The Hand We're Dealt - Chapter 6 (Patreon)

“You are correct in your assertion that quartz crystals are the other common means of purification by mineralogy,” the Professor stated with a nod, still looking about his home with a discerning eye as he ran a finger along various surfaces and inspected it for the slightest trace of dust afterward. “Diamond is, of course, far better for these purposes. But in addition to being more expensive, crystals of sufficient size are much more difficult to source. Thus, even with an increased capacity to draw in impurities and corruption per unit of mass, it is usually both safer and more efficient to use a larger quartz crystal than a smaller diamond for all but the most elaborate and delicate rituals.”

I nodded, compiling some of that within my memory and other bits on the paper in front of me as I scratched out with the quill I'd been given. Oh, the Professor had pens, but using quills was apparently both a valid tradition and an important life skill for a sorcerer, magician, and gentleman. Apparently, using strictly organic components when writing out sigils and runes could occasionally be important.

Thus, I would learn.

“Your other answer... is also correct,” Professor van Beek grunted. “If incomplete. Oils are commonly used in various sacraments to purify both the living and the dead, prized even among the ancients for their lasting ability to resist spoiling when properly sealed. The best oil for these purposes is oil of the olive, but others may suffice when necessary.”

“Yes sir, thank you sir.” I nodded.

Professor van Beek stopped and looked around the house with his perpetual scowl in place before nodding. “Your work on the common areas is... acceptable. We will speak more on this later. Get to your studies. I will call for a servant to have a meal prepared. You will see to your studies. Go.”

I hastened to obey, making my way to my room.

Which was a small miracle in and of itself. Having my own room was both very enjoyable on a personal level and more than a bit odd after so many years sharing in the orphanage. Private space had been (and likely still was) at a premium. Beyond that, though, in an age without indoor heating, the best practice was to share body heat to make a room bearable during the winter. Also, most families shared a sleeping space during this time period as well. Furniture was expensive to buy or, alternatively, time-consuming and costly to create and you'd need extra rooms in a house to put them in.

Material possessions were just more difficult for most people to acquire more of if they had any to begin with. The result was that very few things were personal property, the majority of possessions and tools being in community ownership within a family unit at the very least.

In that light, having a personal room with my own possessions automatically put me in at least the top ten percent of the general population.

Summoning my Sacred Gear, I paused before focusing on something new.

[Aaron Burr's Personal Communications]

Opening the book I found that, sure enough, there was page after page of handwritten letters addressed to and from notable historical figures. Some were in code, but others were in plaint text... if somewhat rough in their sense of spelling and grammar. The first real definitive English dictionary was only about fifty years old at this point and some people hadn't really gotten the memo.

Still...

The conversation I'd overheard had reminded me of some of the larger events of the time I was living in. Obviously, given the existence of angels, devils, pagan gods, and a plethora of other supernatural creatures I couldn't be completely certain of coming events, but I had some good guesses. The more interesting matter, right now at least, was the series of events going on at the top level of the American government.

Aaron Burr was generally only known for shooting Alexander Hamilton, especially thanks to the Broadway production that bore the latter's name. Before that, both were generally part of the 'forgotten' Founding Fathers... with the possible exception of those who recognized Hamilton's face on the ten dollar bill.

The problem was that while Hamilton wrote extensively and produced a rather prolific body of work...

Ugh, fine. Yes, he wrote ‘like he was running out of time.'  There.  I said it.

Anyway, a lot of the stuff Hamilton wrote survived into the future. Burr's body of work and personal communications largely didn't. That meant he didn't really have a 'voice' in his own defense and was constantly slandered by a number of other notable Founding Fathers of the era.

Because, when you got down to it, Aaron Burr was probably America's first professional politician. He campaigned for office in a way that other people just didn't during this time period. He kept voter rolls, went door-to-door and polled eligible voters, and dealt in political favors to keep his friends in valuable positions. Regardless of any moral judgment on the matter, a generation or two from now that would become the norm, not the exception.

But in the current day, it made Burr look like a power-hungry would-be tyrant. The American Experiment was young and unsure of itself, and so recently escaped from the oppression of the English crown. The people at the reigns of the government right now were ideologues. To quote Hamilton himself, they were 'men of principle.'

The current trial was a great example of the disconnect between Aaron Burr and the political establishment. Perhaps the perfect example.

After Burr shot and killed Hamilton, he'd... well, 'scheme' was probably the best way to put it, a way to get back into power. During the Revolutionary War the man had been an accomplished spy, so subterfuge came naturally to him. What he'd done was rather complicated and suspicious.

Based on the superficial facts of the case, all that Burr had actually done was assemble a militia force, a stockpile of arms, and a group of settlers to occupy land in western Louisiana and the eastern area of the Spanish province of Texas, the former of which was available for settlement by him due to his friendship with the current military governor of the Louisiana Territory and the latter of which he'd purchased from the Spanish crown.

And, again, on the face of it... there wasn't anything really 'wrong' with this series of events. While a twenty-first century American might look askance at taking an armed military force to settle western Louisiana, in the early nineteenth century it was a no man's land.

Quite literally, actually.

As someone who was, quite ironically, native to the periphery of the region in his last life, I knew the history quite well. With Spain still reigning over the colonial territories of Mexico, Texas, and Florida, significant portions of what would be the state of Louisiana were in dispute. Which, traditionally, meant that no armed force of either nation would go into the area until a solid line could be drawn. In the meantime, bandits, pirates, and other criminals would use the area as a refuge from either side.

So if someone wanted to colonize the region, they'd better bring lots of guns and some people who knew how to use them.

All of this was a reasonable course of action in theory.

But, Burr had done a few things that were less explicable. Again, he was in close contact with the Governor of the Louisiana Territory, James Wilkinson. He also had contacts in the Spanish colony of Mexico and the British Empire that he exchanged quite a bit of communication with. A funny little footnote to add to the mess was that he'd also liaised with a younger Andrew Jackson, a future president, now in command of the Tennessee militia, who even gave Burr a place to stay a few times.

The 'Burr Conspiracy' constituted exactly what Burr intended to do with the settlers, guns, and militia he planned to take to west Louisiana, of which there was no real answer due to the lack of Burr's personal papers.

The current sitting President, Thomas Jefferson, alleged that Burr was in illegal communication with Spanish and British agents to secede from the union and form his own kingdom or empire using their help. Now, again, it was a bit of a stretch when one considered it logically, but this was a very young America. We'd had traitors who looked to self-aggrandize before and Burr had a long history of being rather grabby with power.

On the other hand, though, the entire trial was a bit of a farce. Jefferson had gone at it with a personal grudge and, arguably, abused the powers of the presidency to try and force a conviction. He'd even gone so far as to issue blank pardons with his signature that were to be issued to all but the worst offenders of the conspiracy. John Marshall, the Chief Justice of the American Supreme Court, had presided over an... eight month trial for treason, I think? Something like that. Over a hundred witnesses were called and damning letters between Wilkinson and Burr were presented and then published.

For all that the press was fairly limited in the early eighteen hundreds, it was quite possibly the first real media circus surrounding domestic politics.

And it ended in an acquittal, because there was no actual evidence of what Burr really planned to do. He'd promised different things to different people, played his actual cards close to the chest, and had good legitimate cover. It probably didn't hurt that he'd helped defend a member of the Supreme Court from an impeachment a few years earlier. Even the most 'damning' letter between Wilkinson and Burr wasn't really the letter itself. It was a copy Wilkinson had made which referred to Burr in both the first and third person and might not have even been written by Burr originally.

For all the accusations, there was little substantiated evidence.

But it was enough to permanently ruin Aaron Burr's political career, turning him from the second-most-powerful man in the young nation to a complete outcast that fled to Europe and lived under his mother's maiden name to escape his own infamy. Even if the truth of the matter was unknown and his real aims a hotly debated topic by every armchair historian who'd heard about it.

“Well... looks like someone flew too close to the sun,” I sighed, finishing decoding one of the ciphers.

Really, I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was.

Especially given that I knew something which no other American likely did, something that hadn't been uncovered for another fifty years or so.

But... the explanation was both simpler and more complicated than one would expect.

It was also, to me at least, a very familiar tale.

 Or perhaps it was better to call it a recipe?

Take a group of armed Americans where they probably don't belong, hang around long enough to make it clear they're not leaving, perform an otherwise innocuous act that doesn't seem threatening out of context, and stir in an opposing hegemonic power out to maintain its authority.

The most famous instance was James K. Polk, who'd sent an armed force to camp in disputed territory with Mexico under orders not to provoke a war, but refuse to leave long enough that the other guys felt like shooting. Hell, Andrew Jackson had seized upon the skirmishes with the Seminole Indians to pseudo-invade Spanish Florida and extort Spain into selling the territory to the United States.

I leaned back in my chair, as much as I could with its hard wooden back.

I could see Burr's plan. Playing the innocent settler who'd done everything right, starting a war with Spain, getting Wilkinson and Jackson to rally troops to respond before Jefferson could deescalate the conflict, and present the entire thing as a fait accompli when America won.

But why would he be so sure that America would win?

Even if Spain was an empire in decline at this point, it was still a globe-spanning power with a navy that could crush its fledgling American counterpart if properly brought to bear. Even if the United States could probably win a land war, the Spanish navy would be able to wreak havoc on coastal cities using their uncontested dominance of the ocean.

“At least... if they hadn't just gotten themselves embroiled in Napoleon's mess.” I hummed thoughtfully.

The Battle of Trafalgar had just occurred in October of eighteen-o-five, which was just under two years ago. The Spanish navy, as it was now, was a broken shell of its former self and the armies of Spain were about to be enmeshed in a land war in Iberia with the upcoming invasion of Portugal. Given that France and Spain were close allies, as were Portugal and Britain... well, it didn't take a genius to see that it was nearly inevitable.

Burr wasn't precisely a genius, true, but he was an extremely well-connected man with a history of intelligence work who understood the complex web of European imperial politics very well.

Judging from his personal letters, most of which contained some variation of 'burn once read,' Burr planned to present himself as an innocent entrepreneurial settler assaulted by a foreign army on 'American Soil' as well as being ultimately responsible for calling in troops to fight off the 'invasion.' If it had all gone to plan, Burr would have come out of the ensuing war as the man responsible for growing the United States by a few more million square miles, his previous sins forgotten, and in a prime position to make another run at the presidency and displace Jefferson.

There was just one tiny problem with his master plan.

James Wilkinson, the Military Governor of the Louisiana Territory? That guy that Burr was relying on to bring in reinforcements? The guy that was integral to the whole plan as the highest local authority with real military power?

 He was a spy for the Spanish Empire.

Which, well... it made a little more sense why Wilkinson had a sudden attack of conscience and confessed everything to Jefferson. Which, in turn, prompted Jefferson to issue a warrant for Burr's arrest and stop the whole plan in its tracks. And, for good measure, created a political schism and distraction within American politics that kept the government from taking advantage of Spains preoccupation with European matters to attack their colonies.

[James Wilkinson's Personal Communications]

Dipping briefly into the military governor's own papers proved it. Along with his assassination by poison of Anthony Wayne some years prior, when he'd been about to court martial Wilkinson for taking money from Spain and passing on intelligence.

All of which meant that I now had a choice to make.

Wilkinson was known to be friendly to the Spanish, but in his defense they had helped us win the Revolutionary War. He had semi-decent reasons to claim that friendship, and it wasn't as though we were at war with Spain. High-ranking military personnel and political leaders were almost expected to have some amount of foreign friendships with their counterparts, just look at Burr. Or, well, maybe not Burr, but Adams or Franklin were great examples, too.

But there wasn't any solid evidence against Wilkinson and the public was already against Burr. I didn't have any reason to think that Burr would actually be convicted. He hadn't in my history and the setup seemed identical given everything I knew. Burr also wasn't a saint. He'd tried and failed to start a major military conflict for a combination of national interests and his own political career. Many would argue that he'd very much earned the fall from grace he was experiencing.

On the other hand, Wilkinson was an actual traitor to the United States.

He was also a military governor of a major territory and passing information to a foreign power.

Inasmuch as Burr was a sneaky, self-interested son of a bitch, he was also a loyal American patriot in his own way. That was evidenced by the fact that he hadn't outright confessed to attempting to incite a war to get out of being tried for treason.

But I had communications from Burr and Wilkinson that had been destroyed. I had communications from the Spanish crown to the latter.

“Putting my finger on the scales could radically change things,” I sighed, beginning to drum my fingers on my writing desk as I contemplated matters. There was a lot at stake this early in the game. Even a small alteration to current events could produce a massive change in future events. Did I want to be responsible for that? Could I handle that?

Would I be, though?

There was something to be said for the Butterfly Effect. I was planning to be, if not obscenely wealthy, then at least comfortably rich. I was planning to introduce inventions that would advance technological progress by decades at the very least. Those actions would change more than the result of a political trial, wouldn't they?

Could I justify having evidence that would exonerate someone and keeping it to myself? Especially if I was letting the innocent man rot to maintain a timeline that I would be changing radically in a few years myself?

Unwillingly, my eyes drifted back to Wilkinson's letters.

Would staying silent make me culpable in his betrayal of my country?

I did consider myself an American, even if I wasn't blind to the flaws of either nineteenth-century or twenty-first century America. It was my home. My country. Personal allegiance to a flag and nation might seem petty in the face of a world filled with gods, monsters, and stranger threats, but... it wasn't just the country, was it?

It was the ideals it stood for.

I sighed and reached for my quill and paper. “You better be grateful, Mister Burr, sir.”

~~~

As promised, new chapter of one of the things that flows easier. Had a lot of shit on my plate this past week, but I'm hoping things get back to normal now that my parents are coming back from their vacation.

Might have something out tonight/tomorrow as well, as a bonus.

But I'll start working on the next chapter of Winning Peace and The New Ron for the next week as well.

In the interim... Rock On, Stay Awesome, and Thank You Again for all the support!