by Edward Cline
Jack shook his head again. “Neither would Mr. Reisdale,” he answered. “There’s your partner in the Assembly, Hugh. He’s a respected man. I would go so far as to endorse him. But I will not offer myself as a candidate, should you be right about Mr. Cullis’s prospects for reelection.”
Hugh sighed. “I will speak with him about it.” He grinned. “You know, it has taken me some time to accustom myself to our society’s new name. ‘The Sons of Liberty.’” A week ago, he and Jack had persuaded the Attic Society’s membership to change its name. The change was agreed upon by a margin of one vote.
Jack grinned in answer. “It is partly your own fault, Hugh. You introduced our toast, ‘Long live Lady Liberty.’ But you may share the blame with Colonel Barré.”
* * *
Thomas Reisdale’s plantation, simply named “Freehold,” lay across the Hove Stream from Meum and Morland Halls, surrounded on three sides of its irregular rectangle by a dozen smaller freeholds. The attorney-planter’s great house was a mongrel composite of additions and alterations built over the course of more than a century. Most of its fertile fields were once swamp land, patiently but ruthlessly drained and reclaimed by Reisdale’s father and grandfather. Freehold owed its steady prosperity to its rich soil and the efforts of a capable overlooker and business agent retained by Reisdale after he inherited the place. The scholarly attorney kept a critical eye on the management of the plantation, and made some suggestions to his managers on minor matters, but otherwise did not interfere in the running of the place. This policy allowed him to pursue a law practice, sit on the county court as its chief and oldest justice during county court days — which were usually held every three months but especially a week before the General Court convened in Williamsburg and before the opening of a General Assembly — and ensconce himself in his well-stocked, disorderly library and bury himself in his books in search of clarity, justice, and truth.
He was a shy man in social occasions. He had never married, and never bothered to apply his energies to the daunting and ticklish project of finding himself a wife. He addressed a statute with more confidence than he could a widow or any available lady. As a youth, he had studied law at Gray’s Inn in London, and had permitted himself some dalliances then, but now, at the age of fifty-one, those days and that particular confidence were fading memories. He was more likely to recall an obscure lecture from those years than he was the name or face of any woman he might have squired in that metropolis’s pleasure gardens. Occasionally he felt a loneliness, and in a dry, wistful manner contemplated the advantages of a companion. But this malady’s corrective was a distracted search for a certain turn of phrase or point of legal reasoning in an ancient tome.
It was raining the day Hugh Kenrick called on him. He welcomed the interruption and the respite from his present labors. He was struggling to compose an address for the next meeting of the Sons of Liberty in two weeks, an address he planned to develop into an “inquiry” as a pamphlet he hoped he could find a printer for. He was attempting to establish a solid argument that the Stamp Act was legally and morally unconstitutional, and that colonial courts could, without risk of censure, and in conformity with colonial charters, sit within the bounds of the Constitution without employing or requiring stamps in any action or document presented to those courts for adjudication, and retain the legal force of those actions and documents.
At the moment, his address was a confused, unruly mélange of ideas and theories. Since the stamps were in fact and in effect a new duty or tax, and an internal one at that, he felt comfortable in resorting to the Parliamentary Petition of Right from Charles the First’s time, for although Parliament had authored the act, the act remained a nullity until endorsed by the king as executive. One of the points of the Petition of Right was that the king could impose no loans or taxes without Parliamentary leave or consent.
George the Third had indeed endorsed the Stamp Act, authored by Parliament in violation of most colonial charters that stipulated that no taxes, imposts, or levies could be introduced in the internal affairs of the colonies. George the Third was ostensibly the guardian of those charters, but instead of exercising his veto on a patently unconstitutional law, had endorsed the Act, and in so doing abdicated his constitutional role as a check against Parliamentary caprice and avarice. Reisdale did not accuse His Majesty of indifference, neglect, or wickedness — God forbid — but insinuated in his argument that His Majesty was the victim of evil counsel. The king had joined in unfortunate accord with Parliament, and consequently made a mockery of his oft-expressed desire to be a “patriot king” and his concern for summum bonum, or the supreme good, which was the preservation of the liberty and happiness of his subjects, wherever they might reside.
This end, stressed Reisdale on paper, was demonstrably not served by the Stamp Act.
Following that notion, he wished to dwell on the corruption and confiscation of wealth caused by the customs and regulatory machinery, and in great detail to illustrate the destruction caused by ancient Roman sumptuary laws, which taxed or punished luxuries. Then he would argue that the Stamp Act would render colonial courts a luxury and in time put them beyond the means of most of His Majesty’s subjects in North America, as well as so many articles of British manufacture upon which the colonials had become dependent as necessities. The Act would thus reduce most industrious and thrifty colonials to a state of rightless, voiceless, and hopeless beggary, and foster an altogether different breed of lawlessness and dishonesty.
Next, he planned to rail in decent terms against the provisions in the Act that empowered vice-admiralty courts exclusively to try offenses concerning stamps. The number and convenience of those courts, he asserted, was not irrelevant; their “generous” multiplication from one to four simply multiplied the opportunities to try Englishmen without benefit of jury or justice.
Next, he wished to weave into his argument the reasoning of John Locke, Hugo Grotius, and other proponents of natural rights and natural law, and delve into the moral legitimacy of protesting and even flouting Crown authority concerning the noxious Stamp Act.
He wished to conclude his address with the assertion that the Act represented a declaration of pecuniary war against the colonies, and that it was no less a precedent than when Roman Emperor Sulla, for the first time in that republic’s history, lead an army of Romans against fellow Romans. The Stamp Act contained in its presumption of power all the violence of a siege and the wastage of a perpetual tribute paid to a besieging army. He would assert that destruction of liberty and property under the Act was as certain and guaranteed as if Parliament had chosen to employ engines of war to collect revenue by means of fire and sword instead of by the innocuous stamps, the minor difference being the subtlety versus the immediacy of that destruction.
But what confounded Reisdale was his desire to couch his argument in “modest” language, certainly more modest language than that of the Resolves of last May. Like many men in that critical time, he was emboldened by the Resolves, yet frightened or intimidated by them, as well. What perplexed him was that no matter how gently he composed and arranged his arguments, there was in them an element of violence and implacable, offensive certitude that he could neither tame nor eradicate.
When his servant announced the arrival of Hugh Kenrick, Reisdale reluctantly, but with a sigh of relief, put his pen and draft aside and made his guest welcome in the library, and ordered that a pitcher of lemon punch be brought in. After an exchange of pleasantries and comments on the much-needed rain that fell in rivulets down his library windowpanes, he asked Hugh the purpose of his visit.
Hugh queried him on the idea of standing for burgess in opposition to Edgar Cullis.
Reisdale rose and paced back and forth before his guest for a moment, then retired to his commodious armchair. He shook his head and said that he declined even to weigh the possibility of a more public role in the county’s affairs. “I should need to surrender my place as chief magistrate here, Mr. Kenri
ck,” he said, “and that I am not prepared to do.” He shook his head again. “You must, of course, know that you are not the first to solicit my candidacy. It has been necessary for me to request my past erstwhile sponsors to withdraw my name, and on numerous occasions.”
“Why are you so unwilling?” asked Hugh.
Reisdale cocked his head. “For many reasons, sir. First, six men, including myself, sit on this county’s court. Now, the other five, although otherwise upstanding and well-meaning men, are not persons of sound legal knowledge or fairness of judgment. I have guided them in the administration of justice for close to twenty years. Please excuse my vanity, but I fear that if I resigned that task to represent the county in the Assembly, for I must quit one bench to claim another, no one could replace me, and our court here would undoubtedly fall into miserable confusion.”
Hugh sighed in concession of this truth. Reece Vishonn was one of those justices and the next senior, but he, too, required Reisdale’s direction and knowledge. The other justices were smaller freeholders who had studied law but had never practiced it or made it a profession, except in Caxton’s diminutive courthouse. He grimaced in irony and related his conversation with Jack Frake from the day before, and wondered out loud who in Queen Anne County could oppose Cullis in the next election. He remarked, “I do not relish the prospect of sharing a seat with him.”
Reisdale did not immediately reply to his guest’s plaintive musing. “Besides,” he said at length, “I am too well associated now with you and Mr. Frake and the Sons.” He paused. “Now, sir, you must have observed,” he continued in a more serious tone, “that this county is more patriotic than it might appear. My election, should I relent and stand for burgess, would in no sense be guaranteed, no matter how disliked or mistrusted Mr. Cullis might be — and I agree with you that he is one or the other among the freemen here. For the nonce, my good man, you and he, so far as the county’s electorate are concerned, comprise a safe, perfect, representational balance in the Assembly. I am certain they would want to continue that balance. Lacking another candidate of Mr. Cullis’s character, they would, I am afraid, merely reelect him.”
Hugh’s eyebrows went up. “I did not know that my own character was so feared.”
Reisdale frowned. “Not at all, sir. You and Mr. Cullis act as curatives on each other, in the electoral eye. Mr. Cullis is more congenial and accommodating, while you are a…model of principle.” The attorney stopped speaking then, because he suddenly realized that his guest was a key to the best way to compose his address and inquiry, and also an obstacle to it. There was something ingenuous about the young man that was also fundamentally right. His whole character and person exuded that odd quality. This posed a paradox to Reisdale, for his guest’s person and character were both attractive and repellent, at the same time.
HIs other neighbor, Jack Frake, presented the same paradox, but in more severe terms. He thought of the frank gray eyes, and the scar on that man’s forehead, and then remembered that this man, too, was his friend.
The subject of Reisdale’s candidacy being exhausted, Hugh and his host chatted for a while about their properties. Hugh spoke about the progress his tenants were making in topping his tobacco. “My wheat, corn, and oats are about ready for harvesting. I am almost glad that the Governor has prorogued the Assembly this fall. My crops will exceed last year’s gross.”
When his guest departed, Thomas Reisdale turned back to his labors, but soon gave up the effort. Hugh Kenrick had gone, but somehow an aura of him remained in the room. Reisdale glanced over the words in his draft, and judged his prose to be not only inadequate, but abhorrent, given its purpose. It read like the bluff words of a coward. The absolutes he wished to communicate did not wear well the garb of abnegation. This thought caused the attorney to blush in anger, anger with himself and with the conundrum. Abruptly, he felt the throbbing of a tremendous headache. He rose and retired to his bedchamber to take a nap.
When he had made himself comfortable, he listened to the rain. It helped him slip into a sound sleep, and the sudden headache receded. But even then, he was troubled by an exchange that he and Hugh Kenrick had had weeks ago. It kept repeating itself in his mind, and would not go away.
“You are our resident legal scholar, sir, and we shall rely on your mental archives in our quest for greater liberty.”
“But, sir!” he had protested with humor, “do not mistake me for a Schoolman, I beg of you!”
“Oh, no! Never that!” Hugh Kenrick had replied with a laugh. “Thank God you are not one of those, wherever He may be!”
It had been the jocular end of another conversation, but it seemed to Reisdale to contain the careless regard for propriety that colored so many of his remarks. A careless, and dangerous, regard.
* * *
It was a half-hour’s ride from Freehold to Meum Hall. In the same rain, Hugh Kenrick rode down the tree-lined boulevard in between long worm fences that bordered Reisdale’s spacious crop fields to the Hove Stream, then across the log bridge into his own plantation and well-tended fields.
The rain had become heavier and he noted that his tenants had retreated to their homes on the far eastern part of the fields. He rode parallel to the bamboo conduit he had designed and built years ago; in the downpour it looked superfluous. He smiled in thought: not so superfluous. The water it had carried from the Hove Stream to his crops recently when there was no rain had allowed him to prosper while other planters struggled to salvage their thirsty crops. Reece Vishonn at Enderly had tried to copy the idea, using iron pipes fashioned from his mine in the Piedmont, but it was a patchy network that could not properly water the uneven areas of Enderly’s fields. Jack Frake had built a trench that served the same purpose as the conduit, and no longer had to rely on his oxen-pulled “water wagons” to nourish his fields during dry spells.
Arriving at his own great house, Hugh handed his mount to the stable boy, asked his cook, Fiona Chance, to fix him a light dinner, then changed into some dry clothes. The desk in his own study was cluttered with books, newspapers, and letters.
One letter was from Dogmael Jones, dated mid-July, in which his friend in the Commons reported the king’s dismissal of George Grenville. “This came not as a surprise to the gentleman,” wrote Jones, “but the expected flick of His Majesty’s handkerchief cannot have been a less bitter snub. He had such great ambitions, and they proved to be in mortal conflict with St. James’s Palace. As if to augur the fate of the late minister’s government, Mr. Williams, who has continued Mr. Wilkes’s North Briton in a like style, was this last February, before the Stamp Act debates, put on a pillory in the Palace Yard for the offense of perpetuating the miscreant publication. A mob soon constructed a gallows opposite him in support of the fellow, and suspended from its bar a boot stuffed and decorated with straw. Some two hundred pounds were also collected by the mob to defray Mr. Williams’s legal expenses, to which I contributed a small sum. It was certainly a distinct species of creature, that mob, from the one that greeted you and the Pippins at Charing Cross so many years ago.…”
A letter from his father reported that “the work on the Blackfriars Bridge has recommenced, the fourth arch to the north side of the center nearly completed.… Those old hazards, the overhanging shop signs, are fast disappearing in London, as a result of the law passed some years ago. Oddly, I shall miss them.… Mr. Jones reports that there is some talk among persons connected to the Board of Trade that your royal governors may be relieved of their colonial appropriated salaries by naming them to His Majesty’s annual civil list, thus making them independent of your various legislatures’ approval or censure. Methinks the proposal, if the rumor can be credited, augurs ill for any future ministry, for it would be breaking windows with guineas in a tantrum of spite. It will be interesting to observe how Mr. Grenville’s successor will address the matter.… The Evening Signal carried an item about Mr. Wilkes, whose lodgings in Naples were broken into and papers of his stolen. He reportedly ha
s accused his enemies here of conspiring in the theft.… The Post carried an item from L’Orient, by way of our Indiaman Ajax, concerning a French Indiaman Duc de Praslin, which sailed from here last year for Bengal, employing a machine on board for making sea-water fresh and potable, according to a method conceived by a Mr. Poissannier. The Indiaman was at sea some five months, and the machine produced sixty barrels of sweet water for two months.”
His father’s letter had accompanied a crate of books and some housewares and clothing. Among the books were Charles Perrault’s Parallels of the Ancients and the Moderns and Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation. Weeks ago he had written Otis Talbot and Novus Easley in Philadelphia about the closing of the Courier and the suspension of the Gazette. They had responded by sending him back issues of the Pennsylvania and Maryland Gazettes.
He was amused with his divided attention: Otis Talbot in a letter described some of the turmoil over the Stamp Act in Rhode Island and Massachusetts Bay — colonial gunners at Fort George in Newport Harbor had even fired on a naval schooner over the impressment of some Rhode Islanders and the theft by British sailors of pigs and chickens — and a mental itch to know how the French Indiaman could purify water without burning prodigious amounts of wood or coal. There were many persons who lived close to the Bay here, he thought, whose livelihoods centered on purifying and selling sweet water to farms, naval vessels, and merchantmen.
Rachel, the black servant who worked with Miss Chance in the kitchen, appeared and set before him on the desk the serving tray with his dinner. Hugh ate idly, brimming with quiet pride as he studied a copy of the Maryland Gazette, dated July 4, that he had fixed to the wall opposite him, beneath the long series of sketches he had done of his friends the Pippins. It contained all seven of Patrick Henry’s Resolves from last May, sent to the paper, noted the editor in a brief preface, “by an anonymous gentleman.”
