The Proud and the Free

by Howard Fast

  There then spoke Lawrence Scottsboro, master sergeant in the 1st, a bent, gnarled, bitter little man of fifty years – old, woefully old that was, in our ranks – toothless, professional soldier all his life, from the French wars; dirty profane; such a man as I would have shrunk from once, but whom I knew now – and knew also the core of hope and fear within him.

  Naked, he said, naked into the world and naked out of it, and where will I lay my old bones when the time comes? A bounty of twenty dollars they promised me, nor paid it. Christ no! Nor paid my wages! I see them a nation! Gentry they are, but where is a tot of rum to warm my aching old bones? A shred of meat? A man wants a woman, a sip of wine, a bite of pudding! A man’s entitled to his wages – I tell you so. What in hell’s name else has he?

  Else, much else, said the Jew Levy, in his piping voice with its Spanish accent, a skinny little man with black eyes and a thin, ragged beard. He has in him a soul which can also be whipped, and that can be whipped to death even if the body lives. We here – we are like huntsmen roving the world for some flowers to smell, but the smell, it has become a stink in our nostrils. For you it is the cane and the whip; but for me and my kind, it is dirty Jew bastard from dawn to nightfall.

  Talk, talk, talk, said Emil Horst, chief carpenter in the train, but what does it lead to? It leads to the gallows, you benighted fools!

  Will they hang all of us?

  How many scaffolds have ye built, Emil? Will you carve us one?

  Now who is that? Who is that? roared Horst, a powerful and bitter man, short and broad and powerful.

  He leaped onto the table top and roared, Come up here with me! Come up here with me, you dirty outland rat, and stand up to me, and say it to my face!

  Ah, quiet, quiet – or they’ll be hearing us over in Morristown, soothed Bowzar.

  Do I have the look of gentry? Has sense no place here? Are you all mad with hunger and the want of a little rum? I’d be a rich man and gentry myself, if I had a dollar for every lad who died mutinous! And frightened I am not – we pledged the oath, I hold with it!

  And how many scaffolds have ye fashioned?

  I’m a soldier, and I was ordered to build, and by God in heaven, I’ll build a staircase to hell if they order me.

  Then Jack Maloney leaped onto the table alongside the carpenter, and they stood there in the center of that stirring, murmuring, packed body, like two wolves centered in the circle of the pack, the one great and gross, the other small and dapper, and Jack Maloney, grinning, asked:

  Will you call yourself a better soldier than me?

  Shaking his great head, the carpenter answered seriously, No, no, there be no better, Jack, but you have betrayed the King what fed you.

  Betrayed? For what pay? For what reward? For what gain? So that I will never lay eyes again on my bonny land and my native Yorkshire? You have never seen a pretty land, Emil Horst, until you look upon the green sward of England, but it’s bitter for a man whose eyes open and who says, Only a butcher kills for pleasure or pay. From that, I move one step. One step! How many times have I told the raw recruit that fear is a matter of one step; the second comes easier. When I had said to myself, I will not fight against the rebels, I had to ask myself: Then will ye not fight alongside them? Only if I stayed in the pay of King George would I betray, and now if I bend my head to this mockery the officer gentry have made of good men who fight for freedom, then I betray. Don’t betray me, Emil Horst! Get out now, and go to the Hardwick House where the gentry are swilling, and tell them that over here in a hut of the 11th, a lot of dirty curs are making a mutiny – or stay here and hold your peace, for they will never hang the Pennsylvania Line! Who will hang us? Who?

  He addressed this to the crowd, and a low, animal roar of approval answered him.

  Who? Who? Five years ago, when the Yankees ran like frightened hares in New York, their war would have been over if it were not for the foreign brigades – and it hasn’t been different since. You ask who is the Revolution? We are the Revolution – we are! And if we should cast out the gentry who have made this noble thing into a pigsty, who is traitor to who?

  No answer now, but a deep and thoughtful silence, now that the thing had been formulated, worded, made plain. Whatever thoughts are, whatever thoughts we had been keeping inside us, no one had ever spoken like this. My heart matched theirs; well I remember the stab of fear and pain and excitement and wild exultation that ran through me, as if a new sky were seen beyond black clouds, a sky that was more of a mystery than the secret of life itself, but glimpsed a moment; All the years I have lived since, all the pain and sorrow I have known, have not served to take away that one single glimpse I had that night, in that crowded, body-warmed, stinking hut.

  Now stay or go, Emil Horst, said Jack Maloney, in a voice that was gentle and awful. And after moments, the carpenter answered:

  I stay.

  Do we all stay? asked Jack Maloney.

  Then the Revolution is over, a voice spoke from the dark corner of the hut.

  Ye are mistaken there, for it has just begun.

  Then clear your heads and fuzz the cobwebs off your brains, said Billy Bowzar. The night is half over, and we have a matter of work to do.

  PART THREE

  Being an account of the events of New Year’s Day, observations on the mood of the men, and certain details concerning the preparations for the rising of the Pennsylvania Line.

  DAWN CAME, and still only the barest essentials of our work were complete, for we were trying to remake not only the Pennsylvania Line of the Revolutionary Army but, in a fashion we only vaguely understood, our lives and our destiny and the lives and the destinies of all folk within our land; and that, you will agree, was no small undertaking for a handful of wretched and hungry soldiermen. So when it comes to what we made and what we failed to make, you should measure the target we shot at as well.

  One of the first steps we took was to appoint a Committee, to act for the Congress of the Line, which had come into being spontaneously and without plan or direction, but simply out of grief and anger over the death of the drummer lad, of the soldier Kelly, and of our own tired hopes. A Congress of fifty or sixty persons could hardly accomplish what we needed to accomplish before dawn broke, and that was readily agreed to and understood; so we created a Committee of Sergeants, which would have a sergeant – or in some cases a corporal, since many of those were good men, held back by the hate they had earned from the gentry – to represent each of the ten infantry regiments, with an eleventh to speak for the artillery company. A twelfth was added to the Committee, and that twelfth was myself; the purpose was to ensure discipline and protection. First, I was designated provost, but the name itself was compounded out of such hate and fear and terror and misery, that it sat uneasily with me and with them as well.

  We could not do as the provosts did. If we were not all of us hanged or shot down by noon of the next day, we would begin to bring something new into being; it would be a new army with a new discipline and a new law and a new hope, and it would have no officers, but a discipline out of itself – which was not a matter we understood too well, but somehow felt in the marrow of our hopes. All that long night and morning, we were changing, and somehow we had the assurance that all the soldiers of the Line would change too. Yet for all of that, we knew that in the first stages at least, there would be an iron hand needed – not I but a group, a Committee, to enforce decisions; and if they chose me first, it was because I was Pennsylvania and Scotch too, free but born in bondage, native yet bound blood and body to the foreign brigades. And another thing, if I say it – I was a soldier, and I would know my work. If they chose me, it was because the pattern of toil and trouble was rubbed into me – and they knew I would not leave them in the lurch.

  So my committee was given the title Guard of the Citizen-soldiery, and I myself was called President of the Guard.

  It may seem strange to you that everything we did was done through committees and you may have heard folk wh
o malign us say that we took not a step or an act without making a committee first; but it should also be remembered that, before the gentry took over, the Revolution arose from committees of the plain people; and for five years, the lesson had been driven home that war is not made by heroes or by gallant officers in blue and white uniforms, but by the men of the Line, standing shoulder to shoulder. It is true that we created committees for care of the women, the children, the ammunition, the commissary – yes, and we even had a Committee of Moral Purpose for Citizen-soldiers, and a Committee of Propaganda, and a Committee for the General Good of the Common Weal; and it is also true that few enough of these committees ever functioned; but that is not to say that what we did was wrong. We did only what we knew how to do, and that was little enough.

  First the Committee of Sergeants was formed. Names were raised; they were discussed – some at length, some hardly at all. Billy Bowzar was elected from the 10th, Danny Connell from the 11th, Lawrence Scottsboro from the 1st. These were all unanimous, but there was a good deal of discussion over Leon Levy of the 5th. Many held that it was not right for a Jew to stand for a whole regiment, even as they held again that it was wrong for, the black man, Jim Holt, to represent the 2nd Regiment. It was Jack Maloney, who was elected from the 6th over protests that a British deserter could not be wholly trusted, who said:

  What kind of a mockery is it when we make foreigns among the foreigns themselves?

  They were elected, as was Bora Kabanka, the giant African-born Bantu of the 9th Regiment. There was Dwight Carpenter from the artillery and Abner Williams, the gentle Connecticut-born scholar from the 3rd Regiment. Sean O’Toole stood for the 4th and Jonathan Hook for the 7th. Some thought it proper to have someone stand symbolically for the 8th, but since they were hundreds of miles away, guarding Fort Pitt, and since we had heard nothing of them for so long, it was decided better to let them be apart from us, until they could come to a decision of their own.

  Before the Committee of Sergeants sat down to build an agenda and deal with it, a Commissary Committee was appointed by Billy Bowzar and myself, with Chester Rosenbank as its president, and they adjourned to his hut in the encampment of the 2nd, to begin to deal with the various and complex questions of supply.

  Most of the night had gone by now, and most of the lads of the Congress had staggered sleepily away to their hutments. Built red though the fire was, it could not drive off the cold that crept through the chinks in the logs, and our tallow wick had burned out and we had no fat to replenish it. Katy Waggoner was huddled on the floor, close to the fire, with Mathilda’s head in her lap, and as the mountain girl slept, Katy gently stroked her yellow hair and sang to her, so softly that it came as a kitten’s purr: Long is the night for sleeping childer, goblins dance in the redwat snow … In the bunks, men huddled in the straw snoring hoarsely, for our heads were heavy and thick with constant sickness; and on either side the long table the Committee of Sergeants sat and planned, their bearded faces weary and gray. Billy Bowzar had a writing pad that he tilted to catch the fire gleam, and Jack Maloney was advancing an argument for speed and precision in getting under way.

  Or you’ll find a traitor among you, mark me, said Katy Waggoner, breaking her sad song and then picking it up again.

  Angus MacGrath came in, beating the cold from his blue knuckles.

  How is it? we asked him.

  Caller, and much so. Cold and deeply so. But quiet.

  Have ye a good guard of lads?

  Twenty of the best. I took me the Gary brothers, who are tight on a scent as hellhounds, and I put me one at the Hardwick House and one at the Kemble House, and there they crouch in the snow for a whisper among the gentry. But they sleep the sleep of the just this New Year’s, even if no other time, with bellies full of wine and pudding. And if I may trouble ye, Jamie, I’d be the better for a crust of bread in me to stave off the cold.

  And wouldn’t we all, smiled Danny Connell. Just tighten yer belt and come another day – we’ll all of us be eating sufficient, or without any appetite to trouble us.

  Jamie here – and heed me, Angus, and get it into your thick head – is now President of the Guard … said Billy Bowzar seriously, his broad, flat face solemn and judicious … and it’s him we will thank for staying alive. We are a Board of Sergeants to deal with a rising up of the whole Line, so that from this moment on, we will fight a war for ourselves and for our own, and not for the God-damned officer gentry.…

  The big Scot’s jaw fell, and he rubbed his beard and looked from face to face among the twelve stolid members of the Committee.

  Well?

  Give me a chance to swallow.

  Are ye with us or agin us, Angus?

  What in hell kind of a question be that to ask a man? Do I have the look of the fause?

  True or fause, each man pledges here.

  Be damned to ye, and I pledge, said the Scot sourly. Ye would mistrust your own mother, and me that has never been corporal even, for I would not put my head where some will!

  And I’m a better man than you are, Danny Connell, he added. Or any other black Roman! Would you make something of that?

  If I were not this tired, answered Connell wearily.

  Button yer lip, MacGrath, said I, putting my arm through his, for you are my man now. We need a hundred more to the twenty fine lads ye have found, and then we will figure out the putting into action of all the fine plans they cook up here.

  And I turned him to the door —

  Come along, and if yer head rings a little, and if ye find your belly rubbing your backbone, it’s but a temporary nuisance; for it seems to me that we’re on the wildest jig a man ever danced.

  And it’s no pleasure dancing when the ground is four feet below ye, MacGrath said solemnly. Ye do not intend to go into that cursed cold at this hour of the morning, Jamie Stuart?

  Indeed I do. There is no more sleep for us, Angus, until this is finished.

  There is sleep for me, the Scot said stubbornly. I have done my round of this mad duty.

  I slid my musket from the rack and looked at him. Then I said:

  Well now, Angus MacGrath, this is a new hitch for me, but the skin of my neck is tight enough for me to play it out, and to tell you the truth, I don’t much give a damn at this point. I have lived in hell too long, and I will not see my sweet Molly again, and the whole fact of it is that I’m past caring for anything but the one chance in a thousand we are playing for. So what do you say?

  I leveled the musket at him; and from me he looked to the eleven grim-visaged men who sat at the sawbuck table, all of them watching us, but no one of them saying a word, and still Katy Waggoner in front of the fire, keening her plaintive lullaby.

  What will I do? I thought to myself then. What will I do? Will I shoot down this great brave man, this large ugly Scotsman who is like a brother to me – or will I back out? And if I do back out, what then? What sort of a wild venture have I embarked on, that every step of the way it comes to a crisis that must either be driven home, like the peg into its wooden loin, or left to triumph on the ashes of our insane hopes? Are any of us sane? Or are we all mad with hunger and cold and humiliation?

  Yet for all of these thoughts, I knew that I was sane – saner indeed than I have ever before been, in all of my life, and I also knew that I would slay Angus MacGrath or any other who stood in our path from here on. Something had happened to me, just as something had happened to the eleven at the table; a new fire had been lit, and the heat of its flame was still untested.

  Well, I will be damned, said MacGrath. Here is Jamie Stuart, with the pap still wet on his mouth, and he holds a gun on me. By all that is holy! Well, it will take the gentry to slay me, not such a skinny lad as you, Jamie Stuart. So let us go out into that cursed cold night and do yer crazy business.

  And I went out arm-in-arm with Angus MacGrath, and when I returned, as I said, there was dawning in the smoky air, and still hardly a beginning had been made by the Committee. I brought them an a
ccounting of the Line, which was three thousand and fifty-two enlisted men, as near as I could reckon it with no access to the officers’ records.

  Just for a moment before I entered the hut, I paused and looked across the silent, flat parade ground, with its lines of huts and its tracked-over, dirtying snow. It slumbered in uneasy peace; but what, I wondered, would it be like a few hours from now? Would that pale, cold sun, nudging the mist so timidly, look down upon a sanguine plain of fratricidal horror? And would this be the end of all the best hopes that the ragged band of us had ever entertained? Yet I was committed, so what did it matter? And as for nightmares – had I not lived long enough in the midst of one?

  The Committee listened as I made my report on the number of soldiers we had in the encampment. I spoke and blew on my hands alternately, edging to the fire to warm myself. Now Danny Connell rose and spread his ragged coat over the two women, who lay sleeping before the bed of coals, and old Scottsboro shook his head sadly, commenting:

  A sight of men is three thousand and more, Jamie, and has any of us the head to lead them?

  Cut that grumbling, said Jack Maloney.… How did you and Angus make out with the Guard, Jamie?

  I reported that we had enlisted at least sixty more lads who pledged to stand by us; but that it was no easy work, crawling into bed with a man in the dark and persuading him with whispers. The call for the Guard was the refrain of the Yankee camp jig, to be sounded three times on the trumpet; and whenever that came, if there had been no further instruction, the men pledged to us would lead their hutments out onto the parade, with arms and bayonets fixed. But so far we had nothing to speak of among the 4th and the 2nd, and were particularly strong in the 10th and 11th.