Altsheler, Joseph - [Novel 05]

by A Herald Of The West (lit)

  We were well into the Connecticut country when we took on a woman passenger for New Haven, at which town our coach intended to stop for the night. She was a strapping big woman, at least sixty-five years old, with the face of a grenadier, barring the whiskers and mus tache, and a figure of great strength and activity. Her complexion was very red and was rimmed around by white hair. Her long, vigorous stride, as she approached the coach, and the ease with which she climbed into it increased her martial appearance. She took the seat be side me, which was the only one then vacant, but re mained silent, taking no notice of the talk and staring straight ahead like those who are busy with their own thoughts and see nothing.

  The conversation was naturally of the expected war and its probable consequences. One could not escape the

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  talk of war in those days, if not about a war of our own then about some one else's, for nearly all. the world was fighting the shadow of the twin evils Bonaparte and England, being over everything.

  In New York we had some friends who were willing to share with us the dangers of war for the sake of honour and an independent national existence, but here we had none; the New Englanders, who had brought on the Revolutionary struggle, who had proven themselves so stern and enduring in the conflict, who hardly knew what it was, farmers though they were, to be beaten in the open field by the best regulars of Europe, had now turned to sheep, and the potion which had caused the evil transformation was money. The New Englanders had a great trade and commerce spread throughout the world; they were the best, the most daring, and the most enterprising of all sailors, and with that strange com mingling of the New England nature, as I have seen it, which loves God and loves money in about equal parts, they were prepared to endure any dishonour rather than imperil the commerce which was enriching them so fast. I like the dollar, and I know its value. I do not think it should be despised, and a pretence that it is despised is usually an affectation or evidence of an un sound mind; but I believe that a nation should be ready to make a sacrifice even of its prosperity for the sake of what is right and just.

  But we three, though we talked our best, were no match for our New Englanders, who had the advantage of age and numbers and could quote innumerable doc trines for which we had no reply, though as sure as ever that we were right. Thus we wrangled for a long time.

  " Sir," said one elder at length with great empha sis, " the men of New England will never be led into any such wild and ruinous measure as this proposed Avar."

  168 A HERALD OF THE WEST.

  " Did you say the men of New England? " asked the old woman beside me.

  They were the first words that she had spoken, and her voice was deep and harsh like a man's. Her accent was on the word " men/'

  " Certainly, madame," replied the elder politely.

  "Where are they?"

  "Where are they? I do not understand you?"

  " Where are the men of New England of whom you speak? I live in New England and I have not seen one of them for a long time; I have not heard one of them speak. We used to have plenty of them thirty or forty years ago, but they have all emigrated to the West and South, and now we have left only children and old women like myself and you, sir."

  A heavy and solemn silence fell upon us. I could have embraced that woman then and there. Remember that she was old enough to be my mother, almost my grandmother. Still I did not dare.

  " Madame," said the elder after a while, and timidly, " your remark was violent."

  " A woman might think so," she replied.

  " But peaceful people are opposed to war."

  " They were not in '76."

  The elder again relapsed into silence. The martial lady imitated his example and did not speak again until we reached New Haven, where she left the coach with a curt adieu, followed, however, by the deep respect of us three.

  On the evening of the third day we approached Bos ton, famous for valour, piety, and good business, all three of us looking about with the deepest interest, as the glo rious memories of the Revolution clustered thickly there, and no city, not even New York or Philadelphia, had a larger place in our minds than Boston. We alighted at the Sun Tavern, which you may know is in Faneuil Square, near Faneuil Hall of patriotic fame, and slept soundly in

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  an atmosphere which seemed to be composed of the same elements as that of the other cities we had visited. Yet we felt the next morning that, despite ourselves, a certain primness had left upon us a mark sufficient to be noticed by each of the others, and sufficient, too, to make us feel a trifle constrained, as if we had put on new clothes that did not fit us.

  Breakfast finished, we followed our custom of seeing the sights of a town as soon as we could after our arrival, and walked about the streets of Boston with the greatest diligence, as there was much to see. We visited all the cradles of liberty that is, the places where independ ence was born and were surprised to find that they were so numerous. We saw Faneuil Hall, the Old South Church, the Old North Church, the queer old Feather Store, and the Province House, where the royal govern ors used to live, with the Indian on the weather vane ready to shoot his arrow, the house where the Boston tea party met, and we walked three times around the stump of the old Liberty tree, with the Liberty pole planted in the centre of it. Then, feeling as full as we could hold of patriotism and ready to whip the universe if it needed a whipping, we went off in search of our friend Mr. Jonathan Starbuck, once wild sailor boy of the Bon Homme Kichard, now pious merchant of years and wealth. His invitation to call upon him in Boston had been given with such heartiness that we were sure he would be glad to see us, despite our knowledge that invitations to visit given far away from home are not always to be accepted in too literal a spirit. But we were not mistaken in him, for, though surrounded in his warehouse by boxes and bales to such an extent that we could see only his perspiring face projecting above them, he reached each of us his hand in turn across the bar rier of merchandise, and shook ours with strength and heartiness.

  " But remember one thing, lads," he said after first 12

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  greetings, "I am a man of peace and this is a town of peace."

  " Peace and trade, peace and profit," said Courtenay.

  " Put it that way if you choose," said the merchant, " but remember, none of your fiery Western talk here. We feel very friendly toward England, nor do we want any quarrel with France either."

  He spoke in much seriousness, and I, for one, having seen the value of silence resolved to be chary and careful in my speech.

  He asked us where we were putting up, and when Mercer told him at the Sun Tavern he seemed to be pleased, and his eye twinkled as if the reply had put him in mind of something.

  " Have you brought your best clothes with you? " he asked.

  " We never travel without them," said Courtenay.

  " You show wisdom," he replied, " and it will be convenient for you now. You are three fire eaters from the West and South, mad for war with Britain, and you wish to know something about the temper of the people of New England; there is to be a banquet at your tavern to-night, and I am to attend it. I can take you with me, and as you will hear things there that will interest and instruct you, I shall be pleased to do so if you will promise to conduct your selves as if you had been born and bred in Boston itself."

  We promised with eagerness, despite the proviso in his invitation, and my general instruction to seek other than public men, and we besought him to tell us some thing more about the affair, but he would not, content ing himself with saying that our time would be well spent, his eye meantime lighted up by the same twinkle which I had observed when he asked us to be of his com pany at the feast.

  " Be sure that you put on your choicest clothes and

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  your best dignity, for some fine people will be there," he said as we left him.

  There was nothing to fear upon that
point, since we three were determined to make our best appearance in this city, in which people looked at us in the critical and chilly way, and with that intention well to the fore we hastened back to the Sun Tavern, where we devoted the remainder of the afternoon to our preparations.

  Soon after supper, elderly men of fine presence and careful and costly apparel, whom we took to be people of consequence, though their names were unknown to us, began to gather at the Sun Tavern. We heard them addressed as judge and doctor, but we remained in igno rance until our friend, Mr. Starbuck, came. He was pleased with our appearance.

  "You will do me credit," he said; "you certainly will that is, if you will hold your tongues."

  He was in fine attire himself, and we followed him to the great parlour of the tavern, where a long table was spread richly for the banquet and a company of at least twenty men were gathered, to many of whom we were introduced. It was not the fighting sailor of the Bon Homme Eichard who introduced us, but the portly mer chant of Boston, and as the names were called we saw that we were right when we supposed these people to be of distinction, though the distinction was not altogether of the kind that we admired or liked. We were surrounded by that body of men known as the Essex Junto, afterward the leaders in the infamous and treasonable Hartford Convention; a group learned and of extreme respect ability in private life, but as untrue to their country, to public interest, and to public duty as anybody could well be, so I believed then and so I believe now, and so all the historians say. How true it is that men of learning, posi tion, and luxury think so much of those things that they lose sight of the right when it may bring hardship with it!

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  " Mr. Pickering, my young friends, Mr. Ten Broeck, of Kentucky; Mr. Mercer, of Tennessee; and Mr. Courte- nay, of South Carolina. They wish to know the real East, and I have brought them here that they might see it."

  We were bowing to Timothy Pickering, the great Federalist of Massachusetts, a man who considered all people of the West barbarians, and who seemed to be sur prised that we wore clothes of the cut and quality of his own and comported ourselves with becoming dignity. He was nearer seventy than sixty then, with a fine face and a head clad only on the "back with hair. He said, a trifle dryly, not seeking to conceal the satire in it, that he hoped we would return properly enlightened concerning the Eastern state of mind, and we could only reply to a man so much older and more distinguished than our selves that we were sure we would be, passing on then with our patron to be presented to others. We found ourselves bowing, a moment later, to Theophilus Par sons, the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and after him Harrison Gray Otis, the President of the State Senate; George Cabot, the financier; Theodore Sedgwick; John Lowell, both senior and junior; one of the Griswolds of Connecticut; and others whose names were known and hated by us of the West as rank a group of Federalists as could be gathered between the four seas that rim America. I kicked Courtenay's toe.

  " We are in the enemy's camp," I whispered. " Be careful."

  " We need to be," he replied.

  Our presence attracted much attention and curiosity, as was natural, we being so much younger than the others and coming from a portion of the country which was then distinctly hostile to New England. They seemed to be glad that we were there, as it gave them an opportunity to instruct us, and, moreover, they could badger us a bit, neither of which they neglected to do, though they w ere very nice and delicate in their bestowal of such at-

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  tentions, compelling us to admire the fineness and polish of their manners. Courtenay had acquired something of this personal finish in his own Charleston, where there was a cultivated and literary society, though small; but we were unused to it in the West, where the manners that we valued highly were of the large, open kind, ac companied by long sentences delivered in a loud voice, and men's faces were always ruddy or seamed with much living in the open, a characteristic that they preserve to this day. But these were men of books and the study room, and their faces were thin and white, and their bodies looked lean and weak in comparison with the great, rugged beings to whom I was accustomed in the West. I don't think they learned from their books the policy that so nearly brought our country to ruin, but must have evolved it from their own desires and objec tion to anything that might disturb their personal comfort.

  They were not at all averse to talking before us; in truth, seemed rather glad of it, wishing their opinions in all their virulence to be known afar, and thinking we would prove faithful reporters of what we heard. So we listened to much abuse of Mr. Jefferson's Republican party, which everybody in his heart knows was the Na tional party, representing the thoughts and the just as pirations of the United States, and I was forced to reply several times as best I could to the taunting question how Mr. Madison proposed to carry on his war when he succeeded in declaring it.

  " We will whip old England first, and then New Eng land," I said at last, in some exasperation to Mr. Justice Parsons.

  He laughed, as if the first were much easier than the second, and continued to badger us. We also made the original discovery among those learned men that New England alone had fought and won the Revolution, and she had permitted the Middle and Southern States to

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  share with her in its benefits. They seemed to have for gotten the thousands of Virginians and other Southern ers who marched hundreds of miles at the first cry for aid from Massachusetts and helped to drive the British out of Boston, and the shiploads of corn that came free even from far North Carolina to feed the starving Bos- tonians. They had forgotten all these things, and hun dreds of others like them, and remembered only that New England had fought everything and done everything, and would continue to think and to do everything; other people were superfluous; in which New England has been vastly fooled.

  " It's time to be seated at table," said Mr. Pickering. " The chief guest of the evening, as you know, is de tained at an earlier and somewhat similar entertainment, but we are not to wait for him."

  So we sat down. I had a very fair place, near the foot of the table, hidden somewhat though by a curve of a wall, with Mr. Starbuck on one side of me and a Con necticut Griswold on the other. I had pricked up my ears at the announcement of a chief guest to come later, and, supposing it to be the Governor of the State at least, looked forward with interest to his coming.

  But those men knew how to choose a dinner if not an honest political policy, and eating their good food my heart warmed toward them a little. Yet I fear that a nation is in decay when it begins to make a god of its stomach. But the Connecticut man beside me did not permit any excessive growth of sympathy on my part, since he took occasion to ask many questions about us Western people in a supercilious way, as if we were really not worth it, but he must talk about us as a matter of courtesy to me. He seemed to take the greatest offence at the manners of the West, and our lack of that polish and knowledge of small social detail which in his opinion added so much distinction to the courts of Europe and which New England hoped to imitate, humbly and afar,

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  it is true, but still to imitate; as if men like ours of Ken tucky, who had been forced to spend half their lives axe in hand cutting down the forest, and the other half rifle in hand fighting wild beasts and wilder Indians, could become dandies and beaux or ought to become such. I replied with as much eloquence and logic as I could, and we were deep in attack and defence, thinking not much of other things, when there was a bustle near the head of the table, and Mr. Pickering, who seemed to be master of ceremonies, called out in a loud voice:

  " Major Gilbert Northcote, our guest, gentlemen! "

  There stood my kinsman, in his finest apparel, easy, triumphant, bowing with infinite grace to the guests who had risen to receive him. I rose with the others, half mechanically, though I supposed there was nothing else to do, and looked at him, surprised at his appearance as guest of honour in a company of A
mericans.

  His attire, in cut and quality, was much like mine I wore the new clothes that had been made for me in New York but brighter in colour, and he also car ried a richly chased and enamelled sword at his side, after a custom passing away. He was a large, fine man, whose manners were impressive, and he showed plainly that he felt the warmth of his reception. I remembered then Mr. Pickering's early allusion to the guest of the evening, but I had not dreamed that it could be Major Northcote, who, if one is to speak bluntly, was a caught spy upon us, driven out of Washington, and deserving the suspicion and dislike of all honest Americans, but bearing himself now with dignity and satisfaction, as if he were the best among many patriots. I looked at Mr. Starbuck, but I felt sure that this was the result of no plan of his; very likely he would remember now the face of the British officer who had been with us on our trav els, but he had not heard his name nor did he know that he was a kinsman of mine.

  " Friends," said one, " a cheer for Major Gilbert

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  Northcote, the gallant Englishman who has been made a martyr by those barbarians down there at Washington because he is a gentleman and a true lover of his great and glorious country."