Husband was jailed and released three times in a tense series of riots, trials, and standoffs. The governor, meanwhile, kept trying to negotiate with the Regulators, who kept rebuffing him. During one of Husband’s arrests in the backcountry, seven hundred Regulators marched on the prison to free the prisoner; terrified officials let him go. In New Bern, he rose in the assembly chamber to castigate the body and announced that if he was arrested again, men would come to release him. This was too much. Husband was stripped of legislative powers, expelled from the assembly, and arrested. Regulators did muster to march on the capital itself. Husband was acquitted, and the Regulator attack on New Bern was averted, but now the governor readied the provincial militia for serious action.
Husband had no illusions about how things would go if Regulators challenged the governor to a military contest. He argued for moderation, but the Regulation had become self-destructively defiant. In March of 1771, Tryon called out the militia and marched it west. Regulators armed themselves and mustered.
Tryon offered to withdraw troops if Regulators would only sign loyalty oaths and disband. Husband involved himself in the negotiations, hoping for compromise, but he was high on the list for hanging, no matter what ensued, and the Regulators, though outnumbered and outskilled, only mocked the governor’s offers. The Battle of Alamance commenced. Two hours later the few Regulators who hadn’t fled or been killed were captured. One was summarily hanged on the spot to mollify the troops; six others were hanged after a trial. Less than two months later, six thousand Regulators signed loyalty oaths and were granted an amnesty for past crimes. The North Carolina Regulation was over.
Husband, having failed to prevent the battle, fled on horseback just as it began, a fugitive from justice at forty-six, his new community shattered, his comrades hanged, his plantation seized by troops. He was alone again, a marked man. Yet he didn’t sink into dejection. He drew resilience from hopes he’d recovered in the Regulation’s struggle for justice in the backcountry. He’d been widowed again in North Carolina; not surprisingly, given his ardent nature, he’d married a third time. He had a large family, children whose ages spanned almost a generation. For Husband, unconsummated sexual tension was the most creatively fecund state—an image of Christ’s relation to His church—and the crown of creation was the first stage of sexual passion between a man and a woman. He knew well the penalties for consummation: marriage, with the repetition and exclusivity that can silence the Song of Songs, followed by too many children. He loved his children and took good care of them, considering what was becoming a very high-risk lifestyle. Yet he was sure that if people were allowed to consult both nature and their consciences, they’d find a way of regulating their own reproduction. His third wife was another Cane Creek Quaker. Her name was Emmy; she was expelled from the Cane Creek meeting for marrying the excommunicant. Together they’d added children to those from his earlier marriages. Only twenty-seven when Husband fled the Battle of Alamance, Emmy was a Regulator too, a resourceful administrative talent and a partner in Husband’s vision.
Pregnant and under surveillance by provincial authorities, Emmy managed to follow the fugitive north with her children and stepchildren and keep in touch with him without causing his capture. Husband had fled home to tidewater Maryland, where he stayed briefly with family and friends. When he learned that a childhood friend had established a hunting camp in the wildest part of western Pennsylvania, he resolved to seek refuge there from North Carolina law enforcement. After Husband left Maryland for the west, Emmy brought her family to Maryland, settling briefly in the farmland near Hagerstown in the western part of the state, southeast of the mountains, where she gave birth to another son, sent messages to Husband, and waited to hear from him.
The fugitive had meanwhile traveled west to Fort Cumberland and then northwest, ascending the Pennsylvania Alleghenies. Over the crest of those mountains, and partway down the west side, he arrived in an unsettled area known as the Glades, whose only tiny village was Bedford, where a low, small fort stood on the banks of the wild Juniata River. Though east of the Forks of the Ohio, the Glades’ loneliness made them frightening to some, and strikingly beautiful to Husband. The country was rolling and thickly timbered, with bottomlands that grew bluegrass as tall as a man. Above and to the east, hills and then ridges shot upward, full of boulders, ancient trees, cliffs. A paradise for hunters and trappers, the Glades had long been a temporary home for hunting parties both native and white, who camped and took bear, deer, and beaver for the skin trade. Packs of skinny wolves, drawn by hopes of leftovers, nosed around the camps and bayed all night.
Husband began by using the Glades as a hideout and ended by civilizing it. Taking the alias Tuscape Death, he joined his childhood friend and another hunter in their rough wilderness camp. Both hunters agreed to bury his identity further by referring to him only as “the Quaker,” a designation fitting his style of dress and refusal to carry arms. Husband wouldn’t hunt, but he made himself useful at camp by dressing skins and adding crops to the hunters’ scratch potato farming. When he began taking up his old development interests, the hunters laughed at him. He was buying and claiming Glades property, long considered too wild to farm, and registering it under the name Tuscape Death. To the hunters’ further amusement, he expected to improve his land, raise crops and livestock there, even build a commercial gristmill. Most absurd seemed his plan to bring a young wife and a lot of children into this transient, all-male hunting and camping culture.
Husband had only the use of his horse and some basic cutting and digging tools. Yet he cleared acres and built a cabin and shed. He sent Emmy word to name their new son Isaac Tuscape Husband. He planted. When the farm was ready, he traveled to Hagerstown and rejoined his family at last. He described bluntly the ruggedness of the situation at the Glades. Emmy repeated what she’d told him by letter: she planned to settle with him there. Husband’s grown sons didn’t share his optimism about Indians and wild animals. Husband wouldn’t raise a gun against other human beings, but as the family walked through the mountains with packhorses, his eldest son, John, only a few years younger than Emmy, carried one gun, John’s brother Herman another.
Before long the family needed two log stables to house their livestock and a barn with a threshing floor for the grain they were growing in abundance. Herman Husband was becoming one of the biggest landowners in the Glades. Change came quickly and irreversibly. By the mid-1770s, more farmers than hunters lived in the newly erected county of Bedford. One settler’s farmhouse boasted a four-hundred-pound metal stove. Trees had been felled and the turf plowed and planted; grazing livestock pushed out game, and hunters with it. When wolves, starved of leavings, began attacking hogs, humans organized posses to control wolves. Absentee land speculators, inevitably, also became interested; a local political ring, centered around the courthouse in the village of Bedford, represented creditor and landlord interests, with strong bonds to eastern officialdom. When politicians started receiving lucrative public offices in Bedford County, it was clear that minions of the Antichrist were starting to control local politics, even in the Glades.
Yet Husband kept a low profile. He was still in hiding. He explored the most forbidding parts of the Alleghenies, seeking easier passes east that would help develop the region. He began drawing elegant maps, perfectly scaled on grids, displaying visual and verbal information with precisely plotted longitudinal and latitudinal degrees, beautifully integrating neatly handwritten annotations. He studied the mountains’ complex geology and vegetation. Husband and his horse, wearing protective suits of thick hide, fought their way through tangles of laurel and thorns. Tiny figures beside fallen, overgrown timber and huge rocks, they hauled surveying rods and chains down ridges, clambered up dry creek bottoms, walked outcroppings that opened on range after range of tree-covered mountain. Birds wheeled. In the humid, gusty days of early fall, the trees swayed high overhead, and chestnuts socked the turf while Husband, measuring his home, cut new trails.<
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• • •
In 1776 his aliases became unnecessary. The provincial government that had made him a fugitive was replaced, abruptly, by an independent entity known as the state of North Carolina. Even more miraculously, with its own independence, Pennsylvania restructured itself along the lines of what Husband considered good government. In creating a constitution with no upper house, easy access to the franchise, frequent elections, and close regulation of officials, Pennsylvania was beginning to make real what had once been Husband’s demands. Many former Regulators, despising rich eastern revolutionaries, went Loyalist. But Husband had allies among the delegates to the convention that created the radical Pennsylvania constitution; the convention appointed him collector, in the Glades, of a new kind of tax, whose funds were earmarked for poor families of rural revolutionaries. Then his neighbors elected him to represent them in the Pennsylvania assembly.
In office in 1778, Husband was no longer an insurgent but among a majority that hoped—though embattled by the creditor faction—to use the new state government to change the world. To Pennsylvania radicals, this war, for all its grimness, revealed the wild dreams of Diggers, Levellers, and other seeming utopians as constitutional and republican, hard-nosed yet suffused with holy spirit. Husband had experience with legislative process, and many others in this revolutionary assembly were new to elected office, so at times he took a leading role. Trying to stabilize the crashing wartime economy, the assembly carried to new extremes populist measures that gave Bob Morris hives. They instituted the price-control regulations that Morris fumed over in the confederation Congress; they passed resolutions against profiteering merchants and the lust of avarice. They broke up a lead-mining monopoly. They considered a radical scheme, set forth by Husband, not only to tax property—and tax it in proportion to the quantity of property owned—but actually to tax income.
If those ideas seemed extreme, Husband had others. The scarcity of gold and silver, along with the paper-currency inflation that was sinking Pennsylvanians deeper in debt and foreclosure, inspired him to develop a full-scale monetary plan. Its most novel feature was a proposal to disconnect paper currency completely from gold and silver. Paper would always fluctuate unpredictably, Husband believed, if backed by metal, which was persistently overvalued. He envisioned a currency system tied to no external standard. Depreciation would of course occur, but the creditors’ horror of any and all depreciation, and their concomitant obsession with gold, were actually making depreciation worse, Husband suggested. If money were taken off the gold standard, inflation, accepted as natural, could be limited and steadied, regulated by a thoughtful, centralized policy.
The creditors never had to withstand the horrors this plan would have caused them, because Husband’s allies, though approving of many of his tax ideas, disliked the excessive regulation his monetary plan would require—and the idea of a paper currency without an ultimate gold standard was simply baffling. Despite his grave and authoritative mien, Husband’s thinking lent him an aura that struck even fellow radicals as strange.
He left the body at the end of the session and returned to the Glades. His neighborhood was suffering terribly from the deepening poverty of the wartime economy. The terror of British-inspired Indian attacks kept western people in their cabins or fleeing to forts. The outcome of the war was far from secure. The winter of 1779 brought a blizzard that lasted forty days, burying the Alleghenies deep in snow. Still, Husband’s hopes for the revolution remained high.
Then they soared. That June, he was exploring an Allegheny pass when his life underwent yet another change. Like George Washington, Husband had been determined to connect the west to the east, but he thought roads built to serve private interests were impractical. That day he was looking for a natural highway, something passable because of its geological formation, which would allow those he called the princes of the east to come easily westward. All at once his road-building survey was swept into something engulfingly big. The vision he’d been awaiting all his life was given to him.
Herman Husband saw, very suddenly, where he really was. These Alleghenies, which he’d been exploring with such intense interest, formed the eastern wall of the New Jerusalem, the redeemed city of God described in the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation. He was in the twelve-gated city. Like John, he was walking in Jerusalem. The Bible described the city symbolically, but he saw that it existed literally, on a massive scale, here on the North American continent. Now he knew why he’d been drawing, mapping, and surveying with such passion and precision. Up on this eastern wall, the four famous gates were really specific mountain passes; and if he followed this wall southward—as he immediately planned to—he would come to its intersection with a range that stretched toward the Pacific Ocean. Ultimately, all four walls might be surveyed, as well as the interior of the city, whose meaning for life in an independent America would be revealed.
Back at the farmhouse, he began reading with new eyes. Up in the forests he took long bushwhacking trips. One winter, when Indian raids sent everybody at the Glades to safety at Fort Cumberland, he traveled back to North Carolina to see his grown sons John and William, who had returned there to live, and to explore the Virginia mountains on the way. In 1784 he traveled to Canada. Ultimately he covered hundreds of miles, mapping and taking notes. It emerged that the four walls of the city stretched southward from the Hudson Bay to the southern end of the Appalachians, from Georgia westward to the foot of a north-south range running parallel to the Pacific, from the northern end of that range eastward to the Hudson Bay. He backed up these observations with intense and patient study. For historical context he used an oddball book attributed to Voltaire, deliberately employing the work of a rationalist because he didn’t want bias in favor of religious vision. Ezekiel gave the best blueprint of the city: Husband was amazed to find that Ezekiel’s dimensions for fields, walls, and gates, as given in cubits and furlongs, precisely matched Husband’s own punctilious surveying, once units were modernized and scaled up to the size of the mountains. Daniel remained essential: The prophet’s climactic symbol of the glorious mountain evoked the whole upthrust Allegheny area, with its astonishing ridges, hundreds of miles in length, and flat tops like the walls so carefully measured in Ezekiel. John’s Revelation describes the eastern wall as made up of twelve kinds of precious stone. Husband saw that John meant valuable deposits of stone and mineral, six of which—sandstone, limestone, marble, salt, coal, and iron ore—the naturalist in Husband had already identified on travels through the woods.
There was nothing new in the literary world about a close reading of biblical prophecy as applied to contemporary settings and events. Isaac Newton had published a famous one, as had dozens of other philosophers, theologians, and scientists before and after Newton. What made the vision of New Jerusalem especially satisfying to Husband was the way it linked the ongoing war against England with social justice, millennial redemption for America, and a new understanding of the western country he’d come to live in. Husband tracked Daniel’s history of government through the development of the modern states and interpreted Daniel as predicting the current revolution. Ezekiel had foreseen the exact locations and characters of the thirteen states. In the Prophets and in Saint John, the western country was specially blessed, the revolution divinely inspired.
Now Husband began writing. Publishing as “the Philosopher of the Allegheny,” he predicted the war’s draining British public finance. As “Hutrim Hutrim,” he published a series of one-liners making patriotic prognostications. Husband described the philosopher of the Allegheny as an elderly wilderness prophet, tall and skinny, with piercing eyes and long white hair and beard. The philosopher lived in a cave, studied the stars, and interpreted dreams. In real life, visitors to the mountain farm found the rich, sixtyish Husband, a major Glades landowner with many horses and head of cattle, barefoot and unkempt, in old clothes. In spite of his unassuming dress and increasingly prophetic image, or perhaps because of th
em, he retained the respect of his farming and laboring neighbors. With the war over, his constituents elected him county commissioner. In his sermons he began to speak to them directly of biblical prophecy. Fulfillment of the visions he’d been chasing since his teens seemed at hand. Independence meant redemption.
For Husband was a nationalist. He wanted unity and a strong national government. In the 1780s, as he entered his own old age and the infancy of American independence, he called for regulation of local officialdom and fair and equal access to political power, but unlike many at the radical end of the revolutionary spectrum, he believed that the Antichristian powers of creditors and conservatives needed greater vigilance, planning, and control than anything state power would resist on its own. Husband envisioned the New Jerusalem as a powerful federal system. In contrast to the federal government endorsed by Alexander Hamilton, Husband’s was designed to obstruct the concentration of wealth. Mixing biblical prophecy with the work of the English political writer Richard Price and other sources, Husband came up with a three-tiered federal structure. The thirteen states, at the lowest tier, continue to oversee their own counties and townships, but laws regarding property ownership are set by constitutional fiat. Titles must be granted to those dwelling on and cultivating land, not speculators. The state is responsible for granting each man a maximum of three hundred acres, with a wife owning an additional two hundred and each child receiving an additional one hundred at birth. While larger land-office titles may be granted, they are limited to two thousand acres and revert to the public if purchasers fail to use them. Inheritance laws prohibit large entailments to any single heir.
The Whiskey Rebellion Page 10
