The Whiskey Rebels Read online

  “I told you I do not want you looking into my past.”

  “You did not say not to, only that you prefer the past to be left alone.”

  “Then now I shall tell you not to.”

  He studied me. Then at last he spoke. “Ah, I see.”

  What could he see? What could he know? Perhaps he had heard fragments of the story, or perhaps Hamilton had told him all he knew, though Hamilton’s version of events would be slanted and ill-informed. The short of it was that, in the weeks before Yorktown, Fleet and I had been stationed with Hamilton’s company and had just returned from making a series of runs between the main army and Philadelphia, visiting our Royalist contacts along the way. We had been sitting outside our tents, playing at cards, when an officer I had never before met, a major from Philadelphia, rode into our camp and demanded from Hamilton permission to search our tents. I had been outraged upon general principle, but Fleet had outright refused.

  Fleet was a tall man, slender, more serious in bearing than he was in character, with a full head of cottony white hair. He was a man born to be a spy. One moment he could be either serious, or a doting father to his Cynthia, or as good a drinking companion as any man might wish. He could also be studious and sober and precise.

  That afternoon, as we stood outside our tents, the air still and lifeless, I would have expected Fleet to tell me to endure the outrage with good cheer; that there was little that could be done, so it must be suffered without resentment. But not that day. He swore that this man, this Major Brookings, would lose his hand before he would touch any item in Fleet’s tent. At last, Colonel Hamilton was called upon and, in his stiff, magisterial manner, ruled that as Major Brookings acted upon good intelligence, he must be allowed to search, but that he, Hamilton, would oversee the matter to make certain all was done properly. Indeed, he even demanded that we be allowed to remain present, though he asked us not to speak.

  Fleet’s tent was searched first, and when suspicious documents were discovered tucked into the lining of his travel pack, I could hardly believe what I saw. It had to be planted falsely, I thought, for, beyond any unthinkable doubts about his loyalty, Fleet would have known far better than to hide something in so obvious a place. Yet the look in his eye, that of distant terror, left me unable to speak.

  The knife was to twist once more, however, for, when my own pack was searched, documents of a similar nature were found in a similar position. Appearances may have been sufficiently against Fleet to make me doubt him, my best friend, and yet now they were also against me, and I had no doubt of my own innocence. It was hard to focus my rage on this Major Brookings, for he hardly looked pleased at his discovery. Indeed, his face was cast in an expression of distant sadness. Neither Fleet nor I knew him, and that made it unlikely he came upon some errand of personal vengeance.

  Fleet and I were placed under guard while Hamilton reviewed the materials, and in a few hours’ time he came to see us. The documents, he said, letters between an unnamed American and a British agent, suggested we had been selling low-level, inconsequential secrets. To an outsider it would appear that we had been in the business of making money while not precisely compromising the American positions, though certainly coming close to doing so.

  Given, he said, that the army was in motion, it could ill afford the distraction of the discovery of treason among two well-placed officers. It was his decision, therefore, that we resign. We both resisted vehemently, but in the end it became clear that we had no better option, and we surrendered to our fate.

  Hamilton would not permit me to examine the documents myself, so I could not see the hand in which they were written. It hardly mattered. Fleet and I both knew how to disguise our penmanship. I could not imagine that Fleet would do something so base as to sell the British secrets, even useless ones. He hardly needed the money, and even if he had done such a thing, why would he have hidden some letters among my things? And yet, how else could they have gotten there? Was it possible that the letters were from an earlier time in the war? Perhaps they were from months or even years before. I did not place items in the lining of my travel bag, but neither did I make a habit of checking to see if anyone else had inserted something.

  I was troubled because Fleet hardly spoke to me on the subject. I proposed all the most obvious questions. I asked how he thought the letters came into our possession, if we were being made to look like traitors by some other person. He would not answer. He never struck me as guilty, only as too thoughtful to speak. He would fall into such moods at times—as he pieced together a puzzle or connected disparate facts or decoded a message—when he would allow no conversation, sometimes for days at a time. He needed time to think.

  Then he left camp without speaking to me. While I awaited his return, Hamilton came to see me and put a hand on my shoulder. “There’s something I think you should know,” he said. “The war has been hard for Fleet, hard on his finances. I believe he is quite ruined.”

  I removed his hand from me. “What of it? We’ve all suffered.”

  He shook his head. “You and I came into this fight with little of real value, but Fleet was a rich man in Philadelphia. Now he is near penniless.”

  “He would not allow his daughter to slip into penury,” I said.

  “Before the war he settled separate property on her, in anticipation on this. But his business is gone. I am only saying that he might have thought it not wholly wrong to make some money selling worthless secrets to the British. He might have thought it his due.”

  I came close to striking him. Nothing could have convinced me of such a thing, and I turned away without another word. I suspected Fleet had gone to Philadelphia to be with his daughter, and I rode out the next morning intending to follow him. Instead, I decided that it would be best to have some time away from him first, so I went to visit my sister in Connecticut for two weeks.

  When at last I arrived in Philadelphia, I received the shocking news that Fleet was dead. Cynthia was in mourning, the house shut against almost all visitors. Her father, she told me, had returned from the war a different, nearly unrecognizable man. He had spoken to her infrequently, and then only a word or two at a time. He had turned aggressively, uncharacteristically, to drink, and had become very belligerent when drunk, only slightly less so when sober. After a week of such behavior, he was killed in a barroom brawl by an assailant never found. And there was more, she said. People whispered. They said he had been cast out of the army in disgrace.

  I told her all I knew, disguising as best I could the degree to which appearances implicated her father—implicated both of us, really. I vowed I would find for her the man who had killed her father, but it proved impossible. I could go nowhere without fingers pointed at me in suspicion and hatred. No one would speak to me or answer my questions. Not only was it said that Fleet and I were traitors but that the accusation came from an unimpeachable source, Hamilton himself.

  It was for that reason I left Cynthia behind. I could not ask her to be with someone labeled so blackly as I was. Fleet was dead, and people soon forgot that he had ever been involved in the scandal. I could go nowhere, however, without the rumors following me. These accusations had killed Fleet, and they destroyed my life. They were never forgotten, but time, at least, had softened the bitterness felt toward me. And now Lavien wished to unearth it all.

  I kept my gaze hard and cold. “You cannot know what it is like to be labeled a traitor, and so you cannot understand why I want it left alone.”

  “I think I understand,” said Lavien. “You have proclaimed your innocence, and I believe you. That means there can be only one reason you do not wish the past unearthed.”

  “And why is that?” I asked, though I wished I hadn’t.

  “Because you believe your friend, Captain Fleet, was indeed a traitor. He, your best friend, father of the lady who is now Cynthia Pearson, whom you intended to marry—it was he who sold secrets to the British. That is what you know—or what you believe. It is a great an
d noble secret that allows you to revel in your own suffering, for each time someone marks you as a traitor, you know that you bear this burden for love—not once but twice.”

  It is not an easy thing to be laid bare in this way by a man who is little better than a stranger, a stranger to whom you are indebted and whom you have wronged. He had seen things as they really were, and had done it at once.

  “You must let it alone,” I told him. “When Fleet died, the world chose to forget his part in these crimes. His name was allowed to be spoken without taint.”

  “You allow your name to remained blackened for her sake?” he asked.

  I nodded. “For her, and for Fleet. I do not say he was guilty, but if he was, it was trivial. Empty secrets were sold—lies and worthless information only. Whatever the truth, Fleet was a good man, a hero who did a thousand courageous things for his country. I’ll not have it said about him now that he was a traitor.”

  “It is said about you.”

  “I am here to defend myself. He is not.” I stood up. “I have asked you to leave this alone. I will say no more of it.”

  “Sit down, Captain. I am sorry if you feel imposed upon, and I shall heed your words.”

  I sat. I wanted to press him into more vigorously worded promises but at this point I observed Leonidas enter the tavern. I waved him over, and he called for bread, butter, and small beer. I finished my ale and called for another.

  After a moment, Lavien excused himself, saying he had things to do, and wished me good luck with Hamilton. He and Leonidas shook hands, and I watched the little man leave. Once he was gone, I informed Leonidas of all that had happened since I last saw him—being cast out by Mrs. Deisher, the note from Cynthia, and the encounter with the Irishman.

  Leonidas listened, nodded, but said little. Finally, he commented upon the most practical of matters. “What shall you do about lodgings?”

  “I have not yet made a determination on that.”

  “Do not think you will come live with me. I’ll not have it.”

  “It would only be for a few days.”

  “No.”

  “It is really unkind,” I said. “I would not have thought you so unkind.”

  “I must have a place that is mine.”

  “And I must have a place,” I said.

  “That is your business and none of mine. However, if you would be so good as to free me from bondage, as you promised to do, I would happily lend you the money to get your things out of surety and to rent a new set of rooms.”

  “Why, that is the most villainous blackmail I have ever heard,” said I.

  “Ethan, do you mean to hold me forever? You are not a man to keep a slave, and I am not a man to be one. I know not what you mean by it. You agreed to free me when I turned twenty-one, which was six months ago.”

  “I agreed to free you when you were twenty-one. I didn’t mention anything about the specific moment of that year. I wish you would attempt to be a little patient, Leonidas. All this casting about for favors does not become you.”

  I could not free him. That was what he did not know and could not understand, though the reason would have surprised him. I could not free him because he was already a free man. I’d simply neglected to inform him.

  It was really no more than a curious series of events. Once Dorland began stalking me, I grew concerned for Leonidas’s future. I owed him his freedom and thought it best to secure it at once. Accordingly, I’d gone to a lawyer and paid ten dollars to have the appropriate papers drawn up, freeing him not simply upon my death but immediately and irrevocably. As I sat across from him, Leonidas had been a free man for nearly a week.

  If Dorland had killed me, he would have found out then. He was to be freed in my will, but I arranged with the lawyer to contact Leonidas and make sure he knew I had freed him before I died. I did not die, and I surely would have mentioned all of this to him, but then I’d heard from Cynthia, and suddenly there were more complicated issues requiring my attention.

  Were I to tell Leonidas that he was free, he would likely continue to help me, but perhaps he would not. There was so much about his life I did not know. I should have liked to have taken the chance, and if it were merely my life, my happiness, in the balance, I would have done so. I would not take that chance when Cynthia Pearson told me she was in danger. Leonidas would have to believe himself a slave for a few more days—or weeks.

  Do not think this decision was an easy one. I could imagine the joy of leaping up there in that tavern and informing him that I had already freed him and required no more of his pestering to do what was right. But as much as I yearned to be open with him on this matter, I dared not. I therefore sacrificed not only the immediate relation of the news of his liberty but my own chances for obtaining a place to live.

  We walked to the offices of the Treasury upon Third Street at the corner of Walnut. Leonidas was clearly still harboring resentment over our conversation, but my thoughts were already elsewhere. All around us hurried clusters of men who appeared too big for their suits. Walnut Street was the center of finance in Philadelphia, and of late it had been a place where clever and ruthless men could easily fatten themselves a little further.

  Hamilton had launched his bank the previous summer, using an ingenious system of scrip—certificates that stood not for bank shares but for the opportunity to purchase those shares. Scrip holders could later, on a series of four predetermined quarterly dates, buy actual bank shares, using cash for half the payments and already-circulating government issues for the other half. These issues—six percent government loans—had been performing poorly in the markets, attracting little interest, so Hamilton’s method promoted trade in the six percents, since scrip holders needed to acquire them in order to exchange their scrip for full ownership of the bank shares. In addition to strengthening a market for already existing government issues, Hamilton’s scheme created a frenzy for the new Bank of the United States shares; the act of delaying gratification fueled the mania, and in a matter of weeks speculators were earning two or three times on their investment. Then, just as manically as the price soared, it crashed to earth, producing a panic. Hamilton had saved his bank only by sending his agents to the major trading cities—New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston, as well as here in Philadelphia—to buy up scrip and settle the market. Many unwary investors lost everything they had, but clever men made themselves richer.

  No harm done, one might say, but there were those who thought otherwise. Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State and Hamilton’s great enemy, argued that this mania proved the bank was a destructive force. Jefferson and his republican followers believed that the true center of American power must be agriculture. A national bank would empower merchants and traders and turn the nation into a copy of Britain—that is, a sink of corruption. I’d been inclined to side with the Jeffersonians on this point, though in truth I’d not given things too much thought. I merely chose to be opposed to anything that Hamilton desired.

  The center of this new American trickery and greed was the Treasury Department, now located in a complex of conjoined private homes, roughly converted for the purpose of housing the largest of the federal government’s departments. We stepped through the front door and were met not by an austere and magisterial lobby but by a frenzy of excitement, hardly less riotous than the jostling of traders outside. Men scribbled away furiously at desks or rushed to bring one meaningless stack of papers to a place where an equally meaningless stack would be taken instead. Everywhere were clerks, busily writing and tallying and, many believed, plotting the downfall of liberty. I gave a clerk near the door my name. He looked at me most unkindly, but soon enough we were directed to Hamilton’s office.

  Not until that moment had I considered what was about to happen. Hamilton had cast me out of the army and made free with my name, letting the world hear the lies that I was a traitor. His actions had led directly to the death of my great friend. Now, ten years later, I was about to present myself to
him, red-eyed and haggard, in a wrinkled and stained suit, and beg that he make me privy to what he seemed to regard as state secrets. I felt anger and humiliation, and I wished to run away, but instead I marched forward, as a man marches forward to the noose that is to hang him.

  I took deep breaths and attempted to anticipate the scene that lay before me. Since returning to Philadelphia I’d seen Hamilton a few times upon the street, but I had kept my distance, wanting no discourse with him. I’d not had an opportunity to see him close since the end of the war, and I was now pleased to observe that he was not looking his best. He was a year or two older than I was but looked as though the span were closer to ten years. He had grown plump in office, jowly in the face, saggy under the eyes. His nose was as long as ever, but it seemed to be growing, as the noses of old faces do, and he had begun to lose his hair, which must have displeased his vain and libertine nature. Clearly the duties and difficulties of being one of the most hated men in the nation had begun to affect him. They had affected his clothes too, for his suit looked faded and shiny in spots. Perhaps the Treasury Secretary ought to present himself to better advantage, but then even I knew the rumors of his enriching himself off government funds were false. The less popular truth was that Hamilton had so dedicated his time to promoting his policies that he had allowed his own finances to suffer.

  If, however, he looked less than his best, he was certainly formal. He rose when we entered his spare-looking office—short upon decorative flourishes, but long upon filing cabinets, imposing-looking financial volumes, and writing desks filled with ledgers and charts. As for his own desk, it was as neat as though no one used it. Hamilton, I recalled, from his days as Washington’s chief of staff, loathed a cluttered workplace.