Time Enough for Drums (24 page)

That was how I knew what John was up to and how I kept from going mad in the next three years. For a handsome sum he was persuaded to defect to the British in New York, for his reputation as a journalist was well known. And so, once again, he was writing for the
New York Gazette
, the infamous Tory newspaper. He would frequent coffeehouses where the British went, pick up information, and get it out to the Americans.

He never met Washington, although his maps, sketches, and reports went directly to Washington himself. It would have been too dangerous for a spy to have come in contact with him.

Until the end of the war he and others like him kept up the flow of information—news of the arrival of British ships, British losses in battles, and the doings of British generals.

“Yorktown!” The cry was taken up by man, woman, and child as they rushed past me down the street. I stood there on the steps of Father’s shop. Yorktown, Brandywine, Valley Forge, Monmouth Courthouse, Savannah, Guilford Courthouse, Cowpens. I knew all the names.

John was still tutoring me.

The tears came down my face as I stood there. The war was over! How long ago it was when it started! I had been a little girl of fifteen, running off on my tutor, arguing with Lucy, upsetting Mama, provoking Father, learning to shoot a musket on a hill in town.

I heard more names as the crowd went by. The French.
Rochambeau. Cornwallis. De Grasse and a battle at sea. Washington. The long siege over at Yorktown. Cornwallis. Beaten to the sea.

Two weeks later, in mid-November, I came in from the shop after closing. It was dark outside and the candles in the hallway welcomed me. As I closed the door I saw Lucy standing at the end of the hall.

“What is it, Lucy? In heaven’s name, what’s the matter?” She looked as if she had just taken leave of her senses.

She raised her hands in the air, opened her mouth, but did not speak. A stab of fear went through me. Dear God, what now? Was there bad news about Daniel? David? John?

“Jemima Emerson, will you come in here, please?”

I froze in my tracks, hearing his voice from Father’s study. I flew down the hall and stood there. For a moment neither one of us moved. He was wearing his American uniform again, his coat open, his hat on the desk.

I screamed, threw my cloak off, and ran to him. He caught me in his arms and kissed me. I was crying and kissing him all at once.

“Barbarians come into a room with such an entrance, Jemima Reid,” he said.

“I don’t care.”

“Have I taught you nothing?”

I clung to him. “It looks, sir, as if you will have to teach me all over again.”

The cold November wind whipped through the churchyard of St. Michael’s. I stood there with Dan and Betsy Moore and John and Cornelius and Lucy. Dan was a major. He’d proven himself at Valley Forge, Monmouth, and the whole southern campaign. He stood next to me. In his hand
he held the wrinkled flag that he had brought from Yorktown. Its red and blue were faded and it was torn. He smiled at me, then he and John fastened it onto the makeshift pole and planted it in the ground over Father’s grave.

“It’s too bad David couldn’t be buried here, too,” I said.

David had been killed at Yorktown, storming a re-doubt, something he wasn’t ordered to do. David, who always tried to please Father, killed himself in a final attempt to avenge Father’s death. He was buried somewhere in Virginia.

Grandfather Henshaw, because he was a Tory, had to leave the country for Canada, and Becky went with him to stay until she could go back to England with her husband.

Dan and Cornelius were home for only two days while the army passed through Trenton on its way north. The war was over, but they were not yet discharged.

The night before, after supper, Dan had summoned John and me into the parlor and showed us the flag and asked us to come to the churchyard with him.

“Do you think Mother will want to come?” he asked me.

Dan was twenty-six, a full-fledged man. He and Betsy would marry when he was discharged and make Father’s house their home. He asked John and me to stay in the house, however, and keep things going until that time came, even though John was purchasing Major Barnes’s house for us on Queen Street.

I was twenty-one. “No, Dan, I don’t think Mother should come. It wouldn’t do her any good. She’ll never be the same. You’ve only been home a day, so you can’t tell. She’s never talked about the war in the last three years since she’s been home again. Or even gone into Father’s shop.”

“It’s the only way she could live with it, Jem,” John said.

Dan nodded. I could see the hint of tears in his eyes. “You’ve done such an excellent job with her, Jem, and with
the house and the shop, that I want to give you the shop. Lord knows I’ve no need for it. I’ll be getting back to my books and my law.”

“Daniel Emerson, you may have fought for freedom, but don’t you know? Married women can’t own property. Things have changed, but not that much!”

“Why, then”—he smiled—“that’s a war you’ll have to fight out with your husband, madam. Knowing you, I’m sure you’ll get the best of the arrangement after all.”

From the corner of my eye I saw John move away from me in the cemetery and incline his head toward the others. Leave it to John to know I wanted to be alone. But now that I was alone, my heart was so full I could barely breathe.

“The flag Dan brought is beautiful, Father. You’d like it. Oh, it’s kind of faded and there’s a tear in one place, but Dan said you wouldn’t mind that. I remember the day you said you wished we had one to fly when the British came to town.

“If I had a flag to give you, it would look just like this one, faded and wrinkled, with a tear in it. Somehow I do feel as if I have one for you, even though mine can’t be seen.

“It’s what I’ve become that I can give you, Father. I’ve grown up, at last. Oh, it was a long time coming. But I’ve learned some of the things finally, that you and Mama were always trying to tell me.

“For one thing I’ve learned that doing what you think is right doesn’t always make you feel good. For another, I’ve learned that sometimes you just have to keep on going when you want to do nothing but drop. And that just doing the everyday things, like keeping a shop running or getting up every morning, will keep the world going until things can
straighten out again. And doing those things right every day soon becomes more important than the more pressing issues of the time.

“Civility, you used to say, and an army coming through shouldn’t make any difference.

“Lord, Father, I’ve gone and married John Reid. Did you ever think I’d do such a thing? Of course you did! You and Mama were forever talking him up to me. You wanted our marriage right from the beginning, didn’t you?

“I only wish you could be here to see our children someday when we have them, and help us teach them to handle this liberty we’ve won for ourselves. Nobody knows what it really means yet. We’re just glad the war is over and all the killing is done with.

“I’m going to leave now. The sun is nice here, and I suppose St. Michael’s will be opening again soon. Reverend Panton’s house was destroyed. By the British! John Fitch’s shop was burned to the ground. The bell of St. Michael’s was carried off, twenty-four pews were destroyed, and twelve common seats were ruined. The pulpit and reading desk are damaged, but everything will be fixed again.

“Oh, Lord, Father, freedom’s nice. But sometimes I ache wishing we could all go back to the way things were before the war, when we were together.

“Well, I have to go now. They’re waiting for me by the gate.”

The thirteen colonies in North America were only a part of the British possessions scattered throughout the world, and before 1763 they were not considered the most valuable part. Up until the French and Indian War (1754–1763), the thirteen colonies were left, within broad limits, to pursue their own interests and were able to assert fairly extensive rights of self-government.

After winning the French and Indian War in North America, England was left with the problem of defending the new territory it had acquired from the French and the staggering burden of the war debt. To solve these problems, King George the Third of England took several courses of action. He established a western boundary line along the Allegheny Mountains beyond which the colonists could not settle. He stationed British soldiers in America to enforce this Proclamation Line and to keep the Indians at peace, and he also passed the Stamp Act in 1765, imposing a tax on most paper items purchased by the colonists. But the colonists rejected this tax on the grounds that they, as Americans, possessed all the rights of English subjects, most especially the right to be taxed only by their own representatives.

In various places, like Boston, mob riots broke out and eventually the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, but only after England passed the Declaratory Act, which gave the English Parliament the authority to make any and all kinds of laws to keep control over the colonists. But the colonists were not about to accept this parliamentary authority either. It was seen as a threat to their self-government. The Americans had gained a new attitude about themselves after the French and Indian War. They were more self-confident in their military prowess and held contempt for the British soldiers and officers with whom they did not get along during the war. With the French threat mostly gone, the colonists believed they could take care of themselves and needed less guidance and rule from England. They were a strong people who had made their way in a wild land, and the very act of taming that land gave them a self-reliance the Europeans did not have. They believed that the laws of nature and God justified them in resisting any intrusion on their rights.

Between 1763 and 1775, England passed the Sugar Act (1764) and the Townshend duties (1767), which required the colonists to pay taxes on certain items. Again, the colonists opposed these taxes and, except for a tax on tea, all were repealed. Mob violence again erupted, and in March 1770, Americans confronted British troops in what became known as the Boston Massacre. In December 1773, Americans dressed as Indians threw tea into the water from British ships in Boston Harbor to protest the tea tax in what has come to be called the Boston Tea Party.

The English Parliament then passed the Coercive Acts of 1774 to punish the colonists. It was during this year that the colonists began to unite to resist England. The Continental Congress, a body of learned men representing each colony, met in sessions in Philadelphia to unite the colonies and to discuss their problems. In September of 1774, the Continental Congress sent a list of colonial grievances to King George. They also agreed not to buy any more goods
from England and made military preparations for defense against attack by British troops.

The colonists stopped drinking tea and started wearing homespun clothing rather than import these and many other products from the mother country. Then, in the early months of 1775, people in Massachusetts began to gather arms and ammunition and to train local men to fight. The British troops in Boston under General Thomas Gage, aware of this activity, were sent on April 18 to capture a large supply of ammunition in Concord and arrest the Rebel leaders, Sam Adams and John Hancock. On April 19, 1775, the first shots of the War for Independence were fired on Lexington Green.

After the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the colonial armed forces took the offensive. The Americans circled and besieged the British army in Boston and, though suffering severe casualties in the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, inflicted heavier losses on the British. The Americans penned the British in Boston all that summer, fall, and winter. Food in Boston became scarce, sickness threatened to spread, and Loyalists (Americans loyal to King George) streamed into Boston from the surrounding areas. The Patriots (those fighting for independence) were not tolerant of fellow Americans who were loyal to the King so those Loyalists or Tories sought protection from the British in America.

Then, in March of 1776, General George Washington, commander in chief of the American army, fortified Dorchester Heights above Boston with cannon brought down from Fort Ticonderoga through the winter snow by Colonel Henry Knox. Rather than fight Washington, the British general Sir William Howe sailed away to Halifax, Nova Scotia, but he returned to the American colonies in July of 1776.

Howe’s redcoat army consisted of 32,000 soldiers. General Washington’s Continental army (the regular American army formed under the Continental Congress) had about
19,000 men. Washington’s brave but poorly trained soldiers met defeat at the Battle of Long Island in August, the Battle of Harlem Heights in September, and the Battle of White Plains in October. After pushing the Continentals out of New York City and into North Jersey, the British attacked and captured two important American forts, Washington and Lee, on the Hudson.

It was now November, and Washington’s army began its famous retreat through New Jersey. New York City was lost and not a single battle had been won since the Continental army was established in July, 1775. The British captured 2,900 Americans when they took Fort Washington. A large amount of much-needed artillery, equipment, and supplies was lost to the enemy at Fort Lee, the weather was damp and cold with fog and heavy rains, and now it seemed that the small band of 3,000 men under Washington, which was plagued with desertion, would have to yield the colony of New Jersey to the enemy. This they did on December 7–8, 1776.

Having missed the chance to capture and destroy Washington’s force, General Howe and Lord Charles Cornwallis and the British army settled down for the winter in New Jersey. Posts were established at Bordentown, Penny Town (Pennington), Trenton, Princeton, and New Brunswick. General Howe announced an offer of pardon to those Americans who would take an oath of loyalty to the king, and many did.

Meanwhile, Washington’s army stood on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, freezing and waiting. Many men were sick, and all were poorly clothed. Enlistments would be up on December 31. Then there would no longer be an army unless morale and spirits could be raised. Only a victory would give life to the dying cause. Washington knew this and formed a plan to cross the ice-clogged Delaware River on Christmas and attack and take the town of Trenton. He conferred with his officers—Generals Sullivan, Mercer, Lord Stirling, and St. Clair, Major General
Greene, Colonel Knox and others. The plan to take Trenton was kept secret, even from the enlisted men who were about to take part in the crossing. Washington’s army in Pennsylvania was joined by Continental troops who had been left in New York before the retreat. New Jersey militia (citizen-soldiers who fought and went home after fighting) harassed the British and Hessians (paid German soldiers fighting for King George) at the Trenton outposts every chance they got.