The Proud and the Free

by Howard Fast

  Yes, we could lose us, said Scottsboro, choosing his words slowly and painfully, and the nation would lose us too. And we would not set up a republic, but only a company of lost men who would turn bandits in that bitter land.

  Lawrence Scottsboro was an ancient among us, a small, knotted man, wrinkled, with only four teeth in his whole mouth, and on and off racked with the rheumatic pains which were the special reward to each and every one who followed the soldier’s trade. He, like Jack Maloney, had no father, no mother, no kith nor kin. He had licked and scraped from a camp kettle when he was seven years old, and he had not the slightest notion where he came from or who he was or of what blood. Scottsboro, as you know, was the old wooden fort the British built on the upper reaches of the Hudson River, so long ago – and now not even a stick of it remains – and that was the name he took, since it was the first place he could root out of his memory. And he had grown up in the camps of the British regiments, lickspittle at first, serving and scrounging and running to heel with a fist at his forelock – until he was old enough to beat a drum and then to carry a gun. Often I have heard him remember the endless marches he made, the uncounted miles from garrison to garrison, fort to fort, post to post – in the dirty, miserable, meaningless life a redcoat Regular lived, the cane on the shoulders, the filth, the loneliness, the depraved practices among the ignorant, hopeless, undersized men who sold their souls and their lives for the mess of pottage King George served out. He became a corporal and a sergeant and then a master sergeant, and you would have said that there was never a thought or a dream in his obedient head; but the bitterness had made a score, and when the farmers beat the British into Boston in 1775, he and two others cut off a redcoat captain’s head and brought it to the Yankee farmers as enlistment papers. But he was an army man and nothing else, and in the great rout of 1776, when the Yankees ran away, he saw that the foreign brigades remained to fight, and he joined the 1st Regiment of Pennsylvania – which was my regiment then, until they took me out to be sergeant in the 11th.

  This old man, such a hard and bitter old man, now spoke with gentleness and wisdom and said:

  Because we are not a folk, but an army. We be soldiers, and of soldiers and soldiering I know something, laddies, for I was under the weight of a gun before the lot of ye were born. There is no good in soldiers except what comes from the folk they soldier for – and if you soldier for that bastard King, as I did so long, what are ye but a buffer, a pimp, a bruiser, a blower, a hooker, a prigger, a whip jack – and it don’t matter ye wear a red coat on your back. Now, what virtue is in us? I been rolling that round and round in this old head of mine, for we are as hard-bitten and scraggy a lot of men as there are in this whole world over, and I know, I tell you. I seen hard men a-plenty, but I seen harder in these foreign brigades. But I look around at my comrades, and I find them gentle, so gentle I got to go and put my cloak over my face and cry, which a grown man shouldn’t need to do. I ain’t but a simple man, as ye know, but I think there is a deeper virtue in freedom than we sense – and that is why the country folk come with food. That is why. We are their soldiers for freedom, but we got no virtue apart from that. I don’t know how to say that to make it plainer, because it ain’t too plain in my own head. But if we go away from them, from the Jersey and Pennsylvania and York and Connecticut and Massachusetts people, we become something else, and all what is bitter and hard in us will erupt like a boil that breaks. When ye come down to it, that is why we let the gentry cane us and whip us and starve us these five years – we got a deeper attachment than them. But if we do like Connell and Carpenter says and go into the deep woods, then God help us indeed. I don’t know what we can do, but not that.

  He’s right, said Billy Bowzar then. We are in a war because people have suffered and people struck back. If we go to a place where there are no people, we are all through. It would be better to lay down our guns and go home.

  And where is home for the foreigns? asked the Jew Levy. Here is my home.

  Me thought is this, said Danny Connell, that Scottsboro is an old one, and the heart is out of the old ones. Me old father he said, If ye are going to make a rising, then go through with it and be damned!

  Christ, when I hear an Irishman talk! cried Jack Maloney. Do ye make a rising for the sake of a rising? Then ye would rise all alone, ye damn fool! We made a rising because the men wanted it, and now we have cast out the officers – but what the old man says is right, and don’t make mock of him. I tell you, I will not run away to the mountains! I will lay me down and die first! I will crawl first to Wayne and tell him, come back and lead me again!

  I am sick to me belly of hearing ye talk about the Irish, began Danny Connell, but Billy Bowzar cut in and held them.

  You have neither of ye the floor, and hold your peace. This is a Committee meeting, and that it will be. If you want the floor again, put up your hand and ask for it, and when your turn comes you can speak. But I’ll not have us shouting back and forth like a gabble of red Indians.

  He then recognized Abner Williams, who remained silent for a while before he began to speak. There had always been a little of mistrust in our attitude toward Williams, not only because he was a Yankee with the long, narrow, aloof face that so many of the Yankees have, but because he was a man of college education, strange with our women, apart from our jesting, and had made such remarks as to the effect of his believing as little in God as he did in King George III, except that one was there and you could put a hand on him and the other had a residence unknown. While this wasn’t taken well by the Protestants, it went even worse with the Romans, who pointed out that it was logical for the Yankees, who had cast out the true God, to make the next step and defame their own false God as well. Also, he spoke a different tongue from us, a different way of the English; yet he stood for us, and from him the officers took much that they would never take from us. He too had come to us in the great rout and had remained with us, and we knew that he, like the Jew Levy, was full of many books and many mysteries. So we hearkened when he spoke and studied his words, always conscious that we were ignorant men, most of us by far knowing no letters and few numbers. And for all our dislike of the Yankees, they were like the Jews in this matter of reading and writing, scrounging for it, even if they were just common folk like ourselves.

  We are a people of committees, said Abner Williams. It’s in the blood, and for ten years we’ve made a Committee for everything, and everything we have done has come through a Committee, even the Revolution itself – and my father used to tell me that more hours than he slept, he spent at committee meetings. I say this because perhaps a Yankee is more patient with the Committee way than someone who has not bitten his teeth on it. When I first began to hear and speak, a Committee of Resistance met at our house, and then a Committee of Liberty in the church cellar, and then a Committee on Stamps and then a Committee on Tea and then a Committee of Correspondence – only we couldn’t run our army with committees. We tried, but it didn’t work. Well, here in the Midlands, it is different, and you have a gentry of a kind we don’t have in Connecticut, or in the Bay Colony either – or I should say that those of them we had, some we hanged and some we tarred and feathered and the rest we drove away on the British ships. Not because we are more knowledgeable about gentry, but because it is a different world in the North than here with the patroons and the lords and the squires – and the cheating of a man out of his little bit of land to make him a tenant, and binding men like slaves to apprenticeship, and the kind of officers who rode a saddle on us, and the kind of a war they are fighting. But they’re not all of it, and that’s why I want to talk as a Yankee, as a stranger among you, although I’ve eaten and slept and marched and fought with the foreign brigades for five years – and never seen my own home or my own blood in all that time. I lived under the officers as you lived under them, and to me they and what they represent and what they believe and hold are like a disease – and here for a moment the disease joined the body to cast off a
greater danger; and sometime – a year, ten years or a hundred years from now – the disease must go or the body will die. That is why I rose against them and that is why I will do whatever you do and go wherever you go, even across the mountains – although I hold with Scottsboro that such a way is wrong and bad. But I’ve brooded over this and brooded over it, and I know no way, no other way. If we turn out the Congress in Philadelphia – and they have no force that can prevent our doing so – then we will plunge our confederation into civil war, and there is still the British enemy sitting among us and waiting. If we call for the other Lines to join us, some will, but some will march against us. Jersey is with us, and I think Pennsylvania would be with us – but I don’t know what the Yankees would do, and I am a Yankee. And what would Virginia and the Carolinas do, where the gentry are worse than here, and where their own slaves have run away to fight in our brigades? And if we lay down our arms and go home – where is our home? Shall I go back to Connecticut and say, This is no more for me, this Revolution, for I hate the Midland gentry worse than I hate the British? But I don’t hate the British. I love liberty – and not a word, but a way I’ve dreamed where there would be a little dignity to men, and not for the most to be like beasts driven by a few. And that we’ve won, here in the Pennsylvania Line; and we’ve had twenty-four hours of it, and, God help me, I don’t know where we are to go with it!

  Then Yankee, take the damned gentry back! Andrew Yost snorted. Or go to them!

  Fairly – fairly: ask for the floor, several shouted.

  I had the floor – all I want to say. I ain’t got words like him! cried Andrew Yost.

  Keep your order! shouted Billy Bowzar, pounding the floor with a stick of wood.

  And I can tell ye where to go, cried Angus MacGrath, though I no be one of the Committee. Has a kemp a right to speak, Billy Bowzar?

  I have not enough of the Scottish to know if that’s a good man or a dirty scoundrel, but say your piece, MacGrath. This is a forum for the regiments. Say your piece.

  I’ll tell ye where we can go, providing ye got a little bit of courage. We can go up to York city and dad them – if ye got the guts – march north, and cross the river, and hit on them!

  The British?

  I mean no others, answered Angus, standing straight and proud, throwing his deep voice against the back wall of the barn.

  There are fifteen thousand of them in York city! someone cried.

  And when there were fifteen thousand dirty redcoats on the border, was it my own father afraid to come down and faught? The hell he was!

  Ye got a fine notion of the Scottish, and too little of the English, a lad in the hayloft laughed.

  I got a notion of the Line. And if ye want to fight for that notion –

  Angus! cried Billy Bowzar, spreading his arms. I gave you the floor, and you said your piece. Now keep a still tongue! There is no doubting your courage or the courage of the Line, and I’ll have no fighting unless you want to fight with me. And I’m no Scottish and no Irish either and half your size, but I’ll take you on, thick head and all. Now listen …

  We were laughing now, and wrapping deeper in our rags; for a cold night wind blew through the openings in that ruin of a barn; and the laugh was all surface, for there was a memory of the cold of winters past, and there was the beginning of a realization that we were embarked on a road no one had traveled before.

  Now listen, said Billy Bowzar, if you are so short of memory that a day of sunshine can wipe the winter from your mind. Today we marched in the sunshine, but tomorrow the snows can begin again, and our tents would not even make good foot wrappings. That is why the Committee chose Princeton as our destination. The college buildings there are empty and waiting, and we can make something in them and in the hutments the British set up there. So Angus MacGrath says, March on York city where the British are …? With enough leather on our feet to sign our tracks in blood? With twenty thousand loads of powder to the whole Line? I am not impressed with the fifteen thousand of the King’s men, laying with their whores in that rotten city – give us the support of the country and the people, and we can take the Line against them, and cut them up too, and drive them shrieking and screaming and howling from York city the way they drove us out of there in ’76 – but I don’t live in dreams. We have food for three or four days, and we will have more here when that is eaten, too, because the Jersey folk know us – but who will feed us when we march into the doxy-hole of New York? Who will shelter our wounded? Who will give us powder when we have shot away what we carry?

  The British, someone called.

  Ah – yeah? And if it snows, and we must wait five days to feel the bottom of the roads before we can march?

  Let me speak a word, Billy Bowzar, said the Jew Levy, standing up and walking over to where Bowzar sat on an old cider keg. He put his hand on Bowzar’s shoulder, gripping it – and Bowzar smiled self-consciously, pulling off his woolen cap and running his fingers through his curly red hair. He nodded and pursed his lips, and the skinny little Jew said:

  We are lucky for having Bowzar. Such men there aren’t too many of.

  No one’s against Bowzar, said Simpkins Gary.

  That’s right – no one’s against Billy Bowzar; but he hasn’t slept for two days. He’s never stopped for two days. It shouldn’t be thought that this revolt just happened. It had to be organized and led, and it still has to. And if men should lead it, they got to see over the heads of the soldiers of the Line. A thousand times since it began, we said to each other, What will we do next? Where do you go with a thing like this? What is the rest of the army doing? What is Washington doing? Does he know about this? Does Congress know? And if we elect new officers – can we fight alone? You heard Billy Bowzar: Who will feed us? Who will arm us? Today the Jersey folk, but what about tomorrow? The people will not trust foreign bandits who have cast out their officers – this is not what we are, but this is what the officers will say. I know – I know what the people think about Jews and Romans and black men. Ask Jim Holt!

  He is right, said Jim Holt. My God, we ain’t criminal – we be good men, but who going to believe that unless we show it? And how we going to show it? The Nayger should be no slave, because we fight for no man to be slave, but if we sing out No Nayger slave, the whole Southland going to turn against us! We say, No rich man, no man with a million acres. But how you going to live without rich man? You hang them all, and then it just take a little time: there be rich man again. You going to turn them against George Washington, who is rich man with many Nayger slave …?

  Thus it went, on and on, with one and another and then still another speaking, and round and round and round it went – in a weary, awful circle, with the wind blowing colder and colder through the open gaps in the barn, with more and more men from the regiments coming to listen and shiver and watch our leaders butt their heads against a wall that had no openings.

  Guns we had, and powder and shot, and almost three thousand of the best troops in the world – but we had nothing to fight for except what we had fought for under our officers.

  It was the tail of the evening – well on and well under, when sleep had mixed with cold and many had gone and I no longer heard words but only voices – when MacPherson came and shook me from my doze, and said softly, Come outside, Jamie.

  I went out with him, and there was Allen Gutton, a barber from the 3rd Regiment who had dropped away in the rising, as men had here and there – and what with one thing and another, we were not able to brood on those who were gone.

  So ye lost yourself, Allen, I said.

  No, Jamie: I chose to stay.

  Like similar filth.

  Say what you like, Jamie. I followed my own conscience.

  None of ye got one; but, anyway, what in hell are you doing here?

  I come with a message from the general.

  I would have kicked him to the ground and driven him from the camp on his hands and knees, with a stick across his shoulders, but MacPherson was
watching me out of his somber eyes, and I nodded and said, I will get someone to talk with you. My own stomach is too delicate.

  Go to hell and be damned, Jamie. I come with a message from the general, and I don’t have to take your gabble.

  Not now, you don’t!

  I went into the barn and called Billy Bowzar aside and talked to him. He turned the chair over to Danny Connell, and then nodding at the Jew Levy and Jack Maloney, he motioned for them to follow. We went outside, our feet crunching the hard ground, and Gutton handed him the letter, which he read in the moonlight then and there. I had wanted to make a copy of that letter, but I neglected that, and it is gone and lost now, but I remember that it stated matter-of-factly enough that Wayne and two of his staff would appreciate a conference with the Committee of Sergeants of the Pennsylvania Line. It was polite and gentle and somewhat coaxing, not the way gentlemen talk to dirt, but the way one gentleman talks to another.

  He wants to meet with us, said Bowzar.

  He looked at me and I stared at him emptily, and then he looked at Maloney and Levy – and they made no move nor gesture, but they did not have to.

  Tell him to approach our pickets at Princeton tomorrow, said Bowzar tonelessly. The Committee will discuss any matters he wishes to bring before us. Now take him through the lines, Jamie.

  With that, I escorted Gutton through the sentries and onto the road where he had left his horse. When he turned to mount, I kicked him in the butt and then ground his face in the dirt.

  That’s reward for your conscience, Allen Gutton, I said.

  And something to remember in the future, Jamie Stuart, he answered, rising and climbing on his horse.

  Remember and be damned! Geck on ye!

  With no other word, he mounted and rode off; and I went back to the barn. The meeting was over now. The Committee and the Reverend William Rogers remained; the others had gone.