The Heart of Liberty

by Thomas Fleming

  We marched north, with Kemble and Slocum riding at the head of the regiment. It was past noon when we reached the battlefield. All morning the New Jersey Continentals and the Essex County militia had been fighting the British in the village of Connecticut Farms. As we arrived, the entire British army of six thousand men was beginning an aggressive advance. Kemble and Slocum galloped to the center of the American line and found General Maxwell’s command post on a hill near a white steepled church.

  The General greeted Kemble with a grim nod. “Don’t tell the you’ve brought Slocum and his heroes with you.”

  “Three hundred of them, General.”

  “Well, this excuse for a soldier won’t command them as long as I am in charge of this fight,” Maxwell said, glaring at Slocum. “He was supposed to support me at Germantown. He got lost until the shooting was long over. At Monmouth he never came at all.”

  Slocum mumbled something about a fog at Germantown. Maxwell snorted and offered Kemble a drink of rum from a leather flask in his saddlebags. Kemble politely declined and said, “My father - Captain Gifford - thought you would give us a regular officer.”

  Maxwell looked almost agreeable and inquired about Jonathan Gifford’s health. Kemble said he was well, except for his crippled knee, which was why he was not with them on the battlefield. It was an unreal conversation, with cannon booming, muskets crashing only a few hundred yards away.

  General Maxwell took a hefty snort of rum and was putting the bottle back in his saddlebags when his huge aide, Major Aaron Ogden, came racing up on a lathered horse to tell him that the Essex militia were giving way on the right.

  Maxwell cursed spectacularly for a full minute. “Well, you are in luck, Ogden, this fellow here has brought you another three hundred sprinters. Do what you can with them. You,” the General added, pointing to Kemble, “shall act as his second-in-command. As for you, Slocum, go find General Washington and kiss his ass. That is the only thing you are good at.”

  Choking with rage, Slocum wheeled his horse and rode away. Maxwell pointed to a long narrow defile thick with gunsmoke. Shadowy figures moved through the haze. At times the firing was continuous. “My regulars can hold them down there for another hour or two if they don’t flank us,” Maxwell said.

  He whipped a map from his saddlebag and began discussing it with Ogden. Kemble could make nothing out of it. But to the two regulars it was a battle plan. For the first time Kemble was seeing what his father meant when he talked about the importance of military knowledge.

  “Take this farmhouse and barns, first, there’s good cover there.” Their fingers traced swift lines across the map anticipating the enemy’s movements as well as their own.

  “Have you ever commanded militia?” Maxwell asked Kemble as he put away the map.

  “Not really. I am not a trained soldier.”

  “You have lots of company. The trick is to get them to retreat without running away. That is the most you can hope for. Don’t ask them to attack. They can’t do it. They must have woods or some fences to fight behind or they won’t stand at all. If the other fellows come at you with the bayonet, give them one volley and get out of there. But King George’s boys haven’t shown much appetite for that sort of thing today. They want to keep their casualties low. They are as worn out by this damn war as we are.”

  Kemble led Major Ogden to the woods where we were resting from our forced march. Within ten minutes we were fighting two British regiments in and around a deserted farmhouse and its barns. As General Maxwell predicted, the redcoats showed no appetite for charging us. They had long since abandoned those Bunker Hill tactics. Instead, they wheeled companies to our left and right and pressed hard on our flanks, firing rapid volleys and shouting insults and threats of imminent death.

  Nothing rattles amateur soldiers more than fire from the flanks. As the man beside me toppled to the ground, blood streaming from his throat, I felt a gust of confusion and terror run through us. My legs almost betrayed me again. But Major Ogden was there with an order to carry the wounded man to the rear, and another order shifting men from the center of our line to support us and match the enemy’s fire power. My treacherous legs regained their courage, along with those of my comrades, and we held our ground for a good hour. Only when the British threw in two more regiments did their superior numbers force a retreat.

  Here, Major Ogden’s presence was crucial. He withdrew us by companies, giving the order in a calm, easy voice, although bullets were flying around us thick as bees in a swarm. “We’re not losing, we’re just falling back to a better place to fight,” he said.

  This was the way we fought throughout that long hot afternoon, slowing the enemy’s advance to a crawl, making them pay for the ground they gained. Once, Kemble asked Ogden’s permission to counterattack. The British fire had slackened. They were apparently low on ammunition. The Major shook his head and reminded Kemble of General Maxwell’s orders. “You don’t have the training,” he said. He had no intention of letting us get too close to those murderous British bayonets.

  Our last position of the day was a hill with a stone fence on the summit. We could see the Rahway, only a few hundred yards behind us. Around us the hillside was sown with barley growing waist-high. A horseman on a big black horse appeared on the other side of the Rahway, studied us for a moment, and then splashed into the shallow stream. In a moment, Jonathan Gifford was riding through the barley into our little perimeter.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “If they put a bullet into Thunder, you will have to carry me off. But I couldn’t resist the chance to see you fellows fight.”

  “They have done pretty well,” Major Ogden said

  “The King’s Own couldn’t have done better, Captain,” someone said.

  A British regiment filed out of the woods and began forming in the pasture below us. “You will have a chance to prove that,” Jonathan Gifford said.

  The blue facings on the redcoats’ cuffs and lapels had instantly identified his old regiment for Jonathan Gifford. “There’s Moncrieff,” he said.

  Sure enough, there was the Major on a white horse, gesturing briskly to his captains with his sword. They began coming up the hill toward us. It was a beautifully executed movement. Four companies swung to the right to get between us and the river. Two worked around our left and one came at us in the center, where most of us were crowded behind the stone wall. Ahead of each company moved a screen of light infantry skirmishers, ducking and dodging through the barley.

  Major Ogden raced to direct the fighting on the right flank, where the threat was serious, telling Kemble to take the left and center. Battle fever rose in Jonathan Gifford’s blood. “Look at that,” he said to Kemble. “Only one company in the center. If you people knew how to use the bayonet, we could chase them halfway to Staten Island.”

  Kemble nodded mournfully. “We had another chance like that earlier today.”

  Momentary panic flared on the left flank when a half-dozen men were hit in a single volley. Kemble rushed to steady them. Jonathan Gifford was left alone in the center. He could not resist taking command. He rode up to the wall and moved along our line. “Take your time,” he said again and again. “Don’t shoot until you have a target.”

  He paused for a moment and studied the fighting. “There’s only one company out there. Drive them and they will think twice about pressing so hard on our flanks. Over the wall into the barley. But don’t go more than ten yards.”

  With a shout we leaped into the smoke to take cover in the grain. The ruse worked. The single British company that was skirmishing in the center recoiled. Major Moncrieff, standing at the bottom of the hill, shouted curses and gesticulated at them with his sword. They reformed and moved up the hill again under Moncrieff’s personal command. Jonathan Gifford spurred his horse over the wall to join the men in the barley. “They don’t have the stomach for it,” he said. “Stand up and give them a volley when I say the word.”

  As the British closed
to fifty yards, he shouted “Fire.” The redcoats broke again and ran down the hill.

  We roared with fierce delight, no one louder than Jonathan Gifford. “Give them another round,” he shouted, leading us another ten yards down the hill. We obeyed with alacrity.

  Suddenly Captain Gifford gave a cry of pain so acute I thought he had been wounded. Major Moncrieff had been hit as he turned to bellow denunciations at his men. He stumbled a few feet and fell, disappearing into the grain. Jonathan Gifford spurred his horse down the hill to where Moncrieff was lying. By the time he got there, the Major had thrashed himself into a sitting position and was clutching a bloody knee:

  “Billy - are you all right?” Jonathan Gifford asked.

  “I thought it was you, Gifford, you son of a bitch,” Moncrieff roared. “I’ve never seen militia fight like that. Get out of here before I take you prisoner and hang you on the spot.”

  Jonathan Gifford returned to the top of the hill, and ordered everyone back behind the stone wall. A moment later a messenger from General Maxwell galloped up with good news - Washington’s army had arrived from Morristown to block the passes through the Watchung Mountains. We had orders to retreat across the Rahway, where the regulars would support us. We filed off the hill with only a few scattered shots from the British to harass us. In a half-hour we were shoulder to shoulder with other militia regiments and the New Jersey brigade, ranged along the western bank of the Rahway.

  We looked like coal miners. Our faces and hands were black with gunpowder. We were so exhausted we could barely cheer. But we managed a parched croak or two. We knew now the British were not going to cross the Rahway. For a while the disgruntled generals concentrated their red- and blue-coated battalions on a hill about a quarter of a mile from the river, trying to decide whether to risk a frontal assault. They counted the casualties they had already taken in the long day’s fighting and concluded that the price would probably be too high. We watched the enemy’s battle flags disconsolately wheel and begin their retreat toward Staten Island. We sent them on their way with another hoarse derisive cheer.

  Kemble suddenly spurred his horse across the Rahway bridge as if he were about to attack their rear guard singlehandedly. I ran after him, wondering if he had gone mad. But he stopped a few yards from the river and swayed there, weeping in one breath and laughing exultantly in the next.

  “For Margaret O’Hara,” he said. “For Margaret O’Hara.”

  I looked back and saw Jonathan Gifford watching anxiously from the other side of the river. He yearned to put his arm around his exhausted son and take him home. But he did not know whether the gesture would be welcomed or rebuffed. He sat there, a spectator, while I led Kemble’s horse back across the bridge.

  There he regained his self-control and rode down the line of our regiment, shaking the hand or slapping the shoulder of every man he knew well. In a mysterious way the pain he was suffering impelled him to affirm his solidarity with these simple farmers, even though none of them would ever know the reason for his tears.

  DEAR GIFFORD:

  It is nice of you to inquire after my leg, since you did so much to put the bullet into it. It looks like I will keep it, but I will have a limp. It will not be quite as bad as yours, which is some consolation, I have to thank you for it, at all events, because it has gotten me out of this damn army, which has forgotten how to fight a winning war. I am selling my commission While the asking price is still high at home. They dont know we are licked, but I know it and so does every other soldier above the rank of corporal.

  I have inquired into the matter of that Irish girl, Margaret OHara, for you. They sentenced her to a life term as a convict servant in Jamaica. She received this favor with shocking oaths against King, Queen, lords, commons, and generals. Apparently your son has his fathers fondness for the wildest women in sight. Then she lapsed into a Gaelic gloom, refused to eat, and was soon so ill she had to be carried aboard ship. Contrary winds delayed the convoys departure for three or four days, during which she continued to fail. She died not long after they reached open water and was buried at sea somewhere off your coast.

  - Moncrieff

  Almost every day for a month after Jonathan Gifford gave him this letter, Kemble rode down to Garret Hill, in the highlands not far from Sandy Hook. The view is awesome. The Atlantics immensity stretches in a great dark blue arc for hundreds of Kemble would stand for hours on the summit brooding upon this image of eternity and the woman who lay beneath it. At Jonathan Giffords request, I often went along with Kemble on these rides, two loaded pistols in my saddle holsters. There were a lot of Tories in that neighborhood. Sometimes Captain Gifford rode with us. Not once did anyone mention Margaret OHara. But his presence - and the fact that Kemble made no objection to it - was evidence of a new wordless sharing that both father and son were loath to name, for fear that it was too fragile to sustain the weight of other feelings, still unresolved.

  One day, on the way home, Jonathan Gifford suggested we stop for tea at Kemble Manor. Caroline was out in the fields directing twenty or thirty workmen. She rode in to greet us at Jonathan Giffords wave. As she dismounted, I noticed a look pass between them that I was too young to understand at the time, It took me a few more years to learn how much lovers can exchange in such glances.

  Jonathan Gifford began teasing Caroline about being the hardest-driving foreman in south Jersey. Caroline said she considered that a compliment, and led us into the house. Sukey had tea and corn cakes waiting for us. Caroline quickly got too the point.

  “Your father and I think you should run for the assembly, Kemble. He is afraid you will disagree with him, as you do on practically everything. So he has asked me as the familys next most active revolutionist to propose it to you.”

  “No,” Kemble said.

  “If we can get an honest man into that legislature, we can force them to investigate Slocum,” Jonathan Gifford said. “We can chase him out of the state. Everybodys talking about the way you made a fool out of him in front of the whole regiment.”

  Kemble shook his head. “We must get someone without blood on his hands. The people are sick of the war. They will only vote for a man who stayed out of it, who disapproved of both sides.”

  “Like George Kemble?” Caroline said.

  Everyone turned to me and asked if I thought my father might run. “I think we can talk him into it,” I said.

  The next day, Caroline, Kemble, and Jonathan Gifford descended on my father and urged him to run. As usual, he hesitated. He despised Slocum. But he saw no point in abandoning his neutrality in a war that Americans seemed to have lost interest in winning. Jonathan Gifford read him the first part of Moncrieffs letter to convince him that the British were even more War-weary. But Carolines arguments were decisive. She forced my father to admit that the legality of independence had little to do with the situation now. The war had become a struggle for dominance between two very different peoples, English and American. Once he conceded this, it was hard for him to deny his American feelings.

  My father paced up and down the room looking at our ripped furniture cushions. We had been unable to persuade any Philadelphia upholsterer to venture this close to the British army to mend them. But my father had been impressed by George Washingtons uncompromising court-martial of Major Yates.

  “Perhaps youre right, Gifford - ”

  The Captain turned to me. “What do you think he should do, Jemmy?”

  “Run,” I said.

  My father looked at me and for the first time saw I was almost a man. “All right,” he said. “By God, I want to do it. We will give him a fight.”

  It was a brawl of an election. General Slocum had antagonized and disgusted a lot of people. The problem was to reach them and assure them that they could vote against Black Daniel without fear of retaliation. Jonathan Gifford persuaded Governor Livingston to write Slocum a letter, forbidding him to station armed men at the polling places. The Captain let my father use Liberty Tavern as his
headquarters and distributed gallons of free rum to the crowds that gathered there after church on Sunday and on Thursday market days. They listened - I was going to write “soberly,” but that may not be quite the right word - perhaps “intently” would be more accurate - to my fathers denunciations of General Slocum as a war profiteer and land jobber.

  That summer we proved the old aristocrats could adopt the new democratic style in politics. Up and down the dusty roads in the sultry August heat my father rode, carrying his message to every part of our huge county. It was exhausting work. We worried about his health. My mother repeatedly predicted he was killing himself.

  “General Slocum is more likely to do that, my dear,” he replied in his dry, indirect way.

  “Has he threatened you?” I asked. “I met him on the road to Freehold with a few of his friends yesterday. He told me I would regret every word I ever said against him.”

  My father was more upset by a letter he received a few days later. I found him in his study brooding over it when he should have been on his way to address a meeting at Liberty Tavern. His expression reminded me of the mixture of anger and regret I saw on his face when Major Yates and his Yankee regiment visited us. “What is it, Father?” I asked.

  “A letter from Charles Skinner - with a postscript from his son. They tell me I will be a traitor, from the moment I take a seat in the legislature. Perhaps General Slocum will save me from that embarrassment.”

  With a sigh he arose and let me drive him to Liberty Tavern. He spoke better that day than I have ever heard him. He was candid about the familys loyalist connections and his own hesitations about joining the Revolution. There were men in the audience with sons in the British army and others with sons in Washingtons army. Both sympathized, I think, both shared the pain of what the war had cost and was costing us, no matter which side won. Not that my father implied for a moment that he was now indifferent to an American victory. With a wealth of detail which his lifetime of reading history made it easy for him to cite, he assured his listeners that a British victory meant decades of exploitation. By now the war had cost the British several hundred million pounds. They would get that money back from our sweat if they won. An American victory was our only salvation. But it had to be the victory of honorable men, my father insisted. If we won with men like Slocum in positions of trust, we would turn into a nation of brigands, we would become international outlaws.