The Empire of Necessity (10 page)

Preached before the British governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, at a time when Boston newspapers were openly debating the question of independence, Turner’s sermon was practically insurrectionary. “The scriptures,” he said, “cannot rightly be expounded without explaining them in a manner friendly to the cause of freedom.” Turner said that he had lived for nearly two decades among the good men and women of Duxbury. London opinion thought of them, along with the rest of America’s “common people,” as “little superior to Indian Barbarians,” but they, better than the king and his deputies, were the true source and guardians of virtue.

Turner also included in his sermon a formulation that would become increasingly common in public debate, the idea that the “avarice” of individuals could contribute to “publick advantage.” By increasing available wealth and resources, the pursuit of personal gain, he said, could benefit the community as a whole. In this new equation, qualities that Christians in the past had considered vices, such as ambition, were placed in the category of “interests.” They weren’t to be
repressed
but
balanced
by virtue—or, as Turner put it, “enriched” by “higher principles” that would protect the “publick good” from the “vile affections of a few.” Man’s passions, appetites, and interests needed to be, he said, regulated with what “if we please we may call a constitution.”
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Turner’s remarks are a clear example of one of the things that the historian Gordon Wood says made the American Revolution radical: the equation of the governance of the self and the governance of society, a reliance on a moral constitution to check and balance passions in individuals and a written one to check and balance them in politics. Governor Hutchinson “winced and changed color during the sermon” and “pointedly did not invite Turner to the festive meal that followed the preaching.” Samuel Adams, though, was so impressed with Turner’s sermon that he distributed its text far and wide, throughout the colonies and to London, where it reached the desk of Benjamin Franklin.
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Back in Duxbury, Turner would take his flock to the shores of the revolution and leave them there. He retired from the ministry in early 1776 due to ill health. On July 3, 1776—the day after the Continental Congress voted to break with Great Britain and the day before it adopted the Declaration of Independence—the town’s new minister, Zedekiah Sanger, was ordained, and Reverend Elijah Brown, pastor of nearby Sherborn’s First Parish Church, gave the sermon.
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Brown’s optimism concerning human nature was even greater than Turner’s. “There is nothing in divine revelation inconsistent with, or contrary to the prime dictates and requirements, of pure, unabused reason,” he said in his lecture introducing Sanger. “Reason, that shining ray of the Deity—that bright effulgence of eternal light, when first implanted in the human soul,” he continued, choosing a set of luminous words that radiated pure love, “was a suitable guide to bliss and glory.”
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But Reverend Brown had a problem. Like many of its neighboring towns, Duxbury had sided with Boston’s Sons of Liberty against London. Three years earlier, Amasa’s father and uncles helped raise the village’s first company of minutemen, promising to “stand or fall” with the Congress. Duxbury paid a price. Even before the Battle of Lexington, royal troops were harassing its residents, encircling its church during services and political meetings, and impeding its fishermen from going to sea. The Royal Navy burned one schooner just off shore, transferring its crew, which included a number of Amasa’s cousins, to a prison ship in New York Harbor, where some perished. Elsewhere, too, the war against the British had exacted a heavy toll. And the losses suffered at the hands of the British were nothing compared with the smallpox epidemic that swept North America, from New England to Mexico, beginning in 1775, laying siege to cities and villages and claiming more than 100,000 victims by the time it abated.
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And so, at the end of his sermon celebrating the brightness and bliss of God-given reason, Brown turned gloomy. He told the Duxury congregation that he supported independence from Great Britain and he urged the town to continue “struggling for our natural rights.” But the situation is “calamitous,” he said; “heaven is angry with us.” The wasting plagues, the groans of our wounded, the blood of our brethren, the horrors of war—how else could such a procession of woe be understood other than as punishment? Have we not, he asked, “wickedly forsaken the lord?”

Brown had given up the doctrine of predestination for individual souls, yet he held on to the idea that God spoke through history, that history was more than the accumulated tally of individual acts derived from free will. It was an expression of divine favor or disfavor. If the good people of Duxbury had used their free will to act virtuously—to fight for their natural rights—then how to account for their suffering?

Amasa was thirteen years old in 1776. By all accounts he was a thoughtful boy. Yet sitting in the Delano family pew, he probably missed the depth of Brown’s paradox, that individual lives might not be foreordained but the course of history was still guided by God. It wouldn’t be until the end of his life that he questioned the idea that if reason and discipline were put to controlling appetites and impulses, success would follow. In any case, the reverend’s dark turn was brief, coming at the very end of a long, long sermon.

When Brown finished, he yielded the pulpit to Duxbury’s new minister, who started with the subject on everyone’s mind. Reverend Sanger began by quoting Leviticus: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

*   *   *

The revolution changed Duxbury. Samuel Delano, Amasa’s father, did well as the owner of a small shipyard, moving from being “poor and without any literary attainments” to, in 1783, able to buy a decent-sized plot of land. Yet though he is often listed among the men whose skill and hard work made Duxbury rich, his name doesn’t appear on the rolls of those who became rich themselves, like his neighbor Ezra Weston. Weston also started as a poor freeholder and shipwright, but he came to dominate the town’s economy by the end of the 1700s, owning a large shipyard, a blacksmith shop, timberlands, a ropewalk, a sawmill to cut spars, and a fleet of fishing ships. He acquired so much wealth and influence that he would earn about as damning a nickname as could be imagined in republican New England: King Caesar.
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Duxbury’s postrevolutionary prosperity led to an increase in harlotry, hard drinking, cursing, gambling, and other iniquities concentrated near its shipyards. “Keep away,” one old timer warned a bunch of back-country farm boys looking for work with the town’s fishing fleet. “It’s Sodom, and it’s going to be sunk, it is.” Individuals like King Caesar, who reigned over Duxbury’s little Sodom, accumulated riches that would have been undreamed of just decades earlier. Weston’s son, Ezra Weston Jr.—who was about the same age as Amasa—inherited not just his father’s business and property but his title as well. He was King Caesar II, presiding over the further expansion of his family’s shipping empire.
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With wealth came poverty. The kind of occasional family and church charity that paid for old Jane’s coffin was no longer enough to deal with spreading destitution. In 1767, the town had voted to “drive the poor” into a workhouse, and soon thereafter a standing committee was established to administer the institution. In exchange for food and clothing, the insolvent picked oakum (like Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist), pulling strands of hemp or jute out of old rope, which would then be mixed with tar and used to caulk the hulls of ships.
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The changes in Duxbury were slices of larger ones taking place throughout the new republic. Gordon Wood describes this period in American history, in the decades following the triumph of the revolution, as a great unraveling. “Everything seemed to be coming apart,” he writes, “and murder, suicide, theft and mobbing became increasingly common responses to the burdens that liberty and the expectation of gain were placing on people.” Far from creating a nation founded on “benevolence and selflessness, enlightened republicanism was breeding social competitiveness and individualism.” Reverend Turner’s idea that “higher principles” could temper private ambitions was put on its head. For many, private ambition
was
the higher principle. Everywhere rude men were accumulating great fortunes, speculating, lending money at high interest, price gouging, or seeking political office to advance not the ideals of the republic but the interests of their particular class, or worse, just themselves, by “exploiting the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality.” “The Revolution,” Wood writes, “was the source of its own contradictions.”
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In Duxbury, one response to these changes was to go abroad. Even before the revolution, Reverend Turner had defined knowledge of the world as a positive good, a way of cultivating civic virtue. “If a few general terms can give no tolerable idea of the blessings of freedom,” he preached, then “let them be learnt from the story of the world.” By the turn of the century, leaving Duxbury was thought to be a way to both learn about the world and rise in it. An unwritten law governed the town, a “natural decree,” as one resident put it, “that every boy should take his place on board a ship as soon as he was able to go aloft.” The experience would allow the sons of Duxbury to “expand their sympathies” and better their circumstances—that is, to improve themselves morally and materially.
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*   *   *

Beginning his life when the idea of an independent America was dim in the minds of a few radicals and ending it in 1823, when all of the Western Hemisphere (excepting Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Canada) had declared itself free, Amasa Delano was truly a new man of the American Revolution. He held deeply and certainly the most radical of all the revolutionary ideas then coursing through the new nation: human beings were born equal. What they made of this equality, however, was their own doing. Tutored by ministers like Turner and Sanger, Delano thought the idea of “self-government” to be a personal virtue as much as it was a political program, perhaps even more so, and he strived for self-mastery. He admitted to being ambitious, to having wanted very much to be successful, respected among his peers for his talent and honest nature and financially secure enough to support a family.
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Like many other republicans of his day, Delano made a distinction between ambition and envy. Envy was a vice, ambition a virtue, a force for self-improvement, a way to better one’s self and one’s community. Had Delano been envious, he might have responded to an increasingly divided Duxbury by turning inward and demanding a leveling of wealth. Instead, he struck outward, believing that he could fulfill his ambition by enlarging his world. Delano hoped to escape Duxbury’s parochialism and see the world as it really was, liberated from the “exaggerated accounts” found in books and the tall tales told by sailors who returned from long voyages peddling “false statements of things a great way from home.”

He wanted to do what his pastor had urged him to do: learn the story of the world.
*

War gave him the chance. Shortly after hearing Reverend Sanger proclaim liberty, Amasa, against his father’s wishes because he was underage, signed up with Duxbury’s rebel militia and marched to Boston to fight the British. From that moment on, to the day three decades later when he picked up a pen to write his memoirs, Amasa seemingly didn’t have a moment’s rest.

Like some republican Zelig, Delano witnessed, or came close to witnessing, many of the most storied episodes that mark the start of modern times. He guarded British prisoners taken at the Battle of Saratoga and observed the destruction of Yorktown, reflecting afterward on the “melancholy sensations” that overcame him upon “viewing scenes of devastation and blood.” He sailed many times to Haiti in the years before that country’s revolution, on merchant ships built by King Caesar carrying New England salt cod to sell to plantation owners to feed their slaves. Amasa was in the port cities of Canton and Macao just as China was opening to Western trade. He dropped anchor in Hawaii shortly after the death of Captain Cook. When he left he took with him two young men. One, the son of the legendary King Kamehameha, later disappeared in China. The other made it to Boston, where he would earn good reviews for his performance in the
Tragedy of Captain Cook
. Amasa witnessed battles fought between the British and French navies and among the inhabitants of the Palau islands, leading him to reflect on the moral superiority of the latter. When he asked the king of Palau why his followers destroyed the property of their defeated rivals in a spirit of revenge, he was told: “The English do so.”

A dreamscape of abundance passed before his eyes in Africa, South America, and the South Sea Islands: clusters of antelopes and herds of deer that seemed never to end, enormous stands of flamingos and companies of parrots, banks of swans that covered the whole of the coast of Chile, marching colonies of penguins blanketing the Malvina, or Falkland, Islands. Decades before Darwin observed the Galapagos’s giant turtles, Delano compared them to Indian elephants; “their mouths, heads, and necks,” he said, “appeared to quiver with passion.”

While in Lima, Delano visited the offices of the Spanish Inquisition and toured the Spanish mint and gave a remarkable account of African slaves casting gold into bars and coins. Delano was the first to tell in detail the story of the mutiny on the
Bounty
against Captain Bligh. He had his cargo seized by French revolutionaries in Île de France and was present at the beginning of British rule in India and European colonialism in the Pacific’s island archipelagos. Delano described the Dutch roots of apartheid in South Africa, thoughtfully considering the implications of what we today would call the racial division of the world. He smoked opium with Moors in Malaysia, conversed on matters of ethics and war with Polynesian chiefs, and considered the resemblance between the Christian Holy Trinity and a three-headed statuette he came across in Bombay representing Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma.