Last Refuge of Scoundrels

by Paul Lussier

  Deborah knew that Washington knew better, and that mistakes like this, with the tremendous balancing act Washington had to perform, were bound to occur. And he was still a “gentleman,” after all. Nonetheless, by the end of the day, Deborah was unwilling to allow him slack. I’m through with him, she said to herself. Leave him to his own devices then, I’ll run this Revolution my way. I started it and I can finish it. Just you wait, my darling Alice, my lover John, just you see. . . .

  And so she slithered out of the ravine back up to her hill. And after burying her daughter, she slept atop Alice’s grave for three whole days, deeply, soundly, peacefully.

  And Clinton retreated into the night, his baggage train battered but unhalted. Monmouth had amounted to nothing but a nasty draw. All because the “gentlemen’s” respect for military custom—over instinct, wisdom, common sense—had ruled.

  And Deborah left. Meandering her way to Long Island, she began life anew as a lone fisherwoman with only a small dory to call home.

  But one day a week she wouldn’t fish. Instead, she’d row herself to the Jersey, the British prison ship anchored off the Long Island coast, and feed prisoners fish and sundries in excess of what she needed to survive. She found herself living for this day, for the off chance it promised of a sighting of dear, beloved John whom at Monmouth she’d come to learn she desperately loved.

  CHAPTER 31

  The Legend of Deborah and John

  Please, Lord, let me see him, let my palm at the least brush his cheek, she prayed every day as she handed food through a porthole in the decaying warship, searching the hundreds of faces crammed into the black, noisome hold for some sign of John. Oh, wouldn’t they fight for space at the hole for a bit of apple, a chunk of bread, a pipe, some tobacco, a comb, and, failing all that, a breath of air!

  The Jersey was the most notorious of the fleet of eleven miserable vessels anchored off Walkabout Bay. Retired warships pressed back into service as British hellholes, they were rotten sewage-maggot-smallpox-infested prisons.

  After John’s capture in 1778, it was here that he’d been carried, bound in irons, stripped down, and then ordered below, under the gun deck, into the pit of the undead: an unfed, unclothed, unwatered mass of men packed so tightly together they would sleep—and die—standing up.

  It was early 1779 when Deborah first rowed to the Jersey, having heard that this was where John was stowed. Disguised as a “little biddy” or, as one British sailor put it, an “ugly hag,” she offered to supply the guards and officers in charge with items for their pleasure, everything tidily wrapped in paper.

  “I set my price, now and it don’t change! So there’ll be no quibbling, no bargaining, or—mind you—I shall not return!”

  The prison guards, a woefully underfed and bored-senseless lot themselves, didn’t want that, no!

  “Pray, woman, stay. Whatever it is you require, you will have!”

  “Meeting the fee will do me just fine,” she said. But deep down, of course, Deborah had another idea. Once she had the guards where she wanted them—unwilling to go without her goods—she would exact a greater price.

  “Open the porthole, then, and let me feed the prisoners therein. Do it or else this day will be my last here!”

  The porthole door was flung open wide.

  Two more years, one hundred and fourteen visits, after never missing a chance despite squalls, sleet, snow, and rain, Deborah finally laid eyes on John.

  Careful not to tip off the sailor on guard, she was unable to speak. Her eyes watered and her knees buckled a bit, yet somehow she managed a smile.

  Even in her costume—gray hooded cloak, big boots, fat belly, salt-and-pepper fright wig—John recognized her smile. And knew better than to breathe a word.

  Although she could see but a piece of his face, one of his eyes, a cheek, and an ear, it was his hand that brought her the joy, the hope, the inspiration to give the Revolution another go.

  Eight visits later, Deborah, as was now customary, ordered the porthole opened. She stuck a note inside a piece of fruit: Bring me John.

  Although it took much more time than she would have liked to bring John to the hole, for by this point he was weak and could barely walk, he eventually appeared.

  She risked speaking. “Don’t move,” she whispered under her breath, with one eye fastened to the guard, who, thank the heavens, was only too happily preoccupied with today’s especially delicious goods. “I’ll be coming inside,” she whispered. “Keep still.”

  She waited a moment more for the guard, as he always did at this point, to move out of eyeshot to the quarterdeck where he could, in peace, munch on today’s particularly spectacular feast: pears and salt cod and cold fish soup with bread.

  Once inside, Deborah tossed John her cloak, instructing him, since the wig fit miserably, to at all costs remain covered by the hood.

  “Row for your life, my friend! Your country calls!” she whispered. She turned to John’s fellow prisoners. “Help me lift him through!”

  Even with the additional time made possible by today’s generous meal, Deborah knew well that any second now the guards would be lifting the ladder. “Until next week then, Dame Grant!” they would say, as such was the name she’d taken. And Dame Grant’s impostor had better be in the dory by this time!

  “I will be safe here, waiting for your return,” she whispered to John. “Go to shore and you’ll be told what to do: the one thing that hasn’t been tried.”

  “I don’t understand—” John croaked out the words as best he could.

  “Nor should you. Just trust me, love—my love—and do it.”

  “I can’t leave you.”

  “You’ll be back. I know you will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because this is it. Finally—the way. You can’t fail to meet with success.”

  Abovedecks, the guards could be heard stomping their way to the rail. “That’ll be all for today, missus!”

  There was no more time. With strength Deborah didn’t know she had, she nearly flung John through the hole into her boat.

  John, passing undetected as a picture-perfect “Dame Grant,” rowed without direction for hours. He had been without light for so long he was unable to see.

  He was reminded of sailing into Boston Harbor with Papa, where this entire journey had begun, of how impossible passage seemed, yet in the end how effortless, how sublime. He recognized his dory experience as being exactly the same.

  Without even so much as a single thought about how to get there, John somehow landed himself safely on shore. He was met immediately by a small farmer, who was hiding out in the reeds, waiting. Within seconds of John’s arrival, “Mr. Smith” dragged him to a stone fence and issued instructions.

  “Take cover, now, while I indicate to the others that you’re here!”

  Indicating involved arranging and rearranging stones according to an understood code visible from clear across the bay.

  Finally, John’s vision was beginning to return. And with it his mind became clearer than ever before.

  He recognized this farmer, Smith; he knew he did. John had seen him at least twice before: in Boston, the night of Otis’s rescue; and in Philadelphia, deep inside Hell’s Caves.

  “Who are you?” John asked.

  “It doesn’t matter who I am, there isn’t time. The task before us is to get you to Boston, and from there to France!”

  Oftentimes the story would end ’round about here, because mostly it was understood that the audience could guess the rest all too easily. “The Legend of Deborah and John,” you see, wasn’t meant to document the couple’s role in turning around the Revolutionary War, for this was considered common knowledge: fact and not news. The point was to rivet the listener not with what they did but with how and why. Not everybody knew that.

  And that’s how and why Deborah and John came to be heroes of the Revolutionary War.

  CHAPTER 32

  One Thousand One Hundred and F
orty Bottles

  Why, after the war, were Massachusetts farmers like Daniel Shays up in arms all over again, just as they’d been at Lexington and Concord—but this time to make war on Congress?

  Why were “patriotic” speculators driving up land fees, pushing generations of American tenants off their own property?

  Why were Continental soldiers who stuck it out for years and years in large measure never paid by the republic they stoically served?

  After the war, apparently, there was money enough for fireworks, for inaugural balls, to entertain dignitaries and commission alabaster busts—why not enough to pension real Patriots? To forgive war debt? To feed the widowed, orphaned, and poor whose land, families, and fortunes were devastated by the war?

  Why were women and blacks and Quakers and Jews and Baptists and Catholics and gypsies and John Adams and Samuel Adams just as reviled as ever before?

  As usually told, “The Legend of Deborah and John” claims that Deborah, after Monmouth, lost heart. This reveals more about the postwar malaise of those who told our story than it does of Deborah.

  That said, “The Legend of Deborah and John” still comes closer—much closer—to the truth of the American Revolution than History does in its chronicle of the Revolutionary War’s battles, its generals’ lives, and its Founding Fathers’ exploits.

  However, while it’s indeed true that by February 1781 I was on my way to France, the Legend errs in giving Deborah the job of sending me on my way. In fact, Washington sent me.

  The Legend’s generations-old insistence that Deborah was acting alone was testament of just how desperate the people were to have a hero of their own who made the difference between defeat and victory. As far as the people were concerned, George Washington was beside the point—victory was effected by France’s navy and cash, and this in turn was due to the likes of Deborah and John.

  But what people couldn’t know was that Washington was the one who sent me to France, and that in so doing he was more of a hero of the people than History or the Legend has ever allowed.

  History, for example, does not miss the fact that John Lawrence was sent to France by Washington, any more than it misses any other event for which there are official, “reliable” records for support. It even notes the title Washington and Congress decided upon for this suddenly elevated diplomat (me): Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Versailles.

  What it doesn’t bother to elucidate is the dire necessity of my mission, and the humility and genius required for Washington to realize the need to forgo traditional diplomatic channels and send me instead.

  And one last detail, before sharing the tale of my sojourn in France: I was indeed taken prisoner, but in Charleston, South Carolina, after the fall of that city to Cornwallis, and not aboard the Jersey prison ship. Deborah was the one jailed aboard that floating inferno, after being captured by the British as a spy. (Code number: 355. I never figured that one out. Thirteen stars and stripes, perhaps?) I was released almost immediately in a prisoner exchange. And she was the one to be rescued by me, rather than the other way ’round, by war’s end. Yet she never stopped working with Washington, right through to the finish.

  So . . . to my story, subtitled: “Deborah and John and George,” a tale depicting how Washington turned to the people—not the reverse—to win him the war. . . .

  By the time I had boarded that ship to France, I had been brought up to speed on the ever more disastrous state of affairs of the war.

  After Monmouth, Washington basically sat out the war for the duration, not budging from the Northeast (Morristown, New Jersey; New Windsor, New York), using his need to keep an eye on Clinton in Manhattan as his excuse. Meanwhile, the British, turning their focus southward to Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia, launched a savage reign of bloody terror, taking Savannah, Charleston, and Richmond, in the correct belief that winning these objectives would be easier than subduing the Northeast. Now seemingly unstoppable, they began to make plans to take the Chesapeake and Philadelphia (again) from below.

  For our part, well, we had little to show but shame. During this same period (1778–1780), General Horatio Gates, the “hero of Saratoga,” fled the brutality of battle at Camden, North Carolina, galloping fast and furiously away from his own soldiers. His ignominy was to be rivaled only by General Benedict Arnold (the real but unacknowledged hero of Saratoga, believe it or not) who ’round about the same time attempted to betray his country by offering up West Point to the British for large sums of cash.

  The war was losing a sense of itself, what precious little it had, and the civil war that had always been threatening finally exploded at center stage. Roving Tory troops roamed the South, such as bloody British Major Banastre Tarleton’s gang of Loyalists and Dragoons, engaging Rebels in swamps and on mountainsides, on bridges and at crossings. Sawing off heads, hands, and arms, and ripping fetuses from wombs even as soldiers and innocent women waved white flags of truce and begged for mercy. “Liberty be damned!” : Tarleton would give no quarter.

  Economically too, anarchy had taken hold. Speculators such as Robert Morris, signatory to the Declaration of Independence, cornered markets in flour, guns, and rye and drove prices up so steeply that by 1779 it would take forty Continental dollars to equal one gold coin—to wit, ten thousand dollars to purchase a single cow.

  In an attempt to keep up, Congress printed so much paper currency it became worthless. Stories of farmers using greenbacks as livestock feed and toilet tissue were legion and not mere lore.

  “Mock money and mock states shall melt away, and the mock troops disband for want of pay” was the 1781 war cry, coming first from the soldiers of the Pennsylvania Line and then New Jersey. Would Congress give them the food and supplies they needed and the money they were due to continue to fight the war or not? Otherwise they would quit.

  The Pennsylvania Line received their due.

  The New Jersey Line, however, lacking sufficient numbers, were shot, executed for their presumption.

  At this point (with History’s hindsighted apotheosis of the General still to come), Washington was basically regarded as a dullard, a dolt, and a poltroon—better off stashed in the Northeast doing essentially nothing.

  But this is exactly where History is wrong. For this period offers Washington at his most fertile. Washington was plotting his last great gambit, which he was smart enough to realize mostly had to involve getting himself and Congress and all the ambassadors and diplomats out of the goddamned way. To let the American Revolution happen as it was meant to, just as it had at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill (still our two greatest victories of the war): as a great and God-fearing Coming Together.

  Time to stop duping Congress, playing too many roles. Time to hide from the spotlight and just let go. To surrender to this vast, superior task force of coopers, miners, housewives, Indians, retarded boys, apprentices, butchers, whores, journalists, teachers, ministers, and slaves (including his own), some of whom he’d assembled with intent, but most of whom predated Washington’s involvement in their devotion and commitment to Liberty by decades . . . even generations.

  Washington wrote: “The knowledge of innumerable things, of a more delicate and secret nature, is confined to the perishable remembrance of some few of the present generation.”

  I was one of those few to whom George Washington, in these waning days of the war, had turned to ask for help. Just one. But my job was to secure tons of money and a naval fleet from the French king, Louis XVI, without whose help Washington quite clearly understood he hadn’t a prayer of winning the war.

  Another part of my job was to get Benjamin Franklin, dispatched as French ambassador since 1776, the hell out of my way as I tried to accomplish this. For all the treaties, the promises of aid, and the alleged enthusiasm for The Cause which he reported from France, Franklin’s efforts, by 1781, had availed next to nothing.

  All I had to do was spend one day at Franklin’s villa in Passy, France, and it was easy to see
why.

  “. . . In a word, we are at the end of our tether and now or never our deliverance must come. Yours, General Washington.” So read the letter Washington had supplied me for those who might inquire of my instructions. And how was I to accomplish all this? I hadn’t a clue. Nor did I care.

  I had developed faith. Lucky thing.

  It was just what I needed to overcome the sight of Franklin’s flabby, naked, seventy-plus-year-old ass, which greeted my face.

  I had arrived in Passy, a neat village at the top of a hill half a mile outside of Paris, on the morning of March 15, 1781—two months and six days after setting sail from Boston. I don’t know what I was expecting from Franklin, officially monikered the “Sole Plenipotentiary to the Court of Versailles, Ambassador of the Thirteen United Colonies to France,” but I most certainly wasn’t expecting the reputedly austere, venerable, world-renowned scientist and inventor (who had invented everything from the odometer to the Franklin stove, as well as the concepts of fire departments, fire insurance, and daylight saving time) to moon me with such gusto.

  Maybe it was simply that he despised me. Yes, that had to be it.

  I had rung at the mammoth mahogany doors of the Hotel de Valentinois, Franklin’s residence lent him by a French entrepreneur. Surrounded by a chain of pavilions, multilevel flowering gardens, terraces filled with spraying fountains, and an orangerie that stretched for miles, it was a palace fit for a king. There was a note tacked to the door:

  I’M IN THE TUB. ENTREZ, S’IL VOUS PLAIT.

  Hmm. Not quite the welcome for which I’d hoped. Vive la France. I let myself in.

  There was one servant in sight. An uptight little man directed me to Franklin’s boudoir, advising me to scratch and not knock at the door, as this, in France, was how it was done with royalty. (Franklin? Royalty?)