The Proud and the Free (10 page)

I ordered my men on the double with bayonets for attack, and we made a smart sight as we ran down the hut fronts, with Angus and me shouting:

Fall in! Fall in! All troops out on parade! Fall in! Fall in!

It was amazing how much discipline was shown there, for hardly had the bugle finished its call when at least a thousand men were forming in parade order, muskets in hand, knapsacks on back. A ripple of musket fire came from the direction of the redoubt; and then, square down the center of the parade, hanging for dear life onto a big white horse, came Sean O'Toole with four fieldpieces and their ammunition carts thundering after him. A wild roar of cheers greeted this, and O'Toole, for all his difficulty in maintaining his seat, managed to wave back and grin and bow his head. Most of this, and most of what followed, I saw in only the most fragmentary fashion – for I was moving on from hut to hut, shouting at stragglers, calling them out, and putting the parade into marching order as I went along. What became of the colonel after that, I do not know, but at least twenty minutes went by before any officers appeared on the scene, and then it was too late. By then, better than half of the Pennsylvania brigades were under arms and in marching order, with the Committee of Sergeants as the acknowledged authority.

It was our plan to march across the face of the hutments and over to the separate quarters of the 5th and the 9th Regiments in the old Connecticut huts. From where I was and in the darkness, it was impossible to see what had happened over there; possibly they too had gone out – possibly not. In any case, we felt that the moral force of our own column of men, in perfect discipline, with fifes playing and drums beating, would sweep them along with us.

In the telling, and more so in the telling after so long a retrospect, what happened up to now seems simple indeed, as if the men had moved with one mind and one heart; but things are not done in that way, even though the wise scholars of our Revolution would have it that the rising came about of itself, born and executed in that same evening, as if three thousand men all at one moment felt the need to rise up and cast out their officers. But in my mind's eyes there is a memory of that chaotic night, of hundreds of men running here and there and shouting all at once, of little clumps of men locked in struggle, of a five-year-old child standing in the snow and crying, of the disorganized groups trying to maneuver the cannon into position to cover our advance, of the frantic fool who touched a match to one of the cannon, and the roar of grape as it screamed across the parade, of O'Toole beating the man into insensibility, of the twitter of the fifes as the drummer boys and the fifers from all the regiments formed at our head, of the group of Germans who barricaded themselves into a hut of the 6th Regiment, screaming that they would die there before they joined the rising, and of Andrew Yost standing before the hut and addressing them in Dutch in a mighty voice that carried over all the noise and tumult.

We had reached the space between the huts of the 1st and 2nd Regiments when the baggage train appeared, led by an ox-drawn freight wagon, with the Gary brothers riding astride the lead oxen. The freight wagon was filled with the youngest children, and women and older children were perched all over the baggage carts. I recall that moment well, for it was then that the magazine was broken into. I heard the flurry of musketry and wondered whether we were already engaged in a fratricidal combat with troops who held back, but the shooting stopped as suddenly as it began, and I learned later that we had taken the magazine easily enough and that only one young lieutenant had been hurt with a bayonet wound in the thigh. But the children in the big wagon began to weep in fright, and Arnold Gary had to shout at the top of his lungs to make himself heard, as he called:

Well, here we are, Jamie, and where in hell do you want us to put these brats and sluts?

Olive Lutz climbed down from the wagon and ran up to him, crying, You big oaf, sitting there so one cannot tell which is ox and which is man – there's children behind you and keep your tongue decent. We're not in this to take from you what we take from the gentry!

She's right and this is no rig, said Angus. So shut your dirty mouth, Arnold Gary.

Where the baggage train was to go I had not been told by the Committee, but it seemed obvious that the best place for them would be somewhere in the middle of the column; and acting on that, Angus and I led them along between the huts and the parading men. The men cheered as the women rode by, and the older children watched everything open-mouthed, this being such excitement as they had not experienced before.

Now, for the first time, I ran into Billy Bowzar and Jack Maloney, and they seized me and pulled me outside the line of men.

How is it, Jamie? asked Bowzar.

There are still men in the huts, but each one needs a great argument and persuasion, and I would say, To hell with them.

I am with Jamie, agreed Maloney. We want to march.

While we spoke, other committeemen ran up and down the files, trimming them into order and dressing them up. Never before in the history of the Continentals had a permanent camp been broken thus swiftly and with such dispatch, and there was a new air about the men, a smartness in the way they addressed their lines and ordered their arms.

By now, the musicians had arranged themselves into one compact group, and the two dozen or so little drummer lads were stiff and proud as peacocks, not wholly understanding what had come about, but knowing well enough that they would no longer be sport for any officer who wanted to exercise his cane. Chester Rosenbank started the music, leading the men so that they would all play together, and the first song they struck up was that sweet Pennsylvania air,
Oh lovely hills of Fincastle, for thee my sad heart yearns.
Afterwards I asked Chester why he had chosen that air instead of marching music, and he answered that marching songs were only partly ours, but this song of the buckskin men something all ours and calculated to take the hot bitterness out of the men, yet leave them their resolution. The fifes played sweetly if somewhat raggedly, and the drummer boys tapped their sticks lightly.

The shouting had lessened and now with the music it halted entirely. At least fifteen hundred men were on parade now, and Sean O'Toole had finally arranged his cannon to flank the column head. Angus was laying out the baggage carts alongside the center of the line; and there, but outside the men and facing the expanse of the parade, I stood with Bowzar and Maloney. We were joined by the Jew Levy and Danny Connell and the Nayger Holt; and it was then that we saw a body of mounted men sweep up the road from Morristown and drum across the parade toward us.

So here are our officers, said Danny Connell.

We stood side by side, waiting, and the Line dressed like grenadiers. The music finished, and there was no other sound than the drumming of hoofs as the officers rode down upon us and drew up their horses a few yards away. I counted them; there were seventeen of them, many of them regimental officers, with Anthony Wayne, brigadier general of the Line, among them and voice for them. He, with Colonel Butler, stepped his horse forward and demanded:

What in hell's name is the meaning of all this?

As if he didn't know – and that was to be the way it was, at first, as if none of them knew. Billy Bowzar glanced sidewise at us, and his look said, Keep your mouths shut. Let me talk. If more than one talks, we'll be talking against one another. … So Billy crossed his arms and looked at the general a lot more coolly than I felt; but I stepped back and waved at Angus, and when he ran over I told him to dress up ten lads of the Citizen-soldier Guard directly behind and alongside of me, and for them to prime their muskets. While this went on, Butler reared his horse, a trick our gentry knew better than the leading of men, and roared out at the top of his lungs at the Line:

Undress! Stand at your ease!

I think of all the moments we faced, that was the hardest, for it was in us and in the marrow of our spine and our bones to obey a command hurled at us that way; so that while my mind said, Keep cool and stand still, Jamie Stuart, the muscles in my legs twitched of their own volition. I looked at the Line, and a good half of them had dropped their muskets to butt the ground and were falling out of parade position. But their sergeants and corporals were snapping, Dress it, dress it, ye dirty white scuts! And once again the Line pulled itself into tension.

Who gave these men the order to parade? Wayne demanded.

The Committee, answered Billy Bowzar quietly, yet loud enough for much of the Line to hear. He was square and small and rocklike, and to this day I recall the pride I felt as I watched him that night. There was a solemn, unruffled truth about him that few of us matched. He had been a ropewalker before the war, in the Philadelphia cordage house, and, as with the ropewalkers in Boston, he and the men who worked with him had formed a Committee of Public Safety and armed themselves, and when the question of independence hung in doubt, the whole shop laid down tools and paraded a show of strength before Carpenters' Hall.

What Committee? Wayne wanted to know, his tone high and disdainful. Many of the other officers, I could see, were afraid, but there was no fear about Wayne, only a wild anger he could hardly keep from dominating him. The man had courage and little else; and courage was not enough to make us love him; for along with the courage went a cold streak of contempt and disdain and unmitigated cruelty that had earned the undying hatred of all too many in our ranks. A general they loved or a general they didn't know might have won over many of them right there, for what we had done was yet unresolved, and the light of fear had begun to burn in us – and we had no certainty, even now, that an army could remain an army without officers; but we did not love Anthony Wayne, and we knew him all too well, and what we had done for him in the past, to give him such glory, we did because his gut was the gut of a reaver. His gut won no respect for him here.

The Committee of Sergeants, answered Billy Bowzar, still in the same tone.

The Committee of Sergeants, said Wayne. The Committee of Sergeants!

And he raised his voice, hurling it into the cold and rising night wind:

Disband, I tell you!

But it was too late, and we stood on our ranks, and we stood silent except for the wail of a little child that lifted over and above the men and mingled with the winter winds.

Butler said: I know you, Billy Bowzar, and I know you, Jack Maloney, and I know that dirty Jew Levy and that black Nayger Holt, and you too, Jamie Stuart, and well indeed do I know that slaister Connell who was swept up with the dung from the streets of Dublin – and I have a long memory!

We are not hiding our faces, answered Billy Bowzar.

Then well you should, cried Wayne, for this is the dirtiest picture of a mutiny I have ever seen, and I'll go down to my grave if them that fixed it don't swing for it!

We are not mutineers, spoke Bowzar firmly, but loyal and good soldiers, as you should know as well as the next man, General Wayne, and it is not for the sake of any mutiny that we stand here in the winter cold.

And what are you loyal to?

To the name of freedom and to the deep hopes of Pennsylvania folk.

Enough of this sanctimonious gibberish! cried Butler. Either disband or prepare to take the consequences!

We are well prepared, for this is not anything that we did lightly, and we are no strangers to your consequences –

What kind of damn fools are you? cried Wayne. How long will this rabble last when we bring the brigades up against them?

What brigades? said Billy Bowzar softly.

I tell you, cried Wayne, loud enough for the whole Line to hear him, that if you go back to your hutments now and lay away your arms, and go to sleep as honest men should, then no more will be made of this, except the punishment of the rascals who lead you! I tell you this now!

There was a mighty urge in me to turn my head and see how the men of the Line took this, but Bowzar and Maloney and Levy and Holt and Connell stood as still as though they had become a part of the frozen ground they occupied, and, for all the cold that seeped now from my skin into the marrow of my bones, I would not do otherwise. But when I heard not even the crunch of a lifted boot, I was filled with a heady pride, as if I had suddenly become drunk, and my earlier dreams of a great movement and rising returned. Now Butler sided his horse to Wayne, and moments went by while they whispered to each other. Then Wayne dismounted and walked over to us, so that he, in his elegant, booted, spurred, cloaked height, his thin, handsome, clean-shaven face thrust forward, stood almost up against the square and ragged rock of Billy Bowzar, yet a whole head higher – like some chief facing a bearded, work-hardened crofter. It was later that they came to call him “Mad Anthony,” but even now there was a touch of madness about him, and fame and glory had touched him, so that he would never forget what it was to wed either. He was imperious, but without the humility that could have made him a great leader whom men would love as well as fear; and when years later I watched Junius Brutus Booth play out Shakespeare's tale of
Richard III,
I thought immediately of this young, wild, arrogant general officer who crunched toward us through the snow so fearlessly; but again it was only years later that I could place myself inside him and understand that much of the courage came from hopeless desperation; and that, for all of his proud and violent talks, there that night his world crumbled about him, and all the vainglory of his belted boots, his fine doeskin trousers, his powder-blue coat and his deep blue cloak surrounded a crushed man. No better picture of the relationship of this officer gentry to us can be shown than through their surprise at our rising; not only did they not anticipate it, but, now it was here, their only means of treating it was as another cause for caning or whipping. But you do not cane or whip a line of the best and hardest troops in the New World, standing motionless to arms in the bitter cold of night.