The Proud and the Free (17 page)

We are a people of committees, said Abner Williams. It's in the blood, and for ten years we've made a Committee for everything, and everything we have done has come through a Committee, even the Revolution itself – and my father used to tell me that more hours than he slept, he spent at committee meetings. I say this because perhaps a Yankee is more patient with the Committee way than someone who has not bitten his teeth on it. When I first began to hear and speak, a Committee of Resistance met at our house, and then a Committee of Liberty in the church cellar, and then a Committee on Stamps and then a Committee on Tea and then a Committee of Correspondence – only we couldn't run our army with committees. We tried, but it didn't work. Well, here in the Midlands, it is different, and you have a gentry of a kind we don't have in Connecticut, or in the Bay Colony either – or I should say that those of them we had, some we hanged and some we tarred and feathered and the rest we drove away on the British ships. Not because we are more knowledgeable about gentry, but because it is a different world in the North than here with the patroons and the lords and the squires – and the cheating of a man out of his little bit of land to make him a tenant, and binding men like slaves to apprenticeship, and the kind of officers who rode a saddle on us, and the kind of a war they are fighting. But they're not all of it, and that's why I want to talk as a Yankee, as a stranger among you, although I've eaten and slept and marched and fought with the foreign brigades for five years – and never seen my own home or my own blood in all that time. I lived under the officers as you lived under them, and to me they and what they represent and what they believe and hold are like a disease – and here for a moment the disease joined the body to cast off a greater danger; and sometime – a year, ten years or a hundred years from now – the disease must go or the body will die. That is why I rose against them and that is why I will do whatever you do and go wherever you go, even across the mountains – although I hold with Scottsboro that such a way is wrong and bad. But I've brooded over this and brooded over it, and I know no way, no other way. If we turn out the Congress in Philadelphia – and they have no force that can prevent our doing so – then we will plunge our confederation into civil war, and there is still the British enemy sitting among us and waiting. If we call for the other Lines to join us, some will, but some will march against us. Jersey is with us, and I think Pennsylvania would be with us – but I don't know what the Yankees would do, and I am a Yankee. And what would Virginia and the Carolinas do, where the gentry are worse than here, and where their own slaves have run away to fight in our brigades? And if we lay down our arms and go home – where is our home? Shall I go back to Connecticut and say, This is no more for me, this Revolution, for I hate the Midland gentry worse than I hate the British?
But I don't hate the British. I love liberty
– and not a word, but a way I've dreamed where there would be a little dignity to men, and not for the most to be like beasts driven by a few. And that we've won, here in the Pennsylvania Line; and we've had twenty-four hours of it, and, God help me, I don't know where we are to go with it!

Then Yankee, take the damned gentry back! Andrew Yost snorted. Or go to them!

Fairly – fairly: ask for the floor, several shouted.

I had the floor – all I want to say. I ain't got words like him! cried Andrew Yost.

Keep your order! shouted Billy Bowzar, pounding the floor with a stick of wood.

And I can tell ye where to go, cried Angus MacGrath, though I no be one of the Committee. Has a kemp a right to speak, Billy Bowzar?

I have not enough of the Scottish to know if that's a good man or a dirty scoundrel, but say your piece, MacGrath. This is a forum for the regiments. Say your piece.

I'll tell ye where we can go, providing ye got a little bit of courage. We can go up to York city and dad them – if ye got the guts – march north, and cross the river, and hit on them!

The British?

I mean no others, answered Angus, standing straight and proud, throwing his deep voice against the back wall of the barn.

There are fifteen thousand of them in York city! someone cried.

And when there were fifteen thousand dirty redcoats on the border, was it my own father afraid to come down and faught? The hell he was!

Ye got a fine notion of the Scottish, and too little of the English, a lad in the hayloft laughed.

I got a notion of the Line. And if ye want to fight for that notion –

Angus! cried Billy Bowzar, spreading his arms. I gave you the floor, and you said your piece. Now keep a still tongue! There is no doubting your courage or the courage of the Line, and I'll have no fighting unless you want to fight with me. And I'm no Scottish and no Irish either and half your size, but I'll take you on, thick head and all. Now listen …

We were laughing now, and wrapping deeper in our rags; for a cold night wind blew through the openings in that ruin of a barn; and the laugh was all surface, for there was a memory of the cold of winters past, and there was the beginning of a realization that we were embarked on a road no one had traveled before.

Now listen, said Billy Bowzar, if you are so short of memory that a day of sunshine can wipe the winter from your mind. Today we marched in the sunshine, but tomorrow the snows can begin again, and our tents would not even make good foot wrappings. That is why the Committee chose Princeton as our destination. The college buildings there are empty and waiting, and we can make something in them and in the hutments the British set up there. So Angus MacGrath says,
March on York city where the British are …
? With enough leather on our feet to sign our tracks in blood? With twenty thousand loads of powder to the whole Line? I am not impressed with the fifteen thousand of the King's men, laying with their whores in that rotten city – give us the support of the country and the people, and we can take the Line against
them,
and cut them up too, and drive them shrieking and screaming and howling from York city the way they drove us out of there in '76 – but I don't live in dreams. We have food for three or four days, and we will have more here when that is eaten, too, because the Jersey folk know us – but who will feed us when we march into the doxy-hole of New York? Who will shelter our wounded? Who will give us powder when we have shot away what we carry?

The British, someone called.

Ah – yeah? And if it snows, and we must wait five days to feel the bottom of the roads before we can march?

Let me speak a word, Billy Bowzar, said the Jew Levy, standing up and walking over to where Bowzar sat on an old cider keg. He put his hand on Bowzar's shoulder, gripping it – and Bowzar smiled self-consciously, pulling off his woolen cap and running his fingers through his curly red hair. He nodded and pursed his lips, and the skinny little Jew said:

We are lucky for having Bowzar. Such men there aren't too many of.

No one's against Bowzar, said Simpkins Gary.

That's right – no one's against Billy Bowzar; but he hasn't slept for two days. He's never stopped for two days. It shouldn't be thought that this revolt just happened. It had to be organized and led, and it still has to. And if men should lead it, they got to see over the heads of the soldiers of the Line. A thousand times since it began, we said to each other, What will we do next? Where do you go with a thing like this? What is the rest of the army doing? What is Washington doing? Does he know about this? Does Congress know? And if we elect new officers – can we fight alone? You heard Billy Bowzar: Who will feed us? Who will arm us? Today the Jersey folk, but what about tomorrow? The people will not trust foreign bandits who have cast out their officers – this is not what we are, but this is what the officers will say. I know – I know what the people think about Jews and Romans and black men. Ask Jim Holt!

He is right, said Jim Holt. My God, we ain't criminal – we be good men, but who going to believe that unless we show it? And how we going to show it? The Nayger should be no slave, because we fight for no man to be slave, but if we sing out
No Nayger slave,
the whole Southland going to turn against us! We say,
No rich man, no man with a million acres.
But how you going to live without rich man? You hang them all, and then it just take a little time: there be rich man again. You going to turn them against George Washington, who is rich man with many Nayger slave …?

Thus it went, on and on, with one and another and then still another speaking, and round and round and round it went – in a weary, awful circle, with the wind blowing colder and colder through the open gaps in the barn, with more and more men from the regiments coming to listen and shiver and watch our leaders butt their heads against a wall that had no openings.

Guns we had, and powder and shot, and almost three thousand of the best troops in the world – but we had nothing to fight for except what we had fought for under our officers.

It was the tail of the evening – well on and well under, when sleep had mixed with cold and many had gone and I no longer heard words but only voices – when MacPherson came and shook me from my doze, and said softly, Come outside, Jamie.

I went out with him, and there was Allen Gutton, a barber from the 3rd Regiment who had dropped away in the rising, as men had here and there – and what with one thing and another, we were not able to brood on those who were gone.

So ye lost yourself, Allen, I said.

No, Jamie: I chose to stay.

Like similar filth.

Say what you like, Jamie. I followed my own conscience.

None of ye got one; but, anyway, what in hell are you doing here?

I come with a message from the general.

I would have kicked him to the ground and driven him from the camp on his hands and knees, with a stick across his shoulders, but MacPherson was watching me out of his somber eyes, and I nodded and said, I will get someone to talk with you. My own stomach is too delicate.

Go to hell and be damned, Jamie. I come with a message from the general, and I don't have to take your gabble.

Not now, you don't!

I went into the barn and called Billy Bowzar aside and talked to him. He turned the chair over to Danny Connell, and then nodding at the Jew Levy and Jack Maloney, he motioned for them to follow. We went outside, our feet crunching the hard ground, and Gutton handed him the letter, which he read in the moonlight then and there. I had wanted to make a copy of that letter, but I neglected that, and it is gone and lost now, but I remember that it stated matter-of-factly enough that Wayne and two of his staff would appreciate a conference with the Committee of Sergeants of the Pennsylvania Line. It was polite and gentle and somewhat coaxing, not the way gentlemen talk to dirt, but the way one gentleman talks to another.

He wants to meet with us, said Bowzar.

He looked at me and I stared at him emptily, and then he looked at Maloney and Levy – and they made no move nor gesture, but they did not have to.

Tell him to approach our pickets at Princeton tomorrow, said Bowzar tonelessly. The Committee will discuss any matters he wishes to bring before us. Now take him through the lines, Jamie.

With that, I escorted Gutton through the sentries and onto the road where he had left his horse. When he turned to mount, I kicked him in the butt and then ground his face in the dirt.

That's reward for your conscience, Allen Gutton, I said.

And something to remember in the future, Jamie Stuart, he answered, rising and climbing on his horse.

Remember and be damned! Geck on ye!

With no other word, he mounted and rode off; and I went back to the barn. The meeting was over now. The Committee and the Reverend William Rogers remained; the others had gone.

Well, Jamie? asked Danny Connell.

I sent the little rat on his way. But I been thinking to ask you something, you gentlemen of the Committee. What in hell have we got to say to the officers?

We don't know, Jamie, Bowzar answered.

Well …, I began, but Dwight Carpenter interrupted me with:

Close your yap, Jamie, and let us get to bed.

To hell with them, I thought. To hell with them and their theories and their wisdom; and I turned around and walked out. But before I had taken ten steps, Jack Maloney was after me with an arm around my shoulders.

Jamie, hold yer hot head. We are in a profound and frightening thing, and we got to feel our way.

And take back the officers!

We are not taking them back, Jamie. We are going to look at this and that, and try to understand what we have done. That is all. We got to find a future, because, as sure as God, there is none facing us now!

Then I went to my blankets, rolled close to the fire, and slept. And once more the morning was warm and sunny, and as we marched down the road to Princeton, the men of the Line singing as they paced, the drums beating and the fifes shrilling and the pipers blowing with all their might and main, my fears of the night before went away, and I knew only the great and massive comfort of the Pennsylvania Line, the strong and tried men who alone of all the armies in the world had no officers, but ruled themselves and marched for their own freedom.

PART SEVEN

Being an account of the events at Princeton.

O
N WEDNESDAY, the 3rd of January, about two hours after the sun had set, I was summoned by one of the Citizen-soldier Guard to Nassau Hall, where the Committee of Sergeants had established the general headquarters of the Pennsylvania Line.

In those times, the Prince Town, as many of the native Jersey folk still called it, was a village of some thirty or forty houses, almost all of them built on the main pike that ran southward and across the river to Philadelphia. It was a pretty and quiet little village, which Jack Maloney said reminded him of the Sussex towns in the old country, and it was dominated in its center by the hall of the college, which was not in those days called Princeton, but the Old School of the Jerseys. We were no strangers to Princeton, for one or another regiment of the Line had marched through there at least a hundred times since the war began, and at least four times the whole Line had made a bivouac in the broad meadow behind Nassau Hall, and so had the British on one occasion or another. And at least four regiments of the Line recalled well and vividly the wild and terrible battle we had fought with the British, hand to hand, butt to butt, knife to knife – when they first tasted the difference between the foreign brigades and the Yankee militia. Four years ago to the day, that was, on the 3rd of January – yet how many lives had we lived since then, and how many good comrades had died, and how many things had changed!