Late 1776 (pre-dates original entry)
What a lovely new curtain Mrs. Stoddard has got from York City to decorate her parlor! The print is so charming I find myself believing I could look upon it for hours, imagining not only what the scene shown upon it presents, but the far away places the fabric of which it is made has been: the faces of those who stitched it, the hands that packaged and shipped it here to us in Setauket.
The Stoddard family enjoys it, I am sure, for the thing of beauty that it is, but I cannot keep from thinking about such a purchase in far broader terms.
We were there, Bess and I, calling to see it for the first time when a hue and cry rose up in the village nearby the front of Strong's Tavern. [Selah Strong has only just been sent away, we are told, to The Jersey and to prison for assaulting an officer of the Crown (and that officer shortly and most shockingly found dead, as I have written about yesterday)], and Abraham Woodhull-the husband of Mrs. Mary Woodhull-was there, opposite his father, Bible betwixt them-taking an oath of allegiance to the King.
It was most public (more so than had he been at the church or other meeting house), and I am not ignorant of the dark things some in the village have been saying about Abe and his part in Selah's arrest (and his own, odd release from that same arrest), but I must confess myself startled to see him declaring undying loyalty to King George.
It is peculiar, is it not? The notion that Abraham ought publicly vow to support the King in His Majesty's endeavors, when the King has taken no such oath in favor of His subjects?
Will the King work to defend and uphold the honor of Abraham and Mary's family?
It sounded of a vow of matrimony at one point to my ears, but a discordant, coerced one.
What choice did Abraham have? What would a man not do to avoid sentence upon The Jersey and forced abandonment of his family and property? What good, honorable father would not do anything in his purview to keep his child from such a fate?
Bess tells me not to be foolish. Of course Abraham-and all Woodhulls-are loyal to the King. Was not Thomas a soldier of the Crown, dying in His service? Does not Major Hewlett himself occupy Whitehall?
But, as with the Stoddards' curtain, I cannot help but see something deeper, less obvious, when I look at it. I see instead Anna Strong's husband-appointed to a revolutionary body-with whom Abe was assisting in that fight with the dead Captain. I see Abe, the life-long friend of boys with Brewster and Tallmadge for surnames. Surnames now synonymous in Setauket for rebels and revolutionaries.
And I remember a boy who could not bear to see a bully triumph, though he be bigger and stronger than him.
But what good is there to such a vow, if coerced? Doth such an oath hold?
If my father were to promise me to a red coat, require of me to accept him and stand up in a church beside him and speak away my future to such a man-is this a true troth of my heart?
What permanence any pledge, at that? Can such words endure? Words shared on a dappled hillock overlooking the water, when a young man destined to soldier in a blue coat spoke that he would never see a prettier shade of hair than mine?
How many promises might I have to unwillingly give before I learn if your vow yet endures? If those stolen moments of that afternoon weigh upon your memory as they do mine?
Will I recognize your hair, its queue so short a ribbon hardly did it service before you left us?
Will you praise mine, or will time have dimmed its shade and color, or a reluctantly-worn wife's cap hide it from your eye?
What would you have thought, Ben Tallmadge, to hear your friend bind (or perjure) himself so, declaring for a King you fight even now to depose from these colonies?
Would you have wished for such words of constancy to last? Or have prayed that they lived little longer than the air it took to voice them?