have ignored the taunts; he could have thrived in Richmond, buttonholing wealthy influential men for higher office, but something happened to him that summer in Virginia, something that had been building since the shameful midnight exit from Derne. During the month waiting for the trial to begin, his inner demons from the Tripoli war overwhelmed him. The $12,000 payout had clearly not made him whole. The war was clearly not over. He tossed around the government’s money in card games; he drank whiskey, lots of it. He still craved praise from Jefferson and justice for Hamet.
Some days, he looked worse than others. “The once redoubted Eaton has dwindled down in the eyes of this sarcastic town into a ridiculous mountebank strutting about the streets under a tremendous hat, with a Turkish sash over coloured clothes,” wrote one of Burr’s coconspirators, Harman Blennerhassett. “When . . . tippling in the taverns . . . [Eaton] offers up with his libations the bitter effusions of his sorrows.”
That was Blennerhassett’s opinion and, with his life on the line, he clearly had an incentive to portray Eaton in the worst light.
After numerous preliminaries, the trial finally opened on August 3, with Chief Justice John Marshall presiding.
The prosecution—with Jefferson calling the shots—chose Eaton to be its first witness. Months of anticipation had built to this moment.
To Eaton and to Burr, this was a duel without bullets. Both men’s reputations were at stake. The two former Army officers were both well dressed in high white collars and long dark jackets befitting the occasion; Burr of Manhattan, though shorter and balder, cut a more elegant figure than Eaton of Brimfield.
In the packed courtroom, held in the Virginia House of Delegates to accommodate the overflow, Eaton began dramatically by preempting the lawyers and making a statement.
“Concerning any fact which may go to prove treason against Colonel Burr, I know nothing. Concerning certain transactions which are said to have happened at Blennerhasset’s island, I know nothing; but concerning Colonel Burr’s expressions and his treasonable intentions, I know much; and it is to those my evidence relates.”
With this large prestigious crowd, Eaton couldn’t resist the temptation to speak about his own issues, to justify his conduct in Tripoli. Eaton would exonerate Eaton. He explained how Burr had approached him and why he would have seemed a ripe candidate for this treasonous expedition.
EATON: I had but a short time before been compelled ingloriously to strike the flag of my country from the ramparts of a defeated enemy, where it had flown for forty-five days. I had been compelled to abandon my comrades in war on the fields where they had fought our battles. I had seen cash offered to the half-vanquished chief of Tripoli as the price of pacification.
The Prosecutor interjected: By whom?
EATON: By our negotiator when as yet no exertion had been made by our naval squadron to coerce the enemy. I had seen the conduct of the author of these blemishes on our then proud national character, if not commended, not censured; whilst my own inadequate efforts to support that character were attempted to be thrown into shade. . . . Here I beg leave to observe in justice to myself, that however strong those expressions, however harsh the language I employed, they could not justify the inference that I was prepared to dip my sabre in the blood of my countrymen, much less of their children, which I believe would have been the case had this conspiracy been carried into effect.
Burr’s attorney, Mr. Luther Martin, leaped up to object to Eaton’s lurid language regarding Burr’s expedition. Justice Marshall sustained the objection.
Eaton was clearly becoming more animated with every sentence, and the defense waited eagerly to needle Eaton into embarrassing himself. When Burr and his lawyers began to cross-examine the government’s star witness, it’s clear they wanted to show him up as a befuddled drunk and a purchased witness.
Defense lawyer Martin cleverly used the word drunk several times in his opening questions in various contexts before moving on to the issue of Eaton’s recent settlement with the federal government.
MR. MARTIN: What balance did you receive?
MR. EATON: That is my concern, sir.
Aaron Burr, famous for his slippery geniality, followed up his lawyer’s attack.
MR. BURR: What was the balance against you?
MR. EATON (TO THE COURT): Is that a proper question?
MR. BURR: My object is manifest; I wish to show the bias which has existed on the mind of the witness.
Burr’s wit drew snickers from the crowd.
The chief justice saw no objections to the question.
MR. EATON: I cannot say to a cent or a dollar, but I have received about 10,000 dollars.
Burr now shifted to a new topic, one designed to show blustery Eaton as fantasizing about having an important role in Burr’s enterprise. But the strategy would backfire.
MR. BURR: You spoke of a command?
MR. EATON: You stated . . . that you were assured . . . that an army would be ready to appear when you went to the waters of the western country. . . . You spoke of your riflemen, your infantry, your cavalry. It was with the same view you mentioned to me that that man [pointing to General Wilkinson] was to have been the first to aid you, and from the same views you have perhaps mentioned me.
Mr. Martin objected to the witness interposing his own opinions in this manner.
MR. HAY (government prosecutor): Some allowance is to be made for the feelings of a man of honor.
Mr. Eaton, bowing, apologized to the court for the warmth of his manner.
MR. BURR: You spoke of my revolutionizing the western states. How did you understand that the Union was to be separated?
MR. EATON: Your principal line was to be drawn by the Allegheny mountains. You were persuaded that you had secured to you the most considerable citizens of Kentucky and Tennessee, but expressed some doubts about Ohio; I well recollect that on account of the reason which you gave: that they were too much of a plodding, industrious people to engage in your enterprise.
Now, Eaton was playing to the crowd.
MR. BURR: How was the business to be effected?
MR. EATON: I understood that your agents were in the western country; that the army and the commander-in-chief were ready to act at your signal; and that these, with the adventurers that would join you, would compel the states to agree to a separation. Indeed, you seemed to consider New Orleans as already yours, and that from this point you would send expeditions into the other provinces, make conquests, and consolidate your empire.
MR. BURR: Was it after all this that you recommended me to the president for an embassy?
That was a snide question.
MR. EATON: Yes; to remove you, as you were a dangerous man, because I thought it the only way to avert a civil war.
Burr then asked Eaton if he had ever rejected Burr’s offer of a command in the army.
MR. EATON: No . . . I determined to use you until I got everything out of you; and on the principle that, “when innocence is in danger, to break faith with a bad man is not fraud, but virtue.”
The supposed drunk had come prepared. In this public clash of the titanic egos, Eaton had been bloodied but had survived Burr’s fire.
After Eaton, the prosecution’s case staggered as Chief Justice Marshall, a longtime foe of Jefferson, ruled repeatedly in favor of the defense, signaling that he would probably demand proof of physical actions of treason, not merely evidence of Burr’s pipe dreams shared over drinks.
As the lawyers haggled, Eaton drank and played poker and wagered on the outcome of the trial. He seems to have wagered in favor of a treason conviction simply because he believed that to be the correct verdict. A scrap of paper reveals just how much Eaton was risking. On August 21, he sent a rush letter to moneylenders Theodore & Herman Eli in New York City; he requested permission to draw $500 on account and promised to pay them back on his next trip north. He cited as his reason for this somewhat odd request the favorable loan rates in New York. The implication, however, was that his credit was tapped out in Richmond. Eaton had received $12,000 in March in Washington City; he had paid off some of his debts; how was it possible that he needed $500 in Richmond in August?
The inescapable conclusion is that hard liquor, a deck of cards, and a bitter heart make a very dangerous combination. His love of risk and his bullheadedness doomed him as a gambler.
On August 31, Chief Justice Marshall—as expected—delivered his narrow opinion that the government must restrict itself to showing overt actions by Burr; the prosecution reluctantly abandoned its case the following day.
Jefferson was appalled, and so was Eaton, who lost considerable sums and prestige on the verdict. Eaton left no record of his gambling losses, but another clue is that on September 3, 1807, he sold property in Ohio to Morris Belknap, the man who had sent the letter that had tipped him off to Burr’s movements.
The president, outraged that Burr might remain a “rallying point” for the “disaffected and worthless of the U.S.,” wrote to prosecutor George Hay to pursue misdemeanor charges. Jefferson’s decision to chase lesser charges meant that the handful of government witnesses must remain marooned in Richmond for the indefinite future. Eaton, with time to kill, continued to frequent inns such as the famed Eagle Tavern, where just two years prior a dinner had been held in his honor. He lost more money; liquor was his constant anodyne.
The misdemeanor cases against Burr also suffered a long slow death. On October 19, when it became clear to the prosecutor that General Wilkinson would not make a credible witness, George Hay abandoned those cases as well. Burr walked free; Eaton piled more bitterness onto his plate. His imbibing had never been light, but during the summer of 1807 he passed from excessive carouser (in an age of drinking) to borderline drunk. The false accusations by Burr’s stalwarts at the beginning of the trial were coming true.
In late autumn in Washington City when Congress returned to session, Burr and Tripoli and everything else were suddenly pushed aside by the very real threat of war. Everyone wondered how the United States would respond to England’s latest insult at sea. The HMS Leopard had laid a broadside into the USS Chesapeake when the latter refused to allow the British to search for deserters. Most everyone expected war. Monomaniacal William Eaton, however, was still stuck fighting his battles in the Mediterranean.
On November 3, Eaton relayed an unctuous eight-month-old letter from Hamet to Congress. “In the depth of my miseries,” Hamet had written from Syracuse, “my only consolation has been the reliance I placed on the powerful support of a republic so distinguished throughout the world for that justice which protects and sustains whoever confides himself to her patronage.”
And Eaton wrote yet another plea to the Committee of Claims, imploring them on the grounds of “honor, justice and humanity” to give Hamet more than $200 a month.
The Mediterranean was last year’s war. Eaton could not rouse even his Federalist friends to Hamet’s side. These nights, in his boardinghouse room in Washington City, Eaton filled his notebooks with bile against the administration and especially against Lear and that man’s empty excuses for negotiating peace.
“The danger of the American prisoners in Tripoli? What! A soldier in danger! such an apprehension . . . from a lovesick girl or a doting mother . . . might not have excited contempt but when it is made the subterfuge . . . by an ambassador. Who can restrain that nation’s indignation?”
Then Eaton took aim at Jefferson’s interpretation of a “co-operation” between allies. “Supposing I had said to [Hamet] that it was our object & intention to co-operate with him till a favorable occasion should offer and then dispose of him? Where is the wretch abject enough not to have considered [that] undignified and insulting?”
Around this time in mid-November Eaton made a discovery that roused him to even greater fury. He found out that President Jefferson had known for at least several months of the existence of Lear’s secret article abandoning Hamet’s family. Jefferson had known! The American consul, Dr. George Davis, had sent Jefferson a letter on June 2, 1807, from Tripoli and had included with it a verbatim copy of the secret article. Dispatched in duplicate via two vessels, that letter had arrived sometime in August.
On the evening of November 17, Senator Bradley, Eaton’s first patron, told Eaton in deepest secrecy that President Jefferson had sent a “Confidential” message the preceding week to the Senate about the secret article. (“Confidential” meant that for national security reasons no senator could reveal it to anyone.) Eaton was so exasperated that in his personal notebook he sarcastically referred to Lear as an emperor. “Have we then an Emperor . . . who while he amuses our republican President and Senate with the apparition of an honourable treaty, cedes at discretion and in conclave with the enemy, the honor of the Government and the people of the nation by making them ignorantly accessory to fraud?”
He added a new charge: “Was it not enough that this diplomatic swindler for the consideration of a wheat speculation bartered away the proud claim we had established in that sea to military honor?”
Eaton had learned Lear was in the middle of a major wheat deal at the outset of the Tripoli negotiations. He had found out that Lear had shipped $37,000 worth of grain from Malta to Algiers just before he left to negotiate. Eaton was accusing Lear of rushing to a peace deal with Tripoli so as to protect his shipment from the risk of capture by Tripoli corsairs.
Eaton concluded: “Are we so bankrupt in talents and so bedased [sic, or perhaps hiccup, for “debased”] of soul as to be compelled to employ such agents and to countenance such duplicity? It is treason against the character of the nation: and he who gives it his countenance is an accomplice in the crime.”
That “he” was clearly Jefferson, and Eaton now expected apologies and reparations. He was in for a shock. Amid the war fever and the Chesapeake outrage, very few politicians or ordinary people cared about Hamet Karamanli or the secret article.
In the coming days, Eaton—waiting for an apology—somehow learned the text of Jefferson’s “Confidential” message to the Senate, which the president had delivered on November 11.
Jefferson had explained to the senators that when the new consul, Dr. Davis, had arrived in Tripoli and demanded the release of Hamet’s family, he was instead presented with the secret article.
The president then strung together a long convoluted sentence, vaguely intimating a mistake had been made. “How it has happened that the declaration of June 5 [secret article] has never before come to our knowledge, cannot with certainty be said; but whether there has been a miscarriage of it, or a failure of the ordinary attention and correctness of that officer [Lear] in making his communications, I have thought it due to the Senate, as well as to myself, to explain to them the circumstances which have withheld from their knowledge, as they did from my own, a modification, which, had it been placed in the public treaty, would have been relieved [removed], from objections which candor and good faith cannot but feel in its present form.”
Eaton’s hopes for a Jeffersonian mea culpa or a Lear lambaste were disappointed. The president, who had drafted an inspiringly clear Declaration of Independence, had chosen to obfuscate his meaning on Tripoli and Lear.
Lear’s act of betrayal, in any case, was soon overshadowed by fresh crises in foreign affairs. News arrived that England had drafted an order-in-council that all U.S. transatlantic commerce must receive British licenses and pass through British ports; this outrageous insult seemed to guarantee that the United States would declare war on Great Britain.
Instead, Jefferson—completely in his visionary character—decided to try out his theory of Commercial Exclusion in the form of a nonviolent trade measure, an embargo on all foreign commerce. It was an otherworldly solution, worthy of the Sage of Monticello, and deeply frustrating to the Federalist military men of America.
At this very troubled time, on December 18, the newly reconstituted Committee of Claims in the House issued its report on Hamet; their verdict in no way resembled the earlier Bradley report. The new team stated definitively that none of the American promises about return-of-family or stipend had led Hamet to leave Derne but rather “his influence and resources . . . were so small . . . that he, himself, considered it necessary to his own safety that he should withdraw.” The report concluded that the United States was “not under any obligation to support the ex-Bashaw or to have given him what had already been bestowed.” However, since Hamet “may have rendered . . . services and his expectations may have been improperly raised”—(read between the lines . . . by William Eaton)—therefore, “as an act of generosity,” a gift of unspecified dollars might “be paid under the direction of the president.” That resolution would still have to pass both House and Senate.
On December 22, 1807, Congress passed the Embargo Act. No U.S. merchant ships could carry any goods whatsoever to any foreign ports and no foreign ships could carry American goods out of the United States. Jefferson intended to hurt England and France and Spain, to slow trade until the pain made the belligerents behave fairly toward the United States. Instead, it would turn out, the Embargo Act would strangle the commerce of New England and endanger the union; port business would dry up. New Haven, Connecticut, and Newburyport, Massachusetts, for instance, would never recover; American sailors would volunteer on British ships. Napoleon—tongue in cheek—soon said he would comply with Jefferson’s wishes and capture all American merchant ships trying to enter French ports. British merchants were delighted at the reduced competition.
Impoverished by heavy gambling losses and disappointed by congressional indifference over Tripoli, William Eaton—still the Federalist hero—returned to New England to attend the Massachusetts Legislature.
Although the fervor of anti-Embargo and anti-Jeffersonism echoed in the chill corridors, Eaton—deaf to it all—delivered a long harangue against Chief Justice Marshall and the Burr verdict. He denounced Federalism as helping to free a traitor. And he sounded his new favorite theme: End your loyalty to political parties and start thinking first about the needs of the United States.
His speech won him no friends, especially since hometown Brimfield was overwhelmingly Federalist. Eaton stayed in Boston to attend the raucous session, spending much time drinking. He failed to “govern his glass,” wrote a longtime friend, and “at such times, his wit was out.”
In his cups, he tended to return over and over to his military triumphs, which led inevitably to Lear’s betrayal of Hamet and of the United States. He repeated that this young idealistic nation had within its grasp the chance to stop the piracies. Eaton, the obsessive, could not move beyond that dark night when he had slipped out of Derne, or the ensuing dark years when he had failed to correct the mistake.
Almost two months had gone by since Jefferson’s Confidential Message on Tripoli, and no newspaper had printed anything about Lear’s betrayal. On January 26, 1808, sitting at a desk in a boardinghouse in Boston, Eaton wrote a letter that—in effect—threatened the president of the United States.
His Excellency Thomas Jefferson Pres: UStates.
Sir,
. . . I am assured that Tobias Lear did privately stipulate with Joseph Bashaw of Tripoli an article which he signed, that the family of Hamet Bashaw should not be surrendered, as by public treaty engaged, until after the expiration of four years—It is impossible to suppose that information of this dishonourable duplicity and fraud against the dignity of the government of these United States can have been reported to the Chief Magistrate; though Doctor Davis, our Consul at Tripoli, is said to be in possession of the document.
Lest events should occur which may give sufferings to your feelings and fame from a concealment of these facts, I use the freedom, indeed I feel it a duty, to make this private communication—I shall make it public if Hamet Bashaw should not be provided for and our promises fulfilled—It is just that the world should know the iniquity from which he suffers; and that infamy should fix on treachery and fraud—
I have the honor to be most respectfully, Sir,
your very obedient servant,
Eaton waited for a reply; he hoisted tankards in the taverns. The Chief Executive did not respond. On February 12, 1808, Eaton tried again; he relayed to Jefferson a misery-laden note from Hamet in Syracuse. “Having lost the hope of the restitution of my family . . . and seeing myself abandoned like a prisoner . . . now that there are no longer American ships in this sea and the Consul being about to depart without making provisions for payment of the monthly pittance . . .” And on and on. Hamet asked Eaton “to fulfill the promises by which I was seduced.”
Eaton, in an accompanying note, made his case to Jefferson yet again. Unlike the vague threat of the previous letter, Eaton now tried to make a logical argument followed by an appeal to Jefferson’s goodness.
On meeting with Hamet Bashaw . . . , I . . . pledged to him my life and honor not to abandon him; and I did keep my faith—We marched to the enemy’s provinces and, though a modest member of Congress [John Randolph] says, at the head of a handful of raggamuffins, our host was sufficient to subdue the second garrisoned city in the kingdom, vanquish an army, and revolutionize the country.
At a crisis, the enemy sued for peace—with no effort on the part of the whole squadron to complete the conquest, so desirable to our government and so fairly in view—And in direct disobedience of positive instructions Mr. Lear paid money for our national disgrace and ended our enterprise by an inglorious peace.
In order to induce Hamet Bashaw to evacuate the kingdom . . . , he stipulated in public treaty with the enemy that Hamet’s family should be restored to him—and assured me in an official letter that our government would make suitable provisions for his future well being. . . . The baseness of [Lear’s] duplicity, in its effect, stamps dishonor on our whole nation, entails misery on a blameless friend; and brings reflections to the soul of sensibility too painful for utterance.
I know it is enough, Sir, that you should be acquainted with all these facts to engage the honorable interference of your influence and feelings to relieve distress—and of your authority to punish the fraud attempted to be passed on the public; nothing less that these can retrieve, in my opinion, the sacrifice of our national dignity.
Snows slowed the post coaches; Jefferson received the letter ten days later in Washington City. Eaton, still at General Court in Boston, awaited a reply. And he waited. He approached Senator Bradley for an appointment as general in the U.S. Army. He heard nothing from Bradley or Jefferson.
After the end of the state legislature session in Boston, Eaton found himself called to Philadelphia to testify at a trial of one of Burr’s alleged accomplices. Sometime in late April of 1808, Eaton decided to quit drinking. This dramatic resolution might yet save his reputation and his life. He told a friend that he was now determined to quit “the cursed slow poison,” as he called it.
He avoided flask and decanter, and took nothing stronger than coffee or tea for four consecutive days. It was a start. He finished his trial testimony and boarded a stage north, sober. He was delighted to discover that the arch-Federalist Timothy Pickering would be his companion for the entire journey to Brimfield. Since Pickering despised both Jefferson and Lear and was an instigator of a secret New England secessionist movement, he was Eaton’s kindred spirit. The pair talked as the coach bounced along the rutted roads. On day two of the journey and day five of Eaton’s sobriety, he and Pickering were pulled up Breakneck Hill into picturesque Brimfield. A clear sky framed this lovely day in early May.
General Eaton convinced Pickering to alight from the stage for a moment and come into Eaton’s home for a brief visit. Eaton was eager to show off his wife and daughters and young sons and teenage stepsons. He was in a fine mood and asked stepson Timothy in a jaunty voice who the district had just elected to represent it in Boston at the next state legislature. Timothy replied: “Your old friend Stephen Pynchon is placed.” According to an eyewitness, Eaton’s countenance fell and revealed his deep disappointment at not being re-elected.
The mail coach waited for no one, not even a senator, and Pickering stayed only a few minutes. Eaton was deeply embarrassed. He wandered outside and looked in the stable and discovered that his carriage had been repossessed for debt.
He soon took a walk to the neighborhood tavern and topped off his glass again and again. From that disappointing day to his death three years later, Eaton’s affairs headed steadily downhill; he would lose most everything but his anger.
“His domestic and financial concerns preyed upon his mind,” wrote a friend. “His habits of intemperance became more constant and excessive; and excepting in moments of hilarity he appeared to view the world with gloom or indignation.”
The general mood in Brimfield and the surrounding regions was somewhat grim as well. The ripple effect of Jefferson’s Embargo Act was forcing bankruptcies. The records of the local justice of the peace show case after case of fellow townspeople going after each other over petty debts.
That summer, Eaton’s beloved nineteen-year-old stepson, Eli E. Danielson, who had wandered in Egypt with him and had been on the Argus at Derne, died in a duel in Brooklyn, New York, on August 5, 1808. Eaton was profoundly disturbed by the news. “Brave, great and experienced men may sometimes find it necessary to . . . meet in personal contest; this may be justified when the fate of a nation is depending . . . but the trivial disputes which excite ardent young men to put life up at a game of hazard, cannot be reconciled to principles of morality, patriotism nor character.”
Eaton settled down to an embittered life in Brimfield. Almost every month the sheriff came to the house to demand payment for some creditor or to execute some forfeiture of furniture or a horse or a piece of jewelry. During the Burr trial, Eaton had squandered thousands of dollars. Real estate records reveal him selling or mortgaging all his own and his wife’s properties. He sold 5,000 acres in Maine at 50 cents an acre. He lost the other half to back taxes.
He continued drinking, and his old war wounds—his leg from the Revolutionary War and arm from Derne—began plaguing him more.
Around New Year’s Day 1809, Eaton mustered one last effort to right the Hamet wrong. “Every sigh of Hamet Bashaw sinks deeply on my soul,” he wrote to Senator Bradley, “and he breathes nothing but sighs!” Eaton launched yet another vague threat in the direction of Jefferson. “Unless I see liberal justice rendered towards Hamet Bashaw & merited punishment inflicted on the speculator Lear,” he informed Bradley, “I shall feel myself justified in exposing some document to my country concerning Barbary affairs which shall stagger the devotion of the uninformed to the existing administration.—The man who will connive at fraud shall sit uneasy, even on a throne, where I am a subject.”
Above all, Eaton wanted Lear crushed, and no newspaper had yet revealed the secret article. “Why seek to conceal his iniquity with secret injunction & closed doors? There must be a hidden reason for this carefulness to hide his compromise of our national honor. What has Tobias Lear done to entitle him to an exemption from responsibility? If the Executive have sound reasons for shielding him in duplicity amounting to fraud, I have a right to know those reasons—I shall demand them in a manner which will require an answer.”
This was Eaton’s last hurrah; it almost sounded as though in his agitated state, he was challenging Jefferson to a duel. That phrase, “which will require an answer,” was then standard in affairs of honor.
Neither Bradley nor Jefferson ever replied.
In January of 1809, the president pushed through a measure to beef up the hated Embargo; he added the so-called Force Act, which allowed federal officials to seize any American vessel on the suspicion that it was headed to a foreign port.
Rumblings spread in New England to hold a convention to nullify the embargo, and to discuss possible secession from Jefferson’s biased-against-New England America.
When the crisis inside the country began to loom larger than the threat from outside, Jefferson backed down. He ended his embargo experiment. Three days before the end of his term, he signed the repeal of the Embargo Act, enabling James Madison to enter office with less controversy. On March 4, 1809, Jefferson left Washington in mild disgrace and rode home on horseback through a snowstorm. He had squandered seven years of popularity over an economic theory, over a passionate but unconfessed pacifism. (Generations of historians would repair his briefly tarnished reputation.)
As Jefferson left office, Eaton’s body—though he was only forty-five years old—was beginning to fail him. A half decade earlier, he had survived a desert trek, now he had trouble walking.
A family friend described his conduct toward his wife and family as “irregular and capricious, sometimes treating them with affability and gentleness and sometimes with harshness, severity and great rudeness.” The friend, who was often a houseguest, added: “His commands were often foolish or absurd, [and were] obeyed from terror rather than respect or affection.” Throughout it all, wife Eliza stayed with him. She showed “patience, good sense and singular fortitude . . . to correct his irregularities and promote his comfort.”
Eaton was now a full-fledged drunk.
In December of 1809, a family friend, Charles Prentiss, tried to help Eaton resurrect himself. “I dwelt on the certainty of speedy ruin, without reformation, on the easy means of regaining health and reclaiming credit, peace, fortune and honor but more than all urged him how high his name still stood and how probable would be his advancement. He squeezed my hand, affected even to tears, applauded my frankness and repeatedly with much warmth . . . expressed his determination ‘to be a man, to be Eaton again.’ ”
The next day early, Prentiss entered Eaton’s drawing room, and Eaton greeted him: “Good morning—say what you please but no more lecturing—come take with me a glass of spirit and water.”
Around Christmas, one of his Derne officers, eccentric Jean Eugene, came to Brimfield to visit. He and the general relived their adventures, and Eaton loaded him with letters of recommendation to hand out in Washington. (Jean Eugene, who now added the family name Leitensdorfer, eventually became a caretaker at the Capitol Building, living in a vacant chamber in the north wing, and Congress later awarded him with far more than it ever did Eaton; the Tyrolean native received 320 acres of land in Missouri, and back pay to 1805.)
Eaton was well aware of his own relentless downfall, though he found himself unable to slow its pace. “Fortune has reversed her tables,” he wrote to Humbert, a French friend in Tunis. “I live, or rather stay in obscurity and uselessness. The wound I received on the coast of Tripoli and others more early, have deprived me of an arm’s use and the use of a leg.—Want of economy, which I never learned, want of judgement in the speculative concerns of private life, which I never studied, and what is more, privation of the consideration of a government which I have served, have unmanned me.”
He added, with a nice Barbary pirate touch: “Death has laid himself alongside and thrown his grappling hooks upon my quarter and forecastle but I keep him off midships yet.”
He complained often and he knew where to pin the blame. “I am crippled in health & fortune,” he wrote his brother Ebeneezer. “Ask you how? Burr and Jefferson.”
He sought out other embittered souls. One J. Dunham wrote to him: “Our country is gone to the devil . . . You like others, have fought in vain.”
By April 1811, his feet and ankles were so swollen he could barely climb out of bed. One day, in great pain, he struggled to a farm cart and visited his friend Colonel Morgan. A carpenter happened to come by and Eaton joked with him to be sure not to make his coffin out of pine because he hated the smell. He advised Colonel Morgan not to set him in the casket on his back. “For in that position, I am prone to nightmares.”
As his health worsened, he decided that he wanted his children baptized. He made the request to the local minister, Mr. Fay, whom Eaton had helped select. Mr. Fay sent him a regretful note: “Your long absence from communication with the church and your immoral habits render it improper to perform such a service.” Eaton was very un-Christian in his feelings toward the minister.
The night of May 31 his legs and stomach began to swell, and he became incoherent. At 8:40 P.M. on June 1, 1811, he died, at the age of forty-seven.
Four colonels carried the self-appointed general to his grave in Brimfield’s cemetery, located down a dirt lane off Breakneck Hill with a view out over the valley.
The newspaper in Boston, The Centinel, which had devoted many column inches to his Tripoli exploits, now ran a succinct obituary. “Gen. EATON, the hero of Derne, and the victim of sensibility, was entombed at Brimfield, on Wednesday last.”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines sensibility, as it was used during that era, as “a liability to feel offended or hurt by unkindness or lack of respect.” No brief obituary was more apt. He festered at the ingratitude of his nation.
In 1876, Civil War veteran General Fitz Henry Warren came to Brimfield to give a centennial speech. He praised Eaton for having been “brave, impulsive and generous” but he also lamented the man’s “hot chivalry,” his “temper,” his “imprudent speech.” At the end of this frank assessment, General Warren gestured toward the cemetery and said: “William Eaton became a tenant in your dwelling of the dead where his humble headstone now reminds you of the vanity of human pursuits and the almost utter oblivion of a once widely known name.”
Eaton had refused to bask in his abbreviated glory; instead he had dared to defy Thomas Jefferson, and no good can come of that.