Society, however, cannot exist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another… Beneficence, therefore, is less essential to the existence of society than justice… Justice is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society… must in a moment crumble into atoms.
—ADAM SMITH, 1759
Lichfield, England: Winter 1798
Tonight was the night of the full moon.
The night of justice, at last, thought Dr. Erasmus Darwin.
Tonight’s meeting at Birmingham would be their first meeting in many “moons”—indeed, in scores of them, several years in fact. And today, as Darwin thought wryly, was most appropriately a “Moonday,” a term that his confrères of the Lunar Society—their unofficial gaggle of scientists and inventors, or “Lunaticks”—had humorously dubbed themselves and their choice of meeting nights over these past forty years. For despite membership that often rotated, whether due to death or wars, travel or exile, those who could meet had traditionally met each month on the Monday nearest the full moon, in order to ensure safe return on horseback to their homes. At least, that was the reason that Darwin’s eccentric band of “loonies” had always given outsiders.
The doctor limped across his library to peer through the frosty Italianate windows, waiting for his carriage to be brought round. Since he had shattered his knee many years ago in an accident, his horse riding days were over: Physician, heal thyself, he mused. For tonight it seemed far too late for recriminations. Over anything.
In the nearly forty years of the Lunar Society’s scientific explorations, they’d become internationally famous, jointly and separately, reaping awards and honors, as well as vast fortunes from their manufacturing, scientific discoveries, and inventions: whether it was their harnessing electricity with their early cohort, Dr. Franklin; or Joseph Priestley’s isolating oxygen; or naturalist and physician William Small’s creating new metals; or Wedgwood and Bentley’s inventing new forms of ceramics; or Watt and Boulton’s supplying steam engines and copper coinage; or their collective engagement in building canals and launching balloons—Darwin himself being the first Englishman to fly in one. Not to mention the risks they’d taken to their reputations and even to their lives, in supporting liberal movements like the American and French Revolutions.
But tonight’s private meeting in Birmingham, as Darwin recognized better than anyone, might prove their greatest risk of all.
He suddenly felt a chill not caused by the weather. Though the temperature alone might be enough to discourage any sane man from venturing abroad on a night like this. For hadn’t today been marked in the almanac as the coldest in fifty years? Only this morning, Darwin’s milkmaid had protested to her master that she could not milk the cows, for her fingers were blue, and the hot froth of milk had turned to slush the moment it hit the pail.
No, Darwin knew quite well that this chill of his wasn’t for fear of the rough journey that lay ahead, nor was it caused by the bitter climate—at least, not weather-wise. It was the political climate that numbed him to the bone, the changing climate throughout England, which threatened him and his closest cohorts, and had grown ever and ever worse, these past three years.
Indeed, tonight’s gathering had been presented overtly as a simple “dinner invitation.” For by law, the members of the Lunar Society could actually be imprisoned for “holding a meeting”: ever since Prime Minister Pitt had passed his Seditious Meetings and Treasonable Practices Acts. The former required that all intellectual societies, such as their own, must be licensed by the State in order to exist. And the latter banned members from merely discussing either religion or politics.
In addition, there had been the riots of “Church and King”—roving mobs of faceless men who’d ranged throughout the countryside, burning homes and meetinghouses, targeting Freethinkers, Quakers, Unitarians, any dissenters not belonging to the official Anglican Church. The Lunar Society itself was hardly left unaffected:
Matthew Boulton and his partner, James Watt, had set live cannon outside their Soho steam engine manufactory to protect the Works against marauders, who were bent upon demolishing free enterprise; chemist Joseph Priestley saw his home devastated by the mob, his valuable scientific instruments looted and smashed, and he’d fled to exile in America, in fear for his life; ceramics industrialist Josiah Wedgwood was found dead under suspicious circumstances, in a room locked from within. And now, Joseph Johnson—the publisher of Erasmus Darwin’s own vast, erudite, and widely acclaimed botanical studies—had just been jailed for selling seditious works!
They’d all felt the noose tightening round the throats of liberal thinkers like themselves. Experimental science such as theirs, which had blossomed in the Age of Reason, was lately deemed treasonable behavior; their own skills were turned against them as a weapon, a crude bludgeon to pound them into conformity. The members of the Lunar Society—isolated and reviled by royals and the masses alike—watched in horror as England herself, slowly yet willingly, sank into the mire of her own ignorance….
Darwin shook such thoughts away as he saw, just outside his imposing Georgian manor, that his horses had been harnessed and the carriage brought round, the coachman seated on the box. It was time for the journey to Birmingham that he had postponed for so long. This journey that, in truth, he had both desired and dreaded these past three years. It could not be put off any longer.
Turning from the windows, the doctor caught a brief glimpse of his reflection inside the mullioned glass: that beefy yet trustworthy face that men admired and numerous women had, quite improbably, fallen in love with; his massive arms, thick neck, and bull-like torso, which gave the impression of substance.
For the first time Darwin felt the full weight of his sixty-six years of trials and travails. He hoped the tide might be turning at last. For tonight, Darwin and his eminent colleagues were together about to step off a steep and daunting precipice, an act after which there could be no change of heart, no turning back.
But wasn’t that what justice was all about? thought Darwin. For, as wise men had known since Solomon’s day, there was no justice, for anyone, in slicing the baby in half!
Limping to his desk, Darwin opened the black leather satchel sitting there—it was another of his own inventions, a “medical bag,” as he’d dubbed it—which contained the tools of his trade. Then, from the box beside it, he carefully lifted the artifact from its wrappings: it was a ceramic medallion that fit neatly into the palm of his meaty hand. Though the doctor’s hands might appear to some to be as awkward as grappling hooks, his dexterity was such that, using only his thumb and forefinger, he’d trained himself to tie a surgical knot within the confines of an eggshell! It was a skill and precision that had always been his hallmark, and which, he thought, might well come in handy in the mission that lay ahead.
The medallion itself was no secret: indeed, its image was legendary. Created about ten years ago, by a cofounder of the Lunar Society, the great ceramist Josiah Wedgwood, it was a beautifully crafted cameo, carved of black-on-yellow jasper. It portrayed the figure of a dark man, who knelt upon one knee and looked beseechingly skyward. His hands, manacled with irons, were clasped in prayer: a slave. Above this figure letters were printed in the shape of a rainbow. They read:
Am I Not a Man and a Brother?
Ten years ago, when Wedgwood and his fellow Lunar members had first learned from Darwin that local Birmingham manufacturers made a successful trade in forging such manacles and leg chains for British plantation owners in the West Indies, they’d been horrified and infuriated. Wedgwood had retaliated by creating this medallion, in honor of the recently formed “Society for the Suppression of the Slave Trade.”
And to further the destruction of a business which Lunar members found abhorrent—the sale of and trade in human beings—they made sure that the cameo was copied and disseminated everywhere. This heartrending image and its motto—whether worn by men or women, on a pin, a button, a hair ornament, a bracelet, a snuffbox—both the image and its motto had spread swiftly from England to the Continent to the Americas. But the popular, ubiquitous black-and-golden cameos were missing one critical element:
The artifact that Erasmus Darwin now held in his palm was in fact the prototype, the original casting, a gift ten years ago from Josiah Wedgwood to Darwin, his closest friend. As such, it was the only cameo in existence that contained the secret lacking in all the others, a secret known only to three people—and one of those was now dead.
Now, with infinite care, Darwin wrapped the fragile object in a soft, supple layer of sheep’s wool and placed it in his satchel, topping the whole, against possible prying eyes, with vials of opium, and the herbs of his standard medicaments. Then he shut the bag and took up his walking stick, and he went into the entryway. His manservant, awaiting him there, bundled the doctor in thick robes for the journey, then assisted his master to labor down the steps in the bitter cold, and to squeeze his bulk into the waiting carriage.
But within the dark confines of the carriage, Erasmus Darwin could not help thinking about two worrying things that had nagged at him all along:
First, that if tonight’s mission took off, like that hydrogen balloon he’d sailed from Derby so many years ago—as he, perhaps recklessly, prayed that it would—then the rest of their journey might equally prove more fraught with danger than if it had failed upon the launching field. And second, that by unveiling this long-kept mystery that was hidden within the medallion, they might open a Pandora’s box too difficult ever to shut again.
Darwin would soon know the answer to both these worries: for that third person, the cameo’s original genius—both of its inspiration and its creation—had agreed to join their illegal gathering of “Lunaticks.” At Birmingham, tonight.
Birmingham, England: The Full Moon
For the first time in three years, the members of the Lunar Society were together again. The conversation around the table, thus far, had been light and filled with pleasantries, against prying eyes and ears.
They had lost so many, but the five were here at the long table: in addition to Erasmus Darwin was his fellow founder and their host this evening, the senior member at age seventy, Matthew Boulton, who’d begun as a successful buckle maker and had gone on to create copper coins for the realm, and to fund the engine manufactory of the man seated here beside him, James Watt, now age sixty-two. Then Darwin himself, the famous botanist and man of medicine; and at his other side the chemist James Keir, followed by “young” Samuel Galton, age forty-five, the wealthy son (paradoxically) of a Quaker gunmaker. Sam, a latecomer to Lunar membership, had experimented in optics and color following the works of Isaac Newton. Not present were inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth, retired to his farm in Ireland, and Joseph Priestley, who still languished abroad in self-imposed exile in America.
The sideboard, which had been laden earlier in the evening with fat capons, ham and fish, Cheddar and Stilton, puddings and baked apples, had now been cleared off by the “newlyweds,” as Darwin still liked to think of the two young folk, who’d just arrived tonight from their home in Shrewsbury: the beautiful and bountiful Susannah “Sukey” Wedgwood, who, a bit more than two years ago, had married her favorite childhood playmate: none other than Darwin’s young son, Robert. A marriage that Erasmus Darwin cherished, and that would have filled Sukey’s father, Josiah, with joy, had he lived to see it.
As Robert was setting around the stone beakers of ale, flasks of whiskey, and platters of sweetmeats, Sukey now joined the group, sitting among these men of science as if she were one of them—as she’d often done, even as early as the age of seven or eight, by her father’s invitation.
Sukey Wedgwood was a treasure. Everyone knew the famous paintings of the Wedgwood clan, done when Sukey was young, and executed by “Lunar” artists like George Stubbs and Joseph Wright, who’d happily attended their meetings, participated in their experiments, even lived among them.
And Sukey was special in other ways: while all the Lunaticks believed that girls should benefit by a scientific education, and had trained their daughters accordingly, none had done more than Josiah Wedgwood, with Sukey, his favorite daughter. The boys might run the manufactory, but Sukey had Josiah’s spirit and spark, his scientific curiosity, and even his headstrong stubbornness; her father had favored her beyond all his passel of other children. Now Sukey was a fully blossomed young woman, radiant in her youth and in her recent marriage—which, as everyone knew, had brought to her new husband, Robert, a dowry of more than twenty-five thousand pounds from her father, Josiah’s, estate—a vast fortune to bestow upon such a mere slip of a girl.
And tonight, she’d come hither from Shrewsbury, to bring another bequest.
In anticipation of this, their host, Matthew Boulton, made certain that the servants were kept away, and that all the dining room doors were shut and locked. Standing beside his son’s lovely wife, Erasmus Darwin placed his medical satchel upon the table, and withdrew and unwrapped the medallion, placing it in Sukey’s waiting hands. Her husband, Robert, had already prepared the burner apparatus, and its blue flame, so familiar to all the scientists around this table, shimmered amidst the yellow candlelight.
Sukey stood beside the flame, her face illuminated from below, looking upon the cameo in fascination, just as she’d looked in all those portraits of her as a child watching scientific experiments, gazing into an orrery or watching a bird in a glass cage.
“Gentlemen,” Sukey said, regarding the face of each man around the table, these men who had been her mentors and father figures. “You are gathered here tonight to engage upon an enterprise that may prove to be a dangerous risk, and a risk for something that perhaps may be founded upon nothing more than the fantasy of a dead man and upon its explanation, tonight, by myself, whom you’ve only known as a girl. This medallion represents my father, Josiah Wedgwood’s, last will, which he wrote in secret ten years ago and entrusted me to interpret as best I could, for nothing was written down except what has been writ here, within this bit of colored jasper.” Sukey paused and added, “God help us, each and all, to determine, once we have seen it, what will be the right path.”
The men stood and gathered closely about Sukey; they all waited as she held the medallion lightly over the flame, with the uncarved side down. Slowly, within the yellow-and-black field of the raised carving itself, a shape began to emerge around the figure of the Negro slave: a large, luminous triangle that glowed in the dim light.
Then Sukey turned the medallion over to reveal its other side. And Erasmus Darwin gasped: “Good Lord, so he’d planned it all along….”
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Spring, Third Quarter Moon
Joseph Priestley dismounted from his lathered horse and took the sweaty reins in his hand to lead his beast to the wooden trough to drink. His clothes were caked with mud. What a night it had been.
The noted chemist and former Unitarian minister had ridden all day from his isolated place in the countryside; he’d departed from home, with just some cash and the clothes on his back, the very moment this morning that he had received the written message.
But now he was dismayed by what he saw here around him: he’d not been in Philadelphia in nearly five years—not since he’d first arrived on these shores, an exile with the stench of his burnt house back in England still clinging to his clothes. His reception was poor, for at the moment of his arrival, the American Congress itself, in pandemonium, was clearing out of the city whilst the yellow fever raged all around them. That epidemic, it was said, had by now claimed the lives of more than four thousand Philadelphia souls. Even tonight, here beneath the bright blue moonlight, the streets appeared to him deserted and desolate.
Now, for the first time, the peril of Priestley’s immediate situation struck home to him. How would he even find a place to shelter himself, much less his horse, here in the Negro quarter of the city? But here was precisely where he’d been directed to go. He patted his horse on the flank and peered up the street anxiously.
Just then, in the cold moonlight, he saw a lone figure striding along the quai; the chap raised his arm aloft in a gesture of greeting. Priestley waved back and was about to call out, but the man gestured for silence. Priestley took his horse’s reins and went to meet the other.
“Hallo, Reverend Priestley, we’ve been expecting you,” the chap said, sotto voce. “We mustn’t be seen here, there’s a curfew, you know. I’ll explain when we reach our destination.” And with that, he took Priestley by the arm and the horse’s reins in his other hand, and led them away from the river, through the maze of ramshackle streets.
Priestley glanced over at the fellow as they went: he was a tall, slender chap of about thirty, clean-shaven, wearing a well-cut vest and breeches, his straight black hair tied back in a queue—exceedingly handsome. And somehow familiar, Priestley thought. Could this be the mastermind he was to make contact with, or merely an emissary?
They reached a stable, where a small black boy came out and took the horse’s reins. “Horatio here’s rather young, but an excellent stabler,” the man assured Priestley. “He will curry your horse and clean his hooves and make sure he’s fed. And we’ll do the same for you!” he laughed.
Then he led Priestley up the steps of a darkened building and rapped at a door, which was opened by a young mulatto woman. Mellow light flooded out, they entered the room, and the door was shut and bolted behind them. There a fire flickered in the hearth, a kettle swung from the soup arm above the flames; the overwhelmingly delicious aroma of victuals reminded Priestley of just how long it had been since he’d eaten. The man had already filled a large plate for his guest, and he dismissed the young woman.
As Priestley expressed his deep gratitude and broke bread into his plate of soup, the younger man studied him.
“You do not recall having met me, Reverend Priestley,” he said at last.
“You are familiar to me,” the scientist assured him. “Though at this moment, I can’t think when or where.”
“It was five years ago, here in Philadelphia, that we met,” said the other.
Priestley thought again how remarkably good-looking this young man was, more so here in the firelight, his cheeks flushed with health, his intelligent brow, the chiseled profile like a noble Roman cameo….
“We were both then in the company of Thomas Jefferson,” said the other.
And then Priestley knew.
“You’re the cook,” he said, in complete amazement. But here, in different clothes, in a position without subservience—dear Lord, the chap looked as white as anyone else! The younger man was nodding in wry amusement. Though, of course, thought Priestley, he couldn’t have felt all that amused. After all, the man now sitting before Priestley, when last they’d met, had been Thomas Jefferson’s slave!
“James Hemings, at your service,” said the fellow. “I’m free now: two years ago, my cooking finally bought me my freedom. I’ve just been back to Paris, where I’d first learned my trade when my former master had been Secretary to France. For five years we lived there, up until the Revolution; my sister Sally and I were among the household staff. I procured everything for Mr. Jefferson, from horses to houses. We were briefly in England, and that was where I met professor William Small, a founder of your Society.”
As flabbergasted as Priestley was at these revelations, now the connections were falling into place. Scotsman William Small, a physician and natural historian, had for some years been professor at the Virginia College of William and Mary, and mentor while there to the young Thomas Jefferson, whom Priestley himself, even now, mentored through their correspondence. After William Small’s return from America to England, he had also become one of the founding members of the Lunar Society: like Priestley and the rest, Small had never been reconciled to anything about the slave trade.
But something still puzzled Priestley.
“The message I’ve received,” he explained to Hemings, “the one bringing me hither tonight, had directed me to make all haste here, to ‘Come to the aid of a Man and a Brother.’ That is a motto you must know, referring as it does to an African slave. Yet, Mr. Hemings, you tell me that you, grace to God almighty, are now a free man.”
“Reverend Priestley,” said James Hemings, “was there a symbol written on the letter you received? Perhaps a triangle?” When Priestley nodded, mystified, James added, “You have heard, perhaps, of ‘the Triangular Trade’?”
It was a term that Priestley knew as well as anyone might, who was opposed to the slave trade: the highly lucrative business of interdependent financial traffic, called “triangular” because on the first leg, guns, shackles, and muzzles were exported from Europe into West Africa, where they were deployed to capture whole villages of innocent people; the ships there would refill their empty holds with cargos of captured humans—“black gold”—who were bound on the “middle passage” for perpetual enslavement in the West Indies and Americas; and the vessels then returned, on the final leg, laden with luxuries like coffee, chocolate, sugar, rum, and cotton for gluttonous European consumption. It was a business so lucrative, as Priestley well knew, that it had run its three-hundred-year cycle virtually unchallenged, creating fortunes for some of the noblest families in Europe—and with no end in sight.
“Reverend,” said James Hemings, “I may be free, and living in a free state like Pennsylvania, but all of my relations in Virginia, even my sister, are still enslaved by a man you know well. As I said, I’ve just returned from France, where, as you are aware, four years ago the French revolutionary government abolished slavery. While there, I realized that the war with England and the current crises in France make it impossible to know what will happen there next. The safest place for a free black man may well be England; I do not know. Reverend Priestley, mine are a people who have spent hundreds of years awaiting a miracle. We cannot wait to learn what the French or the British may plan to do.”
Priestley, a humanitarian who did admire Thomas Jefferson, but who loved freedom more, felt at this moment that he might weep from the weight of his emotions.
“I now understand why the Society sent me here with such urgency,” he told James Hemings. “I am to meet with you, to plan a concerted effort, hands across the seas, to create a multinational abolitionist movement!”
“Actually, Reverend Priestley,” Hemings said, “you are here tonight, just as the message said, to come to the aid of a man and a brother.” Hemings paused and added, “Now I would like to introduce you to the man you have been beckoned here to meet.”
At this cue, a tall, dark man in elegant clothing entered the room. He was a person of substance, as Priestley could tell by his demeanor. He seated himself before the hearth, between Hemings and Priestley, and turned to address the latter.
“I am called Horace Wright,” the newcomer said. “I am a trained master chef with twenty years of experience, and have recently, this past year, learned even more chef’s technique from our young friend here, who is a master of French cookery.” He smiled toward James Hemings. “However, I have learned that I cannot ply my trade openly—not even here in Philadelphia, where we of African descent are deemed free.”
“Why can you not?” asked Priestley.
“Because, sir, several years ago, President George Washington signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act, empowering whomever desired to do so to seize enslaved peoples who had escaped bondage, and, with the reward of large bounties, to return them to anyone who claimed to be their ‘rightful masters.’ ”
“From whom had you yourself escaped?” asked Priestley, already sensing what that answer might be.
It was James Hemings who supplied it: “Horace escaped from President Washington and his family,” he said. “He was their chef. His name was not Horace then: they called him Hercules.”
Shrewsbury, England: Summer, New Moon
Sukey Wedgwood Darwin stood upon the terrace of their country house, one arm about the shoulder of her husband, Robert Darwin. His arm was wrapped around her waist. Robert looked down upon her lovingly.
“Susannah,” Robert said, “your father, Josiah, did not die of natural causes. What caused him, do you think, to take his own life?”
“Father was dying of a cancer in the jawbone,” Sukey said. “Your father gave him enough laudanum to relieve the pain—and perhaps a bit more. Father took it, and locked the door. But Father only left us as he did, because he knew that we would set in motion the mission he himself had fought and prayed for all his life. As indeed we’ve done.”
“Only thanks to you, and to your well-celebrated infernal grit,” Robert commented blithely. “Those old men of the Lunar Society may have dreamed of, or even wished for, a better world. But you’re the one, my darling, who actually set those wheels in motion.”
Sukey shrugged. “I only gave them the key to their dreams and wishes,” she objected. “The rest they are accomplishing themselves, with very little help from me!”
“Admit it to me,” said Robert, “that you and my father, the ‘doctor,’ actually ‘doctored’ that medallion!”
“That triangle—my father’s message about the ‘Triangular Trade’—was already present on the medallion,” said Sukey. “Could I help it that all those names mysteriously appeared on the reverse? How could I have known that those names were the names of famous slave owners, whose slaves were already mounting, on their own, an important resistance to the slave trade? Could I help it that the Lunar Society rushed to the aid of these men, or that Messieurs Watt and Boulton had already minted copper coins that could pave their paths to freedom? My dear, far be it from me to interfere with a plot that may free hundreds of families that are still in bondage! Indeed, this entire scenario may have been the work of the angels!”
Robert bent and kissed his wife on the lips. “You are the angel,” he said.
The two were silent for several moments.
Then Sukey said, “Robert, when we have children, let us be sure that each and every one of them understands what we, and our parents, have lived for. Let us vow to one another that, no matter what the future brings, and at all costs, our children will destroy this vile abomination of slavery, that they will know and respect what the Lunar Society once stood for—as manifested in its secret code.”
“And what exactly is that?” asked Robert Darwin. “For I’m afraid that my father never shared any secret code with me.”
“It’s simple,” said Sukey. “We believe in reaching for the moon.”
End
Postscript: Another of the “favorite” slaves owned by George Washington’s family, Oney Judge, managed to escape to freedom, and later, so did six relations of James and Sally Hemings, once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Sukey and Robert Darwin’s son Charles became a lifelong, bitter opponent of slavery, and was inspired by his grandfather Erasmus’s example to pursue scientific research that supported the common origin of all humans: The Origin of Species.