The Whiskey Rebel

With pen, ink, and paper at my disposal, I began to set up my key, matching the words I believed I could crack with those I could not, substituting letters as I went. It was tedious work, and the whiskey made my vision waver, but I drank it all the same. Soon the puzzle pieces fit together, and I looked at the message. I could scarce believe what I saw, yet there it was.

I come from D. All on schedule here. Use contacts to confirm Ham suspects nothing. Without his interference, BUS will fall by March.

I stared at the note, hardly daring to comprehend it. Leonidas looked over my shoulder.

“What is BUS?” he asked. “Who is D?”

I had my suspicions about D-Duer?-though I was still too early in the game to say for certain. BUS, however, was another matter. It was the institution that was upon everyone’s minds, upon everyone’s lips. It was the thing that had elevated Hamilton to unimaginable power and made him, to some, an unspeakable demon. It was the thing that, it now seemed to me, for good or ill, defined our moment in time, much as the Revolution itself had defined the world half a generation ago: the Bank of the United States. What I held in my hands changed everything, for this was not a matter of a missing gentleman and a pushy Irishman. Cynthia was right. Whatever had happened to her husband had something to do with the bank, but it was a far more sinister something than I could have suspected. There was a plot at work, a genuine plot to destroy Hamilton ’s bank. It was a plot to alter, for good or ill, the future of the American government.

Joan Maycott

Summer and Autumn 1789

The half-face camp built that day proved but a poor shelter, yet shelter it was, and though we endured a few rain showers that rendered it near useless, it was, at most times, not so terrible. To be sure, our difficulties were eased by the help of our new neighbors. Mr. Dalton developed a particular attachment to my husband that first night, and he proved to be a good friend. We learned that his companion, Mr. Jericho Richmond, was generally praised as one of the great marksmen in the region, and in that period of adjustment we would have starved had it not been for their regular gifts of game. Two or three times a week, as sunset approached, we would see the two of them enter our clearing, some great beast stretched over Mr. Richmond’s shoulders or, if too large, dragged in a cart. They brought us deer and bear and once a small panther, quite sleek in form and beautiful in its tan color.

“Can panther be eaten?” I inquired, skeptically eyeing the felled beast.

“Panther’s good,” answered Jericho Richmond, in his terse and soft-spoken ma

“What does it taste like?” I asked.

Mr. Dalton considered this question. “Tastes a lot like rattlesnake.”

I laughed aloud. “You ca

Dalton answered by strolling toward the thick growth of forest. Richmond stared at his back, and then, when Dalton was gone from view, Richmond stared at me. He seemed to have nothing to say, and yet his look held an accusation I did not understand. I attempted conversation-nothing of great complexity, for most of what I said involved speculation upon what Mr. Dalton might be doing-but Richmond would not speak to me. And so we stood there, Richmond as quiet and inscrutable as an Indian, I confused and not knowing how to excuse myself. So we remained until Dalton returned ten minutes later, the limp body of a rattlesnake dangling from one hand, its lifeless head peeking out from above his fist. He held it out to me.

“Roast it on the fire. Don’t boil it. Boiling’s too tough.” He winked at me as I, with some effort, reached out and took the thing from him. Later, when I examined it, I found it had not a scratch upon it, and that, for all I could tell, Mr. Dalton had reached out, grabbed it by the neck, and strangled it. Not precisely Hercules in his crib, but near enough to astonish me.

Richmond said nothing during this exchange, but he shook his head once in a way that made me feel as though I had walked into a disagreement between the two of them.

Dalton was equally useful in selling us supplies that we required, including seed for our first crops and ropes for land clearing, giving us a pup to be raised as a hunting dog and, most useful, an old work horse whom he called Bemis. I later learned that the beast had been named after the skirmish at Bemis Heights, the pivotal encounter of the battle at Saratoga, in which both Mr. Dalton and Mr. Richmond had served under Colonel Daniel Morgan. Mr. Dalton told us that Mr. Richmond was the marksman who dispatched the British general Simon Fraser, a shot that changed the course of the battle and thus of the war itself, given the victory’s influence on France’s entry into the conflict. It was something I loved about my country. In a war with countless turning points, one never needed to look far to find the men who had worked the levers upon which all depended.

With the occasional assistance of our new friends, Andrew managed to fell eighty trees within three weeks, and so the call went out that there was to be a cabin raising. I had thought our camp building had been a significant gathering, but a cabin raising turned out to be an event of an entirely different order. Mr. Dalton had it put about that he wished everyone to help, and as a prominent distiller of whiskey for the region and an employer of more than ten men-his whiskey boys, who traded his wares-his wishes were always obeyed. From as far away as twenty-five miles, dozens of men arrived for what was to be a four-day frenzy of work and merriment. When it was completed, we had a home and we had friends. The house was rough, and so were the people, but life seemed much easier than it had at first.

Through Andrew’s skill and industry, and with the aid of our new friends, we managed to improve upon our uncouth cabin week by week. Though there was much to do outside the house, Andrew found time to construct for us a bed, a di

Those early weeks now seem a blur to me as, with the warmth of spring turning to the heat of summer, we spent our days engaged in little more than the business of surviving-or, perhaps more accurately, attempting to understand how we were to survive. Andrew cleared land-backbreaking labor which I feared might be the death of him and his horse. Even with all his strength poured into the work, it yet confounded him, as he pulled saplings from the ground and chopped to the stump a near forest of oaks and birches and sycamores. They gave up their earth grudgingly, and Andrew would return from a day’s work covered in dirt, his hands caked with blood. I would gaze out upon the land and be unable to see what his efforts had yielded.

Yield it did, though, and at last enough land was cleared for a small planting. I would spend my mornings tending to corn and vegetables in the hopes that enough would grow for us to have some food in the fall. Many in the West planted Indian style, sowing the seeds upon the earth in a formless scatter and hoping a sufficient number took, but Andrew and I were more methodical, tilling the earth, planting in rows, giving each stalk room to breathe and grow.