The book sold. It contributed to Holt’s reputation as a fiery opponent of the Federalist Party—which, in the eyes of the Federalists, meant the American government. As his publications got fiercer, Federalists accused him of anti-American agitation. He set his lead type as fast as his fingers would work and fired back: “The editor of this paper is an AMERICAN—his principles are AMERICAN—and his paper is supported by AMERICANS.” After the Sedition Act passed, he went right at it, charging that in muzzling the press the act was “directly contravening one of the most essential articles in the code of freedom, and as clearly defined as any other clause in the bill of rights, namely liberty of speech, printing and writing.” For his pains—specifically, for publishing an account of the raising of an army under Alexander Hamilton to fight the French in the event of war—he was imprisoned, under the very act he had attacked.
Venture Smith’s autobiography did not change many minds on the question of slavery. In 1801, Congress extended the slave codes of Virginia and Maryland into the new capital city of the United States, officially working slavery into the nation’s political heart and, simultaneously, into the future metropolis that was now named for George Washington.
Nor did the book change Venture Smith’s life much. He became, if anything, sadder in his last days. Solomon, the son whom he had set up with money and to whom he had entrusted his precious land, began selling off parcels of it literally out from under him, setting off a new wave of sadness and anger in the old man. In the summer of 1804, after an argument, despite his blindness and difficulty walking, Venture had enough and simply went off. Solomon ran an ad in the newspaper that was more legal notice than missing person report; it showed that the fight had been about money, and it revealed him to be truly his father’s son:
Whereas Venture Smith, my father, has departed from my house, and refuses to return and receive a comfortable support, which I am willing to provide for him. All persons are forbidden to harbour or trust him on my account, as I shall not pay any expence or contract of his making.
Eventually, the old man came back and grumbled and complained through the last months of his life. The following year, in September of 1805, Venture Smith died. Meg died four years after him. Both were buried in the cemetery of the First Congregational Church. Despite his numerous complaints, his last years were not entirely filled with bitterness. He acknowledged that “amidst all my griefs and pains, I have many consolations.” Two things in particular stood out as sources of pleasure at the end of his life. One was Meg: “the wife of my youth, whom I married for love.” And despite being systematically cheated by fate and his fellow human beings, despite “all the losses I have suffered by fire, by the injustice of knaves, by the cruelty and oppression of false hearted friends,” one other thing shone out like a torch to light his last days. “My freedom,” he said, “is a privilege which nothing else can equal.”
It was 1803. Margaret Coghlan had emerged from her most recent stay at King’s Bench Prison further weakened, only to face more financial woes. The former friends from her days of high living had abandoned her. She cast about for others who might help and began contemplating her more distant connections, those from her time in America.
America was suddenly much on the minds of people in London. Thomas Jefferson, who was now the third U.S. president, had sent Robert R. Livingston—the man who had given the oath of office to George Washington—to Paris to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans, which the French had recently acquired from Spain along with much of the interior of North America. Instead, Livingston wound up dealing with something else entirely. Napoleon Bonaparte, the French leader, no longer had an interest in North America. As a result, Livingston found himself negotiating for the purchase of an enormous stretch of the continent’s interior, from the Mississippi River west to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. Rarely in human history had a nation obtained such a vast swath of geography at the stroke of a pen. The Louisiana Purchase stunned Americans and Europeans alike.
Margaret Coghlan, meanwhile, in pondering how to extricate herself from debt, heard that Livingston’s private secretary and son-in-law, Robert L. Livingston, was in London on his way back to the United States following the completion of the purchase. She knew that he was a member of the same Livingston family her father had married into when he wedded her first stepmother. Margaret hadn’t liked Mary Livingston, but she considered it a stroke of luck that an American official with wealth and a connection to her was nearby. She dashed off a letter to him in her flowing, assertive hand, providing a rapid summary of her life and misfortunes:
Sir
With the greatest submission to your goodness, I take the Liberty to address you and rely solely on your politeness to plead in my behalf —
Permit me therefore Sir to inform you, that I am the only daughter of the late Major Moncrieffe, who married at New York, Miss Mary Livingston. . . . I had the misfortune Sir to lose my Mother when I was only eleven years of Age—and in 1791 death deprived me of my father who is buried at New York. I was married during the American War in obedience to the Commands of my father ere I had seen fifteen years, to a Captain in the Army, whose barbarous ill usage and abandonment has plunged me into an Abbeyss of Woe. . . .
Eventually, she got around to the point: she was destitute and “deplorably situated.” She indicated the depth of her misery by referencing the small amount of money needed to keep her from being hauled back to prison: “Should you deign Sir to stretch forth your kind hand to my relief whatever you please to afford will be safely delivered to me by the bearer and be ever most gratefully remembered for I am liable to be confined in a horrid prison, for want of Three pounds which I am unable to obtain.”
Whether Livingston responded or not, whether or not he handed her messenger a few pounds, her situation was not much improved in the next months. She did have occasion to ponder the path her life had taken, thanks to more news from America. Her lunge for freedom, her refusal to marry the man her father had chosen for her, had come about at least in part thanks to her having fallen in love with another. She must have been thrilled, three years earlier, to learn that that other man, Aaron Burr, had run for president of the United States, lost by the narrowest of margins, and ended up as vice president. He was one of the most powerful men in her native country, a leader in the self-proclaimed “land of freedom.” He had stolen her heart when she was still a child, and then he was gone, swept away from her by the winds of war. Had she been able to find her way back to him, how different everything might have been for her. But now came news of a twist of fate that must have seemed like something out of a fable. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton had become bitter political enemies; Burr, feeling that Hamilton had besmirched his honor, had challenged him to a duel. Hamilton, whose impetuousness went back to his hasty decision to leave George Washington’s service during the war, accepted. Standing on the bluffs overlooking the Hudson River and Manhattan, Burr had shot and killed Hamilton. Now the founder of the Federalist Party and the American banking system was dead, and the vice president was charged with murder.
Margaret Coghlan must have thought of herself and Burr on a parallel with Shakespeare’s doomed, star-crossed lovers, hurtling toward tragedy, for while he was on the run, she was once again facing prison. This time, straining to find a savior, she shot her final bolt. On January 11, 1805, she sat herself down and, in a hand resolutely firm and composed, wrote:
To The Kings Most Excellent Majesty,
The Humble Memorial
of Margaret Coghlan
Daughter of the late
Major Thomas Moncrieffe
Major of Brigade on the Staff
Of Your Majesty’s Forces
In North America
Her plea to the king of England outlined the loyal military service of her father and brother during the American Revolution, and indicated that after the war her father’s property had been “taken from him by the Rulers in that Count
ry.” She touched on her own straitened circumstances only vaguely, and ended abjectly: “Humbly I pray your Majesty’s Pity that you would be graciously pleased to take my fathers tried Loyalty under Your Royal Consideration and be pleased by Your Royal Clemency to relieve my Distress.”
It didn’t work. Soon she was back in prison, spiraling downward. And then . . .
Nothing. Margaret Coghlan disappeared. Earlier she had succeeded in faking her death and transporting herself to another country to evade creditors, so perhaps she did it again. Maybe this time, on her release from custody, she changed her name and left England for good, went to Paris or Rome or the Mogul Empire, where she led a wholly new life of luxury and exoticism. But it seems unlikely. Her health had been failing and her beauty, on which she had long banked, was gone. It had been years since she had attracted a wealthy protector. It’s more likely that she continued on her steep downward trajectory and died, in squalor and pain sometime after the failure of her final and most desperate petition for aid, without leaving even a record of her death.
Two years later, John Coghlan, the man who had forced her to marry him, died, “in the most abject state of poverty and distress,” according to an obituary, without even a single friend to sit by him in his suffering or to claim his body. If she was evilly conjoined with him in life, Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan probably also matched her estranged husband in the doleful circumstances of her leaving it.
It was the din of industry: a clatter that you had to shout to be heard over, an insistent, driving noise that seemingly would never stop. That indeed was what set it apart from any sound that had come before: the absolute regularity of its racket.
For Cornplanter it was a good sound, a hopeful one. He was in his fifties now, a very busy man, and this was his latest project. He had bought the parts, hauled them to this spot on the river, hired white men to assemble the whole crazy structure of it, with its big wooden wheel, the buckets of which filled with river water and set it in motion, set the cogs and pistons and crossbeams moving, all of which pulled the blade of the saw up and down, incessantly. He had built the first sawmill in Warren County, Pennsylvania. His Senecas worked it. They chose the trees the white people found most desirable as building material: chestnut, black walnut and, most of all, white pine. They chopped them down, hauled them on sleds, rafted them to the mill, cut them into smooth boards. He hired a white man named George Hildebrandt to manage the mill and maintain its complex functioning. His men shipped the finished boards to Pittsburgh, where they helped build the endlessly growing city. Cornplanter had never learned to read or write but he had an Americanized form of his name put at the bottom of each contract—CAPT. O.BEAL.—and he made his X beside it.
For a while following his farewell meeting with George Washington, Cornplanter enjoyed a golden period. He founded a gristmill in addition to his sawmill. He was a businessman, a farmer, a husband and father, and the de facto mayor of the town. And as a representative of the Iroquois Confederacy, he was repeatedly called to councils at reservations.
Cornplanter Town—guarded by cliffs and surrounded by thick forest—was difficult to reach, on purpose, for Cornplanter was trying to have it both ways. He wanted his people to participate in white society and yet to be apart from it. His Senecas still hunted, still foraged for medicinal herbs in the forest. In March and April there was the age-old ritual of gathering sap from maple trees and boiling it into sugar. In June, as in his childhood, everyone took part in the strawberry festival. At the same time, he had made contact with Quaker missionaries following his first meeting with Washington, when he had told the president he would like his people to learn the English language and modern farming principles. In 1798, five Quakers arrived with a goal to set up a model farm. As it turned out, the men were not themselves farmers, and they hadn’t brought the equipment they needed. Comically enough, the Senecas—who after all had their own highly developed agricultural methods—helped them by setting up the model farm themselves and showing the white men how to operate it. Somewhat more successfully, the Quakers built a school in the town and began teaching the children English.
The cultures, however, clashed. The Quakers were horrified to learn that it was customary, when a dignitary came to visit, for a woman from the village to spend the night with him, as a comfort and a courtesy. The Senecas didn’t like the fact that the Quakers wanted them to stop their traditional dances, believing them to be the work of the devil.
In the main, though, Cornplanter approved of the assistance the newcomers provided, especially in combating alcoholism, which was rampant. His men who delivered wood to Pittsburgh would come back with jugs of spirits; people killed one another in drunken fights, or were found frozen to death in the snow. He was especially disappointed in his son, Henry, whom he had sent to Philadelphia to learn American ways; since he had returned, he was drunk much of the time. Henry believed he knew best how to deal with whites, and thought his father naïve and backward. They argued often.
Among those who had succumbed to alcohol was Cornplanter’s half-brother, Handsome Lake, whose condition became so severe that he spent most of his time in bed. Even when Handsome Lake’s son died from a drunken accident, it wasn’t enough to stir him. Then in 1799, Handsome Lake fell into a stupor and was feared dead. Miraculously, when he woke, he was a changed man and began preaching about the evils of alcohol and the importance of family and traditional values. Cornplanter assisted him in spreading his message. It caught fire among all six Iroquois nations, where lives and traditions had been systematically upended. In a remarkably short time the teaching, which became known as the Code of Handsome Lake, sparked a renewal of the traditional Iroquois religion.
The stunning reversal in Handsome Lake’s fortunes continued. In 1801, just two years after his miraculous awakening, he was named Supreme Leader of the Six Nations. The next year he led a delegation to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Thomas Jefferson. Cornplanter accepted the transformation in his brother, and the lessening of his own status. He was pleased at the sudden turn toward tradition and family among his people. But he remained firm in his conviction that the Iroquois needed to make accommodations to the future, which meant adapting to the ways of the United States of America.
He tried meanwhile to focus on his own issues. Though he was now in his sixties, he was still plagued by remorse at having been shunned by his white father. He knew the man had died some years before, but in 1810 he decided to undertake the difficult 300-mile journey to Fort Plain, New York, where John Abeel had lived. He had no notion what to expect, or even why he was going. But when he got there, he found himself welcomed by Abeel’s family members who still lived in the area. He and the Senecas who had come with him were treated to a feast that lasted for days. It was a celebration of a long-lost relative returned, and an acknowledgment too of Cornplanter’s fame. It was a moment of healing.
Then came successive waves of troubles. In 1812, the Americans and the British went to war again, and the Iroquois became caught up in it. Cornplanter wanted to stay neutral, but many Senecas fought on the American side, including his son Henry, who served as a major in the U.S. Army. The war furthered divisions within the Iroquois Confederacy and hastened another round of pressure from new commercial enterprises that had designs on Iroquois land. The policy of the American government now was to relocate as many tribes as possible west of the Mississippi River. Cornplanter resisted, as did other chiefs. As one said, if they were to move “towards the setting sun,” they would be looked upon “as foreigners and strangers, and be despised by the red as well as the white men.”
Cornplanter argued against further land sales. He complained that money promised to the Senecas in previous agreements had not been fully paid. In some cases they had received only half of what was owed. In other cases, the annuities they had been promised had failed, and they were left with nothing. But by 1826—with the Erie Canal completed and cities in the region growing exponentially—speculators h
ad the means to apply overwhelming force. A former New York congressman named David Ogden created the Ogden Land Company, which used bribes to play chiefs against one another. As a result, all the Seneca reservations along the Genesee River—Cornplanter’s ancestral homeland, where he had been born and raised—were sold, as were many others.
Cornplanter, who was around eighty years old at the time, did not play a central role in these events. His health was failing, he was blind in one eye. But he offered what resistance he could. He appeared in court. He joined with other chiefs in denouncing the sales that had taken place and vowing never to sell more land. Meanwhile, there was an influx of Christian missionaries in Seneca villages. Cornplanter had long accommodated Christian teaching; like many Iroquois, he believed it could be compatible with traditional ways. But now the missionaries were demanding an end to many ancient practices.
At some point, the two rapidly swelling negative forces—the loss of land and the erasure of beliefs—merged in his mind, seemed to squeeze his mind. He had a dream, a vision. He had never been one for spiritual flights, but his brother, the mystic of the family, was dead now, and it was as though Cornplanter felt the need to take on this role too. The dream seared him, annihilated him with its clarity. The Creator came to him in his dream and spoke to him at great length. He started at the beginning, reminding Cornplanter of how Sky Woman had fallen from the Sky World into the sea and the animals had built the turtle’s back into a home for his people, the Haudenosaunee.
The first part of the Creator’s message to Cornplanter was about transgressions. The whites had transgressed in coming to the land of the Iroquois, which had been theirs from the time of the creation. The Iroquois had transgressed in following the ways of the whites, which were unnatural for them. The Christian religion was not for them. They had no business with rifles or whisky, nor with sawmills. Even cow’s milk was not for them: the fact that so many Indians got sick from it was proof of this. All of these alien things had bound them like chains. If they were to live, they needed to be free. Cornplanter himself had been the main transgressor, for he had led the Iroquois toward the Americans. The Creator instructed him to rid himself of everything alien. Cornplanter made a fire and burned items he had been given over the years, things he had cherished. There was a French flag, some ceremonial papers with markings from the Americans, a hat that was a gift from the governor of Pennsylvania, and the sword that George Washington had presented to him. He destroyed them all.
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