George Washington's Ghost

“Here, in this city, reside the criminals who have led us to this sad pass; the men in Government House who will surely tax us to kingdom come to pay for their blunders!”

Pennsylvanians tended to be a lot harder-headed about most things than their southern brothers and sisters. For example, nobody in the colony fondly cast their minds back to the slave-owning past, and modern industry, shipping and commerce had long ago made the colony prosperous. There were none of the ghettos and poverty-stricken backwaters one found in most Virginian cities, and in the north the old plantations had been replaced by modern arable and cattle farms. In the south, Virginian agriculture still depended on cotton and tobacco, on vast estates dependent on a large number of low-paid workers, many first or second generation Hispanics from Cuba and Santo Domingo, or the descendants of African slaves, most of whom were trapped in the southern colonies by penal indentures, or for the want of education and the skills necessary to find employment in the factories and offices of the middle and upper colonies of the East Coast, most of whom denied welfare and Poor Law support to ‘outsiders’.

The Royal Navy had long been the biggest single employer in Virginia and the Carolinas, coincidentally, those same colonies the least taxed, per head of their populations, of any of the First ‘Fifteen’ for much of the twentieth century. In Philadelphia, the man or the woman on the street, insofar as they thought about it at all, was not preoccupied with how much tax they paid but by how little some of the other colonies, like Virginia, for all its complacent superiority and sneering condescension of its neighbours, paid!

Roger Lee may, or may not have been aware of this. He was not a man who read widely, if at all, or who was not known for his capacity for original thought. Like many career politicians he was always too preoccupied looking for the next wagon to hitch his horse to. Politics was the game he played to give his life meaning, because nothing else ever had.

He talked a lot about his family but his wife, Emily Beauregard Lee, was a semi-recluse hardly ever leaving the family’s vast Arlington Estates – which straddled the Potomac for several miles north and south of Arlington itself – and his five surviving children; idle, spoiled brats aged between twenty-one and thirty-four, of whom the eldest, Jackson, now an independently wealthy sometime merchant banker, was the only one who had threatened to make anything of himself, and tellingly, had estranged himself from the clan in recent years.

Roger had been perfectly happy to escort potential New Granadan, Mexicans as they called themselves, and Cuban tobacco-men clients around his plantations before the Empire Day atrocities, and afterwards. In fact, the man had been positively pro-Spanish – even to the degree of learning a smattering of conversational Spanish – until that was, he discovered that his spinster sister, Amelia had supposedly had a ‘dalliance’ with the then Spanish Ambassador in Philadelphia, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, whom he had publicly challenged to a duel.

That affair had laid him low for a while.

Not least because, much to Roger Lee’s surprise, the Spaniard had responded by offering to give him ‘satisfaction’ either with the sword or the pistol ‘on the field of honour’.

Suddenly, Roger had dropped out of sight, re-emerging eventually after his attorneys had allegedly advised him that ‘reluctantly, I must decline Medina-Sidonia’s challenge on legal grounds’.

Amelia, a bookish, plain woman in her forties who had been completely under her brother’s thumb, having lived in his house all her adult life, had since struck out on her own, in the last year publishing a book of short stories for children, and two slim volumes of what her agent called ‘English-style country verses’. There were even rumours of further ‘dalliances’, titillatingly for the tabloid press, almost exclusively with younger men. It had also transpired that under the terms of her and Roger’s father’s will; forty-nine percent of the family’s estates had been left to her and her descendants, in perpetuity, a thing which had never been a problem while she was unmarried, and a near-recluse companion for Emily Beauregard Lee.

All in all, the ‘Spanish affair’, now some thirty months ago, still had a lot of people smirking behind their hands whenever Roger E. Lee’s name was mentioned.

A more empathetic, less thick-skinned man would have found it intolerable but Roger, once he had dodged – quite literally – the bullet in declining to meet the Duke of Medina Sidonia on the field of honour, had carried on as before.

Which only went to show that if he had ever been a man motivated by idealism, patriotism or fellow feeling; these days he was just in it for himself. He had no scruples about lighting a fire under the respectable, oh-so-superior burgers of Philadelphia.