AUTHOR’S NOTE
Our history books too often create the impression that American independence was abruptly born with the crack of a Lexington musket in April 1775. Their truncated perspective suggests that colonists woke up one morning and decided to cast off the yoke of oppression, launching a new nation. The truth is that the United States rose out of a long, deeply complex struggle featuring a stunningly diverse cast of characters who gradually recognized they had become something other than European. It may have been geographic quests that brought Europeans to America but it was thousands of journeys of self-discovery in the 17th and 18th centuries that gave rise to our country.
These are the journeys I seek to reflect in the chronicles of Duncan McCallum, the tragic, exhilarating, joyful, very human tales of Scottish rebels, woodland natives, wilderness missionaries, hardscrabble farmers, soldier adventurers, and the other outcasts, exiles, and original thinkers who inhabited the colonies. Such tales may escape the sterile pen of the historian, but they are often the most meaningful way for us to connect with our past. These people were living in an extraordinary time, when geographic, economic, and social boundaries were crumbling just as science and self-expression had begun to blossom, and many lived extraordinary lives.
America was coming of age in 1765, taking its first stuttering steps, not knowing where it was going but beginning to sense that its path was not aligned with its homeland. Blood of the Oak is framed around the profoundly important historic events of that year. The passage of the Stamp Tax, levied on not just all legal documents but also books, newspapers, diplomas, playing cards, and dice, was triggering the first widespread, coordinated protests ever seen in the colonies. Tax collectors were hanged in effigy, stamps were burned, and riots swept Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and many smaller towns. As colonies recognized their common cause, political discourse between them started in earnest, giving rise to the committees of correspondence that in the next decade would expand to play a vital role in creating common strategies for the colonies. Until this fateful year the government in London had adeptly kept the colonies isolated from one another, keeping colonial leaders always focused on England, not on their neighbors. Suddenly the colonies were speaking with each other and, to the outrage of officials in London, daring to suggest an inter-colony congress.
This was the year when many of those who later signed the Declaration of Independence and led the Revolution first stepped onto the public stage. In May Patrick Henry made himself heard in the Virginia legislature by passage of his Virginia Resolves, the first official rejection of the hated tax. Opposition to the tax brought together many unexpected allies, at all levels of society. Thus it was that William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs and adopted Iroquois chieftain, joined ranks with such charter members of the committees of correspondence as Samuel Adams and James Otis, America’s foremost scientist Benjamin Franklin, and the hundreds of farmers, lawyers, merchants, craftsmen, and militia officers who began calling themselves Sons of Liberty. Another significant development, unheard of in the Old World, was that colonial women began actively expressing themselves in public demonstrations. While the Sons of Liberty receive more frequent mention, the Daughters of Liberty, who later provided vital aid to Revolutionary War soldiers, were also established as a movement during the protests.
Benjamin Rush, who became a leading figure in the revolutionary cause and the American Enlightenment, was a youthful nineteen in 1765. While his adventures here are fictitious, the peripatetic, inquisitive scholar-rebel who went on to become a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Surgeon General in the Continental Army had a lifelong interest, bordering on obsession, in the physiology and anatomy of native Americans and Africans. Soon after this tale is set, Rush was able to realize his ambition of receiving medical training at the University of Edinburgh. Later in life, established as a preeminent scientist, he was called upon by President Jefferson to train Lewis and Clark for their expedition to the Pacific and, in an intriguing twist of history, supplied their Corps of Discovery with hundreds of his laxative “Rush’s Bilious Pills,” the high mercury content of which has become an important marker for modern archaeologists tracking the campsites of the Corps.
There were, of course, those on the banks of the Thames who labored mightily to stifle all colonial dissent, and, most importantly, to stop the proposed congress. As early as the 1730s the British government had been intercepting the mail of political opponents, on such a scale that the postal service had its own “Secret Office” which not only clandestinely opened correspondence but was also known to forge letters to confound political enemies. Such practices escalated during the volatile 1760s. Ciphers and codes were used on both sides of the Atlantic, ranging from simple word substitution, such as that used by Thomas Jefferson the Williamsburg student to describe his amorous aspirations, to sophisticated “dictionary codes” that utilized book references and alphabet shifts to create nearly unbreakable ciphers, of which Woolford’s Shakespeare code is a variation. The use of knotted strings and sinews to send messages was a system of the woodland tribes that undoubtedly predated the arrival of Europeans. Details of the many surprising ways codes, ciphers, and spycraft were utilized during this period—and the surprising people who used them—can be found in John Nagy’s fascinating book Invisible Ink.
The Conococheague Valley in south central Pennsylvania, home of Murdo Ross, was indeed the site of the first armed uprising against the British army this same year, led by ranger James Smith and other Scots who could not abide the government’s failure to enforce its own rules prohibiting shipments of weapons to the western lands. These rebels, risking life and limb in raising arms against their government, actually did capture a squad of Black Watch Highland troops sent against them from Fort Loudoun, as reflected in the novel. Although the chronicles do not reflect it, I have always assumed there would have been some awkward camaraderie between captors and captives once the whiskey and Highland tales starting flowing. While the complaints of the rebels were eventually addressed and the episode largely forgotten, it was an omen of things to come, and provides poignant evidence of the stubborn independence that had grown instinctive among frontier families.
Since the inception of the Virginia tobacco plantations in the prior century native American captives had been forced to work alongside African slaves—as well as many indentured Scots who essentially lived as slaves. The last survivors of Tidewater tribes and natives captured in the colony’s Indian wars were disappearing into this harsh servitude well into the 18th century. While the Iroquois were not among those who were thus extinguished, the leaders of that once mighty confederation could no longer deny that their world was ending. Their numbers were dwindling and their traditional culture was rapidly disappearing, yet proud and determined chieftains, matriarchs, and warriors—some of them former rangers savvy in the ways of both the tribes and the Europeans—struggled to preserve their way of life. That remarkable native civilization, uniquely in balance with the natural world, had maintained the Pax Iroquoia for centuries in the Northeast woodlands but it was no match for the disease, rum, and timber axes brought by European settlers.
Ultimately British efforts to thwart the Americans failed and the Stamp Tax Congress proceeded in the autumn of 1765, with nine colonies attending. The resolutions it passed, though not as fiery as the Virginia Resolves, unequivocally rejected the authority of London to impose domestic taxes on the colonies. While the delegates tried to placate the king by asserting that England’s monopoly on colonial trade should be deemed America’s contribution to London, the Congress represented a vital turning point in relations between England and its American colonies. Its enactments were undeniably a joint action against Parliament, and while it infuriated many in London, including King George, it also strengthened the resolve of the colonists. The stamp tax was repealed a few months later.
Among those who stepped onto the public stage during this year of protest was John Ad
ams, who until that time had been an obscure lawyer in Braintree. He recorded then that 1765 had been the most memorable year of his life, underscoring that the Stamp Act “has raised and spred thro the whole Continent, a Spirit that will be recorded to our Honour with all future Generations.” It would be ten more years before muskets were fired on Lexington Green, and the intervening years were to be filled with more intrigues, triumphs, and tragedies, but the spirit of freedom that had been bred into the colonists had found a common voice. It would not be silenced.
Blood of the Oak: A Mystery Page 41