Despite, or in part because of, that devastation of Iroquois lands, Cornplanter held Washington in some regard. He knew how the Americans felt about him. He knew that they considered their victory over the British and their forming of their own nation to be a momentous thing, and that they gave Washington much credit for their success. Such things held value too for Cornplanter, even though they had happened at the expense of his people. As a child in the longhouse, Cornplanter would have heard tales of a strange creature called Tadadaho. Tadadaho was a kind of wizard, with a twisted body, who lived in a swamp and controlled people by sowing fear. As part of the coming-together of the Iroquois Confederacy, the figure known as the Peacemaker was able to work magic on Tadadaho, converting his evil into good, so that his natural leadership abilities could be put to positive use. As a result, Tadadaho became the grand chief of the Confederacy. The story of Tadadaho fit the history of George Washington, and Cornplanter seemed to believe that, like the Peacemaker, his task as spokesman for the Iroquois was to try to convert Town Destroyer into a leader who would help rather than harm his people.
The Indians were shown into Washington’s office, where they found him flanked by three soldiers. Coming face to face at last, the two leaders must have seen evidence of one another’s stature and experience. But where Washington had become stooped with ailments, his face rutted and his lips pursed, Cornplanter was still vital. His eyes expressed almost shocking force. He began by acknowledging their respective roles, referring to himself as “the voice of the Seneca nation” and to Washington as “the great Councillor, in whose heart the wise men of the thirteen fires have placed their wisdom.” Then he offered an acknowledgement of Washington’s greater power: “When your army entered the Country of the Six Nations, we called you the Town-destroyer and to this day, when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the neck of their mothers.”
He spoke at length. He could not know whether he would ever get another meeting with the leader of all Americans, so he wanted to set the situation in perspective. He had no notes, and as Washington’s interpreter took it all down, it became clear that the Seneca held a prodigious amount of historical information in his head. He went back to the time before the Iroquois had formed their Confederacy, remarking on how the various Indian nations had fought with one another. Then the Confederacy brought peace. He talked about the arrival of the French and the English. In coming to the period of the Revolution, he recounted how the Americans themselves had warned the Iroquois that the king of England was a fearsome leader whom they must obey, suggesting, ever so slyly, that the blame for their entering the war on the British side might reasonably be laid at the Americans’ feet. He discussed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, and how he now understood that a trick had been played on them, the Iroquois being alternately told they were dealing with British law, then with various state governments, then with the American government. Further, the treaty had contained a promise that once they gave up certain lands, “we should be secured in the peaceable possession of the lands which we inhabited.” But that promise had been violated almost at once. He went into details of discussions with the State of Pennsylvania, and how that state’s negotiators had insisted even in the midst of the discussions that it was all moot because the land “was already ceded to them by the great King.”
Cornplanter made Washington understand that he was no fool, that, as far as he was concerned, the Americans, with their seemingly inexorable civilization, were toying with the native inhabitants of the continent. He concluded with a bold demand: “You have said we were in your hand, and that by closing it, you could crush us to nothing. Are you determined to crush us? If you are, tell us so.” Many Iroquois, he said, wanted to know plainly if the Americans were going to obliterate them, in which case they preferred to do the work themselves: “eat the faral root,” and sleep with their fathers in peace.
But rather than leave the president with the taunt to finish them off and be done with it, he added a caveat: “Before you determine on a measure so unjust, look up to the God who made us, as well as you.”
It was a stunning address, one that summarized a civilization, its claims to its land, its very claim to existence. Washington could not give an answer on the spot. He promised to reply after he had had time to consider the remarks. When they next met, he was ready, and spoke in the clear, frank terms of one who holds power and knows it. He informed Cornplanter that the Fort Stanwix treaty was not up for renegotiation. They would have to live with a territory that was much smaller than what they had before the war. But he also promised that the existing boundaries would be upheld. The American government, he vowed, would “never consent to your being defrauded, but it will protect you in all your just rights.”
Washington was aware that the Iroquois needed to restructure their society in the face of a rapidly growing American nation, and he seemed to accept that helping them to do so was part of his responsibility. The president of the United States went so far in a subsequent meeting as to personally walk the Senecas down the street from his mansion to do some shopping for their settlement. (Cornplanter’s nephew was struck enough by the novelty of this that he recalled the order in which they strolled: “Red Jacket was next to Washington as we went along on the sidewalk; I was far behind.”) Meanwhile, the State of Pennsylvania made Cornplanter a grant of 1,500 acres of land for the formation of a new Seneca town. It also gave him and his party 65 pounds in cash; the Senecas used the money to buy equipment for the new settlement.
Having seen a great deal of the scope and spread of American civilization, and having thought much about how to ensure the long-term survival of his people, Cornplanter, in his meeting with the president, expressed his desire to have Iroquois children learn English and some of the ways of the Americans. Washington liked this. He agreed to provide teachers for the new town, as well as experts who could demonstrate some of the latest agricultural methods.
Cornplanter left Philadelphia without getting the commitment to return native lands that his people were hoping for. He knew that many would refuse to accept this, and that there would be more bloodshed. But Washington had treated him with respect and had promised—had solemnly promised, and surely that was something—to uphold the new boundaries. The American government, he had said, “will protect you.” So Cornplanter had to think that there were some grounds for hope: that he had successfully played the role of Peacemaker, and that the evil in the white Tadadaho had been transformed to good.
On the way out of the city, the relatively hopeful mood was violently broken. The Senecas were attacked by a party of American militiamen who had been lying in wait for them. They robbed them of all the items they had purchased for their new village.
Margaret Coghlan’s English creditors were not stupid. She may have thought that with the passage of time she would be able to slip back into London unnoticed, but shortly after her return, they pounced. She was arrested and taken to a “sponging house,” a private house that served as a temporary prison for debtors. Seven weeks she languished there, until her case came up at the King’s Bench court. Her creditors—drapers, perfumiers, hairdressers, furniture makers—paraded before the judge. She was found guilty. Unable to pay, she was sentenced to two years in prison.
This time it was real: iron bars, rats, lunatic screams, watery gruel for meals. And, again, she was pregnant. As the time of her delivery approached, she became reflective on her long, mad quest for happiness, for freedom: “I ever have grasped at a shadow—the substance I could never attain.” She rued having given herself over to the promises of men. “Beware, then, ye lovely victims of their crocodile caresses!” she wrote, addressing any young women who might heed her warning. She had known perfectly well that for a woman to get ahead by using men she had to be very calculating; but she had stumbled in her calculations, and she offered advice to others: “make the false dissemblers, while they pay homage to your beauty, provide also for yo
ur interest: lay up stores against a rainy day.” She gave birth in squalor, assisted by a young prison doctor who had no experience. So vile were the conditions that, after her son was born and her bloodied clothes removed, she and the baby lay naked for two days before they received any attention.
Shortly after she was released from prison, in late 1791, she learned that her father had died in New York. He had been buried in Trinity Church, where her ghastly marriage had taken place. The news shook her terribly—she declared that she had had a premonition of it—but, worse, it brought a new round of creditors after her. There were still many people to whom she owed money, and they now assumed she would have received an inheritance. She had not. But the lawsuits resulted in her once again being hauled to prison. Her father’s death, though, had one happy result: it brought her in contact with her long lost brother. He sent her money: not a lot, but, she said, enough “to raise my drooping head, and to sooth the miseries of the King’s Bench prison.”
When she stepped outside after another two years, the pale sun showed a ghostly pallor to her skin. The arresting beauty that had clung to her her whole life, as much a curse as a gift, was gone. Searching for some peace and security, she made her way 70 miles south to Portsmouth, where she tracked down two aunts. They invited her into their cozy home, fed her, sat her by the fire. She unwound her long, sad and exhilarating story for them, and for once she felt a bit of relief.
It didn’t last. Back in London, another bailiff appeared at her door. Other creditors demanded that she pay. “Arrest after arrest pursues me,” she wrote weakly. Her body was breaking down, but her will remained firm. She wracked her brains over this new round of debts. “I am certain that Four Hundred Pounds would discharge them,” she thought. “But to raise that sum, where is my hope?”
And then she had a new idea. Not a man, for once. A book.
Everyone in England was riveted by the French Revolution. Would its ideas spread across the Channel? People were devouring the works of French writers. An Englishwoman named Mary Wollstonecraft had noted a glaring hole in the reasoning of these fine thinkers. Rousseau, one of the inspirations of the revolution, in the midst of arguing for the elevation of reason over superstition, added a caveat that women did not have the same capacity for reason as men and therefore were not entitled to the same kind of education. Educating women in the ways of the world would only encourage them to challenge men, which was unnatural. “If woman is made to please and to be subjugated to man,” he wrote, “she ought to make herself pleasing to him rather than to provoke him.”
What particularly stirred Mary Wollstonecraft to action were similar remarks by one of France’s revolutionary figures, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who declared that the enlightened French Republic would be a nation in which women would stay out of worldly affairs and instead “accustom themselves to a calm and secluded life.” The book Wollstonecraft wrote in response, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, argued that all people, regardless of sex, had the same God-given natural rights. Society treated women like “slaves,” she said; education would free them: an “enlightened nation” should conduct an experiment, allowing women “to share the advantages of education and government with man,” and “see whether they will become better, as they grow wiser and become free. They cannot be injured by the experiment; for it is not in the power of man to render them more insignificant than they are at present.”
Wollstonecraft’s book was being read as Coghlan got out of prison. One passage in particular seemed to reach right into her core: “Consider . . . whether, when men contend for their freedom, and to be allowed to judge for themselves, respecting their own happiness, it be not inconsistent and unjust to subjugate women . . . ? Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason?”
Coghlan’s very life had in a sense been a search for the freedom that both recent historic revolutions promised. Why had she failed so miserably? Obviously, because she was a woman. The men who led the Enlightenment movement toward freedom had excepted half of the species from their grand program. She had not fully understood this before; she had instead charged ahead in pursuit of her own freedom. She had had no choice, really; she had needed to do what she did; she would have lost her mind living in servitude to the abusive beast she had been forced to marry. Yes, she had gotten sidetracked: she had forgotten that she was only playing a role; she had let herself be lured by silk and champagne and the possibility of love. But her life had been animated by the same forces that were driving these world-historic movements. It deserved to be put into a book; there would be lessons in it for young women. When she had told her aunts of her mad adventures, she hadn’t spared them any of the lurid details. Why not do that in print?
She met a man named Pigott. He was an oily little fellow, but he knew the business of printers and books and such. As a political radical, he was consumed by the goings-on in France, which had now reached the level of what seemed like mass insanity. While she was in prison, first the king had been executed, then his wife, Marie-Antoinette; then the revolutionary leaders began turning on one another. There were riots in the streets of Paris. Charles Pigott had once been a newspaperman. The revolutions in America and France had given him a new career: publishing books on the louche sex lives of English aristocrats as a way to highlight their decadance. It was sleazy, but he had a political motive that he thought of as legitimate: to undermine the upper class and help bring revolution to England’s shores.
When Margaret mentioned her idea to Pigott, he made it happen. He encouraged her to be herself, to pour out her story in whatever manner came most naturally to her. And she did. She named names. She described high passion and low squalor. She showed herself the proud and defiant mistress of a duke, a general, a captain, a businessman: she reveled in tolling the succession of lovers. She described the travails of trying to live as a free and independent woman. It wasn’t, in the main, a philosophical piece of writing, but she had learned a great deal and was suddenly conscious of her whirlwind of a life having taken place at a fulcrum of history. She had been shaped by the collision of the old—British feudalism and the French old regime—with the insurgency of values that comprised the American and French revolutions. She had lived through, she said, “an aera replete with events still in the womb of time to produce,” an era that “threatens destruction to long established systems—to long established orders.”
She filled sheet after sheet with her clean, strong handwriting, and while the work was focused on her own affairs, as she neared the end, she saw how the larger story of the times had given her her identity. “Born in America, and resident many years in England,” she concluded, “I feel no partialities, no prepossessions or disgusts—my country is the world!” She begged the reader to excuse her political digressions, but didn’t really excuse them herself, declaring them to be “the spontaneous emanations of a soul fraught with sensibility, and glowing with zeal for the general happiness and improvement of mankind.”
She brought her personal story right to the present moment: December 1793, with the threat of jail hanging once again over her head for want of 400 pounds. The pen scratched its way to the end. At the last moment she thought of a dedication. She had come to identify with the republican spirit of her native land, but America and its revolution were far away. Her own life had played out mostly in England, the book was being published in England, and her underlying motivation in publishing it was to win the pity of English readers, who might relieve her of her suffering. She scribbled the dedication: “To the British Nation.”
And what to call it? She had taken particular, dark pleasure in detailing the abuses her husband had subjected her to. If there was a prime mover to the tragedy that was her life it was surely John Coghlan. But the conventions surrounding the institution of marriage, which violated a woman’s freedom just as she was setting out in life, were also to blame. She chose a title that pointed at both her odious husband and marriage itself. She
called it the Memoirs of Mrs. Coghlan.
The cane tapped purposefully along the street. Abraham Yates had appointments to hurry to, but then too the tapping was itself part of his work.
The struggle over the United States Constitution had left Yates a creature of the past in many ways, but here in his hometown he still had another act to live out. Albany had always been his focus and his passion, and in 1790, following the federalist victory, Governor George Clinton, his old comrade, appointed him mayor of the city.
Yates hadn’t seen it coming, but the appointment ushered in the happiest and most rewarding period of his life. He took to the task with as much zeal as he had ever shown for anything. He had served the city in so many capacities through the years, now that he was given a chance to run it, he was keen to do everything in his power to make it flourish. He began with a new effort at paving the streets. It was an enormous job—Market Street alone, where his own house was, required thousands of cartloads of stone—hence the tapping to test the work. He set up an additional ferry crossing the Hudson River, and a new system of lamps to light the streets. Under his administration, local residents established a bank, which they sensibly named the Bank of Albany. The place was growing: the city itself had only 3,500 residents, but Albany County’s population swelled to 75,000, surpassing even New York City.
The year 1793 was a hard one. In August, his dear friend and onetime protégé, Matthew Visscher, died, at the age of forty-two. Outbreaks of smallpox and yellow fever to the west and south required Yates to institute a quarantine on travelers from certain regions. In September, he got word that a high government official was being held across the river, and he was furious at being denied entry into the city. The official was the secretary of the United States Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who was traveling with his wife to visit her parents, the Schuylers. Since yellow fever was raging in Philadelphia, where they had come from, they were being detained. Yates sent a physician to examine his old enemy and Mrs. Hamilton; the report came that they seemed in good health; he cleared them to enter, perhaps grudgingly.
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