Masses & Mainstream, Vol. 3,
December, 1950, pp. 53-64.
Reply to Critics
by Howard Fast
When a reviewer
presumes to charge me — as Mr. Sterling North did in the New
York World Telegram and Sun — with treasonable
distortion of fact, I think he and all of his fraternity deserve
to be answered. The question of who falsifies history is an
important one, for this is an era of many historical novels, few
of them good, and very few indeed which have more than a nodding
acquaintance with fact. A tolerant attitude is adopted toward
most historical novels — an attitude so tolerant, indeed,
that the charge of historical manipulation comes as something of
a shock; and the singular quality of it makes one wonder whether
those who charge falsification are not far more disturbed by
certain elements of truth.
As a matter of
fact, the only novels published in America over the past decade
which have been challenged as to historical content are my own.
Most bitterly resented was and is my partisan position — in
defense of the working class and the oppressed people of America.
This is the position I have chosen — and on this ground I
stand.
The strange and
little-known narrative1
I have told through the person of one Jamie Stuart, soldier in
the Continental Army, would be neither justified nor tolerable if
it were an invention. In the freest of literary worlds an author
has no right to invent such happenings; and within our present
literary surroundings, such a narrative inevitably must do battle
with facts as well as fancy. If the background to Jamie Stuart's
adventures were known widely, as it should be, an offer of proof
would not be necessary. If the times were different, a few
reference notes would do the job. As it is, a fuller explanation
is needed.
Let me give a
specific example of what I mean. John Hyde Preston's Revolution
1776 was enthusiastically reviewed when it appeared in 1933.
Here is how it treats the great revolt of the Foreign Brigades:
"All New Year's Day an ominous atmosphere pervaded
the camp. Gaunt half-clad men wandered about sullenly in the
snow, their cheek bones sticking out under their leathery
skin, beneath those hollow eye sockets; and they muttered to
themselves and to one another and looked furtively at the
leaden sky. Wayne watched them with a despairing heart and
after supper, to cheer them up, he gave every man an extra
ration of rum. The rum was poured greedily down parched
throats. The thick hum of voices grew louder. The soldiers
gathered in little groups in the gloom, muttering and
whispering, and now and then there was a guttural curse....
"Then, suddenly, about nine o'clock in the evening,
the low rumblings outside became a howling riot.... Hoarse
rum-throated cheers rose from the ranks. Guns and pistols
went off, fired into the air.... The big column of
half-drunken men began to move — slowly, cursing to the
beat of a drum ahead.... The dogs were barking, the women
screaming....
"Wayne, vibrant with rage and energy, brought out his
lighthorse brigade and his few remaining troops of infantry,
and ordered a pursuit. The maddened horde had set off on the
lower road to Elizabeth, and Wayne's forces, dragging some
howitzers behind in the dry snow, took the high foot-pass
across the hills. They cut the rioters off at the fork, and
Mad Anthony, standing in the stirrups of his black stallion,
flourished his saber.
"The mutineers fell back. The voices died away, and
there was only the sound of guns and sick groans in the
darkness. Wayne and his faithful officers herded the
rebellious regiments like cattle. A few stragglers escaped
through the woods—and some died from hunger and freezing
before they could reach their homes. The rest slunk back to
their huts, lighted candles, and undressed slowly."
This was greeted
as fine, popular historiography and not criticized at all from
the point of view of accuracy. But let us just glance at a few
surface trimmings:
1. The Light Horse were in Philadelphia, eighty miles
away. They were not with Wayne nor under his command.
2. The "maddened horde," as Preston calls them,
never took the road to Elizabeth. There was no high foot-pass
across the hills.
3. Candles were as rare in that camp as hen's teeth.
4. And no one would be likely to die of freezing during
the warmest winter thaw of the war.
However, these
are only details, and a man who can invent the whole should not
be reprimanded for inventing details as well. Where did Mr.
Preston get his information and what prompted this gratuitous
slander of brave men — so much in the style of today —
who had fought tirelessly and well for five years? At the back of
his book, Mr. Preston has gone to the trouble of rating all other
historians of the period, much in the manner that movies are
rated today. And there, top rating goes to Sydney George Fisher,
of whom Mr. Preston says, "Fisher's style is muscular,
balanced and often droll." So we go to Sydney George Fisher,
and in his True History of the American Revolution (1903),
we find the following concerning the revolt of the Pennsylvania
Line:
"On January 1, 1781, thirteen hundred of them [the
Pennsylvanians] stationed at Morristown marched for
Philadelphia under command of three sergeants, with the
intention of forcing the Congress to pay them.... By the
greatest exertions of leading patriots, who met them at
Princeton, the mutineers were quieted and prevented from
reaching Philadelphia; but this was done by yielding to all
their demands for discharge and pay."
Aside from cutting the number of men in half — and there
is ample factual proof of how many there were — and aside
from the implication that this army, which had carried the
greatest burden of the war for five years, was unpatriotic, this
is a straightforward account of what happened. Why, then, did not
Preston adopt it?
Writing a
hundred years ago, when Thomas Jefferson's opinion that "a
little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing," was still
not "un-American," Washington Irving was able to hold a
much more objective point of view than most present-day
historians. His observations on the Pennsylvania uprising are
particularly interesting when we consider the uncritical worship
he rendered to George Washington. For all that, he wrote at a
time when some soldiers of the Revolution still lived and when
the glory of the Pennsylvania Line had not yet been relegated to
the scrap-heap of history. Of Wayne's attitude, Irving notes in
his Life of Washington:
"Wayne was not 'Mad Anthony' on the present occasion.
All his measures were taken with judgment and forecast. He
sent provisions after the mutineers, lest they should supply
their wants from the country people by force. Two officers of
rank spurred to Philadelphia to apprise Congress of the
approach of the insurgents, and to put it upon its guard.
Wayne sent a dispatch with news of the outbreak to
Washington; he then mounted his horse, and accompanied by
Colonels Butler and Stewart, two officers popular with the
troops, set off after the mutineers, either to bring them to
a halt, or to keep with them, and seek every occasion to
exert a favorable influence over them."
Contrast this
with Preston's contempt for men who forged, out of their
endurance and courage, the beginnings of the United States of
America. Throughout his "history" and many other modern
studies, only the officers are treated as people worthy of any
respect, and the men they led are constantly referred to as
"dogs," "scoundrels," "rioters,"
and even "cutthroats." Of course, these armchair judges
hardly ever pause to consider why such low elements should show a
steadfastness of purpose — without pay, remember, without
decent food or clothing, without any prospect of reward —
unmatched in their times. Any serious military student of the
American Revolution must admit that a central role was played by
the eleven Pennsylvania regiments, while any objective study of
the Battle of Yorktown must show that a considerable part in the
ultimate surrender was played by the remnants of the foreign
brigades, when, under the leadership of Anthony Wayne, they made
a headlong charge upon a British army ten times their size and
cut through them like a scythe, leaving dead on the field of
battle fully half of those original foreign volunteers and
regulars who remained.
One of the best
modern historians of the American Revolution is Professor John C.
Miller of Bryn Mawr. Unlike so many others, he is quite willing
to face the fact that many of the Continental soldiers were
foreign volunteers, and of the Midland troops, he says, "The
Pennsylvania Line contained a higher proportion of foreigners
(chiefly Scotch-Irish and English) than did the line of any other
state; and a number of British deserters had been enlisted in the
Pennsylvania ranks."2
In context with this, he notes that a mutiny of the Connecticut
line in 1773 had been "prevented by the bayonets of the
Pennsylvania Line, which, fortunately for the Continental army,
remained loyal." But even Miller, in discussing the January,
1781, mutiny says of the Pennsylvania Line, "A ration of rum
was passed out to the men (on January 1) and they promptly got
riotously drunk." As his reference for this, Miller quotes a
letter from Washington; but it should be noted that Washington
remained at West Point — and quite wisely — for the
whole length of the rising, and that the bulk of his information
came from Wayne, Reed and Lafayette, and Lafayette's fear and
hatred of the Pennsylvania troops was near to the point of
hysteria. Now this was a hard-drinking age, and a quart of rum at
a sitting was not uncommon. But the records among the Wayne
papers in the Pennsylvania Historical Society state that in the
sixty days prior to the revolt only one ration of rum, of half a
gill per man, had been served out. Rum was a regular part of the
daily ration in the American as well as in the British Army at
that time, and the amount each day per man was a full gill, or
about four ounces. This was the common ration, and certainly it
was not enough to make a grown man "riotously drunk";
but Wayne himself is evidence for the fact that on January 1,
1781, only half rations were available. Anyone who has ever
lingered over a rum collins can give his own testimony as to the
effects of two ounces of the liquor; yet in spite of this
evidence, almost every historian tends to lay the major reasons
for a revolt of such size and complexity, organized in advance
with the greatest of care and skill, and carried off under arms
almost without loss of life, to drunkenness.
Now it is very
hard indeed to get at a clue to the actual character of the
enlisted men. Literacy was so rare among the common men in the
Midlands, native or foreign, that from the whole of the
Pennsylvania Line only one apparently authentic account survives,
A History of the Life and Services of Captain Samuel Dewees,
who was an enlisted man, not an officer, when he served in the
foreign brigades. This book appeared in 1844, and was written
— edited, it is claimed — by one John Smith Hanna, and
as sixty-three years had passed since the revolt of the Line, its
accuracy is open to question. Aside from this, there are the host
of books published in the first five decades of the nineteenth
century and a considerable number of manuscript papers and
letters. But all of these books are open to question; they are
poorly written, full of homilies, and without exception contain
no real people. In the Parson Weems tradition, they simply make
the problem of investigation more difficult. The manuscript
papers are better, but they rarely originate in the Pennsylvania
Line.
Therefore, one
is forced to draw the pieces from here and there and carefully
put them together. Without question the whole will take shape
according to a particular point of view. Let me illustrate what I
mean.
You will find in
The Proud and the Free a part of Jamie Stuart's narrative
which concerns the two British agents, Mason and Ogden. Here is
how the story was told by Washington Irving:
"The two spies who had tampered with the fidelity of
the troops were tried by a court martial, found guilty, and
hanged at the crossroads near Trenton. A reward of fifty
guineas each was offered to two sergeants who had arrested
and delivered them up. They declined accepting it; saying
they had merely acted by order of the board of sergeants. The
hundred guineas were then offered to the board. Their reply
is worthy of record. 'It was not,' said they, 'for the sake
of or through any expectation of reward, but for the love of
our country, that we sent the spies immediately to General
Wayne; we therefore do not consider ourselves entitled to any
other reward but the love of our country, and do jointly
agree to accept of no other.'"
This is Bowzer,
of the Committee of Sergeants, to Wayne, and Irving is willing to
accept the simple dignity of their position. Remember that these
men were paupers; and that fifty guineas gold was more than their
pay for a year — if the money in which they were paid had
its face value. Actually, when they were paid, it was with money
worth little more than the paper it was printed on. Strange
actions for these "villains," as Wayne frequently
called them.
A most
interesting commentary on this is contained in a letter written
by Joseph Reed to George Washington. Even though Reed crowed with
glee at having saved the hundred pounds Wayne had so
thoughtlessly promised, he wrote, ".... A large reward
having been offered to the sergeants for the fidelity in this
respect, they declined it in a very disinterested manner and in
terms that would have done credit to persons of more elevated
stations in life..."3
And contrast
this with the actions of Lieutenant John Bigham of the 5th
Regiment of the Pennsylvania Line, who, in August of 1780
"was sent by the Council from Philadelphia with 14,068
dollars to pay bounties due recruits in the Line, but never
arrived with it. When he was afterwards cashiered he frivolously
claimed he had spent the money for necessary charges on the road
to camp."4
In case one is
unfamiliar with antique military language, to be cashiered is to
receive a dishonorable discharge. Evidently, when one came from
the "more elevated stations in life," the punishment
did not exactly fit the crime. It is at strange odds with the
hanging in May, 1780, of James Coleman of the Eleventh
Pennsylvania, who, near to starving, left his encampment in a
temporary desertion to seek food. Though he was proven to be a
good soldier with a heroic record, his execution was deemed
necessary.
With the above
in mind, one can see that the truth of what actually happened in
the Pennsylvania Line in January of 1781 is not easy to arrive
at. The major credit for this task belongs to one of the finest
and most scholarly historians of our colonial period, Carl Van
Doren, and his amazing book, Mutiny in January.
When the
Pennsylvania Line expelled its officers and created the Committee
of Sergeants to govern itself, the British almost literally
suspended every other operation in order to win over these
foreign brigades. In the offers they sent out, not only with
Mason and Ogden but through every channel they could command,
they promised the rebels everything but the throne of England.
They rolled our a great plush carpet, with gravy bowls on every
hand, and said, "Walk into our parlor." The
Pennsylvania men told them to go to hell and be damned. There is
no indication from any source that even one of the soldiers
concerned in the revolt ever raised the question of going to the
enemy. The British themselves — and their intelligence was
so good that they made better accounts of the revolt than our
side could provide — admitted this somewhat bitterly, and,
at the conclusion of his journal on the mutiny, the British
General De Lancey wrote:
"This day a Captain [William Bernard Gifford] of the
3rd Jersey Regiment, who I had corresponded with came over to
us. He confirms the information of yesterday...
"He says they [the Pennsylvania troops] have shown no
intention of coming to us, but on the contrary declared that
should the British interfere, they would take up arms to
oppose them as readily as ever."
Since then,
historians have been at a loss to understand why the foreign
brigades were more antagonistic toward the British after their
revolt than before it, and why they took the somewhat
unprecedented step of handing British agents over to Wayne to be
hanged; and this bewilderment was shared by most of the highly
placed Pennsylvania officers. None of them understood what life
itself so amply demonstrated, that the action of the Pennsylvania
troops was a step that carried the Revolution forward, not
backward. For the moment, the fate of the American Revolution was
literally placed in the hands of and under the leadership of
those participants whose needs were most urgent — in the
revolutionary sense — and who would thus be least ready to
compromise. The fact that they could not maintain themselves in
that position for more than a few weeks is very interesting, for
it must be remembered that they surrendered their power and that
it was not taken from them.
They could not
maintain themselves because they could put forth no revolutionary
program that was either basically different from or better or
more satisfying to their needs than the program of the
Continental Congress and of Wayne and his fellow officers.
No matter how
far the officers had departed in practice from the principles of
the Declaration of Independence, they still subscribed publicly
to that program — and to the program of the Confederation.
And the soldiers themselves had no better program than this and
were historically unable to formulate one, since in 1781 the
Declaration of Independence and its associated documents embodied
the most advanced political program possible in America. In their
revolt, they stepped beyond the progress of history and into a
future still unmade. From this they had to retreat, for the
essence of the Revolution was a compact and unity between the
various classes in America at the time; and if this were smashed,
the Revolution itself would have perished. Thus, in surrendering,
the Committee of Sergeants acted less from choice than from the
strong pressures of necessity.
An indication of
the precise nature of this revolt is contained in two aspects of
it, for which we have a good deal of evidence: the sudden
increase of discipline and self-imposed restraint, which added up
to the highest enlisted man morale of the war, and the reception
of the rank and file troops by the population of New Jersey.
First of all,
consider the number of men involved. Practically every authority
on the subject places the number of men who revolted anywhere
between a thousand and fifteen hundred. But Anthony Wayne
himself, supervising the dissolution of the Line in Trenton on
January 3, states explicitly that 2,400 men were then present to
be discharged or retained. Since this is based on an official
count which he himself undertook, and since it would be wholly to
his interest to understate rather than overstate the number, 2400
must be accepted as a minimum. One must recognize what a
tremendous organizational task the revolt presented. The word
"riot" cannot be used in connection with this, for such
a movement of men and equipment could only have been carried out
if the great majority of the men were involved — and
involved on the basis of the highest sort of self discipline.
Carl Van Doren quotes an observer, an officer, as remarking of
that first night, "'They went off very civilly to what might
have been expected from such a mob.'"
And of the
second day of their march, he has this to say:
"They left Vealtown early on Tuesday morning.
Cornelius Tyger, a loyalist who was at Pluckemin about eight
miles away, stood and saw them all march by .... 'They were
in very high spirits. They marched in the most perfect order
and seemed as if under military discipline.' They had what he
thought a vast number of wagons.'"
This is clearly
an army on the march and no mob. General Oliver De Lancey of the
British army, coordinating his intelligence reports,
substantiates this view. Many more such references are available,
but I will quote only one other, on which the incident of the
chicken in my book is based.
"An
admiring spy," writes Carl Van Doren, "reported to the
British that 'the Pennsylvanians observe the greatest order, and
if a man takes a fowl from an inhabitant he is severely
punished.' The behavior of the troops on the march was so good
that the people of the district, who had suffered from the
marauding of British, Hessian, loyalist and rebel soldiers, at
once felt friendly and sympathetic toward these honest
mutineers."
The factor of
consciousness is always belittled by spokesmen for reaction, who
would, as Kenneth Roberts does in Oliver Wiswell, turn the
revolutionists into a mob of ignorant and murderous hoodlums. But
their conduct in January, 1781, refutes these charges completely.
They were men who knew very well what they were fighting for
— and indeed there is no other explanation for their
consistency in the struggle.
The foreign
brigades were composed, for the most part, of the following
national groups, given in order of numerical importance: Irish,
Scottish, English, German, Negro, Jewish and Polish. But even
this breakdown cannot be wholly relied upon, since the surviving
regimental lists leave much about these men unsaid. We know that
less than five percent were farmers or peasants, excluding former
slaves. The rest were laborers and artisans, professional
soldiers, sailors, deserters from the British army and navy,
clerks, etc.
It is pathetic
how little we know about them. In Mutiny in January there
are detailed accounts of the actions of the officers as well as
an extraordinary description of intelligence and
counter-intelligence; but of what went on among the men of the
Line, there is almost nothing at all, and Van Doren admits quite
frankly the difficulties of obtaining such data. For this reason,
the core of Jamie Stuart's narrative had to be a reconstruction,
nor from thin air, but from all the bits of information I had
been able to gather about the men of the Pennsylvania Line since
I first began to write of them, some fourteen years ago. That I
colored this information according to my own beliefs, I do not
deny; it could hardly be otherwise; but I have tried faithfully
to understand these men and to depict the forces that motivated
them; and I have always tried to link the trends of their time
with the trends today. After all, they are not so far from us
— only a moment in the great panorama of human history
— and they are by no means strangers.
Now a word must
be said of the occurrences at York and the conduct of Anthony
Wayne. Whether the horrible affair at York happened as I have
described it in my story is something no one can determine today.
There are in existence at least five versions of the incident at
York, and each varies from the other. Three versions give an
account which is substantially that in The Proud and the Free.
The semi-official records surviving tell of a court martial at
York, wherein six men were condemned to death and four executed,
which is more or less what Wayne's accounting of the incident to
Washington is.
However,
Lieutenant Colonel William Smith Livingston, in a letter to
Colonel Samuel Blatchey Webb, gives the following account:
"There has been a mutiny in the Pennsylvania Line at
York Town [Pennsylvania] previous to their marching. Wayne
like a good officer quelled it as soon as twelve of the
fellows stepped out and persuaded the Line to refuse to march
in consequence of the promises made to them not being
complied with. Wayne ... begged they would now fire either on
him and them, or on those villains in front. He then called
to such a platoon. They presented at the word, fired, and
killed six of the villains. One of the others, badly wounded,
he ordered to be bayonetted. The soldier on whom he called to
do it, recovered his piece and said he could not, for he was
his comrade. Wayne then drew his pistol and told him he would
kill him. The fellow then advanced and bayonetted him. Wayne
then marched the Line by divisions round the dead and the
rest of the fellows are ordered to be hanged. The Line
marched the next day southward, mute as fish."
Too many of the
accounts introduce the same note of horror for this to be
entirely an invention. In his memoirs, Samuel Dewees goes into
the executions at York in great and horrible detail. In his
account, only six men are involved. Leonard Dubbs, a drummer in
the Sixth Pennsylvania, gives a somewhat similar account and
places Jack Maloney as the central figure. My own problem was to
make to appear logical a frightful incident almost beyond logic.
As for the role
of Anthony Wayne in this affair, history has given him a place of
honor and there is no reason to disturb it. He was a very young
man when all this occurred, and if he was hard and to an extent
cruel, he was also brave and loyal — which all too many of
his fellow officers were not. Faced with the disintegration of
his army, a process he could not relate to cause, as a wiser man
might have, he acted promptly and mercilessly. Enlisted men were
a little less than human to him, as they have been to so many
officers since the first army took the field of battle.
There are a few
more points I wish to make before I conclude these notes. Several
contemporary accounts mention a Williams as the leader of the
revolt. But he remains shrouded in mystery, and we do not even
know his first name; the only two of the Committee of Sergeants
whom I could reconstruct in any manner as living persons were
Bowzer and Maloney, and therefore I gave them leading roles. I
also took the liberty of pre-dating the revolt of the Jersey
Line, so that it might be an integral part of the events
described. All of the songs used are authentic and were taken
from old books and manuscripts. In the summer of 1783, the
foreign brigades were permanently demobilized, and the few men
who were left were swept up by the great postwar surge of the
young nation — and thereby disappeared from our sight. What
happened to them or to the hundreds of others who were once part
of the line, no one will ever know. Some, perhaps, went back to
their old trades; some, without kith or kin or tie to hold them,
must have gone west on the expanding frontier; some went to sea,
and undoubtedly some returned to the life they knew best, the
army. However it was, they left no trace of themselves; and one
can imagine them, as the years went by and every summer
militiaman became more and more of a hero, they spoke less and
less of what they had seen or done. Their strange revolt had now
become a mutiny and was discussed scornfully by students of such
things, and their hopes and dreams were locked away in their own
hearts. Simple men, working men most of them, unable to read or
write, they took their places in the mass of the American people
— and there something of them must remain, to come to life
once again and to fight again for the vision of freedom this land
once gave to the world.
NOTES
1 The Proud and the Free. This
novel was reviewed in Masses & Mainstream last
month.
2 Triumph of Freedom. Boston,
1948.
3 Joseph Reed papers, New York Historical
Society.
4 Carl Van Doren, Mutiny in January. New
York, 1943.
Thanks to Steve Trussel, creator of the
fabulous Howard
Fast Home Page, for corrections to this text
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