Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  There was a pattern to life in George’s early years. His father was continually under stress—tobacco prices were down in Europe, and the greedy plants quickly exhausted the soil, requiring him to keep moving his family further into virgin lands—yet he was determined to succeed, to move up in society. When he was home, there was the clatter of hooves outside: visitors, dinners, tea served in Wedgwood cups and saucers. When his father was away, the social hubbub vanished. In its place were chores, dull responsibilities. George’s sister, Betty, had been born a year after him; then in rapid succession came Samuel, John, Charles and Mildred. With his father gone and his mother a needy and demanding presence, George had work to do.

  Then, when he was eleven years old, and visiting his cousin, he was ordered to go back home at once. His father had caught a fever while traveling in a storm, and was dying.

  As challenging as George’s life was before Gus Washington’s death, it had had considerable promise. His father had been outgoing, open. He had built up a small fortune. But his will directed most of it to his sons from his first marriage. (George would inherit ten slaves, though these were to remain his mother’s “property” until he turned twenty-one.) There wasn’t even money for George to attend a proper school. Before, he had had the prospect of formal education in England, of becoming a businessman and a member of the local gentry. Now his future occupation looked more likely that of a harassed nanny. He was up at dawn every morning, saddled with the responsibility of helping to feed and care for his younger siblings and with the challenge of handling his mother, who seems to have berated him as much as she leaned on him, and of whom one of his cousins later declared, “I was more afraid than of my own parents.”

  The American colonies constituted a significant portion of Britain’s empire by the 1730s, but not all of England’s holdings were an ocean away from London. Ireland, a few dozen miles across the Irish Sea, had been subject to English will, in one form or another, as far back as the twelfth century. England ruled the Irish through an official called the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. When George Sackville was fourteen, his father was named to that position. The boy went to Dublin with him, leaving behind the great estate of Knole, where he had been raised, and wading for the first time into the wider world.

  Dublin, circa 1730, was a city on the move—in two directions at once. Grand medieval houses were being given clean modern facades, and a new Parliament House—the world’s first purpose-built bicamercal legislature—was under construction. But it was also a city of famines and riots. Gentlemen and ladies who went walking in the streets complained of being swarmed by beggars. Outside its urbane heart, the streets and alleys seethed with crowds of poor people. “If they happen to hear of the death of a horse, they run to it as to a feast,” a pamphleteer lamented. If George Sackville had had a sublimely sheltered upbringing, Dublin was a sharp introduction to reality.

  As it happened, the boy received a world-class chaperone in Dublin. His father was preoccupied by politics during his time as Lord Lieutenant, but Lady Betty Germain, his in-house benefactor at Knole, had written a friend—a sixty-seven-year-old scholar, a man with a round face, a penetrating gaze and a tendency to sport a resplendently flowing wig—asking him to look after the boy. The friend was Jonathan Swift, the dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and one of the most celebrated writers of his or any other age. His masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels, had been published six years earlier, and it had made him internationally famous. Swift wrote to the new Lord Lieutenant, accepting the commission to watch over the boy in the most fawning terms: “I must here by the way take notice that not only the University but even the whole kingdom are full of acknowledgments for the honor your Grace hath done them in trusting the care of educating one of your sons to Dublin College. . . .”

  Swift knew where the power lay, and was skilled at manipulating it. He was a dynamo of a man, whose daily life mixed academics, politics and church affairs, and he blended all of it into his writing with a combination of intellect and lacerating wit. George Sackville’s association with the great man gave the boy an excellent opportunity to study how power worked in the British system. All of the places in which the British Empire held sway shared certain features, having to do with accommodation to the distant power, yet each colony, dominion, outpost and protectorate had its own manner of accommodation. The system that had developed in Ireland involved three interest groups. One was the Irish people. Then there was England. The third group was the so-called Protestant Ascendancy, which was the ruling class of Ireland. Beginning more than a century earlier, England had kept the Irish subordinate by passing laws that discriminated against the Roman Catholic majority, decreeing that only members of the Protestant Church of England could own land or serve in government. England had confiscated tracts of land and installed English and Scottish colonizers, who then took control of Irish society and government. Swift was not only part of this Protestant ruling class, but, as the dean of St. Patrick’s, the seat of Protestant Irish faith, he was at the very center of the web of Anglo-Irish life.

  Young George Sackville must have absorbed a good deal of the complexity of imperial politics in his first two years in Dublin. Then, when he turned sixteen, he enrolled at Trinity College, the great Irish university, which was serious enough educationally to rival Cambridge and Oxford. Even here he was in the middle of politics. The university stood just across College Green from parliament, and a few minutes’ stroll away was Dublin Castle, the seat of British power in Ireland and the base from which his father carried out his duties.

  When George finished his studies, he began his apprenticeship in the mechanism of the empire in the most direct manner, by working as his father’s secretary. At eighteen, sitting in the Lord Lieutenant’s office in Dublin Castle, handling quill and ink, he suddenly found himself involved in the great issue of the day between England and Ireland: finance. In order to raise an army and expand its empire, England had, over the previous four decades, pioneered the concepts of a paper currency and a national debt. Dutifully following suit, Ireland’s parliament had begun its own debt, which was financed by taxes on ordinary people. Ireland’s debt was intended to serve its own interests, but the needs of Britain’s overseas empire were so pressing that the Irish people—without a say in the matter—saw their tax money get rechanneled to fund other British concerns, as far away as the American colonies.

  George Sackville’s aged but still wily mentor, Jonathan Swift, played a part in this taxation-without-representation debate. As a member of the Protestant leadership, his inclination was to support England, and as an Anglican he was a fierce opponent of Irish Catholic nationalists, both politically and religiously. Yet he was still Irish and was appalled that England should use the Irish debt for other purposes. Not only that, he found the new ideas coming out of England to be morally reprehensible. Along with the economic innovations came a new way of thinking about poverty. Whereas in Elizabethan times “the poor” were seen as a class that society was obliged to aid, the new mercantilist economists tended to see “the impotent poor”—those too young, old or sick to work—as a burden that had to be lightened. To that end, some argued that poor children could go to work as early as age four or five.

  It may have been as much due to his delicate political situation as to his temperament that Swift became a master of the use of satire. He published A Modest Proposal in the midst of this economic debate. The small pamphlet exploded on society. Those unfamiliar with the genre of satire must have been gobsmacked to read his argument “for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.” Claiming to have heard that “a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled,” he proposed, in elaborate terms, that the children of the poor be sold for meat. Such a scheme, he said, would greatly lessen the number of “Papists” and, overall, turn an e
conomic problem into an advantage.

  Swift’s pamphlet skewered the new economic theorists by carrying their scientific detachment to its logical extreme. At the same time, it went at the British policies that kept the Irish mired in poverty even as they were forced to pay taxes for the upkeep of the empire. And the indirectness of his expression allowed him to evade official censure. He managed to remain on very good terms with the Lord Lieutenant.

  By the time George Sackville was installed as his father’s secretary, the boy had had several years’ experience of both the complexities of Irish politics and the cleverness of Dean Swift. And by this time he had developed an understanding of his father. The Duke of Dorset was known, as one contemporary said, for his “good breeding” and “decency of manners,” and for the fact that “He never had an opinion about public matters.” He was, in other words, a diplomat to a fault: courtly, genial, inoffensive, always exquisitely attired in full wig and flowing silk. Swift and other Irish leaders liked him. If England’s rule was harsh, Lionel Sackville, as representative of the foreign power, avoided confrontation.

  Maybe what drew him to his third son was an opposite temperament. Unlike him, the boy had a fire in his belly. Young George Sackville was not an intellectual, but he was smart and he had galloping ambition. He believed in England and in himself; he wanted to earn glory in service to the crown. It wouldn’t have been long before the young man, as he scraped his quill across sheets of paper, taking down his father’s dictated letters, recognized the man’s mildness. He opened beseeching letters from Swift, meanwhile, and saw the Irishman dancing with witty verbiage and extravagant praise (“I cannot but think that your Grace, to whom God hath given every amiable as well as usefull talent, and in so great a measure, is bound when you have satisfyed all the expectations of those who have the most power in your club, to do something at the request of others who love you better . . .” ), and in public injecting mawkish praise with shots of satire.

  Somewhere along the way the son formed his own opinions about governing an empire. And he developed a directness that would stay with him for the rest of his life. “He studied no choice phrases, no superfluous words,” a contemporary said of him, but rather always employed “the simplest and most unequivocal” language. As for the Irish, young George decided, they were too clever for their own good. They needed a firm hand.

  In 1737, Lionel Sackville’s term as Lord Lieutenant ended, and he returned to Knole. George, however, stayed on in Dublin and became secretary to the new Lord Lieutenant. He updated his father on events, expressing his own increasingly clear and not especially diplomatic opinions. Regarding his new boss, for whom he had little respect, he wrote, “My Lord Lieutenant’s speech is very well lik’d; he spoke it so low that few people could hear it.” And despite the help he had gotten from Swift, he exhibited more contempt than fondness for his old mentor. “The Dean has shown himself more mad and absurd than ever,” he wrote his father.

  George Sackville was twenty-one. He had concluded that running an empire required not finesse but firmness, not affection but efficiency.

  A year after Broteer Furro’s mother left him to tend the sheep of a farmer in a distant province, a man on horseback arrived. He gave the farmer some money, then took the boy onto his horse and they rode off—back to Broteer’s home of Dukandarra. When the boy got to his village, he saw that his parents had made up their quarrel. They greeted him joyfully. His old life could begin again.

  Six weeks later, however, a messenger came into the village from the very province where Broteer had been living, with a message for Broteer’s father. The news was ominous. Although Broteer may not have been aware of it until now, all of Guinea had been churning with violence for decades. Much of the region, especially the rainforested lands to the south, was controlled by one or another of the Akan kingdoms. These states—the main ones were Akyem, Asante, Akwamu, Fante and Denkyira—allied with each other, and at times fought with each other, over control of the region’s major products: ivory, kola nuts (which contain caffeine and were chewed by many West Africans), slaves and gold, which was mined in the inland forests. The Akan were a distinct culture, decidedly unlike Broteer’s people. The Akan language, Twi, would have been alien to the boy. The Akan peoples lived in rooted communities, in clay houses, sometimes with columns decorated with swirling relief images. Their cultures were built around their kings, who had elaborate courts and the symbol of whose authority was a throne, called a stool. Gold, goldsmithing and jewelry were important to the Akan. So were weaving, pottery and crafting products from iron. Unlike the herders of Dukandarra, they lived in fixed societies.

  Europeans had first reached the coast and begun trading for gold and slaves as far back as the 1450s. By the 1480s, Portuguese ships were sailing away from West African ports with as many as 3,500 slaves a year. Europeans had not introduced slavery. The practice of capturing and enslaving other Africans had long been a feature of many cultures in the region—in some places the slave population outnumbered the native—but as more European nations sent ships, their trade played a part in reshaping the native economies, politics and even diet. Prior to European contact, the Akan and others in the region had a lack of carbohydrates in their diet. The Europeans brought corn, which the Akan took to growing, and it helped spark a population surge, especially among the Fante on the coast. The agricultural revolution in turn gave the Akan kingdoms a greater need for slave labor.

  The Danes, the Dutch, the English and the Portuguese established themselves at “castles” along the Gold Coast, which were essentially trading bases. They were not fortresses from which they controlled the Africans; the Europeans were very much subordinate. They paid rent and forged alliances with the local kingdoms. By the early decades of the 1700s, as slavery became a truly massive industry, the alliances—among Akan states and between Akans and Europeans—shifted often as parties jockeyed for advantage.

  In 1737 and 1738, a complex situation unfolded, with the Dutch and the Danes exerting pressure on different Akan factions, while the Akyem kingdom, in an attempt to gain dominance over other Akan states, sent armies into Fante territory along the coast. The governor of the Danish-controlled territory reported to his bosses in October 1738 that the Akyem “have for the last month been at war with the Fantes and have defeated them, just as they have destroyed the market place that was in Agona. . . .”

  The Akyem power grab seems to have set off a chain reaction in which other states, eager to get guns from the Europeans with which to defend themselves, roamed northward, out of the forest and into the savanna, in search of slaves they could trade.

  The news from the messenger to Saungm Furro was that the territory astride the wide river where Broteer had lived with the farmer had been invaded. Unlike the invaders, Broteer’s people had no guns. The locals weren’t equipped to fight. The messenger asked Broteer’s father if the people from his village could take refuge in his lands. Saungm Furro agreed. But a few days after the refugees arrived came word that the invading army was headed toward Dukandarra. The newcomers fled, but Saungm Furro and his people remained in their homes.

  When the advance party appeared, soldiers gave Broteer’s father their demands. The army would leave him and his people alone provided he paid them. They wanted three hundred cattle, equally large numbers of other animals, and money. Cattle were precious, but Broteer’s father paid what was demanded. After he paid, however, he learned that the foreign soldiers were preparing to attack anyway, so he ordered his people to flee in small groups. At dawn, Broteer sneaked away from the village with his mother and two brothers. His father left together with his other two wives.

  The little party met up on a plain some distance from the village, where they crouched in the brush and hid. Eventually, figuring that the coast was clear, they decided to cook some food. But a scouting party spotted the smoke from the fire and charged at them. Saungm Furro had his bow and arrows for defense; he started shooting at the soldiers. Broteer
, the other children and the women hid themselves in tall grass, but eventually they were captured.

  Then the world stopped: the forend of a rifle, used as a club, smashed into Broteer’s head. He felt a hand at his throat. Then there was a rope around his neck; he was tied to the women. His father had likewise been captured and bound. They were marched to the soldiers’ camp.

  The soldiers knew who Saungm Furro was, knew that he was the head of the village and that he had wealth. Much of that wealth was in animals, which they already had. But they knew he had gold. They wanted it.

  When it had been a matter of turning over his animals in order to save the village, he had willingly done so. But something else was at stake now. This perhaps had to do with a Fulfulde word, pulaaku, which translates as “the Fulani way.” It related to a code of conduct, the chief tenets of which were personal reserve, aloofness, strength, fortitude. Implicit in the code, which was instilled in Fulani during childhood, was a sense of shame that comes if a person violates behavioral standards. Pulaaku was a code of honor.

  Saungm Furro refused to say where his treasure was hidden. The torture began. The son looked on. His father was a large and powerful man, six and a half feet tall according to the son’s memory, but he had no power now—none but what came from maintaining his honor. The soldiers cut the man’s body, pummeled him, demanded that he reveal his hiding place. In answer, he taunted them. The torture intensified. He refused to talk. As Broteer watched, transfixed, he may have thought of the Gumbala, the Fulani epic poem of courage, which was typically sung to the accompaniment of a single stringed instrument and women beating gourds on the ground:

  Allah, for the sake of my mother’s prayers