Old-Time Politics Pondered Under the Forest Starlight.
Among the numerous books which at one time of another I had resolved to
write, and which the evening twilight of my life finds still unwritten,
was one on Fur-trading. This volume, indeed, came somewhat nearer to a
state of actual existence than any of its unborn brethren, since I have
yet a great store of notes and memoranda gathered for its construction in
earlier years. My other works, such as the great treatise on Astronomical
Delusions--which Herschel and La Place afterward rendered unnecessary--and
the "History of the Dutch in America," never even progressed to this point
of preparation. I mention this to show that I resist a genuine temptation
now in deciding not to put into this narrative a great deal about my
experiences in, and information concerning, the almost trackless West of
my youth. My diary of this first and momentous journey with Mr. Jonathan
Cross, yellow with age and stained by damp and mildew, lies here before
me; along with it are many odd and curious incidents and reflections
jotted down, mirroring that strange, rude, perilous past which seems so
far away to the generation now directing a safe and almost eventless
commerce to the Pacific and the Gulf. But I will draw from my stock only
the barest outlines, sufficient to keep in continuity the movement of
my story.
When we reached Caughnawaga Mr. Cross and his party were waiting for us at
the trading store of my godfather, good old Douw Fonda. I was relieved to
learn that I had not delayed them; for it was still undecided, I found,
whether we should all take to the river here, or send the boats forward
with the men, and ourselves proceed to the Great Carrying Place at Fort
Stanwix by the road. Although it was so early in the season, the Mohawk
ran very low between its banks. Major Jelles Fonda, the eldest son of my
godfather, and by this time the true head of the business, had only
returned from the Lakes, and it was by his advice that we settled upon
riding and carting as far as we could, and leaving the lightened boats to
follow. So we set out in the saddle, my friend and I, stopping one night
with crazy old John Abeel--he who is still remembered as the father of the
Seneca half-breed chieftain Corn-Planter--and the next night with
Honnikol Herkimer.
This man, I recall, greatly impressed Mr. Cross. We were now in an
exclusively German section of the Valley, where no Dutch and very little
English was to be heard. Herkimer himself conversed with us in a dialect
that must often have puzzled my English friend, though he gravely forbore
showing it. I had known Colonel Herkimer all my life; doubtless it was
this familiarity with his person and speech which had prevented my
recognizing his real merit, for I was not a little surprised when Mr.
Cross said to me that night: "Our host is one of the strongest and most
sagacious men I have ever encountered in the Colonies; he is worth a
thousand of your Butlers or Sir Johns."
It became clear in later years that my friend was right. I remember that I
regarded the hospitable Colonel, at breakfast next morning, with a closer
and more respectful attention than ever before, but it was not easy to
discern any new elements of greatness in his talk.
Herkimer was then a middle-aged, undersized man, very swart and
sharp-eyed, and with a quick, almost vehement way of speaking. It took no
time at all to discover that he watched the course of politics in the
Colonies pretty closely, and was heart and soul on the anti-English side.
One thing which he said, in his effort to make my friend understand the
difference between his position and the more abstract and educated
discontent of New England and Virginia, sticks in my memory.
"We Germans," he said, "are not like the rest. Our fathers and mothers
remember their sufferings in the old country, kept ragged and hungry and
wretched, in such way as my negroes do not dream of, all that some
scoundrel baron might have gilding on his carriage, and that the Elector
might enjoy himself in his palace. They were beaten, hanged, robbed of
their daughters, worked to death, frozen by the cold in their nakedness,
dragged off into the armies to be sold to any prince who could pay for
their blood and broken bones. The French who overran the Palatinate were
bad enough; the native rulers were even more to be hated. The exiles of
our race have not forgotten this; they have told it all to us, their
children and grandchildren born here in this Valley. We have made a new
home for ourselves over here, and we owe no one but God anything for it.
If they try to make here another aristocracy over us, then we will die
first before we will submit."
The case for the Mohawk Valley's part in the great revolt has never been
more truly stated, I think, than it was thus, by the rough, uneducated,
little frontier trader, in his broken English, on that May morning years
before the storm broke.
We rode away westward in the full sunshine that morning, in high spirits.
The sky was pure blue overhead; the birds carolled from every clump of
foliage about us; the scenery, to which Mr. Cross paid much delighted
attention, first grew nobly wild and impressive when we skirted the Little
Falls--as grand and gloomy in its effect of towering jagged cliffs and
foaming cataracts as one of Jacob Ruysdael's pictures--and then softened
into a dream of beauty as it spread out before us the smiling, embowered
expanses of the German Flatts. Time and time again my companion and I
reined up our horses to contemplate the charms of this lovely scene.
We had forded the river near Fort Herkimer, where old Hon Yost Herkimer,
the father of the Colonel, lived, and were now once more on the north
side. From an open knoll I pointed out to my friend, by the apple and pear
blossoms whitening the deserted orchards, the site of the Palatines'
village where Daisy's father had been killed, fifteen years ago, in the
midnight rout and massacre.
"It was over those hills that the French stole in darkness. Back yonder,
at the very ford we crossed, her poor mother was trampled under foot and
drowned in the frightened throng. It was at the fort there, where we had
the buttermilk and _Kuchen,_ that your cousin, Major Cross, found the
little girl. I wonder if he ever knew how deeply grateful to him we
were--and are."
This brought once more to my mind--where indeed it had often enough before
intruded itself--the recollection of young Philip's arrival at the Cedars.
For some reason I had disliked to speak of it before, but now I told Mr.
Cross of it as we walked our horses along over the rough, muddy road,
under the arching roof of thicket.
"I'll be bound Mr. Stewart welcomed him with open arms," said my
companion.
"Ay, indeed! No son could have asked a fonder greeting."
"Yes, the lad is very like his mother; that of itself would suffice to
warm the old gentleman's heart. You knew he was a suitor for her hand long
before Tony Cross ever saw her?"
I didn't know this, but I nodded silently.
"Curious creature she was," mused he, as if to himself. "Selfish,
suspicious, swift to offence, jealous of everything and everybody about
her--yet with moods when she seemed to all she met the most amiable and
delightful of women. She had her fine side, too. She would have given her
life gladly for the success of the Jacobites, of that I'm sure. And
proud!--no duchess could have carried her head higher."
"You say her son is very like her?"
"As like as two leaves on a twig. Perhaps he has something of his father's
Irish openness of manner as well. His father belonged to the younger, what
we call the Irish, branch of our family, you know, though it is as English
in the matter of blood as I am. We were only second cousins, in point of
fact, and his grandfather was set up in Ireland by the bounty of mine. Yet
Master Philip condescends to me, patronizes me, as if the case had been
reversed."
Mr. Cross did not speak as if he at all resented this, but in a calm,
analytical manner, and with a wholly impersonal interest. I have never
known another man who was so totally without individual bias, and regarded
all persons and things with so little reference to his own feelings. If he
had either prejudices or crotchets on any point, I never discovered them.
He was, I feel assured, a scrupulously honest and virtuous gentleman, yet
he never seemed to hate people who were not so. He was careful not to let
them get an advantage over him, but for the rest he studied them and
observed their weaknesses and craft, with the same quiet interest he
displayed toward worthier objects. A thoroughly equable nature was
his--with little capacity for righteous indignation on the one side, and
no small tendencies toward envy or peevishness on the other. There was not
a wrinkle on his calm countenance, nor any power of angry flashing in his
steadfast, wide-apart, gray eyes. But his tongue could cut deep
on occasion.
We were now well beyond the last civilized habitation in the Valley of the
Mohawk, and we encamped that night above the bank of a little rivulet that
crossed the highway some four miles to the east of Fort Stanwix. Tulp and
the Dutchman, Barent Coppernol, whom Mr. Cross had brought along,
partially unpacked the cart, and set to with their axes. Soon there had
been constructed a shelter for us, half canvas, half logs and brush, under
a big beech-tree which stood half-way up the western incline from the
brook, and canopied with its low boughs a smooth surface of clear ground.
We had supper here, and then four huge night-fires were built as an outer
wall of defence, and Barent went to sleep, while young Tulp, crouching and
crooning by the blaze, began his portion of the dreary watch to keep up
the fires.
We lay awake for a long time on our bed of hemlock twigs and brake, well
wrapped up, our heads close to the beech-trunk, our knees raised to keep
the fierce heat of the flames from our faces. From time to time we heard
the barking of the wolves, now distant, now uncomfortably near. When the
moon came up, much later, the woods seemed alive with strange vocal noises
and ominous rustlings in the leaves and brakes. It was my London
companion's first night in the open wilderness; but while he was very
acute to note new sounds and inquire their origin, he seemed to be in no
degree nervous.
We talked of many things, more particularly, I remember, of what Herkimer
had said at breakfast. And it is a very remarkable thing that, as we
talked thus of the German merchant-farmer and his politics, we were lying
on the very spot where, five years later, I was to behold him sitting,
wounded but imperturbable, smoking his pipe and giving orders of battle,
under the most hellish rain of bullets from which man ever shrank
affrighted. And the tranquil moon above us was to look down again upon
this little vale, and turn livid to see its marsh and swale choked with
fresh corpses, and its brook rippling red with blood. And the very wolves
we heard snapping and baying in the thicket were to raise a ghastly
halloo, here among these same echoes, as they feasted on the flesh of my
friends and comrades.
We did not guess this fearsome future, but instead lay peacefully,
contentedly under the leaves, with the balmy softness of the firs in the
air we breathed, and the flaming firelight in our eyes. Perhaps lank,
uncouth Barent Coppernol may have dreamed of it, as he snored by the outer
heap of blazing logs. If so, did he, as in prophecy, see his own form,
with cleft skull, stretched on the hill-side?
"I spoke about Philip's having some of his father's adopted Irish traits,"
said Mr. Cross, after a longer interval of silence than usual. "One of
them is the desire to have subordinates, dependents, about him. There is
no Irishman so poor or lowly that he will not, if possible, encourage some
still poorer, lowlier Irishman to hang to his skirts. It is a reflection
of their old Gaelic tribal system, I suppose, which, between its chiefs
above and its clansmen below, left no place for a free yeomanry. I note
this same thing in the Valley, with the Johnsons and the Butlers. So far
as Sir William is concerned, the quality I speak of has been of service to
the Colony, for he has used his fondness and faculty for attracting
retainers and domineering over subordinates to public advantage. But then
he is an exceptional and note-worthy man--one among ten thousand. But his
son Sir John, and his son-in-law Guy Johnson, and the Butlers, father and
son, and now to them added our masterful young Master Philip--these own no
such steadying balance-wheel of common-sense. They have no restraining
notion of public interest. Their sole idea is to play the aristocrat, to
surround themselves with menials, to make their neighbors concede to them
submission and reverence. It was of them that Herkimer spoke, plainly
enough, though he gave no names. Mark my words, they will come to grief
with that man, if the question be ever put to the test."
I had not seen enough of Englishmen to understand very clearly the
differences between them and the Irish, and I said so. The conversation
drifted upon race questions and distinctions, as they were presented by
the curiously mixed population of New York province.
My companion was of the impression that the distinctly British
settlements, like those of Massachusetts and Virginia, were far more
powerful and promising than my own polyglot province. No doubt from his
point of view this notion was natural, but it nettled me. To this day I
cannot read or listen to the inflated accounts this New England and this
Southern State combine to give of their own greatness, of their wonderful
patriotism and intelligence, and of the tremendous part they played in the
Revolution, without smashing my pipe in wrath. Yet I am old enough now to
see that all this is largely the fault of the New Yorkers themselves. We
have given our time and attention to the making of money, and have left it
to others to make the histories. If they write themselves down large, and
us small, it is only what might have been expected. But at the time of
which I am telling I was very young, and full of confidence in not only
the existing superiority but the future supremacy of my race. I could not
foresee how we were to be snowed under by the Yankees in our own State,
and, what is worse, accept our subjugation without a protest--so that
to-day the New York schoolboy supposes Fisher Ames, or any other of a
dozen Boston talkers, to have been a greater man than Philip Schuyler.
I remember that I greatly vaunted the good qualities of the Dutch that
night. I pointed out how they alone had learned the idea of religious
toleration toward others in the cruel school of European persecution; how
their faith in liberty and in popular institutions, nobly exemplified at
home in the marvellous struggle with Spain, had planted roots of civil and
religious freedom in the New World which he could find neither to the east
nor to the south of us; and how even the early Plymouth Puritans had
imbibed all they knew of clemency and liberty during their stay
in Holland.
I fear that Mr. Cross inwardly smiled more or less at my enthusiasm and
extravagance, but his comments were all serious and kindly. He conceded
the justice of much that I said, particularly as to the admirable
resolution, tenacity, and breadth of character the Dutch had displayed
always in Europe. But then he went on to declare that the Dutch could not
hope to hold their own in strange lands against the extraordinary
conquering and colonizing power of the more numerous English, who, by
sheer force of will and energy, were destined in the end to dominate
everything they touched. Note how Clive and the English had gradually
undermined or overthrown French, Portuguese, and Dutch alike in the
Indies, he said; the same thing has happened here, either by bloodshed or
barter. No nation could resist the English in war; no people could
maintain themselves in trade or the peaceful arts against the English.
"But you yourself predicted, not an hour ago, that the young gentry down
the Valley would come to grief in their effort to lord it over the Dutch
and Palatines."
"Oh, that indeed," my friend replied. "They are silly sprouts, grown up
weak and spindling under the shadow of Sir William; when he is cut down
the sun will shrivel them, no doubt. But the hardier, healthier plants
which finally take their place will be of English stock--not Dutch
or German."
I hope devoutly that this lengthened digression into politics has not
proved wearisome. I have touched upon but one of a hundred like
conversations which we two had together on our slow journey, and this
because I wanted to set forth the manner of things we discussed, and the
views we severally had. Events proved that we both were partially right.
The United States of the Netherlands was the real parent of the United
States of America, and the constitution which the Dutch made for the
infant State of New York served as the model in breadth and in freedom for
our present noble Federal Constitution. In that much my faith was
justified. But it is also true that my State is no longer Dutch, but
English, and that the language of my mother has died out from among us.
Before noon next day we reached Fort Stanwix, the forest-girdled
block-house commanding the Great Carrying Place. Here we waited one day
for the boats to come up, and half of another to get them through the
sluices into Wood Creek. Then, as the horses and carts returned, we
embarked and set our faces toward the Lakes.