From the Scythe and Reaper to the Musket.
And now, with all the desperate energy of men who risked everything that
mortal can have in jeopardy, we prepared to meet the invasion.
The tidings of the next few days but amplified what Enoch had told us.
Thomas Spencer, the half-breed, forwarded full intelligence of the
approaching force; Oneida runners brought in stories of its magnitude,
with which the forest glades began to be vocal; Colonel Gansevoort,
working night and day to put into a proper state of defence the
dilapidated fort at the Mohawk's headwaters, sent down urgent demands for
supplies, for more men, and for militia support.
At the most, General Schuyler could spare him but two hundred men, for
Albany was in sore panic at the fall of Ticonderoga and the menace of
Burgoyne's descent in force through the Champlain country. We watched this
little troop march up the river road in a cloud of dust, and realized that
this was the final thing Congress and the State could do for us. What more
was to be done we men of the Valley must do for ourselves.
It was almost welcome, this grim, blood-red reality of peril which now
stared us in the face, so good and wholesome a change did it work in the
spirit of the Valley. Despondency vanished; the cavillers who had
disparaged Washington and Schuyler, sneered at stout Governor Clinton, and
doubted all things save that matters would end badly, ceased their
grumbling and took heart; men who had wavered and been lukewarm or
suspicious came forward now and threw in their lot with their neighbors.
And if here and there on the hillsides were silent houses whence no help
was to come, and where, if the enemy once broke through, he would be
welcomed the more as a friend if his hands were spattered with our
blood--the consciousness, I say, that we had these base traitors in our
midst only gave us a deeper resolution not to fail.
General Herkimer presently issued his order to the Tryon militia,
apprising them of the imminent danger, and summoning all between sixteen
and sixty to arms. There was no doubt now where the blow would fall.
Cherry Valley, Unadilla, and the Sacondaga settlements no longer feared
raids from the wilderness upon their flanks. The invaders were coming
forward in a solid mass, to strike square at the Valley's head. There we
must meet them!
It warms my old heart still to recall the earnestness and calm courage of
that summer fortnight of preparation. All up and down the Valley
bottom-lands the haying was in progress. Young and old, rich and poor, came
out to carry forward this work in common. The meadows were taken in their
order, some toiling with scythe and sickle, others standing guard at the
forest borders of the field to protect the workers. It was a goodly yield
that year, I remember, and never in my knowledge was the harvest gathered
and housed better or more thoroughly than in this period of genuine
danger, when no man knew whose cattle would feed upon his hay a month
hence. The women and girls worked beside the men, and brought them cooling
drinks of ginger, molasses, and vinegar, and spread tables of food in the
early evening shade for the weary gleaners. These would march home in
bodies, a little later, those with muskets being at the front and rear;
and then, after a short night's honest sleep, the rising sun would find
them again at work upon some other farm.
There was something very good and strengthening in this banding together
to get the hay in for all. During twenty years of peace and security, we
had grown selfish and solitary--each man for himself. We had forgotten, in
the strife for individual gain and preferment, the true meaning of that
fine old word "neighbor"--the husbandman, or _boer_, who is nigh, and to
whom in nature you first look for help and sympathy and friendship. It was
in this fortnight of common peril that we saw how truly we shared
everything, even life itself, and how good it was to work for as well as
to fight for one another--each for all, and all for each. Forty years have
gone by since that summer, yet still I seem to discover in the Mohawk
Valley the helpful traces of that fortnight's harvesting in common. The
poor _bauers_ and squatters from the bush came out then and did their
share of the work, and we went back with them into their forest clearings
and beaver-flies and helped them get in their small crops, in turn. And to
this day there is more brotherly feeling here between the needy and the
well-to-do than I know of anywhere else.
When the barns were filled, and the sweet-smelling stacks outside properly
built and thatched, the scythe was laid aside for the musket, the sickle
for the sword and pistol. All up the Valley the drums' rattle drowned the
drone of the locusts in the stubble. The women moulded bullets now and
filled powder-horns instead of making drinks for the hay-field. There was
no thought anywhere save of preparation for the march. Guns were cleaned,
flints replaced, new hickory ramrods whittled out, and the grindstones
threw off sparks under the pressure of swords and spear-heads. Even the
little children were at work rubbing goose-grease into the hard leather of
their elders' foot-gear, against the long tramp to Fort Stanwix.
By this time, the first of August, we knew more about the foe we were to
meet. The commander whom Enoch had heard called Sillinger was learned to
be one Colonel St. Leger, a British officer of distinction, which might
have been even greater if he had not embraced the Old-World military vice
of his day--grievous drunkenness. The gathering of Indians at Oswego under
Claus and Brant was larger than the first reports had made it. The regular
troops, both British and German, intended for our destruction, were said
to alone outnumber the whole militia force which we could hope to oppose
to them. But most of all we thought of the hundreds of our old Tory
neighbors, who were bringing this army down upon us to avenge their own
fancied wrongs; and when we thought of them we moodily rattled the bullets
in our deerskin bags, and bent the steel more fiercely upon the whirling,
hissing stone.
I have read much of war, both ancient and modern. I declare solemnly that
in no chronicle of warfare in any country, whether it be of great
campaigns like those of Marlborough and the late King of Prussia, and that
strange Buonaparte, half god, half devil, who has now been caged at last
at St. Helena; of brutal invasions by a foreign enemy, as when the French
overran and desolated the Palatinate; or of buccaneering and piratical
enterprise by the Spaniards and Portuguese; or of the fighting of savages
or of the Don Cossacks--in none of these records, I aver, can you find so
much wanton baseness and beast-like bloodthirstiness as these native-born
Tories showed toward us. Mankind has not been capable of more utter
cruelty and wickedness than were in their hearts. Beside them the lowest
painted heathen in their train was a Christian, the most ignorant Hessian
peasant was a nobleman.
Ever since my talk with Colonel Dayton I had been trying to look upon
these Tories as men who, however mistaken, were acting from a sense of
duty. For a full year it seemed as if I had succeeded; indeed, more than
once, so temperately did I bring myself in my new philosophy to think of
them, I was warned by my elders that it would be better for me to keep my
generous notions to myself. But now, when the stress came, all this
philanthropy fell away. These men were leading down to their old home an
army of savages and alien soldiers; they were boasting that we, their
relatives or whilom school-fellows, neighbors, friends, should be
slaughtered like rats in a pit; their commander, St. Leger, published at
their instigation general orders offering his Indians twenty dollars
apiece for the scalps of our men, women, and children! How could one
pretend not to hate such monsters?
At least I did not pretend any longer, but worked with an enthusiasm I had
never known before to marshal our yeomanry together.
Under the pelting July sun, in the saddle from morning till night--to
Cherry Valley, to Stone Arabia, to the obscure little groups of cabins in
the bush, to the remote settlements on the Unadilla and the East
Creek--organizing, suggesting, pleading, sometimes, I fear, also cursing a
little, my difficult work was at last done. The men of the Mohawk district
regiment, who came more directly under my eye, were mustered at
Caughnawaga, and some of the companies that were best filled despatched
forward under Captain Adam Fonda, who was all impatience to get first to
Fort Dayton, the general rendezvous. In all we were likely to gather
together in this regiment one hundred and thirty men, and this was better
than a fortnight ago had seemed possible.
They were sturdy fellows for the most part, tall, deep-chested, and hard
of muscle. They came from the high forest clearings of Kingsland and
Tribes Hill, from the lower Valley flatlands near to Schenectady, from the
bush settlements scattered back on Aries Creek, from the rich farms and
villages of Johnstown, and Caughnawaga, and Spraker's. There were among
them all sorts and conditions of men, thrifty and thriftless, cautious and
imprudent, the owners of slaves along with poor yokels of scarcely higher
estate than the others' niggers. Here were posted thick in the roll-call
such names as Fonda, Starin, Yates, Sammons, Gardenier, and Wemple. Many
of the officers, and some few of the men, had rough imitations of uniform,
such as home-made materials and craft could command, but these varied
largely in style and color. The great majority of the privates wore simply
their farm homespun, gray and patched, and some had not even their
hat-brims turned up with a cockade. But they had a look on their
sunburned, gnarled, and honest faces which the Butlers and Johnsons might
well have shrunk from.
These men of the Mohawk district spoke more Dutch than anything else,
though there were both English and High German tongues among them. They
had more old acquaintances among the Tories than had their Palatine
friends up the river, for this had been the Johnsons' own district. Hence,
though in numbers we were smaller than the regiments that mustered above
at Stone Arabia and Zimmerman's, at Canajoharie and Cherry Valley, we were
richer in hate.
At daybreak on August 2, the remaining companies of this regiment were to
start on their march up the Valley. I rode home to my mother's house late
in the afternoon of the 1st, to spend what might be a last night under her
roof. On the morrow, Samson Sammons and Jelles Fonda, members of the
Committee of Safety, and I, could easily overtake the column on
our horses.
I was greatly perplexed and unsettled in mind about Daisy and my duty
toward her, and, though I turned this over in my thoughts the whole
distance, I could come to no satisfactory conclusion. On the one hand, I
yearned to go and say farewell to her; on the other, it was not clear,
after that letter of her husband's, that I could do this without unjustly
prejudicing her as a wife. For the wife of this viper she still was, and
who could tell how soon she might not be in his power again?
I was still wrestling with this vexatious question when I came to my
mother's house. I tied the horse to the fence till Tulp should come out
for him, and went in, irresolutely. At every step it seemed to me as if I
ought instead to be going toward Cairncross.
Guess my surprise at being met, almost upon the threshold, by the very
woman of whom of all others I had been thinking! My mother and she had
apparently made up their differences, and stood together waiting for me.
"Were you going away, Douw, without coming to see me--to say good-by?"
asked Daisy, with a soft reproach in her voice. "Your mother tells me of
your starting to-morrow--for the battle."
I took her hand, and, despite my mother's presence, continued to hold it
in mine. This was bold, but there was little enough of bravery in
my words.
"Yes, we go to-morrow; I wanted to come--all day I have been thinking of
little else--yet I feared that my visit might--might----"
Very early in this tale it was my pride to explain that my mother was a
superior woman. Faults of temper she may have had, and eke narrow
prejudices on sundry points. But she had also great good sense, which she
showed now by leaving the room.
"I came to you instead, you see," my dear girl said, trying to smile, yet
with a quivering lip; "I could not have slept, I could not have borne to
live almost, it seems, if I had let you ride off without a word, without
a sign."
We stood thus facing each other for a moment--mumbling forth some
commonplaces of explanation, she looking intently into my eyes. Then with
a sudden deep outburst of anguish, moaning piteously, "_Must you truly
go_?" she came, nay, almost fell into my arms, burying her face on my
shoulder and weeping violently.
It is not meet that I should speak much of the hour that followed. I
would, in truth, pass over it wholly in silence--as being too sacred a
thing for aught of disclosure or speculation--were it not that some might,
in this case, think lightly of the pure and good woman who, unduly wrung
by years of grief, disappointment, and trial, now, from very weariness of
soul, sobbed upon my breast. And that would be intolerable.
We sat side by side in the little musty parlor. I did not hold her hand,
or so much as touch her gown with my knee or foot.
We talked of impersonal things--of the coming invasion, of the chances of
relieving Fort Stanwix, of the joy it would be to me if I could bear a
good part in rescuing my dear friend Gansevoort, its brave young
commandant. I told her about Peter, and of how we two had consorted
together in Albany, and later in Quebec. And this led us back--as we had
so often returned before during these latter hateful months--to the sweet
companionship of our own childhood and youth. She, in turn, talked of Mr.
Stewart, who seemed less strong and contented in his new home at
Cairncross. He had much enjoyment now, she said, in counting over a rosary
of beads which had been his mother's, reiterating a prayer for each one in
the Romish fashion, and he was curiously able to remember these
long-disused formulas of his boyhood, even while he forgot the things of
yesterday. I commented upon this, pointing out to her that this is the
strange quality of the Roman faith--that its forms and customs, learned in
youth, remain in the affections of Papists to their dying day, even after
many years of neglect and unbelief; whereas in the severe, Spanish-drab
Protestantism to which I was reared, if one once loses interest in the
tenets themselves, there is nothing whatever left upon which the mind may
linger pleasantly.
Thus our conversation ran--decorous and harmless enough, in all
conscience. And if the thoughts masked by these words were all of a
forbidden subject; if the very air about us was laden with sweet
influences; if, when our eyes met, each read in the other's glance a whole
world of meaning evaded in our talk--were we to blame?
I said "no" then, in my own heart, honestly. I say it now. Why, think you!
This love of ours was as old as our intelligence itself. Looking back, we
could trace its soft touch upon every little childish incident we had in
common memory; the cadence of its music bore forward, tenderly, sweetly,
the song of all that had been happy in our lives. We were man and woman
now, wise and grave by reason of sorrow and pain and great trials. These
had come upon us both because neither of us had frankly said, at a time
when to have said it would have been to alter all, "I love you!" And this
we must not say to each other even now, by all the bonds of mutual honor
and self-respect. But not any known law, human or divine, could hold our
thoughts in leash. So we sat and talked of common things, calmly and
without restraint, and our minds were leagues away, in fields of their own
choosing, amid sunshine and flowers and the low chanting of
love's cherubim.
We said farewell, instinctively, before my mother returned. I held her
hands in mine, and, as if she had been a girl again, gently kissed the
white forehead she as gently inclined to me.
"Poor old father is to burn candles for your safety," she said, with a
soft smile, "and I will pray too. Oh, do spare yourself! Come back to us!"
"I feel it in my bones," I answered, stoutly. "Fear nothing, I shall come
back."
The tall, bright-eyed, shrewd old dame, my mother, came in at this, and
Daisy consented to stop for supper with us, but not to spend the night
with one of my sisters as was urged. I read her reason to be that she
shrank from a second and public farewell in the morning.
The supper was almost a cheery meal. The women would have readily enough
made it doleful, I fancy, but my spirits were too high for that. There
were birds singing in my heart. My mother from time to time looked at me
searchingly, as if to guess the cause of this elation, but I doubt she was
as mystified as I then thought.
At twilight I stood bareheaded and watched Daisy drive away, with Enoch
and Tulp as a mounted escort. The latter was also to remain with her
during my absence--and Major Mauverensen almost envied his slave.