The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  He meets Martha Custis, a widow with children, when he is twenty-seven and proposes to her on a second meeting. She is very wealthy, and it is hard to conclude that he marries her for any other reason. She is evidently pleasant. She is an unattractive woman one year older than he. This is not love, or passion. It is, at best, companionship. What more could a syphilitic hushmarked ask of any woman?

  Yes, like Lincoln, he has syphilis. Boxes of dried sassafras accompanied him all his life. The Indian braves? Syphilis is rampant among his troops, among all troops. Do they joke about it as they fuck each other? Sodomy is also rampant among his troops, among all troops. Who else is there to fuck, for goodness’ sake?

  No one (except Gore Vidal) has ever called him what he is: a young man so obviously on the make that in seven years he goes from “poorly educated younger son of a minor planter” to “one of the richest and most famous men in America” (Rhodehamel). By then his landholdings—and yes, his slaveholdings of more than three hundred—are immense.

  He has an insatiable appetite for acquiring land. With Martha’s money he is able to do so. Is this his only visibly naked hunger? His years of surveying in the wilderness have given him this appetite for more and more land. His enemies say he wants to own all of America for himself. If this is so, it is by far the most interesting and honest human quality about him.

  One wonders why Martha destroyed all her letters to and from him. What could possibly have been in them to prompt such a strong reaction? Were they too boring? But then, she would have had to have been intelligent and tasteful enough to recognize them as such, which she was not. She was dowdy, frumpy, uninteresting. So what could they have contained? Sympathy for his physical illness that made lovemaking impossible? Sadness for their lack of children? Would either of them have committed such feelings to paper, to words? The marriage has always been presented as a good one. But what actual hard information has been uncovered to tell us anything about what passed between them? What was there to hide that might cast doubt on this pleasing picture? Well, several possibilities have just been presented to you. He was fond of her. And she of him. But like Mary Lincoln, Martha knew that his interest lay elsewhere. Mary also destroyed almost every letter from her husband. Mrs. Herman Melville did the same. This act alone bespeaks more loudly than anything else the determination of these women to keep the world from knowing the paucity of their emotional lives with these men.

  We’ll continue to consider this peculiar man and the country he will rule, and that will let him rule it—we want him to rule it!—twice.

  THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

  The American Revolution is the first successful colonial war of independence. This unprecedented success is achieved against one of the most powerful nations extant, a country that is the greatest naval and financial power in the world. It should have made us feel good.

  It is important to know, as the most astringently vital of all lessons about the early history of The American People, that the American Revolution is not what it’s cracked up to be. John Adams said that a third of the people didn’t even want independence, a third didn’t care one way or another, and the rest were probably faithful to the Crown. Indeed, some 50,000 Americans are said to have fought on the British side. And one out of every five Americans traces his roots to Africa. In the port of Charleston alone between 1672 and 1775 nearly 90,000 black slaves enter this country, and their masters have better work for them than to be shot dead defending a country that isn’t theirs. So this 20 percent of The American People don’t fight at all, or give much of a hoot.

  Brutus Herakles Perdist, ever vigilant to locate the soul of his people, confides to his diary, “I fear for us how we shall get through the coming fray, for it shalle be a fearful fray, a fray of frays, with nary enow of us to fight back. And even should we fight back we have no power to Staye Firm and spitte in the enemy’s eyes. We are not angry enow. We want too much our soup and porridge. We want our land and barnes and cowes and ducks more than we wante our freedom from the masters who enslaved us once before and return to do it again” (Historical Archives Division, Admiral Mason Iron Vaultum Library).

  The British over there care even less than the people over here about soldiers getting killed. Many of the soldiers, on both sides, are mercenaries. Mercenaries are paid to get killed. Indeed, they are among the few soldiers who do get paid. Stories of filthy prisons and crude amputations and no medical attention, never mind harsh medicine (such as it is), lift neither patriotic fervor nor enlistment.

  The soldiers of The American People run away with regularity, back to their farms and shops and families. They have no guilt about this: they were roped into service in the first place, with too much wine, a rousing speech in a pub, and a few coins for joining up. So what if I signed a piece of paper? My wife needs me more than my country, whatever that is. While George and his staff are at their parties and horse races and gaming tables, those who remain in his forces are half-starved, half-frozen, and entirely unhappy. There is no record of George noticing this with sufficient concern.

  Rich people want to stay at home and poor people can’t afford to leave it. Poor people? A growing class of poor people is finally appearing. It’s about time they are noticed, even if they most certainly aren’t attended to. Between 10 and 20 percent of the inhabitants of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia are genuinely poor. While it may have seemed a good idea for them to join up, for the sake of food, shelter, shoes, when these run out the bodies once enjoying them do as well.

  Some of us fight, of course. We even have rebels. “Mobs,” they’re called, a radical fringe. And there are popular “upheavals” wherein country folk, town and village people, short of joining up, pitch in and do odd good deeds to help the growing cause. Not that many can yet enunciate what that cause might be. Don’t they want to be free? It’s not a concept that many have given much thought to yet. They don’t like those damn taxes, that’s for sure. We have the Loyal Nine and the Sons of Liberty and the Friends of Moses Brown. We have the Sons of Caleph and the Sons of Seneck. And of course there are the Minutemen of Massachusetts, so called because they’re pledged to come in a minute, the joke among the men soon arising whether the name describes their readiness or their ejaculations, so close a bunch in affection are they. As for the men who have signed up, they are discovering that boredom in the army is a big, big problem. How do you occupy an army that isn’t fighting, or if it is fighting doesn’t want to be fighting, and either way is short on food and clothing? It’s a logistical mess on all fronts however you mention it, and no one ever mentions it, really. Another case of our wanting our history pure as the driven snow. Well, the snow was filthy, all winter long and into the spring. And this went on for some eight years. How do you hold on to, much less amuse, troops away from home for so long a time?

  So it’s a wonder we had any army at all. They don’t tell us that, all those other historians. Much too much has been made of our noble defense of ourselves. If we won it’s because we got lucky. Nothing to congratulate ourselves for so endlessly and for so many centuries.

  As Hermia keeps saying, plenty of British are against the war, too. Britain is a rich place and, as such, sloppy in its accounts management and, as noted, in constant need of ready cash. Their biggest argument against the war: don’t bite the hand that feeds you. America is a good customer.

  As she also points out, the Brits are not about to let us slip away through the very fingers they keep showing us how not to eat with. They try every which way to corral us. The Molasses Act, the Currency Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Sex Act, the Coercive or Intolerable Acts, the Manchester Act, the Townshend Act, the Foreigners Act, the Hemp Act, the Barrel Tax. When the British treasury needs more money they pass more Acts. They add to colonial asperity such ass-kickers as the Second Molasses Act, the Third Currency Act, the Fourth Stamp Act, the Fifth Quartering Act, the Grenville Program, the Fifth Coercive Act, the Intolerance Act, even something called the Bed
ding Act. It becomes difficult to remember what each one demands from suddenly diminishing incomes that were not much to begin with. There is also a Sodomie Act that allows Britain to export to the colonies all those so inclined or caught in the inclination, as well as just your general rowdies. How many are actually sent here? No one is counting, but sent here many are, much as prisoners will shortly be shipped off to Australia. England knows how to clean house and is fortunate to have many far-flung closets to sweep her unwanteds into.

  All these Acts are ostensibly pursued to extract much-needed revenue from us, her ungrateful children. Sir Robert Walpole, a shortsighted and short-of-cash chancellor of the Exchequer and Britain’s first prime minister, had railed: You must never forget you are our citizens, you belong to us, and you are British subjects! You need our permission to journey forth to attempt your fortunes. “We were unfortunate he was such a stupid ass,” Hermia says. “Our history was punished evermore.”

  Although there are perhaps some 200,000 Indians from some eighty-five different Indian nations living east of the Mississippi River, it should be no surprise that few are willing to fight in any war for any white man’s burden. (Some fought for the British, but they were paid more than American troops were.) They never “surrendered” their lands to “The American People” in the first place, and the news that Britain has or had dibs on their territory comes as something of a shock. So many acts of injustice white men are capable of! Such acts go even further when the victorious Americans show up with papers maintaining that since they defeated Britain they are entitled to all the Indians’ land. This claim causes many defensive and futile acts on the part of tribal nations seeking to protect their ancestral homelands. If year by year there are fewer Indians, there will soon be even fewer. White men will take all the land they can get, any way they can get it. Their means are bloodier than the Revolution’s, and, obviously, than the Indians’.

  Statistics are still scarce for this war. Dead Americans: 4,435 out of 290,000 soldiers. Dead Brits: 10,000 out of a much larger fighting force.

  But these statistics do not tell the real story: that “roughly nine American soldiers succumbed to disease for every one killed by the British,” as estimated by James Flexner in Doctors on Horseback. Indeed, from 1775 to 1782, Variola major, the virus that causes smallpox, killed more than 100,000 people in North America, maiming even more. Measles, influenza, mumps, typhus, cholera, plague, malaria, yellow fever, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and diphtheria caused their own revolutionary devastations.

  So yes, the Revolution is a big win on paper for our side, but against pretty low odds and with the forces of fate most cooperative. Few wars in history have won so much and cost relatively so little and then been entombed in so much hoopla. That dramatic a fracas it wasn’t. Noble is not the word to use, for either this war or so much death from disease and sickness. The American People do need their glorious history, like an addict needs a fix. When you haven’t got much decent history to begin with, noble it up.

  How did we win? In a nutshell: the enemy was lazier than we were.

  By the time of the Declaration of Independence five generations had lived here since the first settlements 150 years or so earlier.

  The most little-observed fact about our revolution is that it was the first time American men held each other in their arms as they were struck down, as they died, the first time they cried over each other’s bodies and kissed so many comrades goodbye. Men had not seen men behave like this. Men had not known they could feel and act like this. And it did not shame them or embarrass them. These feelings, and these acts, burrowed their way into their hearts, their bones, their minds and souls. And remained there, searching in vain for safe ways to get out. Yes, America, the United States of America, is born out of this.

  But we are now free! What does it feel like to be free? What do The American People do when they are free?

  * * *

  I cried too. Please give me credit for having a heart. I lost many I loved. It is part of the wicked curse that fate has placed upon all living things. I fall in love and lose, just like you. I have left little bits of me on all the major battlefields. Why, at Yorktown itself I had a mini-epidemic going. But it sputtered out. So my influence is only imperceptibly increasing. People don’t understand about soldiers. People don’t see that men-only groups are the wellsprings of many contagious diseases, including me, of course. Strange fevers and purple-spotted bodies are cropping up here and there. So I do manage to leave a few of my calling cards. Perhaps someone will notice me. I want to be famous, too.

  I have a lot of time on my hands. But I can tell you from personal experience that you have many more hushies than anyone can know. I am doing my best to meet them as fast as I can, but they are still too spread out across your mighty land.

  THE ADJUDICATOR

  The Adjudicator, who is not made known as such to the men, the better to observe them, wrestles with loose ends that do not knit themselves into whole cloth. He sees too clearly how harsh life is for these men who are not officers. They daily endure living conditions so wretched it is a wonder more of them don’t desert the job, the cause, the general himself, whom all profess to worship. The least one can grant them is a look-the-other-way when same-sex comfort is sought.

  But the list grows longer. Caleb Halstead, the new Adjudicator (the previous one having been shot to death by, it is [incorrectly] thought, an enemy sniper in the forest on a recent skirmish), young and handsome and himself an occasional recipient of Hamilton’s cock inside him, faces a tormenting question: How can he order the death by hanging of men whose only crime in the face of death in battle is to love each other so briefly?

  Yes, the list grows longer, of those he has caught in the act, or about whom he has “information” from the ones who are always there to provide it, for whatever reason, to please the mighty boss: jealousy, ambition, vindictiveness, just being a shit. It is not difficult to “catch” the “perpetrators” in performance. The quarters are squalidly intimate, and after the rations of rum, which are meant to appease the troops, men are not so concerned about the noise they make. After so many, so very many months, lengthening into years of life together thus, it has become for many of them a joke. “There they go again,” that sort of thing. It is only when the “perpetrators” are repeat performers that Caleb notes their names down. Then he begrudgingly sees this as not good for the morale of others not blessed by any couplings. Would that it was not so awfully cold so they could all go screw each other outside.

  But Caleb is discovering that actually turning them in goes against his nature. And Caleb is aware that one Norwood Punic knows what he’s not doing.

  Washington had asked Hamilton to be the Adjudicator; Hamilton had refused and suggested Caleb. “Sir, young Halstead will understand what this is all about.” Apparently Caleb wanted more of Alex, and Alex is too infatuated with Jack at the moment; indeed Jack might notice, or worse, want a taste of Caleb himself. Jack is John Laurens, the son of a rich South Carolina planter, educated abroad, and the great love of Alex’s life.

  Yes, the general knows what’s going on. He is no fool when it comes to understanding how bodily needs, one way or another, can take a mighty hold. If he did not have his handpicked group to observe, and touch, and invite to sleep by him throughout these years, throughout these battles, he would go crazy. That, he knows for certain, would mightily pain him.

  Just as watching Alex and Jack make love mightily pains him.

  Just as watching Alex sodomize Jack mightily pains him.

  George has no intention of hanging either one of them.

  Alex and Jack are in the inner circle of the general’s inner circle, the general’s direct daily company, along with the young Lafayette, whose particular passion is for the general himself. Perhaps I am not so old after all, the general cannot help thinking when such an adorable youngster is all over him with hands and arms and embraces, and that double kiss, one on each cheek, which
the French evidently bestow. Yes, George has assigned young Lafayette to his personal staff as well. He likes his hand held, he likes his cheeks double-kissed, by this effervescent young man who brings such profound enthusiasm for what his general is accomplishing in this New World. Has not this richest young man in France come with his own army, to join in this fight for freedom? Why, he has defied an order from his own king in coming to America. George, the general, his general, has actually referred to him out loud as “the man I love.” Alex and Jack, who serve as translators and teachers for “Jeel-bare,” as the young Frenchman pronounces his first name, hear the general throw these words out casually. Thank goodness the old boy has found someone to entertain himself with, for the nonce.

  But there is a war on.

  And regulations are being flouted all over the place.

  And Caleb Halstead is confronted by Punic. “I have witnessed you, sir, as you make note of all these disgusting couplings. I wait. I listen. I look. I do not see these malefactors hanged by their necks until they are dead as General Washington commanded, and is of course demanded by the very law itself. Why, sir, is this? I shall pen a letter to the general myself.”

  Which he does.

  The general summons Halstead to his tent.

  “This was your first test, young Caleb. I am sorry you have failed it. You have provided me with no names.”

  Caleb is relieved of his commission and of his rank as well. He commits suicide. He falls on the ceremonial sword his father gave him when he became an officer.