The Heart of Liberty

by Thomas Fleming

  The prosecution had all the witnesses. The landlady from Shrewsbury told in simpering detail what she knew - and imagined - about Kate’s night there. Two of Slocum’s militiamen told the court how Kate had lashed them when they tried to arrest her at the Colonel’s order. Slocum himself testified that he had heard Kate confess in Liberty Tavern’s taproom that she had helped Skinner escape. A coup de grace - if one was needed - was delivered by George Kennedy. His face still swollen from the beating he had received, he testified in a low defeated voice that Kate had voluntarily joined Skinner and his loyalists in the Shrewsbury swamp.

  My father tried the only possible defense - a woman’s weak, easily influenced judgment. In effect he said that women had no judgment at all, that they surrendered it to every man who winked at them. I happened to glance at Caroline Skinner, who sat among the spectators, while my father was making this argument. I was startled by the anger visible on her usually composed face. The defense made no impression on the judges or the spectators. The trial ended with Kate’s reputation in shreds and her guilt beyond question. The judges conferred and agreed that they could not afford to ignore such outrageous disloyalty. They sentenced Kate to receive thirty-nine lashes on her bare back at noon on the following day. Kate did not show an iota of emotion. We could only admire the stoicism of a Christian martyr, wasted on a bad cause.

  Later that night a note wrapped around a rock was flung through the bay window of Liberty Tavern’s taproom. It was a message from Anthony Skinner. He had heard about Kate’s sentence. Skinner swore before “the most high God” that the man who laid the whip to Kate’s back would forfeit his hand. It was a typical Skinner solution, meeting violence with worse violence. Jonathan Gifford showed the note to the judges when they arrived at the tavern the next morning. Lemuel Peters huffed that the people’s representatives could not allow themselves to be intimidated in the execution of their duty.

  “In this case,” said Dr. Davie, who was at the bar pouring himself a morning brandy, “execution should be tempered by mercy. What do you hope to accomplish by inflicting this brutal punishment on an eighteen-year-old girl? You will only make yourself and your cause an object of ridicule and disgust.”

  “You would do well to confine yourself to medical opinions, Doctor,” said Peters.

  “All right, here’s one,” said Davie. “You may kill her. I have seen a hundred lashes kill a man. Thirty-nine may well kill a woman.”

  Peters shook his head. “It is too late to change our minds now. We must show every man and woman in this state the kind of resolution displayed by the ancient Romans.”

  “I never heard of a Roman abusing a woman.”

  “Bring down the prisoner and let us proceed with the business.”

  A company of militia under Colonel Slocum’s command and about a hundred spectators were assembled in the yard. I was among them, I watched, numb with disbelief, while Kate was led from the tavern door. It was a gray cold day. She wore only the old blue housedress in the raw northeast wind. They tied her hands to one of the columns on the tavern porch and cut her dress up the back with a shears. Ten militiamen were ordered to step from the ranks and draw straws to see who would wield the lash. A husky farm boy named Dunlap drew the shortest straw. He said he would not do it; he had never struck a woman in his life. Colonel Slocum lectured him on his duty. The lad still refused. Slocum turned to his youngest son, Peter, who was about Dunlap’s age. He reluctantly picked up the short ugly whip, with its nine ugly tails.

  Kate cried out at the first blow. Then she did not make a sound. Many in the crowd watched with sick fascination as the whip fell again and again on that proud quivering back. I saw for the first time the hatred and envy that lurked beneath the surface of ordinary life. They were here to see Kate punished not for what she had done, but for what she was in their narrow eyes, a spoiled rich girl with bad morals.

  I could see that Peter Slocum was striking her with less than half his strength. Still the cat was taking a cruel toll of Kate’s flesh. The skin broke and bled. By the twentieth stroke, her hack was a mass of raw oozing welts. Pain engulfed her. She no longer knew where she was, what was happening. On the thirtieth stroke she fainted.

  Lemuel Peters, badly shaken - he had obviously never seen anyone whipped before - declared that justice had been done and commuted the rest of the sentence. Jonathan Gifford rushed to Kate, cut loose her hands, and carried her away. She was as pale and cold as a corpse. Upstairs Dr. Davie helped him force brandy down her throat to restore her, then held her arms while she underwent the final agony. Her father swabbed her back with brine - the standard treatment for lashed backs in the British army and navy. It prevented infection, but the salt water in the fresh wounds was hellishly painful.

  For the next two or three days, Kate was feverish to the point of delirium, yet it was almost impossible for her to sleep. Every time she moved, pain clawed at her back. Dr. Davie derided to try one of his unorthodox remedies from the medical practice of the previous century. Davie’s mother had been a Highland Scot. Half his head followed the scientific tradition of Edinburgh and the other half inclined toward the potions, charms, blessings, and curses of medieval medicine.. He had saved the dress stained with Kate’s blood. At the foot of her bed, he stirred into a bowl full of water something called the Powder of Sympathy, which turned the water bright green. He added a half-dozen strips of the dress. Within the hour, Kate’s pain eased, and by morning it was gone. It was my first glimpse of the power of suggestion as a medical remedy.

  Kate’s fever passed the following day. But she was far from cured. She stayed in bed for another week, face down like a corpse on a battlefield, staring silently into her pillow. Jonathan Gifford tried the obvious - and wrong - tactic of trying to discredit Anthony Skinner. He told her of Anthony’s cynical reaction to the letter Barney had carried to him. This only deepened Kate’s melancholy. She ate practically nothing and became alarmingly thin. Her father looked almost as haggard. In desperation, he begged Caroline to make another attempt to talk with Kate.

  At first Caroline was wary. She acted the sympathetic aunt, visiting a sick niece. Kate declined to respond to her small talk. Caroline decided to risk bluntness again.

  “What are you trying to do, kill your father?”

  “Kill him? What do you mean?” Kate answered in a leaden voice.

  “He eats no more than you. I don’t think he has slept an hour since you were whipped.”

  “Of course. I’ve disgraced him. I’ve failed him just like Mother failed him.”

  “How did she fail him?”

  “She didn’t. He failed her. He failed to love her for what she was. ”

  “What was she?”

  “A woman. A woman with a heart full of love, a woman who never found a man - worthy of her.”

  “Kate; I grew up with your mother. I freely admit I was envious of her. That was almost inevitable. She was five years older. I saw early that we were quite different people. Sarah was infinitely more enthusiastic. She won hearts more readily. She was always so ready to give hers. A lovely trait, but only if it is under some control, Kate. There is always the danger that it will become an extravagance, a thing we do for its own sake, for the glory or the pity or the sadness of it.”

  Caroline paced up and down the room for several moments trying to conceal her agitation. What she was saying went to the roots of her life. “That was your mother’s real flaw. In part it was our father’s fault. He goaded her to extremes with his awful abuse of our mother for not giving him a son. It was a bad match from the day of their wedding, as far as I can learn. But in the end, Kate, I believe that no one - not even a woman - can blame her fate on anyone but herself. Bound as we are by all the prejudice against us, we still have enough freedom to decide our destiny. But if you lose your faith in that - as your mother did - if you do not develop your mind as well as cultivate your heart, if you see yourself as nothing but a bundle of desirable flesh created to excite a man
for fifteen minutes twice a week - if that’s all you are, Kate, then everything depends on blind fatality, on whatever man happens to cross your path, and whether or not he chooses to be attracted to you. That is the way to desperation, Kate. You end up flinging your life away for a man who has no more use for you than – ”

  “The Viscount loved her. I’m sure he did. She wouldn’t have gone to Antigua if – ”

  “He did not love her. He wrote a letter to your father, after she died, swearing he had done his best to send her back. They say she died of fever. I think she died of embarrassment.”

  This was stunning news, exploding one of Kate’s most cherished romantic dreams. But she was not yet ready to surrender to her aunt’s realism.

  “She was driven to it. He drove her to it. The way he refused to forgive her. The man has no heart, Aunt Caroline.” She hesitated, remembering Jonathan Gifford’s tears the night before her whipping and plunged willfully to her conclusion. “He searches for one now and then. But he has no heart.”

  “You are wrong. I know you are wrong, Kate. When he came to me last month and pleaded with me to speak to you, if I ever heard love in a man’s voice, saw it on his face, I saw it then.”

  Stubborn disbelief still confronted Caroline. “Kate,” she burst out, “face the truth, for God’s sake. Your mother was a fool. A wild, wayward fool who never knew what she felt from one day to the next, who was sixteen years old until the day she died. You are going the same way, or worse. Are you proud of the fact that George Kemble asked the judges to forgive you because you were a typical woman, a creature with a weak will and no understanding? If you had any pride, Kate, any real pride in being a woman, you should have died of shame at those words. I almost did.”

  Caroline fled from the room, all the deepest, most disturbing emotions of her life thundering in her soul. Her suppressed hatred of her sister, her smoldering resentment against men’s treatment of women, and her forbidden yearning for Jonathan Gifford flashed like a series of tremendous lightning bolts across her moral landscape. Outside, one of our northeast storms shrouded the sky with gray and sent a chill wind moaning through the September trees. The blooming beauty of the rose garden was gone. Like a foretaste of fall, the delicate plants were wrapped in burlap, looking like blind mourning statues. An image of your soul, Mrs. Skinner, Caroline told herself as she walked along the bank of the little stream, struggling for calm.

  “How is our patient?”

  Jonathan Gifford’s voice made her start violently. He was the last person she wanted to see. He limped toward her, a serious smile on his face, apologizing for his dirty hands. “I was working in the greenhouse. I saw you come out.”

  Caroline nodded. She felt frozen by the fear that she might reveal to this man some of the feelings she had just confessed to Kate. “Our patient - our patient is not very well, either physically or spiritually.”

  “She still loves him?”

  “Who?”

  “Anthony.”

  “I don’t think - we didn’t even mention him. Kate is troubled by something - more serious.”

  “What is it?”

  “I - I’m not sure I can tell you. It has to do with - your wife - with Sarah.”

  Caroline’s heart was pounding. She felt perspiration sheening her forehead. Was she about to faint?

  “Oh,” said Jonathan Gifford, a stricken look on his face. “I know Kate and Kemble blame me for what happened. As I told you, there is some truth in it.”

  “Captain Gifford - ”

  How could she speak without confessing the wild, absurd, implausible, disgraceful love that was raging inside her? Was she going mad like the rest of the world?

  “I was never the husband Sarah wanted. That is the only defense I can make. We both discovered it - too late.”

  “Captain Gifford - She was my sister. I knew her well. Perhaps too well. She has paid a terrible price for her . . . That is why we both hesitate to speak ill of her. But it grieves me deeply to see you blame yourself.”

  Jonathan Gifford’s voice was husky with emotion. “Mrs. Skinner, your sympathy - means a great deal to me. But I have thought about it through more than one night. There’s some truth to the charge that I was - less than wholehearted. It is part of my nature and I am afraid part of my profession. A soldier learns very early to control his feelings. In the end he almost loses touch with them.”

  It was hopeless, Caroline told herself. Even in death Sarah was triumphant. She stared into the dark autumn waters of the brook. “I told Kate she is wrong. Wrong in what she thinks about Sarah. Wrong to imitate her. But of course she wouldn’t listen. Why should she, when it comes from me?”

  She wanted him to contradict those last words. She wanted him to ask her, at the very least, why she said them.

  But Jonathan Gifford only shook his head. “At least you told her the truth. We can’t do more than that.”

  “Yes.”

  She watched him limp away, back to his roses.

  I told her the truth, but not you. When can I tell you the truth? Never, she told her mournful heart, never.

  “NOW, BY GOD, we shall have the fight we have been waiting for. I kept Henrietta and the girls up all night making cartridges,” said Samson Tucker, taking a hefty swig of his tankard of Stewed Quaker. “Yes, by God, Washington has proved himself a general, has he not, Captain Gifford? Getting his tail out of that damn nest of Tories in New York and joining us here in New Jersey where men are ready to fight?”

  “I wish he had done it six months ago,” Jonathan Gifford said.

  “Ah, six months or six weeks, what difference does it make,” said. Samson, drawing a bead on an imaginary redcoat with an imaginary musket. “We are ready for’m one way or t’other.”

  “I hope you are ready for this,” said Nathaniel Fitzmorris in the doorway of the taproom. “The Continentals are retreating.”

  “Retreating,” said Samson dazedly. “Retreating where?”

  “New Brunswick, they say. Mayhap Philadelphia, for all they know. I brought some beeves and a wagonload of flour to the commissary at Amboy not two hours ago. They flung money in my face and said they had no time to slaughter the cattle. They would run in the midst of their train to Brunswick.”

  Fitzmorris turned to Jonathan Gifford. “How is Kate?” Natty was a married man, but Kate still owned a corner of his heart.

  “She’s better, thanks,” Jonathan Gifford said. Not many people even bothered to ask about Kate. Everyone was absorbed by the war. They rode or walked to Liberty Tavern every day for the latest rumors and reports. For weeks it had been bad news piled on worse. The American army was reeling from defeat to retreat to defeat. But Fitzmorris’ news was the worst we had heard. About a thousand regulars had been guarding the coast against invasion between Elizabethtown and Sandy Hook. Our militia had been depending on them to bear the brunt of any British assault.

  “Retreating,” cried Samson, and leaving us without an army? Leaving us to fight the Foot Guards and the Royal Welsh and the King’s Own? They’ll be ashore at Amboy before the week is up when they hear the place is undefended.”

  “Unless we go down to stop them,” Jonathan Gifford said.

  “We?” said Samson. “If you’re joking, Captain Gifford, ‘tis not the time for it. God’s bones, we don’t even have a cannon in the whole district. They will haul them line-of-battle ships against the shore and let loose a broadside that will blow us all to Burlington.”

  Lemuel Peters burst into the taproom, fear pulsing in his bulging eyes and twitching mouth. “The Continentals. I just saw them on the road.”

  “They are concentrating in New Brunswick,” Jonathan Gifford said. “I suppose Washington has no other choice. Abel Aikin tells me lie brought only three thousand men with him.”

  “Washington should be court-martialed and shot,” Peters squawked. “The man is playing a traitor’s game. He gave New York to the British. Now he’s giving them New Jersey.”

  “
There is not much a general can do when his men won’t fight,” Jonathan Gifford said. “I read you that letter Kemble wrote after the rout at Kip’s Bay.”

  “He should have shot those damn Connecticut cowards wholesale. That’s what a real general- would have done,” Peters said. “That’s what Hancock would have done. When I was at Harvard, I saw him drill the Boston Cadets - the best uniformed militia in America.”

  “Uniforms don’t win battles,” Jonathan Gifford said. “You had better ride down and tell Colonel Slocum this news. I imagine they will be calling out the regiment.”

  A half-hour later we stood in the tavern yard and watched the Continental troops trudge past us to New Brunswick. They looked dispirited and beaten. Among them were John Fleming and his Virginia regiment. Captain Fleming concentrated grimly on keeping his men in ranks and did not even glance in the direction of Liberty Tavern. He had heard about Kate.

  Other officers were not so diligent. Dozens of stragglers drifted into the tavern for as much rum as they could gulp. They talked bitterly of being “sold” by Washington and the other generals.

  The next day we heard from New Brunswick that when they reached that town they took over every tavern and got so disgracefully drunk they turned to rioting and rape. Only violent efforts on the part of their officers restored some semblance of order.

  The same day, General Washington, backed by Governor Livingston and the legislature, issued a call for every man on the militia rolls in New Jersey to join the army at New Brunswick without a moment’s delay. Dispatch riders posted a copy of the proclamation on the door of Liberty Tavern. Few paid attention to it. In the evening Nat Fitzmorris stopped at the tavern with ten of his company - all he could persuade to follow him. Jonathan Gifford filled their canteens with rum and wished them luck. Colonel Slocum wore out two horses racing through the countryside in search of his regiment, but not even his most ferocious roars had much effect.