Madam Constantia

by Jefferson Carter

C. J. Fox.

Six months ago I went through the old papers in the Strongroom. I noted that neither my father nor my grandfather had added a line, save in the way of leases and the like, to the records which the first and second baronets left of the Siege of Newcastle, and of the Union troubles. It occurred to me that we owed something to posterity; and that, for lack of more important matter, my fortunes en campagne in America were a part of the family history, and proper to be preserved.

For an idle man, however, to will and to do are two things; and I might never have proceeded beyond the former if I had not a day or two later taken up the Gentleman’s Magazine and learned that General Washington of the United States of America had passed away at his seat at Mount Vernon on the fourteenth of the preceding month. That gave me the needed fillip. I never knew him; at least I never knew him by that title, since on the few occasions on which I met him, it was beyond my duty as an officer in His Majesty’s service to admit the existence of the States. I believe him, however, to have been a gentleman of good family, kindly and dignified, somewhat of the old school, and of considerable military ability; one, too, whose influence went some way towards checking within his sphere of action the rancour that in the Southern Colonies stained the Continental Cause and did not spare ours. Unfortunately from ’80 onwards my duty led me into the Carolinas; and it was to the sad and unusual nature of the war in those provinces that what was singular in my experiences was due.

Previously, to be brief, I had served for three years in the north, I had suffered the humiliation of surrendering with that gallant and loyal gentleman, General Burgoyne, I had been exchanged. But my experiences in Canada and on the Hudson were those of a hundred others and I pass over them, proposing to begin my relation at the point at which the fortunes of war cast me adrift, and flung me on my own resources.

From where I write, looking out on the barren, frost-bound hills of the Border, it is a far cry to the rice-fields and tropical lands of the Tidewater of Carolina; and a farther cry to the rolling country of pleasant vale and forest that sweeps upwards to the foothills, and so to the misty distances of the Blue Ridge. In those days it was often a three months’ passage, on salt meat and stale water; a passage of which many a poor fellow never saw the end. To-day I cross in a moment. But before I do so, let me add a word of preface, that all who read this may view the matter from our standpoint in ’80, midway in the fighting, rather than from the point at which we stand to-day, with the end behind us and an American Minister at St. James’s.

I say nothing about the Tea Duty or the claim to tax the Colonies. I believe that we had a right to have money from them; our fleet covered their trade. But whether we should not have left it to them to tax themselves is another matter, and seems more English. What is certain is, that we had through the war the most worthless government that ever held power in England; and so my father said a hundred times—and voted for them steadily till the day they fell!

In the City and at Brooks’s the war was never popular. There were many in both who asked with Mr. Walpole what we should gain by triumph itself; would America, laid waste, replace America flourishing, rich and free? And here and there an officer declined to serve against his kinsmen and was allowed to stand aside. But for the most part we ran to it, younger sons and eldest too, from my neighbor Lord Percy downward, as to an adventure. All who could beg or buy a commission mounted the cockade. The thing was fashionable—with two results that I came to think unhappy.

The first was that too many of our people—those in particular who had the least right to do so—looked down on the Colonials from a social height as on a set of farmers and clodhoppers; forgetting that many of them were our own cousins once or twice removed, and that some had been bred up beside us at Westminster and Oxford. The second was that those of us who had seen service under the great Frederick, or had learned our drill at Finchley or Hounslow, sneered at the rebel officers as tailors, called them Mohairs—God knows why!—and made light not only of their skill but their courage, treating even the Loyalists who joined us as of a lower grade.

For these two prejudices we were to pay very dearly. They not only brought into the struggle a bitterness which was needless and to be deplored, but, as things turned out, they reacted very unpleasantly on ourselves. It was bad enough to be worsted by those whom the meaner and more foolish among us regarded as of lower clay; it was still more mortifying for old soldiers, who had learned their drill in the barrack-yard, to find that it went for little in face of the immensities of that unknown continent; and that among the forests of the Hudson or in the marshes of the Savannah our military art was of far less value than the power to shoot straight, or to lay an ambush after the Indian fashion.

Owing to these two prejudices the lessons we had to learn in the war were the more painful. Not that our poor fellows did not fight. Believe me, they fought with the most dogged courage—sometimes when the only powder they had was the powder on their queues, and the steel or the clubbed musket was their only weapon. But the others fought too and stubbornly—what else could we expect? They were of our blood and bone; they, too, were Britons. And they were in their own forests, on their own rivers,—which seemed to be seas to us—they were fighting for their homes and barns and orchards. Whereas we were twelve weeks from home, ill-fed, ill-found, and ill-supported, scattered over hundreds of leagues, and lost in pathless wilds that grew more hostile as outrage on the one side or the other embittered our relations.