on, too, a noble island was calumniated.
The New England scholar, bereft of everything else on which to arraign the great movement in Virginia, takes up a lie about St. Domingo, and hurls it in the face of an ignorant audience,--ignorant, because no man ever thought it worth while to do justice to the negro.
Edward Everett would be the last to allow us to take an English version of Bunker Hill, to take an Englishman's account of Hamilton and Washington as they stood beneath the scaffold of Andre, and read it to an American audience as a faithful description of the scene.
But when he wants to malign a race, he digs up from the prejudice of an enemy they had conquered, a forgotten lie,--showing how weak was the cause he espoused when the opposite must be assailed with falsehood, for it could not be assailed with anything else.
I said that they had gone to sleep, and only turned in their graves,--those men in Faneuil Hall.
It was not wholly true.
The chairman came down from the h
to seek battles.
You have as exposed a duty as can be assigned to you,—the separate command of a company at an advanced post.
If the officers of such posts are known to relax in their vigilance, we may expect a general battle very soon; which I hope you will have no share in bringing on. If my division enjoys an unusual exemption from the clash of arms, it is what I want; and I am thankful that I have such active and faithful outposts.
For some days Sumner had charge of the guard of Major Andre, while he was under arrest and sentence of death; held frequent conversations with him, and conceived sincere respect for that unfortunate officer.
Lieutenant-Colonel (afterwards General) William Hull commanded a detachment of light infantry, cavalry, and artillery, which guarded New York in the autumn of 1783, during the evacuation of the city by the British troops.
Major Sumner was his second in command.
General Hull, in a letter to Charles Pinckney Sumner, dated March 12, 1825,
.
My dear Head,—Thanks for your letter, with the references to Calderon and Romilly, and for the note with its enclosed pamphlet about the Bodleian.
The reference to Romilly came particularly apropos;
Life and Letters of Romilly, p. 142. for I have had two letters—the second a sort of postscript to the first from Lord Mahon about the Andre matter. . . . . Lord Mahon cited to me an opinion of Guizot's, given him lately in conversation at Paris, that Washington should not have permitted Andre to be hanged; to which I gave him your reference to Romilly, as a Roland for his Oliver.
He is in trouble, too, about a passage in his last volume concerning the Buff and Blue—Mrs. Crewe, true blue—as the Fox colors, which he intimates, you know, to have been taken in compliment to Washington.
But, besides that,—as I think,—the Whigs would have been reproached for this assumption of traitor colors in a way that would not now be forgotten; these colors were fashionable earlier.
You
ll, then choose; I ever revered her, for I was not sure that I could have resisted the call of the Now, could have left the spirit, and gone to God.
And, at a more ambitious age, I could not have refused the philosopher.
But I hoped from her steadfastness, and I thought I heard the last tones of a purified life:—Gretchen, in the golden cloud, raised above all past delusions, worthy to redeem and upbear the wise man, who stumbled into the pit of error while searching for truth.
Still, in Andre and in Jacques, I traced the same high morality of one who had tried the liberty of circumstance only to learn to appreciate the liberty of law, to know that license is the foe of freedom.
And, though the sophistry of passion in these books disgusted <*> dank and dirty ground I thought she had cast aside the slough of her past life, and began a new existence beneath the sun of a true Ideal.
But here (in the Lettres d'un Voyageur) what do I see?
An unfortunate bewailing her loneliness,
with Myers.
Chancellor was a soldier who had come home on a short visit to his father, who was a neighbor of Myers.
Chancellor was on his horse about leaving home when Myers with some citizens rode up with the professed deserter.
They were sure from his actions that he was a spy feigning desertion.
They asked Chancellor to take him out to the Confederate lines.
Chancellor agreed.
It the man was a spy, it was Chancellor's right to hang him on the spot, just as General Washington hung Major Andre.
If, on the contrary, he was a deserter, then Powell would have shot or hung him if he had caught him. He was not entitled to the protection of a prisoner of war; if he was a spy, he had dearly forfeited his life to one side or the other.
But Chancellor was merciful, and gave the man the benefit of the doubt.
He started off to deliver him as a suspect to the provost marshal at Gordonsville.
If the motive had been cruelty, the man would not have been taken ten miles across a river for
chool we read Cow. per's Task, and did our parsing on Milton's Paradise Lost, but what were these in comparison with:—
The cold in clime are cold in blood, or:—
I loved her, Father, nay, adored.
After my brother's return from Europe, I read such works of George Sand and Balzac as he would allow me to choose from his library.
Of the two writers, George Sand appeared to me by far the superior, though I then knew of her works only Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre, Spiridion, Jacques, and Andre.
It was at least ten years after this time that Consuelo revealed to the world the real George Sand, and thereby made her peace with the society which she had defied and scandalized.
Of my German studies I have already made mention.
I began them with a class of ladies under the tuition of Dr. Nordheimer.
But it was with the later aid of Dr. Cogswell that I really mastered the difficulties of the language.
It was while I was thus engaged that my eldest brother returned from Germany.
In
He was a kinsman of William Polly who was shot at Lexington.
The youngest in this levy was sixteen years old—Josiah Cutter, 2d.
There were seven others under twenty-one.
While these men were in service, Arnold's treason and the execution of Andre occurred.
The Medford men were stationed on guard duty at North river.
William Bucknam was promoted and served as sergeant.
His name is on the muster-roll dated Tappan.
At this place Andre was executed, and it is probable that Bucknam stoodAndre was executed, and it is probable that Bucknam stood with the troops drawn up to witness the ignoble death of that brave man.
When the six-months' men were discharged they were each given a passport bearing the signature of the colonel to show they were not deserters, and to recommend them to the charity of the farmers, whose help they needed.
Some barefooted, others nearly so, ragged and dirty, they set out for their walk of over two hundred miles. They were absolutely penniless.
The December weather made their condition worse, but they pu
Horace Bishor, one of the patriots of the revolution, died in Michigan last week, in the 100th year of his age. He served four years in the revolutionary war, and was one of the guard who stood sentry over Major Andre at the time of his execution.
General Government, whose course he approves.
A story has been going the rounds for several days, without any apparent paternity, to the effect that an armistice had been agreed upon for sixty days, between the authorities at Washington and the Secession leaders in Virginia — it having been asked by the former.
A note from the Assistant Secretary of State to Simeon Draper, of New York, pronounces it a hoax.
The Rev. John Pierpont, of Medford, Mass., has tendered his services to Gov. Andre was Chaplain to one of the Massachusetts regiments.
In his letter he says: "If, sir, this my proffer of service is accepted by your Excellency, I have only one stipulation to make in connection with it, namely, this : that on our way to Washington we are not to go around Baltimore."
Ex-President Fillmore has been elected Captain of the Home Guards of Buffalo, composed of the retired commissioned officers of the State militia.
A Boston sculptor has offered to make a statute in m
Something New in History.
A Mr. Massey, it seems, an Englishman, is publishing in London a history of England.--He has gotten down as low as 1793, the last volume including all the events between 1780 and that year.
The Westminster Review, speaking of this last volume, says:
"Opening with an account of the military operations in the Carolinas, of the treason of Arnold, and the execution of the compromised though gallant and patriotic Andre, the historian relates the retirement of Lord Cornwallis into Virginia, his occupation of Yorktown and Gloucester, his frequent repulses of the enemy, and finally, after vainly awaiting the arrival of Sir Henry Clinton, his capitulation to General Washington. This capitulation was the turning point of the American war. A year after the surrender at Yorktown the preliminaries of peace were signed.
The treaty concluded, not without some sharp practice on the part of the American Commissioners, between Great Britain and the United States,
