Uglier wife-beatings. Arson fires. Some said it was the heat that did it. Others said it was the dryness you could feel in your sinuses, way up inside your head. Jack blamed the clarity. With the smog blown out to sea, everything appeared in unrelenting relief. Nothing gray, nothing imprecise, nothing uncertain.

And people needed uncertainty. They needed to know that there was always a chance for good in the bad guys, or bad in the good guys. They needed to know that life was not simple and never had been, no matter how simple the past looked in the rearview mirror. People who thought otherwise, people who thought they could see beyond the curve of the earth, the way Angelenos thought when the Santa Anas blew—those people were dangerous.

So he was writing The Stafford Story. But when he came to the grayest area of them all—the things the Staffords had done, and failed to do, in the war that ended certainty for good—he couldn’t finish. He sat on his alien hilltop, perched between the certainties of his upbringing and the Pacific horizon that so many Staffords had tried to see beyond, and he struggled with the truth of history.

And he was blocked… and hot… and feeling very old at seventy-eight. He had decided the only thing to revive him would be Annapolis. He was going back to buy the house that had been at the heart of his family’s history for over two centuries. He wasn’t sure why—maybe for a place to finish his book, or a place to die, or a place to feel something that was certain and deserved to be. But he had to have that house.

And in Annapolis, a young woman named Susan Browne would be waiting. She had written to him a few days before: “I am a distant cousin and an independent filmmaker working on a PBS project called The American Family. I’m researching the Staffords of Annapolis. Your perspective as a liberal journalist would be quite different from that of your military brother. Would you consent to meeting me?”

He had mailed her a note and the first chapter of The Stafford Story, which would take her to a time and place where no one could have imagined the USS America. But it was the time and place where Stafford history began in America. If she was a good reader, he might give her more, but nothing was certain.

The Stafford Story

Book One
Jedediah’s Credo
July 1745

“One son for the soil and one son for the sea.”

That was what Jedediah Stafford said to his wife on the bright summer morning that the Lord blessed them with their second boy.

And his wife understood, because she had labored with him to bring tobacco from the soil, and she knew what happened when pirates came from the sea.

Both sons would follow their father’s credo, and so would the generations that came after. Sometimes more than two sons arrived in a generation, and sometimes there were daughters, who could be as independent as the Chesapeake tide. But each generation understood. Each fought its own pirates and fit Jedediah’s credo to its own times.

One son for the soil and one son for the sea. One for family and one for nation. For plantation and privateer. For free soil and slave state. For the Big Stick and the democratic dream. For a polyglot nation forged finally to a single purpose. For unquestioned loyalty faced finally with a questioning conscience.

From that summer day in 1745, the Staffords lived by a credo of opposites, opposites linked by the imperfect logic of history.

But it all began with soil and sea… and pirates.

ii
Little Jed and the Pirates

Jedediah Stafford was six years old when he first went to Annapolis.

The year was 1712, and the English queen had given her name to both the capital of Maryland and the current war with France.

Queen Anne’s War had brought French pirates and privateers into the Chesapeake. But in Queen Anne’s capital, life continued apace. And when word went out that a ship had arrived from the Indies, carrying molasses, spices, and two dozen black Africans consigned to tidewater plantations, Jedediah’s father decided it was high time for his son to see Annapolis.

Thomas Stafford was known as one of the best judges of black flesh in the Maryland colony. It was a skill he had learned from his father, who had learned from his before him.