Dr. James Thacher Journal
late March/early April 1781, near West Point, New York
This vicinity is constantly harassed by small parties on our side and parties of royalists and Tories on the other, who are making every effort to effect mutual destruction. . . .
Six of our men . . . were all killed but one . . . we saw four dead bodies, mangled in the most inhuman manner . . . and among them, one groaning under five wounds on his head, two of them quite through his skull bone with a broad sword. This man was capable of giving us an account of the murder of his four companions. They surrendered and begged for life, but their entreaties were disregarded, and the swords of their cruel foes were plunged into their bodies so long as signs of life remained. . . .
[The situation of those] who reside on their farms between the lines of the two armies . . . is truly deplorable, being continually exposed to . . . horse thieves, and cowboys, who rob and plunder them without mercy, and the personal abuse and punishments which they inflict.
PEGGY ROCKED HER NEWEST LITTLE SISTER TO KEEP her from crying. Dressed in ancient family lace, baby Caty squirmed against the itch of her elaborate christening gown.
“Will you pray for her, care for her, and by your example in faith help her walk in the way of Christ?” asked Reverend Eilardus Westerlo, faltering a bit as he translated the Dutch Reformed Church liturgy into English for Martha Washington. She, Peggy, and one of Peggy’s uncles, James Van Rensselaer, were standing as godparents. General Washington, of course, could not break from the war to be there for the service.
“I will,” the three answered.
“Will you renounce the devil and all evil, turning away from earthly things that are against our Lord and his scriptures?”
Peggy felt Martha Washington take in a deep breath as she tucked her finger into the baby’s grasping hand, before solemnly replying, “I will.” She wondered if the general’s wife was feeling the same irony Peggy did in that question. Certainly war and the killing it required was against the scriptures even if the minister had used his pulpit to preach for the Revolution.
As the reverend dribbled water onto baby Caty’s forehead to baptize her, the infant let out a wail that echoed through the vestibule. She kicked and flailed in protest. Peggy had to fight to hang on and not drop her.
“Kindred spirits,” chuckled her uncle Johnny, who had escorted Martha from headquarters to Albany for the ceremony. “Your parents certainly chose the right godmamma for this baby,” he teased.
After the service, Peggy’s family gathered at the house. As they waited in the best parlor for dinner, Martha settled beside Peggy and happily cradled the now slumbering baby. “How I miss this,” she murmured. She hummed a little, and Peggy realized silent tears slid down the cheeks of the nation’s first and most admired lady.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” Peggy whispered.
“I was just thinking of how my Patsy looked as a baby. She was such a peaceful, beautiful child. Who would have guessed that such pain was to be hers.” Martha looked up from baby Caty to Peggy. “I am sure you have heard the stories.”
“Only . . . only that you lost her right before the war.”
Out of respect, Peggy did not share that she knew Washington’s teenage stepdaughter had suffered terrible seizures. So many people said ridiculous things about what caused such convulsions or what they might represent. Just as cruel individuals speculated why Washington had not fathered any of his own children after he married the young widow. As a doctor, her uncle Johnny could explain to Peggy that the smallpox, malaria, and pleurisy His Excellency had managed to survive as a young man might have left him sterile. Perhaps that personal tragedy was part of the reason Washington was so attached to his young aides-de-camp.
Peggy sighed, thinking of Hamilton’s petulant break from the great man. Her brother-in-law had totally ignored her papa’s plea to his patriotism and sense of responsibility. Hamilton had just written Schuyler that he had even sent his commission to Washington as a demonstration of his resolve to quit the war entirely unless given a field command of his own. Her papa had sadly folded up that letter and not replied.
As a result of Hamilton’s departure, Washington was so shorthanded he had taken to dictating letters occasionally to Mrs. Washington. But her spelling was so atrocious that the arrangement couldn’t last long. Peggy marveled that Martha had not said a thing about the quarrel and the disappointment her husband surely felt, not to mention the upheaval Hamilton’s absence caused in Washington’s workload.
Instinctively, Peggy reached out to touch Martha Washington’s shoulder in sympathy. Martha forced herself to smile. “We had tried everything for our beloved Patsy. Valerian, nervous drops, musk capsules, mercury, Peruvian bark, barley water, bleedings, purges, even an iron ring for her to wear. Nothing helped. The last fit was so violent she died within minutes, George holding her hand and weeping.” Martha turned her eyes to look out the window. “I do not think he has ever recovered from the loss. He loved her dearly, raising her with me since she was a toddler.”
Her gaze turned back to Peggy. “I wear her miniature as a bracelet, so I can look at her every day.” Martha held up her wrist for Peggy to look at a pretty teenage face with round green eyes and a gentle smile, very like her mother.
“Peggy,” her papa called. “Please retrieve the Bible from my study. I wish to record Caty’s birth and godparents in the presence of Lady Washington, who has so honored us today.”
Peggy hesitated, not wishing to leave Martha in her sadness. But Washington’s wife nodded and said with perfect for-the-public composure, “Go ahead, my dear. I am content holding this baby. Nothing is as precious as the life of a child.”
Peggy flung open the door to the study, unwittingly crushing a guest up against the shelves.
“Zounds!” came an aggravated voice.
“Oh, I am so sorry!” Peggy pulled back the door to discover a young man cradling an armload of books and a red nose from the blow of the heavy wooden panels. “Are you all right?”
The youth shifted the books into one arm and rubbed his nose with the other hand.
Peggy felt terrible—besides displaying a lack of ladylike deportment, she would hate to have marred that beautiful face. Because it was quite pretty—dark, resonant eyes under a mop of soft black curls, an open, heart-shaped face paired with a cleft chin. No beard yet and a youthful flush to his cheeks—which weirdly complemented the red nose she’d given him.
“You need to stop doing that to me, Peggy,” the young man joked.
Peggy looked at him with puzzlement. She had noticed him among the congregation at the baptism, but she hadn’t really recognized him. Certainly she should since he called her by her first name.
“When we used to gather at our grandparents for berry-picking and picnics, you constantly knocked me over as we all played tag.”
Oh goodness! How stupid and rude of her! He must be one of her distant, younger cousins. “Stephen?”
He grinned and bowed.
“I am so sorry, I didn’t recognize you!”
She was related to him on her mother’s side. Stephen would eventually become the patroon of Rensselaerswyck, an enormous estate granted the clan long ago by the Dutch government. Peggy knew he had been away, studying at Princeton. Plus all the tumult around Albany had pretty much precluded extended family gatherings. It had been years since she’d seen him. Of course, he would be at the baby’s christening if he were home. Reverend Westerlo was his stepfather. “Why are you not at college?”
“So quick to be rid of me?” Stephen laughed.
“No, I just . . .” Peggy hesitated, then decided it was fine to be honest with family. “If I had the chance to go to university I would never leave campus except kicking and screaming.”
He chuckled with a nice, easy sense of humor. Then he sobered to say, “There is so much fighting around Princeton, my mother thinks it safer for me to attend Harvard instead. I will leave for Boston in August, when the next term starts. Meanwhile your father was kind enough to lend me your library.” He held up his stack of books. “But it is presumptuous of me to borrow so many at once. What would you recommend?”
He laid the volumes out on a table: The Adventures of Telemachus, The Son of Ulysses; Cato’s Letters; a collection of Alexander Pope’s writings; histories of New York, Canada, and Sweden; plus Molière’s comedies. The boy was ambitious to tackle all this, thought Peggy, as she spread them out. “Papa won’t mind your borrowing all this. He is very generous with his library. All these books are fascinating, although”—she laughed as she pushed it to the side—“I might leave off the history of Sweden for now.” She’d have to remember to ask her papa why he had that volume. “With Molière, I’d begin with Tartuffe.”
“Not Don Juan?”
“No, that’s not one I particularly care for.” Reading about a rogue who left a trail of brokenhearted women in his wake was certainly not something that interested her now. “I’d recommend The Learned Ladies over that.”
“Ah,” Stephen answered, “you must empathize with the characters, surely, given the title? My memory is you always have a book with you.”
Peggy smiled at the compliment. “Well, it is a bit of a satire on pretentiousness, so I hope you do not find me in those characters.”
“The School for Husbands, then?” he asked with a playful tone. “Would I find something instructive in that for our future conversations?”
Peggy looked at him with surprise. Was he flirting with her?
“Ah, so that is what delays you!” Both Peggy and Stephen startled a bit as Schuyler limped into his study on his cane.
“Oh, Papa, forgive me. I completely forgot about fetching the Bible!”
“So I see. I will forgive it because your delay clearly involves books.” Peggy caught his glancing between the two of them. What in the world was her father smiling about with such amusement?
“Sir?” One of Schuyler’s guards appeared at the door. “There is a man at the back gate, saying he wishes to see you. We checked him for arms.” He turned to Peggy. “He says he is a suitor to you, miss.”
“What?” she gasped. It felt as if a cannonball had just exploded near her.
It was Stephen who caught her arm and kept her from falling, Peggy felt so faint. Her heart started pounding so hard she could barely hear her father tell the guard to bring the gentleman in or his questioning her as to who this visitor could be. She could only shake her head as Stephen helped her sit in the nearest chair and then excused himself from the room.
Could Fleury have changed his mind? Why didn’t he write first?
Breathe! Breathe! her mind hissed, her heart racing. Calm yourself. You’ll look like an idiot!
Peggy fixed her gaze onto the carpet to focus and stop the house from spinning around her. Breathe, damn it!
A pair of boots entered the room. Broken open, dull brown, no flash of white gaiters. Those were not Fleury’s boots. Peggy blinked back hot tears. She raised her eyes. It was Sergeant Moses Harris—her papa’s double agent.
Schuyler closed the door, sealing them into privacy.
“Begging your pardon, miss,” Harris apologized, “for taking liberty with your romantic name and all, but I didn’t want no one to suspicion I came with intelligence for the general.”
She wanted to hit him, kick him, run him through with a sword. But she forced herself to smile shakily.
“Are you all right, miss?” he asked, squashing his hat in his hand. “I didn’t mean to give you a fright. Or . . . or to humiliate you none.” He tugged on his waistcoat and his brown jacket, which were far nicer and cleaner than what she had seen him wear before. “I borrowed these togs so I weren’t disreputable.”
“Very kind of you, sir, a good touch of deception,” said Schuyler as he poured and handed Peggy a small glass of Madeira. “My daughter is simply overcome with fatigue. I have been overburdening her with work of late, I am afraid.”
She looked up at her father with gratitude. It was bad enough to feel this overwhelmed because of a man who had wounded her; being pitied for it would be like gangrene.
“Should we wait until she feels better, sir?” Harris whispered, clearly thinking Schuyler would prefer Peggy leave the room before he shared what he knew.
“No; please proceed.”
“All right then. Well, sir, I done burned the letters I were carrying for fear of being caught with them. Miss Schuyler can tell you what I already been through at the hands of them Tories. Spiteful blokes, they be. Don’t much want to be hauled off by your Patriot guard neither. Our ruse last time with them cost me a broken rib. So I committed the messages to memory.” He tapped his head.
“Pray, go on, Sergeant,” Schuyler said, easing Harris along in his story.
“Yes, sir. Them bloodybacks in Canada are thinking on another invasion. Led this time by old Sir Guy Carleton hisself. Leaving from Montreal and coming straight down Lake Champlain again. They be thinking they can convince Vermonters to join up with them at Crown Point.” Harris nodded. “There’s their aim, sir.”
Schuyler rubbed his jaw in thought. “This coincides with something a deserter told the conspiracy commissioners during an interrogation. And with what an old friend who managed to escape a Canada prison could tell me of talk he’d overheard among his jailers.” He paused. “And rumblings of the Green Mountain Boys’ disgruntlement about our legislature not carving out a state of their own between New York and Connecticut.”
“Then that makes it sound like truth,” said Harris.
“But we need much more intelligence for His Excellency to make decisions. Numbers of troops. Exact locations. What artillery pieces.” Schuyler hesitated. Peggy knew what he was thinking, even if he didn’t trust Harris enough to say it to him.
Recently, Washington had met again with Rochambeau to discuss whether they should join forces to attack New York City—to finally dislodge the British fleet in its harbor and the sixteen thousand troops occupying it—or to travel south to join Lafayette and Lincoln fighting Cornwallis and the turncoat Benedict Arnold in Virginia. Washington, of course, would love nothing better than to defeat and humiliate the traitor he once called friend. But if the British were really mounting yet another full-blown invasion from Canada, either of his plans would be a terrible miscalculation, leaving the northern states open to disaster.
Schuyler considered Harris a moment, obviously assessing if Harris could manage the hundred-mile journey north to Crown Point, or even up into Canada, for a good long reconnaissance. Wiry in build and scrappy in attitude, Harris seemed perfectly capable of that to Peggy. After all, he had done it before—making it to Burgoyne with faked intercepts that Schuyler had filled with false information meant to mislead the British. But such a mission was a lot to ask of a man to do alone these days. It would mean a trek through the wilderness and an area where bands of raiders—nicknamed cowboys and skinners—regularly ambushed travelers and scouts.
“Sir,” Schuyler began, “ever since the Oneida and Tuscarora were so brutally attacked and their villages destroyed, I have been loath to ask them to scout as far as I used to. Would . . .”
Harris held up his hand. “Say no more, General. I thought I’d take a little jaunt and look-see along Lake Champlain. Might even trap me some beaver.” He put his hat on and tugged on its tip in salute to Peggy. “Sorry to have affronted you, miss.”
“Oh, Sergeant Harris.” Peggy recovered herself enough to stand and curtsy. “You have flattered me much. I look forward to your safe return.”
“Really, miss?” Harris straightened up taller and backed his way out the door, beaming. Out in the courtyard they heard him whistling as he left.
“Remind me, Margarita,” Schuyler said with a fond laugh, “to have you in the negotiating room whenever I must ask a man go into battle.” He hugged her as he gently added, “Is there anything you wish to tell me?”
“No, Papa.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Papa. The curtain has already come down on a drama that is not worth sharing.” She ached to tell him she was recovering because she was helping him, doing tangible things, no matter how small, for the Revolution and being included in his thoughts gave her purpose, a sense of individual identity and consequence. But she was afraid to call attention to it, knowing his reliance on her was unusual and a result of war necessity.
“I am relieved,” he answered. “I would hate to lose you to someone who does not appreciate you enough to make himself known to me.” He kissed her on her forehead. “Now. Let us collect that Bible.”
Schuyler played host seamlessly for the rest of the day, but Peggy could tell he was worried. And well he should be.
Over the next weeks, more of his spies came in with alarming reports. A man Schuyler called “Mr. Fox” shared that his Tory friends just north of Saratoga bragged they were about “to make rare work with the rebels.” Right across the Hudson from Saratoga, on the river’s eastern banks, a Mr. Shipman saw three British boats landing infantrymen. Another agent, going by the name Pierre, reported British campfires at Crown Point that to him suggested two thousand Redcoats were encamped there. A local man doubled the spy’s estimate, counting English forces as being closer to four thousand strong. An Oneida scout spotted another fifteen hundred British soldiers near Ticonderoga.
Meanwhile, cattle and hogs were being stolen in droves from the settlements edging New York’s wilderness. Barns were burned. Farmers were being pulled out of their beds and from their homes into the darkness of night, beaten, and left for dead.
In retribution, Albany’s anticonspiracy commissioners stepped up their arrests of suspected Tories, increasing their threats and confiscations of Loyalists’ property to force confessions. Such tactics unearthed, for instance, the fact that five hundred Loyalists and Mohawks were hovering southwest of Albany determined to torch the city. They planned to accomplish that plot with a series of coordinated kidnappings of militia officers that would leave local forces leaderless and in chaos during the larger attack on the city.
Then in late May, a commissioner arrived, breathless and heaving from his climb up the hill to the mansion’s front door. The old Dutchman was so agitated, Peggy guided him to her papa’s study without waiting to announce him.
“General!” The man nearly flung himself at Schuyler. “I have dire news you must heed!” He was so loud, Peggy worried he would frighten her mother and siblings. She pushed him unceremoniously into the study and shut the door behind them as he hurried on with his story: “We have this from two sources. One is a most perfidious deserter, but a man who knows the worth of intelligence to save his own skin. The other man is a local Tory. This Loyalist is most grateful for previous favors you have done him, and so gives up information to save your life specifically. They both say that just beyond your pastures lurks a band of Queen’s Rangers bent on capturing or assassinating you.”
Schuyler nodded.
“Truly, sir, you must believe me! It’s Robert Rogers’ Rangers.” Once a legendary American fighter during the French and Indian War, Rogers had pledged himself and his barbaric guerilla tactics to the British. Mention of his name struck terror in the hearts of New Yorkers.
“I do believe you, sir,” Schuyler answered. “In fact, I have been told the British Canadian government has placed a price of two hundred guineas on my head.”
The Dutchman fell into a chair. “Two hundred guineas!” He fanned himself. “For that amount, General Schuyler, most anyone might be tempted.”
Schuyler laughed ruefully. “Just think of all the salted fish we could buy with that, eh?”
“Papa!” Peggy couldn’t help herself. “This is serious!”
“Oh, I know, my dear. I have written General Washington already. He has promised to double our guard.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “Please do not worry. Best for you to check on your mama, who might have heard all this hubbub. Please? I need to discuss with the councilman how we can build some bateaux for General Washington. Then will you come back and help me with some correspondence?”
Peggy nodded.
When she returned, her father’s bravado was gone. He handed her a letter from Ethan Allen, leader of the Vermonter militia.
“Why is he writing you?” Peggy asked. “I thought you suspected the British of trying to seduce this man and his followers.”
Schuyler shrugged. “Allen may have been talking with them. But this letter proves once again that having more than one source for a story is what allows us to determine fact. If nothing else, this letter suggests Allen is aware of our watching him—which may temper his choices. More important, however, as I speak with you now, daughter, is other information he sends, which is of grave importance to our family.” He motioned for her to look at the letter for herself.
Peggy quickly read Allen’s rough-written statement that despite false rumors he was conversing with the British, he was committed to the welfare of the United States and to Schuyler. As proof he shared that he had taken several British prisoners who confessed “that they at several different times threatned to Captivate your person, said that it had been in their power to have taken some of your family the last Campain, but that they had an Eye to your self.”
Peggy looked up at her father. “Do you suppose he is offering you this report to regain your favor, as a way to dispel suspicion against him?”
Schuyler smiled. “You have become quite the analyst, my dear.” He crossed his arms and paced. “I did consider that. But given what the good commissioner rushed here to tell me today, I need to give the threat credibility. What I am most concerned about, of course, is Allen’s statement that the enemy considered taking some of my precious family captive.”
“Papa, did Mama ever tell you that when we were in Saratoga gathering things before Burgoyne reached it, that there were shots fired from the woods and an attempt to invade the house?”
“Yes,” Schuyler answered gravely. “I will always be grateful to Richard Varick for his actions that night.” He took her hand and sat them down together, facing each other. “I need you to be on guard now, Peggy,” he said with urgency. “Do not go wandering through the orchard, as you are wont. Nor go through the pastures down to the river. You must not walk too far from the safety of the house. Keep close watch on your sisters and brothers.” He searched her eyes to ensure she was listening, really listening, and heeding him. “Do you promise?”
Peggy nodded solemnly.
“Good.” Her papa seemed relieved. “I depend on you. It could be a matter of life or death.”