“Promissory notes from your Congress, to be exact. To be redeemed at par—if Congress ever has the ability to pay, that is. Down the years, as you well know, your Congress’s notes have been increasingly discounted. I started buying them soon after Yorktown—only paid pence for them. I believe you’ll find, however, that Congress will now accept them, at full value, as payment for confiscated Loyalist land.”
“There’s a small fortune here,” exclaimed James.
“I believe we shall end this war,” said Master, with quiet satisfaction, “with considerably more land than we had when it began.” Then he turned to Abigail. “You have been buying china and glass, Abby. I have been buying debt. It’s all the same game. The risk was high, so the price was low. And of course, I had the money ready to do it.”
If the merchant felt pleased with himself about these transactions, however, there was something else that pleased him also. It was the day after James and his friend had left that he spoke quietly to Abigail.
“I noticed, Abby, that the Count de Chablis was rather agreeable to you.”
“Was it so plain, Papa? I hope I did not embarrass myself.”
“Not at all. But a father notices these things, you know. And I was very glad, Abby.”
“Why, Papa?”
“It will soon be two years since Albion died,” he said gently. “You have mourned for him, as you should. But it is time, now, for you to begin your life again.”
And she knew that it was true.
As the summer of 1783 turned to autumn, it was clear that the British must soon leave the city. But the British commander was firm. “We’ll leave as soon as every Loyalist who wants to leave has safely departed.”
They were leaving by their thousands. A few were New Yorkers, but most were Loyalists who were coming through New York from elsewhere. Some shipped to England, the majority to maritime Canada. The British government paid their passage.
And then there were the former slaves that the British had freed. They too were departing, though for a different reason—to escape their Patriot owners. Hardly a day went by when Abigail didn’t hear of some Patriot arriving in the city and scouring the streets and waterfront for his former slaves.
“Washington’s quite clear about it,” Master remarked. “He says they’ve every right to reclaim their property, but the British say that’s not fair. Anyway, the poor devils would sooner freeze up in Nova Scotia than be slaves again.”
About one slave, however, there was no news. It had taken some time, but Master had finally been able to discover the fate of his missing French prize. “She’s back in French service, down in the Caribbean. But what happened to Solomon, I can’t discover. He isn’t aboard her now, that’s for certain.” To Hudson he promised: “I am still searching for him. He may well have been sold, but we shouldn’t give up hope.” To Abigail he confessed: “If I find him, I’ll buy him back for Hudson and give him his freedom immediately. But I fear that the chances of finding him are not good.”
It was at the start of October that the letter from Vanessa arrived. It was addressed to John Master, as usual. It informed him, in her bold hand, that she was leaving London, being obliged to go to France. She didn’t say why. She expressed regret that she was unable to come to New York to see Weston, and her usual gratitude that he was in his grandfather’s safe hands. But it was the postscript that caused Master to cry out in utter astonishment.
The news in London is that Grey Albion was last week married.
Abigail found her brother at West Point. Hudson took her there. She was directed up to the ramparts, where, as soon as she reached him, she handed him the letter.
As he read his wife’s plans to leave London, and her words about their son, James’s face remained grave, but impassive. As he read the postscript, Abigail watched him closely. He gave a start. Then he frowned, and read it again. But he did not look at her. Instead, he stared out from the ramparts, over the River Hudson far below, for a few moments.
“They told me he was dead,” he said tonelessly.
“You did not ascertain?”
“There was so much going on. Washington sent me across the river to where the other British forces—Tarleton’s men—had also surrendered, the very same day. By the time I returned, I heard that several prisoners had been buried. I assumed …” He shrugged.
“Surely you would have heard that he lived?”
“Not necessarily. I had little to do with the prisoners after that.” He continued to stare out into space. “He must have recovered, then returned to London, perhaps on parole. That is possible.” He frowned again. “His father said nothing in his letters?”
“No. That is another mystery.”
James pursed his lips. “Under instruction from his son, perhaps. Who knows?”
“I find the business very strange,” she said.
“So do I.” James glanced at her, then looked away, apparently deep in thought. “All manner of strange things happen in war, Abby,” he said slowly. “In war, as in matters of the heart, none of us can be sure how we’ll behave. We do not know ourselves what we may do.” He looked back at her gravely. “But whatever caused Grey Albion to leave without a word, let us hope that he has found happiness now.” He paused. “So many unexpected things happened in this war, Abby, that I have learned that it is useless to question why they fell out as they did. It is destiny. That’s all. I don’t think,” he added, “that we shall see him again.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t suppose we shall.”
On November 25, 1783, at the head of eight hundred Continental troops, General George Washington came peacefully down the old Indian trail from the village of Harlem, and entered the city of New York. Riding slowly down the Bowery and Queen Street, to the cheers of the crowd, he turned into Wall Street and crossed to Broadway, where he was greeted with a fulsome public address.
The Master household went to Wall Street to watch. James rode in Washington’s company, only twenty feet behind him. Abigail noticed that her father seemed quite pleased with the whole affair.
“Washington has a most stately air,” he remarked with approval.
But it was a tiny incident later that afternoon that gave him even more pleasure. The general was to be given a banquet at Fraunces Tavern, only a stone’s throw from the Master house, where James came to dress beforehand. As James was departing, a clatter of hoofs in the street announced the arrival of Washington and a party of officers, on their way to the gathering. James greeted them in the street, while Abigail and her father stood at the open door, watching.
And it was then that, glancing across at them, the tall, grave-faced general bowed to Abigail courteously and, as he had once before, but with a nod of recognition this time, and even the ghost of a smile, gravely touched his hat to her father, who bowed low in turn.
At dinner with Abby and young Weston, a little while later, having told Hudson to break out a bottle of his best red wine, Master raised his glass in a toast.
“Well, Abby,” he said with considerable cheerfulness, “and you too, Weston, my dear grandson, the world that I knew is turned upside down. So let’s drink to the new one.”
The Capital
1790
JOHN MASTER GAZED at them all. The hot summer day made the air in the house close. Perhaps he’d had too much to drink. It was a pity that Abigail wasn’t here—she could always keep him in order. But with her first child due any day now, she was staying at her house up in Dutchess County. So he stared at them all—at his son James, graduate of Oxford, his grandson Weston, about to go to Harvard, and at their distinguished visitor, whose outrageous statement James and Weston seemed content to accept without a protest.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he said to Thomas Jefferson, “you can go to Hell.”
Not that Thomas Jefferson believed in Hell, Master supposed, or Heaven for that matter.
Until now, John Master had found himself surprisingly content to be a citizen of th
e United States of America. For Washington himself he had a deep respect. At Washington’s inauguration in the nation’s capital of New York, he had stood in the crowd on Wall Street as the great man took the oath on the balcony of the Federal Hall, and he had taken pride in the fact that, when he walked down the street with James, the great men of the new state—Adams, Hamilton, Madison—would greet his son as a respected friend.
As for the new Constitution that the wise men of the nation had framed in Philadelphia, Master had been very impressed. It seemed to him that, with its admirable system of checks and balances, the document could hardly be bettered. When Madison and the Federalists had argued, against the Antifederalists, that the states must yield some of their independence, so that the republic could have a strong central government, he’d thought the Federalists were quite right.
“We should accept the Constitution as it is,” he had argued. But here, his natural conservatism had come into conflict with his son.
“I follow Jefferson,” James had declared. Jefferson was acting as the new state’s representative in Paris at that time and, while approving of the Constitution, he had raised one objection.
“The Constitution still fails to protect the freedom of the individual. Unless an amendment is made, our republic will finish up just as tyrannical as the old monarchies like England.” This was a gross exaggeration, his father had responded, but James had been insistent. Freedom of religion was not sufficiently guaranteed, he insisted, nor was freedom of the press. On the latter subject, he’d even started to give his father a lecture about the Zenger trial until Master had been forced to remind him: “I know about the Zenger trial, James. I was here at the time.”
“Well then, Father, you surely were not against Zenger, were you?” Wryly remembering his unfortunate boyhood performance during the visit of his Boston cousins, John Master had contented himself with replying: “I listened to my cousin Eliot from Boston speaking for Zenger strongly—and a damn sight more elegantly than you,” he had added, just to keep James in his place.
“Back in ’77,” James had continued, “Jefferson proposed a bill to guarantee religious freedom in Virginia. What we need is an amendment along those lines. New York won’t ratify the Constitution without one, nor will Virginia.” And when the First Amendment had appeared, James had treated the matter as though it were a personal victory for Jefferson.
No doubt it was his innate conservatism, but for all his respect for the new republic, Master could not feel entirely comfortable with what he now sensed was a profound, secular tolerance at its very heart.
Even Washington was guilty. Of course, the president always observed the proprieties. While Trinity was being rebuilt after the fire, the Masters had attended the handsome chapel of St. Paul’s nearby, and it always gave John Master pleasure to see the president and his wife in their pew there—even if Washington did leave before communion. But there was not the least doubt, for Washington made it clear, that the president couldn’t care less what religion his fellow citizens followed. Protestant or Catholic, Jew or atheist, or even a follower of the prophet Mohamet—so long as they observed the new Constitution, Washington declared, it was all one to him.
Others, it seemed to Master, were more devious. Before he died that spring, old Ben Franklin had claimed to be a member of every Church, and prayed with each congregation in turn. The cunning old fox.
But Jefferson, this handsome, Southern patrician with his fine education and his fancy Parisian friends, who had returned to America to run the nation’s foreign affairs—what was he? A deist, probably. One of those fellows who said that there must be a supreme being of some kind, but who didn’t seem to think they needed to do a damn thing about it. A fine belief for a coxcomb.
And now here he is, thought Master, giving me, a vestryman of Trinity, lectures about New York’s bad moral character and her unworthiness to be the capital of America. This from a man who’s been happily living in the flesh-pots of Paris, if you please!
It was intolerable.
“You may like it or you may not,” Master continued heatedly, “but New York, sir, is the capital of America, and it’s going to stay that way.”
It was certainly starting to look like a capital. Life hadn’t been easy since America became a nation. Saddled with British and European trade restrictions, not to mention the war debt, many of the states were still struggling their way out of depression. But New York had been recovering more rapidly than most places. Entrepreneurial merchants found ways to trade. A constant stream of people flowed in.
True, there were still areas where the fires had left charred ruins. But the city was rebuilding. Theaters had opened. The tower and spire of a new Trinity Church rose splendidly over the skyline. And when Congress had decided that their city should be the capital of the new nation, New Yorkers had reacted instantly. City Hall on Wall Street—Federal Hall, they called it now—had been splendidly refurbished as a temporary home for the legislature, while down at the foot of Manhattan, the old fort had already been torn down and used as landfill, to make room for a magnificent new complex to house the Senate, the House of Representatives and the various government offices by the waterside. Where else would you get such action, except in New York?
James intervened now, trying to smooth things over.
“The fact is, Father, many people say the New Yorkers worship only money and love luxury too much.”
“Doesn’t seem to bother Washington,” his father retorted. The president’s magnificent cream-colored coach and six was the finest equipage in the city. George and Martha Washington had already moved into a splendid new mansion on Broadway where they entertained on a scale quite as lavish as any New York merchant prince. And anyway, where was the harm in that?
But if Master chose to curse Jefferson, that gentleman was quite capable of responding in kind. His finely chiseled face set hard, and he fixed the merchant with a steely gaze.
“What I find unseemly about New York, sir,” he said coldly, “is that despite the fact that we fought a war of independence, this city is chiefly populated by Tories.”
There he had a point. If the war had brought all sorts of Patriots and low fellows into prominence, it was quite remarkable how well the city’s old guard—and many of them were indeed Tories—had managed to survive. When you looked at the people who had bought up the houses and lands of the great landowners who’d fled or been dispossessed, the names spoke for themselves: Beekman, Gouverneur, Roosevelt, Livingston—rich merchant gentlemen like himself.
But did that make the city unfit to be America’s capital?
No, it was all jealousy, Master reckoned. Jealousy, pure and simple. It was one thing that Philadelphia was angling to be the capital—that he could understand. Every city looks for its own advantage—though now that Ben Franklin was dead, Master suspected that Philadelphia might be a less lively place. But the real pressure wasn’t coming from Philadelphia.
It was coming from the South. They might call him a damn Yankee, but it seemed to Master that he’d heard enough from the Southern states. In his view, the South should be satisfied with the Constitution. If many Northern Patriots were becoming uncertain about the morality of owning slaves, they’d still agreed to guarantee the institution of slavery for another generation. And when the South had negotiated that every three slaves should count as two white people in calculating the population of each state, hadn’t that neatly boosted the number of representatives the Southern states would be allotted in Congress?
Their latest complaint was typical.
Master liked young Alexander Hamilton. There he could agree with James, who’d served with him in Washington’s army. Hamilton was a clever fellow, with a lot of go in him—born illegitimate, of course, though his father was a gentleman. But illegitimacy often spurred men to great deeds. And now that he was appointed Secretary to the Treasury, young Hamilton had made a perfectly sensible proposition. He wanted to take all the vast overhang of war debt
—the worthless Continental paper—and bundle it all up into a new government debt, backed by tax revenues that would stabilize the nation’s finances.
Of course, these arrangements were never entirely fair. Some Southern states had already paid off their debts. “So why should we pay taxes to bail out the others?” they demanded. But the real bone of contention, the thing that drove the South wild, was the role of New York.
For before Hamilton announced his plan, he’d had to consider one big question. By the end of the war, the promissory notes issued by Congress, and the individual states, had become almost worthless. So how much of the good new paper would you get for them? Ten pounds for every hundred of the old notes? Twenty? How generous should the government be?
Just as Master had done a few years before, some brave speculators had bought up quite a bit of the old debt at huge discounts, from men who needed the cash and were glad enough to get something for their worthless notes. Many of these sellers were from the South. Of course, if a speculator could have got inside information about what the conversion rate was going to be, he’d make a killing. Quite properly, until the public announcement, Hamilton hadn’t breathed a word.
Not so his deputy. A New York man, of course. He told his friends.
And the word was—astoundingly—that the debt would be redeemed at par. Full price. Any speculator who could get his hands on the paper cheap could make a fortune.
Among the lucky merchants of New York, therefore, a feeding frenzy had developed. Southern gentlemen, not privy to what was afoot, were glad to find eager takers for any paper they cared to sell. Until they discovered the truth. Then there was an outcry.
“You accursed New York Yankees—you’re feasting upon the sorrows of the South.”
“If you weren’t short of cash, or understood the market, you wouldn’t be in this mess,” the New York insiders cruelly responded.
Such insider dealing might still be legal, but one thing was certain: New York was hated. And not only by the South. Anyone who’d sold their paper cheap felt aggrieved. As for Jefferson, as a Virginia plantation owner himself, there was no doubt where his sympathies lay. He looked upon the New York profiteers with loathing.