CHAPTER XIII
The dearest thought of an American patriot is the fact that, no matter how deep and powerful the plots for aristocratic forms of government, these ideas wither and die in embryo on the free soil of America. The dreams of a Fairfax in Virginia, the Patroons in New York, a Blennerhasset in the Ohio Valley, were never to be realized in the free air of America. The principle of primogeniture found no favor in the new land of hope and refuge. The Covenanters in Pennsylvania and the valley of Virginia, the Puritans in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Catholics in Maryland, the Debtors in Georgia, all left British soil with grievances which were to be righted in the wilderness.
All of those who were favored with prosperity remained at home, and they were largely the first-born sons, or entailed heirs. The underlings cleared out to the wild-woods. How could the mother country expect, therefore, conformity to her system of aristocratic estates, if those who sought the Colonies left home smarting under the inequality shown to the younger sons? The laws of Britain had, through generations, elevated the first-born and pauperized the junior offspring, till at last the American Revolution could with propriety be named the uprising of the younger sons of Britain for equality. Can Englishmen wonder, therefore, to-day, that Americans have no patience with English aristocracy and royalty? Any statesman who would emulate English social systems in America may be prepared for an avalanche.
However, there is one relic of old England’s musty law tomes with which the younger sons may again have to measure swords, if not settled by peaceful and constitutional means. That is a law analogous to the law of entailed estates, which maintains inequality in like manner between individuals. The growth has been gradual and unseen until recent years; but at the same time producing rumblings in the hearts of the unfavored persons. Primogeniture maintained inequality between brothers and sisters in the family; the other creates an inequality in finance and commerce, in perpetuo, by means of an artificial person, endowed with a legal immortality which destroys all individualism. That fiction of vested rights is the stock corporation under the genius and authority of the Common Law of England.
No matter how safe Americans may feel against the introduction of aristocratic laws and forms of government, still, spasmodically and industriously, attempts have been made to supplant the idea of equality before the law, by legislation for the favored ones.
The mission of Roderick Barclugh to the new world was to crush out the struggle for liberty by means of bribery and at the same time to imitate those laws of England, which would bind the social conditions of England upon the Colonists forever. Against the rebels, the outcome of the War for Independence seemed such a foregone conclusion, that already Roderick Barclugh was scheming to advance his own social prestige which his zeal for the King of England promised. He expected to be Viceroy of the Colonies, and to receive the title of Lord Barclugh of Allegheny.
The matter had been so far decided and planned that the letter to Arnold explicitly stated that the Parliament of the Colonies would have an upper house of Lords of the Realm who were to receive their patents of nobility from the King of England. The thought of independence was ridiculed by the English; so what could more properly occupy the thoughts of Barclugh than his exalted position when England should subdue the rebels?
His mind was set upon creating one of the most extensive landed estates to which noble blood could lay claim. He would receive one of those royal grants of land out of the public domain in Western Pennsylvania, equal to a principality. He would build such a castle that its renown would live through ages. The tenantry would be bound to the soil from generation to generation, paying their rents for the privilege of bare existence upon the lands of a noble lord. The miller’s son would be a miller, the blacksmith’s boy would be a blacksmith, the ploughman’s boy would be a ploughman, toiling without hope and without ambition; for the privilege of equality would be denied them under the English social system.
The consuming thought of Barclugh in all these stirring panoramas was the founding of a noble family that would emblazon the crest of Barclugh high in the fields of statesmanship and war.
But how was such a problem to be accomplished? Should he wait until his honors had fallen to him, and then go home and ally his name with one of the great houses and names of English nobility? Or should he seek among the best blood in the Colonies, a lady out of the representatives of wealth, gentility, and intellect, because such an one would be inured to the customs and privations of pioneers which a grande dame from ancestral halls could never endure? Either one course or the other must be chosen. For land and heirs are necessary appendages to successful nobles. Land without heirs is a misfortune; but heirs without lands or wealth, among aristocrats, had better been unborn.