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A first curiosity concerns, predictably, the patriots' defense of black chattel slavery. One of Fleming's early references to the issue also opens up other perplexities. After describing George Washington's attachment to standards of Roman virtue found especially in the eponymous hero of Joseph Addison's tragedy Cato, Fleming pauses to expand upon the ideal of freedom:
Virginia's liberty was very different from the ordered, morality-driven liberty to which the Puritans of Massachusetts were devoted. Virginia was closer to the traditional English idea of liberty—a right to rule, to have one's own way—and not to be ruled arbitrarily by the will or whims of others. In this view of life, the world was a harsh place that did not apportion liberty equally. Some men had more than others, and some had none at all—which explains why George Washington and his fellow Virginians saw no conflict between being fervent devotees of liberty and owners of slaves.
Here there are three problems.
The obvious one is that if modern Americans are heirs to the liberty of the American Revolution, a mutation must have occurred somewhere along the way, since modern instincts view the ideal of liberty as opposed to the practice of slavery. A second is that, if the Virginia ideal of liberty was not that different from the British, then why the War for Independence? The third is the acknowledged difference between Massachusetts and Virginia. Were the colonies in fact fighting for different things in the struggle against the mother country?
Also early in his account, Fleming pauses to praise the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew of Boston, who on August 25, 1765, preached a memorable sermon. At the time, Boston was at a fever pitch of resistance to the Stamp Tax that Parliament had passed only shortly before as a measure to recoup a fraction of the expense it had incurred in sending an army to the colonies to deliver North America from the control of the French. Mayhew's text was from the Epistle to the Galatians: "I would they were even cut off which trouble you. For brethren, ye have been called unto liberty." The next night a Boston mob, inspired at least in part by Mayhew's sermon, stormed the home of Massachusetts's American-born but royally appointed governor, Thomas Hutchinson. Here is Fleming's account of what the mob did:
Working through the night with ferocious determination, the rioters smashed doors to splinters, tore the wainscoting off the walls, chopped down the fruit trees in the garden, flung into the street the manuscript of a history of the colony that Hutchinson had been writing for years, destroyed or stole all the books in his library and made off with every piece of furniture, crockery and clothing in the place, plus £900 sterling. Dawn found them trying to tear off the roof. Another hour of darkness and they would have leveled the building. "Such ruins were never seen in America," Hutchinson wailed in a letter to an English friend.
The most curious word in Fleming's account is "wailed," as if Hutchinson were only a fastidious crybaby making up a complaint out of thin air. The most curious connection is Fleming's apparent approval of the notion that the Reverend Mr. Mayhew, by inciting such a riot, had actually communicated Saint Paul's very own understanding of the meaning of liberty.
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