The Tempest--Commander Putnam and Mr. Madison's War

by James L. Haley

  “Men and wars,” she muttered. “Men and wars. Things might be different if women had more say about things.”

  In his spare time Bliven had been reading a volume of the plays of Aristophanes borrowed from old Mr. Marsh’s library, and he thought of his Lysistrata and the way that the Greek women had forced a war to a conclusion. Just as quickly he decided not to mention it because it would be well not to give either Clarity or his mother any ideas. “Now,” he said, “I shall hitch up the wagon and see to those pumpkins.”

  Benjamin pushed himself to his feet with some effort. “I’ll go with you.”

  It was a moment for Bliven to pause. He hated to see his father working in pain, but dreaded even more his father’s reaction to being eased aside and denied his usefulness. “That will be very well. I will fetch the pumpkins if you could spread some fresh hay on the racks in the cellar.”

  Benjamin understood his calculation, exactly and appreciatively. “Up and doing,” he said, “up and doing. What have you in mind for supper, my dear?”

  Dorothea reined in her flash of temper as she understood that both her older and younger men had sensed a tempest coming and determined to seek the greater shelter of the open field. She took a more moderate tone. “We have yesterday’s turkey,” she assessed. “The crib is full of corn, and beans in the pantry. Perhaps some of that Brunswick soup you are so fond of?”

  “Ah, yes!” His enthusiasm surfaced in the instant. “It was one of General Washington’s favorites, as I hear. Something to look forward to, indeed.” A measure of freshly ground ginger in the turkey soup, and fresh brown bread, and pumpkin pie, and a tankard of their own good hard cider before bed. God is good, he thought.

  They walked slowly, at the older man’s pace, to the barn. “So,” Bliven began, “what is your thinking, Father? Who should we fight, the British or the French?”

  Benjamin had no hesitation. “I grant you it is a close question for many people, but fight the Redcoats, for my part. The French have not such an all-powerful navy, mind, and if we join the British against them, victory would be swift and certain. But the high and mighty damned English would not thank us for our help, and as soon as the French be defeated, mark my words, they will directly resume the outrages upon us that they practice now. And if our Navy suffer losses in such a war, the more likely the English will turn on us afterward, and if they conquer us, we will be colonies again, and never under such a yoke before. But look now, if we and the French together can best the British again, we may gain a lasting alliance with France and force the British into a more respectful relation with us.”

  Bliven hitched their new shire mare to the wagon and heaved a bale of hay into it. Benjamin eased himself onto the tail of its bed, easier than clambering up onto the seat. They rolled slowly back toward the house, as far as the root cellar, where Bliven tumbled the bale of hay down into it and steadied his father to the top of the cellar stairs. “Do you want help down?”

  “No, I thank you.” Benjamin gathered himself. “Down I can manage. I may need help back up.”

  “That is a fair bargain. When I come back I will hand the pumpkins down to you.”

  “Right. Except take the best one in to your mother first, so she can set it to cooking. Every moment that pie is delayed is a moment lost!”

  2

  Mr. President Madison

  The day that Bliven left for Washington, he was up early in the snug suite that he had built for himself and Clarity onto the back of the Putnams’ keeping room. As he dressed he faced away from her, as he habitually did, shielding her from the livid white scar that, after six years, still slashed across his lower belly. His souvenir of Naples reminded her every time she saw it how close she had come to losing him, and how she might yet.

  When he returned from the Barbary War and he was furloughed on half-pay, her family saw no need for haste in their marriage. In fact they insisted on a lengthy courtship—for the first reason that they wanted to be sure that Clarity was certain of her affections, despite her two years of protest that she knew her mind very well; and for the second reason that they wanted to be certain that she understood she was marrying beneath her station, and beneath their expectations. She would be marrying honesty and enterprise, to be sure, but they needed her to accept that her social deposition would be noticed by all in their circle. It was true enough, once they were dead and gone, that her husband would rise inestimably in wealth, but that would not equal social acceptance, at least not without their friends noting how luckily he had married. They did not need to articulate a third argument, that the members of their church must be certain that there was no need for speed in the ceremonies—and all knew what that meant. Bliven took it as an affront that his honorable intentions should be to any degree suspect, and also as a commentary on the nature of the Reverend Beecher’s church. Their faith was zealous, that was certain, but he doubted the need for it to extend to speculating, leave alone snooping, into one another’s lives—never mind that many of them were the descendants of Pilgrims conceived by defeating the bundling board.

  To Bliven’s surprise, his parents sided with hers in the contest. Where the Marshes cited respectability, his parents relied on the platitude that they would have a lifetime together and there was no harm in letting their love mature and season before taking that irrevocable step. He and Clarity could not fight them all. After weighty discussion they made up their minds to regard this as a halcyon time that they could look back on with nostalgia, and he utilized the months of courtly calling and carefully governed privacy to improve the circumstances on their farm to such a degree that she could not feel she had descended to too low a perch. In fact, he took to calling it New Putnam Farm, to both connect it to and distinguish it from his great-uncle Israel’s original Putnam Farm, near the town named for their family, in the very east of the state just across the Massachusetts line. That place was still worked by his cousins, still harvesting Vermont russet apples from the now-gnarled trees which were the first of their breed in the state, brought by their famous grandfather. Nor did it escape his design that tightening his identity with the celebrated General Putnam let Clarity’s more rarified circle know that however fine their fortunes were now, it was his family that purchased their prosperity on the battlefield, and that he did not feel in the least their inferior. His dress uniform, which he habitually wore to church throughout the months of being furloughed on half-pay, did the rest.

  As his father withdrew into a distant but supervisory consent, Bliven hired a man to run the livery and drayage, a young Pennsylvania man, Frederick Meriden, eager and amiable, keen to work his way up in the world. Bliven hired him at the farrier’s wage of eighty cents per day, at which his father balked and pointed out that the youth had few expenses, for he had taken up residence with an aunt and uncle in Litchfield. With some application of logic Bliven brought him around to see that laborers were hired for their skills and services, not for their needs. Indeed, he pointed out, had the Navy taken himself on based on his material wants, they would not be paying him anything at all. It was true, he allowed, that eighty cents shaded to the generous side of the median, but that modest generosity was recompensed in young Fred’s willingness to drive him and Clarity, and his parents when they chose to go, to church on Sundays.

  Bliven also used a small inheritance from his mother’s family to buy into Captain Bull’s Tavern, of which they eventually assumed full ownership. Once certain of the tavern’s earnings, Bliven hired another man to operate it. A Boston man and formerly a sailor named Peters, ruddy and strapping, he was possessed of a streak of amiable kindness that seemed to distinguish so many who had known the familiarity of life on a ship. Bliven hired him at sixty-six and two-thirds cents per day—not on the generous side of the median, but they provided him a room to live in upstairs and board from the tavern’s larder, which left him content.

  Bliven himself expended his energies o
n the farm, which allowed him to work off his frustrations both with the courtship and with the Navy, in a salutary way. While his parents occupied the main house, he built the extension onto the back of the keeping room, a large chamber partitioned first into a sitting area so Clarity might import some of her well-appointed previous life, and then a bedroom, enough removed from the main house to insure their privacy.

  When they finally married, the transition was smooth, but it was apparent that Clarity had much to learn in the kitchen. Furnishings that were of everyday utility to Bliven’s mother seemed curious artifacts to her. It had been many years, for instance, since Benjamin Putnam had left off raising sheep, so the spinning wheel in the corner was kept for the memories it brought, though his mother remembered well how to use it and still occasionally purchased a parcel of raw wool and eased her nerves by carding and spinning it. Using it defeated Clarity at first but she sensed an opportunity, in requesting lessons from her mother-in-law, to spin not only passable wool, but an affectionate bond between them.

  Bliven knew how much his mother disliked leaving tasks undone, and as the day neared for his journey to Washington City, he concluded stages of work so as to leave her with the satisfaction that things were well paused until he should return: apples were harvested and cider pressed, Fred had been dispatched in the wagon to their Dutch accounts in the Hudson Valley, and he would return with ample cash for the winter. The farm now had entered its winter dormancy, and all that needed daily tending now were the pigs and chickens, well within his parents’ and Clarity’s capacity, and Fred when he returned would oversee the larger stock. A glance at the woodpile revealed less than a cord stacked, and he would have to see to that when he returned.

  Bliven packed his sea bag—the same he had used since first shipping out on the Enterprise—though now as a lieutenant commandant when he went to sea he commonly took three trunks with it as well, one for more clothes, one for his books, and one that his mother always packed solid with a variety of preserved meats and treats. In exchange, he returned it to her packed with whatever exotic foodstuffs would survive the journey home. When he returned from the West Indies, most of the oranges he brought were spoiled, but the candied fruits and molasses had delighted her almost as much as the rum boiled from sugar cane had awakened his father to a new taste.

  “I shall return and be back in harness in eight or ten days’ time,” Bliven told her as he hugged her and climbed into the carriage to go meet the stage at Bull’s Tavern. “You will hardly have time to miss me.”

  She embraced him, longer than usual. “I shall try not to fear the news you will bring.” There was no need to don his dress uniform yet; it was some days to Washington by the coach, but he was at his best when he materialized at the reception desk in the Navy Department four days later. Having been so long on furlough, it surprised him that the young adjutant rose and saluted him, which Bliven returned even as he realized this was in order. He had not felt much like a naval officer when he was so lately hauling pumpkins on the farm.

  It surprised him even more that he seemed to be expected. The adjutant opened a door and disappeared within an interior warren of rooms, and when he returned he was in the wake of James Barron, who strode in with his hand extended. “By God, Putnam,” he exclaimed. “By God, it has been a long time.”

  “Too long, Commodore. How have you been, sir?” He remembered to salute before taking his hand.

  “Tolerable well, thank you.” He was older and plumper but still bore his essential features, his balding dome poorly concealed by combing his curly hair forward, his nose now ending in a more prominent reddish bulb, his coat habitually unbuttoned because his growing stomach prevented it. It was now four years since that sad matter with the Leopard and Barron’s court-martial. Everyone with whom Bliven had corresponded from the remoteness of his furlough felt that the whole business had made Barron a scapegoat, when the correct response would have been a declaration of war on Britain. But at least the Navy had seen sense in the end; they had reinstated him to rank and command, and all agreed to let the incident pass into history. “You remember Captain Hull?” Barron held his arm out to keep the door open as he entered.

  Bliven saluted again. He and Hull had been friendly before, but now there was a matter of rank between them. “I remember him very well,” he said. “Captain, your promotion was very welcome news. They could not have chosen better.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Putnam, thank you.” Hull was now almost forty, gray showing at the temples of his black, curly hair. His form was settling into the greater heaviness of middle age, but his blue eyes were the same, sly and sleepy.

  “Well.” Barron smoothed his coat, trying not to be obvious in glancing over Hull’s and Bliven’s uniforms. “I am told our coach is ready. Are we prepared to meet the President?”

  Bliven felt underdressed, with only his single epaulette of a lieutenant commandant, but he followed outside. Barron mounted first up into a black barouche with vis-á-vis double seats. Hull stepped up next and sat next to him; they faced forward, leaving Bliven to enter last and take the rear-facing seat; he must take care not to appear too much the peasant by turning around to take in the approaching sights of the capital city. The day was crisp but sunny; the top remained folded down. “You may walk on,” Barron said to the sailor on the driver’s seat, who gave a light snap of the reins to the matched grays who pulled them.

  “Mr. Putnam,” said Hull, “I was not aware until reviewing your dossier that you are from Litchfield.”

  My dossier? wondered Bliven. “Yes, sir, and my wife also.” He was not married at the last time he was in nautical company, and he took some pride in being able to broach it.

  “Ah. I wonder that we were not acquainted in earlier life,” said Hull, “for I am from Huntington.”

  “I know the town,” said Bliven. “I see the cut-off from Mr. Strait’s coach as it leaves New Haven.” It was only twenty-five or thirty miles south of Litchfield, an old town cut from the dense forest along the lower Housatonic. It was no mystery that Hull would have gone to sea; Huntington’s first industry was building ships from its ancient oak and hickory trees.

  Hull laughed. “You know Mr. Strait?”

  “Yes, very well.”

  “Damn fine head for business, that one.” Hull grew wistful. “I miss Connecticut. I miss it very much.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder, sir,” said Bliven. He missed it after four days. How could he cope with such homesickness if he were ordered back to sea? Perhaps he should have insisted on at least one more tour of duty before so much time had passed. Since returning from the Mediterranean with Preble in 1805, he had been recalled only once, to engage pirates in the West Indies. Since then he had become accustomed to marriage and home life. He took in some of the streets of the national capital as they slipped by. Some of the houses and commercial buildings were fine enough, but the town itself seemed unkempt and unclean. Natural enough, he supposed, for the untidiness of a democracy.

  It was only a short ride before they turned into the grounds of the President’s House. Bliven was disciplined not to remark upon its size, but he was taken aback at its expanse of cream-colored sandstone, its dry moat down to a ground floor that was not visible from the avenue, and the vast height of the portico into which the barouche pulled with the slowing clatter of hooves. He did allow his gaze to wander up to the angled quatre-face Ionic volutes, straight out of the Scamozzi pattern book. Suddenly it struck him how much he had absorbed from old Marsh’s library in the preceding years, and how terribly he would miss those cultured books if he went back to sea.

  A black servant in livery saw them down and held the door open as they passed inside. Bliven regarded the fawn-and-white diamond pattern of the foyer floor, of marble, and the height of the ceilings supported by paired Doric columns. In Naples he had supposed that marble floors and columns were limited to titled Europeans, but now he realize
d that he was wrong, and he was not sure how he should feel that the American President lived in similar state. But it was not quite right; there was something ignorant and imitative in it. The Doric order was meant to be stocky and bear weight; the pattern books he had seen showed that columns of this airy proportion should also have been Ionic, like those outside.

  The doorman handed them off to a butler, also black and liveried, who showed them from the foyer, through a cross-hall, and then into a spacious round room with bow windows, dark parquet flooring, and white-painted wainscoting beneath a blue patterned paper.

  “The President will be with you in a few moments,” said the butler, and he closed the door after him as he withdrew.

  There was ample seating among the fine mahogany sofas and chairs. “I wonder if we should sit,” Hull said.

  “Do we dare?” Bliven answered.

  There was no time to consider it before there entered from an adjoining drawing room perhaps the most striking woman Bliven had ever seen. She wore pink silk with a white lace overdress, cut to the latest Parisian fashion with an Empire bustline, a matching pink turban with a large puff of teased feathers above that. Two things startled him: The first was her height. She was taller than any of the men present except Bliven himself, and in this assemblage she was quite his equal even before calculating her headgear. Second was her evident cheer. The raven-black curls that peeked from beneath her turban framed the merriest, most brilliant blue eyes he thought he had ever seen, her rouged cheeks raised like a well-formed apple in good humor that seemed completely without affectation. She looked as though she knew the funniest story in the room and was awaiting the right moment to tell it.