“I could say the same thing to you.”
Skinner retreated to the assembly room, where he spread his sheaf of blank pardons on the table and waited for customers. The talk of the taproom that day was a threnody on New Jersey’s abandonment. Jonathan Gifford tried to fight the tide of defeatism with common sense. He pointed out how much of America remained to be conquered. Pennsylvania alone was five times the size of New Jersey with twice the population. Washington could retreat almost indefinitely, while behind them the supply lines of the pursuing British became longer and longer. A few men listened to him. But more listened to Charles Skinner.
Leading the procession was our Harvard hero, Lemuel Peters, and his confrere, Ambrose Cotter. Not far behind them was Esek Duycinck, the major of our militia regiment. Colonel Slocum’s brother Sam resigned as county court judge and swore obedience to His Majesty a day or two later. (I have always suspected he did it on orders from the Colonel, so that he would have a friend on the other side.) Reports from travelers passing through Liberty Tavern from other parts of the state made it clear that pardon seeking was becoming epidemic. The numbers of submitted were in the thousands. But peace did not return to New Jersey.
On December 21, about two weeks after Charles Skinner began issuing pardons, and just about the time when the pardon seekers were multiplying ominously, a band of masked men attacked Daniel Slocum’s farmhouse at midnight. They dragged sixteen-year-old Peter Slocum, the boy who had whipped Kate, into the night. At dawn he was found stumbling about the yard of Liberty Tavern, half mad with pain and horror, his right hand cut off at the wrist.
He was carried into the tavern, where Dr. Davie quickly stanched the flow of blood and cauterized the wound. Kate rushed to the room where he lay moaning in delirium and assisted Dr. Davie until his father and brothers came to take him home in their farm wagon. Daniel Slocum was incoherent with rage and grief. The sight of Kate produced a stream of obscenities. He called her a Tory bitch, a slut, a whore. Kate stood there, head bowed, enduring the tirade. But Jonathan Gifford was not so patient.
“She had nothing to do with it, Slocum.”
“But you did, I wouldn’t be surprised, you goddamned double-crossing English trimmer.”
“This does your lad no good,” Dr. Davie said. “He has had a fearful shock. He needs rest, quiet. Take him home.”
Slocum let his two oldest sons carry the boy downstairs. His farewell was aimed at Kate. “Tell your Tory hero he will lose more than his hand for this.”
A few minutes after the Slocums drove away, Charles Skinner arrived to issue the day’s pardons. With undisguised anger in his voice, Jonathan Gifford told him what had happened. Skinner’s lips went ashen. He called for a glass of brandy. “I know nothing about it, Gifford, so help me God I know nothing,” he said, gulping the fiery liquid as if it were water.
“I’m sure of that. But he’s your son. To most people it’s beyond belief that you don’t know.”
“I have no authority over him,” murmured Charles Skinner. “This little task I perform for government here gives me no power over anyone or anything.”
“You’d better tell him that Americans are not people to take that sort of treatment. If he thinks he can terrify them into obedience, he is very wrong.”
“I agree,” said the shaken Skinner.
But Anthony Skinner was through listening to his father. He issued a proclamation, announcing himself as colonel of the district’s loyal militia. Every man in the county was required to enroll or be considered “an enemy of his King and country.” With an escort of loyalists in which the Bellows family were prominent, he roamed the district appointing captains and lieutenants and openly gloating that soon Daniel Slocum and his friends would be standing before royal courts, criminals with nooses practically around their necks.
In Liberty Tavern’s taproom, fear was visible on every face. Men talked in low, discouraged voices. Nat Fitzmorris told Jonathan Gifford that now he could not even persuade the ten men who had followed him to New Brunswick to turn out. Daniel Slocum stayed on his farm, drunk most of the time, according to Fitzmorris, who rode down there to ask him for instructions. Jonathan Gifford found himself wishing that Kemble was home. They desperately needed someone who could say stirring things about the Cause.
“I will grant the lobsterbacks this much,” said Samson Tucker. “They have behaved themselves. Them tales of ravishing virgins and looting every house on Staten Island had me fearing the worst. After all, a man with five daughters has got to think about such things!”
“I’m told we may sing a different song if the Germans come this way,” Jonathan Gifford said.
Two days later, the Regiment Knyphausen from Hesse-Cassel marched into Liberty Tavern’s yard. We crowded onto the porch to get a look at them. They wore dark blue coats with black cuffs, yellow waistcoats, and white breeches. Their black hats were lined with yellow. The whole effect was darkness and it perfectly matched their manner of marching - like wooden soldiers in an evil fairy tale. British and American soldiers marched alike, slouching along in ragged, irregular lines. Not so these haughty mercenaries. The officer on the lead horse raised his hand. They came to a stop in the yard with a double stamp of their feet. An order was barked in German and they rested their arms and looked around them with greedy, contemptuous eyes. The officer - a major - dismounted and marched - he was that stiff - to the door of Liberty Tavern, where Jonathan Gifford stood watching the parade.
“You,” said the officer. “Food.”
“Can you pay for it?”
“Pay?” The officer’s stolid features registered bafflement.
“Money. Geld.”
Rage transformed the German’s face. “Damned American rebel,” he snarled.
“No money, no food,” Jonathan Gifford said and repeated it in German, “Kein Geld, kein Essen?”
“Hier ist Geld,” snarled the German and flung a bag of coins at Jonathan Gifford’s feet.
He picked it up and asked the German how many dinners he wanted.
The German held up five fingers. Jonathan Gifford took some coins out of the bag and handed it back to him. The Major wheeled, barked an order, and the regiment broke ranks.
The Major was joined by four younger officers. They ate a hearty dinner of ham, veal, fresh fish, and vegetables, washed down by flagons of beer. While they were eating, Charles Skinner arrived, and tried to introduce himself to them. The commanding officer showed no interest in being friendly. “No English,” he said, and Skinner retreated, his feelings not a little hurt.
Outside, we were watching the regiment’s baggage wagons arriving in the tavern yard. They were loaded with loot - furniture, clothing, bedding - presided over by their camp women, who glared at us and howled curses if we came too close to their treasures. Most of the Germans spread out into the fields around the tavern and began cooking their dinners. Suddenly we heard a scream from the direction of the Gifford residence. We raced toward the sound, followed closely by Jonathan Gifford and Charles Skinner. On the porch we saw Kate wrestling with two grenadiers with oily black mustaches and high-crowned brass caps. They were trying to steal the mahogany chest containing her mother’s silver.
One of the grenadiers was about to strike Kate in the face when Jonathan Gifford bounded up the porch steps, moving with amazing speed for a man with a bad knee, and struck him a blow in the jaw that sent the fellow reeling head first off the porch into the December mud. He staggered to his feet, bellowing murder, and his friends in the regiment came running by the dozens. So did the officer who had ordered dinner.
“Was ist? Was ist?” he roared. The soldiers cowered before him, jabbering in German. He stamped up on the porch and opened the chest. His eyes came aglow at the magnificent silver imported from England. He turned to the other thieving grenadier. “Schwein,” he roared, and struck the fellow in the face with his open hand. Then he put the silver chest under his arm and said to Jonathan Gifford, “I will take, rebel.”
“You will do no such thing,” thundered Charles Skinner, blocking the Major’s path. “This man is no rebel. He is a good peaceful citizen going about his business. Even if he is a rebel, you have no right to rob him.”
“Was? Was?” roared the Major, his pale face flushing. He shouted an order and a half-dozen soldiers seized their muskets, fixed their bayonets, and rushed to his assistance. Mr. Skinner found himself confronting a ring of deadly steel.
“Let him go, Charles,” Jonathan Gifford said.
“But it’s Mother’s – ” Kate cried.
“I know – ”
The Major strode back to the tavern and displayed his prize to his fellow officers. They murmured their appreciation. Only one of them did not seem to approve his senior’s theft. He spoke sharply to him in German. The Major snarled an answer in which the word “rebel” was used several times. He obviously believed that rebels deserved neither mercy nor justice.
After dinner the Germans broke into Isaac Low’s dry goods store and hauled out bolts of cloth, spools of ribbons, boxes of pins, bonnets, and piled them into their wagons. Poor old Mr. Low - he was in his sixties - was too frightened to say a word. We filed back into Liberty Tavern, the most dejected, humiliated human beings I have ever seen. I was only a boy of sixteen. No one expected me to do anything. But even I felt the shame of it. It was a sickening sensation. It was centered in the pit of the stomach and seemed to suck energy from the rest of the body. Your head drooped. Your brain felt like a cold, soggy sponge in your head. It was like losing a night’s sleep and trying to get through the next day without it. That is how it feels to be part of a defeated people.
We sat there all afternoon while people wandered into the taproom bewailing their losses. The Germans were like a swarm of locusts going down the road. Every farmhouse within a mile of their march was plundered. It made no difference which side a man was on. Richard Talbot lost two cows and a horse and his family’s silver. Ambrose Cotter lost all his dishes, even though they were only cheap pewter, and had two windows smashed because he had nothing else worth stealing. Cotter had flourished the protection given him by Charles Skinner. “I might as well have used the bark of one of my trees,” he said.
One of Clement Billington’s neighbors rushed in looking for Dr. Davie. The Hessians had started looting Billington’s house and he had shot one of them. They had bayoneted the old miser a half-dozen times and left him for dead.
“What are you going to do about it?” asked Jonathan Gifford. He spoke in a quiet, almost offhand voice while filling a tankard with ale.
Heads jerked up, eyes blinked dazedly at the question. “What can we do?” whined Cotter.
“He’s right, Captain,” said Samson Tucker. “What can a handful do against the whole British army?”
“He’s right. He’s right,” went around the taproom.
“It seems to me you’ve got two choices,” Jonathan Gifford said. “You can let the Germans and Anthony Skinner’s friends beat you up and rob you until they are tired of it. Or you can give them a taste of their own medicine. You’ve still got guns on your walls and horses in your barns.”
“Who’s to take care of my wife and kids if I’m caught and hanged?” asked a man who had already accepted a royal pardon.
“What will happen to them if they grow up thinking their father and his friends are cowards - if all Americans - and New Jerseymen in particular - are cowards?”
“It’s easy for you to talk, Gifford,” Ambrose Cotter said. “You stand here pouring out drinks for Whigs and Tories alike.”
“I know it,” Jonathan Gifford said. He looked him steadily in the face as he said this, accepting the insult - and forcing them to accept the possibility that he was telling them the truth.
A little after eleven that night, after Jonathan Gifford had called out his familiar “Time, gentlemen, time,” and the last drinkers were adjusting their cloaks and setting their hats for the cold December night, Black Sam emerged from the kitchen to whisper in Jonathan Gifford’s ear. “There’s two men over by the barns. They want to see you.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know. I think they’re army men. Our army.”
“Take them down to the house and give them a drink.”
A half-hour later, the front door bolted and the taproom spotless, Jonathan Gifford asked Barney McGovern to join him and they walked down to the house to find two men in blue coats and mud-spattered buff breeches before the fire in the living room. Between them was an almost empty bottle of brandy. The man on the left side of the fireplace was at least six feet four and had two pistols strapped to his waist. He arose, his hand on one of his guns as they stepped through the door. The smaller man on the right was obviously in charge. He was in his late forties with a grim pockmarked face and dour dark eyes.
“Gifford?” he asked.
Jonathan Gifford nodded and introduced Barney. Brigadier General William Maxwell introduced himself and his huge aide, Major Aaron Ogden. Maxwell spoke with a thick Scotch burr “Washington said you were a safe man. We’ve got a message for Colonel Slocum and no time to ride about Colt’s Neck in search of him.”
“Give it to me. I will take it down to him.”
“He is to call out every man he can muster and attack the enemy’s supply wagons, boats on the Raritan, shoot up their sentries.”
Jonathan Gifford told Maxwell the blunt truth. “I’m not sure how many men he can raise. Most people have practically surrendered. They think that Washington has deserted them.”
“Not so, not so,” Maxwell said. “He is planning a capital stroke this very moment against the Germans posted along the Delaware. But to gain its full value, we must do something around here to make their royal rears feel less safe.”
“If you brought some regulars with, you - even. fifty of them - it would make a big difference.”
“We don’t have a man to spare - or a shoe to march them in. If you can only raise a hundred men, spread them thin and make the British think it’s a thousand. If our plan works, we can clear west Jersey and most of the south. But it all depends on making them think that there’s trouble at their backsides.”
By the time General, Maxwell killed the rest of the brandy, he was a little drunk. He damned Congress for not giving Washington a decent army to fight the British, “You can’t get the militia to fight without kissing their goddamned asses,” he said. “But we will do it. for the country’s sake,; right, Ogden?”
Major Ogden nodded. He looked at the General with pure admiration on his young face. He was a hero worshiper. But Jonathan Gifford saw a man who was too inclined to let liquor console him for the way the Americans were fighting the war. A professional soldier with twenty years in the British army, Maxwell was enraged by the incompetence of the Continental Congress. He called them “the sixty generals” and denounced their constant meddling in military strategy. The Scotsman’s exasperation helped Jonathan Gifford put his own critical attitude toward the American conduct of the war in better perspective. He saw that it was a waste of breath to rant about what had been done wrong.
General Maxwell departed unsteadily for Springfield, where he hoped the Essex County militia was gathering. Jonathan Gifford and Barney McGovern rode in the opposite direction, to Daniel Slocum’s farm at Colt’s Neck. The small two-story main house was dark, but there was a light in the ell that jutted from the rear. As they dismounted, a voice spoke from the dark part of the house. “Move and you’re a dead man. Who are you?”
“Gifford, from Liberty Tavern. Barney McGovern’s with me.”
In the kitchen they found Slocum’s two oldest sons with loaded muskets. Beside them sat their brother Peter, the sleeve of his shirt flopping over his missing right hand.
“Where’s your father?”
“In the ell. He’s been drunk for two days.”
“Take me to him. I’ve got a message for him - from Washington.”
The ell was a series of storer
ooms. Slocum sat in one of these, a jug of home-brewed applejack - commonly called Jersey lightning - beside him.
“What’s this, Gifford? What are you here for?” he mumbled. “Come to ‘rest me? Shoot the bastard, boys.”
“He ain’t come to arrest you, Pappy. He’s got word from General Washington.”
“Shit on Washington, goddamn Virginia bastard - leaving us here - “
Slocum tried to stand up. He got halfway to his feet and tumbled back into the cane chair.
“Get me a bucket of water from the well,” Jonathan Gifford said.
At a nod from his oldest brother Peter Slocum performed this chore. Jonathan Gifford took icy water and flung it in Slocum’s face.
“Goddamn you, Gifford,” roared Slocum, temporarily sober.
“Sorry I had to do that,” Jonathan Gifford said with a grim smile. “General Maxwell left orders from Washington for you at Liberty Tavern. You’re to turn out the regiment immediately and attack the British at Brunswick, Amboy, and along the Raritan.”
“Who does that crazy bastard think we are, the Iroquois? I can’t turn out a man. We’re licked, Gifford. They’ll hang me and these boys here. You’ve got friends in the British army, Gifford. Let them do what they want to me, but not the boys - “
“You’re not licked. Washington’s still got an army and he’s ready to do something with it, if Howe spreads his regiments thin enough. That’s where he wants you to help. Keep them busy back here so they don’t pay too much attention to what’s happening. on the Delaware.”
Slocum shook his head. “Can’t turn out a man - ”
“You can now. The Hessians came through here today. They looted every farm within sight of the King’s Highway. You’ve got men who are mad enough to fight.”
“Is that the truth?” Slocum asked his oldest son.
“I don’t know, Pappy. We been here all day on guard.”
“It’s the truth. I saw it with these two eyes,” Barney McGovern said.
Slocum shook his liquor-soddened bead. He picked up the bucket and handed it to his youngest son. “Fill it again,” he said.
The Heart of Liberty Page 22