The Jews in America Trilogy (86 page)

This, of course, was the most irritating result of a sickly son-in-law—business, inevitably, was put backward, and Abraham's letters back to Aaron are full of apologies and excuses for his poor performance. The news is nearly always gloomy: “We lost 10 sheep.… The black horse looks very bad.… Stepped on board to view the slaves … the major part of them are small things, and those that are large has age on their side.… The poor success I had in receiving your Outstanding Debts and not getting cash for the cargoes have not enabled me to remit until March.… I am much afraid your Out-Standing Debts will not be collected, not for want of my care, but the people being incapable.” His father-in-law warned him about a certain slave captain named All, whom Aaron Lopez distrusted. Abraham met the man and, “To my great Surprize,” found
him quite satisfactory. The result was disastrous. The man turned out to be an utter scoundrel. By making private deals with Slave Coast governors, Captain All bilked Aaron Lopez out of a full year's profits.

One of Abraham's problems, in addition to his health, was his lack of education. His letters are full of eccentric spellings, their sentence structure is erratic, and at one point he apologizes: “You'll excuse the Writing being oblige to gett a Young Cousin to scrible over.” It is possible that a “Young Cousin” wrote most of his letters.

His devotion to his young wife was, despite his brother's assurances, something less than complete. During the early days of his Jamaica sojourn she remained behind in Newport, and it would seem as though Abraham missed her rather little. Writing to her father, at one point, he mentioned that he had had a letter from “my dear Sally,” though he has yet “not received the Sweet Meets she had promised to send.” He added that he would have “no time” to write her, and quaintly urged her father to “embrace her in my behalf with all the love of a Loving Husband.” His attitude may have disturbed Sally because, about a year later, she sailed to Jamaica to join him. He was probably less than happy to see her. A few months after her arrival, he did a thing that was shocking news to eighteenth-century Newport as well as to Jewish society in the West Indies. He ran off with another woman.

Obviously, this was a situation requiring delicacy and a certain firmness. Aaron Lopez was disgusted with his son-in-law's delinquency and poor performance, and he was ready to wash his hands of him. The same was true of Abraham's brothers. His father was dead, and it fell to his mother, Leah Mendes, to put her child's household in order. There was, after all, much at stake—not only Abraham's job, but the family's reputation, the possibility of future children. She set about single-handedly to repair the
marriage. It wasn't easy, and took her many months, and once she had exacted her son's promise to return to his wife it was next necessary to appease his angry father-in-law. It is possible to envision this aristocratic old lady, who had been born in Spain, who had watched many of her Marrano relatives die in the Inquisition, writing this poised and elegant letter to Aaron Lopez announcing the success of her mission and begging him to forgive her son:

H
ONOURABLE
S
IR
,

It is with great pleasure and joy I now write you acquainting of the dutifulness of my son Abraham in complying to our request to return home. He has insured me of never disobliging nor never to cause you and his wife any more grievance, and will always be bound to your obedience, and he has acknowledged his fault of being so long absent, and it is with no doubt it gives him great concern in reflecting on his follies, but you are fully sensible that youthness and bad advisers are always of great prejudice, and much so when they won't be ruled. But all his transgressions will be an example for his better amendment, and I make no doubt that he will fulfill his promises to me, and he goes overjoyed to your feet to crave pardon, and which I hope you'll grant for the sake of a poor widow'd mother, who will always receive great satisfaction and contentment in knowing of his good proceedings and dutifulness to you. And as God (the best exemplar of the whole world) forgives mankind, so I hope you'll be so pleased as to pardon him, and in granting me this favour I shall forever acknowledge.

L
EAH
M
ENDES

Abraham seems to have been incapable of speaking for himself, so his mother wrote to his wife also:

L
OVING
D
AUGHTER
,

It is with great pleasure I now acquaint you of Abraham complying to our request in returning to enjoy your sweet company, and I beg of you that you'll forgive him of his misbehaving and his absence from so good a wife as you, but he has promised of never causing any more grievance, but always to be the instrument
of seeking for to give you pleasure and content, therefore hope that all will be forgotten, and shall always be pleased to know of both your happiness, and remain craving you health and prosperity from, Your Loving Mother,

L
EAH
M
ENDES

All, however, was not forgotten, and the marriage continued on an unsteady course. There were a number of other separations, each of them painful for all concerned. Two years later, his brother David visited Abraham in Kingston, found him parted from his wife, and wrote to Aaron Lopez: “I found my Brother Abraham in a very poor state of health. He is just come out of dangerous fit of sickness. He seems to be very anxious of seeing his wife, and throwing himself at your feet. I shall dispatch him by the latter end of next month, in the manner I promised you, and shall write you by him more copiously on that subject.” But at that point Abraham's name drops from the family correspondence. He was “dispatched” to Newport, his brother succeeded him in Jamaica, and Abraham's wife followed him home a few months later.

Aaron Lopez, meanwhile, continued to prosper until he was counted among Newport's richest men. In March of 1762 he had attempted to be naturalized but had been refused by the Newport court. His Tory leanings were making him unpopular. Since he also maintained a summer home in Swansea, Massachusetts, he petitioned the superior court of Taunton to make him a citizen of that state, and on October 15, 1762, he became the first Jew to be naturalized in Massachusetts. At his request, the words “upon the true faith of a Christian” were deleted from the oath.

He had also joined a club, established a year earlier, which was purely social and exclusively for the use of gentlemen of Newport's Jewish elite. It was the answer to Newport's Fellowship Club, which had no Jews as members. Aaron took his club with great seriousness, and was
nearly always present at its gatherings, on Wednesday evenings “during the winter season.” The others in the club, it might be noted, were nearly all, in one way or another, Aaron Lopez' relatives, members of the Lopez-Bivera-Mendes-Levy-Hart complex of families. The club operated under strict rules. From five to eight, members were “at liberty to divert at cards,” and in order that the club not gain the reputation of a gaming club, stakes were set at “twenty shillings at whist, picquet, or any other game.” If a member was found guilty of playing for higher stakes, he was to be fined “four bottles of good wines,” to be enjoyed by the club at its next gathering. At eight, the rules noted that “supper (if ready)” was to be brought in. No card playing was permitted after supper, and members were to depart for their homes at ten. If any member had a matter of club business to discuss, he had to wait “till the chairman has just drank some loyal toast.” The club was an excellent diversion from home, wives, children, and attendant problems. The club bylaws also specified that there should be no “conversations relating to synagogue affairs” during club evenings. Again, the punishment for mixing synagogue and club life was “four bottles of good wines.”

Aaron had not joined in the nonimportation agreement, according to which a number of New England merchants had pledged to import no further goods from Britain. He could not afford to. A good standing with the British was important for business reasons. At heart, he was probably not an outright Tory. He was not as Tory as, for instance, his neighbor and fellow clubman Isaac Hart, and several other Newport Jews—a state of affairs that had begun to split Newport's Jewish club down the center. Lopez found himself in a difficult situation when the British attacked and seized Newport in 1777—moving 8,000 troops onto the island, destroying 480 houses, burning ships in the harbor,
devastating fields and orchards, and in general sacking and looting the city. At this point, Aaron deemed it wise to move his large family elsewhere, to secure them, as he put it in a letter to a friend, “from sudden Allarums and the Cruel Ravages of an enraged Enemy.” He chose the considerably safer inland town of Leicester, Massachusetts. All the Lopezes—including his father-in-law, Mr. Rivera—moved there in the autumn of that year.

Here, he wrote, “I pitched my tent, erecting a proportionable one to the extent of my numerous family on the summit of a high healthy hill, where we have experienced the civilities and hospitality of a kind Neighborhood.” It was indeed a proportionable tent that Aaron Lopez pitched—a huge, square mansion of brick with white pilasters at the corners and tall arched windows that addressed the surrounding landscape. The Lopez mansion still stands as part of Leicester Academy. In his grand house, decorated by his young and pretty wife, Aaron Lopez became a great host, and was noted for the size and opulence of his dinner parties, receptions, and balls. He became a Jewish Maecenas, a vast patron of the arts and education, a collector of paintings, and he was still under fifty, still in his prime. There were hardly any who dared suggest to him that now, with his shipping trade cut off and his business seriously limited by the war, he might be spending too much.

He continued to keep in touch with Newport, gathering what news he could from friends who passed through the besieged city, and wrote that he had heard that “the poor inhabitants of that Town have been very much distress'd this winter for the want of fuel and provisions, those Individuals of my Society in particular, who [my informant] said had not tasted any meat but once in two months: Fish there was none at this season of the year, and they were reduced to living upon Chocolate and Coffee. These and many other Callamities and Insults the wretched inhabitants
experience ought to incite our thanks to the Great Being who gave us resolution to exchange at so early a period that melancholy Spot for that we are now enjoying.” To a friend he wrote: “Your dwelling house I understand has suffered much. Your neighbor Augustus Johnson was found dead at his house. My [former] neighbor Gideon Sesson's wife is crazy.” What he appears to have resented most was news that the occupying British officers were spreading slanderous tales about Newport womanhood. He complained that “the vertue of several of our Reputable Ladies has been attacked and sullied by our destructive Enemys.” When the chips were down, he too became a Revolutionary.

The Revolution ended the golden age of Newport as a commercial center—though of course it would flourish again as a resort—and Aaron Lopez was never to return. In 1780, he was saddened to hear of the death, in Philadelphia, of his old friend Daniel Gomez, who had reached the lofty age of eighty-five. With his death, Daniel's son Moses became a rich man. Aaron Lopez' own affairs were in a somewhat shakier condition. The situation of his oldest daughter, “my darling Sally,” continued to depress him. She and Abraham Pereira Mendes had moved to Leicester with him, and the couple had taken a small house near Aaron's. Abraham continued to display his ineptitude and poor health through one or two other business ventures in which his father-in-law tried to place him. For a while he was in the candle business, and was no good at that either. Finally, which was best, Abraham was given nothing to do. Ten years after their marriage, Sally Lopez Mendes gave birth to a tiny son, on whom she doted. It began to be said that Sally was “touched,” for after the baby's birth she never set foot outside her house again—a strange, unhappy woman in an unhappy marriage.

Late in May, 1782, Aaron Lopez started out for Newport in his sulky. About five miles outside Providence, at a place
called Scotts' Pond, he stopped to water his horse. Suddenly the horse stepped out of its depth and the sulky came plunging after him into the pond. Aaron Lopez was flung forward, out of the sulky. He could not swim, and the servant who tried to swim after him was unable to rescue him before he drowned. He was fifty-one years old.

Learning of his death, Ezra Stiles, who was by now president of Yale, extolled him as

that amiable, benevolent, most hospitable & very respectable Gentleman Mr. Aaron Lopez … a merchant of the first eminence; for Honor & Extent of Commerce probably surpassed by no Merchant in America. He did business with the greatest ease and clearness—always carried about a Sweetness of Behavior, a calm Urbanity, an agreeable & unaffected Politeness of manners. Without a single Enemy & the most universally beloved by an extensive Acquaintance of any man I ever knew. His beneficence to his Family Connexions, to his Nation, and to all the World is almost without a parallel. He was my intimate Friend & Acquaintance!

The fact that much of Aaron Lopez' business was the business of slavery appears to have made little difference to the noted educator and antislavery preacher. Stiles, apparently, was against slavery in the abstract, while quite aware that a number of his intimate friends and acquaintances made their money in it. He did, however, find it quite difficult to reconcile the long list of glowing qualities he attributed to Mr. Lopez with the fact that Aaron Lopez was a Jew. His eulogy continues: “Oh! How often have I wished that sincere, pious, and candid mind could have perceived the evidence of Xtianity, perceived the Truth as it is in Jesus Christ, known that
JESUS
was the
MESSIAH
predicted by Moses and the Prophets!” He then goes on to pray that those in charge of heaven will perhaps overlook Aaron Lopez' Jewishness and admit him anyway, despite his “delusions,” into “Paradise on the Xtian System,
finding Grace with the all benevolent and adorable Emanuel who with his expiring breath & in his deepest agonies, prayed for those who knew not what they did.”