Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  Hamilton’s appearance in Albany under threat of infectious disease must have seemed metaphorically apt to Yates. For the federalist threat, led still by Hamilton, had not abated, and Yates was still doing everything he could to resist it. The French Revolution had indirectly brought his fears of tyranny—along with those of many other Americans—back to the fore. Relations with Britain had remained poor since the end of the war. In the fallout from France’s revolutionary turmoil, England and France were now at war. The American government had to pick a side. Antifederalists strongly supported France, whose populist ideals, they felt, closely matched those that had sparked the American Revolution. Federalists sided with England. Hamilton urged President Washington to turn his back on the nation that had given crucial support to the Americans and instead ally with their former enemy. Fearing another war with the British, Washington went along with Hamilton’s advice. He sent John Jay to negotiate a treaty with England that was intended to ensure peace and settle grievances left over from the Revolution.

  Jay’s treaty, which the Senate quickly voted on, incensed the American public. People had suffered financially from an ongoing trade imbalance since the end of the war, which the treaty was supposed to rectify, but it ignored the issue. Jay had given much, and gotten very little in return. The outcry reached the level of outright fury—angry crowds surrounded Washington’s mansion, people threw rocks at Alexander Hamilton in public—not just because of the terms of the treaty but also because it had been ratified by the president and the Senate without any popular input.

  Yates went back into essay mode. The danger that the treaty’s swift passage pointed up, he said, was of a future president becoming an out-and-out tyrant. All a president needed was enough power to control the Senate. With that, he could force through Supreme Court justices that were to his liking. Then he could proceed to dismantle press freedoms and other checks on power. Yates’s fear was that the Constitution, in its very construction, allowed for America’s hallowed fight for freedom to be subverted into dictatorship.

  Because he kept hounding them, the federalists continued to attack Yates. Several times they tried to oust him from the mayor’s office. He fought them off with gusto. Meanwhile, in his spare hours, he began writing, as a postmortem on the American experiment, should it become necessary, a history of the state of New York. It was a lopsided history: he devoted most of it to the Dutch period, and to the background of the Dutch in Europe, describing in page after page the steady development among them of the concept of “the people’s rights and liberties.”

  Between the mayor’s day job and his history project, he worked doggedly, despite his seventy-one years and wobbly health. Then, quite suddenly, Antje, his wife of forty-eight years, died. He tried to soldier on despite his sorrow. In the months following her funeral the big house on Market Street remained as boisterous as ever. As if to make up for the sole child Abraham and Antje had had, that daughter, Susanna, and her husband, Abraham Lansing, had thirteen children all told; the entire extended family continued to live together, for Yates relished being surrounded by his grandchildren. But Antje had been as vital to him as his work had been, and he declined rapidly after her death. For a short time he continued overseeing the weekly meetings of the city council. Then in the early summer of 1795 he suddenly stopped attending them. A year later, still clinging onto the office of mayor, he managed to get himself to one last municipal meeting. Nine days later he died. Much of Albany turned out to see him laid to rest next to Antje.

  Never one to spare words, Yates, just before he died, wrote his own epitaph, which he intended to be inscribed on his tombstone. In typical fashion, it was long: fifty-nine turgid and overwrought words. Not surprisingly, it was never carved. But the Albany Register published it. It highlighted the two things he wished to be remembered for. “Beneath lies Abraham Yates Jun.,” he had written, “who uniformly opposed the tyranny of Britain, and the corrupt perfidious Establishment of the funding system.” To the very end of his life, and even in a sense beyond it, he cried out to Americans to heed his warning: that the federal system of the United States government would, in the end, “prove most injurious to the equal rights of man.”

  Chapter 20

  WHICH NOTHING ELSE CAN EQUAL

  George Washington was toothless. Or virtually so: by the time he had reached the age of sixty, he had exactly one of his own teeth in his mouth. Steady dental rot had been a nagging, debilitating affliction throughout his life. And if, during his presidency, his deafness made him an ineffective listener, the dentures that he wore, made of human teeth held together with ivory and gold, rendered him an awkward speaker as well. Plus, he had the devil of a time chewing food.

  As his political career wound down, he came to feel metaphorically toothless as well. He was determined at the outset of his presidency to do what he could to ensure that the new nation did not divide itself into political parties, which he felt would lead to its ruin, yet that was precisely what happened in the split between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, or Democratic-Republicans, as the latter came to be known. Washington himself had fueled the divide by installing leaders of the two parties—Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson—in his cabinet, giving each a power base from which to nurture a constituency.

  The treaty that Washington had sent John Jay to negotiate may have staved off another war with England but it exacerbated the political rift in the country. And the Jay Treaty became the means for politicians to do what had been unthinkable a few years before: attack Washington himself. As word leaked out that Washington and the Senate had kept the treaty’s terms secret until it was signed, thus seeming to act in violation of the prime principle of a democratic government, newspapers unleashed waves of invective. Writers fed on the growing public anger, and in a remarkably short time everything Washington had done in his life was turned on its head. In his early military days in the French and Indian war, one writer declared, Washington had been “ignorant of war both in theory and useful practice.” During the Revolution, he had waged a “stupid policy” that dragged out the war. A writer went so far as to suggest that General Washington had taken bribes from the British. As president, newspapers charged, he had been monarchical, antidemocratic and pompous.

  Anti-Federalist leaders joined in the attacks. James Monroe wrote a highly critical book on Washington’s conduct of foreign affairs. Freed by the sudden change of mood, Thomas Paine felt at liberty to air long-standing grievances, and to get deeply personal, declaring that while he had an acquaintance with Washington that went back decades there had never been friendship between them, for Washington “has no friendships” and “is incapable of forming any.” The president, he charged, had no principles; he could “serve or desert a man, or a cause, with constitutional indifference.” Whipping himself to the kind of rhetorical lather he had once devoted to supporting the American cause, Paine charged that Washington had duped everyone into thinking he possessed “prudence, moderation, and impartiality,” when in reality he simply had no human warmth, only a “cold hermaphrodite faculty.”

  At times Washington no doubt wished he had not given in to the figures on both sides of the political divide who had urged him to stand for reelection to a second term. He did have achievements in his second term. Three new states—Vermont, Tennessee and Kentucky—entered the union. He worked out a treaty with Spain that was much more happily received than the one with England. Spain controlled virtually all territory west of the Mississippi River; with the treaty, it acknowledged the river as the United States’ boundary, vastly extending the nation’s exploitable territory. The treaty also granted American vessels the right to use the Spanish port of New Orleans.

  But the political storms kept coming. Abolitionists accused him of being the ultimate hypocrite, for purporting to be, as one wrote, “the great champion of American Freedom” while holding on his estate “FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN SLAVERY” twenty years after the founding of the republic. It wa
s true that his position on slavery was as fraught as ever. He truly hated the institution: for how it destroyed the lives of the enslaved, for how it led white owners into moral reprehensibility, and for the way it undermined the ideology of freedom that the country was founded on. He had not freed his own slaves (nor had any of his fellow leaders in government) in part because he was still caught in the economic trap of a planter, but probably also because it would have been political suicide. The southern slave owners were a powerful bloc.

  In the fall of 1796 he decided he would definitely retire at the end of his second term as president, and, eager for the end, he prepared a farewell address. He didn’t actually deliver it in public, but rather arranged to have it appear in a newspaper, thus letting the world know of his intention to leave public life without having to face the reaction. He took pains in the address to advise “friends and citizens” of one thing in particular as they looked to the future: “the danger of Parties in the State.” After all he had witnessed in his years of military and public service, he seemed most shaken by the damage that the split into two factions had caused the nation, and he implored America’s leaders to find a way to dispense with political parties. “They serve,” he said, “to Organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force—to put in the place of the delegated will of the Nation, the will of a party.” He seemed truly to fear what could happen if the federal system that he himself had helped champion were subverted by parties. “The alternate domination of one faction over another,” he said, is “itself a frightful despotism” which could lead to “a more formal and permanent despotism.” Just months after Abraham Yates’s death, Washington seemed belatedly to agree with Yates’s fears for the system he had helped create, almost to wish to reverse his own support of a strong central government, in light of the tendency of his fellow citizens to form factions. Sounding much like Yates, Washington said he now saw that periods of turbulence would “gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”

  There were five churches nowadays in the Connecticut towns of Haddam and East Haddam, and black residents, slaves and free, were joining the congregations. This was somewhat new. From the time the first slaves had been dragged to America, many owners had preferred to keep them separated from the Christian faith, reasoning either that they were too brutish for it or that it would encourage them to push for freedom. But in the 1790s a mass revival movement swept through the country; people gathered by the thousands in vast tents or in the open air to sing and pray and dedicated themselves to Jesus Christ. In the egalitarian spirit of the Revolution, blacks were now being welcomed. The preachers wove together in their sermons the themes of religious freedom, political freedom and the joy of the spirit taking flight, the combination of which moved them toward calling with new energy for the abolition of slavery.

  Venture Smith did not join a church. But he was thinking about mortality, and he began preparing for his own end with customary practicality. He was over seventy years old now and described himself as “bowed down with age and hardship.” He maintained his girth but was weaker: “it is with fatigue that I can walk a couple of miles, stooping over my staff.” His eyesight had faded; he now used one of his grandchildren as a guide when he went about in town.

  Two of his four children were dead. Of the two remaining, Cuff, after serving in George Washington’s army, had come back to Haddam, married, begun having children and lived on his father’s land. He was a “large, tall, bony man” a local woman said, and in addition to working for his father he hauled stone in the local quarry and loaded vessels on the Connecticut River. But he had his problems, and in time his father pulled away from him. He developed a reputation as a drinker and a thief. Venture did not drink and didn’t like it, but theft was for him an altogether other issue, and when in December 1794 Cuff was convicted for stealing two cords of wood, his father was mortified. Ezra Brainerd, the justice of the peace, who had known Venture Smith a long time and knew his sense of propriety, tried to save him some embarrassment by leaving out his last name in his verdict, referring to the guilty party only as “Cuff Negro.” But the sentence—“to be whipped ten stripes on his naked body and pay a fine of forty shillings”—must have stung Venture anyway. It echoed almost verbatim the language in the state’s dreaded Slave Code, which stipulated conduct and punishment for slaves. To be associated with the Slave Code at all, this many years after Smith had bought his freedom, was a source of immense shame. He all but ruled Cuff out of his life.

  That left Solomon, the baby of the family, the second child he and Meg had given that name to. He was now twenty-four years old, the only one of Venture’s children to receive an education. He lived on the family land with his parents. Venture wanted to arrange things so that when he died his property would pass to Solomon, and the boy would have care of Meg.

  But the situation wasn’t straightforward. He had his property: rich, alternately wooded and under cultivation, running downhill to the peaceful cove. It was a piece of paradise, really. But the world was changing in ways that were difficult to fathom. Before the war, land meant security. Now banks were popping up everywhere; a young man needed money. He could potentially sell a portion of his land, converting it to cash, and then will his estate to Solomon. But he seems not to have trusted in wills. What he understood, what had worked for him up until now, was real estate.

  He began to see a way forward when, in 1798, he learned that Oliver Smith, his former owner down in Stonington, from whom he had bought his freedom and taken his last name, was in court for bankruptcy. Venture had kept in contact with the Smith family, was in some way still tied to them. He hatched a plan and laid it before Edward Smith, Oliver’s son, who was struggling to deal with his father’s business failure. For 200 pounds, Venture offered to mortgage his 100-plus acres of land to Smith, except for one choice three-and-a-half-acre parcel, which he transferred to Solomon. Edward accepted. He signed an agreement with Solomon Smith, the result of which was a cash payment to Solomon and a portion of his father’s former land. Venture Smith used his former owner’s misfortune as a vehicle for transferring his property into his son’s name and providing him an inheritance as well. Solomon would take care of the land and his two aged parents. Surely now Venture Smith could live out his remaining days in peace.

  It was a big, sturdy log house. Cornplanter stepped out of it and onto his porch. The town he looked out onto, which he had organized—Cornplanter Town, it was called—was not composed of traditional longhouses, the kind of communal dwellings from which his people had taken their name, but the buildings were strong and secure and surrounded by rich farmland. His house was connected, by the shared porch, to that of his half-brother, Handsome Lake. With Cornplanter lived his wife, five daughters and one son. The boy suffered from mental retardation, and Cornplanter liked to keep him close. Handsome Lake had his own children and grandchildren living in his half of the compound. Around them were forty similar, newly built houses. The Senecas’ farmland was fenced in now, in the manner of the Americans. The house of Cornplanter, the head of the community, faced the central square of the town, in which stood a wooden statue of Sky Holder, grandson of Sky Woman, a central figure of Haudenosaunee myth.

  There were 400 people living in the village. Many of them gathered on this day in the fall of the year and joined Cornplanter for a journey. They traveled west to the village of Canandaigua. Days later, there was a stir among the people there when the Seneca party arrived, for Cornplanter’s presence was considered essential for what was to come. In all, 1,500 Iroquois gathered for a new council with the Americans. The year was 1794; in the three years since Cornplanter had met with President Washington, the American leader had had endless trouble with Indians in the Ohio Country. He despe
rately wanted to settle those western lands. That coupled with growing irritation from the Iroquois, who were insisting they had claim to some of those lands, had finally convinced Washington that it was necessary to renegotiate the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.

  The man he sent, Timothy Pickering, who had been a general during the war, faced Cornplanter and other Iroquois leaders on November 11. Cornplanter had learned from his past mistakes. Rather than plead for mercy for his people, he put on a stoic face and held his ground, threatening to break up the negotiation if Pickering did not accede to his demands. In the end, the United States agreed to give back much of the land from the Fort Stanwix Treaty; in exchange, the Iroquois gave up claims to Ohio Country territory. The Iroquois celebrated. The Treaty of Canandaigua was a victory. It showed that they could stand up to the Americans.

  That situation lasted until 1797, when a consortium of government agencies and commercial companies put new pressure on the Senecas to sell land. Some were interested in selling because white settlement near the lands in question had made them less fertile for hunting. Cornplanter tried to take a broad view. He had spent a good deal of time learning the Americans’ ways. He was interested, in particular, in the concept of banks. He was informed that, should they agree to sell, rather than be given goods that would be used up, they could receive money that would be held in an account in the Bank of the United States. This money would earn interest, and the interest would be paid out, year after year, thus providing an assurance for his people’s well-being long into the future. This was appealing, but it was a difficult concept to understand.