by Ron Carter
She scoffed. “That’s nonsense. I’m fine. You go. If anything happens, your mother’s only two blocks away, and the doctor can be here in ten minutes. You go.”
“Sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He took her hand in his, and raised it to press it against his cheek, and for a moment they sat quietly, saying nothing. He released her hand and rose, and silently strode down the hall to their bedroom while she began clearing the breakfast table. Minutes later he returned to set his large seaman’s bag beside the front door and hang his cape and tricorn on the pegs next to the door. He was seated at the table putting on his shoes when movement in the great archway to the hall brought his head up. John was standing in his nightshirt, toes raised from the cool floor, with his dark, straight, unruly hair awry, one eye clenched shut, digging at the other one with a knotted fist. In the yellow lamplight, Matthew could see much of his father in the boy, with his blocky face and the miniature cleft in his chin. John dropped his hand and opened one eye to a slit, squinted at Matthew, and spoke.
“Where’s Mother?”
“Kitchen.”
“You bring me something when you come back?”
“If you mind your mother and take care her.”
“I’ll take care of her.”
“And the house.”
“And the house.”
Matthew worked with the buckles on his shoes. “Keep the kindling boxes full. Both parlor and kitchen.”
“I will.”
“Keep your room straight.”
“I will. I’m hungry.”
“Mother has breakfast ready, but it’s early.”
“I smell hot chocolate. Can I have some hot chocolate?”
“Ask your mother.”
Kathleen walked in from the kitchen and smiled at her son, and he turned his squinted eye to her. “Can I have some hot chocolate?”
“Half a cup. Breakfast later. Get your robe. And your slippers. Floor’s cold.”
John bobbed his head and turned on his heel and they heard him trot down the hall. Matthew glanced at Kathleen and smiled as he finished with his shoe buckles. John came trotting back down the hall and into the room, working to tie the cord to his robe. He went to the table and sat down, waiting for hot chocolate, and Matthew turned to him.
“I’ll be gone for a while. A long time. You’ll have to be the man of the house. If you need help with anything, get Uncle Caleb, or Billy. Understand?”
John nodded as Kathleen came through the door with a half-cup of steaming chocolate and set it on the table before him.
Matthew continued. “Don’t play with the ax. Don’t climb on the stacked firewood. You could get hurt if it fell. Help pull weeds from the flower beds and the vegetable garden. The weeds, not the flowers and vegetables. Say your prayers every day. Understand?”
John bobbed his head and reached for the cup with both hands.
Matthew leaned forward. “If you’re good, you can sit at my place at the head of the table while I’m gone. That’s where men sit when they’re the man of the house.”
The boy stopped with the cup halfway up. “Honest? I can sit in your place?”
Matthew turned to Kathleen. “What do you say?”
“If he does the work of the man of the house, he should sit there.”
John turned incredulous eyes back to Matthew. “I’ll do it.”
Matthew bobbed his head. “Then you sit at my place while I’m gone. That’s fair.”
The boy raised the cup to his mouth, blew for several seconds, then sipped gingerly, only to jerk the cup back while he licked violently at singed lips. Kathleen turned her head to stifle a laugh and was on her way back to the kitchen when a quiet rap came at the door.
Matthew stood. “That’s Adam.” He walked quickly across the room, turned the key and swung the door open to let the yellow lamplight flood outward. It cast an irregular yellow shape on the wet grass and dripping shrubbery, and framed Adam standing with tricorn in his hand, seaman’s bag at his side, and cape latched about his shoulders. The youngest of the three Dunson brothers, Adam was the quiet one, dark-eyed, dark-haired, regular features, not as tall as Matthew, taller than Caleb, thoughtful, mature beyond his years, a Harvard College-trained navigator after his brother Matthew, and a born leader among men. The sound of rainwater dripping from eaves and trees sounded behind him, but there was no rain falling.
“Come in, come in,” Matthew exclaimed.
Adam nodded and stepped inside where he set his seaman’s bag beside Matthew’s.
Matthew gestured toward the table. “Had breakfast?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Hot chocolate?”
“No, thanks.”
Kathleen walked in from the kitchen and Adam smiled as he spoke. “You’re looking well, Kathleen.” He gestured toward Matthew. “Can you spare him for a while?”
Kathleen laughed and tossed one hand in the air. “Take him. He’s yours.”
Adam grinned back. “We’ll try to deliver him back safely.”
John spoke up from the table. “Uncle Adam, are you going to sail the ship, or is Father?”
“I will navigate. That means I pick the direction the ship goes. The captain is Neil Sturman. He’s a very good captain. Your father is our passenger.”
“What does he do?”
Adam grinned, “Whatever the captain tells him.”
John turned pained eyes to Matthew. “I thought you were captain.”
“I’m just a passenger this time. Maybe I’ll be captain next time.” Matthew turned to Kathleen. “Anything we’ve forgotten?”
She shook her head. “No. You two better go. It’s seven o’clock.”
Matthew snapped his cape about his shoulders and took his tricorn in hand as Kathleen walked to the open door, arms folded in front of her in the way of women. She motioned to John who dropped from his chair and came to stand beside her. Matthew reached for her and they held each other close for several moments before Matthew kissed her and released her. He looked down at John, and the boy thrust his hand upward to shake that of his father, but Matthew swept him off his feet into his arms. The boy threw his arms about his father’s neck and locked his legs about him and clung to him for a time before he let go, and Matthew set him on the floor. Kathleen looked at Adam, and reached to hold him for a moment, and kiss him on the cheek.
“You two be careful,” she said.
“We will,” Adam answered.
The two men hefted their bags and stepped out the door into the wet world, dim beneath the deep purple of heavy rain clouds moving southeast over the Boston Peninsula. The rising sun was but a faint impression in the blue-black of the eastern rim as they walked to the front gate, turned back to wave to the two silhouettes in the door, and were gone, striding briskly east in the clean, chill air, through the narrow, winding streets toward the Boston waterfront.
Notes
The Boston custom of men called the “rattle-watch,” patrolling the streets at night and calling out the hour and the weather is described in Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days, p. 362.
Hot chocolate was a drink commonly used in America at the times in question. Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days, p. 165.
The Articles of Confederation, which formed the first Continental Congress and served as the first inclusive form of government between the thirteen states, was fatally flawed, since it granted the government no power to tax and almost no powers of enforcement. Bernstein, Are We to Be a Nation? pp. 81–82, 85–91; Warren, The Making of the Constitution, pp. 6–7.
Merchants and other interested persons in the various states and major cities set up what was called a Committee of Merchants or a Committee of Correspondence, intending that the committees work together to resolve the conflicts that were becoming epidemic between the states. Bernstein, Are We to Be a Nation? p. 90.
The references to Daniel Shays, an honorably discharged captain in the Continental Army, and his leading of t
housands of other discharged soldiers in what was eventually called “Shays’ Rebellion,” are accurate, including the closing of courthouses in many cities to prevent bankruptcy proceedings and debtors’ prison for thousands of unpaid veterans, as well as the three open battles of January 25, 1787, at Springfield, Massachusetts; February 4, 1787, at Petersham; and finally at Sheffield on February 27, 1787. Bernstein, Are We to Be a Nation? pp. 93–95; Freeman, Washington, p. 534; Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, pp. 447–48; Warren, The Making of the Constitution, pp. 30–33; Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention, p. 44; Berkin, A Brilliant Solution, pp. 27–29.
Nathaniel Gorham, Caleb Strong, Elbridge Gerry, and Rufus King comprised the Massachusetts delegation to the Grand Convention. John Rutledge, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Charles Pinckney (second cousins), and Pierce Butler comprised the South Carolina delegation. A complete list of all delegates from all participating states may be found in Bernstein, Are We to Be a Nation? p. 284. A description of the background and general physical appearance of the delegates is found in Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention, pp. 79–156.
George Washington was President of the Society of Cincinnati, an organization dedicated to honoring the officers of the Revolutionary War, membership in which was to pass from father to son. Washington opposed the bloodline membership requirement, and it was abandoned. At the time of the Grand Convention, Washington was to preside at the annual Convention of Cincinnati meetings scheduled in Philadelphia concurrent with the Grand Convention, but after receiving many letters from leaders begging him to represent Virginia at the Grand Convention instead (including a very persuasive letter from James Madison), Washington excused himself from the Convention of the Society to attend the Grand Convention. Bernstein, Are We to Be a Nation? pp. 124–27; Warren, The Making of the Constitution, pp. 62–63, 88; Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention, pp. 44–45.
The question of states with large populations having voting powers greater than those with small populations very nearly split and destroyed the Grand Convention. Resolution of the conflict became known as “The Great Compromise,” and it will be discussed in later chapters of this volume. Bernstein, Are We to Be a Nation? p. 167.
The slavery issue nearly divided the northern states from the southern states and ended the Grand Convention. Bernstein, Are We to Be a Nation? pp. 175–77.
At the time of the Grand Convention in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson was serving as the American minister to France, while John Adams was serving the same function in England. Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention, pp. 83, 138.
Boston
May 8, 1787
CHAPTER II
* * *
Rainwater stood in the streets and in low places on the narrow sidewalks as the two men made their way through the gathering morning traffic toward the familiar scent of salt sea air. Storekeepers and workers and merchants, clad in coats and capes and tricorns rustled from their homes to walk hunch-shouldered, staring down to avoid puddles as they hastened toward the small shops and taverns and offices they owned, or the places where they were employed. They offered a perfunctory “Good morn’” to acquaintances they passed in their hurry to be about the business of another unremarkable rainy Tuesday in Boston.
Old, weathered wagons and great, two-wheeled carts rattled from the farms and gardens on the peninsula and from the mainland, heavy with fresh and salted meat, milk in cans and jars, forty-pound cheeses, chickens complaining in coops, sacks of milled flour, and the first of the year’s vegetables. Milk carts drawn by huge dogs stopped before homes while the drivers patiently dipped milk, still warm and frothy into buckets and exchanged them at the door for copper and silver coins before moving to the next stop. Some wagons stopped at the small shops with lamps glowing in the windows to cast odd-shaped patterns of light into the streets, where drivers in old, patched coats and trousers and worn shoes haggled price with the shopkeepers who wore shawls about their shoulders. Bargains were struck, goods were exchanged for coins, and the wagons and carts rolled on.
Some traveled on Fruit Street to pass through the town to the clamor and bustle of the Boston waterfront, where ships under flags from most of the ports of the world were tied to wharves and docks, being loaded and unloaded by men who wore dress strange to the Puritan Bostonians and spoke languages and dialects from lands and peoples that, for many, existed only in fables and storybooks. The wagons and carts creaked slowly past the wall-to-wall offices of shipping companies and brokerage firms on the north side of the waterfront, through the jostling crowd on the wharves, while the drivers read the names carved on the bows of the ships tied to the docks on the south side until they found the one they sought, where they hauled their loads to a stop to inquire after the quartermaster. Contracts were read, heads nodded, and men unloaded the wagons and carts into great nets spread on the black timbers of the dock, to be hoisted by the yardarm onto the ship’s deck, emptied, and lowered for the next load of flour, potatoes, salted meat, or cheeses, other goods. The outbound tides were running, and ship’s crews with schedules and contracts to meet in ports all over the world were intent on clearing Boston harbor, steering out into the Atlantic, before the moon changed and reversed them; none wanted the frustration of bucking incoming tides.
For Matthew and Adam, the sights and smells and sounds of the waterfront were like a second home. They picked their way past the weathered buildings with peeled paint and lamplight glinting dull through grimy windows, and the rattle of wagons and carts, and the loud, coarse confusion of the voices and languages of the crews unloading them. Seagulls with black heads and wingtips, and terns and cranes and pelicans wheeled, squawking overhead, plummeting down to pluck dead fish and carrion and garbage from the sea or the shore, then battling other winged thieves to keep it. The two men angled left to the large sign with black block letters “DUNSON & WEEMS SHIPPING COMPANY” high above the door and pushed inside. They set their seamen’s bags against the inside wall and Matthew closed the door behind them.
The room was large, rectangular, with two windows in the front wall, and one in the rear wall, next to the backdoor. The two sidewalls were common with the offices next door, and without windows. There were six heavy, plain desks in two rows, each covered with books and ledgers, divided by an aisle down the center. Half a dozen scarred chairs stood against the front wall, three on either side of the door. On the wall beside the first desk on the left hung a large calendar with penciled notations on various dates, and next to it was a chart of contracts and dates for the company ships to carry freight all over the eastern seaboard, through the month of December. On the wall to the right was a huge map of the east coast of the North American Continent, from Greenland to the West Indies, with the Gulf Stream, the Horse Currents, known reefs, islands, channels, water depths, deep-water ports, and rivers marked. Past the great map was an American flag. Four lamps were mounted on each wall, and all were burning. A large black stove stood in the front left corner, and another in the right rear corner of the room, both with fires in their potbellies, and the quiet sound of air sucking through the slitted settings in the doors. A pot of tea steamed on the top of the stove at the rear of the room, and behind it were a dozen heavy pewter mugs on a wall shelf, next to an open box of India tea, and an open three-pound canister of sugar. A two-ton iron safe, painted gray, stood opposite the stove at the rear of the room, and above it, on the rear wall, hung an old, plain clock that struck off the hours. There was nothing else. The office of the Dunson & Weems Shipping Company was solid, sparse, no-nonsense, in the fashion of men of the sea.
Four men stood in the aisle between the desks, handling papers between them, and at the sound of the door they stopped to look. All four had arrived at the office while it was still raining, and the pungent odor of wet wool hung heavy in the room. None spoke while Matthew and Adam hung their capes and tricorns on the row of pegs beside the door, next to the damp coats and capes already in place.
Matthew led the way
to the group, Adam following, and they nodded and exchanged a perfunctory greeting with Billy Weems, Thomas Covington, Neil Sturman, and Theodore Pettigrew. With Matthew and Adam, these four men managed the affairs of the company. Billy handled the books. Thomas Covington, gray-haired, round-shouldered, slightly stooped with years, a widower, had sold his failing shipping company to Matthew and Billy more than two years earlier, and they had invited him to stay on. Theodore Pettigrew, plain, long upper lip, straightforward, honest to a fault, had hired on as captain of one ship, then was given charge of handling all captains for the six ships purchased from Covington, and the two added since. Neil Sturman, short, rotund, balding, heavy-jowled, a tough, seasoned, capable ship’s captain, had been trained at Marblehead under John Glover. Each man recognized and respected the competence of the others, and none wasted words.
Matthew spoke to Sturman. “Crew on board? Ship’s surgeon?”
“All aboard.”
He turned to Billy. “Contracts and manifest?”
Billy gestured to Sturman. “The captain has them,” and Sturman raised a sealed packet of papers to show.
“Signed off on them?” Matthew asked.
Sturman nodded, and Matthew continued.
“Insurance papers?”
“With the manifest,” Billy pointed.
Adam was silent, watching, absorbing from these men what Harvard College had never taught him.
Matthew continued. “War chest?”
Billy hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Behind my desk.”
Matthew turned to Sturman. “Signed off on it?”
Sturman bobbed his head. “Half an hour ago.”
Matthew turned to Adam. “Maps? Charts?”
“On board, in my quarters.”
Matthew glanced at Thomas Covington, whose old, blue-gray, watery eyes were missing nothing. “We forget anything?” Matthew asked.
Covington turned to Sturman, eyes narrowed. “When you unload those three thousand barrels in Philadelphia, get a representative from the insurance company to certify the count. The Terrell representative has counted short a few times in the past. Be careful.”