Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  In some ways, the home of Venture and Meg Smith was like that of white inhabitants of Haddam. But there were differences. There were no crucifixes, Bibles or other indications of affiliation to a Christian church: unlike virtually all whites, the Smiths were not part of a congregation. And after Venture Smith finished his house, he buried rock crystals near the doorways and windows, apparently holding in his memory a similar practice from his African childhood, based on a belief that it would ward off evil and lead to good fortune. Other Africans in the area became regular visitors. Smith began referring to them as “my countrymen.” In all his years as a slave, and then as a free man working to buy his family’s freedom, he had been focused on matters at hand. Now that he was living on his own land, in a place he had chosen, he had freedom to begin rebuilding his African identity.

  As soon as he had bought his parcel from Abel Bingham, Smith turned his attention to the property on the other side of him. The owner was willing to sell. Smith had put all his savings into the parcel he had just purchased, and in doing so had put himself in debt to Timothy Chapman, but he wanted this additional land, and he wanted it now. He turned to another white friend. Stephen Knowlton was about the same age, born in East Haddam, and had recently done a stint of service in the local militia. He and Smith formed enough of a bond that Knowlton agreed to buy the 48-acre lot jointly with Smith. He put up the 250 pounds, in what was in effect a loan; Smith later bought him out.

  Venture Smith now owned 128 acres: more land than most well-to-do white Connecticut farmers possessed. He was building boats, harvesting trees, planting crops. And, having established himself as a presence in the small black community, he began forging a settlement. One of his friends, a thirty-year-old man named Whacket, was slave to a local man, Daniel Brainerd. Brainerd died, and freed Whacket in his will. But if Whacket showed up at Smith’s house one day to celebrate, he also had something to bemoan, for his girlfrend, Base, who was also slave to Brainerd, had not been freed in the will but remained the property of Brainerd’s widow. Meanwhile, another “free Negro of Haddam” named Peter Freeman, who was about twenty, wanted to marry a girl named Peg, but had no house or property on which to begin a life with her.

  Venture Smith solved the puzzle for these young people. Whacket bought Base out of slavery, then Whacket and Base and Peter Freeman and Peg got married at a double wedding in East Haddam. Two months later, in July 1777, Venture Smith offered 12 acres of his land to the two couples. They purchased it for 66 pounds, which they would pay in labor, built homes and moved in. As an indication of Smith’s role in this intricate affair, and of the esteem he had built up, the deed was witnessed by Dyar Throop, East Haddam’s most prominent attorney and its representative to the State Assembly, as well as Throop’s wife.

  Smith became a source of stability to Africans in the area. In December of the same year, a man named Sawney Anderson asked him to buy his freedom. Smith obliged. He bought him for 40 pounds, plus 10 bushels of corn and 10 bushels of rye, whereupon Anderson and his wife, Susannah (who was a free woman), and their four children seem to have taken up residence as well on Smith’s property. For the next ten months, until Anderson had worked off the purchase price, he was technically Smith’s slave. When both men were satisfied that the terms of their financial arrangement had been met, Smith formally freed him. Dyar Throop, the assemblyman, witnessed the manumission.

  The black population of East Haddam in the 1770s totaled only 65 individuals. By the spring of 1778, 14 of them lived on or next to Venture Smith’s property. He was a man of means and standing. Physically too he was a presence: people nowadays described him as six feet tall and six feet around; they liked to tell stories of his feats of strength. Some noted that when he paid a visit he had to turn sideways to fit through the narrow doorways of village homes. And for all his seriousness, his inexorable work ethic, he had a playful side. On visiting an acquaintance, he was known to get down on his knees and chase the children around the house.

  In a sense, Venture Smith, as he turned fifty, had achieved the New England equivalent of George Washington’s ambition of becoming a gentleman planter. Like Washington at Mount Vernon, he was a provider and protector. A visitor to either man’s estate would have seen a well-ordered property, with black folks working the land. But the blacks on Smith’s property were free.

  Abraham Yates was feeling lost. He was temporarily residing in Kingston, where the New York State Assembly was meeting. His wife, Anna, had come with him, but he had brought only a few possessions. He missed his books. Most of all, he missed his maps. News of the war flowed in from every direction, including field reports from Washington’s aide-de-camp, Alexander Hamilton. He was a self-taught shoemaker whose life had been confined to a small area of upstate New York and the surrounding region. How was he to make sense of what was happening in distant places without his maps?

  To his great good fortune, he had engaged a capital assistant, who remained behind at Albany taking care of all his needs. Matthew Visscher was twenty-six years old, a lawyer who, like Yates, had grown up in a Dutch-speaking household. He was eager and capable, and burned with revolutionary fire. He loaded two barrels of Yates’s books and papers onto a sloop, and sent with them, as he wrote Yates, “your Maps and Globes.” Visscher was also looking after the shop: “I have sold the Hogshead of Wine to Dr. Potts at 60/ p Gallon, he has forty Gallons of it, and there is about seven left: which he will fetch to day.” All of this gave Yates some pleasure, but he was upset by Visscher’s description of the chaos in Albany: “You cannot conceive the distresses I daily am obliged to be a Spectator of—Boats loaded with Women & Children, hardly bedding with them, and no provisions or Money to buy it—large droves of Cattle Sheep &ca going thro the Town.”

  Meanwhile, the state constitution Yates had worked so hard to complete now had to be heeded. It called for the election of statewide officials. Setting up the mechanism for elections—jurisdictions, ballot places, election overseers, the fielding of candidates and disseminating of their policy positions—was enormously complex in the midst of war, especially with much of the state under British occupation. But the election went off. For the office of governor Yates threw his support behind George Clinton, a son of Irish immigrants from Ulster County, who had fought in the French and Indian War and then became an early opponent of British policies in North America. Two factions had quickly developed in the nascent state politics, and they were the same ones that had emerged in the crafting of a constitution. Clinton was the leader of the radicals, who were angling to keep power concentrated at the local level. The conservatives chose Philip Schuyler to go up against Clinton in the election. Clinton won, and became the state’s first governor. Yates himself won a seat in the State Senate. No less than four other Yateses, all relatives, won elective offices, and Yates’s clerk, Matthew Visscher, became a member of the State Assembly. The radicals had taken the state in a rout.

  But there was no time for celebrating. Not long after the new state government met, the British invaded Kingston and burned the city. Yates and the other legislators fled for their lives. They moved to a series of temporary capitals, trying to conduct business in between periods of packing up, saddling up, hurrying out. At the same time, Yates began maneuvering for the 1778 election, at which he believed he had a chance to become lieutenant governor.

  In the free-for-all of the young state’s politics, Yates was also running for State Senate again, and in this race his opponent was Philip Schuyler. Schuyler, who had been dismissed from his position as general of the Northern Army and then lost his bid for governor, had in the past repeatedly run into Yates’s stubborn insistence on the rights of the common man. The Albany patrician was filled with indignation and scorn when he learned that Yates was now in contention to be the second-most-powerful man in the state. He led a smear campaign against him, accusing Yates of electoral fraud and of being a commoner. Schuyler trumpeted the fact that Yates had once been a shoemaker as if it were an obvio
us disqualification for political office, pointing out to his fellow New Yorkers the outlandish notion that “Ab. Yates . . . late Cobler of Laws and Old Shoes, is to be put in Nomination for Lieut. Governor.”

  Yates was spoiling for a fight, and being scoffed at by the blue-blooded Schuyler only whetted his appetite. But fellow radicals approached him with concerns. While he had a sizable upstate following, and had become a leader in the Senate, his very popularity was a problem. One official voiced the fear that “elevating Yates will forward a Severance between the Popular and the Landed Interest and they will mutually pull each other down.” Yates pondered the possibility of New York’s state government, riven by factional strife, descending into chaos in the midst of the Revolution. He removed his name from consideration as lieutenant governor.

  But he won his other race, for senator, and he took particular delight in beating Schuyler.

  The Atlantic crossing was hell on earth. Winter winds strafed the decks of the British military convoy that carried Margaret Coghlan to her fate. Belowdecks, meanwhile, she was locked in deadly combat with her abusive husband. Freed from the constraints imposed by her father, she violently protested Coghlan’s taking her away against her will as if she were a slave. Her stubborn heart had never let go of Aaron Burr. The soldier who had won her love was at this moment with Washington’s army at Valley Forge, which might as well have been China. What was happening to her life? This was not the way the plot of Polly Honeycombe played out. Against the inexorability of reality, against the pounding of the waves and the tossing of the ship, she somehow held on to the conviction that the age of forced marriages was a thing of the past, that she had a right to freedom.

  Her defiance inflamed Coghlan’s propensity to drunken brutishness. A man, society had taught him, was supposed to be master of his wife. Coghlan’s ample insecurity—he had yet to achieve anything in his life, had in fact left behind him a series of failures and abortive efforts—heightened his need to dominate. Together, they made a spectacle: he young, roguishly attractive and roaring with profanity, she a black-haired, alabaster-skinned teenaged beauty who deflected his violent outbursts with sarcasm and sneers. The fact that virtually every passenger on the ship except the two of them was a soldier being redeployed, and that every one of them knew that Coghlan had left the service of his country and was in the process of returning home, presumably to a life of leisure, added shame to Coghlan’s stew of mental distress. And the shame was intensified by the humiliating way his child-wife treated him, her refusal to subordinate herself to him. Finally, the captain was forced to intervene, telling Coghlan he would throw him in the brig if he did not act as a gentleman.

  Three weeks after leaving New York Harbor the fleet sighted land, but rough winds forced them off course and they made an unscheduled landing at Crookhaven at the southernmost tip of Ireland. As soon as they did, Coghlan had his horse put ashore, pulled himself into the saddle and rode off, “leaving me,” Margaret wrote, “young and unprotected, in the midst of six or seven hundred men, for the space of fourteen days, without a single individual of my own sex in the whole fleet.” Coghlan eventually returned, but in the meantime she had to deal with an onslaught of loitering soldiers “practicing their arts of seduction against me.”

  Finally, they made it to Cork, and there Coghlan informed her of a decision he had made. He had rented an old mansion in Wales, and he proposed to take her there and lock her up in it; “his design,” she declared, “was to break my spirit.”

  She protested. But this extraordinary step, this act of violent possession, he had apparently determined, was necessary for the sake of his masculinity and his honor. He was hell-bent. It was as though all of his life’s wandering debauchery and dereliction of duty could be rectified by imprisoning his wife.

  They traveled to Dublin, where the city was alive with news that France, ancient enemy of England, would come into the American war on the side of the revolutionaries. People on the streets of Dublin had mixed feelings about the goings-on in America. They too had long suffered under English oppression, but the home country was much nearer to them, the ties were tighter, and most Irish radicals viewed the American war more with fascination than a desire to follow suit.

  Coghlan, however, was presumably not interested in engaging the locals in conversation about the war. He had left that behind. As soon as he could, he got himself and his wife onto a ship, and they sailed across the Irish Sea from Dublin to the medieval-walled Welsh city of Conwy. There, in the shadow of its thirteenth-century castle, he wrestled her into a room at an inn where they would rest before continuing on to the place where he would confine her. Coghlan left her alone briefly while he attended to a few things.

  Margaret had been thinking furiously ever since they had left America. Somewhere along the way she began to see the war, which she had once unquestioningly viewed through the eyes of a loyal British subject, in a different light. What were the Americans doing but breaking away from an unjust captivity, asserting their God-given rights to freedom? In sailing back to Europe—or no, before that, when she allowed herself to be ferried from the American army on Manhattan to the British on Staten Island—what had she done? When she wrote it down later, it was in capital letters: “. . . turned MY BACK ON LIBERTY!”

  Her freedom and American freedom: were they, somehow, twin struggles? In the course of her primal battle first against her father and then her husband, and through the transformative act of being shipped to another continent, she had reached a new stage of awareness, a maturity. She was still herself: brash, passionate. She was one of those people who was born into the world with a personality seemingly fully formed; she would never change. But she was no longer a girl. She had run off once before: hopped onto a horse and fled the New Jersey family with whom she had been staying in a desperate attempt to find her father. But what was rash in the past, the thoughtless impulse of a girl, could become something other if it involved mature consideration. She was a woman now, ready to act and responsible for her actions. She knew what she was doing.

  She opened the door of the inn and marched off, through the town and into the wasteland of the Welsh mountainside. Live or die, she would have freedom.

  On March 13, 1778, Emmanuel Marie Louis de Noailles, France’s ambassador to Great Britain, presented Lord North, the British prime minister, with a formal notification that France had, the month before, signed a treaty with the “Thirteen United States of America” indicating that it would join the Americans in their fight for independence. France had been eager to get back at England ever since the Seven Years’ War, in which it had lost Canada and much else. An American delegation, led by Benjamin Franklin, had been in Paris since the end of 1776, impressing on French officials that the American revolution was a manifestation of Enlightenment values that the French themselves espoused. French leaders had been waiting for a sign that the Americans were strong enough to warrant their backing them. The victory at Saratoga was the sign. Lord North presented the French document to King George, who declared that it “must entirely overturn” British plans.

  Among the things the French entry into the war overturned was any thought of the government’s accepting the resignation of George Germain as American Secretary. What had been a civil war, in which the parent country was attempting to discipline a rebellious child, was now, suddenly, an international conflict involving Britain’s greatest rival. It was no longer a matter of using the Hudson River to divide the colonies, or of taking New York or Philadelphia or Boston. The game board now extended, potentially, to British possessions in the Caribbean, to the European continent, to Asia. With his deep military and diplomatic experience and his intricate involvement in the American situation, Germain was necessary. His aggression, his unyielding determination not just to avert loss but to extend empire, to carry forward the progress of England’s ancient rulers in extending her dominions, which until now was seen by his enemies as pure folly, was suddenly an asset. The king in particu
lar, who was committed to punishing the colonists and keeping America British, had to admit that Germain, for all his flaws, was a bedrock of imperial strength. He now asked him to run what was in effect a whole new war.

  Germain, of course, accepted. Like a phoenix risen from its ashes, he stood again, a tower of spleen and sinew, terrible in his imperial dynamism, before Parliament in May of 1778. The occasion was a showdown, for General Burgoyne had returned from his humiliating loss at Saratoga and was defending his actions in the House of Commons. He had been a popular figure in Britain, and, despite his having surrendered an army, he still was. He used that popularity in his defense, and, knowing that Germain was largely loathed, put blame for the failure on the American Secretary. “I expected cooperation,” he told the House, meaning that he had expected Germain to send him reinforcements and make certain that General Howe’s army would join his at Albany. Germain counterargued, saying that Burgoyne chose his route of travel poorly and weighed down his army with unnecessary baggage for the comfort of the officers, creating the conditions for the defeat. Burgoyne scoffed, and referred to Germain and other leaders “who were obliged to cover their ignorance and inability.” Back and forth they went before the assembly. An observer remarked that the opponents “scolded like two oysterwomen.” Temple Luttrell, one of Burgoyne’s defenders, then rose to remind everyone that Germain had received “the most decisive censure of a court martial” in the past; he denounced Germain as “a minister whose loss of a nation’s confidence and his own character is a matter of public record,” and declared snidely that had Burgoyne “disobeyed the commands of his superiors and hid himself from danger,” such conduct would have entitled him to “the honours and emoluments of the American Secretaryship.”