Home: New England Roots
[I hope] the hour is not far distant when we may lie happy in the enjoyment of the fruits of our enterprises.
—WILLIAM EATON TO HIS WIFE, ELIZA
EATON RUSHED HOME from Baltimore to Brimfield, Massachusetts, to deliver news of his mission to his wife and family, and to gather up his swords, knives, pistols, rifles, ammunition, guidebooks, and anything else he might need to help Hamet overthrow Yussef’s government.
Rushing home meant enduring nine days of mishaps and discomforts. Heavy winds almost capsized his sail ferryboat in New York harbor; a snowstorm slogged the stagecoach into traveling three miles per hour instead of the usual breakneck pace of six. Horse-drawn carriages, bumping over rutted roads, jolted their cramped passengers so badly that many travelers complained of a kind of seasickness. Sailboats plying the coast might move a touch faster in the event that wind and current cooperated, which they rarely did.
Forty-year-old William Eaton arrived in Brimfield and delivered his good news to his thirty-seven-year-old wife, apparently with a flourish. (A son, their first after three daughters, would be born nine months later.)
Brimfield was (and still is) a small country hill town, not far from the Connecticut border. (Today it’s known for an enormous outdoor antiques fair.) It was Eaton’s wife and her first husband who had caused all of them to wind up there. Fifty-one-year-old war hero General Timothy Danielson, a wealthy widower from the leading family in town, had chosen for his second wife a local beauty, eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Sykes, known as Eliza. In their six years of marriage, the May-December couple had three children: Timothy, now seventeen; Eli, fifteen; and Sarah, fourteen. The general died, leaving a wealthy widow who one year later in 1792 married Captain William Eaton in nearby Union, Connecticut.
Over the previous decade when Eaton had been consul to Tunis, he had written her passionate letters—“It is this invincible pride which has forced me from the bosom of a companion whose bosom is heaven.” “I love you and long to see you.” William and Eliza had three daughters: Eliza, Charlotte, and Almira. He once lovingly referred to their children as “the little pledges of our mutual pleasures.” He also drew close to his stepchildren, asking them to call him “Pa” and to take the middle initial E as a token of their family bond.
William’s frequent absences for career, however, were taking a toll on their marriage. Of their first dozen married years together, Eaton spent no more than a year’s worth of days, snatched here or there, in the family home and conjugal bed. Almost every visit resulted in a pregnancy. Eliza, pregnant, running a household, raising little ones, rarely wrote any letters, which infuriated William. Without letters, he started to worry about his wife’s fidelity. He once sent her a carnelian gemstone ring of a vestal virgin found in the ruins of Carthage. “It has undoubtedly been worn as a seal by some Roman or Carthaginian Lady many hundred years ago,” he wrote. “I beg you to accept it and use it as your seal for the sake of a man who adores you—it is the emblem of Chastity.”
Eaton, now on the first day of this visit home, informed Eliza that he had landed a midshipman’s berth for her son Eli and that the fifteen- year-old would accompany him to the Mediterranean. The boy would travel the world, join the navy as an officer. Eliza was never happy to see any of her children or her husband leave home. His tone didn’t allow for any discussion. He also told her that her son Tim would return to college, and he berated her for wanting to keep their young daughters home instead of sending them off to boarding school.
Eaton—with his hard opinions and passion—had trouble blending gracefully into anything: a family, an army platoon, or someone else’s small town. At many times in his life, he was downright combustible. The shock waves from his explosions could rock anyone back on their heels, whether it be a preacher, a wife, a bashaw, or a president.
William Eaton was born in Woodstock, Connecticut, on February 23, 1764, into the sprawling Eaton clan of New England. Their Puritan roots stopped just shy of the Mayflower. William’s great-great-great-grandfather John had sailed over on the Elizabeth and Ann in 1630, had signed the Dedham Covenant to strictly follow the Bible, and in more mundane matters, he had helped build the first footbridge across the Charles River in Boston. William was the second son in the “be-fruitful-and-multiply” family of thirteen children of Sarah and Nathaniel Eaton. Nathaniel eked out a living by farming the craggy soil and teaching school in their home during the winter months.
A neighbor said William early on showed “intellectual vigor” as well as “eccentricity.” The boy hated farm work, and his father caught him time and again sneaking off to the woods, carrying a hunting rifle and a book. The family moved to Mansfield, Connecticut, when he was ten, and he quickly gained the reputation as the town daredevil. Some family members didn’t expect him to outlive his childhood. After worship one Sunday, he climbed to the top of a cherry tree to halloo the passersby, fell, and was knocked out for three days before waking up with a dislocated shoulder.
One event dominated his coming-of-age years—as it did the lives of everyone else in that region during that era: the American Revolution. Eaton watched and listened as the rebellion grew from whispered indignation to loud protest, from boys throwing stones at Redcoats to men drilling militias on the commons. At that impressionable age, he soaked in the rising passions of defiance. William saw a messenger galloping to inform Mansfield about the Boston Tea Party. In the family kitchen, his father explained to him how Parliament had passed the “Coercive Acts,” which closed Boston harbor and revoked the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter until Boston repaid the English East India Company for the tea thrown overboard. The British Crown hoped to isolate the troublemakers in Boston; instead, in a parade of defiance, town after small New England town rallied to Boston’s side.
In many of the colonies, such as New York, neighbors stood divided, as tens of thousands of Tory Loyalists supported England (Bainbridge’s family in New Jersey, for one, was Tory), but in Eaton’s Mansfield, the town was fiercely rebellious, with its local Sons of Liberty ready to pound renunciations out of any Loyalists foolhardy enough to express their opinions.
On October 10, 1774, at a town meeting, the residents of Mansfield voted to issue a forceful resolution, complaining about the “unConstitutional and oppressive measures which have justly alarmed British America.” They then vowed, in words that still have a certain ring: “We should, as Men, as Englishmen and as Christians to the utmost of our ability, maintain and hand down to our Posterity—FREEDOM—that sacred Plant of Paradise—that Growth of Heaven—that Freedom which is the grand Constitution of intellectual Happiness, and for the enjoyment of which our Fathers exchanged their seats of Pleasure and of Plenty to encounter the numerous Savages, perils and difficulties of an inhospitable Wilderness.”
To William, this wasn’t rhetoric, this was their communal taunt aimed at the oppressive lords of England.
Then, the following year, the “shots heard round the world” at Lexington and Concord ignited the conflict. Eaton overheard firsthand tales of Tryon’s brutal raids on the Connecticut coast, when drunken cursing British soldiers were said to have threatened colonial mothers: “Shall we bake your baby into a pie?” Eaton, at age fifteen, reckless and patriotic, ran away from home to join the Continental Army, but instead of dodging bullets, he was dodging dishrags; he found himself waiting tables for the officers in Major Dennie’s Connecticut Brigade. Thomas Paine’s classic line “These are the times that try men’s souls” is followed by a less well-remembered sentence. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.”
Young Eaton clearly wanted to be a year-round patriot; he re-enlisted for a new three-year hitch in the Connecticut Brigade. Private Eaton drilled in 1782 before General George Washington, who would become Eaton’s demigod. (He later wrote embarrassing doggerel celebrating the commander in chief.) Eaton saw enough combat to receive a leg wound, although no details have survived of the incident. When General Washington’s victorious armies were disbanded in 1783, Eaton left as a sergeant.
The leg wound must have healed quickly because Eaton soon was judged far and away the fastest runner at Dartmouth College. A fellow alumnus, in a brief sketch, remembers Eaton giving a rival a “two-rod” head start, then catching up to him, somehow leapfrogging over him and beating him in the race.
From his army discharge to his graduation seven years later from Dartmouth, a picture emerges of a poor farmer’s boy, relentlessly pursuing his education despite numerous financial setbacks. The parents of his classmates paid their bills. He, on the other hand, wrote to the president of Dartmouth College, requesting permission to drop out for a semester to earn money. “I have no resource but industry and oeconomy, have not rec’d six shillings assistance since I have been at College, nor do I expect any.” He tutored, took odd jobs, and displayed a persistence he would show all his life.
One time, unable to afford stagecoach fare back to school, he plunked a staff over his shoulder with a bag of trinkets to sell and walked 175 miles from Mansfield, Connecticut, back to Hanover, New Hampshire. Dartmouth in those days graduated about thirty students a year, and the three full-time faculty members specialized in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, rhetoric, arithmetic, philosophy, civil and ecclesiastical history, natural and political law.
One of Eaton’s classmates described him as likable and a bit unusual. “He was odd, precise in his language—full of decision—sometimes a little morose . . . suffered bouts of melancholy.” (All his life, in periods of lull, he would gravitate toward gloom and anger, while in moments of action, his bullheaded optimism would tow others along.) As for his academics, in his Classical Studies, Eaton favored tracts on war, devoting himself to memorizing passages from Caesar’s Commentaries or Xenophon’s Retreat of the Ten Thousand Greeks. Eaton also showed a certain wit . . . well, rather a certain collegiate wit circa 1790.
Always trying to make money, Eaton was hired to haul back to campus the college bell, which had been repaired. In transit, he hung it under the farm cart, and so it pealed throughout his return journey. A classmate asked: How did you feel making so much noise? “I felt bell-igerant,” he replied. A professor scolded him for alarming the townspeople and asked, “Do you not forget your reputation as a student at the college?” Eaton answered: “I did not forget, Sir, but I am a member of the Dartmouth belles-lettres society.” Eaton told a friend who saw him riding into town with the bell clanging: “I am resolved not to go through the world without making a noise in it.”
Dartmouth granted Eaton his long-sought degree of Bachelor of Arts on August 25, 1790, and soon after he landed a job as clerk in the Vermont House of Delegates. But that position was a mere stopover on Eaton’s newly chosen career path to join the military. At the State House, he met one of the first of his Federalist patrons, General Stephen R. Bradley, senator from Vermont, who used connections to gain for the twenty-six-year-old Eaton an appointment as captain in the United States Army. (In those early days, the nation was quite divided over the need for a standing federal army; Jefferson’s Republicans then used to ask: Couldn’t state militias handle the job without the nation running the risk of some charismatic general trying to subvert democracy?)
Around this time, Eaton joined the Freemasons, a secretive society full of high-ranking Federalists. At his swearing-in ceremony, Eaton chose a telling “makr,” or personal motto: “I will spare the vanquish’d and pull down the proud.” (Eaton’s targets for the latter half of that motto would include: Reverend Clark Brown, Commodore Richard Morris, Captain James Barron, Bey Hamouda of Tunis, Bashaw Yussef of Tripoli, Admiral Murad Rais, Army Captain Butler, Army Colonel Gaither, diplomat Tobias Lear, and President Thomas Jefferson, among many others.) William Eaton clearly had a problem with authority.
In August 1792, the newly minted young captain in his smart blue uniform married General Danielson’s wealthy young widow, honeymooned with her about a weekend or so (long enough to get Eliza pregnant), then hurried off to join his army unit. Captain Eaton’s mission called for him to serve under General “Mad Anthony” Wayne on his campaign to subdue the Indian tribes in the Ohio Valley wilderness. This mission would magnify Eaton’s love of country and would hone his military skills beyond reading Caesar’s Commentaries and washing Revolutionary War dishes. Ever the daredevil, he took frequent unassigned scouting excursions on the west or “Indian Side” of the Ohio, where he saw “tracks of dear, bear and buffaloes . . . and here and there a moccasin.” The spectacular grandeur of unspoiled nature—“sycamore, elm, beach, aspin, hickory, walnut, maple . . . large beyond credibility”—intoxicated Eaton with the opportunities for national expansion.
During this campaign, Eaton tasted more combat—skirmishes and ambushes—than during his three and a half years in the Continental Army. He helped oversee General Wayne’s building of Fort Recovery, which stood on the site of one of the worst U.S. losses—and greatest Indian victories—in American history: General St. Clair’s defeat by Chief Little Turtle when one-third of the American force of 1,748 was killed, including 57 women following the troops.
Eaton idolized forty-seven-year-old General Wayne and would model his own style of command after Wayne’s. Some generals speechify then retreat to a hilltop to drain a pot of coffee. “Mad Anthony” personally led the troops. “When in danger, he is in his element,” Eaton wrote, “and never shows to so good advantage as when leading a charge.” As to his character, Eaton described him as “industrious, indefatigable, determined . . . not over accessible but studious to reward merit.” Eaton noted flaws as well: “He is in some degree susceptible to adulation, as is every man who has an honest thirst for military fame.” Tellingly, Eaton added: “He endures fatigue and hardship with a fortitude uncommon to men of his years; I have seen him in the most severe night of the winter of ’94, sleep on the ground like his fellow soldier, and walk around his camp at four in the morning with the vigilance of a sentinel.”
Eaton, though raised in farm country New England and refined at bookish Dartmouth, forced himself to toughen up like Wayne. “[I have] slept more than a hundred nights in that same wilderness, and as many miles back from the Ohio, on the naked, sometimes frozen ground with nothing but a cloak or a blanket, frequently in hail, rain and snow—amidst the yellings of wolves and savages.”
(This training in outdoorsmanship in the American wilderness would one day save Eaton’s life and the lives of his men in the Libyan desert.)
No episode of Eaton’s life, however brief—his stint with Wayne lasted less than two years—could unfold without some personal conflict. Despite all his talents, Eaton’s personal combativeness repeatedly undermined his chances for advancement. A superior officer, Captain Butler, gave Eaton what Eaton perceived as conflicting orders for drilling the infantry. He refused to obey certain commands on the parade ground with a thousand men and General Wayne in attendance. Captain Butler on horseback, sword raised, charged Eaton, who grabbed an espontoon, a military half-pike, and awaited the attack. General Wayne personally halted the fight, shouting, “Gentlemen, this is neither the time nor the place.”
Eaton issued an immediate challenge to Butler, who in the calm of the barracks decided to submit the altercation to a committee of friends to rule on it. All was eventually patched up without bloodshed, and one senses that Captain Butler wanted no part of ten paces and firing pistols with Eaton. (Dueling was then common among officers in the American military, especially in the navy.)
Eaton soon returned to New England (and yes, he impregnated Eliza) before shipping out to his next assignment: the Georgia border, north of Spanish Florida. Sometime during his travels, Eaton met his next Federalist patron, the secretary of war, Thomas Pickering. (An ultra Federalist, Pickering would help found West Point Academy, and his disappointment with Thomas Jefferson would mount so high that he would lead the almost forgotten New England secession movement during the president’s second term.)
In Georgia the main mission of the federal troops was to overawe the Indians into friendly relations with American settlers. However, sharp practices by American land speculators (and well-placed bribes by authorities in Spanish Florida wanting a buffer zone) complicated the situation. Eaton, with 160 men under his command, erected a fort at Colerain on St. Mary’s River. He wrote to the secretary of war and told him that he had called it “Fort Pickering” . . . but “not however, that I might satirize a good man by erecting his monument in mud.”
Eaton, scouting again and learning Indian dialects, acted as a spy for Pickering. He sent him secret reports on the dangerous situation at the border, and he named names of the worst land speculators and fearlessly included his own commanding officer on that list. Land speculation—much of it corrupt, with false property descriptions—fulfilled the financial gambling needs of many early Americans, much as the stock market does today. Fortunes hinged on the validity of a title.
Eaton said that Colonel Henry Gaither had offered him a shady land deal for 500,000 acres of dubious title at $35,000 but that he had turned it down. Eaton also pointed out that Gaither had selected a swampy, unhealthy site for the key Georgia trading post because it suited his holdings. Colonel Gaither ordered Eaton to cease making reports to Pickering; Eaton refused.
Not long afterward, Gaither had Eaton court-martialed on charges ranging from profiteering by selling jackets to the troops, to pocketing sign-up bounties, to disobeying orders and hoarding rations. A fellow officer wrote supportively to Eaton, saying: “[Gaither] is an ignorant, debauched, unprincipled, old batchelor . . . willing to sacrifice the purest character to gratify the spleen of his soul.”
The five-member army jury during the two-week-long court-martial rejected most of their commanding officer’s accusations, but Gaither nonetheless ordered Eaton suspended from command and jailed for a month inside Fort Pickering. More than two dozen heads of family in Georgia signed a letter in Eaton’s favor, thanking him for preserving them from plunder by undisciplined federal troops.
Eventually bowing to pressure, Gaither allowed Eaton to go to Philadelphia to deliver the court-martial findings personally to Secretary of War Pickering. Eaton’s Federalist patron immediately overturned the verdict and reinstated Eaton as captain in good standing. His entire army unit, however, was disbanded soon after.
Eaton now found himself unemployed long enough to spend almost six entire months in and around Brimfield (daughter Almira would arrive from this visit). Pickering, whom President Adams had appointed secretary of state, gave Eaton a confidential mission to investigate a conspiracy by three influential men, including Governor William Blount of the Southwest Territory, to mount a private paramilitary force of Indians and frontiersmen to drive the Spanish from Louisiana and Florida. This was almost a decade before Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, and while many Americans hungered for the departure of the Spanish, the administration chose not to pursue it with an unlicensed band of adventurers. (Aaron Burr about a decade later would launch a similar conspiracy to drive out the Spanish and would try to recruit William Eaton.)
Eaton swiftly arrested the main New York conspirator, a controversial doctor named Nicholas Romayne (1756-1817), who helped found Columbia’s prestigious College of Physicians and Surgeons. Eaton left Philadelphia on July 10, captured Dr. Romayne with all his secret papers in New York City before 3 A.M., and delivered him back to the nation’s capital by 2 P.M. on July 12. Pickering was impressed.
Eaton’s loyalty and efficiency were soon rewarded. Pickering in 1798 chose Eaton as the new consul to Tunis to stand up for American rights and keep tribute payments as low as possible. Unsurprisingly, Eaton, New England patriot, defier of authority, was appalled within moments of arrival on the north coast of Africa. “Can any man believe that this elevated brute,” he wrote of the Dey of Algiers, “has seven kings of Europe, two republics and a continent tributary to him, when his whole naval force is not equal to two line of battle ships? It is so.” Even before he arrived, former Captain Eaton preferred a military solution.
***
On April 30, 1804, with green leaves starting to bud on the family trees in Brimfield, Eaton—entrusted with a mission to overthrow a Barbary Coast government—said good-bye to wife Eliza. Judging from his ensuing letters, this farewell was probably quite frosty. Family finances were tight, and he warned her to keep an “exact account of all receipts.” He was also taking her teenage son to go to war. His diary reveals that he was once again in possession of that Diana vestal virgin chastity ring he had given her—either she had returned it or he had reclaimed it. That spring morning, the snows of a long hard winter having finally melted, he hugged his youngest two daughters and motioned to his two stepsons to mount up for the twenty-five-mile ride to Springfield.
The forty-year-old man, along with seventeen-year-old Timothy (college bound) and fifteen-year-old Eli (soon to be midshipman), had a pleasant day-long ride, accompanied by a handful of young men from Brimfield, friends of his stepsons.
In a rare simple, happy entry in his diary, Eaton noted: “Dined together in great hilarity and parted with mutual wishes of prosperity.”
After a couple of days in Springfield handling business matters, Eaton sent Timothy back home to deliver some valuables—a gold watch, a jeweled snuffbox—to Eliza to help pay off their debts and keep her Danielson properties from being sold.
William and Eli traveled to New Haven and boarded Lane’s Packet to head to New York, and then they continued south on their weeklong trip to Washington City.
Once there, Eaton, in a buoyant mood, splurged $24 to buy six heavy volumes to fill the long days and nights of the transatlantic voyage. His selection reveals his tastes: Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Herty’s Digest of the Laws of the United States, Conductor Generalis (British criminal law procedures), Millet’s General History, Life of Washington (Parson Weems), Telemachus. While Eaton was earnestly choosing his new books, he had no idea that President Thomas Jefferson had received a letter from the Mediterranean and was now having grave second thoughts about sending Eaton on the mission.