The Proud and the Free

by Howard Fast

  You make a great mistake, Finnigan, if you think of us as thieves. I think you are not much good as a man, and I don’t give a damn what you think, but it is a mistake all the same; and the people all around here and back where we were encamped made no such error. We are a mighty force, for we are good soldiers and hard men, and I would lay the Line against any troops on earth, be they equal man to man or five times our number, and we could fight anywhere in heaven or hell or in between, and sometimes it seems that we have too, God forgiving me, for I mean no blasphemy. But what kind of force would we be if the people were against us? Just look around you, my lad, and tell we where all these folk have grown from – since all the winter days we marched this land and saw no soul are fresh in my memory. And how did they know that what we did was right? It is a staggering thing we did, to rise up and cast out the gentry who led us so long – and not to become bandits or thieves or animals to blunder the fields, but to hold our ranks and to make a better discipline than the gentry ever forced out of us. And this is what the people knew, before we ever knew it ourselves. Even before we rose, they knew it, and they came to Mt. Kemble with food, so that we should not march away hungry – and this morning they came to our bivouac and embraced us. Do you hear! They embraced us! How was that? We are the dirty, outland foreign brigades, and even our officers are afraid of us and paint us as devils, but the people are not afraid, and that is why we will not take a blade of grass out of their fields or a grain of wheat from their bins. We are no rabble; we are their army and their shield, and you brought disgrace on us and you deserted when we faced the gentry. So what do you say to that?

  I did no worse than you did, muttered Finnigan.

  Worse ye did, God damn ye! cried Connell. If ye looted, that was one thing, but ye crawled away into the darkness when the little drummer lads stood and beat their drums and faced the gentry!

  Ye got no right to punish me! Ye got no right to whip me!

  Bowzar looked from face to face and so did Finnigan, but there was no hope to be found in the Committee.

  We are going to hang you, said Jack Maloney.

  Jesus Christ, have ye gone mad?

  The Widow Brennen fell to the ground and lay there sobbing as if her heart had broken, and here and there a man expelled his breath like a windy sigh of pain, but there was no other sound except the high-pitched screaming words of Finnigan:

  Then what are ye hanging me for? For me poor belly that hungered? Four years I served in the Line, and did I run away when we battled? Is me hunger different from yer own hunger? Is a chicken exchange for a man’s life? For Christ’s sake, what are ye hanging me for?

  For betraying yer own comrades, said Sean O’Toole.

  And did ye hang Emil Horst who tried to fire a cannon at ye?

  He was loyal to the officers, but what in hell were you loyal to?

  Ye are not going to hang me! Ye cannot hang me! Me old mother in Ireland would know, and she’d die of the shame of a son who went to hell on the gallows! Ye look at me like I was a dirty traitor, but I swear to you by the holy Mother of God that I never betrayed you! Ye must not hang me! Four years I walked in this Line, and took with ye the bad and the good, and ye are not going to take my life away from me for a chicken – ah, Christ, Christ …

  He put his face in his hands and wept, and here and there through the crowd a woman wept too, and the Committee sat like stone.

  But after a long moment, the Nayger Holt said, Let him live. We that strong, we can let him live, and I never going to sleep if I see a man hanged by my hand. Make him go away, and we can spit in the dirt where he walks.

  Billy Bowzar looked at me, and I nodded. Let him go, said Scottsboro slowly. I seen many a man hanged, but we don’t need to hang men for crimes the gentry only whipped us for. Let him go.

  Let him go, said Levy, and Jack Maloney nodded too. No whips, no canes, let him go. And Abner Williams said, Let him go.… And let him go far away from us, said Bora Kabanka.

  So the press of people opened and Finnigan walked through, his head hanging, still weeping, and he climbed the stone wall and went away across the fields.

  Then the trumpets blew, and we put on our knapsacks and marched away.

  This was the chicken of the Widow Brennen, and while it is not much in the telling, it was much indeed to us and to all the folk in the countryside. It became something apart from the details of what happened, something that wholly transcended the simple fact that a chicken was stolen, and that the rank and file of the Line had dealt justice to thief and plaintiff. For no one who witnessed that strange and brief court-martial was not influenced in some way, and the men who marched away from that resting place were not the same as when they came there. And even to this day when I write, among the whole welter of lies and bitterness and awful accusations, it is still remembered that on this matter the Line was just.

  Yet we were just on other matters too, and day in and day out the Committee met to pass on the slightest infraction of our General Orders; and if the truth is known, no army of that sort marched in America before then – or since then either.

  But I must take up the tale of how we left our resting place and marched on toward Princeton. For the first time since the earliest days of the war, there marched along the Jersey highways an army that was light in heart and ready in spirit; for all of our doubts and fears, we marched as though we were returning victorious from some decisive battle. All morning and all afternoon the skirling of the pipes mixed with the drums and the fifes, and over and above it we sang every song we knew. With all good heart, we sang the Yankee song, Come out, ye Continentalers, we’re going for to go, To fight the redcoat enemy, so plaguy cute, you know. And then our fifes picked up, Why came ye to our shores, across the briny water? Why came ye to our shores, like bullocks to the slaughter? But soon we had enough of Yankee songs, and all up and down the Line the regiments began to sing a strange and wild melody, the old Scottish air which was sung, they say, by the clansmen in the long past when they marched south against the false kings of England, and which was called by us “The Song of Revolution,” but by others “The Song of the Foreign Brigades,” for only we of the Line sang it. It is a low and moody song, mounting and savage and bitter:

  And his fate is now sealed and his power is shaken,

  As the people at last from their slumber awaken!

  For their blood has run freely on green grass sod,

  And no power now rules them save that of their God!

  Death to the tyrant, torture and shame!

  Death to the tyrant, faggot and flame!

  Thus it was that we marched through the Jerseys and let our voices sound, so that the people would know that the Pennsylvania Line was coming; and as I said, in all that time, we saw no officer – and when we came to one of the manor houses of a patroon or a squire, the windows were barred and shuttered; the stock was driven away and the fields were empty.

  Yet that day, too, it began to dawn upon us that men did not march without going somewhere, and again and again it was thrown at me:

  Where are we off to, Jamie?

  Where is our destination?

  What is the Committee thinking? Where are the officers? What are they up to? Where are the other Lines? Where is the British enemy?

  It was only curious now and only inquiring, for the men were still flushed with the ease of the revolt and with the rare sense of being their own masters, and with the knowledge that each and every one of them could become a part of the general flux of committees that we spoke of setting up. Also, the march was southward toward the Pennsylvania border, and that was as good a way to go as any other, and they were led by good men whom they had trusted before – but whom they worshiped with a singular reverence now that the revolt had come off so well and cleanly. Still, they had to, have answers; so I took my place with the Committee, between Billy Bowzar and Jack Maloney, and told them:

  The men are asking where we’re off to?

  Are they, Jamie?
And is there a man in the Line who doesn’t know every lane and bypath in the Jerseys?

  That’s tomorrow, and what comes the day after tomorrow?

  And what do you think, Jamie? asked Billy Bowzar.

  I’ve had no time to think. I’ve been on with the Citizen-soldier Guard since my waking hour – and that damned music takes the sense out of my head.

  The music’s good for the men, said Maloney. What are they saying and thinking?

  This and that and everything. Some of them think that we should march straight into Philadelphia and put our demands to the Congress.

  As if the Congress did not know that we are a bitter and angry file of men?

  They might know it better if we stood on their doorstep.

  And then what, Jamie? asked Billy Bowzar, as much to himself as to me. Do we take back our officers for the promises of Congress? Or if we get no satisfaction, do we take over the power of the Congress? Then we fight the country, eh, Jamie? And we fight the British enemy, and the country fights us and the enemy – and what will the people say, Jamie? And what of the men who enlisted for three years and served for five? Do we let them go away, Jamie? And then where do the foreign brigades recruit from?

  If I knew the answers —

  If we knew them, Jamie …

  We walked on then for a time in silence, and then I said, Then why did we rise up?

  Have you forgotten, Jamie?

  Christ, no! But you have forgotten, it seems to me!

  Go slow, go slow, laddie, said Jack Maloney; we’ve been eating our hearts out with this.

  I say again, why did we rise up?

  Because it was intolerable to remain the way we were, answered Jack Maloney.

  But this is madness, I insisted, and the more you turn it in circles, the more insane it becomes. We have cast out our officers; the men are with us; we have the best line of troops in all this continent – and we are citizen-soldiers who have felt the whip enough to know better than to pick it up ourselves. All the dreams and hopes of men who were fed on dirt and scum for a thousand years add up to this. And when I ask you two where we are going, you can only tell me that you don’t know!

  Because we don’t know, Jamie. We will sit down with the Committee tonight and talk about it.

  And talk and talk and talk.

  That’s right, Jamie.

  We talked for five years, but in one night of action those of us who know a little about doing and less of gabble turned the world over.

  Not the whole world, Jamie, said Billy Bowzar gently, taking my arm as I strode along beside him. Not the whole world, but just the Pennsylvania Line. And meanwhile we are marching to Princeton, where we will rest awhile and patch our boots —

  And you’ll have use for a cobbler, since I have no brains in my head to match yourself and the Jew Levy!

  Easy, Jamie, and cork your bung a little. We got a great appreciation for what you did. I am no general that I can pin a medal onto you, Jamie, but I also have no crystal ball to peer into and find the answers. Maybe if we had waited a month or six months before we rose up, we would have known. But if we waited, we would have lost our guts, for we are still like men in a dream, and it was only last night, Jamie, that we did what we did.

  Then Danny Connell drew me aside into the drain of the road, so that we stood against the hump of hedge and rut while the columns marched past. The men came swinging by, grinning at us, and one and another said:

  Ho, Jamie! Ho, Danny!

  What bird pecks in you? asked Danny Connell, his pinched, drawn face anxious and warm, an old man in a lad’s body, like so many of us.

  No bird.

  But the answer was fear, I knew; and I was asking myself, Why, Jamie Stuart, why? even as the 10th marched past, singing Erin’s sons are weeping sadly, they will see her sward no more … I wanted to know Why? why?

  They got an affection for us, said Danny Connell, and me damned heart is glad for that. We lead them, and they got an affection for us, Jamie. There is the whole world turned upside down.

  And again, we stood and watched. Across the road, on a shoulder of a hill, was a wooden stake fence, and a family of nine or ten children were there, German or Dutch from the look of them, all of them like peas from the same pod with corn-thatch hair and blue eyes, a dog next to them – all of them staring open-mouthed and silent at this endless line of men, marching four abreast, playing drums and fifes and pipes and singing outlandish songs.

  Then the wagons came, and on one of them was Connell’s Mathilda, and when she saw him, she dropped off and he caught her up in his arms, laughing as he rocked her back and forth.

  To hell with that! I cried at him. We are on the march, and you are of the Committee, and this is a hell of a thing to do!

  What pecks in him? asked the Irishman.

  But I ran off to catch the head of the column again.

  We bivouacked that Tuesday night in the old encampment at Middlebrook, where we had hutted for a time two years before. That was the way it was then in the Jerseys – for you will remember that for five years we had fought and marched over this ground. There was almost no stream of clear water where we had not bivouacked at one time or another, if not the Line, then one or another regiment of the Line, and there was no lane or bypath with which we were not familiar. And all over the country were our huts, or the huts of the Jersey men or the Connecticut men or the Massachusetts men, the abandoned parades, the forests we had clipped for our warmth, all of it brief, a quick erection that began to rot almost as the sound of our drums vanished; and I know of nothing more melancholy than an old encampment, filled with the ghosts of dead comrades and dead dreams – and in the same way have our deeds and sufferings vanished in the rush of years, to be replaced by a pleasant fairy tale for little children and old women, with no little memory of what the flesh and blood men were and what they wanted and what they died for.

  So we came back to Middlebrook as the sun was setting on that mild, uncommon winter afternoon, and we encamped ourselves on the parade. We had no desire to put the hutments to use, for they were filled with all the old wickedness and suffering of the past – and dirt and refuse and the foul smell of long disuse. The weather was mild enough for us to be comfortable in the open. We raised up all the tents we had, built our fires foursquare, twenty to a regiment, and laid triple pickets around the place; that is, at no time in the night did we have less than three hundred men standing guard, and our cannons were loaded with small grape and short powder and set to sweep every approach. This was the trust of Angus and myself, and it was amazing how, in the short space of a few hours, the hundred men of the Citizen-soldier Guard had become expert at the business of organizing and provosting a bivouac. I can say without boasting that though I have seen many a display and bivouac of soldiers since then, I have never seen the discipline or the co-ordination that existed in the Line during the time of the rising. Each Committee we had created was functioning in part at least, and small though that part might be, it was better than the bitter hatred which had prevailed under the officers, the discord and resentment.

  Meanwhile the Committee of Sergeants, augmented with other committee heads and leading men from the regiments, had begun to meet in an old stone barn which stood at the end of the parade.

  MacGrath and I, and the Gary brothers with us, did not come to the barn until well after nightfall; by then at least forty people were present in the big, drafty room, which had only half a roof and was lit with pitch torches. Two logs had been dragged in for the men to sit on; the rest sat on the floor or on the old feed trough. It had turned cold with nightfall, and the men were wrapped in scarves and in their threadbare blankets, bulked up with shoddy goods and looking strangely small now that their beards were gone, like sheared sheep. When Angus and I entered, old Lawrence Scottsboro was speaking, and it took a while for us to get the drift of what had gone on. Sometime – my memory lapses here, and I cannot recall whether it was after or before we came – they rais
ed the thought of a march westward; yet it was on that the old man spoke, that ever-present dream and refuge and last stand of the army of the confederation, ever since the confederation had come into being. Always in the past, when matters were so low that no one believed they could sink lower, when our nakedness was past nakedness and our hunger was past hunger, when the other Lines of the other states had shrunk into skeletons of a few hundred men each, when no army and no resistance was left but the foreign brigades of Pennsylvania – when that came to pass, the last card was brought from the deck and it was said that we would march westward over the mountains into the wild and lonely land of Fincastle, as we called it then, and make a new republic there, and war on from there if need be for a hundred years against the British enemy. But this was always the kind of dream that desperate men make for themselves, and it was like smoke, blown away by a close examination or even a puff of wind. Yet this was being spoken of now, and the old man Scottsboro was recalling how he had marched with Braddock in the great destruction that the Frenchmen and the Indians had brought upon them, and this and that about how it was to fight in the dark woods. And as we listened, a colder chill than the weather crept over us.

  You may not understand now what a deep horror we had in those times of the dark and awful forest, where the trees were seven feet through the trunk, and where a man could walk a fortnight and never see the sky or properly know when it was daybreak or nightfall – and where a child could go out of sight and never be seen or heard of again, and a grown man too. You are town bred and country bred. But we had with us in the Line many, many of the lonely Scottish buckskin men from Fincastle, who had been driven there because not an acre of open land existed but was pledged to a man of property who had the King’s guns to shoot down those who poached on it; and yet these men shook their heads somberly at talk of a retreat across the mountains.