He followed with growing dismay the fallout from the peace treaty that Britain had signed simultaneously with America, France and Spain. Hemmed in by so many adversaries, the English negotiators had given up some possessions in the Caribbean, in Africa and in India. Meanwhile, the American negotiators, led by Benjamin Franklin, had pushed for and won England’s relinquishment of claim to land on the continent as far west as the Mississippi River. That ensured the new nation a boundless vista of future promise, and on the other hand the concessions made the British public feel that they had been bested both by their former colonies and their age-old European enemies. Sackville, to his very last, believed that his way had been right, and that the only thing lacking was the conviction to see it through.
He spent most of his time these days at his country estate. He threw himself into religion, insisting that the entire household, down to the lowest scullery maid, accompany him to Sunday service. When it was time for the sermon, he would stand and turn to face the congregation with a censorious countenance, making sure everyone was paying attention. The old aggression that had punctuated debates in the House of Commons would manifest itself when he became caught up in a particularly fine sermon. “Well done, Harry!” he was known to bray at the reverend in the midst of his remarks.
He had never been a reader in his life and had no hobbies. He wasn’t moved to write his memoirs. He had few real friends, though he did dutifully host social events, and could make the odd show of humor: he got a charge out of pointing out to people that his baker’s surname was Butcher and his butcher was a Baker.
Very occasionally, he folded himself into a carriage and rode off to Knole, the magnificent estate where he had spent his boyhood and whose feudal architecture had become his own. It had probably been the happiest period of his life, but he didn’t like visiting the place now. The house had passed into the family of his brother Charles, who, thanks to his debts, had let it decay. Most depressing to Sackville, Charles, who had suffered from a mental condition and had died some years before, had, on a whim, had the entire forest of beech trees that Lady Betty Germain had planted in George’s youth hacked down.
Sackville made good on his vow to Richard Cumberland and went to London for the debate on Ireland. When he returned, as he had predicted, he was near death. Cumberland came to be with him; the priest was called in. It was August 26, 1785. In his last hours Sackville was craving light and air: he wanted the heavy curtains around his bed and over the windows thrown open. Cumberland dutifully took down his last words: “I have done with this world, and what I have done in it, I have done for the best; I hope and trust I am prepared for the next.” It was a sturdy and unrepentant final utterance, perfectly in keeping with the life it summarized, suggesting that George Sackville may well have composed it in advance.
Chapter 18
ROUGH HEWER
The day after Viscount Sackville expired, Abraham Yates sat down at his home in Albany to compose a letter. He was angry, as he often was these days. “I am reather Suspitious,” he wrote, of “the advocates for augmenting the powers of Congress . . . I think this quarter Should be Watched.” His correspondent—David Howell, a member of the Continental Congress from Rhode Island—was likewise alarmed at the rapidly growing movement among many in Congress to amass power. Yates outlined for Howell the faults that these advocates of federal authority found with the existing system. The federalists, he said, argue that “Congress have not Sufficient powers,” that “We are in Danger from foreign Trade and Commerce” and from “the increasing of the public debts, and from banks & paper Credit.” And in his estimation the federalists believed that both a free press and “the liberty of voting by ballot” were threats to the American system, which had to be curtailed.
Yates considered these federalist fears to be in themselves threats to American liberty. And in his job as continental loan officer he experienced the pressure to restructure the financial system very directly: it was personally bankrupting him. He was supposed to raise funds by obtaining loans, and his salary came in the form of a percentage of what he raised. But Robert Morris, who as Superintendent of Finance was leading the effort to change the system of financing the government, had sidestepped Yates’s unyielding criticisms by keeping him in his position but creating a new one—receiver of taxes—that superceded it. Morris chose Alexander Hamilton for this new position. Yates had long since identified Hamilton, his fellow New Yorker, as one of the chief threats to American liberty. And Hamilton had nothing but contempt for Yates. He warned Morris about him, calling Yates “a man whose ignorance and perverseness are only surpassed by his pertinacity and conceit.” Hamilton and Yates had both risen from humble beginnings, but where Yates was proud of the fact, Hamilton shunned his past and hungered for advancement in America’s class system. His pretenses, coupled with Yates’s sneering disregard for elites, increased his scorn. Yates, Hamilton informed Morris, “hates all high-flyers, which is the appellation he gives to men of genius.” He warned Morris that Yates was proud to be one of the common people, that he considered himself “a preacher to their taste.” He also misrepresented Yates’s opposition to federal taxation, claiming that Yates saw it as his mission to assure common people that “they are too poor to pay taxes.”
Yates was furious at being outmaneuvered by Morris and Hamilton. He had been borrowing money from friends to live on in these uncertain times. Now Hamilton had been appointed to, as he said, “an office as it were taken out of my office with a generous and Immediate Salary (it is Said between three and five hundred Pounds) when I Am Dayly Obliged to Shift for the necessarys of life.” This, he complained, was “such a hardship that Nothing but the times Will oblidge me to Submit to Without Remonstrating.”
While he technically maintained the post of continental loan officer, his chief task in that role had shifted from collecting funds to arguing with Robert Morris about the limits of Congress’s power. He was also still a state senator. But these positions did not give him sufficient outlet to express his alarm over the way things were developing among the country’s leaders. The people had to be warned. So he began writing. It was common to publish under a pseudonym; he had recently admired essays under the pen name Jonathan of the Valley. He decided to call himself Rough Hewer. It had a nice ring to it, and it suggested a healthy separation from the powdered elites he opposed. Even before the Treaty of Paris was officially ratified Rough Hewer’s essays began to appear in the New-York Packet, published in New York City, and in the New-York Gazetteer, which was based in Albany. From Virginia to Massachusetts, others were speaking out against the federal threat. Rough Hewer stood out as one of the strongest and clearest voices in defense of the principle of liberty that the Revolution had been fought over.
By 1785 the battle lines were being drawn over a move to amend the Articles of Confederation to give Congress the power to raise customs duties: a so-called federal impost. Yates decided the occasion warranted a twenty-page pamphlet. As he nearly always did, he kept his focus on his state and region. He pushed for New York to reject the federal impost amendment. If it did, then, since the Articles of Confederation could only be amended by unanimous support of the states, it would kill the measure.
Despite the use of a pseudonym, Rough Hewer felt he needed, at the beginning of his essay, to make his readers understand who he was, or at least where he was coming from: “I look to the rulers of my country with respect but not servility; as I have to ask no favors, I fear no man’s frown. I profess to be loyal yet free, obedient yet independent.” Then, with his customary vitriol, he charged ahead, outlining the case against the federal impost in apocalyptic language. It was not, he wrote, “an innocent program to raise federal funds but a nefarious plot to destroy American liberties by joining the power of the purse and the power of the sword in a mighty continental legislature.” If Congress was granted the authority to raise taxes directly in the states, superceding state governments, it would, he warned, “swallow up” the st
ate legislatures.
New York rejected the impost, which killed this particular effort by the national government to raise taxes over the authority of the states. But Yates knew the federalists were only just beginning. This failure made it clear to them that what was needed was a complete overhaul of the Articles of Confederation. They believed that the kind of rabid defense of liberty that Yates espoused was naïve, that without a strong central government, able to fund itself, the new nation would collapse. In his insistence that they were undermining the long years of battle that George Washington and the Continental Army had endured, Yates, they decided, had become the enemy. John Jay, with whom Yates had collaborated on the creation of New York’s constitution, now considered him an enemy. So did Gouverneur Morris. Alexander Hamilton saw Yates’s movement to bring politics down to the level of the common man as an outright danger to the American project. He warned his fellow federalists in New York State that “the Yates’ and their Associates” were out to destroy the very concept of private property, and that it was imperative that he and his fellow elitists “put men in the Legislature whose principles are not of the levelling kind.”
The machinations of the federalists were not only about money, but went deeper, into the class system that America had inherited from England along with so much else. Federalists targeted Yates in particular in popular essays and even poems, belittling him in language that equated his commoner status with barbarity and that mocked his self-taught literary style:
The blunt Rough Hewer, from his savage den,
With learned dullness loads his lab’ring pen . . .
Meanwhile, evidence of the class conflict underlying the struggle for power in the new country was right in front of Yates, in Albany. Even before the war had ended, Alexander Hamilton had married Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of Philip Schuyler. Schuyler was not only Yates’s longtime nemesis but one of the most self-exalting of New York’s would-be aristocrats. The marriage of the ardent young federalist into the Albany elite—in the parlor of the grand Schuyler mansion on Catherine Street, just a few blocks south of Yates’s house—must have registered darkly in Yates’s mind. Yates prided himself on being “a Suspitious Man,” and he had reason to be. The elites were plotting. A new American aristocracy was in the offing.
Cornplanter’s decision to put his X on a treaty with the Americans, giving up Iroquois lands in exchange for peace and trade, was not popular among his people. He and his nephew, Governor Blacksnake, returned to their village of Burnt House and everyone gathered for a grand council to hear what had transpired at Fort Stanwix. Cornplanter presented a skin on which the treaty was written, and proceeded to explain it. No one understood. For two days they sat, arguing and going over points again and again. A main source of confusion concerned Britain’s treaty with the Americans. How, even according to the strange logic of the white men, was it possible that the British had ceded Iroquois lands to the Americans when they had never claimed those lands to begin with? Cornplanter himself failed to comprehend that the Treaty of Paris concerned itself with European law. Under it, Britain had given up claims to the territory in question, which included much of the North American continent and all of the Iroquois territory. In relinquishing its interest in this land, Britain did not claim that it was granting it to the new American nation, but the United States chose, in its negotiations with the Iroquois, to act as though it was already U.S. soil.
Cornplanter tried to make people understand that, while the Fort Stanwix Treaty was unsatisfactory, the alternatives for the Iroquois were worse. They refused to accept this. At the end, they made a determination—to reject the treaty. As Governor Blacksnake later said through an interpreter, “The offer that was made by General Washington, they will not take it.” Rather than abide by it, they would “continue war—for they are not willing to give up their Rights of the Soil.”
The prevailing sentiment among the Iroquois was outrage at Cornplanter for relinquishing their lands. He understood, and, like politicians before and since, he allowed himself to be pulled back in their direction. He agreed to make another trip. He would visit General Washington and the Congress to explain the unhappiness of the Iroquois, and to bargain, even though he had little to work with. With five young Seneca men he set out along the shore of Lake Erie, then headed south. After about 30 miles they came to a settlement of friendly white families. They spent the winter here, making birch bark canoes and hunting. In the spring they set off again, by canoe as far as Pittsburgh, then turned eastward and headed toward Philadelphia on foot. They kept mostly to forest trails. This part of Pennsylvania was now well-established white settlement; it had been years since Indians roamed here freely. Isolated families they came upon thus started at the sight of them and ran, fearing they would be murdered. The Seneca party tried to stop some, saying they were on a peaceful mission, asking if they could buy bread. At one cabin, Governor Blacksnake extended his hand to the man and woman. The Senecas were invited in; the family gave them bread and meat and did not charge them for it.
They made their way to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where, Cornplanter knew, Richard Butler, one of the Indian commissioners with whom he had dealt at Fort Stanwix, lived. Their ultimate goal was New York, where the Congress sat, but Cornplanter thought that on the way he might as well present the Senecas’ grievances to Butler. He requested a meeting in front of the town courthouse. Many of the local citizens turned out to see the spectacle. The Indians were interesting in their own right; on top of that, now that the war was over and they had their own country, Americans were deeply concerned over how relations with the natives would evolve. In addition to all of that, Cornplanter himself had built up a reputation. He was known for having been a ruthless military captain against Americans. Then he had turned that warlike persona toward peace, negotiating with sensitivity to the realities his people were facing. All of that made him something of a sympathetic figure. In addition, the story of his white father had become known. Americans lived with Indians as a reality in their lives, but for the most part the Indian presence was ghostly, evanescant. Cornplanter represented a bridge between the two worlds. Somehow his father’s Dutch surname, Abeel, had become attached to him; Americans began referring to him by it, but with an oddly Irish-sounding twist on the name, along with a nod to his role as a leader of war parties: “Captain O’Bail” people called him. That was how Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette referred to him in reporting on his impromptu meeting in Carlisle.
The Seneca party—Cornplanter and the five young Seneca men—stood with strings of wampum at the ready in the square outside the courthouse. Cornplanter spoke through an intepreter. “The ground upon which we now stand formerly belonged to my people,” he said to Butler. “Hearken to my words, brother, for I am now about to divulge to you the cause of my distress.” He spoke at great length, as was the Iroquois way in council, weaving repeatedly back to his point, adding information with each pass, and punctuating his utterances with strings of wampum. He wanted to see the treaty the British and the French had signed following the Seven Years’ War, and the treaty between the British and the Americans. He and his people had difficulty understanding the differing land claims. He complained that the English were now settling in Canada. He suggested that the king of England had deceived the Iroquois; in that case, the Iroquois would fight the British. He proposed that the Americans join them. He had no cards to play, but he tried to maneuver Butler into some kind of agreement along these lines, stressing cooperation: “Let us unite our strength. . . . Let us live in friendship, that we may be able to prevent all people from doing us an injury.”
Butler—a sturdy forty-three-year-old Dublin-born former gunsmith who had fought under Lafayette at Yorktown—knew how to decorate his talk with the diplomatic flourishes the Indians liked, but he did not forget that his work on behalf of the thirteen states of the new union—the “Thirteen Fires,” as the Indians called them—was to get the Indians’ lands. He exhibited the tr
eaties Cornplanter had requested to see, offered to explain them again, as he had at Fort Stanwix, and promised to maintain “a friendly intercourse between your nations and the Thirteen Fires.” But he could not authorize a new fight with the British. “I approve of your going on to Congress,” he told Cornplanter, “as I think the measure argues the goodness of your intentions.” But he assured Cornplanter that Congress would not renege on the treaty Cornplanter had signed.
About 30 miles from Philadelphia, Cornplanter and his men encountered some more wary but friendly Americans. These people suggested the Senecas stay in their village awhile and have European clothes made there. When the Senecas asked why, they politely noted that in their mostly native garb the Senecas made an intimidating impression, which would likely hamper their cause when they came to the big city. Cornplanter thought that made sense, so he and his young colleagues got themselves measured by a tailor, and within a few days each was sporting a coat, pants and shirts, in colors they chose according to their individual taste.
It must have been utterly bewildering, then, that when the Senecas reached Philadelphia dressed as white men they found a contingent of white men ready to receive them with their faces painted Indian-fashion and sporting fanciful feathers and bucktails. The locals marched them in parade down to the banks of the Schuylkill River, where cannons and maypoles were set up, and a crowd of 2,000 people had gathered. Very slowly, through an interpreter, Cornplanter was made to understand some version of what was going on. Decades earlier an annual springtime celebration had started in Philadelphia, which revolved around a seventeenth-century Delaware Indian chief named Tamenend, who had befriended William Penn, the originator of the Pennsylvania colony. Tamenend had impressed people in his time for his wisdom and humor, so that the festival that evolved was a celebration of good fellowship between whites and Indians, in which the colonists donned fanciful Indian clothing. Over time the now-legendary Chief Tamenend had become known, somewhat bizarrely, as Saint Tammany. During the period of the Revolution, patriotic overtones were added to the feast of Saint Tammany. As luck would have it, Cornplanter and his men had arrived in town as the celebration was getting underway. The local members of the Society of Saint Tammany considered it fortuitous, and insisted that the renowned Seneca leader take part.
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