To Richard, as he approached his father in the parlor, Thomas Cutler appeared very much the way he had that horrible day of memory twelve years ago when he had knelt down beside Will's defiled corpse. He was not an old man. He was only forty-nine. But today he looked as though the last vestiges of his youth had abandoned him.
“What is it, Father?” he asked warily.
Thomas Cutler bowed his head. “Good morning, Richard. I must apologize for disturbing you and your family at so early an hour. I'm afraid I am the bearer of very bad news.”
“Mother . . . ?” was Richard's first reaction, for Elizabeth Cutler had been suffering ill health in recent months.
“No, it's not your mother. It's . . . this.” He offered his son the letter he held in his hand. “A post rider delivered it a short while ago.”
Richard unfolded the letter. His eyes swept first to the name at the bottom, signed in the bold script of the U.S. minister to Great Britain. He scanned the text, then read the letter again, this time more slowly.
Katherine asked, “What is it, Richard? Please God, tell me.” The pain scrawled in jagged lines upon his face frightened her.
“It's from Mr. Adams,” he answered, though he spoke more to himself than to his wife, his eyes continuing to glare down at the letter. “Mr. John Adams.”
“Yes, I am well acquainted with Mr. Adams. And?”
He looked at her. “
Eagle
has been seized by Barbary pirates. She's been taken to Algiers. Everyone aboard is a prisoner.”
Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh dear Lord no! Caleb!”
“Yes. Caleb. And Captain Dickerson and every member of the crew, all of them men in our employ.”
For long, agonizing moments the three Cutlers stood mute, as though frozen in time and place by this horrific turn of events. It was Katherine who came to herself first.
“Please, Pappy, sit down. May I bring you some tea?”
“Yes, thank you, my dear.”
As his daughter-in-law left for the kitchen, Thomas Cutler sank onto the soft cushion of an armchair and gazed up at his son with vacant eyes. “What are we to do, Richard? What are we to do?”
Richard could not recall his father ever appealing for his counsel on a matter of such import without first advancing an opinion of his own.
“I don't know, Father,” he replied, his mind at a loss for words that might encourage or console. He refolded the letter and placed it carefully under a paperweight on top of the desk. “I don't know.”
Three
Hingham, Massachusetts, September 1786âMay 1787
W
ILLIAM CUTLER AND HIS daughter did not sail to Boston in September. A month prior to their scheduled departure, Cynthia Cutler, his son John's wife, collapsed under an onslaught of severe abdominal pain. Physicians summoned to the Cutler mansion in Fareham arrived too late to save the baby, so they concentrated their efforts on saving the life of a woman savaged by pain, anguish, and massive loss of blood. She had survived, barely, William informed his brother Thomas in a letter sent to Hingham, but clearly he and Lizzy could not leave England at this time; nor would they hazard a winter crossing. Expect them sometime in early spring, he wrote, concluding with his most devout prayer that God in His infinite mercy would watch over the Cutler family in its time of suffering.
“Amen,” Elizabeth Cutler said after her husband finished reading the letter aloud in their parlor on Main Street. She pulled a woolen shawl tightly around her shoulders. Richard wondered why. Her health had improved over the summer. Was her pain more emotional than physical? Local physicians had no definitive answers.
Anne Cutler's face darkened. “That settles it,” she said. “Frederick and I are postponing our wedding. I want Uncle William and Lizzy to be here for it, and they'll be here in the spring. We can be married then. Frederick will understand. With so much going wrong for our family, how can I go through with a wedding now?”
“You mustn't postpone it, Anne,” her father insisted. “For your sake and for Frederick's, and . . .” his eyes shifted meaningfully from Anne to her mother and then back to Anne, “everyone else's. Please reconsider. You and Frederick have waited long enough. Be married and be happy. Your joy is our joy.”
She studied her father's face for a moment, then bobbed her head.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
Richard spoke into the ensuing silence. “It's not all bad news, Anne. We've heard from Mr. Hamilton,” referring to Alexander Hamilton, a man wielding considerable influence in the halls of power in Congress. During the Battle of Yorktown, Colonel Hamilton had led an assault on a key British redoubt and had credited Lieutenant Richard Cutler with saving his life just as the tide turnedâfor goodâin favor of the Continentals. They had remained in contact ever since. “It seems that Congress is finally ready to do something. A Mr. Barkley has been dispatched to Morocco and a Mr. Lamb to Algiers. From what Mr. Hamilton tells us, their orders are to establish peace treaties with the Barbary States and negotiate the release of American prisoners held there.”
It had come as a severe shock to the U.S. government when, a year earlier, the dey of Algiers had abruptly declared war on the United States. Up to that point, America's commercial and diplomatic dealings with the Arab world had been negligible. Many representatives in Congress could not find the Barbary Coast on a map. Like most Americans, what little they knew about North Africa they had gleaned from reading
Robinson Crusoe
or the writings of Miguel de Cervantes. There were aware, of course, that back in '85 the American merchantmen
Dauphin
and
Maria
had been seized by Algerine corsairs and their crews taken to the port of Algiers, where they still remained. These and other incidents involving unlawful seizures of American vessels in the Mediterranean and Atlantic had received considerable press and had done much to stir up a small but growing segment of the population who were outraged over the impotency of their government to act effectively at home or abroad.
Getting American sailors released from Arab prisons, however, was never a complicated matter. It was simply a question of money. Upon seizure of any foreign merchant vessel, whatever the flag of Christendom under which it sailed, ransom payments became due to the sultan of Morocco, or the dey of Algiers, or the bey of Tunis, or the bashaw of Tripoli, depending on which state had perpetrated the atrocity. Toss into the bargain some form of annual tribute, as most European maritime
nations had been doing for years, and American merchantmen would be free to sail anywhere they wished in the Maghrib.
To add to America's woes, when the Spanish signed what appeared to be a permanent peace with Barbary in 1783, after fighting with the Moors off and on since 1492 for control of the Mediterranean Sea, America could no longer rely on Spain to protect its merchant fleet. Nor could they rely on Portugal or Britain; those two allied powers had their own commercial interests to consider. Americans did assume, however, that they could rely on the French. Article 8 of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce signed in 1778 compelled France to use its good offices with North African rulers to protect American shipping. With France as a de facto ally in the Mediterranean, and Britain not actively meddling in U.S. affairs in that part of the world, the relatively few Americans who followed current events had cause to be optimistic.
“So you see, Anne,” Richard summed up, “there is room for hope.”
Anne bit her lip. “Do you think Mr. Lamb will be successful?”
“God willing, yes,” Thomas Cutler replied. “We know nothing about the man, but the point is, as Richard said, at least our government is doing
something
. Which, considering its makeup, is an achievement all by itself.” He leaned forward in his chair and asked, rhetorically, since he already knew the answer: “Have we heard from anyone besides Mr. Hamilton?”
Silence indicated they had not.
“It's too soon, Pappy,” Katherine encouraged, though it was discouraging to the extreme to have received thus far only one response to the many letters sent out. “We need to give them more time.”
“I pray you're right, my dear. I pray you're right.”
Â
ONCE THE SHOCK of
Eagle
's capture had passed, the Cutler family had called in every chit and favor it had to its credit until the likes of John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington were made aware of the family's plight. Whether such individuals could do anything beyond what was already being done was doubtful even under the best of circumstances. And these, the Cutlers realized, were hardly the best of circumstances. Congress was focused on itself these days, absorbed in heated debate on whether or not to dissolve the Articles of Confederation and replace them with a more viable form of government. In October, in Annapolis, a convention of nine states had ended with a call to convene a second and more inclusive meeting
of all the states the following May in Philadelphia. It would be a truly national convention whose primary purpose would be to resolve the decisive and divisive issue of sovereignty. The delegates would address one central question: Did the Great Declaration grant the states independence from each other as well as from England, or was its purpose to gain independence from England but establish a central government that would have both the authority and the power to act on behalf of all the states? With that question answered, a new national government might then be installed, and the United States could take a more decisive role on the world stage.
“It could take months to decide,” Katherine pointed out gloomily late one afternoon in January. She and Richard were huddled before a flaming hearth as she worked on a red woolen sweater she was knitting for Will. The two needles clicked purposefully together, gleaming in the reflected firelight. Outside, homes across South Street appeared as magical structures in a world turned white by whirling cascades of tiny flecks falling silently from an ashen sky. Will and Jamie sat at the window, impervious to the chill, mesmerized by the silent beauty of snow mounding and curving along hedgerows, tree limbs, and on the flat-bottomed, square-ended punt that their father had begun crafting in November for his sons to take out fishing the following spring. “Perhaps years,” she added. “What will become of Caleb in the meantime?”
“I wish I knew,” Richard replied, hating each word of that oft-used refrain, sick to death of his inability to do something tangible that might lead to the freedom of
Eagle
's crew.
Christmas had come and gone, and what should have been a happy holiday and a respite from emotional stress had proved to be neither. Try as everyone might to make it so for the children, the forced good cheer had ebbed, inevitably, into undercurrents of foreboding once the boys were a-bed. Even the wisdom and joviality of Benjamin Lincoln, an old family friend who had served as Washington's second-in-command at Yorktown, could not help. Lincoln, who had just returned home to Hingham after quelling a rebellion of disgruntled farmers led by a former army officer named Shay in Springfield, did his best to dispel the gloom. But Caleb's empty bedroom in the house on Main Street proved too somber a reminder of where Caleb wasâand where he was not.
“I do know this,” Richard complained bitterly. “Unless Mr. Hamilton prevails in Philadelphia, this country will have neither the will nor the means to do much of anything to anyone anywhere. As he once
said, our country is despicable in its weakness, and if that doesn't wake Congress up, we fought the revolution for nothing. It's one reason why Lamb's mission failed, though I still hold the man himself primarily responsible for that.”
Although Thomas Barkley had succeeded in part in his mission to Morocco, John Lamb had failed completely in Algiers. As reported in Boston newspapers and confirmed by the
London Chronicle,
Dey Baba Mohammed bin Osman had dismissed Lamb from the royal palace and refused to have any dealings with him. Among the reasons given: the only language Lamb could speak was English; his crude mannerisms and lack of diplomacy offended the dey; andâthe reason that dwarfed all othersâhe brought no money with him, simply a promise to draw funds from a bank in Paris on a note co-signed by America's recently installed plenipotentiary minister to France, Thomas Jefferson. The
Chronicle
had also verified, in a report that seemed to Richard downright condescending, that the French foreign minister, Comte de Vergennes, had refused to honor France's commitments to the United States as called for in the 1778 treaty. America stood alone with but seven hundred ill-equipped soldiers to defend it, and no navy whatsoever.
“What I can't understand,” Richard groused, “is why Mr. Jay recommended Mr. Lamb in the first place,” referring to John Jay, the secretary of foreign affairs of the Congress. “What in God's name was he thinking? How does trading mules and horses in Tangiers qualify a man to represent our government? How could an intelligent person like Jay have made such a dreadful decision? Had Congress sent Barkley to Algiers instead, Caleb might be home today.”
Katherine dropped her knitting into her lap. “It's the same in England, my love. Take William Pitt. When war broke out in America, he stood alone in Parliament in opposition to British policy. And today he is one of the few to contest trade restrictions with America. He believes what we believe, in free trade and open markets. But such men are rarely given their due even if what they have been saying for years turns out to be correct. Self-interest and expediency are the coins of every realm. And that, I'm sorry to say, includes the United States.”
“I can't disagree with you, Katherine, though I still hope for better here. Let's pray that what is decided in Philadelphia bears me out.”