Читать книгу Lydia Bailey - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 3

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I’m not over-enthusiastic about books that teach or preach, but I may as well admit in the beginning that my primary reason for writing this book was to teach as many as possible of those who come after me how much hell and ruin are inevitably brought on innocent people and innocent countries by men who make a virtue of consistency.

All the great villains and small villains whom I met so frequently in the events I’m about to set down were consistent men—unimaginative men who consistently believed in war as a means of settling disputes between nations; equally misguided men who consistently believed that war must be avoided at all hazards, no matter what the provocation; narrow men who consistently upheld the beliefs and acts of one political party and saw no good in any other; shortsighted men who consistently refused to see that the welfare of their own nation was dependent upon the welfare of every other nation; ignorant men who consistently thought that the policies of their own government should be supported and followed, whether those policies were right or wrong; dangerous men who consistently thought that all people with black skins are inferior to those with white skins; intolerant men who consistently believed that all people with white skins should be forced to accept all people with black skins as equals. And I know that any nation that cannot or will not avoid the dreadful pitfalls of consistency will be one with the dead empires whose crumbling monuments studded our battlegrounds in Haiti and in Africa.

My first great lesson in the perils of consistency came from my uncle, who was Colonel William Tyng of Falmouth in the Province of Maine—the town whose name was later changed to Portland.

He was a lawyer and shipowner, patron and erector of St. Paul’s Church, First Master of the Falmouth Lodge of Free Masons, Sheriff of Cumberland County, and colonel by virtue of a commission from Governor Gage. Prior to the Revolution, he had taken repeated oaths of allegiance to the King and Government of Great Britain, and, since he had a low opinion of men who refused to fulfill their obligations or their oaths of allegiance, he remained loyal to the King when the Revolution broke out in 1775. As a result he was branded as a Tory, his home was plundered of its plate and valuables, and he and his family—with the exception of his mother-in-law—took refuge with the English in New York.

His family consisted of his wife, his wife’s sister (who was my mother), and my father, Albion Hamlin, for whom I was named. My father was Colonel Tyng’s cousin, and had gone to sea as a cabin boy in one of the colonel’s ships, had captained that same ship at the age of nineteen, and had then been put in charge of all my uncle’s shipping interests, not only the building of the ships, but planning their voyages and cargoes. After he moved to New York he became an officer in DeLancey’s Third Battalion, a Loyalist regiment, and I always think of him as dressed in that uniform of green faced with orange, smart-looking in spite of being patched, darned, and faded from innumerable marches and battles.

All my uncle’s property was confiscated by the Portland rebels, of course; but since he had befriended many Portland men during his life in New York—among other things effecting the release of Edward Preble from the Jersey prison ship—he held the affection and regard of those in high places. Consequently his lands were sold for a nominal sum to his mother-in-law, Madam Ross, who continued to live undisturbed on the family farm in Gorham. They even allowed Madam Ross to buy my uncle’s three slaves as well; for in spite of all their consistent preaching about Liberty, Freedom, and Equality, the rebels thought slavery was a good thing under certain circumstances for certain sorts of people.

At the end of the Revolution, when Loyalists by the thousand left New York and New England to take refuge in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Canada, my uncle went with them; and my father, my mother, and I went too, in the transport Martha, which carried the officers, men, and families of DeLancey’s Third Battalion and Maryland Loyalists. On the voyage the Martha struck an uncharted rock off the southern tip of Nova Scotia; and, since there were only enough boats for the women and children, the two regiments were drawn up in company formation on the deck of the sinking vessel while the women and children were handed into the boats. All but three of the men were drowned. I think of those regiments whenever those who consistently call themselves Liberal speak contemptuously—as they consistently do—of Tories.

I was ten years old at the time, but I can see my father now, on the deck of the Martha in his old green-and-orange uniform, walking up and down along the front of his company. We were lying off in a longboat, and the Martha was rammed high up on the sunken rock with her stern sinking deeper and deeper into the water. We could see him talking to his men, holding them steady, I suppose; and when the ship slipped off the rock like a vessel sliding down the ways, a sort of shining image of him and his men stood there on the empty sea. That’s how I always see him when things look dark—a figure in shining green, walking steadily in the face of danger and sharing his courage with his friends.

So my father died; and a few weeks later, as a result of shock and exposure, my mother died too, and I was left in my uncle’s care.

In return for his sacrifices for the Crown, my uncle was given a grant of land in Queen’s County, New Brunswick, and made Chief Justice of the province. He also acted as mediator between the Loyalists and the Home Government in arranging the settlement of wild lands; and people all up and down the river regarded the big square house he built at White’s Cove as a sort of royal palace.

I had the run of my uncle’s small but excellent library, ranging from the works of the historian Josephus to the Travels of William Bartram, and instruction in French from an impoverished Frenchwoman who had been driven from Nova Scotia when the French residents of that unhappy country had been scattered to all parts of the world by Boston troops. Thanks to her I was able, by the time I was fourteen, to earn my keep by working in my uncle’s office, writing his letters, keeping his letter-book up to date, entering in his day-book the troubles and the complaints of the Loyalists who were perpetually at him for advice and help, and recording the exaggerated claims of the French Canadians, whose chief object in life seemed to be to get the better of Loyalists by fair means or foul—preferably foul.

On winter nights, to help the entire family with the French tongue so necessary to a resident of Canada, my uncle had me read aloud from the only decent French book to be had in New Brunswick—a French biography of Christopher Columbus; and before I’d finished the story of that amazing navigator, I could roll up a French verb in the back of my throat and blow it out through my nose as boldly as though I’d eaten frogs from infancy.

Now the Loyalists who forsook the United States for New Brunswick at the end of the Revolution were fine people, who had elected to be loyal at a time when loyalty was visited by persecution, certain ruin, and probable death; and in partial recognition of their loyalty the British Government promised to help establish them in their new homes. The promises, unhappily, weren’t kept. The necessary food, seed, tools, never arrived on time or in sufficient quantities, so that the situation of the Loyalists was often desperate.

Since my uncle was a man of integrity, he resented England’s failure to fulfill her obligations to the Loyalists, and his resentment grew with every passing year. In 1793, when I was twenty years old, one of the towns on the St. John—a town half logs and half canvas—burned to the ground at the beginning of winter, and ship after ship came out from England without supplies for those poor people, or tools to enable them to build new dwellings. That was more than my uncle could stand, and he sent an ultimatum to the Colonial Office.

Every person in that town [he wrote with an angry hand and a sputtering pen] has fought for the King, frozen for the King, starved for the King, worked his fingers to the bone for the King. They’re starving, they’re dying of exposure while His Majesty’s ministers and clerks roast their fat buttocks before glowing fires, and froust so late between feather mattresses that they can’t find time to help better and more deserving people. For years I have humbled myself to His Majesty’s Government, begging the bare necessities of life for people who sacrificed everything to keep the British Empire together; but all I’ve been able to get them are idle promises, forgotten as soon as made. Any scarecrow would be as efficient a Chief Justice as I, and accomplish as much for the deluded people whose loyalty, I now strongly suspect, was grossly misplaced. It becomes my unpleasant duty to demand that all supplies listed in my past five letters be dispatched immediately. Failing this, have the kindness to replace me immediately as Chief Justice of this province and as Mediator for Wild Lands, for my resignation from both offices will be automatic.

The supplies didn’t come; so, after my uncle had stayed through the winter and done everything he could for those unhappy people, he distributed all his possessions on the St. John to neighbors up and down the river, and with his wife and me sailed straight back to Portland, where he was made welcome and the title to all his lands returned to him: the farm in Gorham, on the outskirts of the city, and even the enormously valuable strip of land across the middle of Portland Neck, from the harbor to Back River.

My uncle was welcomed, on his return to Portland, because of the politics of the time, which were violent and bitter.

In 1775 he had been driven from the city for being loyal to the government he had sworn to uphold. In 1794 he was received with open arms because he had been loyal to England in 1775; for Portland was a Federalist stronghold, and the Federalists, fearing that the ideas of the French Revolution might become popular in America and so cost them their newly acquired wealth, had fallen in love with everything English because England was at war with France—which shows how political principles for which men die in a given year are relegated to the attic the following year, along with childhood playthings, old-fashioned dresses, broken furniture, and dusty love-letters.

Like everybody else in Portland, my uncle considered himself a Federalist when he first came back from New Brunswick. He certainly considered himself so while Washington was still President; and at first, after John Adams became President, Colonel Tyng was willing to agree with the Portland people who were forever telling each other that those men were America’s greatest sons, patient, wise, tolerant, well worth following in everything: that John Adams was a great President, a bulwark against Jacobinism. He was willing to agree, too—at first—with all the Portland people who were everlastingly damning Thomas Jefferson’s hellishness and the frightfulness of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican party. Jefferson was a Jacobin, the Portlanders said, because he sympathized with France and the successful effort of the French people to rid themselves of the aristocrats.

New England’s fear of Jacobins was beyond belief. The section was full of merchants, shipowners, manufacturers, landowners, who had amassed fortunes since the Revolution. They mistakenly thought that their wealth made them aristocrats, so they were in constant agony lest the violence of the French Revolution should spread to America, and all aristocrats be guillotined, as in France—or at least deprived of their homes, their fortunes, and their high positions.

The worst of all epithets, to their way of thinking, was “Jacobin”; and we soon found that anybody who opposed a wealthy New Englander, any admirer of Thomas Jefferson, anybody who refused to do as the Federalists wished him to do, anybody who voted against a Federalist, anybody that New Englanders disliked, was a Jacobin, an outcast; a dirty, ignorant, worthless, dangerous, bloody Jacobin.

My uncle had no quarrel with that argument—not at first. As for me, I didn’t care. I knew one thing and I was determined to be consistent about it at all hazards: my father, my mother, and my uncle had originally been driven from their homes and their country for political reasons, and as a result my parents had died. Politicians had murdered them, and I had no use whatever for politics or politicians, no matter who they were. This dislike was so profound that it even led me to view the entire legal profession with a jaundiced eye. It was painfully evident that most politicians were lawyers, and I never worked on a case without fearing that the hair-splitting forced on every lawyer might some day make me willing to split hairs in matters that had nothing to do with the law.

I didn’t care, even, when Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Law and my uncle began to rage at the Federalists’ iniquities. “What in God’s name are they thinking of?” he’d shout, in the privacy of our law office. “Why, damn these damned, ruthless, self-seeking——”

His tirades wearied me, and I closed my ears to them.

It made no difference to me that President Adams was determined to keep himself and his pet politicians in office at all costs. The truth was that I wasn’t much interested in anyone but myself at just that time—a state of affairs that may have been partly due to believing that my heart was broken, something that almost any young man can understand if he will send his mind back to the period when he used to go calling on Sunday afternoons.

I didn’t want to hear about petty politics, governmental waste and extravagance, or the willingness of Portland Federalists to condone such things; so I was overjoyed when my uncle, in disgust over man’s stupidity, decided to retire to his five-hundred-acre farm in Gorham and take me with him to do the actual farming of his acres. All I wanted, I thought, was freedom from politics, space in which to escape those who discussed political matters.

Farming, I thought, was simple and easy, and anyone could be a good farmer. This was what I thought at first, in my youthful ignorance. But when I went to neighboring farmers for advice on plowing, planting, fertilizing, milking, and all the multifarious activities of a farm, I found their ignorance as bad as mine and, in its consistency, even more appalling. That was how I came to make the acquaintance of Jared Eliot’s Essays upon Field Husbandry in New England, Samuel Dean’s New England Farmer, James Anderson’s great Essays on Agriculture, Lord Kames’s masterly Gentleman Farmer, and Arthur Young’s monumental Course of Experimental Agriculture. Those books gave me a heightened appreciation of the true worth of land and the magic that results when it is properly treated. They taught me the dreadful consequences of plowing up and down hills, so that the soil is washed away; the need of plowing at right angles to every slope, to prevent erosion and to increase the size of crops; the benefits of using lime lavishly and often; the need of fertilizer; the necessity of repeatedly ditching fields so that water can never stand upon them; the reasons why crops should be planted in rotation; the benefits to be gained by restricting cattle to small sections of meadows and moving them frequently; the absurdity of the superstitions that attach, in farmers’ minds, to every phase of farming; and a thousand other things of which city dwellers never have the slightest inkling. Best of all, those books taught me the value of experimenting.

My first year was one of mistakes, mishaps, and discouragement; but from then on I was perpetually amazed at the endless wealth that rewarded our industry and study. The shelves of our rock-walled cellar came to be stacked with jars of preserves, crocks of butter, and boxes of maple sugar; bottles of ketchup, maple syrup, and cucumber relish; bags of beans and field-peas; ducks and chickens in kegs of lard. We made an ice-house, with ice-cakes set solid between the outer walls, and in it we hung saddles and legs of lamb and mutton, succulent hams, shoulders and back-bacon from corn-fed pigs, beef that melted in the mouth, smoked geese and turkeys, smoked salmon from the Kennebec, fat bear-haunches for mince meat.

My aunt was a great hand to work, and from the flax we raised she wove endless yards of linen for shirts and sheets and tablecloths.

When, in the third year, I really began to get the hang of farming, I was happier than I had ever been before and thankful that I had given up the law and no longer had to plead the cases of contentious clients before sleepy judges. My uncle made me a present of half the farm: I was dependent on nobody, and no day was sufficiently long to let me do the things I wished to do. As a result of my following the advice of Kames, Young, and Anderson, all our fields took on a lushness that seemed miraculous, for their lushness held during droughts. And, best of all, I was my own master and free of politicians.

At last, I said to myself, I was doing something that was worth while, something I wanted ardently to do—and if I lived to be a million years old, I wouldn’t move an inch or lift a hand toward anything that would embroil me with politics or politicians.

I was going to be consistent, and that was all there was to it—consistent, like the farmer who plows up and down hill because it’s easier; like the farmer who burns the dry grass on his fields because the burning makes them greener than unburned fields, though it ruins them in the end; like the farmer who continues to take crops from the soil without putting anything back. I realized that the stupid consistency of those farmers was wrecking their land and wasting their substance; but I couldn’t see beyond farming—I couldn’t see that my own consistency was just as ruinous and stupid as theirs.