Thanks largely to the devastation of their homelands by Sullivan’s army, the Iroquois, since the end of the war, had been caught up in a confused and mournful migration; they were dealing with loss, seeking homes. The more eastern nations had moved west into Seneca territory. Cornplanter had lost his wife in the war, perhaps during the depredations of Sullivan’s army. He and his eight-year-old son had taken up residence for a time in the village of Tonawanda, just below the falls at Niagara. It may have been there that he met the woman who became his second wife. Her name was Ke-koi-no-us.
Ke-koi-no-us was from the village of Jenuchshadego, also called Burnt House, along the Allegheny River in northeastern Pennsylvania. Cornplanter and his son moved yet again to her village; with him came his half-brother, Handsome Lake, and his nephew, Governor Blacksnake, and their families. Through the grayness and the suffering came glints of hope. Cornplanter’s wife became pregnant. And despite all they had endured, the Iroquois who had sided with the British could pride themselves on the fact that they themselves had not been vanquished. Unlike George Washington, Cornplanter had won many more battles than he had lost. He and his Seneca brothers had done their part to beat the Americans. The British officials in North America knew this. Despite the loss of the war, the Iroquois who had fought alongside the British expected their loyalty to the powerful empire to be rewarded.
It was only slowly, in the course of 1783, that a devastating truth was revealed to Cornplanter. The British officers he had known and had fought alongside took their time in conveying it, but finally he learned the details of the treaty between the British and the Americans. The British affirmed the sovereignty of the American nation. The British agreed that their dominion would extend from a line that cut through the Great Lakes. Territory north of this line—Canada—would be British. All territory south of it would be open to exploitation by the new United States of America.
It took the Iroquois some time to fathom the betrayal. When they had urged the Iroquois to join them in the fight, the British had pointed to the ancient covenant between Britain and the Iroquois and promised to stand by their allies. In the treaty, however, they had not only abandoned them. They had given the Americans access to what was not theirs and had never been theirs. They had all but handed the Americans the land of the Iroquois.
This had not happened by accident or oversight. There had been debate in London. As the treaty was being negotiated, a member of the House of Lords had decried his government’s abandonment of its allies, calling it “shameful and unpardonable,” and demanding that the government rework the language of the treaty so that it allowed its faithful allies to have “peaceable possession of their native lands.” There was a new prime minister now in England: William Petty, the Earl of Shelburne. He led the treaty formulation, which was positively grotesque in its logic. The Iroquois “were not abandoned to their enemies,” he had countered; rather, “they were remitted to the care of neighbours, whose interest it was as much as ours to cultivate friendship with them, and who were certainly the best qualified for softening and humanizing their hearts.”
As they became aware of all of this, the Iroquois reacted first with outrage and calls for a new war. Messengers went out along the old westward trails. In September 1783 a gathering of disparate tribes of the kind not seen since the time of Pontiac’s Rebellion took place, at Sandusky, Ohio. Not just Iroquois but Cherokee, Mingo, Shawnee, Ojibwa and Creek peoples met to discuss their options.
The American Congress knew something had to be done. Its members understood they could not put off dealing with the Indians, who could unleash terror on the frontier. A council was called, to be held at Fort Stanwix, west of Albany. Cornplanter was one of the leaders who made the journey on behalf of the Iroquois.
So here he stood, opposite the Marquis de Lafayette, who was part of the congressional delegation. Cornplanter opened the discussion with a confession that he found the situation confusing. There were representatives from both New York State and from the American Congress. They had been told different things by each regarding their lands. The Iroquois, he said, didn’t understand which authority they were to deal with. They did not know where they stood. What kind of future could they expect? Where would they live? What of their lands? He knew, he said, that “ill winds blow from every quarter,” but he vowed to close his ears to “evil words” and only listen to and speak honest ones.
Lafayette replied. His words were brisk and direct. He did not dwell on ancient covenants but instead reminded the Iroquois that they had been warned not to take up arms against the Americans. “The American cause is just,” he proclaimed; “it is the cause of humanity.” He told them that “the great chief Warrior Washington” had prevailed in battle against the Iroquois. They were in no position to bargain. Nevertheless, “the great Council of the United States is, in their goodness, disposed to treat with you.” In encouraging the Iroquois to look to the future, the Frenchman stressed the French connection: in winning the war, he reminded them, the Americans had relied on “the intimate friends of your fathers, the French.” The Iroquois would have much to gain in the future through trade with both the French and the new American nation. Therefore, he ended, “let the American chiefs, and yours united around the fire, settle on reasonable terms.”
There was a great deal of grumbling among the Iroquois leaders. They pointed to the treaty of 1768, by which Americans had agreed to permanent boundaries with the Iroquois. This had now been violated. To this, one of the commissioners replied simply that the Iroquois were now “a subdued people.”
Cornplanter, the philosopher, understood power. The Iroquois were not naïve regarding war and its results. Their whole history was one of tension and conflict between competing nations, of war and retribution. Winners of contests exercised power over losers. Lafayette and his fellow commissioners were simply restating the old theme. He advised his fellow Iroquois leaders to accept the situation.
The Iroquois began their deliberations. No sooner had they done so than a messenger arrived with news that halted the council. The messenger had come from Cornplanter’s village, Burnt House, with news that his infant child, a daughter, had died. Surely this was not a good omen. The Iroquois paused to perform the ritual of mourning, to give their leader time to grieve.
When they reconvened, Cornplanter’s thinking won the day. There was, he reckoned, no other way for the Iroquois to proceed than to accept American might. Agreeing to give up land gave them a chance at a future. Refusing to do so meant the return of the white army and its thunder trees, and even greater devastation. The Iroqouis representatives put their marks on a document in which they ceded land in exchange for promises of protection and trade.
In January 1784 word reached Haddam, Connecticut, that the Continental Congress had ratified the Treaty of Paris. Since negotiators had signed the document four months earlier, Congress’s approval was a formality, but the very formality made it resonate among the farmers and tradesmen of the area. Americans had fought for eight years, and they won their freedom. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Those words could now be realized.
A bit later, more news reached Venture Smith’s farm. The people in his family and those who had gathered around him as laborers or tenants were all free blacks, but they, and certainly the slaves of the area, had waited for indications that the conviction of America’s leaders, that “all men are created equal,” might finally be realized. And here it came. The State of Connecticut had just passed a law: “Whereas sound Policy requires that the Abolition of Slavery should be effected . . .”
Some people may have jumped up and whooped. Venture Smith surely knew better. From long experience he had learned to wait for the other shoe to drop. And it did. Connecticut’s new law went on to stipulate that the state would abolish slavery “as soon as may be, consistent with the Rights of Individuals and the public Safety and Welfare.” What exactly did that mean? The framers of the law sti
pulated not that all slaves in the state would henceforth be free—for that would have been too great a blow to the property rights of current slave owners—but instead that children born to slaves after March 1, 1784, would be free.
Well, that at least was cause for celebration. There was reason to whoop and holler after all, for these as-yet-unborn children.
But as the blacks of Haddam and other towns in the state slowly learned, the law did not actually free these infants. In fact, it freed no one. What it did was decree that anyone born in Connecticut to an enslaved mother after March 1, 1784, would be emancipated when he or she became twenty-five years of age. In other words, no one would be freed by the law for another twenty-five years. The members of the Assembly were fussed about individual rights, yes, but mostly the rights of white citizens who owned slaves, and those of poor whites who would have to compete for work with former slaves. They prided themselves on their commitment to the Enlightenment principle of individual freedom and believed they were pushing their state toward abolition, yet they hedged and hemmed the matter so severely that their new law had exactly no effect on the black population of the state.
Or rather, it did, but a negative one. For women who gave birth after the prescribed date found that they and their children, who were now tainted by the stain of future freedom, were suddenly valued by slave owners less than other slaves. Owners began breaking up families in order to ship these slaves to states where there were no gradual emancipation laws.
None of this affected Venture Smith directly. He was one of the very few Africans to buy not only himself but also his wife and children out of slavery. As a result, Cuff’s children would be free. And when ten-year-old Solomon had children, they would be free. But Venture identified with his enslaved “countrymen.” He still played in his mind the scenes of being torn from his family and homeland as a child. He believed in freedom as surely as the men who had written the Declaration of Independence. But he had also lived for forty-six years now in a land ruled by white men, and he was not in the least surprised to learn that a law intended to bring freedom to blacks actually brought them only more suffering.
Despite his own relative security, he began to grow bitter following the Revolution. He took to grumbling about being cheated in business. A Long Island man from whom he had bought a shipment of clams stole his boat after it was loaded up. He chased the man down and recovered his boat, but the clams, for which he had already paid, were gone. The affair cost him nine crowns; “I never could obtain any compensation,” he complained.
Shortly after the gradual emancipation law went into effect, Smith paid a local carpenter named Amos Ranney four pounds to build a scow boat for him. Months went by and Ranney didn’t deliver. Through his real estate dealings Smith had become comfortable using the law. On November 8 he marched into the home of Ezra Brainerd, justice of the peace of the town of Haddam, and filed suit against Ranney for return of his money plus damages. Ranney denied that he owed Smith anything; the evidence suggested otherwise. Smith won his suit.
But Amos Ranney couldn’t let the matter rest. There was simmering anger among whites in Connecticut in the wake of the emancipation law, which may have added an extra complexion to his feelings at being bested by a black man. Three months later, Smith was alone, working on his own property one evening when three men jumped him. They tried to disguise themselves, but he knew perfectly well who they were. One was Ranney. The other two were Elisha Day and Jonathan Bowers. They were all white men from Haddam, all in their thirties. Smith was still a powerful man, but there were three of them, they were younger and they had surprised him. They beat him senseless. He appeared in Ezra Brainerd’s doorway looking like he had been run over by stampeding horses, and filed suit. The suit charged that the three men “assaulted, beat, wounded, maimed and greatly terrified and put his life in danger.” He had spent forty shillings getting his injuries tended to by a doctor; he asked for “the sum of forty shillings lawful money” in damages. The justice of the peace held a trial and summoned the three men to appear. They pleaded not guilty. Brainerd examined witnesses and gave his ruling. The court, he wrote, “is of the opinion that the said Amos, Elisha and Jonathan are guilty.” He ordered them each to pay Smith nine shillings in damages and to pay a further five shillings apiece to the town of Haddam.
The three white men each paid Venture Smith. He had played the game and won, twice over. But as far as he was concerned, life was as riddled with ugliness as it ever had been. You didn’t wait for justice in the new America. You had to go out and get it. And the taste was often bitter.
While George Washington moved from victory at Yorktown toward what he hoped would be his retirement at Mount Vernon, and while the members of the Continental Congress fussed and railed over how actually to govern a nation, Margaret Coghlan was doing the Grand Tour of Europe. Pale Greek ruins, Roman columns standing proud in orange sunlight, the brooding mystery of Vesuvius, the languor of Venice’s canals, the gardens of the Villa Pamphili on the outskirts of Rome: she moved through a landscape that was probably as far from the America in which she had been born as was possible for her to imagine.
She was still seeking freedom, of course. Was this it? Had she achieved it at last? If not, it was very close. Surely that was what she smelled through the carriage window, in the olive and lemon orchards and lavender fields she passed, heavy and sweet in the humid Mediterranean air.
Practically the moment that her Whig lover, Charles James Fox, had let her go, she had attached herself to a man whom she quickly characterized as being Fox’s opposite in nearly every way. Fox was one of the leading intellectual politicians of his day; Samuel Fazakerley, the wealthy young scion of a family that owned a large swath of the Lancashire countryside, was a bit of a dunce. Fox was a lively chatterbox and an expansive personality; Fazakerley, she observed, was “morose and capricious.”
Yet for all his flaws, Fazakerley was wealthy, generous and unmarried, and when she warned him, shortly after they had taken up with one another, that she was four months pregnant, he gallantly waved the matter away as a minor difficulty. The dismissive wave was like a benediction. Fazakerley lived in a world in which the starchy proprieties of marriage and illegitimacy did not hold. His money and his class were like wings that carried him above convention, and they could carry her as well. She felt free in this upper realm. And when Margaret gave birth, not only did he accept her daughter as part of the package, he refused to let her write to Charles Fox, the father of the child, for support. He happily brought mother and child both into his orbit, and promised Margaret he would show her the world.
And so they set out for the Continent. Though they did not marry, Coghlan presented herself as Margaret Fazakerley in hotels and inns and among the Italian and French nobles they met in society. They followed in the wake of so many other wealthy British and American travelers, spending long periods in each place, soaking in art and antiquity and culture. This, then, was the completion of Margaret’s education, and she reveled in it, and considered that, by the end of four long and languorous years of travel, during which people in the United States were processing the reality of their independence, she had reached the point where she could see herself in relation to the wider world; she had, she pronounced with satisfaction, “certainly acquired graces and accomplishments.”
Her very sense of satisfaction and accomplishment led to the end of her relationship with Fazakerley. It was her doing as much as his. Amenable though he was to many things, Fazakerley never even pretended to pay the slightest attention to her thoughts and ideas. Over time, she came to insist on being taken seriously. Tensions arose, and in the end they parted. Once again, she was on her own. But she didn’t mind. The relationship had run its course. She had gotten a great deal from her latest lover. She had tasted that free, refined air. She liked the view from up here. She would surely find a way to stay aloft.
An enormous tree shaded the back entrance to Viscount Sackville’s country es
tate. He had been out riding with Richard Cumberland, his former aide, who, unlike almost everyone else in his professional life, was still devoted to him. They had been discussing resolutions concerning the trade with Ireland, which would be up for consideration in the House of Lords, and what position Sackville would take on them. They stopped beneath the tree and dismounted. Suddenly, Sackville’s face took on such a haggard look that he could read the younger man’s alarm in his eyes. He had been suffering from kidney stones for several years, and other ailments had mounted.
They sat on a bench under the tree. It was May 1785, a lovely, pastoral day in the English countryside. Sackville recovered from his moment of agony. “I know as well as you can tell me, what you think of me just now,” he said, “and that you are convinced if I go to town upon this Irish business, I go to my death.” He asked the younger man not to voice that warning, for he intended on going, and he worried that if Cumberland advised him not to go and he did in fact die Cumberland would “repent of it.”
Later, after dinner, the two men sat outside again on chairs on the lawn, gazing meditatively toward the line of the forest in the distance. Of all things, Sackville brought up the subject of Minden. He recounted the events of the battle—which despite the loss of America he still saw as the great shattering tragedy of his life—in an even, relaxed tone. “He appeared to me throughout his whole discourse like a man who had perfectly dismissed his passions,” Cumberland later wrote.
Sackville was dying, and he knew it. In the three years since his retirement from government, he had appeared regularly in the House of Lords, as much to defy his enemies there as to hold forth on policy. Otherwise he enjoyed corresponding with his children and making occasional visits to their families. He was disappointed that neither of his two sons had pursued careers in politics; it didn’t seem to occur to him that the tempestuous example he had set might have been the reason.
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