Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 56, June, 1862», страница 6

The days crept on, I say, and got bright again; no June days ever stretched themselves to half such length; there was perfect stillness in the house,—it seemed to me that I counted every tick of the clock. In the evenings the neighbors used to drop in and sit mumbling over their fearful memories till the flesh crawled on my bones. Father, then, he wanted cheer, and he'd get me to singing "Caller Herrin'." Once, I'd sung the first part, but as I reached the lines,—

 
  "When ye were sleepin' on your pillows,
  Dreamt ye aught o' our puir fellows
  Darklin' as they face the billows,
  A' to fill our woven willows,"—
 

as I reached those lines, my voice trembled so's to shake the tears out of my eyes, and Jim Jerdan took it up himself and sung it through for me to words of his own invention. He was always a kindly fellow, and he knew a little how the land lay between me and Dan.

"When I was down in the Georges," said Jim Jerdan–

"You? When was you down there?" asked father.

"Well,—once I was. There's worse places."

"Can't tell me nothing about the Georges," said father. "'Ta'n't the rivers of Damascus exactly, but 'ta'n't the Marlstrom neither."

"Ever ben there, Cap'n?"

"A few. Spent more nights under cover roundabouts than Georgie'll have white hairs in her head,—for all she's washing the color out of her eyes now."

You see, father knew I set by my hair,—for in those days I rolled it thick as a cable, almost as long, black as that cat's back,—and he thought he'd touch me up a little.

"Wash the red from her cheek and the light from her look, and she'll still have the queen's own tread," said Jim.

"If Loisy Currier'd heern that, you'd wish your cake was dough," says father.

"I'll resk it," says Jim. "Loisy knows who's second choice, as well as if you told her."

"But what about the Georges, Jim?" I asked; for though I hated to hear, I could listen to nothing else.

"Georges? Oh, not much. Just like any other place."

"But what do you do down there?"

"Do? Why, we fish,—in the pleasant weather."

"And when it's not pleasant?"

"Oh, then we make things taut, hoist fores'l, clap the hellum into the lee becket, and go below and amuse ourselves."

"How?" I asked, as if I hadn't heard it all a hundred times.

"One way 'n' another. Pipes, and mugs, and poker, if it a'n't too rough; and if it is, we just bunk and snooze till it gets smooth."

"Why, Jim,—how do you know when that is?"

"Well, you can jedge,—'f the pipe falls out of your pocket and don't light on the ceiling."

"And who's on deck?"

"There's no one on deck. There's no danger, no trouble, no nothing. Can't drive ashore, if you was to try: hundred miles off, in the first place. Hatches are closed, she's light as a cork, rolls over and over just like any other log in the water, and there can't a drop get into her, if she turns bottom-side up."

"But she never can right herself!"

"Can't she? You just try her. Why, I've known 'em to keel over and rake bottom and bring up the weed on the topmast. I tell you now! there was one time we knowed she'd turned a somerset, pretty well. Why? Because, when it cleared and we come up, there was her two masts broke short off!"

And Jim went home thinking he'd given me a night's sleep. But it was cold comfort; the Georges seemed to me a worse place than the Hellgate. And mother she kept murmuring,—"He layeth the beams of His chambers in the waters, His pavilion round about Him is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies." And I knew by that she thought it pretty bad.

So the days went in cloud and wind. The owners of the Feather 'd been looking for her a month and more, and there were strange kind of rumors afloat; and nobody mentioned Dan's name, unless they tripped. I went glowering like a wild thing. I knew I'd never see Dan now nor hear his voice again, but I hated the Lord that had done it, and I made my heart like the nether millstone. I used to try and get out of folks's sight; and roaming about the back-streets one day, as the snow went off, I stumbled on Miss Catharine. "Old Miss Catharine" everybody called her, though she was but a pauper, and had black blood in her veins. Eighty years had withered her,—a little woman at best, and now bent so that her head and shoulders hung forward and she couldn't lift them, and she never saw the sky. Her face to the ground as no beast's face is turned even, she walked with a cane, and fixing it every few steps she would throw herself back, and so get a glimpse of her way and go on. I looked after her, and for the first time in weeks my heart ached for somebody beside myself. The next day mother sent me with a dish to Miss Catharine's room, and I went in and sat down. I didn't like her at first; she'd got a way of looking sidelong that gave her an evil air; but soon she tilted herself backward, and I saw her face,—such a happy one!

"What's the matter of ye, honey?" said she. "D'ye read your Bible?"

Read my Bible!

"Is that what makes you happy, Miss Catharine?" I asked.

"Well, I can't read much myself, I don't know the letters," says she; "but I've got the blessed promises in my heart."

"Do you want me to read to you?"

"No, not to-day. Next time you come, maybe."

So I sat awhile and listened to her little humming voice, and we fell to talking about mother's ailments, and she said how fine it would be, if we could only afford to take mother to Bethesda.

"There's no angel there now," said I.

"I know it, dear,—but then there might be, you know. At any rate, there's always the living waters running to make us whole: I often think of that."

"And what else do you think of, Miss Catharine?"

"Me?" said she. "Oh, I ha'n't got no husband nor no child to think about and hope for, and so I think of myself, and what I should like, honey. And sometimes I remember them varses,—here! you read 'em now,—Luke xiii. 11."

So I read:—

"And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself. And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, 'Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.' And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God."

"Ay, honey, I see that all as if it was me. And I think, as I'm setting here, What if the latch should lift, and the gracious stranger should come in, His gown a-sweepin' behind Him and a-sweet'nin' the air, and He should look down on me with His heavenly eyes, and He should smile, and lay His hands on my head, warm?—and I say to myself, 'Lord, I am not worthy,'—and He says, 'Miss Catharine, thou art loosed from thine infirmity!' And the latch lifts, as I think, and I wait,—but it's not Him."

Well, when I went out of that place I wasn't the same girl that had gone in. My will gave way; I came home and took up my burden and was in peace. Still I couldn't help my thoughts,—and they ran perpetually to the sea. I hadn't need to go up on the house-tops, for I didn't shut my eyes but there it stretched before me. I stirred about the rooms and tried to make them glad once more; but I was thin and blanched as if I'd been rising from a fever. Father said it was the salt air I wanted; and one day he was going out for frost-fish, and he took me with him, and left me and my basket on the sands while he was away. It was this side of the South Breaker that he put me out, but I walked there; and where the surf was breaking in the light, I went and sat down and looked over it. I could do that now.

There was the Cape sparkling miles and miles across the way, unconcerned that he whose firm foot had rung last on its flints should ring there no more; there was the beautiful town lying large and warm along the river; here gay craft went darting about like gulls, and there up the channel sped a larger one, with all her canvas flashing in the sun, and shivering a little spritsail in the shadow, as she went; and fawning in upon my feet came the foam from the South Breaker, that still perhaps cradled Faith and Gabriel. But as I looked, my eye fell, and there came the sea-scenes again,—other scenes than this, coves and corners of other coasts, sky-girt regions of other waters. The air was soft, that April day, and I thought of the summer calms; and with that rose long sheets of stillness, far out from any strand, purple beneath the noon; fields slipping close in-shore, emerald-backed and scaled with sunshine; long sleepy swells that hid the light in their hollows, and came creaming along the cliffs. And if upon these broke suddenly a wild glimpse of some storm careering over a merciless mid-ocean, of a dear dead face tossing up on the surge and snatched back again into the depths, of mad wastes rushing to tear themselves to fleece above clear shallows and turbid sand-bars,—they melted and were lost in peaceful glimmers of the moon on distant flying foam-wreaths, in solemn midnight tides chanting in under hushed heavens, in twilight stretches kissing twilight slopes, in rosy morning waves flocking up the singing shores. And sitting so, with my lids still fallen, I heard a quick step on the beach, and a voice that said, "Georgie!" And I looked, and a figure, red-shirted, towered beside me, and a face, brown and bearded and tender, bent above me.

Oh! it was Dan!

THE SAM ADAMS REGIMENTS IN THE TOWN OF BOSTON.³

THE LANDING

As John Adams, in the evening of his life, and in the retirement of Quincy, looked back on the scenes through which he had passed, he dwelt on the removal of the British troops from Boston in the month of March, 1770, as an event that profoundly stirred the public mind, and thus contributed to promote that radical change in affections and principles on the paramount subject of sovereignty, which he regarded as constituting the real American Revolution.

The more this chapter of history is examined, the more there will be found in it to justify the judgment of the venerable patriot. It is fragrant with the political aroma of the time; and the event seems worthy to stand out in the American Revolution, like the Arrest of the Five Members in the English Revolution. It is identified with a great principle. It formed the crisis of an issue of the deepest moment. It culminated in the triumph of the people when roused by passion and high resolve to heroic manhood. The trial-scene was on so important a stage, was so richly dramatic, had actors of such dignity of character, and was so instinct with the national life, as "to deserve to be painted as much as the Surrender of Burgoyne." It was the moment when Samuel Adams, in the name of a resolute people, made the demand, as an ultimatum, for an immediate removal of the troops. The close connection of this patriot with the whole transaction led Lord North, ever after, to call these troops by the title of "Sam Adams's Two Regiments."

The story of the introduction of these troops into Boston, also, is rich in matter illustrative of the springs of political action. The narrative soon shows that it relates to far more than an ordinary transfer of a military force from one station to another. Such transfers are not preceded by long hesitation in cabinets, or by long torture of peaceful communities in expectation of their arrival. Yet such was the preface to the landing of this force in Boston. It was sent on an uncommon service,—a service insulting to a loyal people; and though this people had hailed the flag that waved over it with enthusiasm from the fields of Louisburg and Quebec, they now looked upon it with sorrowing eyes as the symbol of arbitrary power.

These troops were ordered to Boston at an interesting period of the American struggle. The movement against the Stamp Act, noble as it was in the main, had phases that were deeply deplored by reflecting patriots. Such were the riots, attended by destruction of property and personal outrage, which, though common in England, were violative of that reverence for law that was thoroughly ingrained in the American character; and they were, besides, rather in the spirit of hasty and irregular insurrection than of the slow and majestic development of revolution. "We are not able in this way," wrote Jonathan Mayhew, "to contend against Great Britain."

On the repeal of the Stamp Act, there was an expression of general joy, and controversy subsided. When fresh aggressions, in, the passage of the Revenue Acts of 1767, required a new movement, the popular leaders, profiting by past sad experience, strove to prevent excesses, and patiently labored to build up their cause in the growth of an intelligent public opinion. Even in reference to obnoxious local officials, the word ran through the ranks,—"Let there be no mobs, no riots. Let not the hair of their scalps be touched." Hard as it is to restrain the rash, when the popular passion is excited, not a life was sacrificed, not a limb even was dislocated, by the patriots of Boston in political action, until the ripe hour of the Lexington rising.

In this way Massachusetts, when called upon to stand by old customs and rights, acted not only in a spirit of fidelity to liberty, but also in a spirit of loyalty to law and order. Her conduct in the Stamp Act crisis turned towards her the eyes and drew towards her the hearts of the other Colonies, and elevated her into what was then a perilous, but is now a proud, pre-eminence; and the call was made on her (1767) in the journals of other Colonies, and copied into the Boston papers, as "the liberties of a common country were again in danger," "to kindle the sacred flame that should warm and illuminate the continent." So instinctively did the common peril suggest the thought and expression of a common country.

The Loyalists, for years, put Boston as in a pillory for punishment. It was (they said) the head-quarters of sedition. It was the fountain of opposition to the Government. It was under the rule of a trained mob. It was swayed to and fro by a few popular leaders. It was the nest of a faction. James Otis and Samuel Adams were the two consuls. Joseph Warren was one of the chiefs. John Hancock was possessed of great wealth and of large social and commercial influence. Such leaders, bankrupts on the exchange or in character, controlled everything. They controlled the clubs,—and there was not a social company or political club that did not claim to have to do with the Government: they controlled the town-meetings,—and these were the instrumentalities of rebellion: and the town-meetings controlled the legislature, and this controlled the Province. Then the local press was filled with incendiary matter from the cabinet of the faction. Thus the spirits who led in the clubs, the town-meetings, and the legislature supplied the seditious writing that was scattered broadcast over the Colonies, and poisoned as it spread.

There was some truth in this Loyalist strain. Patriotic rays gathered and drew to a focus in Boston, and there became intensified with a steady power. The town had jealousies to encounter and prejudices to overcome; but, as if to the manner born, it acted in a spirit of such comprehensive patriotism that it came to be regarded as an exponent of the feelings of the whole country. Its key-note was Union. In fitting words Philadelphia (1768) grandly said to Boston,—"Let us never forget that our strength depends on our union, and our liberty on our strength; united we conquer, divided we die." Boston returned the pledge, "warmly to recommend and industriously to promote that union among the several Colonies which is so indispensably necessary for the security of the whole."

Boston at this period is usually described as a noted and opulent trading town,—the Great Town,—the Metropolis of New England,—the best situated for commerce in North America,—the largest city in the American British Empire. It had the air of an English city. Its commodious residences had spacious lawns and gardens and fields; while the contents of its stores, as seen in advertisements that sometimes cover a broadside of the journals, and the number of ship-yards that are shown by the maps to have girdled the town, betoken its business activity. Its population of sixteen thousand, with its three thousand voters, and no pauper class, had carefully nurtured the common school, and was characterized not only by love of order, but by enterprise, intelligence, and public spirit. It early welcomed the doctrine of a right in the people to interpret the religious law and to fashion, the political law, and thus practically welcomed freedom of thought and of utterance, and acknowledged allegiance only to truth. It had tested for more than a century the working of this principle, as it was carried out in the congregation and in the municipality, in the Church and in the State. By it each citizen was made deeply interested in the support of liberty; and thus the town had not only a public, but a public life, quietly nurtured as worthy citizens were successively called to manage the local affairs. It furnished the instance of a community composed of men of small estates who very rarely had to use a mark for their name, and imbued by the spirit of individual independence toned into a respect for law, which, on the decline of feudalism, began to play a part on the national stage. Thus the political character of Boston was sharply defined and firmly fixed. It started in the republican way, went on for over a century in republican habits, and had the priceless heirloom of principles and traditions that were certainly life-giving, and may not inaptly be termed national. The prediction was publicly uttered here, two centuries ago, and printed, that a day would come when "those that were branded before for Huguenots and Lollards and Hereticks, they should be thought the only men to be fit to have crowns upon their heads, and independent government committed to them"; and the crown that shone with superior lustre was progress in things that elevate and adorn humanity.

Such a government, so far as it regarded local affairs, the people substantially enjoyed under the protecting wing of a proud nationality. They loved the old flag. They claimed its history as their history, and its glory as their glory. It gave security to their rights as men, as Christians, and as Englishmen. It thus sheltered the precious body of civil and religious liberties which they were in the habit of speaking of as the rights of mankind. For this they were attached to the English Constitution. For this they said, "Dear England!" Their strong expressions in favor of the union with Great Britain were sincere. The turn of the words showed the honest bent of the mind. No man respected the English Constitution more than Samuel Adams, and his strong language now (1768) was,—"I pray God that harmony may be cultivated between Great Britain and the Colonies, and that they may long flourish in one undivided empire." His resolution was no less strong to stand for local self-government. As the idea began to be entertained that the preservation of this right might require a new nationality, nothing legs worthy for country was thought of than a union of all the Colonies in an American commonwealth, with one constitution, which should be supreme over all in questions common to country, and have one flag. The great idea was expressed by New Jersey, that the continent must protect the continent.

This idea of creating a new nationality was forced on the Colonies by wanton aggressions on the local self-government. There was far from unanimity of opinion as to the acts, much less as to the ascribed purposes of the Ministry. Setting aside a class of no-party men in peace and of non-combatants in war, the people of Boston, as of other places, were divided into the friends and the opponents of the Administration, Loyalists and Whigs. The Whigs held that the new policy was flat aggression on the old republican way, hostile to their normal political life,—in a word, unconstitutional: the Loyalists maintained that the new policy was required to preserve the dependence on Great Britain, and therefore a necessity. The Whigs, zealous as they were for the local government, claimed to be loyal to the King: the Loyalists, however zealous for the independence of Parliament, claimed, in supporting the supremacy of law, to be friends of freedom. As it was not the original purpose of the Loyalists to invoke for their country the curse of arbitrary power, so it was not the original purpose of the Whigs to sever relations with the British crown. Men, however, are but instruments in the hands of Providence. Both parties drifted into measures which neither party originally proposed or even desired; and thus the Loyalist, to maintain the sovereignty of Parliament, grew into the defender of arbitrary power, and the Whig, to preserve the local government, grew into the asserter of national independence.

Nor was there unanimity among the Patriots themselves as to the way in which the Revenue Acts ought to be opposed; indeed, some were averse to making any opposition to them; but at length the policy of uniting the Colonies in the non-importation agreement, after being talked over at one of the political clubs in Boston, was agreed upon at a public meeting, and sent out to the country. Hence this was the period fixed upon by the Ministry as the time when the popular leaders made themselves liable to the penalties of violated law. When, in England, the idea was entertained and acted upon, that nothing would restore the authority of the Government but the arrest and transportation to London of the originators of the opposition to the Revenue Acts, Lord Hillsborough's instructions to the Massachusetts Executive ran thus:—"The King has thought fit to direct me to signify to you his Majesty's commands that you do take the most effectual methods for procuring the fullest information that can be obtained touching all treasons or misprisions of treason committed within your government since the 30th day of December, 1767, and transmit the same to me, together with the names of persons who were most active in the commission of such offences."

This language was addressed to Francis Bernard, who was at this time the highest representative of British power in Boston. He was a native of England, an Oxford graduate, and, from the training of Solicitor of Doctors Commons, was sent over, by the favor of aristocratic relationship, to be the Governor of New Jersey, and now for eight years had been Governor of Massachusetts. He was a scholar, and kept his memory of Alma Mater fresh. He loved literature and science, could write elegies in Latin and Greek, used to say that he could repeat the whole of Shakspeare, and had such gifts of conversation as to charm the social circle. His politics were of the Oxford school, and old at that. He looked upon the people with distrust, and upon the king with veneration: the people had good claim to be well governed, and British Imperialism had the divine right to govern them well. He was a good hater of republican institutions; habitually spoke of the local self-government as a trained mob; and to it (he was not far from right here) he ascribed the temper of the community which he was set to care for and to rule. It was vexatious to his Tory spirit to see the democratic element, which had excluded primogeniture and the hereditary principle and large landed estates, so firmly bedded here, as if for a mighty superstructure; and his reform plans tended to a change to centralization. It was a marvel to him, that this work, which he deemed essential to the maintenance of British power here, had not been begun long before,—that Charles II. had not made a clean sweep of the little New England republics. He urged that this ought to be done now,—that more general governments ought to take their place, with executives having vice-regal powers; and of course, being English, he urged that they should be moulded by England into a shape as nearly as possible like England and for the benefit of England, and thus be made homogeneous. He sighed to impose the dazzle of a miniature St. James on reality-loving New England: as though the soil which had been furrowed for a race of sovereigns could grow a crop of lords; as though the Norman rôle of privilege could be engrafted on a society imbued with the Saxon spirit of equality: and he clinched the absurdity of his thought by uttering the prediction, that, though the people might bluster a little when such reform was proposed, yet they never would resist by force; and if they did, a demonstration of British power, such as the presence of the King's troops in a few coast-towns and the occupation of a few harbors by the royal navy, would soon settle the contest.

As such an arrogant official, from yet unsealed Oxford heights, thus paternally looked down over Boston and New England, he could see in the little self-directing communities that clustered about the village church and the public school but a race of nobodies. He may be pardoned for not finding greatness in art, literature, or science in the circle that has been called the Athens of America; he could not be expected to measure the rich and enduring fame of a Jonathan Edwards; and it was an article in the then Oxford creed, that there could not be, unmoulded by the influences of an hereditary nobility, such a general product as a people lifted up by education and religion into a self-directing race of high-minded men, as the basis of a State. But a small class of British observers, who had other principles and other eyes, saw now in Boston the most orderly town and the most intelligent and moral people on the face of the earth; and said—the words were printed (1768) in London, and reproduced in the local press here—that no people since the ruin of the Roman Commonwealth seemed to entertain more just ideas of liberty or breathed forth a truer spirit of independence than these American colonists. Now Governor Bernard and his political friends regarded the chafings of such a people at what they held to be palpable aggressions on their established system of local government as the acts of a trained mob, and proofs of a long-matured design to cast off allegiance to the British crown and of an immediate purpose of insurrection; and for years they systematically urged, and attempted to fortify their policy by the most unscrupulous misrepresentations, that nothing could check this anarchical element and traitorous design but the abrogation of fundamental parts of the local constitution and the implanting of a feudal exotic by military power. The people claimed to be as free as the English were, and the calumnies were heaped on them of being anarchists and rebels.

This theory of insurrection was acted upon by the Governor as long as he remained in the Province. Every hasty word of the violent, and every public deliberation of the wise as well, were made to nurture this theory. By acting on such premises, besides doing gross injustice to the people, he made himself ridiculous. Still he clung tenaciously to his error and his plans as long as he remained in office; and even after he returned to England, the course of the Patriots continued to strengthen his convictions, and he wrote back that it was "plainly the design of the chiefs of the Boston faction to measure swords with Great Britain."

Though Governor Bernard had long thought a military force necessary to sustain the new measures, yet he refused to make a requisition for it. He expected the Government, of its own motion, would order troops to Boston in the time of the Stamp Act, and looked for trouble on their arrival. "The crisis," he wrote, (September 1, 1766,) "which I apprehend most danger from, is the introduction of King's troops into this town, which, having become necessary to the support of the Government, will be placed to the account of the Governor." But no troops were ordered then. He never was able to get his Council, even when he supposed a majority agreed with him in politics, to recommend their introduction; for no policy or measure which even such a Council indorsed required troops to enforce it. The Governor, however, was a zealous advocate of the new policy of the Ministry, which he judged could not be carried out without military force; but his point was, that, along with the stiff instructions to carry that policy out, the Ministry ought to supply force enough to do it.

The new Revenue Acts provided for a Board called the Commissioners of Customs, who were empowered to collect duties along a truly imperial line of coast, extending from Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico. They were appointed to reside in Boston. They were five in number,—Charles Paxton, Henry Hulton, William Burch, John Robinson, and John Temple. Not much is said of Hulton and Burch, who appear to have been simply zealous partisans; Robinson's violent temper is seen in his savage assault on Otis; Temple was not in favor of the creation of the Board, and won its enmity by taking exceptions to its doings; Paxton was charged with being the father of the Board and its chief. He was a zealous official, with a clean Tory record, of bland, courtlike ways, and certificated to England as Bernard's confidential friend. There he is said to have "whined, cried, professed, swore, and made his will in favor of that great man," Charles Townshend, whom, when in Boston, he had supplied with funds, and thus gained his objects. This Board soon became a severe and chronic local irritant. The foreign ways of its members, for most of them were strangers, supplied the wits of the town with material for satire, while its main acts were as iron to the soul of a high-spirited community. As it was created to collect taxes held to be unconstitutional, it could not have been popular; but it discharged an ungracious task in an ungracious way; and so singularly ill-judged was its action, that, while it excited odium here, it elicited censure in England.