Essential Novelists - Harold Frederic. Frederic Harold
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softness of the firs in the air we breathed, and the flaming firelight in our eyes. Perhaps lank, uncouth Barent Coppernol may have dreamed of it, as he snored by the outer heap of blazing logs. If so, did he, as in prophecy, see his own form, with cleft skull, stretched on the hill-side?
"I spoke about Philip's having some of his father's adopted Irish traits," said Mr. Cross, after a longer interval of silence than usual. "One of them is the desire to have subordinates, dependents, about him. There is no Irishman so poor or lowly that he will not, if possible, encourage some still poorer, lowlier Irishman to hang to his skirts. It is a reflection of their old Gaelic tribal system, I suppose, which, between its chiefs above and its clansmen below, left no place for a free yeomanry. I note this same thing in the Valley, with the Johnsons and the Butlers. So far as Sir William is concerned, the quality I speak of has been of service to the Colony, for he has used his fondness and faculty for attracting retainers and domineering over subordinates to public advantage. But then he is an exceptional and note-worthy man—one among ten thousand. But his son Sir John, and his son-in-law Guy Johnson, and the Butlers, father and son, and now to them added our masterful young Master Philip—these own no such steadying balance-wheel of common-sense. They have no restraining notion of public interest. Their sole idea is to play the aristocrat, to surround themselves with menials, to make their neighbors concede to them submission and reverence. It was of them that Herkimer spoke, plainly enough, though he gave no names. Mark my words, they will come to grief with that man, if the question be ever put to the test."
I had not seen enough of Englishmen to understand very clearly the differences between them and the Irish, and I said so. The conversation drifted upon race questions and distinctions, as they were presented by the curiously mixed population of New York province.
My companion was of the impression that the distinctly British settlements, like those of Massachusetts and Virginia, were far more powerful and promising than my own polyglot province. No doubt from his point of view this notion was natural, but it nettled me. To this day I cannot read or listen to the inflated accounts this New England and this Southern State combine to give of their own greatness, of their wonderful patriotism and intelligence, and of the tremendous part they played in the Revolution, without smashing my pipe in wrath. Yet I am old enough now to see that all this is largely the fault of the New Yorkers themselves. We have given our time and attention to the making of money, and have left it to others to make the histories. If they write themselves down large, and us small, it is only what might have been expected. But at the time of which I am telling I was very young, and full of confidence in not only the existing superiority but the future supremacy of my race. I could not foresee how we were to be snowed under by the Yankees in our own State, and, what is worse, accept our subjugation without a protest—so that to-day the New York schoolboy supposes Fisher Ames, or any other of a dozen Boston talkers, to have been a greater man than Philip Schuyler.
I remember that I greatly vaunted the good qualities of the Dutch that night. I pointed out how they alone had learned the idea of religious toleration toward others in the cruel school of European persecution; how their faith in liberty and in popular institutions, nobly exemplified at home in the marvellous struggle with Spain, had planted roots of civil and religious freedom in the New World which he could find neither to the east nor to the south of us; and how even the early Plymouth Puritans had imbibed all they knew of clemency and liberty during their stay in Holland.
I fear that Mr. Cross inwardly smiled more or less at my enthusiasm and extravagance, but his comments were all serious and kindly. He conceded the justice of much that I said, particularly as to the admirable resolution, tenacity, and breadth of character the Dutch had displayed always in Europe. But then he went on to declare that the Dutch could not hope to hold their own in strange lands against the extraordinary conquering and colonizing power of the more numerous English, who, by sheer force of will and energy, were destined in the end to dominate everything they touched. Note how Clive and the English had gradually undermined or overthrown French, Portuguese, and Dutch alike in the Indies, he said; the same thing has happened here, either by bloodshed or barter. No nation could resist the English in war; no people could maintain themselves in trade or the peaceful arts against the English.
"But you yourself predicted, not an hour ago, that the young gentry down the Valley would come to grief in their effort to lord it over the Dutch and Palatines."
"Oh, that indeed," my friend replied. "They are silly sprouts, grown up weak and spindling under the shadow of Sir William; when he is cut down the sun will shrivel them, no doubt. But the hardier, healthier plants which finally take their place will be of English stock—not Dutch or German."
I hope devoutly that this lengthened digression into politics has not proved wearisome. I have touched upon but one of a hundred like conversations which we two had together on our slow journey, and this because I wanted to set forth the manner of things we discussed, and the views we severally had. Events proved that we both were partially right. The United States of the Netherlands was the real parent of the United States of America, and the constitution which the Dutch made for the infant State of New York served as the model in breadth and in freedom for our present noble Federal Constitution. In that much my faith was justified. But it is also true that my State is no longer Dutch, but English, and that the language of my mother has died out from among us.
Before noon next day we reached Fort Stanwix, the forest-girdled block-house commanding the Great Carrying Place. Here we waited one day for the boats to come up, and half of another to get them through the sluices into Wood Creek. Then, as the horses and carts returned, we embarked and set our faces toward the Lakes.
Chapter XIII
To the Far Lake Country and Home Again.
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We had left what it pleases us to call civilization behind. Until our return we were scarcely again to see the blackened fields of stumps surrounding clearings, or potash kettles, or girdled trees, or chimneys.
Not that our course lay wholly through unbroken solitude; but the men we for the most part encountered were of the strange sort who had pushed westward farther and farther to be alone—to get away from their fellows. The axe to them did not signify the pearlash of commerce, but firewood and honey and coon-skins for their own personal wants. They traded a little, in a careless, desultory fashion, with the proceeds of their traps and rifles. But their desires were few—a pan and kettle, a case of needles and cord, some rum or brandy from cider or wild grapes, tobacco, lead, and powder—chiefly the last three. They fed themselves, adding to their own fish and game only a little pounded maize which they got mostly from the Indians, and cooked in mush or on a baking stone. In the infrequent cases where there were women with them, we sometimes saw candles, either dips or of the wax of myrtle-berries, but more often the pine-knot was used. Occasionally they had log-houses, with even here and there a second story above the puncheon-floor, reached by a ladder; but in the main their habitations were half-faced camps, secured in front at night by fires. They were rough, coarse, hardened, drunken men as a rule, generally disagreeable and taciturn; insolent, lazy, and miserable from my point of view, but I judge both industrious and contented from their own.
We should have had little favor or countenance from these fellows, I doubt not, but for Enoch Wade. He seemed to know all the saturnine, shaggy, lounging outcasts whom we met in unexpected places; if he did not, they knew him at a glance for one of their own kidney, which came to the same thing. It was on his account that we were tolerated, nay, even advised and helped and entertained.
Enoch had been a prodigious traveller—or else was a still more prodigious liar—I never quite decided which. He told them, when we chanced to sit around their fires of an evening, most remarkable stories of field and forest—of caribou and seals killed in the North; of vast herds of bison on far Western prairies; of ice-bound winters spent in the Hudson Bay Company's preserves beyond the Lakes; of houses built of oyster-shells and cement on the Carolina coast. They listened gravely, smoking their cob-and-reed pipes, and eying him attentively. They liked him, and they did not seem to