Book One: The Olive Branch Part Two: The Grievances Characters
Chapter Eleven
The Small Spots
Joseph Brant. London, in the Kingdom of Great Britain. Thursday, 14 March 1776.
Fighting on the frontier was severe and was not resolved by the settlement. The Iroquois Confederacy, which had maintained a position of neutrality, divided: most of its nations supported the Crown, which had attempted through the Proclamation line to restrain settlement, while the Oneida and Tuscarora supported the colonists. The Mohawk leader Joseph Brant commanded Crown-allied forces with considerable effect.
They had offered him better lodgings in the first week, in a street near the Park where every door had a footman, and Joseph Brant had thanked them and said that he would stay where he was.
The Swan with Two Necks had a yard with galleries and an arch for the northbound coaches. Wheels rang on the stones at all hours. He had arrived from Falmouth at two in the morning with frost on his coat. The people got up, lit a fire and fed him without questions. They were kind in daylight too. Johnson’s friends called it charming that he would not leave for grander rooms. He had lived his whole life among people who were kind to him when he was useful, and he knew the value of the other kind.
On the morning of Thursday the fourteenth of March he dressed by candlelight in the clothes his people wore in council.
In an English coat, with his hair tied back, he could walk Cheapside without a second look. He had worn those coats since Wheelock’s school and spoke English better than many of the gentlemen he met. Today was a council. He put on the white shirt, the blanket over his shoulder and the silver gorget that marked the King’s friend. John Hill waited beside the coach. The ostlers stopped to watch them go.
He had come three thousand miles to ask one question, and in ten weeks nobody had let him ask it.
It was a plain question. For a year the Six Nations had sat still while the King’s subjects in America quarrelled with the King, because it was not their quarrel, and because the Confederacy had decided long ago, after a war it still remembered, that it would not be drawn into the quarrels of the English among themselves. But the quarrel had come to them anyway, as quarrels did. The Congress at Philadelphia sent men with wampum to ask them to stay neutral, and the King’s officers sent men with wampum to ask them to take up the hatchet, and the Oneidas were listening to the Congress’s men and the Mohawks to the King’s; and the Confederacy, which had held for longer than anybody could remember, was beginning very quietly to come apart at the joints.
The Mohawks were the King’s. They had been the King’s since before there was a King George. They had fought for him in the last war, and Brant had fought in it himself at sixteen, under Sir William Johnson at Niagara; and his sister Molly had kept Sir William’s house for fifteen years and borne him eight children, and since Sir William’s death there was nobody on the Mohawk River whose word carried further than hers. There was no nation in America that had done more for the Crown, or asked less.
And they were losing their land. At Fort Hunter the corporation of Albany claimed the very ground the Lower Castle stood on, under an old paper that nobody had ever been able to show them. At Canajoharie, where Brant’s own house was, a man named George Klock had been getting Mohawk men drunk for twenty years and bringing them papers to put their marks on, and every paper was another piece of the Upper Castle’s land, and every time the matter went before the King’s courts in New York the King’s courts found a reason to wait. Sir William had fought Klock for as long as Brant could remember, and died without beating him.
So the question was this. If the Mohawks took up the King’s hatchet against the King’s own subjects, what would the King do for them? It was not a question that could be asked by letter. A man had to come and stand in front of the people he was asking.
They had sailed from Quebec in November, in a merchant ship called the Adamant. Colonel Guy Johnson, Sir William’s nephew and son-in-law, who had come to London to be confirmed as the King’s superintendent of the Indians; Colonel Claus, who was Sir William’s other son-in-law; Captain Tice; John Hill, whose name in his own language was Oteroughyanento; and Brant’s nephew Peter, Molly’s eldest boy, who was sixteen. And below them in the hold, in irons, thirty-odd Americans taken before Montreal in September, who were being sent to England to be tried for treason.
One of them was Ethan Allen of the New Hampshire Grants, who had taken Ticonderoga in the spring with a few score men and a great deal of shouting, and had tried to take Montreal in the autumn the same way and been taken himself, by Peter among others. He was a big man and a loud one, and the irons did not make him any quieter. He talked whenever the prisoners came up for air: he expected to be hanged, would die a Christian, and would make the hanging an expensive bargain. Brant asked why he had tried Montreal without the Congress sending him. Allen said the Congress was slow. Brant had noticed that about congresses, and said so. After that Allen talked to him about liberty through the rest of the crossing. Brant listened. Allen sold land in the Grants which New York said he had no right to sell.
They came into Falmouth a few days before Christmas, and the news was waiting for them.
The King had received the Congress’s petition in the summer, and said nothing about it. Then at the end of October he had opened his Parliament with a speech about reconciliation and about hearing his American subjects’ grievances, and in November the Lords had voted, against his own ministers, that the petition was a ground for conciliation. Nobody at Falmouth seemed to know quite what that meant. The prisoners were put in the castle at Pendennis while London decided what to do with them, and in January London decided, and put them on a frigate, and sent them back across the ocean. Nobody was tried. Nobody was hanged. Ethan Allen went home a prisoner of war instead of a traitor, still talking.
It had taken Brant a little while to understand it, and he was not certain that the English understood it yet. The King’s subjects in America had raised armies against the King’s soldiers, and shot down a thousand of them on a hill above Charlestown, and the King had received their petition and spoken of their grievances. The man he had crossed the ocean with in irons was going home unhanged. The King was quarrelling with them as a man quarrels with his sons: in earnest, and with blows, and with the door left open.
The Mohawks were not his sons. They were his allies, which was another thing altogether, and in most ways a better one. In one way it was a great deal worse.
A man makes it up with his sons in the end.
The room at Whitehall was smaller than he had expected, and warmer, with a good fire and a Turkey carpet and a desk with nothing on it but a closed box. Lord Dartmouth stood up when they came in.
He was a slight, grave man in his forties, very plainly dressed, with a quiet voice and the look about the eyes of somebody who did not sleep much; and he had, Brant noticed, the trick that the best of the English had and the rest of them never learned, of looking at the man he was speaking to rather than at the man’s clothes. An older man sat at a side table with a pen, whom he named as Mr Pownall. Colonel Johnson made the introductions. Colonel Claus took his place at Brant’s elbow to interpret.
Brant did not need an interpreter. He spoke English better than Claus spoke Mohawk, and everybody in the room knew it. But in council a man of the Six Nations spoke in his own tongue, whatever others he had, so that what he said was said by his nation and not by a man who happened to have learned English at a school in Connecticut. So he stood, and spoke in Mohawk, and Claus put it into English after him sentence by sentence, and Brant listened to himself arriving in the room a few seconds late, in another man’s voice.
He called the Secretary Brother Gorah, which was the name the Six Nations gave the King’s great men. He said that they had crossed the great lake with their superintendent, from their Confederacy the Six Nations and their allies, to see their father the great King, and to tell him and his counsellors of their attachment to his Majesty and his government. He said that the Mohawks, his own nation, had shown their zeal and loyalty to the great King on every occasion, and had been very badly treated by his people in that country for it: the City of Albany laying an unjust claim to the lands on which their Lower Castle was built, and one Klock and others doing the same at Canajoharie. He said that they had brought these things before the King’s great men in America many times, and had never had any redress.
Then he said the thing he had come to say, and said it slowly, so that Claus would have time.
“It is very hard,” said Claus, in English, “when we have let the King’s subjects have so much of our lands for so little value, they should want to cheat us in this manner of the little pieces we have left for our women and children to live on.”
“Spots,” said Brant, in English.
Claus looked at him.
“The small spots,” said Brant. “Not pieces.”
Pownall wrote it down. Dartmouth, who had been looking into the fire, looked at Brant instead, and went on looking at him through the rest of it, while Claus finished, and while Brant said in Mohawk, and Claus said after him in English, that they were tired out in making complaints and getting no redress.
When it was done Dartmouth was quiet for a little. Then he said, in English, and to Brant rather than to Claus, that he had heard the name of Joseph Brant before, from Dr Wheelock.
“I was at his school,” said Brant. “At Lebanon. A long time ago.”
“He wrote of you as one of the most promising of his scholars.” Dartmouth paused. “He writes to me still.”
Brant knew that he did. Everybody on the Mohawk River knew where Dr Wheelock stood now: in New Hampshire, in the woods, at the head of a college named for the man in front of him, praying for the Congress. At Lebanon they had prayed for the King every morning, on their knees on a cold floor before breakfast, and Brant had prayed for him every morning since, in English and in Mohawk; and so far as he knew he was the only one of the two of them who still did. He did not say any of that. He said that he remembered Dr Wheelock with gratitude, which was true in its way.
Dartmouth said that he would lay their words before the King, and that His Majesty’s answer would be given them in writing; and that he thanked them, and the Six Nations, for a constancy which His Majesty did not forget. He said it beautifully. Brant had heard a great many Englishmen say that the King did not forget, and he had noticed that it was always said in the present tense.
He sat to Mr Romney at the end of March and the beginning of April, in a new house in Cavendish Square, for the Earl of Warwick, who wanted a picture of him.
Romney was a thin, anxious man from the north of England, of about forty, who said almost nothing and looked at Brant as Brant had once seen a carpenter look at a tree. He wanted the white shirt and the blanket and the gorget, and feathers in Brant’s hair, and the tomahawk with Brant’s name engraved on the blade, J. Thayendanegea, because a man should know his own hatchet. He wanted Brant to hold it across his body and look out of the picture at something a long way off. Brant did it. He stood for two mornings in a cold room that smelled of linseed oil and looked out at something a long way off, which happened to be a window on to Cavendish Square, and thought about Canajoharie.
Warwick would have a war chief with a hatchet for his wall. Nobody asked Romney to paint the table at Fort Hunter where Brant and Mr Stuart had spent two winters translating St Mark, a verse at a time. They had argued long over the word for mercy.
Still, the portrait pleased the Earl. Two mornings in Cavendish Square cost Brant little, and Warwick knew men he needed to see. He sat as Romney asked and thought about Canajoharie.
A Scotch gentleman named Boswell came to see him that spring and asked him everything, about his nation and his religion and the war and whether it was true that the Mohawks did this or that, and wrote the answers down in a little book. Brant answered him carefully. He had learned long ago that the men who write things down are worth answering carefully, because what they write is what will be remembered, and it will be remembered as what you said.
He was presented at St James’s on a Wednesday in April, at the King’s levee, in his own dress, with Colonel Johnson beside him.
He had expected a palace and found a large old brick house, rather shabby, full of men. They stood round the walls of a long room in their court clothes, with their swords at their sides and their hats under their arms, and when the King came in he went round the room from one to the next, as a farmer goes round his stock, and said something to each, and moved on. Nobody spoke until he was spoken to. Brant waited his turn and watched.
The King was a big fair man, younger than Brant had imagined him, with a high colour and pale eyes that stood a little out of his head and looked at everything as though it were about to be explained to him. He spoke quickly, and asked questions, and did not always wait for the answers. When he came to Brant he stopped, and looked at him from head to foot with a frank interest that Brant found he did not mind, and asked whether the voyage had been hard. Brant said that it had been long. The King asked whether the Six Nations were steady. Brant said that they were, and that they had long memories.
“Good,” said the King. “Good. That is what one wants.” He nodded, as though something had been settled, and went on to the next man, who was a bishop.
That was all. It had taken less than a minute. In the coach afterwards Colonel Johnson said that it had gone very well, and that His Majesty had spoken to him longer than to most, and Brant agreed that it had gone very well.
In the room before the levee he had listened for rebels. Nobody used it. The Congress had been misled, the petition received, and all would be settled by summer. A gentleman who had visited New York said that once the quarrel was patched up the King could attend to his good friends the Indians. Brant asked which part of New York he had seen. The gentleman had stayed in the city.
Brant thanked him, and thought about what it would mean to be attended to by a man who must first be reconciled with the people who were taking your land. It occurred to him on the way home that the King had been the only man in the room who had not mentioned the Congress at all.
The King’s answer came in May.
They went to Whitehall again, all of them, and stood in the same warm room, and Dartmouth read it to them himself, standing, from a sheet of paper that he held a little away from his eyes. Claus put it into Mohawk for John Hill, who had less English, and Brant listened to both.
It said that His Majesty had received with great satisfaction the assurances of his faithful Mohawks and of the Six Nations of their attachment to his person and government. It said that His Majesty had been made sensible of their grievances respecting their lands at Fort Hunter and at Canajoharie, and was resolved that they should be redressed. It said that this would be done as soon as the present troubles in America were at an end.
Dartmouth put the paper down.
Brant had sat in a great many councils, on both sides of the fire, and he knew the shape of a promise. This was the shape of one. It was a real one, too, which was rarer: the man reading it believed it. Brant looked at him and saw that the Secretary believed every word, and would have been hurt to be doubted, and he did not doubt him.
“And when will the troubles be at an end?” he said, in English.
Colonel Johnson moved a little in his chair. Dartmouth did not.
“When His Majesty’s subjects in America return to their duty,” he said. “Which I hope, and believe, will not be long. They have petitioned. They are most of them loyal men who have been led a great way by a few. I think they will be led back.”
“And the people who have our land at Canajoharie,” said Brant, “are His Majesty’s subjects in America.”
There was a short silence in the room. Pownall’s pen had stopped.
“They are,” said Dartmouth.
Brant thanked him. He said in Mohawk, and Claus said after him, that the Mohawks would hold fast to the chain of friendship with the great King, as their fathers had, and that they would take the King’s words home and keep them. Then he took the paper, which Pownall had copied fair, and folded it, and put it inside his shirt.
On the way back to the inn he stopped the coach in Cheapside and went into a goldsmith’s and ordered a ring.
He asked for Joseph Thayendanegea, in full, on a plain gold ring. It was for himself. If he died in the woods between the Mohawk and the Susquehanna, he wanted the hand found and known. He watched the goldsmith measure his finger.
He collected it the next week and put it on, and it fitted.
He sailed in June on the New York packet from Falmouth, with Captain Tice. Colonel Johnson and the rest were to follow.
The morning was grey and the wind was fair, and the packet went out past the castle at Pendennis, where Ethan Allen had waited in January to learn that he would not be hanged. Brant stood at the rail and watched England go down behind them, a long grey line of cliff, and then a cloud, and then nothing.
He was taking the promise home anyway. It was all there was. It was more than the Congress had offered, and the Congress wanted the land.
Then he went below, and put the paper at the bottom of his sea chest, under his shirts, where the water would not get at it. The ring he kept on.