Читать книгу A Child is Born - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 3
ОглавлениеGentlemen in velvet breeches who knew how to take a pinch of snuff with infinite grace. Children of mechanics in Boston standing shivering in narrow streets outside of gabled houses singing Christmas carols.
New England merchants aghast at British cheap tea, Colonial workingmen and farmers toiling twelve hours through the day; giving their blood at Lexington, at Brandywine, at Bunker Hill, dreaming of a day when men would be free; facing British and Hessian bayonets.
Hoofs of horses clattering through black-shadowed villages. Massachusetts farmers scrambling out of bed, reaching for flintlocks....
Philadelphia businessmen selling food and supplies to General Howe’s redcoat army. The first Congress haggling bitterly over grants and provisions for the Revolutionary Army. Tom Paine writing to hearten a war-weary people.
The rich domains of the New Land. Indentured white servants from England, Ireland and Wales. Black slaves brought shackled in the holds of slaveships from the brilliant African coast....
Lanky Abe Lincoln splitting rails, reading the law, becoming president, freeing the slaves. New Englanders buying blockade cotton, laying foundations for proud families.
Mississippi paddle-boats and gentlemen with curled, perfumed mustachios; dandies wearing long pantaloons strapped under boots.
Revolution in technology comes. The giant steam is set to work. Factories rear smokestacks where once peaceful towns slept by quiet rivers. A few handlooms become a textile-mill town. Steel mills rise on the ruins of village foundries.
Sprawling, sleepy towns send sons forth to conquer the West. Millions of immigrants are imported to labor in the building of the new empire. They pour through the gateways of the Western World looking with wet eyes at the uplifted arm of the Statue of Liberty in the harbor....
Slums spread. The East Side. The Bowery. In Boston near the wharves. In Philadelphia, in narrow crooked streets. In Brooklyn, too, slums on the bay front—near the oil-covered Gowanus Canal—Red Hook.
