The Declaration of Independence reached the British Army the way most important news reaches most armies: under a beer.
Private Ned Hollis of His Majesty’s Forty-Something Regiment of Foot (the number had been explained to him twice, and both times he had nodded) set his pint down on it in a tavern on Staten Island on the twelfth of July, 1776, and did not notice for a quarter of an hour. It was a good flat piece of paper. It kept the table dry. As far as Ned was concerned, it was already the most useful thing the Continental Congress had ever produced.
The tavern was called the King’s Arms, because that summer on Staten Island it would have been unwise to call it anything else. It had a low ceiling, a hearth nobody needed in July, a loft where the hay used to be and an owl still was, and a keeper named Margaret Decker, a widow who had poured for Dutch farmers, French ferrymen, English magistrates and now ten thousand redcoats who had come ashore ten days earlier and been thirsty ever since. The island had sworn its loyalty to the King the week the army landed, nearly every man of it, and the King’s soldiers paid in coin. Mrs. Decker was loyal to coin. She had been loyal to coin under five royal governors and saw no reason to stop now.
That afternoon two of the King’s warships had run up the North River past the rebel batteries, and half the island had stood on the shore to listen. By evening the men in the King’s Arms had decided the war was going well, mostly on the strength of the noise.
Ned noticed the paper when he lifted his pint and the paper came with it.
“There’s writing on this.”
“There’s writing on everything,” said Private Gethin Evans, who could read his own name, the Lord’s Prayer and the word GIN, and considered himself a man of letters. He peeled the sheet off the bottom of Ned’s pint and held it to the candle. A ring of ale sat across the top of it like a seal. “IN CONGRESS,” Evans read, because those were the biggest letters.
Private Michael Dunphy looked up from the end of the bench with real interest. “Congress with who?”
“It doesn’t say.”
“Then it’s a poor advertisement.”
Sergeant Abel Crouch took the paper from Evans the way sergeants take everything, which is without asking and before you’ve finished. He could read further than Evans. Not much further. “A DECLARATION,” he announced. “By the REPRESENTATIVES of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”
“The what?” said Ned.
“The United States.”
“Of what?”
“Of America.”
“Which states?”
Crouch looked to the paper for help, and the paper gave him none. “It don’t list them.”
“Then how do they know which ones they are?”
“Hollis, I am going to find out who taught you to ask questions, and I am going to have him flogged.”