The Heart of Liberty

by Thomas Fleming

  Slocums answer to this assault was characteristic of the man. He ignored all the charges my father was making against him and concentrated on smearing George Kemble and his family and friends as traitors, British secret agents, dupes, thieves. Slocum also talked ad nauseam about his relationship with General Washington, making it sound as if our commander in chief relied exclusively on his judgment. He especially trumpeted his role in our near-victory at Germantown.

  We had some answers to these tactics. We pointed out that Congress trusted Dr. Franklin enough to make him Ambassador to France, although his son, the former royal governor of New Jersey, was on the British side. As for the battle of Germantown, Jonathan Gifford procured a letter from Brigadier General Maxwell stating that Slocum and his Jersey militiamen never fired a shot at a single British soldier there. They got lost in the fog on the way to the battlefield (they said) and did nothing more heroic than cover the American retreat.

  Throughout the campaign, Kemble rode around the county with my father, lending him the power of his name. He refused to make a speech. But his presence made it clear that the young squire, the man whose name Slocum had used so lavishly in previous elections, was no longer a supporter of our political general. It made a distinct impression on the younger men, for whom Kemble had again become a military hero. Kemble also drew up a list of the men who had slaved for Slocum in the saltworks and visited many of them personally to urge them to vote against the General.

  On election day, Slocum had the inevitable barrels of rum at every polling place. He hired brawlers to shout threats at those who voted against his candidates and in neighborhoods where the Slocumites were in the clear majority, to abuse them with their fists as well as their tongues. At Liberty Tavern several ex-salt workers resented the threats and let Slocums boys know they too could use their fists. The next morning we awoke with a severe collective hangover and a large assortment of black eyes and swollen noses.

  That evening chastened drinkers gathered in Liberty Tavern to sip Madeira, small beer, or some other potion likely to rest gently on their stomachs while awaiting the election news from Monmouth Court House. Those in the know drank a special Liberty Tavern restorative, Old Red Rose Water, made by Captain Gifford from an ancient recipe provided by Dr. Davie. Since I was too young to participate in these celebrations as a true son of Bacchus, I cannot vouch for its power, but some swore by it.

  Perhaps the reason was hangovers, but no one had much hope. Then at eight oclock, astonishing news arrived. My father had won by fifty votes. Jonathan Gifford clapped me on the back. “Weve got an honest man into the legislature, Jemmy. They will have to listen to him.”

  But the honest man never reached the legislature. Later that night I awoke to shouts, the shrieks of horses, gunfire, glass breaking. A strange light flickered in the moonless sky. I rushed to the window. Our barns - our new barns that we had spent so much time and money building - were aflame. Men on horseback were riding around the house firing guns through the windows. The glass in front of my face suddenly exploded and a bullet whizzed past my right ear. Downstairs I heard my mother screaming. I ran in that direction and found my father and sister grappling with her by the front door. She was hysterical, howling, “They will burn us. They will burn us.” Bullets continued to crash through the windows and thud against the walls. We dragged my mother back to the kitchen and cowered there on the floor.

  When they continued to fire into the house, I got mad. “Goddamn them,” I said. “I’m getting my gun. I want to get a shot at them.”

  “No,” my father said. “They might use that as an excuse to kill us all.”

  “Who are they? Loyalists?”

  “Slocum, I’m sure,” my father said.

  “I am getting my gun,” I said.

  “No, Jemmy!” My father half-rose to his knees as I started to crawl away. I could see him in the flickering light from the burning barns. Suddenly his face twisted, he clutched his throat, and he fell back on the floor. My mother began screaming that he had been shot. But I recognized the symptoms of apoplexy. There was nothing we could do for another fifteen minutes - our incendiary visitors continued to riddle the house. When they finally departed, I rushed out to the barn to see if Johannes Hardenburgh had rescued any of the horses. The old Dutchman looked as though he might go like my father at any moment. He had managed to get three or four horses out of the burning barn but our tormentors had shot the poor beasts. Three were on the ground, dying. One, an old mare named Josie, was bleeding from a shoulder wound that I hoped was superficial. As I saddled her, I asked Johannes if he recognized any of the attackers.

  “No. But they not Kings men. They shout, Goddamn Tory bastard,” he said.

  The old mare lasted until I was about a half mile from Liberty Tavern. Then she slowly descended from a trot to a walk to a shamble and finally sank to her knees and with a great sad sigh expired. I finished the journey on foot, awoke everyone at the tavern, and told them what had happened. Jonathan Gifford turned to Thomas Rawdon. Dr. Davie was no longer well enough to practice medicine. “Will you come?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  We returned to the house as rapidly as we dared in the dark, Rawdon and Captain Gifford in the chaise and I on horseback. We found that my mother had, with the help of servants, gotten my father upstairs to bed. There was nothing Rawdon could do for him. He vomited black blood, a fatal sign of apoplexy in the third degree. He sank slowly and around dawn died without regaining consciousness.

  Jonathan Gifford put his arm around me. “We have lost our honest man, Jemmy. Be proud of him. He died for this country as much as any soldier at Princeton or Brandywine.”

  I nodded, staring numbly down at the sad, empty face. I remember someone saying that most citizens of New Jersey were “peaceably inclined” when the war began. He was one of those peaceable men. It was not necessary to kill him with a bullet or a bayonet. There are crueler ways to kill peaceable men. I vowed to revenge him.

  MY MOTHER DECIDED she could not live in a country that killed its patriots. All her antagonism to the Revolution flowered into full-blown virulence. She announced she was leaving for England to join the rest of her loyalist Oliver relations. She took my sister Sally but I refused to go with her. I moved into Liberty Tavern and became part of Captain Gifford’s family, leaving Johannes Hardenburgh and his hired hands to run the farm.

  Slocum blamed my father’s death on the loyalists. I blamed it on Slocum and in the early stages of my fury asked Kemble for a rifle from Liberty Tavern’s armory. He asked me what I wanted to do with it. I told him I was going to hide in the woods near Slocum’s farm and shoot him.

  “I’ve thought of doing something like that,” Kemble said. “But as men of honor, Jemmy, we can’t descend to Slocum’s level. He didn’t care whether or not he killed your father, when he fired in your windows. But strictly speaking he did not shoot to kill. Let us wait and see if the General gives us a better reason.”

  We had drifted far from the soaring ideals of 1776. My father’s death cast a sickening pall over our politics. Governor Livingston urged the legislature to investigate the incident. A committee was appointed. But Slocum’s henchmen got two of their friends named to it, and they managed to convince the rest of the committee that George Kemble was a secret Tory. The investigation dwindled away after a single hearing. We could not find another candidate willing to risk Slocum’s retaliation and one of his yes-men easily won the special election for my father’s seat.

  The impact on our militia’s morale was devastating. Many men swore they would never turn out for Slocum again, no matter how great the emergency. As Samson Tucker put it, “I am through fighting so that murdering son of a bitch can get rich on my blood. I swear I would rather lose the war first.”

  A few months later, we discovered that losing the war was not our only worry. An outbreak of lawlessness threatened us with anarchy. Early in 1781, Jonathan Gifford and Barney McGovern made one of their periodic tr
ips to Little Egg Harbor to purchase wine and whiskey. On the way back, their wagon loaded with perhaps a thousand (real) dollars’ worth of spirits, they were traveling along one of Monmouth’s lonely roads through the pines when a half-dozen men leaped out of the woods with leveled guns. There was no hope of resistance. They took the wagon, its contents, the horses, even the money in their victims’ pockets and rode off into the forest.

  Several of the thieves were wearing remnants of American army uniforms and they carried French muskets, the standard gun for the American foot soldier by this time. They were deserters who had decided the Jersey pines were the perfect place to begin a life of crime. Their numbers grew as sailors from Little Egg heard about the easy pickings. Others were loyalists, exasperated by the persecutions of their Whig neighbors. Once they took to the pines, they became political indifferentists, stealing from Whig or Tory with equal assiduity. Boats were waylaid on the rivers, isolated farms raided, women brutalized, men shot or beaten if they resisted.

  Soon it was not safe to travel south of Perth Amboy - which meant that our normal commercial life virtually came to a halt. We had been depending on the blockade-runners and privateers’ prizes brought into Little Egg Harbor. We were soon running out of everything from tea and coffee to nails and ammunition. A determined man like Jonathan Gifford coped with the situation by hiring seven of the best militiamen from our local company for an armed escort on his next trip to Little Egg. But most merchants had no stomach for running a gauntlet.

  Even more disheartening - and frightening - were the mutinies that shook Washington’s army in the winter of 1781. Coming as they did on the heels of Major General Benedict Arnold’s defection at the end of 1780, these abortive revolts sent shock waves of alarm through the state. The presence of the army was absolutely essential to preserve the Cause in New Jersey and this Made us doubly sensitive to the temper of the troops.

  First, the men of the Pennsylvania Line mutinied and were narrowly prevented from marching on Philadelphia to set up a military dictatorship. Next and most shocking to us, our own New Jersey regulars revolted, and had to be suppressed with brutal force, two of the ringleaders being executed before a firing squad.

  The soldiers all had the same complaints. They were being paid in worthless paper money when they were paid at all. They were living on loathsome food when they were fed at all. They had signed up for the duration of the war. But no one had told them the war was going to last a lifetime.

  Army enlistments dwindled to the vanishing point. In desperation, the state began drafting men from the militia. This provided General Slocum with another source of illicit cash. As militia commander, he had the power to choose who went into the army, who stayed home. For a consideration, he passed over certain names. Most drafted men hired substitutes - indentured servants, even a few slaves. Slocum got into this business too. His constables arrested more than one man who was passing through the county to do some privateering out of Little Egg Harbor. A Slocum judge would pronounce him a vagrant, and sentence him to join the army. Slocum would sell him (without the poor fellow’s knowledge) to someone in the market for a substitute.

  Watching all this, loyalists like Anthony Skinner went insane. The Revolution in New Jersey seemed ready to collapse - but the British army was expending Most of its strength fighting to conquer the South. The loyalists decided to abandon all hope of cooperation with the regulars and fight for New Jersey in their own way. In the spring of 1781, Anthony Skinner landed near Shrewsbury with over a hundred men. He issued a proclamation calling himself a New Jersey patriot. He said he was still loyal to the King - but not to the British army and its greedy generals, who were running the war to line their purses. He hoped that the time would come when an independent New Jersey could return to the Empire - but that would depend on what the King and his ministers offered them. The rebel confederation was about to break up. Now was the time to drive out the New Englanders and Virginians who were plundering the state. Every true patriot who joined him was guaranteed an equal share of the estates which the Congress Party, “by their inveterate hypocrisy, greed, and tyranny, so richly deserved to forfeit!”

  Madness, you say, from your comfortable decades of hindsight. But it did not sound mad to us. It sounded extremely dangerous and alarming. Skinner was supplied with ammunition and weapons by an organization created by our ex-governor, William Franklin. It was called the Board of Associated Loyalists. Skinner vanished into the pine barrens, where we soon heard rumors that he was recruiting the thieves and robbers in that wilderness into echelons of his little army and building a formidable base camp.

  Kemble had helped organize a network of coast watchers along our shoreline to pass intelligence to Washington about the movements of the British fleet. He was one of the first to hear about Skinner’s invasion. He told us about it at supper the day after the loyalists landed. Jonathan Gifford’s first thought was Kate. He searched her face for a sign that this man’s return troubled her.

  For almost a year now Kate had been studying medicine with Thomas Rawdon and planning a life totally different from the one Anthony Skinner envisioned for her as the first lady of New Jersey. With Caroline’s help, Kate had persuaded two or three of the district’s midwives to let her work with them. She and Rawdon were patiently inculcating in them the importance of cleanliness and a thorough knowledge of anatomy to make childbirth safer for the mother and the baby. Rawdon himself was practicing medicine with a small group of patients who trusted Dr. Davie’s unqualified recommendation of him.

  Jonathan Gifford could find no trace of romantic concern in Kate’s manner. “Do you really see him as a threat?” she asked Kemble.

  “He has a name and a following. General Slocum has neither, now.”

  “It is rather shrewd, condemning both sides. I can see that much,” Kate said. “He’s making war on the war itself.”

  Kemble nodded glumly. “Most people just want to see it end. They don’t care how.”

  “You can’t blame them,” Kate said. “Some people are starving. Do you realize that the midwives tell me even babies are going hungry here in New Jersey?”

  “Can’t Washington send some regulars into the pines and get rid of this fellow?” Lieutenant Rawdon asked.

  “Washington’s whole army could wander through those pine barrens for weeks without finding an enemy who knows where to hide. It will be up to our militia, I’m afraid,” Jonathan Gifford said.

  “You don’t sound optimistic.”

  “I’m not.”

  One by one, in a spreading arc that eventually reached from the outskirts of Little Egg Harbor to Amboy, farmers began receiving messages delivered by night. They were told to contribute hay, oats, wheat, or corn, a horse or a cow or a brace of pigs to a wagon that would be waiting for them at a certain point on a lonely road near their farms at ten or eleven or twelve o’clock. They were promised receipts for these contributions to be redeemed when the people of New Jersey had driven out all “foreign usurpers” and once more governed themselves in “freedom and security.” If they failed to cooperate with the “army of the people,” they would be considered “enemies of the same” and treated accordingly, in a class with the “usurpers from Virginia and New England and the traitors who were cooperating with them.”

  Many secret loyalists yielded to Skinner’s demands without a murmur. More than one supporter of the Cause wavered when he looked around his isolated farm and asked himself what protection he had if Skinner and his men came out of the night. The answer was soon apparent: none. The first man to defy Skinner was a farmer named Collins who lived near Red Bank. He was dragged from his bed the night after he failed to make his contribution, beaten until he was bloody, then tarred and feathered. His farm was stripped of livestock and his barn burned, leaving him without a seed to plant for the coming year or a morsel of food for his family.

  “That is only the beginning,” Jonathan Gifford said when we heard the news at Liberty Tavern. “He wi
ll soon be demanding other kinds of tribute.”

  He was right. Gunsmiths were told to deliver guns; blacksmiths horseshoes and nails; storekeepers salt, spices, coffee, tea; tavern keepers casks of rum, pipes of wine. Inevitably, one of these demands arrived at Liberty Tavern. It was couched in particularly insulting terms and the requisition was especially outrageous. A wagon was to be loaded with ten hogsheads of rum and six casks of Madeira, as well as an assortment of brandy, port, and other wines and liquors. That night Jonathan Gifford read it aloud to the drinkers in the taproom and then calmly ripped it into little pieces.

  He was one of the few innkeepers with the courage to defy Skinner. Soon Anthony saw himself as the conqueror of New Jersey. He reached for another prize: Kate. Abel Aikin, who had gone back to work as a post rider, was again converted into an unwilling letter carrier. He handed Jonathan Gifford an envelope addressed to Kate in Anthony’s bold scrawl. Captain Gifford passed it on to her without comment. She opened it instantly, making no attempt to treat it as a secret communication.

  My dearest:

  By now you have heard, Kate, that I have come home to relieve my people from a tyranny greater than the Roman, from men like Washington and Slocum and their thieving crew. I also yearn to free you from the tyranny of your father. I could have done so long ago with sword and gun. But I wanted you to come to me freely or not at all. Now is the moment you can repair the hurt your rejection inflicted on me so unjustly. Come to me in the pines, Kate, and tell the world that the best of the Stapletons has remained loyal to the King’s soldier in spite of her fanatical brother and scheming father. Search your heart, Kate, in the name of our love and ask yourself how you can refuse my call.