The Heart of Liberty

by Thomas Fleming

  “Some of this is my fault,” he said with a sigh. He told her of his inability to shoot Anthony as he fled the fort. “We are in this together,” he said. “Let’s hope for the best.”

  At dusk a hay-filled wagon came up the drive. It was driven by George Bellows, the man whom Kemble and his midnight raiders had so cruelly punished in 1777. He held up his arm with its missing hand in a grisly salute.

  “‘Why, Cap’n, what’re you doin’ here?”

  “I’m here to help a family friend, just like you.”

  “Family friend, hell,” Bellows said. “I don’t put much stock in friendship any more, Cap’n, or in loyalty to anyone or anything. I told Miz Skinner here it was hard money or nothin’.”

  “Here’s your money,” Caroline Skinner said, and handed him a bag of clinking coins.

  They lugged Anthony Skinner downstairs, staggering under his dead weight. He was delirious, babbling about England, and his school days there. The slightest jar of his diseased arm made him groan with pain. They covered him with hay and watched the wagon vanish into the twilight.

  “It was weakness, I know - but you must love me as I am,” Caroline said.

  “It was not weakness,” Jonathan Gifford said. “It took more courage than any man in this state possesses - the courage to forgive. God knows there is nothing we need more. But I am not sure Anthony or his father will forgive in return. They have lost too much.”

  “I know,” Caroline said sadly. “I sensed it from things he said when he first came to the house.”

  Jonathan Gifford put his arm around her. “I have no regrets. I’ve learned a new reason to love you.”

  In the gathering darkness they embraced, still lovers in spite of disagreement and doubt, those almost inevitable diseases of the heart in a revolution.

  JONATHAN GIFFORD RODE back to Liberty Tavern later that night, his mind heavy with foreboding. He found a holiday atmosphere. More news had arrived from Virginia. The British fleet had attempted to rescue the army trapped at Yorktown and had been beaten off by the French squadron in a two-day encounter. The British ships had been so badly mauled, they had retreated to New York for emergency repairs. For the next two weeks we - and the rest of America - held our breaths. We knew from the coast watchers along the shore that a revived and reinforced British fleet had sailed south on the thirteenth of October, with Sir Henry Clinton and most of the New York garrison. There seemed a very good chance that the fate of America would be decided down there in Virginia in a titanic land-sea battle.

  On October 24, precisely at noon, Abel Aikin, our local Mercury, arrived wearing his usual costume, knitting away in the saddle for a full five minutes after the horse stopped in front of Liberty Tavern. With elaborate care Abel put away his needles and dismounted, hoisted the mail pouches from his nag’s back, and stomped into the taproom in his oversized boots.

  We crowded around him. “What news? What news from Philadelphia, Abel?”

  “From Philadelphia? Why no news at all. The Congress fumbles and grumbles as usual.”

  “From Virginia, Abel,” Jonathan Gifford said. “What news from Virginia?”

  “Why nothing at all there either, except Lord Cornwallis and his army are prisoners of war.”

  With a shout of joy, we hoisted our messenger of victory on our shoulders and paraded him around the taproom, banging his head more than once on the rafters. It was our way of simultaneously forgiving him and getting a little revenge for the perversity with which he had delivered our mail and told us the news for so many years.

  We celebrated Yorktown because we were victory-starved - not because we thought it ended the war. Tots who study our history in school these days get the impression that the war ended at Yorktown. We in New Jersey had no such illusions. We sensed a great turning point in the contest had come and gone. But the war continued. The British army and their loyalist allies still controlled New York, Long Island, and Staten Island. The night after we finished celebrating, raiders struck deep into. Monmouth County, seizing grain and livestock around Colt’s Neck and burning Daniel Slocum’s house and barns. Glumly, as the exultation ebbed from our blood, we realized that little had changed.

  “It depends on how the King and Parliament react to the news. They still have twenty-five thousand men in America,” Jonathan Gifford pointed out that evening at supper with Kemble, Lieutenant Rawdon, and Kate.

  “Well, I care not how those dunderheads react,” Rawdon said. “I have reacted as follows. I have asked your daughter to marry me as soon as her inclination permits. I’ve resigned my commission and written a letter to my father, telling him the truth about this stupid war.”

  “If you find yourself disinherited,” Jonathan Gifford said, “I am ready to give Kate her portion of Kemble Manor at a moment’s notice and loan you the money to build a house on it.”

  “I think it would be best if Kate and I lived elsewhere for a few years, Captain. As long as General Slocum is the political ruler of this county, almost anyone could become a victim of his Association for Retaliation. An ex-British officer would be a particularly tempting target. Also, I rather dislike being one of his subjects.”

  “The devil with Slocum for the time being. Let’s drink to your happiness,” Kemble said, raising his glass. “If someone told me in 1776 that I would approve the marriage of my sister to a British officer I would have arrested him.”

  There was a hearty laugh all around at this confession. “Where are you going to live, Mr. Rawdon?” Jonathan Gifford asked.

  “Dr. Davie has a friend in Somerset County who wishes to sell his practice. He thinks the people up there will be so glad to get a decent doctor, they won’t worry about what color coat he’s been wearing recently.”

  “From what I hear, there are more Tories up there than Whigs, anyway,” Kemble said.

  This produced another laugh. The good cheer died when Kemble broke into a fit of coughing. Rawdon looked solemn. He and Kate had been worried about Kemble for months. But lately his condition had stabilized. Lung disease is an unpredictable malady.

  “Perhaps you can spend a winter in the south,” Kate said, when Kemble regained his composure. “It would be good for that cough.”

  “Where?” Kemble said. “The British still hold Georgia and most of South Carolina.”

  “Bermuda or the Bahamas would be the best place to go, but we must have peace first,” Jonathan Gifford said.

  Within a month, Kate and Thomas Rawdon were married in the assembly room of Liberty Tavern. Only the family and a few friends were invited. Immediately after the wedding, Jonathan Gifford and Barney hitched up a hired Jersey wagon and drove the newlyweds to their new home in Somerset County, about forty miles northwest of Liberty Tavern, almost in the exact center of New Jersey. The location, far from all possible contact with British or loyalists, had made it easy for Captain Gifford to persuade the state authorities and General Washington to accept the sincerity of Lieutenant Rawdon’s resignation from the British army and his readiness to swear allegiance to the United States of America. By evening, Dr. and Mrs. Rawdon were settled in a snug stone cottage on a branch of the Millstone River.

  Kate’s farewell words to her father as Barney swung the big Jersey wagon into the road were: “Take care of Kemble if you can - and Aunt Caroline.”

  The next morning Jonathan Gifford decided to heed the second of these directives, telling himself it was much more within his power. But instead of a happy visit at Kemble Manor, he was greeted by tears. What he had dreaded the day Anthony Skinner departed was happening. George Bellows had just left. He was demanding money for his silence. Jonathan Gifford rode to the Bellows’ farmhouse and limped into the kitchen, his horsewhip in his hand. George Bellows was cooking something in a pot over the open hearth.

  “Bellows,” he said, “if you say another word about Anthony Skinner to anyone - above all to Mrs. Skinner - I’ll take the skin off your back with this whip.”

  Bellows retreated into self-
pity. He whined that he was a cripple as well as an outcast. The family had lost their farm because they were unable to pay the bonds they had posted for their good behavior, then forfeited by joining Skinner’s loyalists in 1777. Daniel Slocum was now their landlord. Their father, Joshua Bellows, had died last year. Another brother was with the British. This left him and one brother to work the farm.

  Bellows pointed to his wife Mary sitting in a corner of the kitchen humming a nursery rhyme to herself. She totally ignored two thin, grimy children who sat at the table spooning corn meal mush into their mouths. “I got to take care of her and the kids, as well as carry my share of the farm. You know how she got that way, don’t you, Captain?”

  He held up the arm with the missing hand. “She’s never been the same, since your son, that great patriot Kemble Stapleton, done this to me. All the same, I don’t hold a grudge. I helped cut off that other fellow’s hand. I suppose I deserved it. But the same way, I think I ought to get what I deserve from you and Mistress Skinner. I did dangerous work for you that night. It was worth a sight more than five pounds.”

  Jonathan Gifford was more shaken by the wan, sallow faces of the Bellows children than he wanted to admit. He took five Spanish dollars from his pocket and put them on the kitchen table.

  “If those children are as hungry as they look, they need this. That’s the only reason I’m giving it to you.”

  He rode back to Kemble Manor and told Caroline what he had done.

  “It will never end now, will it? He will whine and threaten us for the rest of our lives.”

  “No he won’t. The moment the war ends and we have decent courts and juries again, and people calm down, I will dare him to tell anyone in the world what we did.”

  “Not we, I,” Caroline said. “I hate myself for forcing you to be a part of it.”

  “Stop it,” Jonathan Gifford said. “You are alone here too much thinking, dark thoughts. Why don’t you leave this empty old barn for the time being and take Kate’s room at our house? We’ll get Dr. Davie to cook up a story about an illness that requires daily treatment.”

  “No,” Caroline said. “The less you have to do with me, the better now. And in the future, I fear.”

  “I will put you over my knee and spank you if you keep talking this way,” he said, drawing her to him with a rough sweep of his arm. “We have come this far together. We will go on no matter what.”

  Caroline freed herself. She had to put some distance between them to disagree with him. “I will stay here. And hope that you can come - more often.”

  “I will come every day.”

  It was not good enough, an inner voice warned Jonathan Gifford as he rode back to Liberty Tavern. It was easy to talk about the end of the war. But it showed no sign of ending. If anything, the loyalist reign of midnight terror was growing worse as their frustration and fear of defeat mounted. Worst of all from our point of view at Liberty Tavern was the news that one of the most atrocious raids, in which two Middletown Point farmhouses were burned to the ground, was led by a man with only one arm. Crippled and almost insanely embittered, Anthony Skinner had returned to torment his ex-neighbors.

  Kemble organized a troop of light horsemen to defend the district. It meant more sleepless nights and exposure to the weather, at a time when Dr. Davie was insisting that he must rest. The saddest part of it was the near impossibility of catching Skinner. It was like pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp in the darkness. After an exhausting month, Jonathan Gifford cautiously pointed this out to Kemble.

  “I know it, Father,” Kemble said. “But at least the people feel someone is trying to protect them.”

  While Kemble was worrying about the people, Daniel Slocum was gleefully expanding his Association for Retaliation. Since he was in charge of dividing the spoils, there can be no doubt that General Slocum found the Association as profitable as it was congenial to his political and military style. Dozens of farms of loyalists and neutralists, Quakers and even Whigs were looted and wrecked. Anyone not in the Association was fair game for the Slocumites. They also showed an ominous appetite for other forms of so-called instant justice. At least seventeen pine robbers, who had returned to simple banditry after Anthony Skinner’s defeat, were caught and hanged without benefit of trial by judge or jury.

  By this time the Slocumites were utterly indiscriminate about whom they approached. Anyone could join the Association who agreed to abide by its cowardly principles. More than a few loyalist sympathizers, men who had been shunned by the patriots for years, saw a marvelous opportunity to change sides.

  Toward the end of December, one of Slocum’s relatives strode into Liberty Tavern and posted on the taproom wall a list of names of those who had recently joined the Association. At the top of the list were all the surviving members of the Bellows family. A chill of apprehension ran down Jonathan Gifford’s nerves. It was only a matter of time, he thought.

  He was right. Early in the new year 1782, a rumor began circulating through the district - a rumor that soon swelled into a detailed story. Exonerating himself, George Bellows told how other unnamed loyalists had come to Kemble Manor at dusk with a wagon and helped Anthony Skinner to escape. The Englishman - the hate name for Jonathan Gifford - was there too, they vowed. He had helped carry Skinner to the wagon. As the story circulated, the loyalists disappeared and Jonathan Gifford played a larger and larger role. He had procured the wagon and driven it to Shoal Harbor. He had hired the boat and sailed it to New York, where he was warmly greeted by his old friends in the British army and well rewarded for rescuing such a valuable partisan leader.

  It was vicious stuff but it went from tongue to tongue with frightening rapidity. With that shrewdness which was the most frightening part of his power, Daniel Slocum let the anger fester and swell beneath the surface of our war-weary district for almost a month. Meanwhile he had relatives watching Jonathan Gifford, waiting for him to visit Kemble Manor alone. Slocum soon noted that the Captain had taken to lingering after dinner, often until darkness fell. One cold clear night in late January 1782, Slocum rounded up forty or fifty of the most violent members of the Association for Retaliation, packed them into a half-dozen large sleighs, and rode swiftly down the snowy roads in search of revenge.

  Kemble and I were playing chess in Liberty Tavern’s taproom when Ambrose Cotter, that ragged remnant of the spirit of 1776, drifted into the tavern and sidled up to us. “I remember a while back your father offered fifty pounds for information that would warn of an attack on him,” Cotter said.

  “You mean from Skinner?” Kemble said curtly. “Where would he find enough men to attack this place now? There are twenty horsemen sleeping in the barn every night.”

  “The trouble does not come from Skinner,” Cotter said, looking nervously around him. “But the news may be just as serviceable. I hear General Slocum is on his way to Kemble Manor this moment with fifty men. He says he is going to hang your father for treason.”

  Kemble took three muskets from the armory and told Barney to hitch a two-horse team to a sleigh. We took the back road to the rear of the manor. Jonathan Gifford was having supper with Caroline in the dining room when we burst in with the news of Slocum’s intentions.

  “How many men did he have with him?”

  “Fifty.”

  “Go home.”

  “What?” said Kemble. “We can - ”

  “We can do nothing with guns,” Jonathan Gifford said. “The sight of a musket will be the excuse they need to burn us out.”

  Kemble refused to go home. Barney was even more adamant. “Twenty years I’ve known and served under you, Captain, and never disobeyed an order. But there’s got to be a first time for everything, I suppose.”

  “Let one of us go back and get the light horse,” Kemble said, referring to the twenty men we had on duty at Liberty Tavern.

  Jonathan Gifford shook his head. “I don’t want anyone killed on my account. This is a private quarrel between me and Slocum. Let’s see if we can s
ettle it with words instead of bullets. Put away your guns.”

  We left the guns in a dark comer of the kitchen. A half-hour later, Slocum arrived with his mob. In the forefront was George Bellows, his round puffy face flushed with anticipation. Other old foes of Jonathan Gifford such as Matthew Leary, the ex-commissioner of confiscated estates were in the crowd. Slocum said he was there “at the request of the good people of this county, to put a stop to the murders and maraudings and thefts by their enemies. We have reason to suspect this house is a headquarters for these fiends. If we find any such proof, summary justice will be executed upon its owner.”

  Slocum glared at Jonathan Gifford as he said these words. The Captain wondered if he had made a fatal miscalculation. Looking into Slocum’s swarthy face, Jonathan Gifford did not have the slightest doubt that the General would hang him if he thought he had even a gambler’s chance of getting away with it. There was no ground for hope in the other faces in the crowd. They wore nothing but the worst passions, greed, envy, blind suspicion, a wish, even a need to blame the pain and misery of six years of war on someone.

  Slocum turned to his men. “Search the house. Look sharp for guns, ammunition, stolen articles, and bloodstains. From what we hear this place has been a hospital for at least one of their wounded.”

  The search did not last more than five minutes. Most of the rooms were empty. One man thought he found blood on the dining room floor. Caroline Skinner calmly informed him that it was blood - from a wounded American soldier. Not even the tableware was valuable. It was pewter and it had SR stamped on the back - for Strangers’ Resort - a relic of Liberty Tavern’s former identity.

  They found our guns in the kitchen, and the guns Caroline kept in her bedroom. These were hardly evidence that the house was a loyalist armory. But Slocum was undeterred.

  “No doubt their spies warned them of our coming. We’ll hear witnesses. Get the serving girl.”

  Watching, Kemble was filled with loathing and sadness. On the hate-filled faces of the men around Slocum, he saw the death of his dream of American perfection. He had clung to the dream in the face of the war’s ruthless and repeated revelation of its impossibility, blaming Slocum, Congress, the Tories. Now he could no longer deny the truth. Expelling old Europe’s corruption would not purify these men. The corruption, the weakness, was in their very natures, in their limited minds and unsteady feelings, in their gullibility and pettiness, which let men like Daniel Slocum so easily lead them, in their egotism and greed, which put their own narrow interests ahead of their country. Speechless, our idealist stood there while his dream withered.