The Proud and the Free (20 page)

One has a debt, said the wife of Elder Simpkins, later on, for me to hear – loyal folk they were, and humane too. Poor lad – she said with such sympathy – poor lad!

Let the poor lad play, he feels safe here, she said … One doesn't find girls these days such as his mother was; for now they're born and bred in the Pennsylvania land; they are spoiled, that they are, and not like the ones who had tasted a bond – they were the grateful ones.

You are grateful for charity, Jamie Stuart, she said to me, and the good Lord rewards those who are.

I am indeed,
said I,
whose mother was a girl when she died, and a fine, strong worker
…

And then back to today I came, and the hall in the college at Princeton and the fire and the fine figures of the bewigged officers. They were finishing their conversations now. I shook sleep off me; I listened to the Committee.

They agreed to meet with these three gentry the following noon, and then my guard and I marched Wayne, Butler and Stewart back across the road to the tavern …

Early the next morning, I found Jack Maloney and Danny Connell, as they were going from hut to hut, talking with the men; and when I would have passed them, Connell called out:

How there, Jamie Stuart of the black puss and sour heart – what in hell eats you that you give me a look to make me stomach crawl?

When an Irishman betrays me, do you want me to lick his God-damned ass?

It's mighty quick that ye are for learning the Irish language, said Connell, but it is not myself that has betrayed you, and if ye want to take off that dirty jacket of yours and fight on it, why I am as willing as a lad could be.

I will not fight with a miserable, undersized Hooley that I could break in two with one hand.

Because ye lack the guts.

I said some words that are best not recalled, and Jack Maloney demanded:

What in God's name is eating you, Jamie?

This, your honor – the sweet pledges of the officers and the sweet pledges of the Committee. That's a start, and I can see damned well what the end will be; but I swear to God, I will never go back to be a slave under those dirty dogs, and give my life sooner or later, so that they can preserve their gentry apart from the British gentry, instead of together with it. For that is all this matter comes down to.

How do you see that, Jamie? asked Maloney.

There are two thousand, six hundred and odd men here in this camp today, and they have followed after the Committee for only one reason, not for a bellyful of food and a swig of rum and a dollar in their pockets – but because they are proud and because they would be free. A different kind of pride from what the gentry has, and a better kind for my money.

And where shall we lead them, Jamie?

Into hell, if need be. Into hell and be damned! But not into polite “Our grievances are this and that, and if you satisfy them we will come back and beg you to lead us once more.”

Danny Connell was watching me. I hold with Jamie, he said.

Oh, you would, said Jack Maloney. Oh, Christ, you would – my fine lads – for you are both good for a fight, where there is no more sense needed than to pull a trigger. But what shall we do? That is the heart and core of it – what
shall
we do? By now, without question, every body of soldiers under Congress is marching here toward the Line. Shall we fight them all?

No soldiers will ever fight the Line —unless you speak of British troops. I swear to that!

Shall we proclaim “the Republic of the Pennsylvania Line”? Shall we execute the three officers? Shall we march into Philadelphia and imprison the Congress? In the name of God, Jamie, what
are
we to do, now that the Line will follow us? Where? Where? Whatever kind of strange dreams you have, the world has not yet made them real. There is no other way than to come to terms with the gentry …

His voice rose now; pitched up and woeful, he cried: For withal it is a bloody Revolution, this is their war! A little crust of the bread is for us, but the slice is theirs, Jamie, and God help us, there is nothing we can do but come to an agreement with them.

I would rather die.

Maybe I would rather die, too, Jamie – but the men of the Line are extremely practical, and they have chosen us, and we will lead them. They have no intentions of dying. They, at least, have certain practical demands for pay and clothes and discharge, and every trust they put in leaders before was betrayed. Shall we betray them too, Jamie?

What else are you doing?

You thank God I love you, Jamie Stuart, and know you well too, or I'd cut your heart out. The devil with you!

And he went his way – and I went mine.

But that afternoon, after their hours of talk with Wayne and Butler and Stewart, the sergeants called me in, and this they said to me:

You take over Princeton, Jamie – every inch and corner of it, and make it secure so that a mouse couldn't creep in.

The taverns?

Yes, the taverns, Jamie, and all the rest; but be easy and gentle with the townsfolk.

Then Billy Bowzar motioned to a bearded, mud-stained man who stood close to the fire, warming himself.

This … he said … is Sergeant Dekkerholts of the 2nd Regiment of the Jersey Line. They have been ordered … he said, his voice becoming flat and toneless … to march against us. But they will not march against us, he said —Is that so, Sergeant?

They will not, said Dekkerholts. They will not shed your blood.

He turned around from the fire, a small, flaxen-haired, travel-stained and travel-weary man, his beard long and full, his overalls rent and patched, his feet bound in canvas instead of leather. He looked at me, and then he looked at the sergeants of the Committee, as if he had not seen them before, and then he looked at me again out of his large, bloodshot blue eyes, and he said:

Who in hell are you?

I am Jamie Stuart, and responsible for the safety of the encampment.

I told you they will not attack you, the Jersey men, he said, sullenly and somewhat sadly, for they are going to rise up and cast out the gentry, just as you did —just as you did. And now I want to go to sleep.

And with that, he sat down in front of the fire, his knees drawn up, his arms around them and his head pillowed upon them. I stood there, looking from face to face – and sad, troubled faces they were – until Billy Bowzar reminded me:

You know what you must do, Jamie. I put little stock in what he says, since he has walked too much and slept too little. We also have information that the Light Horse Troop is riding up from Philadelphia to join the officers. So get on.

And if the Jersey Line rose, what is the Committee prepared to do?

We don't know that they rose, Jamie – only that they are intended to do so. We will see.…

We will see, I nodded – and I went out, happy at least that I had work of my own that I understood; I found Angus, and together we worked out our plans.

But before I go into that, I must say just a little of the encampment at Princeton, where we now spent a week of our lives. Not that it was a perfect achievement, or any sort of a dreamlike place. Men deserted; men ran away because they could not face the terror of what we had done; men got drunk and men whored: but these were the exception, and by and large, in those seven days, we established a working, cooperative means of living together. In the very first day, we cleaned out the upper floors of Nassau Hall, and established there both a hospital and a school. Two women and three men were found among the regiments who were equipped, some better, some worse, for teaching – and the children of the Line, almost a hundred in number, from the little babes to the twelve and thirteen-year-old drummer lads, were put to letters; which was a great wonder in an army where not one in twenty could write his own name. More curious still, those classes for the children – short-lived as they were – were packed always with soldiers too, for we had a hunger for some sort of dignity and learning that was almost as great as our hunger for food. Having neither paper nor ink nor crayon, we made slates out of board and burned and shaped our own charcoal. We had no books, but, for the time we were there, the small knowledge in our heads was sufficient, just as what crude medical remedies we owned had to be sufficient for our hospital. There was a wonderful inventiveness and facility in the Line; every trade was among us, and there was nothing we could not make if given a little time and a minimum of tools and goods – candles, rope, cloth, furniture, shoes; yes, and we would have made paper and a press to print books and a newspaper, if it had not all finished so soon.

Maybe there was much more that we would have made – for word that the Jersey Line would rise stirred a brief vision in me of a new kind of republic that might come out of this long and sorrowful war; but, like other dreams I had then when I was young and strong and filled with my own power, this one is unfinished and befogged with all the years that have passed since then. I tell myself sometimes that now I know better what we could have done; yet when I listen to the same, half-formed dreams on the lips of the Abolitionists – of the young Yankee men who will sweep the whole world with their banner of freedom for all – I am none too certain. I see the thread that ties things together, but where it began and where it will end I do not know.

There was a Roman priest who came into our encampment at Princeton, a little, round-faced Irish man, who was bitterly poor and much despised, as the Romans were in our land then, and who had walked all the way up from Philadelphia when he heard that the foreign brigades had made a rising. Dusty, dirty and cold, his black clothes worn paper-thin, his wide-brimmed, flat-topped hat perched comically on the top of his head, he was brought into our lines and brought to me, and I asked him what he wanted of us and why he had come.

Sure, he answered, when I heard that the Irish men were in a rising with all sorts of low company, Jews and Naygers and Protestants too, I said to myself, I will go up and share their enterprise and perhaps soften it somewhat.

Because he seemed cheerful, and because our hopes were low and morbid then, I told him:

It will as likely be a hanging as anything else, and if the gentry make a start, I assure you they will hang the Roman priest first.

Then I will not be the first Roman priest was hanged by gentry, he grinned.

To which I answered that it was certainly an odd attitude for a man of God to have, since with the rising every pastor had cleared out except William Rogers, who was not properly a Christian but a Baptist or something of the sort. The rest held that resistance, revolution and such were not becoming to a low type of man unless he was led and instructed by a high type of man.

But among the Irish, said the priest, we have had a lot of resistance, yet surprisingly few of the latter type. Myself, I will stay if you don't mind and if you can trust me. It seems to me that, while I cannot predict where this business of yours will end, I have an inkling of where it began.…

I tell this in the way of threads, but I wander from the main tale of how we took Princeton city and made it an armed camp. I pause only to tell you that we did many things in those few days of our new army that are forgotten, and they were things that were good, not only the schools, but discussions in the hutments on such documents as the Declaration of Independence and
Common Sense,
the fine book of Mr. Paine, and we also framed out certain propositions on the rights of all men to speak freely and to assemble and to petition – things that were fanciful then but which came about later, with much additional suffering, in the time of Tom Jefferson. We also made common teams for the sewing of cloth and even for the weaving of it, and for this latter we made looms, although they were never put to use. We put new roofs on the huts and we repaired the bitter damage that the enemy had done to Nassau Hall. So much for that, and more later, but now for how Angus and I turned over Princeton and put it in condition for defense.

There was the town, with the pike running into it across the brook and the gully, so that we were enabled to have the bridge at one end for a boundary and the crossroads at another. We threw a regiment —as we planned it—to the north and another to the south. A regiment could cover the brook, beyond the meadows, and two more regiments could ring the town and block off the two stem roads. This would be a matter of five regiments, leaving five in reserve and one for relief and mobility, and with a light breastworks and concentrations on lanes and footpaths, a cannon at each cross-lane and another at the brook and at the bridge – why, it seemed to me that the little place could be held until Doomsday.

It was a fine feeling for me, to have a plan of defense in my own hands, after five years of running, leaping, crawling and scurrying to the plans of the officers; and there was more of that satisfaction when Angus protested that
they
would have done it differently.

I looked up from the paper on which I was sketching and answered:

To me, that is a commendation, and nothing else.

But ye have but one man to twenty feet of ground, and no corrie for them to crawl into!

And I want none. And if I had ten men to twenty feet of ground, it would be a thin defense, but the one man is a cleg, and he stings a little while we throw the five regiments where we will. And if we know a little sooner, there is our one regiment of mobility to nibble a bit, while we come at the flanks. We are sick with warfare where one puts up a breastwork and cowers behind it.

… In any case, I added from my heart, there is only one body of Continentals in all this land that will come at us – from my heart I know that and surely – and I say that is the Light Horse.

Ye would fire on the Light Horse, Jamie?

On any man that crosses our lines without our will.

God help us if that should be, Jamie.

Something else will be if the Jersey troops come to join us – for something pecks in the Connecticuts and others too, and maybe for once the men who fight for their freedom will win it too.