Chesapeake by James A. Michener
“This is Warwick.”
“They all seem the same. We approach the towns. The people storm out. They drown him with adulation. This land has never seen a hero like Washington, nor will again.”
“Is he so fine?” Paxmore asked.
“You saw him. Six feet four. He towers above ordinary men.”
“I mean morally.”
“He puzzles me,” Lee confessed. “He places his whole destiny in the hands of God, serves Him with devotion. But like a soldier, not a puling clergyman.” In the darkness Major Lee permitted silence to indicate his confusion.
“Will he make a good President?”
“The finest. No man could prove his equal. He stands alone, a monument to integrity.” Another pause and then, “But there are contradictions. You know, of course, that he gained enormous approval by his refusal to accept any salary as general of the colonial armies. That’s right, never accepted a shilling of pay. Said over and over that a patriot should serve his country in time of danger and pay no heed to the cost.”
“That was admirable,” Paxmore said, but he did not point out that in the dark days of the war he had built three ships for the Continental navy, in addition to those for Steed, and that since the revolutionaries had had no funds, he had borne most of the cost himself. Also, his boatyard had been burned and his best workmen conscripted into the army.
Even had he enjoyed cards, he would not have dared to play this night, for the war had left him largely impoverished; but to learn that General Washington had also served without pay was heartening. But then Major Lee added, “What Washington did was refuse a salary but demand an expense account. I helped him make it out, and he listed everything—his son’s expenses, wine for the mess, a carriage for himself and four more carriages for his friends, rations, guns, braid for his jackets, axes for the woods. Thinking back on those accounts, they were extraordinary.”
“I could make out such an account for my shipyard,” Paxmore said, “and would do so, if asked.”
“Yes,” Lee conceded. “Each item submitted was an honest figure. But whether some of them should have been submitted remains dubious. All I know is that when there was talk of Washington’s becoming President, he again volunteered to serve without pay—just expenses. And the committee told him with some firmness, ‘Oh no, sir! This time you must accept a salary!’ They told me later, ‘No new nation could survive another of his damned expense accounts.’ ”
They now turned and walked back down the road past the house where the players were intent on their cards. They could see General Washington studying with some disgust a hand which Captain Turlock had just dealt, and Paxmore asked, “Is he capable of governing? I mean, soldiers are sometimes both obstinate and deficient in knowledge.”
“He’s not read much,” Lee confided. “I rarely see him with a book. He’s certainly no Adams or Jefferson, but maybe they read too much.”
Up and down the silent road they walked, touching upon all aspects of the new position that Washington was moving into: the military appointments, the finances, the judge-ships, the building up of a merchant navy, the admission of new states carved out of the western lands, the entire gamut of government—while the general continued playing cards.
“I never knew my father,” Lee confided toward two in the morning. “So perhaps my good opinion of the general is weighted in his favor. But I’ve served with him since I was a boy in 1774, and no finer man ever walked on the soil of this continent. He may not prove to be a capable President, but he’ll be a just one. And he’ll provide a symbol, stronger and brighter every year.”
He reflected on this, and after they had passed the card-players again he said, “At the meetings related to the revolution we had many fine orators, and I heard most of them. I never heard a finer intellect than that stubby little lawyer from Philadelphia, James Wilson. Ben Franklin could make a point, too, and John Adams could be devastating. But the best speech I ever heard was given by George Washington, who never said much.
“It was in 1774, I think, when the British were bombarding Boston and we in the south didn’t know how to respond. That day the oratory contained much fire and more confusion, but when everything seemed to be lost in chaos, Washington—I think he was only a colonel then ...” He hesitated. “Virginia militia, it must have been.
“Anyway, when it seemed that we must allow Boston to fight alone, this man stood up and spoke one sentence. Just one sentence, and when he sat down the whole history of the colonies was changed.”
“What did he say?”
“ ‘Gentlemen, I will raise one thousand men, outfit and pay them at my own expense, and march myself at their head for the relief of Boston.’ ”
Paxmore said, “I think I need sleep. I shall be going inside.”
Major Lee said, “I’ll keep guard out here.”
When Paxmore entered the gaming room it was half after three and Teach Turlock had only a few shillings on the table. “If you president as well as you play cards,” he said admiringly to Washington, “this country will be all right.”
Turlock lost that hand and decided to quit the game. “Come on, Friend Paxmore,” he said, “we’ll catch some sleep.” And he lay down on the floor outside the door while the Quaker made his way to a back room where a dozen men were stretched out.
Now came the part that General Washington enjoyed most. It was four in the morning, deadly quiet in all parts of the night except in this room where the candles flickered. The game was down to just four players, one of the local landowners having dropped out, and each surviving player knew the established peculiarities of the others. Simon Steed played an absolutely straightforward game, no bluff. Colonel Witherspoon played for every advantage, studied each card, each adversary with minute attention and won more than his share of hands. The planter was a good player, willing to take extraordinary risks if he detected even a slight edge in his favor. And General Washington was proving himself to be what he always had been: a cautious, stubborn defender of his shillings, a niggardly man when it came to betting, a daring man when he saw a chance to win a big pot, but so transparent in his positions that he was destined always to lose if the game continued long enough.
“Your majesty,” Steed said at five in the morning, “I think I have the better of you.”
“I do not take kindly to that appellation,” Washington replied, holding his losing cards close to his sweaty shirt.
“Sire, this country yearns for royal trappings,” Steed insisted.
“I prefer mister.”
“The people will not permit it. Believe me, Sire, we Americans may have thrown out one set of royalty, but we are most hungry to adopt another ... a better, that is. And you’re that better.”
Washington tapped his chin with his cards. “Others have said what you say, Steed, and there’s much common sense in what you advise. It may well be that in the end we shall have to have a royalty. But in this game you must not address a man as Sire when you intend to cut his throat. What cards are you hiding against me, Steed of Devon?”
The game broke up at a quarter to six. Major Lee, hearing the commotion, came to the door of the room to announce, “The horses are ready, sir.”
“We’d better be on our way to Wilmington,” Washington replied. “Shall we take thirty minutes to wash up, Witherspoon?”
“Did you lose again?” Lee asked impishly.
“You can mark me down in the book,” Washington replied, “as having lost two pounds, twelve and three.”
“Warwick has proved costly,” Lee said.
“It was worth it to meet once more my comrade in arms at Yorktown,” Washington said, throwing his long right arm about Steed’s shoulder, and with that, he retired to the washhouse. There would be no confidential talk of government position, but Washington was not an unfeeling man and when he returned from his toilet and saw the bleak look on Steed’s face, he went to him, took him by the hand and said bluntly, “My dear friend, I would give an arm
But before he reached them he was stopped by Teach Turlock, who produced from a filthy bag a paper which he had cherished since 1776; it was the Rector of Wrentham’s cession of Turlock’s hundred acres. “Please, General Washington, restore my land.”
The President studied the paper, asked Turlock and Steed a few questions, then called for Major Lee to bring him a quill. Sitting on a bench at the door to the farmhouse he added this endorsement to the precious document:
To my old comrade in arms, Governor John Eager Howard
Rarely have I seen a document so shot through with fraud and force and forgery as this, but rarely have I heard supporting evidence from reliable witnesses as solid as that which bulwarks this claim. I pray you, lend good ear to the supplication of the Patriot, Teach Turlock, that his lands be restored.
Geo. Washington
In the roadway a throng of hundreds waited to applaud their hero, and in his red-and-blue riding coat he made a handsome figure, bowing gravely right and left. Major Lee provided a small stool to help him mount, and when he sat astride his large chestnut, he looked more noble than ever.
“Great wishes, Sire,” Steed called, tears beginning to form.
“We shall face difficult tasks, all of us,” Washington said as he rode off, attended by cheers that would not cease till he reached New York.
The three Choptank men, without having consulted one another, mounted their horses and followed for some miles as if drawn by a powerful magnet. When the time came to turn back, Major Lee rode up to bid them farewell. To Steed he said, “The general asked me to say that you will have access to him as long as you both shall live. He prizes you as one of the true servants of this nation.”
But to Levin Paxmore he whispered, as their horses moved in the early sunlight, “I spoke perhaps too freely under the stars. You’ll keep what I said confidential?”
“I shall honor thy request,” Paxmore said, whereupon Lee pressed into the Quaker’s hand a personal communication from Washington. Paxmore waited to open it until he had returned to his desk at the boatyard. Then carefully he unfolded the paper, spread it smoothly, and read:
Friend Paxmore
You must submit at your earliest convenience a true accounting of the costs you incurred in building ships for our cause, less whatever funds were advanced you by the Congress. And I shall do my best to see that you are paid in full, because all free men stand in your debt.
Geo. Washington
That day Levin Paxmore compiled an honest account of every shilling he had spent on the revolution, including the replacement of his sheds and a wage for his wife, and when President Washington signed the authorizing bill, Paxmore was paid in full, and it was this military money that formed the foundation of the Paxmore fortune.
VOYAGE SEVEN: 1811
WINTER ALONG THE EASTERN SHORE WAS USUALLY clement. An occasional freezing of some salt-free river, or a desultory fall of snow which soon melted, indicated that winter was at hand, but because of the modifying effects of both the Atlantic and the Chesapeake, temperatures never dropped very low.
But in January 1811 there came a sudden snowfall of some inches, and farmers along the shore stayed indoors until it passed. Thomas Applegarth, twenty-seven years old, unmarried, tenant on a farm near Patamoke owned by the Steeds, used these days of enforced idleness to study a book lent him by Elizabeth Paxmore, for whom he sometimes did odd jobs. It was a geography of the eastern states, and what impressed him was the manner in which the mountains of Pennsylvania drifted in a marked direction from northeast to southwest. Even the dullest mind would have deduced, from this new map, that some extraordinary force had determined the lay of these mountains, but what that might have been, Applegarth had not enough training to detect.
Yet as he studied the map he vaguely recalled something he had read recently about events that had occurred long ago in Europe, but what precisely they were he could not remember. And then, toward dusk, as it came time for him to tend the cattle, he put down his book, went out and walked along a frozen path to the barn, and as he did so he came upon a small accumulation of ice under a tree, and suddenly the whole mystery of the Pennsylvania mountains and the formation of the Chesapeake became clear to him, as if someone had struck a monstrous match in a darkened valley: Ice! That’s what it was that scarred the mountains of Europe. And that’s what dug out our valleys in America!
He could not grasp what an ice age was, nor the vastness of the sheet that had at one time lain over Pennsylvania, but he saw clearly one fact: that the ice sheet must have contained within it an enormous quantity of water, and when the ice finally melted, that water must have formed a gigantic river, parent to the present Susquehanna. And that river, nothing else, had reamed out the Chesapeake Bay and deposited the silt which had become, in time, the Eastern Shore.
His concept was so grand, and its parts fell together so neatly, that as he milked the cows in the shadows thrown by his lantern he existed in a kind of glory. “That’s how it must have happened,” he whispered to himself. “The world up north was imprisoned under a mantle of ice, and when it melted, it scarred the mountains and filled the valleys with tremendous rivers.”
The idea so preoccupied him that on the first clear day he drove down to Peace Cliff to return Mrs. Paxmore’s book and ask her whether she believed it was possible for America to have experienced an age of ice.
“A what?” she asked.
“I read that northern Europe—well, this was long ago—it had ice on it.”
“I suppose Russia has ice every year,” she said.
“No, this book said that the entire land had ice hundreds of feet thick ... all over it.”
“Nothing could have lived,” she protested.
“That’s exactly it,” Applegarth said. “The ice had to be very thick to gouge out the valleys.”
“To what?”
“Have you ever looked at the mountains of Pennsylvania?” he asked.
“I’ve never been to Pennsylvania.”
“I mean a map.”
“I’ve never seen a map of Pennsylvania.”
“There’s one here in your book.”
“There is?” It irritated the Quaker woman to think that there could be either maps or ideas with which she was not familiar, and she took the book from Applegarth rather rudely and thumbed through it. “Why, so there is,” she said, and she studied the map with care.
“See how the mountains all run in the same direction?” the farmer said.
“What’s that signify?”
“They were gouged out by a heavy layer of ice moving southwest.”
The idea was so novel that Mrs. Paxmore had nothing in her past reflection by which to judge it, but she was one of those Quaker women to whom all knowledge was important, so she stood firmly on her left foot, with her right cocked at an angle, and considered the remarkable thesis that her odd-job man was proposing, and the more she pondered his words, the more inherently reasonable they became. “It could have happened that way,” she said.
“And if it did,” Applegarth continued, “then the whole valley of the Susquehanna, as we know it today ... Well, it must have been a stupendous river. A hundred times bigger than we see it.”
With a solid finger he outlined on the map the principal features of his theory, coming at last to the Chesapeake itself. “Our bay must have been the mouth of that immense river. What do you think of that?”
In the weeks that followed, and during the long winter nights, Thomas Applegarth and Elizabeth Paxmore studied whatever they could find about ice ages and mountains; they found little. Speculation about the formation of earth features had only just begun in the United States; the fascinating revelations which were being evolved in Europe could not have been known in Patamoke, but one day Mrs. Paxmore did turn up an interesting piece of information. A professor of moral philosophy at Yale Uni
“Isn’t that a splendid imagination? A river valley which has been drowned, inundated by the sea!”
“Sounds to me like a sad misuse of words,” her husband said. “A pig can drown. Or a little boy who falls out of his canoe. Because they stop breathing and are drowned. But how could a river drown? Tell me that.”
“It doesn’t drown,” she replied. “It is drowned.”
George Paxmore leaned back to consider this foray into logic. Then, with a brusque wave of his hand, he dismissed the Yale professor, the Hudson River and the Chesapeake. “No educated man would condone such grammar.”
But when Mrs. Paxmore brought her new theory to her odd-job man, he visualized its application immediately. “It’s what happened!” he said excitedly. “In the later years, when the ice had mostly melted, the river would begin to lose its force, and the ocean would creep in, and the river mouth would be drowned under the weight of salt water.” It was a concept so intellectually beautiful, and so respondent to observable facts, that it seemed the clincher to previous speculations. He now saw the Susquehanna system in grand design, the remnant of a river which had once drained a major portion of an ice-laden continent, a majestic river which in the end had seen itself overcome by the ever-encroaching sea. He resolved to look into this matter further, when spring came.
Mrs. Paxmore, whose geography book had launched these speculations, pursued her own investigations, looking into all the books she could find and talking rather obsessively to those members of the community better informed than she. She was surprised one evening when her husband” pushed back from the table and said, “Thee may have been right, Elizabeth. I’ve been studying our bay ... Well, I’ve been endeavoring to reconcile what I see with that interesting thesis thee propounded some weeks back. And the more I contemplate, the more I have to conclude that thee has hit upon something.”