Abolition

by Tim Black

  “The men love George Washington,” Mr. Greene explained to his students. “Mrs. Tuchman, do you have anything to add for the students?”

  “About Valley Forge,” Barbara Tuchman explained. “For years the state of Pennsylvania ran the park. They built the first huts as replicas of the original huts at Valley Forge. People have the misconception that Valley Forge was a battle. It wasn’t. It was a winter encampment. The Continental Congress had fled Philadelphia and was set up in York, Pennsylvania, as General Washington just mentioned. Valley Forge was between York and Philadelphia. The British controlled Philadelphia. Historians have often wondered why the British didn’t just march out of Philadelphia and crush Washington’s army. Mr. Greene’s theory of the importance of the strumpet in United States history is viable, although I am not sure I hold to it entirely. I consider the reason for British inaction to be a bit more prosaic. It was winter for one thing. And most 18th century armies didn’t fight in the winter. That is why Washington’s attack on the Hessians on Christmas Night 1776 was such a surprise. It was a winter attack. Two years later Washington’s army encamped near Morristown, New Jersey, in 1779. The winter was harsher than the winter at Valley Forge, but the troops were more experienced. While between one and three thousand soldiers died at Valley Forge during that winter of 1778–78, only about a hundred perished at Morristown.”

  Mrs. Tuchman pointed to a soldier standing by the fire, writing into a journal. “That man writing in his diary is George Ewing. He kept a diary of his service during the American Revolution. I think he would be amazed that his diary survived and that it is available on the Internet with just a click. If you read his journal, forgive his spelling as uniformity of spelling was not universal in colonial America. But I am sure that Mr. Greene had told you that,” she added.

  “What about the black soldiers in the revolution, Mrs. Tuchman?” Mr. Greene asked.

  “Black soldiers at Valley Forge struggled from typhus, exposure, dysentery and pneumonia along with their white counterparts. By 1778 the number of black soldiers in the Continental Army had increased as some states promised slaves their freedom for joining the army to fight. Some of the Southerners feared a slave rebellion more than the British. But black men had already fought at Lexington and Concord, the first two battles of the Revolution. The British, on the other hand, offered freedom to any slave who fought against the Rebels. The British did this before any of the states did likewise. As you may have noticed while walking around the encampment, there were several black soldiers at Valley Forge and they served, as you have noticed, with the whites in integrated units. Some were slaves whose pay was sent home to their masters. In 1778, Washington agreed to allow more black soldiers to join the army and Rhode Island even paid off slave owners in the state and formed what was called ‘The Black Regiment,’ which was a segregated unit that fought with the Continental Army until the British surrendered at Yorktown in October of 1781. So yes, black men fought in the American Revolution and I wish I could say that they received the same benefits as white veterans of the conflict, but they did not. I mean, consider Crispus Attucks, a black man killed in the Boston Massacre. One of the first Americans to die for freedom was a black man from Boston in 1770.”

  Mrs. Tuchman went on, adding, “Did you notice that General Washington alluded to smallpox when he spoke to his men? There is a reason for that. You know, Mr. Greene, when I was eavesdropping on the Washingtons at army headquarters, Martha reminded George that in 1776 half of the Continental Army soldiers came down with smallpox in Quebec, Canada, and she suggested to her husband that he have his soldiers inoculated against smallpox. After all, Martha suggested, the army had already lost scores of men to smallpox at Valley Forge. She explained to him what she had read about inoculation and urged her husband that army medics create small wounds in the arms of soldiers and rub some of the pus from the pox from infected soldiers into those wounds. It was an amazing inoculation, what they called ‘variolation’ in the 18th century. This was about twenty years before Doctor Edward Jenner used cowpox sores from milkmaids and developed a vaccine that replaced variolation, which was so called because it was named after the ‘variola virus,’ which was the clinical name for smallpox. Variolation gave the soldiers a milder case of smallpox which made them immune to the disease. Anyway, Martha’s idea would go on to save hundreds of men in Washington’s army. You see, Mr. Greene,” Mrs. Tuchman continued, “had these primitive forms of vaccinations occurred in the Continental Army before it invaded Canada, American forces might have been victorious in Quebec and Canada might be part of the United States today. At least that is my theory.”

  “I did not know that Mrs. Tuchman,” Mr. Greene admitted. “I am not sure the modern Canadians would wish to be part of the United States these days. Did any of you students know about the smallpox outbreak of colonial army in Canada?” he asked his class.

  “I did,” Heather chimed in. It was in an episode of America: The Story of Us on the History Channel, Mr. Greene.”

  Mr. Greene smiled at Heather. “Well now, I do so love it when a student teaches the teacher something, Ms. Miller. When we get home, I will award you ten points on your next European History Advanced Placement exam.”

  Heather beamed, although she did not know whether Mr. Greene was being gallant with Mrs. Tuchman by feigning ignorance of the variolations at Valley Forge. Heather remembered that Mr. Greene was a History Channel junkie and that he had mentioned America: The Story of Us in class on more than one occasion the previous year. But then, Heather thought, Mr. Nathan Greene was something of an enigma…what was that Winston Churchill had once quipped about Russia…“it is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”? That, Heather Miller concluded, was her history teacher. A riddle. And the source of endless speculation by his students.

  Had Mr. Greene ever been married? He said he hadn’t, but Heather and her girlfriends doubted that. They much preferred the rumor that Mr. Greene’s wife had died, and he had forsworn never to remarry in honor of her memory. Samuel and the boys laughed at such romantic fantasies, but Heather and her friends preferred to concoct a romantic, albeit fictional past, for their eccentric history teacher. When pressed, Heather Miller might concede that she had seen far too many episodes of Outlander. But after all, Mr. Greene was a time traveler and perhaps he used a bit of his summer vacation to visit his wife in another time. Heather knew that even ghosts reanimated if one ventured to the time when the ghosts had been alive. The History Channelers had discovered that anomaly in the time stream when Mr. Tesla appeared as a seven-year-old boy at the Gettysburg Hotel after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

  “I think it is time for us to be on our way,” Mr. Greene advised. “Before Samuel and Michael are forced to line up for an inoculation that will make them sicker than dogs. They might make everyone, civilians along with soldiers, get an inoculation of the smallpox pus. That is not something we want to experience.” He added a little chuckle to his pronouncement and lifted his left sleeve to show a fading smallpox vaccination scar. “I was one of the last kids to receive a smallpox vaccination,” the teacher explained. “Your grandparents will have the scratch marks on one of their arms, I suppose. ‘Granny. show me your smallpox vaccination.’ Try that at Thanksgiving,” the teacher chortled. “That will probably go well with ‘pass the cranberries.’”

  Mr. Greene could be a bit goofy, Heather thought. But at least he hadn’t unleashed a torrent of puns on this trip. Thank the Lord for small favors, she thought, as she lifted her head up in gratitude.

  With a floating Barbara Tuchman leading the high school time travelers through the rows of huts and into, and across, an unused pasture, a small night light appeared about fifty yards away. The group heard the whir as the classroom came to life and prepared itself for their return. Under the facile administration of the late Nikola Tesla, the classroom had its own special “rendezvous with destiny,” as FDR might say.

  Since the cloaking device was stil
l activated, Mr. Greene took the lead for his students as Mrs. Tuchman did not require a door to enter the portable; she floated straight through the windows of the classroom and hovered like a buzzard above the Serbian-American scientist who was diligently going through his pre–time travel checklist.

  “Don’t pester me, Barbara,” Tesla said.

  “Nikola,” the dead historian replied. “You are so cute when you are agitated, you are a Slavic hunk of honey,” she teased.

  “Buzz off, Barbara,” Tesla countered with a scowl from his brow and a stare from his deep, dark eyes. The historian merely laughed. She loved to needle the scientist. There weren’t many advantages in being dead, but sarcasm helped pass the time in eternity, the infinite 24/7.

  *

  By the time the students took their seats in the classroom, Nikola Tesla’s temperament had returned to its normal affability. He was smiling delightedly like a little miscreant who had gotten away with something mischievous. Having dismissed Barbara Tuchman from his mind, his dark eyes sparkled with the science he was about to apply—time travel. What was left of Tesla’s human self took pride in his time travel device, which he proudly thought was much more significant than Thomas Edison’s silly lightbulb or his phonograph. Hadn’t he shown the world that Edison’s direct current was inferior to alternating current? His AC won out over Edison’s DC. Tesla’s paper, “A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers,” which he delivered before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1888, changed the history of electricity in the United States and attracted the attention of George Westinghouse. His invention made Westinghouse a rival with General Electric, the company that Edison began as Edison Electric. The thought of his victory over Thomas Edison brought a slight smile to the scientist’s face…

  “What have you been up to you, your crazy ghost?” Mr. Greene asked.

  The teacher’s question ended Nikola Tesla’s reflections and resentments of Thomas Alva Edison, his bitter rival in life, and it would seem, in death. He replied to Mr. Greene. “Well while you were walking about Valley Forge I went back a few years and watched Benjamin Franklin fly his famous kite. Just a short little visit to see Ben lift his famous kite into the wind and receive the little shock that changed the world of science. Don’t worry, I didn’t show myself or speak with Franklin, if that is what you are worried about. It is a small point, but that painting of Franklin and his little boy is all wrong. That seems to be one consistency in time travel, historical paintings are baloney… William Franklin was a grown man on the day that he assisted his father,” Tesla said. “That surprised me as I had been duped by romanticized paintings of father and son and the kite flying.”

  “Yes, and in 1778, William Franklin is a traitor,” Mr. Greene replied. “He was a Tory who was the governor of New Jersey, appointed by King George III. He was Franklin’s illegitimate son whom the great inventor and diplomat recognized as his offspring and they had been close until the American Revolution separated them. The son remained loyal to king and country and after the Revolution, William would spend the remainder of his days in England. A sad story of family separated by the war, but it was not the only one. There were countless others, as we saw when we visited Gettysburg and learned of the families that were split between the Union and the Confederacy. War is a terrible thing. For a country. And for families as well.”

  Chapter 1

  In the first class after Thanksgiving, Victor Bridges fidgeted in his aisle seat as he sat, bored, in the amphitheater-like classroom at Turlington Hall at the University of Florida. Dr. Byelicki, his American Colonial History professor who sported a dark handlebar mustache, was referring to the establishment of Jamestown and was citing Carl Bridenbaugh’s seminal work Jamestown 1544–1699.

  The professor pontificated: “Although John Smith wrote that Opechancanough was a giant of a man, towering about 6'8". I think that was just another of Smith’s hyperboles as we know the good captain was prone to embellishment…”

  Having met the English explorer and having dug a latrine for him during Victor’s high school field trip to colonial Jamestowne (sic), Victor conceded that Smith engaged in stretching the truth as easily as one stretched a rubber band and he did so often in his A General Historie of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles, but in this case, John Smith got it right. Victor had met the Powhatan war chief and Opechancanough was as tall and as muscular as Lebron James. He wanted to correct his professor, but he stopped short of raising his hand when he suddenly realized his teacher would ask him to cite his source of information and he could never tell Dr. Byelicki that he had met the famous war chief and the uncle of legendary Powhatan Princess Pocahontas. How mad would he sound in claiming that he had met Opechancanough personally? Like the braying bull on the funny farm, Victor thought. What could he say? That he and his high school class had traveled with their eccentric high school A.P. history teacher to Virginia in 1607? First, he had sworn an oath never to divulge his time travels and second, his college classmates would laugh him out of the lecture hall and probably the university. And he might wind up as a cover story in the Independent Florida Alligator, the student-run newspaper in Gainesville. Humiliation was a fate worse than death, Victor Bridges believed.

  He decided to let Professor Byelicki be wrong. What harm would it do? he thought. So many textbooks were wrong, anyway. Not just boring, but wrong. What harm could it do? he repeated to himself.

  “Not much,” a voice replied to Victor’s thought. “The man seems to be wrong about so much. He must be tenured.”

  “Professor. Bridenbaugh!” Victor shouted to the apparition floating in the aisle beside him, surprised that the ghost of Carl Bridenbaugh had floated over to Gainesville from Cassadaga.

  “That is correct Mr. Bridges,” Dr. Byelicki replied to Victor’s outburst. “But you don’t have to be so enthusiastic, Victor.” The professor, somewhat delighted that a student was truly paying attention, twisted the end of his handlebar mustache enthusiastically.

  Victor blushed. While acknowledging the ghost of Carl Bridenbaugh, he inadvertently answered a question proffered by his Colonial History professor. He had no idea what the question was but “Bridenbaugh” seemed to be the correct answer. Irony and bovine excrement were the two constants in life, Victor believed, and once again irony had shown up in his life when he apparently and inadvertently answered the professor’s question. Dr. Byelicki smiled at Victor, nodded and moved on with his lecture. Victor was much more interested in chatting with Carl Bridenbaugh who, though dead, was livelier than his Colonial History professor.

  Victor was thankful that he was the only one who could see or hear the ghost of the dead historian Carl Bridenbaugh, who served as a spirit guide when the kids from Cassadaga Area High School had journeyed to the nascent Jamestowne (sic) colony on the swampy banks of the malarial James River in Virginia in 1607 in the time travel device piloted by the late scientist Nikola Tesla.

  Remembering Mr. Greene’s admonition about communicating with ghosts when there were non–time travelers present, he began to think-text to Carl Bridenbaugh. He sent him a thext.

  Why are you here Mr. Bridenbaugh? he thought-texted.

  “Mr. Greene asked me to float over and see you.”

  Why?

  “He wanted to know if you would be home for Christmas vacation and if you wanted to meet Harriet Tubman or the Black Ducks of Gettysburg. He wants the kids to rescue a slave from Maryland before the Civil War. Something of a Christmas present to the past, I think. Seems he and Mr. Tesla spent summer vacation in the antebellum America meeting principals of the abolition movement and the Underground Movement. Maybe we will even meet Frederick Douglass.”

  Cool, Victor thought keeping his head facing the front of the lecture hall.

  “I suppose you heard about the History Channelers’ fall trip, Victor,” Bridenbaugh said, using the official name of the time travel group of Cassadaga Area High School in Florida.

  No,
where did they go?

  “They crossed the Delaware with George Washington. Next time you are in New York City, check out the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the painting Washington Crossing the Delaware…”

  The painting by the German Emmanuel Leutze? It is more symbolic than realistic. The boat is wrong. It is not a Durham boat. The boat is too small, there were no blocks of ice in the river, the Delaware had sheets of ice.

  “Picky, picky, Victor. Picky, picky. But check out the painting on Google images. Looks like Samuel and Heather snuck into the painting. Heather is the gal in the boat and Samuel is by Washington’s right knee rowing up a storm. It sure as heck looks like them, anyway. And they are bragging to the others that it is them.”

  You mean it’s something like how the girls changed the Capitol rotunda painting of Pocahontas from Christian conversion to her wedding with the three maids of Jamestown?

  “Yes. It seems that we can’t go anywhere without leaving a footprint behind. Victor. Just little wrinkles though, no ‘butterflies.’”

  Carl Bridenbaugh was alluding to “the butterfly effect,” Victor thought, a concept first broached by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury in a short story: the belief that the smallest misstep a time traveler makes can change the future.

  “If the changes remain only on canvass and not in the time stream, Mr. Greene has no qualms. You know, I think one of these days when Mr. Greene is set to retire, he will just pick a time and place in the past and spend his golden years there. I think he longs to live during World War II, when the nation was truly united. Fighting evil. The good old days.”