Part of General Howe’s strategy in establishing a zone of pleasure in New York had been to lay out a stark contrast with the rebels. The English thought of Americans as dour Puritans; the fact that the Continental Congress had banned public performances in 1774 fed into the idea. If the rebellion co-opted English ideas about liberty, then Howe wanted to offer Americans a counter-narrative: that England represented culture, sophistication, wealth. Mightn’t the Americans want to reconsider their revolt and keep themselves aligned with the country that could advance their backward culture?
To this end, one of Howe’s first commands on arriving in New York was to reopen the city’s single playhouse. The John Street Theatre, which was renamed the Theatre Royal, came back to life in January 1777, and it commenced an explosion of entertainment such as the city had never seen, putting on eighteen plays that year.
Margaret soaked up the culture, and the theater was a focal point during these months. Its plays were staged by British officers, with proceeds going to war widows. Perhaps at her urging, her father signed on as one of the theater’s managers. One play that might have especially struck her was called Polly Honeycombe: A Dramatick Novel of One Act. It revolved around a smart, headstrong girl and her search for love. The eponymous heroine is addicted to reading novels and chooses to believe that life follows literary conventions. She wants to marry her beloved, but her father chooses someone else for her. She rebels, confident that, as in the stories she reads, after many travails love will conquer. The not especially lifelike twist at the end of the plot is that, in fact, love does conquer: Polly squelches her father’s plans, and she and her beau live happily ever after.
“Polly” was not a unique figure. The character in the play was part of a swirl of change taking place at the street level in the revolutionary era in which Margaret was coming of age. Individual identity itself was in flux; everyone, in a sense, was trying to figure out who they were. The war was part of the change, but it was also a cause of it. In Britain, an individual had always been defined in relation to the Crown. What were you? Why, a subject, of course. Being a British subject meant you had certain rights, but the emphasis was on your subservience to your monarch. Suddenly, the Americans were tearing up that social contract. An individual, in their new reckoning, had obligations to society and to the government, yes; but first and foremost an individual had rights. The individual came first, and the state served him or her.
But what about women? In Britain and America, they were considered not truly individuals but dependents. They were classed together with children and slaves. And yet even for them plays such as Polly Honeycombe and flesh-and-blood examples like Elizabeth Loring showed that the rules were changing, or at least that they were being challenged.
Margaret would surely have read herself into the lead role of Polly Honeycombe and cast Aaron Burr, whom she refused to forget, as the love she was destined to have. Surely, eventually, somehow, he would come for her. But not long after her return to New York, real life mimicked one of the play’s twists. At a social event she met a soldier named John Coghlan. She didn’t give him a moment’s thought, but later her father informed her the man had asked him for her hand in marriage and he had agreed. The match made sense to Major Moncrieffe. Coghlan’s family had money and pedigree: his grandfather had been a member of Parliament, his father had made his fortune in the slave trade. Coghlan himself had previously served in the navy before joining the army. He was twenty-two years old and he presented himself well, as a young man of breeding. The major himself, meanwhile, was uncertain where his own military service would take him next. His son, Margaret’s brother, was now installed in a military career. Margaret was very young, but of age to marry, and war often called for irregularities. All in all, this seemed a wise path, and Major Moncrieffe fixed himself to it. Margaret would move out of his care and begin assuming the duties of a wife.
Margaret had a passionate nature, one side of which, her temper, she kept in check around her father. But, like Polly Honeycombe, she refused to accept this fate. She met with John Coghlan and explained to him, delicately, that she had no affection for him. She suggested that “as a man of honor and humanity” he should rescind his offer of marriage. His response was chilling. “He valued not any refusal on my part, so long as he had the Major’s consent,” she said. “Indeed, my refusal signified nothing.” Going back to her father to plead her case, she came to realize that the two men had had lengthy discussions on the matter, in the course of which Coghlan had convinced the major of the rightness of the match. Whereupon Margaret finally unleashed her fury. Her father responded by confining her to her room. When she didn’t relent, he took the step of refusing to see her.
Major Moncrieffe’s line of reasoning followed standard, respectable and responsible channels. Children submitted to parents just as surely as wives submitted to husbands. A father decided what was best. In this case, he was providing for his daughter’s future. He was outraged by Margaret’s reaction.
The wall between them was in part generational. Margaret could see it reflected in, for example, family portraits. Her father was in his mid-fifties. In his day a family was always painted with the mother and children seated while the father stood. The man was different, on another plane. Nowadays the fashion was for the whole family to be on the same level.
Margaret’s rejection of the idea of forced marriage was likewise a feature of her era, part of the impulse to social change that was rooted in the makeup of the 1770s generation. It was, in fact, related to the way the colonies had rejected the mother country. The force that had impelled men like Washington and Yates to break from England sprang from deep within the individual. Yes, it was based on reason, but Enlightenment thinkers all knew that reason was something that lay within every human being, so that employing reason involved a personal examination. By the 1770s, listening to the inner voice was part of the zeitgeist. Thomas Paine told the readers of Common Sense to “examine the passions and feelings,” which would reveal the path forward, and to reject whatever felt “forced and unnatural.” He was talking about politics, but the same advice was being applied in life. Novels, plays, even newspapers, were alive with stories of people following their inner voices, listening to their feelings, believing they knew which way personal happiness and fulfillment lay, and believing they had a right to those things. The Pennsylvania Magazine had recently published a series of articles about marriage; according to these, in the modern world, a world based on individual reason and individual feeling, men and women should only marry if both felt the proper degree of love and conviction. Polly Honeycombe had the same theme, and its message of self-determination was pointed at the very dilemma Margaret now faced. “You may depend on my constancy and affection,” Polly tells her lover at the end of the play. “I never read of any Lady’s giving up her lover, to submit to the absurd election of her parents. . . .”
The standoff with her father built toward a climax. Margaret stayed locked in her room, holding out as long as she could, feeling “wretched in mind, smarting under the sad reverse, I who had only known the heart-cheering smiles of parental fondness, to become the object of parental anger. . . .” Eventually, her brother returned home for a time and she asked his advice. He told her she had no choice but to submit to her father’s wishes.
Finally, she did. She married John Coghlan, against her every wish, convinced she was denying her nature, casting aside the lover who had been meant for her. She felt the man she was marrying was not just wrong for her but fatally so. “My union with Mr. Coghlan,” she wrote, “I never considered in any other light, than an honourable prostitution, as I really hated the man whom they had compelled me to marry.”
“They” were three men: her father, brother, and Coghlan himself. She was caught between two historic forces. There was a new wind blowing, a wind of freedom, and it compelled her to follow her inner voice. Yet social convention, which was ruled by men, was unyielding.
Nature its
elf seemed caught up in the tension. The wedding bore out her forboding. She had previously known the Reverend Auchmuty, who performed the marriage, and found him a “truly amiable man.” During the wedding banquet the Reverend complained of “indisposition.” Three days later, in what Margaret felt to be a black premonition, the man was dead.
Chapter 13
CANNONS MUSKETS DRUMS
With a few weak signals of incipient New England spring evident outside the window, Venture Smith stood in the cramped, low-ceilinged parlor of Jabez Chapman, justice of the peace of the town of East Haddam, Connecticut. In his hand was one of the few tools he did not feel comfortable wielding: a quill pen. It was March 14, 1777. Margaret Moncrieffe had recently become Margaret Coghlan. George Washington was camped at Morristown, New Jersey, pondering how to attack General Howe’s army when it moved out of winter quarters. As far as Smith was concerned, America’s war for independence was a distant and inchoate thing. More consequential were the two legal documents before him, which would, he hoped, bring the freedom and security for which he had longed ever since he had been forced from his homeland nearly four decades earlier.
It was more than two years since he had moved here. His new home was a small, rural community, or rather two communities. Haddam sat on the west side of the Connecticut River, East Haddam on the east side. The main thing that had attracted him to this area, besides its being away from the coast and the trouble of the war, was that not one but two rich rivers dominated the landscape: the Connecticut, and the Salmon River, which flowed into it. All rivers were highways; these two, in addition, were particularly fecund sources of life and income, wriggling with salmon and shad.
Venture Smith had found that the two men he began working for on arrival—Timothy Chapman and Abel Bingham—were both people he could deal with. Chapman, who was born and raised in East Haddam, owned a sawmill, and he came to realize that Smith was an expert at felling trees and handling lumber. Bingham, meanwhile, who had only recently moved to Haddam, owned a large triangular-shaped tract of land right smack between the two rivers, at a place called Haddam Neck, and this was what Smith found himself pondering in those first months. It was wild, thickly timbered and hilly, with a fine fertile meadow. Shortly after his arrival he struck a deal with Bingham to buy some of it.
It was an odd bit of real estate to possess: a thin, rambling strip, too narrow, long and steep to have much agricultural use. But it cost him only 25 pounds, and it was a foothold. A “free Negro,” he well knew, had no standing at all in Connecticut. He would have to forge a local identity, and the only path to that, he concluded, was through real estate. The population hereabouts was small, close-knit, conservative, and overwhelmingly white. Yet soon after his arrival he decided he wanted to make the place his home. For the next two years, as he went about his work, Venture hiked his strip of land, as well as Bingham’s adjacent larger parcel, studying it. It was darkened by ancient trees whose canopies closed out the sky. Yet as he tramped it, he realized he knew this land. He knew its seasons: bud and shoot, leaf and thistle, wing and hoof. He knew that when autumn came mushrooms, meaty and loamy, would encrust the hillsides and cluster along dead logs. He knew the insects that would bite his flesh, the plant called goldenrod that would shoot up four feet high in late summer, topped with sweet-smelling yellow flowers that made a good tea. He knew the nuts that would plummet down through the leaves. He knew how soft the land would be in summer after a day’s sweaty heaving work, and how hard to death it would be most other times.
Most of all he knew the trees, their trunks vaster around than three men could reach, piling themselves hundreds of feet into the air. These he could cut, saw, bite into with his blades. He could send them rocketing groundward, make the earth shudder as if it had feelings. He could strip and hack these trunks, use oxen to haul them downhill to the river, turning the steepness of the land to advantage. The trees were money. They were his future.
For two years, then, he harvested trees from his narrow strip of property and sold his wood, floating it down the Salmon River to Bezaleel Brainerd’s sawmill near the East Haddam Landing. He got to know everyone in the area, became financially tangled with them. There was no other way, for in a rural community goods weren’t bought and sold for ready money. All transactions were on account. People even settled their taxes in goods, using an official ledger to calculate their payment in grain, wood or meat. When he needed staples, Venture went himself, or sent Meg or his young son Solomon, to Ezra Brainerd’s, to pick up leather, candles, beef, cider. Brainerd recorded each purchase, and at the end of the year he agreed with Smith on a means of repayment: so many cords of wood, so many days of labor scything hay. In the same way, he made neighborly connections with Amos White, the cooper, and with James Green, a blacksmith and musket maker. Venture Smith was transactional by nature; he reckoned all his relationships, even with family members, in dollars or pounds. In doing business with local people, calculating the fruits of his labor against theirs, he stitched himself into the community. People began to talk about him, saying that he was as sturdy in his character as in his physical self.
On this day, then, he was ready to make a complex deal, which involved a considerable understanding of the law and the frank goodwill of these two white neighbors. Abel Bingham didn’t use the 70 acres that bordered Smith’s property, and in fact he was getting ready to leave the area, having signed on as a sergeant in a regiment gathering to join General Horatio Gates’s army in its assault on Burgoyne’s forces. He was willing to sell the land for 140 pounds. Venture Smith didn’t quite have that much money saved. But Timothy Chapman stood ready to assist. Before justice of the peace Jabez Chapman they executed a pair of agreements. In the first, Bingham agreed to sell to “Venture a free negro of Haddam” his plot of land for 140 pounds. In the second, Venture Smith agreed to sell half of this same parcel to Chapman, for 55 pounds. Chapman wasn’t actually buying the land. It was a mortgage, a back-country loan, arranged without banks or intermediaries. Chapman’s 55 pounds—which Smith would repay later—made it possible for Smith to buy the land that would give him his security.
As they were filling out the papers, they noted a problem. The line for the date on the preprinted form said:
In the __________ Year of the Reign of our Sovereign
Lord GEORGE the Third, of Great Britain.
They crossed out the line and wrote:
In the first year of Independency of American States.
Then Smith, who had never learned to read and write, put an X beside his name. He now owned 80 acres of Connecticut real estate. He was part of the community.
Also in March of 1777, George Germain sat down at his desk in Whitehall and penned a letter to Sir Guy Carleton, the general in charge of British forces in the northern theater. He tried to put to one side his long-standing enmity toward Sir Guy, the fact that his fellow nobleman had questioned his honor in the aftermath of the Battle of Minden. He tried to be delicate. But then delicacy was not really part of his nature.
“With a view of quelling the rebellion as soon as possible,” he wrote, “it is become highly necessary that the most speedy junction of the two armies should be effected.” It was time to set in motion the master plan: to bring the northern army down the Hudson and the southern army up, strangling the rebellion. However, Germain told Carleton, “the security and good government of Canada absolutely require your presence there.” Germain was informing the leading general of the northern army that he would not be part of that army’s major action in the war. He was instead being ordered to stay behind and guard the back door. Meanwhile, two other generals would sweep south. Germain instructed Carleton to send them into action. John Burgoyne, with the greater part of Carleton’s army, was “to force his way to Albany” and meet up with General Howe’s army, while Barry St. Leger, with a smaller force, was “to make a diversion on the Mohawk River.” Germain went into detail regarding which companies and detachments would accompany which c
ommander.
Further, he stated that “As this plan cannot advantageously be executed without the assistance of Canadians and Indians, his Majesty strongly recommends it to your care to furnish both expeditions with good and sufficient bodies of those men.” Germain was no longer willing to put up with the failure of his generals to engage the Iroquois. He now made it not only his wish but the king’s, and he wanted Carleton to see to it. He added a further push for Carleton to get the Indians on board, an attempt at flattery that was almost oily, telling the general, who had often boasted of his deep knowledge of North America and its native peoples, that “your influence amongst them is so great that there can be no room to apprehend you will find it difficult to fulfil his Majesty’s expectations.”
Carleton was livid when he received the letter. He scratched out a heated reply, declaring to Germain that “from your first entrance into office, you began to prepare the minds of all men” toward his eventual emasculation. He accused Germain of running the war as a means of exercising old grievances, of acting out of “private enmity” toward him. He demanded to be recalled to England, where he could begin to clear his name.
But, good soldier that he was, in the meantime Carleton did everything he was ordered to do for the coming action, including, finally, compelling the Iroquois to join the British cause.
Several weeks later, a messenger arrived at Conawaugus. Cornplanter greeted him and asked his business. The message was that the British government wanted to meet in council with the Senecas and other nations of the Iroquois confederation. The meeting place was to be Oswego, on the banks of Lake Ontario. The villagers discussed the matter and decided they would go. The British were particularly eager for the Senecas to attend, as, traditionally, this westernmost nation, which during the French and Indian War had been closest to the French, geographically and otherwise, was the least inclined of all the Iroquois to side with the British.
Revolution Song Page 30
