to town with their wagons and buggies for the celebration. The young
fellows and their girls were walking along hand in hand, eating
gingerbread, and here and there a farmer had already begun his spree,
and was whooping up and down the sidewalk unmolested by authority. The
boys did not think it at all out of the way for him to be in that state;
they took it as they took the preparations for the public dinner, and no
sense of the shame and sorrow it meant penetrated their tough ignorance
of life. He interested them because, after the regular town drunkards,
he was a novelty; but, otherwise, he did not move them. By and by they
would see him taken charge of by his friends and more or less brought
under control; though if you had the time to follow him up you could see
him wanting to fight his friends and trying to get away from them.
Whiskey was freely made and sold and drunk in that time and that region;
but it must not be imagined that there was no struggle against
intemperance. The boys did not know it, but there was a very strenuous
fight in the community against the drunkenness that was so frequent; and
there were perhaps more people who were wholly abstinent then than there
are now. The forces of good and evil were more openly arrayed against
each other among people whose passions were strong and still somewhat
primitive; and those who touched not, tasted not, handled not, far
outnumbered those who looked upon the wine when it was red. The pity for
the boys was that they saw the drunkards every day, and the temperance
men only now and then; and out of the group of boys who were my boy's
friends, many kindly fellows came to know how strong drink could rage,
how it could bite like the serpent, and sting like an adder.
But the temperance men made a show on the Fourth of July as well as the
drunkards, and the Sons of Temperance walked in the procession with the
Masons and the Odd-Fellows. Sometimes they got hold of a whole Fourth,
and then there was nothing but a temperance picnic in the Sycamore
Grove, which the boys took part in as Sunday-school scholars. It was not
gay; there was no good reason why it should leave the boys with the
feeling of having been cheated out of their holiday, but it did. A boy's
Fourth of July seemed to end about four o'clock, anyhow. After that, he
began to feel gloomy, no matter what sort of a time he had. That was the
way he felt after almost any holiday.
Market-day was a highday in the Boy's Town, and it would be hard to say
whether it was more so in summer than in winter. In summer, the market
opened about four or five o'clock in the morning, and by this hour my
boy's father was off twice a week with his market-basket on his arm.
All the people did their marketing in the same way; but it was a
surprise for my boy, when he became old enough to go once with his
father, to find the other boys' fathers at market too. He held on by his
father's hand, and ran by his side past the lines of wagons that
stretched sometimes from the bridge to the court-house, in the dim
morning light. The market-house, where the German butchers in their
white aprons were standing behind their meat-blocks, was lit up with
candles in sconces, that shone upon festoons of sausage and cuts of
steak dangling from the hooks behind them; but without, all was in a
vague obscurity, broken only by the lanterns in the farmers' wagons.
There was a market-master, who rang a bell to open the market, and if
anybody bought or sold anything before the tap of that bell, he would be
fined. People would walk along the line of wagons, where the butter and
eggs, apples and peaches and melons, were piled up inside near the
tail-boards, and stop where they saw something they wanted, and stand
near so as to lay hands on it the moment the bell rang. My boy
remembered stopping that morning by the wagon of some nice old Quaker
ladies, who used to come to his house, and whom his father stood
chatting with till the bell rang. They probably had an understanding
with him about the rolls of fragrant butter which he instantly lifted
into his basket. But if you came long after the bell rang, you had to
take what you could get.
There was a smell of cantaloupes in the air, along the line of wagons,
that morning, and so it must have been towards the end of the summer.
After the nights began to lengthen and to be too cold for the farmers to
sleep in their wagons, as they did in summer on the market eves, the
market time was changed to midday. Then it was fun to count the wagons
on both sides of the street clear to where they frayed off into
wood-wagons, and to see the great heaps of apples and cabbages, and
potatoes and turnips, and all the other fruits and vegetables which
abounded in that fertile country. There was a great variety of poultry
for sale, and from time to time the air would be startled with the
clamor of fowls transferred from the coops where they had been softly
crr-crring in soliloquy to the hand of a purchaser who walked off with
them and patiently waited for their well-grounded alarm to die away. All
the time the market-master was making his rounds; and if he saw a pound
roll of butter that he thought was under weight, he would weigh it with
his steelyards, and if it was too light he would seize it. My boy once
saw a confiscation of this sort with such terror as he would now,
perhaps, witness an execution.
XI.
MUSTERS AND ELECTIONS.
THE Butler Guards were the finest military company in the world. I do
not believe there was a fellow in the Boy's Town who ever even tried to
imagine a more splendid body of troops: when they talked of them, as
they did a great deal, it was simply to revel in the recognition of
their perfection. I forget just what their uniform was, but there were
white pantaloons in it, and a tuft of white-and-red cockerel plumes that
almost covered the front of the hat, and swayed when the soldier walked,
and blew in the wind. I think the coat was gray, and the skirts were
buttoned back with buff, but I will not be sure of this; and somehow I
cannot say how the officers differed from the privates in dress; it was
impossible for them to be more magnificent. They walked backwards in
front of the platoons, with their swords drawn, and held in their
white-gloved hands at hilt and point, and kept holloing,
"Shoulder-r-r--arms! Carry--arms! Present--arms!" and then faced round,
and walked a few steps forward, till they could think of something else
to make the soldiers do.
[Illustration: THE "BUTLER GUARDS."]
Every boy intended to belong to the Butler Guards when he grew up; and
he would have given anything to be the drummer or the marker. These were
both boys, and they were just as much dressed up as the Guards
themselves, only they had caps instead of hats with plumes. It was
strange that the other fellows somehow did not know who these boys were;
but they never knew, or at least my boy never knew. They thought more of
the marker than of the drummer; for the marker carried a little flag,
and when the officers holloed out, "By the left flank--left! Wheel!" he
set his flag against his shoulder, and stood marking time with his feet
till the soldiers all got by him, and then he ran up to the front rank,
with the flag fluttering behind him. The fellows used to wonder how he
got to be marker, and to plan how they could get to be markers in other
companies, if not in the Butler Guards. There were other companies that
used to come to town on the Fourth of July and Muster Day, from smaller
places round about; and some of them had richer uniforms: one company
had blue coats with gold epaulets, and gold braid going down in loops on
the sides of their legs; all the soldiers, of course, had braid straight
down the outer seams of their pantaloons. One Muster Day, a captain of
one of the country companies came home with my boy's father to dinner;
he was in full uniform, and he put his plumed helmet down on the entry
table just like any other hat.
There was a company of Germans, or Dutchmen, as the boys always called
them; and the boys believed that they each had hay in his right shoe,
and straw in his left, because a Dutchman was too dumb, as the boys said
for stupid, to know his feet apart any other way; and that the Dutch
officers had to call out to the men when they were marching, "Up mit de
hay-foot, down mit de straw-foot--_links_, _links_, _links_!" (Left,
left, left!) But the boys honored even these imperfect intelligences so
much in their quality of soldiers that they would any of them have
been proud to be marker in the Dutch company; and they followed the
Dutchmen round in their march as fondly as any other body of troops. Of
course, school let out when there was a regular muster, and the boys
gave the whole day to it; but I do not know just when the Muster Day
came. They fired the cannon a good deal on the river-bank, and they must
have camped somewhere near the town, though no recollection of tents
remained in my boy's mind. He believed with the rest of the boys that
the right way to fire the cannon was to get it so hot you need not touch
it off, but just keep your thumb on the touch-hole, and take it away
when you wanted the cannon to go off. Once he saw the soldiers ram the
piece full of dog-fennel on top of the usual charge, and then he
expected the cannon to burst. But it only roared away as usual.
The boys had their own ideas of what that cannon could do if aptly fired
into a force of British, or Bridish, as they called them. They wished
there could be a war with England, just to see; and their national
feeling was kept hot by the presence of veterans of the War of 1812 at
all the celebrations. One of the boys had a grandfather who had been in
the Revolutionary War, and when he died the Butler Guards fired a salute
over his grave. It was secret sorrow and sometimes open shame to my boy
that his grandfather should be an Englishman, and that even his father
should have been a year old when he came to this country; but on his
mother's side he could boast a grandfather and a great-grandfather who
had taken part, however briefly or obscurely, in both the wars against
Great Britain. He hated just as much as any of the boys, or perhaps
more, to be the Bridish when they were playing war, and he longed as
truly as any of them to march against the hereditary, or
half-hereditary, enemy.
Playing war was one of the regular plays, and the sides were always
Americans and Bridish, and the Bridish always got whipped. But this was
a different thing, and a far less serious thing, than having a company.
The boys began to have companies after every muster, of course; but
sometimes they began to have them for no external reason. Very likely
they would start having a company from just finding a rooster's
tail-feather, and begin making plumes at once. It was easy to make a
plume: you picked up a lot of feathers that the hens and geese had
dropped; and you whittled a pine stick, and bound the feathers in
spirals around it with white thread. That was a first-rate plume, but
the uniform offered the same difficulties as the circus dress, and you
could not do anything towards it by rolling up your pantaloons. It was
pretty easy to make swords out of laths, but guns again were hard to
realize. Some fellows had little toy guns left over from Christmas, but
they were considered rather babyish, and any kind of stick was better;
the right kind of a gun for a boy's company was a wooden gun, such as
some of the big boys had, with the barrel painted different from the
stock. The little fellows never had any such guns, and if the question
of uniform could have been got over, this question of arms would still
have remained. In these troubles the fellows' mothers had to suffer
almost as much as the fellows themselves, the fellows teased them so
much for bits of finery that they thought they could turn to account in
eking out a uniform. Once it came to quite a lot of fellows getting
their mothers to ask their fathers if they would buy them some little
soldier-hats that one of the hatters had laid in, perhaps after a
muster, when he knew the boys would begin recruiting. My boy was by when
his mother asked his father, and stood with his heart in his mouth,
while the question was argued; it was decided against him, both because
his father hated the tomfoolery of the thing, and because he would not
have the child honor any semblance of soldiering, even such a feeble
image of it as a boys' company could present. But, after all, a paper
chapeau, with a panache of slitted paper, was no bad soldier-hat; it
went far to constitute a whole uniform; and it was this that the boys
devolved upon at last. It was the only company they ever really got
together, for everybody wanted to be captain and lieutenant, just as
they wanted to be clown and ring-master in a circus. I cannot understand
how my boy came to hold either office; perhaps the fellows found that
the only way to keep the company together was to take turn-about; but,
at any rate, he was marshalling his forces near his grandfather's gate
one evening when his grandfather came home to tea. The old Methodist
class-leader, who had been born and brought up a Quaker, stared at the
poor little apparition in horror. Then he caught the paper chapeau from
the boy's head, and, saying "Dear me! Dear me!" trampled it under foot.
It was an awful moment, and in his hot and bitter heart the boy, who was
put to shame before all his fellows, did not know whether to order them
to attack his grandfather in a body, or to engage him in single combat
with his own lath-sword. In the end he did neither; his grandfather
walked on into tea, and the boy was left with a wound that was sore till
he grew old enough to know how true and brave a man his grandfather was
in a cause where so many warlike hearts wanted courage.
It was already the time of the Mexican war, when that part of the West
at least was crazed with a dream of the conquest which was to carry
slavery wherever the flag of freedom went. The volunteers were mustered
in at the Boy's Town; and the boys, who understood that they were real
soldiers, and were going to a war where they might get killed, suffered
a disappointment from the plain blue of their uniform and the simplicity
of their caps, which had not the sign of a feather in them. It was a
consolation to know that they were going to fight the Mexicans; not so
much consolation as if it had been the Bridish, though still something.
The boys were proud of them, and they did not realize that most of these
poor fellows were just country-jakes. Somehow they effaced even the
Butler Guards in their fancy, though the Guards paraded with them, in
all their splendor, as escort.
But this civic satisfaction was alloyed for my boy by the consciousness
that both his father and his grandfather abhorred the war that the
volunteers were going to. His grandfather, as an Abolitionist, and his
father, as a Henry Clay Whig, had both been opposed to the annexation of
Texas (which the boy heard talked of without knowing in the least what
annexation meant), and they were both of the mind that the war growing
out of it was wanton and wicked. His father wrote against it in every
number of his paper, and made himself hated among its friends, who were
the large majority in the Boy's Town. My boy could not help feeling that
his father was little better than a Mexican, and whilst his filial love
was hurt by things that he heard to his disadvantage, he was not sure
that he was not rightly hated. It gave him a trouble of mind that was
not wholly appeased by some pieces of poetry that he used to hear his
father reading and quoting at that time, with huge enjoyment. The pieces
were called "The Biglow Papers," and his father read them out of a
Boston newspaper, and thought them the wisest and wittiest things that
ever were. The boy always remembered how he recited the lines--
"Ez fur war, I call it murder--
There ye hev it plain and flat;
'N I don't want to go no furder
Then my Testament fur that.
God hez said so plump and fairly:
It's as long as it is broad;
And ye'll hev to git up airly,
Ef ye want to take in God."
He thought this fine, too, but still, it seemed to him, in the narrow
little world where a child dwells, that his father and his grandfather
were about the only people there were who did not wish the Mexicans
whipped, and he felt secretly guilty for them before the other boys.
It was all the harder to bear because, up to this time, there had been
no shadow of difference about politics between him and the boys he went
with. They were Whig boys, and nearly all the fellows in the Boy's Town
seemed to be Whigs. There must have been some Locofoco boys, of course,
for my boy and his friends used to advance, on their side, the position
that
"Democrats
Eat dead rats!"
The counter-argument that
"Whigs
Eat dead pigs!"
had no force in a pork-raising country like that; but it was urged, and
there must have been Democratic boys to urge it. Still, they must have
been few in number, or else my boy did not know them. At any rate, they
had no club, and the Whig boys always had a club. They had a Henry Clay
Club in 1844, and they had Buckeye Clubs whenever there was an election
for governor, and they had clubs at every exciting town or county or
district election. The business of a Whig club among the boys was to
raise ash flag-poles, in honor of Henry Clay's home at Ashland, and to
learn the Whig songs and go about singing them. You had to have a wagon,
too, and some of the club pulled while the others rode; it could be such
a wagon as you went walnutting with; and you had to wear strands of
buckeyes round your neck. Then you were a real Whig boy, and you had a
right to throw fire-balls and roll tar-barrels for the bonfires on
election nights.
I do not know why there should have been so many empty tar-barrels in
the Boy's Town, or what they used so much tar for; but there were
barrels enough to celebrate all the Whig victories that the boys ever
heard of, and more, too; the boys did not always wait for the victories,
but celebrated every election with bonfires, in the faith that it would
turn out right.
Maybe the boys nowadays do not throw fire-balls, or know about them.
They were made of cotton rags wound tight and sewed, and then soaked in
turpentine. When a ball was lighted a boy caught it quickly up, and
threw it, and it made a splendid streaming blaze through the air, and a
thrilling whir as it flew. A boy had to be very nimble not to get
burned, and a great many boys dropped the ball for every boy that threw
it. I am not ready to say why these fire-balls did not set the Boy's
Town on fire, and burn it down, but I know they never did. There was no
law against them, and the boys were never disturbed in throwing them,
any more than they were in building bonfires; and this shows, as much as
anything, what a glorious town that was for boys. The way they used to
build their bonfires was to set one tar-barrel on top of another, as
high as the biggest boy could reach, and then drop a match into them; in
a moment a dusky, smoky flame would burst from the top, and fly there
like a crimson flag, while all the boys leaped and danced round it, and
hurrahed for the Whig candidates. Sometimes they would tumble the
blazing barrels over, and roll them up and down the street.
The reason why they wore buckeyes was that the buckeye was the emblem of
Ohio, and Ohio, they knew, was a Whig state. I doubt if they knew that
the local elections always went heavily against the Whigs; but perhaps
they would not have cared. What they felt was a high public spirit,
which had to express itself in some way. One night, out of pure zeal for
the common good, they wished to mob the negro quarter of the town,
because the "Dumb Negro" (a deaf-mute of color who was a very prominent
personage in their eyes) was said to have hit a white boy. I believe the
mob never came to anything. I only know that my boy ran a long way with
the other fellows, and, when he gave out, had to come home alone through
the dark, and was so afraid of ghosts that he would have been glad of
the company of the lowest-down black boy in town.
There were always fights on election-day between well-known Whig and
Democratic champions, which the boys somehow felt were as entirely for
their entertainment as the circuses. My boy never had the heart to look
on, but he shared the excitement of the affair, and rejoiced in the
triumph of Whig principles in these contests as cordially as the
hardiest witness. The fighting must have come from the drinking, which
began as soon as the polls were opened, and went on all day and night
with a devotion to principle which is now rarely seen. In fact, the
politics of the Boy's Town seem to have been transacted with an eye
single to the diversion of the boys; or if not that quite, they were
marked by traits of a primitive civilization among the men. The
traditions of a rude hospitality in the pioneer times still lingered,
and once there was a Whig barbecue, which had all the profusion of a
civic feast in mediaeval Italy. Every Whig family contributed loaves of
bread and boiled hams; the Whig farmers brought in barrels of cider and
wagon-loads of apples; there were heaps of pies and cakes; sheep were
roasted whole, and young roast pigs, with oranges in their mouths, stood
in the act of chasing one another over the long tables which were spread
in one of the largest pork-houses, where every comer was freely welcome.
I suppose boys, though, were not allowed at the dinner; all that my boy
saw of the barbecue were the heaps of loaves and hams left over, that
piled the floor in one of the rooms to the ceiling.
He remained an ardent Whig till his eleventh year, when his father left
the party because the Whigs had nominated, as their candidate for
president, General Taylor, who had won his distinction in the Mexican
war, and was believed to be a friend of slavery, though afterwards he
turned out otherwise. My boy then joined a Free-Soil club, and sang
songs in support of Van Buren and Adams. His faith in the purity of the
Whigs had been much shaken by their behavior in trying to make capital
out of a war they condemned; and he had been bitterly disappointed by
their preferring Taylor to Tom Corwin, the favorite of the anti-slavery
Whigs. The "Biglow Papers" and their humor might not have moved him from
his life-long allegiance, but the eloquence of Corwin's famous speech
against the Mexican war had grounded him in principles which he could
not afterwards forsake. He had spoken passages of that speech at school;
he had warned our invading hosts of the vengeance that has waited upon
the lust of conquest in all times, and has driven the conquerors back
with trailing battle-flags. "So shall it be with yours!" he had
declaimed. "You may carry them to the loftiest peaks of the Cordilleras;
they may float in insolent triumph in the halls of Montezuma; but the
weakest hand in Mexico, uplifted in prayer, can call down a power
against you before which the iron hearts of your warriors shall be
turned into ashes!" It must have been a terrible wrench for him to part
from the Whig boys in politics, and the wrench must have been a sudden
one at last; he was ashamed of his father for opposing the war, and
then, all at once, he was proud of him for it, and was roaring out songs
against Taylor as the hero of that war, and praising Little Van, whom he
had hitherto despised as the "Fox of Kinderhook."