Boy's Town

by William Dean Howells

  XI.

  MUSTERS AND ELECTIONS.

  THE Butler Guards were the finest military company in the world. I donot believe there was a fellow in the Boy's Town who ever even tried toimagine a more splendid body of troops: when they talked of them, asthey did a great deal, it was simply to revel in the recognition oftheir perfection. I forget just what their uniform was, but there werewhite pantaloons in it, and a tuft of white-and-red cockerel plumes thatalmost covered the front of the hat, and swayed when the soldier walked,and blew in the wind. I think the coat was gray, and the skirts werebuttoned back with buff, but I will not be sure of this; and somehow Icannot say how the officers differed from the privates in dress; it wasimpossible for them to be more magnificent. They walked backwards infront of the platoons, with their swords drawn, and held in theirwhite-gloved hands at hilt and point, and kept holloing,"Shoulder-r-r--arms! Carry--arms! Present--arms!" and then faced round,and walked a few steps forward, till they could think of something elseto make the soldiers do.

  THE "BUTLER GUARDS."]

  Every boy intended to belong to the Butler Guards when he grew up; andhe would have given anything to be the drummer or the marker. These wereboth boys, and they were just as much dressed up as the Guardsthemselves, only they had caps instead of hats with plumes. It wasstrange that the other fellows somehow did not know who these boys were;but they never knew, or at least my boy never knew. They thought more ofthe marker than of the drummer; for the marker carried a little flag,and when the officers holloed out, "By the left flank--left! Wheel!" heset his flag against his shoulder, and stood marking time with his feettill the soldiers all got by him, and then he ran up to the front rank,with the flag fluttering behind him. The fellows used to wonder how hegot to be marker, and to plan how they could get to be markers in othercompanies, if not in the Butler Guards. There were other companies thatused to come to town on the Fourth of July and Muster Day, from smallerplaces round about; and some of them had richer uniforms: one companyhad blue coats with gold epaulets, and gold braid going down in loops onthe sides of their legs; all the soldiers, of course, had braid straightdown the outer seams of their pantaloons. One Muster Day, a captain ofone of the country companies came home with my boy's father to dinner;he was in full uniform, and he put his plumed helmet down on the entrytable just like any other hat.

  There was a company of Germans, or Dutchmen, as the boys always calledthem; and the boys believed that they each had hay in his right shoe,and straw in his left, because a Dutchman was too dumb, as the boys saidfor stupid, to know his feet apart any other way; and that the Dutchofficers had to call out to the men when they were marching, "Up mit dehay-foot, down mit de straw-foot--_links_, _links_, _links_!" (Left,left, left!) But the boys honored even these imperfect intelligences somuch in their quality of soldiers that they would any of them havebeen proud to be marker in the Dutch company; and they followed theDutchmen round in their march as fondly as any other body of troops. Ofcourse, school let out when there was a regular muster, and the boysgave the whole day to it; but I do not know just when the Muster Daycame. They fired the cannon a good deal on the river-bank, and they musthave camped somewhere near the town, though no recollection of tentsremained in my boy's mind. He believed with the rest of the boys thatthe right way to fire the cannon was to get it so hot you need not touchit off, but just keep your thumb on the touch-hole, and take it awaywhen you wanted the cannon to go off. Once he saw the soldiers ram thepiece full of dog-fennel on top of the usual charge, and then heexpected the cannon to burst. But it only roared away as usual.

  The boys had their own ideas of what that cannon could do if aptly firedinto a force of British, or Bridish, as they called them. They wishedthere could be a war with England, just to see; and their nationalfeeling was kept hot by the presence of veterans of the War of 1812 atall the celebrations. One of the boys had a grandfather who had been inthe Revolutionary War, and when he died the Butler Guards fired a saluteover his grave. It was secret sorrow and sometimes open shame to my boythat his grandfather should be an Englishman, and that even his fathershould have been a year old when he came to this country; but on hismother's side he could boast a grandfather and a great-grandfather whohad taken part, however briefly or obscurely, in both the wars againstGreat Britain. He hated just as much as any of the boys, or perhapsmore, to be the Bridish when they were playing war, and he longed astruly as any of them to march against the hereditary, orhalf-hereditary, enemy.

  Playing war was one of the regular plays, and the sides were alwaysAmericans and Bridish, and the Bridish always got whipped. But this wasa different thing, and a far less serious thing, than having a company.The boys began to have companies after every muster, of course; butsometimes they began to have them for no external reason. Very likelythey would start having a company from just finding a rooster'stail-feather, and begin making plumes at once. It was easy to make aplume: you picked up a lot of feathers that the hens and geese haddropped; and you whittled a pine stick, and bound the feathers inspirals around it with white thread. That was a first-rate plume, butthe uniform offered the same difficulties as the circus dress, and youcould not do anything towards it by rolling up your pantaloons. It waspretty easy to make swords out of laths, but guns again were hard torealize. Some fellows had little toy guns left over from Christmas, butthey were considered rather babyish, and any kind of stick was better;the right kind of a gun for a boy's company was a wooden gun, such assome of the big boys had, with the barrel painted different from thestock. The little fellows never had any such guns, and if the questionof uniform could have been got over, this question of arms would stillhave remained. In these troubles the fellows' mothers had to sufferalmost as much as the fellows themselves, the fellows teased them somuch for bits of finery that they thought they could turn to account ineking out a uniform. Once it came to quite a lot of fellows gettingtheir mothers to ask their fathers if they would buy them some littlesoldier-hats that one of the hatters had laid in, perhaps after amuster, when he knew the boys would begin recruiting. My boy was by whenhis mother asked his father, and stood with his heart in his mouth,while the question was argued; it was decided against him, both becausehis father hated the tomfoolery of the thing, and because he would nothave the child honor any semblance of soldiering, even such a feebleimage of it as a boys' company could present. But, after all, a paperchapeau, with a panache of slitted paper, was no bad soldier-hat; itwent far to constitute a whole uniform; and it was this that the boysdevolved upon at last. It was the only company they ever really gottogether, for everybody wanted to be captain and lieutenant, just asthey wanted to be clown and ring-master in a circus. I cannot understandhow my boy came to hold either office; perhaps the fellows found thatthe only way to keep the company together was to take turn-about; but,at any rate, he was marshalling his forces near his grandfather's gateone evening when his grandfather came home to tea. The old Methodistclass-leader, who had been born and brought up a Quaker, stared at thepoor little apparition in horror. Then he caught the paper chapeau fromthe boy's head, and, saying "Dear me! Dear me!" trampled it under foot.It was an awful moment, and in his hot and bitter heart the boy, who wasput to shame before all his fellows, did not know whether to order themto attack his grandfather in a body, or to engage him in single combatwith his own lath-sword. In the end he did neither; his grandfatherwalked on into tea, and the boy was left with a wound that was sore tillhe grew old enough to know how true and brave a man his grandfather wasin a cause where so many warlike hearts wanted courage.

  It was already the time of the Mexican war, when that part of the Westat least was crazed with a dream of the conquest which was to carryslavery wherever the flag of freedom went. The volunteers were musteredin at the Boy's Town; and the boys, who understood that they were realsoldiers, and were going to a war where they might get killed, suffereda disappointment from the plain blue of their uniform and the simplicityof their caps, which had not the sign of a feather in them. It was acons
olation to know that they were going to fight the Mexicans; not somuch consolation as if it had been the Bridish, though still something.The boys were proud of them, and they did not realize that most of thesepoor fellows were just country-jakes. Somehow they effaced even theButler Guards in their fancy, though the Guards paraded with them, inall their splendor, as escort.

  But this civic satisfaction was alloyed for my boy by the consciousnessthat both his father and his grandfather abhorred the war that thevolunteers were going to. His grandfather, as an Abolitionist, and hisfather, as a Henry Clay Whig, had both been opposed to the annexation ofTexas (which the boy heard talked of without knowing in the least whatannexation meant), and they were both of the mind that the war growingout of it was wanton and wicked. His father wrote against it in everynumber of his paper, and made himself hated among its friends, who werethe large majority in the Boy's Town. My boy could not help feeling thathis father was little better than a Mexican, and whilst his filial lovewas hurt by things that he heard to his disadvantage, he was not surethat he was not rightly hated. It gave him a trouble of mind that wasnot wholly appeased by some pieces of poetry that he used to hear hisfather reading and quoting at that time, with huge enjoyment. The pieceswere called "The Biglow Papers," and his father read them out of aBoston newspaper, and thought them the wisest and wittiest things thatever were. The boy always remembered how he recited the lines--

  "Ez fur war, I call it murder-- There ye hev it plain and flat; 'N I don't want to go no furder Then my Testament fur that. God hez said so plump and fairly: It's as long as it is broad; And ye'll hev to git up airly, Ef ye want to take in God."

  He thought this fine, too, but still, it seemed to him, in the narrowlittle world where a child dwells, that his father and his grandfatherwere about the only people there were who did not wish the Mexicanswhipped, and he felt secretly guilty for them before the other boys.

  It was all the harder to bear because, up to this time, there had beenno shadow of difference about politics between him and the boys he wentwith. They were Whig boys, and nearly all the fellows in the Boy's Townseemed to be Whigs. There must have been some Locofoco boys, of course,for my boy and his friends used to advance, on their side, the positionthat

  "Democrats Eat dead rats!"

  The counter-argument that

  "Whigs Eat dead pigs!"

  had no force in a pork-raising country like that; but it was urged, andthere must have been Democratic boys to urge it. Still, they must havebeen few in number, or else my boy did not know them. At any rate, theyhad no club, and the Whig boys always had a club. They had a Henry ClayClub in 1844, and they had Buckeye Clubs whenever there was an electionfor governor, and they had clubs at every exciting town or county ordistrict election. The business of a Whig club among the boys was toraise ash flag-poles, in honor of Henry Clay's home at Ashland, and tolearn the Whig songs and go about singing them. You had to have a wagon,too, and some of the club pulled while the others rode; it could be sucha wagon as you went walnutting with; and you had to wear strands ofbuckeyes round your neck. Then you were a real Whig boy, and you had aright to throw fire-balls and roll tar-barrels for the bonfires onelection nights.

  I do not know why there should have been so many empty tar-barrels inthe Boy's Town, or what they used so much tar for; but there werebarrels enough to celebrate all the Whig victories that the boys everheard of, and more, too; the boys did not always wait for the victories,but celebrated every election with bonfires, in the faith that it wouldturn out right.

  Maybe the boys nowadays do not throw fire-balls, or know about them.They were made of cotton rags wound tight and sewed, and then soaked inturpentine. When a ball was lighted a boy caught it quickly up, andthrew it, and it made a splendid streaming blaze through the air, and athrilling whir as it flew. A boy had to be very nimble not to getburned, and a great many boys dropped the ball for every boy that threwit. I am not ready to say why these fire-balls did not set the Boy'sTown on fire, and burn it down, but I know they never did. There was nolaw against them, and the boys were never disturbed in throwing them,any more than they were in building bonfires; and this shows, as much asanything, what a glorious town that was for boys. The way they used tobuild their bonfires was to set one tar-barrel on top of another, ashigh as the biggest boy could reach, and then drop a match into them; ina moment a dusky, smoky flame would burst from the top, and fly therelike a crimson flag, while all the boys leaped and danced round it, andhurrahed for the Whig candidates. Sometimes they would tumble theblazing barrels over, and roll them up and down the street.

  The reason why they wore buckeyes was that the buckeye was the emblem ofOhio, and Ohio, they knew, was a Whig state. I doubt if they knew thatthe local elections always went heavily against the Whigs; but perhapsthey would not have cared. What they felt was a high public spirit,which had to express itself in some way. One night, out of pure zeal forthe common good, they wished to mob the negro quarter of the town,because the "Dumb Negro" (a deaf-mute of color who was a very prominentpersonage in their eyes) was said to have hit a white boy. I believe themob never came to anything. I only know that my boy ran a long way withthe other fellows, and, when he gave out, had to come home alone throughthe dark, and was so afraid of ghosts that he would have been glad ofthe company of the lowest-down black boy in town.

  There were always fights on election-day between well-known Whig andDemocratic champions, which the boys somehow felt were as entirely fortheir entertainment as the circuses. My boy never had the heart to lookon, but he shared the excitement of the affair, and rejoiced in thetriumph of Whig principles in these contests as cordially as thehardiest witness. The fighting must have come from the drinking, whichbegan as soon as the polls were opened, and went on all day and nightwith a devotion to principle which is now rarely seen. In fact, thepolitics of the Boy's Town seem to have been transacted with an eyesingle to the diversion of the boys; or if not that quite, they weremarked by traits of a primitive civilization among the men. Thetraditions of a rude hospitality in the pioneer times still lingered,and once there was a Whig barbecue, which had all the profusion of acivic feast in mediaeval Italy. Every Whig family contributed loaves ofbread and boiled hams; the Whig farmers brought in barrels of cider andwagon-loads of apples; there were heaps of pies and cakes; sheep wereroasted whole, and young roast pigs, with oranges in their mouths, stoodin the act of chasing one another over the long tables which were spreadin one of the largest pork-houses, where every comer was freely welcome.I suppose boys, though, were not allowed at the dinner; all that my boysaw of the barbecue were the heaps of loaves and hams left over, thatpiled the floor in one of the rooms to the ceiling.

  He remained an ardent Whig till his eleventh year, when his father leftthe party because the Whigs had nominated, as their candidate forpresident, General Taylor, who had won his distinction in the Mexicanwar, and was believed to be a friend of slavery, though afterwards heturned out otherwise. My boy then joined a Free-Soil club, and sangsongs in support of Van Buren and Adams. His faith in the purity of theWhigs had been much shaken by their behavior in trying to make capitalout of a war they condemned; and he had been bitterly disappointed bytheir preferring Taylor to Tom Corwin, the favorite of the anti-slaveryWhigs. The "Biglow Papers" and their humor might not have moved him fromhis life-long allegiance, but the eloquence of Corwin's famous speechagainst the Mexican war had grounded him in principles which he couldnot afterwards forsake. He had spoken passages of that speech at school;he had warned our invading hosts of the vengeance that has waited uponthe lust of conquest in all times, and has driven the conquerors backwith trailing battle-flags. "So shall it be with yours!" he haddeclaimed. "You may carry them to the loftiest peaks of the Cordilleras;they may float in insolent triumph in the halls of Montezuma; but theweakest hand in Mexico, uplifted in prayer, can call down a poweragainst you before which
the iron hearts of your warriors shall beturned into ashes!" It must have been a terrible wrench for him to partfrom the Whig boys in politics, and the wrench must have been a suddenone at last; he was ashamed of his father for opposing the war, andthen, all at once, he was proud of him for it, and was roaring out songsagainst Taylor as the hero of that war, and praising Little Van, whom hehad hitherto despised as the "Fox of Kinderhook."

  The fox was the emblem (_totem_) of the Democrats in the campaigns of1840 and 1844; and in their processions they always had a fox chained tothe hickory flag-poles which they carried round on their wagons,together with a cock, reconciled probably in a common terror. The Whigsalways had the best processions; and one of the most signal days of myboy's life was the day he spent in following round a Henry Clayprocession, where the different trades and industries were representedin the wagons. There were coopers, hatters, shoemakers, blacksmiths,bakers, tinners, and others, all hard at work; and from time to timethey threw out to the crowd something they had made. My boy caught a tincup, and if it had been of solid silver he could not have felt it agreater prize. He ran home to show it and leave it in safe-keeping, andthen hurried back, so as to walk with the other boys abreast of a greatplatform on wheels, where an old woman sat spinning inside of alog-cabin, and a pioneer in a hunting-shirt stood at the door, with hislong rifle in his hand. In the window sat a raccoon, which was the Whigemblem, and which, on all their banners, was painted with the legend,"That same old Coon!" to show that they had not changed at all since thegreat days when they elected the pioneer, General Harrison, president ofthe United States. Another proof of the fact was the barrel ofhard-cider which lay under the cabin window.