The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles (7 page)

What planter who prided himself on efficiency—and ledgers that showed a profit—wouldn’t prefer to purchase a cowed, completely unlettered black from Africa? A black whose legal status, from the beginning, was vague? And whose fatally distinctive coloration made him easier to detect if he fled his bondage? Even the meanest petty criminal from the London stews at least had a white skin to keep him relatively invisible if he succeeded in escaping.

But what had begun as a natural tendency to seek the most stable and permanent kind of agricultural labor force had degenerated into outright ownership of one human being by another.

It was a source of sardonic amusement for Judson to recall that the very first blacks on the continent—twenty—were put ashore and sold at the Jamestown colony by the largely British crew of a Dutch privateer. The date was 1619—one year before the arrival of the
Mayflower
at Plymouth, carrying forty-one stiff-necked Puritan families, whose children and grandchildren prided themselves on being descended from “founding fathers.” What a pity there were no genealogical tables to permit the offspring of the Jamestown twenty to dispute that claim!

In the early years of the colonial blackbird trade, the word
slave
had seldom if ever been spoken. Gradually, though, it came into common use as the more unscrupulous members of the landed class realized that New England shipowners were quite willing to supply a constant stream of African bucks and wenches, and that a combination of evolving custom and clever writing of new statutes could transform purchased black workers into permanent chattels with no hope of ever earning freedom—a condition the redemptioners and transported prison inmates never faced.

Now the institution had grown so entrenched—producing fear and repression on one side, submission and hatred on the other—that Judson could only foresee an eventual confrontation between those who listened to their consciences and those who heard nothing but the jingling voice of the pound.

By mid-morning, his reflections had put him in thoroughly miserable spirits. He lay in a grove at the edge of the plantation, glooming over the explosive potential of the situation with the local blacks, then experiencing even deeper depression over his own behavior.

Why in God’s name was he driven to such excesses of word and deed, both in his father’s presence and elsewhere? Gazing out across the tobacco fields where heat-devils rippled the air, he saw the white walls of Sermon Hill rising on the crest of the low rise above the Rappahannock and wished he were anywhere but here.

He wished he were out beyond the Blue Wall with his friend, for instance. In empty country. No laws, no Bible-spouting hypocrites, no incipient rebellions, no pea-headed overseers, no—

No Peggy to haunt him.

His father’s words came back to him with tormenting clarity.

Taint.

Poisoned.

Devil’s blood
—

Try as he might, he couldn’t scoff away the uneasy suspicion that Angus had struck a vein of truth. One from which Judson turned in terror and loathing. The only way to blunt the fear was with rum. Slowly drinking himself insensible, he was able to convince himself that he only needed to escape Virginia to escape his demons.

He fell into a stupor that brought bizarre dreams.

He saw flame-haired George Rogers Clark stalking through the wilderness, standing as tall as the trees themselves. He saw Peggy naked, beckoning him with lewd gestures, a slut’s teasing smile. He saw his father, fierce as Moses, hand raised to deliver a blow while lightning flashed in a sky of churning storm—

He awoke suddenly. Lying on his back in the grass, he felt chilly. Nearby, his roan stood head down, a statue against the first faint stars. In the west, red stained the horizon.

Judson licked the inside of his furred mouth. He heard a sound so faint that the slightest change in the direction of the breeze silenced it for a moment. But he recognized the sound.

The hollow boom of a hand drum.

The moment he identified the sound, it stopped completely. But he could have sworn the eerie thudding had drifted from the direction of Sermon Hill.

R
AGGED AND LOUSE-RIDDEN
, Philip Kent trudged through the mud of what passed for a street in the camp of the American army.

He was physically exhausted. Not from working at digging and fortifying new earthworks; not from trenching out new vaults when the old ones overflowed with human waste. From boredom. The endless, uncertain waiting—

Constant worry about his wife Anne only added to the strain. He got to see her once or twice a week if he was lucky. Regulations were haphazard in the American siege lines surrounding Boston. Sometimes he could obtain permission to slip away to Watertown of an evening, sometimes not. He seldom knew in advance. Tonight he’d been fortunate, and gotten leave to go.

A drizzling mid-September rain fell, worsening conditions in the already wretched camp that had sprung up and spread as various volunteer regiments from all over the colonies arrived during the summer and settled in beside one another, helter-skelter. Since taking charge in early July, the new commanding general of the Continental Army, George Washington of Virginia, had been trying to bring some organization to the chaos. He hadn’t made much progress, even though new orders relating to camp discipline or procedures came streaming out of Wadsworth House in Cambridge almost every day.

Philip Kent, a short, wide-shouldered young man with dark eyes and hair tied up in a queue, scarcely looked like a soldier as he slogged along in boots worn perilously thin on the bottoms. But then, few of the volunteers resembled soldiers.

There were some exceptions, of course. The Rhode Islanders with their neat tents, each equipped with its own front awning. Their encampment looked almost British. The same held true for the Twenty-first Massachusetts, men from Marblehead who had given up their occupations as shipwrights and fishermen but not their seafaring heritage. The Marbleheaders were outfitted in trim blue seacloth jackets and loose white sailor’s trousers. But apart from a handful of such regiments, the Americans dressed and often acted like rabble. Their living places matched.

Most of the men, Philip included, lived in shelters made of whatever materials they had purchased, brought from home, or stolen. Philip’s Twenty-ninth Massachusetts infantry regiment, camped between Cambridge and the earthworks at the center of the American line overlooking the Charles River, made do in shanties knocked together from warped boards. But as he walked, Philip saw many other types of structures, from sailcloth tents sagging under the drizzle to crude shelters of fieldstone chinked up with turf. Some units simply lived on the ground between constantly soggy blankets.

To add to the confusion, it was often impossible to tell officers from enlisted men. General Washington had tried to outfit the volunteer soldiers in some semblance of a uniform. Amid the flurry of organizational orders and new commissions issuing from the house formerly hunting shirts. No action had been taken on the request to the Continental Congress for ten thousand smock-like hunting shirts. No action had been taken on the request before the assembly adjourned early in August. Washington had meantime authorized officers to adopt scarves, cockades, second-hand epaulets—whatever they could find to identify themselves.

Not that it made much difference to the men who served under them.

The army encamped at Boston consisted mostly of farmers and artisans, all waiting to see whether a full-scale war would break out, or would be defused by moves toward reconciliation already taken by the Congress that represented every colony except Georgia. The men who made up the army didn’t understand military discipline and in fact resented it. Philip recalled hearing a prediction that this attitude might prevail, and prove disastrous. The prediction had been made by his friend Henry Knox, the fat Boston bookseller who was somewhere in the lines acting as a sort of supervising engineer in charge of artillery. Philip had not seen Knox all summer, though.

No one knew how many volunteers had arrived in Massachusetts since the outbreak of hostilities. Philip had heard figures ranging from twelve to twenty thousand. The reaction of these summer soldiers to the commander-in-chief’s various orders forbidding such activities as gambling and “profane cursing,” and demanding attendance at “divine services” twice daily, ranged from indifference to outright defiance.

A few shrewd commanders recognized the problem and tried to deal with it. One such was Iz Putnam of Connecticut, the old Indian fighter who had defended the king’s interests during the American phase of the Seven Years’ War. Putnam invented schemes to sharpen his men for combat and keep them diverted at the same time.

Since the terrifying shelling of Breed’s and Bunker’s Hills in June, most of the Continentals had learned they had little to fear from the barrages of the British batteries in Boston. But the artillery fire was almost constant in clear weather. So Putnam sent his men darting out of their earthworks to recover spent cannon shot, in short supply on the American side. The prize for each round was a tot of rum. An explosive shell earned two tots—provided it didn’t blow up the man who went after it. Philip wished that the Twenty-ninth Massachusetts had that kind of imaginative commander.

Now, as he slogged along in the mud, his mind began to veer from camp life to the other world he lived in whenever he could. The world of Watertown—and Anne. He paid less and less attention to the men idly attempting to wipe their muskets dry inside lantern-lit hovels. He dodged the bones of an evening fish ration flung into his path. Unseeing, he passed two volunteers urinating in the open—the accepted custom. He went by tents and lean-tos noisy with quarreling, drinking and forbidden dicing. In some of the temporary dwellings, feminine giggling could be heard, indicating that “immoral practices”—likewise prohibited—were in full swing. Head down, hands in the pockets of his sodden coat, he thought only about his wife.

She was near her term; immense of belly. She’d been extremely weak the past month or so, abed most of the time in the rented rooms Lawyer Ware had taken in Watertown.

But even more disturbing, the Connecticut surgeon whom Philip had located with such difficulty in midsummer, and hired to take over Anne’s care on a once-weekly basis, had been shot and killed the preceding week after an argument about cards.

Philip had paid the cheerfully greedy doctor with money saved from his earnings at the Edes and Gill print shop. He’d gotten the money from Ben Edes personally. Edes, who had set up his patriot press in Water-town, had been keeping the funds for Philip. Now the money was of no use. The doctor was permanently unavailable.

In the past few days Philip had searched frantically for someone to replace the doctor. The quest so far had been fruitless.

Wiping rain from his cheeks, he turned a corner past another hovel. He glanced up suddenly at the sound of a brawl in progress between a double row of tents a few steps further down. Damnation! He should have watched his route more carefully. Avoided this most contentious section of the American center. Now he was caught.

He walked rapidly, determined to pass the twelve or fifteen men punching, kicking and yelling in the middle of the muddy street. He kept close to the line of the tents, eyed the combatants. Virginians to a man.

The Virginians had become the marvel of the camps when the first contingent reached Boston in July, boasting a march of six or seven hundred miles in three weeks, with no one ill, no deserters. They were tall, peculiar, violent men with skins the color of browned autumn leaves. Their clothing—especially their voluminous white hunting shirts and their headgear: round, broad-brimmed hats or caps with dangling fur tails—excited comment wherever they walked.

The Virginians automatically pushed aside all men smaller than themselves, and many who weren’t smaller. Their height and tough bearing gave them the authority. So did their strange weapons: guns much longer and narrower through the barrel than the familiar smoothbore muskets.

The backwoodsmen from Virginia called their weapons Kentucky rifles, though they claimed the pieces were manufactured in Pennsylvania. Using the rifles, they challenged all comers to shooting contests—and always won—shattering bottle targets at impossible ranges of two or three hundred yards. Philip’s Brown Bess could barely fire half that distance before spending its ball.

Though the rifles took longer to load than muskets, and could not be fitted with bayonets, they were deadly accurate. So were the eyes that aimed them. Eyes that had supposedly gazed on distant country where blue mountains climbed toward a sea of cloud, and tribes of the red-skinned, savage Indians roamed.

This evening, the Virginians were having at each other again. That too was a familiar occurrence. Men gleefully booted the groins of their opponents, stepped on faces, bit ankles or wrists. Half the fighters were on their knees or backs or bellies, covered with gummy mud. But they kept slugging and thrashing and getting up again. And—to Philip’s astonishment—for the most part, they were laughing.

He moved faster, determined to get clear of the brawl post haste.

He skirted the churning mass of men while other Virginians lounging near the tents eyed him with arrogant curiosity. Further down the camp street, a phaeton turned the corner, heading away from the brawlers. Suddenly one of the phaeton’s three cloaked occupants lurched to his feet. He grabbed his driver’s shoulder. In a moment, the team was charging back toward the fight, which continued without letup.

One side of the battle abruptly grew like a living organism, rolling outward until Philip was virtually on the edge. He had to jump aside to avoid a whizzing fist. Someone shoved the small of his back:

“Hey, Zech, if you need somebody to punch, here’s one of them wise men!”

Philip had been pushed by a spectator. Off balance, he cursed and fisted his hands. He got angry when men from other colonies taunted the Massachusetts soldiers with the epithet applied to the Boston radicals. But before he could swing on the man who’d shoved him, he inadvertently stumbled into the melee. A huge, hard hand blasted into his stomach, doubled him over—