Patriot's Dream, page 1
Patriot’s Dream
ELIZABETH PETERS
WRITING AS
BARBARA
MICHAELS
Dedication
TO SANDY
In whose gracious drawing room the idea
for Patriot’s Dream first came to me
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prelude
Chapter 1
Summer 1976—Spring 1774
Chapter 2
Summer 1976
Chapter 3
Spring 1775
Chapter 4
Summer 1976
Chapter 5
May 1776
Chapter 6
Summer 1976
Chapter 7
Autumn 1777
Chapter 8
Summer 1976
Chapter 9
December 1778
Chapter 10
Summer 1976
Chapter 11
March 1780
Chapter 12
Summer 1976
Chapter 13
February 1781
Chapter 14
Summer 1976
Chapter 15
March 1781
Chapter 16
Summer 1976
Chapter 17
May 1781
Chapter 18
Summer 1976
Chapter 19
June 1781
Chapter 20
Summer 1976
Chapter 21
Summer 1976
Chapter 22
Winter 18—
Chapter 23
Summer 1976
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Barbara Michaels
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prelude
I. Leah
THE MAN WHO BOUGHT HER CALLED HER LEAH. SHE HAD forgotten her real name long before. She had also forgotten the name of her tribe, if she ever knew it; but a modern anthropologist would have had no difficulty in classifying her. The brown skin, long, curly dark hair, thin lips and aquiline nose were typical of the Fulani people who lived in the inner regions of Senegal.
The voyage to America was Leah’s second encounter with slave traders. She was six years old when she was stolen the first time, along with three other small children whose mothers had left them playing under a tree while they worked the fields. The slavers were Mandingoes. The great Mandingo empire, with its university city of Timbuktu, was in decline, but the Mandingoes were still powerful planters and traders. The trade included slaves, as one of many commodities, for the vast plantations required hundreds of field hands. The economy had a superficial resemblance to one that was developing on another continent far to the west.
Leah became a house servant and eventually bore her master two children. Both died. She was approximately sixteen when the next group of slavers entered her life. Her master fought bravely to protect his property, but in vain; the raiders were professionals, who earned an excellent living supplying human cargoes to the ships that came in increasing numbers to the West African coast.
The raiders acquired approximately fifty prisoners, including Leah. The march to the coast took five days. There the captives joined several hundred others who were crammed into the barracoons. Leah spent only one night there, since a ship was already at anchor out beyond the bar. It was an English ship, but it might as easily have been Dutch or Swedish, or even American, although the Yankee traders did not enter the Guinea trade in force until later, after slave trading had been legally abolished and the profits were correspondingly higher.
Early in the morning two hundred and fifty slaves were chained together and marched to the shore. The mounting roar of the surf sounded like the voice of a great angry beast to the captives, many of whom had never seen the ocean. They began to cry out in fear. Some tried to run away. Held by the chains that bound them together, the weaker were dragged by the stronger as the panic spread. The shouts and blows of the drivers soon restored order. Weeping and groaning, the prisoners went on. When they reached the top of a low sandy rise, they saw the ocean.
Of all her experiences, this sight impressed Leah most. She often described it to her children. Mountains of water broke on the desolate shore. The sound of the surf was like thunder, and the wind chilled her bare skin. Leah flung herself down, digging her nails into the sand; but rough hands dragged her up, removed her chains, and forced her out into the water. The foam swirled around her ankles as she was flung into one of the waiting canoes. The canoe crewmen were experienced sailors, who knew the tricks of the treacherous waves; at precisely the right moment the paddles were driven in, and amid triumphant shouts the small boats flew out and over the bar, toward the waiting slaver.
Two of the bigger, stronger men in Leah’s boat managed to jump overboard and drown themselves, but she made no attempt to escape. She was numb with terror. She knew what awaited her and the others. The whispered rumors had spread among the captives the night before. The ship came from a distant country called Jong sang doo, “the land where the slaves are sold.” The men of Jong sang doo were savages who ate human flesh.
It was a bad trip. The fault was not the captain’s; he took every precaution. Each day the male slaves were brought on deck to be “danced.” The exercise was rather hard on wrists and ankles chafed raw by the chains, but it was considered helpful in preventing scurvy and the suicidal melancholy that took almost as many lives as disease. The women and children were allowed to roam free, except at night, when they were stowed like cordwood in the hold. Like the other women, Leah was allotted a space five feet ten inches long and sixteen inches wide. The men had a little more room—six feet by sixteen inches. Unfortunately, the ship ran into bad weather, and for two weeks the slaves had to be confined in their coffin-shaped spaces day and night. Dysentery and smallpox ran rampant.
It would not have made Leah feel any better to know that the mortality rate among the black cargo was slightly less than the one that prevailed among the white crews of the English ships in the Guinea trade. The slaves were worth money to the captain, but the sailors were not. Flogged, starved, crippled by scurvy and syphilis, they were so badly misused that the slaves, out of pity, sometimes gave starving seamen part of their own meager rations.
When the ship finally reached Virginia, only six crewmen were on their feet. A hundred of the original two hundred and fifty slaves were still alive. A sentimentalist might say that Leah was one of the unlucky ones. Not being a sentimentalist, Leah was glad to be alive, and glad to be out of the hold.
She was sold on the block at Jamestown to a tobacco planter named Johnson. The Fulani complexion and bone structure, refined by several weeks of inadequate rations, appealed to his tastes; and Mrs. Johnson, a long-nosed, sallow woman who had been a minor Byrd before her marriage, was no more surprised than anyone else when Leah’s baby was several shades lighter than its mother, with the distinctive Johnson chin. The second child, a girl, resembled its father to an astonishing degree, but this did not prevent Johnson from selling it, when he found himself short of cash.
Leah lived to be almost sixty, and she lost count of the number of her grandchildren before she died. It is regrettable, but true, that she had not found life in the New World particularly unpleasant. It was not much different from the life she had known in Africa—serving a man and bearing his children. And in Virginia, her children lived.
II. Charles
Charles Wilde was named after a king. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. But the time was 1630; and in 1649 Charles the First of England lost his throne, and then his head, and Charles Wilde’s father lost everything but his head. It must be admitted that he had very little to lose. In years to come, proud descendants of Cavalier families would explain the absence of family silver plate by saying that it had been melted down in the King’s cause. The Wildes made the same claim, but in point of fact they had never had any plate, or any furniture to put it on. The manor house was a tumbledown ruin in 1630, and the tenants had long since left for greener pastures. The upheaval of civil war provided Charles’s father with a good excuse to leave home and the embarrassing debts that had reduced the family to a state somewhat less prosperous than that of a hard-working craftsman.
Francis Wilde went first to the Continent with his son; and then, finding that area oversupplied with men whose only talents were drinking and gambling, he proceeded to his Majesty’s colony of Virginia. Shocked by the execution of the King, the colonial legislature had proclaimed the dead monarch’s son King Charles the Second, and Governor Berkeley gave fleeing Cavaliers support and comfort.
The Wildes took kindly to the new country, which was not surprising, since Berkeley and his friends were doing their best to reproduce the old system of a landed aristocracy. Being officially a “gentleman,” Wilde obtained a land grant and settled down to the occupations of his station—drinking and gambling.
It would be pleasant to be able to report that Francis Wilde died in a manner befitting his station. His descendants cherished a legend that he was killed in a duel. In fact, he drowned in six inches of muddy water, having fallen face down in a stream while on his way home after a prolonged drinking bout with a friend.
In 1660, when the English restored Charles the Second to the throne, Charles Wilde was thirty years old. He had a wife who had brought him three hundred acres adjoining the property he had inherited from his father, and he had no inclination to return to Eng land. He was doing very well.
Berkeley, a clever old aristocrat, had quietly bided his time during the rule of the Cromwellians. With the restoration of the monarchy he came out into the open. He and his adherents packed the council and deprived the lower legislative body, the House of Burgesses, of most of its power. The councillors voted themselves land and ample salaries. Charles was one of the council. By the time he died, in 1670, his estate had grown from five hundred to almost seven thousand acres.
His son, Nicholas, was not a chip off the old block. Charles hated the boy, whom he called “changeling” and “prig,” among other things. A slender, fair-haired youth whose delicate features resembled those of his mother, Nicholas had taken to reading—which, as Charles was wont to point out, is a pernicious vice. Even so, it is hard to explain why Nicholas should have taken the course he did. His father was dead, so annoying the old man could not have been a motive.
The reasons for Bacon’s Rebellion have been much debated. The men who followed Nathaniel Bacon in 1676 were people who had seen their hard-won western lands stolen by Berkeley and his crowd, frontiersmen whose desperate calls for help against Indian massacres had been ignored by the governor, safe at home in Jamestown. The rebellion might be regarded as a protest of “the people” against the aristocracy. Bacon himself was a “gentleman,” but he was not one of Berkeley’s pets, so perhaps his motives were not unselfish. At any rate, Nicholas had no reason to join him. But he did.
The rebellion was crushed. Berkeley, the suave, civilized aristocrat, hanged twenty of the rebels. He was scolded for this by Charles the Second, who remarked irritably, “That old fool has hanged more men in that naked country than I did for the murder of my father.” This was true, but it was not much consolation to the men who had been hanged.
Nicholas was not hanged, nor were his estates confiscated, as were those of many of the rebels. The Assembly decided on his punishment: “that Nicholas Wilde, gentl, doe with a rope about his neck, on his knees, begg his life of the governour and councell, and in the like posture acknoledge his crimes of rebellion and treason in the country court, and that he be fined to the king’s majestic fifty thousand pounds of merchantable tobacco and caske….”
The experience was apparently an educational one for Nicholas. He became one of Berkeley’s councillors, and not only paid off his fine, but prospered. His descendants spread over two hundred thousand acres of the Tidewater. At the time of another rebellion, a century later than Bacon’s, the name of Wilde was as well known in Virginia as that of Byrd or Carter. Nicholas’ heirs owned a house in Williamsburg and one of the most beautiful mansions in the Tidewater, which Nicholas, for reasons known only to himself, had named The Folly.
III. Johann
The “killing winter” of 1705 became proverbial in Germany. They say that the birds froze in the air and dropped to the ground with, presumably, a solid thud and a sparkle of ice particles. This may be exaggerated. However, it was an extremely cold winter. Thus nature finished what man had begun, and the family of Johann Müller, in the village of Bergstein, was reduced to Johann himself.
He was seventeen, or thereabouts, that day in December when he rose from his knees. He had been praying beside the body of his father, who had died of starvation and cold. Johann’s mother had been killed five years earlier, when partisans of the Catholic duke rode through the Protestant village looking for sport and infidels, in that order. His brothers and sisters had perished in various ways which it would take too long to relate. The village was in an area devastated by religious wars. The hapless peasants seldom had a chance to state a preference for Pope or Luther before they were massacred by whatever party happened to be in town.
Johann’s people were no strangers to persecution. Five generations back, one of his ancestors had died in the Münster massacre, for the crime of rejecting infant baptism. Others had lost their lives, not so much for their religious beliefs as for their slowness in changing them. The Peace of Augsburg, in 1555, had established the principle “like master, like man,” which meant that the peasants had to follow the religious affiliations of their lords. But the local Electors changed religions four times in as many reigns, which made it a little difficult for their subjects to pick a safe church.
Not all the Müllers died nobly for their faith. There were plenty of ordinary nonreligious wars as well, all followed, predictably and monotonously, by famine, plague, and other conditions unfavorable to life—not to mention liberty and the pursuit of happiness, both of which concepts were as alien to a European peasant as psychotherapy. The only reason why an occasional Müller survived is that there were so many of them.
Prolonged suffering carries its own merciful anesthesia. When Johann rose stiffly to his feet that December day, his only conscious emotion was a dull wonder as to what he was going to do next.
A towheaded, blunt-featured boy, he was meant to be stockily built, but semistarvation had reduced him to a point where the heavy bones seemed to push against the flaccid skin of his face and arms. He was slightly dizzy from lack of food; his head spun as he stood up, and he caught at the rough wooden wall for support. A sharp splinter, slipping into his palm, roused him a little, and he stared down at his father’s stiffening features. They were as white as the white strands in the long, unkempt beard that covered Herr Müller’s chest—white as ice, already half frozen. The cold of death was no colder than the chill of the tireless house.
Johann reached out to close the staring eyes, and then drew his hand back. Turning, he walked out of the house. He took nothing with him. He did not even close the door.
Only the stern Protestant God he had once believed in knew how he made his way across half of Europe in winter, and on foot. He knew where he was going. Some of his neighbors had already left for America, after hearing the agents of Penn, the Quaker, describe its broad and fertile acres, free to anyone who would till them. Penn also promised freedom to worship God in one’s own way. That seemed an impossible hope to Johann; at this point in his life, it was also irrelevant. As he stumbled through the winter forests, league after starving league, a single urge took shape in his mind. It was one of the few abstract ideas he had ever entertained. Perhaps that is why it was to become an obsession as time went on.
He had no money for the passage to America, but he did not expect that would be a problem, and he was correct. The ship’s captain in Rotterdam was happy to sign him up in exchange for seven years of servitude.
There were four hundred passengers in the Good Intent. Water was so scarce that the rats licked the sweat from the faces of the sleeping passengers and gnawed holes in the top of the water barrels. By the end of the two months’ voyage, the latter expedient no longer served: the water level was too low. But there was plenty of sweat.
When the boat docked in Pennsylvania there were two hundred and fifty passengers still alive, most of them redemptioners. A wealthy speculator bought the lot and marched them from town to town, selling off part of his produce at each place. Johann was bought for ten pounds—the going rate—by a Philadelphia merchant who had a large estate west of the city. It would be more accurate to say that his services were bought, for he had one conspicuous advantage over Leah: if he didn’t die of overwork or disease, he could look forward to freedom one day. He did not view the situation in this optimistic light. He ran away twice. He was caught both times, and the second time his master, annoyed at his ingratitude, had him flogged. Johann did not run away again. It was not the two hundred lashes that changed his mind so much as the fact that the weeks of his absence were added to his term of servitude. He settled down and became an excellent worker. His master, finding that he had a certain skill in wood carving, had him trained as a carpenter.
Having served his time, Johann received his certificate and his freedom dues. Had he arrived a few years earlier, these would have included fifty acres of land. By 1700 land was getting scarce. Johann’s prize for seven years of labor was two suits of clothing (one new), an ox, a grubbing hoe, and a weeding hoe. He set out to find some land on which to employ the last three items. The idea that had first come to him as he made his way toward Rotterdam had been intensified, by his years of servitude, into a sullen passion. Never again would he plow another man’s land.
