David Liss: The Whiskey Rebel

The stranger met my gaze with something hard and unflinching. “I am a Jew.”

I suppose he might have been prepared for some unkind words, but he would not get them from me. I have nothing against Jews. I have nothing for them, of course, but nothing against them, nothing against anyone-not Papists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Mennonites, Moravians, Millenarians, or Mohammedans. I have nothing against members of any religion-except Quakers, whom I despise, with all their sanctimonious peace-mongering and property-owning and thee s and thou s.

“And what is your business with me?” I asked him.

“That is rather the question, isn’t it?” said Leonidas. He looked pointedly at Lavien when he spoke, and I felt very much a stranger to events in which I ought to have been central.

Lavien cleared his throat. “I was outside your boardinghouse when this good fellow left in search of you, because in the capacity of my work I followed someone to your rooms.”

“Whom did you follow, and what is your work?” I said. “My head is too hurt for circuitous answers. Say what you mean, sir.”

“I am employed in the service of your old acquaintance, Colonel Alexander Hamilton. I serve him now in his capacity as Secretary of the Department of the Treasury.”

Despite my pain and drunkenness and general confusion, I felt my senses sharpening. I had suffered a decade of ignominy because of Hamilton, and now here was his man to save me from a vengeful husband. It made no sense.

“What does Hamilton want with me?” I asked.

“That is the wrong question,” said Leonidas. “Ask him whom he followed to your house.”

“Enough of this nonsense,” I said. “Tell me what you do not say.”

“In the capacity of serving the Treasury Department,” said Lavien, “I followed to your home a lady who wished to deliver you a message.”

“What of it? Ladies like to send me messages. I am a good correspondent.”

“This lady,” said Lavien, “I believe is known to you, though you have not spoken with her in many years. Her name is Mrs. Cynthia Pearson.”

All pain, all confusion and disorder, were gone, and I saw the world before me in sharp detail-fine angles and defined colors. Cynthia Pearson, whom I had once intended to marry, the daughter of Fleet-my dead and much-abused friend-betrayed, as I had been, by Hamilton himself. I had not spoken to her in ten years. I had seen her, yes, glimpses upon the street, but never spoke. She had married another man, married for wealth, I believed, and our paths were forever diverged. Or so I thought, for Leonidas and this stranger now told me that this very evening she had come to my house.

“Why?” I spoke to Leonidas, forming my words slowly and methodically, as though being careful with my question might help him produce a more lucid response. “For what reason did she come to see me?”

Leonidas met my gaze and matched my tone. He had been with me almost as long as I had been apart from Cynthia, and he understood the importance of this question. He understood what this must mean to me. “It has something to do with her husband.”

I shook my head. Never had I believed that Cynthia Pearson even knew I lived in Philadelphia, and now she had come to my home, at night, to speak to me of her husband.

Seeing the confusion upon my face, Leonidas took a deep breath. “She believes her husband, possibly herself and her children, to be in some danger. She came to see you tonight, Ethan, to beg for your help.”

Summer 1781

Iwanted to produce one sort of story, and I found myself producing one entirely different. Much of what transpired was born directly from my own decisions, my own actions. If I had not been what is called willful in women (it is called energetic or ambitious in men), my life might have unfolded quite differently. When we make decisions that lead us down a difficult path, it is easy to imagine the untaken course as peaceful and perfect, but those neglected choices may have been as bad or worse. I must feel regret, yes, but it does not follow that I must feel remorse.

I shall therefore tell my story and explain how I came to be an enemy to this country and the men who rule her. I do so with the full expectation that even if these words are read, they will find few sympathizers. I will be called a base and treacherous woman, diabolical in my unnatural resistance to the paternity of nation. Even so, there will always be those who have lived through what I have, similar or worse-for I know there is worse-and they will understand. It is small compensation, but there is no other for me.

I was born under the name of Joan Claybrook, and I lived on lands near the town of Albany in New York. My mother was one of six children from a poor family, and my father had come to this country from Scotland an indentured servant, so they set out upon the adventure of life with few advantages. But they struggled, and land was cheap, and by the time of my birth they were possessed of a moiety of property upon which they farmed wheat and barley and raised some cattle, occasionally pigs, and always a prodigious number of fowl. We would never have, and never aspired to, true wealth, but my family had reached a state in which we had no fear of starvation, and, at least before the war, we managed to save more each year than we spent.

I had one older brother and two younger, and, the family being well situated-quite overstocked, really-with heirs and farm hands, my parents, and my brothers too, were most indulgent of my whims. I was disinclined to farmwork and, as the only girl child, found my family tolerant-unwisely tolerant, some would say-of my wishes. It was not that I did not have responsibilities. By my estimate, I had far too many, but they only asked of me what they could not do without. I tended the chickens and collected their eggs. I kept them fed and cleaned their coop. I did a bit of spinning and sewing. Beyond that, I read.

It is to be expected, I suppose, that simple folk such as my parents, who grew up with little more than their letters, who had neither time nor money for reading, would have discouraged these pursuits. Perhaps they ought to have, but they were kind people and they found my love of books and reading charming-perhaps as Dr. Johnson found charming the dog that walked upon its hindquarters. They bought for me what they could and cultivated friendships with people of means in Albany, people who would be willing to lend me books of history and natural philosophy and political economy. I hardly cared what it was, so long as it imparted knowledge. I would sit outside on fair days, by the fire in foul, and I would forget there was a far smaller world around me.

By the time I was twelve I had read Hobbes and Locke and Hume. I knew Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments enough to quote chapter and verse, and his Wealth of Nations nearly so well. I had read Macaulay’s history, and Bolingbroke’s essays, all of The Spectator. I had read-in translation, of course-Herodotus and Thucydides and Homer and Virgil.

My father quizzed me, though he was little read himself. Over meals I would tell him of the follies of Xerxes or of how Zeus suffered when made to stand by, powerless to stop the death of his son Sarpedon. He found these tales-those from classics and histories-far more interesting than the thoughts of Hume or Berkeley, and this desire of his that I tell him stories might have colored his choice of books for me. So it seemed when I was sixteen, and he brought home a book that changed everything. Of course, I knew all about fanciful tales; I had read the epic poems of antiquity, and I had read Milton and Dryden, the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe and Jonson. But this-this was something else entirely.