by Ron Carter
“Tobacco’s been down.”
“It’s coming back.”
“How do you buy New England manufacture?”
“I don’t know yet. But I do know there are manufacturers that will be bankrupt in six months if they don’t do something, and I think they’d be just like the sailors on the docks. They’d rather take a risk on getting something than live with the fact they’ll get nothing if they don’t take a chance.”
Billy straightened, mind working. “You’re talking about something like a partnership. Get a ship owner and a crew and a seller and a buyer all together and make a deal. We all take a chance we can make a contract work. If it does, we all get paid. If it doesn’t, we’re no worse off than we are now.”
“I can’t think of anything better. Can you?”
Billy shook his head. “No. Talked to any shipping firms?”
“You remember Covington and Sons?”
“Yes. I did their books of account for one year.”
“They’re in trouble. Talking about closing their office. Either the bank takes it back, or they enter bankruptcy.”
“I heard.”
“They have six ships. Carried a lot of indigo and rice to Holland and France until the market died. I talked to Thomas Covington again yesterday. Offered to take his business if he’ll accept the written promise Congress gave to pay my two years’ salary in the future. He’s thinking about it. I know he’ll ask for a written guarantee that if Congress doesn’t pay, I will. I told him I wanted to think on it, but I would not guarantee pay in less than eight years.”
Billy’s eyes were narrow slits as he listened, working with the pieces of the puzzle, making judgments as Matthew went on.
“His ships are sound—I’ve gone through them.”
“Six ships? That will cost. What price is he asking for his business?”
“Take over the bank loan. He can’t pay it. That’s around sixteen thousand pounds, British sterling. His problem is that the notes he signed are falling due and he can’t pay. The question isn’t how much his ships are worth, the question is how can he avoid losing everything when he fails to pay his notes? Without money to make deals, the whole country’s been working on credit. If Covington can’t pay, his credit reputation will be ruined, and if that happens, he’ll likely never get back into business at all.”
“If he can’t pay the notes, how can we? We don’t have the money either.”
“We don’t pay the notes. We give him the promise of Congress to pay me, and he gives that to the bank and his creditors. It all depends on whether they will accept it.”
“If all that happens, who buys the goods?”
“Someone in the South. They have almost no manufacturing down there.”
“Can they pay in hard money?”
“Likely not, but they can pay in tobacco and rice.”
“Where do we sell tobacco and rice?”
“Sell to British firms. There’s a big tobacco market in Europe, and the West Indies are already starting to feel the need for rice. They’ve got slaves down there that are starving, right now. American ships can’t sell in the West Indies, but British ships can, and they’ll learn soon enough that they can buy rice here and sell it in the West Indies a lot cheaper than shipping it across the Atlantic.”
Billy smiled, then chuckled out loud, then sobered. “While I was with Potter & Wallace, if a client had walked in with a business plan like this one, I’d have sent him somewhere else to keep their books of account. Have you counted the times the word if has come up in all this?”
“Every part of it is an if. But the biggest if is, what do we do if we don’t make this work?”
There was a pause before Billy answered. “I don’t know.”
“What about Covington? If he comes back with a counteroffer, what’re your thoughts?”
“Depends. If it’s much worse than what you’ve offered, maybe we should look somewhere else.”
“I’ll do that. Why don’t you ask around at other business account offices? Try to find manufacturers who might be interested.”
“Agreed.”
Matthew stood. “You have enough money to stay alive a few weeks?”
“Close. Earned half a dollar today.”
“How?”
“Split six cords of wood. Cleaned two fireplaces.”
“Six cords? For half a dollar? For who? Who would do that to you?”
“Erastus Pembroke.”
“Yes, Pembroke would do that. I didn’t know you knew him.”
“I don’t. Someone told him they knew a man who could split six cords of wood in one day for half a dollar, and clean two fireplaces besides.”
Matthew started for the front door, Billy beside him.
“I get the feeling that winning the war was the easier part of this business of becoming independent. We had General Washington. He did his part. The question is, who’s going to step up to lead us now?”
Billy opened the front door. “I imagine Washington will be around, but I doubt he’s ready to take on the sort of trouble we’re in right now.”
Matthew sighed. “So far, nobody seems to know what to do. I know Hamilton and Robert Morris have about given up on it.”
“Washington’s been visiting a lot of people and places he’s had to neglect the past eight years. When he finishes maybe he’ll find a way through all this.”
For a moment Matthew pondered. “Maybe. I wonder where he is right now. If he does take the time, do you think he can find a way?”
“I think he’s south, near New York. Wants to see the officers he served with one last time. Maybe address Congress. He’s a soldier, not a banker. Or merchant. I don’t know if he can find a way out of the trouble. I don’t know if any one man can do it. I don’t even know if it can be done.”
Matthew stopped outside the door. “One thing. We can’t wait to find out. You ask around the counting houses about merchants. I’ll cover the docks about shipping firms. Something will happen. It has to.”
Notes
The practice of doing business on credit, that is, promissory notes that were passed from one merchant to another, as described in this chapter, was common in 1783. Lacking hard money, such promissory notes were essentially used as currency (Bernstein, Are We to Be a Nation?, pp. 8, 9).
The disastrous collapse of the American economic system that began in the late 1770 time frame had reached catastrophic proportions by 1783. There was almost no gold or hard coin to support all the paper currency, which became essentially worthless. On July 2, 1783, England did issue an Order in Council that barred American ships from doing business in the West Indies, an act that seriously crippled American shipping. September 9, 1783, the peace treaty was signed in Paris by England and America, without notice to the French that such was happening. Adams and Franklin both felt America needed to assert herself as independent from France, which was taken as a serious insult by the French. The result was that American ships lost their right to enter foreign ports as British ships, but were required to establish their own credit and rights with foreign ports. It was another serious setback. Merchants in nearly every industry were catastrophically damaged by the loss of trade.
For a succinct, accurate description of the calamity, including charts and tables setting forth the reduction of shipping in certain crucial industries, see Morris, The Forging of the Union, pp. 130–61.
Fraunces Tavern, New York City
November 25, 1783
CHAPTER XVII
* * *
The twenty American army officers came in ones and twos, on foot and in carriages, in the cold morning sunlight of late November, down the crooked cobblestone streets of New York City to lower Wall Street, then on to Fraunces Tavern at the corner of Broad and Pearl streets. They came strangely quiet, unexpectedly subdued, pondering the startling request of their commander in chief to gather for a meeting. It was not an order. It was an invitation to those officers still remaining in or close b
y New York City. The last of the defeated British army had sailed out of New York harbor but hours earlier, and the American officers had rather expected celebration and dancing in the streets, but instead, General Washington had requested their appearance at the tavern to share with him a last meal together. They could not remember him ever issuing a request. For eight years he had issued orders. They came questioning, unsure.
Their boots thumped hollow on the stairs leading up to the long, dark paneled room on the second floor of the tavern where a large table was spread for a banquet. They gathered into small groups, some sitting, some standing, prepared for the usual barracks banter and jocularity of comrades in arms. None anticipated the odd quiet that settled over the room to make boisterousness seem inappropriate. They spoke little as they peered about with the growing awareness that the event was reaching far beyond expectation.
General von Steuben, ever efficient, drew his watch from his vest pocket to check the time. He was twisting the stem to wind it when the door opened, and General Washington entered the room. Instantly every man in the room was on his feet, standing at attention. It was then that the realization struck home. This was their last gathering as the hard core of officers who had stood with the tall man in the doorway, through the dark years to the bright morning of victory. This day would close a chapter in history that had changed the world forever, and before them stood the man with whom they had carried the whole of it on their shoulders for eight years. This was the benediction of the Revolutionary War.
None had ever seen the expression they now saw on Washington’s face. The blue-gray eyes swept the room with a sense of tenderness, and there was a discernible gentleness in the set of his jaw and chin. He nodded to those nearest as he made his way to his seat at the head of the table, and they waited until he had taken his chair before they all sat down as one. The room fell silent as grace was said and then the chefs came with their prepared platters of steaming beef and ham, potatoes, yams, nuts, berries, cheeses of all kinds, and breads. They set them on the table and stood back while the officers quietly passed them and began filling their plates while memories of scenes they thought they had forgotten came rushing to push all thoughts of food from their minds.
They saw Washington in the agony of defeat on Long Island, then White Plains, and Manhattan Island, and they saw his shattered, panic-driven army running southwest across New Jersey to cross the Delaware River to McKonkie’s Ferry on the Pennsylvania side in the desperate hope the river would somehow stop the red-coated British regulars and the blue- and green-coated Germans with them. They saw him as a shadow on the wall of his tent at night on the frozen banks of the river as he paced inside, shoulders shaking as he wept in the knowledge that he had failed his men, and his country. They remembered his impossible order that on Christmas Day, 1776, he was taking what was left of his freezing, starving, barefooted command back across the Delaware in large Durham freight boats, at night, in the midst of a howling blizzard—men, horses, and cannon—and they were going to take Trenton from the fourteen hundred German Hessians sent by British General Howe to hold the Continental soldiers on the riverbank until the entire army was dead. They remembered the midnight crossing—the nine-mile march by barefooted men who left blood from their feet in the snow and ice—the attack at eight o’clock in the blizzard on December twenty-sixth—the ninety-minute battle—the American cannon clearing King, Queen, and Quaker streets—the loss by the Germans of four hundred soldiers and the surrender of the one thousand remaining in their command.
And they remembered most of all the impossible announcement by Washington that the Americans had suffered only two wounded enlisted men and two wounded officers in the frenzied, house-by-house, street-by-street, face-to-face fight in the tiny village; not one American had lost his life. None would ever forget the certainty that swelled in their breasts that the Almighty had crossed the river with them, and been in the streets with them, that stormy December morning when they had risen from the ruins of catastrophy to defeat a command from the most powerful army in the world.
They saw General Washington sitting his gray horse like a statue on the wooden bridge that spanned Assunpink Creek at the south end of tiny Trenton village, as Colonel Edward Hand of the Pennsylvania militia led his six hundred men in a classic retreat down the streets of the town at dusk, stubbornly holding at each house, each barn, each shop, slowing the infuriated General Cornwallis and his eight thousand troops to a standstill. They saw the cannon flashes in the deep purple of oncoming night as the American cannoneers blasted the first ranks of the British to stop them in their tracks and prevent the redcoats from pinning the American army against the Delaware River and annihilating it altogether as night fell.
They remembered the midnight march around General Cornwallis’s camp, then north to attack Princeton. Burned into their memories forever was the sight of Washington, one of the best horsemen in the state of Virginia, turning in his saddle to listen to the rattle of musketfire a mile behind, and the ride he made at stampede gait on his tall gray mare, to rally the green, retreating Pennsylvania militia. Riding in front of the terrified Pennsylvanians, he talked them across an open meadow six hundred yards wide, into the face of a British command under British Colonel Mawhood, row upon row, waiting for the Americans. Mawhood held until the Americans were so close he could see the buttons on their shirts before he raised his hand to give his command to fire, but he was two seconds too late. Washington shouted his order first, and the American volley ripped into the stunned redcoats, scattered them running in a frantic, disorganized retreat. Princeton was taken.
They again heard the muskets and cannon at Brandywine Creek, and then at Germantown, where thick morning fog had confused the battle lines beyond any hope of coordination.
They remembered, and they sat in the warmth of the fireplace, and the security of the tavern, and they looked at the choice food piled smoking on the platters, and on their china plates, and they quietly stopped working with their forks as remembrances of December 19, 1777, came bright and vivid. General Washington was there on his tall bay gelding, caped shoulders and tricorn hat white from the falling snow, face set like granite as he watched his battered army file past to the place called Valley Forge, twenty-six miles northerly from Philadelphia, where General Howe was headquartered with his British army.
The large, sunken eyes of sick men starving to death one day at a time—serving picket duty in January wearing a summer coat at midnight at nine degrees below zero, barefooted, standing on a felt hat to keep their feet from freezing to the ground—cutting off their own dead, black, swollen toes with belt knives to stop the spread of gangrene—eating tree bark—and then eating nothing for eight days—the wagon rumbling through camp every morning, gathering the stiff bodies of the dead, three thousand of them in five months—hacking mass graves with axes in the frozen ground—the dead carcasses of hundreds of starved horses and oxen in camp . . .
Yorktown—the unceasing roar of the heavy guns for fifty-seven days that began when the French navy drove the British battleships from the Chesapeake to leave British General Cornwallis and his army landlocked in the tiny village while the French and American cannon laid siege to them day and night, ceasing only when the British could take no more.
The somber officers were jolted from their memories when General Washington stood. They looked at him and were aware that he had shared their time of quiet reflection. He poured a crystal goblet half full, raised it, and waited while each officer did the same. They all stood, and when the general drank, they drank with him, a silent toast to what they had shared. They were still standing when the general spoke.
“I cannot come to each of you,” he began, and his voice cracked and broke, and he stopped. Tears came to his eyes, and he did not bow his head, nor wipe them away. He tried to speak, and again he could not. Every man in the room felt tears come welling, and they did nothing. Battle-hardened veterans, who had endured every form of the torments of war a
nd been in the midst of men dying from cannon and musketshot, stood with tears running, heads high, unashamed.
Washington shook himself visibly, and they saw the iron will rise in him for the last time in their presence. He cleared his throat and swallowed and continued. “I cannot come to each of you, but shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.”
Chairs rattled as they commenced. The officer nearest the general was General Henry Knox, the short, stout librarian who had stepped forward in 1775 to become the commander of the Continental artillery. It was Knox who had brought the cannon from Fort Ticonderoga in the dead of winter, to Boston, to put the British under siege. It was he who had set the guns at the north end of Trenton to blast the streets clear of Hessians. His guns had been in every major engagement, finally joining in the destruction of the British at Yorktown. Through all the starving and sickness and cold, Knox had never failed his general.
Now the blocky man stepped forward and looked up into the face of his commander, and thrust forth his hand. Washington reached to shake it, and in that moment Washington knew the shake of a hand would never tell what he felt in his heart for these men. Impulsively, Washington wrapped his arms about the stout man and drew him close and kissed him on the cheek, and General Henry Knox embraced his general with all his strength, weeping openly.
Behind General Knox stood General Freiderich von Steuben, the German officer who had learned soldiering from the greatest of them all, Frederick the Great of Prussia. It was von Steuben who had performed the miracle in the purgatory of Valley Forge in ten weeks by transforming the chaos that was the Continental Army, into a precision team that caught the British that spring and beat them at the battle of Monmouth Courthouse.
Washington turned to von Steuben, and the two men embraced, neither caring that the tears were flowing.
Each officer in turn came to the general to embrace him. None had ever known their general to embrace another man, nor had any ever seen him weep. Each knew he was part of something that had never occurred before, and would never occur again, something that reached past protocol or pretense, into the purest fountains of honest emotion. They were seeing a part of their general that for eight years he had been forced to seal off from the world, to save his country. They saw it and realized they would never again be allowed to peer into the heart of such a man.