by Howard Fast
Who in hell are you?
I am Jamie Stuart, and responsible for the safety of the encampment.
I told you they will not attack you, the Jersey men, he said, sullenly and somewhat sadly, for they are going to rise up and cast out the gentry, just as you did —just as you did. And now I want to go to sleep.
And with that, he sat down in front of the fire, his knees drawn up, his arms around them and his head pillowed upon them. I stood there, looking from face to face – and sad, troubled faces they were – until Billy Bowzar reminded me:
You know what you must do, Jamie. I put little stock in what he says, since he has walked too much and slept too little. We also have information that the Light Horse Troop is riding up from Philadelphia to join the officers. So get on.
And if the Jersey Line rose, what is the Committee prepared to do?
We don’t know that they rose, Jamie – only that they are intended to do so. We will see.…
We will see, I nodded – and I went out, happy at least that I had work of my own that I understood; I found Angus, and together we worked out our plans.
But before I go into that, I must say just a little of the encampment at Princeton, where we now spent a week of our lives. Not that it was a perfect achievement, or any sort of a dreamlike place. Men deserted; men ran away because they could not face the terror of what we had done; men got drunk and men whored: but these were the exception, and by and large, in those seven days, we established a working, cooperative means of living together. In the very first day, we cleaned out the upper floors of Nassau Hall, and established there both a hospital and a school. Two women and three men were found among the regiments who were equipped, some better, some worse, for teaching – and the children of the Line, almost a hundred in number, from the little babes to the twelve and thirteen-year-old drummer lads, were put to letters; which was a great wonder in an army where not one in twenty could write his own name. More curious still, those classes for the children – short-lived as they were – were packed always with soldiers too, for we had a hunger for some sort of dignity and learning that was almost as great as our hunger for food. Having neither paper nor ink nor crayon, we made slates out of board and burned and shaped our own charcoal. We had no books, but, for the time we were there, the small knowledge in our heads was sufficient, just as what crude medical remedies we owned had to be sufficient for our hospital. There was a wonderful inventiveness and facility in the Line; every trade was among us, and there was nothing we could not make if given a little time and a minimum of tools and goods – candles, rope, cloth, furniture, shoes; yes, and we would have made paper and a press to print books and a newspaper, if it had not all finished so soon.
Maybe there was much more that we would have made – for word that the Jersey Line would rise stirred a brief vision in me of a new kind of republic that might come out of this long and sorrowful war; but, like other dreams I had then when I was young and strong and filled with my own power, this one is unfinished and befogged with all the years that have passed since then. I tell myself sometimes that now I know better what we could have done; yet when I listen to the same, half-formed dreams on the lips of the Abolitionists – of the young Yankee men who will sweep the whole world with their banner of freedom for all – I am none too certain. I see the thread that ties things together, but where it began and where it will end I do not know.
There was a Roman priest who came into our encampment at Princeton, a little, round-faced Irish man, who was bitterly poor and much despised, as the Romans were in our land then, and who had walked all the way up from Philadelphia when he heard that the foreign brigades had made a rising. Dusty, dirty and cold, his black clothes worn paper-thin, his wide-brimmed, flat-topped hat perched comically on the top of his head, he was brought into our lines and brought to me, and I asked him what he wanted of us and why he had come.
Sure, he answered, when I heard that the Irish men were in a rising with all sorts of low company, Jews and Naygers and Protestants too, I said to myself, I will go up and share their enterprise and perhaps soften it somewhat.
Because he seemed cheerful, and because our hopes were low and morbid then, I told him:
It will as likely be a hanging as anything else, and if the gentry make a start, I assure you they will hang the Roman priest first.
Then I will not be the first Roman priest was hanged by gentry, he grinned.
To which I answered that it was certainly an odd attitude for a man of God to have, since with the rising every pastor had cleared out except William Rogers, who was not properly a Christian but a Baptist or something of the sort. The rest held that resistance, revolution and such were not becoming to a low type of man unless he was led and instructed by a high type of man.
But among the Irish, said the priest, we have had a lot of resistance, yet surprisingly few of the latter type. Myself, I will stay if you don’t mind and if you can trust me. It seems to me that, while I cannot predict where this business of yours will end, I have an inkling of where it began.…
I tell this in the way of threads, but I wander from the main tale of how we took Princeton city and made it an armed camp. I pause only to tell you that we did many things in those few days of our new army that are forgotten, and they were things that were good, not only the schools, but discussions in the hutments on such documents as the Declaration of Independence and Common Sense, the fine book of Mr. Paine, and we also framed out certain propositions on the rights of all men to speak freely and to assemble and to petition – things that were fanciful then but which came about later, with much additional suffering, in the time of Tom Jefferson. We also made common teams for the sewing of cloth and even for the weaving of it, and for this latter we made looms, although they were never put to use. We put new roofs on the huts and we repaired the bitter damage that the enemy had done to Nassau Hall. So much for that, and more later, but now for how Angus and I turned over Princeton and put it in condition for defense.
There was the town, with the pike running into it across the brook and the gully, so that we were enabled to have the bridge at one end for a boundary and the crossroads at another. We threw a regiment —as we planned it—to the north and another to the south. A regiment could cover the brook, beyond the meadows, and two more regiments could ring the town and block off the two stem roads. This would be a matter of five regiments, leaving five in reserve and one for relief and mobility, and with a light breastworks and concentrations on lanes and footpaths, a cannon at each cross-lane and another at the brook and at the bridge – why, it seemed to me that the little place could be held until Doomsday.
It was a fine feeling for me, to have a plan of defense in my own hands, after five years of running, leaping, crawling and scurrying to the plans of the officers; and there was more of that satisfaction when Angus protested that they would have done it differently.
I looked up from the paper on which I was sketching and answered:
To me, that is a commendation, and nothing else.
But ye have but one man to twenty feet of ground, and no corrie for them to crawl into!
And I want none. And if I had ten men to twenty feet of ground, it would be a thin defense, but the one man is a cleg, and he stings a little while we throw the five regiments where we will. And if we know a little sooner, there is our one regiment of mobility to nibble a bit, while we come at the flanks. We are sick with warfare where one puts up a breastwork and cowers behind it.
… In any case, I added from my heart, there is only one body of Continentals in all this land that will come at us – from my heart I know that and surely – and I say that is the Light Horse.
Ye would fire on the Light Horse, Jamie?
On any man that crosses our lines without our will.
God help us if that should be, Jamie.
Something else will be if the Jersey troops come to join us – for something pecks in the Connecticuts and others too, and maybe for once the me
n who fight for their freedom will win it too.
So we called out the soldiers to dispose them. We sounded the trumpets and had the brigades parade, the ten infantry regiments and the artillery, and we formed them up four square to hear the orders. Jack Maloney and Jim Holt joined me, representing the Committee, and they stood with me in the center of the square and listened as I read the plan. When that was finished, before we disposed ourselves, the whole Committee came and we had an inspection parade. We made a fine, proud, handsome square, and if we were not uniform, we were clean-shaven and we carried well.
We dressed like British show troops, and our bayonets were gleaming and rustless, and every man was smooth of face and sharp of spine, and the forty drummer lads stood across the corners of the big square, ten at each point, beating to dress. Every regiment had repaired its faded and tattered banners, and many regiments – because this habit like so many others had fallen into disuse from neglect – set to work to sew the banners they had not carried since ’77, so that now the 1st carried its segmented rattlesnake, the 2nd its clenched fist, the 3rd its wolf’s head, the 4th its depiction of Romulus and Remus nursing at the wolf’s udder, and so forth and so on – while at each side a color guard of the Citizen-soldier Guard bore the Stars and Stripes. Our cobblers had been busy with every scrap of leather we could turn up, and there was not a man in the Line that day who was not shod with a piece of leather on his soles, even if the uppers were sewn from tent canvas. Overalls were sewn and patched and made presentable, so if you had looked at us from the road, as the townspeople did, crowding there to see our display, you could well have said that this was the prettiest, neatest, trimmest body of fighting men that had ever marched among the Continentals.
The artillery had formed inside the square, where every man could look at the six cannons, four of bronze, two of iron, all shining; and by every gun, stiff and proudly self-conscious that they served cannon which had never been left on a routed field – cannon which had been fought since the first engagement outside of Boston in ’75 – stood two gunners, two layers, two caddies and two plungers, while behind them were sixty buckskin men from Fincastle, not standing to arms-parade as were the regiments, but leaning on their long, six-foot, snakelike Pennsylvania rifles, dressed in smock and shawl, with a powder horn and a bag of shot girding every hip – these the only riflemen in the entire Line, and snipers for the artillery.
The women and children stood outside the square, some clapping to the drums, some weeping to see what a proud and strong thing we were with every man standing to his place with only a whisper or a word from sergeant or corporal; and indeed I could have wept myself to look at them, and I would have given all the years of my young manhood to march them on York city where the Enemy was and show the British how men could fight when they fought for themselves, for their own soil and their own dreams.
But the evening was coming on now, with its snapping cold wind to chill the unseasonable warmth of the day. The sun dipped down to the trees, leaving a dazzling warp of pink and purple, and there was much to be done. I threw a look at the Committee, where they stood alongside the cannon, all grouped together, their faces filled with pride and sadness and wonder and joy and bereavement, all of it mixed and struggling with the past and the future, the know-able and the unknowable, the victory and the defeat; and then I shouted:
Brigades to station!
And the regiments marched away to take their places. I checked with one and another as they left, put the Gary brothers on horse and set them to checking over the perimeter and establishing the easy contact of all the regiments, sent Angus to the inn called Sign of the College, to empty it and close it down, and then took twenty of the Citizen-soldier Guard with me to Jacob Hyer’s inn.
It would be a lie to say that I did not relish the job. What would you have of a lad who was twenty-two years old and had known nothing but camp and march and battle in all of his precious youth, so that all the softness within had to be compensated for by a hardening of the shell? Hard we were, and I was a little harder than most, as you will see, hard at the beginning and hard at the end too, God help me.
But now it was still a long time from the end, and I led my men over to the inn, kicked open the door, and had them file into the taproom with bayonets fixed and the winter wind sloshing behind them. Oh, there was good business in the tavern, all right, for the rising of the Line had provoked a great buying and selling, and the commission merchants and the dirty and indifferent traders – who owed allegiance to the hard dollar and the pound sterling and to nothing else – were scurrying over the road between York city and Philadelphia like rabbits, buying low and selling high, spreading every filthy rumor they could concoct, buying what they did not own and selling it before they ever had it, dealing in uniforms unworn, shoes we never saw, food we never ate, guns we never handled, munitions we never shot and bodies not yet dead. They were all there as I have told you, packed in with the warmth and the smell of roasting meat and smoking rum, and I relished what I did, believe me.
What now, Jamie, what now? Jacob Hyer squealed, spreading his arms against me and pressing his great paunch to me as my men crowded into the room. Haven’t I been a good friend to the Line? Haven’t I sent, noon and night, a gallon of hot flip to the Committee? Didn’t I roast up in my kitchen, special, a chicken pie and a hasty pudding? What now, Jamie? Is an honest man not to do his business undisturbed? Is that a way to have folk think of the Line, that you torment an honest citizen?
You’re as honest as Judas Iscariot, I said, and if the truth were known, what a dirty spy’s nest you operate here!
Not so, Jamie! You got no right to blacken my character. I’m a legal-commissioned colonel of militia, and as ready to serve –
To hell with all that! I interrupted him. I will not touch a penny you own or a stinking cut of beef from your racks, but the whole town is now within the perimeter of the Line and under the government of the Line, and I want every transient person out of here in ten minutes and out of Princeton too.
You mean my custom?
Precisely what I mean.
His face turned white, and then as the blood returned, suffused with an angry blush. I had spoken up and loud, and every person in that packed and silent room heard my words. Then a babel of sound commenced, led by the landlord himself.
You got no right … no justice, no right, no warrant!… I will not submit to this!… Here I stand, and my house is my castle!… I will lay down my life first … Here I stand, and you go no further into this, Jamie Stuart!
You fat, foisonless man, I said, you shut your mouth, or I will drive a bayonet up your butt and pin yer tongue with it. What a cackle you make! And look at this room here, you damned bugger – look at this collection of scavenging crows! Look at them and you would never know that this is a country at war and that one or another has taken sides and that there’s no inch of Jersey soil without a drop of American blood on it! What are they doing, traveling the roads between York city and Philadelphia? Honest work?
At this moment, Wayne with Butler and Stewart behind him appeared at the foot of the staircase. Wayne didn’t come forward into the room, but remained there on the stairs for the moment, listening to me and watching, his long, thin cold face composed and emotionless. But some of the guests had risen while I spoke, and now one of them, a lean, middle-aged man with side-whiskers and a mustache and dark, calculating eyes, came over to us and interposed:
Son, how old are you?
Twenty-two winters if it is any of your damned business.
That’s a harsh way of speech, my lad, and harsher for your elders. Don’t you think it’s a little foolish to drive us out of here this winter night? Will that bring you friends? There are many men in this room who would make good friends to you, for they are men of influence and instruction, and it would be better for you to befriend them. Now suppose you sit down at our table and have a glass of grog on this. Hot words and hot heads never accomplished anything constru
ctive.
What do you do? I said. What do you do that you grace this world so?
I buy and I sell, he answered, which is as honest a way as I know.
What do you buy and sell? I roared at him, grasping his cravat and pulling him up to me. Do you traffic in men’s lives and men’s souls? What is north of here for an honest man to buy and sell? Do you sell a little information to the British enemy? Do you buy the dollars the people have, to make them more worthless than they are? Och, I could spit on all your sweet-tongued kind. Get out of my sight!
And I hurled him from me, so that he went down and rolled over, crashing against a table and then crawling on his hands and knees to be out of harm’s way. But Jacob went wild, gabbling and gabbling, running first at me and then to the stairs where he began to plead with Wayne. But Wayne shook him off and pushed him away and brushed the sleeve of his uniform where Hyer had touched it.
All of you! I shouted. Get your goods and be out of this inn in ten minutes! Ten minutes, or a bayonet will prick a little haste into you!
Help them along, I told my men – while the landlord was pleading with Wayne:
Will you let this be? Is no law and order left? Is an honest man to be robbed of his custom?
Standing there at the foot of the steps, Wayne listened to the landlord without particular emotion or interest, and he might have been hearing a dog bark for all the effect it seemed to have on him. When the landlord moved to touch him, he shook him off – and then, as the press of people mounted the stairs, he and the two colonels stepped into the taproom and to one side, from where Wayne watched me curiously.
And out of the village! I shouted after them. Every one of you out of the village. If you came by horse, saddle up and get out. If you came by stage, walk out.