Liberty 1784: The Second War for Independence Page 9

  “Hold up, nigger.”

  Homer froze and cursed silently. He’d permitted himself to be lulled and now two men stood just a few feet in front of him, their muskets not quite pointed at his chest.

  “Damn, Abel, look what we got. Another fucking escaped slave.”

  “I do think you’re right, Joshua.”

  “So what do you think we should do with him?”

  “I am not a slave,” Homer answered with a trace of indignation. “I am a free black man, and I’m on my way to Boston to find work.”

  “Bullshit,” said Joshua. “You’re a fucking escaped slave and we’re going to arrange for you to go back south to your master.”

  Homer was incredulous. “Don’t you know that slavery’s been abolished by the British?”

  Joshua laughed. He was clearly the pair’s leader. “Nigger, you might just be surprised to know that a lot of people down south are simply ignoring that announcement. And you should know that there are a lot of other places like those owned by Spain and France where slavery still exists.”

  This can’t be happening, Homer thought. He had to do something. “I have money. Let me buy my way out of this.”

  Abel shook his head. “Amazing. Not only we get a slave to sell, but he has money as well to help pay us for our inconvenience. He ain’t armed so I think I’ll just take it. You keep him covered, Josh.”

  Abel stepped forward and reached for Homer. For an instant, he was between Homer and Joshua. Homer shifted his left arm and the knife he had strapped above his wrist slipped into his palm. He rammed it into Abel’s heart and stepped to his left, pulling out the other knife that was below his right elbow. This one he threw at an astonished Joshua, taking him in the throat. He quickly grabbed the musket from Joshua who was clutching at his throat while blood gushed down his shirt.

  Homer laughed. As he’d thought, it had never occurred to the fools that a Negro would fight back.

  Homer dragged the two bodies a few yards into the forest. If he was lucky, the animals would turn them into unrecognizable slabs of meat and piles of bones in a very short while.

  In the meantime, he had some decisions to make. First, he would no longer travel unarmed. He selected the better of the two muskets and threw the other away. He also took their gunpowder and bullets and, surprise, had found some money on their bodies, which he added to his own purse.

  Where to go was the next decision. He decided that Boston was not a good idea, if the presence of Joshua and Abel was any indication of the welcome a black man would receive. No, he thought, he would head north, far north. He would go to Canada. Even though it was British-controlled, it might be safer for him than in the colonies.

  If, he thought ruefully, anywhere would be safe for a black man.

  Chapter 4

  The trip south from Fort Washington to the Ohio River had been fruitless. From prior experience, Will had known that gathering intelligence was often like that. For every valuable piece of information you found, you wasted time chasing a hundred useless ones.

  Will was now convinced that there was no significant British presence on the Ohio River. Of course, he and his men couldn’t check every canoe and flatboat for the odd spy or scout, but there was no army to threaten Fort Washington or the various villages collectively known as Liberty. Hell, he decided, there probably wasn’t even a company of Redcoats between him and Tarleton’s headquarters at Fort Pitt.

  “See that, Major,” said Sergeant Barley, pointing in the direction of the opposite shore.

  Will was still not quite comfortable with his new rank. A few months ago he’d been a prisoner. Now, he was a major in the American Army. Tallmadge had bestowed the rank on him just before they departed. Will didn’t really care what rank he held. He just wanted to stay free and stop the British.

  He followed Barley’s gesture and saw a line of canoes in the shadows of the other side. With the mist on the river, they could easily have missed them.

  Will thought quickly. A handful of canoes could not contain an army, but they were coming from the direction of Fort Pitt. Thus, they might be spies or scouts for the British. If nothing else, they would be civilians who had knowledge of what was going on closer to Pitt. With their information, perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary to get any nearer to Pitt and Tarleton’s soldiers.

  Barley read his mind. “And it would be a helluva lot easier paddling with the current than against it, sir.”

  No argument there. Paddling upstream was brutal. Even though they were strong and in shape, and that now included Will, their arms and shoulders ached with the effort of arguing with the strong currents of the Ohio River.

  “We’ll let them pass and turn into their rear,” Will said.

  Their unexpected presence in the other canoes rear might frighten them, or even cause them to shoot, in which case his men would shoot back. He decided it was a chance worth taking. Innocence or guilt could be proven later.

  They drifted for a bit and then turned and began to paddle with the current and across the river. They’d gone about half way when they heard gunfire. Will didn’t hesitate. “Everybody get ready to shoot,” he ordered. “Now paddle harder.”

  They came upon the fighting within minutes. Bodies were in the water and there were individual struggles in those canoes that hadn’t capsized. It was too dangerous to fire their weapons. They couldn’t tell who was who. Then he saw a canoe with a handful of scrawny men in rags bearing down on another canoe that was in distress and appeared to contain what were clearly women though they were wearing men’s clothing. He quickly concluded that they were the victims and that the others were the attackers and fervently hoped he was right. Will pointed out the target canoe and gave the order to fire. Muskets roared, spilling the outlaws into the river in a display of very good shooting since the rocking action of the canoes made aiming difficult.

  Will’s men roared into the fighting and ended it quickly, killing the surviving outlaws with tomahawks and knives. Will had a pistol, but didn’t find a target. None of the men in the canoe they’d fired on had come up from underwater and he presumed they were dead. He saw a small group of the outlaws on the riverbank suddenly dart into the woods.

  “Let me go, sir,” asked Owen.

  “Just take some of the men with you, Corporal, and try not to get hurt.”

  Wells nodded and grabbed a couple of his new friends and headed into the woods where they quickly disappeared. Will almost felt sorry for the outlaws. Even the frontiersmen who came with Barley were impressed by his tracking skills.

  In the short amount of time he’d been with the new American Army, Wells had proven himself to be an outstanding woodsman and an incredibly accurate shot, along with being a solid, experienced soldier thanks to his years in the Royal Navy. Will was thinking of recommending him to a lieutenancy.

  Will gathered up the surviving pilgrims on the riverbank. Out of what he was told was more than twenty, only nine survived. Five were women and there was one child, a boy about seven, who clung to his mother. Most were in shock from the suddenness and savagery of the attack. Well, not all of them. One brown-haired woman glared at him. “I killed one of them,” she said, “and would’ve gotten another but my gun misfired.”

  “You did well,” Will said. He noted that she was really quite attractive, even though she was filthy, exhausted, and dressed in unbecoming men’s clothes. Two other women were helping an older man with a leg wound. He would leave them alone. They were in good hands.

  “And who are you, sir?” she added.

  Will almost bowed. “Captain—I mean Major—Will Drake of the New American Army.”

  The woman sagged visibly. “Then we’ve made it to safety?”

  “I hope so.”

  “My name is Sarah Benton,” she said and then named the others.

  She was about to say more when Wells and the other soldiers returned. “We found one dead a little ways up and caught up with the other two of them real easy. They made a
path like elephants.” Wells had never seen an elephant but he knew they were huge and it made sense that they would leave easy trails to follow.

  Will gestured. “And?”

  “Oh, sorry sir, we killed them.”

  Will grinned. “What are you sorry for, Wells? They deserved killing.”

  “Yes sir,” Wells said, not quite certain that a major made jokes with corporals. He understood the rank might be equivalent to that of captain of a ship, and those worthies never made jokes, at least not to ordinary folk like him. He fixed his eyes on Faith Benton. She caught him looking and smiled before returning to ministering to her father.

  “New American Army?” Sarah asked. “What happened to the Continental Army?”

  Will shrugged. “It lost. It’s time to start anew with a new name.”

  Sarah thought it made sense. “Will you take us to Liberty?”

  “With pleasure, Mistress Benton. In a way, you’re already there.”

  * * *

  Fitzroy was amazed that you could actually take a sailing ship up the Hudson River all the way to Albany. With a landsman’s lack of knowledge of rivers and things that float on them, he thought that the south-flowing current would be too strong to fight and that the crew would spend all their time at the oars, or sweeps as they were called. However, he found that a skilled captain could take advantage of the winds, do some sideways sailing he thought was called tacking, and arrive at their destination without too much difficulty.

  Since the few roads northward were miserable at best, traveling by water was more than a convenience; it was both safer and swifter. It was no wonder that the larger and more important cities in North America were located on navigable waterways. So too were the major cities of England, he realized with mild chagrin.

  It had been just such a sailing ship from New York that had brought a welcome addition to the British forces and some unwelcome news.

  The addition was General James Grant. Like Burgoyne, he too was a lieutenant general, but his orders were to serve under Burgoyne. Grant was quite fat, almost obese, and had little interest in underlings. He tolerated Fitzroy because he was Burgoyne’s aide and distant cousin. Otherwise he was almost uniformly arrogant, rude, and contemptuous, which did not endear him to others on Burgoyne’s staff.

  However, Grant could fight. Like many British commanders, he believed that the bayonet was the superior battlefield weapon for British infantry. Cold steel in their guts and the rebels will run, just as they had at Long Island and Brandywine, was his often stated motto.

  Burgoyne had professed delight over Grant’s arrival. For all his faults, Grant was a vast improvement over Tarleton and Arnold. It meant Burgoyne now had an experienced and seasoned second in command in the sixty-four-year-old Grant. It further meant that he didn’t have to depend on Arnold and Tarleton, whom he considered mediocre talents at best. Now he could create three unequal divisions: Arnold’s, Tarleton’s, and a third grand division under Grant.

  But it was not all good news. The war in France had deteriorated into bloody anarchy. The three factions fighting for control of France were now reduced to two. The French moderates, or those who wanted a constitutional monarchy like that of England’s, had been defeated by the radicals who were making every effort to kill all the aristocrats and nobility they could find. Savage and bloody massacres were taking place all over France as long boiling hatreds overflowed, causing cascades of blood. Some of the most ancient names in the French nobility had been wiped out, hacked to bloody pieces by outraged peasantry.

  The second group consisted of the monarchists who wanted the king restored to his throne and life resumed as if the revolution hadn’t happened. Of course, this would occur after the appropriate revolutionary ringleaders had been executed for treason, and tens of thousands of others sent to prisons and worked to death as slaves.

  Neither Burgoyne nor Fitzroy thought that France could ever return to an earlier world. Fitzroy had little sympathy for either group. Almost all of the French nobility he had met felt that the peasants they ruled were barely human at best and that they, the nobility, were godlike in comparison. Fitzroy felt that the nobles deserved some punishment for their actions in oppressing the peasants, but being hacked to death was far too extreme for the taste of Englishmen. The Bourbons might be fools, but killing them all was not a solution.

  “Sad,” Burgoyne said, “but the voice of reason is often overwhelmed by that of passion. Hatred and vengeance are so much more satisfactory than contemplation and compromise.”

  Fitzroy nodded. “And Calais has fallen?”

  “Yes and our army has almost all fled to England, in effect leaving France to the French. Lord Jeffrey Amherst has been defeated, which must have been a great shock to him. He had a very high impression of his own abilities. You recall, don’t you, that he declined to command our forces in the colonies? As I recall, he felt that fighting rebels was beneath his dignity. The bumbling French king and his idiot queen Marie Antoinette are now in London.”

  “Sir, I’ve read the reports, but I still find it difficult to believe that we were defeated by a French rabble.”

  Burgoyne wagged a finger at him, teacher to pupil. “Fitzroy, never forget that it almost happened here a few years back. If the population of the colonies had been larger and more compressed, perhaps they too could have become the brainless hordes like those that simply overwhelmed our army at Calais without any thought of their own casualties. They might have taken New York or Yorktown and chased us out.”

  “But we still hold Dunkirk, don’t we, General?”

  “For the time being, yes, and for what reason? Oh, I know the rationale will be for us to use it as a base for future operations, but I rather think we’ll soon be walled into the city and port and never be able to break out.”

  Burgoyne poured himself a brandy. He gestured for Fitzroy to help himself, which he did. “Our orders have changed, Major, and I need you to go to Tarleton, wherever he is.”

  “Yes, sir.” Recent messages had General Tarleton shifting forces between Pitt and Detroit in anticipation of Burgoyne’s arrival in the spring.

  “This should not surprise you, Fitzroy, but as a result of the defeat at Calais, their lordships in London want most of their army back to defend England. They are terrified that the French might somehow cross the Channel and lay waste to England or worse yet, that the unwashed English multitude will rise up like the French peasants and commence slaughtering country squires. They are particularly fearful it will happen in Ireland, or even Scotland, or dear God, Wales. It appears that nobody likes us all that much. Therefore, I will have one chance and one chance only to win this war. If we falter, then the rebels will be left unmolested at best to form their own country. At worst, they will be inspired to further rebellion, rise again, and attack the cities in the east.”

  “Dear God,” Fitzroy muttered.

  “Dear God, indeed. And if we do win, or rather, when we do win, the government of the colonies will not be as originally planned with the Loyalists as a privileged group lording it over those who rebelled or simply wavered. Instead, it will be a military government. Thanks to the upheaval in France, London will not tolerate the possibility that there might be another revolution here, so the colonies are to be disarmed and all properties will revert to the king who will decide who will possess them as tenants and not as owners.”

  Fitzroy was shocked. “But that effectively makes landless peasants out of even the Loyalists who now believe they own their property.”

  “Correct, which means they won’t be able to vote either for local or colony representatives. That also precludes the already remote possibility that someday there might be elections for seats in our Parliament. And your second and unsaid assumption is also correct. The takeover will be perceived as a betrayal by the Loyalists who supported us all these years. The exact details are in a package of documents General Grant brought. It’s called ‘Plans for the Future of the American Colonies,’
and it’s to remain a secret. You will read it of course, so you can understand its importance to me and to Tarleton. You will impress on Tarleton the urgency to be ready for anything and to keep the report as secret as we can for the time being, which means until we’ve destroyed the rebels at this Liberty place. A man like Tarleton usually needs no urging to go out and kill people, but one never knows and I’ve certainly learned not to assume anything.”

  Later in the privacy of his quarters, Fitzroy read the fairly lengthy document with both astonishment and dismay. There was good reason for it to remain a secret. It was inflammatory at best. It had the potential to outrage the most loyal of colonists. He finished, and returned it to the chest and locked it.

  Fitzroy’s quarters were in a private room above a large and fairly decent tavern, the one recommended by his innkeeper in New York. It had proven a pleasant surprise at many levels. When he returned there in the evening, he always wrote of the day’s events in his journal. He referenced reading the “Plans,” and how they dismayed him, but did not go into detail.

  There was a tap on the door and Hannah Doorn, the owner of the tavern, entered. She was a blond widow in her mid-thirties, very attractive although a little plumpish. And better, she liked him, which meant he received far better treatment than an ordinary guest, and the tavern was well appointed in the first place.

  Hannah Doorn was a sort of woman he’d never met before. Not only was she quite lovely, but she possessed business acumen and had numerous financial interests in Albany and further west. She was a shapely reminder that the Dutch presence predated the British and, although it had faded in New York, places like Albany still had a number of Dutch families and merchants. Typical Dutchies, he’d concluded on meeting Hannah and others. They made money everywhere, just like the Jews.

  At least as surprising, Hannah was an artist. Her drawings and paintings of life in the area were quite exact. She wanted to sketch him, but he’d demurred, at least so far.