Washington and Caesar

by Christian Cameron

  “Noah?” He mimicked McCoy’s Irish accent. “Yer wanted on the parade, my lad.” He kept his voice low, to make the disguise work the better, and as soon as he heard a response and movement from the hut, he pulled the watch coat around him and, lantern visible, began to walk back to the parade. Decoying blacks had long been part of his trade; he was almost pleased to be doing something more useful than shouldering a musket.

  He looked back once, to see that Noah was close behind. It wouldn’t really matter now if the boy identified him; it was important that the other musicians remember McCoy coming to the tent, not he or Bludner. Weymes didn’t understand the plan, but it didn’t trouble him. Bludner tended to make large plans and Weymes knew he need only play his parts to get his share of the reward.

  As he passed out of the streets of tents and wigwams and on to the parade, the boy caught up with him.

  “Wait, suh! I need ma’ drum!”

  “Not where you’re going, my lad!” said Bludner, and clamped a huge hand over his mouth. The boy tried to fight, squirming and scratching until Bludner pulled him close and hit him almost gently, just behind the ear.

  Weymes held the sack while Bludner dropped him in. They hoisted it, and were out of the camp in a minute. The night was hardly even old before they passed the lines of sentries, and the buyer was waiting in the old apple orchard by the river, just as he had said. He opened the sack and ran his hands over the boy, inside his mouth and over his teeth and gums, then over all his limbs—nothing sensual, just the rough touch of the horse trader.

  The buyer looked happy. “Just as you said, gentlemen. Did he put up much of a fight?”

  “He took it ‘ard. They always do, the poor beggars. But he’ll be happier when he’s back to real work. They’re bred to slavery. Freedom don’ suit them.”

  “Right, then. Here’s the price as agreed.”

  Bludner counted the money. Spanish dollars and some English silver, well over ten pounds English, and hard currency.

  “You’re a real gen’leman, sir. A fine price. I think I must add that it wouln’ be fair for you to sport this lad around ‘ere for a while. The company would know ‘im if they saw ‘im.”

  The other man laughed, a hard laugh that might have touched Weymes if he’d been alone.

  “He’ll be in the Indies in five weeks, given a fair wind. Good night, then.” He hoisted the bag and headed off toward the city. They split the money there, and Bludner repeated their story until Weymes had it right. They knew the game.

  In an hour, they were asleep in their straw.

  George Lake never really believed that McCoy had anything to do with the disappearance of Noah, but most of the men did, although the true believers muttered that Bludner had been a slave-taker and that once a man had fallen so low he was there forever. George never quite figured what Captain Lawrence thought; he never mixed with the men, and after Noah vanished he seemed harder than ever. The other drummers insisted that McCoy had called Noah to the parade at night, which he sometimes did when he wanted to practice an alarm. McCoy repeated to anyone who would listen that he had never called the black boy, that he was innocent, that the whole company was hurt by the loss.

  It was the wonder of a few days, and much discussed. Bludner beat a man very badly for suggesting that he had been involved, but didn’t bother to hide his satisfaction that the boy was gone.

  “He made us look low,” was Bludner’s response to any suggestion that the boy had been valuable.

  The other drummer was passable, although he did tend to mix his signals when he got flustered. His sticking was good enough, and he started training a young soldier from Lake’s own section. For two weeks, their marching suffered, as the new drummer beat his drum a little too slow or a little too fast, throwing the men off in one evolution or another and forcing an angry Captain Lawrence to demand that the drummer stay silent so that the men could perform their maneuvers.

  The aftermath of the boy’s loss split the company even more deeply. Bludner blamed the new drummer for being “unfit, like all these soft boys”, and the true believers rallied behind their own and suspected that Bludner had shown his colors and taken the boy. Fights got worse, and McCoy had suddenly lost the authority to deal with them. Too many still suspected him, and someone had whispered that he blamed Bludner to cover his own guilt. It was an ugly time.

  But rumors that the British were moving on New York City began to drown the concerns of their company, and by early June, when they were issued with ball ammunition and three days’ rations for a march, it became clear that they were going north. No one knew where the British would land, or whether there would be a fight, but at last they were leaving Philadelphia. They didn’t march so well, and Captain Lawrence never seemed to be pleased, but they were done with the camp and going to the war.

  III

  War

  Do you not know that life is a soldier’s service? One man must keep guard, another go out to reconnoiter, another take the field. It is not possible for all to stay where they are, nor is it better so. But you neglect to fulfill the orders of the general and complain, when some severe order is laid upon you; you do not understand to what a pitiful state you are bringing the army so far as in you lies; you do not see that if all follow your example there will be no one to dig a trench, or raise a palisade, no one to keep night watch or fight in the field, but every one will seem an unserviceable soldier.

  …So too it is in the world; each man’s life is a campaign, and a long and varied one. It is for you to play the soldier’s part—do everything at the General’s bidding, divining his wishes, if it be possible.

  EPICTETUS

  1

  Chesapeake Bay to Brooklyn Heights, May 20—August 29, 1776

  Sergeant King returned to them, briefly. He had recovered from his wound but was almost unable to speak from the damage to his mouth, and eating was a labor. He went back to the navy immediately, stopping only to shake hands with the men who had been in his platoon. He convinced a few to join the Royal Navy.

  “No bastard will treat you like they treated ye,” he said, his voice full of gravel. “Navy needs men, an’ don’ ask too close about their past or their color.”

  That much was true. Both of the frigates that had waited out the winter with them in the Chesapeake were clearly short of men. The war had caught them unprepared, with peacetime crews meant for chasing foes no more dangerous than the occasional smuggler. The heavy crews that were needed to fight the great guns and sail the ship were kept only in wartime. Sailors were better paid than soldiers, and such crews were too much for the navy to maintain when there was no one to fight. The war with the colonists changed that, and the ships on the American station were taking any men they could get.

  The rumors that they were bound for New York as a labor force grew to the point where Sergeant Peters, now a sick man, confessed to Caesar that if he didn’t have his wife to care for, he’d consider enlisting as a sailor himself. Mr. Edgerton took no action to stop the navy from taking his men. Indeed, he was barely visible for most of the spring, and then one day they heard he had been posted to the board of ordnance, leaving them without an officer, which seemed a dangerous development.

  Caesar didn’t trust the navy. And he had had a taste of the army, and wanted to try it again. He had exercised command, and liked it. But it was more complicated than that, in his mind, and he sought to understand it all. Perhaps it was the acceptance from the Fourteenth Foot when they were about to go on to the fight at Great Bridge, just the acceptance of other men. Perhaps it was the thrill of the fight. Caesar knew he had been bred to love that in Africa. He fancied the army, and he meant to make his way in it.

  The Fourteenth changed transports and went off to the Indies with the navy, bound for a different campaign. Caesar had no warning and no chance to say goodbye, but understood from the sailors that France, another great power over the water, was threatening war, and the ships and men were going south to the tro
pics to defend the sugar islands against them. Caesar smiled a little, to himself. He didn’t think his heart would have been in any defense of the sugar islands, even if the devils of hell had been the enemy.

  They were moved to the Penelope, a transport that now held most of the remaining Ethiopians and their women, and the frigates left them, taking away the chance of freedom within the harsh discipline of the navy, and the chance of riches in prize money.

  Jim, once he recovered, grew at an astounding rate. Sally had brought him food every day, whether he ate it or not, and once he was well enough to eat, the richer food seemed to extend his bones a little every day.

  Willy and Paget began to creep into their circle, as the rumors flew and the treatment on board ship grew more like the treatment they had endured on land at the end. At first, Caesar kept them at arm’s length, as troublemakers, but Tonny and Virgil pleaded their case, and in time, they were allowed to sit and smoke in the section of cable tier that the group had marked down as their own. Lope stayed with them, as well. He wasn’t bright, but he worked hard, and he could sew a bit.

  The Penelope, of Liverpool, was well found and relatively new, but she sagged to leeward, couldn’t sail anything like a bowline, and her captain spent much of his time drunk. The weeks wore into months and the ships remained anchored in little pools of their own filth, and Penelope’s little flaws of sailing became more obvious every time she moved to leave her waste behind her. The sailors had no animosity for the blacks, but what fellow feeling they might have shared was tempered with a lively inclination for the women the black soldiers brought with them, and only constant attention and some rumors of disease kept the situation from becoming deadly.

  A bad storm would move them all out to sea to ride it out in safety, but a return to gentle weather meant back to the heat and the stench. The smell was all too familiar to the black passengers. The Penelope was coming to smell like a blackbirder, a slave ship.

  Peters and Caesar maintained their authority. The mere fact that Caesar’s circle stayed together gave them an edge; they were the largest group aboard, and the toughest, and they were willing to use force to keep order. Other ships might have become floating brothels or worse, but not the Penelope. The brief southern spring gave way to summer, and the heat and stench drove past unbearable and into hellish. And still Caesar walked the decks, talking to this one and that one, keeping their spirits up, holding them to the standards they had learned from the Fourteenth, both to drill and appearance. He paraded the women every so often, looking for bruises and split lips, for pregnancy, for all the things that the British soldiers looked for when they paraded their women. The women supported him, too. Black Lese, a big woman who had been a slave in New York and spoke Dutch, became their spokesman. She was not a “good” woman like Sergeant Peters’s wife, and she cared nothing for the Bible, but she had become the mouthpiece of the women on the Penelope.

  They no longer had arms, or if they did, the arms were stored in another ship, and no one troubled to tell them. So Caesar and Peters drilled the men with brooms or bits of spar that the sailors could spare, and drilled them every day, even as the heat became infernal. All the men grumbled. Most of those on board were Loyal Ethiopians, but not all; some were members of other units, or just blacks swept up in the last withdrawal from the peninsula. Peters decided early that they would all drill, and Caesar enforced this order.

  Behind Peters’s easy authority and educated air, there was another, distant mentor for Caesar in his Roman namesake, whose cunning and ruthlessness began to seem natural to Caesar in the hot air of the ship, whose lessons about war were there every night when he went to read with Sergeant Peters.

  Caesar was learning to quell mutiny before it came to violence, but twice he missed his moment, or someone mistook his sincerity for weakness. Both times he crushed his opponent in the darkness of the lower deck, first winning and then punishing until his point was clear. That weakness was no kindness was a lesson he learned, and perhaps over-learned, from the crushing of the Gauls. The Gauls, whom the Roman Caesar made slaves.

  Caesar’s authority grew with practice until it was natural. And as it grew, he noticed that Tonny and Jim and Virgil seemed a little distant. It troubled him. The Roman Caesar never mentioned having a friend while he destroyed Gaul.

  Rumor was part of daily life, but toward June the rumors flew thicker and faster. Every department seemed to have its own source of rumor and its own light to shine on possible futures. The sailors said they were going north, the soldiers maintained that they were going south, and the board of ordnance and the governor’s staff suggested that they were going to Long Island, off the port of New York. Caesar knew enough former Ethiopians who were now servants aboard the governor’s flagship to trust the latter, and began to pin his hopes on passage north to Long Island, and a summer campaign. The British Army had been defeated in Boston as in Virginia, and by the middle of June hopes among the white Loyalists as to the outcome of the war seemed to be at an all-time low. But as the Royal Navy vessels set off one by one for the south—indicating that, as far as their own service was concerned, the sailors’ scuttlebutt was as accurate as the servants’ gossip—and the little fleet broke up, Caesar watched the trash around the ship with new hope.

  They finally sailed away from the Chesapeake one day in late June, almost the last ship to depart. The governor had left days before, and it had begun to seem to the blacks as if they were unwanted when the ship suddenly trembled with new life. A few more passengers came aboard, the last white Loyalists to leave Virginia, and then, at the change of the tide, the sailors moved briskly for the first time in months, sails were hoisted, and they were away. The moment they dropped sight of land the breeze cooled, and although squalls had them all in the scuppers, sick and feeble for days, the cool and the rain were a welcome relief from the endless heat and the stench of the long delay. They were away north, and were leaving behind those unspoken fears that had plagued Caesar since the wait began: that they might be abandoned or sacrificed, or simply turned ashore.

  After the first few days they were all well enough, and most of the hale men joined in the working of the ship as well as they were able. There was never a shortage of hands to pull on a rope or sweep the ship, flogging the last of the blackbirder stench out of her. There was no answer for the thick weed that now clung to her below the waterline, taking whatever fine points of sailing she might have had clean away, but what human hands could do aboard they all did. The captain sobered up to do his navigation, and the ship was happy enough.

  Four days off the Chesapeake they saw a strange sail at twilight and the captain doubled back, sailing along his own wake half the night and then setting a new course. The Yankees were known to have privateers out in every water and every weather, and every black man and woman aboard feared them and the necessary return to slavery that would follow capture at sea. But the captain’s simple ruse worked well enough, or perhaps there had been no threat to begin with. Either way, the morning found the horizon clear again, and so they sailed for days and days, the women sewing and singing, the men still busy at their drill or helping with the work of the ship.

  On a Sunday early in July, they sailed into the great anchorage at Sandy Hook off Long Island, coasting into the midst of the greatest fleet any of them had ever seen, even the sailors aboard who had served in the last war. Through repeated hails they found the governor’s ship, and came alongside long enough to report their presence. None of the blacks ever found the reason why their own Penelope had lingered so long, if there was a reason at all. But the great fleet brought hope to every Loyalist, black and white, that the king would not be defeated, that they would be upheld. For the whites, it suggested the possibility of the return of their property, and for the blacks, the hope of liberty.

  On the third of July, the fleet landed troops on Staten Island, and Caesar and the remnants of the Ethiopians received their first taste of their new role in the army; they were
dispatched ashore to dig entrenchments. It was easy work; there was no opposition, and the ground was soft after it had been broken up by picks. Despite the separation of the work from the drill under arms that constituted the “art of war”, Caesar and all the Ethiopians set to it with a will. It offered a change from the cramped quarters of the ships, and they received their first pay since the last parade in Williamsburg, many months before. They were not paid to date; few soldiers were, but the existence of any pay at all at least confirmed that they were not slaves.

  They dug under the supervision of officers from the engineers, a different breed from the other British officers they had met. Engineers were men who went to a difficult school in England. They did not purchase their commissions like other officers, but won them after long study in mathematics and gunnery. Peters and Caesar both came to the commanding engineer’s notice quickly, because they could read and write, and Peters could do mathematics. Jim had stuck to his drawing, at least as long as they had been on board Mr. Harding’s ship; he was also learning geometry from Peters. Murray, the senior engineer, had them copy his notes every day and read them back, as well as using their skills to get more out of the men. He complimented them absently (as if unaware that men needed such praise to get on with work) but mentioned the unit in his daily reports to the commander, Lord Howe.

  The rebel army made no attempt to contest Staten Island, and soon afterwards, Lord Howe’s brother, the admiral, arrived at Sandy Hook with more ships and more men. There were so many vessels that Sandy Hook appeared a bare pine wood floating on the sea, with branches and trees as far as the eye could see. The Ethiopians went back to their ship, their ranks enlarged by some few Staten Island blacks they had liberated from farms there. A few spoke only Dutch, and Black Lese had to translate for them. Their odd words and overdone facial expressions gave them a comic air, but they dug as well as other men, and Peters placed them under Virgil to learn the basic drill, although few of the former Ethiopians really expected to see arms again. It was rapidly becoming a rite of passage, that all the men knew how to perform the manual.