T
HE DRINKERS AT HUGHSON'S TAVERN GATHERED around Clara in a pastiche of wide-eyed white and black faces as she read the story of the Battle of the Bracken in the New York Gazette. I had commissioned Adam Duycinck to write an account of the clash. Duycinck was honest enough to admit the plan for the battle came from Hanging Belt but his version gave Malcolm most of the credit for leading the fray. He also praised “the brave Africans” who had defeated four times their number in the forest.
“That's the part I want you to remember,” Caesar said. “What black men can do with guns in their hands.”
Caesar had no interest in the rest of Duycinck's story, which dealt with political warfare. Because one of the dead was the officer in the French army who had led the band of Ottawas from Fort Niagara, Duycinck argued the affair was proof of French treacheryâand the readiness of some New Yorkers, such as the Van Sluydens, to do business with the Catholic enemy. Duycinck worked into the story a graphic description of Malcolm's rout of the French sloop on Lake Ontarioâmaking him sound like a one-man army on the northern frontier.
Malcolm had come to New York with an advance copy of the story for acting governor George Clarke, urging him to send it to the British secretary of state for America. If that gentleman showed it to Prime Minister Robert Walpole and George II, it might trigger a declaration of war on France. That would clear the muddle of an undeclared war from the atmosphereâand might very well make Malcolm Stapleton the leader of an American army that would invade Canada and settle the question of who would rule North America once and for all.
War was raging all around the perimeter of England's North American colonies. Only last week, the
New York Gazette
had reported that on almost the same date as the Battle of the Bracken, a Spanish army numbering over a thousand men had landed on St. Simon's Island off the coast of Georgia. Timely warning of their arrival had been brought to Savannah by a privateer.
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The royal governor called out the colony's militia and ambushed the Spanish on the march. The enemy soon fled to their ships, leaving behind more than a hundred dead.
“Read us the other story,” Caesar said. “The Stono River Story.”
Clara drew an older copy of the
Gazette
from beneath the bar and read the story of a slave uprising in South Carolina. The paper was almost six months old now. Caesar had asked her to read it a dozen times to various Africans he brought to Hughson's to drink with him.
“A traveler lately arrived from Charleston reports an alarming upheaval on the Stono River, about twenty miles from the capital of that colony. Some twenty slaves from plantations along the river, where rice is grown in great abundance, met secretly at night over several months. Inflamed by reports of Spain's declaration of war and the hope of freedom, they formed an army, joined by a blood oath, and on an appointed Sunday, while most of the white people were at church, broke into a local store, stole guns and powder and left the heads of the two white owners on the store's steps to demonstrate their desperate intentions. They marched south for the Spanish colony of Florida, shouting âLiberty.' Along the way they were joined by numerous other Africans. Any whites they encountered on the road were slaughtered without mercy, except for two, whose slaves pleaded for them as kind masters. Fortunately, several whites escaped their vigilance and sounded the alarm. The militia was called out and soon blocked their route. In a pitched battle, the Africans were totally defeated. Most of those who surrendered were executed on the spot, saving a half dozen who pleaded they had been forced to join the revolt at gunpoint. The greatest perturbation now reigns in the whole colony with extra patrols mounted on all roads at night and Africans kept closely confined, even in the city of Charleston.”
“Fools,” Caesar said. “They should have waited for the Spanish to attack, then risen. The whites would have been fighting the Spanish and been caught between two fires.”
Fat moon-faced Cuffee, Caesar's closest friend, asked Clara to get out her book of maps and show them where it had happened. Clara opened the big atlas of the world she had bought from Harman Bogardus, our old teacher. She showed Cuffee the location of South Carolina on the
American coast and ran her finger along the King of Spain's dominions, which included the entire continent of South America and Mexico and islands in the Caribbean and the long peninsula of Florida.
“How far is it from here to there?” Caesar asked, running his finger from New York to the island of Cuba, which everyone knew was the headquarters of the Spanish fleet. Caesar had been fascinated by the book of maps since the first time he saw it. He had learned the names of the islands and countries from Clara.
“Over a thousand miles,” Clara said.
“How long would it take a ship to sail that far?”
“I don't know.”
“Three weeks,” said one of the sailors in the crowd.
“That ain't long,” Caesar said. “We could have a Spanish fleet and army here anytime.”
“Or French, if the Battle of the Bracken gets read in Paris,” Cuffee said. “My master claims it's all stuff. The Stapletons murdered that Van Sluyden fellow and his French Indians on their way to Oswego to talk peace.”
“That's a lie,” Clara said. “I was there. They came to kill the Stapletonsâand they would have killed me too. Van Sluyden got exactly what he deserved. He was a murdererâand a traitor in the bargain.”
The words made little impact on the drinkers. English patriotism was not popular at Hughson's. Luke Barrington, an elongated hooknosed Irish schoolteacher who frequently drank at the tavern, raised a tankard of rum. “Here's to King Philip of Spain and King Louis of France. Either one's my king more than that fat Protestant bastard on his throne in London. If a Catholic king comes here with an army, I'll carry a musket for him and knock the bloody English on the head.”
“Amen to that!” Caesar said, clinking his glass of ale against Barrington's tankard. “There's a thousand black men ready to join you. All we need is some guns.”
“That's crazy talk. It can get you all hanged!” Clara said.
The war with Spain had turned Caesar's dream of a slave revolt into an obsession. The Stono River uprising and the Battle of the Bracken had redoubled the intensity of his ambitions. At first Clara had merely scoffed at them. But as more and more Africans began listening seriously to him, the memory of her vision of disaster on her first night with Caesar had returned to haunt her.
“Listen to her,” Caesar said. “Since she peddled her ass to the great Malcolm Stapleton, she's been hoping it'll turn white.”
Clara poured a tankard of aleâand flung it in Caesar's face. “Get out of here,” she said. “And stay out until you learn to hold your tongue.”
Everyone roared with laughterâincluding Caesar. “Ever seen a bitch like her?” he said.
Mary Burton, waiting on tables, offered Caesar a dirty napkin to wipe his face. It was not the first time Clara had expelled Caesar from the tavern. He would come back. He knew she wanted him to come back. They were linked in a strange dangerous way that neither completely understood.
Hughson's was one of the few taverns that allowed Africans to buy rum at its bar. It was against the law to sell a drink to a slave. It was also against the law for more than three slaves to meet anyplace, even on the street. New York still remembered the African uprising of 1712. But the laws were seldom enforced by the overworked handful of constables who composed the city's Night Watch.
If Caesar returned before dawn, he would come not to drink but to sell another bundle of stolen silver plate or candlesticks or a dozen yards of cloth. Sarah Hughson would buy them for ten percent of what they were worth and sell them to shopkeepers like Adam Duycinck for three times that muchâand Adam would sell them to rich New Yorkers for ten times as much.
It was wrongâit was dangerous. The legal punishment for theft was deathâbut the law was seldom enforced in New York. In England, it was a different story. The British soldiers from Fort George had told Clara of seeing a hundred people a month hanged in London aloneâsome as young as twelve years oldâfor stealing a loaf of bread when they were starving.
Clara heard little about England that inclined her to respect its government or its laws. But she said nothing about the Hughsons' business in stolen goods with Caesar for a deeper reason. Some sort of rough justice was accomplished by it. The longer she worked at Hughson's, the more Clara felt she had emigrated to another world where different laws prevailed.
The poor drank at Hughson's. The rum was the cheapestâand worstâin the city, so raw Caesar swore it was burning his guts out. From the mouths of the Africans and the poor whitesâthe sailors, the dockworkers, the whores, and schoolteachers like Luke Barrington who were not paid much better than the dockersâClara heard about a different New York, where there was a daily struggle for enough food and shelter to survive. Those who failedâwho became vagrants on the streetsâwere thrown into the almshouse, a prisonlike building on the northern edge of the city, where they froze and semistarved on miserable food or sweated in the summer months and frequently died from the numerous diseases that raged through the place.
“Clara!”
Shoving his way to the bar was the towering figure of Malcolm Stapleton. He pointed to the
New York Gazette
. “Has everyone read the bad news from Georgia?” he said. “It's what happens when your fleet and army lie supine and the enemy can seize the initiative. We should have twenty ships of the line and a hundred transports in the harbor at this moment, ready to attack Cuba. You wouldn't find any Spaniard within a hundred miles of Georgia. Instead we idle here, our cities open to attack, while the Great Corrupter soothes the king with empty promises of action next year. It's enough to make a man repent of patriotism or consider himself a damned fool.”
Malcolm's diatribes against Prime Minister Robert Walpole had long since passed into the realm of hyperbole. But no one disagreed with him. Luke Barrington, the schoolteacher who had just pledged his allegiance to the Spanish king, was silent as a statue. No one was ready to argue with a man of Malcolm's size and political importance. Although he was under savage attack for his role in the Battle of the Bracken, he remained a leader, even a heroic figure, to many New Yorkers.
His victory in the northern woods had added several inches to his military stature. The governor had made Malcolm brigadier general in command of the state's militia. He was at Hughson's to talk up this year's militia bill. In spite of the declaration of war on Spain, the New York assembly had refused to vote money for a local army. They told the fuming governor they would only do it on explicit orders from the king. They implied that the king and his friends had started this war and they were the ones who should pay for it. It was hardly patriotic and Malcolm and his militant friends were left in the dismayed minority.
Clara served drinks while Malcolm argued with those who saw no point in spending money on soldiers until a genuine French or Spanish threat appeared on the horizon. Malcolm vehemently maintained that an untrained army would be worse than none at all. Finally, the drinkers drifted into the night and John Hughson came downstairs and said it was time to close. Mary Burton got out her mop and pail and began swabbing the taproom floor.
Hughson peered at Malcolm in his stupid way and said: “You're all wrong about raising men to fight for King George. He ain't a proper King of England.”
“Who is?”
“He's living in France at this moment. Charles Edward Stuart is his name.”
Malcolm seized him by the shirt. “What the hell are you talking about, man? That's treason. Treason to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, to the heroes who threw the pope off the throne of our country!”
“Call it what you want. It's the truth,” Hughson said.
Malcolm whirled on Clara. “Where the hell is he getting these ideas?”
“I have no idea,” Clara said, dismayed at Malcolm's passion. She suddenly remembered Harman Bogardus warning her and Catalyntie that no one could be neutral in this quarrel, with its explosive mixture of religion and politics.
Hughson broke Malcolm's grip on his shirt. He was a match for him in size and strength. “I thought you was our friend, thanks to Clara,” he said.
“I won't be a friend to anyone who has such dirty ideas in his noodle,” Malcolm said. “My advice to you is wipe them out, fast. Or you'll be talking to a magistrate.”
Hughson waited in sullen silence while Clara got her cloak and said good night. As Malcolm walked her home to Maiden Lane, he again demanded to know where Hughson had gotten his traitorous ideas. “From his wife,” Clara said. “She was born a Catholic. Her relations were principal officers of this colony before your so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688.”
Malcolm stopped in the street as a sailor lurched by them with his arm around a whore. “Claraâit's your Glorious Revolution too.”