Beggarman, Spy (The Israel Potter Series)

By David Chacko

Beggarman, Spy takes you into a world where biography is history, and both are filled with lies. Truth is stranger than fiction, but what happens when the truth is fiction?

An old soldier told his life story to a writer. It is one of the most famous of the American Revolutionary period—or any other—but what is revealed in Beggarman, Spy will change the way we look at everything we thought we knew.

Who was the man called Israel Potter? Is that even his real name? Is his story really his, or is it what he wanted us to know? Is the truth a scandal that was never really known, but can be now?

Yes, it is. Read on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Foremost Press
• Release date: Oct 11, 2010
• ISBN: 9781936154494

David Chacko

A lot of what a writer does at the desk is the result of research being plugged into what happened every day of his life up to that point. Where he's born doesn't mean a lot except that's part of what he brings to the work. So let's say I was born in a small town in Western Pennsylvania where the coal mines closed thirty years before, then let's say that I found my way to New York and Ohio and New England and Florida and Istanbul with lot of stops along the way. I don't remember much about most of those places except that I was there in all of them and I was thinking. One of the things I was thinking about, because I'm always thinking about it, is the way people and governments lie to themselves and others. Those two thing--the inside and the outside of the truth--might be the same thing, really. That place of seeming contradictions is where I live. And that's where every last bit of The Satan Machine comes from. The lies piled up around the attempted assassination of the pope like few events in the history of man. Most of it had to do with geopolitics, especially those strange days when the world was divided into two competing blocs that were both sure they were right in trying to dominate. So an event that was put through the gigantic meat grinder was one that would be mangled nearly forever. That's what I've been thinking about--the hamburger, so to speak. The results will be told in several blog entries from my website, so you might want to mosey over to www.davidchacko.com. I can guarantee you a good time.

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BEGGARMAN, SPY

The Secret Life and Times of Israel Potter

David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar

Published by Foremost Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar

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PART ONE:

ISRAEL POTTER: GENESIS OF A LEGEND

HIS STORY

In 1823, an old man returned to America after nearly fifty years exile from his native land. In the first year of the Revolutionary War—during the hard winter of 1775—Israel Potter had been taken prisoner off a ship of the fledgling American Navy. He and his shipmates were transported to England and imprisoned by the British. Potter managed to escape confinement, taking to the countryside and surviving many vicissitudes, but in all that time he never returned home.

He was about seventy years old when he appeared at Henry Trumbull’s print shop on High Street in Providence, Rhode Island, the town nearest to where Potter had been born. Exhausted and broke, he had only a story to tell. He told it to Trumbull. The result of their meeting was a literary collaboration released to the public in early 1824 as a slim paperback book—a dime novel selling for twenty-eight cents. The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter went through three printings, circulating in the Providence area and eventually being sold from pushcarts all over the East.

This is the genesis of the story that has been called one of the strangest ever made known. The Magazine of American History made that claim, but Potter’s biography has fascinated readers (and writers) from its first day of publication. A real life tale has seldom been as haunting as his, and never at such variance with the raw material of the American Dream.

His story is more than strange. It’s a one-man exodus from America to distant parts when nearly everyone is headed the opposite way. As a young man, forbidden to pursue his love for a neighboring girl, Potter runs away from his home in Cranston and travels to the North Country of Vermont. He attacks the wilderness with his strong back, hunting game for food, trapping for fur, clearing land, and trading with the Indians. One of the early pioneers on that rugged frontier, he prospers well enough to return to Rhode Island and claim the girl he left behind.

Unfortunately, Potter finds that the money he made in the North Woods does not win him his woman. Disappointed in love again, he leaves Rhode Island a second time, signing aboard ship as a seaman. On what is supposed to be a routine trading voyage to the Caribbean, Potter’s vessel catches fire and burns at sea. A castaway, he is taken up by a passing ship and eventually carried into the island of St. Eustatius in the West Indies. From there Potter finds a berth on a whaling ship, and later another whaler, hunting leviathan over the seven seas, before he returns home again and turns his hand to farming.

But the world will not let him be. Potter returns to Rhode Island near the turn of the year 1774-75, the most pivotal time in American history. The events that are about to take place in Massachusetts will change the life of more than one small farmer. Potter joins the local militia as a Minuteman and answers the call of the Lexington Alarm when it sounds throughout the colonies. He marches to Boston, where the British Army is all but besieged by the colonial militia. Later, he fights in the Battle of Bunker Hill and is twice wounded.

After recovering from his wounds, Potter again answers the call for volunteers when he signs on board a ship called the brigantine Washington. Named for the newly appointed commander of the American forces, the Washington is one of the first vessels to bear an American flag. After outfitting in Plymouth, she sets sail only to be captured after a short cruise by a British warship.

In defiance of convention, the Washington’s people are not held for exchange, but put aboard another British ship as prisoners of the Crown and carried across the Atlantic to Portsmouth, England. While they are prisoner, smallpox breaks out among the crew. The Washington’s people suffer grievously in terrible conditions. Many of them die as they wait for the disease to run its course.

Potter is one of the lucky men who escape the outbreak of smallpox. Shortly afterward, he escapes imprisonment, using his ingenuity and plentiful luck. Plunging pell-mell into a hostile countryside, Potter lives as a fugitive until he encounters members of the British radical underground. These Friends of America, who oppose King George’s war against his American colonies, give Potter refuge and put him on a new course—this time as a spy.

Potter becomes a secret courier between the English underground and the American Mission in France. Carrying messages in the heel of his boot, he succeeds in making contact with Benjamin Franklin, the American Commissioner in Paris, and surreptitiously passes on intelligence. He does this twice, making the dangerous crossing in wartime to aid his country. On his second return from France, however, Potter is stranded when diplomatic relations between the two countries are suspended.

No longer able to continue his espionage missions, Potter stays on in the homeland of his enemy as a fugitive, living as best he can. Three years later, he is called upon one last time to contact the American envoy Henry Laurens, who has been imprisoned in the Tower of London after his ship, too, is captured by the British. Potter completes that mission at the request of his friends in the anti-war underground, but from that point he goes forward no more.

Potter continues to live in London as a refugee who has learned English ways. He marries a local woman who bears him nine children, only one of whom survives. He holds various low-paying jobs until he ends his days roaming the streets of London, crying Old Chairs to Mend. He follows the trades of chair-mender, brick-maker and rag-picker for almost fifty years. Living among the lowest reaches of his sworn enemy, Israel Potter endures.

* * *

That is the outline, the time-whitened bones of one of the strangest stories ever made known.

And how is that done? How are biographical stories, the fundamental building blocks of history—or its mortar—made known? When Israel Potter returned to his native land, he was nearly blind from a lifetime of mending chairs and baseline survival. Even if he had full sight, he probably would have signed his name with an X. He signed his pension application that way.

Israel Potter was no Homer, even with Henry Trumbull thrown into the bargain, and his story no Iliad. An Odyssey, perhaps. Not a bad one, but by every measure a very strange one.

And who really knew what the writer in Henry Trumbull added to this tale? He was a practiced biographer and by no means a bashful one. The most consistent accusation against him is that he resorted to his imagination more often than fact. A writer who was also a printer was a man who could employ poetic license without the poetry. A man in a hurry, let’s say. Trumbull did not have the time to refine his stories, as the original Homer had.

But what do we know about the Homer of legend? He was certainly not the man who first spun the tales. That man died hundreds of years before the Iliad and Odyssey took shape. The original storyteller was simply an old soldier who had been spendthrift with his plunder, or cheated of it, and was reduced to telling his story—and the stories of other men—for the price of his bed and board. He may have been blind, or his blindness may have been a metaphor for his condition. Eventually, someone like Trumbull comes along, as he always does, a man with a better than average way with words, and makes the stories all of a piece. He turns the roar of blood into an Iliad, the lost wanderings into an Odyssey, and the facts do not matter.

The facts can even get in the way of a good story. Herman Melville, one of the greatest American writers of fiction, recognized that when in 1854—thirty years after the publication of The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter—he decided to rewrite the memoir as a novel.

After carrying the book around for several years, Melville attacked the story with his usual energy. He added and subtracted freely from the memoir, making Potter a man of Massachusetts (where Melville lived at the time), and stretching the chronology of the story considerably. In addition to Potter’s adventures, Melville put his hero with the great figure of John Paul Jones as he raided the coasts of Britain and fought enemy warships to the death.

For the adventure with Jones, Melville grafted onto Potter’s story the memoir of Nathaniel Fanning, another American seaman who had been stranded in England during the Revolutionary War. It made a comfortable fit. Melville was an experienced seaman whose best books revolved around the life of the sea. If he could have found more authentic narratives of the revolution to conform to his plot, he might have used those, too. Absurdity did not matter because Melville cast his Israel Potter as a comedy. The gallery of American heroes from Benjamin Franklin to Captain Jones came within range of his satiric eye.

Melville, an experienced traveler and critical reader, may also have detected a note of counterfeit in these true stories. If he knew anything of Trumbull’s work, Melville understood that the wisest course was to treat Potter’s life as he would any tall tale. The facts were flexible. Believing Trumbull’s stories was less a matter of mistaking the dream for reality than a cartoon for it.

So Melville wrote his narrative quickly and outrageously. The figure of Israel Potter took on the shape of a Sad Sack—as it remains to this day. The primary source on which the novel was based—The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter—faded into obscurity.

Melville was certainly wise to play loose with Potter’s story. Evidence suggests that the collaboration of Trumbull and Potter produced a document in which the truth ran a distant second to dramatic necessity as well as more personal considerations. Although the memoir purports to be a factual account of one man’s life, it reads more like the blend of event and imagination that is known as a good story. It may be called a docudrama or a nonfiction novel or anything at all, for in the end it’s the narrative and how it’s told that matters. Well we know that heroes are made, not born. Often, they are made by writers manipulating facts.

It’s hard to tell where a writer steps over the line between fact and invention in search of a good narrative. Probably, only that man knows when it happens, and even he may be unsure. In the figure of Henry Trumbull there stands one of the most practiced liars in American history. He could have been called America’s first novelist if he had not insisted that those weird tales were true. No one has ever been able to tell if reality was Trumbull’s crutch or his downfall.

By the time he met Israel Potter in 1823, Trumbull was already in his mid-forties with a growing family to support and a business that fluctuated from glory to bankruptcy in a disturbingly consistent rhythm. Trumbull already had many true life chapbooks to his credit, nearly all produced by his own printing house in the various places where he had lived.

Trumbull was a well-traveled man about early America. Born in Stonington, Connecticut in 1781 but raised in Norwich, he was a Revolutionary War baby who was too young to have seen the war but well placed to hear the stories as he grew up. Trumbull would always be in a position to hear those and other lively tales. His father, John, was one of the founders of the Norwich Packet, the only newspaper in that colonial town. News came through the front door of his waterside office and went out the back with seldom a pause for revision.

When the War of Rebellion broke out in early 1775, John’s two partners in the newspaper were suspected of Tory sympathies and persuaded to leave Norwich by the patriots of the town. They never returned to claim their share of the enterprise. John ran the paper until his death in 1802. Afterward, the Norwich Packet was renamed the Connecticut Sentinel by John’s widow Lucy. It was managed by her son Charles until Henry came of age.

In 1804, Henry Trumbull, all of twenty-one, became the publisher of the Norwich Sentinel. By 1807, the newspaper was bankrupt and out of business. Henry remained in Norwich for seven more years, keeping the paper’s printing press busy by publishing almanacs, sermons, and etceteras. He also wrote one major work, History of the Discovery of America, or History of the Indian Wars.

This history was Trumbull’s first excursion into the vortex of imagination and fact. A sensational account of the bloody, unsparing troubles between white man and red in New England, it exploited every literary and racist cliché known to early America. In addition to its deficiencies as a history, the book is said to contain as many as twenty-two chronological errors on a single page.

The number seems staggering, but is apparently true. Though The Indian Wars sold fairly well, Trumbull continued to experience financial difficulties. He mortgaged the shares in his father’s estate to a local merchant three times over a period of several years. Finally, he sold out the business to his brother Gurdon Trumbull, a man who was destined for greater things. From his base in Stonington, Connecticut, Gurdon eventually expanded his interests in the shipping trades, banks and railroads, until he emerged as one of the earliest American tycoons.

What laid one of the foundations of brother Gurdon’s empire gave Henry the means to put Norwich behind him. By 1815, after a short mysterious stay in Hartford, Connecticut, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he set up shop in the biggest and busiest city in Federal America.

Boston and other American cities were beginning to have what they had never known before—urban masses. The prosperity that followed the War of 1812, the advent of industrialization, and increasing immigration, meant that the streets of the young nation were alive with potential readers who were primed for adventurous tales plucked from the life of the frontier and the sea. Trumbull put his pen and presses to work cranking out chapbooks such as The Narrative of the Shipwreck and Unparalleled Sufferings of Mrs. Sarah Allen, The Life and Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon [sic], and The Captivity and Suffering of Thomas Nicholson.

Chapbooks were usually short (though not always cheap) offerings sold by peddlers called chapmen. The distribution of Trumbull’s works by their hand was quick and efficient. Like newspapers, chapbooks hit the streets as soon as the ink was dry by way of a sales force that did not have to be kept on the payroll.

Although the chapbooks often sold well, they did not have great shelf life, even though Trumbull’s writings touched every depravity from disaster at sea to (in the case of Mrs. Allen) cannibalism. Atrocity, narrow escape, and the will of God were used to milk the same sympathies that today are milked by atrocity, narrow escape, and sex.

Trumbull never gave up trying to expand his audience with new approaches. In some ways, he reached the logical end of his career when in 1817 in Boston he began to publish, along with an associate named Nathaniel Coverly, a weekly paper that promoted gossip and partisan politics. Called The Idiot, the paper ran uninterrupted for two years, a surprising length of time in view of its contents.

The paper’s circulation was never great, and the competition fierce, but the nub of the problem was that Trumbull used The Idiot to regale his audience with literary creations of his design. One of them, later published as a chapbook, was Western Immigration, the Journal of Doctor Jeremiah Simpleton, a propagandistic dialogue that railed against the evils of leaving New England for the new lands of the West. It marked a low even by Trumbull’s elastic standards.

Trumbull was never the man to be tempted by the pioneering spirit except when trampling the boundaries of fact. He never left the welcoming cradle of civilization that had grown up on the Northeastern seaboard of America, though he did search out nearly all its corners. Trumbull survived another year and more in Boston before he headed to Providence. There, he found more opportunities to exploit his audience. His production increased, building to a crescendo in the late 1820s.

Although Trumbull found his métier in Providence, sometimes the small books meant to provoke publicity and awe were touched by the stench of the unholy. Trumbull’s most successful effort was a chapbook he published in Providence in 1829 called The Life and Adventures of Robert, the Hermit of Massachusetts, Who has Lived Fourteen Years in a Cave, Secluded from Human Society. Not only was Robert Voorhis a hermit, but his early life was nearly as peripatetic as Israel Potter’s. A runaway slave who had two families and many adventures at sea, Robert finally retired to a cave (or hut), on the Seekonk River near Providence after he learned that his first family had vanished, presumed to be dead.

But there was more to the provenance of this strange tale. The article on which Trumbull based Robert’s story had first appeared in The Literary Cadet in 1826, written by a local newsman, Sylvester Southworth. Although the two men collaborated on the book that finally became The Wild Boy, Southworth in a later article disputed the veracity of the story and the claim of authorship that Trumbull had made. Southworth insisted that Trumbull had distorted the facts so when it came out of the press I could not recognize it. He further asserted that his collaborator had practiced a calculated fraud to realize a smug little fortune from it.

But the most damaging thing Southworth said was that Trumbull had cynically generated a scheme to burn down Robert’s famous hut (or cave) to create publicity for the publication of his story. Scholarship in the twentieth century has validated many of Southworth’s claims, coming to the conclusion that Trumbull perpetrated an elaborate hoax while making a significant amount of money from the story of an impoverished black man.

Fortunately for Trumbull, these revelations were not publicized in his lifetime. He made the story of Robert Voorhis his only foray into Black History and he seemed not to have much interest in the subject except to exploit it. Trumbull made no comment on the vicious Hardscrabble race riots that took place in Providence in 1824, perhaps because he was busy bringing Israel Potter’s story to the masses at the time.

The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter did not do as well as The Wild Boy would do later, but the writing apparently went easy. All Trumbull had to do was put down the things the old man told him. And what if the author embroidered here and there? The story was basically true. Trumbull, who lied so well, could smell the truth. It smelled like money. He bought a new house off the proceeds of the chapbook and did not begin mortgaging it again for a while.

Throughout the decades of the twenties and thirties, Trumbull rode his success in Providence as the publicist of the bizarre and mock heroic, while he pursued his steadier trade as a book and job printer. He continued to churn out the sermons that brought him respectability as well as the tongue-in-cheek narratives that found him a place as the ventriloquist of a nearly voiceless community. He did not leave town until 1838, completely broke, and he did not die until 1843—at Brooklyn, New York, where his brother Samuel took him in.

When Trumbull died, the Brooklyn Star carried his obituary as Henry Trumbull, author. That was remarkable. People had seldom said that when he was alive. The Star did not list Trumbull’s publications, any title of which was longer than the tombstones of ordinary men. Nor did it say that he spent all the money he made before ending his life as a guest in his brother’s home.

This, then, is the man who set down the life of Israel Potter. That incredible tale is so much a piece with Trumbull’s writing, so neatly fits the pattern of tall tale and shopworn melodrama, that an attempt to discover the truth of Potter’s existence at this late date seems unlikely.

But what if the old man’s story is really his?

And what if there were strange fantastic events in The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter of which Trumbull was unaware and which Melville never suspected? More important, what if there are good reasons why these things never came to light?

For that is the case. The true story of Israel Potter is more fascinating—and much darker—than anyone has ever known.

NATIVITY

The first sentence of The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter provides the key to understanding the early days of its subject and the narrative method employed in the Potter-Trumbull collaboration. It’s a statement of fact. I was born of reputable parents in the town of Cranston, State of Rhode Island, August 1st, 1744.

Actually, three facts are stated—time and place of birth, along with the guarantee of reputable parentage. Typically, one of the facts is correct, another wrong, and the third grossly exaggerated.

The question is why the inaccuracies occur, and who seeded them in the memoir. It does not seem likely that a man could mistake the date and place of his birth unless he had something to hide, but what if he did? And what if it’s a pattern that extends throughout the book?

The memoir does not give the names of Israel’s parents, saying only that they are reputable. Although the first sentence is formulaic, an authentication device that was often used in eighteenth century biography—and one that Trumbull had used before—the absence of names raises a question. Unless Trumbull was being paid by the word, which he was not, it was probably Potter who chose to use the word reputable. It’s the kind of thing that someone with less than reputable parentage would say. In doing so, he would point to exactly the thing he wanted to hide.

The direction it points is to Cranston, Rhode Island, which even today is a small city with few distinguishing features beyond the wonder of Narragansett Bay that forms its eastern boundary. In colonial times, Cranston was mostly countryside and farmland with not as much as a corduroy road connecting the interior to the sea. That included the area around city hall. These days, local government is housed in a building with more columns than it needs and more history than it seems to want. In its vaults are records of value to its citizens, and others of interest only to genealogists. It’s among the oldest that the truth can be found.

Israel Potter was born in Cranston in 1754.

There’s a discrepancy of ten years between the date in the memoir and the official records, but those were nothing to Trumbull. They were a stroke of the pen. The man made worse mistakes on affidavits.

Coincidentally, until 1754, Cranston had been the westernmost part of the city of Providence until it was split off as a separate town. For that reason the first years of the Cranston records are scanty. One of the few items that appear with surprising frequency concerns the birth of an illegitimate child.

His name was Israel Ralph. The boy was the son of Amey Ralph of said Cranston, single woman.

Amey Ralph, single woman, mother of Israel.

Israel Ralph Potter, son of reputable parents.

* * *

The reason for the misstatement is understandable to any compassionate reader. Clearly, Israel Potter tried to hide the less than reputable circumstances surrounding his birth with a lie that was not enough of a lie to escape detection. Being born a bastard was a handicap in colonial times, but even more so in the proper Federal Era where the old man found himself as he conveyed his life story to Trumbull.

About Amey Ralph not much is known. She appears in the records as the mother of Israel, then vanishes into the Ralph genealogy from which she never quite arises. Indeed, the Ralph genealogy for early Rhode Island is primarily a book with ellipses where the names of people should be. It points to the difficulty in tracing family lines that are less than prominent or reputable. In many cases, the poor did not rate so much as a headstone to mark their passage.

The mother does not appear to have raised her baby. No one knows if she survived childbirth, which in colonial times was a dangerous and often climactic event when puerperal fever took the lives of so many women. The records say nothing more about her or her son until in 1756, two years after the child’s birth, when the Town Council awarded William Westcott, a Cranston man, a small sum of money for boarding Israel Ralph and making and mending his clothes.

The infant Israel was farmed out by the Town Council, and these entries are the closest thing to a nativity for the boy as can be found. His early years were spent in the home of William and Christiana Westcott. The Westcotts, who owned land in Cranston, were married in 1749. They had already produced children of their own in a brood that eventually numbered seven.

In spite of the crowded life around him, Israel did not grow up in the happiest home in Rhode Island. William, the head of household, was well known as an enemy of temperance. He, too, can be found in the town records, condemned as a man who doth practice the evil curse of drunkenness which may tend to the ruin of himself and his family. Several years after receiving money for Israel’s maintenance, William’s vice was advertised to all the neighboring towns on the western side of Narragansett Bay when he was publicly labeled a Common Drunkard.

The unfortunate conditions surrounding the upbringing of Israel Ralph were not uncommon at the time. Certainly, the Westcott home does not sound much different than some of the foster homes where unwanted children are placed today. Bureaucracy grinds slowly as it grinds the child. So, too, the Cranston Town Council of the 1750s. They picked up the cost of caring for illegitimate children, but in a way that made the least demand on public funds. Whether the placement was beneficial to the child did not seem to weigh in their considerations.

If the child was to survive the largess of the Town Council, someone must be found to save him from the Westcotts. And, curiously, someone did turn up one day, benevolent and innocent, before the Town Council. His name was John Potter, an upright Quaker from the fertile farmland of Western Cranston.

John was the grandson of one of the original founders of the colony of Rhode Island and a man whose respectability could not be questioned. In