The Proud and the Free (7 page)

So I dreamed of this and that, of one thing and another, of my meeting Molly Bracken, of seeing her, of learning from her, of defending her once from a mad dog, holding the dog at arm's length, both my hands flexed around its neck until it strangled like that, and conscious for the first time of the strength in my long, lean body, and proud – proud as when I said to her:

There was a spark inside me once, which I always knew. But now it will burn, and you will not be ashamed of me.…

But the dream placed all together, and in the dream, after I kissed Molly Bracken, I took her hand in mine and we walked down the street through York Village and out to the meadows beyond. And as we passed along the street, everyone whispered:

See there, it is that worthless orphan lad, Jamie Stuart, but we must honor him now, for there is by his side the loveliest lady that ever lived.

We walked into a meadow all carpeted with daisies, and suddenly we were ringed around with fragrant pine woods, alone under the sun and the breeze. Oh, my true love, sweet Jamie Stuart, she said to me, and I answered, For all eternity, I will be true to fair Molly Bracken. We stroked each other's face and hair, and our happiness was so great that it seemed we must surely die of it, for it was too much to bear.

And then Jack Maloney was waking me, with:

Time's up, Jamie lad. Would you sleep away your whole last day of grace?

Let me go back to my dream, I begged him.

There is no going back to dreams, Jamie, he said, with strange tenderness. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that there is no going back ever, whether in dreams or out of them.

I resisted him and closed my eyes and tried to slip back into the pool of sleep. Weary enough I was, but he kept shaking me, and as he shook me the dream dissolved and I knew I would never regain it.

You have lost me the fairest maid in all of Pennsylvania, I said.

How, Jamie?

You have never loved, so how would you understand?

And do you think there is a man who never loved, Jamie, even a soldier of King George III who was put into the camps with the pap still on his lips? Let that be …

I crawled out of the straw and dropped to the ground. The hut was dark, as it always was, with just one narrow bar of light through a crack in the door.

Close the damned door! I cried.

You're mighty mettlesome, Jamie, nodded Maloney, closing the door. Then he said:

There are some of us who have had no sleep, Jamie, so sit on your temper. You've got a day's work ahead. The Committee wants a check on every hut in the encampment, and at least one member of the Citizen-soldier Guard should be chosen from each hut, if that is possible. Then, tonight, when we issue the order to stand to arms and parade, the guards can lead. We have also heard gossip that a ration of rum has been allotted and will be issued out in honor of the New Year – which is something, for all the officers' crying that they had no rum or food either. Also, it is a piece of madness, for that rum on empty stomachs will drive the men crazy. All the more reason for the guards to be good men and to keep their heads. Also, keep your foot down on powder and shot. The hotheads will want to load muskets, and to the Committee's way of thinking, there's more danger in that than in anything else; for if we pull this off, bayonets will be ample to deal with a hundred and fifty officers, and if we fail, there will be nothing gained by turning it into a blood bath. We have had reports from the Hardwick House and the Kemble House and from three houses in the village where gentry are quartered. They stuffed themselves last night and most of them are still sleeping, and unless I mistake their temper, they'll give the encampment a wide berth all this day. But if any officer seems to get wind of what we're up to, Jamie, you are empowered to place him under arrest, binding and gagging him. The old hospital hutment will be turned into a guardhouse. Both barbers have joined us and taken the pledge to be true to the Line and the enlisted men.

I was out of my sleep and my dreams now, and I noticed that Billy Bowzar and the Jew Levy still sat at the table, scribbling away on paper in the light of a tallow wick they had obtained from somewhere. While Maloney gave me my instructions, two men entered the hut, spoke softly to Bowzar, received slips of paper, and left. And as the door opened, I noticed two other soldiers on guard outside.

The men of my command, who shared the hut with me, were all of them awake, which was strange since they had missed most of the night's sleep. Curled in their straw, which was the only place they could find warmth when they did not have parade or drill – neither of which would be given us on New Year's Day – they were oddly grave and quiet. From somewhere by some means, an organization was shaping itself, and the wild venture of the night before, which should have been revealed for all its lunacy on this cold, clear morning, managed to maintain itself.

Well then, I said to myself, swinging my feet down to the floor, here you are, Jamie Stuart, twenty-two years old, with a little reading and a little writing and a little cobbling, making a great uprising. And I bethought me of Jimmy Coleman of my own regiment, who was hanged here on this same parade in Morristown only May past. Nothing had Jimmy done or said that could match the distance we had traveled since the evening before; he had only talked openly and publicly of the gap between the punishment and food issued out by the officer gentry. He had written down in charcoal across a posted order of the day,
When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?
And it was also charged that he fomented plots and had made insulting remarks to Colonel Chickering, of the Connecticut Line. For this, he was put on the gallows and hanged by the neck until he was dead. But I remember well his behavior there, how he was calm and easy as any of the gentry might be, fingering the rope as he said: A little bit of freedom is not enough, my friends, so mind you treat us better or you will find the tiny spark you struck a mighty flame – and it may be that flame will even singe an officer or two. So the officers cursed him and he swung out of this life, and the officers said: Good riddance to bad rubbish. When an apple is rotten, you pluck it from the barrel.

Well, here I was, Jamie Stuart, and that was that, and there was no use thinking about it any more, and Jack Maloney was saying:

Hop to it, Jamie. There is much to be doing, and after we have made an army out of ourselves and driven George's men into the salty sea, we'll clean house. So there'll be no rest for a long time to come, and you might just as well put that in your pipe and smoke it.

I had slept with my shoes, and there were needles in my feet as I moved across the floor to the musket rack.

As I passed the table, Levy caught my sleeve and said, A moment, Jamie. I am writing you our credentials, and you had best wait for them.

Credentials? What in hell's name do I want with them? Is there anyone in this Line who don't know me?

Know you or not, said Billy Bowzar quietly, every Committee man will have credentials from here on. And no order need be obeyed unless a man can show his credentials and his warrant from the Committee.

Yet if it peters out, I reflected, a man carries his death warrant in his pocket.

That's right, Jamie, said Billy Bowzar, regarding me evenly from his bloodshot, fatigue-ringed eyes. We are all in this together, you know.

But Levy smiled slightly as he handed me my credentials, a slip of paper I still have here beside me as I write, so many years later, the paper less mortal than the men who made and wrote upon it. On it, it says, in the fine, cultured script of the Jew Levy:

To all men who may examine this: Let it be known that this warrant empowers Jamie Stuart, Sergeant in the 11th Regiment of the Pennsylvania Line, to carry out all and sundry orders, desires, needs and complaints of the Committee of Sergeants, which is now and until the enlisted men of the Line shall rule otherwise, the supreme authority and the commanding power in the army of Pennsylvania – which power was invested in them by a representative Congress of the Regiments of the Line, notably as follows: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th and Artillery.

Enscribed this Day of the 1st of January in the Year 1781, by
L
EON
L
EVY
and signed by …
W
ILLIAM
Z. B
OWZAR
sec
.

This I took and wrapped in oilskin with a profile I had sketched of Molly Bracken, a testament of bravery given to me after the New York fighting and signed by Reed, three letters from my Molly, my Bill of Apprenticeship, and my enlistment and bounty papers. These constituted all that Jamie Stuart had gathered in twenty-two years of living, and for what they were worth, I carried them wherever I went.

Then I left the hut to undertake my duties as President of the Citizen-soldier Guard.

That day we began, after midnight struck, as a rude and unruly Congress; by dawn we had created and put into operation our Committee of Sergeants and certain other committees; and by nightfall of the first of January half the Pennsylvania Line was organized and prepared to move; and except for one incident, which I shall relate to you, not one breath of this came to the ears of the officer gentry. On that day when we worked to prepare the uprising, the feat we accomplished seemed not one half so remarkable as it does now, all these years later; but on reflection it seems passing strange that we, the enlisted men and noncommissioned officers of the foreign brigades, despised and reckoned as so much dirt, so many filthy animals, could have carried out in so short a time an organizational scheme never matched in all the history of the Revolution. It is a matter of record that no permanent encampment of the Continental Army was ever broken with so little preparation as we had for our uprising; and it was part of our plan that once we seized power to ourselves, we would break camp immediately and march through the night to another place. This was through the urging of Jack Maloney, who insisted that the only way in which we could consolidate ourselves and impose our new discipline was in the motion of a march.

Marching men, he said, are soldiers. Encamped, they are something else.

But that morning when I came out of my hutment, only the most tenuous threads bound us together. A credential in my pocket which was as good for the hangman as for anyone else; a few loyal and true comrades scattered through the encampment; and a musket in my hands which held one shot to smooth the path to glory. But I was young, and my earlier despair was transmuting itself into a mounting excitement, and my dreams of fair Molly Bracken gave way to dreams of a new army, an army which would sweep across the land, calling thousands to its banners, an army which would brush the British into the sea as a new broom flicks the cinders, an army which would call upon all of those who worked by the sweat of their brow and the strength of their hand to create a new kind of republic.… Yet there my dreams halted, for I knew of no way in which men could live except with the gentry above and such people as myself below. However, I shrugged that off, deciding that I was better for the doing, leaving the planning and the thinking to such men as Billy Bowzar, the Jew Levy, Jack Maloney, and Abner Williams, all of them men in their thirties, wise in all the ways of the world and full of the bitter wine of experience.

As I began to cross the angle of the parade, to a hut of the 1st where there were four good lads to start work with, a little group of officers, mounted and cloaked, came into sight on the road from Morristown. Strangely enough, I was the only one on the parade at the moment, except for a handful of men at the other extreme, a half mile away. There was no reason for me to be afraid, even though I carried a loaded musket – for I could bluff through that with a tale of guard duty – but the very sight of officers threw me off balance. They were the first I had seen since the day before; then they were my officers, the men who led me; now they were something else. Now they were ranged against me and I was ranged against them, and I carried a warrant in my pocket which would give any one of them justification to shoot me down like a dog.

I forced myself to walk along without changing my pace, yet I couldn't help glancing at them, and I noticed they slowed from a canter to a walk and that they were engaged in conversation – in the course of which one of them pointed to me. They must have come over from Kemble; for Wayne, the brigadier general, was among them, and it was he who nodded the agreement that detached one of them to my direction. The rest picked up their canter and went down the Hill Road toward Mendham, and in a few minutes they were hidden by the huts and the rise of ground toward the parade. The one who rode toward me, I recognized as Lieutenant Calvin Chester of the Artillery, the arrogant, pimply-faced son of a Philadelphia merchant.

He drew his horse up within arm's length of me, prancing it as was a habit with them, so close that I could smell the toilet water from his lace and see the brown drip of snuff from his nose. He wore a splendid greatcoat of brown, with yellow facings; his riding boots had yellow cuffs and he wore gauntlets of yellow pigskin.

Stand to attention! he shouted at me. What's your name and rank?

I presented arms, clicked my heels where there would have been heels had my torn boots owned any, and staring straight ahead of me, answered, Jamie Stuart, sergeant in the 11th.

From the corner of my eye, I watched the bobbing heads of Wayne and the others disappear beyond the hutments.

Sir.

Sir, I said.

And what are you doing on the parade with a musket?

Relieving guard, sir.

Now that's a damned lie, said the lieutenant, for I never knew a sergeant to stand guard where there was a private to do his work for him, and much less one of you damned, dirty scuts from the 11th. Let me see your pan.

I leveled the musket.

Primed, he nodded, and – with his affected, imitation-English lisp – 'Od's blood, but we'd be better off if every one of the damned 11th was hanged from the hill. You're under arrest, Mister. Make an about-face, and we'll stroll over to the provost.