by Edward Cline
“Oh, forty pounds per item ought to be right.” Easley glanced at Hugh for agreement. Hugh nodded.
Norris smiled. “Yes, sir. Forty pounds per. The documents will be ready in the morning.” He nodded to his employer and Hugh, and left the cabin.
Easley gave a short, triumphant laugh. “If anyone in your parts has a mind to contest the authenticity or legality of our business, sir, it will be only at some expense to himself or to the public revenues.”
* * *
Hugh bid Novus Easley goodbye the next afternoon and rode out of Londontown. In one saddlebag now were a copy of a bill of sale to Novus Easley for thirty slaves by Baron Garnet Kenrick, nominal owner of them and Meum Hall, signed by his proxy, Otis Talbot, for forty pounds sterling per slave; a deed of manumission signed by Easley and witnessed by his brother, Israel, naming all the slaves of Meum Hall; a copy of a Pennsylvania slave-purchase tax receipt, with the expertly forged signature of a Crown tax collector and bribable acquaintance of Mr. Easley; copies of letters from him to Baron Kenrick and Hugh, advising them of his intention of manumission; and thirty preprinted certificates of manumission, signed by Easley, for the freed slaves to carry, their names to be filled in the blank spaces by Hugh himself.
Hugh journeyed back to Meum Hall, at once glad that the thing was done, and fearful of the possible consequences. He did not try to reassure himself that the slaves would stay in his employ out of gratitude or for any other reason, nor did he contemplate his problems if they did not stay. He was determined to own Meum Hall without any of the real or moral encumbrances other men took for granted as the price for living their own lives.
After a day’s rest at Meum Hall, he advised his staff of the action, then went alone into the slave quarter, called its residents together, and told them what had been done. He concluded, “If you wish to remain here, it will be as employed tenants of the property. If you wish to leave, you may. At the risk of contradicting myself, as I am no longer your master, I grant you a day of rest and reflection tomorrow that you may contemplate your immediate futures.” He paused and addressed Dilch, who stood in front of the crowd. “Miss Dilch, I know you can read. I saw your Bible in your quarters. It would be appropriate if you did this.” He walked up to her and handed her the thirty certificates. “The law in the colony cannot contest your freedom now. If it does, it will need to answer to me.”
The woman took the bundle of certificates and read the one on top. She saw her name elegantly inscribed in one blank space between printed words, and tomorrow’s date filling another space. Hugh saw some emotion in her face, but could not decipher it. He inclined his head, then turned and left the slave quarter.
* * *
Without any encouragement or assistance from Hugh, word of the manumission spread throughout Caxton and the county. It was his former slaves who helped to spread it from plantation to plantation. Some of the men that night slipped into the slave quarters of Enderly, Granby Hall, Morland, and a few of the smaller freeholds to break the news to other slaves and show them their certificates.
On the afternoon of the next day, as a steady rain washed away the snow, Jack Frake and Thomas Reisdale arrived at Meum Hall. They asked their host if it was true. Hugh showed them the documents. Reisdale examined them. He closed the portfolio in which they were contained and said, “It’s a true bill.”
That evening, two of the former slaves disappeared into the darkness, carrying only bundles of their belongings and their certificates. Three came to the great house to inform Hugh that they had decided to leave and try their chances in the north. Hugh wished them well, and gave each of them a small sack of shillings and pence.
On the morning of the next day, Primus and Dilch arrived at the great house. Primus presented to Hugh the iron brand he had fashioned to mark Hugh’s hogsheads, and said that he had decided to stay. Dilch spoke next. “Speakin’ for all the rest of us that’s left, we will stay…Mister Kenrick. There’s this war goin’ on, and we hear things are unsettled all about, so we’ll stay until things quiet down.”
As the pair left Hugh’s library, they turned to glance at their former master. In their eyes Hugh saw hesitancy and embarrassment; he knew that they wanted to thank him, and that they knew also that it was a thanks which neither they nor anyone else should ever have needed to offer another man. He saw gratitude in their eyes, and he merely nodded in acknowledgment of the words he knew they could not speak.
That afternoon, Sheriff Cabal Tippet arrived at Meum Hall, accompanied by Reece Vishonn and several other planters, including William Granby and Edgar Cullis, recently returned from the adjourned session of the General Assembly. Thomas Reisdale accompanied them. These men also wished to know if it was true. Again, Hugh produced his documents. Sheriff Tippet examined them, and blinked when he saw the signatures of the parties. He shook his head and handed the papers over to Reece Vishonn. The planter exclaimed, “I know this Easley fellow! That is, I sold some bar-iron to him. The damned fool!”
Hugh merely smiled. “Which I believe he had made into lampposts to light some of Philadelphia’s streets.”
Sheriff Tippet addressed the two burgesses. “Sirs, you may worry over the precedent here, but as this business transpired beyond the county’s and the colony’s jurisdiction, and was transacted by a man of means and a peer of the realm…well, I don’t think it can be pursued to any purpose, except at the expense of your reputation and pride.”
Thomas Reisdale added with a slight, self-effacing smile, “The legality of this transaction may be disputed very likely over a course of years, and to the benefit only of numerous lawyers.”
William Granby remarked, “Mr. Cullis and I will consider writing a bill to prohibit this kind of carelessness, to be read at the next session.”
Hugh said, “And Mr. Reisdale will study it for its constitutionality. If any suits are brought against me on this matter, he will represent me in any and all proceedings.”
Sheriff Tippet laughed. “Mr. Reisdale?” He glanced at the two uncomfortable burgesses. “Sirs, you would do better tangling with a French privateer!”
Reisdale nodded in acknowledgment of the compliment. “Thank you, sir.”
The party soon left Meum Hall. That was the end of the matter. Hugh half expected a deputy of Attorney General Peyton Randolph, or an emissary of the Lieutenant-Governor’s office to call and demand to examine the documents. But no one from Williamsburg either wrote or came.
Later in the month, Hugh rode out to the cooper’s shed and watched Primus brand the first hogshead that would hold his first crop of tobacco in the fall. He smiled as the hot iron burned into the wood, and, when the brand was removed, he saw HK in the silhouette of a soaring sparrowhawk.
Meum Hall was now truly his own.
Chapter 14: The Rivals
Jack Frake’s assessment of Lieutenant-Governor Fauquier was only partly correct. Two other men, far higher up in the Crown political structure, were also to purchase the colonials time to gather, order, and refine their wits: William Pitt, and George the Third. In a seemingly endless contest for power that matched the Seven Years’ War in animosity, Pitt and the king both began to lose their own wits.
In October 1760, George the Second, aged seventy-seven, died, and was succeeded by his grandson, George William Frederick, or George the Third. George, aged twenty-two, claimed in his first speech that he “gloried in the name of Britain.” His immediate agenda — though some historians aver that it was more an obsession than a considered policy — was to recoup the powers of the monarchy, which since his great-grandfather’s time had been checked or absorbed by the Whigs. George wished to be a “Patriot King,” and actually govern the nation and establish supremacy over a Parliament undivided by petty factions and smoldering jealousies. To aid him in this quest, he brought in his long-time mentor, tutor, and confidant, John Stuart, the third Earl of Bute, former Secretary of State for the Northern Department.
Bute was a disciple of the late Henry S
t. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who in a series of essays propounded a Tory interpretation of good government and patriot kings. Bute also had political ambitions, but knew in the secrecy of his heart that he had not the wit or stamina to immerse himself in contemporary party politics and emerge from the struggle the better. His only chance in politics was to have the trust and backing of a king who meant to rule a unified and grateful nation.
But the combined political intelligence of Bute and George the Third was not equal to their ambition, which was opposed by that of a patriotic minister, William Pitt. This man’s intelligence was equal to his purposes, which were, on one hand, the reduction of France to the status of Portugal, so that it no longer posed a threat to England’s commercial and maritime hegemony; and, on the other, the reconciliation of imperial power with constitutional liberty.
Naturally, George disliked Pitt. Here was this mere commoner behaving himself like a patriot king, and having credited to his name an immense popularity, a string of victories over the French, and the efficacy of his policies. Also, Pitt was so overbearing and demanding that even Henry Pelham, Duke of Newcastle and First Lord of the Treasury, alternately feared and despised him. If George was truly to govern, in addition to authoring a peace and ending forever his grandfather’s detested “German business” — the alliance with Frederick of Prussia against France, Austria, and Russia — Pitt must somehow be removed, or at least neutralized. But not before the Great Commoner had laid the foundations of an agreeable peace with the French. George therefore intrigued with Bute to rid the government of the man whose actions and policies were to hand the king an empire greater than ancient Rome’s. They were, on this point, bright enough to know that the man who could accomplish this Herculean task was not one who would tolerate the designs on that empire of aman who was merely born into his royal station.
If George the Third had been brighter — his mental acumen was certainly not greater than either his father’s or grandfather’s — and had given the Secretary of State free rein to conduct the war and foreign policy, events in the American colonies might have been postponed for another generation. For while Pitt agreed with others that the colonies were beholden to the Crown, he also would deny Parliament’s right to govern or legislate for them in any matter beyond the regulation of trade. It was, after all, a secure mercantilist empire that he was fighting for. His policies had already won him respect in the colonies. He recalled incompetent generals, and ordered that colonial officers be treated and promoted on a par with regulars. As an effective champion of the colonists’ rights as Englishmen under the Constitution, he might have purchased the empire in North America a greater longevity.
But this was not to be. Neither George the Third, nor Bute, nor the Secretary’s colleagues in government, nor many in Lords and the Commons, could tolerate, much less wish to emulate, a man who could say such things as, “I am sure I can save this country, and nobody else can,” and “Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.” He denied Parliament’s right, but Parliament exercised it nonetheless. Men envied his determination and eloquence, but failed to see that Pitt was the apotheosis of that other national anthem, and as did the man himself, dismissed all hints of contradiction both in the policies and the anthem.
George the Third had, by 1762, experienced the first of many bouts with his porphyritic madness. Pitt, too, was afflicted with a recurring illness. He alternated between long periods of lucidity and longer periods of morbid melancholia. He possessed a temper and a flare for verbally abusing friend and foe alike. His malady caused him to be absent from some of the most crucial moments of his nation’s history, when his presence might have made a difference.
Pitt was not what Bolingbroke, via Lord Bute, warned George against. He was not among “the prostitutes who set themselves for sale,” not one of the “locusts who devour the land.” He did not seek the services of “spies, parasites, and sycophants,” and in fact despised them as much as did George. He was not to be counted among “swarms of little, noisome, nameless insects” that “hum and buzz in every corner of the court,” and would wave them away with the same distaste and impatience as his king. George the Third, anxious to be Bolingbroke’s model Patriot King, however, was convinced that Pitt was all these things and more, simply because the man did not fit into his vision of himself as a God-sent pilot of the nation. He ascribed Pitt’s malignity to party politics. He wished to rule a united nation, and to lead it and Parliament down the path of honor. A virtuous king, after all, would cast off such an intemperate, impertinent minister, and banish him forever from politics.
Pitt, friendless on the throne and in the Privy Council, was now isolated. Having learned that Spain planned to declare war on England through a “family compact” of the two Bourbon dynasties that ruled it and France, Pitt demanded that the king do the logical thing and declare war on Spain first before it could put its army and navy in working order. The king and Council refused. Pitt resigned in answer in October, 1761, stating, “I will be responsible for nothing that I do not direct.” His most ardent enemies on the Council regarded his words as presumptuous self-flattery and even near-treasonous.
George and Bute were successful in their aim. What George got in Pitt’s stead, however, was a succession of ministers and counselors who were not so easily remolded, and that became a small, transient swarm of noisome, nameless insects. It is not apparent from the record that he was ever able to discern the difference between them and his chronic nemesis, William Pitt.
In a dispute over supporting Frederick of Prussia’s claims against Austria, Newcastle, who wanted to continue the Prussian subsidies, in May of 1762 resigned from the Treasury. Bute immediately replaced him — with himself. Unofficially, it was a contest over who, Newcastle or the king with Bute, was going to control patronage and preferments. Fortunately for Frederick, Empress Elizabeth of Russia died in January, and her successor, Peter the Third, a maniacal admirer of Frederick, abruptly took Russia out of the continental coalition and even put his army at Frederick’s service. The Prussian king a little later received probably false intelligence that Bute was secretly negotiating with Austria to force him to make hitherto impossible concessions. Rightly or wrongly, it was Frederick who coined the epithet “perfidious Albion.”
George the Third and Bute inherited the fruits of Pitt’s war policies, but nearly gave the bowl away. By the terms of the Treaty of Paris, signed in February, 1763, France was restored most of the sugar- and molassesproducing West Indies islands it had lost to British naval action; Gorèe, its principal slave collection port on the west coast of Africa; and the right to maintain unfortified trading posts in India. There was some controversy in Parliament and the newspapers over which conquest was more important: Canada, or the islands. Bute and his negotiators bowed to British sugar interests in Jamaica, who feared that more British sugar on the market would create a glut and drive down prices. The strategic value of the French islands was considered, and dismissed. Spain, trounced by Britain with humiliating swiftness, ceded Florida to Britain in return for keeping Cuba, but won from France the right to occupy the west bank of the Mississippi River, the better to block any British moves against its Mexican silver mines. This was more or less a French bribe to persuade Charles the Third of Spain to agree to the treaty. Britain was ceded the east bank, and retained its conquests of Grenada, Senegal, and Canada, and secured a near-monopoly on fishing waters off the coast of Newfoundland.
The man who maneuvered a triumphant Britain into accepting these terms was the French secretary of state, Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul, who was so relieved at news of Pitt’s engineered ouster that he remarked that he would rather have been sentenced to slavery on a galley than deal with him again. Shrewder and more adept at diplomacy than either Bute or his negotiators, and certain that the victors were in haste to end the war, Choiseul cajoled from them
terms which a year before he would not have dared propose without risking having them thrown back in his face. As the ink dried on the Treaty of Paris, he immediately began planning the resurrection of the shattered French navy.
Pitt, in the Commons, excoriated Bute and the treaty terms being debated by a committee of the whole House, to no avail. In those times, the best means the Crown had for removing or silencing an implacable or obstinate political enemy, other than dismissal, was to elevate him to a peerage, or award him a pension, or both. Pitt, on leaving office, was given a £3,000 a year pension and a barony of Chatham for his wife, Hester. Years later, as part of an inducement by a desperate George the Third to form a new government in the wake of Rockingham’s collapse, Pitt was offered the earldom of Chatham.
There was, however, a catch to this glittering reward. Aside from souring an adulatory public, Pitt’s acceptance of the earldom effectively removed him from the Commons, where he had the most influence. A seasoned politician would have first weighed the advantages and disadvantages of such an offer. In his career, he had often enough witnessed the consequences. But by this time, his mental malady was growing more and more pronounced, and perhaps he did not believe that a bestowed peerage would much hamper his ability to persuade men to be reasonable and pursue more practical, less tyrannical policies. He was wrong.
Peter the Third, endowed with fewer wits than was George, after a fivemonth reign was perfunctorily assassinated with the knowledge and probable connivance of his vastly more intelligent wife, Catherine, who would later be accorded the appellation “the Great.” In the West, weak, venal men with short-ranged minds and shadowy motives could rise to power. In feudal Russia, they were rarely tolerated and rarely survived. Catherine the Second was as autocratic as any of her predecessors. After abandoning a recodification of Russian law à la Montesquieu, she expanded serfdom, raised taxes, and took part in the first three partitions of Poland.