Washington and Caesar - Christian Cameron

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Quakers made it sound as if Governor Dunmore had provoked the war himself to suit his own ends—but the campaign might have suited him.

      It didn’t matter now. But the short campaign had revealed any number of predictable defects in the Virginia militia. Washington had before him on the table a letter from some of the officers of Fairfax County, asking him to procure muskets, drums, and a pair of colors for their companies, which he had every intention of doing for them. He would want the militia of his county to appear to advantage, just as his parish church should, if compared to others.

      The phrase that caught his eye, had made him rise and pace the room, was one of the last.

      “We leave it to you, sir, to determine whether it may be proper or necessary to vary from the usual colors that are carried by the regulars or militia.”

      Colors were the life’s blood of a military unit, the flags around which they rallied, the sacred symbols of their country’s trust. Roman legions had built temples to honor their eagles; the regulars of Great Britain were not so much different, lodging and bringing out their colors with elaborate ceremony. And in Virginia, the better militia did the same, learning from local regulars or veterans like Washington.

      He looked out on the bustle of his continent’s largest city, and pondered on varying the colors of the Virginia militia from those carried by the regulars. It was a most sobering thought—it gave him more hesitation than all the empty talk of the congress, all the moving speeches by Patrick Henry or young Jefferson—the thought of troops, troops he might yet command in Virginia, serving under colors other than the king’s.

      Men in the Congress talked of war with England. It was that open now. Most of the men who talked and talked had never seen a day’s service and had no idea what such a war would entail. Every member was convinced that as native sons, their own valor and honor would stand any affront. Washington thought of the regulars he had seen, of the Fairfax Militia’s lack of coats or muskets, and the desire to know what pattern the flags should be. It was a question vexing much of the continent, and until war struck them, Washington preferred to endure the Congress. He feared the talk of war from men who hadn’t seen one and wouldn’t have to pay the price.

      Charles Lee, who had been a guest of the Lees in Virginia but was no relation, had already offered to raise a battalion for the defense of the Congress. His offers hadn’t been accepted; neither had he been sent away.

      Men asked Washington questions, ignorant questions for the most part, about war. He resented them; he resented how little they knew about the supply of a battalion, or its feeding. He bought several books to help him answer the questions and to drive home his points, that war would be expensive, that the continent lacked some of war’s most basic necessities. Men listened to him, or didn’t, as their inclinations went; and he sat in his window, and tried to imagine a body of Virginia men without a king’s color, and for the first time since the whole sad business began, he hesitated. But around him, the pulse of the city beat faster, and increasingly, it beat a martial air.

       II Taking off Terror

      Negro servants returning hence [from England], with new and enlarged notions, take off that terror, and shew them all the weaknesses of whites…

      

      MORNING CHRONICLE AND LONDON ADVERTISER, MAY 21, 1772

       1

       Great Dismal Swamp, February 1775

      Even as their tools ate at the swamp, the swamp ate away at the men. As the weeks blurred into months, the toll mounted, until Caesar’s hands were numb most of the night. He couldn’t always grip the tools he had to use during the day, and sometimes they would slip. One day, with his hands wet from the blood of cracked calluses, he had swung his sharp mattock into the roots of an old stump. He’d missed, hit the top of the stump a glancing blow, and the tool turned on him like a live thing. The blade had gouged his leg deep, right into the muscle, and he had dropped like a cleared tree on to the wet ground and watched the blood flow. The wound didn’t hurt like a cut, at least at first, but ached like an enormous bruise.

      It bled fitfully for days, and then began to ooze a noxious pus. He couldn’t stop working, although he was certain he had some kind of fever from it. The blood drew flies, and the flies were like one of the plagues of Egypt that the preacher at Mount Vernon had spoken of. He seldom thought of Mount Vernon anymore. It seemed almost like a paradise compared to this hell—a hell of flies and eternal work, of slaves who had recently become too afraid even to break their tools or protest the abuse.

      Other men died. Not every day, by any means, but the fever took some, and the pistol took others. A broken bone was as likely a death warrant as a bullet to the head; neither Gordon nor the other whites seemed particular about nursing the injured. Caesar worked on with the hole in his leg, and limped, and knew that he would never be as fast as he had been, even if he lived, but the wound never got the smell of death to it, though it oozed an oily white pus for weeks, and in time it left a deep dent and a scar and an ache every time the sky threatened rain, which was most mornings in the winter.

      The wound changed him—as a man, and as a slave. At first, he was so certain he was going to die that he began to work less, and to devise ways of cheating the overseer that would have seemed petty to him once. He rested longer, took slower swings, made simple mistakes. He never broke a tool—that was worth a beating—but he stopped leading the others in his party. He let them return to drifting and asking Gordon for every bit of direction. That was his greatest protest, although he didn’t know it at first.

      Caesar hadn’t appreciated that he had become the leader in his work party until he stopped. It had seemed natural to him to console, prod and help his mates, no matter how dull they were. But he lost interest in them when he hurt himself, and his crew returned, almost without thought, to being a band of lost individuals. None of the other men was interested in leading the work party. Most had been broken before they came; the rest were certainly broken now. If Gordon noticed, he didn’t say anything; perhaps he preferred their puzzled docility to unified work. Perhaps he was himself too stupid even to see the change; Caesar had known his type before, in Africa and Jamaica, and doubted there was much behind those close-set eyes but hatred.

      Caesar had expected a pack of rebels, but almost all the men were broken, except those who had been sent there for being too stupid to work on the big farms of their owners. The smart ones had already run, sometime in the misty past before the overseers were given guns. Mr. Gordon, their overseer, was a brutal man with a terrible fund of energy. Even in the worst of the heat, he continued to hate every black man and woman ever born, and muttered endlessly under his breath. Each time he walked up to a group of men, he made a show of checking the prime in the pistol at his belt. He carried a fancy little flask and reprimed with it often. Caesar noticed these details because he still thought of killing Gordon, but the chance never came.

      Twice they received drafts of new slaves from other plantations, but none came from Mount Vernon or any of the other Washington farms, and Caesar had no news. He rarely even saw Virgil, though he had taken to the man immediately. Virgil had been moved to another crew after a week, and Caesar suspected that Gordon had seen them talking and was wary of allowing them to be partners.

      Sometimes his rebellion hurt him. When he stared down Old Ben because the man wanted his help; when the boy who came and cooked their corn hurt his hand and Caesar simply let him run off injured; a thousand other cuts, tiny abandonings of responsibility. But they were men, and they were not his men; they were slaves. He thought about these things in a distant, unconnected way, as if they were events going on in a fireside story. He couldn’t concentrate on himself.

      After weeks of petty rebellion and hoarded rest, Caesar finally re-emerged from the hell of flies and pain and expected death. As it closed, he began to believe that this wound, at least, would not be

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