Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  The incident colored the ensuing years of Venture’s life on Fishers Island. He determined not to lose his self-control again. Thereafter, he was a loyal slave. In addition to his customary work, he was eventually allowed to look about for ways to earn money on the side. He caught muskrats and minks and sold them. He farmed a little patch where he grew potatoes and carrots, which he also sold. When gentlemen came to visit, or when he sailed to New London or Stonington, he offered to clean their shoes. He saved everything he earned.

  When he was about twenty-five years old, Venture was rewarded for his faithful service. He had fallen in love with another of Mumford’s slaves, a woman of about the same age. Her name was Marget; she went by Meg. Venture asked George Mumford for permission to marry her. Physically, they were a mismatched couple: Meg was a tiny woman, and Venture was enormously tall and broad. But in truth they were made for each other. Their union was, Venture said, “for love.” Beyond that, they had some elemental things in common. Both were Africans living in forced servitude on a continent far from their homeland. And whether or not the man who claimed ownership of them would have thought so, both were also, like him, Americans. Mumford allowed the marriage. In one way, at least, Venture could consider himself a man.

  PART TWO

  George Washington in 1772, at age forty, painted by Charles Willson Peale.

  Chapter 4

  THE CHARMING SOUND OF BULLETS

  The horse thundered south through the Virginia countryside, expertly coaxed by its rider, who would have been all but oblivious to the glory of the fall foliage through which he sped. When he reached his destination—the building in Williamsburg serving as the temporary capitol of the colony while a new one was being erected—he made his way straight to the corpulent and fastidious older man presiding there, and placed himself, sweaty and ramrod-straight, at his service.

  Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie may have been somewhat bewildered. The job he needed performed involved a difficult, delicate, and quite possibly dangerous piece of international diplomacy in the Ohio Country. The man before him, George Washington, acknowledged that he had no military or diplomatic experience. For that matter he barely had whiskers: he was only twenty-one years old. Beyond that, how had Washington learned of this secret mission and traveled 150 miles to offer himself for it so soon after Dinwiddie himself realized it needed doing?

  The answer, probably, was William Fairfax, Washington’s mentor, who also happened to be one of Dinwiddie’s advisors. Fairfax had recognized something special in Washington from early on; he knew of the young man’s grit and guile, knew that thanks to his surveying trips he had gained an understanding of much of the Ohio Country, which few others had. Fairfax must have sent a letter to Washington informing him of an opportunity to advance himself and simultaneously advised Dinwiddie to consider him.

  George Washington’s rigorous study of the outward manifestations of good breeding served him well as he stood before the acting governor of the colony. The newly appointed major in the Virginia militia came off as serious, poised, intelligent. He exuded ambition, and was clearly the ardent English patriot that he proclaimed himself to be, ready to fight for king and country. Dinwiddie may have sighed, he may have mulled, but something had to be done quickly. He chose Washington.

  Dinwiddie’s problem—England’s problem in North America, which was suddenly unavoidable—was France. Throughout the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, while England was developing its thirteen colonies along the eastern seaboard, its bitterest rival in the quest for colonial expansion had established bases at Quebec and New Orleans and had planted settlements at many places in between, around the Great Lakes and along the length of the Mississippi River, including Detroit, St. Louis and Baton Rouge. As English settlers began moving westward into the Ohio country in search of new land, the French were moving eastward from the Mississippi. When George Washington’s brother Lawrence, his patron William Fairfax and other prominent Virginians established the Ohio Company, with an object to settle the region, the French saw it as a direct threat.

  They countered first by sending a flotilla of canoes carrying more than 200 soldiers down the Ohio River, stopping at intervals to bury a series of lead plates, on each of which was inscribed a notice that the king of France claimed possession of the river and “all the territories on both sides.”

  Buried lead plates could be ignored, but in 1753 the French strengthened their position by constructing a series of primitive forts along the Ohio. Among those who were most alarmed at this development was Dinwiddie, a merchant from Scotland who had first been assigned as customs collector in Bermuda before being given the post in Virginia. Not long after his arrival, Dinwiddie had irritated Virginia’s planters by enforcing British tax laws that colonists had previously ignored. But when it came to westward expansion, he not only backed the colonists politically but joined forces with them financially, becoming a major shareholder in the Ohio Company. Meanwhile, in his official capacity he was responsible for maintaining British interest in the Ohio territory. The French forts were a threat to both his job and his investment.

  Dinwiddie dashed off a letter to London alerting Britain’s rulers that the French had made a move of global significance. The response was signed by King George II himself: Dinwiddie was to send a messenger to the French, to “require of them peaceably to depart.” And if they refused, Dinwiddie was to “drive them off by force of arms.” What Washington was to deliver was nothing less than a threat of war.

  Washington headed off from Williamsburg the very day he got his commission. There was no time to lose: it was late October, and bad weather was coming. As he rode north toward the wilderness, he stopped to engage a small party of woodsmen as guides. Also, he had the idea to ask his former fencing instructor in Fredericksburg, a Dutchman named Jacob van Braam, to come along. Washington knew he would need someone who could speak French; he remembered Van Braam said he could.

  Winter came early and with unusual ferocity that year. After weeks of “excessive Rains and a vast Quantity of Snow,” as Washington recorded, of ice-swollen rivers and treacherous mountain passes, he and his party made it to the place where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio. Since the Ohio was the highway westward, the forks of the Ohio, English leaders had guessed, would be the perfect place to plant a fort that would be both a defense against the French and a base from which English settlements would grow. Washington wrote to Dinwiddie that indeed “the Land in the Fork” was “extremely well situated for a Fort, as it has the absolute Command of both Rivers.” The boy who only months earlier had been making youthful surveying forays was now advising on the future of American expansion.

  Washington wanted to have Indian allies with him as he approached the French. He found his way to an Indian settlement called Logstown, and there announced that he desired to meet with the most noted Indian in the Ohio Country, the Seneca leader Tanacharison, known among the English as the Half King. This was hundreds of miles from the Seneca homeland, but as the beaver population had diminished, many Iroquois had made their way west and south into the Ohio Country, where they had formed new villages and, exerting their collective might, cowed Delaware, Shawnee and other tribes in the region into accepting their dominance. Over the years, they had struck deals with the French, and more recently with the English, to allow the Europeans access to the Ohio Country, but as far as the Senecas were concerned, they were the stewards of this region. Now that the two European powers were both making serious moves on the land at the same time, the Ohio Country Senecas—known to the English as Mingos—felt a new kind of threat. The Half King was their leader, though, as his title indicated, he had a lesser status than a chief in the Iroquois homelands. It was up to him to deliver the Iroquois response to this new development.

  Tanacharison was away when Washington arrived, so Washington had to wait for a time. When the Indian finally appeared—in his mid-fifties, hardened, confident, formi
dable—he impressed the young officer. He also astonished Washington by greeting him as “Conotocarious,” or Town Destroyer. Washington had apparently grown up knowing this word. It had been applied by Algonquians to his great-grandfather in the 1670s, after John Washington participated in massacres of Indians in Virginia. The memory of the name had been passed down by the Washington family. It had also been passed down in Algonquian oral history. Presumably, Algonquian Indians at Logstown, on learning the name of the young colonial messenger who was waiting to speak with the Seneca leader, told Tanacharison of it, so that he could now put his inexperienced guest off-balance by bequeathing the name to him, letting him know that the Iroquois were far from simple savages but in fact a people whose intelligence extended even to the young man’s ancestral past.

  Tanacharison had earlier made a treaty with the English, which Washington believed was done in the name of the Iroquois Confederacy, granting the English the right to settle in the Ohio Country. Tanacharison now informed Washington that he had several reasons for loathing the French (one very good reason: he said the French had not only killed his father but cooked and eaten him), and he repeated to him what he had told the French commander. But his recap caused Washington as much bewilderment as the ancient nickname had. What he objected to, Tanacharison said, was for any outsider to build “houses upon our land.” The Half King declared, regarding the land in question, that “the Great Being above allowed it to be a place of residence to us,” and therefore it could not be settled by the French or the English. Surely the Iroquois leader realized that the treaty he had signed gave the English rights to live in the Ohio Country. Washington was learning on the fly that diplomacy between Europeans and natives was never straightforward.

  Washington managed to hold his peace about this issue and focus on the matter at hand, and felt that he had scored a victory when he got the Half King to agree to accompany him. Tanacharison brought three other Senecas with him; one of them, Guyasuta, whom Washington called “The Hunter,” was the uncle of the boy named Cornplanter who was presumably at this moment 250 miles to the northeast in his village of Conawaugus, taking part in the late fall hunt. After ten more days of difficult travel “through many mires and swamps,” they reached the French headquarters of Fort Le Boeuf, 15 miles from the shores of Lake Erie. The fort was home to more than 100 soldiers and bristled with weaponry; Washington was taut with nerves at entering the domain of England’s long-standing enemy. He did his best to clear off the muck of hard travel, and presented himself to the commander, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, an elderly aristocrat who, while bemused at Washington’s youth and inexperience, treated him with “Distinction.” There was an exchange of pleasantries, then Washington handed over the letter from Dinwiddie, which informed the French commander that as “The Lands upon the River Ohio, in the Western Parts of the Colony of Virginia” were “notoriously known to be the Property of the Crown of Great-Britain,” he was forced to demand the “peaceable Departure” of the French troops.

  Legardeur gave Washington a letter in return to be delivered to Dinwiddie. If Washington expected that his mission, and the threat of war implicit in it, would make the French back off, he was disappointed. The Frenchman’s letter referred to the “incontestable rights of the King, my master, to the lands situated along the Ohio.” And it noted: “As to the summons you send me to retire, I do not think myself obliged to obey it.”

  There were maybe two or three dozen forced laborers on George Mumford’s plantation on Fishers Island, and not all of them were African. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of poor whites from the British Isles were taken from orphanages and prisons and shipped to the colonies. Some were called indentured servants, since they had a contract that granted them freedom after a number of years of service to a master. But contract or no, most were treated as slaves. One of Mumford’s “slaves” was an Irishman named Joseph Heday. Heday was a talker, an instigator, a dreamer. While feeding the cattle and tending the sheep alongside Venture, he began whispering to the African about a plan of escape.

  At first Venture was having none of it. Loyalty was part of his honor code; besides, he had recently gotten married. He said later that it was the brashness of youth that caused him to start listening to Heday’s ideas. And it wasn’t like it was unheard of: the newspapers were full of ads taken out by slave owners, giving physical details of runaways and promising rewards to whoever found them. Slaves who lived on large plantations were often kept in ignorance of the world beyond it; to them, the idea of running away probably came with a clench of terror. Those who knew something of the world, however—latitude and longitude, tidal currents, how to follow the course of a river, how to dress and act like a free man—for such slaves the idea of freedom came with something more: the flavor of possibility. In March, after repeatedly dismissing the idea, Venture suddenly changed his mind and told Heday he was in.

  Heday lined up two more of Mumford’s slaves to join them. One, a man named Fortune, was African; the other, Isaac, was what Mumford called a “mustee,” aka an octoroon, a mixed-breed. They made an ungainly group: Heday short, stocky and red-faced, wearing a bold red overcoat; Venture, six feet two inches and broad-shouldered, towering over the little Irishman; Fortune also tall but quite thin; and Isaac a small, sour man with bushy hair and an awkward, creaky way of walking. They made their move by night, hauling 60 pounds of Mumford’s butter, 64 pounds of cheese, baskets of bread and as much clothing as they could carry—most of which they intended to sell to fund their onward journey—down to the dock. The Mumfords had the lease to the whole island, so once the runaways cleared the house they could be pretty sure of going undetected until morning. At midnight they loaded up Mumford’s two-masted boat and slipped away into the blackness of the water.

  As they headed south in the icy darkness, breathing in the salt tang of the open ocean and the wild scent of freedom, they swore an oath: “not to betray or desert one another on pain of death.” They made first for Montauk Point, the easternmost tip of Long Island, 15 miles away. Venture was an experienced sailor, and it didn’t take him long to realize that Fortune and Isaac were inept. When they put ashore, they divided tasks. Fortune and Isaac got to work making a fire and preparing food; Venture and Heday went in search of fresh water. After a while, Heday announced that he was heading back to check on the other two.

  When Venture returned to camp sometime later, he got blank stares from Fortune and Isaac. All the clothes were missing from the boat. As Heday was missing too, Venture could only conclude that he had betrayed them, and taken what they would need to sell in order to continue. Time passed, Heday stayed gone, and his suspicion was confirmed.

  Venture had by now determined that Fortune and Isaac were hopeless as companions on such a dangerous mission. On a whim, he had risked everything—even in captivity, a chance for happiness with a wife was something precious, he was probably now realizing—on one mad throw of the die, a slash at freedom, a life fully his own. And one day into it the plan was already in ruins. What had he been thinking, anyway? What, truly, could a hunted slave do on his own in eighteenth-century America, a place gridded by social networks: by congregation, village, farm? Even slavery involved a community. He was alone, with a desolation of heath and moorland at his back and, ahead, the pounding surf and a sea the forbidding color of dull steel. Alone, for the first time since he had been taken from his family more than a dozen years before. Standing on that easternmost point of land, he may have been gripped by the mordant realization that 4,000 miles across that same ocean lay the shores of Africa.

  A few months later, as the summer of 1754 was making its way into the streets of London, many of that city’s most important men, particularly those who occupied governmental posts, hastily opened copies of a newly published pamphlet entitled The Journal of Major George Washington. These British leaders were well aware of America’s importance to the empire. Half of all British shipping involved th
e colonies across the Atlantic; they generated £7.5 million in revenue per year for Britain while consuming a quarter of British goods annually. But until now the focus of these gentlemen was, as it had always been, on the British Isles in relation to the European continent. Regarding America, they bothered themselves with a few sketchy details: the names of distant ports—Boston, Philadelphia, Norfolk—and some knowledge of products, such as slaves, tobacco, lumber and cattle. The recent news of ominous French maneuvers in America, however, had them suddenly aware of the sizable gaps in their knowledge of their overseas possessions. What was it, exactly, that the French were threatening to take from them?

  After slogging his way back from Fort Le Boeuf to Virginia, completing a death-defying, 900-mile, three-month journey in order to deliver a letter, Washington had presented Governor Dinwiddie with an unexpected trove of information. He had kept a journal of the experience, including detailed notes of the geography and of the French fort and troops. Dinwiddie had it printed in Williamsburg, then his superiors in London ordered another edition, by Thomas Jefferys of St. Martin’s Lane, London. Jefferys, who was the royal cartographer, had included a map in his edition, for the benefit of those members of the British public who were not so well acquainted with American geography. It did not bother with the thirteen mainland colonies but showed the area immediately to the west, from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River to the Mississippi, in considerable detail. If the thirteen colonies were the present, this was the future, or it could be, provided the French didn’t steal it.

  The journal was a vivid travelogue, part wilderness adventure but above all a graphic display of backwoods diplomacy conducted on their behalf by a greenhorn colonial militiaman. Crossing an ice-swollen Allegheny River on horseback, getting spun by native diplomacy, injecting himself directly into the palisaded heart of the enemy: Washington came off as an impossibly eager emissary, personally pushing forward the next chapter in the story of Britain’s vast North American holdings.