Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  But Washington could not accept the idea. “The policy of our arming Slaves is in my opinion a moot point,” he wrote, and declared his reasoning to be that if the American army brought in a great number of slaves then the British would do likewise, and “the upshot then must be who can Arm fastest.”

  This was nonsense, and Washington knew it. The British had already been arming slaves. They had first begun doing so in his native Virginia at the start of the war. Thousands—including a number of Washington’s own slaves from Mount Vernon—had escaped the plantations of patriots and taken up the offer of freedom in exchange for serving in the British army. Indeed, in rejecting Laurens’s plan, Washington had his own situation in mind. At the time Laurens presented his idea, Washington was corresponding with his cousin, who was managing Mount Vernon, and in the exchange he made clear his economic reliance on slaves. Once again he was pondering the possibility of losing the war. This time, he wondered whether it would be a smart investment for him to sell all his slaves and buy loan office certificates, which would help fund the war. If Britain were victorious, he reasoned, “it would be a matter of very little consequence to me, whether my property is in Negroes, or loan office Certificates.” But assuming the Americans won, then, he said, “the only points” that mattered to him were “whether it would be most to my interest . . . to have negroes, and the Crops they will make; or the sum they will now fetch and the interest of the money.”

  Washington admired the verve of the officers on his staff who railed against slavery. But Lafayette, Hamilton and Laurens were all young men. The tentacles of American society—its economic realities—hadn’t woven around them. Lafayette was French, Hamilton grew up poor in the Caribbean, and Laurens had been raised in England. None had families. In conversation, Washington agreed that slavery was an immoral institution. And he could point to steps he had taken, such as having recently given tacit approval to a request for Rhode Island to arm a regiment of slaves, as evidence of broad-mindedness.

  But the South, to a Virginia planter, was an altogether different matter. Slaves there were so numerous, their conditions were so harsh, that practically from birth Washington had thought of them as a latent threat, a potential enemy. Southern slave owners like him followed closely events on plantation islands in the Caribbean. At the outset of the war they had gotten a proper scare when news reached them that hundreds of slaves in Jamaica had attempted an uprising. Even more troubling, the Jamaican slaves had apparently been inspired by the very ideals of freedom that Washington and his fellow rebels proclaimed. The Jamaica rebellion had been crushed, its leaders executed and either burned alive or had their bodies displayed as a public warning. For a man like Washington, the affair underscored the dangerous double-edged nature of the ideology the Americans espoused. Uprisings were a nightmare that all southern slaveholding families lived with. To give weapons to the people they had been systematically abusing for generations was beyond his comprehension. Freedom was what Washington was fighting for. But not for them. Not now. It was an irony, an incongruity, a flaw in the American project of bringing true individual liberty into being: he did not deny that. But he couldn’t solve it. He was not a philosopher.

  Washington longed to clarify the war by reducing it to two sets of players: the Americans and the British. But the African slaves were an inescapable complication. And so were the natives: “the savage tribes,” as he called them. All his life they had manifested themselves as beyond the bounds, problematic, in the way. He had grown up around them as well, as a young man relying on them as guides in the wilderness, eating with them, laughing with them. But always there was an anthropological distance. He could in some way comprehend that they were fighting for a form of freedom. But whether they allied with the Americans or with the British or tried to stay out of the war altogether, their conception of freedom was alien to him. His was built around crisp notions like property rights and written contracts. Theirs was something entirely other. In comparison, even slaves had a more graspably transactional definition of what it meant to be free. A deed of sale or of manumission, a contract, was a piece of paper whose firm import both sides comprehended. Indian notions of freedom were like the water in a stream. Their freedom was too free. It shaded to waywardness. It led him to distrust even the small number of Iroquois who had pledged to support the Americans. Could the two freedoms—the Enlightenment freedom that grounded his fellow revolutionary leaders and the Iroquois freedom that was rooted in their traditions—be reconciled? Probably not. He was not a philosopher.

  Brigadier General Edward Hand, an Irish physician turned patriot soldier who had taken part in Washington’s recrossing of the Delaware maneuver, was the one who sent him the grim news of what “the savage tribes” had done at Cherry Valley: “Destroyed the Settlement, & Murdering many Women & Children . . .” Up to this point the Indians had not been a major factor in the war. But now they had forced his hand. The frontier was aflame with fear. Washington was now, he said, “perfectly convinced, that the only certain way of preventing Indian ravages is to carry the war vigorously into their own country.” He selected John Sullivan, a thirty-nine-year-old bulldog of a man who was raised in New Hampshire by Irish parents, to lead a mission against the Iroquois. Washington wanted to be as clear as possible in his orders:

  The expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the six nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.

  Few white settlers forayed into Iroquois territory, which straddled the boundaries of Pennsylvania and New York. It was as yet a world apart, alien, forbidding in its geography, a place parents told scary stories about to their children. Sullivan was to lead a massive force there: 4,000 men, fully one-quarter of Washington’s entire army, with cannons, howitzers, attendant ammunition and supplies, through an intricacy of mountains and rivers, of gorges and forests, “into the heart of the Indian settlements.” Washington would feel vulnerable with so many of his men sent away, but he realized the stakes. He needed to pivot and fight the British in the South; he could not afford to have, behind him, a conflagration of terror spreading outward from Iroquois country. Sullivan’s job was not to do battle but to destroy a civilization.

  Although they did not have the resounding clarity of a battlefield action, the pair of decisions Washington made regarding slaves and Indians formed a focal point. He reduced and clarified the task at hand. American freedom would mean white freedom.

  Chapter 15

  I AM YOUR SON! I AM A WARRIOR!

  Cornplanter could see them through the trees. He could see that they could not see him, that they saw nothing. The American soldiers, the white men, were obsessed with the darkness all around them. To him this forest was home, its murmuring rhythms matched his own. To them it was a primeval hell.

  Earlier they had been secretive and moon-eyed, the men led by Sullivan, careful not to discharge weapons, running around like loons as they tried to catch turkeys with their bare hands, stopping to marvel at vast open meadows of grass surrounded by distant mountains, at stands of white oak interlaced with pea vine, at herds of deer.

  As the army climbed, the woods got thicker, rain fell, and the men found themselves swallowed by fog. They forded deep streams, the horses struggling and snorting to keep their nostrils above the water. The men lumbered and sweated like dogs in the heat, maneuvering the carts carrying the six-pound cannons and the howitzers: “thunder trees,” Cornplanter’s people called the big guns. On July 4 they paused to celebrate. They offered a toast to “General Washington and the army,” and another to the sentiment “Civilization or death to all savages.”

  They reached a vast swamp. The branches of the trees overhead were so thick it seemed nighttime at noon. Rain fell inc
essantly. They found human skulls, then heaps of skeletons: evidence of the Iroquois attacks on settlers the previous summer. They called the place the Shades of Death. The evidence of what they took to be wanton massacres steeled their spines.

  Cornplanter, Brant and Butler had brought their men back together to meet this threat: 400 Iroquois fighters and 300 loyalists. They had heard of Sullivan’s army long before it set out; they had watched its noisy approach. They were ready to meet the Americans in battle. It puzzled Cornplanter at first that as Sullivan’s force got deeper into their territory they became louder. Not only were they no longer trying to conceal their presence, they were trumpeting it: at intervals a cannon blast echoed through the wooded slopes. But for all their noise, the Americans didn’t seem interested in doing battle. Instead, one by one, they sniffed out Iroquois villages, which had been abandoned as the people fled in advance of the army, and torched them. They set fire to acre after acre of corn, and stood there, feeling the heat compounding the summer’s intensity, watching the smoke blacken the summer sky.

  Cornplanter and Butler decided to make a stand. At a place called Newtown they put their men to the task of felling trees. They forged a defensive works, with a brook on one side, a river on another and a large hill behind. When the two armies finally squared off, on August 29, 1779, Cornplanter began to understand that the enemy’s strategy was to overwhelm. The cannons blasted away from the flanks, wreaking terror, sending many of his men fleeing. The battle raged for three hours before Cornplanter, Brant and Butler organized a retreat.

  The big guns didn’t stop there; they rolled onward, through the jungly woods, across streams, crawling up gray rock faces. The Iroquois sent word northward to abandon villages in the heartland of their territory. Up the long finger of Seneca Lake, Sullivan’s army continued, fending off minor attacks, leveling villages while first stopping to admire the neat log construction of the houses, the glass panes in the windows, the woven baskets, the domesticity of it all. They marveled at the expertness and scope of the native agriculture, the fields of “Corn, Beans, peas, Squashes, Potatoes, Inions, turnips, Cabage, Cowcumbers, watermilions, Carrots, parsnips &c,” as one soldier recorded in his diary. Then they burned it all to nothing.

  The American army overwhelmed the small groups of Indians it encountered. Some of these they scalped, in imitation of their enemy. Some they burned alive in their houses. They skinned two dead Indians and made pairs of leggings for officers out of them, leaving the horror of the remains behind. They were intent on making a statement, one the Iroquois would understand.

  As he raced back to his village of Conawaugus to alert everyone, and herded people toward the protection of the British fort at Niagara, Cornplanter did indeed come to understand what the Americans’ intention was. And, as the American army rolled forward like a force of nature, as village after village—Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca—was obliterated, he knew who was behind it all. He had never met George Washington, but all the Iroquois knew of him. And the name they had called the man from Virginia, which had originally applied to his grandfather, came back to Cornplanter with rueful and prophetic force. Town Destroyer.

  In April 1779, while George Washington was giving orders for the assembly of the army under Major General John Sullivan that was intended to crush the Iroquois, Abraham Yates rode a sloop back up the Hudson River to Albany. From there, he and his wife Anna took a sentimental journey to the little Dutch church in the village of Schaghticoke, 20 miles to the north, where, thirty-two years earlier, they had married. Now it was the turn of their seventeen-year-old daughter Susanna. The bridegroom, Abraham Lansing, was a stout, thick-faced son of an Albany gunsmith. Apart from a bit of awkwardness owing to the fact that Lansing had previously committed to marrying another local girl, Yates seemed to be delighted with his son-in-law. Lansing was a working-class Albany Dutchman who was known to be, as one of his friends said, “rough and somewhat abrupt in his manner, but upright, frank, and fearless in conduct and in character.” The newlyweds moved in with Abraham and Anna, which was just what the older couple wanted; Yates had built his house in downtown Albany large enough to accommodate an extended family. In addition to his love for Susanna, Lansing was bonded to the family by his ardent admiration for her father, who had risen from the working class just as he hoped to do. He supported Yates’s radical politics, and, when he was not on militia duty, hoped to work alongside him in some civic capacity. On the domestic front, Abraham Yates had to be well pleased.

  The wider world was another matter. Everyone in New York was alarmed by the Iroquois attacks to the west, state politics was a nest of vipers, and both the state and the national governments were bankrupt. The Articles of Confederation, which the Continental Congress had adopted in late 1777, had set up an awkward means of raising revenue to fund the war. Each state was to obtain loans from wealthy citizens. The men charged with obtaining the money were called continental loan officers. Yates asked Governor Clinton to appoint him to one of the posts, and the governor obliged.

  It was an odd and impossible job, but Yates had an ideological reason—he would say a patriotic reason—for wanting it. He had been watching with alarm as “aristocrats” in the Congress, as he termed them, maneuvered toward giving the national government the power to raise taxes. To Yates it would be an outrageous betrayal of the people for the national leaders to impose their will upon them in such a way—and at the very time they were fighting and dying for individual freedom, and over the matter of unjust taxation, no less. He took careful note when, shortly after the signing of the treaty with France, the delegates to the Congress agreed to form a committee of commerce whose very name—the Secret Committee—showed it to be, he believed, a conspiracy to usurp individual rights. The fact that the committee stipulated that its first report be restricted to a small circle and that “the printer be under an Oath not to devulge any part of the said Report,” raised Yates’s suspicions to the highest level. He monitored the subsequent journals of the Congress and determined that they “reveal the progress of the conspiracy.”

  He had concluded that the best way to stay abreast of the growing threat of economic usurpation was through being a part of the system. The job of continental loan officer, which he performed alongside his Senate duties, required him to be available every morning from nine to twelve and every afternoon from two to five so that anyone who wanted to make a loan to the government could do so. He hired as his assistant Abraham Lansing, his new son-in-law. After he collected money, he had to send it on to Congress and issue bills of credit to the lenders. The problems were endless. There weren’t enough lenders to fund the war, and those that did come forward discovered that it was a losing proposition. The bills of credit they received didn’t allow for interest, and the inflation that raged during the war quickly made them nearly worthless. After two years, the system had amassed, nationwide, $241 million in bills of credit, but they were worth a mere $4.8 million. As the papers Yates had given them dwindled in value, lenders became more and more irate.

  Thankless as it was, Yates clung to the job. He wasn’t raising his quota, but he was still helping to fund the war effort. And he was keeping an eye on the man who had become head of the American financial system, Robert Morris. Morris, a congressman from Pennsylvania, was fantastically wealthy, having made money on overseas trade, including slaves, as well as in banking. He was a wizard at accounting, and set about reorganizing the national government’s wobbly financial system. At the same time, he used his firm, Willing & Morris, to do much of the country’s trading with European nations for war supplies. Critics, led by Thomas Paine, accused him of war profiteering. Yates believed Morris was pulling the country toward a system of national taxation.

  Throughout 1779, then—as Spain joined the alliance with France and America, as a combination of American and French forces failed to retake the city of Savannah, Georgia, as American merchant raider John Paul Jones tangled with British frigates off the coast of England—Y
ates performed his various political jobs and kept a close watch on Robert Morris. He complained when Congress established a Board of Treasury, which he felt certain would become a bureaucratic mechanism for fiscal tyranny. Then came an even clearer indication of the direction Congress was taking. In January 1780 it voted that the journals of its activities would henceforth be published without indication of who had voted for or against a given item. Secrecy, Yates believed, was the soil in which tyranny grew. He was now openly worried that the Revolution, even as it progressed, was veering off course, that Congress—“the Center of Intrigue and cabal,” he took to calling it—was working to enlarge its own powers “at the expense of the Liberties of the People.”

  At the same time came other, brighter news. Precisely nine months after his daughter’s marriage to Abraham Lansing, Susanna gave birth to a baby girl. The couple gave her a sturdy Dutch name: Jannetje. For years Yates had been working toward a new American future. Suddenly, here it was. The big brick house in Albany rang with his granddaughter’s cries.

  George Germain’s fight wasn’t confined to America anymore. A British fleet clashed with French ships off the coast of Brittany. The encounter caused a political storm in London, which, exacerbated by popular anger over high taxes and rising debt, spilled into the streets. Why was England funneling its resources into a costly and dangerous war simultaneously with France and with its American colonies while people at home were suffering? In February 1779, mobs formed. One of the places they targeted was the townhouse of the American Secretary, who personified the war and was widely detested as an aristocrat and a bully. The crowd smashed windows, broke inside and began tossing furniture out into the street while Germain’s daughters shuddered in their beds.