Part 11 (1/2)

James Parker's son, Patrick, visited London at the height of the panic in June. He was trying to re-establish the family firm in Virginia and to recover some of his father's holdings in and near Norfolk. James reluctantly extended credit to his son for the purchase of trade goods. Patrick worried about repaying his father as he stopped in the subscribers' room at Lloyd's, where he met Samuel Gist. Gist offered to help; he promised to accept a bill of exchange for more than 140 sterling, drawn by a merchant in Northampton County, Virginia, who owed money to Patrick. The merchant had shown a letter from Gist which had convinced Patrick to take the bill in payment. With Gist's a.s.surances Patrick Parker returned to Norfolk in August. In the following months, the bill of exchange came back protested three times. Parker delayed repaying his father, hired an attorney to sue the Northampton merchant, and admitted that he had been misled by ”that Sneaking Lying Creature Sam Gists promise.”

In the summer of the panic, Gist moved to his new home in Gower Street. Builders worked to extend the row of adjoining, almost identical dwellings northward from Bedford Square. Such austere, strict, symmetrically rectangular structures moved Thomas Jefferson to write: ”Their architecture is in the most wretched stile I ever saw.” New neighbors of Sarah Siddons's and Samuel Gist's were retired s.h.i.+p captains, physicians, a few members of Parliament, a builder, Joseph Kirkman, an important corn merchant, Claude Scott, and the Reverend William Morice, longtime secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. When the celebrated fortune teller Mrs. Williams came to London from Bristol and Bath, she offered her clairvoyance at a half-crown per session in her house in Gower Street. John Scott, the Crown's solicitor general, moved into Number 42 not long after Gist took Number 37. The official residence of the lord chancellor stood just down the street in Bedford Square. Other former residents of the City besides Gist escaped smoke and grime by settling among the gardens of Gower Street. Gist's colleague at Lloyd's, Marmaduke Peac.o.c.k, took Number 25. A newly married couple, Osgood Hanbury and Susannah Willet Barclay Hanbury, who united two banking families, became their neighbors. Charles Blagden, secretary of the Royal Society, lived nearby. Mrs. Siddons was not the only artist. The venerable organist and composer, John Worgan, lived at Number 65. In former times his playing had been mentioned in the same breath with that of Handel.

Behind his residence Gist kept a coach and horses in a coach house and stables. He employed a coachman and a full staff of servants. A visitor quickly saw that Gist lived ”much in style,” among pictures and books, his meals served on silver. His ink stood in a silver inkwell; big candles on pillar candlesticks were put out with a silver snuffer. To check the time he reached to a gold chain with pendant seals and pulled out a gold watch made by Mudge & Dutton.

On Tower Hill, in America Square, the three partners of William Anderson & Company struggled to turn a profit. For months at the end of 1788 and early in 1789 unusually harsh cold interrupted commerce in London. ”The streets are a stratum of ice. The river is so hard frozen, that fairs are held upon it.” Men who ordinarily worked on the river and along the quays were reduced to begging in the street. The Planter Planter did not sail for the York River until March 12. did not sail for the York River until March 12.

In June a wedding party came to America Square. John Shoolbred's daughter was married to the Andersons' neighbor, Jerome Bernard Weuves, a rising man in the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. Shoolbred and his partner, Gilbert Ross, held two of the three London seats on the company's committee. Weuves had gone to the Gold Coast the year before the Hope Hope sailed and served there fourteen years, the last six as governor, in turn, of Annamaboe Fort and Cape Coast Castle. He moved back to London in 1784. In the months before his wedding he helped the Company of Merchants by testifying to a committee of the Privy Council in defense of the slave trade. sailed and served there fourteen years, the last six as governor, in turn, of Annamaboe Fort and Cape Coast Castle. He moved back to London in 1784. In the months before his wedding he helped the Company of Merchants by testifying to a committee of the Privy Council in defense of the slave trade.

In June 1788, William Anderson held too much unsold tobacco. A year later his agents in Virginia offered advances of seven to ten guineas per hogshead, while a rival firm, Donald & Burton, told its agents not to go above 6. A short crop came to market in 1789. The price in London rose above 9 per hogshead, with some speculators willing to pay more than 14. Anderson sold a hogshead of Dr. Thomas Walker's tobacco for 13 10s. As his fortunes in business turned better, William Anderson had to find new agents in Virginia because ”unhappy family differences” led him to stop relying on some of his kinsmen.

Samuel Gist at last received 100 sterling from the Dismal Swamp Company in payment for tools and supplies sent long ago and lost in the British invasion. The company paid the remaining 54 5s. a few years later. Gist was eloquent on the subject of Virginia debtors. He told William Jones in the summer of 1789 ”that he not only has not received anything from his old debts, but that he had s.h.i.+pped a good deal at the peace to men he considered as good as any on the continent, from whom he has received little or nothing since.” Jones understood all too well. His firm, Farell & Jones, had been especially unlucky in its dealings with men linked to the Dismal Swamp Company. Among Jones's many large debtors were Dr. Walker, David Meade, John Syme, and the estate of William Byrd. Gist claimed to be owed 34,000. Jones claimed to be owed 80,000.

At home in Gower Street, Gist spent part of the summer of 1789 drawing up a memorial to the Royal Commission for Enquiring into the Losses, Services and Claims of the American Loyalists. Parliament had just extended the commission's inquiry for another year after receiving ”strong applications from various persons” who said they had been prevented from applying for compensation earlier. A list of them in the act of 1789 contained the name of Samuel Gist. In his memorial he said he had lost all his property in Virginia. He asked for 23,051 19s. 5d. He told the commissioners that his daughter, Mary, had eloped while under age, married William Anderson ”against your memorialists Approbation,” and moved to Virginia. During the war, the state had vested all Gist's property in Mary Anderson, ”whereby your memorialist is deprived of the greatest part of the Labour of the early part of his Life.”

More than one-tenth of the sum Gist sought-2,857 sterling-he set as the value of his three quarter-shares in the Dismal Swamp Company. He explained that since 1762 the company had been ”expending Vast Sums of Money in Building draining & improveing.” The swamp, he wrote, ”is full of Timber, & is among the Richest Land in the World.” He calculated the compensation due him by computing his portion of the company's 40,000 acres at 2,857 acres and by setting on them a value of 1 sterling per acre.

In case the commissioners might think it odd that Gist, having lost such a large sum, waited until six years after the war to file a claim, he accounted for his delay. The ”true cause” of it was ”the extreme delicacy of his Situation & his Unwillingness to burthen his Country with any expence until his Friends in Virginia a.s.sured him he had no Chance of relief in that Country.” By the words ”extreme delicacy,” Gist apparently alluded to his relations with the Andersons. The commissioners must know that Mary and William Anderson lived in his former residence in America Square and that William Anderson had joined Gist's other son-in-law and Gist's former clerk in taking over his business as a tobacco and dry goods merchant. The Andersons remained American citizens. Gist's property in Virginia was theirs by law. But was it so in practice, the commissioners might ask. With his memorial he submitted doc.u.ments designed to show that William Anderson ”will not part with the Estate” unless Gist settled upon Mary Anderson a fortune equal to its value. This was out of the question. Thus, he explained, his Virginia property was lost to him, ”as much as tho' he was Actually Dead & had no other Child.” Of course, he did not tell the commissioners that the profits of the labor of his slaves on his Virginia plantations, nominally owned by the Andersons, came each year in a remittance from Benjamin Toler. The commissioners were not gullible men. Consideration of Gist's claim took many years.

The season of 178889 at Drury Lane Theatre brought another series of triumphs for Sarah Siddons: Lady Macbeth, Queen Katharine in Henry VIII Henry VIII, the t.i.tle role in Jane Sh.o.r.e Jane Sh.o.r.e, her first London appearance in Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet, and her usual, ever popular roles in The Gamester, The Fair Penitent, Venice Preserv'd The Gamester, The Fair Penitent, Venice Preserv'd, and Isabella; or, the Fatal Marriage Isabella; or, the Fatal Marriage. A member of her audience for a later performance of Macbeth Macbeth wrote: ”In the sleepwalking scene the mere sight of her makes every drop of blood run cold.” wrote: ”In the sleepwalking scene the mere sight of her makes every drop of blood run cold.”

At the end of the season, she temporarily retired from the stage to regain her health. She said she was ”convinced if I could keep clear of these dreadful Theatrical exertions which enflame my blood and exhaust my Strength that I should be perfectly well in a fortnight.” Though she liked her ”nice house” in Gower Street, she and her husband decided to leave the neighborhood. They bought a house, Number 49, in Great Marlborough Street and moved in 1790. She soon returned to the stage; her admirers left Gower Street to follow her to her new address. Among them was a young Irish law student who said that ”Mrs. Siddons had conceived a pa.s.sion for Him a pa.s.sion for Him. He fancied that she sent persons after Him to drug drug his victuals in order to inspire Him with love for Her.” He repeatedly visited Great Marlborough Street and wrote ”innumerable Letters” to Mrs. Siddons until he was taken into custody and sent back to Ireland. After 1790 the street in front of Samuel Gist's house was quieter than it had been during his first two years there. his victuals in order to inspire Him with love for Her.” He repeatedly visited Great Marlborough Street and wrote ”innumerable Letters” to Mrs. Siddons until he was taken into custody and sent back to Ireland. After 1790 the street in front of Samuel Gist's house was quieter than it had been during his first two years there.

A young British officer visiting Mount Vernon in 1788 admired the improvements George Was.h.i.+ngton had made: ”He seems to be laying out his grownds with great tast in the English fas.h.i.+on.” Was.h.i.+ngton's enthusiasm for details of agriculture showed plainly in his barns, livestock, and equipment; ”he appears to be the compleatest Gentleman farmer I have ever met in America and perhaps I may Add England.” Since the end of the war, Was.h.i.+ngton had enjoyed five years back at Mount Vernon. Then the first electors unanimously chose him as president of the United States. He moved to Manhattan.

At Mount Vernon one of Was.h.i.+ngton's most frequent guests was Henry Lee. A short, talkative man in his early thirties, Lee had won Was.h.i.+ngton's favor as a daring officer in the Continental Army. During the last years of the war he commanded a legion-a small force combining infantry and cavalry-in the Carolinas. He left the army in 1782. He was married to Matilda Lee, granddaughter of one of his uncles and daughter of Philip Ludwell Lee. She had inherited her father's plantation with its elegant brick mansion, Stratford Hall, overlooking the Potomac about 80 miles downriver from Mount Vernon. Henry Lee did not aspire to a retired life as a gentleman farmer. He sought public office, serving in the House of Delegates and the Continental Congress. He vehemently supported the Const.i.tution as a delegate to the ratifying convention. He traveled often, and he took a growing interest in land speculation.

Lee admired an Arabian stallion Was.h.i.+ngton had bought from the estate of his late stepson, John Parke Custis. Sixteen hands high, with ”a very beautiful shape,” Magnolio was ”in high health, spirits, and flesh”-”as fine a horse as any born in this country.” Lee, a skilled horseman, coveted the stallion. Late in 1788 he offered Was.h.i.+ngton 5,000 acres of land in western Kentucky in exchange. After dinner on Tuesday, December 9, the two men closed the bargain.

Lee shared Was.h.i.+ngton's faith in the Potomac Company and its future ca.n.a.l at Great Falls as sure means to wider commerce and great wealth. In 1788 he bought 500 acres on the south bank of the Potomac, where the ca.n.a.l was to run. He envisioned a town there: Matildaville. In his mind's eye he already saw wharves, merchants' offices, warehouses, residences. After acquiring Magnolio, Lee told Was.h.i.+ngton that he wished to buy land in the Dismal Swamp. On the same principle by which a Potomac ca.n.a.l raised the value of Great Falls property, a Dismal Swamp ca.n.a.l would make property near Suffolk and Lake Drummond worth even more than it already was. Lee mentioned the tracts purchased jointly by Was.h.i.+ngton, Fielding Lewis, and Dr. Thomas Walker in 1764 and 1766, which he would be glad to get.

As Was.h.i.+ngton was inaugurated in New York, the April 1789 issue of The Columbian Magazine The Columbian Magazine in Philadelphia published part of the elder William Byrd's proposal for draining the Dismal Swamp. This version included Byrd's description of the swamp and his argument for the benefits of draining it. The contributor, who could have obtained the text only by visiting Westover and copying it or by getting someone else to do so, omitted the last section of the ma.n.u.script. In that part, Byrd described how easily the project might expand in ten years from twenty slaves to three hundred, while financing itself, generating profits, and increasing the price of shares tenfold. in Philadelphia published part of the elder William Byrd's proposal for draining the Dismal Swamp. This version included Byrd's description of the swamp and his argument for the benefits of draining it. The contributor, who could have obtained the text only by visiting Westover and copying it or by getting someone else to do so, omitted the last section of the ma.n.u.script. In that part, Byrd described how easily the project might expand in ten years from twenty slaves to three hundred, while financing itself, generating profits, and increasing the price of shares tenfold.

In remarks upon this text the ”correspondent” cared less about Byrd's plan to drain the swamp than about Byrd's foresight in suggesting a ca.n.a.l to connect the Pasquotank River of North Carolina with the Elizabeth River of Virginia. The contributor used Byrd to endorse the projected new Dismal Swamp ca.n.a.l. ”The advantages...must be obviously great to the community in general.” One of America's leading periodicals in the nation's largest city in effect advertised that the Dismal Swamp and land along the Elizabeth River were about to become sites of a boom in commerce and real estate.

Busied with establis.h.i.+ng a new government and disillusioned by the failure of his attempts since 1784 to revive the Dismal Swamp Company, George Was.h.i.+ngton no longer devoted time to promoting the Nansemond County prosperity he had predicted for the previous twenty-five years. The active partners were David Jameson, David Meade, Joseph Hornsby, and William Nelson, Jr. Jameson's nephew, John, called on Was.h.i.+ngton in New York during his first year as president, and they conversed about the Dismal Swamp Company. Was.h.i.+ngton said that he ”did not expect ever to meet the Company again.” He asked David Jameson to represent him. Late in the year, Was.h.i.+ngton appointed William Nelson, Jr., as United States attorney for the Virginia District. By giving the office to a man who had opposed ratification of the Const.i.tution, Was.h.i.+ngton rea.s.sured Antifederalists that they would not be proscribed. Soon after moving back to Richmond, however, Nelson learned that the unsalaried office yielded little income in fees. He did not hold it long.

John Driver's reports to David Jameson, written from Suffolk, complained about the partners' neglect of the Dismal Swamp Company. Driver had difficulty finding a competent overseer for Dismal Plantation. In the spring of 1789 he dismissed one who would not ”do right.” For months no white man lived there. Driver gave the t.i.tle ”foreman” to ”one of the old fellows” who had not left with the British. Driver visited the plantation two or three times a week. The small group of black people followed their annual routine of producing rice and corn, cleaning and mending ditches to increase the size of their crops. Driver wrote to Jameson: ”If you think the owners of the Swamp do not intend to put any more hands there I wou'd wish to have nothing more to do with it. The place is so much out of order & such a heavy Tax to pay & nothing made I am tired of the business.” Nansemond County encroachers entered the company's land, cut down trees, and hauled them away. Before the end of the summer, Driver chose Demsey Smith, a man he barely knew, as an interim overseer and warned Jameson to find another manager: ”I have a very great notion of going next Summer to the Western Country.” Four years of trips from Suffolk into the Dismal Swamp made Kentucky look inviting.

In the first days of 1790, Major John Simon Farley arrived in Norfolk from Antigua. He was forty-three. He had not heeded the urgent advice of his late uncle to resign from the British Army in order to protect his interest in the Land of Eden and in land along the northeastern margin of the Dismal Swamp. Nevertheless, he and his sister, Elizabeth Morson, remembered their father's claim and a.s.serted it. Francis Farley's daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Farley Dunbar, and her four daughters ought not to keep for themselves all the riches of Norfolk County plantations and the Land of Eden. Major Farley believed that Francis Farley had refrained from giving his nephew and niece t.i.tle to their share because he feared that all property of British subjects in America would be confiscated. The holdings stayed safely intact by remaining in the hands of American citizens, Farley's four granddaughters. The war was over; confiscations had ceased. If Elizabeth Dunbar and her daughters refused to divide the land, Major Farley stood ready to go to court in Virginia and North Carolina. He obtained a letter of introduction to a good attorney, St. George Tucker, and left Norfolk for Williamsburg.

In New York, on Thursday, March 4, 1790, George and Martha Was.h.i.+ngton gave a dinner for Vice President John Adams and the members of the Senate. The senators had deep disagreements over Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton's proposals for funding the public debts of the national and state governments. But Thursday afternoon's occasion was ”a dinner of dignity.” Senator Samuel Johnston of North Carolina had tried, twenty-five years earlier, to incommode the Dismal Swamp Company and force its partners to include the Campania Company in their huge antic.i.p.ated profits. In the Was.h.i.+ngtons' New York residence he drank excellent champagne and took after-dinner coffee with Martha Was.h.i.+ngton, ”a most amiable Woman.” At dinner the president looked grave. Between courses he played with his silverware, drumming on the table with a knife or fork. ”The President seemed to bear in his Countenance a settled Aspect of Melancholy.” The next day George Was.h.i.+ngton wrote to a kinsman in Virginia, describing his terms for selling some land in Gloucester County. He said that he wanted to sell, not lease to renters, ”having found, from experience, that estates at a distance plague more than they profit the Proprietors of them.”

The unaccountable failure of land in and near the Dismal Swamp to rise rapidly in value disappointed men who tried to emulate the foresight of the Dismal Swamp Company and to profit by the coming ca.n.a.l. Among these were Thomas Ruston and William Short. After coming into his fortune in 1785, Dr. Ruston returned to America to grow richer through land speculation. William Short, a friend and cla.s.smate of William Nelson, Jr.'s, went to France in October 1784 as secretary to the American legation. After Thomas Jefferson left Paris to become secretary of state, Short remained as charge d'affaires. He, too, wished to grow rich. Ruston failed, while Short succeeded, but neither profited from Nansemond and Norfolk counties.

Before Ruston gave his power of attorney to Samuel Gist and sailed from London, he received Hugh Williamson's reports on the Dismal Swamp and on two stretches of land along the Nansemond River. Williamson said that buying into the Dismal Swamp Company was ”impracticable. Several Gentlemen have told me that they had attempted in vain.” But Ruston's tracts of 600 acres and 300 acres were said to be worth 1,500 sterling, and 1,000 acres of the Dismal Swamp adjoining these tracts went for 75 per acre. Neither Williamson nor Ruston suggested that this disparity in price looked odd. Ruston reached Philadelphia in 1785 and visited Virginia late in 1787.

Preparing to sail for France at the age of twenty-five, William Short needed money. He had inherited property in North Carolina, which he sold to John Harvie, head of the Virginia Land Office. Harvie paid half the price in interest-bearing Virginia land certificates and half in land-a two-thirds interest in 15,000 acres in Kentucky and a deed to 1,000 acres of the Green Sea in the Dismal Swamp. Short later wrote of the deal: ”I think I must have been in a kind of delirium.” In his mind's eye he saw ”the best 15000 acres of all the western country.” The Green Sea tract in Norfolk County, 1,000 acres of reeds adjoining Patrick Henry's holdings, Short pictured as ”worth their cover in gold.” He imagined the new ca.n.a.l cutting through his property. Harvie knew but did not say until years later that Green Sea lands were ”Immense ponds of Water which probably will not be Drained in a Century.” They had ”little Worth.” Almost thirty years after Short acquired the tract, its annual tax bill was $2.

Coming into money changed Dr. Thomas Ruston. He ”lost all the habits of innocence, friends.h.i.+p, and benevolence of his early life.” Instead of enjoying his freedom, he became greedy. He speculated wildly. By 1790 he had run through his fortune and was ”a Bankrupt out of jail.” His land adjoining the Dismal Swamp was occupied by tenants, who paid annual rents ranging from 1 10s. to 6 Virginia currency. The total payments for 1790 were less than 19. John Driver collected these, not charging Ruston a commission because the sums were ”trifling.” Even so, Ruston badgered both his attorney, William Nivison, and Driver with accusations and demands. He wished to sell the land, but he had difficulty understanding why tracts with an a.s.sessed value of slightly less than 1 per acre did not find buyers at a price of 6 per acre. In desperate straits, Ruston sought rescue through matrimony, courting two of Philadelphia's richest widows. They treated him with ”every possible indignity.... He was the object of the contempt and pity of the whole city.”

Cyrus Griffin was the new federal judge for the Virginia District. For sittings of the United States Circuit Court he was joined by one or two justices of the Supreme Court. They first sat alternately in Williamsburg and Charlottesville, but in 1791 they settled in Richmond. Griffin opened his court in the capitol in Richmond on Tuesday, December 15, 1789. This new venue offered an opportunity for John Wickham, a twenty-seven-year-old attorney, to move from Williamsburg to Richmond. When people spoke of him, the word ”clever” came to mind. His uncle was Edmund Fanning, loyalist politician and soldier, who in 1771 had gone to New York with Governor William Tryon and endured the drunken wrath of Lord Dunmore. Wickham had held a commission in a loyalist regiment at the end of the war, and had been taken prisoner near Roanoke, Virginia, while carrying British dispatches from New York to Charleston. His ”extreme youth” and ”the interest of influential citizens” helped him escape punishment. In 1783 he feared that ”the Disposition for Persecution” would prevent him from living in America, but in December 1785 he arrived in Williamsburg to study law with St. George Tucker and George Wythe. He remained there through 1789, practicing law, living next door to Tucker, building a library of law books.

John Marshall was eight years older than Wickham; he had practiced law in Richmond for six years when Wickham was admitted to the Virginia bar. To a person who needed an attorney in Williamsburg in 1789 he recommended Wickham as ”a young man of great cleaverness.” Marshall's lank, lounging, relaxed appearance did not look formidable at first sight. Yet he was a leader of the Richmond bar by the time the federal court opened and Wickham moved to Richmond.

Richmond, William Byrd's city at the falls of the James, was growing. In 1790 it held more than 3,700 residents-about 2,000 whites and 1,700 blacks. It looked raw. Dirt streets ran uphill from the north bank of the river. Wind raised clouds of dust and rain made thick mud. Wharves and buildings near the river were wooden structures, newly rebuilt after a recent fire. People in trade lived near the river; attorneys, state officials, and richer people lived up the hill. There a new capitol building was slowly rising, which would, Thomas Jefferson hoped, teach Americans cla.s.sical taste in architecture. A British merchant visiting Richmond said of the structure: ”I wish instead of laying out their money so ridiculously that they would first pay the British debts.” The old capitol, near the river, looked like a barn. Delegates and senators attended their noisy sessions dressed in the same clothes they wore in their fields. To a resident of London, Richmond was ”one of the dirtiest holes of a place I ever was in.”

To the extent that a young attorney could afford to specialize, John Wickham devoted his practice to debts. He represented British creditors suing Virginians in federal court. His colleagues at the bar-John Marshall, Bushrod Was.h.i.+ngton, William Nelson, Jr., and others-also took such cases. Marshall represented debtors; Wickham found his best clients among creditors. After Wickham consented to pursue debts owed to the House of Norton, Charles Grymes, a collection agent, congratulated John Hatley Norton on his new attorney, saying: ”he appears to be exceedingly cleaver.” Unlike Marshall, Wickham stayed out of politics. Nevertheless, his early life as a loyalist earned him a reputation as a Tory, which served him well in attracting British clients. He had neither Marshall's ease and cogency nor Patrick Henry's dramatic voice and gestures, but he was witty, urbane, genteel, with beautiful elocution, able to ”gild and decorate the darkest subjects.” He thought fast on his feet, adjusting smoothly to surprises in court. William Nelson, Jr., called him ”the most acute and quick man at the bar.” Though Wickham looked younger than his years and seemed lighthearted, he knew how to make his meaning clear through the mask of his politesse. He wrote to a client's debtor: ”I shall feel much pleasure if I find it unnecessary to have recourse to coercive measures.”

Wickham successfully sued the estate of Robert Munford for more than 2,000 sterling. He represented many British firms, among them William Jones of Farell & Jones. While William Anderson & Company retained John Marshall, Samuel Gist chose Wickham. For receiving payment from debtors and transferring the money to creditors, he charged a commission of 5 percent. For collecting through litigation, he charged 10 percent. His practice in 1791 was ”much more profitable...than it had ever been before.” People spoke of him as ”the famous lawyer.” On Christmas Eve he and his cousin, Mary Smith Fanning, were married. In the following years his practice continued ”to grow more and more profitable.” He and John Marshall built large brick houses on the hill.

In June 1790, William Jones, acting through his Virginia attorney Jerman Baker, later joined by John Wickham and others, brought suit against Dr. Thomas Walker in the United States Circuit Court for the Virginia District. This was one of thirty cases Jones began in the court's first three terms. The suit alleged that Dr. Walker owed Farell & Jones 2,903 15s. 8d. sterling. In December, Francis Walker and John Walker appeared in court for their father. Arguments did not take place until the last week of November 1791. The federal courts' decision on Dr. Walker would govern pending and future suits for debts to British merchants contracted before the war. On the bench were Judge Cyrus Griffin and two justices of the Supreme Court, Thomas Johnson and John Blair. Each side was represented by four attorneys. For the plaintiff: John Wickham, Jerman Baker, Andrew Ronald, and Burwell Starke. For the defendant: Patrick Henry, John Marshall, Alexander Campbell, and James Innes. Arguments lasted more than a week. Dr. Walker's attorneys resorted to the usual pleas: that the dissolution of the colonial government ended the obligation; that British property was forfeit to the state; that Virginia law prohibited recovery; that, in accordance with wartime state law, he had paid his debt to the Virginia Loan Office rather than to his creditor; that the British still owed Virginians compensation for slaves who had left with the British Army; that the British violated the treaty of peace by keeping troops south of the Great Lakes. Patrick Henry, after uncharacteristically vigorous research, went further, giving a long, erudite, impa.s.sioned argument designed to raise the matter of Dr. Walker's debt to a question of the nature of man and of nations. Although the Court gave no decision, the attorneys impressed even the skeptical. William Nelson, Jr., wrote: ”I did not think so much could have been said against their payment.” While others praised Henry's eloquence and scholars.h.i.+p, Nelson noticed the attorneys of the future: ”Campbell & Wickham are young men of great talents.” Most listeners, even those who owed nothing to Britons, ”thought there could not be a recovery.”

The court delayed its ruling. Patrick Henry returned to Richmond with his little brown wig in May 1792, ready ”to harangue 'em on the impropriety of paying.” Justice James Wilson of the Supreme Court and Judge Griffin sat for only a week, ignoring more than one hundred debt cases. A creditor's attorney heard Wilson say to Henry in a hall of the capitol: ”Mr. Henry it will not be necessary for you to attend longer, as we decline going into the general question.”

In the spring of 1793, Judge Griffin, Chief Justice John Jay, and Justice James Iredell heard arguments in another suit for a debt owed to Farell & Jones. William Jones had died, waiting for his money. John Tyndale Warre, or Ware, pursued the firm's debtors. In the case of Ware Ware v. v. Hylton Hylton, the court struck down all but one of the debtors' arguments. Griffin and Iredell outvoted Jay in accepting the plea of wartime payment into the state Loan Office. Since few debtors had made such payments, creditors could win many cases. In 1793 verdicts were given in sixty-eight cases of British debts; plaintiffs won fifty-two. Three years later the Supreme Court reversed Griffin and Iredell on the Loan Office question, disallowing Virginians' last defense. By then Dr. Walker had died.

Many debts went uncollected for lack of proof. Nor did winning verdicts necessarily mean receiving money. But John Wickham did well for Samuel Gist, as did Gist's agent for collections, Thomas Sh.o.r.e. Wickham and Sh.o.r.e recovered and remitted ”large sums.” These did not appear in the ledgers Gist submitted in pursuit of compensation from the Crown for his losses in America as a loyal subject of the king.

The race for the hand of the first of Francis Farley's four Virginia granddaughters, the young widow Elizabeth Farley Banister, ended in victory for Thomas Lee s.h.i.+ppen. Though a Pennsylvanian, he was also a Lee. His mother, Alice Lee s.h.i.+ppen, was a sister of the well-known Lee brothers-William, Arthur, Richard Henry, and Francis Lightfoot-and the aunt of Henry Lee's wife, Matilda. Thomas s.h.i.+ppen toured Virginia after the war, visiting Williamsburg, Rosewell, Westover, and Richmond.

s.h.i.+ppen's father sent him to London in the summer of 1786 to study law at the Inner Temple, but he showed more interest in women. On Tuesday, October 3, he went to Drury Lane Theatre for a performance of Venice Preserv'd Venice Preserv'd. Lord North, his wife, and their two daughters sat in one of the boxes. Seeing Sarah Siddons in a gray satin gown, a woman in the audience thought: ”Belvidera takes the stage in the part of wife and daughter, and acts with a truth which charms and ravishes.” After Belvidera went mad, s.h.i.+ppen could hardly contain himself. He wrote of Mrs. Siddons: ”I have indeed beheld, I have heard, I have felt, through my whole system felt her.... In the mad scene she was particularly great, and in the cry of murder, piercing to the most phlegmatic breast.” Returning to Philadelphia, s.h.i.+ppen nominally practiced law, but he welcomed an opportunity to visit Virginia in the autumn of 1790.

s.h.i.+ppen's uncles entertained him on the Northern Neck, between the Potomac and the Rappahannock. With them he visited Stratford Hall, where they and s.h.i.+ppen's mother had lived as children. Matilda Lee had died the previous month, and Henry Lee was not at home. At the center of the mansion s.h.i.+ppen sat in the elegant room that connected its two wings. He looked at portraits of his late uncle, Philip Ludwell Lee, of his grandfather and grandmother, Thomas and Hannah Ludwell Lee, of his great-grandfather and great-grandmother, Richard and Laet.i.tia Corbin Lee, and of the first Richard, one of Virginia's largest landholders at his death in 1664, and of his wife. s.h.i.+ppen wrote to his father: ”I dwelt with rapture on the pictures of Stratford and felt so strong an inclination to kneel to that of my grandfather.” In his travels along the James River, among Carters and Byrds, he met Elizabeth Banister, the Antigua and Dismal Swamp Company heiress. She had held out against her suitors for more than a year. She accepted Thomas Lee s.h.i.+ppen. He need no longer pretend to practice law. He wrote to his father: ”We shall be comfortably independent I think at least.”

s.h.i.+ppen returned to Virginia early in 1791 for the wedding, which took place at Nesting on the evening of Thursday, March 10. Bishop James Madison, president of the College of William and Mary, came from Williamsburg to perform the ceremony. The bridegroom called himself ”the happiest of men,” married to ”the loveliest and best of women.” Within six weeks Elizabeth s.h.i.+ppen was pregnant. Mary Willing Byrd felt sorry to see the young couple leave for Philadelphia, but she knew that Thomas would be happier there ”than he possibly can be in this unpolished Country.”

Thomas Lee s.h.i.+ppen took an interest in the Dismal Swamp, the Land of Eden, Major John Simon Farley's lawsuits, and the Mercers Creek plantation in Antigua. During the 1790s the labor of the Mercers Creek slaves on cane fields, sugar boilers, and rum distilleries yielded an average annual payment of more than 430 sterling to each of Francis Farley's four granddaughters. Elizabeth and Thomas s.h.i.+ppen bought a country estate about 17 miles northeast of Philadelphia on a hill overlooking the road to Trenton and the toll bridge across Neshaminy Creek. She named the place ”Farley.” Their first child, a boy named for Thomas s.h.i.+ppen's father, was born in January 1792. Planning for his son's future, Thomas s.h.i.+ppen paid $750 for three shares in the Dismal Swamp Ca.n.a.l Company.