Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  In the early 1760s “freedom” was suddenly a preoccupation for Washington and his fellow planters. One of his contemporaries complained openly to his English creditor that he feared that through the onerous economics the colony would “be condemned forever to a state of Vassalage & Dependence.” Some began to think of Virginia’s tobacco culture as a trap, a kind of slavery. The irony that the planters were themselves employing slave labor to further enslave themselves to overseas creditors wasn’t lost on everyone. Some rued ever having gotten themselves into the position of slaveholders. Seeking to distance themselves from the causes of the growing misery, they lashed out at England for having brought Africans to America in the first place and begun the forced-labor system. Under the pressure from the economic squeeze, some discovered a newfound sense of morality, and railed against the institution as evil.

  Washington, at this stage, showed little remorse over the institution of slavery. The only indication of any distaste he may have felt for the existential divide between him and his slaves was his avoidance of the term “slave”; he generally favored “servant.” Indeed, he had become skilled at enforcing order among his “servants,” and as the financial pressures on him increased, he worked them that much harder. He split Mount Vernon into five separate farms for ease of control; each of his slaves knew which farm he or she worked and had to stay put. He had no difficulty ordering disobedient slaves to be whipped, though he did not tolerate overseers who were overly fond of punishment.

  When he was not at Mount Vernon, Washington was in Williamsburg, where the economic crisis was suddenly a top priority for the House of Burgesses. In May 1763 he wrote his old military comrade Robert Stewart, sending him a loan of 302 pounds that Stewart had asked for, and signed off hurriedly because “Our Assembly is suddenly called in consequence of a Memorial of the British Merchants to the Board of Trade representing the evil consequences of our Paper emissions. . . .” The “Paper emissions” referred to paper currency, which the Virginia legislature had begun issuing because in the economic crisis there was a shortage of pounds sterling. The English merchants to whom the Virginia planters owed large sums of money had complained to Parliament, for no sooner had Virginia begun printing money than its value plummeted. Reports arrived that Parliament was debating whether to bar American colonies from issuing legal tender. That would put yet another financial squeeze on the colonists. The issue was so pressing that, before saddling up for Williamsburg, Washington worried that it would “set the whole Country in Flames.”

  Other problems were converging on Washington as well. As his tobacco venture was failing, he had lunged outward in an investment scheme. He joined with forty-nine other Virginia gentlemen in forming the Mississippi Land Company, with a monumentally ambitious and brazen plan to capitalize on the English victory over the French by claiming 2.5 million acres of former French territory—a swath that cut through the future Kentucky, Illinois and Tennessee all the way to the Mississippi River—in order to resell it to settlers. They wrote to the king humbly asking permission to develop the region, declaring that it would be for the “increase of the people, the extension of Trade and the enlargement of the revenue.” In October, however, Parliament, having decided to keep westward expansion under its own authority, scotched the plan.

  The following spring, Parliament did indeed decree that the colonies could not print legal tender. Then came news that Parliament was considering imposing what would be the first-ever tax on Americans. This information was not in the form of a rumor or a leak. The British leaders wanted to involve the Americans in their thinking. They were acting on Dinwiddie’s advice, informing the Americans of the benefits they themselves would enjoy from such a tax. They hoped to show men such as George Washington that their dreams of developing the western wilderness could best be done under British administration.

  The news was not received in that spirit. Americans had been fascinated by the John Wilkes affair. What about the “English liberty” that Wilkes was trumpeting? What about the English Bill of Rights? Was it not the law that British subjects could only be taxed by their representatives? Taxation without representation seemed an ominous step away from individual freedom. Washington huddled with the other burgesses to consider a response. They scribbled out a list of actions for Edward Montague, their representative in England, to follow. Montague was to make it known to His Majesty’s government that Virginians had “Liberties & Privileges as free born British Subjects,” that they could not be taxed “without their personal Consent or the Consent by their representatives.” This they took “to be the most vital Principle of the British Constitution.”

  Parliament did not consider Montague’s objections. In March 1765, following the advice of Robert Dinwiddie and the strong urging of George Sackville and with almost no opposition, it voted the Stamp Act into law.

  The reaction in the colonies was unlike anything that had happened before. People took to the streets in Boston, New York, Annapolis, Charleston and other cities. Some were outraged over extra fees—German immigrants in Philadelphia feared that the cost of becoming naturalized would now skyrocket—but most saw the advent of Parliament imposing taxes as an announcement that their status as British subjects had been diminished. They were now something more like vassals.

  One of the centers of turmoil in the colonies was the eastern wing of the two-story brick building in Williamsburg that served as the capitol of the Virginia colony. In May, George Washington rode hurriedly into town to attend a special session of the House of Burgesses. Here he met a brand-new member of the assembly named Patrick Henry. Henry—who like Washington had failed at tobacco but had afterward gone on to study law—seemed determined to make an independent stand. He did not represent the interests of the aristocratic planter class but rather of the plainspoken, humble folk from his region. His career as a legislator was only nine days old, but on May 29 he submitted a series of resolutions. Though virtually all the assemblymen were opposed to the Stamp Act, Henry’s stridency split them into two factions: the gentry, who wanted to move cautiously so as not to upset their British overlords, and everyone else. The former thought the man’s speech was so inflammatory in its denunciation of the British government that it could be grounds for treason. Others were moved to passionate support. One of these, a twenty-two-year-old law student by the name of Thomas Jefferson, remarked that Henry’s talents as an orator were “such as I have never heard from any other man. He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote.” The resolutions declared it a fact of British law that Parliament had no jurisdiction in Virginia, and that Virginians could only be taxed by their representative body, the House of Burgesses itself. Henry submitted his resolutions strategically, when the more conservative members (he had pegged George Washington as one of these) were out of the room. They passed. Newspapers published the resolutions, and soon news of the Virginia House of Burgesses’ defiance carried around the colonies and across the ocean.

  Patrick Henry’s judgment of George Washington as being among the conservative gentry would have been accurate earlier but not anymore. Washington was as angry at the Stamp Act as his fellow Virginians, and for him it was only the latest affront. The colonies’ crisis and his personal crises were becoming one. Britain had scorned him—repeatedly, over a period of years—in his quest for military dues. Britain then had visited him with financial burdens that he felt denied him the freedom to prosper. Then Parliament barred him from developing western lands, thus blocking him from benefiting from the years of hard soldiering he had done. On the heels of all of that came the Stamp Act.

  His frustration came to a head in September 1765 in one sustained outburst directed at arguably the most appropriate person to receive it: his British financial agent, Robert Cary. He had just received a letter from Cary asking that Washington pay his debt. Washington erupted. “It cannot reasonably be imagined that I felt any pleasing Sensations upon the receipt of your Letter of the 13th of February,” he began. He accused the
man of pricing Washington’s goods below market value. He threatened to move his business elsewhere. Then brought up the latest source of upset. “The Stamp Act, imposed on the Colonies by the Parliament of Great Britain,” he informed Cary, was looked upon by virtually all colonists as an “unconstitutional method of Taxation” and “a direful attack upon their Liberties.” The extra burden of the new tax, he warned, meant that Americans such as him would surely be unable to pay off the debts to their English agents.

  The length of the letter and its garbled, wandering sentences gave evidence of Washington’s unquiet state of mind. To be sure, he had other vexations beyond business. While he certainly couldn’t have laid blame for it on the British Parliament, it was a source of deep frustration to realize, as he would have by this time, that he and Martha were unable to have children. She had brought with her into the marriage two children by her first husband, in effect proving her fertility. That left Washington with the inescapable conclusion that this particularly painful “failure” was his own. Economically, politically, socially, and now in the most basic sense, he felt emasculated.

  A winter’s night, a new year: the second of January 1766, and Abraham Yates was asleep in bed. Suddenly, there was a noise at the door. The agitated men on his stoop demanded that he come with them to Thomas Williams’s tavern. They were drunk but full of some strange energy. Yates got dressed and hurried through the cold the few blocks to the inn. Yates was a fussy man, who didn’t like disruptions, and he had a lot on his mind as he marched through the frosty night. He was building a house, for one thing, and, as he lamented to a friend, “I am an Intire Stranger to architectory.” He and Anna and little Susanna needed more space, plus the couple hoped for more children. So he had sold his house for 550 pounds and bought a well-situated lot right in the busy center of town for 600 pounds, and was now up to his neck in construction details. Besides that, his law practice was all-consuming, with sixteen cases to handle before the Inferior Court and three other circuit court cases. And as a member of the city council he was continuing to build his new sort of political party, one based not on connections to one of the great families of the area but on the economic issues that mattered to common workers.

  Inside the inn all was bright, warm and energetic. “I found about 40 or 50 people gathered,” he later reported. It was a raucous group, all men aged from twenty-five to forty, in New Year’s celebration mode, but with an edge. He knew them all: Cuyler, Ten Broek, Wendell, Roseboom. . . . They had an air of danger about them, something underhanded.

  They were calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They had banded together to protest the Stamp Act. The law had gone into effect two months earlier; a week before that, the specially stamped paper that henceforth had to be purchased for all printed material had arrived in New York Harbor. Each region was to have a new official whose job it would be to distribute the paper. The revelers had gotten names of local men who had applied for the position, gone to their homes, dragged them out of bed and brought them here to swear an oath and sign an affidavit that they would not do the ugly work for the British. They wanted Yates, as a lawyer and city councilor, to make it official.

  Yates wasn’t one of the Sons of Liberty—he was a stickler for propriety, and the questionable legality of the group’s activities conflicted with his position as a city councilman—but he agreed with them. Of the five men dragged to the tavern to swear they wouldn’t work to enforce the Stamp Act, four did so immediately. The fifth, Henry van Schaack, was a different story. He was the postmaster, and a stubborn man. While he readily swore that he had not applied for the post and didn’t intend to, he would not sign a promise that he would never do so in the future, saying he thought such a demand “unreasonable.” The men roughed him up; he countered that their behavior was “illegal, unconstitutional and oppressive.” They let him go, but with a warning that they wanted his promise.

  Three days later Yates was taking part in a city council meeting when Van Schaack showed up at city hall to protest the way the Sons of Liberty had treated him. As a matter of principle, he did not feel it right to swear that he never would apply for a future position. He was shocked when the council members—Yates included—suggested that it would be better for him to swear it anyway. Virtually the whole of Albany was united against the Stamp Act to the point of militancy.

  Van Schaack again refused. The next day Abraham Yates watched a crowd that he estimated at about 400 descend on Van Schaack’s house. They broke windows and destroyed furniture. Van Schaack signed the affidavit.

  As a member of the city government and a man of fastidious sensibilities, Yates deplored the chaos. But he understood the anger that lay behind it. In violation of the concept of individual liberty that Britain itself had enshrined into law, England, he lamented, was determined “to raise a revenue in America” without the Americans having a voice in the matter. He supposed this was more alarming to New Yorkers than to some others because of their previous experiences dealing with the equally egregious quartering of troops in civilians’ homes. The turmoil, he said, all came down to “the mischievious politics of the mother country.”

  The king was out of sorts. He forgot things. Sometimes he flopped on the ground and a servant had to sit on him to keep him still. He would start a sentence and find himself unable to finish, as if he feared a full stop would become literal for him. The symptoms went on for months, then they vanished. His counselors hoped the madness would not return.

  George III emerged from his illness to find a host of troubles, not the least of which emanated from across the Atlantic. Rioters were rioting, effigies had been burned, the Virginia legislature had been suspended by the royal governor for refusing to accept the stamp tax. A customs collector wrote that “the Americans to a man seem resolved” not to pay it, and went so far as to suggest that “some people are determined to die rather than submit.”

  More than a few members of Parliament were also against the tax. William Pitt, who had been cast into exile in 1761, was back in government. He believed that the Bill of Rights of 1689 had real political meaning, and that its force and power extended to America. He was in bed with gout when the issue came up again but said in a letter, “If I can crawl or be carried, I will deliver my mind and heart upon the state of America.” He had felt all along the precedent of a tax in America imposed by Parliament would meet with disastrous results. “There is an idea in some that the colonies are virtually represented in this house,” he declaimed before his colleagues in the House of Commons. “I would fain know by whom an American is represented here. Is he represented by any knight of the shire, in any county in this kingdom?” The Americans were right to assert that the power to tax them rested in their own legislatures, otherwise, he said, they would be “slaves.” He pushed the House to repeal the law.

  The king was against repealing. So was the prime minister, George Grenville. Many British officers in North America were convinced that protests of the tax were the work of organized gangs; they wanted a tough response from London. Among these was Major Thomas Moncrieffe, the father of young Margaret, who had taken part in the military crackdown on protesters in New York. “Dam’n me, if I will Beleive there was one Spark of Patriotick Virtue in all their Maneuvres,” he wrote a friend.

  George Sackville was likewise in favor of standing firm. He confessed to a friend, regarding America, that he found “the spirit that rages there is beyond conception.” As more and more members of Parliament and ministers in government came out for repealing the law, Sackville’s growing rage offered a glimpse into his inner self, suggesting that beneath the urbane exterior of the London statesman there still lived the boy of Knole House, who held close to feudal notions of government based on a beneficent but iron-willed overlord and his obedient vassals. The Bill of Rights of 1689 notwithstanding, a colony, he believed, owed fealty to the home country, and the home country had to punish disobedience. The fuss in America, he insisted, was all “riot and ill-grounded c
lamour.” The Americans were “undutiful children,” and “nothing but military power” would do to put them in their place.

  Sackville’s feudal fulminating went unheeded. The House voted to repeal the Stamp Act. The government was reacting not only to reports of riots in America and constitutional arguments of men like Pitt, but to appeals from British merchants, who were holding large amounts of debt from American farmers and businessmen, which they feared would never be paid with the new law in place.

  Americans celebrated. They took the repeal as a sign that the constitutional arguments had won the day, that they could move forward as dutiful and respected subjects of Great Britain. John Wilkes, whose tirade had started it all, was once again hailed as a hero. “Wilkes and Liberty!” was the toast given in taverns around the colonies. Some people even named their children after him. The city of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, which was founded around this time, chose to honor Wilkes and Isaac Barré, another radical, freedom-proclaiming member of Parliament, in its name.

  George Washington dashed off a letter to Robert Cary that was far more genial in tone than his recent ones had been. “The Repeal of the Stamp Act, to whatsoever causes owing, ought much to be rejoiced at. . . .” he wrote. And, as if sensing that the government had been swayed more by the work of men such as Cary than by republican sentiments, he closed with, “All therefore who were Instrumental in procuring the Repeal are entitled to the Thanks of every British Subject & have mine cordially.”

  With the lifting of the tax, and what it seemed to mean for the future, Washington felt a sense of dawning opportunity, and with it came an explosion of creativity. He began to think outside the traditional system into which he had been born. If he couldn’t achieve economic freedom as a tobacco planter, or via westward expansion, he would do it in other ways. He began experimenting with other crops that could bring in money—wheat, oats, rye, hemp—and settled on wheat as his main cash crop. He became an enthusiastic student of modern farming theory, in particular of the English agricultural innovator Jethro Tull. Putting together the Virginia militia more or less from scratch had unleashed a hidden genius for organization. That now came fully to the fore as he transformed Mount Vernon. His slaves learned to work exotic machinery that he fancied, such as a Rotherham plow and a forbidding-looking device—with an operator sitting in a chair above a large spindle bristling with iron barbs—called a spiky roller. He also taught them trades: some became carpenters, brewers, blacksmiths and masons, producing high-quality products. While standing on the banks of the Potomac and marveling at the shouldering schools of sturgeon, shad and other fish, he hit on the idea of developing a fishery. He became a major marketer of fish, selling hundreds of thousands of herring a year. By the late 1760s he had accomplished a kind of internal revolution against his native culture, which equated genteel success with tobacco farming. He stood like a general on the hilltops of Mount Vernon, transforming what had been a sleepy landscape into an efficient, cutting-edge business enterprise. Where the early years of the decade were a time of financial and political strife, in the last years Washington came into his own as a farmer and businessman. His goal was “independence,” and he had taken huge strides toward achieving it.