“But mere conquest does not entitle you to treat them as rebels,” urged the committee. “They are within their rights to preserve their allegiance, so long as they do not violate the rules of war by opposing you with arms.”
One of the officers smiled. He opened a book. “Once more I must respectfully refer you to your own court decisions,” he said, and read from a United States Supreme Court verdict: “ ‘Conquest is a valid title while the victor maintains exclusive territory of the conquered country.’ ”[126]
“There is nothing that we can do,” the committee reported to the people. It was the refrain that sounded in all the United States just then. To the wild projects for desperate defense that were being broached every day in the city of New York, to the frenzied demands that the volunteers in the western camps be rushed into the field, to the curses directed at the American army because it refused to fight, the same answer formulated itself because there was no other. Always, from all quarters, to all demands and imprecations, the only answer that was possible was: “There is nothing that we can do!”
The city multitudes surrendered wearily to the situation; but there were men whom the helpless reply drove frantic.
There were hundreds of these men in New York, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Newark, and all the towns eastward from there into Connecticut. They were militiamen who had not been able to join their organizations when they went to the front, or whose organizations had been merely paper ones. There were members of sportsmen’s clubs, accustomed to the use of heavy-caliber fire-arms and to the trail, and there were many men who were moved simply by the recklessness of courage.[127]
During the days while there drifted through the United States the broken, incomplete but ever-growing story of New England’s uprising and its fearful suppression, these men had begun to assemble in Connecticut’s country between New Haven and Hartford, urged by no settled plan but moving to that district simply because it was the last American front between New York and the invading army.
The Foe’s Slow Advance
The enemy was moving westward slowly. He had to hold out a mighty screen northwestward against the American army that now lay beyond the Berkshire Hills, holding the land between western Connecticut and Albany. That army, intact and out of his reach, was a constant, acute danger. It endangered his communications, it endangered his base, it endangered his divisions that occupied Boston. It forced him to advance only in continual readiness for battle on flanks and rear-lines.
During the slow approach the men who had gathered between New Haven and Hartford began to form some sort of an organization. Almost it evolved itself.
The enemy pushing forward along the north, took Springfield with cavalry and artillery. The undefended city surrendered without a blow.