Tesla's Time Travelers (13 page)

“My dear,” said Franklin in a fatherly voice. “All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. When will mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their differences by arbitration? Were they to do it even by the cast of a die, it would be better than by fighting and destroying each other.”

“Gentlemen!” John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, addressed the group. “We should be heading back to work, I’m afraid. Drink up.”

“My dear,” Benjamin Franklin said to Minerva as he took her hand and gallantly grazed his lips upon it. “It has been an honor and a pleasure to share this little time together. Pray tell, will you be available for supper tonight?”

Minerva was shocked. Benjamin Franklin had asked her for a date. Wasn’t he married? Didn’t his wife live in Philadelphia?

“I ah…” Minerva stammered.

“She has a previous engagement, Dr. Franklin,” said Victor, rescuing his classmate.

“I see my friend can capture more than flies,” Jefferson said. “He captures hearts as well.”

Victor was blushing. Good, Minerva thought, and then she wondered: Am I blushing too?

She didn’t have time to worry, for Mrs. Beard was floating up the stairs, passing the descending delegates.

“Trouble, children,” Mrs. Beard said.

“What is it, Mrs. Beard?”

“The Anderson boys. They’ve been arrested.”

“Arrested!” Victor said.

“Yes, and taken to Fort Mifflin.”

“Where’s that?”

“On the Delaware River,” Mrs. Beard said.

“Great!” Victor said.

“That’s not all,” Mrs. Beard said.

“What else, Mrs. Beard?” Minerva asked.

“Rodney is nearly here.”

“Rodney. The riding crop!” Victor said. “I must retrieve it or we will be stuck in Philadelphia.”

“‘On the whole I’d rather be in Philadelphia,’ to quote W.C. Fields,” Mrs. Beard said.

“Who is W.C. Fields?” Minerva asked.

“Never mind, dear. It’s before your time.”

Everything, Minerva thought, was before my time.

Chapter 9

“Minerva,” Victor said, as they exited City Tavern with Mrs. Beard. “It’s my job to retrieve Rodney’s riding crop. You are going to have to save the twins.”

“Victor, I can’t do it alone,” Minerva protested.

“Go to Mrs. Ross’s house and get Bette. Maybe Mr. Greene is awake by now and he can help. I mean, if we have to, perhaps we can leave the twins behind, but we must have the riding crop to return.”

“Victor, we can’t leave the twins here. Look what they have done already. They’ve ruined the field trip.”

“I guess.”

“This wasn’t Mr. Greene’s lesson plan, Victor.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Victor said. But he thought: No, Minerva, this was life’s lesson plan. This wasn’t book learning, this was the real thing, and life got a little messy. It wasn’t an original philosophy Victor was espousing in his mind; in fact, the philosophy was something he had probably picked up from some movie somewhere, but Minerva Messinger could revert to being prissy at the drop of a bonnet.

“Victor,” Minerva was talking, but Victor hadn’t been paying attention. When a girl started to sound too
girlish
, he tuned out. “Do you realize leaving the Anderson twins in 1776 will release a swarm of butterflies?”

Did butterflies form in swarms? Victor wondered. No matter, he understood what Minerva meant. “Well then, you and Bette Kromer better get those boys back. I’ve got a date with a riding crop.”

Victor ran off, leaving Minerva behind. After about fifty yards, he stopped and turned to wave at Minerva, but she too was gone—off, he realized, to enlist Bette Kromer to retrieve the Anderson twins.

About two blocks from the state house, Benjamin Franklin was sitting alone on a bench. In the background Victor could hear the singing of what he assumed to be the Founding Fathers nearing the Pennsylvania State House.

“Freemen! If you pant for glory,

If you sigh to live in story,

If you burn with patriot zeal;

Seize this bright auspicious hour,

Chase those venal tools of power

Who subvert the public weal.

“Huzza! Huzza! Huzza!

See Freedom her banner display…”

“Dr. Franklin,” Victor said, stopping. “Are you alright?”

“Ah, the fly catcher. Yes, yes, lad. My gout, I’m afraid. Dr. Rush sent for his sedan chair and it shall be here presently. You know, lad, this is for you.”

“What is, sir?”

“Independence. Providence knows I’ve lived my life. No, this nation is for the future. For the likes of you. In five hundred years it will stretch beyond the Appalachian Mountains and stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Ah, here comes my ride,” he smiled, standing up.

Victor smiled too. He thought: You have no idea, Dr. Franklin, how right you are. What you are doing here today
is
for me, more than you can ever know. But it won’t take five hundred years to go from coast to coast; it won’t even take one hundred.

“Lad,” Benjamin Franklin said as he closed the sedan chair door behind him and took his seat, “if you should like to hear the debate today, give the guard at the door my card.” He handed Victor a very simply printed card that read:
Benjamin Franklin, printer. Philadelphia
.

“Thank you, Dr. Franklin.” Victor couldn’t believe his good fortune. The riding crop, stupid, he reminded himself. He ran ahead of Dr. Franklin in the sedan chair and made it to the Pennsylvania State House to hear, “Rodney approaches!”

“Where’s a groom?” someone called.

The horse needs a groom, Victor thought. Perfect! “Here,” he shouted. “I’m a groom.” For a moment his mind wondered why a husband-to-be was called a groom. Did the first guy to ever get married work in a stable or something? He shook off the thought and watched an approaching horse and rider.

A foamy, dusty horse, with an equally dirty rider, came to a stop in front of the Pennsylvania State House. Victor took the reins of the horse and Caesar Rodney, his face marred by what Victor took to be skin cancer, tossed Victor his riding crop as well. Victor led the horse away to the other side of the state house, found a hitching post and tied the steed to a rail. Then, carrying Rodney’s riding crop, he approached the door to the state house where a militiaman held up a hand as a signal to stop. Not saying a word, Victor showed the militiaman Benjamin Franklin’s card and the soldier nodded him entrance. Victor assumed the soldier thought him to be one of Franklin’s printer apprentices.

Independence Hall, Victor thought. I’m here. Inside. This was a dream come true for a history nerd, the Yankee Stadium of Liberty, he thought. The proceedings had stopped for the entrance of Rodney, who was being congratulated by a sea of delegates.

Rodney noticed Victor and came over to him.

“I’m afraid I have no money on me, lad,” Rodney said. Victor realized Rodney thought he was there for his tip as groomsmen. “Keep my riding crop as a souvenir of this day, lad,” he smiled, and returned to the well-wishers. Another delegate pressed a shilling into Victor’s hand to cover Rodney’s tip. Victor found a place to stand out of the way and watched and listened.

The men returned to their green-baize covered tables in the Assembly Room of the State House and Victor could hear the voices from the Pennsylvania Assembly from the second floor, where they had moved to make room for the Continental Congress. John Hancock called the room to order, and a few delegates who had been writing stopped their quills in respect for the president of the Continental Congress.

Victor listened as a number of letters were read aloud to the assembled delegates. There was a letter from General Washington, enclosing an extract of a letter from a General Ward, of whom Victor had no knowledge. Another letter was from the council of Massachusetts Bay: a missive from the pay master with a return of his weekly account, and the chair ordered that the letter be delivered to the Board of the Treasury. After an hour or so of such tedious, mundane matters, the Congress resumed the consideration of the resolution agreed to and reported from “the committee of the whole.” The clerk, under instructions from the chair, read:

“Resolved that these United Colonies are, and, of right, ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them, and the state of Great Britain, is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

“The chair recognizes Delegate Thomas McKean of Delaware.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. I would like to welcome Delegate Rodney from Dover to this august body. Mr. Rodney?”

As Rodney stood up a bit of dust loosened from his coat in a small puff and floated to the floor. “As I believe the voice of my constituents,” Rodney began. “And all of the fair, sensible and honest men are in favor of independence, and as my own judgment concurs with them, I vote for independence.”

“Mr. President,” McKean said. “Delaware casts ‘aye’ for independence.”

“Huzza!” some delegates shouted.

“That is twelve votes for independence,” Hancock noted. “And one abstention. What say New York?”

A delegate from New York stood up. “New York still abstains, Mr. President.”

“Let the record show that the resolution for independence passes with twelve ayes, no votes against and New York abstaining. This Congress will, tomorrow, again resolve itself into a committee of the whole, to take into their further consideration the declaration on independence.”

Victor heard a moan from the Virginia delegation and noticed the sad look on Thomas Jefferson’s face. His complaint of “another rewrite?” was barely audible, and Hancock didn’t seem to hear Thomas Jefferson whine. Nor did he overhear another unrecorded complaint in which Jefferson mumbled, “Moses is lucky the committee of the whole wasn’t around on Mount Sinai, they would have rewritten the Ten Commandments.”

“This Congress is adjourned to 9 o’clock tomorrow,” Hancock said, gaveling the day over.

The delegates spilled out into the street, a few clustering together to discuss the day’s events. A man and woman in plain Quaker dress were kneeling in prayer outside the Pennsylvania State House.

“Abolitionists,” Victor heard a delegate say, dismissing the quiet protest.

Thomas Paine, an interested bystander, overhead the delegate. “Mr. Rutledge, my friend from South Carolina, how can we say that all men are equal and yet allow slavery? Is that not the conundrum of our Congress?”

“Mr. Paine,” Rutledge smiled. “I shall not cross words with our nation’s most famous wordsmith. I will only say, as Dr. Franklin has already stated, ‘We should all hang together or surely we will all hang separately.’”

“I trust that it will be a noose of hemp gathered at some plantation by a man in bondage, Mr. Rutledge.”

Rutledge lost the smile from his face.

Mr. Paine, like a fisherman who had a bite, tried to reel Rutledge in with an argument. “Christians are taught to account all men their neighbors; and love their neighbors as themselves and do to all men as they would be done by; do good to all men. And man-stealing is ranked with enormous crimes. Is the barbarous enslaving of our inoffensive neighbors and treating them like wild beasts subdued by force, reconcilable with all these divine people? Is this doing to them as we should desire they should do to us? If they could carry off and enslave some thousands of us, would we think it just? One would almost wish they could for once; it might convince more than Reason, or the Bible.”

“Good day, Mr. Paine,” Rutledge said and went off to join a group of delegates.

“Free all the slaves, Mr. Rutledge,” Paine called after the South Carolina delegate. “Let us set an example to the rest of the world.”

Then, in a move that totally surprised Victor, Thomas Paine joined the two Quaker abolitionists, kneeling with them in prayer. Victor remembered what Mr. Greene told them about Paine—how he went to France for the French Revolution and was arrested and imprisoned and sentenced to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror, but survived because a jailer forgot to paint an
X
on his cell door, the symbol for the condemned. Victor had a sudden respect for Thomas Paine, a true revolutionary thinker.

The Quakers and now Thomas Paine quietly continued praying as the delegates passed. Victor pondered Paine’s point: It was a dilemma. Here the delegates to the Continental Congress were claiming that all men are created equal with certain unalienable rights, and one of those was liberty. Slavery was not
liberty
. Here in Philadelphia, living beside the Quaker abolitionists were slaves, for a fair percentage of the Philadelphia population was in bondage. In 1776, the slaves were not restricted to only the South; here they were abundant in the North as well. Mr. Greene said the first time Congress took a stand against slavery was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, when it outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory, which would become the five states of Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin. That was adopted under the Articles of Confederation, which was the
first
Constitution. Abe Lincoln used the Northwest Ordinance as his argument against the extension of slavery into new territories. And shoot, if you did the math, “four score and seven” was eighty-seven, and if you subtracted eighty-seven from 1863—the year Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address—you got 1776. Lincoln liked the Articles of Confederation. Boy, Victor thought, give him a
Document Based Question
on the Articles of Confederation on the A.P. exam. He would ace that! Such a nerd! Who knew if they would even get back to our own time? He didn’t know exactly what to do with the riding crop. Would the Beards know how to use the riding crop to get back if Mr. Greene were incapacitated?

He stood outside the building that would forever be known as Independence Hall. He decided he needed to head for Mrs. Ross’s home and give the riding crop to Mr. Greene, and somehow wake him up. He hoped Minerva had retrieved the Anderson twins.

Chapter 10

When Minerva arrived at the Betsy Ross house on Arch Street, the legendary flag maker was feeding a conscious Mr. Greene a bowl of soup as he sat up on a bed without his glasses. Bette Kromer was applying a wet cloth to her teacher’s forehead and she smiled brightly when she noticed Minerva enter the room. It was a smile of welcome, Minerva thought, relieved. Bette was truly becoming her friend. She could have never figured that would happen. You never know what a little trip in time backward to Philadelphia could do, she thought. It really could change the future in unintended ways.