From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “But Mr. Montgomery, I thought, was bringing money when we came. Something like ten thousand dollars.”

  “So he did have. But that didn’t even cover the back pay for the boys I brought out here a year ago. Dick, when I started this caper, Patrick Henry gave me £1200. That was exhausted before we even left Fort Pitt, spent on boats, grain, shoes, and th’ like. The money Monty brought is Continental currency. It’s sunk to about a penny to the dollar in worth, as the traders hereabouts well know. Look at these.” He held up the bundles of paper. “These scraps I guard with my life. They’re vouchers for credit. I’ve written about fifteen thousand of these so far, to support the Illinois Regiment. They’re promises that Virginia will pay these suppliers for what we’ve purchased. Now, these traders don’t personally know anybody named Virginia, but they do know, and trust, somebody named George Rogers Clark. More of that ‘Reputation’ for you. That means they gave credit only on my signature. Here I’ve signed for supplies and services amounting to several times what my own lands are worth, though I was pretty land rich when I came out here. Sometime before winter I’m going to send all these bedamned vouchers to Williamsburg in care o’ the auditor of state, and then when the state honors ’em, I’ll start feeling about a hundred years younger. I wish to high Heaven I’d never seen these things, but I have to watch ’em all the time, for I’d be ruined if anything ever happened to ’em. I mean ruined for good. A signature on credit is a promise, as you know. And I have to keep my promises. Because the one thing’ll prick the bubble of a reputation, Dick, is one broken promise. Especially a money promise. The way most people are in this world, sad to say, they’ll forget most kinds o’ promises—honor, oaths, vows of any kind—long before they’ll forget a money promise.

  “A lot of people hereabouts have helped me with this credit thing. There’s people you’ve yet to meet. Vigo the trader. Cerré the merchant. Busseron. Even the Spanish governor across the river.” He paused here, took a drink of brandy, and went on. “They’ve undersigned me with their own names. I’m as beholden to them as I am to any American. And they’re ruined with me if Virginia doesn’t honor these. So. So, there, Dick. You can see, I guess, we cover a lot of ground in a lot of ways.

  “Now I’m good at getting around, but it’s hard to be more than three or four places at once. That’s why I need you as an emissary, Dick. Y’ll stay a few more weeks yet in ranks, as ye’ve things to learn. But I do need a lieutenant I can trust for everything, so I can be in all these places at once. You’re going to be probably the travelin’est lieutenant this side o’ the mountains. Think you can handle that?”

  Dickie swallowed. “You know me. Show me a way someplace once in daylight and I can get there in th’ dark o’ the moon.”

  “I know you, y’ say.” George looked at Dickie in a strange, dark way that gave him shivers. “How well does a man know family he never sees? You hardly know me, do you really, Dick? I mean other than what talking I’ve done?” George jolted down his brandy and poured another. “Dick, I’m glad you’re here, because I can say things to you I can’t say to anybody else because they all depend on me. I can’t … I dasn’t … ever let on when I’ve a doubt. Once on the way to Vincennes, I forgot to look cocksure, and they almost fell apart. Slow me down if I get talking too fast to make sense, Dick, for I’ve got a lot I haven’t been able to say.

  “Listen, and I’ll tell something I learned, and it surprised me something awful: When you’re surrounded by people who look to you for everything, you’re more alone than if you were the only soul on earth. Because you can’t let on that you’re dubious or hangdog about anything. By God, they won’t let you! Someone has to keep grinnin’ in the gloom and givin’ orders, and y’know who. Dick, I can trust ye never to tell a soul this, but when we’d crossed that Wabash last February, and the gunboat wasn’t there, and I saw how weak and helpless we all were—no, now listen—why, I had the godawfulest notion there for a spell, that the only right thing I could do, the only thing I could do to save my poor people, was to walk up to the Hair-Buyer’s fort and surrender, just so he’d feed us and shelter us ’fore we all died!”

  “My God, George!”

  “Aye. I’d got ’em in a situation that dang nigh killed ’em, and in spite of all th’ tales you’ve heard about me knowin’ what to do all the time, why, for that little while there I didn’t know what else we could do. Now: can you imagine, brother, what would’ve happened if I’d told ’em any such a thing! Well, that’s what I mean by alone. If I’d let that slip out to anybody, even Joe Bowman, bless his great and true heart, we’d ha’ lost it all.”

  He poured another brandy for each of them, staring at Dick’s astonished countenance over the bottle, and some spilled and ran over his fingers, making him look down. Then he raised his eyes again and said:

  “Know what saved us when I was that addled?”

  “What?”

  “Providence.”

  “Providence?”

  “Meseems when a man’s alone like that, havin’ to be God for a godforsaken people, then Providence steps in and takes over. I’ll have to tell this story to Pa someday, as it upholds all he’s always told us. But, yes, Dick, it was Providence.”

  “How so?”

  “We’d just flopped ashore out o’ the ice water onto that last shore. Scarce a man could stand up and stagger. Our heart-fires were about gone to ashes. And then guess what showed up. Going right past that place, on their way to the fort?”

  “What?”

  “Some squaws in a canoe. They had a kettle and some corn and a hunk o’ buffalo. Now why would they come by that wayward place just then, I ask ye? But they did. And we bought that food from ’em, that manna from heaven, and made a chowder. Hot chowder. One mouthful apiece was about it all came to. But it gave us strength to get up and move on, and that evening we attacked the fort, and the next day it was Hamilton who gave up, not us. Does that sound like Providence to you?”

  “It does.”

  “By then I’d already had about all th’ vainglory wrung out o’ me, Dick. I was wishin’ I had double-hinged knees so’s I could kick my own hindy-end for bringin’ those trustin’ good lads into such an extreme. Now I’m glad it happened, Dick, because”—he paused and swallowed, and gazed into his glass with wet, redrimmed eyes—“because if somehow we’d won out anyway, without that gift o’ Providence, then I might be sitting here right now like Caesar, believin’ I maybe was God!”

  For a long time Dickie could think of nothing worth saying. Finally he said, “From what I’ve heard here, there’s folks just about believe you are.”

  “I know it. What counts is that I don’t believe it. I wouldn’t if I could. I wouldn’t want to be a god if they offered it to me. Too damned lonely. Who would ye talk to, eh? You wouldn’t even have a brother!”

  He stared. Then he winked at Dickie. And then he began to laugh a little, and Dickie laughed, and it got bigger and bigger and more uproarious, and they grew helpless with laughing, and their howls went out the open windows into the summer night, over the fort and the town and out among the night-noises of the frogs and katydids, and sentries heard their Colonel Long Knife laughing, laughing as if he had needed to laugh forever, and the sentries shook their heads, at first, and then soon they were chuckling, at their posts in the dark perimeters of the town.

  MAJOR JONATHAN CLARK STOOD WITH THE SUN BEATING ON his back, stood on a platform on the roof of the house that was Colonel Light Horse Harry Lee’s command post. With his eye to the lens of a long telescope mounted on a tripod, he looked across the Hackensack River, over the heat-shimmering scrublands around the distant town of Hoboken, and beyond that lowland to the shimmering Hudson, and the island of Manhattan on the other side. He could make out a church steeple in the city of New York. New York. The British stronghold all during the war and apparently destined to be so forever.

  He moved the glass slowly down the near shore of the Hudson and brought it to bear on a low, sq
uat structure he had been studying with a growing interest for weeks:

  The British fort on the spit of land called Paulus Hook.

  The fort was an affront to General Washington, and it had become almost an obsession with Colonel Harry Lee. There it sat, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, which Washington considered his side of the Hudson, and with its big guns it commanded this side of the Hudson’s mouth. Where it sat the Hudson was about a mile wide, and were it not for that fort, American ships could probably come up the river hugging the New Jersey shore, relatively safe from the guns of New York’s own battery.

  It sat there, seemingly immune to attack. It was a strong welldesigned fort of thick earthen walls and covering redoubts, surrounded by a water-filled moat and garrisoned by two hundred Redcoat artillerymen and a whole battalion of infantry, all housed in stone buildings within the fort. The only road to the fort crossed the moat over a drawbridge, and inside the drawbridge was an iron-grill portcullis. The fort’s view of the marshy countryside and of the straight, flat road was so complete that the defenders could have their drawbridge up and portcullis closed before any body of attackers could come within a half-hour’s march of it. It was the kind of fort the British had the time and money and manpower and machinery to build. It was impregnable to any kind of direct assualt, and as Jonathan Clark stood studying its massive form in the August sunlight, he thought:

  If the forts in the West had been like this one, Brother George couldn’t have done what he did. Not even George, audacious as he is, would have dared besiege a place like that.

  Yet …

  Yet, it’s but a work o’ man. And there’s no work o’ man that a smarter man couldn’t get into. He and Colonel Lee agreed on that. They had long been plotting how to get in.

  He took out his watch. It was about time for something to happen that Jonathan had observed happening at that fort for several weeks.

  The British military were a regular and methodical people. They did certain things at certain times. Jonathan had noticed that on certain days of the week, a large troop of British foragers would set out early in the afternoon, to range the New Jersey countryside plundering the farms and homes for fresh meat. And most interesting to Jonathan was that the drawbridge and portcullis would be left open for their return. The foragers had to range far, and usually, Jonathan had noticed, they still would not be back in by the time dusk obscured his view of the fort.

  Now, as he watched, sure enough, the drawbridge came down, and a large procession of English troops moved out onto the road. They were tiny at this distance, even seen through the spyglass, and were so distorted by the shimmering heat waves that he could make them out only as a line of red and flashes of sunlight on metal, but it appeared to him that most of the fort’s garrison must be in that foraging body—probably all the dragoons and most of the infantry, he guessed, except the current guard watch. They had to go out in strong force, of course, because Colonel Light Horse Harry’s Virginians kept a watch over the countryside. As Lee had remarked once to Jonathan, “Thanks to us, it takes a British battalion to capture an American cow.”

  Jonathan took his eye from the telescope and straightened his back. He pulled a kerchief from his sleeve and wiped sweat from his face. He said to a lieutenant standing behind him, “Keep that glass on that foraging party, and keep me a record of where they go today, as far as you can follow ’em, all right, son?” Then he stepped off the platform, ducked in through a dormer window, and went down the stairs. There was a murmur of voices in the parlor where Colonel Lee kept his office, and some junior officers came out. Jonathan knocked, and was called in.

  Young Light Horse Harry Lee was one of the most courtly and dashing members of that large clan of courtly and dashing Lees of Virginia. Even on a sweltering August day like this, billeted in a farmhouse doing the humdrum duties of an outpost commander in a static war, he looked as if he could be attending a glittering ball. The color in his finely sculptured face was always high and florid, and his eyes glittered with fun, and his silvery-white wig was always as tidy as the curling iron could make it. He wore rather more braid on his blue coat than regulations prescribed. But for all his prettiness and charm he was a resourceful and brave officer, always looking for clever ways to embarrass the British. Jonathan Clark now believed he had one that Harry Lee would like to try. “Sir,” he said, “d’ you suppose General Washington would permit you to capture or destroy yon British nest on Paulus Hook, if you convinced him it could be done handily?”

  “Mister Clark, you devil! Sit down and tell me what’s on your mind!”

  Jonathan talked for a quarter of an hour. He brought out a notebook and recited dates and times and numbers he had been recording. He got up and showed the Colonel certain details on his wall map. Lee kept pursing his lips and rubbing the palms of his hands together as he listened, now and then interjecting some fact or opinion that he thought might be helpful. Finally Jonathan finished. Lee went back behind his desk and sat there for a minute, fingers steepled neatly under his chin, gazing thoughtfully at the map, and Jonathan could tell nothing of what he thought of the idea. But at last, Lee said, clapping his hands together once:

  “Let’s ride up to Dey House early tomorrow, and see what His Excellency thinks. It just tickles my fancy something fierce!”

  GENERAL WASHINGTON SAT AND LISTENED TO THE WHOLE scheme, nodding, glancing down at the map on the table, his big hands lying still on the edge of the table. After Jonathan and Lee had made their presentation, Jonathan watched Washington.

  He remembered the day he had met him, at St. John’s Church in Richmond, and thought how far they all had come since that day, how much of their naiveté had been lost on so many bloody fields, yet how little had been achieved. General Washington’s eyes were tired and marked with so many more little lines of worry and concentration. But there was still that massive, solid serenity in his whole demeanor. A clock ticked in a corner as Washington digested it all with that thoroughgoing caution of his, and for a long while it looked as if he were not going to approve of it. It was, after all, a rash plan, depending a lot on chance, and many a complex plan of His Excellency’s had been wrecked by chance. The fog at Germantown, for instance. But at last Washington brought his blue eyes directly to bear on Jonathan’s face, and his voice was warm as he said:

  “One might imagine you’d been studying your brother.”

  Jonathan swallowed that with a smile. He knew it was meant well, and, too, he had grown used to hearing it. Jonathan knew that Washington had been very impressed and heartened by George’s successes in the West. The victory at Vincennes had in fact been one of the few bright gleams in the war thus far this year, and Washington spoke often of it in the dinner parties he held for his officers. But damn it, Jonathan thought behind his smile, George isn’t the only Clark in this world.

  Washington turned to Lee now, and said: “It’s really rather admirable, isn’t it? I see no fault with it. I should say, yes, do it, but with one caution:

  “As we have no general offensive just now that this would serve, lives shouldn’t be wasted on it. If it functions as the complete surprise it would seem to, take Paulus Hook and I’ll see that we arrange to hold it. But sirs, if you meet resistance or the plan somehow goes awry, and your men are in great danger, then please be satisfied just to disable their cannon and break off the engagement. We won’t expend our good people except for great, great advantages.”

  ON AUGUST 19, JONATHAN CLARK AND COLONEL LEE stood among reeds in the swamp beside the road to Paulus Hook, and watched the evening light change. Half a mile up the road lay the fort; Jonathan could see the British colors hanging limp in the sultry air above the ramparts. He could still distinguish the red in the flag.

  It was still too light. Only by deep dusk could one troop of men become indistinguishable from another.

  “Patience,” Colonel Lee said softly. “Another fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  Jonathan listened hard for hoofbea
ts or the tread of marching behind him down the road. If the British foragers should come up the road now, or in the next hour, returning to the fort, the whole plan would have to be abandoned. If they did return early, the Virginians were simply to melt into the swamp until they had passed, then regroup to march back and cross the Hackensack to their base, under cover of darkness, and nothing would have been lost.

  Jonathan looked at the tense faces of the nearest men. There were three hundred of them back there among the reeds along the road levee.

  This waiting was the worst part, waiting for something so slow and unhurriable as the fading of evening light. The march down had been something of a game. The Virginians had had to cross a lot of ground in the distant view of the fort. It was impossible to get close to Paulus Hook without being seen, and so the Virginians had had to give the impression of being an American foraging party. They had zigzagged with a seeming aimlessness from farm to farm along the dirt roads all day, gradually working their way down into the swamps a few miles from the fort. And here they had made themselves invisible to come the rest of the way. If the British in the fort had seen them, they apparently had fallen for the deception, or simply had paid them no heed, for the drawbridge was still down and the portcullis was still open, open for the routine arrival of the British foragers. So far so good.

  Jonathan watched the light change and listened to a catbird in the reeds and saw a gull pass overhead, gray now in the dimming light. He saw a light of some kind, a torch or lantern, pass beyond the iron gates within the fort. “If they’re lighting up in there,” he said, “it must be about right now.” He turned to look again at his troops. Their coats were dark, purple-looking now instead of blue, and he knew that red coats now would also look purple. Lee nodded, and squeezed Jonathan’s elbow.