The Heart of Liberty

by Thomas Fleming

  “I see you are from New England,” Yates said. “What was your family name?”

  “Oliver,” blazed my mother.

  Yates groaned like a branded Sinner. “You are one of that nest of Tory vipers that was feeding on the vitals of poor people, swilling from the public trough like the King’s favorite hogs for generation after generation? Why, madam, hearing that inspires my sword to wander again.”

  He whipped his weapon from his scabbard and gouged the blue damask cushion of one of our Philadelphia sofas down the middle from left to right.

  My mother ran wailing from the room.

  “You may have a legal right to confiscate my property, Major,” my father said. “How do you justify this destruction?”

  “Why, this is a Tory house,” Yates said. “We have been sent down here to prosecute you vermin. It is our duty to rip up every cursed cushion in this house. That is where you are likely to be concealing secret messages, money to recruit your Satan-loving traitors. Get to work, men.”

  We stood there and watched them rip apart the cushions of every piece of furniture in the parlor, the dining room, the study, Yates with his sword, the men with their bayonets. My father’s lips were trembling. Any moment I thought he would collapse.

  “Upstairs, men, and do the same job in their bedrooms,” Yates said.

  Within sixty seconds my sister Sally started screaming. One of the men, a stocky fellow with an inch of dirt on his face, came back downstairs to tell us that the Tory bitch had locked herself in her room. Should they knock down the door? I went upstairs and talked Sally into unlocking the door. She stood there whimpering while they ripped her feather bed apart with their bayonets and flung open the chest where she stored her gowns.

  “By Beelzebub, look at this here finery,” said their leader, hauling out satin and silk and damask ball gowns. “If that ain’t the most sinful stuff I’ve ever seen, my name ain’t Silas Gobble. I think I’ll take this one for my old lady.”

  They each decided to take one for their old ladies.

  Sally went almost berserk with rage. “That’s stealing,” she screamed. “Stealing.”

  Silas Gobble gave her a Yankee horselaugh. “You can’t steal from a Tory, hussy, don’t you know that? We are confiscatin’ enemy property here.”

  “Traitors’ property,” said the stocky fellow with the dirt on his face.

  Downstairs we found my father watching Major Yates hacking out of the frame the portrait of my great-grandfather, the first Kemble to come to America. The Major wanted the frame but not the painting. Next, he ordered the men to roll up the Kirman rug on the floor.

  “That rug is worth five times the fine you are supposedly collecting, Major,” my father said.

  Deputy Commissary Beebe and Deputy Quartermaster Beatty had by this time returned from the barns and were available for consultation. They estimated the value of the rug at $50. I informed the Major that his men had just stolen twelve dresses from my sister. “That is their affair,” I was told.

  The Major wanted to know where our silver plate was. “That is where we shall make up the balance of this fine,” he said.

  “The British stole it,” my father said.

  Actually it was well buried behind the barn along with our candlesticks, our tea service, my mother’s jewelry, and our Meissen china.

  The Major preached a little sermon on the sinfulness of lying and ordered his men to roll up the Persian rugs in the dining room and study. He took a white and gold looking glass from the hall and the white and gold damask draperies from the parlor and the chandelier of Irish cut glass from the dining room. You may wonder how I can remember these details with such exactitude after fifty years. My father methodically made an inventory of his losses. I have a copy of that inventory before me as I write this.

  Outside, the Major and his men looted our smokehouse and hen house and slaughtered one of our prime sows for future consumption. As an afterthought, the Major took my sister Sally’s pet goat and tied it to the rear of the last wagon. Deputies Beebe and Beatty handed my father several hundred paper dollars, mounted their wagons, and headed back to their camp near Liberty Tavern. We stood on the steps watching them.

  “Now you know how the Romans felt when the barbarians arrived, Jemmy,” my father said.

  One of the soldiers bringing up the rear fell out of the column and began loading his gun. We watched, not quite believing what we saw. He raised the gun, aimed it at the house, and pulled the trigger. We all flinched with terror, thinking he was firing at us. But the bullet crashed through the dining room window. Every one laughed uproariously at our fright. We could hear them laughing, and Sally’s goat bleating in a kind of counterpoint until they were out of sight on the main road.

  That night I rode down to Liberty Tavern and told the story to Kemble and Jonathan Gifford. Kemble listened with a mournful expression on his face. “You must keep it quiet, Jemmy, for the sake of the Cause,” he said. “There are too many people in this neighborhood who still respect your father. This sort of thing will arouse sympathy for him. And - ”

  “You are talking damn nonsense, Kemble,” said Jonathan Gifford. “Major Yates is an officer in the Continental army. You tell your father to make an inventory of what they stole and send it to General Washington. I will be very surprised if he does not court-martial Major Yates.”

  This nasty argument was interrupted by the arrival of Slocum’s Scottish partner, Andrew McIntosh. He was in an extremely good mood, and ordered himself a bottle of the best Madeira in the house and a dinner of jugged hare and beef a la mode. They were Liberty Tavern specialties. I especially loved the beef a la mode, which was served in a ragout of sweetbreads, oysters, and mushrooms.

  McIntosh ate like a man ten times his size. As he demolished the Madeira, he grew talkative, for a Scotsman.

  “I hate to tell ye this, Gifford, no doubt it will give ye indigestion for the rest of the week,” he said in his squeaky burr. “But we sold our first salt at New Brunswick yesterday. Forty-five dollars a bushel, Gifford. How d’ye like that? Twenty-eight thousand dollars we cleared. How’s that for dooin’ business?”

  “Why, I don’t know,” Jonathan Gifford said. “There was a man in here yesterday with a wagon and a team of half-dead horses. He’d come all the way from the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania he said, looking for salt. They’ll starve to death this winter, if he doesn’t come back with the wagon full of it. They’d given him all the money they had in their township. The fellow was practically in tears. He asked me if I knew where he could get salt at a decent price. He said it was going for forty-five dollars a bushel in New Brunswick. lie couldn’t fill a third of his wagon at that price. I told him he might as well buy; and I loaned him the difference at six per cent.”

  “From the Wyoming,” said McIntosh. “You’ll never see your money, Gifford. I’ll be damned if I know how ye stay in business if that’s what ye do with it. I traded with them in the valley before the war. They’re poor as Job on his dunghill. All ye’ll get will be excuses, and lucky ye’ll be to get them.”

  “Congress set the price of salt at fifteen dollars a bushel.”

  “Let Congress set till doomsday. The price will follow the market,” McIntosh said.

  “But if a man can’t pay, does that mean his family will starve this winter? This fellow I’m talking about was as honest a Whig as ever lived. He had a son in the Continental army.”

  “That’s a question better answered by a parson,” said McIntosh, finishing his Madeira. He reached into his satchel and spread three or four of his twenty-eight thousand dollars on the table and called for his horse.

  One of Major Yates’s captains burst into the taproom bawling for Kemble Stapleton. Kemble identified himself. “The Major says you must call out your militia. There’s a Tory army in the Navesink. Two thousand men, the report says.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Jonathan Gifford said. “No general would send two thousand men anywhere this late i
n the year.” He walked to the window and eyed the gray November sky. “All you need is a little rain and sleet to put half your men in sickbeds. There are a couple of saltworks on the Navesink, aren’t there?”

  “At least two, possibly three. I haven’t been down that way in a month,” Kemble said.

  “That’s what they’re after.”

  “What the devil,” squawked McIntosh. “Attacking saltworks. The buggers show no quarter, do they?”

  “I’m afraid it’s that kind of war,” Jonathan Gifford said. “There’s no way you can defend those places, unless you build a fort around them, which would eat into your profits, wouldn’t it, Mr. McIntosh?”

  “It certainly would,” said McIntosh. “Get me my horse. I moost get this news to General Slocum.”

  Jonathan Gifford was right about the raiders on the Navesink. Anthony Skinner had led a mixed force of regulars and loyalists from New York. There were two hundred of them, not two thousand, a pretty example of how fear and rumor combine to confuse the truth in war. They burned the saltworks on the Navesink and Skinner left behind him a proclamation, denouncing speculators who were feeding on the vitals of the country.

  Skinner and his troops departed from that largely loyalist neighborhood without anyone firing a shot at them. Major Yates and his brave Yankees marched desultorily in their direction, but made sure they were long gone when they arrived. Although no one but the speculators who had invested several thousands in the construction of their saltworks suffered, everyone in the county was struck by the obvious fact that our Continental regiment did not exactly guarantee us protection against loyalist raiders. This feeling did not decrease when Major Yates and his infantry failed to return from their march to the Navesink.

  “Maybe they went all the way to Little Egg Harbor and shipped out on privateers,” Jonathan Gifford said. “They seem more interested in stealing than fighting.”

  “Tis no joke to Deputies Beatty and Beebe. They are afraid to venture more than a mile from here without an escort,” said Samson Tucker. “To hear them talk, you would think the Tories had fangs a foot long and dined on human flesh.”

  Days, then a week passed without a word from or a sign of our Yankee Continentals. The southern part of the county seemed to have swallowed them. A freeze filled the rivers and the Atlantic with ice, making us all but immune to Tory raids. Most people began preparing for Christmas and forgot about our missing protectors. Even my father, once he had sent off letters of protest to General Washington and Governor Livingston, agreed it was time to try to forget the war for a few weeks.

  At Liberty Tavern Kate neglected Lieutenant Rawdon to spend most of the time in the kitchen with our cooks, Molly and Bertha, boiling calves’ feet and rubbing them through a colander for mince pies, her specialty. There was mace to pound, suet to chop, cloves and nutmeg to be added in delicate balance - all this for the mincemeat. There were plum and Yorkshire puddings, Christmas pies and fruitcakes baking in the huge kitchen oven. For years every member of the family had gotten one of the tavern’s fruitcakes, made with four pounds of butter, the same weight of currants, thirty eggs, a pint of brandy. No matter how much you ate, they always seemed to last until Easter.

  Even Kemble softened under the influence of the rich odors wafting through the tavern from the kitchen. But he was abruptly returned to the reality of the war by a visit from a Quaker farmer, George Evans. His son Emmanuel had volunteered to join Slocum for service in the saltworks. His father had given permission for him to go. He was glad to have a member of his family do something for the country that did not involve bearing arms.

  “The lad has come home more dead than alive. Half starved, his arm turned black and blue from a burn. He tells of beatings and threats, working night and day.”

  Kemble called for Dr. Davie, and they rode down to the Evans farm in the chaise. There they found the father’s description was no exaggeration. Emmanuel was a wan skeleton. Dr. Davie had to cut open his arm and clear out a pint of infected matter. Kemble asked him to describe life at the saltworks.

  The fires must go day and night, the General says, so the place is always full of smoke. They fill the kettles to the top and the water boils over. That is how I got my burn. We would all come home in a minute, but the soldiers won’t let us.”

  “What soldiers?”

  “The Yankees. They came down to guard the place.”

  Without saying a word to his father, Kemble mounted his horse and rode south to see for himself. He had no difficulty finding the Union Salt Works. A column of smoke rose into the gray December sky three miles up the Manasquan River. As he dismounted, he was challenged by a Yankee sentry who stood before the gate of a flimsy-looking stockade that surrounded the works on three sides. Kemble identified himself and asked to see General Slocum. In sixty seconds he was in the General’s office receiving a hearty welcome.

  Slocum was wearing greasy leather breeches, a sad-colored coat out at the elbows, and the dirtiest shirt Kemble had ever seen. “Well, if it ain’t the young squire,” he roared. “What brings you down here on such a fine cold day? Has your father decided to put some money into our little business? Well, tell him it’s too late. But if he wants, I’ll let him go a fourth share in a privateer we’ve got on the stocks at Little Egg Harbor. To be named Black Daniel. How do you like that? Captain Hope Willets commands.”

  “I bring no money, General. I found myself rambling down this way and thought I would stop and see how you and the men do.”

  “We are thriving,” said Slocum. “Let me show you around.”

  Their first stop was the boiling house. There Kemble gazed in awe at five copper and four iron pans, each weighing upwards of three thousand pounds. The copper pans were fifteen feet across. Beneath each pan was a brick furnace which sweaty, sooty militiamen stoked with wood or peat bricks. Next door to the boiling house was a storehouse which could hold eight hundred bushels of salt and next to that a pump house which gulped the water from the river into the boiling pans or into a huge covered cistern which held about a hundred and fifty hogsheads of water. There were also stables, a dwelling house, a smokehouse, and two barracks. It was a veritable industrial colony.

  “How do the men like the work?” Kemble asked as they walked back to Slocum’s office.

  “I hear no complaints. I believe our rations are as good or better than the Continental army.”

  As Slocum spoke, about two dozen men trudged in the gate hauling carts of wood they had just finished chopping. They were escorted by a dozen Yankee Continentals with muskets. The wood choppers looked weary and disgruntled. When they saw Kemble their expressions changed to active dislike. One of them, a husky eighteen-year-old named Bayles Platt, spit on the ground near Kemble’s feet as they passed.

  Slocum whirled and hauled him out of the column by his collar. “What the hell did you mean by that?”

  “Why nothing, General, nothing at all,” said Platt.

  “If you ever do anything like that again, you will go on bread and water. Remember, this is the army. You are under my command.”

  “Why did he do that, General?” Kemble asked, as Platt rejoined the column.

  “He is a damned troublemaker,” Slocum said. “We will have to give him a taste of the lash before long.”

  “Emmanuel Evans did not seem to like the work down here, General.”

  “Oh, that fellow. I sent him home. He is like every damn Quaker I ever met. God himself won’t be able to keep them Quakers happy in paradise, if they ever get there. Personally I think they will all keep the father of discontent company down you know where.”

  “Do the men share in your profits, General?”

  “What the devil are you talking about?” Slocum snapped. “They are here to serve their country as soldiers. They are producing a commodity which the army and the nation need as badly as gunpowder.”

  “As I understand it,” said Kemble in a voice that could be heard a mile down the Manasquan River, “you made
twenty-eight thousand dollars on your first shipment. I heard your partner McIntosh telling this to my father last week. Where did that money go, General Slocum? In your pocket and McIntosh’s pocket? Do the honorable Congress and General Washington get a share?”

  “Why, goddamn you,” roared Slocum, “I’m going to put you under arrest. No man can insult General Washington in my presence.”

  “I had no intention of insulting General Washington,” said Kemble, rattled by this unexpected tactic.

  “You have insulted him and I intend to arrest you for it” Slocum shouted. “Major Yates, come here this instant, will you please?”

  Major Yates emerged from the barracks. His eyes clouded with dislike when he saw Kemble. He did not forget those who cast slurs on Massachusetts.

  “Major, this fellow has ridden all the way from Middletown to disrupt the saltworks,” Slocum said. “He has accused General Washington of peculation in its profits. I am asking you to witness his damn Tory talk. Now repeat what you just asked me about General Washington.”

  “I asked you how much money you were making from this salt-works,” Kemble said. “My remark about General Washington was sarcasm.”

  “But you did ask it, you did ask me what General Washington’s profits were?”

  “I’m more interested in yours.”

  “Did you hear him, Major?” cried Slocum. “He’s at it again, trying to bait me into smearing General Washington’s name. Who sent you down here, old Cortland Skinner himself? Damn me if you haven’t turned your coat or started working both sides like your father. What do you think, Major?”

  “A suspicious character, General, no doubt,” said Major Yates. “What the devil are you doing down here?” Kemble shouted at Yates. “You were sent to guard the people of Monmouth County, not this saltworks.”

  “Why this fellow is a marvel, General, he has more brass than a nine-pounder,” Yates droned. “He wants to run your saltworks and my regiment all at once.”

  “How much money is he paying you?” Kemble asked.