Blessings on all the Fourth of Julys up to 1850! What occasions for tar-barrel eloquence, going off into flaming tropes and figures, have they not been! That has not only been “the birthday of freedom,” but the natal initiation into civic or military renown of many a village tyro. The shoemaker, blacksmith, or carpenter, smothered for three hundred and sixty-four days under his own waxed ends, cindery veneering, or plane modesties, has suddenly, on that prolific day, been so brought out on a prancing horse, or caught such a gleam from his well-scoured sword, resting on his trusty thigh, or left to play loose between his crooked legs, as to aspire to be road-master, town-reeve, supervisor of the county, assemblyman, representative in Congress, and even United States senator.
The civic honor of presiding at the old-time traditional public dinner, which crowned, at the principal tavern, the militia morning cantering and inexplicable twistings of crooked military lines,—lines that snarled up until they broke past all sewing by waxed ends, welding by cindered hands, or splicing by plane people,—has again and again pipped the egg, else ingloriously addling, which enclosed the rudimentary germ of a railroad president, it may be even, of a conductor with diamond pin, gold finger-ring, largely accumulating real estate, and all the other incidents. These glorious dinners have been, also, the nurseries of the legal profession, whose young members have thence sent up whizzing sky-rockets, which, mounting and mounting on the straining enthusiastic eye, have burst into such dissolving showers of golden glory, that, by the unexpected explosion, the national horizon and their own have been widened on all sides, and new stars been stuck into its astonished vault.
We pity the American who has been born into our degenerating times, which neglect those primitive occasions of cheap yet great renown, when a little sulphur, administered to a rural population, went further to cure all the scarlet fever of the neighborhood than all the colic-producing iron pills of actual war. We commiserate the condition of the young American, grown so apoplectic ere he arrives of age, by the prodigal display of bunting, fire-works, and red-faced oratory at our frequent elections, that he disdains the frugal but satisfying cakes of gingerbread, then bought with a well-pressed sixpence from the calico-roofed booth on the side of the bars, through which those undulating militia lines managed to unwind without hanging on the fence or getting into puzzling knots.
Gone now are those molasses-plated cards of cake, pleasant to the taste on the Fourth, and sticking to the teeth, stomach, and memory of the patriotic eater for at least one fifty-second part of a year. Gone now are the pranks of horses bestridden by the colonel or major of the regiment,—his first equestrian performance freely exhibited, and in which he showed feats, entirely his own, which could not, or at least would not, be displayed by first-class circuses or turf-bred racers, who, skimmed over in blue, yellow, or green, glide so stunningly through the admiring and opening air. Vanished now, alas! are the groups of innocent children waiting for the show of animals, not those on parade, but the lively monkeys, the pie-colored horses, and the wonderful clown, whose photographs, loading down the staggering fences, blacksmith-shop, horse-shed, and post-office for a whole long fortnight, were all so well known to them before the originals striped the village with their many-colored glories.
Gone glimmering away from this green-backed epoch are the sable groups that danced on the greensward, away from the tangling military lines apparently just as happy as if the American Wittenagemote, led on by Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston, had not solemnly declared, and thereto pledged all that they had, “that all men are created free and equal.”
English Poor Relations eating Colonists out of House and Home.
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CHAPTER III.
SECOND TURN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WHEEL; ITS ECCENTRIC BUT ONWARD MOVEMENTS.
1776–1780.
English Hawks gather around New York.—Washington watches them.—About an Esquire.—The Way the Germans took Brooklyn the first Time.—How they returned, not to their Mutton, but to Kalbfleisch.—Difficulty of reaching New York from Brooklyn in 1776.—Washington takes a Trip to Harlem.—The British also.—Red Eyes and Disfigured Faces the Consequence.—Lord Howe attempts to get around the American Squire.—The slight Unpleasantness at White Plains.—The different Uses of the Croton Water in 1776 and now.—The Amount of Whiskey it took in 1869 to qualify the Water in New York.—Washington ventures into New Jersey.—Set-to at Fort Lee.—Washington across Rivers.—Philadelphia covered.—Homesickness of Agricultural Lads.—What befell Lee at a Tavern.—Washington crosses the Delaware and drops Christmas Presents into German Stockings.—The Effects of Yankee Doodle on Lafayette, De Kalb, Kosciusko, Pulaski, and others.—Friends of America in England, Fox, Hume, etc.—Friends of England in America.—The Statue and Statutes of George III. repealed.—Battle of Princeton.—The Germans obtain Cider and Sausages at Danbury.—Colonel Meigs tickles the Feet of Long Island, and makes Congress laugh.—Colonel Prescott is obliged to rise very early one Morning at Newport.—Silas Deane and B. Franklin in France.—What followed.—Burgoyne tries to find a back-stair Passage to New York.—Strong Gates in his Way near Saratoga.—Still-Water runs deep.—Brandy-Wine an unpalatable Drink.—French Treaty with America in 1778.—The Wheel moves in Water and turns out French Names.—Crossing New Jersey, Lord Howe collides with Washington at Monmouth.—Count d’Estaing is prevented by an Injunction off the New York Bar from entering New York.—Coquetting, but no Engagement, near Newport.—Buzzard’s Bay and its Roosts.—Little Egg Harbor and its Nests,—what was laid there.—The Benefits of the Wyoming Massacre.—Guerilla War in the South.—Savannah trounced.—Horse-Neck and Putnam’s Home-Stretch down it.—Count d’Estaing’s Yachting.—Spain hankers for Gibraltar.—England as a Pawnbroker.—Paul Jones and his Whip.
While the wise men at Philadelphia were making the Fourth of July a precedent for the future by their very readable and taking Declaration of Independence, the English kites were gathering from the north, south, and east around New York. Lord Howe, from Halifax; Sir Henry Clinton, from Charleston; and Admiral Howe, from England, drawn together by focalizing orders, settled down with their separate flocks on Staten Island,—one of the lintels of the gateway to the metropolis,—numbering together twenty-four thousand old hawks which had often whetted their beaks before in Spanish, German, and Dutch blood.