Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  Apparently in direct response to the insolence Yates exhibited during this encounter, one of Loudoun’s officers arrived at Yates’s house and announced that he would be staying there henceforth. Yates told him the house was already filled with soldiers. The captain replied that if necessary he would “lay in the same bed” with Yates and his wife. Antje was pregnant again (having lost yet another baby the year before). Around this time, perhaps due to the stress of the situation, she miscarried.

  Something seemed to snap inside Yates. As his confrontation with Loudoun became personal, the situation inflamed his innate mistrust of power and elites. Until now, as people in Albany and many other parts of the colonies saw it, England had been mostly a benevolent abstraction, if not an actual ideal. They thought of themselves as subjects of the Crown, and assumed they were more or less on a par with those who actually lived in the British Isles. Now, though, they saw British soldiers and officers treating Americans not as fellow Englishmen but as something altogether else, lesser.

  Yates set about preparing a highly unusual legal memorandum, one that charged the Commander of British forces in North America with crimes against the civilian population. He knew that precedence—history—was the foundation of the law. Like George Washington, he had not had the benefit of a proper education, so he took matters into his own hands. His patron, Robert Livingston, had a younger brother named William, who was a year older than Yates. Superficially, the two men inhabited different worlds, William Livingston having been born into extreme wealth and privilege. But they were contemporaries, both from Albany, both brought up in the Dutch Reformed Church. Both young men developed into impassioned spokesmen for the common man. Yates seems to have gotten inspiration and mentoring from Livingston.

  William Livingston had begun his career in New York City as an apprentice to one of the most famous lawyers in America, James Alexander. Twenty years before Abraham Yates locked horns with the head of the British Army in North America, Alexander had wrangled with William Cosby, then the British governor of New York. From the time of Cosby’s arrival, in 1731, he impressed New Yorkers with his penchant for combining arrogance and corruption. Alexander founded a newspaper, the New York Weekly Journal, whose principal aim was to skewer Cosby. Cosby responded by charging the printer of the paper, John Peter Zenger, with criminal libel. James Alexander served as one of Zenger’s attorneys. When Zenger was acquitted, it was a watershed moment in relations between Britain and her American colonies, for the case changed the definition of libel in America. Where before it had been considered libelous to print anything critical of the government, Zenger’s legal team argued that if the reports were true then a publication had a right and duty to print them. From that moment, Americans began speaking of a right to “freedom of the press.”

  Under such tutelage, William Livingston developed a passion for representing the rights of individuals and an aversion to abuses of power and what he called “the bewitching Charms of despotic Sovereignty.” He rebelled against the privileged circumstances into which he had been born (“the Vanity of Birth and Titles”). He became a sworn enemy of religious elites and the control they exercised over ordinary people. Politically, he was a radical Whig: a proponent of the idea that the government’s power derives from the people. In the early 1750s, Livingston’s focus of attention was James De Lancey, New York’s lieutenant governor. De Lancey had been a protégé of Cosby—Cosby had named him Chief Justice of New York’s Supreme Court during the Zenger trial—and Livingston considered him little better than his predecessor, calling him a “monopolizer of power.” In 1752, he and two other young lawyers produced a journal of radical ideas, called the Independent Reflector, which Livingston personally funded and mostly wrote. He was eloquent and passionate in attacking what he saw as abuses by both civil and religious authorities and in supporting what he called “the civil and religious RIGHTS of my Fellow-Creatures.”

  Livingston was based in New York City, but he came back to Albany regularly, riding with the circuit judges. He was an ideal mentor for Yates and was just the person to help make up for Yates’s lack of legal education. One of Livingston’s pet peeves was the colonial system for training lawyers, which he felt was arcane and stressed meaningless labors over knowledge. He had developed a “Directions relating to the Study of the Law” manual for his own clerks. In addition, Yates was a keen reader of the Independent Reflector.

  With Livingston as his advisor and lawyer, Yates sat down to compose his first legal memorandum, one of extraordinary scope and import, detailing the abuses that the British troops, and Loudoun himself, had wrought on the people of his jurisdiction. He began with a foundational observation: that every person has “a fixed, fundamental right, born with him, as to freedom of his person and property in his estate, which he cannot be deprived of.”

  He asserted, further, that “The King of England can neither change laws without the consent of his subjects nor yet change them with impositions against their wills . . .” for “a King is made and ordained for the defence of the law of his subjects. . . .” Then, picking up on Loudoun’s pronouncements that the actions of the army in Albany transcended civil law, he declared, “The pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution as it hath been assumed and exercised of late is illegal.”

  He outlined abuses that the people of Albany had endured at the hands of the British troops: “the most iniquitous and tyrannical violations . . . robberies, assault, batteries, burglaries and other most abominable crimes have been committed, some of them under colour and sanction of advancing His Majesty’s service.” He detailed how “oppressive numbers” of soldiers were quartered in private homes while nearby barracks remained empty. He charged that “We have been threatened by the Earl of Loudoun [that] our houses should be burned,” and that troops did indeed burn houses and furniture. He charged that violence of soldiers had been “the means of frequent abortions,” that drunken soldiers “have kept their whores in the rooms in defiance of the people,” that soldiers had “stripped women naked to their waste and banished them out of the city with halters about their necks.”

  Among the authorities Yates cited was John Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government, written the previous century, had been important for the development of Livingston’s own thinking. In particular, Locke’s concept of “natural law,” according to which all people had certain basic rights that could not be taken away, inspired both men. Very few people in America had read Locke, but Yates found his ideas to be suddenly pertinent to the situation that Americans found themselves in vis-à-vis the British. He referred to Locke in saying that when a government takes advantage of extraordinary circumstances to override the basic rights of its people, that government becomes “the product of force and violence.”

  Yates was ready to send off his memorandum, but William Livingston stopped him. It was too hot even for Livingston. In claiming that Loudoun put the military above civil authority, Yates was in effect accusing Loudoun of high treason. It was too much, too strong, and he convinced Yates to pull back. Yates got his point across without filing a formal complaint. Loudoun reacted with outrage that a minor functionary from an obscure outpost would dare challenge his authority. Yates had taken the precaution of getting the mayor and councilmen of the city to sign a statement certifying that “Abm: Yates Jun Esq: Now High Sheriff of the city and county of Albany is a person of a good character & reputation” who “has behaved in his office as Sheriff with impartiality, honest and integrity, as far as we know or believe.” Yates soon heard from De Lancey. The acting governor informed the sheriff that he had had “repeated complaints that you are on every occasion ready to throw obstacles in the way of his majesty’s service.” He commanded Yates to make up with Loudoun so that the army would “preserve us from a Popish and cruel enemy.”

  But Yates was too riled up. Under no circumstances would he give in to either the most important man in North America or the most powerful politician in the province o
f New York. He fired a letter right back at the governor. He understood perfectly the need for troops, he said, “. . . but I don’t think they should subvert the regular course of justice.” Regarding his being punished, he added that “as I acted up to the best dictates of my judgment I humbly conceive I deserve no rebuke for it.”

  Chapter 6

  THIS LAND I HAVE MADE FOR YOU AND NOT FOR OTHERS

  Vast undulating meadows. A two-story clapboard farmhouse. A barn, and a family burial plot with hand-carved tombstones. Venture’s new home, to which he had been forcibily relocated, was a sleepy, bucolic place, far removed from the turbulence that Abraham Yates and the residents of Albany were enduring. Then again, with the village of Stonington, Connecticut, just a mile away—two meetinghouses, a town center, and neat New England saltbox homes lining its main street, which followed the peninsula of Stonington Point to where it ended at the waters of Long Island Sound—it was also, compared to the windswept isolation of Fishers Island, a place that hummed with life and society. Thomas Stanton, his new owner, was a young man with a wife and small children. Stanton was the great-grandson and namesake of one of Stonington’s founders, who had sailed from England to Virginia in 1635, twenty years before George Washington’s ancestor. That Thomas Stanton then relocated to New England, bought a tract of six acres along the Pawcatuck River in Connecticut and set himself up as a trader. He had a remarkable facility with languages, and learned several of the Indian languages of the region. He served as an interpreter in the so-called Pequot War of the 1630s, which all but wiped out the Pequot tribe. Afterward, he was granted 300 acres of what had been Pequot land along the same river and along the shore of Long Island Sound. Besides being a founder of the town, he became one of its progenitors. By the time Venture intersected with the family, there had been ninety-two Stantons baptized in the First Congregational Church.

  The father of the Thomas Stanton who bought Venture had died a year before, without a will; he and his brother divided his large estate between them. It was while he was preparing to take over his portion of the farm that he heard that George Mumford wanted to let go of his slave. Venture, who knew virtually every aspect of running a farm, would be a valuable asset. He arrived at the start of winter, which meant getting to work threshing oats, mending fences and foddering cattle. That January, of 1755, was warmer than any January people could remember, so that farmhands in the area took to doing some plowing and digging out stones, work that would normally wait for spring.

  Life was busy, and relatively peaceful, though everyone knew of the war with France. A man-of-war left the harbor in January with a great boom from its guns. In September the business manager for the Winthrop family—a man named Joshua Hempstead, whom Venture surely knew—arrived in Stonington with news of William Johnson’s engagement with the French at Lake George. He commented with satisfaction that the British and American forces had “killed their lieutenant general and taken the general and killed about seventy of their army, with a loss of 100 or 150.” And he noted that among the Americans killed were two local men. The war—ranging though it did from Canada to Virginia—was knitting far-flung colonists together.

  The Stanton brothers’ farms were new ventures for them, which required money to get off the ground. Robert Stanton, the brother of Venture’s owner, needed a loan. Venture made it known that he had brought with him his savings, which totaled about 21 pounds in New York currency. Venture was astute at finance. He understood the capital, loans, interest, and how to make money from money. A slave couldn’t go to a bank and deposit his savings. Loaning his savings to his master’s brother, and earning interest on it, would be better than keeping it hidden. Robert Stanton gave him a promissory note in exchange.

  Venture got along reasonably well with his new owner, within the confines of a master-slave relationship. Besides his farming know-how and his steadiness, he had brought with him his reputation for feats of strength. Stanton liked to show him off, having Venture, in one instance, hoist a barrel of molasses (which would have weighed about 370 pounds). Venture too took pleasure in repeating such stories. Honor was the bright and shining coin of the day. If George Washington was able to seek it in military exploits involving European powers, and Abraham Yates could quench the eighteenth-century male need for it in local politics, Venture had only his body: a barrel of molasses, sweat-soaked clothes, glistening muscles, an exchange of looks.

  Pleasing Stanton with his feats of strength was also to a purpose. Venture worked hard at impressing him. When he judged the time was right, he asked a favor. By then the two men had formed enough of a bond that Stanton granted it. He bought Meg and Hannah, and so reunited Venture with his family.

  The war, meanwhile, mostly passed the Stanton homestead by. In May of 1756 two sloops from Boston appeared off New London, transporting troops from Massachusetts to Albany. In June of 1757 a seaman who had turned privateer sailed into New London bringing a prize French schooner he had captured in the waters off Bermuda. Two months later came the news of the siege of Fort William Henry, which ended with French general Louis-Joseph de Montcalm forcing the surrender of the British fort, located 60 miles north of Albany, and with the subsequent massacre of English men, women and children.

  There was one point, in early March of 1756, when Venture could have gotten a glimpse of a newly minted celebrity of the war. Colonel George Washington, of the Virginia militia, suddenly showed up in New London, resplendent in blue uniform trimmed with scarlet and silver, sword at his side and with a retinue of attendants. He had been written about in the newspapers, and his passage through the area excited a good deal of attention. Joshua Hempstead, the man who had been George Mumford’s agent during Venture’s time on Fishers Island, recorded in his diary the news that “Coll. Washington” was in town, having come from Boston. Hempstead didn’t know Washington’s business; he could only speculate that “he hath been to advise or be directed by Governor Shirley” of Massachusetts.

  Venture knew the area as well as Hempstead, and kept alert to what was happening, so in the midst of his happiness at having recently been reunited with his wife and daughter he could have made his way to the New London dock to see the Virginian, whose unusual height would have caused him to tower over virtually everyone in a crowd except Venture himself. In New London, Washington hired from a man named Powers a sloop and two boats and sailed off across the sound, past Venture’s former home on Fishers Island, making for Long Island on the business of a war.

  That, however, was truly no business of Venture’s. His deepest interests were here, close by. A hard day in the pasture, harrowing soil, sowing seed, setting fence; falling asleep to the sound of rain; waking to fields of snow. The goings-on of local people, all of whom he knew, was the news that mattered. Much of it concerned untimely death. Gedion Comstock died, leaving two children parentless. Lydia Harris, an “old maid” of about forty, who people thought of as “weak in her understanding, almost an idiot,” died. So did Abrah Herculas, the twenty-year-old slave of Samuel Lattimer. Not long afterward, Samuel Bills’s son, not yet ten, caught a fever and died.

  Then, in June, came news that Venture’s former master, George Mumford, had died suddenly, just months after giving up the plantation at Fishers Island and settling into his retirement. The world was turning; Venture’s past was being swept away and his future was coming into being. A few months after Mumford’s death, and several months after Washington had passed through, Meg gave birth to a son, Solomon. The next year a second son came, whom she and Venture named Cuff. Out in the wider world, distant European empires were throwing their might at one another, and the outcome, including the fate of the English colonies in North America, was all uncertain. But here on the tranquil Connecticut coast Venture had forged a pocket of security. He had health, strength and savings. He had a family of five, and everyone was together.

  Around the time that Venture’s third child was born—in late 1758—George Washington’s military career came to an en
d yet again. “I have quit a military life,” he wrote to his brother. He was twenty-seven years old and looking ahead to retirement.

  It had been a dizzying—and ultimately frustrating—three years since the battle at which he served under General Braddock. That defeat was so unexpected and profound that, when the dying Braddock learned of its dimensions, he seemingly coined a phrase: “Who would have thought?” Washington had days in which to ponder and to replay scenes from the battle in his mind. He still admired, as he had as a small child, all things English, still dreamed of becoming a regular British officer, yet he had witnessed how poorly the British soldiers performed in the battle, whereas Braddock himself had remarked on the bravery and efficiency of the colonial troops. And he had watched a British general completely and devastatingly miscalculate. As with Abraham Yates, Washington’s image of Britain as an indomitable, noble, world-conquering force had taken a blow.

  Returning home from the defeat, Washington made it as far as Fort Cumberland, in the Maryland panhandle, when he had to stop and recuperate, for he was still weak from the dysentery that had struck him before the battle. Ten days later, when he got back to Mount Vernon, a letter arrived from Belvoir, the Fairfax residence down the river. William Fairfax, his mentor, wrote as effusively as if he were his own son of his feelings upon learning that Washington had survived: “Your safe Return gives an uncommon Joy to Us. . . .” Nice as it no doubt was to receive such affection, the rest of the sentence must have puzzled Washington, for Fairfax said his sentiments must be shared “by all true Lovers of Heroick Virtue.” How could someone who had shared in such a defeat be seen as an embodiment of heroic virtue?