DRUNK OBEDIENCE

   

    “You have French taste; I have Indian.” – an Ottawa brave feasting on the cooked flesh of an English captive, in the company of Roubaud, a Jesuit missionary.” - Francis Parkman

      Ten years after the Swedish immigrant Gustave Hesselius was hired by the Penn family to paint the Lenape chief, Tishcohan’s portrait, the 1744 Lancaster, Pa. treaty signing took place. The signing brought tribes from NY, NJ and those scattered across the vast Penn holdings to Lancaster. Weeks of drinking, dancing, whoring, formal balls, negotiating and paper signing would follow. At the end of the festivities, in return for releasing any legal claim to millions of acres, what today we know as the state of Maryland, the United Six Nations of the Iroquois and outlier Delaware Lenape tribes were offered, and accepted in goods:

200 shirts

3 duffle blankets

47 guns

1 lb. vermilion

1000 flints

4 doz. jews-harps

2 half barrels of gun powder

shot, bar lead, and misc., &c. -worth approximately 220 pounds 15 pence

    

    The whites knew exactly what they were doing. And if you were drunk and shirtless, with a broken rifle, this looked like a pretty good deal. Booze and crooked consumerism built this country.

     Since the 1600’s Euramericans had been importing relatively cheap supply of potent liquor and plying the Indians with it in order to secure land. Then they began making their own and cheating with a better bottom line. Distilling changed the drinking, real estate, and religious rubric in the colonies for all time. Thirst, boredom, grief, pain and commerce replaced spirituality as the excuse to attain the altered state. Now it was an everyday affair. Land changed hands at an alarming rate. Whites, blacks and Indians alike could agree upon the common ground they stumbled across, drowning in the bath they were too stupid to run and too drunk to drain. They just couldn’t remember who owned it.

      Richard Jennings’ nephew James Teed was known across Orange County for his well stocked still house. At the turn of the 19th century this little structure was as important as any village church. Drunkenness, as practiced by those descended from the old world, was a matter of devotion, a way of life. Knowing how to drink in the beginning of the 1800’s was literally being able to function, work and handle firearms half-drunk, or completely plastered, every day of one’s adult life. Abstinence, social moralizing, and the secular theopathy of the temperance movement wouldn’t catch fire in NY for another decade or so. Teed provided Jack’s booze. Conklin promised him the money and Hanna Teed offered up the comfort.

      Charlie Durland rented a wagon and team at Haverstraw. With his large bay horse hitched behind, he straightened the hame, took the reins and headed north. Jack Hodges sat in the back of the buckboard, tied, trussed and secured with the borrowed bridewell shackles. The others followed, congratulating each other, bundled in heavy coats, bouncing up and down on the frozen mountain road. They reached Florida just after sunset.The posse who’d chased Hodges into NYC, during what was then, and most likely would ever be, the most exciting couple of days any of them would ever experience, now stood properly silent behind their quarry, bathed in a swinging lantern’s light outside of Dr. Samuel Seward’s house. It was as if they'd tracked down and brought home a giant gut-shot buck, without a drop of blood or a trace of snow on the ground. They’d accomplished an impossible task. If photography had been invented they would’ve taken a picture.

      Were it not for Jack Hodges’ weakness for booze and Dunning’s toady willingness to participate in the conspiracy, Richard Jennings, the sour, illusive, litigious man with the mysterious schedule, probably would’ve lived out his life in comfort, dying of old age in the home of one of his ten children. As my grandmother Mary Ethel Jennings had proven it wasn’t unusual for a family member to live to 105 without ever making much of a fuss. But dying quietly in bed was not to be Dick’s fate. Instead, a week before Jack Hodges was captured, three days after Dick’s 65th birthday, he would die as a result of a gunshot wound to the head and brutal beating with a musket stock, left to expire face down in a frozen Sugar Loaf woodlot. What would bring the fates of an African American sailor, a young married couple, a well to do farmer, a poor white hired hand and a Jennings patriarch together in this act most foul? Four words: land, liquor, sex, and money.