Last Refuge of Scoundrels

by Paul Lussier

  Shocking as I know all this is, I must tell you that my journey was rather simple, plain, and ordinary, and, I would argue, reasonable, in light of the language I would need to adopt to get Congress to support the battles at Lexington and Concord. It was a seductive and rewarding language which, from the moment I adopted it, began the change in me to a new man, fluent in the “gentleman’s tongue.” Soon I, along with the language, would also become a tool of the “gentlemen” of substance whom I sought to inveigle into supporting The Cause.

  Cowardly? Certainly. But it’s tricky to know that in advance, you see, because on the face of it, the language of the Second Continental Congress seemed not only natural, but heroic.

  Funny how being scared to death distorts one’s perspective: Hewing to the safe and familiar becomes honorable and lies become true.

  I didn’t know I was terrified, of course. Few scoundrels do. I didn’t know that after the Battles of Lexington and Concord (as the “actions” would come to be known), literally tens of thousands of yeomen flocked to the hills just outside Boston to pin the retreated British into the city (“Starve them if need be!”). That was when I actually grew scared that we might be in over our heads and wouldn’t stand a chance.

  I didn’t know I was jealous either. I’d convinced myself that Deborah’s objections to my plans to travel to Philadelphia and appeal to the Continental Congress for food and guns were misguided and wrong. Of course, if I hadn’t been made heartsick by the hundreds of men suddenly adulating her and by the distance wrought between us by the protracted and complex war-preparation period that followed Lexington and Concord, I might have thought differently. I might even have seen my way clear to the truth, as she saw it: that we couldn’t trust Congress as far as we could throw them, and that as far as the majority of her “soldiers” were concerned, they were gathering to fight all tyrants—be they British, Tory, or arrogant “gentlemen” of any stripe or origin. The advent of a burgeoning American consciousness aside, it’s important to remember: We were all British then.

  I don’t know exactly what I had been expecting the Big Bang to bring, but certainly my fantasy did not involve losing Deborah, especially not to hordes of men primed for an all-out, full-scale, dig-in-your-heels, settle-in-for-the-long-haul kind of war.

  And for sure I didn’t expect her to act as if our embrace on the Green had never occurred. That’s what put me over the edge.

  Pity that my experience with my father’s infamous denial of our single intimate moment had worked its way so deeply—and at such a tender age—into my heart. For in clouding my judgment, inducing me to see red where there was only pure, white light, I was myself set on the road to infamy. After all this time, I was still not so much a Revolutionary as my father’s wounded son.

  Indeed, for me to learn to live the thoughts I held so dear, I had a long way to go. The smashing of Apollo’s shell had taken me this far, but now, to go the distance, I’d have to suffer the torturous shattering of my own. All a long way of saying that this business of Revolution was quite fraught and much, much harder than I ever thought possible.

  Small wonder that few of our Founding Fathers wanted anything to do with real Revolution.

  (And as if my campaign for food and guns among the wealthy elite weren’t looked upon with suspicion enough by Deborah’s side, wait until you see what happened when I delivered a general to her doorstep—a real, dyed-in-the-wool commander-in-chief . . . of a sort.)

  Thank goodness, though, I had George Washington to save me from myself. Otherwise I may well have died a man lost, not a man found. Although in the story that is about to resume I recognize it is hard to imagine Washington ultimately being the savior of Deborah’s Cause, imagine it anyway. Like the figment of the Green Dragon, it’ll help you through.

  For in this tale, the very qualities for which Washington is famous were abhorrent, inimical to The Cause. And other of his qualities since hidden or obscured would prove indispensable to it.

  George Washington deserves to be famous, you see; not for the ridiculous, hollow personage he couldn’t help himself from becoming (and the world saw fit to revere him for), but for the one, by war’s end, he turned out to be: just a man named George, who in order to win freedom for America merely needed to exist.

  I can remember with near-exactness the images and thoughts visiting me en route to Philadelphia. The hills of Charlestown looming behind in long, flickering good-byes, thousands of tiny fires dotting their slopes like so many stars in the fall of evening, marking the individual encampments of the soldiers and their families taking part in the siege of Boston. Memories of full-grown men, minutes after the battles, ringing their hair with daisies and on bended knee singing to plump, coy women standing in the river. Dancing, naked children, their torsos streaked with the dye of first-growth, fresh violet, jumping off the remnants of Old North Bridge and turning the river water an iridescent purple.

  It would take three years for these memories to come back, scratched from my mind by personal ambition. Three years before Lexington and Concord would reemerge as more than just a “dangerous skirmish” and three years before Lieutenant Colonel John Lawrence, preeminent aide-de-camp to His Excellency, the commander-in-chief, would return to being John.

  The tragedy starts out innocently enough.

  I hadn’t left Deborah on hostile terms, not at all. She fully understood my reasons for wanting to supply the underfed, poorly armed farmers with the basic tools of war. She just didn’t believe that hounding the Founding Fathers was the way to do it. Be that as it may, she and Dr. Warren, who after Lexington and Concord claimed for himself what he’d always wanted, the role of de facto commander-in-chief, decided against resisting me, urging me instead simply to keep to the issue.

  “Food and guns. Food and guns is all that we’ll need! Under no circumstances should you let them distract you from this goal. You must absolutely ignore all the rest,” Deborah and Dr. Warren had, with great foresight, warned me. But even given my extensive experience with Hancock and the rest, keeping to “food and guns, food and guns” was hard, and ultimately impossible.

  Hancock was the first to spot me in New Haven, Connecticut, on the Boston Post Road.

  “Sweet boy!” he hollered, leaping from his carriage, barreling toward me like a man on fire, suspiciously happy to see me. Food and guns, food and guns, I kept repeating to myself, somehow sensing that just by laying eyes on Hancock I would be sunk in trouble. I also remember being shocked and thinking: My Lord, they left Lexington three weeks ago—and haven’t gotten very far!

  Whether it was drunkenness, hunger, gout-induced faulty eyesight, or just plain dumb luck, I’ll never know, but Hancock ran past me altogether (maybe once he’d gotten started, he simply couldn’t stop?) and plowed headlong into my hired steed’s belly. Sarah, after whinnying, bounced me off her back and, kicking and rearing, ran as fast and as far away from us as she could.

  I should have done the same.

  That was it for the horse, who was gone forever. And that was it for me, the moment I climbed into Hancock’s carriage, tucked between John and Samuel Adams, one unremittingly gabby and the other indefatigably flatulent. Hard not to be distracted by this pair of “gentlemen.” Yet I continued to mouth silently, to myself, Food and guns, food and guns . . .

  “Sirs!” I said aloud, firmly, politely, steadily, and began to speak to them of my intention to give report to the Second Continental Congress, due to commence session in three days (and we were only in New Haven!) on the “urgent, desperate, and immediate need for food and guns to supply the farmers and tradesmen who had fought so valiantly at Lexington and Concord.”

  They were unimpressed. Instead, they instantly began pumping me anxiously for news of these battles—news they would have had firsthand had they not run away.

  It didn’t take me long to learn why, even in running, they hadn’t gotten very far. As we rode south from New Haven to Fairfield and beyond, inching closer to New York,
I noticed behind us what looked like a military escort, and on either side roaring, cheering crowds. In New York alone, why, the spectators of our passage turned out some seven thousand strong; nearly one-third of the entire city lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the men their own advance pamphlets promised were the emblems of the Revolution: the very men behind the triumphs of Lexington and Concord.

  Oh, didn’t the crowds push to our carriage, at one point unharnessing our horses and pulling us along with their own power to show approval, devotion, their infinite glee. And, of course, if the crowd got too close, there were always those militiamen at our rear who, at Hancock’s behest, would “push them back where they belong.”

  Hancock was utterly convinced I had been sent by Warren in response to Hancock’s many letters stating: Please, I beg you, send me information as to the disposition of the troops. Urgent! The “Hero of Lexington and Concord,” as Hancock now wished to be addressed, could, without my briefing, pretend for only so long he knew everything about which he knew nothing. Eventually audiences would grow tired of his repetitive vagaries and want facts. My supply of credible news was his way to save his ass with the crowds.

  I reported on the disposition of the troops, as requested, again emphasizing the need for food and guns. “If something is not done soon, sirs, Gage will rush back in and decimate—”

  (Hancock interrupted me to wave at the crowd and shoo away a small, pug-nosed girl wanting his autograph: “Be gone, you ugly little rat!”)

  “—the citizenry. To stop this, we’ll be needing food and guns, sir.”

  “Perfect!” Hancock replied, in what I would realize later was not at all a non sequitur.

  On the tenth of May we trundled gracefully (read: slowly) into Philadelphia, part of a procession led by two hundred to three hundred mounted militiamen with swords drawn. Once more Hancock took the post of honor at the front and, with John Adams in the seat beside him, made a grand entrance into Philadelphia.

  While we crossed the city limits, bells pealed and trumpets blared to commemorate the convening of the Second Continental Congress. It would soon become apparent to me that Congress had gathered not to celebrate or even debate what had occurred in Lexington and Concord, but to put an end to it—to discourage the man on the street from perpetrating any such kind of action again.

  And if you’re looking to understand what follows, I’m afraid you’ll have to look past the accepted, Historical myth that Congress as a body now moved with great fervor and dispatch to appoint a commander-in-chief and create the American army and look instead to the strange brew of quirk and cupidity that coalesced (with my prodding) into this momentous decision.

  “Food and guns, food and guns, gentlemen!” I made report on the true status of Boston’s militia army whenever and wherever I could—inside committee meetings, courtyards, taverns, and whorehouse parlors. But clear it was from the start that the “opening” through which the Suffolk Resolves had passed had now slammed closed, was buried and forgotten by History. These delegates had been tricked once with the hoax and would not be tricked again.

  “What? Supply the local militias with additional arms? Certainly not. What if these men were to turn against us?”

  “If they’ve made it this far without arms, why supply them now? Isn’t the skirmish over?”

  Or, more flatly: “No. Now leave me, or I’ll call the sergeant-at-arms.”

  As one delegate wrote to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress: “The people now feel rather too much their own importance, and it will require great skill in gradually checking them to such a subordination as is necessary to good government.”

  The events of April 19, 1775, were never once referred to as a “battle,” let alone a “victory.”

  For the first few days, Congress didn’t even speak of the British or how to remove them from Boston. Instead the body obsessed on how to “keep the growing military power in Massachusetts in check”—and by that they meant the Rebels, not the incoming British Generals Clinton, Burgoyne, and Howe. Reports of armories being robbed and weapons being distributed freely among the citizenry is what Congress worried about, as well as stories of women and children up and down the eastern seaboard being taught the “manual exercise” : how to handle a gun, a knife, a bow and arrow, and even a rock.

  No, to this group of “gentlemen,” the shortage of arms for the twenty thousand unwashed men, women, and children gathering outside Boston to hold Gage in was good news, not bad.

  And on top of everything else, there was that awful mess at Fort Ticonderoga giving the delegates a fright.

  Ticonderoga was a British fort up the Hudson on Lake Champlain. It was the key to holding Canada, controlling New York, and, as far as England was concerned, the way to keep New England Rebels split off from the rest of the colonies by isolating and vanquishing them at once.

  On May 10, the very day that Congress called itself to session, New England militiamen (led by Benedict Arnold), together with a paramilitary force from Vermont (Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys) seized it without firing a single shot.

  It was a magnificent defeat of the British, one which came with the particular humiliation of the commanding officer, Lieutenant Feltham.

  It was early morning when the fort was taken. Feltham had been sleeping. When Ethan Allen woke him (“Come out, you bastard!”), Feltham was so frightened that he appeared at the door forgetting to cinch his breeches about his waist. As a result, raising his arms in surrender meant dropping his pants. And so the British exodus from the fort amounted for Feltham to a miserable hop to the Hudson with his exposed prick flouncing (what little there was to flounce!) from side to side as he went.

  It was devastating: a royal fort attacked and captured; the king’s cannon and munitions seized; a British officer’s penis left dangling in defeat.

  Yet at the time, this wasn’t considered funny by either Britain or Congress. Congress immediately put plans into motion to guarantee that “one day soon” Britain would get all her weapons back without hesitation, demands, justifications presented, or questions asked or answered.

  News of this disturbing event fueled debate as to whether or not Congress should move its quarters closer to the Boston army, so that Congress “could act more expeditiously in regulating operations in that quarter.” But the fact was that “being so close to an area with so many questions referred would leave Congress without the leisure they ought to have to digest and perfect matters of greater importance.”

  “Perfect!” Hancock had said, which turned out to mean that at first he considered food and guns a windfall issue for his campaign for president of Congress, his feeling being that advocacy of arming the Rebels might be just the thing to put him back on the road to popularity. Needless to say, it didn’t take long for him to change his tune, or at least to moderate it intensively, covering all his political bases by mixing enthusiasm for supplying the Rebels with food and guns with rank disapproval of “the actions at Lexington and Ticonderoga.”

  And the muddle worked! John Hancock became president—but only after Peyton Randolph (Delaware), who actually won the election, required a leave of absence for health reasons and the Carolinian who was subsequently offered the job declined it. Even then it was stipulated that Hancock had to relinquish the post upon Randolph’s return. Oh, well.

  So when Randolph did return, Hancock was sent packing, back to fishing for another plum post. Lucky for him (or so he assumed), there was a juicy one coming right at him—one that would put him on a collision course with General George Washington, who, unfortunately for Hancock, looked much better in uniform. Which is how Congress preferred their military men—valiant but pliant.

  Commander-in-chief of the American army. My, my—what a ring to it! The concept was just now beginning to emerge in the ranks of the Committee of the Whole, where somehow the discussion had moved from providing food and guns for the current siege forces (discussed for all of three minutes at best), to the subje
ct of raising an army (hastily dropped as well), to the top-priority subject of electing a commander-in-chief. Now, there was a subject that proved capable of setting the collective congressional tongue wagging. For which they would have me to thank.

  The Committee of the Whole, created earlier to study the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’ request that Congress adopt the New England army for its own (“We are without a civil power to provide for and control them. Please help”), suddenly went wild. Up until the issue of a commander-in-chief came up, the recommendations of this committee had been modest, to say the least. Despite my bleak, dire predictions of the terrible fate that would befall the Rebel soldiers should England retaliate against them, the committee’s best effort thus far was a proposal that New England alone supply the farmers drawn up before Boston with food and guns. This despite my explaining ad nauseum that if New England could afford to do that, I never would have come to Philadelphia in the first place.

  But suddenly the mind-numbing indifference toward “New England’s rotten little military escapade” gave way to talk of taking command of the prevailing situation—and all, as it happened, because I had accosted George Washington en route to the latrine.

  It was about ten days into the Second Continental Congress session and I, having made absolutely no headway at all, decided that I must portray the Lexington Rebels differently than I had. Instead of stories about what disasters might befall undefended New England Rebels no one cared about, I decided on a different tack: cheap sentiment evoking pity for the damned and dreams of glory in their deliverance. Some poor sap might be induced to feel sorry for them and agree to lead their ragged asses to victory. And if there was a commander-in-chief, there would eventually be food and guns, of this I was sure. This new leader simply wouldn’t be able to manage anything without them.