Caxton (17 page)

* * *

Hugh bid Novus Easley goodbye the next afternoon and rode out of Londontown.
In one saddlebag now were a copy of a bill of sale to Novus Easley for thirty
slaves by Baron Garnet Kenrick, nominal owner of them and Meum Hall, signed
by his proxy, Otis Talbot, for forty pounds sterling per slave; a deed of manumission
signed by Easley and witnessed by his brother, Israel, naming all the slaves
of Meum Hall; a copy of a Pennsylvania slave-purchase tax receipt, with the
expertly forged signature of a Crown tax collector and bribable acquaintance
of Mr. Easley; copies of letters from him to Baron Kenrick and Hugh, advising
them of his intention of manumission; and thirty preprinted certificates of
manumission, signed by Easley, for the freed slaves to carry, their names to
be filled in the blank spaces by Hugh himself.

Hugh journeyed back to Meum Hall, at once glad that the thing was done, and
fearful of the possible consequences. He did not try to reassure himself that
the slaves would stay in his employ out of gratitude or for any other reason,
nor did he contemplate his problems if they did not stay. He was determined
to own Meum Hall without any of the real or moral encumbrances other men took
for granted as the price for living their own lives.

After a day’s rest at Meum Hall, he advised his staff of the action, then went
alone into the slave quarter, called its residents together, and told them what
had been done. He concluded, “If you wish to remain here, it will be as employed
tenants of the property. If you wish to leave, you may. At the risk of contradicting
myself, as I am no longer your master, I grant you a day of rest and reflection
tomorrow that you may contemplate your immediate futures.” He paused and addressed
Dilch, who stood in front of the crowd. “Miss Dilch, I know you can read. I
saw your Bible in your quarters. It would be appropriate if you did this.” He
walked up to her and handed her the thirty certificates. “The law in the colony
cannot contest your freedom now. If it does, it will need to answer to me.”

The woman took the bundle of certificates and read the one on top. She saw
her name elegantly inscribed in one blank space between printed words, and tomorrow’s
date filling another space. Hugh saw some emotion in her face, but could not
decipher it. He inclined his head, then turned and left the slave quarter.

* * *

Without any encouragement or assistance from Hugh, word of the manumission
spread throughout Caxton and the county. It was his former slaves who helped
to spread it from plantation to plantation. Some of the men that night slipped
into the slave quarters of Enderly, Granby Hall, Morland, and a few of the smaller
freeholds to break the news to other slaves and show them their certificates.

On the afternoon of the next day, as a steady rain washed away the snow, Jack
Frake and Thomas Reisdale arrived at Meum Hall. They asked their host if it
was true. Hugh showed them the documents. Reisdale examined them. He closed
the portfolio in which they were contained and said, “It’s a true bill.”

That evening, two of the former slaves disappeared into the darkness, carrying
only bundles of their belongings and their certificates. Three came to the great
house to inform Hugh that they had decided to leave and try their chances in
the north. Hugh wished them well, and gave each of them a small sack of shillings
and pence.

On the morning of the next day, Primus and Dilch arrived at the great house.
Primus presented to Hugh the iron brand he had fashioned to mark Hugh’s hogsheads,
and said that he had decided to stay. Dilch spoke next. “Speakin’ for all the
rest of us that’s left, we will stay…
Mister
Kenrick. There’s this war
goin’ on, and we hear things are unsettled all about, so we’ll stay until things
quiet down.”

As the pair left Hugh’s library, they turned to glance at their former master.
In their eyes Hugh saw hesitancy and embarrassment; he knew that they wanted
to thank him, and that they knew also that it was a thanks which neither they
nor anyone else should ever have needed to offer another man. He saw gratitude
in their eyes, and he merely nodded in acknowledgment of the words he knew they
could not speak.

That afternoon, Sheriff Cabal Tippet arrived at Meum Hall, accompanied by Reece
Vishonn and several other planters, including William Granby and Edgar Cullis,
recently returned from the adjourned session of the General Assembly. Thomas
Reisdale accompanied them. These men also wished to know if it was true. Again,
Hugh produced his documents. Sheriff Tippet examined them, and blinked when
he saw the signatures of the parties. He shook his head and handed the papers
over to Reece Vishonn. The planter exclaimed, “I know this Easley fellow! That
is, I sold some bar-iron to him. The damned fool!”

Hugh merely smiled. “Which I believe he had made into lampposts to light some
of Philadelphia’s streets.”
Sheriff Tippet addressed the two burgesses. “Sirs, you may worry over the precedent
here, but as this business transpired beyond the county’s and the colony’s jurisdiction,
and was transacted by a man of means and a peer of the realm…well, I don’t think
it can be pursued to any purpose, except at the expense of your reputation and
pride.”
Thomas Reisdale added with a slight, self-effacing smile, “The legality of this
transaction may be disputed very likely over a course of years, and to the benefit
only of numerous lawyers.”
William Granby remarked, “Mr. Cullis and I will consider writing a bill to prohibit
this kind of carelessness, to be read at the next session.”
Hugh said, “And Mr. Reisdale will study it for its constitutionality. If any
suits are brought against me on this matter, he will represent me in any and
all proceedings.”
Sheriff Tippet laughed. “Mr. Reisdale?” He glanced at the two uncomfortable
burgesses. “Sirs, you would do better tangling with a French privateer!”
Reisdale nodded in acknowledgment of the compliment. “Thank you, sir.”
The party soon left Meum Hall. That was the end of the matter. Hugh half expected
a deputy of Attorney General Peyton Randolph, or an emissary of the Lieutenant-Governor’s
office to call and demand to examine the documents. But no one from Williamsburg
either wrote or came.
Later in the month, Hugh rode out to the cooper’s shed and watched Primus brand
the first hogshead that would hold his first crop of tobacco in the fall. He
smiled as the hot iron burned into the wood, and, when the brand was removed,
he saw
HK
in the silhouette of a soaring sparrowhawk.
Meum Hall was now truly his own.

J
ack Frake’s assessment of Lieutenant-Governor Fauquier was only partly correct.
Two other men, far higher up in the Crown political structure, were also to
purchase the colonials time to gather, order, and refine their wits: William
Pitt, and George the Third. In a seemingly endless contest for power that matched
the Seven Years’ War in animosity, Pitt and the king both began to lose their
own wits.

In October 1760, George the Second, aged seventy-seven, died, and was succeeded
by his grandson, George William Frederick, or George the Third. George, aged
twenty-two, claimed in his first speech that he “gloried in the name of Britain.”
His immediate agenda — though some historians aver that it was more an obsession
than a considered policy — was to recoup the powers of the monarchy, which since
his great-grandfather’s time had been checked or absorbed by the Whigs. George
wished to be a “Patriot King,” and actually govern the nation and establish
supremacy over a Parliament undivided by petty factions and smoldering jealousies.
To aid him in this quest, he brought in his long-time mentor, tutor, and confidant,
John Stuart, the third Earl of Bute, former Secretary of State for the Northern
Department.

Bute was a disciple of the late Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who in
a series of essays propounded a Tory interpretation of good government and patriot
kings. Bute also had political ambitions, but knew in the secrecy of his heart
that he had not the wit or stamina to immerse himself in contemporary party
politics and emerge from the struggle the better. His only chance in politics
was to have the trust and backing of a king who meant to rule a unified and
grateful nation.

But the combined political intelligence of Bute and George the Third was not
equal to their ambition, which was opposed by that of a patriotic minister,
William Pitt. This man’s intelligence was equal to his purposes, which were,
on one hand, the reduction of France to the status of Portugal, so that it no
longer posed a threat to England’s commercial and maritime hegemony; and, on
the other, the reconciliation of imperial power with constitutional liberty.

Naturally, George disliked Pitt. Here was this mere commoner behaving himself
like a patriot king, and having credited to his name an immense popularity,
a string of victories over the French, and the efficacy of his policies. Also,
Pitt was so overbearing and demanding that even Henry Pelham, Duke of Newcastle
and First Lord of the Treasury, alternately feared and despised him. If George
was truly to govern, in addition to authoring a peace and ending forever his
grandfather’s detested “German business” — the alliance with Frederick of Prussia
against France, Austria, and Russia — Pitt must somehow be removed, or at least
neutralized. But not before the Great Commoner had laid the foundations of an
agreeable peace with the French. George therefore intrigued with Bute to rid
the government of the man whose actions and policies were to hand the king an
empire greater than ancient Rome’s. They were, on this point, bright enough
to know that the man who could accomplish this Herculean task was not one who
would tolerate the designs on that empire of aman who was merely born into his
royal station.

If George the Third had been brighter — his mental acumen was certainly not
greater than either his father’s or grandfather’s — and had given the Secretary
of State free rein to conduct the war and foreign policy, events in the American
colonies might have been postponed for another generation. For while Pitt agreed
with others that the colonies were beholden to the Crown, he also would deny
Parliament’s right to govern or legislate for them in any matter beyond the
regulation of trade. It was, after all, a secure mercantilist empire that he
was fighting for. His policies had already won him respect in the colonies.
He recalled incompetent generals, and ordered that colonial officers be treated
and promoted on a par with regulars. As an effective champion of the colonists’
rights as Englishmen under the Constitution, he might have purchased the empire
in North America a greater longevity.

But this was not to be. Neither George the Third, nor Bute, nor the Secretary’s
colleagues in government, nor many in Lords and the Commons, could tolerate,
much less wish to emulate, a man who could say such things as, “I am sure I
can save this country, and nobody else can,” and “Three millions of people so
dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would
have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.” He denied Parliament’s
right, but Parliament exercised it nonetheless. Men envied his determination
and eloquence, but failed to see that Pitt was the apotheosis of that other
national anthem, and as did the man himself, dismissed all hints of contradiction
both in the policies and the anthem.

George the Third had, by 1762, experienced the first of many bouts with his
porphyritic madness. Pitt, too, was afflicted with a recurring illness. He alternated
between long periods of lucidity and longer periods of morbid melancholia. He
possessed a temper and a flare for verbally abusing friend and foe alike. His
malady caused him to be absent from some of the most crucial moments of his
nation’s history, when his presence might have made a difference.

Pitt was not what Bolingbroke, via Lord Bute, warned George against. He was
not among “the prostitutes who set themselves for sale,” not one of the “locusts
who devour the land.” He did not seek the services of “spies, parasites, and
sycophants,” and in fact despised them as much as did George. He was not to
be counted among “swarms of little, noisome, nameless insects” that “hum and
buzz in every corner of the court,” and would wave them away with the same distaste
and impatience as his king. George the Third, anxious to be Bolingbroke’s model
Patriot King, however, was convinced that Pitt was all these things and more,
simply because the man did not fit into his vision of himself as a God-sent
pilot of the nation. He ascribed Pitt’s malignity to party politics. He wished
to rule a united nation, and to lead it and Parliament down the path of honor.
A virtuous king, after all, would cast off such an intemperate, impertinent
minister, and banish him forever from politics.

Pitt, friendless on the throne and in the Privy Council, was now isolated.
Having learned that Spain planned to declare war on England through a “family
compact” of the two Bourbon dynasties that ruled it and France, Pitt demanded
that the king do the logical thing and declare war on Spain first before it
could put its army and navy in working order. The king and Council refused.
Pitt resigned in answer in October, 1761, stating, “I will be
responsible
for nothing that I do not
direct
.” His most ardent enemies on the Council
regarded his words as presumptuous self-flattery and even near-treasonous.

George and Bute were successful in their aim. What George got in Pitt’s stead,
however, was a succession of ministers and counselors who were not so easily
remolded, and that became a small, transient swarm of noisome, nameless insects.
It is not apparent from the record that he was ever able to discern the difference
between them and his chronic nemesis, William Pitt.

In a dispute over supporting Frederick of Prussia’s claims against Austria,
Newcastle, who wanted to continue the Prussian subsidies, in May of 1762 resigned
from the Treasury. Bute immediately replaced him — with himself. Unofficially,
it was a contest over who, Newcastle or the king with Bute, was going to control
patronage and preferments. Fortunately for Frederick, Empress Elizabeth of Russia
died in January, and her successor, Peter the Third, a maniacal admirer of Frederick,
abruptly took Russia out of the continental coalition and even put his army
at Frederick’s service. The Prussian king a little later received probably false
intelligence that Bute was secretly negotiating with Austria to force him to
make hitherto impossible concessions. Rightly or wrongly, it was Frederick who
coined the epithet “perfidious Albion.”

George the Third and Bute inherited the fruits of Pitt’s war policies, but
nearly gave the bowl away. By the terms of the Treaty of Paris, signed in February,
1763, France was restored most of the sugar- and molassesproducing West Indies
islands it had lost to British naval action; Gorèe, its principal slave collection
port on the west coast of Africa; and the right to maintain unfortified trading
posts in India. There was some controversy in Parliament and the newspapers
over which conquest was more important: Canada, or the islands. Bute and his
negotiators bowed to British sugar interests in Jamaica, who feared that more
British sugar on the market would create a glut and drive down prices. The strategic
value of the French islands was considered, and dismissed. Spain, trounced by
Britain with humiliating swiftness, ceded Florida to Britain in return for keeping
Cuba, but won from France the right to occupy the west bank of the Mississippi
River, the better to block any British moves against its Mexican silver mines.
This was more or less a French bribe to persuade Charles the Third of Spain
to agree to the treaty. Britain was ceded the east bank, and retained its conquests
of Grenada, Senegal, and Canada, and secured a near-monopoly on fishing waters
off the coast of Newfoundland.

The man who maneuvered a triumphant Britain into accepting these terms was
the French secretary of state, Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul, who was so
relieved at news of Pitt’s engineered ouster that he remarked that he would
rather have been sentenced to slavery on a galley than deal with him again.
Shrewder and more adept at diplomacy than either Bute or his negotiators, and
certain that the victors were in haste to end the war, Choiseul cajoled from
them terms which a year before he would not have dared propose without risking
having them thrown back in his face. As the ink dried on the Treaty of Paris,
he immediately began planning the resurrection of the shattered French navy.

Pitt, in the Commons, excoriated Bute and the treaty terms being debated by
a committee of the whole House, to no avail. In those times, the best means
the Crown had for removing or silencing an implacable or obstinate political
enemy, other than dismissal, was to elevate him to a peerage, or award him a
pension, or both. Pitt, on leaving office, was given a £3,000 a year pension
and a barony of Chatham for his wife, Hester. Years later, as part of an inducement
by a desperate George the Third to form a new government in the wake of Rockingham’s
collapse, Pitt was offered the earldom of Chatham.

There was, however, a catch to this glittering reward. Aside from souring an
adulatory public, Pitt’s acceptance of the earldom effectively removed him from
the Commons, where he had the most influence. A seasoned politician would have
first weighed the advantages and disadvantages of such an offer. In his career,
he had often enough witnessed the consequences. But by this time, his mental
malady was growing more and more pronounced, and perhaps he did not believe
that a bestowed peerage would much hamper his ability to persuade men to be
reasonable and pursue more practical, less tyrannical policies. He was wrong.

Peter the Third, endowed with fewer wits than was George, after a fivemonth
reign was perfunctorily assassinated with the knowledge and probable connivance
of his vastly more intelligent wife, Catherine, who would later be accorded
the appellation “the Great.” In the West, weak, venal men with short-ranged
minds and shadowy motives could rise to power. In feudal Russia, they were rarely
tolerated and rarely survived. Catherine the Second was as autocratic as any
of her predecessors. After abandoning a recodification of Russian law
à la
Montesquieu, she expanded serfdom, raised taxes, and took part in the first
three partitions of Poland.

Samuel Johnson, lionized now as the literary giant of Augustan England, was
in July of 1762 offered an annual pension of £300 by Lord Bute. Johnson had
derided a
pensioner
in his
Dictionary
as “a state hireling paid
by a stipend to obey his master.” After polling his friends concerning the propriety
of accepting Bute’s offer, and being assured by Bute himself that no obligations
would be pressed on him, he agreed to it with gushing gratitude. Later in his
career, though, a master appears to have requested a favor — or two. Johnson
authored a series of pamphlets for the government on Crown issues, none of them
memorable. Among them was one that was a bitter, sneering attack on American
revolutionaries.

* * *

The depth, scope, and perspicuity of Hugh Kenrick’s essays made Jack Frake
inexplicably sleepless. One night, while his neighbor was journeying to Londontown,
he rose, went down to his own library, found an unused ledger book, and sat
down to record his own thoughts and what he could remember had been said to
him by Augustus Skelly and Redmagne. For a reason he understood well enough,
Hugh’s observations had evoked the spirit of those men. A vault of stored-up
wisdom imparted to him by them now demanded expression. At first, he had to
dredge the past for the context of those memories. But after he put the first
few recollected statements on paper, they spewed forth so rapidly that he could
barely keep the point of his quill wet with ink.

Two memories in particular glowed in his mind. The first was of the lecture
Skelly had given him in the caves after he was sworn into the gang. “Chains
are a more honest form of slavery than the bogus liberty enjoyed by most of
our countrymen…. We will submit to chains, but we will none of us submit to
their paper and ink parents!” Jack wrote it all down, as much of it as he could
remember. “Most of those who join me discover something about themselves, and
in themselves — something roused by more than mere disobedience, but which learns
to glory in its unfettered state…. I’ve not been able to say what it is. Perhaps,
you will, some day….” His own reply to Skelly that day came to him effortlessly
and seemed to guide the motions of his hand as he wrote it down: “Even though
we are chained by our outlawry, we are free men, more free than ordinary folk.”