Liberty 1784: The Second War for Independence

by Robert Conroy

  There was silence as Burgoyne digested what Fitzroy had said. “I concur,” he said finally. “And you’ve done extremely well. This damn place may still be filled with spies and enemy sympathizers. For that reason, I want you to work with the provost in tightening security and ferreting out spies. I don’t want any more surprises like Leduc.”

  Fitzroy was dismissed. He saluted and stepped outside. Leduc had been a native local with reputation that was beyond reproach. While in Detroit, he had never said or done anything against the Crown, which made his neighbors’ comments all the more surprising. And, he had prospered under British rule. So what changed him or drove him, and who was the real Jean Leduc? Fitzroy stared at the hurried reconstruction of the outpost. Of most concern was the condition of the sailing barges. Six had been destroyed utterly and most of the others damaged to some degree, and one seemed to have simply disappeared downriver. Danforth thought it would wash over the falls at Niagara in a week or two if it didn’t run aground somewhere, and Fitzroy agreed he was likely right.

  Despite the fact that the fire had been out for a couple of days, fingers of smoke still wafted upwards as scores of soldiers attempted to move the still hot rubble out of the fort and dump it into the river. Only then could the rebuilding begin in earnest.

  Fitzroy found himself staring at the civilians working around him. Who were they? Loyal or rebel? Friend or foe? How many were taking notes and making observations that would shortly find their way to Fort Washington. From Leduc’s now very cooperative neighbors, he’d heard of a tavern a few miles up the road where rebels allegedly congregated. He hadn’t gone there yet and wouldn’t without Burgoyne’s concurrence.

  Who could be trusted? At least he could trust sweet, buxom little Hannah.

  Chapter 8

  Tallmadge held his nose. “My God, the stench is appalling. Are you waiting for the spring thaw to bathe?”

  Will smiled. “You said you wanted to see me the moment I came in, didn’t you? Well, here I am.”

  Even though few people bathed very frequently, and most even less so in the winter when it was common knowledge you could sicken and die from excess washing, Will knew he was a special case. Two weeks of trekking through thick mud and undergrowth had left him covered with filth. That he was also exhausted didn’t seem to affect or impress Tallmadge.

  “Well, you can clean up later, I suppose. In the meantime, stand downwind and give me all the details on the Detroit fire.”

  “You already know about the fire? Someone preceded me?”

  “You might say that,” Tallmadge said with a lazy smile.

  “Damnation. I nearly killed myself getting you the information and here I’m second-best again.”

  “Will, all I got was a scant outline. Details, man, I need details.”

  Will complied and filled Tallmadge in on everything he knew, from Leduc’s heroic death, to the curiously thrilling feeling of watching the British high command standing before him while he was in the barn just before the brawl and Leduc’s setting the fire.

  “The British looked so bloody normal. I found it hard to believe that they were the same people who imprisoned me in that hulk.”

  “If they catch you again, Will, you’ll believe it. They’ll flog you to shreds and hang what’s left of you for the crows to eat.”

  They continued with an assessment of the damage done to the British effort and what impact it would have on an assault in the spring.

  Will sipped on a cup of what was alleged to be coffee, but was more likely something made of crushed chestnuts. “The storm of fire swept away a number of buildings, but they can be rebuilt. I’d say that hundreds of tents were destroyed, but not the inhabitants. Casualties were likely relatively few and fatalities obviously less so.”

  “Too bloody bad,” Tallmadge muttered. “When I heard of the fire, I’d hoped for the complete immolation of the British Army.”

  Drake continued. “I am most intrigued by the damage done to the barges they had under construction. In my opinion it was heavy. I don’t know how important the barges were, or what specific plans the British had for them, except that they obviously planned on sailing them around Michigan. I don’t know how long it will take to replace them; however, I am sure they are working hard as we speak. The fire hurt them, but the wounds are far from fatal.”

  “You don’t know much at all, do you?” Tallmadge said grumpily.

  “I know I need a bath. And then I need a meal and some sleep. I’m still disappointed that I’m not the first with the news of the fire. Tell me, was it someone at the tavern near where I quartered my men?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  Will’s curiosity was piqued. “And just what do you mean by that, my dear General?”

  Tallmadge winked. “Well, let’s just say a little bird told me.”

  * * *

  Braxton unsealed the message and read it carefully. The very young British officer who’d brought it looked distinctly uncomfortable and kept trying not to stare at Braxton’s ruined face and hands. Braxton felt like killing him. Fucking officers always thought they were better than everyone else, especially the young British ones. If they weren’t the only means to his ends, he’d have nothing to do with them.

  “You’ll stay the night. I’ll give you a reply in the morning.”

  “Yes, Captain.” The ensign’s smooth little face sagged. He’d sooner be in hell than spend a night with Burned Man Braxton and his terrible men. The little bastard was probably afraid that someone would try to bugger him in the night. Braxton grinned. Maybe the little boy officer was afraid someone wouldn’t.

  At least the little turd had the decency to acknowledge his militia rank. Of course the young twit probably realized that he, Braxton, could have him killed and blame the murder on Indians, or rebels, or bears. He glared at the Brit and watched him shift nervously. Power was such a good feeling. He felt like growling to see if the British ensign would shit his pants.

  Braxton took the message outside the log cabin he called home and gestured for his two lieutenants, Fenton and Harris, to come to him.

  “You boys bored?”

  “Hell yes,” Fenton answered. While they were warm and comfortable in other cabins they’d taken over, they’d not been allowed to associate with others in Detroit or elsewhere. Burgoyne had decided that the stench from their raids was too much. Well, the hell with Burgoyne. Of course, now there wasn’t a Detroit for them to visit even if they’d wanted to.

  “The British want us to raid another village,” Braxton said.

  Fenton’s eyes gleamed and Harris smiled, “Finally.”

  “Finally is right,” said Braxton. “Just like the others, it’s a compound of several buildings with maybe a dozen people and that includes some women. Word is they’ve been harboring rebel messengers and maybe even the traitors who burned Detroit. If we do this right, we’ll show the British just how useful we can be.”

  Harris and Fenton nodded like puppets. The mention of women in the rebel compound had gotten their undivided attention. There’d been no sex from captured women in a couple of months, which made their inability to visit the whores in Detroit a particular hardship. They were only a couple of days away from the settlement that Braxton had described.

  “How did we miss it?” asked Fenton.

  “Probably because it’s such a little bitty place out there in a great big forest,” Braxton answered.

  He was tolerant with Fenton because they went back a long ways, even though he thought his old deputy was more than a little bit stupid. Fenton wasn’t totally useless, however. It had been Fenton’s idea way back in Pendleton to extort sex from female prisoners, or the wives, daughters, and even the mothers of male prisoners. Hell, some of the older women had been great at what Braxton asked them to do in order to save their families from further harm.

  Still, Braxton thought Fenton would fuck a goat if that was all that was available. “It’s at a place where two strea
ms meet. I know one of them. We follow it downstream and it’ll lead us to the rebels. Maybe the fun we’ll have will make some of the boys who left us regret it.”

  Braxton’s band was now down to under twenty. Lack of action had caused some to leave while others were affected by the fact that they were pariahs and no one wanted anything to do with them. Bring back a few scalps and brag about new meat they’d screwed and the right kind of men would come running real fast.

  Then Harris had a thought. “Hey, didn’t Burgoyne say he didn’t want us around? Did the fire change all that?”

  Braxton spread his ruined mouth in a parody of a smile. “Maybe our new orders didn’t come from Burgoyne.”

  “Who then?” asked Harris.

  Braxton laughed. “Bloody fucking Tarleton.”

  * * *

  Neither Sarah nor Faith had worked up enough courage to greet Will and Owen with open arms and passion as they’d discussed. Faith was still apprehensive about pushing Owen, and Sarah wasn’t certain she wanted to go too far with Will, at least not just yet.

  That and the almost total lack of privacy in Fort Washington conspired against them. Sarah was not going to copulate against a barrack wall or on a pile of hay in a cold barn. Others were always doing exactly that, but she would not.

  Still, Sarah made sure Will knew she was delighted to see him even though he was as filthy as a pig dressed as he was in a mixture of dirty woolen cloth and ripe buckskin. She laughed and told him any pig would be insulted by the comparison. Will thought he was immaculate in comparison with what he’d been like when existing in the hold of the prison hulk. He shuddered at the memory and, with a twinge of guilt, wondered what happened to the Negro, Homer, the man who’d rescued him and given him a second chance at life and freedom. If a miracle occurred and the Americans won their war, maybe he would find out.

  While Will went to his quarters and scrubbed his body with ash soap and lukewarm water from a bowl, Sarah took his clothing to her barracks and cleaned them as best she could. They agreed to meet later in the evening. She strongly felt that people should be as clean as possible and bathed as frequently as it was safe, and was pleased that Will seemed to feel the same way.

  Will still did not have a proper uniform and put on other civilian clothing. A badge showed his rank in the army. So accoutered, he went to Tallmadge for further information.

  First, the news of the draconian laws to be enacted against the colonists, whether loyal or rebel, was beginning to get out and circulate throughout the colonies. Rebel households were horrified, while loyalists were either disbelieving or shocked, with disbelief being the prominent emotion. They wanted proof and they would doubt the news until they either saw the official documents, or when Governor General Cornwallis admitted it.

  “I wonder if people will finally believe it when they are enslaved and have had all their property taken from them,” Tallmadge said bitterly. “Of course, even if they do, we might not be here to laugh at them.”

  They wondered if confirmation of the report would result in mass emigration of Loyalists from the colonies to Canada and elsewhere. “South Africa would be my choice,” Will said.

  In other areas the news was mixed at best. On the negative side, Nathanael Greene’s young wife had informed them that the already very ill general had taken a turn for the worse. He was now partially paralyzed and drifting in and out of a coma. Even the most optimistic admitted that he would never again command in the field. This was a particularly upsetting condition because Greene had been Washington’s right-hand man and, in the opinion of many, a better tactician and fighter than Washington himself. It had been Greene who had taken command of the southern theater and maneuvered Cornwallis into a corner of Virginia called Yorktown that should have been the coffin of British hopes.

  None of the remaining American generals had ever commanded an army or held a significant independent command. And, with few exceptions, the rank and file had little confidence in their abilities.

  The closest to a war leader at Fort Washington was Daniel Morgan, the Old Wagoneer. He had led a wing at Saratoga and defeated the British under Tarleton at the Cowpens where he had utterly destroyed the British force. He had arrived along with Willy Washington, the dead General George Washington’s nephew and a decent cavalry commander in his own right. Morgan, however, was often bedridden himself as a result of bouts of rheumatism and arthritis brought on by too much campaigning in the field. He was nearing fifty and old beyond his years. Willy Washington had been captured before the debacle at Yorktown and subsequently paroled. He’d been one of the lucky ones to have missed the later British sweep of rebel officers.

  “It could be worse,” Will had said, “we could still have Gates and Lee.”

  Neither Horatio Gates nor Charles Lee had distinguished themselves in command of an American army. Although Gates was widely considered to be the victor at Saratoga, the battle had been largely won by his subordinates—Morgan, John Stark and the subsequently traitorous Benedict Arnold. In a later battle and after being given command in the south, Gates had fled in disgrace from his defeat at Camden. He’d been captured by the British and now languished in a Jamaican prison. Lee had been sacked by Washington after his confused performance at Monmouth. He too had been captured by the British and, for reasons unknown, had been hanged. Few mourned him.

  On the positive side, John Glover and his small regiment from Marblehead, Massachusetts, was rumored to be en route. Not only were they fine soldiers and well led, but they were boatmen whose skills had already proven useful. Their work during the retreat from Long Island and the crossing of the Delaware came to mind.

  Still, Glover’s presence would not solve the problem of an overall field commander. He was a fine regimental commander, but not a man to lead an army. Will had heard that at one skirmish on Manhattan, Glover had fought bravely but had openly longed for someone else to lead the effort.

  Tallmadge fumed. “We have colonels and brigadiers, but no one with experience in independent command except for a sickly Morgan. And there’s precious little time for anyone to learn. The only other experienced ranking officer we have is Schuyler and the men won’t follow him.”

  “Don’t you think he got unfair blame for losing Ticonderoga?” Will asked. The defeat at Ticonderoga had resulted in Schuyler’s removal and replacement by Gates.

  “Will, it doesn’t matter what I think. The army has no confidence in him. If Schuyler commands, they will fight with one eye on the Redcoats and one on an escape route out to the west because they think he can do nothing but lose for them.”

  “That reminds me,” Will said, “Have you heard from Clark and his explorers?”

  “Not a peep. Well, perhaps a little,” Tallmadge said in the same smug way he’d said that Will wasn’t the first with the news of the Detroit fire. What the devil was going on, Will wondered.

  “Clark and his men made it well west to a fascinating discovery, a huge salt lake. But now they are hibernating for the winter. What they did find is that there is precious little likelihood of a large number of people finding sustenance in such a barren landscape.”

  “So we fight or die?” Will said.

  “Wasn’t it always that way, Will?”

  * * *

  “Benjamin Franklin is a brilliant man,” Sarah declared. “Perhaps the most brilliant man who ever existed. He lets the others, like that pompous Hancock, think they are in charge, but then he comes up with ideas that they have to follow. He’s like a very old and very skillful puppeteer and they are his puppets.”

  “Do tell,” Will said with a lazy smile. They were seated on chairs across from each other in Franklin’s study. The great man was puttering around someplace, so any sense of privacy was an illusion.

  Sarah was unfazed by his apparent lack of interest in what she was saying. What did faze her was the way he kept staring at her. She continued, “Dr. Franklin has made a series of proposals. First, he thinks that we should come up with a
constitution, a set of rules that our nation should abide by. He says it would be a counter to the dictatorial hand of the British.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me.”

  “Yes. It would show people that they have a choice. They can live freely as Americans, or as slaves under the British. He says there should be no restraints on religion, assembly, or the press, and that just about any man should be able to vote if he wishes.”

  “So what is stopping Congress from doing just that?”

  She grimaced, “The curse of slavery. The representatives from the southern states want slavery reinstated so that when we win they can get their human property back. Dr. Franklin thinks the genie is out of the bottle and can never be returned. Another version of Pandora’s Box, he said. He thinks that the British did the colonies a favor by freeing the slaves, since, in his words, they can never be re-enslaved without an uproar and even an incredible amount of violence. After all, it’s been several years since they were freed. He is certain they are getting used to freedom and would fight to keep it. He feels the results would be a civil war with white against black, and with those whites who oppose slavery helping the blacks. He said the southerners would wind up killing many of the blacks so they can enslave the rest. He also thinks that many blacks would migrate west like we did. It sounds so logical when he says it.”

  “He’s right. I can’t imagine a slave going willingly any more than I can imagine myself going back into a prison hulk. I know this sounds overly dramatic, but I’d rather be killed fighting than surrender and be sent to that hell again.”

  “Will, I’d like to say I understand, but I doubt that I’ll ever comprehend what you went through.”