by Howard Fast
But how will you pay us, Jamie? How will the Committees pay us? It is all very well to have a fine dream, but a man wants a dollar to send home to his wife and kids. And whatever you say about the gentry, it’s them as has the hard money, not us. Not any of us. Can you deny that?
I could not deny it. There was a simple truth in the fact that the gentry had the money, the wealth, the food, the forges and the looms. That they had it out of our blood and sweat, I knew, but what other way there was, I didn’t know.
Now me, says a lad out of the German country along the river, I enlisted in ’76, and they told me for three years, but I cannot read nor write, as you know, Jamie Stuart, and it seems I put my mark on articles for the whole of the war, with the right for them to hang me, just as they hanged Hans Forst and Emil Guttman. If the war lasts twenty years, I got to fight and grow old and gray and get my death of a wound finally, and all for a twenty-dollar bonus they swear to pay when peace is made.
And how many a good lad is dead and never lives to see the peace!… cried Johnny O’Brian.… And the dirty militia cowards that come up now for a six-month enlistment, they get a bonus of one hundred dollars in hard cash, while the heart of me at nineteen years is worn out with fighting and marching and starving. If Jack Maloney and Billy Bowzar are making a rising, I will follow them to hell and be damned, for I care no more for this kind of living. But I will not go on fighting. For what, Jamie?
For the Revolution, I answered.
Be damned with the Revolution! It’s one set of masters for another, and that’s the way it has always been. In the old country it was the chief of the clan, and here it’s the cursed squire; and it will always be that way and no different, and if you think otherwise, Jamie Stuart, ye’re just a feckless young idiot. You know what they say in the old country – for a dog there be always a shangan, and we are dogs. Look a-here at Johnny Burke, sitting beside me. Eleven years old he is, and already two years in the ranks and not knowing of anything but foul language and blows …
A lot more I know, and the hell with you! the child squeaked.
Now shut your damn mouth, Johnny Burke, and let me speak. When they bring up their whores from Philadelphia, they are lasses and ladies, but the women who bore our bitterness and our children in the camp and on the march, they are whores and are whipped monthly for the morale of the regiment. No, Jamie Stuart, we have had a stomachful of the Revolution! We will drive out the officers with you; but then, down arms and go home!
Where is home? a tall, broad-faced Pole asked slowly.
I was racking my brains for what to say, when Angus MacGrath rose and told them:
If I thought living that dree and no hope but to be a lousy gillie all my days, then I’d blow out my brains and be done with it. Give it up, Jamie. I will not argue with these scuts. To hell with them!
We left together, but there was no comfort in the Scot’s words. We walked along the hutments, and already the early winter evening was upon us, cold and dreary.
At the houses of the 10th, rum was being poured from two hogsheads on a cart, an ounce to a man, and the muttering of the soldiers began to grow like a drum beaten heavier and heavier. White-faced, the two rum peddlers sat on the seat of the cart, their lips trembling, their eyes cast down. Captain Oscar Breddon of headquarters straddled a hogshead, pistol in hand, glaring his hatred but keeping his mouth shut, while the sergeants measured out the ration.
As we reached the cart, a soldier, his rum in his hand, walked forward to the driver and said: You profiteering Yankee bastard, look at me!
And when the driver turned his head, the soldier cast the rum in his face, spat in the snow and walked off.
PART FOUR
Being a true narration of the great rising of the Pennsylvania Line, with details and incidents not hitherto revealed.
WHEN I REPORTED to my hutment an hour past sunset, it was like the heart and brain of an army in battle. Candles and two lamps had been found, and the hut was filled with light. Five of the Committee of Sergeants sat at the table, each engaged in some separate task, and there was a steady stream of men coming in and out from the various regiments. Messengers delivered messages and sped away with the answers. Also, food was being found and stored, and already the bunks were crowded with sacks of grain and corn meal and frozen sides of pork and lamb.
Most of the food had come from the central commissary, for the whole guard there was with us and were already removing whatever could be taken without arousing the suspicion of the officers; but somehow, already, news of the rising had leaked out to small farmers nearby, and the meat was a gift from them – and this heartened us more than anything, since not only were most of us foreign brigades but even those of us native to our country’s soil were foreign here, to the land of Jersey. The years of our campaigning over the roads and fields of Jersey had wasted much of the country, and those who had suffered most were the tenants of the patroons and the great lords. They were filled with hatred for the army, so it was a wonder now that they too should make a separation between us and the gentry and that they should aid us instead of betraying us to our officers.
* * *
I had to push my way into that hut, for at the first glance it was like a madhouse; it was only when you looked a second time that you found a scheme in the madness. A giant, yellow-haired German shouted at Levy, who ignored him and went on speaking to the black man, Holt, and to Prukish, who loomed over the table, a pistol in each hand. A delegation of women demanded to know what Jack Maloney expected to do with the children, while he strove to give a messenger an answer and to dispatch him with it. Bowzar roared for quiet every so often, and Sean O’Toole, in his high-pitched voice, screamed across the table at Levy:
Ye damned Jew, if ye will not give me warrants for the two hostlers, how in hell’s name am I to find horses to move the four cannon I have already laid hands on that are standing exposed like a cake of ice in the pit of hell!
And background to this was a wild hammering which came from my own bed and berth, where the hated Captain Jack Auden of my own 11th – and how many marks I bore from his cane I cannot count —lay trussed like a turkey for roasting, his face in a side of pork, his heels drumming madly on the wall. I saw him, and the strain I was under snapped, and I stood there in the doorway roaring with laughter fit to break a gut.
Shut up, ye Dublin dung digger! cried Jack Maloney at O’Toole, and to hell with yer cursed hostlers!
And at me:
Jamie! Jamie – have ye gone mad or maybe gotten the pint ration of rum we was promised? Get in here and make a disposition!
Now here is Jamie, shouted Billy Bowzar. Will you shut your mouths or get to the nation out of here!
But three more men crowded in behind me, calling for Connell.
We were sent to see Connell, they insisted, and that we will. We will see him or be damned. We will not be taking our orders from a black Nayger man, and here we stand until we see Connell, or you can take yer rising and be damned with it!
So you see, Jamie, said Bowzar, when I stood over him finally, the Romans and the Protestant lads and the Naygers and the Jews are all at one another’s throats; and this is what we have, with two hours left before the rising …
He had not slept, and his broad, flat face was lined with fatigue, yet the square cut of his curly red beard and the bald spot on top of his skull gave him a whimsical turn of humor, and there was a blaze of suppressed excitement in him, the more unusual for so stolid a man. From somewhere, he had obtained a big silver watch – it was a wonder, the things we discovered about ourselves now – and it lay ticking in front of him, while alongside of it there was a big sheet of foolscap entitled General Orders and Instructions for All Regiments on the Night of January the 1st.
So make a disposition, Jamie, he said. Have you covered the hutments?
The noise dwindled. We were like that, with waves of confidence, and then with waves of fear. We were sure of ourselves, and then our certainty went away
, and we stood in terror. We had been beaten and starved too long; we were criminals or madmen or heroes or wild adventurers who were embarked on a road no man had traveled before: and do not imagine it was easy for us to know, or that we were all of one mind or one piece.
Talk up, Jamie. And where is MacGrath?
He went over to the old Connecticut huts where the 5th and the 9th lie, and that is where we will have trouble as sure as God. They took the Nayger Kabanka, because he was asked to polish the boots of Major Quenton, and Quenton was in the boots and said, Kneel down, you black dog. And Kabanka answered, That I will not do, nor be called a black dog again. So they put him under guard, and now MacGrath is over there to see how bad it is.
A plague on this bloody pride! snapped Maloney. Are their noses up?
At those regiments, I answered. They have turned out all the lieutenants of the two regiments, and they are in and out of the hutments, filled with fury that they should not be swilling with the others; and if a man turns up from another regiment, they drive him on his way. Angus is on it now, and as for the other brigades, they are secure, or as secure as anyone can hope with a day to prepare, and they are sitting now with knapsacks strapped and bayonets fixed – not with one mind, but our lads have the better of it in the disputes. And all I would say is, for Christ’s sake, do this soon, for a man can go mad with waiting!
Ye wanted much more waiting before.
Well, I don’t want it now.
His neck itches for the rope … a pock-marked buckskin man remarked.
The lot of ye shut up! cried Danny Connell. Christ, to make a rising with this lot!
And I never saw an Irishman that wasn’t expert on matters of rising! – I shot back at him – But to put two and two together, yer land is under the redcoat heel and never was else; and I’m sick of the talk of them that think this is a tea party. Ye sit here, but all this cursed cold day, I was in and out o’ the hutments –
Now, easy, Jamie lad.
In and out o’ the hutments, and this one wants wages and that one wants to go home and this one wants his bounty, and is Billy Bowzar going to pay it, and is the Jew Levy going to get gold from the Philadelphia Jews, and they’ve all had enough of the bloody war and want no part of it again, and they’ve heard there are Nayger men on the Committee and will not be led by Nayger men … and here ye sit like Jesus Christ was going to walk on the earth and make a miracle!
And it may be that He is, Jamie, answered Billy Bowzar – quietly, but heard because all the rest were so quiet now; and in that deep silence the Jew regarded me quizzically, his narrow, pinched face puckered up, his dark eyes probing as he said:
Now, then, Jamie Stuart, you are an impatient lad who wants a thing answered that can’t be answered. But since the olden times men have risen up like we are rising up to throw off their hurts and sorrows.
But in the hutments they tell me, There have always been gentry, and always, them who are bounden under. Will Bowzar be gentry now? Will the Jew Levy or the Nayger Holt?
No.
What then?
I don’t know, answered the Jew. Maybe the Almighty God knows, and in time He will reveal to us what to do. And maybe not so. But there is a will on our part to assert ourselves and to cast out those who make a mockery of our dreams, and that we must do – because if we turn back now …
Flatly and matter-of-factly Billy Bowzar said: Go to work and stop this business of trying to be a gypsy, Jamie, which no Scot is any damn good at. There’s not much time left, so get out in the cold again, which is better for your hot head, and turn out your guard. Let each man committed and pledged tie a white rag around his arm above the elbow. The left arm, Jamie. Rouse them up, and when Andy Swain begins to sound the camp jig on his trumpet, all files are to parade before the hutments, bayonets fixed, knapsacks on, but no powder in the pan. I don’t mind if they load them their guns, but keep the powder safe from hotheads. We want no killing of the officers, Jamie – and you others too!
Now Bowzar rose and looked from face to face.
No killing, no murder! This Committee stands as a court of military citizen justice from here on, and every crime will be punished. Before tomorrow night, we will have arranged and set down the discipline of this new army; meanwhile, we will make it a simple and elementary justice, such as anyone can understand. When the officers come running, cast them off! Drive them away! Tell them we do not want them in the sight of our eyes! But no one retorts and no one speaks unless he carries a properly executed warrant of this Committee. We will be no rabble tonight, Jamie, but a credit to the honest folk of this land. And if shameful things are done, we will hold you accountable. Mark me, Jamie Stuart.
I mark you, I said, and then I saluted. It was the first time a sergeant of the Committee had been saluted. And then I went out to prepare.
I saw Angus coming across the parade, a dozen lads with him, and I joined him. We tore cloth from our shirts and neckcloths, and made our badges, and the moon rose and lined our shadows out across the trampled snow. Low lay the huts, like sleeping hounds, and fanged like hounds too, and far across the white expanse of the parade were the bare trees and the belly hills of the fat Jersey land. Here and there, a light gleamed as the door of one or another hut opened, and, dim on the other edge of the parade, we saw the shadows of men running but could not make out who they were or what they ran for. The sentries were out, and in their cold loneliness they paced back and forth, wrapped in God knows what dreams – for that was a cold and uncertain night, a night for dreams and fears and the inner coldness that freezes the heart of a man who cuts the ropes that bind him to his past. For whatever it was and however it was, this army was our life, and many of us knew no other life or remembered another life only vaguely and indistinctly. We were parts of a body organism that was mother and father, and the tissue of our lives and the logic of our lives was the army of the Revolution. So I do not recall that we had a great and burning certainty; there were forces that moved us and drove us, and there was a spark of glory somewhere; but in the cold matter-of-fact, we moved because it was intolerable to remain as we had been.
We formed the lads in twos, Angus at the rear and I to the fore, and I smartened them and whipped for a marching gate and fancy arms. We went from hut to hut, checking the mood of the men and passing the word on the time, and the way the sentries walked their beats and saw us not at all gave us a strange feeling of disembodiment. At one point there, two officers galloped their horses madly across the parade, but either they saw us not at all or wanted not to see us; and after that a hutment door flew open and men poured forth, but back they went as if the hut had blown and sucked in one spasm. And the minutes passed and the moon traveled; and then the time was upon us, with the shrill, taunting call of the Yankee camp jig.
Now the two officers came riding back, whipping their horses madly; and as they reined up near us, I saw that one of them was our regimental commander, a bitter, sallow-faced man, and one of the very few human souls I have known who never showed one spark of warmth or graciousness. He had a high-pitched, rasping voice, which shrilled out to know why the cursed damned trumpeter was playing that fool tune.
To awaken the dead! roared MacGrath.
I’ll have your hide off for that, MacGrath, he screamed back. And you, Stuart, what in the devil’s name are you doing with that file?
Drilling them! I shouted back.
With him was Captain Purdy, who claimed to be the first son – and a bad one, he always added – of Lord Purdy of the County Mayo, and he spurred on us; but Angus fired a musket over his head, and his horse bolted with him. Meanwhile, the trumpet kept on shrilling, and all up and down the regimental hutments, doors popped open spilling light onto the snow, and men poured out and began to fall in. From the area of the 6th, a rocket hissed up, and a roar of sound greeted it. The colonel whipped out his sword and spurred his horse at the 11th’s hutments, screaming a string of foul oaths, the only printable words of which were Back to quart
ers! Inside with you! But the men laughed at him, and Katy Waggoner flung a handful of snow at him as he went by.
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.
