David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

Our plans met with trouble almost from the first. We had less money than would have been ideal for such a venture, and we could not afford to live in any of the charming old Dutch homes off the Broad Way. Instead, we rented a house between the Collect Pond and Peck’s Slip. This was low-lying land, inhabited by immigrants and the desperate. The streets were muddy, often choked with dead dogs and cats. The horses did not last long before they were stripped of their hide and flesh and hooves. Sometimes, when it was dry, piles of bones could be found stacked alongside the decaying wooden houses. When it was wet, the streets were thick rivers of slow-moving mud that flooded our house. It was a poor place for a carpentry shop, but we could pay for no better. We had, however, our own house and our privacy, and though we could afford only the scrawniest of chickens and the thinnest of cheeses, we made do, happy to be alone and together.

New York had suffered under the occupation, and remaining everywhere were signs of careless treatment of a place that was never to the British more than a campground and a plaything. Much of the city had been burned, and even now some buildings were but charred beams; others had been left in terrible conditions of decay, and the people-so many of whom had sided with the British-were now reduced to penury. Those royalists who had not fled wandered the city as though dazed, unable to believe they had bet upon the wrong horse and lost everything.

Yet, for all that, New York was a city on the rise. Though the dominant argument in the air was whether or not the new Constitution would receive ratification by the states, many New Yorkers were so convinced that they were to be the center of a new imperial experiment that they had already come to think of their city as the “empire city,” their state as the “empire state.” Everywhere, decayed streets metamorphosed into rows of charming brick houses with tiled roofs. Great boulevards of shopping-Wall Street, the Broad Way, and Greenwich Street -became almost daily more refined. In the distance to the north were quaint villages and farmland and, beyond that, sublime outcroppings of mountain and forest. We walked the cobbled streets of the new imperial capital, the rivers filled with forests of merchant-ship masts, yet we were surrounded by the untouched sublimity of nature. There could be nothing more American.

Though I lived in this city of commerce, I continued to have trouble writing my novel, principally because I still did not know what I wished to say. I sat, when I could find the time, with my books on finance: Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, Thomas Mortimer’s Every Man His Own Broker, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and a thousand bone-dry pamphlets arguing on all matters from free trade to taxes to tariffs to pricing. Somewhere in all that reading, I was certain, was a novel.

Though women were not welcome, on a few occasions I made my way to the Merchant’s Coffeehouse on Wall Street, where commodities, bank issues, and government loans were traded in a kind of organized frenzy. Men shouted out prices, while others attempted to buy to advantage or sell before the price further declined. Here I thought was something else uniquely American. In England, jobbers traded their issues in London; in France, they traded in Paris; but in America, we traded in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. What effect did a decentralized market have upon prices and upon a trader’s ability to profit? It seemed to me, even then, that an unscrupulous jobber with a few fast riders in his employ could exploit the system and profit handsomely. This too seemed to me fundamentally American, for we were a land where cleverness and ingenuity bled quickly into chicanery and fraud. How easily, I thought, in an untamed land did the steady energy of ambition become the twitchy mania of greed.

That we had no child also lay heavily upon me. I became pregnant three times in the five years we lived in New York, but always I miscarried before the fourth month. The surgeons and midwives gave me all manner of medicines, but none served. As the years passed, I began to grow despondent. For no want of effort, I could produce neither book nor child.

I wish to make it clear that Andrew was perfectly capable as a carpenter and equally so as a man of business. He was thrifty and hard-working, skillful and exacting, and could we have afforded to establish ourselves upon a better street, I have no doubt he would have risen to prominence, but we were trapped in the horrible cycle of poverty made inevitable by our neighborhood. Andrew offered his services cheap, and we had business enough, but once we were done paying our rents and our bills, there was little left. Some months we earned less than we spent, and after years of trying to make the carpentry business pay, Andrew began to wonder if it would not be better if we gave it up and attempted something new, though what this would be, neither of us could yet say.

Like many soldiers, Andrew found that after his service the Continental government had no funds with which to pay him, but he had long held on to his promissory notes rather than, as had many others, sell them to speculators at a fraction of their face value. Then late in 1788, Andrew came home one evening in a thoughtful mood. After a spare meal, he told me he had something of great importance to discuss. He had met a man named William Duer, an influential merchant in the city and an associate of Alexander Hamilton, who was rumored to be the new Treasury Secretary when General Washington took office as the first president in April.

No one knew what future, if any, there might be for war debt held by the various states. Some said the federal government planned to assume these obligations and pay all promissory notes. Other said it would declare the debt void with magisterial apologies, and soldiers like my husband would be forced to accept that they would never receive their due. There was no way to tell, this Duer had said, but there were men who were willing to hazard the risk. They had acquired land inexpensively in western Pennsylvania, near the forks of the Ohio, and they were willing to trade this acreage for war debt, assuming the risk of its future payment.

I knew nothing promising or inviting of western Pennsylvania, but Andrew had always regretted leaving farming behind, so was this not our opportunity? The western land, Duer claimed, was wondrous fertile. Once we had been willing to put farming behind us, but after years of struggling in the city, perhaps what we required was something familiar.

I always believed Andrew to be more innocent than I and said I wished to meet with this Mr. Duer myself, so the next day we had him in the sitting room, such as it was, on the second floor of our little house. It rained outside, and all the while I was in a fret that the first floor would flood while there was company there to witness it.

Duer was a small man in build and stature, in his forties, well groomed, with delicate features that made him look vaguely girlish but not effeminate. He was too fussy for that, like a squirrel worrying a nut. His pale brown eyes darted rapidly but lingered on nothing for long. Andrew and I sat on a cushioned bench, while Mr. Duer sat in a finely crafted chair-Andrew had made it himself-across from us, sipping tea and smiling with a small mouth full of very small teeth. With the cup in his hand, he rocked slightly with what I supposed was enthusiasm or an excess of energy. “It is a considerable undertaking,” he said. His voice was slightly high-pitched, slightly whiny. It cracked upon long vowel sounds. “You must decide if you will move to western Pennsylvania, a land you have never visited, and start anew. The journey west is long, and it is far from everything you know. However, it is also a marvelous opportunity for many people, people who were never paid by the country they served, to exchange their intangible notes for land of real value.”