He fell, however, as those fall who do more than achieve success,—deserving it. Under the portico of St. Paul’s Church, in the city of New York, at the confluence of those pulsing streams of life which surge down Broadway and the Bowery,—gathering a volume sufficiently strong to overcome the heavy whirlpools of Wall Street,—lie what of Richard Montgomery was mortal, borne thither sixty-three years after his death by his grateful fellow-citizens, who have laid on the island of Manhattan, now glittering with superb edifices, no corner-stone nobler or more imperishable than that which they then deposited.
The Revolutionary wheel had now fairly started, and one of the first results of its motion was the shaking off those dusty particles, the royal governors,—Dunmore, in Virginia; Lord William Campbell, in South Carolina; Sir Joseph Wright, in Georgia; and others,—each of whom, measuring his own weight on his own scales, fancied—as we now can read in their despatches to the Colonial Office—that he was himself a stone large enough, if dropped in front of the wheel, to stop forever its further advance.
The Hessian bees, shaken off the home twigs by their owners, the fussy, poverty-ridden dukes, princes, landgraves, and margraves, swarmed over and settled at Boston on the oaken boughs planted there by Lord Howe. George Washington was determined to make a vigorous effort to break up the hive and to get its military honey. In March, 1776, he drew near to Boston, sitting down on Dorchester Heights with an earth curtain before him, to guard against the stings of any vagrants that might stray away from the main swarm. Scarcely, however, had our general, in his buckskin breeches, begun to feel around the nest, before, to his great surprise, and to the infinite wonderment of George III., and his minister, Lord North, the entire swarm with a peculiar buzz, rose at four o’clock in the morning from their new-made hive and flew away in a bee-line for Halifax. Much honey, then particularly dear to Americans, was gathered after they left; as much as two hundred and fifty combs, in the shape of cannon, and not a little of that bee dust, so very scarce in March, 1776, called powder. Washington was much concerned lest the pesky swarm might turn their flight and settle down in New York. So, after attending a lecture the night following his entrance into Boston, in order not to excite by his absence any hubbub in that literary and then religious place, he set in motion the great body of his troops towards the island of Manhattan.
Major-General Charles Lee, a Welshman by birth, and a soldier of fortune, who had fought in Portugal and Poland, mettlesome and waspish in temper, was despatched in April with other troops to New York, where, after a neck-and-neck race with Sir Henry Clinton, accompanied by a large British force from England, he arrived only two hours before his competitor. Sir Henry, although anxiously expected on shore by several British friends, at length concluded that it was too early in the season to alight so far north, and so cruised southward for a milder climate and reception. Sailing leisurely down our wave-dented shores, he joined the squadron of his old boon companions in arms, Admiral Sir Peter Parker and Earl Cornwallis, with some two thousand five hundred jolly dogs, hired at fourpence a day to come out and inspect our country. Strolling on together pleasantly in a warm latitude, with flying-fish to amuse them on the outside, and broiled fish inside the ships, they touched land at last near Charleston. The restless, waspish Lee, who had been also flying down southwards over the land, hovering on quick wing and watching the jolly dogs to see where they would come ashore, no sooner found that they thought of landing at Sullivan’s Island, and visiting a military summer-house there, built of palmetto wood, and called Fort Moultrie, than he lit upon them, stung two hundred of them more or less uncomfortably, and compelled them all to go off wholly from that place, the pleasure of reaching which depends so much upon the feelings of those to whom the visit is proposed.
New England and the South were now alike freed from British tourists and German musket-holders.
Where Sir Henry and his jolly dogs, constituting one party, and Lord Howe with his lively squad, still enjoying themselves at Halifax after their rapid journey from Boston, making up the other British set, would next prospect, much concerned the Continental Congress, George Washington, Charles Lee, and the colonial people generally. The uncertainty was soon ended. Lord Howe, sailing from Halifax, June 11th, reached Sandy Hook on the 25th of the same month, and dropping anchor off Staten Island, July 2d, was soon joined by Sir Henry and his jolly dogs, feeling a little uneasy of stomach, and somewhat less merry than when they left England nearly three months before, and vowing, ’pon honor, that Sir Henry had somewhat taken them in at Charleston, although, in fact, the real trouble was that he had not taken them in at all there.
Truly the Revolutionary wheel was now well started, and began to get in earnest motion.
CHAPTER II.
JULY FOURTH, 1776, AND SO FORTH.
Review of our Historical Journey from the Start up to the Summit of the 4th of July.—Résumé of our Tramp through Pre-Columbian and Post-Columbian Times.—Our March from St. Augustine, via Jamestown and the Manhattan Cabins, to the Temperance Tavern at Plymouth.—Descriptions of Indian Interruptions.—Polite Interferences of Gallic Gentlemen at Narrow Parts of the Road in 1689, 1710, 1745, etc.—Banditti on the Highways of History, English, French, and Dutch.—Blazing Description of the Summit, the Flagstaff, Flag, and Eagle.—The Grand Political Picnic there of Fifty-one Wise Men.—The Thunder-Storms around them; and their Behavior.—General Account of this Group; and how remarkable and marked.—Special Portraitures of Thirteen of them.—Some Peculiar Heads there, and how much George III. wanted them.—Prayer of John Adams.—A Great Freshet of a Speech and what it carried off.—A Remarkable Declaration made by Jefferson.—An Electrical Battery charged and discharged.—The Peppering George III. got.—How he worked Seven Years against the Declaration.—The Gunpowdery Effect of the first Fourth, and the Fire-Crackers since touched off by it.—Independence originally handled without Gloves; now by Aldermen and very Common Councilmen with a half-dozen Pair apiece.—The Fourths up to 1850.—Tar-Barrel Eloquence.—Military and Civic Renown snatched on that Day.—What Eggs, containing Addling Heroes, pip on that Day.—How Swords embarrass Crooked Legs.—Militia Lines, and what Snarls they get into.—Dissolving Bursts of Golden Glories.—Effects of Sulphur administered to a Rural Population.—Cakes of Gingerbread, and how they stuck in the Teeth, Stomach, and Memory.—Lamentations over the Decay of the Old-time Fourths.
Long time have we been climbing together up the political eminence, until we have at last reached its high summit,—the Fourth of July. Cold and bleak was the weather, and wholly new and uncleared the path on which we set out, thousands of years ago, among the hitherto unknown, pre-Columbian regions of America. The way was beset with obstructions,—heaps of coal and fossil remains,—and strewn with bones of races, human and animal, as strange even to our museums as they were novel to ourselves. Among these freshly discovered relics of our great ancestors, we trode carefully, and lingered with pleased wonder among ruins, which shamed by their age and size the usurping glories of Egyptian, Chinese, and Assyrian antiquities. At last, however, having traversed those broad plains, over which hung the gray, uncertain twilight of chronicle and geological fiction, we emerged, by a sudden turn in the road, into the clearer light and more solid undebatable ground rediscovered and retouched by more modern nations; convinced by our large inspection and survey, that those who landed on our shores long before Columbus—the Cabots, Cortereals, Verrazannis, Vespuccis, etc.—had, like provident patres familias, packed carefully away large stores of carbonized fuel and bone manure for the use of those who should come behind and after them, and had left well-feathered nests for the more helpless brood which might flock here in times long subsequent to their own.