Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  Those same families still ran things in Yates’s time. The power monopoly was graphically arrayed for him every Sunday. When he walked through the doors of the Dutch Reformed Church at the intersection of State Street and Broadway he was not free to choose a seat in front but had to walk up into the balcony, where the slaves also sat. Below, the town’s rulers—the Schuylers, De Peysters, Van Rensselaers, Cuylers and Livingstons—spread themselves before him like the powerful pieces on a chess board. Seating was segregated by sex as well as power. In winter, the women of these families had braziers at their feet, fed with coals by their slaves from the church’s stove. The men occupied the important church offices and sat in high benches along the walls near the front; their seats were passed down from one generation to the next.

  Political offices in Albany were divided up among the same families. At the age of twenty-two, Yates made his first effort at wedging himself into this political monopoly, taking a step that was considered appropriate to his class. His father had served as constable for the second ward; Abraham ran for the same office, and won. It was the smallest of political jobs, and unpaid, but it was a start.

  His next upward step involved making repeated rides on horseback 15 miles north, following the course of the Hudson River. At meadow breaks he had views across to the line of mountains, tawny or gray depending on the sunlight, that signaled what any enterprising young man knew was the future: the west. Cutting eastward then, he entered deep forest. This wilderness was different from the one that George Washington knew. That was a lusher, more southerly forest, of buckeyes and sweetbays and water tupelos. Here, 400 miles to the north, the woods had a harsher aspect; it was a landscape that cracked with cold in winter. Young Abraham Yates traveled past Dutch farms and settlements, past the falls at Cohoes, where the Mohawk River spilled down into the Hudson.

  His destination was a little agricultural crossroads called Schaghticoke. A wealthy farmer named Cornelis de Ridder lived here with his second wife, Gerritje. Abraham had his eye on the farmer’s daughter, Anna, who was also called by the Dutch diminutive Antje. He would have presented the idea of marriage to the girl’s father as a quasi business proposition. What he brought was intelligence and ambition. De Ridder offered as dowry a parcel of land he owned in Albany, together with a house. Abraham and Anna were married in the little log structure of the Dutch Reformed Church in Schaghticoke. Then Abraham brought her back to Albany.

  Now that he was set up with a wife and a home, he prepared to make a bolder move into politics. Things were changing. The fur trade, the power base of the town’s mighty families, was diminishing; at the same time, the wider region was growing and the city was becoming a center for tradesmen and craftsmen like him: coopers, tanners, masons and tinsmiths, who came from New York City and as far away as Europe.

  Yates expanded his client base, selling shoes to the families of these newcomers. At the same time he saw an opportunity to take advantage of the growing consumer base by diversifying; he began selling products from the Caribbean islands—rum, sugar, molasses—and later added others, such as tea, wine and writing paper.

  But the more rooted he became in his city’s economic life, the more Yates came to resent its leading families, who had written laws to favor their own business. Slowly, however, it dawned on him that the influx of newcomers gave him the opening he had been looking for. They weren’t bound by the old ways of the city. They had no inbred awe or special regard for the elite families of Albany. In September 1753 he made his break with convention: he decided to run for an office that had power. Assistant alderman for the third ward was a low post on the city council, but it would involve him in the governing of the city. His novel strategy was to appeal directly to voters (free white property-owning males over the age of twenty-one), and to focus on those at the lower end: a sawmaker named John Price; Thomas Sharp, who was a barber; the tailor, Jellis Winne; tavernkeeper Edward Williams; Indian trader Samuel Pruyn. He tramped into homes and workshops, stirring people up by telling them it was time they took charge of their affairs, time they elected one of their own. He liked to say he stood for “the rights of the people,” which sounded vaguely dangerous but also exciting. He also liked to say he represented not the elites but the “middle sort.” Abraham Yates—the shoemaker, the blacksmith’s son—had by now spent years cultivating such people, building their trust. He won.

  For the sick, life consisted of fever, vomiting, blisters, lethargy and eventual death. For the well, a steady diet of “slauber sauce,” which tasted as it sounded. For everyone there was misery, violence and the ceaseless undulation of the waves.

  Abraham Yates was still a teenager learning the shoemaker’s craft when Venture, who was about three years younger than Yates, left Africa and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. As an old man looking back, he described his experience on a slave ship with grim economy: “An ordinary passage, except great mortality by the small pox.” If Captain Collingwood followed the procedure used aboard other slave ships, he would have begun the ordeal by having the male slaves stand in shackles on the deck as they weighed anchor at Anomabo, keeping them bound securely while giving them a chance to absorb the reality that they were leaving all they had ever known, on the theory that the shock and despair would render them pliable. Then they would be taken down to the hold, where they spent much of the voyage shackled in suffocating darkness.

  Which is not to say that the European captors had no care for the welfare of the Africans. The financial success of the voyage depended on keeping them alive and reasonably healthy. But of course people sickened and died anyway. The menu of available diseases contained many options: dysentery (“the flux”), tuberculosis (“consumption”), yellow fever, yaws and, in the case of the Charming Susanna, smallpox. Of the 87 slaves Captain Collingwood bought at Anomabo, 13 died on the crossing.

  Disease was one regular feature of a slave voyage. Violence and confusion were others. The mix of people from different tribes meant communication among the captives was difficult. They separated by language. One or more groups typically tried to launch an insurrection. Slaves would surreptitiously break out of their manacles and pass chisels or marlin spikes to one another to use as weapons. Crews employed violence and intimidation strategies, such as mounted guns aimed into the slave quarters. An experienced officer—such as Thomas Mumford, the first mate of the Charming Susanna, who was the cousin of the man who had bought Venture—would select a few slaves to be “guardians,” who were assigned to watch the other captives.

  Somehow the boy negotiated the intricacies of the floating system of violence and control as it made its way across the ocean. The ship reached its first port of call, the Caribbean island of Barbados, two months after leaving Anomabo. George Washington, on his own arrival at the same island in his effort to find treatment for his brother’s tuberculosis, would note drinking tea with the local gentry, riding “in the cool of the evening,” and being “perfectly enraptured with the beautiful prospects, which every side presented to our view,—the fields of cane, corn, fruit-trees, &c. in a delightful green.” He did not mention the presence of 40,000 slaves who worked those fields. Barbados was a main port of call for slavers, for it was a center of the British sugar industry, the source not only of the “white gold” to which Europeans were by now happily addicted but also rum, the principal hard liquor of the time, and molasses—a true staple, which was used in everything from beer to medicine to Boston baked beans.

  The attractive landscape was in perfect contrast to the work conditions, for sugar cane was brutally hard to plant, tend, harvest and process, and the slave code gave the English overlords who owned the island’s individual estates near-absolute control over their slaves. The industry was as lucrative as it was brutal—Britain’s Caribbean plantations brought in far more income than did North America, and over the century Barbados alone had almost as many slaves working its fields as were shipped to the thirteen colonies. Of the 74 slaves aboard the Charming Susanna that s
urvived the voyage, 70 disembarked to spend the rest of their lives working the Barbados sugar fields.

  But Venture was spared that nightmare. Because he was already the property of the steward of the Charming Susanna, he watched the cane fields slip from view as the ship sailed back out of the harbor. When it entered its home port of Newport, Rhode Island, on August 23, 1739, 321 days after it had departed, a new life began.

  Robinson Mumford delivered him first into the keeping of his sister Mercy, in Newport, so that the boy could learn some English and begin to comprehend the alien entity that was American society. The Mumford family had wealth, and so did the town. Newport was one of the four or five busiest ports in North America, with more than a hundred wharves and a harbor thick with sailing vessels. Much of the industry was due, directly or not, to slavery. Newport outfitted more slaving ships than any other city in the thirteen mainland colonies.

  Fashions on the street reflected the city’s mixed society, which had heavy concentrations of sailors, Quakers (dourly dressed moralists, already calling for the abolition of slavery, to no avail), Portuguese Jews, and an African slave presence that totaled about 10 percent of the city’s population. Venture took in the cityscape and processed the functioning of a well-to-do New England family’s house and all that went with it: porcelain teacups, silk handkerchiefs, paintings and mirrors on walls, and the noisy and beguiling wooden box that governed life, the hall clock. Learning English was synonymous with learning the nouns and verbs of service. Water, pot, hearth, boil. Wood, ax, chop, haul. Privy, night soil, shovel. Autumn was coming on; a chilly and unfamiliar wind was whipping the sails in the harbor. Venture noted everything, but kept his head down and worked.

  Eventually, Robinson Mumford came to collect the boy to bring him to his father’s estate, on Fishers Island, between the Connecticut coast and the tip of Long Island. Mercy would have confirmed things he had already surmised from the ocean voyage. Venture was smart. He learned fast. He worked hard. He seemed trustworthy. Robinson was himself a young man, barely twenty-one, and had some innocence, at least compared to the other men in his family, who were veteran slavers. He seems to have developed a fondness for Venture, a desire to trust him.

  Trustworthiness was indeed a part of the code of honor that Venture had inherited, and at this point an incident occurred that the boy saw as a test of his character. He traveled with Mumford by ship westward from Newport and put in at Narragansett. Here, Mumford, apparently having an appointment on the mainland, decided that he would go by road westward and Venture would continue on to Fishers Island with the ship. Also onboard was Mumford’s father, George, who was himself a ship’s captain. Before he left, Robinson Mumford handed the boy a set of keys, telling him they were to his private trunks and that he was to keep the keys in his possession at all times and not let anyone open the trunks. He made a point of mentioning his father in particular.

  The ship put in at Fishers Island. Venture unloaded his master’s belongings, and Mumford’s father promptly ordered him to hand over the keys to the trunks. Venture said that his master had told him to give the keys to no one until he returned. “I had given him my word to be faithful to the trust,” he said later. The father got aggressive, threatened to punish him. But the boy refused, with enough conviction that the man went away. Still, Venture felt uneasy, and fashioned the keys on a chain around his neck. At night he took the precaution of sleeping with them under his body.

  Robinson Mumford’s first act on arriving home was to ask for Venture. The boy heard, appeared in the room, and said, in his newly minted English, “Here, sir, at your service.” Mumford asked for the keys. Venture took them off his neck and handed them over. Mumford petted the boy’s hair as he took the keys, and, as if guessing what had transpired, opined to his father that young Venture was “so faithful” that no one could have gotten the keys from him except by superior strength. During the ocean voyage Venture must have told his owner something of his life in Dukandarra, for Mumford went on to say that he believed he could trust the boy with his whole fortune, since “he had been in his native place so habituated to keeping his word, that he would sacrifice even his life to maintain it.”

  Venture settled into life on Fishers Island. The island was seven miles long, skinny, craggy and covey, wooded sections alternating with pastureland. Especially in winter, it was an isolated, windswept place to come of age. But he made one friend. His owner’s youngest sister, Rebecca, was fifteen years old. There were no other white families on the island, no one for her to play with. Venture, who was about five years younger, bonded with her. She improved his English and became the closest thing he had to family.

  In time, Venture came to realize that he was closer to his homeland than he had thought. Fishers Island lay two miles from the New England shore, but its recent history, like that of the Mumford family and the entire surrounding region, was intimately tied to West Africa, slavery, the Caribbean, sugar and rum. Rich soil and a seafaring tradition resulted in the development of plantations in southern Connecticut and Rhode Island, as well as the nearby islands, which provided produce to sustain Caribbean slaves. The plantations were much smaller than those in George Washington’s Virginia, but they also relied on slave labor, so that while in New England as a whole black slaves were only 3 percent of the population, here, along the coast, about 13 percent of the inhabitants were slaves.

  Venture apparently lived in the Mumford house. Southern plantations of the type that George Washington knew had separate slave quarters, but farm slaves in southern New England typically slept in the main house, either in the kitchen or the attic, so he was able to observe carefully the life of his owners. He noticed that some of the people who came and went at the house were treated with great respect. Among other things, the finest bedroom was reserved for their use. These were members of the Winthrop family. The island had been owned by the Winthrops since John Winthrop Jr., the governor of the Connecticut colony in the mid-1600s, had obtained it. The Mumfords leased the island from the Winthrops.

  Going back some generations, Mumfords had insinuated themselves in every facet of the trade between New England, the Caribbean and West Africa, working as ship’s captains, slave peddlers, rum runners and produce suppliers.

  Venture learned that the Mumford business on Fishers Island was raising sheep and cattle that would become food for slaves in the Caribbean. His job, in effect, was to help feed the very people who had been sold into slavery in Africa along with him, who were now working the cane fields in Barbados to support Britain’s colonial empire. He wasn’t just a victim of the slave trade, but an active part of it.

  Initially, because of his youth, Venture worked in the house, doing jobs such as carding wool. Robinson Mumford, who regularly went off to sea, gave him steadily more responsibilities and put continued trust in him, and Venture repaid it. As he grew, his horizon expanded. He learned the area in which he lived: people on the island made regular visits to the coastal Connecticut towns of New London, Groton and Stonington, for work, to socialize, to buy products. He heard about other places further afield: Providence, New Haven, Cape Cod, Boston.

  One day momentous news arrived: Robinson Mumford had died at sea. Robinson’s father, George Mumford, became the boy’s owner. Venture’s life changed from that moment. He was sent outdoors and given progressively more strenuous tasks, such as pounding four bushels of corn every night as chickenfeed. As his teen years went by, he grew uncommonly big and strong, and so did the burdens. The main work—helping tend more than 1,000 sheep and 300-odd cattle—was, ironically, precisely what he had grown up doing in his village of Dukandarra. But that was just the beginning. A farm had land to be tilled, oats to be stacked, apples to be gathered, cider to be pressed, brush fence to be made and mended, meat to be salted, cellars to be plastered, wood to be chopped—all in quantity, no matter what the weather. Fishing was a regular part of life as well, and Venture became skilled at handling boats and negotiating the tricky curren
ts of Fishers Island Sound.

  All of this Venture could manage, toiling alongside other slaves. He prided himself on his strength, and performed feats to impress others. Once he carried a tierce of salt—weighing 350 pounds—a distance of about forty feet. He was showing off, but might also have been developing his reputation, trying to increase his value. He enjoyed learning new skills, each of which he seemed to feel might be of value to him in the future. But then came the hardest task: as he said, “to serve two masters.” George Mumford’s son James, brother of Robinson, took a special interest in him. He seemed to sense a latent willfulness in this particular slave, this giant of a young man whose tests of strength seemed a kind of challenge. He had a coiled energy that needed to be tamed. James began taking it upon himself to give Venture orders.

  One day, when George Mumford was away, James issued a long list of chores for Venture to perform. Venture informed him that he had no time to carry them out because his master’s orders took precedence. Whereupon, Venture said, James Mumford “broke out into a great rage, snatched a pitchfork and went to lay me over the head therewith.” Venture acted fast, grabbed a pitchfork of his own, and used it to defend himself. James Mumford called three other men to come to his aid. They got a rope and tried to tie him up, but the young man had grown strong enough that, fueled by sudden rage, he was able to hold them off. Mumford gave up; he informed his mother that Venture had become too unruly to deal with. At this, Venture—angry at himself for letting his temper flare—changed tactics. He became meek, let the men tie him up. James had him dragged to a hook used for hanging up dead cows that were to be butchered and the men hoisted him onto it. He told them to go to the peach orchard and cut whips—he intended to teach the slave a lesson. But then, perhaps figuring that when his father returned he would not like to find Venture scarred, he thought better of it. He let the slave hang on the meat hook for an hour, then hauled him down.