Christmas eve, 1776, was a very jolly one in the British camp. The commander, officers, and men, all thought that the American fiddle was broken and about to be hung up forever; and so, in their Saxon and Teutonic joy, they hung up their stockings. The shrewd American Squire, borrowing old Santa Claus’s coach and horses, and filling the former with bullets and powder, crossed the Delaware about midnight and suddenly dropped his presents through the camp of his foreign visitors. Never were the Hessians so taken by Christmas gifts. In fact, fourteen hundred of them were so overcome by the novel presence of Washington, that they gave themselves up to American hospitality and followed their new friends across the river to their now merry quarters.
The American fiddle was mended again; and its strains of Yankee Doodle were heard across the Atlantic by a young French marquis, only nineteen years of age, of a very old family, with a very young wife, and an income of $40,000 a year,—an income in those pre-Erie and pre-petroleum times highly respectable. Other Frenchmen also listened to, and, like Lafayette, were moved by, the touching airs of freedom, which passed the Rhine also, and were drunk in with his hock by the Prussian Steuben, a military martinet and schoolmaster, much needed in our militia schoolhouse. The Baron was then generalissimo of his serene, discomposable highness, the Prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, whose magnificent titles would, if printed on a straight strip of paper, have easily reached across his principality; but sounding as they were, they did not fill the ear of Steuben like the notes from that repaired fiddle. The lively adagio airs also struck upon the sensitive vibrating soul of De Kalb, a noble of Alsace, lifting it to highest impulses, which carried him through four years of patriotic service, and even bore him in lofty triumph across the death channel in 1780, when at the battle of Camden he was carried away from the daring front, loaded with eleven bullets in various parts of his body.
These same free airs fell upon those straight, upright Poles, Kosciusko and Pulaski, and so vivifying them by warming heats, that through the whole war they bore most fragrant fruit, until at last they stood as that vintage so ripely planted in Mrs. Browning’s verse,
“Where the sun with a golden mouth doth blow
Blue bubbles of grapes down a vineyard row,”—
the blue grapes of blistered steel.
Even in England thousands of hearts warmed to the American cause. In Parliament, Charles James Fox, Earl Chatham, Edmund Burke, the virtuous Lord Camden, and others; out of it, David Hume the historian, Edward Gibbon, whose studies of the rise as well as the fall of Rome had led him down into the crypt of history, and countless able, learned, and good, others as true to state as to individual freedom, gave vent and weighty shape to the well-considered convictions of the injustice of the attempt to compel the Colonies to submit to impositions unassented to by themselves. But while in England there were advocates of colonial freedom, in the Colonies there were friends of Parliamentary oppression. These last were infiltrated more or less through all the United settlements; but they gathered in notable volume in and about the then considerable village of New York,—numbering about 26,000 inhabitants,—where all the vigilant zeal of Alexander Hamilton, an ardent, eloquent young lawyer, recently arrived from his native West Indies, the equally vigorous but cooler patriotism of John Jay, and the alert wisdom of other Sons of Liberty were needed, to make head against the Tory current whose momentum and velocity, quickened by wealth, social position, and official experience, swept with force and volumed power through the island city. Rude indeed was the shock given to the Manhattan loyalists by the overthrow in the Bowling Green of the leaden statue of George III., and the conversion of its characteristically heavy metal into lively Continental bullets. The popular repeal of this loyal statue was soon followed in Congress by the repeal of more important representatives of royalty,—leaden-typed statutes.
The year 1777 opened with the battle of Princeton, fought under the leadership of Washington and Cornwallis, whereby two hundred English and Germans were put under sodded trenches, to furnish in after times, in addition to their use in well-rounded school-boys’ periods, a special resort for the students of Nassau Hall, accompanied by such persuadable female companions—Dutch, American, English, or German—as might relish history studied under the advantageous lights of a pair of admiring eyes.
In a few days after this battle, all New Jersey was cleared of British and Hessians, who dispersed in various directions, and sought to keep up their courage for several succeeding months by raids upon those peaceful, drowsy villages, Danbury in Connecticut, and Peekskill on the Hudson, and harrying off some of the delights of a German stomach,—winter apples, cider, and sausages. On the other hand, Colonel Meigs tickled the feet of Long Island one night in May, and touched up some British corns on its Sag Harbor toe, making even the grave Congress to laugh outright in a broad vote of thanks; while Colonel Barton, early one morning in July, took, in spite of his guards, the British Major-General Prescott out of his bed, where he was cuddling up to escape the Rhode Island fogs, and bore him off through his own troops, and even through a large British fleet lying off the main-land,—a little surprise party highly relished by the visitors and their colonial friends.
The arrival in France, in the autumn of 1776, of Silas Deane, a Connecticut delegate to Congress, and of Benjamin Franklin, as commissioners, soon raised the gates which had barred French supplies of men and means from flowing into the service of the Colonies. Louis XVI. and Vergennes, his Foreign Minister, had neither forgotten the great fight for the American belt, nor the wrench which French pride had suffered by the tossing of the prize, but fifteen years ago, into the eager hands of its uncivil rival. They were, therefore, more than ready to help the ward escape from her self-constituted guardian, and to send her secretly such instruments as would file off her bolts, cut away the prison-like fences around her suspiciously guarded dwelling-place, and enlarge her straitening liberties. They had even, in the spring of 1777, secretly encouraged, while pretending to prevent, the armed emigration of Lafayette and others to America.