In June, the crisis expanded on yet another front. Spain declared war on England, and Spanish troops joined the French in besieging Gibraltar, the possession of which gave England control of access to the Mediterranean Sea.
People seethed at the situation their government had gotten them into. Whigs in Parliament responded to the ugly mood by issuing demands for reforms of the monarchy and the aristocracy. Edmund Burke called for abolishing sinecures for noblemen, meaningless positions that cost the taxpayers money, such as “the several keepers of buck-hounds, stag-hounds, fox-hounds, and harriers.” To laughter, he insisted that “It is not proper that great noblemen should be keepers of dogs. . . .” He railed against corruption and bureaucracy in government, and demanded that the king’s power be curtailed. Given the prevailing mood, his bill seemed sure to pass. But King George pushed back by audaciously wrapping himself in the very Constitution he was accused of diminishing. He had his men in Parliament fight the measures on the grounds that any attack on the monarchy was an attack on “the present Constitution of the country in its pristine lustre.” The reforms were defeated.
Popular outrage over the defeat blended with a sudden outburst of anti-Catholic sentiment, and the result was an even larger wave of rioting. Soldiers marched into the streets, but the angry crowds insisted on making a statement. Three buildings in particular were targeted: Newgate Prison, the home of the chief justice, and, once again, the Pall Mall house of the American Secretary. Germain was at home with friends. Together they barricaded the doors and windows.
Meanwhile, Germain was again unhappy with the leader of British forces in America. Sir Henry Clinton wrote to him complaining about everything from the rugged terrain of America to French ships off the coast to the lack of funds. “To say truth, my Lord,” he whined, “my spirits are worn out by struggling against the consequences of so many adverse incidents.” A fellow officer wrote to Germain from New York with his own worries about Clinton: “I am convinced nature has not given him an enterprizing and active spirit . . . his affection for New York (in which island he has four different houses), induces him to retire to that place, where without any settled plan he idles his time . . . and suffers himself to be cooped up by Washington with an inferior army.”
Yet again, Germain had a general who was overly fond of the comforts of New York. This was especially vexing because Germain had become convinced that, as the French had not yet exerted themselves in force in America, with a strong commander the war could be won fairly swiftly. But he agreed with Admiral Sir George Rodney, an advisor he trusted, who, after spending time in New York, wrote him about what it would take:
Believe me, my dear Lord, you must not expect an end of the American war till you can find a general of active spirit, and who hates the Americans from principle. Such a man with the sword of war and justice on his side will do wonders, for in this war I am convinced the sword should cut deep. Nothing but making the Americans feel every calamity their perfidy deserves can bring them to their senses.
Rodney further advised that the British concentrate on the South, in particular on the James River in Virginia: “Be assured, my Lord, if Lord Cornwallis and his army were to act up that river and in the Chesapeak the rebels would be undone.”
For some time, Germain had been pushing Clinton to move in that direction, but Clinton had resisted. When Germain sent Charles Cornwallis to America as Clinton’s number two, he gave Cornwallis a “dormant commission”: i.e., the power to take the command away from Clinton, upon Germain’s order. Cornwallis was a seasoned aristocrat who like Germain had fought in the Seven Years’ War. Germain believed he could count on him to pursue his policy of aggression. If Clinton wanted to stay snug in his New York residences, Germain would have the option of transferring authority to Cornwallis.
At the end of 1779, Clinton finally moved. He, Cornwallis, 13,500 soldiers and thousands of horses boarded ships in New York Harbor and headed south. They laid siege to Charleston, South Carolina. Washington had been unable to divert forces southward, and the city fell on May 11, 1780. In a stroke, the British had won the most vital harbor in the southern states. Hundreds of South Carolinians suddenly announced themselves to be loyal British subjects. Germain exulted.
And he dared ponder one other notion that his advisor had opined. Rodney had learned that the American commander in chief had a weakness. From his earliest days he had longed for one thing in life above all others: a commission in the British army. “Washington,” he wrote Germain, “is certainly to be bought—honours will do it.”
The information that Germain received concerning the American commander was years out of date. Holed up in his winter quarters in Morristown, New Jersey, Washington had a hundred things on his mind, none of which involved British honors. He had struggled to keep his soldiers alive through the coldest winter in living memory, in which the vast Hudson River completely froze over and snowfalls of five feet were charted. He became obsessed with recording the weather, and through March and April eagerly observed every anemic sign that the season was changing: “the Trees and Earth being glazed looked beautiful . . . Morning lowering & raw . . . Raining moderately all the forenoon with a little thunder—thick and misty afterwards . . .”
Uppermost in his mind was the failure of Congress to put the tottering country on any kind of financial footing. Relying on income to be raised by continental loan officers in each state (Abraham Yates among them) had proved to be a total failure. As a result, the currency that Congress issued shriveled in value, and, compounding the frigid conditions, Washington could not feed his army. One of his generals lamented that in “a country overflowing with plenty” the men protecting it were about to “perish for lack of food.”
Then, in May 1780, with the late breaking of the weather came the stupendously bad news of the fall of Charleston. It was infuriating in its own right, but doubly so because Washington had been constrained from acting due to the fact that Congress, in its fear of military tyranny, had not given him authority over the South. Even with 2,500 American soldiers now in enemy hands and the British general Cornwallis in command of the port of Charleston, Congress did not expand Washington’s power but instead turned to his continual nemesis, the man who had tried repeatedly to wrest authority from him. Horatio Gates was put in charge in the South.
Washington, meanwhile, had to stay where he was, for Clinton was headed back to New York with much of the British army. So he drilled his men. He studied his maps. And he had learned to appreciate small pleasures, such as taking breaks from pondering strategy by tossing a ball with his young officers.
Then came word from further north. After Sullivan’s fine job of decimating Iroquois villages, Washington had hoped the Indians would have learned their lesson, so that he could focus his attention henceforth on the British. Washington had instructed Philip Schuyler to offer the defeated Iroquois peace in exchange for laying down their arms. But the reply surprised him, darkened his mood and compounded his difficulties. The Iroquois had rejected his offer.
After Sullivan’s army had left, the Iroquois had surveyed their homeland and began trying to comprehend the devastation. “[W]hat were our feelings,” one asked, “when we found that there was not a mouthful of any kind of sustenance left, not even enough to keep a child one day from perishing with hunger.” They made the long march eastward to the British base at Fort Niagara, and set up in and around it as refugees. By late fall 1779 their makeshift villages held 5,000 men, women and children and stretched for eight miles along the Niagara River. Then came the same severe winter that Washington’s men suffered through, with snow five feet deep and temperatures so bitingly cold that people froze to death. Many died of hunger. The people they sent back to the sites of their destroyed villages to scavenge for food in the snow returned with handfuls of burnt corn. “When the snow melted in the spring,” one Seneca said, “deer were found dead upon the ground in vast numbers; and other animals, of every description, perished from the cold
also, and were found dead, in multitudes,” so that food was scarce for the subsequent year as well.
Cornplanter had not gone to Niagara. His village was one of the few left untouched by Sullivan, so he spent the winter there. He wasn’t on hand, therefore, when four men appeared from out of the white mist of the winter landscape in February 1780 and rode into the Iroquois camps around the fort. The four were themselves Iroquois leaders, but from villages that had chosen to side with the Americans. They were the messengers Washington had sent, via General Schuyler. They offered wampum belts signifying peace.
Although he wasn’t at the council, and although he had in the past rejected calls to join in the war between the white nations, Cornplanter was fully in agreement with the Iroquois leaders who declined to receive the belts. They castigated the messengers as “inconsiderable people” for having broken with the Six Nations and sided with the Americans, and for now presuming to instruct them how to proceed. “We have no reason to be ashamed of what we have done,” the Mohawk leader known as Aaron Hill told the messengers.
Cornplanter felt the same. Town Destroyer had burned their homelands but had only sharpened their will. He sent word to the Iroquois leaders at Niagara that he was ready to renew the fight. Guy Johnson, the British Indian officer at Fort Niagara, updated George Germain in London: “four disaffected Indians” had tried “to draw off the Six Nations,” but the Iroquois were more eager than ever to fight. He estimated that they had 1,200 warriors in readiness.
In the spring of 1780 the Iroquois fanned out once again. They swept into American villages in the most agriculturally rich area of New York, burning crops, killing and scalping. By summertime they were targeting Oneida and Tuscarora villages, punishing those Iroquois who had sided with the Americans. This was a historic change of behavior. The Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy had been united in the remote past by the mythic figures Deganawidah and Hiawatha, who had bound them together through a sacred promise to abide by the Great Law of Peace. Now, in the effort to preserve themselves amid the conflict among the English-speaking whites, Cornplanter was leading war parties against other Iroquois. They burned their villages to the ground, and made a special point of torching Christian churches that had sprouted up in them.
In early August, Cornplanter was leading a large Iroquois army along the Mohawk River in search of American settlements. When they reached the town of Canajoharie, they found it deserted, as word of their approach had come before and people had run off. They set about methodically torching every structure. Three miles north they came to Fort Plain, a simple settlement comprised of a fort and a handful of houses clustered around it, and set everything afire. Some Americans here had not gotten word of their approach; Cornplanter’s people captured these and took them with them as they retreated into the forest.
Many of Cornplanter’s relatives were part of this war party, including his highly perceptive half-brother, Handsome Lake, so some may have noticed him growing increasingly agitated as they left Fort Plain. Finally, 10 miles from the settlement, Cornplanter stopped, overflowing with emotion, and turned to face one of the prisoners they had captured.
A Seneca warrior in Cornplanter’s army had as his wife a white woman who had been captured as a girl and adopted by a Seneca family. Her original name was Mary Jemison, but the Iroquois called her Dehgewanus; like other Seneca women, she often traveled with war parties. She recounted in English the words Cornplanter spoke to this white prisoner.
It had been eight or ten years since Cornplanter had traveled to Albany in hopes of establishing a relationship with his Dutch-American father. John Abeel had been impassive at that time, offering him a meal but little else: no accounting for his absence in his son’s life, or even any interest in it. Now, in the midst of the raid at Fort Plain, Cornplanter had recognized him through the smoke, and had pulled him out of his burning home. The old man had changed for the worse. Apparently, he didn’t know who the Seneca leader was, even when the man stood before him, covered in sweat and warpaint and bristling with emotion. “I am your son!” Cornplanter cried, unable to contain himself any longer. “You are my father!”
Here in the forest, in the midst of doing the work of war in the service of his people and their freedom, Cornplanter saw that fate had given him an opportunity, a last chance to connect to his father, to make him see his son as a man. With her knowledge of both languages and cultures, Mary Jemison translated his words in a way a white audience of her time could digest, and also in such a way that the young man’s feelings, his pent-up pain and frustration and anger, and as well his longing for connection and even for parental approval, came through:
You are now my prisoner, and subject to the customs of Indian warfare: but you shall not be harmed; you need not fear. I am a warrior! Many are the scalps which I have taken! Many prisoners I have tortured to death! I am your son! I am a warrior! I was anxious to see you, and to greet you in friendship. I went to your cabin and took you by force! But your life shall be spared. Indians love their friends and their kindred, and treat them with kindness.
The naturally contemplative Seneca fighter—who was in some way at war with his own identity in the midst of a wider war—had a chance to confront the father who had abandoned him. Cornplanter wanted to squeeze something out of it. Meaning. Healing, perhaps. He must have been mulling what he would do with the old man ever since he had pulled him out of his burning cabin 10 miles down the trail. Now an idea came to him: an idea of compassion, of reaching out in love. It was a way, perhaps, to make peace not only with his father but the world of the white men. “If now you choose to follow the fortune of your yellow son, and to live with our people,” Mary Jemison recorded Cornplanter as saying, “I will cherish your old age with plenty of venison, and you shall live easy. But if it is your choice to return to your fields and live with your white children, I will send a party of my trusty young men to conduct you back in safety. I respect you, my father. You have been friendly to Indians, and they are your friends.”
But, no. John Abeel said he did not want to live with his son and his people, did not want Cornplanter’s venison and his offer of an easy life, even though he had spent much of his life trading among the Senecas. Whatever affinity the old man had had for the Iroquois earlier in his life, he wanted nothing to do with them now.
Later, when the Iroquois held a council, Cornplanter asked his fellow leaders to free his father as well as the others they had taken at Fort Plain. The leaders agreed, “as a compliment to Cornplanter,” said his nephew, Governor Blacksnake. The Iroquois army moved on, and left John Abeel behind.
Chapter 16
NUMBERLESS METEORS GLEAMING THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE
Margaret Coghlan had been waiting for a chance to escape from her husband. She took it when he left her alone in the Welsh inn. But she had no plan beyond that. She simply ran out the door, and down the lane, and into the craggy, exposed, baleful wastes of the Welsh countryside. She knew he would be minutes behind her, so she did her best to conceal herself in the hillside that immediately confronted her. Rain fell, the winds whipped, there was no cover. She kept walking; walking turned into hiking. Eventually she found an inn. The innkeeper suspected that she had run away from her parents. She told him the truth; he took pity and gave her a room. The next day she set out again. “I fled from my tormentor, and fought my way across the mountains, destitute of money, and without a hut to afford me shelter from the inclemency of the weather,” she wrote, “but supported by the native innocence of my own heart, I escaped from the great regardless of all lesser evils.” She crossed paths with assorted characters. Men wondered what she was doing on her own, offered their services as her escort. She declined.
Eventually—after a journey of 60 miles—she came out of the mountains and into the town of Nantwich, England. Here she wrote a letter to Lord Thomas Clinton, a friend of friends and a man of stature, whose relative, General Sir Henry Clinton, was now running the British army in America. She
outlined her situation and begged for his help. By return of post came a letter with 20 pounds and a promise that the powerful man would protect her.
Not long after, John Coghlan, who had somehow learned of Clinton’s offer of aid, burst into Clinton’s country home to the west of London in a murderous rage, declaring that he knew for a fact that Clinton was having an affair with his wife and demanding to search the house. Clinton assured Coghlan that the woman was not his lover and was not in his house. Coghlan eventually left, but not before “denouncing vengeance” on Clinton if he discovered the man had been lying to him.
Clinton set Margaret up in a townhouse in London, and provided a woman to look after her. Then he paid her a visit. “I am sorry to remark,” Coghlan later wrote, “to the utter disgrace of Lord Clinton, that his behaviour to me, when I fell within his power, was such as reflects dishonour on both his head and his heart.” She was trapped again: trapped by a man who used his power, the power that society gave men over women, for sexual advantage. Worse, after having his way with her for a short while, Clinton proposed to give her as a kind of prize to one of his friends. She resisted, which angered him. In desperation, she wrote to a friend, Margaret Kemble Gage, the wife of General Thomas Gage, with whom she had lived on Manhattan when General Gage was in charge of British forces. She spilled out her sad story to the woman.
Somehow her letter got into the hands of General Gage himself, who was close with her father. Shortly after, Margaret was shocked to find General Gage in person—sixty years old, flowing gray hair and a face of steely propriety—on the doorstep of her Lower Seymour Street residence. He had contacted both her father and her husband’s father. On behalf of the male keepers of society’s order, they had formed a little committee. Young married ladies could not be running about the countryside, taking up with gentlemen. It was unseemly and reflected badly on the men and their reputations. They concluded that she had become sullied. They decided the best thing was to get her to a nunnery: a convent in France, for a term of three years, which, they hoped, would rehabilitate her and allow time for the scandal she had caused to blow over.
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