 | CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE RAID ON OLDTOWN, AND UNCLE FLIAKIM'S BRAVERY. Oldtown folks |  |
28. CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE RAID ON OLDTOWN, AND UNCLE FLIAKIM'S BRAVERY.
THE next morning after Thanksgiving, life resumed its usual
hard, laborious course, with a sharp and imperative reaction,
such as ensues when a strong spring, which has been for
some time held back, is suddenly let fly again.
Certainly Aunt Lois appeared to be astir fully an hour earlier
than usual, and dispelled all our golden visions of chicken pies
and dancings and merry-makings, by the flat, hard summons of
every-day life. We had no time to become demoralized and
softened.
Breakfast this next morning was half an hour in advance of
the usual time, because Aunt Lois was under some vague impression
of infinite disturbances in the house, owing to the latitude of
the last two weeks, and of great furbishings and repairs to be
done in the best room, before it could be again shut up and condemned
to silence.
While we were eating our breakfast, Sam Lawson came in,
with an air of great trepidation.
“Lordy massy, Mis' Badger! what do you s'pose has happened?”
he exclaimed, holding up his hands. “Wal! if I ever
— no, I never did!” — and, before an explanation could be
drawn out of him, in fluttered Uncle Fliakim, and began dancing
an indignant rigadoon round the kitchen.
“Perfectly abominable! the selectmen ought to take it up!”
he exclaimed, — “ought to make a State affair of it, and send to
the Governor.”
“Do for mercy's sake, Fliakim, sit down, and tell us what the
matter is,” said my grandmother.
“I can't! I can't!! I can't!!! I 've just got to hitch right up
and go on after 'em; and mebbe I 'll catch 'em before they get
over the State line. I just wanted to borrow your breech-band,
where?”
By this time we had all arisen from table, and stood looking
at one another, while Uncle Fliakim had shot out of the back
door toward the barn. Of course our information must now be
got out of Sam Lawson.
“Wal, you see, Deacon, who ever would ha' thought of it?
They 've took every child on 'em, every one!”
“Who 's taken? what children?” said my grandmother. “Do
pray begin at the right end of your story, and not come in here
scaring a body to death.”
“Wal, it 's Aunt Nancy Prime's children. Last night the
kidnappers come to her house an' took her an' every single one
of the child'en, an' goin' to carry 'em off to York State for
slaves. Jake Marshall, he was round to our house this mornin',
an' told me 'bout it. Jake, he 'd ben over to keep Thanksgivin',
over t' Aunt Sally Proddy's; an' way over by the ten-mile tahvern
he met the waggin, an' Aunt Nancy, she called out to him,
an' he heerd one of the fellers swear at her. The' was two fellers
in the waggin, an' they was a drivin' like mad, an' I jest come
runnin' down to Mr. Sheril's, 'cause I know his horse never gits
out of a canter, an' 's pretty much used to bein' twitched up sudden.
But, Lordy massy, s'posin' he could ketch up with 'em, what
could he do? He could n't much more 'n fly at 'em like an old
hen; so I don't see what 's to be done.”
“Well,” said my grandfather, rising up, “if that 's the case,
it 's time we should all be on the move; and I 'll go right over to
Israel Scran's, and he and his two sons and I 'll go over, and I
guess there 'll be enough of us to teach them reason. These
kidnappers always make for the New York State line. Boys,
you go out and tackle the old mare, and have our wagon round
to the house; and, if Fliakim's wagon will hold together, the two
will just carry the party.”
“Lordy massy! I should like to go 'long too,” said Sam Lawson.
“I hain't got no special business to-day but what could be
put off as well as not.”
“You never do have,” said Aunt Lois. “That 's the trouble
with you.”
“Wal, I was a thinkin',” said Sam, “that Jake and me hes
been over them roads so often, and we kind o' know all the ups
an' downs an' cross-roads. Then we 's pretty intimate with some
o' them Injun fellers, an' ye git them sot out on a trail arter a
body, they 's like a huntin' dog.”
“Well, father,” said Aunt Lois, “I think it 's quite likely that
Sam may be right here. He certainly knows more about such
things than any decent, industrious man ought to, and it 's a pity
you should n't put him to some use when you can.”
“Jes' so!” said Sam. “Now, there 's reason in that 'ere; an'
I 'll jes' go over to Israel's store with the Deacon. Yeh see ye
can't take both the boys, 'cause one on 'em 'll have to stay and
tend the store; but I tell you what 't is, I ain't no bad of a
hand a hittin' a lick at kidnappers. I could pound on 'em as
willingly as ever I pounded a horseshoe; an' a woman 's a
woman, an' child'en 's child'en, ef they be black; that 's jes' my
'pinion.”
“Sam, you 're a good fellow,” said my grandmother, approvingly.
“But come, go right along.”
Here, now, was something to prevent the wave of yesterday's
excitement from flatting down into entire insipidity.
Harry and I ran over instantly to tell Tina; and Tina with
all her eloquence set it forth to Miss Mehitable and Polly, and
we gave vent to our emotions by an immediate rush to the garret
and a dramatic representation of the whole scene of the
rescue, conducted with four or five of Tina's rag-dolls and a
little old box wagon, with which we cantered and re-cantered
across the garret floor in a way that would have been intolerable
to any less patient and indulgent person than Miss Mehitable.
The fact is, however, that she shared in the universal excitement
to such a degree, that she put on her bonnet immediately,
and rushed over to the minister's to give vent to her feelings,
while Polly, coming up garret, shouldered one of the guns
lovingly, and declared she 'd “like nothing better than to fire it
off at one o' them fellers”; and then she told us how, in her
young days, where she was brought up in Maine, the painters
(panthers) used to come round their log cabin at night, and howl
and how once her mother, during her father's absence, had treed
a painter, and kept him up in his perch for hours by threatening
him whenever he offered to come down, until her husband came
home and shot him.
Pretty stanch, reliant blood, about those times, flowed in the
bosoms of the women of New England, and Polly relieved the
excitement of her mind this morning by relating to us story
after story of the wild forest life of her early days.
While Polly was thus giving vent to her emotions at home,
Miss Mehitable had produced a corresponding excitement in the
minister's family. Ellery Davenport declared his prompt intention
of going up and joining the pursuing party, as he was
young and strong, with all his wits about him; and, with the
prestige of rank in the late Revolutionary war, such an accession
to the party was of the greatest possible importance. As to
Miss Deborah Kittery, she gave it as her opinion that such
uprisings against law and order were just what was to be
expected in a democracy. “The lower classes, my dear, you
know, need to be kept down with a strong hand,” she said with
an instructive nod of the head; “and I think we shall find that
there 's no security in the way things are going on now.”
Miss Mehitable and the minister listened with grave amusement
while the worthy lady thus delivered herself; and, as they
did not reply, she had the comfort of feeling that she had given
them something to think of.
All the village, that day, was in a ferment of expectation; for
Aunt Nancy was a general favorite in all the families round, and
was sent for in case of elections or weddings or other high
merry-makings, so that meddling with her was in fact taking
away part of the vested property of Oldtown. The loafers
who tilted, with their heels uppermost, on the railings of the
tavern veranda, talked stringently of State rights, and some
were of opinion that President Washington ought to be apprised
of the fact without loss of time. My grandmother went
about house in a state of indignation all day, declaring it was
a pretty state of things, to be sure, and that, next they should
had been gobbled up in the night and run off with. But Harry
and I calmed the fears which this seemed to excite in his breast,
by a vivid description of the two guns over in Miss Mehitable's
garret, and of the use that we should certainly make of them in
case of an attack on Cæsar.
The chase, however, was conducted with such fire and ardor
that before moonrise on the same night the captives were
brought back in triumph to Oldtown village, and lodged for
safe-keeping in my grandmother's house, who spared nothing in
their entertainment.
A happy man was Sam Lawson that evening, as he sat in the
chimney-corner and sipped his mug of cider, and recounted his
adventures.
“Lordy massy! well, 't was providential we took Colonel
Devenport 'long with us, I tell you; he talked to them fellers in
a way that made 'em shake in their shoes. Why, Lordy massy,
when we fust came in sight on 'em, Mr. Sheril an' me, we wus
in the foremost waggin, an' we saw 'em before us just as we got to
the top of a long, windin' hill, an' I tell you if they did n't whip
up an' go lickity-split down that 'ere hill, — I tell you, they rattled
them child'en as ef they 'd ben so many punkins, an' I tell
you one of 'em darned old young-uns flew right over the side of
the waggin, an' jest picked itself up as lively as a cricket, an'
never cried. We did n't stop to take it up, but jes' kep' right
along arter; an' Mr. Sheril, he hollers out, `Whoa! whoa! stop!
stop thief!' as loud as he could yell; but they jes' laughed
at him; but Colonel Devenport, he come ridin' by on horseback,
like thunder, an' driv' right by 'em, an' then turned round an'
charged down on their horses so it driv' 'em right out the road,
an' the waggin was upsot, an' the fellers, they were pitched out,
an' in a minute Colonel Devenport had one on 'em by the collar
an' his pistol right out to the head o' t'other. `Now,' ses he, `if
you stir you 're a dead man!'
“Wal, Mr. Sheril, he made arter the other one, — he always
means mighty well, Mr. Sheril does, — he gin a long jump, he
did, an' he lit right in the middle of a tuft of blackberry-bushes,
Yeh see, they never 'd a got 'em ef 't had n't ben for
Colonel Devenport. He kep' the other feller under range of his
pistol, an' told him he 'd shoot him ef he stirred; an' the feller,
he was scart to death, an' he roared an' begged for mercy in a
way 't would ha' done your heart good to hear.
“Wal, wal! the upshot on 't all was, when Israel Scran come
down with his boy (they was in the back waggin), they got out
the ropes an' tied 'em up snug, an' have ben a fetchin' on 'em
along to jail, where I guess they 'll have one spell o' considerin
their ways. But, Lordy massy, yeh never see such a sight as
your uncle's breeches wus. Mis' Sheril, she says she never see
the beater of him for allus goin' off in his best clothes, 'cause,
you see, he heard the news early, an' he jes' whips on his Thanksgivin'
clothes an' went off in 'em just as he was. His intentions
is allus so good. It 's a pity, though, he don't take more time to
consider. Now I think folks ought to take things more moderate.
Yeh see, these folks that hurries allus, they gits into scrapes, is
just what I 'm allus a tellin' Hepsy.”
“Who were the fellows, do you know?” said my grandmother.
“Wal, one on 'em was one of them Hessians that come over in
the war times, — he is a stupid crittur; but the other is Widdah
Huldy Miller's son, down to Black Brook there.”
“Do tell,” said my grandmother, with the liveliest concern;
“has Eph Miller come to that?”
“Yes, yes!” said Sam, “it 's Eph, sure enough. He was exalted
to heaven in p'int o' privilege, but he took to drink and onstiddy
ways in the army, and now here he is in jail. I tell you, I tried
to set it home to Eph, when I was a bringin' on him home in the
waggin, but, Lordy massy, we don't none of us like to have our
sins set in order afore us. There was David, now, he was crank
as could be when he thought Nathan was a talkin' about other
people's sins. Says David, `The man that did that shall surely
die'; but come to set it home, and say, `Thou art the man,' David
caved right in. `Lordy massy bless your soul and body, Nathan,'
says he, `I don't want to die.'”
It will be seen by these edifying moralizings how eminently
long-winded, pious reflection was not the least among his many
miscellaneous accomplishments.
As to my grandmother, she busied herself in comforting the
hearts of Aunt Nancy and the children with more than they
could eat of the relics of the Thanksgiving feast, and bidding
them not to be down-hearted nor afeard of anything, for the
neighbors would all stand up for them, confirming her words
with well-known quotations from the Old Testament, to the
effect that “the triumphing of the wicked is short,” and that
“evil-doers shall soon be cut off from the earth.”
This incident gave Ellery Davenport a wide-spread popularity
in the circles of Oldtown. My grandmother was predisposed to
look on him with complacency as a grandson of President Edwards,
although he took, apparently, a freakish delight in shocking
the respectable prejudices, and disappointing the reasonable
expectations, of people in this regard, by assuming in every conversation
precisely the sentiments that could have been least
expected of him in view of such a paternity.
In fact, Ellery Davenport was one of those talkers who delight
to maintain the contrary of every proposition started, and
who enjoy the bustle and confusion which they thus make in
every circle.
In good, earnest, intense New England, where every idea was
taken up and sifted with serious solemnity, and investigated with
a view to an immediate practical action upon it as true or false,
this glittering, fanciful system of fencing which he kept up on all
subjects, maintaining with equal brilliancy and ingenuity this to-day
and that to-morrow, might possibly have drawn down upon
a man a certain horror, as a professed scoffer and a bitter enemy
of all that is good; but Ellery Davenport, with all his apparent
carelessness, understood himself and the world he moved in perfectly.
He never lost sight of the effect he was producing on any
mind, and had an intuitive judgment, in every situation, of exactly
how far he might go without going too far.
The position of such young men as Ellery Davenport, in the
theocratic state of society in New England at this time, can be
period.
The colonists who founded Massachusetts were men whose
doctrine of a Christian church in regard to the position of its
children was essentially the same as that of the Church of
England. Thus we find in Doctor Cotton Mather this statement:
—
“They did all agree with their brethren at Plymouth in this
point: that the children of the faithful were church-members
with their parents; and that their baptism was a seal of their
being so; only, before their admission to fellowship in any particular
church, it was judged necessary that, being free from
scandal in life, they should be examined by the elders of the
church, upon whose approbation of their fitness they should
publicly and personally own the covenant, and so be received
unto the table of the Lord. And accordingly the eldest son
of Mr. Higginson, being about fifteen years of age, and laudably
answering all the characters expected in a communicant, was
then so received.”
The colony under Governor Winthrop and Thomas Dudley
was, in fact, composed of men in all but political opinion warmly
attached to the Church of England; and they published, on
their departure, a tract called “The Humble Request of His
Majesty's Loyal Subjects, the Governor and Company lately
gone for New England, for the Obtaining of their Prayers, and
the Removal of Suspicions and Misconstruction of their Intentions”;
and in this address they called the Church of England
their dear mother, acknowledging that such hope and part as
they had attained in the common salvation, they had sucked
from her breasts; and entreating their many reverend fathers
and brethren to recommend them unto the mercies of God, in
their constant prayers, as a church now springing out of their
own bowels. Originally, therefore, the first young people who
grew up in New England were taught in their earliest childhood
to regard themselves as already members of the church, as under
obligations to comport themselves accordingly, and at a very early
age it was expected of them that they would come forward by
in a manner much the same in general effect as confirmation
in England. The immediate result of this was much sympathy
on the part of the children and young people with the religious
views of their parents, and a sort of growing up into them from
generation to generation. But, as the world is always tending to
become unspiritual and mechanical in its views and sentiments,
the defect of the species of religion thus engendered was a want
of that vitality and warmth of emotion which attend the convert
whose mind has come out of darkness into marvellous light, —
who has passed through interior conflicts which have agitated
his soul to the very depths. So there was always a party in
New England who maintained that only those who could relate a
change so marked as to be characterized as supernatural should
hope that they were the true elect of God, or be received in
churches and acknowledged as true Christians.
Many pages of Cotton Mather record the earnest attention
which not only the ministers, but the governors and magistrates,
of New England, in her early days, gave to the question,
“What is the true position of the baptized children of the
Church?” and Cotton Mather, who was warmly in favor of the
Church of England platform in this respect, says: “It was the
study of those prudent men who might be called our seers, that
the children of the faithful should be kept, as far as may be,
under a church watch, in expectation that they might be in a
fairer way to receive the grace of God; so that the prosperous
condition of religion in our churches might not be a matter of
one age alone.”
Old Cotton waxes warm in arguing this subject, as follows: —
“The Scriptures tell us that men's denying the children of the
Church to have any part in the Lord hath a strong tendency in it
to make them cease from fearing the Lord, and harden their
hearts from his fear. But the awful obligations of covenant
interest have a great tendency to soften the heart and break it,
and draw it home to God. Hence, when the Lord would powerfully
win men to obedience, he often begins with this: that he
is their God. The way of the Anabaptists, to admit none unto
way. One would think it should be a way of great purity, but
experience hath shown that it has been an inlet unto great corruption,
and a troublesome, dangerous underminer of reformation.”
And then old Cotton adds these words, certainly as explicit as
even the modern Puseyite could desire: —
“If we do not keep in the way of a converting, grace-giving
covenant, and keep persons under those church dispensations
wherein grace is given, the Church will die of a lingering, though
not a violent death. The Lord hath not set up churches, only
that a few old Christians may keep one another warm while they
live and then carry away the Church into the cold grave with
them when they die. No; but that they might with all care
and with all the obligations and advantages to that care that
may be, nurse up another generation of subjects to our Lord,
that may stand up in his kingdom when they are gone.”
It was for some time doubtful whether the New England
Church would organize itself and seek its own perpetuation on
the educational basis which has been the foundation of the majority
of the Christian Church elsewhere; and the question
was decided, as such society questions often are, by the vigor
and power of one man. Jonathan Edwards, a man who united
in himself the natures of both a poet and a metaphysician, all
whose experiences and feelings were as much more intense than
those of common men as Dante's or Milton's, fell into the error
of making his own constitutional religious experience the measure
and standard of all others, and revolutionizing by it the institutions
of the Pilgrim Fathers.
Regeneration, as he taught it in his “Treatise on the Affections,”
was the implantation by Divine power of a new spiritual
sense in the soul, as diverse from all the other senses as seeing
is from hearing, or tasting from smelling. No one that had not
received this new, divine, supernatural sense, could properly belong
to the Church of Christ, and all men, until they did receive
it, were naturally and constitutionally enemies of God to such a
degree, that, as he says in a sermon to that effect, “If they had
God in their power, they would kill him.”
It was his power and his influence which succeeded in completely
upsetting New England from the basis on which the
Reformers and the Puritan Fathers had placed her, and casting
out of the Church the children of the very saints and martyrs
who had come to this country for no other reason than to found
a church.
It is remarkable that, in all the discussions of depravity inherited
from Adam, it never seemed to occur to any theologian that
there might also be a counter-working of the great law of descent,
by which the feelings and habits of thought wrought in the
human mind by Jesus Christ might descend through generations
of Christians, so that, in course of time, many might be born
predisposed to good, rather than to evil. Cotton Mather fearlessly
says that “the seed of the Church are born holy,” — not, of
course, meaning it in a strictly theological sense, but certainly
indicating that, in his day, a mild and genial spirit of hope
breathed over the cradle of infancy and childhood.
Those very persons whom President Edwards addresses in
such merciless terms of denunciation in his sermons, telling them
that it is a wonder the sun does not refuse to shine upon them, —
that the earth daily groans to open under them, — and that the
wind and the sun and the waters are all weary of them and
longing to break forth and execute the wrath of God upon them,
— were the children for uncounted generations back of fathers
and mothers nursed in the bosom of the Church, trained in
habits of daily prayer, brought up to patience and self-sacrifice
and self-denial as the very bread of their daily being, and lacking
only this supernatural sixth sense, the want of which brought
upon them a guilt so tremendous. The consequence was, that,
immediately after the time of President Edwards, there grew up
in the very bosom of the New England Church a set of young
people who were not merely indifferent to religion, but who
hated it with the whole energy of their being.
Ellery Davenport's feeling toward the Church and religion had
all the bitterness of the disinherited son, who likes nothing better
than to point out the faults in those favored children who enjoy
the privileges of which he is deprived. All the consequences
result from the proposed system of arranging the Church were
strikingly verified in his case. He had not been able entirely
to rid himself of a belief in what he hated. The danger of all
such violent recoils from the religion of one's childhood consists
in this fact, — that the person is always secretly uncertain that
he may not be opposing truth and virtue itself; he struggles
confusedly with the faith of his mother, the prayers of his father,
with whatever there may be holy and noble in the profession
of that faith from which he has broken away; and few
escape a very serious shock to conscience and their moral nature
in doing it.
Ellery Davenport was at war with himself, at war with the
traditions of his ancestry, and had the feeling that he was regarded
in the Puritan community as an apostate; but he took a
perverse pleasure in making his position good by a brilliancy of
wit and grace of manner which few could resist; and, truth to
say, his success, even with the more rigid, justified his self-confidence.
As during these days there were very few young persons
who made any profession of religion at all, the latitude
of expression which he allowed himself on these subjects was
looked upon as a sort of spiritual sowing of wild oats. Heads
would be gravely shaken over him. One and another would
say, “Ah! that Edwards blood is smart; it runs pretty wild in
youth, but the Lord's time may come by and by”; and I doubt
not that my grandmother that very night, before she slept,
wrestled with God in prayer for his soul with all the enthusiasm
of a Monica for a St. Augustine.
Meantime, with that easy facility which enabled him to please
everybody, he became, during the course of a somewhat extended
visit which he made at the minister's, rather a hero in
Oldtown. What Colonel Davenport said, and what Colonel
Davenport did, were spoken of from mouth to mouth. Even his
wicked wit was repeated by the gravest and most pious, — of
course with some expressions of disclaimer, but, after all, with
that genuine pleasure which a Yankee never fails to feel in anything
smartly and neatly hit off in language.
He cultivated a great friendship with Miss Mehitable, — talking
with her of books and literature and foreign countries, and
advising her in regard to the education of Tina, with great
unction and gravity. With that little princess there was always
a sort of half whimsical flirtation, as she demurely insisted on
being treated by him as a woman, rather than as a child, — a
caprice which amused him greatly.
Miss Mehitable felt herself irresistibly drawn, in his society, as
almost everybody else was, to make a confidant of him. He was
so winning, so obliging, so gentle, and knew so well just where
and how to turn the conversation to avoid anything that he
did n't like to hear, and to hear anything that he did. So
gently did his fingers run over the gamut of everybody's nature,
that nobody dreamed of being played on.
Such men are not, of course, villains; but, if they ever should
happen to wish to become so, their nature gives them every
facility.
Before she knew what she was about, Miss Mehitable found
herself talking with Ellery Davenport on the strange, mysterious
sorrow which imbittered her life, and she found a most sympathetic
and respectful listener.
Ellery Davenport was already versed in diplomatic life, and
had held for a year or two a situation of importance at the court
of France; was soon to return thither, and also to be employed
on diplomatic service in England. Could he, would he, find any
traces of the lost one there? On this subject there were long,
and, on the part of Miss Mehitable, agitating interviews, which
much excited Miss Tina's curiosity.
| CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE RAID ON OLDTOWN, AND UNCLE FLIAKIM'S BRAVERY. Oldtown folks | |