The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  Knox stopped writing. “And your brother? It’s known he marches with Shays.”

  “My brother follows his conscience, sir. I follow mine.”

  “If yours dictates debate rather than riot, you’re the better for it. But desperate factions are at work here, son. Mind that they don’t work upon you.” Knox went back to writing, as if to set down the thoughts that Will had inspired in him before they fled.

  “My father is part of no faction, sir, except your own.” Will stood and swept his hat from the table. “He even wore his Continental uniform to prison.”

  Knox’s quill stopped moving. For a moment, he kept his eyes on the paper. Then he sat back, emotion ebbing at last. “These are difficult times, Will Pike. We are threatened on all sides. But your father was a good man. I’ll speak for him. On my word.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And … I take interest in the children of my men. What do you see as a future?”

  Will clutched his hat before him. “I hope to make a mark, sir, among men who matter … as a barrister, perhaps. But I first must apprentice in the law.”

  After a moment’s thought, Knox took a new sheet of paper, wrote a letter, sealed it with wax. “Do you know Rufus King?”

  “I know of him, sir … a Massacusetts delegate to the Confederation Congress in New York.”

  “A fine lawyer, too, in need of a new apprentice at year’s end. This letter states how well you hold your own in argument. It goes out in my next post to Congress. When King comes to Boston over Christmas, perhaps you’ll hear from him.”

  “Thank you, sir. I … I don’t know what to say.”

  “Know this: There’s talk that King will be delegate to a convention in Philadelphia, to strengthen the articles under which we govern. Considering this Massachusetts crisis, such a gathering is now imperative. Work for King, and you may effect real change.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “One more thing.” Knox leaned forward in the chair. “Have you heard talk about the rebels—the Regulators—marching on this arsenal?”

  After a quick swallow, Will lied. “I’ve heard nothing, sir.”

  Knox smiled. “Then I’ll sleep well tonight.”

  WILL PIKE DID not sleep well for many nights, so guilt stricken was he at lying to Knox, so fearful was he of the day when his brother would summon him to march on the arsenal. And denying that summons would bring its own guilt. But he had made it plain that while he might provide observations about the arsenal’s defenses (which were few) and its guards (fewer), he would not march against government property.

  As October faded, Will’s resolve hardened with the freezing earth. Then, on the day of the first snowfall, resolve became conviction, for that was the day that Will’s father came home, having served only three months instead of six.

  Knox had restored him to freedom, but no one could restore him to health. Whatever afflicted George North Pike, he continued to lose weight, suffered ever more brutal stomach pains, and had little appetite, even at Christmas, when they roasted a fat goose stuffed with brandied apples.

  “Look at him,” said North one cold January night. “A broken man, sleepin’ by the fire, not even interested in a bowl of mush. The government done that to him.”

  “The government is changing,” said Will. “And I may help to change it.”

  “You’ll march with us then? On the arsenal?”

  “Arsenal?” Will’s stomach turned.

  “What do you think this is for?” North pointed to the sheet of paper on the table.

  It was a broadside that had been posted across the county. It warned of a four-thousand-man army marching west, financed by Boston merchants. The army’s intent: “by point of sword to crush the power of the people and render them unable of ever opposing the cruel hand of tyranny.” The petition called for the men of Hampshire County to “assemble in arms to support and maintain not only the rights but the lives and liberties of the people.”

  North said, “If we’re to assemble in arms, we need arms.”

  “When?”

  “We march day after tomorrow. Shays wants to know if you’ll be with us.”

  “Day after tomorrow, I’m leavin’ for Boston.”

  “Boston? Why?”

  Will pulled a letter from his waistcoat pocket. “This come in today’s post.”

  North took the letter and read it aloud. He always read aloud. He had been a poor reader in the schoolhouse where they had learned their alphabets and their sums, so reading aloud proved his comprehension.

  “ ‘Dear Mister Pike’ “—North looked up—”Mister? Someone calls you Mister and you’re ready to turn your back on your neighbors and your blood?”

  “Read,” said Will.

  So North read, stopping not at all and stumbling only a little. “ ‘I am in receipt of a letter from Henry Knox, October 26 of last year, which recommends you to my service. As my apprentice moved on at year’s end, I shall wait upon you on January 26, while I am in Boston to confer with the legislature. I shall be at Government House the whole day. Should I find myself favorably disposed to a relationship, be prepared to step immediately into my service. Yours, Rufus King.’ “

  Will gave his brother a moment, then said, “I plan to use my brain.”

  “You’d desert us? To work for some Boston lawyer?”

  “Lawyer and a congressman, too.”

  “Even worse.” North threw the letter back at his brother. “We’ll need every able-bodied man in Hampshire County to take that arsenal. Every man needs a weapon. ’Tis the only way to stand against a government set out to oppress the people.”

  “You don’t need me.” Will folded the letter and put it back into his pocket.

  North stood—the older brother, intimidating by his size, his personality, his simple position in the birth order. “You desert us now, Willie, and you won’t be able to hold your head up in this town again … or in this family.”

  And from the hearth came these words: “He’s goin’ to Boston.”

  Both brothers were shocked to hear the sudden strength in their father’s voice, shocked as well that he was awake and listening.

  The old man stood, steadied himself, and shuffled across the room. “Whatever lies ahead, we can’t be killin’ a boy’s dream. Especially when it makes good sense.”

  “Good sense?” said North. “To join the other side?”

  “We’re all Americans. We’re on the same side,” said George North Pike. “I got out of jail because Will used his smart brain, not because you closed the courts.”

  “If not for the closin’ of the courts,” answered North, “Henry Knox never would’ve went to Springfield so Will could go there and impress him.”

  The father sat at the table, thought about that a moment, and said, “True enough … I’d have to say you both done good.”

  Then North dropped into his chair, swept up the petition again, glanced at it, threw it back on the table.

  And their father continued to talk more than he had since he came home. “A man with two strong sons is lucky for certain. Especially when they’re strong willed, too. So I’ll stand by both of you. And if one wants to march on the Springfield arsenal and one wants to go to Boston, I say that each of you is right.”

  AT DAWN TWO days later, the brothers bade goodbye to their father. Will had stoked the fire and made an extra-large pot of cornmeal mush. North had brought in three days’ worth of firewood and promised he would be back before it ran out.

  At the meetinghouse, two dozen Pelham Regulators were waiting. A bonfire released waving sheets of warmth into the gray sky and lent a strangely festive air to the scene. But the bundled bodies of men hulked inward against the cold and the tentlike stacks of muskets—fewer muskets than men, to be sure—gave the moment a more appropriate foreshadowing. Will Pike smelled snow and trouble in the wind.

  Daniel Shays stood on the meetinghouse steps, motionless under a black wool cape. Doc Hines stoo
d near him, holding a ledger on which he was writing the names of the men as they arrived.

  “Hot rebellion in the freezin’ cold!” shouted North Pike.

  “Mornin’ boys,” said Shays. “Glad to see the both of you.”

  “I’ll set down both names, then?” asked Doc Hines.

  “Not mine,” said Will. “I’m only goin’ as far as Palmer.”

  “Palmer?” Hines looked faintly comical with a scarf tied around his ears and his tricorne plunked on top of it. “If it’s Palmer and no farther, why go at all?”

  “He’s gettin’ the coach in Palmer,” said North. “Goin’ to Boston. Goin’ to do our politickin’.”

  “Politickin’?” said Doc Hines. “Who appointed him?”

  North said, “I did,” so that it sounded like a threat. And Shays said, “Good. We need good men doin’ our talkin’.”

  After that, no one said a bad word to Will Pike. They wished him Godspeed in Palmer, and he wished them the same. Any who watched were struck by his farewell to North: a strong handshake and a brotherly embrace. One had inherited his father’s analytical calm, the other the fiery nature of a mother they did not remember. One headed east toward politics; the other went west to war.

  And the northeast wind gusted across the snow-fields.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Will Pike awoke to the sound of farting.

  He was in a bed with two other men, in a chamber containing another bed and three more men, in the Post Road hostelry known as the Wayside Inn. And someone in his bed was farting. He guessed that the culprit was the clockmaker named Adolf Gefahlz, who had partaken of a bowl of cabbage soup in the taproom before retiring.

  Will got up and cracked a window to let in a bit of fresh air. He was glad to see that the snow, which had stopped them the night before, had now stopped falling. They were a day’s ride from Boston, a day and a night by foot, but to keep his appointment with Rufus King, Will had resolved that he would walk the whole way if need be.

  In the taproom, he downed a mug of tea, declining a larger breakfast so as to save shillings and hasten their departure. When the coachman called for help to clear the wheels, Will grabbed a shovel and went to work, but it was after ten before they dug the coach out of a snowdrift and began to roll.

  SOME EIGHTY MILES away, eleven hundred men under the command of Daniel Shays were tramping west on the Post Road toward Springfield. Their plan was for three columns of Regulators to attack the arsenal at the same time—from West Springfield on the west, from Chicopee on the north, and from Palmer on the east.

  By three that afternoon, Shays’s column was drawn up before the arsenal. But the column in the west had not marched. The commander had changed the plan on his own, and his message to Shays had been intercepted, then brought to General William Shepard, who defended the arsenal.

  AT THE SAME time, Will Pike was getting his first glimpse of the steeples of Boston. The snow was not as deep here, perhaps because the city was surrounded by water and reached by a causeway called the Neck.

  As the coach approached the gates, Herr Gefahlz—who was still farting silently, or so Will was certain—explained that the water to the north was the Back Bay, to the south Dorchester Bay, and the snowy hills beyond were Dorchester Heights, where Henry Knox had entrenched the cannon that drove the British from Boston ten years before.

  “My father commanded one of the artillery companies,” said Will.

  And Herr Gefahlz brightened. “Ja? So? A man to make a son proud, eh?”

  “Yes, sir. Very proud.”

  WHILE WILL SPOKE of cannon in Boston, his brother faced them in Springfield.

  North Pike and several of the other lieutenants stood with Shays, about two hundred yards from the arsenal, and studied the ranks of defenders drawn up on the snowy ground before it.

  “This ain’t what my brother saw in October,” said North. “Two cannon, four hundred men armed with new muskets taken right from the stores. A tall order, Dan’l.”

  “Yeah,” said Doc Hines. “And where are the other columns?”

  “Don’t know,” said Shays. “But we’d best drive this team today, or they’ll never pull for us again.”

  A rider was coming down from the arsenal. He reined up close to Shays and said, “I bring General Shepard’s ultimatum: If you put your troops in motion, they will be fired upon.”

  The wind skittered across the road. It ruffled coat-tails and hat brims and two American flags, one fluttering over the arsenal, the other at the head of that cold column of farmers.

  Then Daniel Shays pulled his sword from his hanger and shouted, as much for his own men as for those before the arsenal, “We are here in defense of the country you’ve come to destroy.”

  “Aye!” cried North Pike. “And if we’re not in possession of new muskets by sundown, the people of New England will see a day such as they’ve never seen before.” Then he gave Shays a wink, as if to say that yes, they would brazen their way through.

  Some of the troops cheered. But it was a halfhearted sound that caught in most throats, because none of these Regulators had yet marched against cannon. Big talk would not protect them from grapeshot.

  Then the messenger leaned down and said to Shays: “You see the stakes in the ground on either side of the road? A hundred yards from the arsenal? They form the line of demarcation. Cross it, and General Shepard will give the order to fire.”

  Shays laughed. He was normally a morose man, not much given to display. It had been shocking enough to see him swinging his sword about. But to hear him laugh … perhaps it was more brazening.

  Then Shays turned to his lieutenants and said, “Your posts, men.”

  WHILE NORTH WAS taking his place at the front of the Pelhamite column, Will Pike was walking through Boston with his flatulent new friend.

  Herr Gefahlz explained that as a Hessian soldier he had been captured by the Massachusetts Artillery at Trenton. “They treat me better than my own sergeants. So I decide to stay in America and make clocks. And because your father command them, I treat you good now.”

  The red bricks of the city seemed to glow in the setting sun. The world, Will Pike concluded, was brightening.

  BACK IN SPRINGFIELD the light was fading, and North Pike, who had fought on battlefields and in forecastles and in Boston back alleys, was preparing to fight in the cold blue of a January afternoon.

  At Shays’s command, North shouted, “Forward!”

  Few of the men moved, except to shiver.

  “Forward!” shouted Shays. “Forward march! March, Goddamn you!”

  The other officers from the other towns took up the cry.

  And four hundred men—the only ones who were armed—began to advance.

  North tried to call out a cadence, as he had when he drilled these men on the Pelham town green. But they were farmers, and they were frightened. Their advance, so slow in starting, quickly became a stampede.

  And General Shepard was true to his word.

  As the first units crossed the line, his cannon flashed and blasted jets of smoke. The sound echoed off the advancing farmers, then bounced back and echoed off the walls of the arsenal. But the shots went high, a warning.

  A few of the Regulators stopped, as if shocked by the noise. But many others pressed forward with even greater momentum, as if they would be safe once they closed with the cannon.

  North cried for the Pelham men to keep order, to remember their training, but there was no stopping the column now. Unless …

  The cannoneers were reloading, lowering their barrels, raising their linstocks….

  Another flash ignited the fading light, another blast hammered the attackers, and hundreds of pieces of grapeshot whizzed and sizzled and seared into the flesh of frightened men. A great shout of shock and pain went up from the head of the column, which seemed to stop as if it had run into an invisible wall.

  A man beside North Pike was struck in the forehead with a piece of shot the size of—yes—a Concord grape.
He staggered, looked at North with wide, unseeing eyes, and fell over dead.

  That did it.

  If the Regulators had expected that the militia would not fire, would possibly run, and would probably come over to their side, they were wrong.

  In an instant, those Hampshire County farmers became the rioters that the Boston moneychangers had always considered them to be. But it was a riot of retreat. They did not stop running until midnight. By then, they had run all the way back to Pelham.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Will Pike put on his best deerskin breeches and a green velvet coat that his father had worn on his wedding day. He bade farewell to Gefahlz and his wife and their three plump children, and following Gefahlz’s directions, he took himself from the North End to Long Wharf, where Boston’s commerce made its way into the world. He looked out to sea, past the schooners and East Indiamen, and his heart filled with a grand sense of possibility.

  Then he turned and looked up State Street, past the wagons, the horses, the crowds going about the business of the city, toward the building at the head of the street: the Massachusetts State House, former government house of the British Empire, the place where Will would learn his future. He took a deep breath and started walking.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, with the snow deep and the cold air shimmering in the winter sunlight, North Pike and Daniel Shays and a few others crossed the Massachusetts border into Vermont. The remains of their army had been routed, the rebellion was over, and the leaders were now fugitives under sentence of death.

  But Vermont was its own little republic. They would be as safe in Vermont as if they had crossed into Canada … for the time being.

  So they went in snowshoes and heavy blanket coats across the frozen landscape.

  But toward evening, North Pike decided to split from the others. He told Shays that he had had his fill of uprising. He would take his chances on his own.

  He knew a New Hampshire man who cut logs and floated them down the Connecticut each spring. And he knew a woman in the logging camp, too, a woman with breasts big enough to warm both sides of a man’s face at once.