Nicholas Biddle

Everyone in the cathedral of Notre Dame on December 2, 1804, remembered the sheer audacity of it. The pope had come to Paris to crown the new Emperor of France, but at the last instant Napoleon took the crown from Pius VII and majestically placed it on his own head.

In the glittering audience was 18-year-old Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia, who later brought his coronation ticket home to put in the family souvenir album.^[2]Biddle Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. “N. Biddle Esq” is written on the back of the ticket, which assigned its bearer to the cathedral’s choir section. He was then a secretary to the American ambassador in Paris, a rather undemanding job that allowed him time for social calls on General Lafayette and Madame de Stael. He also toured France, Switzerland, Italy, and Greece in the style befitting a young man of means. Heading home through London, he was asked by Ambassador James Monroe to pause as a temporary secretary in the U.S. embassy there. Not until 1807 did the worldly-wise youth return to Philadelphia.

Aristocrat

All his life Nicholas Biddle moved comfortably among men of great affairs, soon becoming one of them himself. His wealthy father was a friend of Vice President Aaron Burr, who his out in the Biddle home after his fatal duel with Alexander Hamilton. Nicholas likewise cultivated big-time politicians —his honeymoon trip included a visit to President Madison in Washington—and aspired to his own stardom in elective politics. He got only as far as the Pennsylvania legislature, failing three times for a seat in Congress. Instead, Biddle made his mark as a titan of high finance; politicians became flunkies to put on his payroll. Consenting at one point to be considered for President, he boasted the White House would be a step down from the power he had wielded as head of the Second Bank of the United States.

This is the Nicholas Biddle known to Presidential historians, an aristocratic foil pitted against the muscular Presidency of Andrew Jackson. The saga of Czar Nicholas v. King Andrew I, as drawn by political cartoonists of the time, became a landmark in studies of Presidential power.

Yet there’s a seemingly quite different Nicholas Biddle known to historians of the American West, the self-effacing narrator of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific. This Biddle was a young writer who mastered a tough task with admirable accuracy and obvious respect for the story’s wilderness heroes. So rigidly does specialization rule their craft that Presidential historians and Western historians rarely make the two Biddles match in the same person. yet a single Nicholas Biddle uniquely played both roles, and his performance in one inevitably was reflected in the other.

Biddle did everything early. At age 15 he graduated from Princeton, where he discovered a knack for writing. He then started reading law, a tedium relieved when his father’s influence got him that glorious boy-diplomat interlude in Europe. Nicholas returned hooked on politics as his life’s goal, but willing for the moment to start practicing law with his brother William. On the side, he wrote articles for a literary magazine called the Port Folio, winning a local reputation as a pretty good wordsmith.

Queries for Clark

In January 1810, that reputation led to a meeting with General William Clark, a militia commander from St. Louis. Clark was in Philadelphia to arrange for publication of an official account of the expedition that he and Meriwether Lewis had led to the Pacific and back in 1804–1806. Lewis was supposed to write it, but he had died just three months before in Tennessee, and Clark needed a ghostwriter to take over. He apparently mentioned the job to Biddle, but also said it was being offered first to William Wirt, a Richmond lawyer whom Clark regarded as “one of the first writers in this Country.” The general left Philadelphia at the end of January still believing Wirt would be his author. Back in Washington, however, a letter from Richmond told him that Wirt didn’t have time for it. So from his father-in-law’s home in Fincastle, Virginia, Clark on February 20 wrote back to Biddle asking him to take the job after all.^[3]Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 2:489, 490-91, 493, 494.

William Clark was a famous man who had seen exotic sights that would be the envy of any world traveler. On the same day Biddle watched Napoleon crown himself in European splendor, Clark was ceremoniously entertaining a delegation of feathered Mandan and Cheyenne tribesmen at the expedition’s winter fort in North Dakota. But Biddle wasn’t awed by celebrities, and perhaps resented being Clark’s second choice. He replied he had “neither health nor leisure” to do the narrative, later confessing to a friend that “my usual indolence” was the real reason.^[4]Jackson, 2:495, 555. But Clark’s Philadelphia publisher, John Conrad, got him to change his mind, and Biddle quickly left for Virginia to get the project started.

Young Biddle stayed with his Fincastle host for nearly three weeks. First, he read through the manuscript journals kept by Lewis, Clark, and Sergeant John Ordway, jotting down points wanting clarification. Then Clark patiently submitted to question after question, with Biddle writing down the answers on blank pages of a Lewis journal, and between some lines of the manuscripts themselves. Promising a finished text within a year, Biddle in mid-April took all the papers back to Philadelphia to start writing.

Two key threshold decisions were made. Clark, Biddle, and publisher Conrad agreed first that the massive manuscript pile should be condensed into just two printed volumes telling the story of the trip. This meant Biddle wouldn’t merely edit the manuscripts for the press, marking paragraphs and sprucing up the language. Rather, he had to write an entirely new work of original composition. He mostly retained, however, the manuscript’s basic diary format, with a separated entry for each day’s events.

Second, Biddle chose the narrative’s “point of view,” deciding who would be talking to the reader. In effect he created an extra member of the party who would use the first-person “we” for the whole group, as in “we set out early.” When the story required it, individuals like Lewis or Clark would be named, but the narrator never identified himself. “They” would be used for a party detached from the main group, or for the enlisted men. Biddle’s plan required consistency, but this sometimes proved awkward. In describing a Lewis-led detachment’s approach to the Great Falls of the Missouri in June 1805, the narrator found himself mixing they-we in the same sentence: “At the extremity of this course they overlooked a most beautiful Plain, where were infinitely more buffaloe than we had ever before seen at a single view.” Nevertheless, the diary format and first-person narration created the successful illusion of being an on-the-scene account written by the explorers themselves.

Though called a “literary dilettante,” Biddle resisted the amateur’s urge to paint layers of lurid word color atop the original descriptions of the journalists. His added shadings were minimal, and they usually helped. “Every object here wears a dark and gloomy aspect,” originally wrote Lewis at the Gates of the Mountains, where projecting rocks “seem ready to tumble on us.” Biddle’s paraphrase was smoother but conveyed the same foreboding tone: “Nothing can be imagined more tremendous than the frowning darkness of these rocks, which project over the river and menace us with destruction.”

Biddle was supposed to shrink his material, not add to it, but some passages seemed to require lengthening for clarity’s sake (see box on page 11). He also fattened the text here and there with editorial comment having no other apparent purpose than to display his knowledge of Europe and his Princeton education. At the expedition’s outset Biddle described the French-Canadian inhabitants of St. Charles as showing “all the careless gayety and amiable hospitality of the best of times in France.” No explorer put it that way, but Biddle had been to France, and they hadn’t. Later, near the Arikara villages in present South Dakota, Clark heard a legend of how two Indian lovers were turned to stone figures seen near the river. The story reminded Biddle of a classical Latin poem; this legend, he interjected, “would adorn the Metamorphoses of Ovid.”

Biddle assumed that the books’ readers would share his own fascination with the West’s two great novelties—wild Indians and animals. The explorers filled page after page about them, but Biddle kept pumping Clark for more. “In our towns, and in Europe too where we know nothing of Indians every little matter is a subject that excites curiosity,” he told Clark in a 7 July follow-up letter asking about Plains Sign Language. Clark’s journal for 29 April 1805, told how the innate curiosity of antelope caused them to “approach any thing which appears in motion near them &c.” Closer quizzing of Clark on this point during the Fincastle interview allowed Biddle to describe how a savvy hunter could lie on the ground waving hat, arms, and feet until an antelope came within reach of the rifle.

Omissions

Biddle’s job of boiling the travel story down to two volumes was supposed to let him skip the expedition’s scientific findings. The publisher planned to segregate this data into a third volume to be written by Philadelphia botanist Benjamin Smith Barton. Even so, Biddle couldn’t resist putting a surprising amount of botany into his travelog. In mid-July 1805, Lewis minutely described the flax, currants, and serviceberries found growing above the Great Falls of the Missouri, most of which found its way into Biddle’s narrative (“The perianth of the fruit is one leaved, five cleft, abbriviated, and tubular.”) That was just as well, because the ailing Dr. Barton never produced his assigned volume.

What, then, did Biddle leave out to save space? Routine camp occurrences and little mishaps on the trail—a hunter out overnight, a gun dropped in the water—were often ignored. The worrisome illnesses of Sacagawea at the Great Falls and of her son at Camp Chopunnish rated bare mentions. And possibly at Clark’s urging, his ghostwriter suppressed almost every manuscript account of friction within the exploring party. Lewis had reported a 6 May 1806, horse-handling quarrel between two of his best men, George Drouillard and John Colter, but Biddle left it out. And as far as her readers knew, it was an Army command where nobody ever got punished, or even chewed out. The officers’ August 7, 1804, order to bring back deserter Moses Reed dead or alive was excised in Biddle’s text. So was Lewis’s 19 April 1806, admission of his own testiness in “severely” belaboring poor Alexander Willard for letting a horse get away; the horse, wrote Biddle blandly, was lost due to “negligence.”

Where Biddle really cut down on bulk was in combining or discarding most of the duplicate accounts of his sources. As mentioned, he worked from manuscript diaries kept by Lewis, Clark, and Ordway, plus notes from his Fincastle interview. Also at hand was the expedition journal of Sergeant Patrick Gass, who had scooped everybody by getting it published in 1807. On occasion, Biddle wove unattributed details from several diarists into a rich multi-source tapestry, as in this paragraph describing Christmas at Fort Mandan:

Tuesday, 25th, we were awaked before day by a discharge of three platoons from the party [reported by Clark]. We had told the Indians not to visit us as it was one of our great medicine days [Ordway], so that the men remained at home and amused themselves in various ways, particularly with dancing [Clark, Ordway, Gass], in which they take great pleasure. The American flag was hoisted for the first time in the fort [Gass]; the best provisions we had were brought out [Ordway], and this, with a little brandy [Gass], enabled them to pass the day in great festivity.”^[5]James K. Hosmer, ed., History of the Expedition of Captains Lewis and Clark. (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903 reprint of the 1814 [Biddle] edition), 1:154; Gary Moulton, ed., The Journals of … Continue reading

But this was rare. Usually, Biddle just based his text on material in the more literate Lewis’s journal, when available, or from Clark’s when Lewis was silent. He mostly ignored Gass, believing Ordway’s account was “much better” for fleshing out details overlooked by the captains. On 14 July 1804, as the expedition approached the plains country, Clark reported trying to shoot some elk near the river; it was a comment by Ordway that allowed Biddle to write that the explorers were seeing these animals “for the first time.” Beyond Fort Mandan, however, even Ordway was little used.

Interviews

By far the most valuable non-journal source for Biddle was his own Fincastle interview with Clark. From it came the particulars of Sacagawea’s dramatic reunion with her brother Cameahwait, the story of York‘s black skin being rubbed by a skeptical Hidatsa chief and other nuggets of Expedition lore recorded nowhere else.^[6]For a fuller account, see Arlen J. Large, the “Biddle-Clark Interview,” We Proceeded On, August 1980. 7-8. Biddle’s notes of the interview appear in Jackson, 2:497-545.

Biddle had yet another source: George Shannon, sent by Clark to Philadelphia to answer questions on the spot. Private Shannon had kept no journal on the trip, but he was smart and relatively well-educated. His specific contributions to the narrative are hard to detect, however. At least two months into the project Shannon still hadn’t arrived at the Biddle family home on Chestnut Street, where Nicholas was rising at 5 o’clock each morning to move the expedition another notch up the Missouri. When Shannon finally appeared (he was there, at least, by October), Biddle doubtless had him read over what had already been written, including the account of his own harrowing separation from the party for 16 days in the summer of 1804. The lost soldier added a detail or two to Clark’s account of the incident, but his fingerprints elsewhere in the text aren’t obvious. Shannon probably served mainly as a verifier of facts and impressions.

He would thus share credit for the remarkable accuracy of Biddle’s narrative, measured against the manuscript sources and later scholarship. Page after page of the text is a carefully condensed reflection of what Lewis and Clark originally wrote about the look and feel of the West. Mistakes tended to be trivial. Sergeant Nathanial Pryor at one point was misnamed “John.” The herd of elk Lewis reported seeing on August 1, 1805, became a “flock.” Curiously, Clark’s name throughout the text was spelled “Clarke,” though Biddle should have known better.^[7]See Paul Allen, ed., History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark. (Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1814), 2 vols. Clark’s name is spelled correctly on the title … Continue reading Elliott Coues corrected the misspelling in his 1893 edition of the Biddle narrative.

Publishing the Journals

On 8 July 1811, Biddle reported to Clark that “by diligence I have got through the work . . .” When the Conrad publishing house folded, however, his attention turned to other matters, and it wasn’t until the spring of 1813 that a new publisher was lined up. Biddle then turned final preparation of the text over to Paul Allen, a fellow writer for the Port Folio. Allen’s contribution, like Shannon’s, is hard to isolate. With modesty Biddle later said his own work produced only “a rude outline” of the expedition, which Allen was hired to complete. Donald Jackson, a later editor of Expedition documents, thought Allen’s handsome $500 fee was a clue that “Biddle left a considerable amount of work to be done.” On the other hand, journal editor Reuben Gold Thwaites believed Allen merely added “typographical and clerical” touches, and Elliott Coues rather savagely dismissed Allen as a “mere dummy” in the project.^[8]Jackson, 2:285. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. ( New York: Antiquarian press, 1959 reprint of 1904–1905 edition), xliii. Elliott Coues, ed., History … Continue reading Coues was particularly outraged by Allen’s remark that he needed an eye-catching biography of Lewis—written by Thomas Jefferson—to “enliven the dullness of the Narrative.”

It’s remarkable that Biddle‑then still politically ambitious‑passed up the chance to use the Lewis and Clark story for self-promotion. His name appeared nowhere in the work; a preface signed by Allen said only that a “gentleman” had sketched the narrative “nearly in its present form.” By Biddle’s apparent code of conduct, gentlemen were not publicity hounds, and of course he took no money for his effort.

The two-volume final product didn’t appear until early 1814, seven and a half years after the expedition’s return. Late though it was, Biddle’s coherent account of the trip has earned an enduringly high reputation. “The story of this adventure stands easily first and alone,” said Coues in prefacing his 1893 edition of the Biddle work, heavily footnoted with the first public excerpts from the manuscript journals. The Biddle narrative “will always remain one of the best digested and most interesting goods of American travel,” wrote Thwaites in his 1904-1905 edition of the journals themselves. Ironically this prediction was somewhat undercut by Thwaites’s own work, and by Gary Moulton’s new edition of Expedition manuscripts being published at the University of Nebraska. Students today tend to turn first to the explorers’ own words, despite the smoothness of Biddle’s story and its exclusive gems from the Clark interview.

Politician

Biddle began his march into political history right in the midst of his vicarious fling at Western adventure. In October 1810, while still busy with the Lewis and Clark project, Biddle was elected to the lower house of the Pennsylvania legislature and left for Lancaster in December. Somehow, he also found time just then to fall in love. At the session’s end the following year he came home to conclude his part of the expedition narrative and to marry Jane Craig, a teenage heiress whose pet name for him was “Edwin.”^[9]Nicholas B. Wainwright, “Nicholas Biddle in Portraiture,” Antique, November 1975, 958. Now he was really rich, for the Craigs had even more money than the Biddles. Coming with the marriage was “Andalusia,” the Craig mansion northeast of town.

Biddle once tried his hand at a novel, where he wrote: “Distinctions in society you must have, because wealth, beauty, notoriety, family connexions create them . . .”^[10]Thomas Paine Govan, Nicholas Biddle: Nationalist and Public Banker. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 72–73. Biddle was an aristocrat of both talent and wealth who believed the world’s management should be left to a tight circle of people like himself. His elitism even surfaced in the Lewis and Clark story. At Fort Mandan, the explorers saw an Indian buffalo dance involving old men and young women. Biddle coded the ceremony’s erotic climax in Latin, giving only high-minded scholars access to juicy details that wouldn’t be appropriate for the prurient mob.^[11]For a fuller discussion, see Walter H. Marx, “A Latin Matter in the Biddle ‘Narrative’ or ‘History’ of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” We Proceeded On, November, … Continue reading

He hoped to follow the example of Virginia’s aristocrats, like his friend James Monroe, by serving mankind in public office. He returned to the legislature but resigned in frustration in 1817. Then he lost an election for the U.S. House of representatives in 1818, and again two years later. He was nominated in 1821 for the U.S. Senate in both houses of the Pennsylvania legislature, but lost there too. He was “mentioned” for governor, but nothing came of it, and he could not wangle from the White House a European ambassador’s job.

Banker

All he ever got from President Monroe was an 1819 appointment as one of the government’s five part-time directors on the 25-member board of the Second Bank of the United States. The bank was chartered by Congress as a depository for government funds, and it could issue paper money backed by its own reserve of gold and silver coin. As the only good source of a nationally circulating currency the bank was a powerful institution indeed, and Biddle’s entry into its orbit changed the direction of his life. Three years after he joined the board it elected him president of the bank. Biddle was just 36 years old—early again.

Andrew Jackson came to the White house distrusting all banks, but the U.S. Bank’s charter didn’t expire until 1836 and Biddle initially felt safe. Congress passed a bank re-charter bill in July 1832, and Jackson vetoed it in a famous message complaining that “the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.”^[12]Richard Hofstader, ed., Great Issues in American History, A Documentary Record. ( New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 1:291–295. Webster’s rebuttal is at 1:296–301. In 1833 Jackson escalated his war against the bank, which still lived under the old charter. King Andrew ordered all Federal money out of the bank. Czar Nicholas ordered the bank’s branches to tighten up on new loans, hoping the White House would buckle under a national credit squeeze. As economic suffering spread, pressure mounted on both sides to relent. But to delegations of businessmen and mechanics Old Hickory had just one reply: “If you want relief go to Nicholas Biddle!”

Among those urging Biddle to ease credit was venerable Albert Gallatin, Treasury Secretary during the Jefferson administration and an active planner of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.^[13]James Marquis, Andrew Jackson: Portrait of a President. ( New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1937), 377. Biddle may have remembered writing that name 24 years before: “We then left the mouth of the southeast fork, which, in honour of the secretary of the treasury we called Gallatin’s river . . .” With respected men of affairs abandoning him, Biddle agreed to let up.

His power now declining, Biddle watched his bank’s cherished Federal charter expire on time in 1836. A compliant Pennsylvania legislature quickly issued a new state charter to Biddle’s Philadelphia bank, but it did not prosper.

In 1841 the state-chartered bank failed, and he barely escaped jail for fraud. He still had some personal land interests to tend and he spent more time at Andalusia, where periods of illness came more frequently. On 27 February 1844, he died at the age of just 58—early for the last time.