by Howard Fast
Enscribed this Day of the 1st of January in the Year 1781, by LEON LEVY and signed by … WILLIAM Z. BOWZAR 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.
Oh, no, I smiled – hitching the musket around and dropping it on the middle button of his fine greatcoat – You are under arrest, and don’t reach for a pistol, or I’ll blow your fat ass out from under you. Just climb down from your horse and hook an arm through the reins, and lead it like you and me was out for strolling, and never a thought of who is gentry and who is dirt.
You’ll hang for this, he began wildly, but I cut him short, telling him, I have no desire to converse with you or any of yer damned brethren. Just walk ahead until we come to the last of the 1st’s hutments, and then knock at the door.
There was something in my voice that told him I meant what I said, and he did as I ordered him to. He led me and his horse to the hut and knocked at the door, which Sammy Gruen opened, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and staring in wonder.
We have a breakfast guest, I smiled, so make him welcome.
That was all Sammy needed, and the lieutenant entered the hut quicker than he warranted, and dropping the reins of the horse, I followed. There was an oil-paper window in the hut, and by the light I saw the dull, hopeless expression on the lieutenant’s face as he watched the men tumble from their straw and gather round him. Dennis Sullivan, a good lad, but wild and marked for some sort of foolish fate, fingered the greatcoat, stroked the lace, and then pinched the pimply cheeks.
Do you plan to kill me? asked Chester hoarsely. For if you do, you will swing for it as sure as there’s a God in the heavens above.
Now will we? grinned Dennis.
Pack that! I snapped. He was going to arrest me so I arrested him instead, and you can take off those nice clothes of his and gag him and tie him up, but no manhandling and no taking out grudges here and no talk. Tie him up and put some sacking over him, and we’ll bear him to the hospital, where they’re making ready for the sick.
This they did. We trussed him, wrapped him in sacking, and bore him to the hospital like a sack of potatoes, only of less use in any way. Sullivan and Gruen and a Pole named Krakower came with me, after I had warned those left in the hut to stay in the straw and keep their mouths shut. Two others, Kent and O’Malley, unsaddled the horse and then led it to the Artillery stable, with a story of a stray mount.
The old hospital hutment was supply dump an
d dispensary for the 4th, 10th and 11th Regiments. No doctors were assigned to it, since at that time we had only three doctors for the whole Line, and two of them were fine gentlemen with Philadelphia practices, which at the moment they were attending. The third doctor, a Jew from Charlestown in South Carolina, was brigade officer at the General Hospital, which was at the further end of the encampment. Some thought we might trust him, seeing that he was a Jew, but others said, Jew or not, he was an officer and gentry and would therefore best be left alone. Here at the dispensary were two barbers from Edinburgh, Andrew MacPherson and William Hunt, and they tended the odds and ends of hurts, distempers and minor sicknesses that took the three regiments. For all that theirs was a rough-and-ready practice, picked up as porters at the medical school and as staunchers on the battlefield, I would rather have had them than the cruel and offhand gentry; if you died, you died at least with a warm hand on your shoulder – and when one of our lads stopped a large-bore ball from a British gun, it was short odds that he died whether you had a physician or a barber to bleed him.
MacPherson opened the door for us. He was a tiny, wizened imp of a man, clean-shaven, a sharp, filthy tongue in an ugly little head, a randy goat of a little man and never without a woman, whether in camp or on the march. And not an old bag either, but the fairest lass in camp would be his and how that was none of us could ever make out; except that his was a joy in life not matched in that grim and sorrowful encampment. Hunt, on the other hand, was a dour, unhappy Scot, dark and humorless, and slowly dying away with longing for the streets and taverns and fog of Glasgow.
Now welcome, Jamie Stuart! cried MacPherson. You would not think business to be this good when we have only set up some few hours past, but already the lads of the 10th have brought us two white-livered sergeants, and that’s not bad for the first of a darg. Now what have ye there?… Not Chester, the dirty little dog!
Chester it is, sang Dennis Sullivan.
Then roll him in and make him snug and warm.
And like a sack of potatoes, we rolled the lieutenant to where two sergeants, trussed and gagged, sat against the wall. Already the hospital was crowded, and the day had only begun – and it was hot. A huge blaze roared in the hearth, and six women crouched before it, so close that the loose ends of their hair crackled, melting lead and spooning it into bullet molds. The hutment being supply depot as well as dispensary, a good third of the space was taken by bar lead, stacked as high as a man’s head. Only the two barbers had sleeping quarters there; but in addition to them, the six women, the three prisoners and a white-faced lad from the 4th who was being bled for the shakes, there were Arnold and Simpkins Gary making a high bid for the girls, and with me and my four lads and the heat, and the sharp smell of molten lead, the bitter smell of medicine and the sweet odor of blood, the air was near unbreathable. But no one seemed to mind that. The women gave the Gary boys as good as they took, telling them, Now why don’t you take over this molding, if ye’re so bright and strong and free with affection? And as she worked, MacPherson’s lass sang: The Bishop’s wife, she looked me down, ye’re either fine or common, I got what ye can never match, and sure it’s far from common.
And how is a man to treat the sick with this stinking lead boiling?… Hunt wanted to know … Already, we are cursed with committees, for the first Committee man comes and turns this into a jail, and then comes the second snooking for supply. The lead he spies, and orders it to be bullets before nightfall come.
Come out a ye tout, laughed MacPherson. The less sick we meddle with, the more will survive, and this is a fine piece of organization. I tell ye, we got a natural bent for committees.
But my heart was heavy as I left there. Suppose Chester should be missed and a search made? And didn’t all this activity indicate that the gentry had a whiff of something?
From the hospital, we started a check of the hutments, but already the thing was in motion of itself, and every third or fourth hut there would be a black, cold silence until I had shown the warrant the Jew Levy wrote out for me. The men were in the straw and the encampment was dead – a silence and withdrawal that would have been suspicious on any other day than New Year’s.
Because it was New Year’s Day, much went by that would not have passed muster in the normal course of things. There was no parade and no drill; and until midafternoon, aside from Wayne and his orderlies, no officers approached the hutments; Lieutenant Chester was not missed, which was not so strange, for we learned afterwards that his mess had thought him to be with Wayne and Wayne had thought him to be back by now at the Kemble House. In any case, though the officers neither knew nor cared what we did that New Year’s Day, the hutments were full of talk about how the gentry passed their time, once they had slept off their drunkenness of the night before. And they could not have better confirmed us in what we had decided to do.
There was, around our encampment, a ring of great holdings of the gentry, some of them patroons, some of them British quality, and all of them loyal to His Majesty, George III. We learned well the year before, when we encamped at this same place, to respect that loyalty, for eight men of the 4th Regiment who broke into Peter Kemble’s grain bin were docked their pay and given thirty lashes each. The pay was nothing, for we never got it anyway, but thirty lashes is a cruel and terrible thing, and one of the lads, a boy of fifteen, died from the beating. Peter Kemble held over four thousand acres of land, with three manor houses upon it and sixteen barns, and for all that he was open and brash and defiant with his loyalty to the King, never a step was taken against him; instead, our own gentry snuggled up to him, for he was a true gentleman and hunted his hounds day in and day out, and in return for their respectful consideration, he quartered our officers, lent them his hounds to hunt with, and fed them at his board nightly. It was one of those things – as I came to know later – that are understood among gentlemen, even though they fight on different sides; but it was not understood by the buckskin men in our ranks, those who came from the Western counties, Scottish men with a century-old dream of an acre of land for their own, bound out to America to realize their dream – and discovering then that, far from their having land, they could never get enough hard money to own woven clothes or an iron tool.
So when word passed through the hutments that four musicians had come up from Philadelphia to play for a New Year’s minuet at the Kemble House, and that two carriages of Philadelphia ladies had followed them – and that there were hanging for bleeding on the Kemble sticking rack two beefs and five fat pigs – you can imagine that our mood was not eased.
Angus MacGrath and I were going among the huts of the 7th, passing out instructions and arguing with faint-hearted men and family men, when we came into a hutment with a stew cooking, the first stew we had smelled in a long while. Chicken heads, they told us: a stew of two dozen chicken heads scrounged out of the garbage of the Kemble House; and did we want a pan?
I would die first, said Angus MacGrath. I am a simple man and not a prideful man, but I will see myself damned before I scrounge in garbage for the leavings of the gentry.
It was no way for him to talk, for these were hungry lads and hunger is a great leveler, and a man wants a taste of meat after he has lived a month on corn mush.
Toward midafternoon, there was a flurry of alarm in the hutments, for we beheld a company of at least thirty officers coming toward the parade at a smart canter. Angus and I were at a hut of the 7th then, and we and the men inside it charged our muskets and determined then and there that if this was a stroke to cut the head from the rebellion, we would go down under bullet and bayonet and not stand trial for any shameful hanging. But the crowd of officers turned off down the road to Whippany, and we learned later that they were guests for a great dinner given that evening at the castle of the patroon Van Beverhoudt. Van Beverhoudt was a mighty Dutch lord who held two hundred black slaves and lived in peace with both the British and the Colonials. In ’76 and in ’77, when the flame of the Revolution burned hot and fresh,
one of his barns had been raided and burned, but after that he went to Philadelphia and had certain dealings with certain folks there, and from then on he was not molested.
So with one thing and another, the men became more sullen, more bitter, more willing to attempt some wild and foolish enterprise, and their bitterness increased as midday passed and the promised ration of rum, the one note of joy for the New Year, was not dispensed.
I recall how Angus and I faced at least forty of them, packed into a hut of the 7th, answering their questions, fighting their wild, random moods.
By now, I had spoken to hundreds of men, and I came to realize that the dream I held, the dream held by Billy Bowzar and Handsome Jack Maloney and the Jew Leon Levy – the dream of turning the still, stagnant current of the Revolution into a mighty new stream; the dream of a whole population of farmers and artisans and bond servants, serfs and slaves, rising up and sweeping the handful of redcoats into the sea like so much rubbish, and then making a true new land where there was freedom and equality for all – I came to realize that this dream was no commodity for sale or conviction. The men were with us; they were for the Committees; they hated the officer gentry as much and more than we did; their cup of sorrow was so full that they no longer cared for the consequences of some wild venture – but they could not be lured with dreams.
We must be paid, they said. That’s a simple matter, a plain matter. If a man enlists him at ten dollars a month, he deserves that money, not in paper, but in hard metal. If a man is promised a bounty, he has got to get it. Now what of that, Jamie?
It is not a matter of money, I tried to tell them. There is a reason why you have not been paid, and the reason lies in the very nature of how the gentry lead this struggle. That is what we must change.
