The Heart of Liberty

by Thomas Fleming

  Sukey was dragged from the kitchen. She was badly frightened and Slocum did his best to scare her even more by threatening her with the noose if she did not tell the truth. But Sukey did not panic. She despised Slocum too much to give him that satisfaction.

  “Did you ever see a Tory refugee in this house? Someone who praised the King, damned Congress?”

  “I know what a Tory is. There has never been one in this house since Mr. Anthony went to New York.”

  “And he has not been back?”

  “I have never seen him.”

  “Did your mistress ever give you sheets or blankets to wash, with blood on them?”

  “No.”

  “You’re lying. Do you want to hang along with your mistress and Captain Gifford?”

  “You can’t hang them. They have done nothing wrong.”

  “No? Do you know what fornication is?”

  “Yes.”

  “They do that, don’t they? Haven’t you seen them?”

  “You are a disgusting man, General Slocum.”

  “You will be sorry you said that, you black bitch,” Slocum snarled. “Bellows, come forward here.”

  George Bellows told his story, carefully leaving himself out of it. He was just passing by. He saw the whole thing from the road. He watched Jonathan Gifford and Caroline Skinner carry Anthony Skinner to the wagon. He hid among the bushes at the end of the drive and heard them talking as they drove out. Skinner was telling Jonathan Gifford to head for Shoal Harbor. Bellows even remembered the day and the hour. September 29, at six p.m.

  “Where were you on that day at that hour, Gifford?” Slocum asked.

  “I have no intentions of answering your questions, General. This is not a court of law.”

  “For you it is,” Slocum said. “If you don’t contradict this man’s story, this will be the last court you ever see.”

  He turned to the mob crowding around them in the hall. “What do you say, gentlemen of the jury?”

  “Guilty, guilty,” came from every mouth.

  “No, he’s not.”

  Caroline Skinner stepped between Jonathan Gifford and his would-be hangmen. She pointed to George Bellows. “This man is implicating Captain Gifford from a low spirit of revenge. But there is this much truth in his story. I did shelter my stepson, Anthony Skinner, when he came here wounded and sick. I arranged for him to escape to New York - with Mr. Bellows’ help.”

  “She’s a damn liar,” howled Bellows.

  “The crime you are confessing is serious enough without attempting to implicate a good citizen,” Slocum said, “a man who has had a change of heart and joined the side of his country. Is that why you are attempting to ruin him?”

  “I’m telling the truth. I cannot believe that even you, General Slocum, and this mockery of a court would dare to hang a man when a witness has testified to his innocence.”

  “Caroline - ” Jonathan Gifford cried in agony.

  “Be quiet, Captain Gifford. I will not permit you to commit suicide on my behalf.” She turned to face Slocum and his mob again. “I confess my crime, gentlemen,” she said. “If a woman commits a crime when she allows a mother’s feeling for her dying son to overcome her patriotism.”

  “Dying, madam?” roared Slocum. “Is that his ghost that’s burned a half-dozen houses and stolen five thousand dollars’ worth of horses and cattle in the last few months?”

  “He was dying when he came to my door.”

  “I suggest you go where you sent him, madam. If you think New York is such a fine place for him, why don’t you join him there so he can enjoy his mama’s love day in and day out? That is the sentence I would pass on you. But I will let the good people of this jury decide for themselves. I think you will hear from them in the next few days.”

  “There is no need for waiting,” shouted a voice at the back of the hall. “Let’s escort her to Amboy this night.”

  “You will do it over my dead body,” Jonathan Gifford said.

  “I will be ready to go in a half-hour, Captain Gifford,” Caroline said. “If this is the price I must pay - I will pay it - gladly.”

  Seeing the anguish on his father’s face, Kemble realized what others had suspected for a long time. Jonathan Gifford and Caroline Skinner were lovers. The man he had accused in his heart of a failure to love - a failure that had darkened their lives - had loved this quiet cool woman so well that she was sacrificing herself for him. Kemble felt the vise of resentment and regret that had made him reluctant to touch this man or be touched by him - he felt this last barrier of knowing, confessing the reality of his father’s character - loosen.

  He also saw how his dream of a perfect America had stifled his love for this man, because his calm acceptance of human failure had seemed to contradict it. How his very strength, his perseverance in the face of failure, including his son’s failures, had been another barrier. These prejudices had been eroding steadily in the years of war, and they vanished totally now in the sympathy and forgiveness that flooded Kemble’s heart. Our torchbearer of liberty was free at last to be a son.

  Jonathan Gifford knew nothing of this silent drama in Kemble’s soul. He only knew that his own heart was shriveling with pain.

  “I would like five minutes alone with Mrs. Skinner,” he said.

  “You will have no such thing,” Slocum said. “And you, madam, will have no time to pack anything. You will take nothing but the clothes on your back. Everything else in this house is confiscated and will be sold at auction to repay those who have suffered as a result of your treachery.”

  Jonathan Gifford, Kemble, Barney, and I could do nothing but stand there, virtual prisoners, while Caroline submitted to this edict. One everyday cloak was all she was permitted to take for an outer garment. As she walked past us to the door, she carefully avoided looking at Jonathan Gifford’s anguished face. She spoke only to Sukey.

  “You cannot stay here alone. Captain Gifford will give you work at the tavern.”

  “The hell he will,” Slocum said. “She is confiscated with the rest of your property.”

  “I am not property,” Sukey said. “I am as free as you are.”

  “Her manumission papers are on file at the courthouse,” Caroline said.

  Slocum growled his disbelief. Weeping, Sukey said she would come with Caroline. “No,” she said. “I’m not sure I could protect you. My husband might refuse to recognize your papers and sell you to the West Indies.”

  Her bead bowed, Caroline walked out without looking back at us. In a moment hoofbeats dwindled down the drive. We stood in the silent hall, waiting for Jonathan Gifford to tell us what to do.

  The sound of breaking glass came from the south parlor. Another crash in the library. The Association for Retaliation was saying goodbye to Kemble Manor with rocks. Faint shouts of glee reached us, then more breaking glass. But Jonathan Gifford said nothing, did nothing. More than glass was breaking. His resolution, his strength were cracking, crashing to the wintry earth, ripping up the very roots of his manhood.

  Through a haze of tears he saw Kemble walking toward him. What was on his face? Anger, accusation? It was logical. He knew his guilty secret now along with everyone else. What else could or would this idealist son do but accuse him of desecrating his mother’s memory?

  “I’m sorry, Kemble,” he said. “She was so - so different – ” There was a hand on his shoulder. An arm that circled his back. “I understand, Father. I - understand,” Kemble said.

  Through his pain Jonathan Gifford heard - or half-heard - the wider meaning of those words. He reached out blindly for this son who was reaching out to him, returning some of the strength he had tried to give him now that his own strength was failing.

  A huge rock smashed out half a window in the north parlor, The house was filled with the sound of destruction. But we saw in that center hall an image that enabled us still to hope: the son lifting up the fallen father, confessing the reality of his tormented love.

  WHAT HAPPEN
ED AT Liberty Tavern in the next month was a hard lesson in the limits of our human ability to comfort and console each other when pain and loss strike hard. In spite of everything Kemble and the rest of our family tried to do for him, Jonathan Gifford withered before our eyes. His vitality, his commanding presence, vanished. He ignored his roses. He lost all interest in his customers and his friends, the news from home or abroad. Not even the report that the British Prime Minister and the Cabinet who had prosecuted the war against America had been ousted, that Parliament had passed a resolution condemning the excessive influence of George III, stirred him. A visit from Kate produced no more than a wan smile, even when she reported that her old nabob of a father-in-law had replied to Thomas Rawdon’s letter with grudging affection and no warnings about disinheritance.

  Worst of all, Captain Gifford made no attempt to respond to a charge of treason which Daniel Slocum lodged against him in the court of common pleas. If he was convicted, the tavern, the manor, everything he owned, would be condemned and confiscated, to be sold by Slocum’s commissioners. With Caroline exiled, he had lost his only favorable witness. With Slocum in control of the judges, it would be a struggle to get an honest jury. Kemble urged his father to hire the best lawyer in the state. Jonathan Gifford wearily agreed, and did nothing.

  It was almost unbelievable to see Jonathan Gifford defenseless, unmanned. Kemble’s soul was stirred by an emotion much darker than sympathetic grief. He had been brooding about General Slocum for a long time. The man had poisoned the Revolution in our part of New jersey. I had added to this conviction my own bitter rage for revenge. More than once I told Kemble that Slocum had killed my father as certainly as if he had fired a bullet through his heart. Now he was destroying the man Kemble had come, almost too late, to accept and love as his father.

  You will remember back in 1776 Jonathan Gifford had trained me to fire one of the Pennsylvania rifles in Liberty Tavern’s armory. One night, about two weeks after Caroline was exiled, Kemble asked me if I had used a rifle lately. I shook my head. “Stay close to home,” he said. “We will put one to some use tomorrow.”

  That night, Kemble took a rifle from the armory and hid it in the barn. The next day we extracted it from the hay and tramped deep into the woods. If ever there was a wicked weapon in its very appearance, it was the rifle of this period. The immense barrel - fifty-two inches long - the gleaming stock with its intricate brass ornamentation gave it a personal, almost living menace. The accuracy with which it could strike a target a quarter of a mile away was awesome. It made the crude muskets with which the average militiamen fought the Revolution seem worse than toys.

  Kemble had never fired a rifle. He asked me to teach him everything Jonathan Gifford had taught me. “There is no need for this,” I said. “I am ready to shoot him any time you say the word.”

  Kemble slowly shook his head. “This must be on my conscience - and no one else’s.”

  The darkness and pain on Kemble’s face silenced my arguments. All day we fired at paper targets across a clearing in those still woods. I told Kemble everything Jonathan Gifford had taught me about breathing, wind speed, the curvature of a bullet in flight. By the end of the day he was putting ball after ball into a target one foot square, at two hundred and fifty yards.

  That night, about two a.m., we put on snowshoes and easily covered the thirteen miles from the tavern to Colt’s Neck, keeping off the roads. By dawn we were in position about a quarter of a mile from the front door of General Slocum’s farmhouse. He had largely repaired the damage done by the loyalist torches, although his barns were still burnt-out hulks. The winter sun rose in a clear blue sky. There was almost no wind. It was perfect shooting weather. The General came out on the porch in his expensive green coat and black felt tricorn. Kemble leveled the rifle and shot him through the heart, killing him instantly. As Slocum slumped to the porch, I saw once more how easy it was to kill a man - and how terrible.

  No one ever accused me or Kemble of this deed. It was generally attributed to loyalists or some neutralist victim of the Association for Retaliation. Slocum had legions of enemies. Only Barney McGovern suspected the truth. He happened to meet Kemble returning the rifle to the armory an hour or two after the sensational news of Slocum’s death had swept through the tavern.

  “Been doing some hunting?” he said.

  Kemble nodded.

  “Did you hit anything?”

  “Only a skunk.”

  From the vantage point of fifty years, this savagery saddens me. But it did not trouble me in 1782. When you live for six years with guns in your hands, when you see those you love die and suffer, you lose the humanity that is a normal part of your blood. War replaces it with a cold harsh fluid of its own creation.

  Without Slocum’s vicious energy, the Association for Retaliation began to collapse. The state legislature suddenly discovered the moral courage to condemn it. A hint of another investigation of rigged elections and fraudulent land sales produced resignations of several Slocumite judges and assemblymen. The indictment against Jonathan Gifford was dismissed. There was now no reason why Caroline Skinner could not return to Kemble Manor. Mentally, Jonathan Gifford knew this, but morally he was a paralyzed man, What he dreaded most had happened. Charles Skinner had regained his wife. There was no way that Jonathan Gifford would or could attempt to pirate that wife away from him, even though she represented to him more happiness than he ever hoped to achieve in this world. The depth and the intensity of the joy he had known with Caroline had only redoubled the guilt that pulsed beneath it, like an abscess always ready to erupt. Now the poison was spreading throughout his spirit, and he made no attempt to resist it. He was little more than a walking dead man.

  You may think I am exaggerating. You may think that a strong character can resist such feelings. It is true that strong characters can overcome the everyday moods that bedevil many weaker men and women. But when melancholy breaks into a strong spirit, it often takes deeper root, especially when there is an underlying guilt. The sadness is almost welcomed, out of a hidden wish to expiate the guilt.

  Every day Captain Gifford rode to Perth Amboy to meet boats from New York. He was hoping for a letter. One finally came. But it was not from Caroline. It was from Charles Skinner.

  Dear. Sir:

  My wife has asked me to write to you and let you know that she is well. She came to me because she had no choice, having neither money nor even a change of clothes, thanks to your good Whig friends and their benign judgment of a mother’s mercy. I wish for the sake of our friendship that I could thank you for your kind treatment of her over the last four years. But she has been utterly frank with me, and I find that you have been no more a friend to me than the rankest rebel in New Jersey. In fact, I can now only think of you as my worst enemy. The rebels have taken my property. I can hope that the value of it will be restored to me by the King’s generosity. But you have stolen my wife’s affections, and she tells me there is no hope of me ever regaining them. This is the worst cruelty I have met in this cruelest of revolutions. How could you do it? Women are children, they are given to us for, our consolation and protection. I trusted you with my wife as a father might a daughter. You have betrayed that trust. I despise you, sir. If I had my health, I would call you, out to answer for it.

  Your friend no longer, Charles Skinner

  Those words about women being children revealed Charles Skinner’s appalling ignorance of his wife. They eased Jonathan Gifford’s guilt. But the rest of the letter sank him deeper into desolation. There was no hint of forgiveness for Caroline, and the remark about the King’s generosity strongly implied that Skinner would shortly join the hundreds of other loyalists who had retreated to England to recoup their losses by pleading for compensation from the Crown. God knows how many years Caroline would spend as a prisoner of this embittered old man. In desperation, Jonathan Gifford wrote a doomed reply to Charles Skinner’s letter.

  My dear old friend,

  I knew someda
y I would have to look you in the face and tell you what had come to pass between your wife and me. It was a deep thing, one of those special friendships that flower into love in spite of everything that both parties do to prevent it. I freely own my responsibility. But this is not the confession of a man who has wantonly seduced a child. It is a responsibility I felt - and still feel - to my love for her, and more particularly to her love for me. You know me. I am not a child. Neither is your wife. I am afraid old soldiers like you and me never knew much about love. Caroline has taught me the difference between old and new ideas, between true feelings and conventional attachments. Let me come see you and tell you this to your face. If I cannot make you understand it, you can blow out my brains.

  Your friend, J.G.

  There was no answer to this letter. The madness of war and the various madnesses of love and hate had created a kind of arena in which the Skinners, Caroline, Jonathan Gifford, and Kemble were now trapped. The Skinners spent their days and nights brooding on their ruin. The endless war had exhausted Charles Skinner’s funds. He had been forced to sell his fine furniture, his silver, and even most of his splendid clothes. They were living on the loot Anthony brought back from his raids. Soon father and son shared a common delusion. They saw Jonathan Gifford as the worst criminal in New Jersey, the man who had risked nothing, yet had landed on the winning side in possession of their lands. Winning Caroline was the final enormity. Night after night, as Caroline paced like a prisoner in the room above them, father and son got drunk and denounced Jonathan Gifford as Satan incarnate.