George Sackville had no intention to let the repeal of the Stamp Act stand as the final word on the British governing of America. The reports of celebrations taking place from Virginia to New England confirmed his fears that the Americans would see the repeal as a formal acknowledgment of their autonomy on the matter of taxation, and by extension on other matters. He had previously entered negotiations with a group of like-minded parliamentarians. The result was “An Act for the Better Securing the Dependency of His Majesty’s Dominions in America Upon the Crown and Parliament of Great Britain,” otherwise known as the Declaratory Act, in which Parliament asserted that its legal authority encompassed the American colonists as fully as it did subjects in the British Isles.
Having thus established the question of the legality of taxing the colonists, Parliament then set about doing so once again. Sackville, as spokesman for the group that wanted to bring the Americans to heel, exchanged gossipy letters with Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, befriending him and pulling him into their circle. Soon they had framed a series of new taxes. The group believed that the essence of American objections to the Stamp Act had been that it was a tax on products bought, sold and used within the colonies; they reasoned that taxes on British goods that America imported would circumvent the objection.
Sackville was pleased with the resulting measures. The taxes were on staples, things the Americans needed, so they could hardly boycott. Who, after all, could do without tea?
It was early April 1769, a chilly, overcast day. George Washington’s desk was littered with journals and his head churning with the ideas they conveyed. Taking a break from overseeing his slaves as they carried out their spring chores—threshing wheat and sewing grass seed—he picked up a pen and wrote his neighbor and fellow burgess George Mason: “At a time when our lordly Masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprication of American freedom, it seems highly necessary that something shou’d be done to avert the stroke and maintain the liberty which we have derived from our Ancestors. . . .”
The moment the Townshend Duties had been reported, he, like other Americans, had reacted in outrage. Americans hated the new taxes as much as they had hated the Stamp Act. There were boycotts. There was anger in the streets—enough to prompt Britain to send a warship sailing into Boston harbor to keep the peace. But more striking were the hotly worded and intensely reasoned missives and essays that suddenly appeared. A series coyly titled “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” penned two years earlier by a Philadelphia lawyer named John Dickinson, was reprinted in newspapers around the colonies. Their effect was signaled in the first words of the first letter. “My dear countrymen,” it began, and indeed as Dickinson’s writings were picked up by newspapers all around the colonies, the notion began to cohere that the letters’ readers did not see themselves any longer as first and foremost Virginians or Pennsylvanians or Rhode Islanders but rather as Americans. Where British leaders considered that they were asserting proper governmental authority for the eventual benefit of all, Dickinson saw a betrayal of the British concept of the rights of individuals. Like many other Americans, he still held warm paternal feelings for the king, and he tried to hold George III blameless for the overreach of Parliament (“We have an excellent prince, in whose good dispositions toward us we may confide”). But the repeated assaults on “American liberty” by England had brought him to the point of pondering violence, and he turned the tables on the home country: “If at length it becomes undoubted that an inveterate resolution is formed to annihilate the liberties of the governed, then English history affords frequent examples of resistance by force.”
Another letter, written by a Boston brewer and politician named Samuel Adams, was also read all over the colonies, and it too declared that the taxes imposed by Parliament on Americans were “infringements of their natural and constitutional rights.”
Washington consumed these sentiments, and found that they reinforced his own. In writing to George Mason, the former soldier went so far as to suggest that matters might come to military conflict, though he took pains to mask the word “arms” so as to avoid a potential charge of treason: “. . . no man shou’d scruple, or hesitate a moment to use a—ms in defence of so valuable a blessing. . . .” The blessing in question, of course, was freedom. He was broadening his idea both of what it was and of what Americans needed to do to secure it.
Before Venture left Thomas Stanton’s farm for the last time, he took a shovel out to the main road just above the house and dug at a spot “in the road over which [Stanton] passed daily.” In the back of his mind he never fully trusted the Stantons to redeem the note for his life savings, so he had done with a portion of his money just as his father had with his treasure: buried it. And there it was, still safe in the ground.
Where his father’s hidden treasure had marked the beginning of Venture’s life of slavery, he hoped that his own buried treasure would be the key to freedom. Venture and Oliver Smith quickly recognized one another as men of business, and they set about making a formal arrangement by which Venture would eventually purchase his freedom. It could not be a simple matter of Venture handing money to Smith. Venture understood the law: “as I was the property of my master,” he said, “[I] therefore could not safely take his obligation myself.” A man who was the property of someone else could not enter directly into a business arrangement with that person. He had to go through an intermediary. Venture knew a free black man in town who agreed to serve as his agent. Venture gave his buried savings to him, paperwork was drawn up, and the agent gave the money to Smith as the first payment toward Venture’s freedom.
Oliver Smith wasn’t motivated to help Venture strictly out of feelings of altruism. He recognized Venture’s value but was also aware of his sense of justice: his ability to defy and confound an owner if he felt demeaned. By helping him to win his freedom, Smith had nothing to lose. The man would literally pay for himself, and by assisting him toward what Venture so openly desired, Smith believed he would create a valuable ally, a multitalented laborer who would likely continue to work for him.
Still, there were legal impediments to the arrangement. Most of the colonies had laws on the books that made it difficult for owners to free slaves. In the past, owners had gotten out of the burden of caring for old or sick slaves by freeing them when they could no longer work. It then fell to the government to care for them. Taxpayers didn’t like that, so most of the colonies had forbidden the freeing of “aged or infirm slaves” for the purpose of relieving “the master from the charge of supporting them,” as one Massachusetts statute put it. Connecticut law stipulated that if a freed slave became destitute then the cost of caring for him or her must be borne by the former owner. Venture wasn’t aged or infirm, however, so Smith was able to work around the law, though he would still be liable to pay for his keep in the event that Venture became infirm. It was for this reason, he told Venture, that he had demanded such a high price for Venture’s freedom.
Smith agreed to let Venture spend part of his work week in freelance money-making pursuits. In the predawn darkness, before starting his chores, Venture walked down to Long Point, the outcrop where the town of Stonington stuck a rocky finger into Long Island Sound, and fished. He sold his catch in the town market and turned the proceeds over to his agent, who would then pay the money toward Venture’s freedom. There was a fertile patch of land adjoining the Stanton brothers’ property that Venture had long had his eye on. He obtained it and began making it profitable: “By cultivating this land with the greatest diligence and economy, at times when my master did not require my labor, in two years I laid up ten pounds.” Smith didn’t have a lot of work for him in the wintertime, so Venture struck a deal with him. Fishers Island, across the Sound, was where he had spent his formative years, working for the Mumfords. There were new caretakers installed on the island; no one knew the island better than Venture. He proposed that he spend the winter there, chopping wood and doin
g other off-season jobs. Smith agreed. The arrangement was that one-quarter of his earnings would go to Smith as profit, and the other three-quarters Venture would give to his agent, who would then pay it to Smith toward Venture’s freedom.
So it went through the mid-1760s. While George Washington and Abraham Yates fought the Stamp Act, rejoiced in its repeal, then began to contemplate military measures as the likely response to the imposition of the Townshend Duties, Venture chopped, hoed, seeded and harvested. As white Americans simmered over what they increasingly felt was a form of slavery imposed on them from English leaders like George Sackville, and as they circulated lofty quotes from English writers about individual liberty and natural rights, Venture, on his own and with no printed wisdom to guide him, worked exhaustively toward the same end. He kept a careful tally of what he had paid off toward his own liberty: “four pounds sixteen shillings . . . thirteen pounds six shillings . . . fifty-one pounds two shillings.” As he approached his goal, he spurred himself harder than any master ever had: fishing for lobsters and eels in the night and early morning hours; working the land by day, harvesting and hauling ten cartloads of watermelons to market; chopping enough firewood to heat a village.
As his goal got closer, Venture put every penny he earned toward it, depriving himself of all but the barest necessities. He had one pair of shoes. He slept on the ground, with only “one coverlet over and another under me.”
After one long stint of laboring, he returned to Oliver Smith and personally handed him what he had earned. He knew precisely what remained on the account following this payment: “thirteen pounds eighteen shillings to make up the full sum for my redemption.” To his great surprise, Smith released him on the spot, saying that he could pay him the rest at some point in the future, or not.
Bewildered by the suddenness of it, Venture stepped outside Smith’s door and into a brash new light. He had a lot to think about at this wondrous juncture, and, as was typical for him, he converted his musing on his life to financial terms: “I had already been sold three different times, made considerable money with seemingly nothing to derive from it, been cheated out of a large sum of money, lost much by misfortune, and paid an enormous sum for my freedom.” He was in his early forties, still strong, with an uncertain future—one that, as had never been the case before, was up to him to chart.
On December 16, 1769, Elizabeth Germain, George Sackville’s unofficial godmother, who had lived at Knole House during his childhood, died, not at Knole, where she had planted thousands of trees, but at her townhouse in St. James’s Square, London. She had survived her children and her husband and, in accordance with her husband’s wishes, in her will she left most of her fortune to one of the sons of the Duke of Dorset. Lady Betty having long favored George Sackville, upon her death he received word that her wealth would pass to him, with one proviso. He was to legally assume the family name.
Sackville seems not to have had a moment’s hesitation. Swiftly, at the age of fifty-nine, he became someone else. George Sackville ceased to be. He was now Lord George Germain. His enemies quipped that he was even eager for the change, for it distanced him from the stain of his dishonor at Minden: it was Sackville who had disastrously failed to carry out an order in battle, not Germain.
If he thought the memory of his humiliation would go away, he was wrong. In the midst of a speech in Parliament late in 1770, the now Lord George Germain made a passing reference to England’s honor. Another member of the House piped up. George Johnstone was a career naval officer with a reputation for bravery and hotheadedness, whose long-standing loathing of Sackville—that is to say, Germain—was only deepened by the Minden affair. He declared in the chamber that he found it wondrously strange that “the noble Lord should interest himself so deeply in the honour of his country, when he had hitherto been so regardless of his own.”
It was a public slight of the first order. George Germain had no choice but to challenge the man to a duel. Unfortunately for him, Johnstone was an expert marksman with a history of success in affairs of honor. They met with pistols in Hyde Park, took aim and fired. Both bullets missed. Johnstone’s second shot twanged off the barrel of Germain’s pistol: enough of a hit to satisfy the demands of honor. Both men walked away unscathed.
Germain hoped his upright conduct in this most gentlemanly of encounters—Johnstone publicly acknowledged afterward Lord George’s manly calm when staring down a gun barrel—would finally silence the charge of cowardice that had been flung at him for more than a decade. But for someone with his personality, his penchant for going at opponents with unbridled aggression, the Minden affair would never end: it was simply too fine a weapon for his enemies to ever abandon. They managed to spin the story of the duel in such a way that it underscored Minden rather than erase it. Since it had taken several days after Johnstone’s public slight for Germain to challenge the man to a duel, they gossiped that in that time Germain had been trying to squirm out of it, just as he had ducked his duty in the German countryside, and only formally challenged the naval officer when he realized that to do anything else would bring humiliation. George Sackville may have been no more; but Minden lived on.
On May 17, 1769, shortly after noon, the door of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg burst open and in spilled dozens of men, bewigged and bothered, talking raucously and thrumming with nervous energy. Among them were Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. Also among them was George Washington. Echoing in their ears were unprecedented words that they had just heard. The day before, meeting in the House of Burgesses, they had unanimously passed a series of resolutions in opposition to the Townshend Duties, asserting that they, as their colony’s elected representatives, had the sole right to tax Virginians. On returning to session the next day, a messenger from the royal governor had charged in and demanded that they appear before him at once. His office was upstairs; they all marched up and crowded into the Council Chamber. The governor—Norborne Berkeley, the Fourth Baron de Botetourt, a member of the House of Lords who had only recently arrived in the colony but had orders to be firm—was brief: “Mr. Speaker, and Gentlemen of the House of Burgesses, I have heard of your resolves, and augur ill of their Effect: You have made it my Duty to dissolve you; and you are dissolved accordingly.”
With that, Virginia’s legislative body was shut down. The unprecedented act had the effect of spurring the rattled gentry to consider responses that previously most would have shied away from. They promptly formed themselves into a “nonimportation association,” which would use the tactic of boycotting British goods as its organizing principle. The tavern would be their new assembly hall. Washington was appointed to a committee to draw up a plan of action. They agreed that they were suffering extreme economic distress, that the cause was “unconstitutional” acts of Parliament, and that they would henceforth do whatever they could to boycott English products. They took pains to specify the target items, including:
Spirits, Wine, Cyder, Perry, Beer, Ale, Malt, Barley, Pease, Beef, Pork, Fish, Butter, Cheese, Tallow, Candles, Oil, Fruit, Sugar, Pickles, Confectionary, Pewter, Hoes, Axes, Watches, Clocks, Tables, Chairs, Looking Glasses, Carriages, Joiner’s and Cabinet Work of all Sorts, Upholstery of all Sorts, Trinkets and Jewellery, Plate and Gold, and Silversmith’s Work of all Sorts, Ribbon and Millinery of all Sorts, Lace of all Sorts, India Goods of all Sorts, except Spices, Silks of all Sorts, except Sewing Silk, Cambrick, Lawn, Muslin, Gauze . . .
They further vowed that they would resist the temptation to import more slaves “until the said Acts of Parliament are repealed.”
Then they drank a toast, to “The King,” and a second toast, to “The Queen and Royal Family,” for despite all they had suffered, they still held the royals in parental regard. Then, as a precaution, and a reflection of their nervousness over the dangerous step they were taking, someone proposed a toast to the governor who had just abolished their assembly. They drank that. Then they drank a toast to prosperity for Virginia. And then—again hedging thei
r bets—they drank to “a speedy and lasting Union between Great-Britain and her Colonies.” Then, as a qualification to the previous toast, they drank to “constitutional British liberty in America.” And then to “all true Patriots, and supporters thereof.” Then, further reflecting the extent of their nervousness, they drank six more toasts.
So fortified, they pronounced their business over for the present and staggered out into the light of day.
It was October 14, 1772, and Abraham Yates was celebrating. He was having a very good year. Indeed, he had to think that all in all he was enjoying quite an acceptable life. He was forty-eight years old, in excellent health, living in a fine home he had built on Market Street in Albany with a loving wife and, the jewel of his life, their ten-year-old daughter Susanna. He had risen from the humblest of beginnings to become a man of substance. It was years since he had stitched a pair of shoes. As one of the city’s busiest lawyers, he had handled more than 900 cases in the past decade, with clients ranging from the wealthy Livingston family to local farmers and carpenters, and cases that ran from disputed inheritances to a woman who had fled her abusive husband.
Meanwhile, like George Washington, he had worked through the 1760s to make himself financially independent by investing in land. He bought city lots and rolling country acreage. He partnered with Philip Schuyler, the powerful scion of one of Albany’s old Dutch families, to buy four acres of land along a waterway called the Battenkill, north of his wife’s hometown of Schaghticoke. There was a fine waterfall here; Yates had a sawmill built on it and rented out the land and the mill. But most meaningfully, he was a leader of his beloved city, and it was political success that he was now celebrating. The election results that had just come in showed him winning a seat on the city council for the tenth straight year. In that time he had helped the city to grow. Five years earlier he had overseen the construction of three stone docks on the Hudson River, the first permanent docks in the city’s history. Three years later, the council found that four more docks were necessary to accommodate the burgeoning traffic. Ships sailed up constantly: barrels of rum and molasses from the West Indies rolled ashore, and wheat and timber from the interior were hauled aboard. The population of the county had surged to more than 42,000. Albany was taking on some aspects of a big city; the year before, Yates and his five fellow councilmen had initiated an experiment in public safety, erecting oil lamps high atop poles at twenty intersections around town, to be lit every evening.
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