Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  The other side of the Creator’s message to Cornplanter was hopeful. It was about the clarity and rightness of living a good life. Inhabiting the land that was created for him and his people. Hunting and fighting, each as necessary. Loving fully. Dying well. This was freedom. Cornplanter knew he would not be the one to lead people forward toward what had been. But he also knew that dreams had truth in them. And the dream said freedom.

  A page from one of Margaret Coghlan’s pleas for financial assistance.

  EPILOGUE

  The past is not as far away as we think. In many ways it’s right here with us.

  The six people whose stories I have told in this book, each of whom represents some part of the struggle for freedom at America’s founding, all had descendants, biological or metaphorical or both, who have carried their legacies forward through time and into the present.

  Abraham Yates’s passion for grassroots politics spread through his extended family. The history of New York State includes a host of feisty Yateses and Lansings (his only daughter having married a Lansing) serving as aldermen, assemblymen, judges and mayors. More to the point, Yates’s dogged devotion to the common man and his alertness to the dangers of the accumulation of power have had many echoes through the centuries, from both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum. In the 1890s, the leftist Populist Party, fueled by farmers and laborers, rose to prominence by warning that elites had taken over American society. In our day, the anger that fueled both Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency and impassioned opposition to Trump would be recognizable to Yates. Indeed, it seems that today, more than perhaps at any other time in American history, Yates’s fears are ours.

  Margaret Coghlan felt the pull of freedom that was in the air in the eighteenth century, but she realized, too late, that it did not then apply to half the human race. History does not record what became of Coghlan’s children, the poor waifs she dragged around with her as her tragic life wound down, but her ideological descendants span the history of the women’s movement, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Gloria Steinem, and for that matter include people like Amelia Earhart, Ellen DeGeneres and every woman who broke a gender barrier.

  George Washington had no descendants of any kind. He was childless, and even in symbolic terms he had no parallels or descendants in American history. There is only one George Washington. Then again, the United States itself might be thought of as his descendant. You could argue that the nation inherited his bravery in defying historical convention, his belief in the ideal of individual freedom, his willingness to fight and die for it and to lead the cause of it, and also his failure to live up to that ideal.

  Washington’s British opposite in the war, George Sackville, was a true product of empire, and his quasi-feudal vision lived on throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth as the British Empire expanded and then waned. He was also the scion of an aristocratic family, and Sackvilles remained connected to that history down through the centuries. To this day, Knole, the grand house where he spent his boyhood and which is now run by Britain’s National Trust and open to the public, is still in the care of the Sackville family.

  At the time of Cornplanter’s death in 1836, he was living in a town largely comprised of his own progeny: children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, spouses and various others. They lived not on a reservation but on land that the State of Pennsylvania had given him, which was known as the Cornplanter Grant. His descendants continued to inhabit the Grant well into the twentieth century. When Congress authorized construction of the Kinzua Dam on the Allegheny River in the late 1950s, which eventually inundated most of the Grant and forced those living there to move, it constituted the first breach of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, which Cornplanter had taken part in negotiating. His descendants still gather for a summertime “Cornplanter Descendants Picnic” at the Cornplanter Gazebo in Salamanca, New York.

  As to the Iroquois people as a whole, their reservations in New York State are scattered across the geographic region that was the nations’ traditional homeland. While I was visiting the Tonowanda reservation in 2016, a Seneca woman named Go-wa-yah-doni Jimerson offered to show me around the tribal-run museum. I had noted a variety of Christian churches on the reservation, which prompted me to ask about her faith. She stunned me by saying, “I follow the Code of Handsome Lake.” I felt that visceral rush that a writer of history gets only rarely, of the past flooding into the present. Cornplanter’s brother’s vision of renewal, I discovered, lives on, as, of course, do the Iroquois.

  Many of Venture and Meg Smith’s descendants stayed in Connecticut, and quite a few lived in the towns of Haddam and East Haddam. Their granddaughter Eliza, Solomon’s daughter, dutifully took care of their graves in the cemetery of the Congregational Church. In her old age she arranged to put her own tombstone right next to theirs and beside her father’s, and there they all are today. Venture’s great-grandson, Nelson, lived in Haddam in the mid-nineteenth century, working as a laborer and stonecutter. Nelson’s son George enlisted there in the 29th Connecticut “Colored” Regiment of the Union Army in December 1863, and died nine months later at the Siege of Petersburg.

  Venture Smith’s story became part of the birthright of each generation of his family. In the twentieth century, a descendant named Mandred Henry, who worked as a health care sales rep in Hartford, took it particularly to heart. In the 1960s, the era of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., he became the president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told the story of Venture to his children and dreamed of making a pilgrimage to Africa.

  Mandred Henry died in 2007, never having fulfilled his dream. But in late 2014 three of his children, along with one granddaughter and a great-grandson, traveled to Ghana to see the place their father had longed to visit, the place where Broteer Furro’s saga had begun. I learned about their plan while I was organizing my own research trip to Africa for this book, and so was fortunate enough to join them.

  Angi Perron, Corinne Henry Brady, Floyd Henry, Gina Ryan and Gina’s son Jasir all live in New England, not so far from where Venture Smith settled. Most had never been out of the United States before. Together we shopped for souvenirs in Accra, toured the national museum of Ghana and ate fried fish at a seaside restaurant. But the focal point of our visit was their ancestor. At the former slave port of Anomabo an American preservationist named Chandler Saint had installed an exhibit of Venture Smith’s life, and to launch the exhibit he arranged a ceremony at which local dignitaries would welcome the descendants. The event, at the town hall, was a mixture of grandeur (lavish costumes and fine speeches) and some comedy (a tribal chief’s cell phone went off at one solemn moment, its ringtone a few bars of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”). Then, together with much of the town, we processed down to the sea.

  The whitewashed hulk of the British-built fortress on the shore was in ruins, but the slave pens were still pitch-dark and horrid, there were still a few manacles on the walls, and along the ramparts lay rusted cannons bearing the insignia of King George III. We stood there a long while, high above the sea, the wind in our faces, silently watching the merciless waves.

  The next day Angi, Corinne and Floyd, the three children of Mandred Henry, went back down to the beach together. Corinne pulled an Advil bottle out of her purse and flung its contents into the wind. In it she had mixed soil from Venture Smith’s grave in Haddam together with some of her father’s ashes. Then the siblings said a quick prayer at the foot of the fort where their ancestor had been held in captivity before sailing off to play his part in America’s founding.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to the friends and experts who read this book in manuscript. Your suggestions were invaluable in helping me to tame and shape it, and your corrections saved me from embarrassment. Each of you devoted many hours to it, and I am deeply grateful for your time, care, knowledge and creativity. Robert Cwiklik, my old friend, who also happens to
be a crack editor, devoted himself particularly to helping me hone the prologue, and thus to helping me figure out what the book was about. Tim Paulson, another longtime friend who is a skilled editor, provided thoughtful line edits and wide-ranging commentary. Barnet Schecter, who has written revolutionary history with such clarity and insight, not only critiqued the history in the manuscript but offered excellent suggestions for reshaping it. Michael Martin brought a poet’s eye to the task and assisted me in particular in understanding the forces at work in Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan’s life. Dennis Maika helped me to appreciate the complexities of that fraught word, “freedom,” both in the revolutionary era and in later interpretations of it. Sarah Knott likewise brilliantly and thoughtfully parsed and recast my concept of freedom in the revolutionary era, and provided helpful observations about women’s freedom and female sexuality in the era. Charles Gehring brought his unparalleled understanding of early America to bear on the manuscript, tweaking and correcting everything from tribal nomenclature to the geography of Albany and the surrounding region.

  Karl Stofko gave me the benefit of his deep knowledge of Venture Smith and his world, flagging errors in the manuscript, offering up his own research, guiding me through the land records of the town of Haddam, and helping me broaden my sense of Smith and what he accomplished. Stefan Bielinski, who knows more about Abraham Yates Jr. than anyone alive, pointed me to Yates in the first place, gave me access to his remarkable Yates archive and deepened my understanding of Yates and his Albany. Michael Galban of the Seneca Art and Culture Center gave me the benefit of his profound knowledge of the Senecas in the eighteenth century, and delighted me with insights on Iroquois ways of seeing the world.

  I want especially to thank my editor at Norton, Maria Guarnaschelli, who believed in this idea when it was nothing more than a rambling monologue and shepherded it along with grace and intelligence. Thanks too to Nathaniel Dennett for working hard and well on so many aspects of this project, and for the encouraging words. Thanks also to John Glusman, Rachel Salzman, Meredith McGinnis, Eleen Cheung, Ingsu Liu and Beth Steidle. Fred Wiemer copyedited the manuscript with a light and thoughtful touch.

  Thanks as always to my agent and friend Anne Edelstein; Anne, you outdid yourself on this one.

  Thank you to my wife, Pamela Twigg, for every little thing.

  My thanks to Laurel Daen for fact-checking the manuscript with uncommon care and diligence.

  The New Netherland Institute was extremely supportive of this work, naming me its Senior Scholar and thus enabling me to use the wonderful facilities of the New York State Library and New York State Archives as a base for my research. Thanks especially to Marilyn Douglas for her steadfast support of my work.

  A special thank you to Angi Perron, Corinne Henry Brady, Floyd Henry, Gina Ryan and Jasir Ryan-Lee, descendants of Venture Smith, for letting me accompany you on your family history adventure in Ghana.

  Like any writer of history, I owe a debt of gratitude to the geniuses behind the Internet Archive, who have revolutionized the work of historical research. Thanks also to the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon, for making the papers of George Washington available online.

  In no particular order, my thanks to all of these wonderful people who guided me with advice, assistance, inspiration and information: Carol Morrison; Len Tantillo; Peter Rose; Elizabeth Covart; Mayor Kathy Sheehan of Albany, New York; Fred Bassett, New York State Library; Lucianne Lavin, Institute for American Indian Studies; Thomas Lannon, New York Public Library; Lisa Malloy, Haddam Historical Society; Elizabeth Sell and Stacy Winters, Washington Street Library, Cumberland, Maryland; Go-wa-yah-doni Jimerson, Seneca-Iroquois National Museum; Dennis Northcott, Missouri History Museum; John Levin, University of Sussex; Cameron Blevins, Northeastern University; Nancy Steenburg, University of Connecticut; Steve McErleane, New Netherland Institute; Pierce Rafferty, Henry L. Ferguson Museum, Fishers Island, New York; Geoff Benton, Crailo State Historic Site; Peter R. Henriques; Tricia Barbagallo, University at Albany; William Starna; Jaap Jacobs; Benjamin Carp, Brooklyn College; Louise Mirrer, Michael Ryan and Edward O’Reilly, New-York Historical Society; Stephan Wolf; Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Congregation Shearith Israel; Robert Bantz; Joseph Weaver; Paul Lovejoy, York University; Stanley Welch, Loretta McCray and Marguerite Burke; Chandler Saint; Lindsay Turley, Museum of the City of New York; Emmanuel Saboro; Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, University of Cape Coast; Rebecca Shumway; Mariano Pavanello, Sapienza University of Rome; Chris Kelly, historian, town of Schaghticoke, New York; Kathie Ludwig, David Library of the American Revolution; Kurt Jordan, Cornell University; Jim Folts, First Church in Albany, New York; Paul Otto, George Fox University; Thomas Abler; Jayne Ptolemy, Clements Library, University of Michigan; Al Saguto, master shoemaker, Colonial Williamsburg.

  NOTES

  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

  Prologue

  2Its meaning in the Seneca language: Abler, Cornplanter, 2.

  2On this night: Hazard, Pennsylvania Archives 7:589–594; Godcharles, History of Fort Freeland, 28.

  2had organized a formal council: Abler, Chainbreaker, 71–80.

  3“War is war”: Abler, Chainbreaker, 75.

  3“stop speaking”: Abler, Chainbreaker, 75.

  3“rather womanly”: Brown, American Secretary, 38.

  4“decisive, direct, and firm”: Force, American Archives, 6:184.

  Chapter 1: Sons of Fathers

  13In the summer of 1716 . . . newborn baby: Germain was born at his father’s house in Haymarket, London. I am assuming the trip was taken by carriage on the turnpike, which by 1710 had been completed through Sevenoaks to Woodsgate and Tunbridge Wells, and have relied on Johnston, Abstract of Turnpike Acts Relating to Sussex.

  13The house was called Knole: Sources on Knole include Robert Sackville-West, Inheritance, and V. Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles.

  13a succession of luminaries: Valentine, Lord George Germain, 3.

  14“splendidly sombre”: V. Sackville-West, 10.

  14forty-two for the interior alone: Valentine, Lord George Germain, 5.

  15“I have not genius”: Brown, 39.

  16“the boundaries of Empire”: Govier, “Royal Society,” 203.

  16“set to sea ships”: Govier, 206.

  17Broteer Furro opened his eyes: I am following Africa historian Paul Lovejoy in his assertion that Broteer was probably born between 1727 and 1728. Lovejoy, “The African Background of Venture Smith,” in Stewart, Venture Smith, 39–40.

  17the blue sky: Stewart, 39–40.

  17His father, Saungm Furro: Smith, Narrative, 5. (Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to the 1798 edition.)

  17Broteer’s people may have been Fulani: I am following Paul Lovejoy in his presumption that Broteer was Fulani. Lovejoy bases his belief on a number of clues in Venture Smith’s memoir. However, as Lovejoy himself notes, Broteer could have belonged to any of a number of herder tribes.

  17Their basic communal unit: On cattle culture in Africa, my sources include Adebayo, “Of Man and Cattle,” and Jeffreys, “Mythical Origin of Cattle in Africa.”

  18In one variation: Adebayo, “Of Man and Cattle,” 7.

  18At dry times: Oppong-Anane, “Ghana: Country Pasture/Forage Resource Profile.”

  18one of the earliest African peoples: Paul Lovejoy, in email correspondence.

  18One day when Broteer was about ten: Smith, Narrative, 5–7.

  20“raise up and place”: Quoted in Wieneck, Imperfect God, 31.

  22“I was more afraid than of my own”: Conkling, Memoirs, 17.

  23“If they happen to hear”: Ehrenpreis, Swift, 3:627.

  23“I must here”: Great Britain, Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Report on the Manuscripts of Mrs. Stopford-Sackville, I:160 (hereafter, Stopford-Sackville). Note that “onely” is in the o
riginal.

  25Dutifully following suit . . . American colonies: Moore, “Devouring Posterity,” 680–681.

  25Whereas in Elizabethan times . . . four or five: Wittkowsky, “Swift’s Modest Proposal,” 79–84.

  26“good breeding”: Fitzmaurice, Life of William, 1:341.

  27“I cannot but think”: Swift, Works, 2:762.

  27“He studied no choice phrases”: Brown, 39.

  27“My Lord Lieutenant’s speech”: Stopford-Sackville, 1:166–167.

  27a man on horseback: Smith, Narrative, 8.

  28By the 1480s: Elbl, “The Volume of the Early Atlantic Slave Trade,” 35.

  28The practice of capturing: Lovejoy, “Indigenous African Slavery,” 19.

  28Prior to European contact . . . slave labor: Sparks, Where Negroes Are Masters, 15–17.

  29“have for the last month”: Lovejoy, in Stewart, 45.

  29had been invaded: Smith, Narrative, 8.

  31“Allah, for the sake”: Aziz Sow and Angell, “Fulani Poetic Genres,” 63.

  31“He thus died”: Smith, Narrative, 11.

  32“the trees and the richness”: Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, vol. 1, Journey over the Mountains, 1748.