The Heart of Liberty

by Thomas Fleming

  “Certainly,” said Jonathan Gifford, glancing with just a trace of nervousness at Kemble and Kate. Kemble had heard the invitation and was glaring. Kate was already deep in conversation with Anthony Skinner. The rest of us walked toward the manor house in the Squire’s wake. The two-and-a-half-story house of rose-red brick stood in the center of a broad lawn, at the end of a drive lined with huge old elms. Beyond the coast road the gray winter waters of Raritan Bay were visible in frothy turmoil. Behind the house was a formal garden in the latest English style, a deer park which included some thirty acres of cleared woods, and an orchard of six hundred fruit trees. Barns, quarters for two dozen Negro field hands, a carriage house, and a thousand acres of prime topsoil and pasture land completed the immediate estate. About three miles away on Halfpenny Brook stood a mill which ground most of the district’s grain and corn. Another large farm, owned by the Squire before his marriage, was thirteen miles away at Colt’s Neck. The weight of this property and his reputation as a soldier had long since made Charles Skinner one of the most influential men in New Jersey.

  To Jonathan Gifford, Kemble Manor was almost a second home. It was here that he had been welcomed by his old friend Charles Skinner like a prodigal brother, here that he had met Sarah. The parties, the dinners they had enjoyed in those first carefree years. Always they had ended by Sarah calling on him to give the last toast of the evening.

  Here’s to all them that we love

  Here’s to all them that love us.

  With a happy laugh, everyone would join the last two lines.

  And here’s to all them that love those that love them

  Love those that love them that love us.

  What a yearning for peace those words evoked. It was hard to believe they were still singing them only three years ago. Now it all seemed as remote and pathetically quaint as a song from ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore or some other primitive play.

  Snowflakes began whirling in the air as we reached the front door. In the entrance hall, a grandfather clock bonged four, and two black menservants hurried to take our cloaks. The blacks wore the standard Skinner livery, blue velvet suits trimmed with yellow. On their heads were glossy black wigs. Two other servants met us with silver trays on which steamed tankards of mulled wine.

  In the drawing room, on a spiral-legged mahogany table, sat a magnificent tea service by the well-known New York silversmith of an earlier age, Charles Le Roux. The furniture in the room was mostly in the Queen Anne style with lovely carved shells on crests and knees, the chairs with those tapering-footed rear legs favored by New Yorkers. The upholstery was all light blue damask embroidered with mythological griffins and swans, a motif repeated in the wainscoting of the room, while the blue was repeated in the paper on the walls.

  Charles Skinner stood in the center of this splendid room, beaming on his family and friends. He raised his tankard of mulled wine high. “Here’s to the New Year. May it bring us plenty - but above all peace.”

  We all drank to this thoroughly unobjectionable toast.

  “I have another wish,” Anthony Skinner said, looking at Kate with a smile on his handsome face. He raised his tankard. “May the most beautiful woman in New Jersey rescue a wretched being from a fate worse than death.”

  Kate blushed. Kemble glowered. I, who loved Kate with the forlorn hopelessness of fifteen, found it easier than ever to dislike Anthony Skinner.

  “Damn me if you look wretched, Anthony,” Charles Skinner said. “Though if you had to pay for those clothes you’re wearing, you’d be miserable enough.”

  The Squire was the richest man in south Jersey but he never stopped counting his pennies. It was not easy to be his son, as the look on Anthony’s face testified. But there was some truth in Charles Skinner’s remark. Anthony’s green silk breeches were flowered with silver and gold. His coat was a quilted pale blue satin trimmed with silver galloon, the lapels wide and the pockets huge in the latest London fashion. Lace blossomed from his chest and wrists. The heels of his blue shoes were at least three inches high. His wig was in what London called the macaroni style, sharply raked in the front and rising to an absurdly high toupet.

  Charles Skinner more than matched his son’s sartorial splendor. His breeches and coat were velvet, covered with small designs in soft shades of red and green, giving a pinkish hue to the eye. His long waistcoat was of corded silk, a shade darker than the coat and embroidered with a flowered pattern reflecting the suit’s soft red and green. His shoes were bright green with great silver buckles and red heels.

  The rest of us were not exactly dressed down. All of us, ladies and gentlemen and boys like myself, wore the brocades and satins and ample lace displayed by the rich in 1776, from the Hancocks of Boston to the Rutledges of South Carolina, Jonathan Gifford wore a suit of dark red satin with a waistcoat of white satin embroidered in several colors. Kate Stapleton wore a brocade gown, blue on the surface and green underneath, with a narrow stripe of green at regular intervals between a running vine pattern of small bright flowers and leaves. It was divided over a quilted petticoat of blue satin fashionably instep length. The skirt was gathered into large festoons a la polonaise, the latest mode. But Kate scorned the absurdly high headdresses of 1776 London, preferring to wear her lustrous hair unpowdered in a loose pile, artfully dressed with twisted scarves to affect a country carelessness.

  I should hasten to add that this hair style was also fashionable in England, where only Londoners were slaves to the bizarre whims of Paris. But my mother and sister were slaves to London, and they wore their hair piled a foot and a half high on their round heads, making themselves perfect examples of the satiric poem on the subject:

  Give Chloe a bushel of horsehair and wool Of paste and pomatum a pound;

  Ten yards of gay ribbon to deck her sweet skull And gauze to encompass it round.

  In this gallery of brilliant colors, Kemble Stapleton was a morose island of drab. His hair was unpowdered, and cut so unfashionably short, it had no need of a tie behind. His suit was the plainest imaginable brown broadcloth, without even a cuff or lapel. Not a painted Paris button, such as those that adorned Anthony Skinner’s coat, nor a silver buckle on his shoes, nor a single ruffle of lace on his shirt front or cuff. Two years ago, he had departed for college in a blue silk coat, a flowered yellow vest, and fawn breeches as tight as any London macaroni’s. But in that same year the First Continental Congress had voted an end to all English imports and called on Americans to abandon the luxuries and ostentation to which we had become alarmingly accustomed.

  “Damn me, Kemble,” Charles Skinner said, “you look like a Quaker.”

  “Or a Presbyterian. That’s worse in my opinion,” Anthony said.

  “Benjamin Franklin wears this kind of suit these days,” Kemble said. “What is good enough for him is certainly good enough for me.”

  “That old fraud,” boomed Charles Skinner. “I saw him in London at Coronation Day wearing kincob brocade straight from the China coast. Everything Dr. Franklin does is affectation, nothing but affectation. Believe me, my boy. The old rogue is always playing a part.”

  “I beg to differ, sir,” Kemble said. “I consider Dr. Franklin a great man and a great patriot.”

  “Charles, please. You promised not to talk politics,” Caroline Skinner said. She was wearing a surprisingly simple dress for New Year’s Day, a rather old-fashioned green taffeta, the bodice laced in front over a white stomacher.

  “My dear, I thought I was talking religion,” said her husband.

  Anthony changed the subject by producing a present for Kate, an English translation of The Sorrows of Young Werther the novel by the German writer Goethe that was creating a sensation throughout Europe.

  “What is it about?” Charles Skinner asked.

  “A young man who falls in love with a beautiful woman who rejects him,” Anthony said, looking somberly at Kate. “In despair he kills himself.”

  “I can’t wait to read it,” Kate said.


  “Are you suggesting a similar fate may be in store for you, Anthony?” Jonathan Gifford asked dryly.

  “Who knows, Captain Gifford,” Anthony said with a sigh that struck me as patently false. “We are only beginning to understand the mysteries of the heart.”

  “I have serious doubts about how much understanding you can get from today’s novels,” Caroline Skinner said. “The characters all seem to have hearts but no heads.”

  “I could not agree more, Mrs. Skinner,” Captain Gifford said.

  “I’m safe from the plague no matter what,” Charles Skinner said. “The last book Mrs. Skinner tried to get me to read was Hurne’s history of England. I couldn’t get past Alfred the Great”

  “I see no point in an American reading such European trash,” Kemble said. “If a man must die, let it be for his country, not for some spoiled woman whose only interest is where her next dress is coming from.”

  “You should really move to Boston, Kemble,” Anthony said. “You would be much happier up there with the rest of the fanatics.”

  “Anthony. No politics,” Caroline Skinner said.

  “It is the simple truth, Mother,” Anthony said

  No one disagreed with him. At this point the Revolution seemed like a foreign war to most people in New Jersey. All the fighting had taken place in Massachusetts and we were inclined to blame the cantankerous sons of the Puritans for the trouble as much as the British. Not one man in three agreed with Kemble’s contention that the British were using the quarrel with the Yankees to menace the liberties of all Americans.

  Caroline began pouring tea into fragile blue Sevres china cups. Black servant girls wearing velvet dresses that matched the livery of the menservants began passing plates full of cakes and sweetmeats. Anthony Skinner produced the latest copies of The Gentleman’s Magazine and we listened with fascination to his recounting of two recent London trials in which beautiful women had been defendants in the dock. Mrs. Caroline Rudd had been tried for forgery and Miss Jane Butterfield for poisoning her “benefactor,” an old rogue named Scawen who had been keeping her for several years. Both ladies had been acquitted. But the real sensation was the pictures of these not very innocent females. Kate, my sister, and my mother crowded around them to study the latest London styles. Miss Butterfield was in “undress” - without a hoop - and wore an elegant polonaise with studied folds and graceful puffs and a flounced decorated petticoat. The profusion of her ruchings and the length of her elbow laces brought as much comment from the ladies as another topic was stirring among the men.

  The King’s speech from the throne, closing the latest session of Parliament, had reached Governor Franklin, and he had given a copy of it to Charles Skinner. His Majesty had denounced the “unnatural” rebellion in America and accused the rebels of plotting to set up an independent state. Charles Skinner saw it as the final warning to disband Congress and cease all agitation or face war.

  “I expect it will give Dr. Franklin and his friends in Philadelphia an electric shock they will long remember,” the Squire said.

  Jonathan Gifford was not so sure who would be shocked but he glumly agreed that the future looked grim.

  Both these conversations were interrupted by Kemble’s sharp, strained voice. Caroline Skinner was holding out a teacup to him. Perhaps suspecting what was to come, she had served him among the last - it only postponed the inevitable. Kemble slowly shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Caroline. I will have no tea.”

  “Oh. Would you prefer coffee?”

  “No. No thank you.”

  Anthony Skinner’s mouth curled contemptuously. Kate looked as though she might explode. Charles Skinner finished selecting his tidbits and then asked: “Do I detect in this refusal a reproach, Kemble?”

  “You know as well as I do, Uncle Charles, Congress has said no man can be a patriot and drink tea.”

  “But this isn’t English tea,” Anthony Skinner said. “This is Dutch. Smuggled into good old New York, as we’ve been smuggling it for most of the century.”

  “It is still tea.”

  “Any moment,” Kate said mockingly, “we shall have a sermon. Give us a poem instead, Kemble.”

  Without waiting for him to answer, she recited one for him.

  No more shall my teapot so generous be,

  In filling the cuts with this pernicious tea,

  For fill it with water and drink out the same,

  Before I’ll lose liberty, that dearest name.

  “I’m serious, Kate,” Kemble said.

  “Oh, goddamn you and your seriousness,” Kate said.

  As usual, my mother was almost giddy with horror at Kate’s language. In her native Boston, young ladies - or old ones - never swore. It was unthinkable.

  “Dear me, Kate,” cried my mother. “If you continue to talk that way, you will have us praying for your immortal soul?”

  “Why?” asked Kate. “Men talk that way all the time and no one prays for them.”

  “It’s honest American talk, Aunt,” Anthony said. “I see nothing wrong with it.”

  “It is not American talk,” Kemble said. “It is English affectation. She thinks that is the way duchesses talk in the country.” “Go to hell,” Kate said.

  “To soothe your liberty-loving soul, Kemble,” Caroline said, “I have made you some tea from Dr. Rush’s formula, and some Edenton party cakes.”

  Benjamin Rush was a young Philadelphia physician who had published a number of pro-American essays in the papers, including a recipe for making tea from twigs of white oak and leaves of sweet myrtle.

  “And what may I ask are Edenton cakes?” asked Charles Skinner.

  “Cookies baked to a recipe from the ladies of Edenton, North Carolina, a year or so past, at a party in which they drank tea made from dried raspberry leaves,” Caroline said.

  Caroline passed the Edenton cakes to me, and poured Kemble his patriot’s tea from a blue Wedgwood pot. “Jemmy,” hissed my mother, but I had popped a cake into my mouth too fast for her to stop me. At fifteen I was old enough to defy my mother and young enough to get away with it half the time by pretending it was just boyish high spirits.

  “They look very good,” said my sister Sally, who was two years older than I.

  “You will have nothing to do with them, my dear,” said Mother. “You prefer sweetmeats anyway.”

  Sally nodded obediently. She had long since succumbed to my mother’s New England attitude toward child raising which made parents moralizing tyrants, determined to crush the original sin out of their children. South of New England a much freer, more indulgent philosophy prevailed, and I strove mightily to take advantage of it.

  “I’ll try one,” Kate said, taking a crunchy bite.

  “Are you going to report us to the Committee, Kemble?” Anthony Skinner asked.

  “No,” Kemble growled.

  Caroline Skinner passed the Edenton cakes to others while this tense conversation took place. In spite of glares from my mother I declined the Bohea and accepted a cup of the patriot’s brew. It tasted like dishwater. I concealed my dismay by defiantly narrating what students at Princeton had done to tea drinkers in the vicinity of Nassau Hall. Dressed in white to demonstrate their purity, they had forced the weed worshipers to surrender their supplies, which they then burnt in a bonfire in the street.

  “Thereby proving the worthlessness of an American’ college education,” Anthony Skinner said.

  Jonathan Gifford accepted his teacup from Caroline Skinner. For a painful moment, he had thought of joining Kemble in refusal. But he could never explain such a gesture to Charles Skinner - nor to himself. Something in his nature resented the idea of a Congress, supposedly fighting for the liberty of America, denying him the freedom to drink a cup of tea.

  But how could he tell this to a nineteen-year-old who relished arguments and was in love with the sound of his own voice? Jonathan Gifford had never been good at expressing his feelings, but this did not mean he lacked feel
ings - the conclusion that too many young people seemed to draw when a man resisted enthusiastic impulses. He had grown up in a world that placed enormous stress on self-control, common sense. Kate and Kemble’s generation were consciously revolting against this idea. They gloried in throbbing emotions, they read novels and poetry which made them weep - and were proud of it. Jonathan Gifford simply could not understand it. Only a few months ago, Kate had urged him to read a novel by the British writer Laurence Sterne. The fellow made a fool of himself, emoting plaintively over the death of a fly, oozing sighs over everything from old ruins to reckless lovers.

  “Haven’t you been able to talk any sense into, this young man’s head, friend Jonathan?” Charles Skinner asked. He picked up two or three lumps of sugar and threw them into his mouth, crunching them into powder with his formidable jaw and washing it all down with a huge swig of tea. Eating the sugar raw was a habit he had picked up from the Dutch when he had spent a winter at Albany during the French and Indian War.

  “What?” Jonathan Gifford asked, disconcerted as much by the grinding operation as the question itself. For a moment he was hypnotized by the amount of sugar Caroline and Kate were stirring into their tea. It was twice, perhaps three times the average English portion. Once more he felt himself a disembodied stranger.

  “When a young man is nineteen . . .” he said, looking steadily at Kemble.

  “ - either he has some sense or he doesn’t,” Anthony Skinner said.

  Kemble flushed and glared at Jonathan Gifford as if the cutting words had come from him. For a moment he was almost blinded by a wild mixture of grief and anger. This was the only son he would ever have. Kemble did not bear his name. But he had done his best to be a father to him since the boy was ten. Sadly, Jonathan Gifford remembered the happy hours they had spent together, prowling the marshes in the dawn for ducks, fishing in Raritan Bay, discussing military history before the fire on winter evenings, working together in the greenhouse. All these bonds seemed to be dissolving now.