From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “They tell us, sir, that we are weak, unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed? And when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of Hope, until our enemies have bound us hand and foot?

  “Sir, we are not weak! Three millions of people armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as this, are invincible by any force our enemy could send against us!”

  Jonathan noted his use of the word “enemy” and his mouth felt dry. Henry was referring to fellow Englishmen as if they were another race. Now he went on, in the grave faces of his audience.

  “The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no choice. Even if we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but to submission and slavery. Our chains are forged; their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable—and let it come! I repeat, sir, let it come!”

  Henry paused, and he paused at the risk of being shouted down before he could finish. Or maybe he had finished. His last three words hung like a bloody banner in the still air over the heads of the delegates, in the rafters of the church. But no one spoke; no one even murmured.

  “It is vain, sir,” Henry said with a sarcastic edge on his voice, “to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace, but there is no peace. The war is actually begun. The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have?” Now he spoke as if from a tightened throat.

  “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God,” he now nearly bellowed. “I know not what course others may take, but as for me—” He flung up his arms, his fists knotted as tight as his brows, and shouted: “Give me liberty, or give me DEATH!”

  And in the reverberations of his words he stepped down and took his seat. There was not a whisper of applause. Jonathan felt as if his heart were as big and heavy as a mountain; his hands were shaking, and he realized that the transfixed, gaping, chalky-faced listeners were beginning to blur; he was looking at them through tears. He jumped up, as if to dodge from under the great weight upon his heart, and raised an arm. Others were now rising all around, and somebody cried:

  “To arms!”

  Fists were being raised and shaken.

  “To arms!”

  “To arms!”

  Richard Henry Lee, white-wigged, his fine features drawn, face going from chalk-pale to florid as he talked, took the floor in the midst of the uproar, and talked, scarcely heard, about the realities of the situation, and the odds against the success of arms, but finally, as the noise subsided, he said: “… admitting the probable calculations to be against us, we are assured in holy writ that ‘the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,’ and, if the language of genius may be added to inspiration, I will say with our immortal bard: “Thrice is he armed, who hath his quarrel just!” Lee droned on, but Henry’s words “liberty or death” seemed to linger like echoes in the backs of all the delegates’ minds. Jonathan had never seen a roomful of people remain so agitated for so long. And when Henry’s resolution for a militia was put to vote, it was swept through with little opposition, that mostly from older members, who had come to the convention expecting a mood of reconciliation with Britain. Most of these august ones were visibly shaken by the sudden turn of events Henry’s speech had caused, but some of them were walking about with misty eyes and more youth in their step than anyone had seen for ages.

  The next order of business was formation of a committee to prepare the plan for a militia. Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were named to the committee, which included the few delegates with military experience. Among these were Colonel Washington, Colonel William Christian, and General Andrew Lewis, hero of the Battle of Point Pleasant last fall at the mouth of the Kana-wha. These three were clustered near the door at the end of the day’s proceedings, receiving blessings and advice from the departing delegates. Jonathan, waiting nearby to shake their hands, watched the veterans Washington and Lewis, who stood shoulder to shoulder surrounded by the powdered wigs and velvet coats of their well-wishers, and he fancied them standing just like this nearly twenty years ago amid the humming musketballs and the cries of the mortally wounded on that awful day of Braddock’s defeat. They were fighting for the Crown then, he thought suddenly; how must they feel now, knowing they’ll surely be fighting against it soon? Suddenly he became more aware than he had been all day of the audacity of what had been wrought here in this old Richmond church, by a group of responsible, propertied men swept along on the crest of a wave of idealistic words.

  We’re all likely to ruin ourselves by what we’ve done here today, he thought.

  That, or we’ll find out who we really are. Englishmen with the rights of Englishmen, or …

  Or Americans, he thought.

  A hand closed around his upper arm. “Jonathan,” said a soft voice, and he turned to see Tom Jefferson’s ruddy face. “How goes with you?”

  “Right well. A big day, this, eh?”

  “A great one. I expect a celebration tonight. A somber one withal. Join us?”

  “I’m laying at Cap’n Gunn’s, and they’ve planned a dinner. But thankee.”

  “Come.” Jefferson kept his hold on Jonathan’s arm and edged in among the delegates crowded around Washington and Lewis. “Colonel, you should meet this old neighbor of mine from Albemarle, Jonathan Clark.”

  Washington’s handshake and proximity gave Jonathan a totally new impression of this grave, big-boned farmer-soldier, whom he had heretofore seen only across rooms, and it was an impression both attractive and forbidding. Washington’s hand was enormous, strong, and warm. Jonathan was aware that he was standing before a man whose physical size and strength were at least the equal of his own, someone who, like him, was accustomed to looking over the heads of men; if from a distance Colonel Washington looked soft and wide-hipped, it was a delusion of skeletal structure; his two hundred and more pounds obviously were all hard muscle and big bone. His eyelids were heavy and he was slow to smile; his eyes, Jonathan now could see, were shrewd and somehow sad. His cheeks and cheekbones were deeply pitted, and the powder or flour he used to subdue the appearance of those scars gave a false pallor to what was really an outdoorsman’s complection. Colonel Washington was known as a man of few and well-chosen words; he offered none now; he bowed slightly and then looked in Jonathan’s dark eyes as if awaiting some pertinent information. Tom Jefferson filled the silence: “Jonathan’s Clerk of Dunmore County,” he said, then grinned, obviously amused by a sudden thought, and added, “Jonathan, maybe we ought to change the name o’ your county, eh?” Washington started to smile, but his eyes looked sadder still. Apparently he was not taking lightly the changes of the day. Then he said:

  “Clark, is it. Lately I heard of a Clark named to do my old duties—that is, surveying for the Ohio Company. George Clark. A relation?”

  “Aye, sir. My younger brother, he is.”

  “And a bom Westerner if ever there was one,” said Jefferson.

  Now Washington laid his hand on Jefferson’s forearm; a thoughtful look had come over his face. “As for the West,” he said, “this committee of ours mustn’t ignore its defense. Mister Clark, a pleasure to know you.”

  “If I can ever be of service, Colonel.”

  “I expect you can, sir. I expect we’ll all have a great need of each other ere we reap what we’ve sown today.”

  JONATHAN LAY THAT NIGHT IN A GUEST BEDROOM AT THE Gunns’, so full of dinner and brandy that he almost dozed with the candle still lit. His emotions were drained. He sat up in bed, yawned, reached
for his diary, a palm-sized notebook, and made the terse daily entry in pencil:

  Clear: at Richmond, the Convention continued: lay Capt Gunn’s.

  He blew out the candle, turned on his side and pulled the blanket up on his shoulder. He tried to imagine what an actual conflict with the mother country would cost him, and his family, and all these Virginians he had come to know. But the thought was too enormous. He could not think of it at all. A parade of faces passed through his head: Henry’s, Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Parson Robertson’s, George’s, his father’s and mother’s—and he went to sleep with Patrick Henry’s resonant voice rolling around him, distorted by its own echoes.

  CAROLINE COUNTY,

  April 29, 1775

  “HEY! JOHNNY CLARK!”

  The cry came with the hoofbeats of several horses. Everybody at the breakfast table scooted chairs back and started to rise. “That’s Cousin Joe,” Johnny exclaimed.

  “This time o’ morning?” said Ann Rogers Clark.

  Johnny raised the window sash and leaned out, thinking perhaps Joe was bringing him a message relating to one or another of his sweethearts; many of the messages that came to the Clark house were of that nature. The sun was not yet above the horizon. Bands of cream-colored sky silhouetted the leaves of spring outside the window. Five young horsemen were controlling their excited mounts in the roadway. They were Joe and Johnny Rogers, and three others, all in their hunting shirts and armed with rifles. They were fellow members of Johnny’s militia company, so recently mobilized by the Revolutionary Assembly and just beginning to take training. Johnny saw by their weaponry that they had not come as messengers of love. “What’s it about, fellows?” Johnny called. Most of his family was crowding at his back.

  “Come on! Patrick Henry’s marching an army on Williamsburg! We’re mustering at the Bowling Green!”

  “Mercy on us,” murmured Mrs. Clark. “Give a man an army, and he’ll use it.”

  “Henry? What for?” called Johnny.

  “To give Lord Dunmore some proper hell!”

  “You mean about the gunpowder!” For once Johnny Clark was growing excited about something besides romance.

  “Aye! Proposes to make ’im put it back, or pay for it!”

  “Stay a minute, boys, I’m with’ee!”

  He started from the window, but his mother seized his arm and held him, searching his face with those drilling blue eyes. For the first time ever, he was aware of the little squint-lines beside her eyes and tiny wrinkles at the corners of her mouth.

  “I wish you wouldn’t go, Johnny. I mean, without your Pa knowing.”

  “You tell him, Ma, when he gets home. We can’t wait.” He started to pull free, then paused and gave her a peck on the cheek, and she released his arm, sighing.

  “No,” she said. “I guess ye can’t.”

  Johnny bounded up the staircase to the boys’ sleeping room, yelling for Cupid to go saddle up Atlas. Dickie stormed up the stairs after him, all elbows and big feet, followed by Lucy and Elizabeth, both exclaiming at once. Johnny pulled on his canvas hunting shirt, belted it, slung powder horn and shooting bag over his shoulders, hung a sheath knife on his belt, and lifted his rifle down from the wall. Dickie’s arm reached up beside him and took another gun down. Johnny paused. “Ho, Dickie, what’re you up to?”

  “I’m goin’.”

  “You’re not a minute man.”

  “Maybe not, but I can outshoot any dum fool in your company.”

  That was true. But Johnny said, “Ma won’t let ye go. You’re only fourteen.”

  “Nigh on fifteen. And Ma doesn’t stop us when we’re doin’ right by conscience.” That was true too. Dickie was slinging on his horn and bag. And now Edmund was pushing between them, getting his hunting rifle down. Both his brothers reminded him snortingly that he was only twelve. But he retorted with the truth that he could outshoot both of them put together. So all three trooped downstairs, Lucy and Elizabeth following them back down. At the foot of the stairs stood Billy, not yet five years old, bright red forelock hanging down over one blue eye, watching all this commotion with his mouth half open. Johnny, putting on his three-cornered hat, paused and looked down at him, and ruffled his hair.

  “Billy, you stay here and protect the girls. That’s the most important part.”

  Everybody laughed. Except Billy.

  Johnny’s company was supposed to be infantry, according to the militia plan. But most of the men in it had horses, and it was hours by foot to the Bowling Green, minutes by horse, and they did after all call themselves minute men. Johnny ran outdoors and vaulted into Atlas’ saddle, while Dickie and Edmund ran to the stable to saddle Herk. They would have to double up on Herk, as their father had taken the only other good saddle horse. In a minute they rode around the house, Eddie behind Dickie. Their mother was coming from the kitchen house with a bag of provisions for Johnny. She saw Dickie and Edmund, looked astonished, then set her lips in a white line. She seemed ready to protest, but instead just called toward the kitchen house, “Rose, fetch another loaf and about a yard o’ sausage! Johnny, you watch everybody keeps warm. I’m holding you responsible for your brothers.”

  “Stay warm, you two,” Johnny commanded. Then he reached down and touched her hand, and, with a whoop, the Clark boys and the Rogers boys and the others all kicked off into a gallop. Johnny was a bit ashamed for having given his mother no more of a good-bye than that, but, after all, he was a soldier now, and his comrades-in-arms had been looking on; surely she’d understood that. And Dickie and Eddie, who were younger, had not even touched her hand in parting. Still, he was annoyed with himself, and if he had been alone he would have gone back to embrace her and give her a good-bye kiss.

  Two miles up the road they began overtaking a lone rider cantering ahead of them, cape flying. The man and the horse looked very familiar.

  “IT’S PA,” DICKIE SHOUTED. JOHN CLARK WAS SUPPOSED TO be on his way home from the tobacco warehouse at Port Royal.

  He turned and saw them coming. Everybody reined in, horses blowing. “Y’re going the wrong way, aren’t ye, Pa?” Johnny said.

  “I was coming home when I heard the governor’s plundered the arsenal, then about Cap’n Henry, so I turned about.” His boots and saddlebags were dusty. He had no rifle with him, but lately had taken to carrying in his saddlebags the set of pistols George had given him—the “useless” guns. “Dickie, Eddie, y’re a bit short in the’ breeks to be along, say what? Did ye disobey your mother?”

  “No, Pa, she didn’t try to stay us.”

  “Well, then, come along, but stay by me. I’ll not have you all bein’ rash. Let’s go, then!”

  BY MAY 2, THE COLUMN OF VOLUNTEERS SEEMED TO stretch a mile along the road.

  “Look at us!” Johnny exclaimed, his voice tight and shivery. “I say, to hell with Dunmore and his bloody Royal Marines!” Johnny imagined that the Crusaders of old, clanking along the dusty roads in their mail and armor, must have felt this same fierce, happy righteousness. He felt that he and these compatriots of his were crusaders, their holy cause being Liberty. Patrick Henry’s original force of seven hundred Hanover County riflemen had been swollen to thousands, as armed men and boys from counties along the route had poured into the column like creeks into a river. Edmund Pendleton, and then Peyton Randolph, Speaker of the House of Burgesses, had come to the Bowling Green and tried to persuade the Caroline minute men not to follow Henry, but they had pleaded in vain. Spirits were too high.

  The Hanover drummer could be heard at the head of the line, his chattering cadence making the pulse beat a little faster. Back toward the rear, voices were singing a new patriot song: “Our peach-brandy fellows can never be beat …”

  Spirits were in concert. All were angry at Dandy Dunmore. Some now and then grew quiet in contemplation of the chance that tomorrow might be the day when they’d die. The sight of banners fluttering, of muskets and rifles glinting in the comfortable spring sunlight, of dust rising from the
trodden road, gave Johnny Clark that exquisite sense of vitality he usually felt only when he soared on the wings of new love.

  He laughed at himself suddenly, at the way he was mixing all these thoughts together—Crusades, Liberty, being in love, being martial—into one heady feeling that was really, he realized, nothing more than the giddy recklessness of defying an old authority.

  “Hey-o, Johnny Clark, how d’ye?”

  He heard this just as a hand gripped his knee, and he looked down to his left to see the seamed, strong face of Isaiah Freeman, the poor neighbor farmer whose daughter Betsy had been Johnny’s true love once—for a whole month after their close call in the haymow. Isaiah Freeman was marching alongside Johnny’s horse, musket aslant over his left shoulder. He was not a young man, had not been a militiaman probably since the French and Indian War, and might well not have come. His face was a-gleam with sweat, his gray-shot eyebrows beaded with it.

  “I do right well, Mister Freeman. How d’ye?”

  Johnny had a momentary sense of irony, of pity; here holding his knee and smiling up at him was a man who likely would have wanted to shoot him had he known of Johnny’s lustful liaisons with his dear daughter.

  And now Isaiah Freeman said:

  “A great day, what?”

  “A great day.”

  Mister Freeman shook his head, grinning. He had few teeth left. The sound of thousands of shoes and hooves beating and shuffling on the dusty roadway was like an incessant, rushing whisper. “Cap’n Henry says ’twas but part of a great British plot,” said Freeman.

  “What was?”

  “Dunmore takin’ the gunpowder. All th’ Royal Governors of all th’ Colonies. To make us all helpless at once, like.”

  “Y’ don’t say so!”

  “Aye, lad.” Mister Freeman breathed hard as he paced alongside. “It’s what they aimed to do up at Massychusetts. But th’ folk got wind of it and fit ’em off at two towns. Lexington and, uhm, Concord, ’twas. A real bloody affair, they say.”