The Heart of Liberty

by Thomas Fleming

  The tavern sat back from the road a good hundred yards, creating a kind of spacious, comfortable assurance to arriving visitors. Plenty of room, it seemed to say, plenty of room and good cheer inside. In daylight the first-floor walls of thick gray fieldstone gave it a somewhat fortress-like appearance. The wooden upper floor and wooden roof to the stone porch that ran the length of the building added a comfortable companionable touch of home.

  Above all else was the sense of order, neatness, command that the place communicated. The wooden upper floor, the trim of the windows, the porch pillars were always pristine white. They were painted twice a year. Kate knew how much time and effort all this took. She knew this man beside her in the chaise was responsible for it. It made her, for a moment at least, grateful for the order, the comfort, the care he had brought into her life, grateful for him and sorry for the pain she was causing him now. She was simultaneously able to forgive herself because the pain he felt, the turmoil she felt was part of this wider upheaval, which Anthony told her would change America forever.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” she said.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said.

  Black Sam, the Negro stableman, was waiting on the porch beneath the tavern’s sign. The words Strangers’ Resort were painted in blue on a field of white. Above them was the silhouette of a wayfarer hiking along with a staff in his hand. Jonathan Gifford threw the reins to Sam and told him to give the pacer a pint of beer and a good rubdown. The little horse was famous for his fondness for beer and cider.

  Sam nodded and put up the fur collar of his matchcoat. Jonathan Gifford had worn it campaigning against the French in Canada. “Mighty busy night, ‘spite of this weather. I’d be glad to work at the bar, if you need some help.”

  “Busy?”

  “Soldiers,” Sam said, twitching the reins and expertly guiding the horse around the corner of the tavern toward the barn. “Another recruiting party?”

  Lately, recruiters for the four New Jersey regiments of the regular American army had been making speeches in Strangers’ Resort two and three times a week. As indignation over the blood spilled at Lexington and Concord faded, Americans were proving as reluctant to sign away their freedom and join the regulars as the British. The recruiters were now using the same tactics Captain Gifford had seen in England and Ireland - equal amounts of liquor and patriotism.

  Kemble emerged from the shadows, his eyes bright with excitement. “It’s the militia, Father. Our militia regiment.”

  Jonathan Gifford instantly expected trouble, not from the militia but from Kemble. He brooded for a moment on that sensitive face, only half visible in the glow of the oil lamps on the tavern porch. The large, intense forehead, the fine high-crowned fragile nose, the narrow, stubborn jaw and precise mouth could have belonged to a Puritan squire of the previous century. It was a thoroughbred face, marred by mild arrogance. But this would pass with youth. It was the rest of Kemble’s physical self that troubled Jonathan Gifford. Everything about him spelled fragility, from his delicate hands to his narrow shoulders and pinched chest. Raising him had been a perpetual struggle against disease.

  There was so much that was fine in the boy, such rich promise. In his first two years at the College of New Jersey at Princeton he had stood at the top of his class. He was doing the same thing in his third year when an attack of pleurisy sent him home. To Kemble’s indignation, his father had refused to let him return this year. He feared the effect on his lungs of another year in that icy dormitory. The decision had done nothing to improve relations between him and Kemble. At least, Jonathan Gifford thought, he still calls me father. How much longer would that last? How much longer would anything last?

  From inside the tavern came a crash that made Kate cry out with fright. Jonathan Gifford knew the sound. It was a musket shot.

  “You’d better go down to the house, Kate,” he said.

  She looked cross but obeyed him and followed the path down to the high-porched red brick house that Jonathan Gifford had built beside the brook about a quarter of a mile from the tavern.

  In the taproom Jonathan Gifford found four or five men at every one of the round stone tables and dozens more at the bar and around the fireplace. There were at least two hundred of them. Their guns were stacked along the wall by the fireplace. A musket close to the blazing hearth had just gone off. Everyone thought it was funny. They grinned while a gaunt man wearing an old bagwig denounced a runty boy of fifteen in a voice that was loud enough to shake the paintings of George III and George II off the walls. “Didn’t I tell you not to charge your piece until you heard a positive order, soldier?” shouted Colonel Samuel Breese. “‘Pon my word, the liberties of your country may depend upon your obedience to such orders. As a punishment, my man, you will bed down without your supper. Consider yourself fortunate. In the British army you would have a hundred strokes of the lash. Ain’t that right, Captain Gifford?”

  “Absolutely, Colonel Breese,” said Jonathan Gifford. Breese was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, in which he had achieved the rank of sergeant. Like many others, he had fallen in love with soldiering and this explained his present eminence as the commander of a militia regiment. That and his fanatic Presbyterianism, which inclined him to see George III and the Church of England not merely as tyrants, but agents of the devil.

  In New Jersey and the other colonies of middle America, a man’s religion had a great deal to do with his politics. We were not religiously homogeneous, like New England. Presbyterians were almost all fierce revolutionists. Jonathan Gifford and all our relatives were nominal members of the Church of England, which inclined us toward loyalty or neutrality.

  Breese had his old army knapsack on his back Around his waist he was encumbered with a canteen, a cartridge box, a bayonet scabbard, and a sword. He looked ridiculous, but Jonathan Gifford treated him with grave decorum. “What brings you out in such bad weather, Colonel?” he asked.

  “Orders,” said Breese. About half his teeth were missing, enabling him to snap his upper lip over his lower lip in a style that was more grotesque than impressive. “Secret orders.”

  He stepped close enough to Jonathan Gifford to say in a stage whisper that was easily overheard by militiamen all around him: “Between us I ‘spect it’s to arrest some great men for betraying the liberties of their country.”

  Jonathan Gifford nodded and asked Breese if his men had brought their own provisions. He doubted if he had enough food on hand to feed them dinner.

  “They had orders to bring two days’ victuals with them,” said the Colonel, looking around. “Them that hasn’t done it will have to pay their own way. We hoped to be in Amboy this night, but the storm slowed our muster. We must make use of your barns, I fear, and mayhap the floor of the meeting room, when the Committee finishes.”

  “They are at your service, Colonel.”

  Jonathan Gifford looked around him at the flushed, excited faces of the militiamen. He saw them with a double vision - as a neighbor and friend, and as a former professional soldier. Many were men he liked, men to whom he had loaned money after more than one bad harvest, men who amused him, like fat, loquacious Private Samson Tucker, who never ceased complaining about the woes of a fallow farm, a sharp-tongued wife and five daughters. Clinking glasses with him was Captain Nathaniel Fitzmorris, an ebullient young giant who had recently inherited one of the best farms in Middletown. He had spent a year wooing Kate in vain. At a nearby table sat one of Kemble’s boyhood friends, John Tharp. He was defying his Quaker parents by shouldering a gun in the Cause.

  To the eyes of a former professional soldier, these men raised grave doubts. Instead of uniforms, they wore the loose homespun coats and leather breeches of the average farmer. They were not part of the American regular army. They were temporary soldiers, who were supposed to train several times a month, and be ready to turn out if the British invaded their state. Most of them never showed up for their training sessions, which were boring rehearsals o
f the manual of arms. Their officers were ignoramuses like Colonel Breese who knew nothing about tactics or strategy. No one had taught them how to use a bayonet, the British army’s weapon of choice.

  Yet these were the men on whom the Americans were depending if the gunfire that had begun in Massachusetts last April became a war. Americans had been mesmerized by the way the minutemen - the militia of New England - had turned out to batter the British at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill. The Continental Congress had decided America did not need a big regular army and missed their chance to recruit one when every man’s indignation over the news of Lexington inclined him to be a soldier. They were convinced that patriotism would turn the farmers of America into invincible infantry at the beat of a muster drum.

  Jonathan Gifford did not believe it. For Kemble it was an article of faith. To doubt it was tantamount to treason. When Jonathan Gifford showed him a letter from Major William Moncrieff of the King’s Own Regiment claiming that the British were outnumbered six to one at Lexington and Concord, Kemble dismissed it as an official lie. He preferred the New England newspaper reports which gave the impression that a few hundred minutemen had routed two thousand redcoats.

  Dr. Christopher Davie seized Jonathan Gifford’s arm. He was an elf of a man with a head that seemed too large for his body. He wore an old frock coat two decades out of style and an equally old-fashioned bagwig. Dr. Davie had spent twenty years in the British army as surgeon of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Like Captain Gifford, he had retired at the end of the Seven Years’ War. Meeting him at the house of a mutual friend in New York, the Captain had persuaded the old Scot to settle at the tavern and practice his often unorthodox medicine among us. Dr. Davie had no love for George III. But he had had his fill of rebellions. He had lost half his family in the Scottish risings of 1715 and 1745.

  “You are just in time, Gifford,” he said. “They were about to start pot-shotting the King’s portraits, so help me. Did you ever in your life see anything so damn foolish as pouring liquor into men with loaded guns?”

  Jonathan Gifford agreed with Dr. Davie. wouldn’t let these men drink any more if I were you, Colonel,” he said to Breese.

  “Precisely my opinion,” said Breese, who was more than a little drunk himself. “On your feet, lads. We’ll muster in the barns for a soldier’s supper.”

  “Another round, Colonel,” came a voice from the corner. Instantly it became a chorus. “Another round. Another round.”

  Breese waggled his head on his long, thin neck. “No, lads, no. We’re under orders now. We must be soldiers.”

  A squat, swarthy man at the table in the bay window stood up. “Damn it, Breese,” Captain Daniel Slocum roared, “give them another round. It’s the least you can do for fellows ready to stick a bayonet up the King’s ass for their country’s sake.”

  A drunken cheer greeted these words. Breese blinked thoughtfully for a moment. “Well. Mayhap it will do no harm. Another round it is. But the last, it must be the last.”

  Jonathan Gifford ducked behind the bar and nodded to a slab of a man with a red face that seemed to extend, at least in color, to the crown of his bald head. Between Barney McGovern and Jonathan Gifford there was a unique combination of trust and affection. Barney had been the senior sergeant of the Captain’s company in the King’s Own Regiment.

  “What are they drinking?” Jonathan Gifford asked.

  “Cider, what else?” growled Barney McGovern. “Except for his nibs, the Colonel. He’s on flip. And the great Whig, Captain Slocum. He’s drinking stonewall, and plenty of it.”

  This was a mixture of rum and hard cider, which more than lived up to its name.

  “He’ll have a headache tomorrow. Who’s at the table with him?”

  “Who else but more Slocums?”

  The Slocums were a family who had attracted little attention until our troubles with England began. Most of them were obscure dirt farmers, scratching out a bare subsistence on cheap, unproductive land in the vicinity of the pine country. Daniel Slocum owned fifty acres of heavily mortgaged but relatively good land in the Colt’s Neck neighborhood. This was five times bigger than any other farm in the family and automatically made him the clan leader. In our rising revolutionary ferment, Captain Slocum had pushed his way to the front rank of the liberty boys with his outspoken enthusiasm for total defiance of Great Britain and a ferocious hostility of all those who had a word to say on the King’s behalf.

  “You pour the cider. I’ll do the honors for Breese and Slocum. Has the Committee of Safety arrived?”

  “They’re in the Crown Room this very moment,” said Barney. “Well tended by Black Bertha and me own darlin’ wife.” “Good. Have they got their bishop?”

  “They have,” said Barney. “Piping hot.”

  Bishop was a favorite New Jersey drink in 1776. It was a mixture of wine, sugar, and oranges served hot in tumblers.

  Jonathan Gifford nodded his approval and began preparing the flip. Strangers’ Resort had its own recipe, which Captain Gifford had picked up in his travels through New England. The magical ingredients were four pounds of sugar, four eggs, and a pint of cream, beaten well and left to stand two days. Four great spoonfuls of this mixture were stirred into a quart mug filled two thirds with strong beer, then bolstered by a gill of rum.

  “Shall it be a bellows top, Colonel?” Jonathan Gifford asked.

  “Oh yes, bellows bellows, ‘pon my word,” said Breese.

  A fresh egg was quickly whipped into the tankard, then Jonathan Gifford limped to the fireplace and took from the coals the glowing poker - the “dog” as we called it - and plunged it into the liquid. A creamy white froth rose over the edge of the tankard, a tribute to the late-whipped egg.

  Colonel Breese stood by Jonathan Gifford’s elbow now, literally smacking his lips. “‘Pon my word, Captain Gifford,” he said, “I swear there isn’t a better flip made between here and Boston.”

  Jonathan Gifford accepted the compliment with a brief smile. He took a bottle of nun and a jug of hard cider from the bar and walked over to Daniel Slocum’s table. The Captain was surrounded by his three oldest sons, his brother Samuel with his two sons, and a half-dozen cousins. All shared the swarthy complexion that gave Slocum his nickname, “Black Daniel.” He was describing a patriotic task that he and his fellow liberty boys had performed in Middletown on Christmas Day. They had tarred and feathered a wheelwright named Benson for singing God Save the King in front of the local liberty pole.

  “We made the tar hot enough to roast the bastard,” Slocum said. “You should have heard him yell when we dipped him in it. When we spread the feathers on him we jabbed a good two dozen of them in quill first. But the rail. Oh, boys, you should have heard him when we hoisted him on that. In a minute or two he was screaming his balls were split for sure.”

  “He changed his tune, I hear?” asked one of the Slocum cousins.

  “Oh, he did, he did. Standing there with the tar dripping off his ass, he told us he was a much deceived man. We were right. George the Third and the British Parliament were enemies of the liberties of this country. He apologized to us and his fellow citizens for his bad behavior and poor understanding.”

  Everyone at the table laughed heartily. Jonathan Gifford did not join the merriment. He had heard from Dr. Davie, who had visited Benson only yesterday, that the wheelwright had suffered serious bums and might not recover.

  “I understand you’re drinking stonewall, Captain Slocum,” he said.

  “I am, Captain Gifford. But I don’t expect to pay for it.” “Why not?”

  “I’m risking my health on this foul night in the service of the honorable Congress. The least you can do is contribute a drink to the Cause. You ought to do the same for every man in this room.”

  “I have to charge for what I serve or go out of business, Captain. But you know that I stand a round now and then for everyone who drinks here regularly. We’ll consider this” - he filled his glass - “the custom of th
e house.”

  In the center of the room, Colonel Breese was holding his flip high and offering a toast “The liberty of America.”

  The word came back with an enthusiastic roar. “Liberty.”

  Jonathan Gifford wondered if any of these men really agreed on the meaning of that magic word. It was such an easy thing to shout. But when it came to the business of everyday life, agreement became very complicated. Inevitably, the word promised different things to different people. Some of these militiamen were indentured servants, Irishmen or Scotsmen who had sold themselves into bondage for five or six years to pay their passage to America. Most of the others were small or middling farmers who toiled ten or twelve hours a day on the thousand and one tasks involved in raising crops and cattle. A few were hired hands living on thirty or forty pounds a year. Liberty could not mean the same thing to all these men.

  “You’ll excuse me, Colonel, the Committee of Safety is meeting upstairs.”

  “That we know,” said Breese. “I believe the General is with them.”

  “No. But he will be shortly.”

  In the doorway of the taproom stood a towering figure in a thick bearskin coat that made him look even larger than he already was. Fifty-year-old William Alexander was six-foot-three and his blue and buff trimmed cocked hat added another two or three inches to his height. He had a strong, brooding face dominated by a high-crowned nose. One of the richest men in America, he had been a member of Governor William Franklin’s Council until be accepted command of New Jersey’s revolutionary militia last year. The governor had ordered him to resign from the command or the Council. Alexander had chosen to leave the Council. Although he did not live in the neighborhood, Alexander often stopped at Strangers’ Resort on his frequent trips to New York, where he also owned much valuable real estate. He greeted Jonathan Gifford cordially, and they chatted for a few minutes about the latest military news from Boston.

  “Between the two of us,” said Alexander, “Washington is having the devil of a time recruiting men for a year’s service. Isn’t that just like a Yankee? Start a fight and then run home, claiming God told him it was time to warm his backside by his fireplace.” Like many Americans south of Connecticut, Alexander had a low opinion of New Englanders and seldom hesitated to express it.