MY DEAR CHILDREN:
Yesterday we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of our birth as a nation. It was a lavish affair. The mayor and one of our U.S. senators gave speeches, hailing the services of the men and women of New Jersey on behalf of the Cause. A handful of the old soldiers tottered up to accept the cheers of the multitude - and to persuade the senator to increase their pensions. Cannon boomed, church bells rang. I listened, but I did not feel a part of the general emotion. The senator and the mayor made the Revolution sound unremittingly glorious - and incredibly dull.
While the bands were still playing Yankee Doodle and our militia strutted down Main Street in their expensive uniforms, I mounted my horse and rode into the country. An hour out of town, I left the handsome new turnpike and was soon negotiating a road full of rocks and ruts that had my wise old horse picking his way. Hard to believe that this was once the King’s Highway, the main road to Philadelphia. But practically no one remembers how wretched our roads were fifty years ago. We are in the boastful stage of our national childhood. Everything American must have always been bigger, better, faster, smarter, braver, or wiser than the rest of the world.
I came around a horseshoe bend and paused, my heart pounding. There was the tavern, surrounded by its noble oaks, the swift-running waters of the brook behind it dappled with July sunlight. I felt a quickening anxiety as I dismounted. On my last visit I discovered that neighborhood boys had broken into it. They had done no damage, but it made serious the danger of a fire. You will recall how upset I was when flames destroyed the residence last year. I could see its burnt-out hulk beside the brook as I dismounted.
But all was well in the tavern. The windows were undamaged and the padlock I had added to the front door was still secure. In a moment I was inside, walking with an ever fuller heart into the past. Memories flooded me so precipitously, for a moment I could see nothing as I entered the taproom. I stood there until the great stone fireplace, the massive scarred bar, with its lowered portcullis, the round stone tables became visible again.
Before the bar stood Jonathan Gifford. I saw him as vividly as I see this paper before me, his arms folded over his formidable chest, a rock of a man, so often maddeningly imperturbable, unknowable in his silence, his reserve. With a careful smile on his face he listens to some drunken militiaman, who he knew would run a mile at the first glimpse of a redcoat, roaring out a favorite verse.
From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms Thro’ the land let the sound of it flee.
Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer In defense of our Liberty Tree.
A blink of the eye and he stands in the doorway facing down a mob of liberty boys or a regiment of British infantry, both equally ready to burn the tavern to the ground.
Beside Jonathan Gifford stands his stepdaughter Kate, her red hair flashing defiance in the sunlight. Another blink of my blurry eyes and I see her at the spinet in the parlor of the residence, singing with a delicious hint of mockery one of our more sentimental airs.
In rapture I gaze when my darling is by
And drink the sweet poison of love from his eyes I feel the soft passion pervade every part
And pleasures unusual play round my fond heart.
Watching from a distance is her brother Kemble, his dark gray eyes smoldering with headstrong devotion to the Cause. How many times I fought beside him, gun in hand. For a moment it is like a scene from Homer, a glimpse of a hero in the Underworld, the sight of a face stamped forever with grief and failure.
Beside the spinet stands the woman who changed us all, Caroline Skinner. At first she seems as masked, as impenetrable as Jonathan Gifford. But beneath her composure burned an inner transforming fire. It was no coincidence that I had spent the previous week rereading her diaries, reviewing the extensive notes I had made of my conversations with her in the decade after the Revolution. I have also been talking to Kate, who stands as straight and speaks as saltily at sixty-eight as she did at eighteen. For a month now a wish has been growing in me, and today it has become a resolve.
I shall write it all down. I will fill the tavern and other rooms with the faces, the voices, the passions, and the anguish of those years. Not for publication, but for my own pleasure and your enlightenment. You are all grown men and women now. I cannot see how you would be harmed - and I suspect you might be helped - by knowing the true story of our Revolution.
Perhaps there is a little personal pride in it too - a wish that when I am gone you will think of me as a little more than a dull old country doctor. But let me caution you in the strictest terms against publishing what I write, if by some miracle you consider it worthy of such an expense. The nation is not ready to face the truth about itself that an honest story of the Revolution must mirror. There is another reason for this stricture which you will learn toward the end of the story. Let it pass from hand to hand within the family and rest undisturbed in some vault for a generation or two or three. By then, perhaps, Americans will be able to read the truth without the shock and wrath such a production would engender today.
Above all I hope that the book, if it ever becomes one in some freer future time, will help Americans of that distant era see us not as a set of demigods impossible to emulate, but human, like themselves, torn by dissensions without and doubts within, groping toward happiness and repeatedly missing or mistaking it, struggling back from defeat and even from despair, learning painfully to forgive not merely our enemies but our friends and above all, ourselves.
Your loving father,
James Kemble
In most books about the Revolution you get the feeling that the people had no pasts, they were born in 1775 or 1776. The opposite was the case. The Revolution burst like a hurricane on all our lives, changing most of us forever. But it was only part of our personal histories. Each of us already had a past that complicated or tormented our efforts to cope with the storm. Nowhere was this more visible than the first day of the year 1776, when most of the family met at Kemble Manor in the course of making their annual New Year’s Day visits. By the time we arrived the small and middling farmers had paid their respects and departed. Most of the eggnog was gone from the huge Waterford cut-glass bowl which the Squire had set up for them in the center hall.
I was ordered to station myself by the window in the south parlor and sing out when I saw Jonathan Gifford and his stepchildren. They turned up the drive within the hour. Kate sat in the chaise beside her father, while Kemble rode beside them on his big black gelding Thunder. In Kate’s lap was an enormous bouquet of red and white roses.
Without a word we bundled ourselves into our cloaks and coats and trooped out to the burying ground on the south lawn. Jonathan Gifford knew why we joined him, as we had last year, in this memorial gesture to his dead wife. It was an act of public defiance, not on his behalf but on behalf of the family. No matter what Sarah Kemble Gifford had done, we were saying that she was still a Kemble and that was more important than anything else, with the possible exception of being a Stapleton or a Skinner. The triumvirate, that was the name humbler folk used to describe our three families.
Two years ago we had laid Sarah in the burying ground on land that was part of the family’s original royal grant. With a possessiveness that strongly hinted of resentment, the Kembles had claimed her. Jonathan Gifford had stoically agreed to this alien grave - alien to him, at least - proof, if we needed it that he was a hard man to know.
Why, you may ask, did Sarah Kemble marry a tavern keeper? Since the turn of the century this trade has been declining in prestige. If the reports I hear from our large cities are accurate, it will continue to fall in public esteem. But in the decade of the Revolution - and for a good many preceding decades - the owner
of an American tavern was one of the most influential and respected members of the community. His access to ready money made him a kind of banker with numerous outstanding loans. Circuit judges held court sessions in the tavern’s public rooms and gentlemen and ladies filled these same rooms with lively music and witty conversation at spring and autumn balls. On election days the tavern was the local polling place where farmers and tradesmen came in the good old English tradition to call out their support - or sometimes their opposition - to the Squire as their representative in the provincial assembly. Mail was delivered and distributed from the tavern. The militia performed in its front yard each Training Day and got gloriously drunk as further proof that they were true soldiers. A well-located tavern, run by a man who knew his business, could clear a thousand pounds a year - considerably more than many a lawyer made and two or three times the income of the average doctor or clergyman.
But even if Jonathan Gifford bad by some strange circumstance been forced into such a business at a time when it lacked social respect, I believe Sarah Kemble Stapleton would have married him anyway. Command, a quiet assurance, emanated from this compact man. It was not in the least diminished by his limp. His shattered knee was an honorable wound acquired in the final battle of the Seven Years’ War - the conquest of Havana.
Above all, Captain Gifford was a British officer and he carried with him that special aura of sophistication, power, and romance which to American eyes surrounded these far-traveled guardians of the Empire. He had arrived in our midst, moderately wealthy from his share of the spoils of Havana, bought Strangers’ Resort, one of the finest taverns in the state, and within a year had married one of our richest young widows.
This was in my mind - and in other minds - when we gathered at the graveyard to recall for a few moments the sad, bizarre story of Sarah Kemble Gifford. At that time, I, like everyone else, knew only the external face of it - the public fact that her marriage bad been unhappy. Even before her death, rumors, often spoken behind hands in the taproom of Strangers’ Resort itself, implied that Mrs. Gifford was not beyond sharing her favors with other men. Some said she had done the same sinful thing during her first marriage to Jared Stapleton. This was supposedly why he had gone to sea as captain of a privateer in 1762. He had been killed by a cannon ball from a French West Indianian, leaving Sarah with two small children - and a whacking fortune.
That this fortune played some part in Captain Gifford’s offer of marriage was not likely to shock anyone on our level of society. That this in turn would cause unhappiness - especially public unhappiness - was the surprise. Several times Sarah had all but announced her dissatisfaction with Jonathan Gifford to members of the family, talking recklessly about her fate - to marry unfeeling men whose only interest was money. Once in a particularly wayward moment she told my mother that Jonathan Gifford was more than unfeeling - he was cruel. All this was food for more than a few conversations across teacups. But not even our most inveterate gossips were prepared for Sarah’s denouement - her flight to Antigua, her abandonment of her husband and her children - in passionate pursuit of her lover, an army captain who had visited Strangers’ Resort on a summer’s tour of America and stayed long enough to conquer her. Within two months she was dead, a victim of the fevers that made mortality so commonplace on that pestilential island.
With the malice that seems to be a natural part of consanguinity, the family took sides. Some saw Sarah as the victim of a heartless husband. Others felt that Captain Gifford, who bore the gossip and the humiliation with stoic silence, was a much wronged man. One side noted that Sarah had been careful in her will to sequester all her substantial wealth to her children. Others were quick to point out that Captain Gifford was the will’s executor, and the guardian of the children. But those with vicious minds and nasty tongues were unappeased. They even saw the memorial flowers on Sarah’s grave as a kind of hypocrisy on Jonathan Gifford’s part - a way of fending off the relatives. Litigious as well as avaricious by instinct, they were all too ready to intervene on behalf of their conviction that blood and money were indissolubly mingled.
Jonathan Gifford’s thoughts were far from those carpers. He gazed down at the small, sad tombstone and saw nothing, heard nothing, remembered nothing but words that coruscated through his brain and seared his flesh as brutally now as when he first heard them. I loved you, but not with my whole heart. Just as you loved me. He tried to erase the pain of those words with other memories - Sarah as he had known her during that first blazing year, the one year in which they had been true lovers, the wildness in her which had seemed to him as American as her glowing skin and violent red hair. He had loved her enough to forget his dream of a gentleman’s estate in England, enough to put all the Money he had and ever hoped to have - in the prime years of his life - into the difficult venture known as America. But the words still quivered in him like a wound he had received an hour ago.
Dazedly, Jonathan Gifford looked at the circle of faces in the graveyard and then at the small stones with their inscriptions, the first of them a hundred and twenty-five years old. He was gripped by that most unnerving of all anxieties - the sense of being the stranger, the alien in a hostile land. Even more disturbing was the unspoken accusation which he thought that he saw on some of the faces around him. Above all on the face of his stepson, Kemble. He half-knew, half-suspected that Kemble believed he was the real reason why Sarah Kemble Stapleton lay at their feet beneath this frozen January earth. He could only suppose others in this mourning circle felt the same way.
Among the more likely candidates was Sarah’s sister, Caroline Kemble Skinner. Five years younger, she was Sarah’s opposite in almost every way. She was almost too neat, too composed, too quiet. A dull, mercenary girl, that had been Jonathan Gifford’s conclusion when he first met her. He had revised dull to clever in the intervening years, but had not altered the rest of his opinion. Caroline was married to his best friend in America, Charles Skinner. He was at least twenty-five years older than his wife. Such unions of youth and age were as common among wealthy Americans as they were among the English aristocracy. Sarah had been twenty years younger than her first husband.
Beside his slight dark-haired wife Charles Skinner was a brooding mountain. He and Jonathan Gifford had met during the Seven Years’ War (or the French and Indian War, as we called it here in America). Both had joined a corps of rangers organized by the famous American scout Robert Rogers, and later augmented and supported by that beloved, tragedy-fated young soldier Lord George Howe. They had shared a hundred forest fights with Indians and French irregulars. In those years Charles Skinner had been in his prime, an American giant full of incredible strength and daring. A decade and a half of peace had left him ponderous, on the edge of obesity, with a bulging belly, sagging cheeks, and two drooping chins. Among us impudent youngsters in our frequent discussions of our elders, Charles and Caroline were referred to as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Everyone else called him the Squire.
Beside Charles Skinner stood his son, Anthony Franklin Skinner. His middle name was a compliment to the royal governor of New Jersey, not his famous father, Benjamin. Charles Skinner and William Franklin had met in London in the mid-1750s. Both bad enjoyed the high life of the great city and produced proof of their pleasures - illegitimate sons. William Franklin had left his son in England with his father, but Charles Skinner had brought Anthony home and declared his mother had been his wedded wife who died in childbirth. Such lies are impossible to maintain, and everyone in the family and out of it soon knew Anthony was a bastard. It became a whisper behind Anthony’s back which neither his father’s money nor his own savoir-faire could suppress. In the marriage settlement that made Charles Skinner the Squire of Kemble Manor, Anthony was specifically excluded from inheriting the estate. Only children of Caroline Skinner’s body, to use the legal phrase, could inherit the manor, commonly considered the finest piece of property in south Jersey.
Anthony was not as tall as his father nor as broad. B
ut he made up in charm what he lacked in strength. As a boy he had had a most engaging manner, and he was obviously intelligent. He had been educated at home, largely by Caroline, whose father had had one of the best libraries in North America. Caroline had doted on him and at family gatherings talked frequently about the books Anthony was reading, the clever, witty things he had recently said.
Now the clever boy was a man, back from two years at Cambridge and a year spent reading law in London. His manner had Changed, so it seemed to Jonathan Gifford. There was a condescension in his smile now, a certain arrogance in the angle of his head. He reminded Jonathan Gifford of some British officers he had known in his army days, younger sons of the nobility who thought Irish, Scots, Americans - anyone who was not English - subhuman barbarians. But he admitted to himself that he might be prejudiced against Anthony Skinner. These days he felt utterly incapable of understanding younger Americans.
Captain Gifford may have felt a little more at home after a glance at the next four faces in our semicircle. My father could have sat for a portrait of John Bull. My sister Sally and I were cast in the same mold - hardly surprising since my mother was a Boston Oliver. We were veritable apostrophes to English continuity, with our ruddy beefeater faces and sturdy well-padded physiques. But on second thought, the Captain probably found little comfort from a look at us. Wealth won in America had added pride to habitual reserve. My father would have liked to be friendly, but he was cowed, as usual, by Mother, who was a leader of the anti-Gifford side of the family.
Jonathan Gifford laid on Sarah’s grave the bouquet of roses from his greenhouse. There and in his summer garden, to the bafflement of many, he grew roses of every kind and color from cuttings sent to him by friends in the British army around the globe. A soldier who loved flowers! No wonder many people thought Jonathan Gifford was an enigma.
The little ceremony was over. The semicircle of mourners walked out of the graveyard and Charles Skinner put his arm around Jonathan Gifford’s shoulder. “I hope you will do more than drink and run, old friend. I’ve talked the rest of the family into staying for tea. We’ve still got a case or two of good Dutch Bohea before we are driven to brewing maple twigs and strawberry leaves.”
The Heart of Liberty Page 1