New York - The Novel

pleased. The trial was never forgotten. It became a milestone in the history of America. And the people at the time sensed correctly that it was so.
    There was one other feature of the trial that was little remarked upon, however.
    The rights that Eliot Master believed in, the rights claimed by Andrew Hamilton and exercised by the jury, came from the common law of England. It was Englishmen, alone in Europe, who had executed their king for being a tyrant; it was England’s great poet, Milton, who had defined the freedom of the press; it was an English philosopher, Locke, who had argued for the existence of men’s natural rights. The men who fired the cannon knew they were British, and they were proud of it.
    Yet when old Hamilton addressed the jury, he had made one other point that they had liked. An ancient law, he told them, might have been a good law long ago, in England; but it could also become a bad law centuries later, in America. Though no one particularly remarked upon this statement, the idea had been sown. And it would put down roots, and propagate, in the huge American land.

The Philadelphia Girl
1741
    T HE BOY MOVED cautiously. A May evening. Late shadows were falling, and nothing was safe. Not a street, not a house. If only he had known what was going on when he arrived, he might have acted differently. But he’d only found out an hour ago, when a slave in the tavern had explained: “Ain’t nowhere safe for a nigger in New York. Not now. You take care.”
    He was fifteen years old, and the way things were going, this would be the worst year of his life.
    Things had been bad when he was ten. That was the year his father had died, and his mother had taken up with another man and left, together with his brothers and sisters. He wasn’t even sure where they were now. He’d stayed behind with his grandfather in New York, where the old man ran a tavern frequented by sailors. He and his grandfather had understood each other. They both loved the harbor, and the ships, and everything to do with the sea. Maybe fate had been the guiding hand at his birth, when his parents had given him the same name as the old man: Hudson.
    But fate had been cruel this year. The winter had been colder than anyone could remember. The harbor was frozen solid. On the last day of January, a young fellow arrived at the tavern after skating down the frozen river from a village seventy miles to the north, for a wager. Everyone in the tavern had bought him a drink. That had been a cheerful day; but it was the only one. The weather had grown even colder after that. Food had become scarce. His grandfather had fallen sick.
    Then his grandfather had died, and left him all alone in the world. There’d been no big family funeral. People were being buried quietly that winter. A few of the neighbors and the patrons of the tavern came to mourn. Then he’d had to decide what to do.
    That choice, at least, had been easy. His grandfather had talked to him about it before he died. It was no use trying to run a tavern at his age. And he knew what he wanted, anyway.
    “You want to go away to sea?” the old man had said with a sigh. “Well, I reckon I wanted the same thing at your age.” And he’d given the boy the names of two sea captains. “They know me. Jus’ you tell them who you are, and they’ll look after you.”
    That was where he’d made his mistake. Been too impatient. It hadn’t taken long to dispose of the tavern, for the premises was only rented. And there was nothing else to hold him in the city. So as soon as the weather turned at the start of March, he’d wanted to be off. His grandfather had kept his modest savings and a few items of value in a small chest. Hudson had taken the chest and left it for safe keeping with his grandfather’s best friend, a baker who lived near the tavern. Then he was free.
    Neither of the captains were in port, so he’d signed on with another, and sailed out of New York on the seventeenth of the month, St. Patrick’s Day. The voyage had gone well enough. They had reached Jamaica, sold their cargo, and started their return by way of the Leeward Islands. But at that point, the ship had needed repairs. He’d been paid, and taken on by another ship’s master, to sail up the coast to New York and Boston.
    He’d learned his lesson there. The captain was a useless drunkard. Twice the ship had nearly been lost in storms before they even reached the Chesapeake. The crew wouldn’t be paid