No, she faced the terrible truth. She could not lie to him about this - or anything else. She had dared him to love her with his whole heart, dared herself to do the same thing. To lie to him about this letter would be a wound that would eventually bleed. If they had a future - and her inability to answer this question tormented her - if they had a future, they must face this together, now.
“What does he say?” Jonathan Gifford said.
The tension in his voice was terrible to hear.
“Read it,” she said, holding the letter out to him.
“No. It is private.”
“You must read it. There is nothing - between us - that is private.”
Almost angrily he snatched the letter from her and stood reading it in the bright sunlight pouring through the window, the same sunlight that was spilling across the empty bed upstairs. His face remained saturnine. He handed the letter back to her and turned away, to stare out the window again.
“You should go to him.”
“How can you say that?”
“You should go to him. But if you try it, I will shoot your horse, burn your chaise, and bribe my friend General Maxwell at the Elizabethtown ferry to arrest you and parole you in my custody.”
“Oh. Oh.” Caroline flung her arms around his neck and wept. “That was cruel,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Does it please you to make me act like a child?”
“I had to say it,” Jonathan Gifford said. “I’m sorry, but I had to say it.”
She saw he was profoundly serious.
“I owed it to him. He was - is - my friend. Someday I may have to look him in the face.”
“Stop, please,” she said, putting her fingers on his lips. “I cannot even bear to think of going to him. I would run away to Canada or the West Indies. I would rather roam the world like a wandering Jew - ”
In the dining room they tried to calm themselves with cups of strong coffee. Caroline was solemn. “Strange,” she said. “I don’t really like the idea of a French alliance, as you know. But I find myself liking it now because it gives us a few more years together. See what you have done to me? I was once a woman of principle, of intellect. Now I’m a mere slave of shameless passion.”
“It suits you well,” Jonathan Gifford said, taking her hand. “Perhaps we all need a touch of slavery now and then, to make us appreciate freedom.”
It took courage to joke about either love or politics. Both were intertwined with threats and anxieties of the worst kind. But if there was one thing Jonathan Gifford and Caroline Skinner had in common, it was courage. What a mysterious and little-understood virtue it is. We tend so often to identify it with reckless daring on the battlefield or in the prize ring. But those moments of physical bravado, I am convinced, are often the very opposite of courage. They are wild animal outbursts. True courage involves the mind and spirit. It confronts the fragility of love, the uncertainties of politics, the fearsome face of war without flinching.
WE COULD TELL by the look on Abel Aikin’s face that he had some special news. We were almost ready to tell him what it was, we had heard so much about it. For weeks we had been wondering whether the British peace commissioners, with their supposed concessions to every imaginable American demand short of independence, would win the race with the French diplomats offering us a treaty of alliance.
Meanwhile we enjoyed the beauties of a Jersey spring. The snowy wreaths of the shadbush appeared on the hillsides and in the dry open woods along with trillium, hepatica, and the eggshell-white blossoms of bloodroot. In the woodlands and south-sloping hills arbutus bloomed along with the pale yellow blossoms of the spicebush, the delicate pinkish white nodding clusters of the staggerbush. As the land flowered we sowed corn and wheat, flax and oats in long furrows of moist gleaming soil - a gesture that was in itself a symbol of hope in the future.
This was our chief emotion as we encircled Abel Aikin, who sat smugly in his saddle as usual, his needles clacking away while his old mare rewarded herself with a drink.
“Have the French arrived, Abel?”
“What are the chances of us getting a regiment or two to replace our Yankee heroes?”
“Come, Abel, tell us the news, or we will drown you and your nag in that trough.”
“What day of the month is it?” Abel asked.
“The thirteenth of May.”
“Nine days ago, the honorable Congress announced its ratification of the treaty of alliance with France.”
With a cheer we trooped into Liberty Tavern to celebrate. Jonathan Gifford stood the house to a round of French brandy. We toasted King Louis XVI and Dr. Franklin, who negotiated the treaty for us. Everyone confidently predicted that the war would be over by September.
Captain Gifford seemed to agree with us. “I would not be commander in chief of the British army for all the money in the Bank of England,” he said, running his finger across his maps. “They have done exactly what I always thought they would do to conquer a country as big as America. Spread themselves thin. They have garrisons in Rhode Island, New York-, and Philadelphia. Even if the French send no troops, but only a strong fleet, we can gobble them up one by one.”
Sir William Howe had resigned as commander in chief of the British army. His successor, Lieutenant General Henry Clinton, was also studying maps. He decided to abandon Philadelphia and concentrate his army at New York. Fearful of an attack by a French fleet, he chose to travel by land. For us in New Jersey, especially those who lived south of the Raritan, this meant the return of war in all its mindless fury. They came straight at us, thirteen thousand retreating redcoats and Germans in the ugliest possible frame of mind.
Washington and the main American army pursued them. Dispatch riders thundered into Liberty Tavern’s yard with orders to call out every militiaman on the rolls. We were to swarm on their front and flanks like our native mosquitoes, to slow their march and let Washington bring them to battle. When General Slocum tried to execute the order, he found himself in a very embarrassing situation. Not a militiaman who had slaved in his saltworks, nor any of their friends or relatives, would turn out. Too many others remembered what had happened when he persuaded them to attack the British on their last retreat from New Jersey.
“Where’s Washington and his regulars? Show them to me and I might turn out,” was the cry.
“Tell Slocum to put some of his salt on the lobsters’ tails,” was another frequent comment.
Others invoked the law Slocum had wangled from the legislature, barring Monmouth militia from serving outside the county. They declined to turn out until the British army was inside our borders. If the British took an alternate route, let the militiamen in other counties do the fighting and good luck to them.
Slocum rode hastily to New Brunswick, where we were ordered to collect, leaving Kemble and others, to argue with our recalcitrant stalwarts. We eventually mustered about a hundred - a. heavy percentage of them youngsters like myself, who had just turned sixteen or seventeen and were coming out for the first time. I had expected a fearful argument with my father, but he surprised me. He let me go without a word of reproof, and silenced my mother when she attempted to lecture me into inactivity. My best friend, Billy Talbot, had a much more difficult time with his family. He had to steal one of his father’s muskets and with Kemble’s help hide out in Liberty Tavern’s barn.
There were about twenty of us new militiamen from Liberty Tavern’s neighborhood. Ever since the British departed, we had drilled with guns loaned to us by Kemble from the tavern’s armory. He was our leader, awesome in his relentless devotion to the Cause, a man who had fought and almost died at Trenton and Princeton, battles that meant more to us than Thermopylae or Pharsalia. In the past few months he had taught us to despise General Slocum. We did not know it as we marched to New Brunswick, but the stage had been set for tragedy.
At New Brunswick we found nothing but heat, dirt, and confusion. The quartermasters complained that people in Middlesex County would not take their paper
money. We lived for two days on food better suited for pigs. Meanwhile, rumors swept our little army of one thousand men, most from north Jersey. The British were coming our way and we would have to stop them on the banks of the Raritan. The British were not coming our way, they were marching north, toward Hackensack. They were plodding through the pines of southern Monmouth.
On the morning of the third day, it was clear that the British were not coming near us. They were heading for the coast by they shortest route, miles to the south. But General Slocum gave no order to march. We sat there in the heat, eating our rotten food, growing more and more disgusted. Kemble went to Slocum’s headquarters and demanded to know why he was doing nothing.
“Every report says the enemy are slipping past us,” he said.
“We have gotten no orders,” Slocum said.
“Since when does Washington give orders to militia? He expects us to be there when we are needed. I think you are a damn coward. You remember what the regulars did to you last year and are afraid to go near them.”
“I will go right through them, sword in hand,” roared Slocum, “if I get an order. Until I get one we will stay here.”
“You will. There are others who think differently.”
“Damn you. I will have you court-martialed and shot,” Slocum shouted.
Kemble ignored him. He strode back to our camp and made a furious speech, denouncing Slocum and asking our regiment to follow him south. Only our band of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds stepped forward, eager to march. No one else had much appetite for tangling with the British army, without a guarantee of support from Washington’s regulars. Kemble called them cowards and marched us south. Only then did he realize that the heat was ferocious, and we had no food in our knapsacks. He decided to stop overnight at Liberty Tavern, where he could get provisions, and continue our march in the cool of the early morning.
Jonathan Gifford regarded our detachment with unconcealed dismay. It was obvious that Kemble had no idea what he was attacking. He did not understand that an army on the march through enemy country is like a huge serpent out of a nightmare, a beast with a thousand deadly claws, and a murderous sting in its tail.
“Let the regulars do the fighting, Kemble,” he said. “Washington is supposed to have thirteen thousand men.”
“Militia trapped Burgoyne at Saratoga,” Kemble said. “We can do the same thing to Clinton. We can end the war, end it here in New Jersey. I don’t think you can stand the thought of your beloved regulars being beaten by militia, Father.”
“From what I hear, it was Daniel Morgan and his riflemen - three-year veterans - who stopped Burgoyne,” Jonathan Gifford said. “If you must go, Kemble, for God’s sake stay away from the British army until you find Washington. He’ll have officers detached to work with militia. They’ll know what they’re doing.”
Again, inadvertent words cut deep. Kemble’s mouth grew sullen at the (to him) implied insult. “Yes, Captain,” he said ironically. “Depend on it, we will obey your orders.”
The next morning we marched south, boisterous boys on a glorious adventure. The weather was still hot but we called it tolerable for born New Jerseyans. Some of us filled our canteens with rum, courtesy of Barney McGovern. The rum passed through the ranks, and soon we were all acting more like skylarkers on a picnic than soldiers marching to battle. We blazed away at rabbits and pigeons to supplement our rations and roared out songs that mocked British presumptions.
“I’ll sing you a song, as a body may say,
‘Tis of the King’s regulars, who ne’er ran away
Oh, the old soldiers of the King
And the King’s Own regulars.”
I marched beside Billy Talbot, tall and fair-skinned with hair so blond we called him Whitey. His hair streamed down to his shoulders. Mine was almost as long. Hair was one of several ways we defied our neutralist parents. We scorned the use of a wig, or even of a little powder, knowing this galled our fathers. Kemble encouraged this hirsute defiance - and all other forms of rebellion. In recent months he had spent most of his time with boys our age. It was to us more than to anyone else that he preached his conviction that the Revolution would launch a new era. If Americans succeeded in defeating the aristocrats of England and Germany here, poor and disenfranchised Germans and English at home would rise against their masters. America would be the leader of this age of republican virtue. She alone was qualified because she was relatively untainted by old Europe’s corruption. When the war ended, we would achieve a state of social perfection unparalleled in human history. Slavery, that blot on America’s national honor, would be abolished. Demagogues like Daniel Slocum would be chastised or banished. There would be a limit to the amount of wealth a man might possess before he was forced to share it with his less fortunate brothers.
This last idea brought growls of disagreement from us as we sat in the woods eating our dinner. Kemble agreed that such an idea sounded ridiculous. But that only proved how important it was for us to free ourselves from European habits of thinking and feeling. The older generation was hopeless. Men like our fathers were trapped in the past - even when they pretended to support the Revolution. This was why it was necessary to keep our feelings toward them under the harsh rein of revolutionary necessity. “You cannot love what you don’t admire,” Kemble said. We accepted the dictum with the cold ecstasy of the mind, never for a moment considering the violence it must do to the heart. We were very young. In some ways Kemble was the youngest of us all.
Our talk turned to our military mission. Kemble gave us a lecture on courage. That was all we needed to show these mercenaries that free men were determined to protect their home soil. Nothing could be more important than this battle, Kemble repeated. Anyone who died here would be remembered as a hero for as long as America endured. We did not take this talk of dying very seriously. At sixteen we were convinced of our immortality and invulnerability.
We were not invulnerable to the heat. By four p.m. we were exhausted and Kemble let us retreat from the open road to the shade of a grove of maple trees, where we camped for the night. Sundown brought no relief. We sweltered through the hours of darkness. Not a breath of cool air stirred.
The morning was more of the same. Most of us drained the last rum from our canteens and the water drinkers - there were a few - finished their supply with our hasty breakfast.
Kemble assured us that we would find fresh water from farms along the road. But we got alarming news on this score from the first farm we tried. The farmer was a Quaker, a small spare man who was doing his best to keep his temper as befitted his creed. He had no water. Some horsemen arrived last night with saddlebags full of horse dung, rotten entrails of pigs and chickens and flung this garbage in his well. They were doing the same thing to wells for miles around.
“It is to prevent the British from getting water,” said the Quaker. “But thy friends do not seem to realize that thee and I and other Americans also need water.”
We marched on, our tongues thick with thirst. We were soon in pine country, miles upon miles of hot silent woods, the beginning of the great stretch of pine barrens that runs south through the heart of New Jersey almost to Cape May. The road beneath our feet was no longer the firm dusty earth of our native district, but soft shifting sand that wearied the legs with every step. The heat was intense. Local historians claim thermometers soared past a hundred that day. We had begun marching at dawn. About eight o’clock we heard hoofbeats on the road and scattered into the pines. The riders turned out to be Americans. They wore the blue and white uniforms of the Philadelphia Light Horse. As we approached them, we quickly learned they were part of the well poisoning squad. They stank of horse dung and rotten guts. We asked them where the British army was.
“Go down this road about a mile and mount the rise to the west. You will see it clear: enough,” one of them, said.
We did as they told us, cutting through the, woods to reach the long pine-crowned hill that rose against the sky to the w
est. From its crest the pines dwindled into scrub and a kind of sandy plain full of coarse grass and bushes opened to our view. On a road about a half mile away was the British army, creeping along like that great beast to which I have already compared it. Its size was awesome. We could see neither the head nor the tail of the beast, only the groaning creaking center, with its thousands of wagons and squads of blue-coated Hessians trudging at intervals beside them and faster-moving squads of red-coated cavalry outpacing them.
Where was the American army? We were baffled by our lack of information. Throughout the spring we had heard that Washington’s army was growing by spectacular leaps. We had envisioned a host surrounding the harried enemy with a gauntlet of fire. Nothing was troubling those British or Germans below us on the road but the heat - which was also tormenting us. We did not understand that this was only half the British army guarding their immense supply train. The other half was preparing to attack Washington.
Kemble was studying his map. “That is the road to Middletown,” he said. “They are heading for the coast - ”
A shot rang out.
“Who fired that? Who fired without orders?” Kemble cried. Lewis Simmons, one of the more brainless members of our little band, came sidling through the trees, grinning through his crooked teeth. “I just wanted to make them jump,” he said.
“A waste of ammunition,” Kemble said. “You can’t hit anything with a musket at a half mile.”
“I just wanted to make them jump,” Lewis Simmons said, pouting now.
“They are jumping all tight. Look.”
A squad of men in short green coats was moving up the hill toward us, their guns leveled.
“Jägers,” said Kemble. “Let us give them a taste of American marksmanship.”
None of us, Kemble included, knew that the Jägers, which was the German word for “huntsmen,” had become the best skirmishers in the British army. They were equipped with short-barreled rifles, much more accurate than our crude muskets.
The Heart of Liberty Page 38