Sackville was now thirty-eight; he had just gotten married—to Diana Sambrooke, a twenty-three-year-old woman from a good family, who was utterly devoted to him—and his tall, fleshy person was often seen these days huddled together in and around the Palace of Westminster with William Pitt, the most brilliant member of the cabinet and the most vocal advocate of all-out war against France. With Pitt’s help, Sackville extricated himself from the American assignment. It was not that he had become battle-shy. Surely not. But he was nothing if not savvy in his career calculations. If Ireland, with its messy politics and rambunctious populace, was a place to risk ruining one’s reputation, then in the American colonies that risk was elevated to near-certainty. The king had made clear that the colonies were to participate in the war effort, which required careful orchestration. But the governments of the individual colonies were always at each other’s throats, and separately and together they bickered with the home country even in peacetime. Then there were the dozens of Indian tribes, who signed and then broke treaties with individual colonies as well as with each other. It was a foolhardy situation for a man who wanted to distinguish himself.
Sackville was relieved when the American assignment went to another man.
As George Washington and George Sackville maneuvered for position in the coming war with France, Abraham Yates and his wife, Antje, were in a state of gathering melancholy. In eight years of marriage Antje had been pregnant four times, and four times they made a solemn procession to the graveyard of Albany’s Dutch Reformed Church to bury a small body. Abraham, meanwhile, continued his work for the city council, but the pay was not enough to support them, so he was still making shoes. As winter settled in on the shores of the Hudson River late in 1753, he sat at his workbench and crafted a fine pair of leather boots for Ephraim Bogardus, for which he took as payment three heifers and a half gallon of rum. Then he made two pairs of gloves for Wouter Groesbeek. And he continued to work as a merchant, selling a pound of tea here, two pounds of chocolate there, a pound of “wilde” (i.e., unrefined) sugar, nine ells of checkered cloth. In the evenings, he and Antje had time to contemplate their empty cradle and the pains of human existence.
Then, as spring gave way to early summer, a sparkle of novelty appeared in the grayness of their life. It was late June of 1754 and hot, and in the steamy, rainy weather the people of Albany watched as men who seemed as exotic as turbaned potentates from faraway lands stepped by twos and threes off the ferry at the Hudson River landing and processed up the hill into the streets of their bucolic town. At 150 miles north of Manhattan, 240 from Philadelphia, and a good 500 miles from Williamsburg (about two weeks’ ride on horseback), Albany was remote. Its inhabitants knew it; they felt the snugness of its parochialisms. And so this influx felt like an exotic parade.
The influx into Albany was the doing of George Montagu Dunk, the Earl of Halifax, a contemporary of George Sackville in the British government. As the First Lord of Trade he oversaw the committee—commonly known as the Board of Trade—that was responsible for the American colonies. The forts that the French had been constructing in America concerned him intimately. He knew as well as Sackville that order was lacking in the colonies, that some kind of overall control was essential. So he had sent letters to the governors of each, requesting that they come together and hash out a common plan. The most pressing issue concerned the Iroquois Confederacy. The upheaval in the Ohio Country, plus repeated instances of land fraud in Iroquois territory—colonists concluding treaties with Indians for land and then creatively redrawing borders to make the purchased area vastly larger—had brought the Iroquois to the brink of open conflict with the English. If the Iroquois chose to side with France, it would be disastrous. The conference, then, was to include representatives of the Iroquois nations as well. Abraham Yates’s city may have been remote compared to some places, but its location was precisely why it had been chosen to host the gathering. For Albany was the main link of British North America not only to Iroquois country but to the French in Canada.
Among the delegates from distant colonies whom Abraham and Antje Yates could get a close look at were such notables as Elisha Williams, the distinguished former rector of Yale College, and John Penn, scion of the family that owned the Province of Pennsylvania. But the “foreigner” who drew the most attention was John Penn’s fellow Pennsylvanian, the portly and courtly, the alternately learned and bawdy, Mr. Benjamin Franklin. The forty-nine-year-old Franklin was by this point known far and wide for his experiments with and bewildering promotion of electricity (five years earlier he had hosted a party featuring “a Turky . . . killed for our dinners by the Electrical Shock; and roasted by the electrical jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle”), as well as for his publication Poor Richard’s Almanac, his work as a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and as proprietor and publisher of and regular contributor to the Pennsylvania Gazette, the most widely read newspaper in the thirteen colonies. Even here in distant Albany, people could quote Franklin’s aphorisms about daily life (“time is money”) and politics: “Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigour from a popular examination into the actions of the magistrates.”
As the delegates sat down to meetings in the Town Hall, and waited day after humid day for the Indians to arrive, a committee of delegates, led by Franklin, put their heads together and drafted a plan to unite the colonies by which, as they wrote, “one general government may be formed in America, within and under which government each colony may retain its present constitution.” The new government would be led by a “President-General.” Among the delegates and back home in Pennsylvania, Franklin enthusiastically promoted the plan; it would give the thirteen colonies a single voice in dealing with the Indians and, for that matter, in dealing with Britain. He went so far as to publish a political cartoon (the first in America, by some reckonings) in his Pennsylvania Gazette to illustrate the situation:
The delegates in Albany voted in favor of the plan of union. But when they brought it back to their respective provinces, the colonial governments failed to ratify it, and the British Board of Trade, which had asked them to come up with just such an arrangement, didn’t approve it either. The united colonial government would have been loyal to Britain, but to certain officials in England the plan looked like a step toward some kind of independence.
At last, the Indians arrived. A procession of 200 Iroquois, ceremonially robed, beaded and feathered, was not especially remarkable to people of Albany such as Yates, but it was an impressive sight for some of the delegates, particularly those who had recently come from England, one of whom noted that delegates hiked “up the hill on the Back of the Town to View the Indians &ca.”
Abraham Yates was a hanger-on at the so-called Albany Congress—too minor an official to play a serious role—but he managed to use the occasion to advance his career. The assistant alderman on the city council, now thirty years old, knew well that Albany’s fortunes hinged on the Iroquois. He paid careful attention to what transpired at the grand conclave, which went on for four long weeks and was held in the open air, with the delegations seated by colony and tribe. As tribal chiefs stood and spoke, the newcomers from England followed via interpreters (“almost all the Albany people speak Indian,” one noted) and marveled at the native sense of decorum. Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Tuscarora and Mohawk speeches were punctuated by shouts of support from allied Indians that sounded to English ears like “Yoheigh-igh!” and were accompanied by wampum belts of polished beads the size and elaborateness of which was related to the importance of the speech. Yates may have noted a particularly serious-looking youth among the Seneca delegation—for it is possible that Cornplanter, still a boy but a leader in training, was among them. The Indians recounted past agreements and failures to live up to them. They recounted, in ceremonial language, their disappointment, even their pain. They said frankly that they feared the French, but also that they distrusted the English.
A
s Yates knew would happen, the Iroquois presentations revolved around one man on the New York delegation. William Johnson, thirty-nine years old, had emigrated sixteen years earlier from his native Ireland. Recognizing that it was possible to outflank Albany’s oligarchy of fur traders, he had bought land to the northwest, which he set up as a trading post. He would eventually take a renowned Mohawk woman, Molly Brant, as his consort, learn the language, and don native dress. He got himself named head of New York’s Board of Commissioners for Indian Affairs, and earned the trust of the Iroquois—even while buying tens of thousands of acres of land from them and representing the English crown in dealings with them—and at the same time garnered the enmity of Albany’s leading families. By 1751 he had become so ensnared in sparring between Albany’s great families and politicians in New York’s provincial government that he quit the Indian Affairs commission. Other men took over, and their handling of things was a main complaint of the Iroquois now. The Indians gestured toward Johnson as the man they trusted. They wanted him reinstated.
They didn’t get that—Johnson had too many enemies in New York politics—but they got assurances that things would be different. And they got presents, wagonloads of them, including four hundred guns.
The Indians also succeeded in getting the Indian Affairs commission revamped. In its new incarnation, Abraham Yates won the job of deputy secretary to the commissioners. It was a meaty role, which put him smack in the middle of his city’s complexities. He would have access to goings-on between rival factions in Albany, between them and others in New York’s colonial politics, and with the Iroquois. He would be a nexus of information.
No sooner was he awarded the job than the stakes were raised. In the middle of the congress, word reached Albany of the skirmish that George Washington and Tanacharison had engaged in with the French, at which the Half King had murdered Jumonville. The gathering in remote Albany suddenly took on global significance.
After the delegates left town, and Albany got back to its normal life, Yates dived into his new work. Drawing on the accounting skills he had developed as a shoemaker, he reorganized the files of the Indian commission and developed a deeper understanding of what the Indians felt their interest to be, where the fault lines lay. But if he found a certain sympathy for the Iroquois, he remained steadfastly an advocate of his city. Against critics who said the Indian Affairs Commission abused the Indians for their own profit, he declared that the commissioners had “the Wel being of their Country at heart.” They were, he said, fair-minded toward the Indians, but he also noted that the commissioners “governed themselves according to the following maxim: that an Indian will either fight or trade and that the only way to keep them from fighting is by trading with them.” It was, he seemed to think, a sturdy slogan for the times ahead.
As 1754 came to a close, Abraham Yates could feel a sense of accomplishment even as rumors of war grew. At home, meanwhile, there was reason to be cautiously optimistic. Antje came to him with news. She was pregnant again.
Antje Yates’s pregnancy coincided with that of Meg, Venture’s wife. In November of 1754, the chill of approaching winter on Fishers Island was made more endurable by the warmth of new life. Meg and Venture now had a daughter, whom they named Hannah. Venture wasn’t one for open displays of affection, but family bonds were sacred to him. Hannah’s arrival gave him a chance to ponder the wild vagaries of life: how in the normal course of events he could have expected to raise a family in the cattle camp where he had been born, surrounded by the comforting sounds and smells and heat of the savanna, but instead it was happening here, on a lonely island plantation, with views across to the winking lights of the Connecticut shore. With so little that was truly theirs, Venture and Meg could count themselves fortunate at least in this.
Everyone in the household would have been involved in the birth in some way. But any feelings of human conviviality between masters and slaves were short-lived. Within a matter of weeks, George Mumford decided what he would do about Venture. A slave who had run off, even if he had returned and brought his coconspirators in tow, was, in the estimation of many owners, damaged goods. He could never again be trusted. Work on the island was multifaceted. Slave or free, a worker needed to be out in the pastures, up into the hilly woods, around the farmhouse. Running the Mumfords’ operation required regular trips by boat across the sound to New London, Groton or Stonington. George Mumford was getting too old to oversee the island farm. Newspapers said troubled times lay ahead. He was contemplating ending the lease on the property with the Winthrop family. He didn’t need to be saddled with worries about the big African with the scarred face, who had been dutiful enough when Mumford’s son Robinson was alive but had now exhibited the ornery longing for freedom that all slave owners feared.
Mumford made an arrangement with a man he had known all his life, Thomas Stanton, who lived in the village of Stonington, directly opposite the island on the mainland. Stanton agreed to buy Venture. But Stanton had no need for a female slave with a newborn baby. Somewhere around Christmastime, Venture climbed into a boat and sailed away from the island, while his wife and his month-old daughter stayed behind. In case he might for a moment have forgotten, he was reminded of the inexorable harshness of human affairs. Affection, love, consideration: these were soft and uncertain and not to be counted on. The truth he had absorbed as he witnessed his father’s torture and death—that money was the hard and cold measure of things, the only solid ground in human affairs—was reinforced in him. As he sailed across the sound, he had with him his life’s savings, which he tolled with precision: “two johannes, three old Spanish dollars, and two thousand of coppers, besides five pounds of my wife’s money.” Whatever the currency, whether paper notes or chinking coins, money would be his anchor.
George Washington had his hands in the earth, his fingers testing its grainy structure. He paced off fields, studied the December sky. He was pondering a new life for himself, that of . . . tobacco farmer.
After the travesty at Fort Necessity, Washington had made his way back to Williamsburg, where he was delighted to discover that Virginians were putting a positive spin on the affair, lauding him for bravery against impossible odds. The authorities, however, took a different view of things. Governor Dinwiddie gave him a cold reception, and he was informed that, due to a reorganization of the colonial militia, the rank of colonel would no longer exist. He would in effect be demoted to captain. Others in the same situation went along with the change, but Washington refused to live with it. He was offered a new commission, which would allow him to keep his title of colonel, but only unofficially. This annoyed him even more, to the point of near illegibility. “You must entertain a very contemptible opinion of my weakness,” he wrote to the officer who made the offer, “and believe me to be more empty than the Commission itself.” Rather than tolerate what he took to be a slap in the face, he chose the young man’s dramatic gesture of quitting altogether, citing “the call of Honour” as his reason for doing so.
And so he “retired” and began to refashion himself as a gentleman farmer. Following his brother’s death, Lawrence Washington’s wife had remarried. Her plans, and those of her new husband, did not include Lawrence’s estate of Mount Vernon. But they knew that George had coveted it, so they leased the property to him, along with eighteen “Negroe slaves.” In Virginia society farming was nearly as much of an arena for garnering honor as the military, so that Washington’s second ambition in life was to learn to grow tobacco on a commercial scale. It was a treacherously tricky business, however, and competition was cutthroat among the planters. But there were rewards: those who produced the sweetest leaf that garnered the best prices sat at the top of the social hierarchy. Washington began a serious study of the business.
At the same time, he kept a close eye on events in the wider world. The man who got the job that George Sackville had dodged—to lead British forces against the French in North America—was named Edward Braddock. William, the Duke of Cu
mberland, the rambunctious son of King George, had made the selection. Cumberland knew both Sackville and Braddock well, and in deciding on Braddock, he seems to have opted for a weaker copy of Sackville. Both were aggressive and detail-minded. Braddock had not had an especially distinguished military career, and at age sixty he was old for such an arduous assignment, but the hope was that he would make up for it with his tenacity and his organizational abilities.
Braddock’s biggest hindrance was his utter lack of knowledge about America. He knew nothing of the landscape, and didn’t have a real appreciation of the distances and the difficulties of moving an army through the thickly wooded wilderness. He had little understanding of the relationships between the various colonial governments, and none whatsoever of Indian affairs.
When his ship sailed into Hampton Roads, Virginia, in February 1755, however, he had no sooner stepped ashore than colonial officials began trying to make him aware of the scope of his ignorance. The plan he was to execute—which had been dreamed up in London, by men who like him had little knowledge of America—involved leading an army to the Forks of the Ohio, kicking out the French, then continuing on to other places the enemy had constructed forts. These were wild lands, familiar to almost no colonials. His army, he knew, would need a guide.
Washington was aware of Braddock’s predicament. He asked friends to discreetly remind General Braddock’s staff that he knew the way to the Forks.
Not long after came a letter from Robert Orme, Braddock’s aide-de-camp. Orme informed Washington that the general had heard of Washington’s disappointment at having lost his rank, that he wished him to join his expedition, and that he had found an honor-saving way to make that happen. The general “will be very glad of your Company in his Family,” Orme wrote, meaning that Braddock was inviting Washington to join him not as a ranked officer but as a volunteer and personal aide.
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