From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Well, sir, we snuck up to St. Louis first, like ye said do, then we got on board a bateau headed down to Kaskasky, so that when we got off there they’d believe our story that we’d been up th’ Missouri trappin’. We acted s’prised there was a rebellion goin’ on. Perty soon we got in t’ see Roachblob, got in by sayin’ we didn’t believe it and wanted to hear it from a ’thority. We got in, hired on as meat-hunters for th’ town.”

  “What’s he like?” George asked.

  “Blowed up like a bullfrog with ’imself. A haughty man, eh, Sam? He’s Frenchy, but got King George stamped all over ’im. No slouch, I’ll say that. He runs a right elegant militia.”

  “But more for love o’ parade than fear of attack,” interrupted Moore.

  “Aye. Medoubt they could fight their way ’crost a boo-dwahr, but they’re pretty dressed and jolly,” Linn said; then he gave George a description of their fort and quarters, their numbers and their armaments and the cannon at the fort, the times and customs of the guard. “Likable rascals,” Linn went on. “They’re perty lukewarm on Britain, spite of Roachblob’s haranguin’. So’s most of the population. They’re a lazy-loosy sort o’ folk. They find British reg’lations perty stiff. But Roachblob’s got a grip on ’em. Tells ’em us rebels is anything from cannibals on down to baby-rapers, an’ tells ’em only King George can perteck ’em from us. He, he!”

  “Do they believe ’im?”

  “About half-believe, I think. They’re a somewhat fraidy people, right, Sam? And we make ’em a right handy bogey, as they’ve never saw many of us Virginians to know how genteel and harmless we be.”

  George laughed, then he touched the quill to paper and asked, “British in the garrison?”

  “Usually been a company of ’em at Kaskasky, but’s all been called back to Canady.”

  “For how long?”

  The men shrugged. “Till who knows?”

  George nodded, and made some marks on the notebook page. “I know you’re trail-weary, boys, so forgive me for keepin’ you overlong, but I’ve been waiting quite a spell with a thousand questions about that place.”

  “Ask away, Major Clark,” said Sam Moore, gurgling some more rum into his cup and settling forward with his elbows on the table. “It’s a rare day when we’uns know more’n you do about anything, and we’re enj’yin’ it whilst we can!”

  By midnight George had pumped their memories dry, getting information from them that they’d hardly realized they had, and in his notebook was a clear enough picture of the Illinois Country outposts to convince him that he could surprise and occupy that territory with as few as five hundred men.

  Now, he thought. All I need do is go to Governor Henry and persuade him to let me do it. I guess I can stop up this bedamned Indian war right at its source!

  He thought of General Henry Hamilton at Detroit, on the far side of the chessboard, and he thought:

  My move, Mister Scalp-Buyer.

  10

  GERMANTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA

  October, 1777

  JOHNNY CLARK STOOD IN THE WOODS WITH COLD OCTOBER fog on his face and tried to see a road, a landmark of any kind, but trees ten yards away were invisible. I might as well be a fish in a milkpail, he thought.

  We’re lost. Just lost.

  Near him in the murk he could see three or four of his soldiers with their guns and bayonets, and just beyond them the red clothes and white underwear of the British prisoners they guarded. Elsewhere nearby he could hear the invisible presences of other companies: the knock of a scabbard or canteen against a gunstock, a throat-clearing, a sniffle, hawk, spit, a murmured complaint, a query. But they were invisible. Off in the distance, in a direction he presumed was southward, though it did not feel southward, there was a muffled sputtering of gunfire, and cannon were booming.

  How can they even see what they’re shooting at? he wondered.

  It had all sounded so clever in the orders; it had all looked so neat on the maps, a plan so intricate and well conceived and daring that no one would have dared call Washington a dumb Virginia farmer again: four divisions marching all night southward down Skippack Road, parallel with the Schuylkill River, toward Germantown. Dividing before daylight into four columns. Bits of white paper pinned to their black hats so they could identify their compatriots in the dark. Attack through and around Germantown with bayonets fixed and catch Howe’s whole army in its blankets before reveille. Oh, it would have been diabolically clever, it would have been brilliant. But then the day had dawned like this: in a milky fog.

  The 8th Virginia had practically walked over this unit of British Guards, had rousted them up half-dressed and herded them along like cattle, but to where? With no road to follow, creeping along over wet grass and among red-leafed autumn maples, over fences, around cribs, with no idea where the other columns were, unable even to find the town, General Greene’s division was astray in a muffled blankness and now there was gunfire, which meant the surprise was lost.

  After Brandywine, the British had occupied Philadelphia; Congress had fled to Lancaster. Washington had hoped, by surprising Howe here, to recover Philadelphia. And it might have worked, Johnny thought bitterly, but for this damnable unexpectable fog.

  It might yet, though, he thought. The gunfire in the distance was increasing to a steady, crackling roar. Maybe, he thought, maybe this fog isn’t everywhere, maybe the other columns found Howe’s camp and surprised him enough.

  A major materialized out of the fog. “This way,” he said. “I’ve found a road.”

  “Come on, lads,” Johnny said. “Herd those lobsterbacks along.”

  They moved off now, following the major, who picked his way along so hesitantly, stopping and veering and thinking, that he inspired more rueful headshakes than confidence.

  They got onto the road within five minutes, and were walking it seemed from nowhere to nowhere on ten yards of packed dirt roadway with grass and brown weeds and fallen leaves at each side and then that confounding circumference of fog. As they moved along, the din of shouting and gunfire grew louder and louder before them. Off to the left front, a crash and a flare of yellow in the fog showed where a cannon was being fired. They could smell gunpowder smoke now; it seemed to diffuse everywhere in the fog; it stank in the nostrils and stung in the eyes.

  “Wait,” the major said, and strode off toward the cannon.

  “Company, halt.”

  “Halt.”

  “Halt.”

  The command went back into the fog.

  Johnny stood looking at his troops with weariness and pity. Half of the men were barefooted; some had wound their feet with strips of strouding. Some had footless stockings clinging to their calves. One tall boy wore a sleeveless uniform coat from which both long, bare arms protruded, and his hat perched atop a filthy mass of head bandages, brown with old blood. Many of the men had no coats or hats. The garments of some still showed the rips and rents that they had sustained weeks ago in the hand-to-hand battle at Brandywine. There seemed to be no such thing as a quartermaster in Washington’s army this fall.

  Someone had fashioned a new regimental flag from a piece of buff trouser cloth and inked the words VIII VIRGA. on it. It now hung on an ash pole, and he gazed at it. The original probably still was lying there in the battlefield at Brandywine, stained by British and American blood, and the thought haunted him like a poem of pathos.

  The invisible commotion ahead went on unabated. Vaguely, through the fog and smoke, Johnny thought he could discern the rectangular form of a large building. So much shooting and shouting was coming from there that he presumed it must be a fortified house, under attack.

  A musketball hummed past his nose, and a dozen shots flashed in the fog ten yards away. Before Johnny could move, a body of men came charging out of the fog from that direction with their bayonets leveled, bellowing murder, and the two companies were but twenty feet from clashing before the attackers saw that these were Americans like themselves, and hauled up.


  “By heaven, forgive me,” their lieutenant implored, coming ashen-faced toward Johnny. “I saw those red coats,” he explained, nodding toward the prisoners.

  This turned out to be a company of Marylanders, and was, like everybody else, it seemed, lost. “I saw a damned crow fly by upside down, he was so lost,” the Marylander tried to joke. “I …” The lieutenant was looking over Johnny’s shoulder. His eyes bulged. “Oh, thunder,” he muttered. Johnny turned to look.

  The entire fog bank behind him seemed to be turning pink, then deepening to scarlet. It was a line of advancing British infantry, looking as long as a regiment, treading out of the haze with bayonets at the ready. Johnny looked to the other side of the road, as a way to retreat; his men were babbling excitedly. From that side of the road came the sounds of horse, and a long line of British cavalry materialized, just then seeing the ragged Continentals and their prisoners in the road and turning guns on them. The prisoners cheered and laughed.

  There was nowhere to go. A youthful British officer, handsome but for his sleep-puffy eyes, walked close to the two American lieutenants and stopped, clicking his heels once.

  “I presume,” he said, “you’re discreet enough to give me your swords, gentlemen, and order your men to ground their arms?”

  It was such a strange, absurd moment. Here Johnny Clark stood, in a hazy world no more than thirty yards around, while cannon and musketry roared unseen somewhere outside its misty horizons, and he was being addressed politely in cultivated English by a most agreeable young man who was his enemy. Somehow the whole matter of war seemed revealed as a game, and he was almost stupefied by a great sense of relief. Johnny had felt this way only once before: once when a young lady he’d loved, but disliked, had said she was tired of him. He told his men to lay down their muskets.

  He turned his saber in his hand and presented it hilt-first to the smooth-cheeked Briton, who smiled.

  “Thank you. And you.” The Englishman took the Marylander’s sword, too, bowed slightly, straightened up, and sighed, then rose on his toes two times. “Ehmm! I say. It’s rather good to be alive, what?”

  “So my mother always tells me,” Johnny replied, “but then, ’twas she that put me into this lunatic world.”

  GOVERNOR’S PALACE, WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA

  November, 1777

  THE OTHER THREE AUGUST CONSPIRATORS WERE ALREADY IN Governor Henry’s library when Thomas Jefferson arrived. In the years since George had seen him, Jefferson had acquired some markings of maturity: a few gray hairs among his crisp waves of red, and tired bluish swellings under his eyes. But at thirty-four he had not lost that vaguely distracted look of boyish wonderment. There’s still a thousand things at once a-workin’ in that head of his, George thought.

  Jefferson walked to him, smiling, his woolen clothes as always a bit ill-fitting, his stride purposeful but a little ungainly, and George was so happy to see him that he had an impulse to give him a genuine frontier bear-hug. But not wanting to startle him out of his celestial wits, he instead just extended his hand.

  “George. By Jove, you’re fit. I’ve not felt so hard a hand since my father’s.”

  “And I take the hand that penned our independence, and I’m honored, sir.”

  Governor Henry came close and took Jefferson’s hand, and tilted his head toward George. “Our young friend here’s been doing some headwork on a scale reminds me o’ yours, Tom. He’s about convinced me he can do what all the western commanders haven’t been able to do: shut our back door on the British.”

  “He can,” piped in George Mason from where he sat, gout-ridden, in a hearthside chair.

  “I’ll not be surprised,” Jefferson said. “I know this fellow.”

  “What I know,” said Henry, “is that he traipses in from the hinterland every fall, all covered with burrs and bear sweat, with a list of wondrous outrageous demands to embarrass the Assembly and the Executive with. You can count on him, like the leaves turning red.” George glanced aside at Henry from under an arched eyebrow and was glad to see that he was smiling as he said this. “I really believe he can do it, the way he’s worked it up,” Henry went on. “I mean to say, it’ll strike you as a strategy of the absurd on first hearing, but there’s not a detail I can see he’s left to chance. His biggest obstacle I reckon on is not the enemy at all, but getting it past the short thinkers in the Assembly. It calls for a lot of authority granted on the sly, seems to me.”

  “I’m intrigued already,” said Jefferson, going toward a chair and pulling George after him by a wrist. “Enlighten me, neighbor.” They sat down next to Dr. Mason, George’s old mentor.

  George told him what his spies Linn and Moore had learned. He quickly outlined the military stores and advantages existing at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, and Rocheblave’s role in the incitement of Indian atrocities. And then he unveiled, in a tight, swift, positive narrative, his audacious proposal.

  “I declare with no doubt,” George began, jabbing a stiff forefinger into his palm, “that I can secure that whole territory north of the Ohio, stop the Indian raids coming from there, block up the Western Rivers against British traffic, and, in fact, sir, foil the entire British design on our western frontier, inside of three months—with but one regiment of Virginians.” Jefferson’s red eyebrows lifted and his eyes gleamed. George Mason nudged the governor with his elbow. “One regiment,” George went on, still jabbing with that long, hard forefinger, “and militia, I mean; I’m quite aware no Regular Army can be spared.” He was heading off all possible objections, having heard them already in his long, private sessions with Governor Henry. “I would intend to float my regiment down the Ohio to Kentuck. Discipline ’em there. Boat on down to Illinois where Fort Massac used to be, and, to avoid patrols on the Mississip, go over the prairie to Kaskaskia. Surprise that place by night and get into the fort. They scarcely bother to guard it. Then gain Cahokia right after, the same way. Then … well, sir, then I should start to council with the savages—who would by then damn well listen to the Rebels, wouldn’t they?—and get them neutral. Then I’d build a strong fort at the Ohio’s mouth, and arm it with the cannon from Kaskaskia. D’you see a flaw thus far, Tom? Surprise! That’s the trick! The advantage o’ surprise is worth a regiment. D’ye see? A coup like this is a bargain! Not to do it will mean a fortune for western defense next season—if it could be defended at all, by then.”

  Jefferson was trying to frown, to pose any possible objection to this thousand-mile foray into the wilderness. “What if … what if something failed? It sounds workable—nay, bedazzling—but—”

  “We could take refuge on the Spanish side of the Mississippi, if we got outnumbered or something. Spain’s neutral, o’ course, but not at all kindly disposed to the British. A main thing I’d do is gain the loyalty of the French who inhabit those places, once I’m among ’em. They’re just plain galled by the British rule.”

  Jefferson sat sipping a glass of port and pondering, gazing into the fireplace, and George remembered that night by the firelight in Harrod’s Town eight months ago when this plan had first blossomed in his own solitary head.

  “Cost,” Jefferson began. “The state’s purse is flat.”

  “Such men as I’ll use cost but a fraction of what regular troops cost. They bring their own clothes and weapons and can range for weeks with what they carry on their backs. Hunt off the land and fight in the Indian mode. As special pay for the special hazards, I recommend we’d offer ’em what Kentuck’s got aplenty: land.”

  Jefferson nodded over these persuasions. But then he said, “There’s something bothers the lawyer in me, and likewise would bother the other lawyers in the Assembly: taking state militia out of the state. And the county lieutenants where you recruit, they’re not going to like that either.”

  “Aye. That’s another reason for secrecy.”

  “Ah. What?”

  “The governor suggests I’d have a public set of orders, authorizing me to recruit just ‘for the de
fense of Kentuck County.’ That would forestall such objections, and hide our aims as well.”

  “Very shrewd indeed. But how do you explain it to these rangers of yours when you lead ’em off the edge of the world?” He smiled with raised eyebrows, sitting back and steepling his hands.

  “However best I can when the time comes. By that time I reckon we’ll all be pretty much of one mind and they’ll be willing.”

  Mason actually gasped aloud in admiration of that statement. “Lord,” he said, “give us generals who think that way!”

  George’s plan was convincing them all; he could see that. Patrick Henry winked at him once or twice to assure him how well he was doing.

  George and Governor Henry shared a secret that they had not yet revealed even to these other conspirators. It was a part of George’s plan—the ultimate end of it—and it was so audacious that George had hesitated to reveal it even to Patrick Henry in their first few meetings. George had feared that the mere mention of it would have killed the whole scheme because Henry would have thought him deluded. But in their last previous conference, George had revealed it to him: after taking the Illinois and Wabash forts, winning the alliance of the French, and neutralizing the Indians, George intended to sweep on up the Wabash, down the Maumee to Lake Erie, and seize the British western headquarters at Detroit, with General Henry Hamilton in it. He was sure he could do it, with his five hundred men, although conventional military opinion was that it would require an army of thousands to do that.

  So he had at last broken it gently to Governor Henry, who had come to believe it could be done—if done in the guerrilla mode George had in mind. But neither of them had mentioned it to the others. Because now both of them wanted not to be thought daft.

  GEORGE ROGERS’ EYES WERE GLIMMERING WITH TEARS, and his clenched jaw muscles worked. George could barely see this, because his own vision was blurred with tears too. He said:

  “If Joe’d only been able to keep up. But … Aah, what-ifs don’t do any good.”