Revolution Song
Page 20
Maybe what he was most proud of was how he had steadily carved a path through the thicket of Albany’s unique politics. There were the old Dutch and English families. There were the patricians who owned much of the county’s land and who had for more than a century held all power. There were the British soldiers who had settled in the city following the quartering of troops during the French and Indian War, who had married local girls, put down roots and wanted to exert their influence. There were newcomers from New England, and those from Europe and from New York City. Each was an interest group, which spoke its own language, literal or otherwise. Out of this babble Yates had, from the time of his first election as assistant alderman in 1753, steadily built his own coalition of common laborers and skilled craftsmen. He had made them see that their interests were not necessarily tied to those of people who may happen to have come originally from the same country or to those who had traditionally demanded their fealty. Their interests were linked to others in their economic class: people who were hurt by the imposition of British taxes, by sudden restrictions in trade.
And on this very day, the long steady trail of his work had reached something of a climax. A year ago, Yates had succeeded in getting his nephew and political protégé, Robert Yates, elected to the council. Now the returns showed that another nephew and protégé, Peter Yates, had won as well. Together the three men made up half the council. Abraham Yates’s new ideology was taking over Albany. People were talking of a “Yates party,” one that would serve the interests of ordinary workers.
But all the while he was rising, Yates had also been making enemies. Much of his legal work over these years was on behalf of newcomers who wanted to settle on land in the county. The old Dutch families still claimed ownership of vast tracts of it, little of which they actually used. Yates questioned their title to that land, arguing that the Dutch West India Company, from whom their forebears had received it in the days of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, had never properly procured it from the natives. While Yates was gaining a reputation as an activist lawyer for the common man, he was thus focusing the entrenched elite in its opposition to him. The rise of his party, in the 1772 election, triggered them into concerted action. As a result, Yates was stunned, in the fall of 1773, to find that he had been voted out of office.
He launched an investigation, and uncovered evidence of bribes and other voting irregularities. He challenged the election, but the results were upheld.
Probably he would have begun preparing to run again the following year, but two months after his loss, electrifying news reached Albany. In response to the boycotts of English products throughout the colonies, Parliament had repealed the Townshend Duties. Members like George Germain, however, insisted that a new law was necessary that would assert Parliament’s right to levy taxes on American subjects. In May of 1773 it passed the Tea Act, which was meant both to help the East India Company, which had massive surpluses of tea in its warehouses as a result of the boycotts, and to assert once and for all the right of Britain to tax the colonists. The act set off a new wave of boycotts and protests. The news that reached Albany indicated that the situation was now a crisis. On the night of December 16, enraged locals in Boston had boarded three British ships that were due to deliver tea and dumped their entire cargo—342 chests, weighing a total of 92,000 pounds and valued at nearly 10,000 pounds—into the harbor.
“The Destruction of the Tea,” as the incident became known at the time, was not just another protest but an act of wholesale vandalism, a rent in the fabric of Empire, which demanded an unprecedented response. Abraham Yates put aside his thoughts about running for city council. He seemed at once to understand that the landscape of his life had changed.
Frederick North, Fifth Earl of Guilford, the prime minister of England, stood before a packed chamber in the House of Commons. With goggly eyes and a wide fleshy mouth he tended to look, one contemporary said, like “a blind trumpeter.” As a politician, he had wisdom, but his ascent to the leadership of the British government was due more to the fact that, as Horace Walpole observed, “he offends nobody.” Following the arrival of news of the dumping of shiploads of tea in Boston Harbor, he read out to the assembly a message from the king: “His Majesty, upon information of the unwarrantable practices which have been lately concerted and carried on in North America, and particularly of the violent and outrageous proceedings at the town and port of Boston... with a view to obstructing the commerce of this kingdom . . . hath thought fit to lay the whole matter before his two Houses of Parliament.” The king, in other words, wanted the government to act. And Lord North needed guidance.
Among the first to speak was Edmund Burke, an Irish philosopher and Whig politician. The experience of England’s dealings with Ireland had colored Burke’s perspective on America. The Americans, he was lately given to observing, were not an alien people but cousins of the English; they should not be bludgeoned with principles but treated with common sense. After Parliament had repealed the Stamp Act, he observed, the colonies became quiet and obedient. Giving in on the matter of taxation, therefore, had been prudent, and that was what he now advised his colleagues to do.
Lord George Germain rose to his fleshy height and disagreed weightily, saying that after the repeal of the Stamp Act “the contrary was the case” in America, that the Americans had been “totally displeased” because Parliament still asserted its right to tax them. The problem, he insisted, was Parliament’s failure to assert its power and authority.
British leaders grouped themselves around these two poles. In the following weeks Germain elaborated his views before the House. What the colonies needed, he said, was a structural reorganization. He considered it an “absurdity” that the colonial government of Massachusetts was an elected body. It was obvious to him that the colony’s representatives should be appointed, which would make them easier to control. As to local government, he would “put an end to their town meetings.” The colonies’ various assemblies he denounced as “the proceedings of a tumultuous and riotous rabble.” He assured his colleagues that “by a manly and steady perseverance, things may be restored from a state of anarchy and confusion, to peace, quietude, and a due obedience to the laws of this country.”
Lord North, with his mild character, gravitated to Germain’s forcefulness. As soon as Germain finished speaking, he stood up to declare that Germain’s ideas “are worthy of a great mind, and such as ought to be adopted.”
Several Whig members, Edmund Burke notable among them, vehemently debated the approach Germain had outlined. Ramming the “supreme sovereignty” of British government down the colonists’ throats was counterproductive, Burke argued: “. . . you will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question. When you drive him hard, the boar will surely turn upon the hunters. If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. Nobody will be argued into slavery.”
But North picked up Germain’s line and extended it. “The Americans have tarred and feathered your subjects,” he declared to the members in April, “plundered your merchants, burnt your ships, denied all obedience to your laws and authority; yet so clement, and so long forbearing has our conduct been, that it is incumbent on us now to take a different course.” Shortly afterward, Parliament passed a series of what it called Coercive Acts (which the Americans took to calling the Intolerable Acts), which closed the port of Boston, gave Parliament direct control of Massachusetts’s government, provided for the quartering of British troops throughout the colonies and enabled British officials accused of crimes to be tried in England.
Germain was satisfied with the legislation. He believed with all his heart that it would quell the “anarchy and confusion” in the colonies. But he cautioned the government that the follow-through was crucial. The Acts, he said, must be enforced “with a Roman severity.”
Around the time the Coercive Acts were being enforced in North America, a
Seneca man strode through the gates of the city of Albany and began making inquiries about a certain resident. Cornplanter was in his early to mid-twenties at the time, tall and erect. His appearance would not have been remarkable, for Iroquois were regular visitors. He would have shown up in the city dressed in a combination of European and native clothing: a shirt possibly manufactured right in Albany, made for the native market, wool leggings, leather moccasins decorated with beads. The beadwork would have been stitched by his wife, for he had recently married.
Maybe it was reaching the state of marriage that got him thinking more about his childhood and family. Or it could have been the mounting tension with the whites. For just as his dress was a mix of European and Iroquois, so too was he, and lately his white father’s absence in his life had been haunting him. He had been teased about it as a boy: not just that the man was white, but that he played no role in the boy’s life. Family bonds were paramount to the Iroquois. Where was this ghost of a man?
The world of the whites, for all its nearness, was completely alien to Cornplanter. And yet he was part of it, thanks to this stranger.
He knew his father’s name: John Abeel. He knew he was a trader. Other Senecas had given him some information about him, for he not only did business with them but preferred their company to that of white people. People in Albany knew John Abeel. He lived in a rough settlement along the Mohawk River called Fort Plain. Cornplanter went there.
Abeel’s years of familiarity with the natives had led to his fashioning a split nature of his own. He lived among whites, but otherwise he shunned them. As a result, over the years, the people of the area had come to consider him as something of a madman. His wife had in the past run to the authorities for help in dealing with him, complaining that “Sinneca Indians” had the run of the house, that he had barred from their home all those “that are of white couller” and “only suffers a few Nigros to Stay,” and that he “takes Loaded arms Every night Into his Bead.” He had gone so far as to kick his wife out of their marriage bed and set up cohabiting there for a time with an Indian woman. If a man from town came calling whom he didn’t care to see, he was known to stick a hatchet into his front door as a way of asking him to leave.
Cornplanter found the house and knocked on the door. He knew no English, but Abeel spoke Seneca. He told him who he was, and Abeel invited him in. Cornplanter had no idea what to expect from the encounter: anger, scorn, maybe a loving embrace. What he did not anticipate was indifference. His father gave him something to eat; otherwise he seemed uninterested in him. Maybe the wild old man’s mind was too far gone for him to engage in a substantive conversation with his son. Perhaps he was shuttered by shame.
Cornplanter felt particularly rebuffed as he was leaving. He had traveled 200 miles for this. Ordinary decency, among both whites and Indians, called for a host to give his guest food for his journey. As the man’s son, Cornplanter expected more than that. He had made it clear to Abeel that he and his wife lived in their village largely in the native manner, without any comforts that European products could provide. Yet, “when I started to return home,” he later said, “he gave me no provision to eat on the way. He gave me neither kettle nor gun. . . .” Cornplanter had been hardened by battle, by a life lived close to nature. He was a man in every respect, which, to a Seneca, included having control over his emotions. It seemed to surprise him that he felt wounded by this encounter.
Sometime in 1772, a letter arrived at Miss Beard’s, the Dublin boarding school where Margaret Moncrieffe had spent the past seven years. Her father had decided that her formal education was over and was summoning her back to America. She and her brother boarded a ship bound westward across the Atlantic.
Several weeks later they sailed into the bristling, forest-rimmed natural cathedral of New York Harbor. Their immediate concerns were narrow and domestic: for the first time, at the ages of ten and fourteen, they would take up life as a family with their soldier father and his forbidding wife. At the same time, stepping ashore, they couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the wider world into which they had been delivered. New York had the façade of an English colonial city, but it seethed with exotic life. German and Dutch were common languages on the street. Taverns lining the waterfront were packed with sailors from Danzig, Stockholm, Bristol and Nantucket. Prostitutes, dressed like gaudy versions of proper ladies, displayed themselves openly around St. Paul’s Chapel. Rich merchants rolled through the streets in private coaches. Slaves—dressed in rags and worked to the bone, to the horror of European visitors, which Margaret for all intents and purposes was—hauled barrels of flour and salted fish through the maze of horse traffic. Around the time the Moncrieffe children arrived, the celebrated Mrs. Ferrari opened a new coffee house on Maiden Lane with a reception at which customers were “genteelly regaled with arack, punch, wine, cold ham, tongue &c.” That same night a fire broke out nearby in St. George’s Square, destroying most of its houses. That winter was so cold Margaret and her brother Edward could have played games on the East River or walk, as many did, across it to Brooklyn.
For two years, life was peaceful. Edward attended King’s College and Margaret was looked after by a governess. Relations with their stepmother did not become especially warm, but when her father was not on maneuvers with General Gage, Margaret was able, as she said, “to bask in the heart-cheering smile of paternal fondness.” She also dutifully imbibed her father’s less than heart-cheering political views. Regarding the situation in London, where Whig politicians were berating the government’s management of America, Major Moncrieffe wrote to a colleague, “If some heads had been lopped off long ago, the King would not be insulted now.” As to the colonial upstarts, they were, as far as he was concerned, “raskals.”
Then in 1774, Thomas Moncrieffe’s second wife died. He did not wait long before getting back into the game. A wife was virtually a necessity for keeping a household running, but besides that he had a great eye for women (“the finest race of Young women I ever saw are at present in New York,” he had opined to a friend not long before he became a widower again, and noted of one young lady in particular that “if I was two & twenty, I would not wish for more than her, & six thousand bottles of her father’s old wine”). Just six months after his wife’s death, he married again. He also had a knack for using marriages for social leverage. His deceased second wife had been a Livingston; his new wife was a member of another of New York’s important families, the Jays.
Margaret took to her second stepmother in a way she never had with the first: the young woman was warm, funny and maternal. The girl came to love her and was delighted when she became pregnant. But, just ten months into her marriage to Margaret’s father, her second stepmother died, in childbirth.
Her father was in Boston at the time, where General Gage and his army were confronting a rapidly deteriorating situation with the militant locals. Being the daughter of a British officer gave Margaret an awareness of political events, but then again a simple wander through town provided a vivid sense of things. Walls were covered with placards and broadsides. Many contained news from Boston: acts of defiance, skirmishes, bloodshed. There was a reprint of a speech King George had given to Parliament: “Those who have long too successfully laboured to inflame my people in America by gross misrepresentation . . .” Another—shocking to the loyal daughter of a British officer—contained the lyrics to a song attacking General Gage: “such a sot whose conduct is a slander.” One was a warning to Britain’s disloyal American subjects that they were in danger of annihilation; another promised American patriots that they were on the threshold of a new era of freedom.
The battle of the broadsides reflected the fact that, unlike Boston or Williamsburg, New York was a hotbed of loyalist sensibility. Many of its elite families had close ties to England. That the city was the center of the British Army in North America also gave it a strongly pro-British cast, which Margaret and her brother, with all the upheaval around them, found comforting.
Chapter 9
ASSUMING COMMAND