The Square Pegs

by Irving Wallace

  Despite the horror of this attack, most of the survivors remained in the area. Anne stayed on only three years more. By 1785, when she was sixteen, her stepfather had died, her younger sister had married, and she, her half brother, and her mother were again destitute. Mrs. Butler decided to leave the frontier and seek help from relations in Virginia. Upon arriving in Staunton, Virginia, Mrs. Butler fell ill of blood poisoning. She was advised to visit the nearby health resort at Old Sweet Springs, located in a valley of Monroe County. Though the cure worked, it did not replenish the family purse. Mrs. Butler would have been reduced to beggary had not the richest man in the county, Captain William Royall, heard of her lot. He immediately hired her as “his washwoman and menial,” an eccentricity frowned upon by his fellow landowners, who felt that such tasks assigned to a white woman instead of a slave would cause general loss of face. In hiring Mrs. Butler, Captain Royall also undertook the responsibility of providing for her children. And thus it was, in the most unashamedly romantic tradition, that Anne entered the great house on the slope of Sweet Springs Mountain and first kid eyes upon her future husband.

  Captain Royall had served America well during the revolution. In 1777, at the age of twenty-seven, he had personally raised and financed Virginia’s first company of militia. He claimed that Patrick Henry had served under him. He and his militia raided a ship on which the British Governor, Lord Dunmore, guarded a vast store of ammunition. He spent, Anne later stated, “a fortune in the war. He was rich and generous. He brought the troops from Virginia and North Carolina, after Gates’ defeat, at his own expense to Guilford Courthouse, N.C. Entitled to ten rations a day, he never drew a dollar. He was Judge-Advocate to the Brigade, Judge-Advocate to the regiment.” He was an aide to Lafayette, and belonged to the same Masonic Lodge as his friend George Washington. He left the Army not a general, as Anne liked to think, but a captain, and in lieu of back salary accepted the acreage at Sweet Springs Mountain.

  Because he was the wealthiest landowner in the area, his eccentricities were tolerated. He released slaves and would not buy new ones. He allowed his livestock to run wild. He would not permit “unnatural” cattle such as geldings and steers in his herds. He was obsessed with the virtues of Freemasonry. He was devoted to Thomas Paine and Voltaire, and his enormous library, filled with books by democratic authors and French philosophers, was generally regarded as radical. He was aristocratic and bookish, yet friendly and kind. He was uninterested in his many property holdings, and he disliked his many relatives. He lived the life of a puttering, scholarly recluse until he became interested in Anne.

  For twelve years Anne lived under the Captain’s keen eye, first as a somewhat spindly, energetic assistant to her mother in household chores, then as a slender, darkly attractive assistant to her employer in managing minor affairs of his estate, and finally, as her master’s pretty and maturing protegee. After the passage of a few years Captain Royall learned, to his utter astonishment, that Anne possessed an intelligence beyond what he had expected in a menial. She wanted to become as educated as he was himself. She hungered to know what he knew. Only her semi-literacy held her back. The Captain’s astonishment turned to delight. He made Anne his project and his Galatea. After teaching her to read and to write, he fed her book after book off his shelves, all of Jefferson, all of Voltaire, all of Masonic history. He poured his entire library into her until, as one contemporary reported, “she became the most learned woman in all the county.” For almost twelve years he molded her in his image. Then he fell in love with his creation.

  What happened next happened with almost Biblical simplicity. It was a warm autumn day in 1797. Anne was working in the fields. “The dogwood was in bloom,” she remembered, “and I was out sowing seeds when the messenger came with a saddle-horse for me to go and get married.” It was proposal, betrothal, and wedding all in one afternoon. When Anne returned to the house, the Reverend William Martin and the Captain were waiting. The marriage took place at once. The certificate gave the date as November 18, 1797.

  The marriage lasted sixteen years. Despite the disparity in their ages on their wedding day Royall was forty-seven years old, Anne twenty-eight and despite the Captain’s reticence about declaring his love, their union was a happy one. Though Royall’s neighbors frowned upon this elevation of serving wench to mistress of the manor, and though Royall’s relatives were shocked to see their inheritance diverted to a comparative stranger, Royall was contented with his choice of mate. By conventional standards the marriage may have seemed bleak. It produced no children, no gay parties, no exciting trips, and, from all indications, no moments of high passion. But there was always, as Anne often professed, the deeply satisfying and peaceful pleasure of intellectual affinity.

  Actually Anne’s relationship to the husband whom she worshipped remained that of student to mentor. Persistently, he instructed her in the precepts of Voltaire and the values of Freemasonry. Month after month, Anne and her Captain undertook challenging reading projects and discussed what they had read. Together, on foot and on horseback, they managed the estate. Occasionally, when there was a holiday, Royall permitted relaxation from the routine and encouraged Anne to direct festivities in the area. At such times, he presented her with gifts of valuable property holdings. In 1813, when he was sixty-three and Anne forty-four, Captain Royall took to his bed with a painful illness. After long weeks of suffering, he died. With him to the grave went the last peace and security Anne was to know.

  Yet in the first days of widowhood it appeared that Anne would be independently wealthy. Her husband’s last will and testament, written five years before, gave her every protection against want. “In the name of God, AMEN. I, William Royall, of Monroe County, do make and ordain this, my last Will and Testament in manner and form following viz: I give unto my wife, Ann, the use of ail my Estate, both Real and Personal, (except one tract of land) during her widowhood… .” Excepting the one tract of land left to a niece, nothing was bequeathed to Royall’s large and indignant clan of relatives. Everything belonged to Anne as long as she did not marry again.

  Immediately Royall’s relatives banded together to fight this unequal distribution of his wealth. Led by one of Royall’s nephews, William R. Roane, an attorney who needed the money and was “a great fool,” said Anne they filed suit to have the will declared invalid. Their charges were threefold: that Anne had never legally married Royall, that Anne had influenced him to sign the will while he was senile, that Anne had entertained a succession of lovers, among them a young barrister with whom she frequently corresponded.

  Without her husband to protect her, and with malicious slander against her on all tongues, Anne decided that she wanted to get as far away from Virginia as possible. As her estate was in the hands of the court, Anne liquidated her personal holdings to pay for her travels. She sold a house and real estate in Charlestown, both earlier gifts of her husband’s, and with this money and a small allowance granted by the court, she started south accompanied by three colored slaves and a courier.

  She traveled constantly and in state for six years. Except as she was disturbed by word of the interminable judicial wrangling at home, she found the inns and sights and people of Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans relaxing and stimulating. “Hitherto, I have only learned mankind in theory,” she wrote, “but I am now studying him in practice. One learns more in a day by mixing with mankind than he can in an age shut up in a closet.” While she returned several times to Monroe County to give depositions in the legal marathon, she now leased a house in Huntsville, Alabama, and made it her home. There, early in 1823, she learned that the Virginia courts had handed down their final decision, and that she was disinherited. The Royall relatives had won the battle, and overnight she became penniless.

  She viewed the defeat with incredulity. She could not explain it. Actually, there was an explanation. Her absence from the courts, which permitted all scandal attached to her name to go unrefuted, had helped to weigh the final judgment a
gainst her. She was fifty-four years old and as impoverished as she had been at sixteen when first she entered Royall’s household as a servant. Dazed and soon depressed, she was rendered temporarily immobile. But if the mentally disturbed can rarely help themselves, Anne Royall was an exception to the rule. From some deep reservoir of character she found the strength to stir herself to action. While her next movements may have drawn her closer to eccentricity, they certainly helped her escape insanity.

  Her destination was Washington, D.C. Her late husband had been a gallant veteran of the Revolution. As his widow, she deserved a pension. She would attend to her just claim in person. And along the way she would gather material for a book. For, like millions of amateurs at writing before and since, Anne had long been commended for the style of her private letters. It was encouragement enough. The pension would support her and the writing would occupy her mind. To avoid further depressive moods, she said, “I resolved to note everything during my journey worthy of remark and commit it to writing.”

  She began the two-week journey on horseback, then transferred to a public stagecoach. She had money for three days’ food and lodgings. When this was gone she found her food in the garbage behind tavern kitchens and slept in the open. Then, remembering that her husband, a prominent Mason, had often assured her that Masons were the kindest folk on earth, she began to call upon members of the order in each community. They were indeed generous, and not one refused to provide her with funds for necessities and travel fare. In Alexandria, Virginia, again reduced to pauperism, Anne called upon M. E. Clagget, a Mason who owned the City Hotel. “At ten o’clock, one cold December night, I arrived at his house without one cent in my pocket, a single change of raiment and badly dressed. I had not a friend on earth. Mr.

  Clagget took me in and from the 15th of December to the 6th of April following kept me not in a style according to my appearance, but furnished me with an elegant parlor and bed-chamber and gave me a servant to wait on me the whole winter.”

  Refreshed, she resumed her journey to the capital. But first she wanted to visit Richmond, to search out evidence of her husband’s war record in support of her pension claim. By the time she dragged herself into Richmond she was again destitute. Unable to ferret out Masons, she accosted ordinary citizens on the street. First she asked for loans and was refused. Then she begged for money and was ignored. Finally, she tried to soften the hardhearted with passages quoted from the Bible, again to no avail. At last she obtained some small sums, and embittered by the lack of Southern hospitality, took boat and stage for Washington.

  She arrived in the capital on the morning of July 24, 1824. Too poor to rent lodgings, she selected a house at random and told her story, simply and directly, to the occupants, who were named Dorret. They sympathized with her, gave her a room and meals for six months “without fee or reward,” and even supplied her with fresh garments. During this period Anne enlisted the aid of John Quincy Adams on behalf of her pension claim. But because her husband’s military record had been lost in the Richmond fire, and because the legality of her marriage had once been challenged, she was faced with the double burden of proving that Royall had served his country and that their wedding had not been irregular. For years she busily gathered affidavits backing her claim. And Adams, as secretary of State, as president, and as congressman, faithfully presented her tireless petitions. With monotonous regularity they were rejected, and Anne Royall would not see a dollar of her pension until almost a quarter of a century after her first application.

  Suddenly, the book she had planned to write as therapy became a financial necessity. With five-dollar subscriptions collected in advance from people as diverse as John Quincy Adams and Joseph Bonaparte, she continued her researches through New England, And all the while she wrote. In 1826 the result of all this desperation and energy was issued from a press in New Haven. The book was entitled Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States, by a Traveller. Its sharp delineation of personalities and conditions encountered in her travels caused an immediate sensation. It was widely commented upon, and it sold well. The most balanced review was published in the Boston Commercial:

  “Sometimes she lets fall more truths than the interested reader would wish to hear, and at others overwhelms her friends with a flattery still more appalling. At any rate, hit or miss, the sentiments she gives are undoubtedly her own; nor will it be denied that she has given some very good outlines of character. Her book is more amusing than any novel we have read for years.”

  The next year, encouraged by this reception, Anne made her first and, happily, her last sally into fiction, a romance entitled The Tennesseean, a Novel Founded on Facts. It related the painful adventures of one Burlington, a Princeton student who was forced to make his own way after his wealthy parent had been defrauded in business. Burlington attempted merchandising in Nashville, then chased riches in Mexico, at last fell into the hands of brigands and pirates, and finally escaped to freedom poorer, but richer in having won a Spanish bride. The novel was not a success, and it might have ended Anne’s creative career at once had not a dramatic political occurrence brought her unexpected literary patronage.

  The setting for the dramatic political occurrence was Batavia, New York, where resided in 1826 a dissolute bricklayer and Royal Arch Mason named William Morgan. When citizens of the community decided to form a Grand Lodge, they excluded Morgan because of his reputation as a drunkard. In angry retaliation, Morgan composed a book, Illustrations of Masonry, which was intended to expose the secret ritual of the order. When he prevailed upon a local editor to publish it, the Masons of Batavia became worried. Somehow they contrived to have Morgan arrested on charges of bad debts and petty theft and removed to the Canandaigua jail. On the night of September 11, 1826, two men appeared at the jail, announced that they were Morgan’s friends and offered to bail him out. Only the jailer’s wife was on hand. The offer seemed reasonable, and she complied. But the moment Morgan was led outside she heard him shout: “Murder!” She rushed to the door in time to see Morgan in the hands of four abductors, struggling to free himself. Shoved into a carriage, he was spirited away. He was never seen or heard of again.

  News of the incident spread across the land, and with it the rumor that Morgan had been murdered and dumped into the Niagara River or strapped to a canoe and sent over the falls. Even as those suspicious of Freemasonry began to agitate, Governor De Witt Clinton of New York, himself a Mason of note, sought to smother the hysteria by offering a reward of $1,500 for information leading to the arrest of the kidnappers. The offer of reward came too late. Already opportunistic politicians, led by Thaddeus Stevens, had seized upon the affair and kept hatred burning. The Masonic Grand Lodge, roared Stevens, was “a chartered iniquity, within whose jaws are crushed the bones of immortal men, and whose mouth is continually reeking with human blood.”

  The agitation might have died of natural causes Morgan’s widow had gone off to become one of Joseph Smith’s multiple Mormon wives had not an anti-Mason political party, dedicated to suppressing the order, come into being. At last the Masons realized the danger and rallied to save their discredited order. It was then that their leaders remembered Anne Royall. She had long been one of their staunchest supporters. Her first book had proved that her pen was a rapier. And excepting one girl who had become a first-degree Mason at Newmarket, Ireland, in 1713 (after having overheard the ritual in her father’s house), no woman was better informed as to the purposes of the order. Why not actively enlist her in the service of Freemasonry?

  In 1827 the Masons made their bargains with Anne. They would finance an immediate tour of Pennsylvania, New York, and all of New England. She would be at liberty to research her books and write as she pleased, though a good word for the order would not be amiss if at the same time she would propagandize for the Masonic cause. Anne was satisfied. This unexpected backing from men she admired helped her to visit, during the next three years, almost every section of the United States and t
o produce four books in nine volumes that would make her name a national scandal and her person a national curiosity.

  In pursuit of her research Anne was never unmindful of her benefactors. Wherever she went she crusaded for the cause of Freemasonry. Sometimes she met impatience. In Burlington, Vermont, where anti-Masonic sentiment was feverish, she cornered a shopkeeper named Hecock and chastised him for his intolerance. Hecock, a man of few words, did not bother to debate the issues. He merely reached out, picked Anne off the floor, and heaved her down a long flight of stairs to the street below. More than her pride was injured. She repaired a fractured leg herself, and for several years walked with a limp.

  But it was in her writings that she repaid the Masons for value received. “Was not General Washington a good man?” she asked in her books. “He was a Mason. Was not Dr. Franklin a good man? He was a Mason. Was not De Witt Clinton a good man? He was a Mason. These are enough. Now all of these are not only the best, but the greatest men in the world.” The anti-Masons “might as well attempt to pluck the sun and moon out of the heavens, as to destroy Masonry old as the deluge. And, to give my opinion of it in a few words, if it were not for Masonry the world would become a herd of savages.” As for the martyred Morgan, the story of his violent death was only “a vile speculation to make money, and not only to make money, but further designed as a political engine.”

  If she served the Masons well in her relentless travels, she served her reading public better. Despite the repetition of her personal prejudices and injuries that marred her objectivity, the three volumes of The Black Book, the two volumes of Pennsylvania, the Letters from Alabama, and the three volumes of A Southern Tour gave a more accurate representation of the American scene than was to be produced by the equally mobile Mrs. Trollope. On foot and on horseback, by stage and by water, Anne ranged the primitive land from Delaware to Missouri and from Illinois to Louisiana. She wrote precisely what she saw, which was almost everything.