One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Another Philadelphia Jew, meanwhile, was among the most skillful and effective blockade runners on the continent. Isaac Moses owned nearly a dozen brigs and schooners that ran regular routes from the American mainland to St. Eustatius and on to the Netherlands. Across the ocean, meanwhile, Moses’s business partners in Amsterdam kept a steady stream of supplies flowing west to a war in which their nation of residence had no official stake. Moses sent flour, furs, lumber, and indigo to Amsterdam by way of St. Eustatius, and in return his partners sent munitions, rifles, blankets, and heavy cloth cloaks for use by the Continental army. Like Solomon, he also contributed to the finances of the war. The American branch of Isaac Moses & Company provided the Continental Congress with the funds it needed to fight the British in Canada, while the Dutch branch of Moses’s company served as the clandestine shipping agents between Philadelphia and Amsterdam when John Adams was in the Netherlands negotiating the loan that would save his young nation from bankruptcy.

  The role the merchants of St. Eustatius played was not limited to forwarding Yiddish correspondence between merchants. As the war progressed, the island became the bridge between the Americans and their European allies. Money, gunpowder, weapons, even blankets and cloth for uniforms—all of it filtered through St. Eustatius. The sympathies of those on the island were plain enough. If the British did not yet know the name of Phillips’s agent in St. Eustatius before they seized his letter, they would have found it out soon enough. The agent’s name, Samuel Curson, also appears throughout the correspondence of the Continental Congress, which frequently instructed him to make ever larger supplies of munitions and other necessities of war to the American cause. “We have therefore to desire you will instantly Give orders to your House in St. Eustatia to provide Fifty Tons of [gun] powder,” they wrote Curson on one occasion. Also on order were “Coarse woollens, Sufficient for Five thousand pair of Overalls for the Soldiers without delay.”

  That St. Eustatius was more than just a neutral center of trade became clear to the British two months after they seized Phillips’s letter. It was then, on November 16, 1776, that the governor of this tiny Dutch island gave instructions that ships flying the American flag should be given the international salute reserved for sovereign nations by firing its cannons in recognition.

  The British would not forget this slight; nor would they forgive the role the island’s Jewish community specifically had played in helping the Americans wage war on their king. When England at last had proof of Dutch involvement in the war, and declared war on the Netherlands in 1780, the British navy converged in force on St. Eustatius. Led by Admiral George Rodney, fifteen ships and a ground force of three thousand arrived—“as sudden as a clap of thunder,” the admiral said—before the inhabitants of the island even knew their mother country was at war. The island’s defenses included a garrison of fifty men and only a handful of ships equipped with guns. The governor of the island surrendered unconditionally.

  While the victory may have been quick, the plundering of the island promised to be a more involved affair. The order was given that there was to be “a general confiscation of all the property found upon the island, public and private, Dutch and British; without discrimination, without regard to friend or foe, to the subjects of neutral powers, or to the subjects of our own state; the wealth of the opulent, the goods of the merchant, the utensils of the artisan, the necessaries of the poor.” This included not only the pitiful showing of gunboats but the dozens of ships loaded with cargo that had been in port when the Royal Navy arrived. Suspecting there was still more to be gained, Rodney did not raise the Union Jack over his conquest but let the Dutch flag stay in place, inviting further merchant ships—from France, Spain, America, and the Netherlands itself—into the harbor, where they were all seized as the spoils of war.

  “The riches of St. Eustatius are beyond all comprehension,” the admiral wrote. “There were one hundred and thirty sail of ships in the road. All the magazines and store-houses are filled, and even the beach covered with tobacco and sugar. Upwards of fifty American vessels, loaded with tobacco, have been taken since the capture of this island. There never was a more important stroke made against any state whatever.” Another witness hailed the island as “a vast magazine of military stores of all kinds” and noted that more than two thousand Americans had been captured.

  And it was not just the Americans who would feel the sting of this defeat. Still in Amsterdam hoping to secure Dutch funds, John Adams noted the response to the capture of St. Eustatius in the Netherlands, where the loss of their great New World emporium meant financial ruin for many and surely made Adams’s own task more difficult. As he wrote to the United States’ first Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Robert Livingston (William’s second cousin), “You can have no idea, sir, no man who was not upon the spot can have any idea, of the gloom and terror that was spread by this event.” The damage done to the powerful Dutch merchant class was so great, he reported, that some had “expectations of popular insurrections.” Should such uprisings come about, he noted wryly, the doomsayers “did Mr. Adams the honor to mention him as one that was to be hanged by the mob in such company.”

  Having shaken both Amsterdam and America, Admiral Rodney was feeling justifiably pleased with himself. “What blockheads have the Dutch been to quarrel with the only power that could destroy them,” he wrote. Had he had a larger army with him, he mused, he might have won the whole war himself. His superior, British Lord of the Admiralty John Montagu, was similarly impressed: “Upon every dispatch we receive from you, a new panegyric is necessary as you give us no opportunity of writing but to convey applause.” All of England, in fact, celebrated Rodney’s conquest as a tide-turning event in a long and costly war.

  As grand a victory as this was for the British, however, it did not quite remove the sting caused by the new awareness that St. Eustatius had been secretly a vital part of the war effort for years, making a mockery of the English blockade. Admiral Rodney seems to have taken this fact personally. The entire island, he said, was “a nest of villains; they deserve scourging, and they shall be scourged.… They ought to have known that the just vengeance of an injured empire, though slow, is sure.”

  Because of the role St. Eustatius had played in inspiring British plans to seed its own colonies with Jewish merchants, it was the island’s Jews who bore the brunt of Rodney’s ire now. “Commerce, commerce alone, has supported them in their rebellion,” he wrote of the Americans, and his actions following the taking of the island show that he held Jewish merchants responsible for the commercial activities that had sustained the war. In a scene that revisits the Inquisitions of the past and foreshadows the worst horrors of the future, Rodney ordered all Jewish men on the island to assemble, then placed them under guard in the weighing house. Numbering more than one hundred, all of them had been taken without notice from their wives and children. They were beaten and stripped, their clothes torn to tatters in front of them as Rodney’s men checked the linings of their jackets for hidden cash.

  Thirty Jews were deported from the island that day; the rest were imprisoned until sales of their homes and possessions could be arranged. Their crime was simply serving as intermediaries between their landsmen in America and landsmen in Europe. Having forwarded money, munitions, and Yiddish letters across the sea in a time of war, they were guilty of putting the merchants’ networks the British once hoped to exploit—the Jewish tendency to “keep up correspondence”—in the service of liberty.

  After the war, the Jews of Philadelphia—Jonas Phillips among them—were well aware of the possibility that the laws of England that had made them less than full subjects might be replicated in the new nation. Just as Phillips had written in the wake of the Declaration, he wrote another letter during the debates on the Constitution in 1787. Spurred on by the concern that the United States would institute “sacramental tests” of its own, he sent this missive not to family across the ocean but to the Constitutional Convention then meeting
in his city.

  Identifying himself as “one of the people called Jews of the City of Philadelphia, a people scattered and despersed among all nations,” Phillips voiced concern that among the provisions of the Constitution of Pennsylvania there was a clause requiring all to “acknowledge the scriptures of the old and New testement to be given by a devine inspiration” in order to hold public office. “To swear and believe that the New Testement was given by devine inspiration is absolutly against the religious principle of a Jew,” he wrote, “and [it] is against his Conscience to take any such oath.” Furthermore, he added, not only was this against his own conscience, it was contrary to the state’s own Bill of Rights, which he quoted at length:

  That all men have a natural and unalienable Right To worship almighty God according to the dectates of their own Conscience and understanding, and that no man aught or of Right can be Compelled to attend any Relegious Worship or Erect or support any place of worship or Maintain any minister contrary to or against his own free will and Consent.

  It is well known among all the Citizens of the 13 united States that the Jews have been true and faithful, and during the late Contest with England they have been foremost in aiding and assisting the States with their lifes and fortunes, they have supported the Cause, have bravely faught and bleed for liberty which they Can not Enjoy.

  Therefore if the honourable Convention shall in ther Wisdom think fit and alter the said oath and leave out the words ‘and I do acknoweledge the scripture of the new testement to be given by devine inspiration’ then the Israeletes will think them self happy to live under a government where all Relegious societys are on an Eaquel footing. I solecet this favour for my self my Childreen and posterity and for the benefit of all the Isrealetes through the 13 united States of America.

  This time, of course, Phillips had written in English, not Yiddish. Yet something of the spirit of his earlier missive remained. When British naval officers seized his letter in 1776, they had taken one look at it and declared it must have a secret meaning. They were perhaps more correct than they could have known. Rather than military plans or espionage, however, hidden between the lines of both of Phillips’s letters was an affirmation that those on the margins of dominant faith create bonds that transcend borders—bonds strong enough to hold a nation together, or to help one people break free of another.

  Capture and burning of Washington by the British, in 1814. Illustration from Our First Century, by Richard Miller Devens. Springfield, MA: C.A. Nichols & Co., 1876. (Library of Congress)

  CHAPTER 10

  Twenty Gods or None

  1814

  Two weeks before a pair of Baltimore teenagers put a volley of buckshot in his chest, the British Major General Robert Ross set the capital of a young nation on fire—and inadvertently sparked a heated public debate about the influence of unpopular religious ideas in American life.

  Deep in the second year of the War of 1812, General Ross led British troops through Virginia and into Maryland, with a momentous stop along the way in Washington, which was still then under construction as the first city of the nation. General Ross, a man of near fifty who was often perceived as somewhat younger (the American press figured him to be about thirty-five), was a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, but he was new to commanding forces larger than a regiment. By all accounts, he performed beyond expectations, earning the respect even of his battlefield adversaries. His junior officers thought him at times rash, but as the scion of a military family and a former aide-de-camp to the king, he valued professionalism in his soldiers, and he kept his troops impeccably in order.

  It was no doubt thanks to his usual sense of discipline that, despite being vastly outnumbered, he and his men were poised to overwhelm the Americans during their campaign along the Potomac. But on August 24, 1814, Ross’s horse was shot out from under him—by a barber turned sniper, or so the war story goes—and the general, in a rare flash of rage, began ordering his men to set buildings afire. After his mount fell, Ross instantly burned to the ground the house where the barber was hiding, and then marched on as the ashes of the structure flecked the sky like hair clippings in the wind. If those ashes blew with particular force that day, it was because a reported “tremendous and unusual” hurricane made itself known as the British advanced, soon bringing driving rain and raising gusts that made it appear to one local witness that both “nature and man seemed to mark our city for destruction.”

  Yet the damp and darkening skies did not stop Ross from following the same fiery protocol throughout Washington. In short order he put flames to the President’s House, the Treasury, and the Capitol, attacking all as if with a renewed awareness that war was fought over symbols as much as borders or shipping channels. To rob a general of his horse, to reduce him to standing in the mud like a common rifleman (he was known to harbor a special antipathy for the ragtag militias of this rebellious land), was to beg a symbolic counterattack. He chose his targets carefully, and made certain any British soldiers caught plundering private buildings during the mayhem would receive the lash. Adding self-inflicted insult to injury, Americans alone looted the burning city that day.

  Torrential rain continued to fall while the disciplined English completed their arson, allowing the shells of the homes of both the executive and legislative branches to remain standing. The downpour, however, did not save the interior of the Capitol, which was gutted by a blaze fueled by the ready supply of paper within its sandstone walls. Already, governance in a nation little older than the soldiers defending it had proved to be a matter of record-keeping and research, and it was for the latter that the unfortunately combustible Congressional Library had been founded twelve years before. First proposed with the understanding that lawmakers might frequently need to reference books of law and statecraft, the collection consisted largely of legal texts and parliamentary proceedings. By the time General Ross marched into town, the library included some three thousand volumes, all of which were lost to his torch.

  From Washington, Ross rode on into Maryland, where the following month he would be part of another attack rife with symbolism, though this time he found himself on the losing end. The same week that a young lawyer and amateur poet named Francis Scott Key saw “the rockets’ red glare” and “bombs bursting in air” over the Chesapeake Bay, two American militiamen, little more than boys, put an end to his campaign. Concealed in woods along the road to Baltimore, they fired on a man commanding his troops from high atop a “magnificent black horse,” a replacement for the one whose loss had set Washington on fire. This time the horse survived, but the rider did not. His body was shipped to the English ground of Halifax for burial, crudely preserved in a hogshead of rum.

  It was a fitting turning point in the struggle between an empire and its youthful antagonist. Perhaps all wars are battles of symbols, but this one was particularly so. For the British it was a fight to redress the injury it had endured a generation prior, when the offspring had cut itself off from its motherland, as well as more recent slights, including the former colonies’ impudent forays into British Canada, which likewise had seen its governmental buildings burn. For the Americans, meanwhile, in addition to the disputes over trade and borders that had precipitated the conflict, the War of 1812 was a battle over what sort of nation they would be.

  During the drumbeat leading to open hostilities, the religious tenor of appeals for and against war was unmistakable. “Such a war God considers as his own cause,” the Massachusetts pastor John H. Stevens wrote, “and to help in such a cause is to come to the help of the Lord.” In Stevens’s view, the Revolution had freed Americans from England as Israel had been freed from Egypt, and the most important liberty that had been gained was the “free enjoyment” of religion. For him, the continued English presence to the north, as well as the English threats to American sovereignty on the Atlantic and in the frontier, remained a threat to the free exercise of faith that had been so dearly won.

  Anti-war preachers made exactly
the opposite case. This war was not for God, they said, but against all that was holy. In a sermon immediately after President James Madison’s declaration of war, the Massachusetts Congregational minister David Osgood pointedly chose as his preaching text 2 Chronicles 13:12: “O children of Israel, fight not against the Lord God of your fathers; for ye shall not prosper.” In case this “ye shall not prosper” left too much to the imagination, Reverend Osgood’s sermon then became achingly specific.

  “At this moment,” he preached, “your minds are harassed and your bosoms tortured with the idea of your sons, your husbands, your brothers reluctantly torn from all the scenes and occupations of peace, from all their domestic connexions, enjoyments and pursuits, to be exposed in the tented field, subjected to the rigors of a military life, liable to the numerous and fatal diseases of a camp, and occasionally, to stand as so many marks for the sharp shooters in the hostile army.” Driving his point home, he then expressed the fears of his congregants in stark, nearly apocalyptic terms:

  You anticipate the tingling of your ears at the tidings of one, and another, and another of these your beloved friends and relatives fallen in battle, mangled with wounds, groaning and expiring on the crimsoned field, or lodged in military hospitals, there to linger in torment for a little space, till nature be exhausted, and they give up the ghost. Your bowels sound with pain and yearning at the expected accounts of garments rolled in blood, and the extensive carnage spread by contending enemies.