The Heart of Liberty

by Thomas Fleming

  “What is the alternative?”

  “Wait. The war cannot last another year, now that we have the French on our side. In the meantime, let me be your pupil. I would like to be more than a wife to you. I would like to be your partner in medicine. Especially in treating women and infants. Don’t laugh at me – .”

  “I like the idea. But what if the war ends tomorrow?”

  “I would still like a year of study before I begin rocking cradles.

  Nature complicates life for us more than for you, Thomas.” “Is there any other reason for waiting, Kate?”

  They both knew what he meant. Anthony Skinner was still writing forlorn passionate letters to her from New York. There was not even a trace of hesitation in Kate’s answer.

  “None.”

  “All right,” Rawdon said. “But let me warn you that you will be studying with the most dangerous professor of anatomy in the history of medicine.”

  There was only one thing wrong with this arrangement. The war showed no sign of ending. Kate’s confidence in victory within twelve months was the product of our first euphoria over the French alliance. She had forgotten Caroline’s prediction, that France’s entry into the war would arouse British patriotism. She was also out of touch with what the French were doing - or rather not doing - to help us. Kate would have gotten a far different vision of the future if she visited Liberty Tavern’s taproom as I did, the night the hospital closed.

  Everyone was sitting around in a fog of gloom. The previous night, the British and Tories had landed on Middletown Point and burned the house and barns of John Burrows, our so-called “corn king.” He had made a tidy fortune buying corn from all corners (including our crooked commissaries) the previous year and reselling it when the price rose. Dozens of farmers had sold him their corn this year on promissory notes that offered them twice the market price, betting that old John would repeat the performance. Instead, Anthony Skinner and his loyalists had loaded John and his corn into their boats. Burrows was in a British prison and Skinner and company were probably counting the hard money they had made selling the corn to the British army in New York. General Slocum, who was (according to rumor) a silent partner of Burrows, tried to call out the regiment. No more than one hundred men responded. They tiptoed down to Middletown Point, fired a round, and ran for their lives when the loyalists came after them three hundred strong.

  “Where is that damned French fleet?” Samson Tucker groaned. “Why ain’t they protecting our coast?”

  Nat Fitzmorris shook his head. The ravages of eighteen months in a British prison were all too visible on his face. He had been exchanged about a month ago.

  “They’re doing just what the limeys in New York said they’d do,” Nat said. “Caress us until we rejected the peace offer and then sail for the West Indies.”

  No longer were toasts being drunk to Louis XVI. Our disillusion with our French allies was intense. Historians will undoubtedly find many arguments for their strategy. We only knew that our soaring hopes of an early end to the war had looped to the ground like boyish kites in a sudden calm.

  First the confident talk of capturing the British army in New York went glimmering when the French admiral declined to risk his ships to batter his way past the British men-of-war blocking the Narrows. Next the attempt to capture the British garrison in Rhode Island collapsed when the admiral could not agree on tactics with the American general, John Sullivan. Whereupon the French fleet had departed for the West Indies to grab off a few sugar islands, leaving us exactly where we were in 1776, with the royal army breathing down our throats from New York and Staten Island. To complete our sense of abandonment, Washington recalled Major Yates and his regulars to the dwindling main army.

  Infuriated by Congress’s rejection of the King’s peace offer, loyalists and regulars dismissed all hope of reconciliation and launched a war of unrelenting destruction. We in New Jersey were their logical - that is to say nearest targets. They struck almost at will up and down our long, exposed coast, burning and looting with savage energy. Not a few previously staunch Whigs lost heart and made secret agreements with the British to lapse into neutrality for a guarantee of protection. Even among those who did not “take a protection,” to use the phrase of the day, despair amounting to collapse prevailed. Many abandoned their farms and moved west, considering the Indians a lesser risk than our implacable royal enemies. Recruiting officers who appeared in the taproom were insulted to their faces and were lucky to get away without physical bruises.

  Jonathan Gifford fought this undertow of defeatism with all his strength. Again and again he repeated a favorite maxim of Washington’s - “We cannot lose as long as we stay in the game.” But he could not control another major cause of our collapse - which ironically undercut his influence: our money.

  In the closing months of 1778, the Continental dollar began to sink in value with frightening rapidity. By mid-1779 it had dwindled away until it took twenty Continentals to buy what one had bought in 1776. The Congress printing presses in Philadelphia continued to spew a river of dollars into the nation, making the money in circulation worth even less. For a man in business like Jonathan Gifford, this meant the price of everything went up in great leaps. A quart of flip which cost a shilling - about twenty cents - in 1776 now cost two dollars. The price of food became even more outrageous. The British on Staten Island and in New York continued to buy tons of food from our loyalist neighbors, paying hard money - which made patriot farmers demand extortionate amounts of paper money for their meat and grain.

  It was difficult enough for Jonathan Gifford to endure the unpopularity and accusations of profiteering that the soaring prices brought down on him. He also took an economic beating from his fellow patriots. As I mentioned earlier, he was, like many tavern keepers, a banker to farmers in the neighborhood, loaning them cash when they ran short. Sometimes the sums amounted to a mortgage on a man’s farm. When the Revolution broke out and the royal courts were suspended, it became impossible to collect many of these debts. Jonathan Gifford never dunned a single man as far as I know. In a time of social convulsion one could not expect debts to be paid. More than one man had borrowed additional sums from him to replace a burned house or barn or a stolen wagon or a runaway slave.

  With Deputy Commissary Beebe and Deputy Quartermaster Beatty flooding the district with Continental dollars to buy supplies for the American army, camped not far away at Middlebrook, more than one man decided there was nothing wrong with paying off his debt in this almost make-believe money. They insisted on their right to pay at 1776 ratios, roundly declaring it was Jonathan Gifford’s patriotic duty to accept Continental money at its face value. Hadn’t Congress said so? Jonathan Gifford could only swallow hard and accept the bundle of bills the man was handing him. Some refused to take such shameful advantage of him, I’m happy to say. Samson Tucker, for instance, denounced those who were doing it one night in the taproom, in stentorian tones. But there was a formidable phalanx around Daniel Slocum, who whispered behind Jonathan Gifford’s back about the profits he was making from Kemble Manor and the tavern. All this justified paying debts to “the Englishman” with cheap money.

  Among those who began to strut in Slocum’s entourage were such discredited patriots as our turncoat committeemen, Lemuel Peters and Ambrose Cotter. They had taken advantage of an offer made by Washington to give those who had succumbed to British pardons a chance to recant. But for a year they had cowered on their farms, shunning and being shunned by their neighbors. Now the general malaise induced by our French hangover enabled them to emerge without meeting the slightest odium.

  There was no local spokesman to uphold the purity of the Cause. We were left with Daniel, Slocum and his venal clan for leaders. Jonathan Gifford had hoped that Slocum could be defeated at the polls in the summer of 1778. His profiteering at his saltworks, his illegal land-grabbing - he had purchased the estate of another leading loyalist, John Taylor, in an equally fraudulent sale only a month after C
aptain Gifford had frustrated his attempt to seize Kemble Manor - the rapacity with which he collected militia fines had antagonized a substantial bloc of voters. But we needed Kemble and the power of his name to rally this formless group. Only his angry rhetoric could have given them the courage to withstand Slocum’s bullying.

  Kemble was a brooding hermit, seldom emerging from his room except to wander through the woods or along the shore like a solitary leper. Night after night, as he bolted the front door, Jonathan Gifford heard his son’s footsteps in the room above the entrance hall, pacing up and down, up and down.

  Kemble was experiencing something Americans cannot endure - failure. Someone had to be blamed for it - that is the way Americans think. Since there was no one else available, Kemble blamed himself - another common American mental contortion. Europeans with their sense of history’s rises and falls, idiosyncrasies and absurdities, find this difficult to comprehend.

  Jonathan Gifford had discussed Kemble with Caroline several times in the previous year. Carefully, without ruffling Captain Gifford’s formidable temper, she had pointed out to him his tendency to give too much advice. No matter that it was good advice, Kemble felt smothered by it. After the Monmouth tragedy she felt that the situation was too serious to be diplomatic. She saw how hurt Jonathan Gifford was, how much anger was mixed with his love for his son. She urged a dangerous solution.

  “You must go to him, Jonathan. You must take the risk of more insults.”

  Jonathan Gifford’s face darkened. He shook his bead. “I have had enough of that - that shit,” he said.

  “There is no other way. I was able to talk to Kate - as one woman to another woman. I don’t know what one man says to another man at a time like this. But you have to try, Jonathan.”

  Captain Gifford thought about those words for a week. He was still thinking about them as be knocked on Kemble’s door. You are a damn fool -woman’s advice - what does she know? Fragments of negative thoughts skittered through his mind.

  “Who-is it?”

  “Me - your - your father. Can I come in?”

  “Why not?”

  Kemble stood with his back to him, staring out the window into the darkness. There were no words in Jonathan Gifford’s mind. For a moment he almost panicked.

  “I’ve got some news you’ll enjoy. The British have burned Slocum’s saltworks.”

  “Oh.”

  “They sailed right up the Manasquan. No one fired a shot at them.”

  “Oh”

  “There are plenty of other saltworks. I think we are free to gloat, don’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  There was a long silence.

  “You don’t sleep well.”

  “No. How do you know?”

  “I see the light in your window.”..

  Another long silence.

  “Why can’t you sleep?” Kemble asked.

  “I keep thinking about you.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t believe what you’re doing.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “Quitting.”

  “If the militia is called out, I will march.”

  “I’m not talking about that. Any fool can do that. I’m talking about being a leader.”

  Kemble laughed. “How can you even use that word - for me?”

  “Because that’s what you’ve been. You’ve been a leader for the people around here - and a pretty good one. I didn’t agree with everything you said or did - but that’s to be expected. The situation is so new, so strange. A war and a revolution in one bottle - but now when your friends need you - when your country - ”

  Kemble was no longer listening. He was letting his eyes drown in the darkness outside the window. For a moment Jonathan Gifford saw him dissolving into that darkness.

  “Goddamn it,” he roared in a voice that woke sleepers throughout Liberty Tavern. “Do you think you’re the only one who’s ever lost men in battle? The only one who’s ever tormented himself about it? See this knee? Every time I limp on it, I’m reminded of a worse failure. There was a Spanish strong point outside Havana that had been blocking our advance all during the siege. I convinced our colonel we could storm it by night. I was wrong. I lost half my company. My lieutenant, a close friend, was killed. And my ensign, a boy only seventeen. The next day the Spanish surrendered. Our attack had nothing to do with it. They were starving. All those deaths - were wasted. I wasted them. Oh, son - ”

  Kemble was stunned to see tears in his father’s eyes. They were deep in it now, that dark world of pain and loss that surrounds the glittering panoply of war. Jonathan Gifford was entering it again, facing the dead men and the blood and the grief, to drag Kemble back into the light before the darkness swallowed him. He was dealing with feelings too deep for an inarticulate man to express. Kemble could not see the connection between him and that long-dead boy Captain Gifford had mourned in Havana, could not understand or even hear the spiritual resonance in that word “son.” But the violence of his father’s feelings penetrated his despair.

  “All right,” he said. “All right. I will stay in the game.”

  The bitter grudging tone made it clear that it was a minimum concession. Kemble could not free himself from his obsessive indictment of this man. He refused to heed Jonathan Gifford’s urgings to return to active leadership in our county - which practically guaranteed our decline into apathy. Slocum’s conduct - or the lack of it - at Monmouth had destroyed the little popularity he had left. But Kemble turned his back on our smaller world and rode over to Washington’s headquarters in the nearby village of Raritan to offer the General his services.

  This was primary among the several reasons why Liberty Tavern became a headquarters for American intelligence agents in the winter of 1779. Another reason was the parlous state of the American army. To stay in the game, Washington had to know what the British were doing and thinking. His army had dwindled to the point where a single defeat would have shattered the. Cause.

  By this time the General had become a spymaster extraordinary. He had a half-dozen networks operating on Long Island and Staten Island and in New York City. Since New Jersey swarmed with British spies, couriers from these networks could not chance being recognized entering or leaving the American camp.

  One morning General Washington rode down our way, seemingly out for nothing more than a little exercise. He stopped at Liberty Tavern for coffee and in five minutes’ conversation with Jonathan Gifford arranged for couriers to leave their messages with him. Kemble took them on the last stage of their journey to the Wallace house, where he often delivered them to Washington personally. In the course of a few months, he got to know the General well. The next step was almost inevitable.

  In the spring of 1779, Washington stopped at the tavern at his usual early hour - about seven-fifteen - and sat down to coffee with Jonathan Gifford. They talked for a few minutes about the war. Washington was gloomy. There seemed to be no hope of raising enough men to drive the British out of New York. Then the General asked, “Does your son still have good nerves?”

  “I would say so.”

  “I need someone to visit a friend in New York, immediately.”

  “There are refugees there - friends from New Jersey - who might recognize him.”

  “We will give him a disguise - some forged papers.”

  The thought of Kemble dying a spy’s death made Jonathan Gifford hesitate.

  “He wants to go,” General Washington said.

  “I’m not surprised at that.”

  “I thought you should have - a veto.”

  “I appreciate that very much, General,” Jonathan Gifford said. “But he is a man in his own right. He must make his own decision.”

  “I wish we had more like him.”

  Washington told Jonathan Gifford how Kemble had ridden into his headquarters on Christmas Day, 1776, and volunteered to cross the Delaware with him. “There were men with rank - high rank - who found it convenient to f
all sick that day.”

  “He has never said a word to me about this, General. I am glad - proud - to know it,” Jonathan Gifford said, his voice husky with feeling.

  Like Captain Gifford, Washington had a stepson and no natural children. But his stepson sat home on his plantation, contributing nothing to the war. His mother was said to dote on him so much, the. General could not bring himself to insist on his service. Perhaps this was why he offered Jonathan Gifford a veto. Perhaps he also wanted to study a little more closely this ex-British officer who was becoming an important part of his intelligence system.

  They talked for several more minutes about the war. Washington candidly admitted to Captain Gifford that his “greatest mistake” was not insisting on the right to recruit a thirty-thousand man army for the duration of the war when patriotism was burning fervently in 1775. “I keep saying that we cannot lose this thing, as long as we stay in the game. But between you and me, Captain, I worry about doing even that much.”

  Jonathan Gifford was loath to put another burden on. Washington’s mind. But he could not resist talking frankly to him about the situation in south Jersey. He bluntly placed the blame for the widespread disaffection and apathy on Daniel Slocum. Washington sighed. “Your son has, hinted as much to me. But the army cannot interfere in the politics of New Jersey. I have no authority over General Slocum.” For a moment Washington’s face became saturnine. “I could name you Slocum’s counterpart in. Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland. I hope the time will come when we can root out such men.”

  “There is one thing you could do, General,” Jonathan Gifford said. He described Major Yates’s rampage in my father’s house and urged Washington to court-martial him. Washington brought his fist down on the table and made a sulphurous comment about thieving Yankees. He swore (literally) that he had never seen my father’s complaining letters. (An officious aide, perhaps cajoled by Daniel Slocum, had apparently pigeonholed them.) The General rode back to his headquarters at Raritan, and a court-martial board was hearing testimony against Major Yates within the week. My father and I were the chief witnesses. In spite of the Major’s plea that he was only doing the Lord’s work, he was found guilty of looting and cashiered,