Epilogue

Sir Henry Clinton. New York, in the Province of New York. Thursday, 19 October 1780.

Enslaved people had come into the British lines by the thousand during the war, with no promise from anyone. The army took them as labourers, pioneers and servants, and nothing in law protected them. When most of the garrisons left in 1780, Clinton's officers took those who asked north to Canada and the Maritimes, without asking London, and the owners' claims for them became one of the questions the settlement deferred.

The Universal Register: The Four-Year War

The last pages of the list came up from the wharves at eight in the morning, and André brought them himself.

He laid them on the big table in the house at the foot of the Broadway, in their portfolio, and stood back, and said that these were the last: the Mary and the Joseph for Halifax, and the little brig for Annapolis Royal, which the inspectors had finished at ten the night before by lanterns, in the rain. He looked tired. He was a major now, and adjutant general, as Clinton had meant him to be, and had been since the week they came back from Boston; and he had spent most of the summer on the wharves with the inspectors and the shipping, in a sea-cloak, doing a clerk’s work and a quartermaster’s work and a good deal of work that was nobody’s, and had not once complained of it, which was not like him.

“The convoy sails on the afternoon tide, sir,” he said. “The commodore says the wind will serve. He says it as if he had arranged it.”

“Very likely he has,” said Clinton.

When André had gone he sat down with the pages and read them, as he had read every page of that list since June: all of it, every line, three times, and then a fourth, as he read everything. Then he took his pen and initialled the foot of each page in his own stiff hand, H.C., and dated it. It was the nineteenth of October. He looked at the date for some time after he had written it.

It was a year to the day since Boston. He had not arranged that. The wind had arranged it, and the commodore, and the order in which a great many things had been done over a great many months; but he found, sitting there with the pen in his hand, that he was glad of it, though he could not have said why, and would not have said so to anybody if he could.

The list was in columns, ruled by the clerks of the quartermaster general’s department, who ruled everything. The ship’s name and where bound. The names. The age. A description. Whence they came, and when they had come in. And the last column, which had been André’s idea and then Clinton’s order: by whom claimed.

When he had initialled the last pages he took the rest of the list out of the drawer and went through it once more from the beginning, slowly, with his lips pressed together, as a man reads over a long letter before he seals it; and he stopped where he had always stopped.

Harry Washington, 40, fine fellow. Formerly the property of General Washington; left him about four years ago. Since in the Black Pioneers. And in the last column, in another ink, added afterwards: Claimed for the General by Mr Lund Washington, of Mount Vernon, by letter.

He sat looking at that line for a long time.

He had read that page in September, on the morning it came up from the wharves, and gone down in the afternoon and looked for the man in the line, and found him: a tall, quiet, grizzled man in a pioneer’s jacket, waiting with the others, who looked at nobody. He thought of the hand he had held out across the little table at Boston, and of the tall still man on the other side of it who had taken it, and who had said “No, sir” to him, which was the only honest answer anybody had given him that day. He did not doubt that the General had meant it. He did not doubt either that the General’s steward had written the letter, and that the General had very likely never seen it, or had seen it and thought about it for exactly as long as a man can afford to think about a thing like that, and then put it away among the other things; and that it made no difference at all to the man in the pioneer’s jacket which of those it had been. Harry Washington had sailed for Halifax in the third week of September. His claim would go to Philadelphia with the rest.

Thomas Peters, 42, stout fellow, a sergeant in the Black Pioneers. Formerly the property of William Campbell of Wilmington, in North Carolina; left him in 1776. Sally, his wife, 23. The last column was empty. Nobody had come for Sergeant Peters, or not yet. Clinton had known him for four years by sight, and once by name, when the sergeant had come to headquarters on behalf of the company about their pay, and had stood in this room, very upright, and said what he had come to say with great clearness and no deference at all, and gone away with half of it; which was more than most men got out of Clinton about pay, and he had liked him for it, and not said so.

And on the last page but one of that morning’s pages, among the people for the Mary:

Hannah, 25, stout wench, and her son Cuffee, 4. Came in at Philadelphia, the winter of 1777; marched with the army to the Hook in 1778. Formerly the property of a man whose name meant nothing to Clinton, of Chester County, in Pennsylvania. In the last column: The same, by his attorney.

Stout wench was what the clerks wrote of every woman who could carry a load, as a dealer writes of a horse. Clinton had tried in July to have the descriptions struck out of the list, and had been told by the quartermaster general’s people, very respectfully, that without them no claim could ever be valued, and that the valuing of the claims was the purpose of the list; and he had seen that it was, and let the words stand, as he had let a great many words stand in his life that he did not like, because they were true to the purpose they served.

Marched with the army to the Hook in 1778. He read that line four times. Then he gathered the pages up, and put them all back in their order in the bottom drawer on the right of his campaign desk, where the list had been growing since June, sheaf on sheaf. The drawer would hardly shut. It was the fullest it had ever been. He shut it, and did not lock it.

It had begun in the winter, though he had not known then that anything was beginning.

The winter had been the worst that anybody in America could remember. The snow had begun in November and gone on until March, and in the middle of January the rivers had frozen, the North River from the Battery to Paulus Hook and the East River from shore to shore, and the bay between the town and Staten Island, which no man living had ever seen frozen; so that two hundred sleighs went over the ice to Staten Island in a body with provisions for the garrison there, with the light horse riding beside them, and the artillery said that the heaviest cannon in the park could have been taken over to the Jerseys if anybody had had a reason to take them. Nobody had. That was the strange thing about the winter. A year before, a frozen river would have been an invitation to Washington, and Clinton would have sat up every night of it with the maps; and now the ice was only ice, and the Continental pickets on the heights of Bergen looked down across the frozen marsh at the King’s sentries on the Hook, and the King’s sentries looked back, and both sides stamped their feet and blew on their hands and wondered about each other’s firewood.

There was none. The town had used its trees in the first winter of the occupation, and its fences in the second, and the wood that should have come in the autumn from Long Island and the Jerseys had not come, for reasons that seemed sufficient at the time; and when the ice closed the rivers nothing could come at all. Clinton had issued a proclamation in November, in his own words, which he had been rather pleased with, saying that the ample price allowed for firewood at this market cut off every pretext from the proprietors of woodlands for delaying the cutting of their woods. In January it did not cut off anything. The ink froze in his pen at the big table, by a fire. People died of cold in their beds in the town, he was told, every night, the poor mostly, and some who had been comfortable in seventy-six. He had the old hulks in the harbour cut up for fuel, ship after ship, and the wood carted to the regiments and the barracks and the poor; and the town said a great many things about him, which his friends were kind enough to report to him, and some of which were true.

And he had sent a share of the hulks to Canvas Town.

That was the part of the town towards the East River, between Broad Street and Whitehall, that had burned in seventy-six and never been rebuilt: a waste of chimneys and cellars in which people had made themselves houses out of the walls that were left and old sails from the ships and spars and whatever else they could find, half hut and half tent, so that the whole quarter looked from the water like a camp that had been struck and not taken away. The people from the lines lived there, most of them, the ones who were not quartered with the regiments they worked for: the pioneers’ families, and the labourers of the artillery and the engineers, and the washerwomen and the cooks, and a great many more who had come in over three years with nothing and had nowhere else to go. The town called it the worst place in New York. It was the coldest. Clinton had ridden through it in the second week of the frost and seen what the cold was doing there, and gone home and given the order, and been told that he was robbing the King’s loyal subjects to warm their runaway property, which was a sentence he remembered, because it was the first time he had heard the matter put so plainly, and because he could not at the time think of an answer to it that would have satisfied the man who said it.

He had not tried to think of one. He had sent the wood.

The ice went out at last in March, and in the spring the orders came, and the army began to go home.

They came from Lord Shelburne by the first packet of the year, and they were what he had expected. The cessation held, and the commissioners were sitting at Philadelphia, and His Majesty’s forces were to be withdrawn, as the articles provided, to such posts on the coast as had been agreed, and to Canada; and from Canada and Nova Scotia, as the French and the Spaniards allowed, to the islands and home. A garrison was to remain at New York, a small one, to keep the King’s colours on the fort until the treaty was made. The rest was to go. It was left to Sir Henry, as everything was left to Sir Henry, to say in what order.

So he had said it. He had sat at the big table through April with the returns and the shipping lists and a great many sheets of paper, and set it down in his own hand, regiment by regiment and ship by ship, the stores and the sick and the baggage and the guns, which way each should go and when, as he had once set down the march from Philadelphia; and in May the first of the transports had gone, for Quebec, as soon as the river there was open, with three regiments and the families; and after that they had gone all summer, out past the Hook and away, north and east and south, in convoys and alone, and the town had emptied of soldiers behind them, very slowly, like a cask with a slow leak in it.

And in April, as soon as the roads were dry, the owners had come.

He had known since Philadelphia that they would. He had written it down a year ago, on the night Washington’s answer came in by the flag at Paulus Hook: that the people who owned them under the law would be waiting at the gates of the town with their papers. He had been wrong only about the gates. They did not wait at the gates. The cessation had opened the town; the country people came in every day to sell, and the ferries ran, and anybody with a pass from either side might walk up the Broadway; and the owners walked in with the rest, from the Jerseys and Westchester and Long Island, and then from Pennsylvania and Virginia and the Carolinas, with their papers and their attorneys and sometimes with two or three large men who did not appear to be attorneys, and went looking.

They went into Canvas Town, and into the yards of the regiments, and the kitchens of the town, and the barracks in Church Street. They seized people in the streets. They took a man out of his bed at four in the morning in a lane by the North River, and carried him down to a boat, and were across to the Jerseys with him before anybody in authority had been woken to be told. A rumour went through the town, and through every hut in Canvas Town, that the King’s general was going to deliver them all up to their masters before the army sailed, in return for the Congress’s leave to take the army away in peace; and for a week in May, André told him, the people from the lines did not eat and did not sleep, and some of them went off into the woods of the island and could not be found.

Clinton saw one of the seizures himself.

It was on the Broadway, on a fine morning in the middle of May, at about nine, when he was riding back from the barracks in the Fields. A man in a good blue coat, with two others behind him, had a man in a pioneer’s jacket by the arm, at the corner of the Bowling Green, and the man in the jacket was not resisting, exactly, but was not walking either; he was standing quite still and looking at the ground, while the man in the blue coat read something to him from a paper and the two others took hold of his other arm. A sentry of the guard at the fort stood twenty yards off and watched. Nobody had told him to do anything else. On the Green behind them, the King sat on his gilded horse, in the dress of a Roman emperor, with his arm out over the town, as he had sat there since before the war, looking down the Broadway at nothing in particular.

Clinton stopped his horse.

He did not know afterwards what he had meant to do. He was not good at that kind of thing; he never knew what to say to people in the street. He sat there on his horse and looked at the man in the blue coat, and the man in the blue coat looked up from his paper and saw who it was, and took off his hat, very properly, and said, “Your servant, Sir Henry. I have a warrant here.” And Clinton heard himself say, in the stiff voice he could never make do anything else, that within His Majesty’s lines no person whatever would be taken by force by anybody, on any paper, until he, Clinton, had said otherwise; and he told the sentry to see to it; and he rode on down the Broadway to his own door without looking back, because if he had looked back he would have had to think about what he had just done, and he wanted first to get to a table and a sheet of paper.

He did not ask London.

He thought about it, that night, for a long time, at the big table, with the window open on the harbour and Mrs Baddeley’s step going about the house below. He wrote it all down first, as he always did, in a memorandum, in order: what he had seen on the Broadway, and what he had said, and what the law was, which was very clear, and what the articles of Boston said, which was nothing at all. He took out the articles and read them again: the fifth article, the heads, the Congress’s heads, which he had accepted with nothing changed in them but the order of two words, and signed at the little table with Washington’s knees almost touching his under it; and he read the end of the last of them twice: and that all other questions between the two countries, not provided for in these heads, be reserved for the treaty.

He had read the clause a dozen times in a year and thought it a lawyer’s sentence, a door left open so that the gentlemen could get out of the room. He saw now that it was a door, and that it opened both ways. The claims were reserved for the treaty. They were not for a constable on the Broadway to settle, or a guard on the wharf; nor could Clinton settle them. But he could keep them from being settled there, by the first man with a paper, until the people who were empowered had settled them in the proper place. That was all that was in his power, and he found that it was a good deal.

If he asked London, London would take three months to answer. It would answer, when it did, as London answered: that His Majesty’s servants could not be seen, in a summer when commissioners were sitting at Philadelphia, to carry off the property of His Majesty’s subjects in America, whatever their colour, and that Sir Henry would no doubt find means to satisfy the claimants. And by the time the answer came half the ships would be gone, and the people with them or not with them, and the season for Quebec nearly over. He did not ask London. He wrote to London in July, when it was too late for London to say anything that would make a difference, and told them what he had done, very plainly, in a dispatch that was not well written and was exact; and he had not yet had an answer, and did not expect a kind one.

He gave the order the next morning, to André, by word of mouth, and André gave it on in the same way, to the inspectors and the guard and the masters of the transports. It was never put into the general orders, where the town would have read it over its breakfast. Clinton wrote it down only in his memorandum, for the drawer, because he wrote everything down.

Every person who had come within the King’s lines during the war, and who asked to go with the army, was to be embarked with the army, at the King’s charge, in the same ships and on the same rations as the troops. No such person was to be given up to anybody, at the gates or in the streets or on the wharves, on any paper whatever. And every one of them was to be written down, by name, before they went aboard: the age, and a description, and whence they had come and when they had come in, and the name of anybody who claimed them; so that every claim could go to the commissioners at Philadelphia with a name against it, and be settled there, by money or by whatever the treaty settled, and not here, by a constable.

André had drafted the passes. They were to be given to each person at the foot of the gangway, a half-sheet each, so that they could show it at Halifax or Quebec or wherever they went; and André, who wrote better than Clinton and knew it, had made a very handsome thing of the draft, and brought it to him to sign.

It said that the bearer, having resorted to the British lines, and having been employed since in His Majesty’s service, was a free person, and had His Excellency’s permission to go to Nova Scotia, or wherever else he might think proper.

Clinton read it three times. Then he took his pen and struck out was a free person, and, and wrote nothing in its place, and gave it back.

André looked at it, and at him.

“I cannot give them that,” Clinton said. “It is not mine to give. The King has never given it, and the law in Nova Scotia is what the law is here. If I write it, it is a lie with my name under it, and the first magistrate at Halifax who reads it will know it for one, and it will do them more harm than if I had written nothing.” He touched the rest of the paper with his pen. “I can give them a passage. I can give them leave to go wherever they think proper. That is in my power, and I will give them all of it. The rest is for Philadelphia.”

“It is very little, sir.”

“It is as near to the other thing as I am empowered to come,” said Clinton. “I mean to come as near as I can.”

So the passes said that. They said it on a great many half-sheets before the summer was over, by order of the commandant; and he wrote himself, without asking anybody, to the brigadier commanding at Halifax, to say that the people coming to him in the transports were refugees who had been in His Majesty’s service and were to be received and victualled as such until they could be settled. He knew, writing it, that they advertised people for sale in the Halifax newspapers, as they did in New York. He wrote it anyway. He thought that a brigadier who had a letter from the commander-in-chief in his desk would be slower to forget it than a brigadier who had not.

General Greene had sent an officer to watch the embarkations for the Congress: a young major of his staff, a Rhode Island lawyer, very civil and very exact, who stood on the wharves all summer beside the inspectors with a portfolio of his own and wrote down everything they wrote down, so that there were two lists of every ship and not one, which seemed to Clinton the most sensible thing the Congress had done in four years. In August the major came to the house at the foot of the Broadway to protest, formally, in writing and in person, on behalf of the Congress and of the citizens whose property was being carried out of the country.

Clinton heard him out, standing. Then he took the articles of Boston from the table and read him the end of the sixth head.

“All other questions,” he said. “Not provided for in the heads. Reserved for the treaty. The question of these people is not provided for, Major. You know why as well as I do. It is reserved, and the commissioners will settle it, and when they settle it they will have every name, and the name of every man who claims, and what he says the person was worth. I am not deciding it. I am keeping it from being decided on a wharf.”

“You are carrying them out of the country, Sir Henry.”

“I am carrying them to Nova Scotia,” said Clinton, “which is the King’s, as this is. Nobody is being carried out of His Majesty’s dominions. If the commissioners decide that they are to be given back, the commissioners will know exactly where to find them.” He put the articles down. “They will have to go to Nova Scotia and fetch them. I do not think they will. But that is for them.”

The major looked at him for some time. He was a young man, and honest, and Clinton could see him deciding that it was a very bad answer and a very hard one to argue with, and deciding too that he would write it all down and send it to the Congress, and let the Congress argue with it, which was what Clinton would have done in his place.

“I shall report what you have said, sir,” the major said.

“I hope you will report it exactly,” said Clinton. “I shall.”

He went down to the wharf in the afternoon, because he had gone down for every ship.

The Mary lay at the wharf by the Fly Market, deep in the water, with the troops already aboard her and the people from the lines going aboard after them, up the gangway in a long slow line with their bundles, as they had gone aboard every ship since June. There was a small table at the foot of the gangway, set on the cobbles, with the inspectors behind it and the list on it, and a stone on the list to keep the pages down in the wind; and beside it, at his own small table, the young major with his portfolio. Clinton stood a little way off by a stack of casks, with his hat under his arm, where he had stood for every ship, and watched them go up.

There were men on the wharf who had come with papers. There were always a few, at every ship, standing back by the warehouses, with their attorneys, watching the line; and sometimes one of them would come forward to the table and name a name, and the inspector would find it on the list and write the claimant’s name against it, very civilly, and the man would watch the person he had named go up the gangway and onto the ship and out of his reach, and the inspector would ask him to sign where it said claimed by, and some of them signed and some of them did not. Clinton watched one of them sign now, a heavy elderly man in a brown coat, with his hand shaking; and then stand back by the warehouse and watch the gangway with his face working, and say nothing to anybody, and not go away.

He did not see her until she was nearly at the table.

She was in the line with the child walking beside her, holding on to her skirt, a small solemn boy of four in a coat that had been somebody’s waistcoat, carrying a bundle of his own. She had a bundle on her head and another on her hip, where the child had been. She was thinner than he remembered, and older, and she might have gone by him and up the gangway without his knowing; and then she looked round, and saw him by the casks, and he knew her at once, and knew that she knew him.

She stepped out of the line. The inspector half rose. Clinton put up his hand, and the inspector sat down again.

She came across the cobbles to him with the child holding her skirt, and stopped in front of him, as she had stopped in front of his horse at the edge of the baggage park in Philadelphia, two years and four months before, on the morning before the march, with the child on her hip and the whole of her life in a bundle; and looked at him, not quite in the face, as she had then.

“You told us to keep up,” she said.

“I remember,” said Clinton. “You kept up.”

She did not say anything to that. She looked past him at the warehouses, where the heavy man in the brown coat was standing with his attorney; and Clinton saw that she knew who the man was, and had known since she came onto the wharf, and had come up the line towards the gangway anyway, at the pace of the line, with the child beside her, because that was the way to the ship.

“They say,” she said, very low, “they can come aboard after. At the other end. With their paper.”

He thought of all the things he was not empowered to say. There were as many of them as there had been at the edge of the baggage park, and he knew them all by heart. He was not empowered to make her free. He was not empowered to say what the commissioners would decide at Philadelphia, or the magistrates at Halifax, or the King. He was empowered to give her a passage, and he had given it, and her name was on the list in the drawer at the foot of the Broadway with the claim of the man in the brown coat written against it, and the list was the one paper in his life he meant to be found.

“Hannah,” he said.

She looked at him then, in the face, quite startled, because he had her name.

“Nobody will take you off that ship,” said Clinton. “Not here, and not at the other end, and not on any paper. You have my word for it.”

She looked at him a moment longer. Then she nodded, once, and took the child’s hand off her skirt and into her own, and went back across the cobbles to the line, and up the gangway with the others, and aboard; and the child looked back at Clinton once from the top of the gangway, solemnly, over his bundle, and then he was gone too.

The convoy sailed at four, on the ebb, with the wind fair at north-west.

He watched it from the Battery, standing under the wall of the fort with André beside him and the King’s colours over their heads, that were to stay. The town was very quiet behind them. It had emptied all summer, regiment by regiment; there were houses in every street with nobody quartered in them now, and half the wharves were bare, and the regiments that were left would have room in their barracks that winter for the first time since seventy-six. Down on the water the transports were getting under way, one after another, the Mary and the Joseph and the store ships and the little brig for Annapolis, with the frigate ahead of them and a sloop astern, their topsails filling as they came out from the wharves and caught the wind, and the crowd on the wharves standing to watch them go, as crowds will, without much noise.

“They will remember this, sir,” said André, after a while. “The ones who went.”

“Nobody will remember it,” said Clinton. “That is why it is written down.”

He thought of the fire in September, a year ago, and the papers he had held over it one at a time. He had burned those so that nothing would be known. He had kept these so that everything would be. He thought of Harriet, too: he could have explained this to her, and she would have asked why he had not done it in Philadelphia, and he would have had no answer.

The ships went down the bay in a long line, towards the Narrows and the sea, with the low sun on their sails and the hills of Staten Island going blue beyond them; south first, because for ships of any burden the way out of New York lay past the Hook, whichever way they meant to go after. He watched until the leading ships were in the Narrows and he could no longer tell one from another. Then he stayed, because the last of them had not gone yet.

They were off the Hook by dusk, and the frigate hoisted her lights, and the convoy came round onto its course, with the Highlands of the Navesink going dark astern and the whole of the open sea ahead of it, and stood away to the north and east for Halifax, the frigate leading and the transports following in her wake, one after another, as the order had been set down; and the last of them, a small deep-laden brig that had been slow all day, went round the Hook behind the others in the failing light, and turned north after them, keeping up.