Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The green is an irregular triangle fronted by the village churches and dwellings, and the historic fact is commemorated by a rude monument erected at the close of the last century, with an inscription by the minister of the village: a good man who seemed to have learned his rhetoric from the French Republic, then distributing equality and fraternity to the reluctant peoples of Europe at the point of the bayonet. The stone is “sacred to liberty, independence, and the rights of man;” it rehearses in swelling terms the wrongs endured from British tyranny by the colonists, and their resort to arms. “The contest was long, bloody, and affecting: righteous Heaven approved the solemn appeal,” and the sovereignty of the States was the final conse quence. The great-grandchildren of those who fell there look from their windows upon the consecrated spot; not far up a street to the northward the house yet stands in which Adams and Hancock were hiding, with a price set on their heads by the British commandant in Boston, while Major Pitcairne’s troops were marching up the Concord road; and three of the houses that witnessed the bloodshed on the green seem to be still strong and sound, and good for another hundred years. They are all interesting as specimens of the early village architecture of New England, and one is especially quaint and picturesque, with a pretty, old-fashioned garden beside it, where the flowers defied the May in a sort of embattled bloom. This was the Buckner Tavern at the time of the fight, and it was even then an old house, — of the seventeenth century, as the beams in the parlor ceiling still show. It afforded a rendezvous for the Provincials when the alarm of the British approach was first sounded by Paul Revere, and there most of the men lingered and waited subject to their captain’s orders, after he had begun to doubt the truth of the rumor. The interval must have been trying to those unwarlike men, but they all answered the drum when a messenger galloped up with the news that the King’s troops were right upon them. Some of them had gone to bed again in their homes beside the green, and they left their wives and children sleeping almost within sound of a whisper from the spot where they loosely formed on the grass before their doors. They were very simple and quiet folks, with no long perspective of national glory to embolden and sustain them in the resistance they were about to offer their King: a name at which we do not trouble ourselves to laugh now, but which was then to be feared next to God’s. Independence was scarcely dreamt of; all that the villagers were clear of was their right as Englishmen, and they stood there upon that, with everything else around them in a dark far thicker than the morning gloom out of which the red-coats flashed at the other corner of the green. Major Pitcairne called a halt at some thirty rods, and riding forward swore at the damned rebels, and bade them disperse. They stood firm, and he ordered his men to fire; the soldiers hesitated; but when he drew his pistols and emptied them at the Provincials, they discharged a volley, and eight of our people fell. They were not a tithe of the enemy in number, and it is doubtful if they returned the fire; their captain called a retreat, and those who were unhurt made their escape, to join later in the long running fight through which the Provincials all day harassed the flight of the British from Concord back to Boston. Major Pitcairne had dispersed a riot, and had shed the first blood in a seven years’ war. The dead men lay on the grass where their children had played a few hours before; one, shot through the breast, dragged himself a little space to his own threshold and died there in the arms of his wife.

  Many stories are told of the peaceful inexperience of these people who had defied a mighty empire. A few of them had been in what we call the Old French War, and had served under Wolfe at the taking of Quebec; but it was so little understood generally that war meant fighting, that some boys came to the common that morning as to a sort of muster, and only retired when the bullets whistled over their heads. After the encounter at Concord, where an hour or two later —

  “The embattled farmers stood,

  And fired the shot heard round the world,”

  the popular education in the art of war proceeded rapidly; though even then one of our men who was unsuspiciously firing from behind a stone wall at the British column in the road, had the surprise and mortification to be himself shot in the back by a flanking party. Before noon the retreat from Concord had become a rout, that was not arrested till Earl Percy arrived at Lexington with twelve hundred men and two pieces of cannon. The whole country side was up; the Minute-Men from Acton, Concord, Menotomy, Lexington, and Cambridge were joined by those of Woburn, Billerica, and even some of the seaboard towns, in pursuing the King’s troops. The season was so unusually advanced that the cherry-trees were in bloom; the day was one of that sudden and sickening heat that sometimes occurs in our spring; and when the troops met Percy’s supporting column at the Monroe Tavern, many of them fell down in the dust, “with their tongues lolling out like dogs’.” They had fought a running fight for ten miles, and they had marched in all nearly thirty since they left Boston the night before. Percy’s cannon scared away the riflemen who hung upon their rear, and his men, scattering over the country, fired the farmhouses that might be supposed to afford shelter to the Minute-Men. Some of the houses were beyond gunshot, and the sick and old who were here and there bayoneted in them would perhaps now have been spared. The word had gone about that the Americans were scalping the English dead, and something had to be done in retaliation. No soldiers were found scalped, but a good many farmhouses were burned; for when Percy began to retire, the shooting from the walls and the woods along the road began again, and continued throughout the retreat. At different points on the route stones have been set up to commemorate the acts of reprisal committed by the soldiers: here stood a house burned by the British; in another house three Americans were massacred; in another twelve; and so forth. One of these monuments, in Arlington (then Menotomy), celebrates the valor and final per severance of one of the patriots in terms that used to amuse me in spite of the gravity of the facts. “On this spot, Samuel Whittemore, aged 81, killed three British soldiers. He was shot, beaten, bayoneted, and left for dead, but recovered, and lived to be 98 years old.” My readers may differ with me as to the political principles of this hoary man, but there can be but one opinion concerning his resolution and physical toughness.

  We have counted it all joy in our annals that we were able to embitter defeat to the British in the pursuit from Concord to Boston, and have of course made the most of their reprisals. But perhaps these did not appear to them such enormities. To be fired on from every covert by the roadside, and helplessly slaughtered by a people they despised, was a thing that must have had its exasperations; and they responded in the way that might have been expected. “War is cruel, madam,” General Sherman explained to the lady who came out from Atlanta to reproach him for bombarding a town where so many non-combatants must suffer; and our race, whether English or American, has never “made war with water of roses.” The British had succeeded in the object of their expedition; they had destroyed the Provincial stores at Concord; but they lost that day more men than it cost them to capture Quebec. The day is only a chapter of history now. We are tender and proud of it, because it is our own, and because it vindicated us, and proved us after the fashion of war in the right. But if there have been griefs between the two countries that no dilution of “the language of Shakespeare and Milton” can wash out the memory of, there is scarcely a pang in them any more. Meanwhile we are still very far apart, and after all that cables and steamships can do, there are three thousand miles of sea, and immeasurable gulfs of democracy between us. With a few exceptions on either side, we heartily dislike and distrust each other’s civic and social ideas. England Americanizes in some respects, in some respects America Anglicizes; but the most of that amounts to very little, I suspect; and for our part, whatever outcry we make over our own follies and sins and errors, we do not believe that it is less democracy, but more, that is to help us. Mere contiguity might do something to reconcile the ideals of the two countries, but it could not do everything. The four millions of Canada are not affected by the proxi
mity of our fifty millions; they cling all the more closely to the English ideal, or what they imagine it to be, and shudder at the spectre of annexation, which exists only in their own nervous abhorrence.

  At the same time, there is apt to be so much kindness between us personally when we meet on any common ground, that it is difficult to realize the national alienation, and impossible to account for it. We seem so very much alike, — I necessarily speak only for the American half of the impression, — that we feel like asserting an indisputable brotherhood. Upon reflection we have our reserves, our doubts, our fears; but for the time the illusion is delightfully perfect. It occurs with Americans, sometimes not only upon acquaintance or speech with Englishmen, but at the mere sight of their faces, which have a kindred look, whatever their calling or degree; and I think we are never less wrapped in the national flag than when we encounter English soldiers. The other day I was walking through one of the Parks when I came upon some sort of little barrack, where two or three privates, being temporarily debarred from flirtation with the nursery maids by the duty they were on, presented themselves purely and simply as my traditional enemies. But so far from wishing to offer them battle, I could only think of that whimsical and remorseful passage of Hawthorne’s “Septimius Felton,” in which he describes Pitcairne’s men as they marched into Concord after the affair at Lexington, dusty, wearied, and footsore, but “needing only a half-hour’s rest, a good breakfast, and a pot of beer apiece, to make them ready to face the world. Nor did their faces look in any way rancorous, but at the most only heavy, cloddish, good-natured, and humane. ‘Oh, heavens, Mr. Felton!’ whispered Rose; ‘why should we shoot these men, or they us? They look kind, if homely.’ ‘It is the strangest thing in the world that we should think of killing them,’ said Septimius.”

  Indeed it was monstrous. I realized then as never before the tremendous moral disadvantage a democracy is at in any war with a royal or oligarchic power; for whereas a portion of the Republican idea is slain in every American who perishes on the field, the poor fellows who fall on the other side personally express nothing, while the real enemy remains safe at home. It was no longer a question of shooting at the King and his ministers from behind stone walls, as it had been hitherto, but of picking off such amiable and friendly-looking folk as those I saw. Something in my heart — no doubt the brother plebeian — stirred in their presence with a novel pain; and if I could have hoped to make these honest men in anywise cognizant of April 19, 1775, I might have wished to excuse it to them.

  SHIRLEY.

  IT was our fortune to spend six weeks of the summer of 1875 in the neighborhood of a community of the people called Shakers, who are chiefly known to the world-outside by their apple-sauce, by their garden seeds so punctual in coming up when planted, by their brooms so well made that they sweep clean long after the ordinary new broom of proverb has retired upon its reputation, by the quaintness of their dress, and by the fame of their religious dances. It is well to have one’s name such a synonyme for honesty that anything called by it may be bought and sold with perfect confidence, and it is surely no harm to be noted for dressing out of the present fashion, or for dancing before the Lord. But when our summer had come to an end, and we had learned to know the Shakers for so many other qualities, we grew almost to resent their superficial renown among men. We saw in them a sect simple, sincere, and fervently persuaded of the truth of their doctrine, striving for the realization of a heavenly ideal upon earth; and amidst the hard and often sordid common place of our ordinary country life, their practice of the austerities to which men and women have devoted themselves in storied times and picturesque lands clothed these Yankee Shakers in something of the pathetic interest which always clings to our thoughts of monks and nuns.

  Their doctrine has been so often explained that I need not dwell upon it here, but the more curious reader may turn to the volumes of “The Atlantic Monthly” of 1867 for an authoritative statement of all its points in the autobiography of Elder Evans of Mt. Lebanon. Mainly, their faith is their life; a life of charity, of labor, of celibacy, which they call the angelic life. Theologically, it can be most succinctly presented in their formula, Christ Jesus and Christ Ann, their belief being that the order of special prophecy was completed by the inspiration of Mother Ann Lee, the wife of the English blacksmith, Stanley. She is their second Christ; their divine mother, whom some of their hymns invoke; and for whom they cherish a filial love. The families of Shirley and Harvard, Massachusetts, were formed in her time, near the close of the last century; at the latter place they show the room in which she lived, and whence she was once dragged by the foolish mob which helps to found every new religion.

  In regard to other points their minds vary. Generally they do not believe in the miraculous birth or divinity of Christ; he was a divinely good and perfect man, and any of us may be come divine by being godlike. Generally, also, I should say that they reject the Puritanic ideas of future rewards and punishments, and accept something like the Swedenborgian notion of the life hereafter. They are all spiritualists, recognizing a succession of inspirations from the earliest times down to our own, when they claim to have been the first spiritual mediums. Five or six years before the spirits who have since animated so many table-legs, planchettes, phantom shapes, and what not began to knock at Rochester, the Shaker families in New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, and elsewhere were in full communion with the other world, and they were warned of the impending invasion of the world’s parlor and dining-room sets. They feel by no means honored, however, by all the results. But they believe that the intercourse between the worlds can be rescued from the evil influences which have perverted it, and they have signs, they say, of an early renewal of the manifestations among themselves. In some ways these have in fact never ceased. Many of the Shaker hymns, words and music, are directly inspirational, coming to this brother or that sister without regard to his or her special genius; they are sung and written down, and are then brought into general use. The poetry is like that which the other world usually furnishes through its agents in this, — hardly up to our literary standard; but the music has always something strangely wild, sweet, and naïve in it.

  The Shakers claim to be the purest and most Christian church, proceeding in a straight succession from the church which Christ’s life of charity and celibacy established on earth; whereas, all the other churches are sprung from the first Gentile churches, to whose weakness and wilfulness certain regrettable things, as slavery, war, private property, and marriage, were permitted. Acknowledging a measure of inspiration in all religions, they also recognize a kindred attraction to the angelic life in the celibate orders of every faith: the Roman vestals, the Peruvian virgins of the sun, and the Buddhist bonzes, as well as the monks and nuns of the Catholic Church. They complain that they have not been understood by such alien writers as have treated of them, and have represented them as chiefly useful in furnishing homes for helpless and destitute people of all ages and sexes. In the words of Elder Fraser, of Shirley, the Shakers claim that their system is “based on the fact that each man has in himself a higher and a lower life,” and that Shakerism “is a manifestation of the higher to the exclusion of the lower life. Its object is to gather into one fold all who have risen above their natural propensities,” and they think with Paul that though those who marry do well, yet those who do not marry do better. Their preaching and teaching is largely to this effect; and yet I do not find it quite strange that friends from the world-outside regard rather the spectacle of the Shakers’ peaceful life, and think mostly of their quiet homes as refuges for those disabled against fate, the poor, the bruised, the hopeless; after all, Christ himself is but this. As I recall their plain, quaint village at Shirley, a sense of its exceeding peace fills me; I see its long, straight street, with the severely simple edifices on either hand; the gardens up-hill on one side and down-hill on the other; its fragrant orchards and its levels of clovery meadow-land stretching away to buck wheat fields, at the borde
rs of whose milky bloom the bee paused, puzzled which sweet to choose; and it seems to me that one whom the world could flatter no more, one broken in hope, or health, or fortune, could not do better than come hither and meekly ask to be taken into that quiet fold, and kept forever from his sorrows and himself. But — such is the hardness of the natural heart — I cannot think of one’s being a Shaker on any other terms, except, of course, a sincere conviction.

  The first time that we saw the Shaker worship was on the occasion of Sister Julia’s funeral, to which we were asked the day after her death. It was a hot afternoon at the end of July, and when we drove out of the woods, we were glad of the ash and maple trees that shade the village street in nearly its whole length. There were once three families at Shirley, but the South Family, so-called, has been absorbed by the Church Family, and its dwellings, barns, and shops are occupied by tenants and work people of the community. The village is built on each side of the road, under the flank of a long ridge, and the land still falls, from the buildings on the eastern side, into a broad, beautiful valley (where between its sycamores the Nashua runs unseen), with gardens, orchards, patches of corn and potatoes, green meadows, and soft clumps of pine woods; beyond rise the fertile hills in a fold of which the village of the Harvard Shakers lies hid from their brethren at Shirley.