In the Valley by Harold Frederic

Author:Harold Frederic
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781776670451
Publisher: The Floating Press

Chapter XXI - Containing Other News Besides that from Bunker Hill

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To pass from October, 1774, to mid-June of 1775—from the moonlit streets of sleeping Albany to the broad noonday of open revolt in the Mohawk Valley—is for the reader but the turning of a page with his fingers. To us, in those trying times, these eight months were a painfully long-drawn-out period of anxiety and growing excitement.

War was coming surely upon us—and war under strange and sinister conditions. Dull, horse-racing, dog-fighting noblemen were comforting themselves in Parliament, at London, by declaring that the Americans were cowards and would not fight. We boasted little, but we knew ourselves better. There was as yet small talk of independence, of separation. Another year was to elapse before Thomas Paine's Common Sense should flash a flood of light as from some new sun upon men's minds, and show us both our real goal and the way to attain it. But about fighting, we had resolved our purpose.

We should have been slaves otherwise.

Turn and turn about, titled imbecile had succeeded distinguished incapable at London in the task of humiliating and bullying us into subjection. Now it was Granville, now Townshend, now Bedford, now North—all tediously alike in their refusal to understand us, and their slow obstinacy of determination to rule us in their way, not in ours. To get justice, or even an intelligent hearing, from these people, was hopeless. They listened to their own little clique in the colonies—a coterie of officials, land-owners, dependents of the Crown, often men of too worthless a character to be tolerated longer in England—who lied us impudently and unblushingly out of court. To please these gentry, the musty statutes of Tudor despotism were ransacked for a law by which we were to be haled over the seas for trial by an English jury for sedition; the port of Boston was closed to traffic, and troops crowded into the town to overawe and crush its citizens; a fleet of war-ships was despatched under Lord Howe to enforce by broadsides, if needs be, the wicked and stupid trade and impost laws which we resented; everywhere the Crown authorities existed to harass our local government, affront such honest men as we selected to honor, fetter or destroy our business, and eat up our substance in wanton taxation.

There had been a chance that the new Parliament, meeting for the first time in the January of this 1775, would show more sense, and strive to honestly set matters right. We had appealed from Crown and Commons to the English people; for a little we fancied the result might be favorable. But the hope speedily fell to the ground. The English, with that strange rushing of blood to the head which, from age to age, on occasion blinds their vision, confuses their judgment, and impels them to rude and brutal courses, decreed in their choler that we should be flogged at the cart-tail.

To this we said no!

In Albany, on this day in the latter

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