Passions of the PotSmoking Patriots
By "Thomas Paine"
Copyright c 2011 by Harvey Wasserman [a.k.a. “Thomas Paine”]
Exclusively written and exclusively owned by Harvey Wasserman.
Published by Harvey Wasserman at Smashwords.
Print version (& t-shirts) at www.harveywasserman.com
All Rights Reserved; please leave intact, as its Creator intended. Contact: solartopia@me.com.
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“Taboo-breaking irreverence...Tom Paine would be truly delighted” Paul Krassner
“Absolutely delightful. Ingenious. What a Romp!” Howard Zinn
“A Hoot” Ernest Callenbach
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When the Iron Bird flies through the air
And the Wooden Horse runs on wheels
Then the people of Tibet will be scattered
Like a million ants throughout the Earth
And the law of the Dharma
Will come to the land of the Red Man
Tibetan Proverb, Eighth Century
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Other Books by Thomas Paine:
Common Sense
The Crisis
The Rights of Man
The Age of Reason
CONTENTS
Publisher's Preface
Chapter One: George and the Marquis, Interruptus
Chapter Two: Tom Jefferson's Big Idea
Chapter Three: Sam Adams Is Watching You
Chapter Four: The War of the Everyman’s Ear
Chapter Five: Abigail’s Awesome Organism
Chapter Six: The Sons and Daughters of Liberty
Chapter Seven: Face to Face with the Soul of America
Chapter Eight: Abigail Takes a Fall at the Falls
Chapter Nine: Revolution in the Revolution
PREFACE: A Note from the Publisher
Was George Washington a gay pot smoker who wanted to marry his “brother in arms” the Marquis de LaFayette?
Did Abigail Adams have an affair with a hill country rebel farmer---and then a “cleansing” in a Ho-de-no-sau-nee village near Niagara Falls?
Did her husband John nearly expire with the mention of sex between consenting women?
Was Thomas Jefferson in love with his slave Sally Hemings, who bore him seven children?
Did Ben Franklin invent LSD and psycho-therapy?
Was Alexander Hamilton a philandering drug dealer?
Did Samuel Adams secretly engineer the Boston Massacre to assassinate America’s first black Revolutionary martyr?
Is this shocking satire actually a “lost manuscript, ” written by the original Tom Paine? Or did it come from some literary prankster, bent on channeling Paine’s spirit, as if our original Revolution magically merged with the hippie heyday two centuries later.
If inspired by recent televised dramas about John Adams, it leaves them gasping. If angered by recent attacks on the right of gays to marry, it says “HEY! Face our Founders!”
In this first of three volumes, we find Washington and LaFayette in a pre-marital embrace. In the second, we will follow their passions and learn if Ben Franklin did, in fact, invent LSD. In the third, we at last discover if the General and the Marquis finally tie the knot.
Like Paine himself, this epic drama is racy, raucous, irreverent and quirky. Its radical heart beats with passion, its eye is on universal liberation, its tongue is firmly in cheek.
Tom’s Everyman is a Massachusetts farmer named Daniel Shays, leader of a great rebellion that followed our Revolution. His unlikely lover is Abigail Adams, America’s second First Lady, and first outspoken feminist.
Better than anyone, our most incendiary writer knew the intimacies of our national icons: their passions and pratfalls, loves and libidos. We are thrilled he put them to pen.
The idea that Washington might have been gay, or that pot was smoked throughout the colonies, or that Abigail could run off with a hill country radical, or that her cousin Sam arranged a public slaughter to kill Crispus Attucks, will certainly provoke howls of outrage from prudish historians and bloviating faux patriots.
But how would the sexual preference of the Father of Our Country affect his performance as a military and political leader? Why wouldn’t our First Feminist seek alternative bed-mates to her doughty, plodding John? Would the virile, passionate Tom Jefferson, after losing his beloved wife, really stay celibate forever?
Not likely! DNA testing has in fact confirmed the wayward impregnations of our third president. And no one---certainly not Franklin himself---denies the the endless sexual experimentations of early America’s greatest genius.
To portray these incomparable characters as uptight Puritans would deny the inner realities of who they really were or might have become.
Make no mistake: Tom Paine deeply distrusted Hamilton’s nascent corporations. Here he gives full throat to his fears about what they might do to this country---and the world. He also wonders what Hamilton himself did to his numerous mistresses.
Paine was Washington’s early admirer, but came to distrust him. Could this manuscript’s shocking opener be Tom’s way of “getting even”? Or of bringing George’s secret heart into modern context, while shouting his own anger over the Puritans’ hypocritical assault on the right to gay marriage.
Indeed, Paine had boundless contempt for Puritan priggishness. “Show me a preacher denouncing prostitution,” says his beloved Ben, “and I’ll show you a man paying for one.”
Like the tea splashing into Boston Harbor, Passions of the Potsmoking Patriots is the ultimate assault on despised tyranny---sexual and political, corporate and connubial.
What Next?
Like Truth itself, let these Passions make us free!
Harvey Wasserman, Publisher: www.harveywasserman.com
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I began to seperate (sic) the Male from the Female Hemp...rather too late.
---George Washington, in his Farm Journal, August 7, 1765, about raising what later became known as “marijuana.”
As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh.
We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians and negroes grew insolent to their masters.
But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented…
Depend on it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems…
I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.
---John Adams to Abigail Adams, April, 1776
...not much fire between the sheets...
---George Washington describing his marriage to Martha, 1790s.
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Chapter One: GEORGE & THE MARQUIS, INTERRUPTUS
George Washington wrapped himself around the young Marquis. Lafayette sighed with pleasure.
It was their fourth such rendez-vous since that delicious denouement in Philadelphia. Each new encounter involved a progressively deepening experience, full of confusion and doubt at first (at least on Washington’s part) but now blooming into a supremely sensitive trans-Atlantic detente.
The Frenchman stared deep into the taller man’s eyes, then down. There was an inexpressible connection between them, and the promise of so much more. The Franco-American alliance was making possible the defeat of the British. Now it would achieve a more perfect union.
“Soon, mon cher, we shall get married. No law shall stop us. Our love transcends all churches and all state hypocrisies, and renders all Puritans impotent. Their rage shall be as nothing when our passion washes over them.”
Washington was overcome with emotion. He fairly lunged forward, moving them both toward the four-poster.
But first, the Marquis had a request.
“Vos dents, mon cher. Vos dents.”
"My Danz?"
“TEETH! YOUR TEETH!”
“Oh.”
The older man withdrew in sheepish embarrassment. Welling with tears, his eyes contemplated a paradise, an unimagined liberation. Since that initial eye-opener before the Declaration, he had sensed something strange, something profoundly troubling and unfathomable in his attraction to this slender young man. He had been unsure of what it was.
But Lafayette had no such doubts. The marble drawing rooms of the ancien regime were a long long way from the post-and-beam barns of the American rebels. Slowly, with supreme sensitivity, the young Marquis had led the old Indian fighter deep into an entirely new frontier.
For Washington, it was the bursting of a dam, or the explosion of matter itself. His sensual life had been a barren battlefield. His union with Martha was something less than transcendental. “Not much fire between the sheets,” he complained.
Elsewhere, slave women and occasional discreet liaisons amidst the outwardly Calvinistic gentry had done little to quench the General's search for true fulfillment.
But this...this was something almost beyond belief. Quietly, the Marquis recovered his composure, and padded toward the night table, removing a small cloth bag filled with Washington's hemp.
The General was, of course, the biggest grower in the Americas. And though his crop was ostensibly for ship riggings, over the years the Frenchman Lafayette and Hamilton, the Jamaican, had conspired with Washington's best cultivators to produce something fit for the pipe. George had even put their best findings into a much-read treatise how to separate the different flowers.
But Lafayette was still displeased. "Mon General," he muttered, stuffing some hand-picked buds into a woody grain barrel, "Again you have failed to separate les hommes from les femmes. I'm afraid this rope is good only for hanging."
Washington said nothing. He accepted the smoking kaywoodie, then handed it back. Wordlessly, the two men passed the pipe between them, moving ever closer. The taller one sighed. He placed his ivory mouthpiece in a jar on the dressing table. He inched toward the four-poster, its satin quilt still turned back and waiting.
He never got there. A step shy, a shiver ran through his spine. His neck jerked toward the door, which creaked slightly. The wave of paranoia peaked and broke as a filthy, ragged Continental soldier flung asunder the last barrier between himself and his commanding officer.
His name was Daniel Shays. For five blank seconds he stared transfixed at his compromised quarry. He had come only to talk. But his agrarian mind, with its lingering traces of Puritan iron, could barely comprehend the scene before it. For a unique epochal moment, time and history stood still.
Then calmly, quietly, the Marquis responded. "What," he said, "is it that you want?"
The soldier had known before. Now he could not remember. "I...I heard a scream."
Washington returned to Earth. Reaching for his breeches, he measured the confused farmer before him. His rank, his origins, his ability to comprehend what he saw, the potential costs of shutting him up, all passed through the Virginian's mind.
"You are from western Massachusetts," said the general, as he pulled on the pipe to calm himself. "I can tell from the manure on your shoes and the stench emanating from your armpits."
It was a caste remark, out of character, but meant to re-set the balance of power. It backfired, instantly grounding the floundering Daniel Shays, reminding him at last of why he had thrown open that door. His Captain's rank had been won with the very sweat this frog-eating foreigner now scorned. His own dirt poor Scotch-Irish origins were a source of fierce pride.
He fought from a burning hatred of the British and their satin sheets and linen britches. Not like so many of the colonial elite, born into rank, soft from it. Washington was himself a farmer, and supposed to be different. But he had been heard referring to his men as "ignorant riff-raff." He had written to Congress upon arriving at Cambridge after Breed's and Bunker Hill, complaining that the Massachusetts field fighters hated privilege, elected their own officers, refused to wear uniforms. The farmers didn’t know it, but the rebel elite---even Washington---feared them mightily.
"See here, boy,” Washington continued...
"I'm a CAPTAIN, sir, not one of your damned slaves." The remark came with involuntary speed and gutteral anger. It startled the three of them.
Under the circumstances, at least until he was fully clothed, Washington could not do what he wanted, which was to slam this filthy hog farmer in some hole and throw away the key. The unruly, undisciplined Continentals were being flogged daily for far less than walking unannounced into the commanding officer’s private quarters.
But with the Marquis de Lafayette still in the buff, and with himself both shirtless and toothless, the flog was temporarily in the hands of Daniel Shays. The two Americans glared in silence.
The Frenchman was unruffled. "My sword, man, take my sword and be gone."
"Your sword? What the Hell do I want with your damn sword?"
Making a loincloth of his towel, Lafayette padded across the room, picked up his rich ornamental cutlass, and carried it to the farmer. "No one will believe your story. This blade is worth at least twenty dollars. You can say it was presented you for heroism by le General himself. Now please leave us."
Shays towered dumbfounded over the lithe foreigner. In Lafayette's mind, the affair was over, fini. He turned his back on the intruder, put on his blouse, buttoned it, and knocked the ashes from his pipe into a pewter tray on the night table.
Taking the cue, Washington also turned his back. He finished pulling on his trousers, restored his ivories to their proper home, and reached for his shirt. Toward the west wall he said "Captain, I am willing to forget your illegal intrusion. Now I suggest you take your leave while you are still able."
Volcanic anger surged up through Daniel's very core. A violent lifetime of poverty and frustration erupted within, barely restrained by the majesty of Washington, the suave detachment of the Marquis.
"DAMMIT TO HELL!!! I came here to talk about our army and our men, not to spy on you. It cost me a month's wages to get by your damn guards.
“Your private affairs mean nothing to me. The people love you. They love this fight against the Crown. How can you continue to live apart from them, to thwart our Revolution?"
Shays paused for breath, a man forever changed. Washington and Lafayette continued to dress in a detached manner meant to disguise their embarrassment and fear. Where the hell were the guards?
"This is a PEOPLE'S war," Daniel yelled at their backs. "In Concord and Cambridge we were united, with natural leadership. Now Congress robs us and we have officers who behave like Redcoats."
Shays flushed. Who was he talking to?
"We need no camps or formations, uniforms or floggings. We are an army of the people. Let’s return to forest warfare, like the Iroquois. Decentralize the army. Abolish the land debts and the taxes. Confiscate Tory property. Free the slaves. Pay us equally.
"THEN," he yelled, “THEN we’ll kick the damned Redcoats into the sea!!!"
Washington and Lafayette finished straightening their uniforms, checking pleats in the mirrors. This angry hulk of a farmer seemed at last exhausted. The danger was passed. Washington turned.
“How did you get past Tipsey and Drunkard?”
“Who?”
“My dogs.”
“You call your dogs Tipsey and Drunkard?”
“I am the biggest brewer in America. It seems appropriate.”
“Well, they seem to like steak with their ale.”
Steam appeared to pour from Washington’s ears. He darkened.
“Oh, mais non, mon cher, non, non, non,” pleaded the Marquis.
Lafayette turned to Shays, dolefully held his palms over his ears, and ducked behind a chair. “REGARDEZ! Monsieur. Here it comes!”
Washington’s Vesuvian temper was poised to blast forth with yet another legendary eruption. “I’ll tell you the hard truth, Captain," he seethed, searching for his cufflinks, trying to calm himself. "Except for the British, I am the richest man in America. I haven’t seen it. I don’t know its name. But I will wager I own lands far vaster than your entire township.
“I am the biggest brewer and hemp grower in America. I have thousands of pounds invested in black slaves and still more in white indentures. I have the absolute support of Congress, composed of men with whom I have working in surveying, law, banking, politics and war for two decades. I have paid men like you a pittance to shovel the manure from my cow barns, some of which you now seem to be wearing on your shoes, as I have done ten thousand times.
“I know from whence you come. I come from there too. But I will not relinquish control of this army or revolution or this country to you and your radical brethren."
He shrugged his shoulders to settle his officer’s waistcoat and turned at last to face Daniel Shays. "It was YOU who forced this damned war upon us, you country peasants and Boston flotsam, with your burning of stamps and your dumping of tea. We cannot let you run wild. I will not forsake Virginia for Nova Scotia.
"I wanted to stay at Mount Vernon, to cultivate my fields, smoke my hemp and brew my beer. But you mountain men and radical agitators, your scheming Sam Adams and ghostly Joe Hill and pontificating Tom Jefferson and polemical Tom Paine…you gave us no choice.
“Now you’ll win this war for us. We are grateful. But we can only let you go so far.
“So we’ll keep our uniforms and our commissions and our Congress, and you can have your mortgages and your backwoods stills and radical ideas about Iroquois sharpshooting and class revolution. And when the time comes, and we’ve beaten the British, we will turn our armies against you, and put you back in your place.
"And now, if you don't mind...."
The general and the Marquis were finally fully clothed. The Frenchman breathed a sign of relief. At last it was over. For once no windows or furniture had been sacrificed. “Pas mal, mon general,” he whispered. “You are learning to control yourself.”
“Someday they will build a monument to your manly firmness,” he continued in a tone that bordered on rapture. “It will tower over the Capitol. They can make it 555 feet high, in honor of your Illuminati beliefs. But it will never do you justice.”
Washington ignored him, and looked Daniel dead in the eyes. The rebel Captain glimpsed a confused combination of contempt and compassion. It bore a deeper meaning that would haunt the two of them---and their nation---for the rest of their days.
The Virginian withdrew from his waistcoat a piece of homegrown ginseng root. He offhandedly offered a piece to both the Marquis and Shays. Each politely refused. The general took a bite, and began to chew.
“Soon,” said the Marquis, “we shall be forever betrothed, and none of this will matter.”
Then the Frenchman ushered le General out the door, looking back as he did to roll his eyes gratefully toward Shays.
Daniel stood silent. He stared thoughtlessly at the richly furnished boudoir.
Only then did he notice the sword in his hand. To his everlasting regret, he kept it.
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Chapter Two: TOM JEFFERSON'S BIG IDEA
Thomas Jefferson stood at attention. He was ecstatically aroused. It was his best moment since the Declaration.
This was not the product of sexual excitement. Lord knows he'd enough of that amongst the female gentry of Revolutionary Philadelphia to satisfy the Hessian army.
No, this particular pillar was the product of politics, the kind that arose whenever Tom Jefferson had a great idea. And just now, he’d erected one for the ages.
Thoroughly energized, he shook his mane of ample red hair and knocked the contents of his pipe into the compost. Washington's hemp had compromised his evening with a mild headache, and he wanted to transcend it with something more suitable to the occasion.
Rummaging through the drawers of his Chippendale desk, he found a brightly decorated pouch made of birch bark and beads, the gift of a Cherokee chieftain. Inside was a blend of aboriginal smoking matter capable of elevating even the current King. With a satisfied smile, the Virginian leaned back in his chair, and lit up.
It was indeed the Cherokee who had prompted this excitement. All along the western frontier, the natives were wrecking havoc with the Revolution. The powerful northern Iroquois were aligned with the British. Their brilliant half-breed chieftain, Joseph Brant, had turned whole sectors of the Hudson Valley into forbidden territory.
In the Carolinas, the problem was equally serious. The southern confederations, including the Cherokee, wanted as little to do with the war as possible. But the British made enticing offers, and there was no guarantee the natives would stay neutral for long.
Floating on his heathen cloud, Jefferson saw the situation with exquisite clarity. Three generations of colonial farmers--- including his father's---had pushed into Indian lands, then demanded Redcoats to back them up.
In those days many tribes allied with the French. After the British beat them, the floodgates opened. The white yeoman farmers poured through the Cumberland and a dozen other gaps, over the Alleghenies and into the vast central valleys.
These were not the trappers and explorers of the earlier era. Many Frenchmen adored the natives, embraced them as equals, joyously intermarried. The squabbles were many, but when it came to the Indians, the French talked of love, not war.
Not so the English Calvinists. To them the tribes were Satan's children. So they pillaged the native villages. They slaughtered whole nations. They gave "gifts" of blankets infected with smallpox, digging a ghastly new hell hole in the annals of warfare.
They also brought something else new to the continent - the violent sexual penetration of women by men. No native culture knew of this until the whites had come. No nation in North America practiced it more brutally or frequently than the Puritan English.
Now the tribes weighed the squabble between the old Empire and its rebellious children. Mostly, they allied with the parent. From his Cherokee cloud, Jefferson saw that as long as the redskins sided with the Redcoats, there would be no new American nation. He liked the Indians a good deal more than the ragtag riff-raff of his own race. But he knew those mobs would never cease taking native lands.
At last, he had a plan. The natives could live, even prosper, amidst the white tide. Only one thing had to go: their culture.
It was so simple. Congress would commission several hundred of its top young men - its best and brightest - to infiltrate the tribes, to live in their villages and teach them the benefits of white society. The errors of their picturesque but obsolete traditions would be eliminated, making way for the new. The natives made great copy for Rousseau's pamphlets and Franklin's magazines, and even for some of Jefferson's own best radical prose.
But in the explosive world of modern 18th century America, there was simply no room primitive longhouses or tribal traditions. The boys would probably emerge as chieftains themselves. At very least there would be cash and land to reward their efforts.
No longer would the savages be treated as inanimate digits to be pushed aside with each economic downturn. This core of idealistic volunteers would see them taught the white ways---educated, pacified---prepared mentally and spiritually to embrace the new Euro-centric order so beautifully embodied in Tom’s beloved Illuminati.
The tingling in his spine and buzzing in his head were at last too much. Jefferson simply had to get up. He would find Franklin.
Grabbing his pipe, pouch and flints, the tall planter hastily donned his smart new Carolina waistcoat and burst through the doors of his study, into the streets of the capital.
It was an unusually warm winter day in Year One of the Revolution, 1776. His wavy red hair bounced in tune with his long strides, as the muscular gentryman sailed through Philadelphia's muddy cowpaths. Thomas Jefferson was the most brilliant embodiment of the New World's physical and intellectual frontiers, and he knew it.
It was a quick three blocks to Franklin's printshop. The route was littered with its usual burden of puddles and horse paddies, today blemished by an extraordinary number of beggars, lured from their hovels by the unseasonable warmth. As was his custom, Jefferson pitched them each a pence, urging as he did that they "get an education."
As yesterday, he spied Dolley Madison approaching on Fleet Street. Luckily, she was again in deep conversation with Mrs. Edmund Randolph, the two of them kept a healthy distance apart by their flowing outer garments.
For complicated reasons, Jefferson needed very much to be seen by neither of them. He darted into an alleyway, navigating toward Franklin's by a secret route through a blacksmith's yard, around a stable. Finally dodging a fetid mud hole, he burst through the publisher's side door, breathing heavily. "Ben, I..."
There was no one immediately visible. The hand-powered press at which he expected to see Franklin laboring was loaded with type and paper, but unmanned. The usual crew of three apprentices was nowhere to be seen.
Jefferson walked to the print board which lay loaded beneath the heavy screw-down imprinting device. On it sat a large sheet of hemp newsprint, partly adorned with obscene drawings and lewd commentary. Tom chuckled, and treated himself to a few snippets.
“I have recently returned from an extensive visit with the Mohawk Nation,” said the already infamous pamphlet on his proposal for a new federal government. “I can report without hesitation that the Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee Confederacy runs better than the British Parliament.” The Brits were exposed in ways that defy mere verbal description.
Ah, yes. Ben was a great pamphleteer and columnist, an ink-powered agitator who nearly rivaled even his great friend Paine.
But everyone in the colonies knew he made his real money in pornography. Even the prissiest Puritans eagerly snapped up his best off-color volumes for late night inspiration.
Jefferson fingered the sheet. It pictured King George, adoring the Queen of France. Lord North, clad only in undershorts, flogged himself as he watched. Jefferson laughed aloud.
But here, beneath, was the most infamous of all---the Starr Report, a deliciously lewd catalog of sexual abuse allegedly compiled by an angry clergyman. Franklin’s “Reverend Kit Starr,” was a thin fiction, an absurdly conflicted Puritan so “horrified” by all imaginable forms of sexual abuse that he was “compelled by God” to address every exquisite detail, leaving no gap unstained, for all to read and “condemn.” Every clergyman in the colonies devoured every paragraph with Godly zeal. Franklin howled all the way to the bank.
As Jefferson read through Ben’s satiric masterwork, his misty reverie was pricked by strange noises, like those of a sick dog. Puzzled and curious, he shuffled toward the back of the shop, where Franklin kept a closet furnished with a small cot for catnapping.
The noises grew stronger, and as he quietly pushed aside the door Tom was confronted with the sight of Ben's formidable derrier, encased shimmering in the smallish legs of a young female. The old boy wheezed and groaned like a tea kettle perking on one of the patented stoves he was just starting to sell around the colonies.
Jefferson guessed she was a street tart, born of the beggars to whose tuition Tom had just contributed, and for whose services Franklin had probably anted up just a few coppers of his own.
The Virginian smiled. So many secret young Franklins now roamed the streets, produced by liaisons such as these, that certain members of Congress branded him "Father of his Country." But Ben was getting a bit on for such sport. His closer friends petitioned that in the interest of longevity, he at last desist.
The strain showed even now. The printer had lapsed toward a coma, and the poor girl groaned under his weight, suddenly kicking out with her left leg, striking the closet wall, knocking Franklin's kite off its mounting and onto the floor, carrying with it a number of glass jars and a bottle of the printer's prized Scotch.
The old man, who had begun to snore, awoke with a start and a curse. The poor girl yelled and began pushing on his chest, gasping for breath.
Jefferson suppressed a hearty guffaw and dashed quickly toward the front door, where he fairly collided with Abigail Adams, primly outfitted in a starched Robin's-egg blue linen dress and bonnet. What a day! Just who he wanted to see!!
"Hello Abigail," Tom smiled. "Shall we have some tea?" Circling her waist with his right arm, he led the unwilling Quincy prude back into the street. Another glass bottle hit the closet floor and the cursing voice of the elderly printer rang out into the mud paths. Jefferson laughed aloud.
"What's going on in there?" Adams's neck twisted toward the print shop, her body still unwilling to accept that the manuscripts in her arms would not reach their destination.
"Ben's busy now," Tom grinned. "Shall we wait around the corner?"
She flashed resentment at his cavalier manner, his off-handed familiarity. Alone among the Congressional wives, Abigail Adams found Tom Jefferson offensive. He was too comfortable, too smart, too good looking, with that pat radical patter that had an answer for everything. She freed herself from his grasp. Looking wistfully towards Franklin's shop, she sensed from past experience that Tom might have a good reason for blocking her entry.
"Well," she muttered, "alright."
Jefferson’s opened palm guided her toward the tea shop, though she certainly knew the way. She was a challenge to him, and more. Her handsome looks and dazzling intellect made her the most powerful woman in the capital. She was also profoundly, though uniquely, uninterested in this Virginian’s legendary prowess.
With revolt against the Crown had come a more intricate attack on the old Puritan austerity, a Great Awakening, as Franklin called it. Congress was seething with sexual intrigue. But John and Abigail Adams stood apart, making her all the more attractive. Abigail found Tom’s advances unsavory, and was none too happy about sipping tea with him now.
Jefferson rarely felt ill at ease and was more attracted than ever to the forbidden creature across the round marble table. The burning question was why she stayed with plump little John Adams when she could have her pick of Revolutionary manhood. There had been tantalizing rumors, traceable to John's cousin Sam, that Abigail was discontent, and was stealing off to western Massachusetts for reasons unknown. Jefferson longed to find more. But to ask outright would be to end his audience and jeopardize his health.
Hailing a waitress to their window table, overlooking the brown soup of the Philadelphia street, Jefferson decided to dazzle her with his plan for the Indians.
Once tea was ordered, he traced its skeleton, embellishing it with details that came to mind as he talked, concentrating especially on the valuable field experience it would give the American boys. Occasionally he lost sight of having an audience at all, and spoke as if enraptured with the Cherokee spirit, whose herb he longed to inhale again. But this was a public cafe, and his flow of words was the truest intoxicant. When he finished, breathless, his pot was cold.
Spent, Tom slowly remembered where he was. He shouted out for hot tea. And in feline contentment, he stretched his long arms over his head. He leaned back and searched Abigail's face expectantly. She also sat back, her eyes wide open, focused - aimed - directly into his.
"You," she finally hissed, "are absolutely demented."
A vague tingling sensation materialized in Jefferson's forebrain. His visage took on a slightly gray pallor. He forgot again about his tea. "What? What did you say?"
"Demented. You're demented, like the rest of your Revolutionary brethren. Do you want to hear why?"
She was finally removing her damned bonnet. "Do I have a choice?" he thought to himself. But he knew better than to speak.
For now it was Abigail's turn. She poured the last of her tea and sipped. She replaced the cup. Then she launched.
"In the first place, what makes you think these people…these so-called aboriginals…want anything to do with us in their villages? We've been firing missionaries at them for a century and look what has happened. Our men of the cloth get the land and turn those women into concubines while the natives are left with little but Bibles and crucifixes, not to mention venereal disease and some ungodly customs. So now you propose to send in young men without offering even the Bibles. What good could they possibly do?"
"Teach English, for starters," Tom said, his blood starting to boil, both at Abigail and at the waitress who did not come.
"Wonderful. So then the Indians can paint themselves white, move to the cities and open gift shops. Listen to me, Thomas Jefferson. You and your liberal kind always seek a way to make your decimations seem humane. But if the Indians were not in the way of westward expansion, would you bother to send in these young people? What is really behind it, Thomas?
“Why don't we bring the Indians to Congress to teach us THEIR language and how to govern, as Ben suggests? You and your French friend Rousseau are always writing about the noble savage. But then you plot better ways to destroy them. Next we know you'll tell them all to pick up and move west so we can better occupy their land. And this, we'll be told, is for their own good."
That very thought had crossed Jefferson's mind. How could she have known? Had he sent that letter to the Delawares, saying they could stay? He couldn't remember. No matter.
"Abigail, it's inevitable. They're going to be destroyed anyway."
"Says who? Thomas Jefferson. Nothing is inevitable unless people like you make it so. Mark my words, when push comes to shove, it will be ‘friends' like you who make precisely the decisions that will destroy these people.
"You won’t be wielding the actual bayonet. But some military strongman will always come along to follow your benign-sounding blueprint to its lethal conclusion.
"And by the way, Tom, how are your slaves this week? Well-fed? Happy to have you as their owner?"
Puritan prude! Why had he run into her? Why were they in this wretched café, where he couldn't even get a cup of hot tea? He was more determined than ever to make his plan a reality. And to track those rumors of Abigail going into the western woods.
With her bonnet resting comfortably on the manuscripts next to her, Adams was unexpectedly happy to face the man who stole her John’s credit for writing the Declaration. Her husband, she knew, would rant about that one for decades to come. And she would have to listen. Here she could extract some revenge in advance.
"While we're on the subject, Tom Jefferson. What's this about 'boys' you're sending in there. Why only boys?"
Jefferson sat bolt upright. "Send WOMEN! Abigail, are you mad? You know the sexual appetites of those savages. Do we really want our women bearing half-breed children?”
"Sexual appetites!" she yelped, finally attracting a waitress. "Those people! Listen to me, Thomas Jefferson. Your so-called ‘savages' have been our neighbors at Quincy for decades. They are far better mannered than your beloved sailors or farmers or even big old Ben Franklin from what I've been hearing lately. Personally, I think our women would be far safer in an Iroquois village than on most of our Philadelphia streets.
"Besides…I would guess that you have no particular problem with half-breed children as long as they are fathered by white men rather than borne by white women. Am I wrong?"
"No, you certainly are not," Jefferson muttered under his breath, ignoring the young girl standing nervously next to him, waiting for his order. He looked at her, failed to divine her purpose, and tumbled deeply into his own inner turmoil.
The idea of a red savage entering a tender white flower made him vaguely nauseous. But his own excursions into the far reaches of red womanhood were among his fondest memories. If young Cherokees bore his blood, so be it! This female diatribe was truly tiresome.
But not for Abigail. Next to Hamilton, it was Jefferson she could bear least, with his paper ideals and his speaking against her John and "for the people" when nothing terrified Tom Jefferson more than the sight of four actual dirt farmers conversing on a street corner.
As for loving the Indians, that was a half-truth exceeded only slightly by Jefferson's advocating freedom for all the black slaves. He would free his own---at least the ones he fathered---only when he died.
The natives made for good romantic theory. But everyone in Philadelphia knew that when it came time to move them out, Tom Jefferson would find a place and an excuse. His radical credentials and high-blown rhetoric made him perfectly suited to lead the charge. "Some of my best friends are Indians," he had once told Dolley Madison. Abigail overheard, and choked on her kidney pie.
Now she had him across the table, and she wasn't quite through. "Another thing, Thomas Jefferson. When will you recognize the role of women in this Revolution. We are tired of taking care of the farms and the children and still being treated like your doormats. We are tired of an all-male Congress and `All MEN are Created Equal.' Do you understand?"
No one could be further from understanding than Thomas Jefferson, who finally realized why this timid young girl was quivering next to him. He ordered a crumpet to go with his new pot of tea.
A plea for women's rights might make good copy for future generations. But Tom Jefferson was hardly about to go that far. Relaxing a bit, he leaned back in his chair and smiled indulgently.
"Politics are far too taxing to cause such a beautiful creature to knit her brow. You are bright, but you must know where you belong."
And you must also know, he thought to himself, that we will laugh you out on your damned behinds if you bring up such ideas in public.
Abigail took a deep breath. "Let's not deceive each other, Tom Jefferson. We women haven't the power…yet!
“But what kind of a Revolution is this? No rights for blacks. Natives slaughtered for their land. Armies of hungry farm families looted by the states and robbed again by Congress. I think history may have a difficult time recognizing this as a revolution at all.”
At last, Tom’s tea arrived, piping hot. He gratefully poured himself a cup, but failed to thank the waitress. Abigail scowled.
"I am neither African nor Indian. But I know women and how many we number. We are human. We can think and act. And you cannot live without us. But I suspect the reverse may not be true.
"And I guarantee you this: It may take two centuries, or twenty. But we will roll you over. There will be a revolution of women as surely as of slaves, the poor and Indians. We will run the Congress and the country. And you white boys will stand in some corner until you learn that all PEOPLE are created equal. And that any society failing to honor all people’s rights at all times will soon fail.
“Do you understand me, Thomas Jefferson?”
He stared at her in silence. He did not understand.
******************************
Chapter Three: SAM ADAMS IS WATCHING YOU!
Sam Adams leaned back and let loose a hearty horse laugh. His dingy office rocked with harsh, cynical shrieks. Daniel Shays, standing hat in hand before Adams' grimy desk, sank further into unhappy confusion.
Adams fairly yelped with pleasure. It was the best story he'd heard since Tom Jefferson got caught with Dolley Madison at that slave shack in Baltimore, and he was not about to pass up the opportunity for a good laugh. Not now, with the both the Redcoats and the Congress breathing down his neck.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity to poor Daniel, Sam’s guffaws turned to muffled chuckles. "Sorry, Shays, really I am. Just couldn't control myself. Have a seat, will you? Haw haw haw. Bare-assed, you say? The little French guy? George with no teeth! Oh LORD!"
Adams lost control again. He wheezed helplessly and nearly fell off his chair, which was none too sturdy to begin with. Tears welled in Daniel’s eyes. It was a week of hard disillusionment. Samuel Adams was the only man he felt he could trust with the startling information, the only one he thought would ever believe him.
He had steeled himself for a rebuff, even anger. But laughter? From Samuel Adams? About a matter such as this? Daniel Shays was drowning.
Finally pulling himself together, Adams ran his hands through his greasy, thinning white hair. He sat up straight, barely suppressing another grin. Shaking his head he withdrew some foolscap from his desk and dipped his quill in ink. "Alright, Captain, let's have it. The whole story."
For the next hour, Daniel Shays told his tale. Working carefully, Adams wrote it all down, interrupting only occasionally for clarification and expansion. The grins alternated with dead seriousness, as Adams scratched away, blotting his paper while Shays caught his breath.
When at last they were finished, the farmer sighed with relief. Adams tipped back in his chair and viewed his foolscap with reverence, as some sort of divine treasure.
After a few moments of embarrassed silence, Sam Adams shuffled the papers into a neat pile, and reached into his desk for a folder. Tipping his chair forward again, he withdrew a leather tobacco pouch as well. He slipped Shays’s story into the folder. Then he opened the pouch, grimaced, and threw it back on the desk. It was filled with Washington's hemp. Sam Adams was in no mood for another headache.
"Captain, reach behind you there, will you, and fetch me down that canister from the shelf."
Shays looked over his left shoulder, stretched up and grabbed a round tin off a dusty ledge. It was the only clean item on it.
"Ethan Allen's stuff," Adams smiled. "Vermont Vermillion. I don't know how he grows it up there, but this is pure gun powder. Care to join me?"
Allen's herb was legendary, grown with Mohawk seed, better even than Daniel’s own Pelham Purple. His mind was far from settled, but no one in the Continental Army ever refused Ethan's ether.
As he smoked, Shays scanned the man in front of him, the legendary Samuel Adams. He was plump and shabby. His teeth were decrepit, his clothing caked with grease. His was not the honest dirt of the farmer's soil, but the sticky grubbiness of back alleys and unkempt basements. A man who slept with cockroaches.
Yet through Adams' flaccid face shone the steely eyes of a consummate agitator, sole rival to Franklin and Hamilton as America's most brilliant manipulator. Cold, calculating, with the detachment of a New World Machiavelli, Sam Adams played human nature like an Appalachian dulcimer. Beneath that rat's nest of matted white churned the machine that had sparked the Revolution, from the Tea Party to the Shot Heard Round the World. When he was on his game, the Redcoats were his puppets, the Congress his toy. Through his Green Mountain haze, Daniel Shays regarded Adams as did most of his rural compatriots - with a mixture of awe and terror.
Adams retrieved his pipe, and tapped its spent contents onto his new Franklin stove. Ben had just sold him the Boston franchise. Maybe this rube of a dirt farmer wanted to make a deal.
He reloaded the pipe, handed it back and dropped the idea of doing business. Money matters never mixed well with Ethan Allen’s legendary weed. Besides, it was time to take stock of this fellow.
"I'll level with you Shays. I'm sure you're aware of it anyway, or you wouldn't be here. This is not the first such story that has come to me. And I guarantee you it won't be the last."
With that he tipped forward and reached down into a two-drawer oak cabinet to his left. He withdrew a manila folder, pregnant with foolscap, and threw it carelessly on the desk top. "This is my file on Washington."
Shays was not surprised. The cabinet was stuffed with folders. Adams leafed through them coyly. "Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr, Arnold, my cousins John and Abigail, Madison, Monroe, Henry, Paine, Otis, Allen, Lincoln, Lee, Ward, Marion...they're all here. This one I'll file under Lafayette, though rightly it belongs with George."
Adams regarded Shays from the corner of his eye. The rugged farmer was fingering Washington's dossier.
“Here’s another one. The infamous Joe Hill. Do you know him?”
“As well as anyone can, I guess. He comes and goes. He’s a hell of an organizer. The Brits really want him dead.”
“They’re not the only ones,” Adams muttered.
Shays looked up. Adams was gritting his teeth, and quickly moved along. “Here are the British. North, Gage, Burgoyne, the Howes, Amherst, and, of course, the King himself. His is the best. Couldn’t read until he was eleven. His father ran through the streets of London at night, breaking windows.”
But Shays had his eyes full of his commanding officer. "December 12, 1775. Washington made disparaging remarks concerning several officers. He told an unidentified aide in his tent at Cambridge that he felt “they were ‘fools’ to have associated with such `rabble' on an equal basis, and that..."
Shays winced. He flipped the page. "January 10, 1776. Washington described a western Massachusetts contingent as `filthy corn eaters.' In a conversation with...."
"February 22, 1776. Washington was observed with a young bootblack from Dorchester. He told staff that in honor of his birthday he wished his boots to be cleaned, and then ordered them out of the executive tent. He later emerged in a funk, wearing just one boot. The boy had refused to finish the job until every Revolutionary soldier was given a contract. Washington ordered the boy banished."
"March 16, 1776. Washington was seen....
"July 18, 1776. A letter from Washington to...
"August 10, 1776. Washington’s meeting with the Masons is...
"January 12, 1777...February 9, 1777...March 12, 1777...."
There were fully two hundred sheets, all in Adams' quick but sharp handwriting, all with carefully recorded dates, names, places and sources, though the source names were obviously in code.
Shays let out a low whistle. The backwoods grapevine had hinted at such files. But to actually see them was another thing altogether. Adams smiled. A number of purposes had been served here, and he reached complacently across the desk. "The pipe, boy. Don't hog it."
Shays jerked as if shot. "I'm a Captain, dammit."
Adams immediately realized the cost of his moment's relaxation. "Boy" had been a bad choice of words, and now Daniel Shays viewed Samuel Adams in yet another light, one Adams would have preferred to avoid.
The agitator took the pipe, leaned back and sized up this dirt farmer turned subversive. He'd seen a thousand of them. Strong and dense. Proud, ferocious at times, but simple and often naive. How much did this one know? How different was he from the rest? Did he have a something special to set him off? And if so, where were his crucial vulnerabilities? He was getting quite an education, this Scotch-Irishman from Pelham, and one thing was certain: when he left Sam Adams's office, there would be a new file in that cabinet---one labelled "Daniel Shays."
"You kept Lafayette's sword, did you?"
"Yes, I kept it," Shays responded warily. "I sold it and bought a good musket. I gave the musket to Sam Ely."
"From Northampton?"
"That's right." Bostonian though he was, Sam Adams knew western Massachusetts as well as any man alive. Still angry, Daniel Shays was impressed. What he didn’t know was that the information had come from Abigail Adams.
And it eluded him that this snippet about Lafayette's sword was now destined for foolscap. Guile on that level was precisely what made Sam Adams most wary. Finding it lacking in Daniel Shays, he smiled inwardly, and began to probe further.
"What do you think of our Commander now, Captain?"
Shays paused. His brow furrowed. It took him a while. “General Washington is a great leader. He has accomplished the impossible, keeping this army together. Look at Valley Forge. Trenton. And he is a farmer, and a great one at that. Often times, he seems to understand us, to be one of us. His ale knows no peer. Under its influence, the men would make him King.”
“From what you’re telling me here, Shays, Queen would seem more appropriate.”
“Oh Hell, Mr. Adams, we don’t care about that. At Valley Forge, half the men in the Continental Army became their brother’s lovers. How do you think we survived the winter without blankets?”
This was no surprise to Adams. His files were full of such stories. Many of his own closest friends were....“Yet you hesitate?”
“The other times, we just don’t know. General Washington is the richest man in America. He is a slave owner. His estate is far bigger than my whole town.
“Sometimes he seems to lose touch with us, to forget his roots. He patronizes that bastard Alexander Hamilton, who seems to think we are less than dirt. And that fancy Marquis. He seems to identify with them and the lawyers and the other slave owners. We worry he is fighting this Revolution for them, not us. This makes us think we will have to fight them after we fight the British, and that when push comes to shove, Washington will identify with his social class rather than his fellow farmers, who fight for him now. Not like you, who we are sure is on our side.”
Adams smiled again, this time openly. He had a vision of hordes of rugged farmers like this one, carrying on their town meetings like a pack of earnest schoolmarms. He knew the `rabble' of western Massachusetts were of two minds about George Washington, as was he about them.
Sam Adams once shared Daniel Shays’s rural rage. It had engulfed his own father. And he was getting a sense now of how deep it went and how best he could use it.
Beginning in the early sixties Adams sent agents into every town in New England, including Shays's Pelham. In the harsh wilds of the west, he developed a network of correspondence. He worked himself to exhaustion, cajoling the coarse, tough puritan farmers into action. He organized, manipulated and irritated their class consciousness and their hatred of the aristocratic Redcoats. With consummate genius, he played town against town, faction against faction until they came alive against the Empire.
Now he sat atop a volcano. Once aroused, America’s frontier farmers would be next to impossible to stop. He shook them from their bucolic slumber. Now he struggled to contain their explosive democratic fury, lest it engulf his own plans for power.
Led by the likes of that damned Joe Hill, the ferocious farmers of western New England were now ready to fight not only the British, but Congress as well, and then, perhaps, Boston itself. This he could not allow. Daniel Shays was here to show him how to rein things in.
"This may surprise you, Shays, but I can almost guarantee you we will beat the British. It's a bit early yet, but the signs are all there. They are arrogant, clumsy and overconfident. They have underestimated us. They will lose this war."
Adams's words made Dan’s head spin. He hated to see the strength of his beloved Massachusetts forest fighters squandered by the colonial elite. He helped decimate the British from behind rocks and trees, only to have Washington show up with funds from Congress, forcing them into uniform. Now there were foolish camp regulations, even flogging the most spirited rebels. Hundreds went home before they would eat Congressional dirt.
If the Continental Army was in desperate straits, it was because of upper class generals and thieves in Boston. Daniel Shays knew the Revolution could be won with squirrel guns, fired from behind trees by farmers dressed in green. Did Sam Adams know it too?
Of course he did. What he didn't know was how to shut down the snipers once the British were gone. "I will govern Massachusetts," of that he was certain. But would Massachusetts be governable?
"Tell me, Shays. What would you do with Washington once the British are defeated?
"DO with him? I don't understand?"
"This country will require order. How will you govern it?"
Shays did not hesitate. "Like a town meeting, sir. All the men will vote. No slaves. No aristocracy. Everyone has his say."
"And Boston? What would you do with us in the cities, Shays?"
"Town meeting, too, sir." Shays knit his brow. Wasn't it obvious?
Adams eyed his visitor carefully. He already knew what Shays did not - that very soon, after the Revolution, they would be enemies. Samuel Adams would be governor of Massachusetts, that much was written in scripture. And Pelham would have to knuckle under.
The state had already suffered through three years of anarchy. Boston was reduced to a mere town. The countryside stepped into the vacuum left by the Declaration and governed itself.
It was a vision of hell. Sam had embezzled customs money, picked Hancock’s pocket, extorted the urban gentry mercilessly - all for funds to keep the westerners in line. And all to no avail. They were headstrong, bitter, and unless he ran at full speed, they would leave him in the dust with the Redcoats. His sheriffs and tax collectors would be tarred and feathered. There would be no Massachusetts of which to be governor. That Sam Adams would never accept.
"What about his land, Shays. Would you let Washington keep his land?"
Shays pursed his lips. Washington's plantation was bigger than Pelham itself, was it not? It could support a thousand families like his own, maybe more. He looked at Adams. "Some of it. He could keep some of it. None of his slaves, though. And not that big house."
"And Hancock's ships. What about Hancock's ships?"
"They belong to us, sir. Did Hancock pound the nails? Does he work their bellies?"
"The women, Shays. What about the women?"
"They fight beside us, sir. They run our farms."
“Shall they vote, Daniel? Will you grant them full equality?”
Shays was silent, not quite comprehending the question. Adams's arm began to reach for Abigail's file. But he reconsidered, and continued probing.
"The blacks, Shays. What would you do with them?"
"They have had equal rights in the west for several years now, sir. The Revolution will free them from the damned southerners. They will learn that this is not the Indies!"
Adams remembered Crispus Attucks and winced. "The vote, Shays, shall they have it, and the presidency as well?"
"Yes," was the reply, but as Adams expected, the voice quavered.
"And the Indians, Shays. What will become of the Indians?”
Here the hesitation deepened. "The Indians, sir?"
There was a long, uncomprehending silence, with no sign of a break. Shays sat confused, his brow stuck in a knit. Adams smiled. The game was over. He had reached the man's limit. And he wanted to feel his pulse, not educate him.
Sam relit the pipe and handed it back. Daniel took it and relaxed, distracted, slouching in his chair, looking absently around the office. "You're tough, Shays," Adams said softly. "And you're learning fast. But you're not there yet. And you called me `sir.'"
Shays barely heard him. His exhausted eyes half-stared out the soiled window into the fetid back alley, deep in the guts of Revolutionary Boston, far from the clean cold sheen of Pelham's maple snow drifts. He longed for home.
A sharp rapping interrupted his reverie. The door opened. In the tight space allotted, it pushed against Shays's chair. John Hancock slipped through, dressed in the satin finery of a wealthy urban merchant. Shays stared at him. Hancock glanced back, then looked at Adams, whose eyes motioned him out of the room.
Shays sat bolt upright. "Two hundred years, Shays. I give you two hundred years, maybe a bit more."
"Beg your pardon?"
"Listen, Captain. You've done your country a most valuable service. Keep this stuff about George under your hat, will you? Return to the army and go on fighting the damned British. If you do, we will win, of that I have no doubt."
Now all business, Adams put the new foolscap sheets into Lafayette's file, took Washington's as well, and replaced them both in the cabinet.
Standing up, he thrust his hand across the desk. "You're a fine man and a true patriot, Captain. Now I have your friend Mr. Hancock to attend to. Go back to the Connecticut Valley. This is Boston. We will meet again soon."
Daniel shook Sam’s hand in a daze. "Two hundred years, sir? What do you mean, two hundred years?"
"You'll find out, Shays. You will find out."
******************************
Chapter Four: THE WAR OF THE EVERYMAN’S EAR
His interview with the great Sam Adams obviously over, Daniel Shays rose through the fragrant fog of Ethan Allan's weed and floated out the door without saying goodbye.
Emerging into the wintry alley, he smacked into John Hancock. Grabbing the ship-owner's slim, expensively tailored shoulders with his massive, plough-battered hands, Shays paused to view the first signer of the Declaration of Independence.
He beheld a well-fed, intelligent face with a wry smile. John Hancock was the wealthiest smuggler in the colonies. He was a revolutionary by virtue of intellectual commitment and commercial expedience borne of British mercantilism, which cramped his profits and jeopardized his fleet for far too long. Sam's brains and John's gold made Boston the hotbed of Revolution.
Hancock had no taste for the masses. But he loved the excitement and intrigue of revolutionary politics. He played with the good taste and meticulous balance sheet of a moderate aristocrat in a yeoman nation. He was determined to be president. But he had only signed the Declaration, not written it.
When the British chased him and Sam through Lexington to Concord, he laughed all the way…and left the peasants to stand and fight. John Hancock never doubted he would escape all injury and emerge from this joyful upheaval quite on top.
And now there was this huge farmer, holding him by the ruffles, staring at him with glazed eyes. His own fancy breeches and velvet jacket made quite a contrast with this walking manure heap.
"Hiya fella," Hancock offered. "What can I do for you?"
"You're Hancock, aren't you?
"Right," said the ship owner, freeing himself from those rural paws and offering a shake. Shays vacantly accepted, as he had with Sam Adams a moment before.
"You going in there?"
"I suppose so. Sam's a friend of the family."
"He's a mighty cagey fellow. Mighty cagey. I'd be careful if I were you."
Hancock waited for more. Nothing came. He realized Shays's mind was somewhere in Ethan Allen’s Ethernet, and thanked him for his concern. He then danced gently through Daniel’s bovine stare and up three shaky steps to Sam’s office, leaving the westerner dumbly blowing frosted breaths in the frozen alley.
"That's quite a hulk you were entertaining, Sam. What's he got for you?"