Before meeting with negotiators, therefore, Cornplanter traveled once again, in February 1797, to Philadelphia to see George Washington one last time before the end of his presidency. He hoped to speak with him directly.
Washington had that very day completed one of his last acts as president, vetoing a bill that would have reduced the size of the army. There were many other things to attend to. But he agreed to see the Seneca leader. It had been six years since their first meeting. Both men had aged, both had become sadder. “Father,” Cornplanter began, using the term of respect, “I thank the Great Spirit for protecting us through the various paths which we have trod since I was last at this place. As I am told you are about to retire from public business, I have come to pay my last address to you.” Cornplanter was capable of expressing a disarming frankness, and he did so now. He informed Washington that his hope was “to provide for the rising generation,” which he knew would face a different world from the one that he had grown up in. The forefathers of the Iroquois, he said, “thought that their posterity would pursue their tracks, and support themselves by their hunts. . . . But the great revolution among the white people in this country has extended its influence to the people of my color. Turn our faces which way we will, we find the white people cultivating the ground which our forefathers hunted over. . . . If a few years have made such a change, what will be the situation of our children . . . ?”
What he wanted from Washington, Cornplanter went on, was “to have your candid and friendly advice” on “how we can best provide for posterity.” He had studied the Americans as they went about their business here in Philadelphia. “Your people have a different mode of living from ours,” he said; “they have trades and they have education, which enables them to take different pursuits, by which means they maintain themselves.” Then he got to the point, and in doing so he showed that he was completely putting himself in Washington’s hands. “I am also told that your people have a strong place for their money,” he said, “where it is not only safe, but that it produces them each and every year an increase without lessening the stock. If we should dispose of part of our country, and put our money with yours in that strong place, will it be safe? Will it yield to our children the same advantages after our heads are laid down, as it will at present produce to us? Will it be out of the reach of our foolish young men, so that they cannot drink it up to the prejudice of our children?”
Washington’s reply was not recorded by the interpreter who took down Cornplanter’s words, but it must have reassured him, for he left Philadelphia intent on taking the next step. Before he did, he gave a heartfelt farewell to this man who had vanquished his people but for whom he held a confusion of feelings that included warm regard. “I congratulate you on your intended repose from the fatigues and anxiety of mind, which are constant attendants on high public stations,” Cornplanter said, “and hope that the same Good Spirit which has so long guided your steps as a father to a great nation, will still continue to protect you.” Cornplanter likewise won Washington’s admiration, as a token of which the president gave him his sword.
Six months later, in high summer, Cornplanter was one of 1,200 Iroquois gathered at the village of Geneseo, also known as Big Tree, in the center of the traditional Seneca homeland. He and other Iroquois conducted a lengthy series of negotations with American officials, at the end of which they agreed to sell large swaths of their lands for cash and United States government bonds. The Treaty of Big Tree fixed boundaries around the remaining Iroquois territories, which would forever be reserved for their use and hence would be called reservations. There, they were assured, they would have total sovereignty.
Margaret Coghlan’s book came out in London in December 1794. People bought it, and gossiped. It was thrilling for its frank coverage of what one reader called “the licentiousness of elevated life.” It gave private insights into personalities as diverse as George Washington, General Cornwallis and Charles James Fox. It read like a drawing-room accompaniment to the history of the previous decades. Among the many liaisons Coghlan detailed in the book was a brief one she had had with the Prince of Wales, which was what The Times focused on in the brittle little notice it gave it: “The publication of Mrs. Coghlan’s Memoirs just on the eve of a Royal Duke’s return, will not prove very acceptable to him; the anecdotes there are of a singular nature; nor should we wonder if on that account they were to be suppressed.”
The book was not, however, suppressed. And many readers saw the underlying point to her sad story. One reviewer noted that the author, “who has long been known in the circles of gallantry, but who is now a prisoner for debt, imputes the cause of her misfortunes and her deviation from the paths of virtue, to a marriage against her wishes,” and lamented that forced marriages were the cause of misery for many British women.
The memoir aroused enough interest that a second edition appeared the following year in New York. The publisher there, who saw her tale as a tragedy, and Coghlan as a woman sacrificed on the altar of freedom, explained in a preface that the social value in bringing her story to America was to highlight “the absurd practice” of forced marriage.
But while the book caused a bit of a stir, it did not bring the financial relief that Margaret had hoped for. No pitying benefactor, no champion of the rights of women, stepped forward to assist. In 1797, she was once more before the King’s Bench, and then again in debtors’ prison.
On March 9, 1797, Washington stepped into a carriage and rode out of Philadelphia, and out of public life. He was sixty-five years old, looked a decade older, and felt that at long last he had earned a true and final retirement. And for a time it seemed he would get it. He rose at dawn, spent the early part of his day riding the farms at Mount Vernon, studying peas, wheat, pumpkins, flax, soils and manures, sun slant and rainfall. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, and he frowned a lot. Yet again the buildings of the estate were dilapidated, the farms less productive than he had hoped. His finances were a disaster.
He became wistful. He rode past Belvoir, the estate of the Fairfax family, and saw that it had fallen into ruins. Had it not been for that family taking him to their bosom, he might have remained tied to his mother, and had the career of a Virginia planter. His path in life had in a sense begun in this mansion. He felt prompted to write Sally Fairfax, with whom he had fallen in love as a young man but who had married his friend George William Fairfax. That had been half a century ago. She and her husband had moved to England before the war; George William had died in 1787, but she lived there still. Washington began his letter by glancingly referencing the catalogue of his achievements since their youth, then said something utterly remarkable: “None of which events, however, nor all of them together, have been able to eradicate from my mind, the recollection of those happy moments—the happiest of my life—which I have enjoyed in your company.” The happiest of my life. The military hero, the father of his country, was feeling the passage of time as an ache, was overcome with melancholy for the road not taken.
He felt his cares leaving him as he wrote to this woman from his past, and he opened up further to her. He confessed himself “Worn out in a manner by the toils of my past labour,” and said that he wished “to spend the remainder of my days (which cannot be many) in rural amusements.”
He went on to describe for her one of his pet projects. “A Century hence, if this Country keep united (and it is surely its policy and Interest to do so) will produce a City—though not as large as London—yet of a magnitude inferior to few others in Europe, on the Banks of the Potomack; where one is now establishing for the permanent Seat of the Government of the United States.” The Federal City, as it was being called, was to be completed in two years’ time, so that John Adams, Washington’s successor, would be the first to preside over it. Washington believed its very existence could help heal divisions in the country, since it would not be part of any existing state and was situated on the line between the north and the south. He had gone so far in promoting it
as to purchase land there, around the site of the Capitol Building.
Washington’s retirement was interrupted. Tensions between the two political parties heightened as the French, incensed at America’s signing a treaty with England, seemed on the verge of declaring war. The Anti-Federalists were pro-France, the Federalists favored an English alliance. Once again, Washington was asked to bring his political clout to bear. Hamilton exhorted him to take a stand. And Washington found that he did have strong feelings on the matter. There was evidence that the postrevolutionary French government was plotting to undermine the United States. President Adams was preparing for a possible war. Adams wrote him for advice. Washington wrote back to say that if the country were attacked he himself would be willing to serve again. Whether he meant this or not, Adams took him at face value and named him commander in chief of American forces. He did so without even bothering to alert Washington, who learned of his appointment from the newspaper.
Washington left Mount Vernon for Philadelphia, his head swirling with considerations of how he would once again lead troops in battle. As he situated himself amid the political players who were now active, however, he began to feel out of his element. He disliked the way Adams ran things, disapproved of some of the military officers chosen, and began to realize that Adams, despite his having appointed him to a major post, harbored a toxic jealousy toward him. The rumors of war faded, and Washington returned home.
The fall of 1799 turned toward winter. On December 12, Washington sat down to write Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton had sent him some observations about establishing a military academy. Washington wrote to say that he approved, that he had long thought such a thing was vital to the country. He spent the rest of the day riding out on his farms. He wanted in particular to inspect a new kind of cattle pen that his farm manager, James Anderson, had installed. It was raw weather—rain, hail, snow, wind—and the next day he was overcome with congestion and a sore throat. He wrote a note to Anderson saying he didn’t think the cattle pen would work: “Such a Pen . . . would, if the Cattle were kept in it one Week, destroy the whole of them.” He sat up that evening with Martha and his secretary, Tobias Lear, reading through his mail. He went to bed in a cheerful mood, though still with the cold symptoms.
At two in the morning Martha woke up to the sounds of struggle. Her husband was having trouble breathing. She called for Lear, who sent for the doctor. They bled him twice, and the doctor had him inhale steam from a pot of vinegar and hot water. He began to suffocate. They bled him a third time. Eventually, he held out his hand to Lear and said, “I feel myself going.” He asked the doctor to let him be, and after a while he became calm. At about ten o’clock in the evening, the doctor put his hand over Washington’s eyes. “Is he gone?” Martha asked, and Tobias Lear indicated that he was.
Venture Smith was not quite finished with hatching clever ideas. Or perhaps someone suggested it to him. A black man who had freed himself and his family from slavery and become a landowner and person of substance in rural Connecticut was a highly unusual figure. He was, in fact, a local celebrity. The idea for Smith to dictate his memoirs may have occurred first to Charles Holt. Holt was from New London, a place Venture regularly visited. He was twenty-five, about the same age as Solomon, and he had set himself up as a newspaper publisher, with a goal to, as he said in the first issue, “circulate political intelligence.” He was a man of action. He called his paper the Bee, and he wanted it to buzz; he wanted it to sting.
Venture had his vanity: all his life he loved showing off his strength, and he was proud of what he had accomplished. He had always stayed clear of politics, but in agreeing to dictate his story for the editor of the Bee he was inadvertently wading into the center of what was threatening to become an American civil war. As the Federalists grew in power, they came to believe that they, by definition, represented the American viewpoint, and that those who argued that rights should be maintained principally in the states and in individuals were a danger to national stability. The ongoing turmoil in Europe fed their fear that the American government could collapse at any time. They became all the more suspicious of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, whose supporters tended to be tradesmen and farmers as well as non-English immigrants. As fear of a French invasion of America built up again, and with it rumors of foreign spies, President Adams and the Federalist majority in Congress passed a series of laws that undermined the Bill of Rights and weakened Jefferson’s opposition party. The Alien Acts made it harder for immigrants to become American citizens and gave the government power to imprison foreigners. The Sedition Act made it a crime to criticize the federal government.
Charles Holt was one of many young idealists around the country who started newspapers as an act of defiance against the government’s smothering of individual rights; he was, in essence, continuing the work of Abraham Yates. One of the forces that drove him was the anti-immigrant tone of the Federalists. Another was slavery: it was an embarrassing and shameful violation of the principle of freedom on which the country was founded, Holt argued, and the federal government, in its very Constitution, had perpetuated it, ensuring that it would remain a part of American life far into the future. Holt set up his presses and published his first issue in June of 1797. At the same time, he published books that he offered for sale in his New London office on topics that highlighted the moral shortcomings of the federal government.
Everyone in the area knew that Venture Smith had stories from his childhood in Africa, stories of the passage to America, stories of pain and suffering in slavery. And his life after he had bought his freedom, with all the humiliation and cheating he had endured, through which he had nevertheless prospered, cast the promise of America in a sober light. Holt wanted that story.
Venture Smith couldn’t write, but he could talk. And he remembered. Once he agreed on the project, he relaxed into it, let his mind drift back. The old man sitting in the chill of a Connecticut autumn returned to the African savanna. He remembered Broteer Furro: the boy he was. Scenes flickered. Skinny cows in blinding sunlight, the green wall of vegetation after a heavy rain. Names came back. His siblings: Cundazo and Soozaduka. Saungm Furro, his father. His father’s example, his toughness, the frank way he valued money. The scene of his father being beaten, being “cut and pounded on his body with great inhumanity,” tortured so that he would tell where his treasure lay buried. But, with the boy watching, the father had “despised all the tortures . . . until the continued exercise and increase of torment, obliged him to sink and expire.” He let himself relive the horror of that moment, of watching his father’s death. Then the forced march with the invading army. Being held in the black dungeon of the Anomabo fortress, being rowed out to a slave ship off the coast. The young man Robinson Mumford taking him for his own, buying him for “four gallons of rum, and a piece of Calico,” and then owning him, naming him. Venture. Broteer became Venture, and then sailed off on the grim and occasionally soaring adventure that was to be his life.
Elisha Niles was the local schoolteacher. He was an abolitionist, possibly a friend of Charles Holt. He probably was the one who listened to Venture and took down his words. If he added any words of embellishment, they were few, which suggests that Venture Smith demanded to have it read back to him and to make corrections. It was his story, he would tell it, and it would go out into the world as he wanted it. Like Margaret Coghlan, he brought his story right up to the present: the autumn of 1798, leaves coming down and winter starting to make itself felt. He was feeling mournful. “My strength which was once equal if not superior to any man whom I have ever seen, is now enfeebled so that life is a burden.” He expressed the bitterness he felt toward his children. He lingered over the cheating he had endured both as a slave and a free man.
The bitterness worked for Charles Holt. He could use it. He made typographic adjustments to highlight the racial injustice of Venture’s story, such as the time he was cheated by a Captain Elisha Hart of Saybrook. “Captain
Hart was a white gentleman, and I a poor African, therefore it was all right, and good enough for the black dog.” It was supposed to get attention.
Holt knew that a black man’s story needed to have a white seal of approval, so he got five respected white men from Stonington to attest to it, including Edward Smith, to whom Venture Smith had recently linked himself financially in order to transfer his property to Solomon. The men certified at the back of the book that they had known Smith for years, that he was “a temperate, honest and industrious man,” that after years of being “ever intent on obtaining his freedom” he had done so, and become a respectable member of the community.
Holt printed the book, and put it up for sale in his shop on November 3, 1798. The day after Christmas, he ran an ad in his paper:
Just published, and for sale at this office
Price 1S.
A NARRATIVE
of the
LIFE AND ADVENTURES
of
VENTURE,
A native of Africa, but above sixty years an inhabitant of the United States of America.
Related by himself, and attested by respectable witnesses.
Holt added a little verse of his own construction to underscore the dark truth that for many people the promise of American freedom was more in the nature of a trick or a mirage, noting the irony of American freedom, that Venture Smith was
Descended from a royal race,
Benevolent and brave;
On Afric’s savage plains a PRINCE
In this free land a SLAVE.
Revolution Song Page 49
