Читать книгу Lydia Bailey - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 9

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Many and many a time, during the ensuing months, I wished with all my heart that I had never heard of French Spoliation Claims, had never gone to Washington to attempt to wrench Harriet Faulkner’s sixteen thousand dollars from a reluctant Congress, and had never been caught in that endless waiting in the outer offices of Congressmen and departmental whippersnappers which is the unhappy lot of every man who wishes reimbursement for losses for which the government is responsible.

I hated everything about Washington—that raw, mud-smeared, newly created city. I hated its blazing, steamy heat in spring, summer, and autumn; its moist and biting cold in winter; the vast, be-puddled, churned-up distances between its buildings; the determined ignorance of a large part of the duly elected and appointed representatives of the people; the universal gossiping and backbiting among those who considered themselves socially superior; the unwarranted importance arrogated to themselves by public men whose mental attainments and value to the world were noticeably inferior to those of any competent journeyman carpenter.

There were a number of things that kept me from giving up in disgust: my own unwillingness, after my loss of the Bailey case, to be again defeated in a task to which I’d set my hand; the encouraging letters my uncle and Aunt Emmy wrote me almost weekly in reply to my own discouraged ones; and above all my indignation at a government that so blithely taxed its citizens in order to toss their money away unwisely, yet at the same time refused to pay its just debts. That resentment was fanned at this particular time, too, by the insolent demands made upon the United States Government by the robber states of Barbary. Not only were they continually threatening to take toll of American ships unless bribed with frequent costly gifts—a ship, a score of cannon, a hundred thousand dollars, five thousand stands of arms—but our government was cravenly dispensing these unnecessary bribes, even while refusing to listen to my attempts to obtain simple justice for my clients.

Never a day passed that I didn’t long to get out of Washington and go back to Harriet and to the farm in Gorham; but, like many another man, I’d embarked on an enterprise without realizing how many facets it possessed. I was like a man from the city who longs for the bucolic pleasures of owning a few cows and a farm, and is then amazed to learn that he cannot properly enjoy them unless he builds barns and dairies, fences innumerable acres, enters the hay-and-grain business, studies cow diseases and their remedies, takes up cheese-making, maintains large numbers of pigs to eat up his surplus milk, and devotes all his days to multifarious activities that are as unpleasant as they are unavoidable—as wearying as they are unanticipated.

By great good fortune I found a small room—more of a closet than a room—at Conrad’s Boarding-House on the south side of Capitol Hill, looking down on the winding Tiber and the miserable plain that stretched from the Capitol to the Potomac—miserable because of the way the inhabitants had girdled and hacked down for firewood the magnificent tulip-trees that until recently had made that now desolate plain into a series of parks and groves.

The star boarder at Conrad’s was Thomas Jefferson himself, whom I had never expected to see, much less to meet, when I set off for Washington; but he was as unpretentious as the least of Conrad’s many boarders: just a tall, angular, red-headed, benevolent-looking man, who sat unobtrusively on one side of Conrad’s long table, apologetically asking for the butter and obligingly passing the salt.

To me the most important man at that table was Samuel Harrison Smith, owner and editor of the National Intelligencer. He was one of those men who speak to everyone they see, as a matter of course; and the very first night of my long stay at Conrad’s, he tapped on the open door of my hall bedroom—a tall, thin man, stooped a little at the waist. He smiled at me bashfully with an air of being willing to believe anything and trust anybody; but when he stepped into my narrow quarters and saw the little painting of Lydia Bailey that I had propped up between my books, his look changed to one of keen inquiry.

“Why,” he said, “I know that lady! I knew her in Philadelphia! Isn’t that David Bailey’s daughter?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s who it was. She’s dead.”

“Dear, dear,” Smith said, “that’s unfortunate! I remember her well. How did it happen—and, if you’ll pardon me for asking, how do you happen to have her portrait?”

At that I told him all about my uncle and myself and the Thomas Bailey case, and about Harriet Faulkner and the French Spoliation Claims, and of how I carried Lydia’s portrait with me because of the resemblance it bore to Harriet. Smith had a way of nodding his head appreciatively while listening, with the effect of commenting favorably and at length on everything, even when he hadn’t uttered a word.

I couldn’t have met a more helpful man than Samuel Harrison Smith. He had been a newspaper editor in Philadelphia before a number of influential Washingtonians had persuaded him to come to Washington to start its first newspaper. His wife had been a Bayard of Delaware, which is something like being a Preble or a Wordsworth in Maine, only more boastfully so; and the two of them together knew everything there was to know about Washington, Washington politics, Washington society, and Washington scandal.

Smith even knew about the Bailey case, and seemed more than amiably disposed toward me because of my part in it, and it was he who told me which senators to see, which representatives to see, whom to ask for in the State Department, how to delve into the State Department records. It was he who directed me to that strange and unexplainable man Tobias Lear, and in the end suggested the association with William Bartram that had so violent an influence upon my life.

When I first came to Washington I had only Harriet’s inherited shares in the Kingfisher claim to occupy my attention; but in a month’s time, thanks to my uncle’s efforts in Maine and Mr. Smith’s representations in Philadelphia, I had a dozen offers from Maine and Philadelphia shipowners whose vessels had been summarily boarded and seized, unjustly condemned, and high-handedly sold three years before by the French in the West Indies. To name a few of them, there was the ship Three Brothers of Portland, Captain Lendal Smith; the William of Portland, Captain Colin Campbell; the sloop George belonging to Wise & Grant of Kennebunk; the ship Louisa of Bath, Captain John Clark; the ship Fame owned by Hall & McClintock of Portsmouth; the brigantine Philanthropist of Portsmouth, Captain Hodgdon; the brigantine Friendship of Salem, owned by Nichols & Hodges; the brigantine Six Brothers of Salem, Captain Needham; and the brig Franklin of Philadelphia, Captain Peck.

This seems as good a place as any to explain the French Spoliation Claims, which are simple enough to understand, though not creditable to this country and therefore not understood.

To my way of thinking, all those claims resulted from an unparalleled piece of national ingratitude on the part of the United States. When the cause of the American rebels during the Revolution was almost hopeless, Benjamin Franklin was sent to France to persuade the French to grant the rebels money, arms, clothes, artillery, ammunition, and recognition. Only France was in a position to help the struggling rebel government; and, lacking that help, the rebels would have had to lay down their arms. To make a long story short, the French provided everything for which Franklin asked, and in return Franklin signed a treaty with the French guaranteeing that the United States would, in return, protect any French possession in the West Indies that might be threatened by any other nation. This treaty was ratified by Congress—the first treaty entered into by the United States.

Later, when England went to war against Revolutionary France, the English set out to gobble up, one by one, all the French islands in the West Indies. On that, France invoked the treaty, and asked that the United States come to her help as agreed. Congress, however, refused to live up to the treaty, saying that this country was determined to be neutral. Thus the United States disgracefully dishonored the treaty to which she owed her national existence.

The French Government, naturally resenting such flagrant ingratitude, ordered that American ships and cargoes in the West Indies be seized on any pretext whatever, taken into French ports, and condemned and sold. French cruisers, French privateers, the French Government, and French courts, working in collusion, seized, sold, or destroyed eight hundred and ninety-eight American vessels.

Congress undertook to straighten out the claims of the American shipowners whose vessels and cargoes had been seized by the French. The American Government, of course, argued that France was responsible and should therefore pay the claims. France replied that the United States Congress, in refusing to live up to its treaty, had shown itself to be made up of treaty-breakers, ingrates, shirkers of responsibility, ignorers of obligations. If Congress had lived up to its treaty, the French said, the vessels would never have been seized: and thus Congress and Congress alone was responsible for their seizure.

My task, therefore, was to find a way to persuade someone to introduce in Congress a bill calling for the payment of my clients’ claims; and there were times when the Labors of Hercules seemed, by comparison, like an afternoon’s diversion.

Of all the claims, the Kingfisher claim was worst, for the Kingfisher had been stopped at night off the coast of Porto Rico by a French privateer. Although the Kingfisher’s papers were all in order, the French captain ordered her captain, mates, and crew into her three boats and set them adrift. They finally made land at Curaçao, were marooned there penniless for several months, and were then brought back to the United States through the kindness of the captain of another American merchant ship. Thus the captain of the Kingfisher had no knowledge of the name of the French privateer that had captured him, or the port into which the Kingfisher had been sent, or the reasons advanced for her condemnation and sale. And all I had was the affidavits of the captain, the first and second mates, and the crew, together with those of the owners and of the firm that had put the cargo aboard.

The ignorance of the senators and representatives to whom I went daily to state my case was beyond belief. Nearly all were lawyers, the petty, quibbling type of lawyer who is against everything on general principles; and I came back to Conrad’s Boarding-House every night almost too tired and discouraged to eat; but every night I’d sit down in front of that little portrait of Lydia Bailey and pour out my discouragement in a letter to Harriet Faulkner.

I even came to have a sort of feeling, in time, that it was the portrait that was alive, and Lydia to whom I was writing; that Harriet was the faint and pictured likeness of somebody I had known only slightly, and long ago. I can’t explain this as I’d like to; but after a few weeks of staring for hours on end at the almost smiling lips, the sidelong glance of the girl in the portrait, I was even uncertain how Harriet Faulkner had really looked, while Lydia Bailey’s image came instantly to my mind a thousand times a day.

What disturbed me most about my Washington experiences, I think, was the attitude of the gentlemen in the State and Treasury Departments, who were so afraid of hurting somebody’s feelings that they seemed wholly unable to do or say anything definite. A Congressman, for example, was unwilling to sponsor a bill asking for the payment of a just claim against the government unless the Treasury Department and the State Department were willing to recommend it; but the gentlemen in the Treasury and State Departments were so afraid of committing a diplomatic blunder in recommending to Congress anything that might hint at a slur against France or a slur against Congress or a slur against itself, that to get an answer out of anyone was more difficult than making a sow out of a silk purse.

Smith only laughed when, in the privacy of my room, I cursed the State and Treasury Departments and the cautious and cat-footed little nobodies who lowered their eyelids and raised their eyebrows whenever I entered their offices. “Maybe,” he said, “you’ll get somewhere when the administration changes.”

“Yes,” I retorted, “and maybe I won’t! They’ll put in a new Secretary of State, yes; but we’ll only be allowed to look at him every Fourth of July! All the little pinfeathered tea-drinkers will stay in office, frightened of France, frightened of England, frightened of Congress, frightened of each other, frightened of the voters, frightened of opening their mouths, frightened of having the truth known about them and their ineptitude.”

“Perhaps things might be worse,” Smith said with a twinkle.

“Like hell they might!” I told him. “I went to the French Ambassador and asked him to let me see the official statement made by the French Government in reply to our suggestion that the French pay for the vessels they’d seized. He gave it to me fast enough, and I saw that the French hadn’t been afraid of hurting our feelings! It came right out and accused Congress and the State Department and everyone in the government of being no better than petty thieves! Why can’t our own government talk that way when it has occasion to? Look how the State Department and Congress and everybody else in the government has acted about the Barbary pirates! Bribing the Dey of Algiers with ships, naval stores, hogsheads of American dollars, trunkfuls of Portuguese gold, and gifts for his wives and his generals and his admirals, for God’s sake—and all to persuade him to keep his hands off American ships! And does he do it? He does not! Why talk soft to people who don’t understand softness?”

“Wait till after election,” Smith said. “Jefferson’s going to be elected, and everything’ll be all right then.”

It was next to impossible to transact any sort of business in Washington during that entire winter of 1800-1801, when Congressmen fought and wrangled and cut each other’s throats in their effort to decide whether Thomas Jefferson or Aaron Burr should become President. Jefferson and Burr, by a strange political freak, had received the same number of votes in the November election, and the burden of deciding between them lay in the hands of Congress.

Tedious and costly though a journey to Washington then was, people hastened there by hundreds. Hotels, lodging-houses, boarding-houses, all were crowded. In one house, fifty men slept on the floors, with no beds but blankets and no coverings but their greatcoats.

Day after day, during February, the members of the House of Representatives balloted to decide whether Jefferson should be President, or Burr; and in their voting they revealed how invariably a consistent politician, in order to defeat a political enemy, will sacrifice all the best interests of his country.

Burr was a man beneath contempt. Jefferson, on the contrary, was a great man whose election was desired by three-fifths of the people who had sent their representatives to Congress. Yet the representatives from the New England states and South Carolina, hating Jefferson, voted almost solidly for the unspeakable Burr.

Not until the thirty-sixth ballot did the Federalists give way and allow Jefferson to be elected.

With the installation of Jefferson as President, I lost my pessimism and began to think that, as Smith had assured me, my troubles would shortly be over. Throughout Washington and everywhere else in America, there had never been seen such an exhibition of heartfelt joy as on the day John Adams went out and Jefferson came in. Everywhere there was bell-ringing and cannonading: no business, no labor, was anywhere done.

Jefferson’s inaugural speech confirmed me in my hope that all would now be well; for he said freely that it was time to put away animosity, heartburning, and strife, and bring back that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. He condemned political intolerance as being as bad as religious intolerance, which, he insisted, had been driven from our shores.

Knowing how people in the Province of Maine felt about the Papist French, and how those in Newport felt about the Jews, I had some doubts about this last statement; but I heartily agreed with him when he went on to point out that political intolerance was as bad, as wicked, as capable of bitter persecution and bloody deeds as was religious intolerance. A minority, he argued, should have the same rights as the majority. He called for universal acceptance of the principles of good government; then—and this, it seemed to me, shouldn’t have been necessary—he explained what he meant by good government: equal and exact justice to all men; peace, commerce, and an honest friendship with all nations, but entangling alliances with none; states’ rights, majority rule, honest elections, a well-regulated militia, economy in the expenditure of public money, payment of the debt, diffusion of knowledge, freedom of the press, freedom of the person, and freedom of religious belief.

Jefferson may have been foolishly optimistic in that speech of his; but I was even more foolishly so than he, for I—like an idiot—thought that he had good government sufficiently at heart to pick public officials who would think as he thought and act as he acted.

One of my troubles, before Jefferson took office, had been an epidemic of record-burning in the Treasury Department, in the War Department, even in the State Department. How these burnings came about, nobody seemed to know; but if any Army officer, say, had been court-martialed and perhaps found guilty, all the papers in his case had a queer way of getting destroyed in an unexplainable holocaust. Or if a battle had been lost through somebody’s carelessness, or something discreditable had appeared in the records of high officers, those papers, too, had a way of going up in flames.

One of the more interesting fires had taken place in the Treasury Department during the secretaryship of Oliver Wolcott of Massachusetts—and though that fire took place at dusk, when the workers in the building had departed, it just happened that a number of carts were standing in the vicinity of the building, and were able to cart away several dozen of Mr. Wolcott’s private boxes, bundles, and trunks. Among the documents consumed were a number that would have required the payment of money by the government—among them several shipowners’ claims. As a consequence, the Treasury Department staff were confused over just which papers had been lost. Naturally, they were unable to trace any papers at all until they could recover from that confusion; and, since they (as has been the case since the beginning of time) found a confused existence easier and pleasanter than an ordered one, they never did recover from it.

When, therefore, Mr. Jefferson didn’t immediately replace Mr. Wolcott with another Secretary of the Treasury, and the confusion persisted, I was still balked in my efforts to get from that department any of the papers in the Kingfisher case.

Early in the summer, however, Smith offered me a ray of hope, bringing me the information that a man by the name of Tobias Lear had come to be recognized by Mr. Jefferson as an authority on the West Indies.

“What you’d better do,” Smith told me, “is to see Lear as soon as possible and get in his good graces. He can probably do more for you than anybody in the Treasury Department or the State Department. You shouldn’t have any trouble doing this, because he comes from your part of the country—Portsmouth, New Hampshire—and he used to be George Washington’s secretary.”

I didn’t like the sound of it. “If he was Washington’s secretary,” I told Smith, “he must have been a Federalist, because Washington was a Federalist. Why should Jefferson pick a Federalist as one of his advisers? And why should any Federalist have any use at all for me after my opposition to the Alien and Sedition Law?”

“Don’t ask me,” Smith said. “I don’t understand politics. I only write about ’em.”

“Well,” I said, “how does Lear happen to be an authority on the West Indies? Has he lived there?”

“No,” Smith said, “he hasn’t; but he’s President of the Potomac Canal Company, so that he has a good deal to do with boats and West Indian trade and such matters.”

I looked hard at Smith to see whether he was serious. He was. “Boats!” I said. “That means canal boats. I don’t believe I could get anywhere with a canal-boat expert.”

“You’ve got to,” Smith said. “You’re dealing with French Spoliation Claims, and all your cases have to do with ships that the French seized in the West Indies. But no department of the government will do anything about such cases without first consulting Lear. That’s the way things are done in Washington. The most influential men in Washington aren’t elected. They come in by the back door. Lear got in by the back door, and he has a passion for diplomacy. You know he married a niece of General Washington.” He coughed. “It’s an interesting thing, too: he’s kept possession of all Washington’s papers—all his correspondence.”

He looked complacent, as if he’d made everything clear.

“What’s that got to do with it?” I asked, and I must have spoken sharply; for the things Smith had partly revealed, coupled with the dry manner in which he had spoken, had infected me with something like aversion toward Mr. Lear.

“I don’t know that it has anything to do with it,” Smith said. “But Lear’s a peculiar man. I know that when Washington toured the New England states at the end of his administration, Lear went everywhere with him. When Washington entered a town, it was his custom to get out of his carriage and ride into the town on horseback, leaving Lear in the presidential carriage. In many places the crowds made the mistake of thinking that Lear was Washington, and they cheered him to the echo. I have a feeling that Lear came to consider himself as great a man as Washington—if not greater.”

“What if he did?” I asked. “That doesn’t make him a greater man, as I see it. It just makes him a damned fool.”

“You may be right,” Smith said. “All I know for sure is that Lear has all of Washington’s correspondence in his possession, that he is ambitious and has an excellent opinion of himself, and that a great many men, high in public life, wrote letters to General Washington in the heat of political strife that might be damaging to them today—if they should be made public or put in the records where they could be examined.” He shot a quick look at me. “If there should be any delay in burning ’em, they might prove most embarrassing.”

“All right,” I said, “I’ll see Lear, but I’ll tell you this much: when these cases are settled, I’m through with law and Washington for life. I’ll stick to farming, where a man can keep his self-respect.”

Colonel Tobias Lear—colonel by virtue of his peacetime service in General Washington’s household—was not an easy man to see; but see him I did, eventually.

He had a neat little office at the head of Lear’s Wharf, from which he could watch the goings and comings of the canal boats, sloops, and schooners that entered the very shadow of Capitol Hill from the Potomac; and it seemed to me, when I was finally ushered into that snug little office, that Colonel Lear affected the appearance of his great friend and benefactor General Washington, for his air was one of high dignity and he had a way of staring impassively from the window so that his profile was presented to me. Also, he kept his lips tightly pressed together, as if considering important matters; and his hair was prematurely white, so that he made himself look more than a little like the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington. He had the calculating winsomeness of a man who is spoiled by the ladies, so I knew he’d insist on doing things his own way or not at all.

As rapidly as possible I put my case before him: I was a resident of his part of New England, a lawyer and farmer by profession, with several clients who had claims against the government for losses incurred through the action of the French in seizing American ships illegally, and selling both ships and cargoes in West Indian ports. In proof of my statements I laid upon his desk a list of my clients and their ships, pointing out that the ship Fame had been owned by Hall & McClintock of Portsmouth, his own home town.

When I had finished, Colonel Lear gave me a sweet smile and delicately touched the sheet I had placed before him. He put me in mind of a dignified white tom-cat lackadaisically extending a paw toward a kitten’s plaything.

“I hardly see why you should do me the honor of calling on me about these matters, Mr. Hamlin,” he said. His utterance of my name seemed to strike a chord in his memory. “Hamlin? Hamlin? Are you by any chance related to the Hamlin who defended Thomas Bailey?”

“I am the Hamlin who defended Bailey,” I said. “My uncle had intended to do so, but he fell ill and I took his place.”

“Very interesting,” Lear said, and his eyes were veiled. “Most unpleasant experience, but laudable—oh, laudable. Yes! Ah—tell me, Mr. Hamlin, how did you happen to come to me?”

“Well, Colonel,” I said, and I steeled myself to using soft soap because Smith had warned me that Lear had to have it, “there’s nobody in New England who isn’t proud of your connection with General Washington, and who doesn’t know that your friendship would be the greatest asset he could have in this city. No other New Englander knows so much about public affairs; so, being a New Englander myself, I presumed on that fact.”

“I see,” Colonel Lear said. He examined the list of ships. Then he shook his head and looked unhappy. “You know, Mr. Hamlin,” he said, “most of the ships seized by the French were sold in Haiti, and things are in a dreadful state in Haiti—or should I say San Domingo?” He smiled patronizingly. “Haiti is how the Negroes themselves refer to San Domingo, Mr. Hamlin. Yes—ah—well, Mr. Hamlin, the Negroes have seized power down there and driven out most of the Frenchmen who formerly held office. Philadelphia, New York, Savannah—all those cities are full of French officials.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said, “but that has nothing to do with the justness of these Spoliation Claims.”

“I’m afraid,” Lear said, “that it has a great deal more to do with it than you suspect. With all the French officials absent from their posts, there’s no way to authenticate the justice of these claims.”

“But there is,” I replied. “Every one of these ships was seized by the French—and seized unjustly. We have the affidavits of the officers and the crews to prove it.”

“That may be so,” Lear said, “but you haven’t the French documents. For example, in the case of the Barque Kingfisher, on what grounds did the French court condemn her?”

“I don’t know, Colonel Lear,” I said, “and that knowledge, it seems to me, isn’t necessary. She was seized by the French, and her value was twenty-five thousand dollars, as attested by the builders, Lord & Dutton of Ipswich. Her cargo was valued at forty-two thousand dollars, to which the loaders, Burbank & Towne of Boston, have sworn.”

Lear was patient with me. “I understand all that, Mr. Hamlin, but there may have been some action on the part of the Kingfisher’s captain—some failure on his part—that caused the French to take action against her. Now, for example, what was the name of the French ship that seized the Kingfisher?”

“We don’t know,” I said; “but that has nothing to do with the justness of this claim.”

“Oh, yes,” Lear said. “Nobody can make such a demand on the United States unless all the evidence is complete and in order.”

“But it is complete,” I said. “The Kingfisher was seized in retaliation for the failure of the Government of the United States to carry out the terms of its treaty. That government was responsible for breaking the treaty, and it is therefore responsible for the losses suffered by those whose property was taken from them.”

Lear looked regretful. “Of course, Mr. Hamlin, I can only give you an opinion on such a matter as this. You really overestimate my importance and my influence, but I feel quite sure I am on safe ground when I say that you can never collect these claims until you have the additional evidence I mentioned.”

I wondered what in God’s name was in the man’s mind. He looked like a sensible, amiable, educated man, and yet it seemed to me that he was quibbling like an old woman. At the same time, I saw clearly that I could argue forever without changing his stubborn refusal to admit the obvious.

I got to my feet. “Well, Colonel,” I said, “I appreciate your advice, and I’ll make every effort to get the additional proof. May I assume that if I’m successful, you’ll say a good word in my behalf?”

“Oh, my dear Mr. Hamlin,” Colonel Lear said, “I’ll do everything in my power! Everything! But let me assure you again, you overestimate my influence.”

He got up from his chair slowly and cautiously, as a cat might have risen. In fact, I’ve never since that day been able to see a cat without thinking of Tobias Lear.

When I told Smith about Lear’s insistence that my evidence was incomplete, he looked thoughtful. “Now that’s an odd thing,” he said. “All those ships were lost, as you say, and lost because of Congress’s sullen refusal to help the French against the English. What does Lear care about the intricate little details of their loss? He must have a reason for it! You don’t do things like that just because you want to keep on being a damned fool.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” I said. “Lear’s one of those consciously winsome men—wavy white hair, lovely profile, elegant manners. A man like that often can’t help making a damned fool of himself.”

“That’s possible,” Smith said, “but I don’t believe it. He’s a planner, a plotter. Look at his persistence in hanging on to all of Washington’s correspondence. He doesn’t do that because he’s a damned fool: he does it for a good reason. How many American ships did you say the French seized?”

“As far as I’m able to make out, there were eight hundred and ninety-eight of them, with a total value of something in excess of five million dollars.”

“Five million dollars, eh,” Smith said. “Well, well, well! That’s a lot of money, isn’t it! If it’s not an impertinence, how would you expect your clients to reimburse you if you should be successful in collecting their claims?”

“I haven’t given it much thought,” I said, “but I think probably it ought to be on a percentage basis—say five percent or seven percent of the amount recovered.”

“Exactly,” Smith said. “You’d be in a splendid situation, wouldn’t you, if you had so much influence—so much knowledge of happenings in the West Indies—that you’d be able to collect a great many claims: say two or three million dollars’ worth of them. You’d be one of the richest men in the United States, wouldn’t you? And you certainly wouldn’t want some unknown upstart to cut the ground from under your feet by offhandedly collecting a lot of Spoliation Claims before you’d done anything about them yourself.”

I stared at Smith, and gradually his meaning dawned upon me. Lear had influence: Lear knew the West Indies! And certainly I was unknown. “I see,” I said, “I see. That hadn’t occurred to me before. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if you were right!”

“No,” Smith said, “it wouldn’t surprise me, either. If he got the proof himself, there wouldn’t be much question about his being able to collect, would there?”

“Damn it,” I said, “he doesn’t need any more proof.”

“No, but it wouldn’t hurt him to have it, would it?” Smith asked.

“No,” I admitted. “It wouldn’t hurt him. It wouldn’t hurt him a bit. In fact, a lot of people would be impressed by his having it.”

“In that case,” Smith said, “do you know what I’d do if I were you? I’d go where I could get that proof. I’d go to Philadelphia and see some of those refugees that the Negroes drove out of San Domingo. You’ll find ’em out at Bartram’s Gardens across the Schuylkill. Bartram’s a naturalist and a kind man, and he’s encouraged them to use his Gardens as a meeting place where they can sponge on their friends.”

“Is that William Bartram?” I asked.

Smith seemed surprised that I knew of him, and I explained that Bartram’s Travels had been a sort of Bible to me ever since I came across it in my uncle’s library.

“Well,” Smith said, “you’ll find every Frenchman in Philadelphia hanging around Bartram’s Gardens every day of the week, and Bartram can give you the history of every last one of them.”

Smith’s words excited me. The prospect of getting out of this filthy hole of a city, of being closer to Harriet, of somehow obtaining enough evidence to circumvent Lear, to whom I had taken a profound dislike, filled me with more enthusiasm than I had felt for months.