Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

  “We have that man.”

  Duncan squeezed Sarah’s hand. “I am getting married.”

  Conawago smiled.

  “A man and a boy,” a determined voice rang out. It was Solomon Hayes. Will was standing at his side.

  “And a monkey and a sea bear,” Will added, raising grins all around as Sadie climbed from Hayes onto Will’s shoulder.

  Sarah stepped to the boy and put both hands on his arms. “We had hoped you would join us in our new school, Will.”

  “He wants to go to Rhode Island to meet my relatives,” Hayes announced, “and I promised Rabbi Cohen we would bring some things from our synagogue there. But we hope to find a little corner here that we could call our new home, where we could stay in the winters, and where we could receive mail and inventory for my trading goods. The world will still know me as a tinker and trader.”

  “Of course,” Sarah said, then cocked her head at him as if expecting something more.

  “And if you but inform us of the primer you are using,” Hayes ventured, “I promise that Will shall have his lessons six days a week, from me.” Sadie, ever with perfect timing, leapt to the log and hoisted one of the little sacks of coins to her back.

  “I suppose,” Sarah said with a laugh, “that settles it.”

  Munro grew more solemn, and stood, followed by each of the others in the circle. “There be perilous times ahead,” the Scot declared. “We’ll need a leader to make plans, a spokesman who might go from time to time to confer with leaders of the Sons in Boston and New York, even Philadelphia.”

  Duncan realized they were all looking at him.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I WAS IN PRIMARY SCHOOL when I first visited the Liberty Bell and pressed my hand upon it in wonder, feeling its cool bronze power. Through that touch, which would probably get me arrested today, I felt a link to the extraordinary years of the mid-eighteenth century, which pushed me toward more artifacts and venues of the American Revolution. It was only after many years of such visits and studying the chronicles of the era that I began to grasp that the Revolution is best understood not as a military event, but as a deeply complex social process. Battles didn’t revolutionize America, it was scores of thousands of personal revolutions that transformed the colonists, who then transformed their colonies. Conventions and congresses amplified those transformed voices and focused them into a common political structure that bridged colonial borders, but it was these earlier, very personal struggles in the years before the Revolution that forged the new American identity. Individual colonists from vastly different backgrounds and cultures eventually translated their painful confrontations and frustrations with Old World mentalities into a common view built around taking ownership of their personal liberty.

  In the final pages of this novel I provide a glimpse at the emerging role of the printing press, which became the most potent of all revolutionary weapons. Although the first presses had appeared three centuries earlier, only during the mid-eighteenth century did they become widely dispersed in America, resulting in a revolution in communication. Remote populations became, in eighteenth-century terms, instantly connected, launching a tsunami of change in education, literature, science, commerce, and politics. Old social and economic structures were rapidly crumbling by 1768, reflected, for example, in the dismantling of the vast baronial estates of the Hudson Valley.

  The remarkable actors who walked on this stage provide rich material for the historical novelist, and I have drawn on many in creating Savage Liberty. Their diverse characters highlight how colonists discovered their American identity through strikingly different routes and experiences. Some learned to embrace liberty as a result of religion or education, others through experiences in commerce or politics, and some, I am convinced, by exposure to the original Americans who still inhabited the wilderness. While the figures of John Hancock and Samuel Adams stand tall in our history books, there are many lesser known, but no less authentic, players on this eighteenth-century stage who make their appearance at Duncan’s side.

  Samson Occom was very much the prominent, highly educated Mohegan pastor depicted here, and his tale of collecting a vast sum in England, only to have it diverted by his mentor, Eleazer Wheelock, for his own institution, is historically accurate, made all the more poignant by the fact that Occom lived in poverty all his life, never being paid as much as a pastor of European blood. The college Wheelock founded in 1769 with Occom’s funds still thrives near the banks of the Connecticut River and is still known by the name of the benefactor who thought he was giving his funds to Occom’s school for natives—Lord Dartmouth.

  A few miles south of that renowned college, in Charlestown, New Hampshire, is the reconstructed Fort Number Four, to which Major Rogers returned after his raid on St. Francis. Sections of the 1759 Crown Point Road that linked Fort Four to Lake Champlain, on which Duncan and his company traveled, can still be seen in the forests of Vermont. The community of St. Francis itself had a rich history, not only as one of the most important Jesuit missions in New France but also as the base for many natives who had been dispossessed from their traditional lands. More than a few captives from the British colonies resided there, some intermarrying with the natives. Although the French suspected that Rogers was seeking to infiltrate Quebec in the autumn of 1759 with an expeditionary force, no one expected him to reach as far as this bastion near the St. Lawrence. When he arrived there on October 3, Rogers did indeed boldly enter the town on a clandestine scout before attacking it. Doubtlessly he would have seen Father Jean-Baptiste de LaBrosse, who was in the church that night, conducting a wedding. LaBrosse, deeply committed to the tribes of Quebec, was later renowned for his dictionary of the Abenaki language.

  Members of LaBrosse’s Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, had been actively working with northern tribes for more than 150 years by 1768, and their strong attachments to the tribes did not disappear when King Louis XV, jealous of Jesuit power and wealth in France, officially dissolved the order and seized its property in 1764. Canada had become a British dominion by then, but King George also prohibited the entry of new Jesuits into Canada. Jesuit allegiances to either king had thus been severely eroded. The most ardent of the “warrior priests,” Father Roubaud, notorious for leading Abenaki raids against the English, actually switched loyalty and became a secret informer to his former archenemy, Sir William Johnson, superintendent of Indian affairs.

  Henry Knox, only eighteen years old when Duncan met him in Boston, was fascinated by all things military; only seven years later he abandoned his bookshop to join George Washington in the Siege of Boston. Quickly rising to the rank of colonel with the help of his friend John Adams, Knox changed the early course of the war by his miraculous feat of retrieving cannons from Fort Ticonderoga in the dead of winter, after the capture of the fort by the frontier firebrand Ethan Allen and his followers in the Vert Monts. Although there is no evidence that Allen was conspiring in 1768 to form an independent nation called Champlain, the notion of carving out a separate country in those remote mountains is not a fiction. The Green Mountain Boys played a key role in establishing the short-lived independent republic of Vermont a few years later.

  Robert Rogers, hero of the French and Indian War, was a brilliant leader of irregular troops but was ever rebellious toward the British military establishment and made many enemies among high-ranking officers. An enigmatic, restless man, he was feted as a hero for his wartime accomplishments, but his rapid descent into drink and gambling after the war led him to a New York debtors’ prison in 1764. With the help of wartime companions, including the Highlanders of the Black Watch, he made a dramatic escape and fled to Connecticut, then eventually to London. In the hub of the British Empire he failed to obtain funding for his lifelong aspiration, an expedition across America to the Pacific that would have preceded that of Lewis and Clark by decades. He rehabilitated himself sufficiently, however, to get his command at Fort Michilimackinac in what was then the far Northwest. One of Ro
gers’s fiercest foes, the senior military commander in North America, General Gage, had him arrested for treason for allegedly conspiring with French agents to help King Louis take back western lands. The wartime hero endured months of hardship in chains, ultimately being transferred to a cell in Montreal, where in late 1768 he was eventually acquitted and released under mysterious circumstances. Surprisingly—some say because of a feud with George Washington—he embraced King George’s cause when revolution eventually erupted into combat. Although he was given command of the royal rangers, his career, and the remainder of his life, was overwhelmed by chronic drunkenness. Readers interested in further details of the extraordinary life of this frontier commando, with particular focus on the St. Francis raid, can find them in Stephen Brumwell’s riveting White Devil.

  Although it is not known for certain that the mysterious ledger that lies at the heart of this novel existed, the secrets it embodied are well documented. The merchant houses of Boston and New York, as well as those of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, were actively engaged in secret, illegal trade with the French military during the French and Indian War. Their ships frequently called at the port of San Fernando de Monte Cristi in Hispanola, near French Haiti, delivering sorely needed supplies that kept the French war effort in America alive, extending it for several years. One observer reported seeing at least 150 American ships anchored in the port on a single day, many of them transloading cargo directly onto French ships. New York especially owed its wartime prosperity to trade with both sides of the conflict. Details of this clandestine traffic are described in Thomas Truxes’s valuable book Defying Empire and Peter Andreas’s broader chronicle, Smuggler Nation.

  Many lesser planks in the scaffolding of this novel are also based on historical fact. Rhode Island did indeed host an active Jewish population, many of its members having been evicted by Massachusetts leaders who seemed to forget that their own colony had been founded by those fleeing religious intolerance. In the year 1768, the first synagogue in Canada, Congregation Shearith Israel, opened under Rabbi Jacob Cohen. Although the sinking of the Arcturus is of my own creation, John Hancock’s ship the Liberty was seized in the spring of 1768 as described herein, and its captain did indeed mysteriously die after the ship was searched by overzealous customs agents. The Liberty was conscripted by the British navy and later played an important role in another chapter of this revolutionary era. The city of Worcester, Massachusetts, was indeed built on the site of Quinsigamond, capital of the Nipmuc tribe, as Conawago vividly reminds an Irish sawyer. Louis Antoine de Bougainville was stationed at Montreal at the close of the French and Indian War, and his lifelong pursuit of the natural sciences led him to become the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe, taking with him Jeanne Baret, the first woman ever to do so. Bougainville would have heard with great interest the descriptions of the great water horse of Lake Champlain, which had circulated since Samuel de Champlain himself allegedly reported a sighting in 1609. The inhabitants of Chevelure, now known as Chimney Point, Vermont, no doubt must have kept an eye out for the mysterious beast. Although the creature was once held in reverent awe by the tribes around the lake, today the popular image has softened to that of “Champ,” mascot of a minor-league baseball team.

  A final historical element that I believe was a profound factor in many journeys to liberty is what I call “endings” in this book. There is powerful meaning behind Conawago’s words that all those in Duncan’s company are in their “ending times.” The Highland Scots had suffered an eradication campaign that, in its intensity and violence, was unmatched until the twentieth century. The Jesuits had been disowned and were required to renounce their holy vows, although their order was finally restored decades later. The Jews had been enduring efforts to destroy them for centuries, and they often resorted to covert measures to keep their faith alive. The once-vital woodland tribes had become a pale shadow of their former glory, and many tribes, including the Nipmucs, were well aware that they were approaching extinction. Duncan and his companions, as well as thousands of other colonists, have to confront such forlorn realities, but they have begun to grasp that in every ending there is also a beginning.

  —Eliot Pattison

  Author photograph by Jed Ferguson

  ELIOT PATTISON is the author of The Skull Mantra, winner of an Edgar Award and finalist for the Gold Dagger; as well as Water Touching Stone, Bone Mountain, Beautiful Ghosts, Prayer of the Dragon, Bone Rattler, The Lord of Death, Eye of the Raven, Original Death, and, most recently, Blood of the Oak. Pattison resides in rural Pennsylvania with his wife, three children, two horses, and two dogs on a colonial-era farm. Find more at eliotpattison.com.