Revolution Song Read online

  In one sense, these three people of the eighteenth century stand for others, people whose freedom was limited. But to define them in terms of issues—slavery, women’s liberty, the struggle of commoners versus elites—feels too cramped. They were not representatives of groups. They were gorgeously themselves. As I researched their lives, they seemed to reject categorization; like each of us, they demanded uniqueness.

  This book, then, tries to avoid abstract labels and stays close to the lives of its six protagonists. It follows the whole sweep of those lives, from birth to death. My objective is to offer not just an account of the era in which the American nation was founded, but a sense of what it felt like. Philosophers say that human subjectivity is the one wall science can never break down: we will never know scientifically what it is like to experience life from someone else’s perspective. But art can do this, and I believe that history has an element of art in it.

  Chronologically, the book opens in the early 1700s and ends in the 1830s, when steam engines accelerated the pace of the nation’s growth. And while it mostly takes place in America, the story begins in England: pastoral, green England, the land of both Empire and Enlightenment, which was in so many ways the cradle of America.

  PART ONE

  George Germain (aka George Sackville), painted in 1760 by Nathaniel Hone.

  Chapter 1

  SONS OF FATHERS

  In the summer of 1716, a carriage made its rumbling way southeast from London, following the turnpike road toward a tiny village called Sevenoaks. Entering the county of Kent, it traversed luxuriantly green hills and meadows stippled with color. Inside, braced against the turbulence of the ride, and maybe the only thing to disrupt the peace of the journey, was the reason for it: a newborn baby.

  As the trip neared its end, the travelers tending to the infant could see ahead of them what to the unknowing eye looked like a cityscape rising up from the countryside. Gabled brick houses, built of mottled Kentish ragstone, formed the outline of a medieval English town. But as one drew nearer, the optical illusion faded. It wasn’t a town at all but a single house.

  The house was called Knole. It had been owned by a succession of luminaries that included the Archbishop of Canterbury, King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, but for some generations now it had been the estate of the Sackvilles, one of England’s most deeply aristocratic families. Knole was a supreme manifestation of an architectural fetish that developed among European nobility in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the calendar house. It had 12 separate entrances, to represent each month of the year, 52 staircases, one for every week, 7 interior courtyards, which corresponded to the days of the week, and no fewer than 365 rooms. In total, it comprised four acres of interior space, all of it gilded, tapestried and hung with stately art—“spendidly sombre and sumptuous,” as a later inhabitant would say. It was the most famous private house in England and one of the grandest houses in the world. For the baby boy who was carried through its front door for the first time that summer, past rows of dutifully arrayed servants (there were forty-two for the interior alone), it would simply be home.

  His name was George. He was the third son of Lionel Sackville, the Duke of Dorset. Despite his low place in the birth order, he became his father’s favorite. His childhood unfolded against a backdrop of extreme privilege, starting with his baptism, at which George I, the king of England, served as his godfather. The boy grew up playing in the endless corridors (he was well into his teens before he was able to venture through the whole house without fear of getting lost), amid the beech, chestnut, pear and cherry trees of the garden, and in the deer park, which flowed so seamlessly toward the paneled interior of the house that a Sackville once stepped into the central hall to find himself standing face-to-face with a live stag.

  Much of that garden—10,000 beech trees, to be exact—had been installed by Knole’s only boarder. Elizabeth Germain, familiarly known as Lady Betty, was a wealthy widow whose three children had died young. Her late husband, Sir John Germain, had been a friend of the Sackville family, and upon his death George’s parents had offered her a wing of the house. She spent her time and money in improving Knole and in supporting various charities. Her husband had left her one thing besides a fortune: a request that she eventually bequeath her wealth to one of the Duke of Dorset’s sons. Like the duke, Lady Betty favored young George—who, if and when he inherited the Germain fortune, would take the family name as well. So, all in all, the boy’s prospects could not have been brighter.

  Lord George Sackville had the best tutors and teachers, and while literature did not move him—“I have not genius sufficient for works of mere imagination,” he once said—when it came to English history he was in his element. History books of the time told the story of England as a grand pageant, starting with the colonization of the island by the Romans, bringers of literature and government. Then the Germanic tribes swept in: the Saxons and the Jutes and the Angles, from the latter of which the island would get its name. The Norman invaders from France introduced a new overlay of language and civilization. King John’s concessions to the barons at Runnymede in 1215 were recognized in the eighteenth century as the beginning of a constitutional form of government. Then came the age of the explorers, and the period in which the English broke their inward focus, sent ships into distant waters, and began to comprehend a new, seemingly unlimited horizon. They battled with the wily Dutch in the far-off East Indies over control of sea lanes and access to spices. They defied malaria and sunstroke to install sugar plantations on Caribbean islands.

  Young George was particularly drawn to political history. Beginning in the decades before he was born, a revolution in ideas swept over England, which would transform the political landscape. Focusing on the human mind as the arbiter of knowledge led certain men to argue that the most just society was one in which power was in the hands not of a monarch or an elite but of individuals. The concepts of “natural law” and “toleration” became the foundation of a political party, the Whigs, which favored Parliament over the monarchy. A simultaneous revolution was taking place in science. All of this led some to the optimistic belief that, thanks to English ideas and inventions, a new, more modern and civilized world was coming into being. England, by this thinking, was the land of expanding freedom, the land of the future.

  This did not preclude England also becoming a major colonizing power. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, a grand scheme coalesced in the minds of a handful of leaders: to extend “the boundaries of Empire,” as the charter of the Royal Society declared. (The Society—of which George Sackville’s grandfather was a member—was founded to advance not only English science but English dominion.) In particular, those boundaries would encompass two continents, Africa and America, tying them inextricably to England and to one another. The Stuarts, England’s ruling family, together with several other aristocratic families and members of the Royal Society, formed a company, the Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, which would have a monopoly to exploit the continent and a mission to “set to sea ships &c with ordnance &c” in order to secure “mines of gold and silver,” which would be used “for the buying and selling bartering and exchanging of for or with any negroes slaves good wares merchandises whatsoever.” The scheme, in short, was to expand outposts in West Africa for obtaining slaves and gold, and to use these to develop the Caribbean sugar fields and the colonies in North America. A vast, rambling system came into being in which sugar, tobacco, guns and other products, not the least of which were human beings, got cycled around the Atlantic Ocean. Over the decades from the 1660s to the 1720s, profits streamed into the home country, in particular into the purses of the shareholders of the Royal African Company (as it became known), which encouraged more ships to set sail for the West African coast and more English settlers to make their homes in America.

  This was the backdrop to George Sackville’s upbringing and education: a sense of England rising inexorably, thanks in large part to
its management of a network of trade and exploitation that ran from the west coast of Africa to the east coast of North America. British youths learned about this network with pride; they saw it as the capstone of a saga that stretched all the way back to the founding by the Romans of a city they called Londinium. Punctuating this saga, for a history student such as George Sackville, was the toll of the kings and queens of England and details of their reigns. And for every monarch associated with the pageantry and sweat that had steered England toward greatness there was a corresponding Sackville: this one Chancellor of the Exchequer for Queen Elizabeth, that one Lord Chamberlain to Charles I.

  Through his childhood young George thoroughly absorbed the lesson of Knole and its illustrious family. The feudal truths mortared into its walls—of the greatness and inexorability of England, its rise and its noble families—became part of his being. He listened reverently to the war stories of his grandfather, who had fought on the Continent. He grew big and strong. He became an accomplished horseman. His personality developed: combative, coltish. He yearned to test himself in battle, to fight for England’s ever-widening empire.

  Broteer Furro opened his eyes for the first time—this would have been when Lord George Sackville was about ten years old and racing about the endless corridors of Knole—onto the blue sky yawning above the West African savanna. His village, called Dukandarra, was located in the interior of what was generally referred to as Guinea. It was a place of low shrubs, fiery sun and kaleidoscopic birdlife. Cows, goats and donkeys milled thickly: his family had wealth. His father, Saungm Furro, was a local prince, the head of the village. Broteer had two younger brothers.

  Broteer’s people may have been Fulani, herders who had slowly spread out from their original homeland in the Senegal River valley, in westernmost Africa, eastward as far as Lake Chad, near the center of the continent. Their basic communal unit was the ruga, or cattle camp. Cows were the center of life. As a very small child, Broteer would have developed a close bond with the animals. He may have learned the Fulani creation myth, according to which the Fulani and their cows were kindred beings. In one variation, a girl named Bajemongo was bathing in a river when the spirit of the river rose up and took her, impregnating her with two sons. When the boys were old enough, the spirit provided for each of them by bringing forth from the river twenty-two cattle: ten cows and one bull for each boy to tend. Slaveholding was a fixture of Fulani life from ancient times, and in the creation story the spirit also produced from the river a pair of slaves for each boy, one male and one female.

  Years passed, and Broteer learned the rhythm of the seasons. When rain fell, it was like a curtain. The grassland carried onward like an ocean, the grass so high a boy could be swallowed up in it. At dry times it was perishingly hot, and animals needed to be moved in search of water.

  Along with the other boys of Dukandarra, Broteer would have developed strength and self-reliance by practicing a ritualized form of stick-fighting. He also apparently received ritual scarring on his face. Girls hoisted dried calabashes filled with sour milk onto their heads and walked with them to nearby villages to sell. Everyone drank milk and ate a gruel of sour milk and millet. They also ate meat, but if they were indeed Fulani, they would not have eaten pork, for they were one of the earliest African peoples to convert to Islam.

  One day when Broteer was about ten, there was a terrible argument between his mother and his father. Broteer was old enough to comprehend its complexity. As his father’s first wife, his mother was, by tradition, entitled to be consulted on the subject of subsequent wives. Presumably, his father had asked for her blessing when he chose a second wife, but he picked a third without telling Broteer’s mother. For her this was a matter of honor and pride. The fight ended with her hoisting up Broteer’s two younger siblings, one on her back, the other in her arms, and marching off, out of the village, with Broteer running to keep up.

  Broteer was also old enough to notice and be concerned about the fact that his mother, in her haste and anger, brought nothing else: no cloth to use for a bed, and no food. She stopped periodically and foraged for fruit for herself and the children. After two days, they came to the edge of a desert, and she headed straight into it. At night they curled up next to each other and listened in terror to the howls of wolves and lions.

  After five days of travel, the desert ended and they entered a countryside such as the boy had never seen before. There was a wide and sparkling river surrounded by flat land lush with vegetation, with mountains brooding in the distance. They had arrived at his mother’s destination: the house of a farmer whom she knew.

  And here, abruptly, his mother left him. He was to stay with this man and help him tend his sheep. So his life started anew. Every morning Broteer and another boy drove a herd of sheep out to pasture on the plains, and as the sun set they returned. The farmer had no children of his own, and he treated Broteer with kindness. When one day Broteer was attacked by dogs and bitten so severely that the scars would stay for the rest of his life, the man carried him home and cared for him, tenderly nursing him back to health.

  Life, for all its strangeness, was good. Broteer was big-boned, strong, and growing fast. He witnessed the changing of the seasons in his new home. In June, the rains came, and the river flooded the plains. As the flood waters rose to seven feet and more, people retreated to the hills. When the water receded Broteer saw that it left a fresh coating of black mud behind, and with it fertility. People came back to the plains, and the planting of crops began.

  George Washington entered the world about four years after Broteer Furro. It was a winter’s morning, February 1732, in tidewater Virginia, the heartland of British North America. As the season changed, nature slowly began to reveal itself. In spring, the baby could squint up toward the bright sun through red cedars and towering loblolly pines. The family’s simple brick house sat on a gentle slope just above Popes Creek, which flowed into the Potomac River. There were fish in the creek; turtles lurked around the marsh just behind. But the boy would have few memories of playing or fishing here, for when he was three years old the family moved to another, even wilder and more fertile portion of Virginia.

  The new home was a place the Washingtons called Little Hunting Creek Plantation: 2,500 soaringly panoramic acres of forested hills and valleys stretched out along the Potomac River, much of which had been owned by the family since George’s great-grandfather’s time. The English had been in North America for more than a century, and the infant George was the fourth generation of Washingtons to call it home. He was the third son of Augustine Washington, whose grandfather had emigrated from Oxfordshire in 1656.

  Gus Washington, as people called him, was the kind of father a young boy could admire. He was tall, gentle and famed for his strength. Someone said he could “raise up and place in a wagon a mass of iron that two ordinary men could barely raise from the ground.” He was also restless, endlessly striving. He served in the local militia and local government. He was the county sheriff. He ran an ironworks. Like his forebears, he had bought up Virginia acreage, but in even greater quantities than they had. The transcontinental economic system that fostered the rise of England’s empire was now in full swing, so that his ambitions exceeded his father’s. And where in Gus Washington’s grandfather’s time much of the work had been done by white indentured servants, Gus himself came of age along with a new system, in which Africans, supervised by whites, did the work in teams. When Gus was born, there had been about 5,000 slaves in the whole region. By the time he himself started having children, the number was above 40,000; slaves made up 20 percent of the population, and the numbers were growing. As Europeans fell in love with tobacco—partly for what they took to be its medicinal properties—more slaves were needed, to plant, prime, top, cure and prize tobacco that would be smoked in London cafés.

  Gus Washington was on the rise, but he was also of the earth. He was rugged, pink-complected: very much an Englishman, but born and bred to the woods and farmla
nd of Virginia.

  As George grew, he became aware of the complexities of his family. His father had had another wife, who had died before he was born; thanks to their marriage, George had two older half-brothers whom he didn’t know—they were at school in England—and there had also been a half-sister, Jane, who died when he was a toddler. As much as George must have idolized his father, the man was away much of the time. Though the family moved yet again in order to be near the ironworks that Gus Washington managed—to a new farm on the banks of the Rappahannock River, a place they called the Home Farm—he also traveled to England on business, and on horseback up and down the coastal plain and west toward the wild hinterland of the Blue Ridge Mountains, between his farms and on behalf of the British administration of the colony.

  That meant that George’s mother was the dominant presence in his life. Mary Ball, as she was known before she married Gus Washington, was a backwoods woman: hard-nosed, domineering, illiterate. She didn’t fancy dressing up or trying to fit into society. She had bad teeth. She may have smoked a pipe. She was miserly and hectoring. A plausible impetus for Gus Washington to have offered marriage to a woman who seemed to inhabit a different realm of the social universe was the fact that she had inherited 600 acres of land, which adjoined his.