FICTION — RESTIVE SOULS
The Tale of Shyllandrus Zulu: Chapter 8
Chapter Eight of Part Two: The Governess of New York, Margaret Moncrieffe, tells Zulu West a harrowing tale
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A Restive Souls excerpt
As told to eminent historian Emmet Bolo by the high priestess Zulu West.
This is a long chapter. Buckle in, grab a cup of tea, and listen to some thudsong while you read.
Chapters 1&2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5.1
Chapter 5.2
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12.1
Chapter 12.2
Restive Souls Part 2: Carolina Rising
Zulu’s Tale (1801–1804)
8
Bedíàkṍ performed her ritual in a building called The Chalice Hall, which in its original incarnation had been a plantation guesthouse. Its interior was quite ornate.
There were several veneered curios in the anteroom near the entrance to the home. Each was of Dutch design, with two etched inlaid lovebirds facing each other over a cornice that topped the glass doors. One of the curios was further adorned with an escutcheon inlaid between the two birds, but the coat of arms was crudely struck out with a sickle and one large drop of blood etched over it in a way that made its house of origin unrecognizable, although some said it wasn’t a coat of arms for a house, but for the Dutch East India Company.
Each curio was filled with shelves containing rows of glass, earthen, and porcelain figurines from Europe and Britain. Pairs of stoneware jugs made by a small pottery from the Lambeth area of London named Doulton flanked the sides of each row.
There had been some debate on whether to retain the European provisions. Some had argued that they represented the mindset and plundering decorum of slavers, but others argued that there were other considerations. The argument was won when a young girl, aged about five or six, said, “They’re pretty.”
The young girl’s unsolicited decision had ramifications throughout the region: Art was something to be appreciated unless it celebrated slavery and oppression. Most of us were hard-pressed to find malevolence in the fine furniture or decorative arts of the guesthouse and other plantation buildings.
Paintings throughout the former plantation told another story. Some, therefore, were burned. These included a few portraits of colonial leaders and, oddly, one of Louis Bonaparte, who was said to be a younger brother of the leader of France.
I never learned how the painting found itself in a former plantation building that surely had changed hands before the painting was commissioned. I knew little about Bonaparte’s brother other than an odd fact that he called himself the Rabbit of Olland, apparently because his mastery of the Dutch language was poor as he tried to ingratiate himself with the local population.
I knew very little of Napoleon Bonaparte. Nor did I care to.
Louis Bonaparte, after spending a significant amount of time in Holland, was installed as proxy leader of the Dutch in 1806 by his more famous brother Napoleon Bonaparte. The painting was probably commissioned by his brother shortly after he took control of France in 1799.
A painting of William Randolph III, who was a cousin of Thomas Jefferson, was burned. Fittingly, a mural on the side of the guesthouse depicting the razing of Monticello, Jefferson’s home, which was built largely by slaves, was painted with varying degrees of skill by several hands.
The mural was an oddity because Monticello never burned. The mural was said to be a replica of a mural on the walls of Monticello painted by a freed slave, Burwell Colbert, who helped liberate Monticello. Monticello had been captured after the Jefferson Rebellion, which lasted from 1778 until 1797. Jefferson had holed up on the grounds of Monticello with remnants of the Colonial Army immediately after the war. He never freed the slaves that lived on the plantation, nor gave them the news of their official emancipation. Monticello’s slaves only discovered the news after Monticello was finally liberated by the British and The Carolina Union in 1797.
Although many historians insist that the British were otherwise occupied and didn’t have the resources to wrest control of the vast plantation from Jefferson’s mountain, others claim the British were reluctant to challenge Jefferson’s authority in case he was able to eventually muster a new, successful rebellion.
The Carolina Union, meanwhile, was busy establishing a Navy and dedicated few resources to a ground army that could take Monticello.
Jefferson was not interested in another national revolution, but some of his writings indicate that he held out hope that a slave economy could be maintained, if only in autonomous pockets of the country.
Jefferson’s death is known as one of the most gruesome that occurred during the many skirmishes that gripped the nation in the two decades following the Colonial Rebellion. Monticello was famous among local slaves for its nailery. It was equally infamous for its child labor. Children as young as nine years old were brought in as slave labor for the nailery. Upon hearing of their emancipation, the slaves that worked the plantation and its slave tunnels captured Jefferson and nailed him from neck to toe to a tree with nine-inch nails (celebrated in song by the acclaimed eponymous modern musical group), reportedly while he was still alive.
British troops captured the Monticello estate after sustained fighting with the heavily armed Jefferson Militia. Slaves on the property who witnessed the battle began to assist the British and prevented several attempts by the Jefferson Militia to raze Monticello, much of which had been built by slaves. One slave who was loyal to Jefferson, and managed other slaves, attempted to start a fire in the tunnels under Monticello, but the effort failed.
Wormley Hughes, the founder of the Carolina Union Birding Society, and Monticello’s estate gardener as a slave even after emancipation thanks to Jefferson’s intransigence, stayed on to become the chief landscape architect at Monticello until he died in 1829.
Hughes was responsible for several innovations in gardening and horticulture, leading the Monticello Gardens and Arboretum to eventually become a worldwide tourist attraction. The center of the garden features a twenty-foot statue of two freed embracing slaves, one holding a bucket with water splashing out, and the other brandishing a machete with blood dripping from its blade.
Even more importantly, Hughes was responsible for negotiating Monticello into the hands of the newly freed slaves after a short British army occupation.
Colbert was not a painter. No mural representing Monticello burning has been seen on the Monticello grounds, so the small mural at the Vanguard of Mary was probably drawn from rumor.
In 1837, Monticello became the headquarters of the Monticello Baptist Congregation led by Peter Fossett, who led its growth as Virginia’s most powerful congregation until his death in 1901, excluding a brief period in the 1870s when he served as Carolina Union’s Ecclesiastical Tribune.
In his book The Reminiscences of Peter Fossett, published in 1898, he wrote of spending two years with Shyllandrus Zulu on the grounds of the Vanguard of Mary in the 1820s, but Zulu makes no mention of him in any of her writings.
To be certain Bedíàkṍ was allowed her sanctity, I remained in my residence while she performed her duties.
More waiting, I sighed as I started some tea.
Mine was not generally an existence of loneliness. My residence was normally a harbor for many visitors. Sometimes the visitors were congregants seeking an answer to the loss of a loved one. Other times, there were questions of governance, which were still being sorted out by our fledgling nation at every level.
We were bound by English law through both custom and legal circumstance, but we were a restive people, seeking answers outside of Europe’s barbaric ways.
The English had a fine template for legal institutions, but it was our duty to alter them to better fit the needs of those who arrived on the continent from other lands, especially those arriving in chains, and to consider our suffering brothers and sisters in the First Settler nations, on whose land we had unwillingly found ourselves.
All of this is a backstory to the fact that I had forgotten an evening dinner appointment with the Governess of New York, Margaret Moncrieffe. I was fortunate that there were administrative personnel on congregation grounds who knew my itinerary better than I.
Maddie Hall, an attractive widow with a wide, long scar on her cheek that she had acquired as a nine-year-old escaping the low country rice fields that she claimed still maintained pockets of slavery, came to me, hastily saying in Gullah through a stumbling breath that the dinner was but moments away. “In the banquet hall, m’lady.”
“What would I do without you? I completely forgot.” The day’s events had cleared the date from the calendar in my head, but not the actual event.
“You’d be dining alone somewhere this evening, m’lady. Shall I inform the governess you are behind schedule?”
“No, that will not do.” I was wearing what amounted to roughage. “I’ll find a cloak and hope for the best,” I said.
“Your grace,” she said, bowing. Maddie left, leaving me wondering how the governess arrived without my hearing her entourage, which would have made a substantial raucous and sent the entire congregation into a chatter from north to south. Her arrival in Charleston would have been by a naval escort, after which she would have been accompanied by a small army, especially in these parts.
All I knew about the governess was that she was of British descent. The new nation we were forming would continue to be part of the crown, so in that sense, the provinces of New England were natural allies with us, but the New England provinces were populated by Europeans in much larger numbers than the Carolinas. So, on that score, our natural alliance faced some challenges.
On the other hand, Afrikers dominated New England cities and ports and city-based congregations. New Englanders would need to find routes to peaceful co-existence with the very people they had once held in bondage if they were to avoid generations of suffering.
The largest congregation in Philadelphia was, and is, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Congregation, founded by Richard Allen in 1794. Of course, AME is now known as one of the most powerful congregations in the world, with a global reach and economic interests in everything from cereal to computer chips.
The staff responsible for dinner consisted of two expert cooks from Charleston and one of our own. I knew I need not be concerned with the outcome of the meal, but I was usually aware of the menu plans for these kinds of things.
The events of the day had sidetracked me. I felt some embarrassment for this, but I proceeded as if the day was a normal one under congregational life, instead of strife (although too often, still, these were the same).
I found a simple purple robe with a silver sash in my closet. One part of me wanted to display some pageantry to the visiting governess, but another part was simply indifferent. I would, I decided, save my pageantry for my people. So, I donned the simple robe, found a shell-topped headdress with lavender ribbons to tie around the top of my hair, and slipped on a pair of cowhide moccasin slippers that looked like they could have come out of a First Settler encampment.
Many Europeans would have been appalled and insulted at my fashion indifference, but when I met Margaret Moncrieffe in the banquet hall, she produced a smile that gleamed like an arc of pearl.
She had evidently not made the same fashion decision as me, but she didn’t seem offended by my simplicity. She wore a printed cotton jacket with a long matching skirt and kerchief.
She mentioned later that the matching jacket and skirt were in what she called the Revolutionary French Pierrot style, which meant nothing to me. Her bonnet was influenced by fashionable East Coast Afriker and First Settler women. It sat tall and bent, topped by a rounded purple stovepipe adorned with colorful feathers and ringed in the middle with a set of small shells.
She was accompanied by an entourage of military personnel, who left us alone in the banquet hall after she nodded to them and commanded them to leave. One of them, I was later told, was Hesed Williamson, who had gained fame two decades prior for his role in the liberation of eastern ports.
After formal introductions, we were seated on each end of a long thick walnut table. As soon as drinks of water and cold tea were brought to us, she began speaking with surprising candor.
“I can only imagine,” she said, through thin aristocratic pink lips that glistened against a face so white I felt somewhat concerned that she bore the pallor of disease, “that you see in me the very essence of what you abhor.” She smiled slightly. Apparently, this was a woman who liked to get right to the point. “I cannot find fault in this. For nearly two hundred years, your people were treated as less than citizens.”
I wanted to interject with a remark about what an understatement that was, but I restrained myself. It would have been a poor reward for her immediate show of empathy.
“So let me tell you a simple story. It shan’t wash away the horrors of the days before emancipation, but perhaps it will provide some perspective upon my person.” She sipped her cold tea with a daintiness I had not yet personally encountered.
“When I was fourteen years old, I found myself trapped behind enemy lines shortly after Washington fled New York. For me at that time, being behind enemy lines meant being in British-held territory.
“I was in Kingsbridge. Now, Kingsbridge, your grace, was a region within New York City that received its name from a bridge built by slaves. The bridge spanned a rather rowdy creek named Spuyten Duyvil Creek, which was a tidal strait that connected the Hudson River to the Harlem River. The original settlers in the area were mostly Dutch, and they found the waters difficult to traverse.” At this moment I wanted to correct her and inform her that the Dutch were most certainly not the first settlers there, but I listened instead.
“To compound the problem, the mouth of Spuyten Duyvil where it met the Hudson was surrounded by tall cliffs. The only way to cross anywhere in the area was by a ferry owned by a Dutchman named Johannes Verveelen, who was so determined to maintain his control of the river crossing that he erected fencing over the one other part of that waterway that could be crossed, which is where Kings Bridge is now. The fencing was torn down by people determined to cross as soon as it was erected, then rebuilt, then torn down again. On and on it all went until a rich Dutch aristocrat, the Lord of the Manor of Philipseborough, Frederick Philipse, purchased the land in the area and used slaves to build Kings Bridge. And there you have it. The name Kingsbridge.
“Shortly after the war, The Dutch African Reformed Congregation, an offspring of the Dutch Reformed Church, which, perchance, had been sympathetic to slaves, took over control of the bridge as well as Philipse’s lucrative shipping business, plantation, and provisioning depot.”
She looked at me in a manner that suggested that I should consider all this information as important as she did. I was interested, but I had yet to understand its significance. As I came to know the governess, I learned that stories like this were part of her fabric, like the clothes she wore. She loved local history and was unable to tell a story without such detail.
“Of course, this is not the story,” she said. “As I mentioned, I was fourteen, living amongst the rebels in New Amsterdam, unable to care for myself. A dashing young American soldier by the name of Aaron Burr was presented to me as my protector. Oh, my, but was his face the cause of my utter breathlessness.” She giggled a little, surprising me with its almost childlike affect. “I do declare that if a Lilliputian were to sit atop his head, the little fellow could slide down and off Aaron’s nose, so perfect was the soft descent from forehead to tip of nose, which was matched by a crescent jawline below that captured my young, impressionable eyes each time they encountered it.”
New Amsterdam was the name eighteenth-century residents of New York called a small but thriving Dutch district in Manhattan.
I couldn’t guess what a Lilliputian was, but I imagined it was a small being from a story she knew as a child.
“Aaron’s kindness knew no limitations. And he brought to me such kind gifts. It was not long after that we declared our love for one another. Alas, we were separated for a time, as Aaron found himself in battle during those desperate hours following Washington’s capture in Trenton. New Amsterdam and the rest of the York were in flames, your grace, with freed slaves running amok and capturing ports, plantations, and overthrowing their masters at every turn. As a young colonial girl, I was terrified, truly.
“I briefly sheltered with a young family whose enslaved father had been killed trying to escape Philipse’s shipping depot. I learned much of the woes of the African people during those few months, your grace. Tis not the same as living them, I shall grant you, but such stories they told were horrifying to my young, innocent ears.
“You see, the stories they told were quite different than those I was taught. The Dutch, it was said, were kind to slaves. Offered them provisions, allowed them to church, even provisioned books to read. But the conditions they worked under, and at such impossibly young ages, were cruel, appallingly so, their masters harsh. Surely, I am not providing any information considered newsworthy to you. I merely wish to reflect upon my own revised education and outlook.
“Well, Aaron never forgot me. He returned to Staten Island, where I had remained in hopeful waiting with the newly emancipated family. Soon after, Aaron and I married. Upon which, your grace, almost as quickly as the lights went out on our first night together, he apparently felt determined that I live the life of the least favored of slaves.
“He took me whenever he wanted, no matter my mood or even ability to consort with him, and he forced upon me such trials that when I did as little as whimper a minor objection, he’d beat me about the face with a riding crop, which he always kept on his person, for that sole purpose, I do believe. I shan’t go into further detail, other than to say those occasions facing the riding crop were among my better moments spent within his company.”
I had earlier thought I detected long, subtle scars across her otherwise beautiful face, but the torch and lantern light at dusk was such that I had dismissed my original observations. Now, it seemed, those markings ran deep, and in a sense, I could see the same scars in her eyes, as well.
“This next part of my tale is most difficult, your grace, and I come to you from New Amsterdam with the hope that you can convince me of God’s forgiveness.”
Up until now, I had thought this to be a diplomatic mission.
“The year was 1780. I had endured his cruelty for three years. I will admit to wondering in those years why I had chosen this life. By that I mean, every day that I chose not to kill myself meant that I was choosing to live through another round of his cruel intentions. One day, I found his pistol, which he had proudly used in a duel not a year before, and your grace, I do not to this day know how or why my aim was so true, but I shot Aaron in the head and did not cry one tear.”
I had not heard this story. The governess of New York a murderer? Had New York society also wrestled with jurisprudence like our own congregation? Here she was before me, a free woman.
“Do not misunderstand. I do often struggle with my Christian conscience. But at that moment, my aim was pure and my intent unwavering. I shot him dead, your grace, and for that, I don’t know what kind of God can forgive me. But the jury at my trial most certainly did. I told them the tale much as I have told you, and I was formally acquitted.”
“And now you are governess. That is an impressive leap.”
“You do not approve of me.”
“On the contrary. I am most impressed with your fortitude. You were quite young. And tortured.”
The governess touched her face with her fingertips. “The scars you see were much more pronounced during those days. I am grateful to the jury even after all these years that they saw in my face an act of violence against, well, what else to call it? A child. For that I was.
“Tis a horrible effect on both one’s honor and soul to deliver the death of one’s own husband, your grace.”
I told her of our experiments in criminal law, and I reported on our current crisis, as well as my current wait on the results of Diderot’s search for the fugitive Chastain and the Tsărăgĭ outlaws who were associating with him. I would later wonder what might have happened were I to include Chastain’s name in the telling.
Then I smiled at her. “What would we do with you if you had acted this way in our camps?” I wondered aloud. “Abuse against women is a great crime. It also is one hidden by the thick walls of family and home. Women who don’t report on the abuse of their husbands, or other violence perpetrated against them, well, they must, to survive, take matters of survival to sometimes extreme ends. But fighting back in this way. It is not done. This isn’t a criticism. It’s simply fact.”
“He was a man of stature. I never once considered reporting his actions to anyone. He would have killed me, for one thing, and nobody would have thought much of it.” She looked at me silently as if in thought for a moment. “I never, also, considered a bullet to his head. I can say I wished to end the experience, but I had no plans to do so. The gun was a lucky accident.”
“And one not likely to often repeat itself in the life of others suffering the same treatment. Besides, another bit of good luck for you was a sympathetic jury. It could have gone the opposite way.”
“I was quite fortunate. But there is a story behind that jury as well, your grace. After Aaron’s death, I ran off, with but a few blankets and the least amount of clothing you could imagine. I found my way up north, to the home of James and Elizabeth Baumfree, newly freed slaves who lived in a grand estate about 80 miles north along the Hudson from New Amsterdam and just east of the river into some pretty foothills of the Catskill Mountains. After the war, the estate had been taken by force from the Hardenbergh clan, who presided over two million or so acres that they purchased from the Esopus, who you may know as the Lenape. Well. They were an offshoot of sorts of Lenape, I believe.”
Margaret shrugged, then continued. “I can’t say for certain, of course. The Hardenberghs were the lower Catskill’s most prolific slave owners, and when the tide of the war turned and the slaves were emancipated, word spread much more quickly up the Catskills than one would expect. It being somewhat remote, and all.
“Well. It was a surprise. It was as if word was spread by the wind itself, your grace, and the slaves, they barely waited at all. I’m told they were emboldened by the emancipation with the thought that the law would be with them, and they took one manor after another until all the Hardenbergh land was theirs.
“The Hardenberghs’ many slaves became the very army that ran the family out of the Catskills, and to where, to this day, I don’t know.
“The freed slaves quickly established a church, the Kadesh-moo,” and at that, Margaret giggled, “which I believe was actually intended to mean Holy Cow, but some words were lost in translation perhaps.”
“Kadesh is the Hebrew word for holy,” I acknowledged.
“Precisely, but moo, well that is the spoken word of the cow,” she laughed. “And very similarly to your own Diderot, they used their church to build local businesses and even a rudimentary form of local government, as well as a strong militia to protect their newly acquired land. They established dozens of log cabins on the grounds, overnight, it seemed, as well, to better house the newly freed slaves.
“My. I must attempt to shorten my story, or your eyes will grow thick and heavy with boredom.”
“No, my dear, it is all quite interesting to me. To hear stories describing how people from my homeland performed similar acts, independent of one another and without any coordination. It is fascinating to behold.”
“Indeed,” she said. “It is, perhaps, a miracle of God.”
I nodded at that.
“Well, two former slaves, Qussaba and Dijean, led me by carriage along with a small entourage of armed men to New York when word that bounty hunters were searching for me came rolling through the hills. We had a small contingent of imposing warriors with us, your grace. I suspect we looked quite the fright to the poor Dutchmen we encountered upon my return to New Amsterdam. The men, militiamen, they were dressed in the most remarkable and colorful effluence, with beads and shells and feathers adorning every part of their bodies and faces not covered by cloth. They had shaved heads wrapped in finely polished wire, rings in their noses and ears, bracelets consisting of — I must say that it seemed hundreds of rings.
“And they were armed with the most fearsome of weapons. Muskets, of course, primitive ones, not like the Fergusons we encounter these days, but also long fat machetes with blades that could cleanly slice a grape in half, so sharp were they. One of them carried a battle axe that seemed as big as his horse, and another a modified scythe whose blade glistened in the sun in such a way as to seem to have its own life, a life meant for nothing more than to search for a neck to sever.
“Understand, your grace, that New York at the time was in much disarray. There were many skirmishes, and the ports had, as you know, been seized by newly freed slaves. Anglos and Dutch were not pleased by the turn of events, and they let their feelings known through the barrels of their muskets and the flames of their torches.
“Not a small part of me thinks that Cornwallis is still quite gleeful in any reminisces he may have about those first few chaotic and violent years after Washington’s capture. A suitable punishment for the colonial rebellion, he no doubt thought. Well, I digress. Qussaba and Dijean and the others brought me to a local African church, one protected by a powerful warlord named Mingo, who negotiated with the local constables the terms of my surrender.
“The terms were quite simple: That I be subject to the same kind of misfortune that slaves experienced under European masters.”
“A flogging?” I asked.
“No ma’am. Mingo insisted that I be tried not by a jury of my peers, but by a jury of his peers. The jury was chosen from a pool of nobody aside from Afrikers.”
“And the Europeans within the jurisdiction were agreeable to such a request?”
“Mingo had accumulated much power very quickly. And besides, the constable was happy to have me rounded up. He was quite convinced that I’d receive the type of justice he had contemplated. Aaron Burr was a man of society, after all. I was at this juncture quite convinced that I’d spend the rest of my days awaiting the gallows. These feelings were hardened when I met my attorney for the defense, a man named Jack Fortune, who had apprenticed for… well nobody, your grace. Nor was he a member of the Albany or New York City bar.
“He was as experienced in the law as you or I. He was, I thought shortly after our first conversations, a flim-flam man. A huckster. A smiling, very charming, very funny, huckster. And also an Afriker, I must add. I considered this the seal on my doom.”
“And the men who brought you to this place. Did you feel betrayed by them?”
“Not at all. They truly were trying to find the best solution for my predicament, knowing that my capture by bounty hunters would be worse than the fate their people would muster, even if the result of their efforts led me into the graces of a court jester who had managed to talk his way into a courtroom. I must stress that they had offered me a choice. They didn’t bring me to New Amsterdam under my objections. I think they believed if they brought me to a church, I’d be safe.
“Well, I will keep the rest of the story short. Mr. Fortune used his charm, wit, humor, and most importantly, a profound ability to strike empathy into the most hardened creature, to convince the jury that I was the aggrieved party.”
“That you were the aggrieved party surely helped with his efforts,” I added.
Jack Fortune, of course, is the famous early nineteenth century Philadelphia lawyer made famous by the 1930s movie classic, “Fortune Abounds.” This was his first case. He was admitted to the Albany, Philadelphia, and New York City bars a few years after Moncrieffe’s trial.
When she nodded, a tear dripped out the corner of one eye along her cheeks. She shook her head and dabbed the tear with a kerchief. “I am so sorry,” she said. “But yes, that mattered. However, that fact gave me little hope of an acquittal, especially given, and I apologize for saying so, the animosity I felt from the jury for the simple grievance sustained by the color of my skin. An understandable grievance, I had learned during my residencies among freed slave families, I shall add.
“You see, observing Mr. Fortune in the courtroom was not dissimilar to watching a virtuoso among actors in a grand theater. I witnessed the hostility that had been lodged in the jurors’ eyes change to compassion as he spoke as if watching clouds part from a rising moon.”
“Somehow, we must build protections for women into our systems of governance,” I said. “I can imagine such a different fate for you. And know, governess, that our congregations in Charleston are built on the foundation of forgiveness, as the Lord commands.”
“I know the hearts of Afrikers, your grace. I believe that the jury was selected based on those rarer hearts of anger, from among those who were not inclined toward forgiveness. That was Mingo’s intent, but to his credit, he made no effort to interfere with the final verdict. The Afriker heart, even when it seems set otherwise, gives evidence instead to always be compelled toward compassion.”
Her eyes then grew wide. “Did you know? In New England, congregations have grown powerful, similar to European companies such as the British and Dutch East India firms, but they are not involved in governance. But your proposed Union involves a different civil arrangement as I understand things.”
“Our Union is not a proposition,” I corrected. “The crown has granted us full independence from the North American Union.”
“My apologies your grace. It is such a sudden change in circumstances that I still utter the word proposed in my discussions.”
“I’ll be quite frank,” I replied. “We are forming our rules of governance on an ad hoc basis. Our synod legislature is but a year old. We are only now forming a more representative method for choosing its members. As of now, they are chosen by councils within each congregation. It has been a very messy affair.”
“And no head of state? That seems an impossible provision.”
“That will change. There are meetings and such, daily, on how to create an office of Ecclesiastical Tribune, which would serve that function in some capacity. It is a fluid situation. I don’t think any of us knows how exactly it will play itself out.”
“An Ecclesiastical Tribune. Interesting. Would he come from the ranks of your congregations?”
“She, very possibly,” I smiled. “We shouldn’t limit our choices to half the population, should we?”
She laughed at that. “Quite!” and lifted her glass of cold tea as if in a toast.
“What we seek here,” I said, “is something quite different than what Europeans seem interested in. You see, I don’t quite subscribe to the rhetoric of my cohorts that Europeans are inherently an evil species. I’ll admit I have my prejudices, but they are a more hopeful kind, I hope, in the long run. I believe that the Europeans’ emerging system of industrialization capitalized by a small group is the basis of the evil we face. It is a system that requires subjugation. It celebrates a pronounced, definable differentiation among humans. Division is its most important tool.
“The corporate nature of European mercantilism creates a necessary divide between those with power and those without. Conveniently, those without power can be found in the forests on this continent, and among those from my homeland, and those from my homeland who were brought here in chains to extend the power of what the Frenchman might call the bourgeoisie.”
The governess said, “My friend John Honeyman sometimes refers to your points when he and I discuss the slave trade and the attempted subjugation of the people who first tilled the lands on this continent. He says that Britain did much the same to Ireland, his home country.”
I had been told the same by Diderot. “The Ulster Plantations were not dissimilar from the attacks on this soil, particularly where we sit today,” she continued.
It had taken Honeyman several years after the war to become convinced that the separation from one’s soul was a prerequisite to finding success in British mercantilism.
As such, he wrote in his memoirs that there was depravity attached to its pursuit. If you were a laborer, he wrote, “The soul becomes detached by the onerous methods and demands of labor as it distills into a form of subjugation to your master and his fellow titans of industry. If you are the owner of capital or the means of production, the soul becomes detached by those same relentless demands you became convinced were as much a prerequisite to the movement of goods as reading is to university. Those demands dictate that you treat the workers as something lesser than human to endlessly pursue the expansion of your enterprise.”
“A heartwarming coincidence for you to have a friendship with Mr. Honeyman, who is also a dear friend of a man within these parts.”
“Guillaume Diderot. I know well of him. Through John Honeyman’s many stories, why, I believe it is as though my familiarity with Mr. Diderot is as pronounced as if I have known him all these years as well.
“I met Mr. Honeyman several years ago, just after he had lost his dear wife and several of his children to smallpox. It was after I had navigated my way through the legal system of New England.”
“And is Mr. Honeyman’s loyalty to the crown still as ragged as Monsieur Diderot says it was even as he led Washington astray?”
“Perhaps more so,” she smiled. “Truthfully, I believe everyone on this continent would like to be free of the yoke of Britain. Mr. Honeyman has, dare I say, become a bit of an Irish Republican since the Irish unification with England.”
I wanted to curse my ignorance regarding European politics, an ignorance I typically cherished. I would be forced to confess my ignorance to avoid sounding like a fool. “I’m afraid I am not familiar with this unification you speak of.”
The governess was quiet for a moment. If she had asked me a question regarding the politics of my homeland, I would have easily passed her impromptu history test. “The islands of the Eire and England are now one nation,” she finally said. “Mr. Honeyman wasn’t pleased with the proceedings. In spirit, you see, he had taken up the cause of the Protestant Dissenter movement in Ireland, which was a typical reaction from a man from Northern Ireland who was also a Presbyterian.”
“This dissenter movement, it was a movement against the crown?”
“Not so much a movement against the crown, as a movement against the crown’s colonization of Northern Ireland. If they had not colonized Ireland, there would be no such movement.”
“But Mr. Honeyman is British, is he not? I should think he’d be favorable toward the conquest, if only out of patriotic duty.”
“Scottish by blood. The Scots have their own arguments with the crown. Born in Ireland. There was a rebellion against the English plantations and colonists in Ireland, especially in the north, where Roman Catholics and dissenters had been experiencing an erosion of their civil rights, including land inheritance. Mr. Honeyman has a distaste for inequity in all its forms, it seems.”
“Dissenters. I am quite unfamiliar with that term,” I said.
“Before the British began to colonize Ireland, Ireland was almost entirely of Roman Catholic persuasion. The British immigrated into Ireland, mostly to the north, and, quite simply, took over the northern reaches. The immigration began with small steps, long ago. But then it became conquest and colonization. Irish families who had lived on their land for years lost their parcels for no fair reason. Men like Honeyman, who was British and protestant, dissented against the treatment afforded to the island’s people, hence the name.
“There are some who blame the Irish government’s lackadaisical response to the potato famine, which killed untold many Irish during the 1740s, on British influence and dominance.”
“It is interesting to me,” I responded, “that the British find our people backward and primitive and, one could say, tribal, when you have just described to me such tribal warfare within their own domain.”
“A point well taken, your grace. I will admit to my own guilt in my underestimation of your people. These recent years have demonstrated how quite wrong I have been.”
“And Honeyman’s role in the New Jersey Presbyterian Congregation? Does he still participate?”
“Indeed, he does, but he seems to bear no interest in church politics. However, the power of the church grows daily in the New England Federation, with or without his active involvement. He has laid the groundwork for much economic development on behalf of his congregation. His only dalliance in politics was led by the musket when he offered military support to turn back the efforts of landowners to dominate a local Presbyterian Congregation. The final result has been a congregational economic model that is much like your own and Diderot’s older Moravian Congregation.”
I was pleased to hear this. I could not imagine Diderot consorting with a European who didn’t think like him. Now, it was confirmed.
“But all is not well. Today, smallpox rages through our European community. Europeans are rejecting Wage Longstone’s vaccination program because he is of African descent. They call him a witch doctor.”
“We have experienced such resistance in the Carolinas, also,” I responded. “The vaccine has been very effective for us. But the vaccination is based on English techniques, is it not?”
“Longstone is a New Englander, as you are aware, I’m sure. He developed his methods when he noticed that slaves on dairy plantations were protected from smallpox if they had previously contracted cowpox while working with cattle. After he was emancipated, he studied medicine at St. George’s Hospital in London.” She leaned toward me. “There,” she said with a smile, “He married a pleasant English woman named Catherine Kingscote who he brought with him on his return to New England.
“But yes. Longstone’s vaccine, of course. Yes. You are quite correct in that it was based on the English method of inoculation, which had its own controversies.”
I nodded. I had heard of the process by which doctors injected small amounts of infected discharge from smallpox lesions into uninfected patients in hopes of preventing the disease.
Inoculation helped reduce the number of smallpox infections, but it carried a high risk of making one sick with the disease. Longstone’s vaccination technique was far superior to inoculation but just as simple. He emulated the variolation technique that extracted material from lesions but instead acquired matter from the much milder cowpox. To test it, he injected himself with cowpox, then his wife. Both came down with mild cowpox symptoms like that contracted by slaves on dairy farms. The vaccination technique quickly spread to Afriker communities throughout the east coast and the Seminole Nation (known then as Muskogee).
Smallpox during this period had been producing fatality rates as high as 60 percent in adults and 80 percent in infants. It has been estimated that 400,000 people died per year from smallpox in 18th-century Europe and another 150,000 in North America, mostly those of European descent, leaving others blinded or maimed for life. Some demographers have theorized that if Europeans in North America had not resisted the vaccine, Africa would not have become the dominant ancestry in New England.
The First Settler communities in North America were also quite prone to the disease. Longstone’s vaccination is credited with saving millions of First Settler lives. Today, the largest statue in North America stands in the city of Jumano, in Comancheria. It is a statue of Wage Longstone.
“I’m afraid that it has become an epidemic among people with, shall I say, my European heritage. And it is a quite unnecessary epidemic. It needn’t be so.”
“The three major congregations in Charleston have made the vaccine compulsory,” I said.
“Enforced how?”
“Not having membership in any congregation presents unique challenges. One is basically on his or her own, with no resources, no real employment opportunities, and, well, I think you can imagine.”
“Those who refuse treatment are banned from the congregation?”
“Suspended. Until they receive their vaccination.”
“And how has been the response?”
At that, food was presented by Matilda, who was a young Fula woman wearing a colorful yellow and violet headdress with complex weaves. The yellow waves of the headdress were filled with tiny blue starbursts, while the violet contained light streaks of green.
Matilda placed a large plate in front of Margaret. The plate was full of beaver tail. Next to that was placed a vegetable dish consisting of okra, yams, cauliflower, and black-eyed peas on a bed of collard greens, which in turn was perched upon a bed of rice. A third plate consisted of a presentation of collards in a variety of formats.
Margaret looked as if she didn’t know what to do as Matilda walked to my side of the table and presented three identical plates of food to me. Margaret stared at her empty plate, then the three full plates.
The variety of collard greens in front of her was probably confounding. Our congregation alone grew almost two dozen different varieties of them. Their big fat leaves were dark green, grayish green, light green, and a bright, almost glowing green. The governess studied the collard plate. Some of them wrapped tight, oblong mounds of rice, others wrapped grapes or tomatoes, and some wrapped a sausage of boar meat. Others wrapped baked yams with leaves that had a flavor reminiscent of garlic.
“At first, poor,” I finally answered as I stabbed a collard green wrap. She looked somewhat appalled as I pulled the wrap from my fork and ate it with my hands. “There were murmurs and rumors that it was a way for freed slaves to exact revenge on their former masters.”
She laughed at that. “That in turn implies that they understand that such revenge may have been warranted.”
“I can understand their hesitancy,” I said. “If I was a former slaver and encountered newly freed slaves offering me a dose of cowpox, I’d run for the hills. Our approach has been to offer empathy and be sure that the administrators of the pox vaccine have light skin where appropriate. Not a difficult task, as most doctors have white skin, even here.”
“But not all with white skin are slavers,” she said, sounding somewhat defensive. “Do they sense retribution as well?”
I nodded. “I would say so. In a sense, it is fair to say that they are one tribe, and we another. It is the way of this world. I come from a land of many tribes, many nations, and here, on this continent, my people are of one tribe and one nation. And the Europeans, they are of another tribe. My fervent hope is that we shall live together in peace, but I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say that I believe that the outcome rests on the behavior of the white tribe.”
She thought about this for a moment before saying, “And what of the First Settler nations? Are they of one tribe? Or several hundred?”
“I cannot speak for them regarding their unity. They are many nations who wish we would all return to our lands,” I smiled. “This is their land. I’m afraid the rest of us are interlopers.”
“If only it were that simple.”
“It is that simple. The origins of conflict often are. The resolution and the outcome are perhaps more complex. People from my homeland, and the Caribbean, and elsewhere, they are immigrating to the First Settlers’ land in great numbers. First Settlers are not pleased with this. But there is no continental megaphone that can direct people away from these shores.”
“I don’t think the English are particularly pleased either,” said the governess.
“It isn’t their place to be pleased or displeased,” I said firmly. “The crown holds the flag, but not the land.”
“It is good you say this to me, instead of to the king.”
“The king shall never set foot in this territory. I won’t concern myself with his hypothetical reaction.” I was surprising myself with my current tone. I did not dislike this woman.
And she surprised me with her response. “I can learn much from you. I do hope we can repeat this meeting in the future.”
I nodded politely. “Tell me what your plans are for New England.”
“The Federation is in disarray, your grace. I can’t imagine plans of any kind. The place is in tatters. The plague of smallpox, the strife between peoples, much of it, I must admit, instigated by my people, who fear loss of limb and property.”
“Not an unreasoned fear, correct? Many landowners have seen their properties usurped in favor of congregations much like in the Carolinas, have they not?”
“Almost every important area of production is in the hands of freed slaves. But not just freed slaves now. Workers of all backgrounds have raised their banners. Timber mills, seaports, plantations of every sort. The situation changes daily.
“Not a week ago, I paid a visit to an iron foundry in Raynham — that’s in Bristol County. The Taunton Iron Works. Owned by a Josiah Dean, whom I was under arrangement to meet. When I arrived, I discovered Dean had been sent away by the workers, who had claimed the ironworks for the local congregation.
“Like everything else, there is a story. The rebellion at the iron works was instigated by a descendant of a relative of Metacomet, who had been sachem of the Pokanoket and Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Confederacy in 1662. This relative had been enslaved shortly after King Philip’s War, which had taken place more than a hundred years prior. The descendant, who went by the name of Fierce Madeira, made his way all the way back to Bristol County from Madeira off the African coast but a year ago.”
The governess leaned toward me, as she was prone to do when remarking on a point of interest to her. “In Madeira,” she smiled, “he became quite proficient in winemaking. A long way from his enslaved ancestors who had been brought to that small island to work sugar plantations for the Portuguese.
“Fierce Madeira was in league with descendants of the founders of the original iron works, as well as workers there. It was an interesting amalgamation of people I found, your grace. One of them was Shibodee Turrey Wurry, who, as a slave had been known as Tobias Gilmore, and then, later, became known as James Tagoe.” She laughed at his. “Origin of said name unknown, but he is most famous for having helped in the capture of George Washington, and later the capture and repurposing of Princeton University.”
She sighed gleefully. She truly adored the smallest details of history. I was beginning to rather adore her in turn.
“Other workers included descendants of other founders such as Hezekiah Hoare and Peter Pitts and William Parker. All Scotsmen, I believe. Such a thing!
“Shibodee, or James — Oh to this day I don’t know what he prefers to be called, told me he was captured whilst collecting coconuts and sent via a slave ship to Virginia. The poor man. The ship was damaged in a terrible storm and had to sail north to, perhaps, he thinks, Rhode Island.
“Well, I do go on, don’t I, your grace. My apologies. I’ll just try to conclude my little tale by saying that the workers I’ve named, as well as others, seized the ironworks in the name of the Raynham Baptist Society Congregation and made a determination to follow, for lack of a better name, the emerging model of congregational economics.”
Diderot’s methods certainly seemed to travel quickly, I thought, but, in truth, I knew that the Afriker thought spirit was of one mind, which created a wave of economic thinking that quickly spread.
The governess leaned even further toward me and whispered, “Do you think we are in the midst of another revolution? A worker’s revolution of some kind?”
“One perhaps on behalf of workers in service to Christ,” I said quite simply.
“Not a hair on Josiah Dean’s head was harmed,” she said. “Not that there was much to harm, I’m told. But I must declare that like most other owners of property who have lost land to congregations, he showed little interest in the new arrangement.”
“God approves. This is the only viewpoint that matters in these arrangements,” I said. Then I quoted the Bible. “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need. Acts thirty-four, governess. If you have nothing with which to pay, why should your bed be taken from under you? Proverbs. Chapter twenty-two.
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. Matthew, chapter 23.
“Jesus was not a Roman,” I continued. “He was a Jew, part of a castigated group, walking within the ranks of the oppressed. He wants us to show no interest in wealth, and this nation, the Carolina Union, will honor his wishes.
“Our social system is an organism consisting of the collective human spirit. But rather than treating it like a cell on the tip of your hands, the European now treats each individual within that organism as a cell on the bottom of the foot, to either be trampled upon or to do the trampling. To the European, the social system is not a spiritual entity but is instead an engine for profit, a machine, something for churning out money and gold.
“Martin Luther, upon whose original guidance our protestant churches are based, held strong biases against lending, profits, and rent. Loans to the poor were to be free of any interest charges, a principle of economics that can also be found in the Bible.
“Calvin also chastised general avarice, which is a prerequisite to slavery, is it not? He loathed the concept of profiteering. He proclaimed that economic activity should be dictated by the morals established by The Bible. I will add to this and say that we must not recognize biblical morality as being limited by the European purview of the patriarchs who have transformed the church into the exclusive domain of men, with its justifications for war and the subjugation of women, but no, I refer here to the biblical morality as taught by Jesus when he demanded but one thing of all of us, that we love one another as he loves us, and that we also love him.”
“Tis a noble cause,” said Margaret. “Gallant. But much of the change we are witnessing is not peaceful. Landowners and owners of large mercantile enterprises are not willingly obliging.”
“They are not.”
“And violence often ensues.”
“It does,” I agreed. “The money tables are flipped over, and the fists under the toppled tables are raised.”
“The crown can’t be pleased.”
“The crown is awash in greed. They cannot be pleased, I agree. But I do not believe they have the stomach for another fight.”
Then, the governess shocked me with a steady roll of tears. She wasn’t sobbing. They were silent tears that she dabbed away with a napkin.
Instead of asking her what was wrong, I waited for her to say something.
Finally, she did.
“I fear that the events taking place on our continent will be the one uniting force among the crowns dancing upon the various heads of Europe. I fear that they will bring their great armies and navies together as one and destroy us all.”
My answer was simple: “To quote Psalms 37: The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows to bring down the poor and needy, to slay those whose way is upright; their sword shall enter their own heart, and their bows shall be broken.
“If Europe wants war with us, war she shall have. She will rue that day because God will carry our weapons for us and rain punishment upon her in an Old Testament kind of way, and she will meet the same fate as Sodom and Gomorrah. Forgiveness in that case will arrive after the barrel of the gun has made its last sound.”
Interested in some of the history I borrowed to create Margaret Moncrieffe? Find her story here:
You can read about the real Burwell Colbert here:
Read about the real Wormley Hughes here:
The paragraphs in this excerpt are reformatted to allow for more white space than the original text from the novel. This is sort of a Medium audience thing.
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