who came over to fight with Washington, had gone home. “He’s young,”
men said. “It was only a lark for him. He’s had enough. ‘Leave of
absence’ was it! ‘French leave,’ more likely.” Lafayette was young,
but he had not had enough. How a youth of twenty-two petitioned the
court of France for an army, a fleet and a generous loan for the
states we need not inquire. He got everything he asked and came back
to tell General Washington so and to confer upon him Louis Sixteenth’s
commission as lieutenant-general of the Armies of France and admiral of
His Majesty’s Navy.
In 1918 the United States transport Leviathan, seven days out of New
York, made the harbor of Brest and set ten thousand fighting men
ashore. In the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island, on July 11, 1780 eleven
French warships and thirty-two transports, three months out of Brest,
set six thousand fighting men of France upon American soil. Ponder
on those figures: six thousand men are the complement of two modern
regiments, the half of a bitter day’s casualty list; six thousand men
were the Army of France, the Army of Deliverance. After they had thawed
a cool reception, they were welcomed as such, and while the Comte de
Rochambeau, at their head, was fêted by the dignitaries of Newport, his
disciplined troops pitched their tents in the Rhode Island orchards,
and as their commander proudly reported to their King, never even
robbed the fruit-trees!
Cumulative bad luck camped down simultaneously on the American cause.
Scurvy among the French troops prevented their moving to attack New
York. Clinton made a demonstration against them at Newport until
Washington frightened him back indoors. Rochambeau found difficulty in
conveying his ideas of strategy to American headquarters in Jersey,
and it took all of Lafayette’s tact to keep the forces in contented
alliance. At last, when the summer was nearly gone, Washington arranged
a council of war at Hartford.
The operations of the allied armies planned at that conference hinged
upon the co-operation of a second French land force and the French
fleet. The land force was even then bottled up in Brest by British
warships, the French admiral was in the West Indies and showed no
signs of coming north. To make matters worse, there was brewing
over on the Hudson a plot which Washington later called “one of the
severest strokes that could have been meditated against us.” It was
so well known among the British that it now seems incredible that no
hint of warning had filtered through the Neutral Ground to American
headquarters. London gossip predicted openly throughout the summer a
_coup_ which would shortly bring this upstart rebellion to its knees.
One morning in late September four farmer boys from Westchester
undertook to watch the Albany post-road north of Tarrytown, and to
see that no Tory patrols drove stolen cattle southward. They halted a
well-dressed civilian and searched him. In his stockings they found a
plan of the fortifications at West Point, an inventory of ammunition,
full directions for attacking _and taking_ the forts, and a résumé
of General Washington’s most recent statement of the condition and
prospects of the American cause. It was suspicious enough to find these
papers on an unknown civilian, but when he proved to be Major John
André, adjutant-general of the British Army, and when inspection showed
that the last two documents were in the handwriting of Benedict Arnold,
an American major-general in command at West Point, the matter smelled
rankly of treason.
Washington was returning from Hartford to headquarters when he was
diverted to West Point. An unexplainable bit of stupidity had allowed
Arnold to learn of André’s capture, and when Washington arrived at
Arnold’s headquarters opposite West Point he found the traitor’s young
wife in a state of collapse and Arnold himself fled to the British
frigate “Vulture,” which was already dropping downstream out of range.
From the upper windows of the Livingston house, in Dobbs Ferry, you may
look northwest over the roofs of the town where André and Arnold had
secretly met and plotted to betray the United States. Across the river
you may see the faint outlines of the village of Tappan, where André
was held prisoner, and where George Washington shared his breakfast
with the convicted spy. At the foot of the hill in Dobbs Ferry you may
see the landing where a group of British dignitaries came to plead
with General Green for André’s life. If you had been in Tappan the
next morning you might have seen André walk to the gibbet, adjust the
noose firmly about his own neck, and heard him say: “It will be but
a momentary pang.” With a record that included secret service during
the siege of Charleston, André was undoubtedly a spy, but if you had
watched dry-eyed as this man met death you would have been lonesome,
for there were plenty of honest tears from the American officers who
stood by and saw him hang.
With the plot exploded, Arnold a turncoat, André dead, the cause
at least was safe. “Whom can we trust now?” asked Washington, and
proceeded to find out. In spite of a wide-spread feeling of contempt
for Arnold, his desertion made an impression upon the faint-hearts
in both armies. In an effort to stiffen the morale of his men, and
somewhat stung by the vengefulness of Arnold’s threat in a letter
presented at the Dobbs Ferry conference that he would make reprisals if
André was killed, Washington conceived the idea of kidnapping Arnold
in New York. The sergeant-major detailed for this bold stroke had the
worst possible luck, missed Arnold by a half-hour, and landed on board
a transport filled with a corps of deserters, bound for Virginia, and
commanded by the traitor himself.
By June of 1781 the French army was ready for action. They marched
across Connecticut, and pitched their tents upon the Westchester hills.
That lively, attractive young aide-de-camp who danced with the girls
of Westchester was a chap named Berthier, destined to become field
marshal under Napoleon and Prince of Wagram; the tall, gallant Saxon
aide was the Count de Fersen, later commander of the Swiss body-guard
of Louis XVI. Custine commanded the Saintonge regiment--Custine who had
served under Frederick the Great; on the ridge east of the Nepperhan
were the Viomênil brothers--Count and Baron, soldiers both; over on the
hill above White Plains was the charming Lauzun--he was guillotined a
few years later. “Gentleman rankers out on a spree,” and leading as
gay an army of crimson- and white- and pink- and yellow- and blue- and
green-clad troops as Europe could put in the field. What shortcomings
they found with the entertainment their American allies offered, what
irritation they felt at being served beef, potatoes, lamb and chicken
on one plate, they forgot in the real comradeship that sprang up. New
days were coming. New York, the stronghold, was to be beaten down by
these keen French, and these dogged Americans, and Henry Clinton might
well beware.
Washington moved his headquarters into the Livingston house at Dobbs
Ferry. There on July 6, 1781 Rochambeau met and joined him and for the
first time the armies were formally allied. The two commanders sat late
over the plans for the effort which was presently to make Henry Clinton
shout to Cornwallis and Tarleton for help. In the back of Washington’s
mind was a shrewd manoeuvre, and he kept it in the back of his mind,
for if a plan was to be good enough to fool the enemy, it should be
good enough to deceive his own men. Clinton was to be thoroughly scared
by a demonstration by the combined armies against New York. If he
called for reinforcements from the south, good; if they came, better
yet. For it was not Clinton in New York whom Washington wanted, nor
Tarleton in Charleston, but Cornwallis at Yorktown, the link between
the two. And Washington knew that this was to be his last gamble with
fate.
On July 18 Rochambeau accompanied him on a reconnoissance of the
enemy’s positions north of New York. What they saw led them to throw a
protective cordon of troops across the peninsula of Westchester, from
the Sound to the Hudson, to keep the British patrols from leaking out.
Ten days later Washington heard that three British regiments from South
Carolina had been sent to Clinton’s relief. Back of his calm eyes his
brain was humming with excitement. He wrote letters about his plans
for attacking New York and then saw to it that those letters fell into
the enemy’s hands. When the British approached the American lines they
found them preparing for battle. Washington allowed his engineers to
survey camp sites and build brick ovens within sight of the enemy’s
scouts. And then, on August 3, a travel-worn messenger arrived with a
letter from Lafayette.
“DeGrasse is sailing with the French fleet from Santo Domingo for
Chesapeake Bay” was its message. The moment had come.
To the Livingston house he summoned Robert Morris, who had never failed
before, and who must not fail now; and with him Richard Peters, the
acting Secretary of State. Washington demanded men. Turning to Peters,
he asked: “What can you do?”
“With money, everything. Without it, nothing,” replied the Secretary
of State, and looked questioningly toward Morris. The banker produced
a loan of $30,000. To Washington it was as good at that moment as a
million, for it meant pay and food for his men, a promise of more men,
and supplies for a forced march. And the forced march was imminent.
Rochambeau came down from his headquarters up over the hill and the two
laid their plans. On the eleventh 3000 Hessians from Cornwallis’ forces
arrived to defend New York. On August 25 all but 3000 men of the entire
American army and the whole French force crossed the Hudson and were
half-way to Philadelphia before Sir Henry Clinton knew that he had been
tricked.
Two months later Cornwallis surrendered to the Allied armies, and there
was no more British army between New York and Charleston. The plan
which first saw daylight in the Livingston House at Dobbs Ferry ended
the Revolution.
It was poetic justice, therefore, that in this house eighteen months
later should occur the formal evacuation of the United States by the
British. On the afternoon of May 6, 1783, two barges landed at the
Ferry. In one was George Washington, Commander-in-Chief; in the other
Governor Clinton of New York State. Presently a sloop-of-war appeared,
and from it landed General Sir Guy Carleton, Commander-in-Chief of the
British Expeditionary Forces. The three men met in the front room of
the Livingston House, and at a sturdy round walnut table which stands
in the house today General Sir Guy Carleton signed on the dotted line,
renouncing a claim upon America which was first staked out by Sir
Walter Raleigh. Good Queen Bess would have sworn like a lady at the
spectacle; Guy Carleton, instead, marched out between four companies of
American infantry at present-arms, saluted the flag, invited General
Washington and Governor Clinton to dine aboard his sloop, and after an
exceedingly good dinner fired a seventeen-gun salute for the guest who
throughout the war had been scornfully referred to by Parliament as
“Geo. Washington, Esqre.”
From Philip Livingston, its Revolutionary occupant, the house passed
into the hands of Peter Van Brugh Livingston, a rich, righteous and
rigid citizen who was a member of two legislatures, and who acquired
most of the real estate in Dobbs Ferry. A small parcel of this real
estate he gave to the Episcopal Church. When a local tavern-keeper
applied for admission to the church Van Brugh Livingston’s influence
and indignant protests almost kept the boniface out of reach of
salvation. The house was purchased from Livingston by Stephen Archer,
a gentle Quaker. His wife at her death-bed promised him that if he
would build a bay window in the house and sit at that window on a
Friday night, she would return to him. He built the bay window and
every Friday night for twenty years sat peering out, straining his
eyes to distinguish her ghostly form from the shadows of the ancient
horse-chestnut tree. This is a true story of spiritualism: _she never
came back_. Stephen Archer’s daughter married a Dr. Hasbrouck and the
house became his property upon her death. His fourth wife succeeded in
outliving him, and in the light of Van Brugh Livingston’s prejudice
against tavern-keepers, it is interesting to recall the latest episode
in the possession of the ancient dwelling.
Messmore Kendall, a lawyer of New York, was driving down Broadway one
morning when he saw a sign in the dooryard of the Hasbrouck house
advertising it for sale. He stopped. Inquiry from a woman who answered
his knock brought out the information that financial stress had forced
the sale of the house to a brewer who proposed to open a road house
within its sacred walls. Mr. Kendall went on to the city. He learned
from the real-estate brokers that the title was to be transferred to
the brewer at 12 o’clock of the following day. At 12 o’clock there was
no brewer in sight. At 1 o’clock Mr. Kendall had bought the house. At
5 o’clock of the same afternoon the brewer appeared, but the house had
been saved forever.
So, instead of the clash of weapons of a dance orchestra, the
Livingston House today hears the call of the birds from the garden.
Instead of a coat of scarlet paint, a swinging tavern-sign, and the
installation of new “service facilities” the house has undergone a
complete restoration to its early beauty.
Where a less knowing eye would have altered for the sake of altering,
he has directed changes only as they would preserve the feeling of
self-effacing Colonial occupancy. Where the austerity of the period
might easily have been made inelastic, he has made you sense the vital
nearness of the glorious immortals who were there. Where the old frame
of the building settled back after a century of service and gave an
informal tilt to the door-frames, instead of replacing them with new he
has tailored the old doors a trifle. He has left the old floors, for
flooring such as men laid in those days was not to be disciplined for
little irregularities. Between the drawing room and the study hangs the
original front door, with a lock three hands broad, and the great key
that turned on the invader’s last good-bye. Even electricity came into
the house in a quiet disguise. If it is candle-light, and you should
peer into the low-studded dining-room, with its musket and pewter, and
its great fireplace, you will be forgiven if your fancy pictures a
Continental cavalryman bolting his supper at the end of the long table.
Perfectly sane people have heard Lafayette’s light step on the stair.
Given far less to work with than the Jumel Mansion a few miles
away, the restorer of the Livingston house has avoided the error of
formalizing the restoration. For years he had been collecting rare
furniture for just such an emergency. Out of the storage warehouse and
into the drawing room came a pair of sofas and a little table from the
shop of Duncan Phyfe; two of Thomas Chippendale’s mirrors; a pair of
girandoles of unusual grace; a very early and tinkly American piano;
and a dozen other things, each wearing a veil of antiquity over her
charms. Like a group of delightful reunited old ladies they fell to
chirruping and whispering, agreeing that this was so like home, when
one--and it was probably one of the mischievous girandoles, who give
back your reflection askew--suggested with a sparkle in her eyes:
“Let’s pretend we have always been here!” A whisper of assent fled
from one to another. The Dutch clock in the hallway chimed agreement,
the Queen Anne sofa on the landing heard and sighed happily, and one
of Washington’s own chairs in the study, which had left Mount Vernon
a century ago, remarked that he had always regarded Dobbs Ferry as a
comfortable asylum.
They will hush their chatter when you come in, and you cannot surprise
them at it. But on a June night you may sit outside and watch the moon
rise through the tracery of an old wistaria on the south portico.
Listen sharply: when a white parrokeet waddles in from the blue shadows
of the garden, and a voice is singing, and there is the lightest
feather of air moving, it will bring their whisper through the window
to you. The illusion is yours; they are at home, among their own.
THE LONGFELLOW HOUSE
[Illustration:
© D.McK
THE LONGFELLOW HOUSE
It has the requisite dignity of its poet and its general, the
well-dressed air of its Tory merchant, the scholarly simplicity
of its lexicographer, the open-armed hospitality of its rich
apothecary-general, and the grace of the lady who is its present
chatelaine.]
THE LONGFELLOW HOUSE
“The moonlight poet,” a clever Frenchman called him, “having little
passion, but a calmness of attitude which approaches majesty.” In a
single deft pass of verbal legerdemain he conjures about the venerable
head of Longfellow all the cool alluring mystery that veils a far-away
mountain peak at night. He waves the magic word “moonlight” and the
sun puffs out. In one stroke he has drawn a caricature which is not a
character. The brightness of words tempted him into an error of drawing
at which he would have paused if he had visited the poet’s house.
For it is a yellow citadel stormed by sunlight from morning to
night--sunlight pouring down upon its southerly wall and dancing off
the terrace to ripple over the lawn, splashing in minor torrents
through the tall windows of Martha Washington’s room, and of the poet’s
red-curtained study opposite, slanting its mellow shafts at acute
angles into the rooms on the north side, and breaking up at last into a
carnival of color in the garden.
No such crisp epigram as the Frenchman’s will dismiss the house. True,
he would have found himself at home in the midst of gay colorings and
an orderly clutter of interesting and precious garnitures, furniture,
books and _objets d’art_. But as his critical faculties were trained
upon the interior, as he began to retrace the history of this building,
obviously so colonially American, and yet become so definitely of
another period without losing its colonial flavor, he would have
groped in vain for a bright phrase to polish off his impression.
The Longfellow house is “typical” of nothing, and we may thank heaven
for that. It borrows here and there from architectural convention,
improves vastly upon it here and there, accepts easily the change in
fortunes, in family and in comforts of its successive owners. It has
the requisite dignity of its poet and its general, the well-dressed air
of its Tory merchant, the scholarly simplicity of its lexicographer,
the open-armed hospitality of its rich apothecary-general, and the
grace of the lady who is its present occupant. The composite of these
qualities is a picture which is almost as familiar and as dear to
America as Mount Vernon.
Out of that picture troops a story more varied in human incident than
that of Washington’s own home. It begins in 1759, when a Colonel
Vassall built a splendid new house on Tory Row, the vulgar name for the
_Via Sacra_ of Cambridge, now called Brattle Street. Within a radius
of a quarter-mile one might take tea with the Lees, dine with the last
of the King’s foresters, discuss politics with Richard Lechmere, or
theology with the Reverend East Apthorp, without canvassing more than a
small group of the sociable colony of royalists whose residences gave
the street its nickname. Administrations change, the Tory “keynote”
is perennial, and if your visit to Cambridge had been timed in the
early seventies of the Eighteenth Century, the chances are that the
prevailing topic of conversation in Tory Row would have been politics,
and the keynote would have been--as today--“What are we coming to?”
At that particular season they came to an April forenoon of ’75. A line
of red-coats marched out from Boston at the double, past the college,
and on into the country toward Lexington, where there was trouble.
A few hours later they returned, also at the double, because there
had been trouble in the country. On the tail of the British column
came the men of Acton and Billerica and Carlisle and Concord, and of
every village along the line of pursuit. Four civilians were killed
at the corner of Dunster and Winthrop Streets--perhaps because they
tried to oppose with well-aimed half-bricks the further retreat of a
much-irritated British soldiery. The air of Cambridge became suddenly
unhealthy for royalists, and darkness in the fine houses on Tory Row
told its own story of the hurried departure of their owners.
The Vassalls fled to Halifax. Cambridge was becoming an armed camp,
with incoming militia quartered where they saw fit to alight. The
men of Marblehead made themselves very comfortable on the Vassall
estate. The battle of Bunker Hill on June 17th, with heavy loss and
no tangible advantage to either side, threw the camp into utter
confusion and swelled the number of volunteers to fourteen thousand.
They swarmed down in a great semi-circle to sever the Boston peninsula
from the mainland, while the British retired into the city to await
reinforcements. Congress met, chose as commander of the army a young
soldier-farmer from Virginia who had shown great intelligence in
discussing military plans, and on July 3d he rode down Tory Row from
Watertown, made one of the shortest public speeches on record, and took
command of his army.
After a fortnight in the residence on Harvard Square, now known as
Wadsworth House, he ordered the men of Marblehead out of the Vassall
house to make room for his staff and headquarters. For ten months it
was his base of operations, the longest period during which he occupied
any headquarters during the Revolution. He came there the authorized
commander of an undisciplined, inexperienced mob. He left only after
he had transformed that mob into an army, fed it, clothed it, armed it,
guarded it from small-pox, and finally, with its valor and enthusiasm
and skill, ejected the British from Boston for a more hospitable
battleground to the southward.
The southeast room was his office. One day in the early winter of ’75–6
an out-rider came in with good news, and presently Martha Washington
“arrived in great ceremony, with a coach and four black horses, with
postilions and servants in scarlet livery.” She was installed in the
sunny room across the hallway, the room from whose walls look down
today the interesting faces of Sir William Pepperrell’s children, and
the same room in which you may find an exquisite onyx and metal goblet
from the studio of that delightful international scamp, Benvenuto
Cellini.
As chatelaine of headquarters she presided over a modest celebration
of their wedding anniversary, although, Miss Alice Longfellow says,
“the General had to be much persuaded by his aides.” And there was a
“Twelfth Night party” which is a tradition in the Longfellow family.
On rare occasions since it has been repeated, once by a group of
youngsters of all ages who impersonated in costume the guests of
Washington, and some of those latter-day guests were direct descendants
of the earlier dignitaries. On another winter night the Longfellow
children dressed in the characters of the successive occupants of the
house, and the sword of General Craigie clanked about the boots of a
certain Boston lawyer until, as he says “I was no longer Dana; I felt
like a regular profiteer!”
For the end of the Revolution was the beginning of a large period
of hospitality in the life of General Andrew Craigie. He had been
apothecary-general to the Continental army, and in the light of the
recent war, it must be evident that purveying to any victorious army
is profitable. The Vassall House, during the seventeen years after
Washington’s departure, had been occupied by two good patriots:
Nathaniel Tracy, who gave a hundred ships to the government during the
war, and Thomas Russel, the same who set Timothy Dexter an example for
making a fortune. Then Andrew Craigie (General, if you like) bought the
house, and it bears his name as commonly today as that of the poet.