It warms my old heart still to recall the earnestness and calm courage of that summer fortnight of preparation. All up and down the Valley bottom-lands the haying was in progress. Young and old, rich and poor, came out to carry forward this work in common. The meadows were taken in their order, some toiling with scythe and sickle, others standing guard at the forest borders of the field to protect the workers. It was a goodly yield that year, I remember, and never in my knowledge was the harvest gathered and housed better or more thoroughly than in this period of genuine danger, when no man knew whose cattle would feed upon his hay a month hence. The women and girls worked beside the men, and brought them cooling drinks of ginger, molasses, and vinegar, and spread tables of food in the early evening shade for the weary gleaners. These would march home in bodies, a little later, those with muskets being at the front and rear; and then, after a short night's honest sleep, the rising sun would find them again at work upon some other farm.
There was something very good and strengthening in this banding together to get the hay in for all. During twenty years of peace and security, we had grown selfish and solitary--each man for himself. We had forgotten, in the strife for individual gain and preferment, the true meaning of that fine old word "neighbor"--the husbandman, or boer, who is nigh, and to whom in nature you first look for help and sympathy and friendship. It was in this fortnight of common peril that we saw how truly we shared everything, even life itself, and how good it was to work for as well as to fight for one another--each for all, and all for each. Forty years have gone by since that summer, yet still I seem to discover in the Mohawk Valley the helpful traces of that fortnight's harvesting in common. The poor bauers and squatters from the bush came out then and did their share of the work, and we went back with them into their forest clearings and beaver-flies and helped them get in their small crops, in turn. And to this day there is more brotherly feeling here between the needy and the well-to-do than I know of anywhere else.
When the barns were filled, and the sweet-smelling stacks outside properly built and thatched, the scythe was laid aside for the musket, the sickle for the sword and pistol. All up the Valley the drums' rattle drowned the drone of the locusts in the stubble. The women moulded bullets now and filled powder-horns instead of making drinks for the hay-field. There was no thought anywhere save of preparation for the march. Guns were cleaned, flints replaced, new hickory ramrods whittled out, and the grindstones threw off sparks under the pressure of swords and spear-heads. Even the little children were at work rubbing goose-grease into the hard leather of their elders' foot-gear, against the long tramp to Fort Stanwix.
By this time, the first of August, we knew more about the foe we were to meet. The commander whom Enoch had heard called Sillinger was learned to be one Colonel St. Leger, a British officer of distinction, which might have been even greater if he had not embraced the Old-World military vice of his day--grievous drunkenness. The gathering of Indians at Oswego under Claus and Brant was larger than the first reports had made it. The regular troops, both British and German, intended for our destruction, were said to alone outnumber the whole militia force which we could hope to oppose to them. But most of all we thought of the hundreds of our old Tory neighbors, who were bringing this army down upon us to avenge their own fancied wrongs; and when we thought of them we moodily rattled the bullets in our deerskin bags, and bent the steel more fiercely upon the whirling, hissing stone.
I have read much of war, both ancient and modern. I declare solemnly that in no chronicle of warfare in any country, whether it be of great campaigns like those of Marlborough and the late King of Prussia, and that strange Buonaparte, half god, half devil, who has now been caged at last at St. Helena; of brutal invasions by a foreign enemy, as when the French overran and desolated the Palatinate; or of buccaneering and piratical enterprise by the Spaniards and Portuguese; or of the fighting of savages or of the Don Cossacks--in none of these records, I aver, can you find so much wanton baseness and beast-like bloodthirstiness as these native-born Tories showed toward us. Mankind has not been capable of more utter cruelty and wickedness than were in their hearts. Beside them the lowest painted heathen in their train was a Christian, the most ignorant Hessian peasant was a nobleman.
Ever since my talk with Colonel Dayton I had been trying to look upon these Tories as men who, however mistaken, were acting from a sense of duty. For a full year it seemed as if I had succeeded; indeed, more than once, so temperately did I bring myself in my new philosophy to think of them, I was warned by my elders that it would be better for me to keep my generous notions to myself. But now, when the stress came, all this philanthropy fell away. These men were leading down to their old home an army of savages and alien soldiers; they were boasting that we, their relatives or whilom school-fellows, neighbors, friends, should be slaughtered like rats in a pit; their commander, St. Leger, published at their instigation general orders offering his Indians twenty dollars apiece for the scalps of our men, women, and children! How could one pretend not to hate such monsters?
At least I did not pretend any longer, but worked with an enthusiasm I had never known before to marshal our yeomanry together.
Under the pelting July sun, in the saddle from morning till night--to Cherry Valley, to Stone Arabia, to the obscure little groups of cabins in the bush, to the remote settlements on the Unadilla and the East Creek--organizing, suggesting, pleading, sometimes, I fear, also cursing a little, my difficult work was at last done. The men of the Mohawk district regiment, who came more directly under my eye, were mustered at Caughnawaga, and some of the companies that were best filled despatched forward under Captain Adam Fonda, who was all impatience to get first to Fort Dayton, the general rendezvous. In all we were likely to gather together in this regiment one hundred and thirty men, and this was better than a fortnight ago had seemed possible.
They were sturdy fellows for the most part, tall, deep-chested, and hard of muscle. They came from the high forest clearings of Kingsland and Tribes Hill, from the lower Valley flatlands near to Schenectady, from the bush settlements scattered back on Aries Creek, from the rich farms and villages of Johnstown, and Caughnawaga, and Spraker's. There were among them all sorts and conditions of men, thrifty and thriftless, cautious and imprudent, the owners of slaves along with poor yokels of scarcely higher estate than the others' niggers. Here were posted thick in the roll-call such names as Fonda, Starin, Yates, Sammons, Gardenier, and Wemple. Many of the officers, and some few of the men, had rough imitations of uniform, such as home-made materials and craft could command, but these varied largely in style and color. The great majority of the privates wore simply their farm homespun, gray and patched, and some had not even their hat-brims turned up with a cockade. But they had a look on their sunburned, gnarled, and honest faces which the Butlers and Johnsons might well have shrunk from.
These men of the Mohawk district spoke more Dutch than anything else, though there were both English and High German tongues among them. They had more old acquaintances among the Tories than had their Palatine friends up the river, for this had been the Johnsons' own district. Hence, though in numbers we were smaller than the regiments that mustered above at Stone Arabia and Zimmerman's, at Canajoharie and Cherry Valley, we were richer in hate.