University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.

Sedley.

The diligent and anxious Elias had made
every necessary preparation for the removal of
Mrs. Meredith to Philadelphia, and he arrived
at her house with his escort shortly after Francis
had left it. Mrs. Meredith's alarm, however,
had now greatly subsided. She believed
that she had in Francis, an active and vigilant
friend, who would conteract the evil designs of
the baronet, or at least afford her timely notice
for providing against them. But the wary
Elias was not so easily satisfied on this point.

“Thy persecutor is rich,” said he, “and thy
friend may become frail, if strongly tempted;
or he may, if he takes thy part too openly,
become the object of thy tormentor's dislike,
peradventure his victim; for who can set
bounds to the atrocities of the wicked? The
city is the safer place for thee in the present
emergency; and thy son's residence there, a
matter which thee has for sometime contemplated,
will contribute to his improvement,

and being under thy own eye, there will be
little danger of his acquiring vicious or improper
habits. My cousin, Isaac Ellworth and his
wife, will gladly receive thee, having often
wished thee to sojourn, for a season, with them,
that thee might enjoy the society of the ctiy.”

Mrs. Meredith yielded to these reasons,
and that evening the young and delighted
Edward, for the first time in his life, found
himself in the beautful and flourishing metropolis
of his native country. Edward was now
upon the borders of seventeen, with a heart
joyous, generous, open, and susceptible to every
impression of novelty, and every impulse
of sympathy and delight. He soon formed a
large circle of acquaintances among the respectable
young men of the city, with whom his
manners became at once assimilated. His mother
was delighted with the daily improvement
he exhibited in manly appearance, in polish of
manners, expansion of intellect, and knowledge
of the ways of man. It is true, that she felt
occasional apprehensions, lest amidst the temptations
that surrounded him, he might deviate
from the path of rigid morality, and suffer his
principles to be corrupted by the fascinations
of pleasure. But, as yet she had nothing of
which to complain; and she was too much delighted
at witnessing his felicity to interrupt it
by any manifestation of doubts respecting the

stability of his principles and the continued
propriety of his conduct.

She had been five or six weeks in the city,
before she heard any thing concerning the
movements of Sir Robert. She then received a
letter from Francis, from which the following
passage is extracted.

“The rage of Sir Robert, when I reported
your message to him, was excessive; and it became
still more so, when he learned that you
had withdrawn from the neighbourhood. He
vented better reproaches against me, ascribing
your flight to my unseasonable exposure of
his designs. He at length became convinced
that you had been alarmed before my interview
with you, and acquitted me of any intention
to betray him. He followed you to
Philadelphia, and remained there, incognito,
about a week. But perceiving that you were too
well protected by your friends, to afford him an
opportunity of effecting any project of abduction
against you, he began to listen to the voice of
reason, and to perceive the folly of his conduct.
I had left him, my own affairs requiring my
presence in New York. He followed me to
that city, as soon as he became convinced of
the impracticability of forcing you into a marriage.
He there spent some days, making inquiries
after the relations of his American wife.
He was informed that her father had been dead

many years, and that her only sister had long
ago removed, with her husband, to some other
place of residence. Where this was he had
now no time, and perhaps little inclination
to trace, for having obtained the command
of a troop of calvary, he was ordered by Sir
Guy Carleton to assume his military duty at
Boston, the inhabitants of which city have become
extremely violent in their manifestations
of hostility to the measures of the British government.

“I intend to remain in New-York for some
time, having formed a connexion which, as I
begin to feel wearied of a wandering life, may
terminate in domesticating me here. If not, I
shall take a trip to Boston, to enjoy the society
of some old acquaintances who are now in the
army there.”

This letter having quieted Mrs. Meredith's
fears of suffering any immediate outrage from
the violence of Sir Robert Radnor, she returned
to her residence on the Brandywine.
Her son accompanied her, and, although he
was far from being wearied of the society and
amusements of Philadelphia, he felt a real satisfaction,
for he was somewhat of a sentimentalist,
at being again amidst his native woods.

At this period, the spirit of political discussion
animated all classes of people in America.
That opposition to the British authority which,
shortly afterwards, produced the bold measure of

the declaration of the independence of this great
country, was every day waxing stronger. Patriotism
had taken firm root in the breasts of
the eminent and masterly spirits of the age, as
well as of the great mass of the people. The
feeling that the rights of the colonies were infringed,
and the opinion that such infringement
ought to be opposed, prevailed from one
extremity of the continent to the other, not universally,
it is true, for there were many who
felt and thought differently, but with such predominating
influence as to give impulse and
direction to all public measures. It happened,
fortunately for the cause of America, that a
great proportion of those who disapproved of
the principles and conduct of her friends, and
considered the patriotism of the day sedition,
were men of peaceful habits, inactive and
unwarlike. This was particularly the case
in Pennsylvania, where the sect of the Quakers,
quiescent in feeling, and religiously averse to
war, possessed great influence, not only from
their numbers, but from their wealth, and the
peculiar correctness of their moral deportment.
Had these men been as active and warlike as
the Eastern and Southern royalists, and had
they thrown the weight of their great resources
into the scale of the latter, the balance might
have turned against the country, and rendered
the efforts of her patriots, at that time at least,
to rescue her from a foreign yoke, abortive.
But the same principles which induced the
Quakers to acquiesce in the arbitrary measures
of the British government, namely, a submissive
spirit and aversion to bloodshed, prevented
them from presenting any essential resistance
to the efforts of those who boldly took
up arms in their country's cause. Hence thousands
of Americans who were opposed in principle
to the struggle for independence, were
altogether neutral in practice. They surveyed
the scenes of devastation and carnage that surrounded
them with horror; admiring, no doubt,
the courage, and pitying the sufferings of the
brave men who faced and defied the terrors of
the times, but, at the same time, lamenting and
condemning what they esteemed their rashness
and delusion.

Among this class of sentimental opponents
to the military patriotism of the times, we are
reluctantly obliged to rank our good friend,
Elias Meredith. He often and deeply deplored
the infatuation of that hot-headed generation of
men, as he called them, who preferred plunging
into all the evils of a bloody war, to the
paying of a small sum of money, merely because
it was demanded from them as a tax, to
the levying of which the customary formality
of voting for it by their own representatives
was not attached.

“Because a small wrong is done thee,” he
would say to his nephew, who, during his visit
to Philadelphia, had become strongly tainted
with whiggism, “is it any reason why thee
should do thyself a great wrong? If a stronger
man than myself attempts to force six-pence
from me, would I not be foolish, if I were to
grapple and fight with him, at the risk of my
life, in order to save it? No; rather than
engage in mortal combat with any one, I would
choose to give up all that I possess; for of what
value would riches be to me, if I were slain? Or
should I slay my antagonist in a quarrel which
I might avoid, what comfort could wealth ever
afterwards afford me? Solomon saith truly,
`Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith,
than an house full of sacrifices with
strife?”'

Such reasoning made but little impression
on the judgment, and still less on the feelings
of Edward. The degradation of tamely submitting
to injustice, he considered intolerable to
any generous spirit. “And what,” he would
ask, “could be more pusillanimous or contemptible
than for a whole people to submit quietly
to be despoiled of the fruits of their industry,
at the will and pleasure of dictatorial and hectoring
foreigners? It cannot be either true religion
or sound morality which would condemn
resistance to such flagrant injustice.”

This difference of political sentiment, however,
although freely avowed on the part of
Edward, occasioned no personal variance between
him and his uncle. Elias disliked no
man merely on account of opinions. The most
honest mind, he believed, may be mistaken in
judgment; and, if power ever exercises any
species of oppression more unjust and barbarous
than another, he considered it to be that
which attempts to enforce opinion and destroy
the freedom of conscience.

The country was now fast assuming an armed
attitude, and preparing with remarkable
energy and resolution, for the bloody crisis
which was fast approaching. Blood had, indeed,
been already shed, for the battle of Lexington
was fought, and a military enthusiasm had seized
upon the minds of all the generous patriots
in the land. Edward had not escaped the ardour;
but a due deference to the feelings not
only of his uncle, but his mother, (for against
her views and wishes, he had also to contend,)
prevented him, for some time, from arraying
himself openly as a soldier beneath the standard
of that cause to which he had given his affections.

The whiggism of Edward had also to contend
with the reasonings and remonstrances of
another individual, for the extent of whose
knowledge and the soundness of whose judgment,

he had long cherished an habitual respect,
this was his excellent preceptor, Adam
Balantyne. The peaceful habits of this gentleman,
his long cherished veneration for the
name of Britain, and his thorough conviction,
that the British constitution was the best model
of government that could be framed by
man, rendered him extremely hostile to the
insurrectionary doctrines and movements now
so prevalent in America. With his characteristic
warmth, he did not hesitate to proclaim
his sentiments, and with his national propersity
to abstract disquisition, he never declined
to enter into the arguments which the friends
of the mother country, at that busy period of
political animadversion and theorizing, adduced
in behalf of her cause.

As these arguments have been long since
exploded, it would be useless to protract this
history by introducing them here. I shall therefore
take the liberty of concluding this chapter,
by informing the reader, as an inducement for
him to proceed in the work, that he will find,
by the example which the story of Balantyne
will furnish, that the influence of theoretical
convictions or abstract opinions on the mind,
is but feeble when it happens to come into
collision with awakened and strongly excited
passions.