Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  After getting paid for a job on Ram Island, he did his usual tally of his savings and realized that he had reached the point he had been working toward: 500 dollars. Without delay, he made his determined way back across the Sound to Stonington, and the Stanton farm. He presented himself to Thomas Stanton, the man who had beaten him savagely and locked him in manacles, whose wife had despised and taunted him. For the Stantons still owned his wife and children. The money in his pocket gave him a rush of power and confidence. He entered into negotiations with Stanton. He wanted to buy his two sons.

  Stanton knew Venture, knew what “freedom” meant to him, fanciful though the notion was in a real world that was and would continue to be controlled by white men. That wider world—white America—was itself rocking and swaying over the meaning of the word. Men like Stanton thought slaves were misguided to want freedom, which would only bring hardship and insecurity. But if Venture—or Mr. Venture Smith, as he now called himself—wanted to pay good money, he would take it from him.

  They settled on 200 dollars for each boy. It was a high price, but Stanton had him over a barrel. Venture knew the going rate for every commodity—as well for a cord of wood as for two slave boys—but of course he had expected Stanton to bargain hard. He had presumably been ready to pay more, thus the extra 100 dollars in his pocket.

  He had previously purchased a piece of land on Long Island and built a rough house on it. That’s where he headed now: back across Long Island Sound with his two sons, the sea air fresh in his face and a sense of accomplishment swelling his chest. But he had much yet to do. His wife and daughter were still in bondage. The decision to leave them behind had been the result of a straightforward bit of mathematics. Two strong boys would earn more with their labor than two women. Venture, Cuff and Solomon could raise funds to buy Meg and Hannah more quickly than Venture and the women could to buy the boys.

  But his plan—his future—revolved around the womenfolk. They were still in Stonington, and he intended to return there. As an indication of his intent, on one of his trips to visit Meg he met with a man he knew in town named John Denison and offered to buy a 26-acre plot of land from him. It was rocky, and Denison didn’t do anything with it. But it was near the Stanton homestead; Venture could point it out to Meg and tell her it would be their future home. He and Denison agreed on a price of 60 pounds. Then, deed in hand, he left: back across the water to Long Island.

  And so they went to work, he and his boys. They could do a lot: Cuff was about twelve; Solomon about fourteen. Back and forth across the Sound they traveled, seeking out jobs, and all the while Venture was building up his network of associations. What he was doing was highly unusual. The vast majority of freed blacks chose to live in cities. There they could form communities, support each other at a time when white New Englanders looked at them with confusion and mistrust. But Venture had never been a city type. His childhood in Africa had unfolded on the savanna; he had grown up beneath the broad sky, in a society shaped by animals, sun and rain. He felt at home here on the Sound, among the farmers and small-scale shippers and manufacturers. But he had to build trust, convince whites that he was a man of substance.

  Shortly after he bought his sons’ freedom Venture met another black man, a slave, who was presumably owned by a white man for whom Venture was doing work. If there was an explosion of energy that came with freedom, then freeing your own children had a doubly energizing effect. He opened up to this man about what he had done, and the man convinced him to buy him out of bondage as well, promising to pay him back out of future earnings. Venture struck a deal with his owner, and bought the man for 60 pounds, becoming a de facto slave owner. As the man went to work, Venture took his earnings, keeping careful tally of what was still owed him. His “slave” had paid him 20 pounds when, one day, he vanished, never to be seen, leaving Venture 40 pounds in the hole. He felt betrayed, muttering about how the man “ran away from me.” He had now played the game, and tasted its bitterness, from the other side.

  Things got bitterer still. When Solomon was seventeen, Venture hired him out to a Rhode Island man named Charles Church. It was routine—the sort of thing Venture had been doing since he had freed his boys three years earlier. The deal was for a year’s work. Church would pay the boy 12 pounds, and Solomon would learn some new skills. Then Venture got word that Church was outfitting a whaling ship and had offered Solomon a place on it. He had enticed the boy with the promise of adventure and a bauble—a pair of silver shoe buckles—in addition to the agreed-upon wages. Venture’s own time on a whaler had been hellish, and as a boy he had traveled across the ocean, seen the pitiless power of the sea, watched people die like animals out there. He raced to the dock, determined to stop his son, but “to my great grief, I could only see the vessel my son was in almost out of sight going to sea.” Months later came the news he most dreaded: Solomon had died at sea, of scurvy. In his brittle way of reducing life’s lessons to monetary terms, Venture noted afterward that “besides the loss of his life, I lost equal to seventy-five pounds.”

  After Solomon’s death he made his way back to the Stanton place and bought Meg. The joy in it was tempered by anguish at their son’s death. Venture reckoned their reunion in financial terms as well: he gave Stanton 40 pounds for her and, since she was pregnant, counted himself lucky that in buying her before she gave birth he “prevented having another child to buy.” In honor of their dead son they named the baby Solomon II. Then, moving with the inexorability of a wound clock, Smith made his way to the home of a man named Ray Mumford. Mumford, a relative of Robinson Mumford, who had bought and named him aboard the Charming Susanna off the coast of Anomabo, had bought Venture’s first-born, Hannah, from the Stantons. She was the last of his family whose freedom he was determined to purchase. But now Venture got a surprise. Hannah, who was twenty years old, and who had given him “much trouble” in the past, informed him that she was in love with a “free negro” named Isaac who worked for Mumford, and she didn’t want to leave the man.

  One child dead, now another pulling away. Venture had worked himself to the limit of human endurance in order to reunite his family in freedom. In the unlikely event that he had seen a production of King Lear (which was popular in New York and New England, but Venture had little patience for such diversions), he would have identified with the old king’s lament “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.” He was feeling a kind of pain he had never felt before, and formulating a theory about children and ingratitude. Later, he gave someone his own mute echo of Lear, saying “a father’s lips are closed in silence and in grief!” In the end, he let Hannah have her way. He paid for her freedom and left her behind.

  He needed a home for his family, or what was left of it. Conditions in the Long Island community where he had based himself for some years now were becoming unstable. The irony was apparent but not surprising to Venture: as the white people in town talked more and more about needing freedom, they passed a law to bar freed blacks from living there. They made an exception for Venture Smith—because, as he said, of “my industry”—but he wasn’t comfortable there anymore, so he sailed back to Connecticut.

  Stonington was roiling too, as were other communities along the coast. It was summer 1774. The news from Boston was of chaos: the harbor blockaded, British troops in the streets. Nearly everyone in Stonington crammed into a special town meeting to offer support to Boston. Venture had not bothered himself too much over the fuss the white people had felt recently toward England and its policies. To the extent that those policies affected business, they mattered to him, but the “freedom” talk left him cold. Now, however, it was hard to avoid. Seemingly all the white people Venture knew in Stonington—including Hempstead Miner, who had bought him on pretence of offering him his freedom only to turn around and try to sell him for a profit—were at the meeting, professing alarm at “the many repeated attacks upon the liberties of the English American colonies.” Then came word of the battl
es at Lexington and Concord. The white men of Stonington formed a militia. One day in late summer a 20-gun British frigate appeared off the Point. The army in Boston, which was essentially under siege by American troops surrounding the city, had sent it in search of food for the soldiers there. A loyalist from the area had gotten word to them that a shipment of cattle had arrived in Stonington from Block Island, and the cows were being hidden in a cove north of town and a short distance from the Stanton farm. James Wallace, captain of the frigate Rose, swooped in to try to steal some of the small vessels in the harbor. A contingent of local militiamen under the command of Captain Oliver Smith, Venture’s former owner, hoisted their antiquated Queen Anne muskets and repelled the invaders. In retaliation, Wallace let loose his ship’s cannons on the little town where so much of Venture’s life had played out. Nearly every building around the Point was damaged.

  Venture Smith, so intent on his own march toward freedom, wanted no part of the larger one. He fled the place: loaded Meg, Cuff and little Solomon into his vessel once more and sailed west. He watched the familiar coastline go by: the harbor of New London, the wide sweep of Niantic Bay. Passing the little village of Lyme, he nosed the craft into the mouth of the Connecticut River, sailing past old John Burrows’s Black Horse Tavern and continuing inland. They glided by wooded banks and around serpentine bends, past a place called Potapoug Point where a finger of land formed an inviting natural harbor, which might have suited him, but he kept going.

  About 20 miles north of the coast he came to a pair of towns that straddled the river called Haddam and East Haddam. It was quiet here, peaceful, with meadows full of birdsong and insect thrum; the soil was loamy. The unrest seemed far away. He knew some people here who could help him make a start. He did five weeks of work for Timothy Chapman. Then he did a job for a man named Abel Bingham. He got along with Bingham. And he liked the look of Bingham’s large stretch of land. It sat near the confluence of the Connecticut and Salmon rivers. He marched up and down it, pondering. It was rugged: hilly and heavily wooded, tumbling steadily downward toward the shore of the Salmon River. There was a cart path along the river, and Bingham had a dry dock for servicing vessels. The river gave easy access to the coast and its market towns, and inland to Hartford. A lot could be done here, and it seemed a safe distance from whatever commotion might be coming. Venture Smith had money in his pocket and an idea in his head.

  George Germain disliked effeminacy. He disliked the Irish possibly even more. And here they were, Edmund Burke and his fellow Whig Isaac Barré, two pink-faced and cherubic Irish radicals, lined up against him, waving their hands about and prattling in their brogues against the war, mewling about rights and liberty. They were clearly afraid of manly English aggression. Well, maybe Barré wasn’t; he had that nasty scar across his face to remind everyone of his time in action against the French. But their parliamentary speeches were practically treasonous in their defense of the Americans. Barré had gone so far as to call the rebels “Sons of Liberty,” a name the Americans took to waving like a flag. The whole radical Whig contingent in the House—the same members who had whined about the Townshend Duties and the Coercive Acts—had been outraged when Germain was chosen to lead the British effort in America. He knew they considered him a hidebound antique, a man whose political sensibility was lodged somewhere in the Middle Ages. They themselves, meanwhile, were very much of like minds with the men gathered in Philadelphia. They believed that individual freedom was a real and tangible thing, that England had been singled out by fate to promote it, but that the country had so far largely failed in that task. The Whigs believed the seed of freedom—after slowly germinating for more than a century in Europe and England—had suddenly burst into leaf and flower in America. For them the colonists were not some rebellious “other”; they represented the very essence of Britain.

  Stuff and nonsense. Germain had been tasked with running a war to punish rebellious subordinates, and, by God, that’s what he would do. He marched into Parliament—this time not as a member of the House of Commons but as a minister of the king—and defended the government’s progress. He outlined the military actions he was overseeing. In beating back the protests, he at one point articulated a fake retreat, echoing the words George Washington had spoken to Congress when they chose him to command the rebel army, reminding the opposition members that “I never sought the office I have now the honor to fill, nor wished for it further than I flattered myself I might be serviceable to my country.”

  The sniping of the Whigs in Parliament was only one element of a much bigger problem: the British public was ambivalent at best about the war, while the Americans were positively infused with righteous energy. If this was a war of ideas, America had all the ammunition. The ambivalence extended into the halls of government. Indeed, Germain owed his post to the fact that his predecessor had been so uncomfortable with the idea of clashing with Britain’s American cousins over their liberties that he had resigned. The squabbling in government grew loud enough that Pierre Beaumarchais, a French spy who was then in England, quipped in his report to Paris that “the war is raging more ferociously in London than in Boston.”

  The official unrest was due not only to the shaky state of British public opinion but to simple military calculations. The army, the navy, the treasury: none of these had fully recovered from the Seven Years’ War. The vaunted British navy was in disrepair. Even if they employed every ship, some felt there still weren’t enough to transport all the men and supplies necessary. The army had 48,000 men, but these were spread across the earth in the ongoing effort to maintain an empire; obviously they could not all be shifted to America. Fighting a full-scale war across the vastness of the Atlantic was unimaginably more difficult than conducting a war on the European continent. Officers and soldiers alike were mostly unfamiliar with the terrain. Communicating with generals in the field who were thousands of miles away, involving as it did months of delay, added maddening complexity and uncertainty.

  Germain appreciated these facts. He endured the sniping and the fretting. But he was so full of grit, so full of his own brand of righteousness, not to mention his need for personal redemption, that he considered it, all in all, a bracing challenge. The more difficult the task appeared, the greater would be the glory that came from subduing the rebels. One member of Parliament noted in his diary after watching the American Secretary bustle in and out of the place that Germain “seems in very great spirits—is quite persuaded that all this will end after the first campaign.” As for the rebels themselves and their character, Germain would have nodded vigorously with the sentiment that the great literary wag Samuel Johnson was penning to an acquaintance at about this same time: “The Americans, sir, are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”

  Besides, the king was with him, and so was the prime minister. And he was precisely where he wanted to be and felt he deserved to be: at the control center of a vast operation for the preservation and maintenance of the British Empire. In his new office in Whitehall, the cluster of buildings that formed the center of government, just around the corner from the prime minister’s office at 10 Downing Street and in a precinct that echoed with the voices of England’s leaders of old, surrounded by maps depicting the features of a continent he was learning intimately but would never visit, he dictated letters to generals, received coded messages from spies, shifted battalions, organized supply chains. Before Germain had stepped into the office of American Secretary, General Thomas Gage, after having lost the battles at Lexington and Concord, had taken the decision to make Boston the center of military operations. Germain had known at once that was a mistake. The virus of the rebellion couldn’t be excised by attacking the center of the affected limb. The limb had to be severed from the body. He had replaced Gage with William Howe, and sent Howe to Boston with new orders.

  Meanwhile, a second front had opened up. The American rebels—following an idea suggested by a brash thirty-five-
year-old colonel named Benedict Arnold—had executed a surprise maneuver by launching an invasion of Quebec. The province having until recently been under French control, the Americans hoped to coerce its inhabitants—whose patriotism had perhaps not hardened—to join their cause. Germain found the notion of one subordinate part of the empire invading another to be of vibrant concern: so much so that he determined he needed to field not one but two armies in North America. The government had already put Guy Carleton in charge of defending Canada. Carleton had served in the Seven Years’ War and following that had served as governor of Quebec. He knew the province, was intimately familiar with America’s wild hinterlands, was a decorated soldier and a capable leader. Unfortunately, Germain hated him. The enmity dated back to Minden; Carleton, then a fellow officer, had been among those who had openly sneered at Sackville’s perceived cowardice in the battle. But Germain would have to work with the man. Anyway, both were professionals; surely there were larger issues at stake than personal affronts.

  Every day a new raft of problems reached him. He threw himself into each with gusto.

  Problem: there were not enough trained troops to fulfill the needs of Howe’s and Carleton’s armies. Solution: hire mercenaries from the German states. This required negotiating treaties with each of those states, which required first getting Parliament to approve said treaties. Once again, Whigs protested, as if hiring foreigners were a treasonous act. Germain stood up in the House and showed, with meticulously prepared data, that the British government had used mercenaries in nearly every war it pursued.