Washington and Caesar

by Christian Cameron

  Boston, October 1775

  Washington sat atop his charger, his heavy greatcoat bundled about his ears, and regarded Boston through Charles Lee’s new Dollond telescope. It was a beautiful thing: wooden barrel twenty inches long and a fast resolution in the hand. Washington hadn’t owned a glass in the Pennsylvania wars. Truth to tell, there had seldom been a vista long enough to use one, through all the trees. This was a different type of warfare, a slow siege where logistics would matter more than tactics. Washington had the patience for a siege, and he wanted the time to train his army.

  Incongruous thoughts of the season wouldn’t leave his head this morning. He wondered if either of his farms had managed a winter crop of wheat; he longed for a report from his manager. He thought of his farms every day and wrote advice to his overseers whenever he could.

  Below him, spread like a printer’s study of an untidy siege, were the British lines; closer in, his own lines, stronger than they had been. The sentries, long-suffering militia or temporary “regulars”, had blankets, and one lucky fellow a watch coat. Watch coats were the proper military garments for winter sentries; they were coming, slowly, from Philadelphia. Washington centered his telescope on the three figures. One man was quite old; the other two were prime. They all had cartridge boxes. Washington smiled grimly. He would be lucky if they had ten rounds a man. Powder was still the critical element.

  As he watched, a British field piece fired—a tiny white blossom of smoke against the bleak gray landscape and the darker lines of their revetments. None of the sentries moved. The ball fell just short, splattering them with mud, hopped a little on a short graze, and rolled over the harder ground by the parapet. One of the sentries leapt after it, placing rocks in its path to slow it. It was a small ball—perhaps a four-pounder, or a six. At this distance, Washington couldn’t tell, but he hoped the sentry wouldn’t be fool enough to try and stop it before it had lost more energy. Men had lost feet by such antics.

  It stopped on its own, and the man flourished it triumphantly at his mates and carried it back to his post, where he put it on a small pile of shot. All three men appeared animated.

  Washington folded the telescope and handed it to its owner.

  “War does not seem to have a terrifying aspect today.”

  Lee brought it to his eye in a practiced movement. He swept it over the harbor, then over the town, then slowly along the lines.

  “That’s the King’s Own in the lines today,” he said. “Blue facings, and those well-cocked hats.”

  Washington smiled. A sharp regiment. Both had noticed over the months the careful attention the Fourth gave to their uniforms and drill.

  A wheelbarrow pushed by two men came down the road past Washington’s staff. Neither man saluted, particularly, although both inclined their heads in a civil enough way. They pushed their barrow down the long slope to the advanced post where the sentries were once again huddled against their fleche.

  “If we allow these enlistments to run out, every watch coat and blanket we issue will be lost. It is not so much that we lose the army,” Lee was never at his best when talking about the Massachusetts men, “as the difficulty we endure in losing the arms and accoutrements.”

  “Nevertheless, General, I wish to procure more blankets, and see them issued immediately.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “How many requests have we written for blankets?” He turned and held out his hand for the glass again, and one of his staff dismounted and opened a saddlebag to retrieve a volume of the army correspondence. They had such volumes now, and daily returns for equipment and ammunition. The Virginia Farmer knew how many bayonets were available in every regiment (too few) and who had muskets with slings. That much he had accomplished, and just the lists had taken him a month. Equipping them might take years, and the pressure from Congress was mounting. He had to evict the British from Boston before they were relieved by a huge fleet and thousands of men who might break his lines and boil out into the countryside, or so the Congress feared.

  Lee handed the glass over again.

  “A very fine instrument, General.”

  “Thank you, sir. I had it last week from London.”

  Most of the staff were dismounted now, pulling at flasks or lighting pipes while they all ran through whatever documentation was handy. Washington insisted that when he was away from headquarters, business must continue on horseback. He smiled ruefully at the provenance of the telescope; his sword was from London, and his pistols, and much of his war material. So far, the war had served better than all George Mason’s sermons to impress on him how essential were the ties of trade between the American colonies and their mother country.

  The wheelbarrow had arrived at the sentry post. The three sentries were helping the two other men load their collection of British cannonballs into the barrow. There were several calibers, four-pounders and six, and one larger ball that might have come from a ship in the harbor with her big twelve-pounders. One of the men with the wheelbarrow paid the sentries. Washington could see the paper scrip changing hands. He shook his head. The wheelbarrow began creeping crabwise across the hill, toward the small battery that the Massachusetts gunners had sited and built so laboriously in late August.

  “General Washington?” An apple-cheeked staff officer with the diction particular to the graduates of the Yale Divinity school. Washington nodded courteously and looked down.

  “We have written for blankets eight times, and watch coats twice, sir.” The man smiled, proud of the speed with which this gem of knowledge had been discovered and polished.

  “Pray mention it in the draft for a ninth letter.”

  Lee chuckled mirthlessly. “In time, there won’t be a farmer in this colony we haven’t provided for.”

  “General Lee, I do not always find these remarks helpful.”

  Lee turned his head, respect warring with an almost overwhelming desire to answer sharply and the struggle plain on his face. Washington put the glass back to his eye. He meant the rebuke, but hoped that Lee would accept it and not reply. General Lee was a first-rate soldier, and Washington could not imagine what the summer would have been like without him. Certainly, General Arnold’s expedition would not have been sent to Quebec even as late as it had been. If Washington now commanded the army, Lee commanded the staff.

  The wheelbarrow had finally reached the distant artillery. Washington was warm from the waist down, where the heat of his horse bathed his legs and coat. Above the waist, the wind pushed through his coat and the salt sea air kept him damp and cold. His fingers were becoming painful in the mornings. He kept the glass to his eye, shutting out Lee’s possible insubordination. The Yale man was still by his stirrup. I should have held my tongue until we were alone. That was ill done.

  The artillerists were loading their six-pounder. Washington knew it was the six-pounder because it was bronze, a captured French piece from the last war and one of the truest in the service, and the polished barrel glinted in the gray light. He could see the gun captain whirling his flaming linstock in the air over his head, a very martial sight that stirred Washington faintly.

  The linstock came down across the breech of the gun and it responded instantly with a fine mushroom of smoke. The sharp “bang” of a good shot and dry powder followed a moment later. The depression of the shot was too low for anyone to follow its fall or its line, but within a few seconds there was a commotion at the British advance post. Washington looked at it through the glass. Three of the smart King’s Own men were gathered around a fourth, prone. Washington could see from the numbers that they had been changing the guard. The downed man was spasming hard, probably screaming, but his voice was lost in the wind and the distance.

  “Hit with their own ball,” said Lee, in an odd, strained voice. He had friends in the British Army, but then, they all did.

  Washington watched the British pickets making shift to move their wounded man. Every man of them had a watch coat, a musket, and a bayonet,
made by the same mills that made most of his army’s equipment. There was blood visible on the mud, even at this distance, and Washington knew from experience that the human body held a prodigious amount of blood. The shot must have taken off a leg.

  Washington handed Lee his glass and turned his horse away as the British artillery fired again.

  Great Dismal Swamp, October 1775

  It took Caesar another week to break the fever, and he was thin and listless, gradually moving from total apathy about food to a raging hunger that he lacked the energy to satisfy. In his fever, he couldn’t imagine what had happened; during his daily moments of lucidity, he still couldn’t understand where the others had gone or where he was himself. Unbeknownst to his rational mind, he crawled every day in his fever, dragging his hot and exhausted body through the tangle of undergrowth in a circle, so that he never awoke from the fever in the same place.

  When he finally came up from real sleep, listless but in possession of his faculties for the first time in days, he was unable to guess his location. He had nothing to hunt with and he couldn’t see open water where he might catch a frog. He tried eating the base of cat-tails but the bitter flavor made them hard to eat despite his hunger. They gave him a little energy, though, and he began to move north, as best he could, hoping to see something he would recognize. He had no reason to think he had drifted south from the camp, but he had to choose a direction, and north was the choice.

  He was almost naked: his shirt gone, his breeches a ruin that barely covered his legs, no boots, no jacket, and caked in mud and the fine vegetable matter that lay over every inch of the swamp’s floor. He was growing desperate for water. He began to suspect he was going to die after all, having survived the fever. When he tried to think back, he couldn’t decide whether the slave-takers’ attack had been real or part of his fever, although logic suggested that it had to be real or he wouldn’t be alone in the swamp. That depressed him further, as it meant that he alone had survived. The utter defeat and extinction of his little band made him a failure as a leader, and he tried to think what he might have done better. He mourned the men, even those he hadn’t liked so well. He felt tremendous guilt. Eventually he stopped walking, although a fitter man would have heard from the bird cries that he was near open water. Caesar slumped down at the base of a giant ancient swamp willow. He didn’t so much sleep as surrender. His eyes, puffy and dry, were open but unfocused. He began to lean a little sideways, gradually slipping down the trunk, curling a little to ease the griping in his gut, sweat dripping off his nose.

  He considered the possibility of standing up. It seemed reasonable. He was at the end, and death was near, and he decided that he would push himself up the trunk until he could stand if for no other reason than to spite the pain in his gut. And it occurred to him, as if from a distance, that despite his many failures and the ruin of his body, he was going to die free. That was worth something. He began to rise, slowly, almost glacially, and then with a mis-step and a stumble back against the trunk, he was erect.

  The movement saved him. Jim saw it away across an arm of the open water, like a deer moving, and he ran around the water and found Caesar standing on trembling legs, rocking back and forth. Jim didn’t have the training to recognize that Caesar had a ghost spear and a ghost shield and was holding them ready. Jim couldn’t see that, but he could just see that it was Caesar—his hero, almost his god—and in minutes Caesar was gulping water from a stolen leather fire bucket in a new camp. He was alive.

  It took him another week to recover, with food brought to his side every day. Virgil tried to keep the story of the slave-takers from him, but day by day he learned the whole of it, from the apparent treachery of the woman to the last shots in the woods.

  “How bad was they hurt?”

  “Little one hu’t bad, Caesar. I shot he face off!” Virgil was anxious to expiate the sin he had committed. The lives of Old Ben and Lolly were heavy on him, and he had buried them in the old camp with good crosses over them, although Lolly had not been a Christian man at all.

  “What about the woman?”

  “I won’ be goin’ to her again, Caesar.”

  Tom was sitting on a stump, whittling with his long razor knife. He looked up and laughed bitterly.

  “She’ll be long gone wi’ them slavers, you ninny. How’d a boy like you grow up so simple, Virgil? She was jus’ honey to catch flies.”

  “How bad was the othuh, the other, one hurt, Virgil?”

  “Jus’ roughed up, I think. I kicked him pretty ha’d in the weddin’ tackle.”

  “So they won’ be back after us right away?”

  “No. No, Caesar. We safe fo’ a whiles.”

  “Time to move again, though. We should go north. We haven’t been north in a long time. If they send militia, they look fo’ us down here, I think. An’ we need to hit a farm.”

  Long Tom looked at the pistol in his lap. He hadn’t fired a shot at the slave-takers, and he was in a mood.

  “We should hit that farm that this fool an’ the boy keep goin’ to.” He waved his hand. “They gave them slave-takers a home. Let’s burn ’em out and take what we want.”

  Virgil stirred. “They got black folks, and them slaves has helped us and helped us. We burn that farm an’ who’s gonna pay for it? Them black folks. I say no. I say we steal something, or just ax for it from the ol’ woman. But burn ’em out ain’t fair.”

  “He got happy memories o’ that place,” sneered Tom. The others murmured assent. They wanted blood.

  Caesar rolled off his fern pallet and looked around, his eyes still bloodshot.

  “We will go to the farm. We will not burn it!” He looked around at the survivors. “If we burn it and kill the farmers, we will jus’ draw the militia after us. Let’s jus’ take what we need an’ git. We might make it free that way. Tom, you shut it. You jus’ jealous that he got somethin’ you didn’. Now everyone jus’ go sleep. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  The survivors of the band grumbled, but they went. And Caesar, still miserable over the losses, puzzled to figure out why he was still in charge.

  They moved well, the remaining men almost silent on the trail and then moving up to the back of the pole barn. There were no horses in the little paddock, and the only smoke came from the slave cabin. The white man wasn’t pulling stumps, either.

  Jim led the way to the back of the barn and then darted across the yard to the slaves’ cabin, where he knocked quietly. Then he disappeared inside. He was gone long enough for Tom and Virgil to check their priming, for Caesar to start to sweat from the exertion. He was out of condition and needed to eat better. He was still thin. The size of his forearms startled and disgusted him every time he looked down—like sticks. The weight of the fowler on his arms was enough to make him want to lie down.

  The door opened and an old black man emerged, clearly BaKongo, with Jim following behind and hopping along with excitement. The old man came up the edge of the barn and stopped, peering into the bush.

  “No one heah but us, boys,” he called, and Caesar moved carefully into the open, well covered, he hoped, by the two pistols.

  “You do look a sight, mistuh,” said the old man when he saw Caesar’s scarecrow figure draped in rags. “You boys been livin’ hahd!”

  “That we have, old man.” He was old, too, with most of his head white; yet he still glowed with vitality like a village elder. Caesar was respectful of his age and knew that Tom and Virgil would be the same.

  “Since the Man and Missus ran off, we got bacon.” The old man smiled. “Come in an’ have some.”

  A regiment of slave-takers couldn’t have stopped the rush for the cabin.

  “That scatterbrained gal left with those men,” the old woman said while she laid another few slices of bacon on her griddle. Then she busied herself pouring the fat into a little betty lamp on the hearth.

  “Ain’t had this much fat since I can’ remember when.” She sounded almost smug.

  “
What abou’ Sally, ma’am?”

  “Don’ you ma’am me, you cock turkey! She gone off with they louts wha’ own her, and good riddance, though I mus’ say she did work she didn’ have to. They kep’ her for her coney an’ nothin’ else, an’ that’s hard on any gal, so I shouldn’ talk mean. But I ain’t sorry to see her gone.” She looked a dagger at her man. He laughed as if it were a compliment and went back to entertaining young Jim. Long Tom was fast asleep, full of corn meal cakes and bacon, and Caesar had a hard time staying awake himself, although it was clear that Virgil still wanted to know where his Sally had gone.

  “Why’d the white folks here run off?”

  “Afeared! An’ of you, I reckon. You hurt that mean little fella bad. He los’ an eye an’ I’m not too sure but he’ll die. That othuh one, that big fella…He was beat! Lef’ heah like a whipped cur. Said there was twenny of yous, an’ you was right behin’ him. The Man, he jus packed his mule and tol’ us to stay put an’ lef. But we heard othuh tales from Sally, too.”