Containing Other News Besides that from Bunker Hill.
To pass from October, 1774, to mid-June of 1775--from the moonlit streets
of sleeping Albany to the broad noonday of open revolt in the Mohawk
Valley--is for the reader but the turning of a page with his fingers. To
us, in those trying times, these eight months were a painfully
long-drawn-out period of anxiety and growing excitement.
War was coming surely upon us--and war under strange and sinister
conditions. Dull, horse-racing, dog-fighting noblemen were comforting
themselves in Parliament, at London, by declaring that the Americans were
cowards and would not fight. We boasted little, but we knew ourselves
better. There was as yet small talk of independence, of separation.
Another year was to elapse before Thomas Paine's _Common Sense_ should
flash a flood of light as from some new sun upon men's minds, and show us
both our real goal and the way to attain it. But about fighting, we had
resolved our purpose.
We should have been slaves otherwise.
Turn and turn about, titled imbecile had succeeded distinguished incapable
at London in the task of humiliating and bullying us into subjection. Now
it was Granville, now Townshend, now Bedford, now North--all tediously
alike in their refusal to understand us, and their slow obstinacy of
determination to rule us in their way, not in ours. To get justice, or
even an intelligent hearing, from these people, was hopeless. They
listened to their own little clique in the colonies--a coterie of
officials, land-owners, dependents of the Crown, often men of too
worthless a character to be tolerated longer in England--who lied us
impudently and unblushingly out of court. To please these gentry, the
musty statutes of Tudor despotism were ransacked for a law by which we
were to be haled over the seas for trial by an English jury for sedition;
the port of Boston was closed to traffic, and troops crowded into the town
to overawe and crush its citizens; a fleet of war-ships was despatched
under Lord Howe to enforce by broadsides, if needs be, the wicked and
stupid trade and impost laws which we resented; everywhere the Crown
authorities existed to harass our local government, affront such honest
men as we selected to honor, fetter or destroy our business, and eat up
our substance in wanton taxation.
There had been a chance that the new Parliament, meeting for the first
time in the January of this 1775, would show more sense, and strive to
honestly set matters right. We had appealed from Crown and Commons to the
English people; for a little we fancied the result might be favorable. But
the hope speedily fell to the ground. The English, with that strange
rushing of blood to the head which, from age to age, on occasion blinds
their vision, confuses their judgment, and impels them to rude and brutal
courses, decreed in their choler that we should be flogged at the
cart-tail.
To this we said no!
In Albany, on this day in the latter part of June, when the thread of the
story is again resumed, there were notable, but distressingly vague,
tidings. Following upon the blow struck at Concord in April, a host of
armed patriots, roughly organized into something like military form, were
investing Boston, and day by day closing in the cordon around the
beleaguered British General Gage. A great battle had been fought near the
town--this only we knew, and not its result or character. But it meant
War, and the quiet burgh for the nonce buzzed with the hum of
excited comment.
The windows of my upper room were open, and along with the streaming
sunlight came snatches of echoing words from the street below. Men had
gone across the river, and horses were to be posted farther on upon the
Berkshire turnpike, to catch the earliest whisper from across the
mountains of how the fight had gone. No one talked of anything else.
Assuredly I too would have been on the street outside, eager to learn and
discuss the news from Boston, but that my old friend Major Jelles Fonda
had come down from Caughnawaga, bearing to me almost as grave intelligence
from the Mohawk Valley.
How well I remember him still, the good, square-set, solid
merchant-soldier, with his bold broad face, resolute mouth, and calm,
resourceful, masterful air! He sat in his woollen shirt-sleeves, for the
day was hot, and slowly unfolded to me his story between meditative and
deliberate whiffs of his pipe. I listened with growing interest, until at
last I forgot to keep even one ear upon the sounds from the street, which
before had so absorbed me. He had much to tell.
More than a month before, the two contending factions had come to
fisticuffs, during a meeting held by the Whigs in and in front of John
Veeder's house, at Caughnawaga. They were to raise a liberty pole there,
and the crowd must have numbered two hundred or more. While they were
deliberating, up rides Guy Johnson, his short, pursy figure waddling in
the saddle, his arrogant, high-featured face redder than ever with rage.
Back of him rode a whole company of the Hall cabal--Sir John Johnson,
Philip Cross, the Butlers, and so on--all resolved upon breaking up the
meeting, and supported by a host of servants and dependents, well armed.
Many of these were drunk. Colonel Guy pushed his horse into the crowd, and
began a violent harangue, imputing the basest motives to those who had
summoned them thither. Young Jake Sammons, with the characteristic
boldness of his family, stood up to the Indian superintendent and answered
him as he deserved, whereat some half-dozen of the Johnson men fell upon
Jake, knocked him down, and pummelled him sorely. Some insisted that it
was peppery Guy himself who felled the youngster with his loaded
riding-whip, but on this point Major Jelles was not clear.
"But what were our people about, to let this happen?" I asked, with some
heat.
"To tell the truth," he answered, regretfully, "they mostly walked away.
Only a few of us held our place. Our men were unarmed, for one thing.
Moreover, they are in awe of the power of the Hall. The magistrates, the
sheriff, the constables, the assessors--everybody, in fact, who has office
in Tryon County--take orders from the Hall. You can't get people to forget
that. Besides, if they had resisted, they would have been shot down."
Major Jelles went on to tell me, that, despite this preponderance of armed
force on the side of the Johnsons, they were visibly alarmed at the temper
of the people and were making preparations to act on the defensive. Sir
John had set up cannon on the eminence crowned by the Hall, and his Roman
Catholic Highlanders were drilling night and day to perfect themselves as
a military body. All sorts of stories came down from Johnstown and up from
Guy Park, as to the desperate intentions of the aristocrats and their
retainers. Peculiarly conspicuous in the bandying of these threats were
Philip Cross and Walter Butler, who had eagerly identified themselves with
the most violent party of the Tories. To them, indeed, was directly
traceable the terrible rumor, that, if the Valley tribes proved to have
been too much spoiled by the missionaries, the wilder Indians were to be
called down from the headwaters of the Three Rivers, and from the Lake
plains beyond, to coerce the settlements in their well-known fashion, if
rebellion was persisted in.
"But they would never dare do that!" I cried rising to my feet.
"Why not?" asked Jelles, imperturbably sucking at his pipe. "After all,
that is their chief strength. Make no mistake! They are at work with the
red-skins, poisoning them against us. Guy Johnson is savage at the
mealy-mouthed way in which they talked at his last council, at Guy Park,
and he has already procured orders from London to remove Dominie Kirkland,
the missionary who has kept the Oneidas heretofore friendly to us. That
means--You can see as well as the rest of us what it means."
"It means war in the Valley--fighting for your lives."
"Well, let it! My customers owe me three thousand pounds and more. I will
give every penny of that, and as much besides, and fight with my gun from
the windows of my house, sooner than tolerate this Johnson nonsense any
longer. And my old father and my brothers say it with me. My brother Adam,
he thinks of nothing but war these days; he can hardly attend to his work,
his head is so full of storing powder, and collecting cherry and red maple
for gun-stocks, and making bullets. That reminds me--Guy Johnson took all
the lead weights out of the windows at Guy Park, and hid them, to keep
them from our bullet-moulds, before he ran away."
"Before he ran away? Who ran away?"
"Why, Guy, of course," was the calm reply.
I stared at the man in open-mouthed astonishment. "You never mentioned
this!" I managed to say at last.
"I hadn't got to it yet," the Dutchman answered, filling his pipe slowly.
"You young people hurry one so."
By degrees I obtained the whole story from him--the story which he had
purposely come down, I believe, to tell me. As he progressed, my fancy ran
before him, and pictured the conclave of desperate plotters in the great
Hall on the hill which I knew so well.
I needed not his assurances to believe that Molly Brant, who had come down
from the upper Mohawk Castle to attend this consultation, led and spurred
on all the rest into malevolent resolves.
I could conceive her, tall, swart, severely beautiful still, seated at the
table where in Sir William's time she had been mistress, and now was but a
visitor, yet now as then every inch a queen. I could see her watching with
silent intentness--first the wigged and powdered gentlemen, Sir John,
Colonel Guy, the Butlers, Cross, and Claus, and then her own brother
Joseph, tall like herself, and darkly handsome, but, unlike her,
engrafting upon his full wolf-totem Mohawk blood the restraints of tongue
and of thought learned in the schools of white youth. No one of the males,
Caucasian or aboriginal, spoke out clearly what was in their minds. Each
in turn befogged his suggestions by deference to what the world--which to
them meant London--would think of their acts. No one, not even Joseph
Brant, uttered bluntly the one idea which lay covert in their hearts--to
wit: that the recalcitrant Valley should be swept as with a besom of fire
and steel in the hands of the savage horde at their command. This, when
it came her time, the Indian woman said for them frankly, and with
scornful words on their own faint stomachs for bloodshed. I could fancy
her darkling glances around the board, and their regards shrinking away
from her, as she called them cowards for hesitating to use in his interest
the powers with which the king had intrusted them.
It was not hard, either, to imagine young Walter Butler and Philip Cross
rising with enthusiasm to approve her words, or how these, speaking hot
and fast upon the echo of Mistress Molly's contemptuous rebuke, should
have swept away the last restraining fears of the others, and committed
all to the use of the Indians.
So that day, just a week since, it had been settled that Colonel Guy and
the two Butlers, father and son, should go west, ostensibly to hold a
council near Fort Schuyler, but really to organize the tribes against
their neighbors; and promptly thereafter, with a body of retainers, they
had departed. Guy had taken his wife, because, as a daughter of the great
Sir William, she would be of use in the work; but Mrs. John Butler had
gone to the Hall--a refuge which she later was to exchange for the lower
Indian Castle.
The two houses thus deserted--Guy Park and the Butlers' home on Switzer's
Hill--had been in a single night almost despoiled by their owners of their
contents; some of which, the least bulky, had been taken with them in
their flight, the residue given into safe-keeping in the vicinity,
or hidden.
"My brother Adam went to look for the lead in the windows," honest Jelles
Fonda concluded, "but it was all gone. So their thoughts were on bullets
as well as his. He has his eye now on the church roof at home."
Here was news indeed! There could be no pretence that the clandestine
flight of these men was from fear for their personal safety. To the
contrary, Colonel Guy, as Indian superintendent, had fully five hundred
fighting men, Indian and otherwise, about his fortified residence. They
had clearly gone to enlist further aid, to bring down fresh forces to
assist Sir John, Sheriff White, and their Tory minions to hold Tryon
County in terror, and, if need be, to flood it with our blood.
We sat silent for a time, as befitted men confronting so grave a
situation. At last I said:
"Can I do anything? You all must know up there that I am with you, heart
and soul."
Major Jelles looked meditatively at me, through his fog of smoke.
"Yes, we never doubted that. But we are not agreed how you can best serve
us. You are our best-schooled young man; you know how to write well, and
to speak English like an Englishman. Some think you can be of most use
here, standing between us and the Albany committee; others say that things
would go better if we had you among us. Matters are very bad. John Johnson
is stopping travellers on the highways and searching them; we are trying
to watch the river as closely as he does the roads, but he has the courts
and the sheriff, and that makes it hard for us. I don't know what to
advise you. What do you think?"
While we were still debating the question thus raised by Major
Fonda--although I have written it in an English which the worthy soul
never attained--my cousin Teunis Van Hoorn burst into the room with
tidings from Boston which had just arrived by courier. Almost before he
could speak, the sound of cheering in the streets told me the burden of
his story. It was the tale of Bunker Hill which he shouted out to us--that
story still so splendid in our ears, but then, with all its freshness of
vigor and meaning upon us, nothing less than soul-thrilling!
An hour later Major Jelles rose, put on his coat, and said he must be off.
He would sleep that night at Mabie's, so as to have all the Tryon County
part of his ride by daylight next day, when the roads would be safer.
It was only when we were shaking hands with him at the door that I found
how the secretive Dutchman had kept his greatest, to me most vital,
tidings for the last.
"Oh, yes!" he said, as he stood in the doorway; "perhaps I did not mention
it. Young Cross has left his home and gone to join Guy Johnson and the
Butlers. They say he had angry words with his wife--your Daisy--before he
deserted her. She has come back to the Cedars again to live!"