AMD" D Stories of American Hisiory 9i^4-^ v\??3sJ»3^4«tifcM.iidttfSis*. CAIiOLyNSHERWINBAILEY Copyright K" »JSa5i Ci)FflRIGHT DEPOSm 'Proclaiming Liberty to all the World' FOR THE CHILDREN'S HOUR SERIES BROAD STRIPES AND BRIGHT STARS Stories of American History BY CAROLYN SHERWIN BAILEY Author of 'For the Children's Hour," '* Firelight Stories," "Stories Children Need , " "For the Story Teller, * ' "Tell M« Another Story," etc ILLUSTRATED IT POWER O'MALLEY MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS 19 19 .3 Copyright 1919 By MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY Springfield, Massachusetts All Rights Reserved BvaiXep Qualit? Books AUG 15 019 ©CLA530543 TABLE OF CONTENTS Pilgrims for Freedom . The First Fight . The Freeman's Charter Following the Beaver's Trail At the Gate of Old Harvard The White Man's Foot Going to London to Visit the King Ringing in the Fourth of July . Keeping Christmas With General Washington The Ghost That Haunted Wall Street The Road That Went Out West In the Wake op the First Steamboat. Cutting the World's Bread When Johnny Bull and Brother Jonathan Hands ...... A Slave Among Slaves One Flag, or Two? .... Uncle Remus at the White House Uncle Sam's Birthday Party The Ship the Giants Launched . The Town Named After Him The Last Fight .... A Proclamation Shook Page 11 24 38 50 64 77 82 97 106 119 131 144 154 164 176 186 198 210 219 230 231 241 EDITORIAL NOTE: I am indebted as follows for copyrighted material appearing in this book: To the George W. Jacobs Company for the extract from Historic Inventions by Rupert S. Hol- land; to Doubleday Page and Company for A Slave Among Slaves from Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington. The White Man's Foot is used by permission of and special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Com- pany. Mrs. Mary Stuart Cutting has given permission to republish in this connection her poem The Town Called After Him. PREFACE I have written this book because I beheve that the story of the American people as it is embodied in the history of our United States suppHes the most important material for character building in the entire field of elementary education, and should be offered to children in a new, humanitarian way as a means of helping them to understand the present. The plan of the book is to present the development of our nation, not as a summary of unrelated facts and a confusion of dates, but as one of the most vivid panoramas the world has ever known, its first scene laid on Plymouth Rock and its last the flight of an American aviator winging his way over a battlefield in Europe. The historical episodes that make this panorama are selected and pre- sented in such a way as to show boys and girls that our present position as a great people is the result of following the road of freedom we have been building steadily ever since the landing of the Pilgrims, and that real de- mocracy can be really efficient, not only in the case of our own nation, but in our relations to the other peoples of the world. My method of presenting these historical epochs is different from the average story in American history in that it makes a direct appeal to conduct and to life. Each story has a central character from history as its hero who played a part, begin- ning often with youth, in our development as a free country. The children who read the stories will feel and understand our history as the men who made it did. Through this appeal to the imagination, boys and girls of today are inspired to follow lines of right conduct and to achieve as our ancestors did. They are helped to understand the drama of present national events in terms of our valiant historical past. They feel an urge to be, themselves, a part of our history tomorrow. The stories embody only those fundamental facts and dates which have a direct bearing upon our present position as a great, free. nation, and some of these facts include the stories of far-seeing inventors whose mechani- cal achievements not only bettered our own industrial organization, but strengthened our bonds with the outside world. Each story emphasizes the social and ethical features of the period it represents; home life, schooling, food, agriculture, travel, transportation, typi- cal customs, business, discovery, everyday work, longing for expansion, and self sacrifice are used to create an atmosphere of reality about each story, and to make it a record of men, rather than of names, battles, and statistics. Quite as important as this social appeal is the appeal that the book makes to children's powers of reasoning and judgment. By its very definition, history is a study in cause and effect; because some individual or group dared something the inevitable happened. So the Pilgrims dreamed of and won their fight for opportunity in the New World. A bit of parchment that Governor Winthrop refused to give up began our government by the people. A New Amsterdam trapper following a beaver's trail along the Hudson marked our first business street. A king of the House of Hanover discovered the stuff of which the Enghsh people were made when he had to recognize our Independence. An American boy experimenting with a paddle wheel and fishing boat gave the steamboat to commerce and travel, and a wilderness road opened for us the development and wealth of the west. They were all adventures and combine to interpret for children the recent great adventure of the American people, the finding of a new democracy for ourselves, no longer cut off from the world, but one with the nations of the Old World in kindness and co- operation, pity, unselfishness, help, and love of noble things. Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, Broad Stripes and Bright Stars BROAD STRIPES AND BRIGHT STARS PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM From the time when he was a boy on his father's great country estate in the north of England, Miles Standish had been thrilled by the stories he had heard of the New World, lying across the Atlantic Ocean from Britain. They were adventurous enough tales to thrill any boy, especially one with a high spirit and great courage pent up in a very small body. ''Miles in name, but inches in stature,'' was what they said of him. On the yellowing charts in his father's library Miles could have pointed out, the voyage across the Atlantic of the Great Sea- man, as English seafaring folk still called Sebastian Cabot, who had touched the main- land of the New World almost a century before. ''Here he started," Miles would say, in- dicating an English port on the map. "Then he sailed due north, toward the land whose 12 PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM islands Christopher Columbus discovered. He loved the sea more than anything else, and he braved fog and chilling winds and huge icebergs on this perilous voyage. Three months the Great Seaman was gone, and when he returned he brought tales of having touched the shores of a cold, bleak country with fields of ice and snow. Until he died Sebastian Cabot talked of the New World that he, sailing for England, had touched. I would have liked to take passage with him,'' Miles would finish. An old serving man on the Standish estate was able to tell Miles a story of one Christmas over three score years before in the New World. ^^England is fair and full of plenty,'' he he would say, "but Cortes, the Spanish discoverer, found a fairer land. Fancy a city, lad, built of gold and silver and set on a wide blue lake with floating gardens on its waters! There were palaces in this southern kingdom in which dark skinned Aztec rulers lived who owned mines of precious stones and rich PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 13 harvest fields, and were envied by other nations/' 'Then, near Christmas in the year 1520?^' Miles would ask. 'The ambitious Spaniard, Hernando Cortes, reached this Aztec city and marched through its streets with a band of soldiers, '^ the old man continued. 'The Aztecs had a tradition that, years before, they had been visited by a stranger from the East who had taught them all the arts of peace and war and had said that he would come again to demand the whole of their kingdom. They thought that Cortes was this conqueror.'' "And so the Spaniard found the southern part of the New World," Miles would end the story as he looked wistfully across the quiet English pastures in the direction of the sea, and this land of wonders. It was the reign of Queen Elizabeth in England, a time of merry feasting and tourna- ments, of pageants and velvet cloaks and jewels and fine lace. There was every chance for Miles Standish, grown to a youth, to sit at the feet of the Queen and obtain favor at 14 PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM the Elizabethan court, being well born and of a fiery, spirited kind of courage. But the walls of a palace seemed to him as limited as prison walls, and the shores of England were too narrow for him. He wanted a chance to voyage away from them as the Great Seaman had done so many years before. Suddenly his chance came. Spanish pirates attempted to take the Belgian coast town of Ostend, and the Hollanders made a stand to hold it against them. Queen Elizabeth decided to send troops to Flanders to help the Dutch. Miles Standish remembered the story that had seemed so wonderful to him in his boy- hood. Again he saw the conquering Spanish explorer marching on the feast day of peace to wrest their kingdom from the Aztecs in the New World. Here, at a port of the Old World, was an expedition of the same ambitious Spaniards. Miles Standish went to the Queen with a request for service. ^'You would be a minstrel, a squire, a jester?^' the Queen asked, looking down at the earnest youth. No wonder she asked it; only a scant five feet tall, a round face like a PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 15 boy's but with large, dark blue eyes that flashed temper and strong determination and high courage like darts of lightning, that was Miles Standish. His answer proved his worth. '^I would like a sword, your Majesty." A lieutenant at eighteen; that was a good beginning! Miles Standish went to Flanders and fought like the intrepid soldier he was for three years in the long siege of Ostend. The town surrendered at last and a truce was declared. Miles Standish was now a captain and engaged in garrison duty, first in one post and then in another, until he was sent at last to Ley den in Holland. Here, away from his native England, Miles Standish heard again tales and rumors of the New World. The Hollanders had an odd geographical theory about it. "That continent on the other side of the Atlantic is only a narrow strip of land," they said. "It is quite possible that there is a strait which leads through it." It was a good guess, for no one really knew. "If we could sail north of or through this 16 PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM strange land/^ the Dutch East India trading company said, *'how it would shorten our route !'^ And with this idea in mind they had sent Henry Hudson on a voyage in 1609 to try and discover a quicker route to India. Miles Standish listened to the reports of Henry Hudson's trip. It was almost as exciting as Cabot's voyage had been. Henry Hudson had sailed in the little Half Moon, a cold and stormy western voyage. His crew was close to mutiny, and he, himself, grew discouraged and heartsick. He en- countered icebergs and chilling currents to- ward the north so he changed his course south. When the Half Moon, battered and with torn sails, was about to turn back, she had drifted quietly into a beautiful river. Wild roses grew so low on the shores that the tired seamen could pick them, and there were purple grapes and rosy apples and plenty of fish. On either side of this river, which they named the Hudson, were great green hills. Close on these tales came others of an English settlement in the New World estab- lished by King James the First, who ruled PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 17 England now in place of Queen Elizabeth. It was called Virginia, because the country was so new and so fair. The colonists were having struggles with wild savages, it was reported, but they had found food and raw materials unknown in their home country, and valuable ; potatoes and wild turkeys, sassafras root, tobacco, great cedar posts and walnut timber, and iron ore. It was all a part of dreams, and yet true. Holland was a tidy, comfortable place in which to live. Captain Standish, when he was not on duty, walked up and down Leyden^s clean, paved streets, saw the gardens bright with tulips and watched the trim housewives in their bright gowns and wooden shoes gos- siping across one carved half door to another. All that the little kingdom of Holland asked was a chance to tend her gardens and keep house in the clean, bright way in which she had always done. But one day Miles Standish noticed strangers in Leyden. A stern, sober English- man in a long black cloak and tall hat hurried by. With him was a young girl, who might 18 PILGRIMS I OR FREEDOM have been his daughter, her fair curls tucked smoothly into a tight muslin cap and a muslin kerchief folded demurely over the shoulders of her straight gray frock. ^Tilgrims/' a friend told Captain Standish later. ^Xeyden is full of them. They left England because thej^ want to be free to build their own church. They will not be held by the laws of the Church of England. Now they find that they are not free in Holland, either. They are restless and chafe under the peace and quiet here. Their children are growing up to speak the Dutch tongue and to forget English customs. These Pilgrims are rightly named, Captain; they have no abiding place. They are planning even,'' the man lowered his voice at the hazard of the scheme, ^^to make a voyage to the New World!'' Captain Standish listened and then made a sudden decision. Here was a great op- portunity for him and for England, he believed. The spirit of all the valiant ex- plorers who had gone before suddenly filled his heart. He fancied himself the Great PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 19 Seaman, bailing an uncharted ocean to find a new land. He was the soldier who would wrest that fair Aztec kingdom from the oppression of Spain. He saw the green hills that bordered the Hudson River, and he could feel and touch the fruits and crops of Virginia. Here, in Leyden, were his followers, Enghsh folk like himself, and bound on the same pilgrimage as that of which he had dreamed. ''I will lead the Pilgrims to the New World," he said. ''But you are not of their belief; you are of the Church of England, '' his friend protested. 'That makes no difference at all," Miles Standish said. "They are pilgrims for free- dom. This matter of building a church is the way the dream came to them." And this proved to be true, for the Pilgrims accepted the leadership of Captain Miles Standish. They put themselves under his guidance for the perilous adventure upon which they at once embarked. An ocean liner of today slips away from her dock with scarcely a throb of her engines. One 20 PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM lives aboard her for the days of the trip across the Atlantic Ocean much as one lives in a hotel in a great city; there are the same comfortable beds and baths, a great dining room, a library, musicians, and servants. One scarcely feels the waves, and a storm is safely weathered. There were no ocean liners in the seven- teenth century. Miles Standish and the Pilgrims boarded a small sailing vessel, the Speedwell, and crossed to England where they were joined by another sailing vessel, only slightly larger, the Mayflower. She was crowded with other wayfarers who wanted to begin living anew in a new land. It was in August of the year 1620 that the two little ships started on their three thousand mile trip. They had gone out a short distance only when water began to pour into the hold of the Speedwell and she barely returned to port without sinking. They stopped the leak and set sail again, but three hundred miles from land the vessel began to take water again. Then Captain Standish discovered that the PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 21 Speedwell's captain was a coward, afraid to go on with the hazardous voyage, and he had disabled the ship. The Pilgrims abandoned the Speedwell and crowded into the May- flower. There were over a hundred men, women and children. She was loaded with guns, and tools for farming and building, kettles, spinning wheels, crude furniture and kitchen utensils, only the needful things for beginning a new life, but they freighted the little bark so heavily that her deck almost touched the level of the sea. There was no refuge from storms as the sea washed over the deck, and the wind bent the frail masts and tossed the Mayflower like a boat sailed by a child in play. Stout hearts and brave hands filled the Mayflower, though. The men bailed out the leaking holds and mended broken spars and never once gave up the ship for lost, even when she was blown about like a chip in the waters of a strange ocean. The women would have scorned to speak of their fears and the children did not murmur. Miles Standish was pilot and comforter and captain of hope all in 22 PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM one. He seemed a giant in stature, so great was his courage. Each one of the cold, bleak days of the two months that the Mayflower took her trackless way to the New World, Captain Standish had the same message of cheer for the Pilgrims. ^'We are one day nearer our port. Some morning we will see the plentiful fields of Virginia." But when land was first sighted from the Mayflower in November of the same year, 1620, it was a bleak, rocky coast. Bare oak trees and pointed pines made impenetrable forests. There was nothing growing; there were no shelters waiting for the Pilgrims, and it was almost winter. They had drifted in a northerly direction and had sighted the point of land that is now Cape Cod, Captain Standish and a few men made a difficult landing and cut trails through the woods to try and locate a spot for a settle- ment. Sometimes they lost their way in the forests; very often an arrow, shot from an Indian's bow, would whiz past them. At last, late in December, they found a little open bay PILGRIMS FOR FREEDOM 23 beyond which lay wooded hills and streams. It showed traces of English explorers and Captain John Smith, in charge of an English expedition to Virginia, had marked it Ply- mouth. Wading through icy water, carrying their children and their few utensils through the surf, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth on December 21st, 1620. They stood with Miles Standish, a gallant little group, their feet on a bare rock, but their eyes fixed on the stars. The New World, America, was very different from the fair land of which they had dreamed, but it held everything for which they had dared the voyage, a chance to start at the very beginning of things, and to start free. THE FIRST FIGHT The Indian, Squanto, crept with silent foot- steps through the wintry woods of Plymouth and peered in the window of the log building at the foot of the hill. News of the arrival of the Pilgrims with their fearless captain, Miles Standish, had been brought to the nearby tribe by Indian scouts. The tribe had watched their landing, the cutting of logs for this single large house that sheltered the Pilgrims and their tools and stores, the placing of cannon on the hilltop and the enclosing of the settlement by a tall stockade. They had seen the women washing the clothes in the water of some chilly stream, they had watched this doughty leader of the pale faces. Captain Standish, helping to make soup in a large iron pot, tending the sick, and even digging graves during those first hard months in the New World. Whatever came to his hand, he did as THE FIRST FIGHT 25 well as he had fought in Flanders and guided the Pilgrims to the shores of Plymouth. It was so with the others of this little com- pany of strangers in the redman's land. Although an occasional glimpse of a painted face looking over the stockade, a swift dart shot from an Indian bow in the forest, or the echo of a savage yell terrified them, they went on hunting and staking off plots for gardens and houses, and cutting logs and stalking game in a fearless way that interested the tribes. The Indians were as much a part of America as were the pine trees and the deer. It was their land on which the Pilgrims were settling and the savages could have sur- rounded them and killed them at any time that they chose. Instead, they were watching their new neighbors and waiting. As he knelt, unseen, by the window the Indian runner touched the rough logs of which this first house in Plymouth was built. The wigwam to which he would return was constructed of several long saplings, stuck in the ground in a circle and covered over with thickly braided rush mats. A round hole at 26 THE FIRST FIGHT the top made the chimney and another hole at the bottom was the door. It was a satis- factory enough shelter but not nearly so well built and lasting as the one beneath whose wall Squanto was crouching. The crevices between the logs were plastered with clay mortar. The roof was strongly thatched. The large chimney was made of stout sticks laid crosswise, one upon another, and well plastered with clay inside and out. These strangers had greater skill, different tools and more deadly weapons than their Indian neighbors, Squanto realized, but the scene inside the cabin was what amazed the Indian. The diminished group of men and women and children huddled about a small fire. Their number was less than half of those who had landed with such hope from the Mayflower at the beginning of the winter of 1620. They had pinched, white faces. Remembering his own lodge hung with dried venison and fish, and stored with grains and dried berries in preparation for this long, white winter, the Indian understood the significance of what he saw. The Pilgrims were about to lose their THE FIRST FIGHT 27 fight with hunger. In spite of their bold courage and the different skill with which they used their hands, the pale faces were conquered — unless. Squanto rose noiselessly. He hurried away through the forest as quietly as a red leaf drifts, blown by the wind. He traveled very swiftly, for he was bearing news to his tribe and he did not stop until he saw the smoke rising from wigwams and was met by other runners who conducted him to the lodge of his great chief, Massasoit. Gathered about a council fire the tribe and their chief discussed the matter of the settlement at Plymouth, the glow of the flames lighting their painted faces and glistening war axes. Should they kill or make friends with these white strangers? At last Massasoit rose and led the way to a mound of earth just outside the limits of the camp. There were many of these mounds, some of them holding implements of warfare, another concealing a collection of tools that they had stolen from the Pilgrims but did not know how to use. These were Indian treasure mounds. Massasoit solemnly opened one and 28 THE FIRST FIGHT lifted out some heavy baskets filled with small kernels of grain, yellow, and red and black. He took a few in his hand and fingered them as if they were gold coins. They were indeed more precious than money, for they were kernels of Indian corn and each one held in its heart the power to win the battle the Pilgrims were fighting against starvation. Massasoit lifted out a basket of corn and returned with it to his lodge. He had made his decision in regard to his pale face neighbors. March, chill and blustering, found the Pilgrims in desperate circumstances. There were a few log houses in Plymouth with land for gardens laid out for the largest families. Each head of a family built his own house, since by this plan every one did his best. But the food supplies they had brought in the Mayflower were exhausted; they were in too great danger from unfriendly Indians now to go for long hunting expeditions, and they did not understand the agricultural conditions of North America or how to get the most in the way of crops out of the land. Even dauntless THE FIRST FIGHT 29 Miles Standish had almost lost heart; it seemed an uneven fight. We think of the settlers of Plymouth in these early days as the pictures show them to us, dressed in the black cloaks and stiffly starched linen and buckle trimmed shoes they had worn in England. But the spring of 1621 saw them a ragged, unkempt, starved colony of nomad English folk whose sole wealth was their courage and the strong belief that out of their desire for freedom would come their power to attain food and shelter and clothing. Then, in the same month of March, the Pilgrims were startled one day by an un- expected vision. Two Indian runners, Squanto and his friend, Samoset, appeared in their midst. Copper skinned, half naked, straight as arrows, these two, who were able to speak a little English, explained that the mighty chief of the Iroquois tribe, Massasoit himself, was on his way with a company of warriors to pay the white men a visit. Before the Pilgrims had time to take council together as to what they should do in this new emergency, Massa- 30 THE FIRST FIGHT soit was seen with his train ascending the hill back of Plymouth. On the brow they stopped, waiting for a hostage. They had made them- selves ready for the visit with great care; their faces were painted across with wide streaks of black and white or black and red, and some had braided foxes^ tails into their long, snake like hair. Each Indian was fully armed with bow and arrows and battle axe. The giving and taking of hostages was an old custom of the nations, the Pilgrims realized, and Edward Winslow, a Pilgrim leader, was chosen to go up the hill to Massa- soit, wearing his polished armor and sword and carrying some knives and a copper chain as gifts. Winslow^s courage was great, for Massasoit's train numbered scores of picked warriors, but as he stood before them fear- lessly the Indians stacked their weapons and followed him down the hill into Plymouth. Captain Standish and his men met the company and fired a salute. Miles Standish had never forgotten for a moment the story he had heard in his boyhood of Cortes' treat- ment of the Aztecs. He had heard tales, also, THE FIRST FIGHT 31 of the trouble the Enghsh colonists were having now in Virginia with the Indians; there was continual warfare and slight basis for permanent friendship between the settlers of Jamestown and their red-skin neighbors. He had faith in fair dealing and neighborliness in the relation between the two races, at least until the Indians showed signs of direct hostility. Here were red men, come on a friendly visit to Plymouth, so the military salute was given to welcome them and then Massasoit and his warriors were conducted to the central house in the village of Plymouth and invited to seat themselves on cushions as a feast prepared from the scanty food stores was offered them. Then followed the framing of the first treaty between the white men and the red. Those of the Indians who could speak English learned it by heart and interpreted and taught it to the others. It was an excellent peace compact for civilized and savage nations. The Pilgrims and the Indians, to begin with, agreed to do each other no hurt. But if an 32 THE FIRST FIGHT Indian should hurt a white man, he was to be referred to the Enghsh for trial. If an Indian should rob the English, or an Englishman an Indian, each one agreed to see that the prop- erty was returned to the owner. Each promised to be the other's ally in case of war and that they would visit each other unarmed. Massasoit agreed to send runners with the words of the treaty to all his neighboring tribes. The great chief rose to leave, as mas- sive and powerful as some forest oak arrayed in its fall colors of red and brown. His war- riors followed him, for their business was over, and they knew that their chief would never break his word as long as he lived. The great day of the first treaty making in Plymouth was not quite finished, though. As Massasoit and his train of warriors went back over the hill, Squanto lingered in the stockade. He took a basket from under his cloak of deer skin and showed it to the wonder- ing Pilgrims. It was full of those same strange seeds, yellow and red and black. He offered it to Captain Standish; explaining that each THE FIRST FIGHT 33 kernel of corn held the secret of victory over the Pilgrim's greatest enemy, starvation. Squanto was more than a savage. He was a successful Indian farmer. '^He could be quite as cruel as any of the rest of his tribe but he knew more about the soil and crops of Ply- mouth than the Pilgrims did, and he liked to plant and harvest. He felt quite rich with the white men's occasional gifts of colored beads, a jack knife, a pair of shoes and a hat. In return, he taught them his methods of getting the most out of the soil. The white men must plant the kernels of corn in hills at about the time in spring when the new leaves on the oak trees were the size of a field mouse's ear, he told them. A fish buried in the earth of each hill of corn was good fertilizer for the corn ; the seed would sprout faster. Pumpkin seed could be planted in the same field as corn and the pumpkins would prove excellent food. In the meantime, to satisfy hunger while this first crop was in the ground, there was plenty of fish to be had. An Indian canoe was fight and small enough to skim over almost any waters for trout and salmon, and eels could 34 THE FIRST FIGHT be had by treading them out of the mud with ones bare feet. Such food made a feast if properly cooked. All this food knowledge was Squanto's and he taught it to the settlers of Plymouth. Europe had known nothing of Indian corn. The Pilgrims' courage was high as they ploughed and planted, and saw green shoots pushing their way up through the earth, and listened to Squanto's instructions about grind- ing the corn into meal, and cooking it in a kettle, or moulding it into cakes. The Spring grew warmer and changed to summer. Then it was the harvest time of the year, and the little log houses of Plymouth sunned them- selves complacently, surrounded by fields of rich grain and gardens of vegetables. Everybody helped his neighbor in harvest- ing these first, most precious crops of Ply- mouth. There was reaping and binding and grinding to be done. The sound of a drum called all the able bodied Pilgrims to the fields every morning, and Captain Standish and the governor of Plymouth, WiUiam Bradford, led the laborers and did their honest share THE FIRST FIGHT 35 of the work. There were wild geese and turkeys, water fowl, deer and partridges to be had for meat, and cornmeal was found just as palatable and nourishing as Squanto had said it would be. In November of 1621 the Pilgrims decided to spread a common feast in celebration of this first epoch making year just ended in the New World. Now that flour and meat were at hand the English housewives had a chance to try their skill in making pies and puddings. There were quite a few sober, grave eyed boys and girls in Plymouth whose faces turned to smiles as they saw a long table set with pewter plates and flanked by rush seated chairs. It was to be their first harvest home; the whole brave family of Plymouth was going to break bread at one table. These children had their share in the preparation for the feast. They had known what it was to feel cold and hunger, to have no happiness through play, and to lose their fathers and mothers even. That was all out of mind for a season, though, as they gathered nuts and brought in fire- 36 THE FIRST FIGHT wood and piled baskets with apples in readi- ness for the feast. Suddenly, almost on the eve of the Pil- grims' harvest feast, they had another sur- prise. The great chief, Massasoit, with his warriors came again to Plymouth. News of the harvest celebration had reached him and he had come to take part in it. The Indians were obliged to set up their camp out of doors, for there were only a scant dozen houses in Plymouth, but with Massa- soit came also Indian summer, warm and soft, and bright with sunshine. His most skilled hunters were sent out to the forest to bring in more game, and the Pilgrims built addi- tional tables under the trees, spread with baked clams, broiled fish, roasted turkey and their own harvest of corn, vegetables and fruit. Then they seated themselves, red men and white, at our first Thanksgiving feast. It was also our first peace table. These wandering Pilgrims for freedom had found that the necessities of life are not won without a struggle, but they were victors in their first fight. They had made the earth supply them They seated themselves, redmen and white, at our first Thanksgiving table. THE FIRST FIGHT 37 with food. They had built themselves homes. They had also made allies of the Indians through neighborliness and mutual helpful- ness. It was a very good foundation which the Pilgrims had laid for building their strong- hold of hope, a new England. THE FREEHANDS CHARTER Stephen Winthrop was puzzled, but he did not speak of his wonder even to his younger brother, Adam. Perhaps Adam would not understand him, Stephen thought, but he was a lad of twelve when the two boys made the hazardous trip with their father from England and he could remember the slightest detail of it. Adam was three years younger than Stephen and had just as much love in his heart for their father, Governor John Win- throp of Massachusetts, as Stephen had. But Stephen realized that his father was a very great man in the Massachusetts colony. Stephen was proud of this but he wondered how it had come about. He longed to know the secret of his father's power in the New World city of Boston in which they lived. Stephen remembered England just before his father and he and Adam and the little THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 39 company of Puritans had set out in the sailing ship, Arabella, for their seventy six days voyage across the Atlantic. There was a new king in England, Charles the First, who seemed to have lost sight of what true king- ship means. His throne and his crown were to Charles the First symbols of autocracy, not of a just rule. He invaded the rights of the English people; he broke his word to his subjects. Stephen could see in imagination the knights and gallants of the court of the king, dressed in velvet, fine linen and lace ruffs, carrying jeweled swords and looking with scorn on such plainly garbed people as John Winthrop and his Puritan friends who walked London's streets with more heart for the persecuted than did these Cavaliers. But there was much talk now of the new England, lying on the other side of the ocean, a land of corn and apples and yet undiscovered wealth and, greatest of all, freedom. That was why John Winthrop had sold his beautiful estate in England and become poor for liberty's sake as he helped to equip the 40 THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER Puritan's expedition and set sail from Cowes in the spring of the year 1630. Stephen and Adam Winthrop of twelve and nine had come then, and their mother would follow with the other children when there was a home ready for her. It had been a colossal task to pre- pare a home, to even keep alive to do it. This Puritan lad who had helped his father found the city of Boston knew that. At Salem, the little fishing settlement on the coast of Massachusetts to which their ship drifted first, the Indians and fisherman had fed the Puritans with venison and wild straw- berries but this was at a sacrifice, for they had scant store for themselves. Then the company had sailed farther along the coast, landed and set up tents and log shelters at what is now Charlestown. The Winthrop boys and the other of the Puritan's sons and daughters who survived, cut firewood and picked blueberries and dug mussels and clams for food. When the corn they bought from the Indians gave out, the women ground acorns into flour and used this for bread. It was different indeed for Stephen from THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 41 his days of drinking cream and eating roasted fowls and rich pastries in their great stone castle in England. But he saw his father tending the sick and sharing their last baking of bread with a needy neighbor. John Win- throp was farmer and physician and builder and governor all in one that first season in Massachusetts. Stephen was daily more proud of his father and tried to be like him, but he wanted to know why John Winthrop had been made governor. He was not at all like the men in power who they had just left in England. But a Puritan lad of those days was silent and thoughtful and had so great a respect for his parents that he hesitated to ask what might seem to them unreasonable questions. In the fall of the same year, John Winthrop had seen a light shining on Beacon Hilf, across the river from Charlestown. Then an invitation came from the hermit who lived alone with his books on Beacon Hill for the Puritans to join him. WiUiam Blackstone was the hermit's name, and he could offer Governor Winthrop a garden, a spring and an 42 THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER orchard! Stephen had helped load the half j&nished framework of their house on a boat to take it across. He and Adam and his father wfent with the precious boards that were going to build walls and a roof for their mother, but Stephen noticed that Governor Winthrop carried a bit of parchment securely wrapped and tied and hidden underneath his cloak. He was as jealous of this parchment and guarded it as carefully as he did the boat^s cargo of wood and food. He had guarded it, also, on the way from England. Stephen wondered if the secret of his father's power in New England might not be written on this parchment scroll. The Winthrop's small frame house was set up and presently Stephen could look out of one of the oiled paper windows, down the green lane that led to the water side and to- ward the market place. His mother had come. The whir of Mistress Winthrop's spinning wheel could be heard in the kitchen and there was quite a company of English folk and Indians to be seen on their way to market. It was now the year 1631. More ships bear- THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 43 ing more Puritans had reached Massachusetts Bay. The town of Boston was founded, facing the great water way of the Atlantic Ocean and with unbounded land back of it for exploring, settling and planting. The town had a harbor for shipping and space for growth such as had been only dreamed of in England. The achievement of building Boston had been worth that first winter of digging clams and gathering acorns. The everyday business of the town was of unfailing interest to Stephen and his friends, the Puritan lads of the time. He saw only scattering, one story buildings and country paths from his windows but the workers of a prosperous community were there. Carpen- ters, masons, stone-cutters, joiners, black- smiths, cobblers and all kinds of artisans had voyaged across to Boston. The men were hunting, fishing, digging, planting and reaping to fill hungry mouths, and the women were spinning and weaving and stitching their cloth into garments. The Indians were friendly and brought corn and vegetables and skins to Boston by forest trails or in their 44 THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER canoes. There was not as great danger from wild beasts as there had been a year before. The men of Boston had built a wall, guarded by an officer and six men with muskets to keep out the wolves. There was also a sentry posted on Beacon Hill. A tall, stout mast with an arm on the top that held a kettle of tar, had been set up to be lighted as a signal if wolves or hostile Indians should be sighted. Boston was safe and busy and happy and honorable. Most of all was it proud of Stephen's father, the Governor and organizer of the Massachusetts Bay settlement. The Indians gave the town little trouble; if there were differences with the colonists, John Winthrop settled them. He was planning a forty mile tramp south through the New England wilderness to Plymouth to strengthen the friendship between the Pilgrims and the Puritans. He led the town meetings wisely. He worked in his garden and helped with the town's building and practised the same thrift that he asked of his people. Boston folk were free, but they looked to Governor Winthrop THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 45 for leadership and counsel. Whenever he walked through the lanes of Boston in his long dark cloak, stiff ruff and stout boots, he was followed and surrounded by the towns- folk, glad to see him, and eager for his advice and help. Stephen Winthrop stood up very straight as he thought of the place of honor in New England his father occupied. Then he left the window and crossed the sanded floor to- ward the low doorway. It was Tuesday, market day, and he thought that he would go down to the square and look on for a while at the trading. There would be baskets of green beans and peas, red apples, sacks of yellow corn, strings of fish and possibly some wild turkeys to be seen. Indians in gay blankets would mingle with the Puritan housewives in their straight gray gowns. The Indians might have colored shells and beads to sell. The Boston market was always an m- teresting place. At the door, though, Stephen stopped. John Winthrop sat at a table at one end of the room, his quill pen, ink stone and a sheet of 46 THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER unwritten paper in front of him. He held an opened letter in his hand that had come from England by the last sailing vessel which had docked at Boston Harbor. Stephen saw, to his amazement, that it bore the stamp of the English crown. Governor Winthrop read and then reread the letter, his face growing, first, troubled and then stern. At last he laid the king's message on the table and unlocked a strong box that stood at his side. He took out the bit of parchment and, unrolling it, spread it out, and looked at its writing long and carefully. Then he wrote, sprinkled his writing with sand and folded it, addressing his message to King Charles the First of England. Stephen Winthrop could wait no longer. He was a young Puritan and he had a great desire to understand this older Puritan who was helping to build a republic from the city of Beacon Hill. 'Tell me about the bit of parchment that you brought from England, Sir,'' the lad begged. '^Does it make you the King of Boston?" THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 47 Governor Winthrop put his hand on the boy^s shoulder and smiled. '^No, not a king in New England/' he said, ^^only the leader and guide of a free people who are kings in their own right if so be it they conduct them- selves righteously/' He pointed to the words on the parchment. ^^The charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony/' he explained, ^^given to me as governor of Massachusetts by his majesty, King Charles the First of England. It grants me as governor, ap- pointed by the king, the power to execute the wishes of the people as expressed in the laws they make. We, of New England, are given the rights of natural born freemen. We can make our own laws, correct, pardon, cultivate the land, and trade as freemen. When my term as governor is over, another leader of Massachusetts will be chosen in my place by all the people." ^'And King Charles wishes to revoke the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, sir?" Stephen asked, guessing what the letter from the crown was about. '^He was in a strangely good humor when 48 THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER he granted it/^ Governor Winthrop answered. *^He thought, mayhap, that our expedition would fail, that we would not be able to bring the high courage of old England with us, here, to New England. Yes, lad, the king has sent for our charter but I have written that we can not give it up/' Stephen had discovered the secret of the greatness by means of which his father was safeguarding freedom in Massachusetts, his treasuring of this bit of parchment that made every man free in his own right if only he had the quahties of a free man. Stephen Winthrop was to grow to young manhood and see his father elected governor for twelve of the nine- teen years that he lived in the colony. Again and again the charter was demanded by the throne of England, but civil war arose, and Governor Winthrop was able to hold the charter by his great tact and wisdom. Stephen and his father sat together until the town was quiet after the pleasant hub-bub of market day, the sun had set and candles began to twinkle through the windows of other houses, There were no lamps along THE FREEMAN'S CHARTER 49 the streets or light houses for the rocky shore on which the surf beat and tumbled. Occa- sionally the far away cry of a wolf could be heard, or the shrill call of an Indian in the nearby woods. Suddenly, the two heard a sound of footsteps in the narrow byways of the town. Up one lane and down another they went and at each lonely house a watchman of New England called, '^AlFs Well!'' It was well, so far, for our liberty. Explorer, Pilgrim and Puritan had found a new land and settled in it. They had conquered man's first enemy, hunger, and had made a begin- ning of neighborliness with the Indians. Now the great step of government by the people had been taken, a milestone along the road on which democracy was building. FOLLOWING THE BEAVER^S TRAIL Tuenis Jansen, of Amersfoort in Holland, laid his hand on the big brass knocker of the house in New Amsterdam, America, where he was to live. The knocker was in the shape of a dog's head, made of solid brass and polished until it shone like gold. Tuenis lifted it curiously and was of a mind to let it fall with a clang, calling the good Dutch housewife from her kitchen to welcome him, a lad of eighteen who had just arrived at Manhattan Island on a sailing ship, the Gilded Beaver. Then he hesitated a second, looking about him at the strange sights in this busy, thriving town of the New World. For a long time Tuenis had wanted to see New Amsterdam in America. He felt that he belonged there in a way, because his grand- father had sailed up the Hudson River in the Half Moon with the explorer, Henry Hudson, fifty years before. He had come again and FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 51 again to the log warehouse that the traders had built on the Island of Manhattan to buy beaver's pelts from the Indians and sell them again on the other side of the ocean. Tuenis' father, also, had told the lad stories of what had happened on this island at the mouth of the Hudson River after his grandfather had died. The Hollanders had bought the entire Island of Manhattan in 1626 from the Indians for what the red men con- sidered a just price, twenty four dollars worth of brass buttons, bright red cloth, large glass beads of all the colors in the rainbow and some ribbons. Several log houses, each one built by the head of a family, clustered about the storehouse soon, and wind mills for grind- ing grain began to turn their white sails in the sunshine. Then trading began. The red men brought beaver and fox and bear and cony and even occasional seal skins in their canoes or by trail to the fort on Manhattan Island where the Dutch traders paid them, with the utmost honesty, whatever they asked for these furs. Usually it was a question of paying in bright 52 FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL . jack knives, little polished hand mirrors or Indian money made out of clam shells and strung on threads of sinew or fastened to deerskin belts. These had value in the Indians' eyes. Tuenis' father had said that this was an excellent arrangement, for it kept peace with the Indians and brought prosperity to the colonists. Tuenis had heard these tales from the sailors as they sat on the edge of the canal at home. He had not been able to stay away from New Amsterdam, and here he was, having worked his passage in a sailing packet, and really arrived, in 1657. The house before whose quaint half door he stood was not built of logs but of wood and stone, and the ends were a kind of patch work of black and yellow Dutch bricks. Over the half opened door Tuenis could see a well scrubbed and sanded floor, a huge fireplace with platters of wood and pewter ranged in long rows in the plate racks above it, and a noisy old clock with a moon face ticking busily in the corner. There was a pleasant odor of frying crullers. It might have been his own home in Holland, Tuenis thought. FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 53 and here he was thousands of miles away in the New World. A sound of tapping heels along the nar- row, cobble paved street came to the lad, and he turned to see who might be passing. He had come up a green path from the wharf and had passed the stone fort with its mounted guns and quite a settlement of these low, gabled houses. Here were the men and women of New Amsterdam, looking as if they had just stepped off the pleasant banks of the Zuyder Zee. A housemother passed in a bright linsey- woolsey gown, a gay little cap of quilted calico on her head and wearing red worsted stock- ings and shoes with silver buckles. She wore a velvet girdle and hung from it by chains of silver were the keys of her pantry, her scissors and her pincushion. Behind her came a Dutch trader in cloth breeches, silver buttons on his coat and wearing a high wide brimmed hat of beaver worth many guilders. He was smoking a long stemmed pipe and looking at the bill of lading for his last cargo to Europe. There were children, too, running by and 64 FOLLOWING T HE BEAVER'S TRAIL kitchen gardens could be seen just across the street. Tuenis was so fascinated by this New- World settlement that he still lingered on the doorstep. Just as he was about to drop the knocker, he heard another sound that stopped him. Tap J tap, tap, it came nearer. '^Old Silver Legs, by my word!" the lad exclaimed. Then he slipped farther into the shadow of the doorway as a soldier in a velvet cloak, lace collar and plumed hat, and with a wooden leg bound with silver bands tramped by. ^ ^Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Amster- dam, peppery, strong willed, of a very bad temper, but brave and honest," Tuenis thought, remembering the tales he had heard of this fiery leader. And the lad was right. When Peter Stuyvesant's rule of energy and terror was over and he was obliged to sur- render New Amsterdam to England in 1664 and see the Dutch flag lowered he did not retire to the shelter of Holland. Instead, he settled down as a farmer in New York and made friends with the new governor and Why, Tuenis Jansen ! Welcome to New Amsterdam !" FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 55 showed what a good loser an old soldier with a wooden leg could be. '^Why, Tuenis Jansen! Welcome to New Amsterdam/' A pair of laughing blue eyes and two rosy cheeks framed in a white cap faced the lad across the door. '^Come in! Mother and father were expecting you by the Golden Beaver and there is a sleeping bench for you under the eaves, and I have laid a place for you at the table." Tuenis smiled back at the girl, a few years younger than he, who opened the door for him. It was Grietje Yerrenton, who he had known as a neighbor in Holland. Her father had been his father's friend and companion in their earher days of exploring and trapping along the Hudson. ^ ^Greetings, Grietje," Tuenis replied going into the comfortable, plain little room. ^^I am glad to be here in New Amsterdam." Food and lodging must be paid for in this busy little town, Tuenis soon found. His host, Mynheer Yerrenton, spoke of this the next day. ^We need ships and still more ships, lad," he said. ^'If I am not mistaken, you were 56 FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL apprenticed to a carpenter in Amersfoort and your trade will stand us in good stead here. I will find you work in the shipyard today/' So Tuenis put on a leather apron and changed his buckled shoes for wooden ones and went to work. He liked it, for every one was working for the prosperity and growth of this trading station on Manhattan Island. Wood cutters were busy in the surrounding forests cutting timber for shaping hulls, beams, posts and spars for a ship that was to stand eight or twelve hundred tons of cargo. Other timber was being cut and drawn for building a saw- mill and a gristmill. ^ Some enterprising Dutchmen had begun making clay bricks, extracting potash from wood ashes, and salt from the sea water. Oyster shells were being collected for the lime they contained. These products, beyond what was needed for the town and the farms that were spreading north, along the Hudson River, were to be used for trade. Every one seemed to have a great desire to build business. As he stood high upon a platform in the shipyard; shaping a hull, and could see on one FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 57 side of him the boundless waters of the harbor and on the other the green trail through the forest that took its way as far as the northern fort at Albany, Tuenis sometimes wondered how the comfort and prosperity in which he lived had come. The Island of Manhattan was surrounded by a wilderness still; it was not so long ago that it had been a wilderness itself. '^I can tell you," Grietje Yerrenton said laughingly to Tuenis that night as the two sat beside the fire, and the lad had said wonderingly, '^What makes New Amsterdam so thriving? '^ ^We^re safe from the little Dutch goblin," Grietje went on, lowering her voice mysteri- ously. '^He hasn't found us yet." "The goblin?" Tuenis queried. "Yes," Grietje shook her yellow braids decisively. "He lives on the top of the great Dunderberg mountain up the Hudson River near the Highlands. He wears a hat shaped like one of our sugar loaves, and he has very great power. If he should take it into his head to come down to New Amsterdam, or 58 FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL if the wind should blow even his hat through our lanes, our luck would go.'' ^'Oh, Grietje, where is your common sense?'' Tuenis laughed and the girl laughed too. Then they were silent, each thinking. Could it be that some mysterious influence made the sun shine on this httle New World colony as it had not shone on any of the other colonies as yet, they wondered? A year of ship building, and then Tuenis could stand it no longer. The roving spirit of his grandfather, Henry Hudson's mate, and his father, the trapper, filled his heart. ^^The lad wants to go for an adventure," Mynheer Yerrenton said to his wife. '^There is a bark sailing up the Hudson for pelts this spring. I will see that Tuenis has a chance to go with the traders and have a taste of the wild Hfe up north." So Tuenis took passage on a sailing boat, so small that it merited the Indians' name of a white bird. It was stored with provisions and those bright trinkets that had value in the eyes of the Iroquois tribe into whose wilder- ness kingdom on either side of the Hudson FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 59 this little band of white men fearlessly journeyed. A few hours away from the shelter of the fort and the friendly candlelight from the little windows of New Amsterdam, and there was no sight of any habitation. Great wooded hills shut the traders in, and the only sounds were the sharp calls of the foxes or the cries of Indians. There were trading posts along the way for many miles, but so isolated that they were often a day's sail apart. The Dutch farms, called poltroons, hugged the shores of the river near enough to New Amsterdam to claim its protection. The trip would have been a great adventure for any lad, particularly for Tuenis Jansen whose ancestors had sailed this great Hudson river before. Most of all, he was interested in that green trail along the bank v\^hich had started at New Amsterdam and could still be seen, although it was sometimes lost in the dense forest that grew deeper the farther north they sailed. The Broad Way it came to be called later. After a few days out, a thunder storm came up and the trading sloop rocked like a toy 60 FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL boat. Through the darkness the sailors could see a mountain, raising its head above the hills; as they approached it a great cloud on its peak seemed to burst and descend upon the little ship. 'The goblin^s hat! The goblin^s sugar loaf hat!'' the cry went up suddenly from the terrified sailors. As Tuenis ran to the bow of the vessel and looked up in the direction they pointed, it did seem as if there was a little pointed white hat resting on the mast head. No one dared climb up and take it down. Ever since New Amsterdam had been settled there had been rumors of the evil this goblin of Dunderberg mountain could work. The ship rolled and rocked, in continual danger of overturning or of being thrown up on the rocks of the shore. In this perilous way she drove through the Highlands of the Hudson. Then she was clear of Dunderberg, the storm lifted, and those of the sailors who had seen the goblin's sugar loaf hat said that it rose from the mast and whirled through the air like a top, up to the mountain. The ship settled back and the Hudson was as smooth FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL 61 as a mill pond. There, again, was the green trail along the bank, broader, and filled with Indian braves, painted and wearing their feather headdresses to welcome the traders. There was a log trading station near the bank, its walls hung with valuable skins and pelts, so the party landed to rest for the night, take on a cargo, and then start home. It took courage for Tuenis to sleep that night on a bed of skins with Indians lying near him, the glow of their camp fire in his eyes and the hooting of owls in his ears. Perhaps that is why he awoke so early and went over at daybreak to the building where the trading had already begun. Soup for all was cooking over a great out door fire and there was a lively kind of bargaining going on as the traders selected their furs and the Indians their scarlet cloth or buttons or beads. Tuenis looked along the trail, wondering again. As far as he could see this Broad Way of the traders stretched north, a road leading to traps and valuable trees and rich land that would yield food. As soon as their business was over, the traders would sail back to New 62 FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S TRAIL Amsterdam at the sea port end of the trail, with its tides waiting for ships, and its ships waiting for cargoes, and the Old World wait- ing to buy. Here, Tuenis realized all at once, was the secret of New Amsterdam's prosperity. Her thrifty burghers had cut a trail through the wilderness that meant the beginnings of busi- ness for America, honest buying and selling, and a short cut between supply and demand. Not even the sugar loaf hat of the Dunderberg goblin could work evil to New Amsterdam if she continued to broaden the trail that led from the beaver's lodge and the Indian's wigwam down the river to the sea and the ships. Tuenis grew up and married and lived to see trouble come to New Amsterdam through Indian warfare and foreign disputes over the ownership of the Island of Manhattan. But the difficulties were settled. He and Grietje built their own house after the fashion of Holland and followed the good example of Peter Stuyvesant who found New York as FOLLOWING THE BEAVER'S T RAIL 63 comfortable a place to live in as New Amster- dam had been. They were proud of the new seal of New York on which were stamped a beaver, a windmill and a barrel of flour. It was, also, one of the seals of our liberty, for it represented the development of honest business and thrift, domestic trade and commerce, without which no people can be free from the foe of poverty. AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD Cotton Mather sat in the doorway of Master Ezekial Cheever^s grammar school in Boston, a lead plummet in his hand and a measure of corn and vegetables on the threshold at his side. It was nearing the end of the seventeenth century and there were schools now in New England. Cotton was the son of Increase Mather, who was very well thought of in Boston because of his great learning, and Cotton, himself, at twelve years was about the brightest boy in Master Cheever's Latin class. He knew it, too, and he had rather enjoyed the whispered comments of the other boys when he had been chosen to sit there in the door and watch for a passing customer for the basket of garden truck. ''Cotton Mather, as learned as his father!'' was what they said, with suppressed titters. They looked upon him as a prig, Cotton AT THE GATE O F OLD HARVARD 65 thought. Well, let them. It had given him this opportunity to study in the sunshine instead of in the small, crowded school room. The basket at his feet represented part of old Master Cheever^s salary as school master and some boy had to watch for a customer who would pay for this harvest from the school field near by in wampum, beaver pelts or some other currency of the time. The school boys had to help cultivate the school field and pick the corn and beans and peas, so they were always interested in getting a good price for them. Cotton's thoughts were wool-gathering. He was supposed to copy on his ruled sheets of foolscap ten times this sentence which had been handed down to these younger Puritans by their Puritan fathers: "Unless schools and colleges flourish the state cannot live." There was no reason why Cotton should not fill his copy book with neat, small script for his was an excellent, well sharpened plum- met. They were making plummets now in Boston by pouring melted lead into little 66 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD wooden moulds and then cutting away the wood with a jack knife. These plummets were moulded in very interesting shapes, like a woodcutter's axe, a cannon, or a battledore. Cotton's plummet was shaped like an Indian's tomahawk and he had tied it securely to his ruler by a hemp string so as not to lose it. But instead of writing with it, he looked back over his shoulder into the school room, think- ing what good luck his was in escaping Master Cheever's glaring spectacles for even a half hour. The school house was small and crowded. It was built of logs with bark shingles to pro- tect the sloping roof, and the windows turned on hinges and had small, diamond shaped glass panes. There were pegs driven in the walls on all four sides of the room at a con- venient height, and long boards laid across these pegs made the older boys' desks. The little chaps sat on log benches in the center of the room within easy reach of Master Cheever's birch rod. There was not a picture, a black-board or a plant to be seen, and the walls and ceiling were dingy from the thick AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 67 smoke that the great fireplace sent up in the winter. Master Cheever, an odd figure in his long black coat and knee breeches, black skull cap, and with his white beard reaching to his leather belt rose. The class in Latin was to stand before him and recite. The boys looked like great, great grandfathers in their square skirted coats and trousers with buttons at the knees. They were little lads to be learning Latin so early. But they knew that they were the future makers of New England — doctors with pill bags, lawyers with important rolls of parchment and the ministers who would preach hour long sermons in the years to come. They valiantly struggled through their verbs and conjugations and then made place for the class in arithmetic. These boys were going to be ship masters some day, send- ing vessels to the West Indies for sugar and coffee and to England for fine broadcloth and manufactured wares. They would stand behind the shop counters in Boston measuring out corn and cambric and tape and ribbon; or they would wield a blacksmith^s hammer. 68 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD or learn the trade of carpentry or shoemaking or tailoring. So they, in turn, struggled with the multiplication tables and the tables of weights and measures, urged on by Master Cheever^s rod. Cotton, watching, felt rather supercilious. He knew the Latin verbs and conjugations for the day and he could have repeated those arithmetic tables backward. He turned away from the row of toiling boys and the sound of their droning voices, looking across the road toward the green common. It was a very pleasant day in fall and the smell of the salt water was in the air. Cotton saw an Indian sauntering along the road that led toward Newtowne. He was probably on his way home to the forest, having sold some skins at the Boston market. Cotton surmised. He laid down his plummet and picked up Master Cheever's vegetables, running after the Indian who turned when he heard footsteps and looked gravely at the yellow corn and fat green beans. Cotton gesticulated, pointing to the basket and then to the Indian's belt, and the red man grunted AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 69 at last, understanding. He took a handful of lead bullets from a pocket in his belt and gave them to Cotton, taking the basket from him in return and stalking off with it. The boy counted the bullets; he had made a good bargain. He tied them up in his handker- chief and then stood a moment considering. At last he made his decision. He was going to play truant. He struck off down the road in whose green lengths the Indian had now disappeared, the road that led to Newtowne. Once having decided to run away. Cotton forgot everything but the excitement of being out on a public highway when all the other boys were shut inside the school room, and he made excellent time. His broad toed, fiat shoes were well suited to the stones and rough way of the Newtowne road. His gray home- spun suit that his mother had made after the pattern of the suits worn by Master Cheever's other Latin class boys did not show the dust that Cotton kicked up as he hurried along. He knew exactly where he was going and he was enjoying the walk hugely. All the rest of his life Cotton was going to follow in the 70 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD footsteps of Increase, his father, and even beyond in the matter of exhorting the young to walk the straight and narrow paths of New England goodness. But today he was a truant, out on the high road alone. '^Good day. Cotton Mather.'' The boy stopped and turned to see one of his girl neighbors following him. She, too, was dressed in homespun and wore a kerchief and an apron. She took a small packet from the bag at her side and showed its contents to Cotton, explaining why she was going his way. "It is the cover of our silver tipped jug that my father gave the Harvard College as our share in helping to pay the expenses this year,'' she explained. "The jug is there, but he forgot the cover so I am taking it. They say there are many gifts made to the College, pewter plates and a flock of sheep, a silver fruit dish and sugar spoons and salt cellars and some bolts of cloth that the ladies of Boston have woven to make coats for the students." "So I have heard. Desire Brewster," Cotton said, "and the College has a goodly library AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 71 of the books left by John, Harvard, the son of the London butcher, who favored learning so much that he gave all his fortune to our College for which bounty it is named.'' ''They have a new wooden fence, I hear,'' Desire went on. Then, looking with a puzzled expression at Cotton, she asked. ''Where are you going, Cotton Mather, during school hours?" ''I am going to Harvard College at New- towne," the boy answered, ''to have a look in the window at the printing press if I can." "Oh, Cotton!" Desire's cheeks flushed. "I would never dare leave school for that. We have no lessons today. What will Master Cheever say?" "I am not considering that," Cotton re- torted, trying to appear brave. "If you like, you may walk to Newtowne with me. Desire. I can probably get in the printing room if I say that you and I brought the cover to the silver tipped jug." So the two went on, side by side, past the fields of ripening harvest, the wooden carts that were bringing food stuffs from the farms 72 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD to Boston and the glimpses of the blue sea. Then the road turned, and they met an occasional student with his books under his arm. One was opening the freshly printed pages of a very slim paper pamphlet. ^They are printing almanacs with the signs of the weather and instructions about the crops/' Desire said. 'We are going to buy one to hang oeside the kitchen clock. The almanac was the first printing done at Har- vard on the first printing press in America, was it not, Cotton?^' she asked. '^No, not the first. They struck off our Freeman's Oath at the first typesetting/' Cotton said, straightening with pride. Now a tall picket fence could be seen with a wide gate and a lantern above it at the edge of the road. Behind, as Cotton and Desire peered through the gate could be seen a wide plot of green grass with a pump and surround- ing it, the rude halls of our first college, wooden buildings, roughly shingled, and clap boarded, the interiors calked and daubed with clay, but housing a hall for lectures, a library, chambers and study rooms. It was AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 73 Harvard College, bravely opened in the year 1638, and now, in 1674, a national seat of learning. Desire slipped through the gate, turning to explain to Cotton. ^There is a book in the office in which the names of all those who have made gifts to Harvard are written down, with the obje.cts they gave," she said. '^I must see that the lid of the jug is entered in the book next the name of our family." She was gone then, a demure, gray gowned little lass outlined on the green campus. Cotton looked at the buildings with awe. He wouldn't have been tempted, he knew, to play truant anywhere but here. He wanted to come to Harvard and graduate; he knew almost enough Latin now. He was proud to think that his father was going to send him to college and he straightened his shoulders and put his hands in his pockets. His fingers touched the lead bullets. Master Ezekial Cheever's bullets! What would he say when he discovered his basket gone as well as that trusted member of his class, Cotton Mather? The shadow lying 74 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD across the face of the sun dial on the Harvard campus showed that the day was waning. It was not of such great consequence, Cotton thought, what Master Cheever would say to him as what he would do. There was just about time to get through a good birching before supper, he realized, and there would be no question of Master Cheever's locking the school until he had administered it. Cotton started back with less haste than he had come, but with plenty of courage, for he was a Puritan lad. Master Cheever, rod in hand, stood in the schoolhouse door as Cotton returned. He did not say a word as the boy gave him the bul- lets; he waited for Cotton's explanation. It came at last, quite honestly, if Cotton's voice did shake a little in the telHng. ^'I sold the corn and beans, sir, and then I ran away.'' ''Where did you go. Cotton Mather?" Master Cheever asked sternly. ''I went to Harvard College, Sir." Cotton answered. ''I knew my Latin and my tables, and I had a great wish to see the Harvard AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD 75 printing press. I want to go to college as soon as I can, sir/' Master Cheever's rod dropped to his side and he looked over the head of the boy and toward the town hall, remembering something momentous that had happened at a town meeting when he was a young man. The battle with hunger and hardship had scarcely been won in New England, when there had come the Pilgrim's longing to found a seat of learning. Master Cheever remembered how the town of Boston had appropriated four hundred pounds in the year 1636, half of its entire income, to build the seat of learning that was now Harvard College. That was their next step toward liberty, establishing freedom from ignorance and providing for the power that comes to a people through education. Master Cheever was looking ahead, too. He saw Cotton Mather leaving his school soon and taking the road to Harvard, not as a truant, but a student. Why, the lad was going to graduate from Harvard at sixteen! Cotton waited, but the school master did 76 AT THE GATE OF OLD HARVARD not pick up his rod. The boy wondered, and then marvelled as Master Cheever's stern old face relaxed and he spoke to him with unusual kindness. '^You may go this time, Cotton Mather,'' he said, ''but see to it that you never play truant again,'' he said. ''Yes, sir. No, I will not, sir." Cotton bowed and then started home. There was going to be hot hasty pudding with molasses for supper he knew, and after supper he would sit by the fire and read the new almanac his father had bought and plan about going to college before long. It had been a great day, he decided, and there were even greater ones to come. > THE WHITE MAN'S FOOT From his wanderings far to eastward, From the regions of the morning, From the shining land of Wabun, Homeward now returned lagoo. The great traveller, the great boaster, Full of strange and new adventures, Marvels many and many wonders. And the people of the village Listened to him as he told them Of his marvellous adventures, Laughing, answered him in this wise: ^*Ugh! It is indeed lagoo! No one else beholds such wonders!" He had seen, he said, a water Bigger than the Big-Sea- Water, Broader than the Gitche Gumee, Bitter so that none could drink it. At each other looked the warriors, 78 THE WHITE MAN'S FOOT Looked the women at each other, Smiled, and said, ^^It cannot be so/' ^'Kaw,'' they said, ^^it cannot be so!'' O'er it, said he, o'er this water Came a great canoe with pinions, A canoe with wings came flying, Bigger than a grove of pine trees, Taller than the tallest tree tops! And the old men and the women Looked and tittered at each other: ''Kaw!" they said, "we don't believe it!" From its mouth, he said, to greet him, Came Waywassimo, the lightning. Came the thunder, Annemeeke! And the warriors and the women Looked and tittered at poor lagoo; ''Kaw!" they said, "what tales you tell us!" In it, said he, came a people. In the great canoe with pinions Came, he said, a hundred warriors. Painted white were all their faces And with hair their chins were covered! And the warriors and the women THE WHITE MAN'S FOOT 79 Laughed and shouted in derision, Like the ravens in the tree tops, Like the crows upon the hemlocks. ''Kaw!" they said, "what Hes you tell us! Do not think that we believe you." Only Hiawatha laughed not, But he gravely spoke and answered To their jeering and their jesting: 'True is all lagoo tells us; I have seen it in a vision, Seen the great canoe wath pinions. Seen the people with white faces. Seen the coming of this bearded People of the wooden vessel From the regions of the morning. From the shining land of Wabun." "Gitche Manito, the Mighty, The Great Spirit, the Creator, Sends them hither on his errand. Sends them to us with his message. Wheresoever they move, before them Swarms the stinging fly, the Ahmo, Swarms the bee, the honey maker: 80 THE WHITE MAN'S FOOT Wheresoever they tread, beneath them Springs the White-man's Foot in blossom. 'Xet us welcome, then, the strangers, Hail them as our friends and brothers. And the heart's right hand of friendship Give them when they come to see us. Gitche Manito, the Mighty, Said this to me in my vision. ** I beheld too in that vision All the secrets of the future, Of the distant days that shall be. I beheld the westward marches Of the unknown, crowded nations. All the land was full of people, Restless, struggling, toiling, striving. Speaking many tongues, yet feeUng But one heart beat in their bosoms. In the woodland rang their axes. Smoked their towns in all the valleys. Over all the lakes and rivers Rushed their great canoes of thunder. THE WHITE MAN'S FOOT 81 'Then a darker, drearier vision Passed before me, vague and cloud-like; I beheld our nation scattered, All forgetful of my counsels, Weakened, warring with each other: Saw the remnants of our people Sweeping westward, wild and woeful. Like the cloud-rack of a tempest. Like the withered leaves in Autumn.'' GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING There was a good deal of excitement thrill- iug around the supper table of the little house of tfce Blue Ball in old Boston. It was Josiah FrankHn's house, and the big blue ball that hung over the doorway indicated that Mr. Franklin made soap and candles to sell. A dozen or so Franklin boys and girls, for they were a large family, sat on hard wooden chairs about the table and looked over their earthenware porringers with wide eyed in- terest at Ben, their brother. Ben was going to work in the morning, that was the reason why it was such an eventful meal. Ben had left school, and was not only going to peddle newspapers through old Boston^s narrow, crooked lanes, but he was going to help make almanacs and books by setting type for them in the shop where they were printed. With the founding of schools and the introduction of the printing press into GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 83 New England there had come a desire among the people for expression as represented in a free press. Quite a good deal of printing; speeches, primers, ballads, two newspapers, and even hand bills of one kind and another was being done. Ben Franklin must have oeen sixteen years old, you decide, and have taken out his work- ing papers? Not a bit of it! The plump, red cheeked little chap who was spooning out his mush and milk at the end of the supper table and trying not to look conscious under the gaze of the whole family was just ten years old. He had left grammar school when he was eight, for the soap and candle business was not profitable enough to pay for more school- ing than this in a family of such size as the Franklin's. Ben was going to take his place as a little man of New England in the morn- ing. Even his spelling book and his arithmetic had become things of the past. The docks and wharves of Boston were busy, crowded spots of interest. Almost every day sailing packets from England or from one of the only two other large cities 84 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING of the New World, Philadelphia, or New- York anchored there. Trudging to the print- ing office of his older brother, James, to whom Ben Franklin was apprenticed, the lad often loitered to watch the billowing sails of the ships. Printing, he soon discovered, was dull enough work, but the boys in the booksellers' shops where he delivered papers loaned him books to read, and Ben's favorite book was Robinson Crusoe. How he did long to have a voyage and an adventure as Crusoe had! Perched on his high stool in the dark, musty printing room, setting type, Ben Franklin built air castles and dreamed dreams. He kept on doing this as he helped write and print the New England Courant, his brother's news- paper, and peddle it at night, and run around Boston in between times gathering news for the Courant. Each of Ben Franklin's dreams began with a wharf and a ship and ended in England. Boys have been longing for adventures and wanting to run away to find them ever since the world began, and some of these boys have been right and some wrong in their desire. GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KI NG 85 The reason for Ben Franklin's wanting to be a Robinson Crusoe was because he had dis- covered that he was not free. A lad of the American colonies who was going to be a ship builder, or a weaver, or a cabinet maker, or a chandler, or a printer was apprenticed, just as a lad would have been in England, to a man of that trade to learn it. This was a natural enough arrangement in those days, and had not seemed wrong to Josiah Franklin. Ben was bound to his brother James until he should be twenty one years old. If he wanted to work for any other man or at any other trade, his brother could prevent it. The newspapers were full every day of advertisements for runaway appren- tices and there were laws for prosecuting them just as if they were slaves. Ben Frank- lin felt exactly as all the people who had come to the New World felt, and more strongly every day, that no matter what the responsi- bilities and consequences were, one wanted to be independent. So one day, when he was seventeen years old, Ben Franklin ran away from Boston, 86 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING There were fifteen other Franklin boys and girls, so he wasn't greatly missed at home, poor lad. He sold his books to pay for his passage in a leaky boat to New York. There was only one printer in New York then, and he had no work to offer the lad, so Ben went on, not to England, but to Philadelphia, walking fifty miles of the way, and reaching the city with just one dollar in his pocket Philadelphia in the early eighteenth century was a clean, snug, garden strewn town, its little red brick house made beautiful by white colonial doors with columns and shining brass knobs. Inside one saw bright rag carpets and polished pewter utensils and tea sets of flowing blue ware. There was beautiful mahogany furniture, too, made there in the colonies by English cabinet-makers; great four posted beds, high-boys for holding the linen, corner cabinets for the pewter platters and tea cups, and desks with carved legs and secret drawers for hiding letters. A post rider stopped once in a while at the Phila- delphia meeting house to collect letters that he carried in his saddle bags to New York, GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 87 and twice each week one could ride to New York in a stage coach. As Ben Franklin wandered up and down Philadelphia's bower like streets, Walnut, Spruce, Pine, and the rest, looking at the orchards and dairies and shops, he felt just as Philadelphia felt then — that the city was quite sufficient to herself and had no need of England, or of Ben Franklin either. In fact that was beginning to be the feeling in New York and Boston, too, as the New World became able at last to sit and sun itself on its newly built doorsteps, resting for a space from its pioneer struggles. New feel- ings of self sufficiency, aloofness and inde- pendence were in the air. Ben Franklin, too, determined to be able to take care of himself. He was not one whit discouraged at having to spend part of his last dollar for rolls which he ate in the street. He paid out the rest of it for a bed in a tavern, and the next day he found work as a printer. Philadelphia was growing every day, and liked to read and know what was going on in the American colonies and in England as 88 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING well. The colonies were subject to the British Crown and the King of England appointed men to have charge of each colony, but differences had already begun to arise over such questions as shipping and taxation by England. It was like the head of a great family who suddenly finds that the children have grown up over night and have their own ideas and will, about what they shall or shall not do. The father expects the children to help support the family, and the children want to support themselves in their own way. Both are right, and both wrong. So it was with England and the American colonies. As Ben Franklin set type and started a newspaper and opened a book and stationery store and published a magazine and printed his Poor Richard^ s Almanac, that still teaches us honesty and thrift and industry, he felt more and more as the American colonists did. He had belonged to a big family and had cut loose from it; he had found out the hazards and the opportunities of such a course. Some- times he wished that he could go back, but that was not possible; he had to work out GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 89 his freedom just as the colonies would have to work out theirs. As the years went on, Ben Franklin be- came Dr. Benjamin Franklin, wonderfully well thought of in Philadelphia. For a long time he wore his leather apron in his shop and in the book store. He still ate his breakfast of bread and milk with a pewter spoon from an earthern porringer, and he mixed his own ink, and he peddled his newspapers and almanacs in a wheelbarrow. But he helped Philadelphia to have its first fire company and police force. Then they made him postmaster general of the Colonies and he had a chance to go home for a visit and also travel to all the principal points on the Atlantic coast, helping to carry and spread news. The Leather Apron Club of Philadelphia interested Benjamin Franklin as much as anything, though, partly because he had founded it and partly because it had the first subscription library in the Colonies. It had been a kind of boys^ club at first, started in his hard times, but he had been able to send to London for two hundred books that the 90 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING Club kept, first, in the house of a member in Pewter Platter Lane and then in the Carpen- ters' Hall in Philadelphia. The club members met there to read and to talk. A great deal of the talk was about matters in England. Good Queen Anne of England and all her children had died years before, and the Eng- lish Crown had gone to a certain fussy, hot tempered German family from Hanover in Germany, cousins of Anne's family. The earliest Hanover to take the throne was King George I, who could not speak a word of the language of the land he had come to govern, and who ruled as easily as he could. He let his prime minister select his cabinet and he never attended the meetings, for he could not understand what was being said. George II liked a fight and was eager for military glory and he had a very hot temper. It was said that he used to stamp his feet and tear off his wig and kick it when he fell into a passion. Although he went to church in Westminster Abby, he did not understand the service and used to talk out loud in German. That was a poor inheritance for George III of this house GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KIN G 91 of Hanover who took England^s throne in the year 1760. He was only twenty two years old, but he decided that, no matter what obstacles he met, he would be king and England should do as he said, whether she liked it or not. That was what Benjamin Franklin and his friends were talking and thinking about. Eng- lish laws now hmited the Colonists' trade. George III said that a stamp bought in England must be placed on every American book, pamphlet and other articles. England had to protect her own trade, of course, and she felt that these wayfaring children of hers over in the New World ought to help support their mother country. Benjamin Frankhn could see both sides of things, but he saw, also, that this might be the beginning of a long trouble. ''Will you go over and talk to King George about it?'' the Leather Apron Club, and Philadelphia, and at last all the Colonies asked Benjamin Franklin. Here, at last, was the adventure of his dreams, and it had come when Benjamin Franklin was an old man, sixty years old. 92 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING London in the year 1766 was just the kind of town that Mother Goose pictures for us. In fact a great deal of Mother Goose's nonsense is really true and has to do with the odd ways of kings and queens, lords and ladies who were not able to see with the eyes of all the people. Read her over again and find this out! There were narrow streets in London, the upper stories of the quaint gabled houses extending so far above the lower ones that they almost touched. Smoky oil lanterns lighted the picture signs of the shops, The Swan, The Golden Fleece and The Red Lion. Simple Simon could be seen trundling pies along the lanes and cr3dng his wares; and if the ladies did not exactly ride to Banbury Cross with bells on their toes, at least they went in crinolines and high headdresses, riding in gilt coaches that rattled gaily along over London's cobble stones. It was London's day of: GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 93 'Xavender blue, and rosemary green, I am the King and you are the Queen. Call up my maids at four o'clock, Some to the wheel and some to the rock, Some to make hay, and some to shear corn; But you and I will keep ourselves warm/' As Benjamin Franklin walked along the streets of London in his plain clothes, gentle- men in powdered periwigs and velvet knee breeches stopped to take pinches of snuff from their gold snuff-boxes — ^but really to smile at this plain old man from the American Colonies. He was thinking too busily, though, to notice them. He was realizing how very different from each other the two Englands, the Old and the New, had grown. He was wondering, too, what King George would say to him. But after all King George told his ministers what to say to this old printer who had come to England to barter with a royal will. It was the King's Parliament, not the King himself, that ►Benjamin Franklin had to face. Fancy an old, dim room in stately West- 94 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING minster Hall, built in the days of the Norman kings. It was a kind of great court room, and filled with the lords of the court of this Hano- verian ruler of England, a few of them able to see the desires and needs of the Colonies, the majority realizing England's need of helping to support herself through restricted trade with, and taxes levied on her American Colonists. Last of all, fancy Benjamin Franklin standing before these representatives of George III for many days, our first Ameri- can diplomatist, and trying to help them to see, as he did, both sides of the question. "How does America feel toward England?'' they asked Benjamin FrankUn. "We not only love, but we respect her," he replied. "Will the Americans pay the stamp duty if it is moderated?" they asked next. "Never!" he told them. "Are you not obliged to buy the articles we manufacture?" they queried. "We may wear English cloth now," Benjamin Franklin answered, "but when our GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING 95 old clothes are worn out, we will weave the cloth for our new ones/' ^^You will not have wool enough/' they told him. ^'We are going to use no more lambs for food/' Benjamin Franklin said to this, ^^and in every one of our houses stands a spinning wheel." Then King George's ministers tried another argument. ^^If we repeal the stamp act, will the colonies acknowledge that the English Crown has a right to tax them?" they asked. ^^Never," was Benjamin Franklin's sure reply. So there the matter stood. The old and the new England could not seem to un- derstand each other. Through Benjamin Franklin's diplomacy the stamp act was repealed. He went home to see the colonies all ablaze with bonfires and hear the church bells from Boston to Philadelphia ringing for joy at what he had accomplished for liberty. But the repeal of the stamp act meant that England had need 96 GOING TO LONDON TO VISIT THE KING of providing some other form of revenue. A tax on tea was proposed, and the tea pot of the colonists' wrath boiled over at this levy. There was no way out of it all except through a fair fight. England needed the American colonists as her apprentices, and the colonists, themselves, wanted to learn their trade of freedom alone, and in their own way. Back of it all was the despotic will of a stubborn, short-sighted King. ^ Benjamin Franklin saw the beginning of it and he was there, too, at the end of the fight, for America was on the verge of Ughting the torches of her Revolution. RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY The bell-ringer of the statehouse in Phila- delphia was growing old, and once in awhile his little grandson climbed the stairs to the belfry and pulled the bell rope to help him. It was a long dark way up the dusty stair- case and the lad always went as quietly as his copper-toed shoes would let him, partly so as not to surprise the mice and bats into coming down to meet him, and partly to avoid dis- turbing the great men of the country who met in the assembly room of the statehouse. They were the important statesmen of the American Colonies, old Dr. Benjamin Frank- lin, who could accomplish almost anything from printing an almanac to catching light- ning, Mr. Thomas Jefferson who was looked up to as the wise scribe of the Colonies. His desk in the statehouse was so covered with quill pens and papers and red seals that the lad scarcely dared to dust it. There was 98 RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY Mr. John Adams of Massachusetts, also, who had seen a shipload of bales of tea turned overboard in Boston Harbor three years before because the Colonists refused to pay a tax on it to King George III of England. John Adams loved a cup of fragrant tea served in Boston's blue and white china, but he loved his country more. On his way up toward the belfry stairs, the bell-ringer's grandson peeped in the door at these men and those others with them in knee breeches, silver buckled shoes, and powdered hair that was worn by some in braided queues. They were the members of the first American Congress, and their talk was of the Colonies they represented, stretch- ing now from Maine to Georgia; what was best for them in the way of government that the people might be free, and yet united. The idea had already come to this first body of law makers that laws should not be made to limit a man's freedom, but to give men new liberty to live and work and think by freeing them from wrong doing, lawlessness, and crime. RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 99 This matter of governing a new nation was becoming increasingly important. The Con- gress reaUzed that, and so it was sitting in the statehouse of old Philadelphia on a very warm summer afternoon, the fourth of July in the year 1776. The lad turned away from the door. Per- haps it would be better not to ring the bell for sunset because the Congress was sitting so late, he decided. His grandfather was up in the belfry polishing the bell, and he would wait and go up when the gentlemen of the Congress started home. The boy stood a little while in the doorway of the brick build- ing and looked down Chestnut Street on which it stood There came the post rider, his mail pouches gray with dust, and his horse's hoofs strik- ing sparks on the paving stones in the warm, gathering twilight. What an adventuresome life a post rider's was, the lad thought envi- ously. They rode between all the cities of the new nation, meeting at the borders of the Colonies to exchange and carry on letters and packets. 100 RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY The post riders were making and living the geography of the American Colonies which were too young and were growing up too fast to be between book covers or on maps yet in the schools. They rode to the green pasture land of New Hampshire, heard the whir of spinning wheels in Connecticut and passed the gate of Harvard College in Boston. They talked to the fishermen of Rhode Island and the trappers of New York; stopped for foaming mugs of milk in some dairy of New Jersey or Pennsylvania, passed fertile farms of Delaware and Maryland, had supper of hot corn bread and ham on a rich Virginia tobacco plantation, and rode past white cotton fields in the Carolinas or Georgia. Thirteen thriving, growing, alert American Colonies, aUke in their desire for liberty, and different in their settlement, people, work, products and mode of thinking. But they were keeping together after a fashion, for they all sent delegates to the Continental Congress here in Philadelphia, and they were united at heart in a league of neighborly friendship and for common defense. RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 101 The post rider was gone now. The lad in the door of the statehouse could see nothing but a cloud of gray dust up Chestnut Street where he had been. It was the quiet, dim end of a sultry day and the street was empty, for the early supper tables would soon be laid. At least Chestnut Street had been empty. Now the boy saw that it was suddenly begm- ning to fill. Housewives who had neglected to take off their cooking aprons, shop keepers with their tape measures still dangling over their shoulders, a raw recruit of a soldier who held his musket awkwardly because his hands were more used to a spade, a barrister in a long black robe and huge wig, even the post rider returned, all these and more moved toward the stately old building that housed the Congress. What could it mean, the bell ringer's grandson wondered, shrinking back into the shadow of the doorway? As he waited, the door of the assembly room opened, and he saw that Mr. Thomas Jefferson held a very long and important looking document in his hand from which he was reading in his strong, clear voice. The boy 102 RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY could catch some of the words, and so could that part of the crowd outside nearest the open windows: ^^When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them^-'' Mr. Jefferson read. He went on: — 'We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our inten- tions, do, in the name, and by authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states.'' That was the word that held the crowd breathless, ' 'independent." Then Mr. Jefferson finished: — 'That as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace. RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 103 contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which inde- pendent States may do. And, for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.'' There was a silence of only a second. Then the ayes of the Congress, pledging the new nation's support to this declaration of inde- pendence filled the room, and resounded in the street and re-echoed from the crowd, mingling with their cheers. '^Ring the bell for freedom!" some one shouted. Now his chance had come to celebrate the fourth of July, 1776, the bell ringer's grandson knew, and he ran up the stairs to the belfry, kicking up almost as much dust as the post rider and not one whit afraid of the scurrying mice and the flapping winged bats. ^'Ring the bell, grandfather," he cried, '^Ring it, the Congress and the people say, for freedom!" Taking hold of the rope, the lad pulled too, 104 RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY helping his grandfather with all his might as peal after peal rang out through the summer evening and was the signal for more shouts of joy in the street and the pealing of every other bell in old Philadelphia. There are Christmas bells that chime for peace, and church bells that call us to think of holy things, the jester jingles his bells for mirth, and the sheep bells tinkUng along country lanes at sunset tell us of the plenty and comfort of the farm. But the ringing of the Liberty Bell on that first fourth of July held the message of all these others. It sounded the desire for a day when wars would not be needed. It rang for religious and civil liberty, for the right to enjoy play and work without autocratic interference, and for free- dom to develop and enjoy all the prosperity that the fertile earth offered. So it rings to- day, and will always ring in the hearts of free peoples. It was a very fine way of celebrating a great day, and particularly for the lad who was able to have a part in it. No one thought about wasting money on fire crackers or pop- RINGING IN THE FOURTH OF JULY 105 guns, or rockets, for the people of the Colonies saw a long road ahead of them before they should be able to work out their independence. The call of the Liberty Bell was all the celebration they wanted or needed to start them along that road. The next year, though, saw them holding our flag. The Congress had adopted one, thirteen broad red and white stripes, and thirteen white stars, circled in a blue field, for the thirteen original American colonies, and waving for freedom. KEEPING CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON A Christmas tree, with shining candles and a gold star set on the topmost branch! The sentinel in the worn uniform of the Conti- nental Army could see it quite plainly there in front of him as he paced the picket line of the camp on the Delaware through the cold and the driving snow. Then he pulled his worn cape closer around his bowed shoulders and quickened his pace. He was almost freezing, he realized that now. Numb from head to foot, he had a strange, dream-like kind of feeling, and the Christmas tree that he had thought he saw was part of a dream. It was a pine tree growing on the bleak bank of the river, hung with icicles, its branches creaking in the winter wind, and a lonely star shining down through a cloud upon it. Christmas night in his home in Virginia! The sentinel could see his house there at the CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 107 end of the road, the Hght in the window mak- ing a bright path leading toward him across the snow. It was a comfortable farmhouse, surrounded by rich pasture land and tobacco fields and orchards. There were horses and dogs without number in the stables and the storehouse was hung with hams and sides of bacon and freshly killed fowl for the holiday feasting. All the family, his brothers, his mother and his father were gathered about the great log fire in the living room, keeping Christmas together. How warm and com- fortable it was! No, this was just another dream, the sentinel understood, as he stamped on the frozen snow and swung his arms to fight the stupor of the cold that had again crept over him. The light he saw shone through the chinks in one of the rude log huts of the army camp. There were other huts scattered along the new roads for holding this depleted remnant of the Continental troops who were fighting for the liberty of the American colonies. The soldiers had chopped down trees from the neighboring hillsides for build- 1 08 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON ing their shelters and had put up the huts that December, with the winter upon them. They had worked in storms, the wind biting through their threadbare clothing, and with no food except flour mixed with water and baked in the coals of an outdoor fire, a strip of tough beef once in a while, or a tin of stale fish. The sentinel himself was crowded with many other soldiers in the cabin whose light he had mistaken for home candles. There was no floor except the frozen earth and not even straw enough to make beds for all the men. They had only pieces of worn blankets left and it bade fair to be a bitter winter. The beggared camp at McConkey's Ferry was his only home this Christmas night. His father and brothers had been killed in the first year of the American Revolution; his Christmas company was the valiant fellow- ship of an undaunted army of farmers, blacksmiths, teachers, shop keepers, printers, preachers, one and all men of the Colonies who had voluntarily given up their peaceful trades and their homes for freedom's sake. They had CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTO N 109 shouldered muskets, and followed the torch that, lighted on Bunker Hill in 1775, had kindled the watch fires of the new nation from the north to the south. Were those holly berries from his Virginia woods, the sentinel wondered, that lay so red in the snow at his feet? He stopped a moment to look. Then he gripped his musket and smiled grimly as he forced himself to hasten his march. They were drops of blood from his feet, for the frozen stubble had cut through his ragged soles, but what did that matter, he thought? All the Colonies were shedding their blood in a plucky fight for freedom. There had been ups and downs so far for the Continental Army, mainly defeats of late. King George III of England had not been able to spare enough EngHsh troops to send to America, and so he had hired soldiers from certain states in Germany that were known as the Hesses. These German soldiers were called Hessians and they had sailed into New York harbor in 1776, thousands strong, to reinforce the English troops of Sir William Howe, More and still more Hessians came 1 10 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON until they swelled the forces of the enemy to the number of almost thirty thousand men, and the Continental Army had only a scant ten thousand left. This invading army under General Howe had sailed down from New York City to Philadelphia, unchecked all the way, and now occupied Philadelphia which had grown to be America's largest city. A terrible winter season was on its way. The army of invasion was comfortably housed for cold weather in Philadelphia with plenty of food and stores of ammunition. The camp across the Deleware close at hand and natural- ly defended by the hills, had been built to meet Howe by a brave handful of the Colonials. If they could prevent the enemy from com- municating with New York until spring, if they did not starve before then, they might see hope. But they were less than three thousand strong, ragged, cold, and half famished. They faced the worst odds of the whole Revolution. Picket duty in the Revolution was one of the most important kinds of soldiering, and the hardest. Half clad, shivering with the CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 111 bitter cold, and with the driving snow wrap- ping him like a garment, the sentinel paced back and forth. It was a duty that had to be done. General Howe was likely to move out from Philadelphia and attack at any moment; there were spies about, waiting for an op- portunity to slip into the headquarters of the Continentals in the stolen uniform of a Continental soldier and take back information to the enemy. There had been spies who had tried to stir up a mutiny among the war worn troops of the Colonies. Shifting his musket from one shoulder to the other that his hands might not freeze to the steel, the sentinel remembered the trouble these spies of the king had made. He repeated to himself what his own hut mates had said to him: '^What is the use of going on?" they had asked. ''It is a losing fight and the odds are against us. We are new at soldiering and the troops that have been sent from England to defeat us have been trained for years.'' They had made other whispered complaints also. ''Why doesn't the Continental Congress 1 12 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON send us food and blankets and overcoats and shoes? We could perhaps get home to a fire and a warm pot of porridge if we slipped through the Unes. It^s not many miles to Philadelphia and the Hessians would only wink at us, or help us on our way." There is nothing like cold and hunger for taking the courage out of a man's heart; the lonely sentinel knew that all too weU. His back bent to meet the blast of a savage, driving north-easter that had just sprung up. It seemed as if he could not straighten his hunched figure to lift liis musket again. Suppose he were to drop his gun there in the snow? Would his broken shoes take him those twenty miles to Philadelphia? But a whirling gust of the gale made a little opening in the white curtain of the snow that hung in front of him, and the sentinel suddenly drew himself up to his full height, looking through. His eyes were not playing him tricks this time. It was not a dream he saw, but the reality of this Christmas night. An open boat, with the red, white and blue colors of the Colonies whipped by the wind CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 1 13 at its bow rocked on the bank of the river, with thick blocks of ice floating near and threatening to crush it. Facing it at the edge of the icy, foaming stream was the tall figure of a man who the sentinel knew and loved, as did every soldier in the Continental Army know and love him. He was erect and stalwart as he stood there looking across the Delaware River through the storm. His three cornered hat, with its tri-colored cockade of liberty in front was pushed back, showing his high forehead and his thick brown hair. In spite of the lines of discouragement in his face his eyes were clear and bright with hope. His cloak, blown open in the gale, showed his blue and buff uniform of the Colonies. He was a strong, healthy, courageous looking man and the sentinel, seeing him, took new courage also. He was the commanding ofiicer of the Continental Army and had more to bear that Christmas night, the sentinel knew, than his men. He, too, was away from the fireside of his home on a Virginia plantation. He had given up the quiet farming life he loved, his 114 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON comfort, ease, and wealth because he could not keep these and do his duty to his country too. The sentinel knew what this officer was thinking: ^^Not one of my men suffers and dies, but it is my suffering and my responsibility. I am carrying all they are and more, for the whole weight of the American Revolution is my burden. I am almost overpowered. I must face ten times my number of soldiers with a handful of ragged, tired, poorly armed troops. It is a trust too great for my capacity, but it has been a kind of destiny that has been thrown upon me, and it was utterly out of my power to refuse it.'' The sentinel watched, straining his eyes to see his general's slightest move. Suddenly he saw him pull the boat closer to shore and step into it, taking his place beside the colors that floated at the bow. Following him, from the huts of Valley Forge, a line of ragged soldiers made their way through the storm with their muskets over their shoulders and took their places silently in the boat. George Washington, commander-in-chief of CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 115 the Continental troops, had decided to take the greatest hazard of the entire Revolution. He was going to try and cross the half frozen Delaware in an ice storm with a handful of weakened men and surprise the Hessians' first line of defense at Trenton. The sentineFs hour of picket duty was ended and with it came an end to his doubts and discouragement. That was always the effect of General Washington's presence upon his men. They knew that he never weakened, never gave up struggling, and his defeats only spurred him on to an ultimate victory. He had taken command of the undisciplined, untrained men of the Colonies in 1775 whose only hope was their patriotism and determina- tion, and he had made them into an army that King George was beginning to worry about in spite of his own picked regiments sent to defeat it. The sentinel knew that he could be one of these Revolutionary heroes under the leadership of General Washington. Instead of finding, as he might have, the poor fire in his hut in camp, he stumbled through the snow drifts and the cutting sleet 1 16 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON toward the river. There were other boats filling fast and noiselessly with Washington's men. The sentinel could find his way to them by the blood stains along the snow, left by the torn feet of his fellow soldiers. It was Christmas night, the night when hope for the whole earth was born to men, and peace was offered to the world. The men of Washington's command with this high hope in their hearts were going to keep Christmas by trying to bring again that peace which their country had lost. The valiant little expedition under General Washington's intrepid leadership crossed the river from the Pennsylvania side during the worst storm of the winter. They were to be met by troops from Philadelphia and from Bristol who would reinforce them sufficiently to make possible an attack upon the Hessians. But the Delaware was a floating mass of cakes of ice, some of Washington's men were frozen to death in crossing, and the rein- forcements failed him. But early on the following morning the half frozen, half amipd Continentals attacked the Hessian front line CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON 117 at Trenton, di^ove in their pickets, surrounded the camp, fought their way through the town, completely surprising the enemy, and re= crossed the Delaware River with a thousand prisoners. It was a turning point of the Revolution, an unprecedented piece of bravery on the part of General Washington and his half de= feated army that put new life into the cause of liberty. It set King George a.nd his fol- lowers to thinking, and more and still more English statesmen were won over to the cause of these struggling brothers of theirs on the other side of the Atlantic. The Christmas snow^s of the camp melted, and the ground was warm once more and bright with grass and wild flov/ers. The French nation, which has always loved inde- pendence, helped the Colonies by lending them money and sending them supplies. A young French nobleman, the Marquis de Lafayette, scarcely older than a boy, organized a relief expedition and ran away to America to help General Washington in his later campaigns. 118 CHRISTMAS WITH GENERAL WASHINGTON There came a day when Lord CornwalHs and his British army of many thousands of men were penned up in Yorktown in Virginia, and on the nineteenth of October in 1781 he made a brave surrender to General Wash- ington. That was the end of our Revolution. Eng- land recognized the freedom of the United States and on the third of September 1783 a treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States of America w^as signed at Versailles in France. It had been a fair fight, but King George had not been able to get men to serve in an army of invasion , and the people and parliament supported the war only half heartedly. For a great many years we have spoken of the American Revolution as our war with England for independence. It was more than that. It was our struggle for a recognition of the rights of English folk in America, and other peoples everywhere for that matter, as opposed to the autocracy of a self willed, ambitious German King. THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET There had never, before, been such a crowd along Wall Street in New York as there was that last day of April in the year 1789. It filled the road and banked the sidewalks and was thickest in front of the Federal Hall, women in their best bonnets and Uttle girls in hoop skirts and flowered frocks, men wear- ing tall hats and boys in odd little round caps and very long trousers. They all pushed their way closer and kept their eyes fixed on the balcony of this old Federal building as if they expected to see someone of importance there. The Stars and Stripes floated everywhere, the colors on all the buildings showing brightly against the blue of the water just the other side of the wall that protected the street from tides. The people who carried our flag, many of whom had traveled by carriage for this great occasion from as far north as Massachusetts 120 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET and as far south as Virginia, waved it with a new and personal kind of pride. Two years before a body of the leading men of the Colonies had met in convention at Phil- delphia and had framed a constitution and decided that, since peace had come, the Colonies needed a closer relationship for mutual help and growth. So they were now the United States with a Congress of two branches, one to be made up of men elected by the people and the other from names suggested by the states' own bodies of law makers, the legislatures. It seemed like a fair plan of government for our new nation, standing alone at last. The people believed in it; that was why their eyes were on the balcony of the Federal Hall in Wall Street. As they watched, a man stepped out and faced them. He wore a plain suit of brown cloth that had been spun, woven and cut in his native state of Virginia, and the metal buttons on the coat were stamped with eagles, our new emblem of liberty. As this man leaned forward to speak to the people. THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 121 a great shout as from one voice went up from the street below. ''President Washington! Our General and leader, George Washington, the first president of the United States!'' the people cried. That was who it was, and that, too, was the reason for the crowd. The United States had chosen a leader and was inaugurating its first president there in Federal Hall in New York City. The cheers for President Washington were so loud and so long that he could not speak for a few moments. He looked, smiling, at his friends and then his face grew suddenly sober. He had seen, with great clearness, a figure down there in the crowd that the people did not know was there. It was not taking part in their joy. It was a gaunt, tattered, hope- less kind of vagabond with an empty wallet and a look of pinched want on its face. It wore the ragged, blood stained uniform of a Ptevolutionary soldier, and it had debts of many milKons of dollars. The few paper bank notes in the ghost's pockets were little more than worthless, for there was not enough 122 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET gold and silver in our national vaults for which to exchange them. While they could buy food and clothing in some states, in others they could buy nothing at all. Pres- ident Washington was looking at the ghost of America's credit. ^The nations of the world see that ghost/' he thought. They watch it even across the ocean, standing here on Wall Street. They know that we are in debt and too poor to pay our debts or develop our business and our trade. ^What is your independence worth?' they ask us.'' But the happy, hopeful crowd kept on shouting its joy and President Washington, as he waited, looked away from the ghost and back a good many years into a dark, musty counting house on one of the islands of the West Indies. What he saw, you, too, may see. Perched on top of a hard, high stool and bending over a lot of thick books full of figures on the desk in front of him, was a little boy twelve years old. His name was Alexander Hamilton and he had a great longing to be rich, but his family was poor. Alexander had THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 1 23 been sent to work in this counting house, when other boys were going to school. It might have been fun for a boy to work in a grocer's shop, or on the wharves where sweet smelling spices and bright fruits were loaded into sail- ing packets every day, but Alexander's work was with figures, adding, subtracting, multi- plying and dividing them and making them come out with honest results. Dull work for a boy of twelve years, was it not? But Alexander Hamilton grew to like his account books and his balance sheets. If he couldn't be rich himself, he at least learned how other people earned a good living and paid their debts and were able to save something beside. It was a matter, he found out, of making the money itself work in buying and selling, in paying for the labor of men's hands and in earning interest. That gave money an increased value and greater power, he learned. As President Washington followed his mind's picture of this lad who so interested him, he saw him earn his passage to New York in order to find greater opportunity to 124 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET achieve, saw him graduate from Columbia college before he was seventeen, saw him, too, a slight, dark-eyed lad, talking to great crowds of patriots at outdoor meetings through the Colonies before the Revolution, urging them to have faith in themselves and courage. Nothing daunted Alexander Hamilton. He had organized a corp of boy patriots called the Hearts of Oak and drilled them every morning at the New York battery in spite of the fact that the cannon of the troops of King George was being unloaded there. When the beacon fires of the Revolution were lighted and New York asked for a company of artillery to be raised, Alexander Hamilton had begged for its command. He was only nineteen then, but he was given the commission. President Washington repeated to himself his recollec- tion of the lad's command: *^I remember the day, even," he thought, ^'when Hamilton's company marched into Princeton. It was a model of discipline; at their head was a boy and I wondered at his youth. But what was my surprise when, struck with his slight figure, he was pointed THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 125 out to me as that Hamilton of whom we had already heard so much. A mere stripling, small, slender, almost delicate in frame, marching beside a piece of artillery, with a cocked hat pulled down over his eyes, ap- parently lost in thought, but every now and then patting the cannon as if it were a favorite horse or a pet plaything/^ Suddenly President Washington saw the final scene of his picture of Alexander Hamil- ton. ''He used his last penny to equip his company^', he thought. Well, so had the colonies used their last resources too in their freedom. Which should triumph now, the ghost of poverty that stalked down there in the street and could cover with its fear the entire United States, or the spirit of financial courage as Alexander Hamilton had expressed it, as he had stood there beside his cannon? President Washing- ton knew as he raised his hand and the crov/d settled into silence to listen to our first inaugural address. The United States were not going into bankruptcy. Alexander Hamil- 126 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET ton, our first Secretary of the Treasury, was going to find a way out of our poverty. When your father comes home with his wages or salary in payment for the work of his hands or his mind, and when you know that this money will pay for your food and your home, your schooling and your happiness with some left over to put safely away in the bank at interest, it is hard to imagine how poor we were at the end of the American Revolution. We had no great manufacturing concerns for giving the people work and wages. We had only rather worthless pieces of paper for money that could pay for little here and less abroad. We had no national banking system such as makes possible now your buy- ing of Government bonds and thrift stamps. There was no mint for coining gold and silver into national currency. If we needed to buy foreign goods that we lacked, we could not pay for them and could hardly ask another nation to trust us, for we were not sure when we would be able to pay even our war debts. We not only owed money to foreign nations for the supplies we had needed to carry us THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 127 through the time of the Revolution, but we owed each other. Every state had its own debts to individuals in money that it had been obliged to borrow for general welfare. But we had the working gold back of us of a very bright, fine courage in our own worth, and we had a good financier to help us, the little boy of the West Indian counting house, grown to manhood and chosen by President Washington as the first Secretary of the United States Treasury. From the north to the south all the men of the country were anxious to get back to work after their long task of soldiering. The north wanted to build and manufacture and hunt. The south wanted to raise tobacco and cotton and rice once more. Here, in the work of men's hands, Alexander Hamilton saw, was a means of creating national wealth. He rec- ommended to the Congress that foreign merchants bringing or sending their goods to our shores should pay a certain amount for the privilege of selling them to us. That made American products a little cheaper and pro- tected the work of the New England shoe- 128 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET maker and the Virginia planter. If anyone wished a pair of French shppers or a dress of English print these could be had, but the pro- tective tariff that made them cost more gave the Government money to get out of debt. It accompHshed more than this. It helped to strengthen and increase American business. Alexander Hamilton's next step was to put real value back of the scraps of paper, dif- ferent kinds for almost every state in the Union, that we were trying to use for money. He transmitted to Congress a plan for having a central mint where precious metal should be coined, under the directions and control of the government, into real gold and silver money. The bank notes of the several state banks were given up and national banks were established with a uniform system of issuing bank notes, each one of which was a promise on the part of our nation to pay its full face value in gold or silver from the mint. We have had great iron factories and textile mills and locomotive works and shipbuilding yards and manufacturing concerns for turning out almost everything that we need from THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET 129 needles to automobiles, shoes to toys, for so long that it is hard to think back to the old days after the American Revolution when we had none of these. We are so used to knowing that a crisp green dollar bill can be exchanged for as much as, or more than its home value in foreign money if we take a trip to Europe that it doesn't seem possible that there was once a ghost on Wall Street with empty pockets and debts. Presently, there was no ghost. We paid all that we owed foreign countries. There was never any question about our need of doing that. When it came to the states who had borrowed among themselves, Alexander Hamilton met diffi- culties. "Why should Georgia, who owes only a few hundred thousand dollars help to pay Massa- chusetts' debt of millions?'' the states asked. 'There is only one kind of honesty," Alexander Hamilton repHed, "and it does not allow for repudiating any debt no matter how small. The states are a family and they are going to stand by each other until every 130 THE GHOST THAT HAUNTED WALL STREET member has been helped to pay what it owes.'' That is exactly what we did. It was a great step forward in our progress as a free nation. Poverty and debt make a very real kind of ghost and the country that gets rid of them is better able to hold its head up, because it has cast away fear. A rich nation may be, also, a helpful nation. There came a time in our history when others who were our Allies needed our help and we were able to loan them the money they needed without question and without measure. THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST ''Look out, Dan! It's coming down the trail for you — not a squirrel, but a wildcat T' ^ With this warning the boys of pioneer days in old Pennsylvania who had been out hunting with young Daniel Boone, scattered like so many scared rabbits and left the boy alone. All around him was the wilderness, untracked, a maze of deep forest and tangled underbrush. The Boones had a small log cabin not so far back with a clearing where they raised potatoes and corn, and Dan, who was about eleven years old, had started out that morning with his old fashioned musket over his shoulder, to shoot some squirrels for dinner. He wasn't afraid of anything and he liked nothing better than tramping a trail through the woods, but he was only a lad, and he could hear the dried branches crackle beneath the soft footsteps of this man killing beast. Dan did not move an inch. He waited there 132 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST in the middle of the trail until he saw the yellow coat and green eyes of the wildcat showing against the hemlock and pine trees. Then he raised his gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger. At the sound of the shot, Dan's chums came running back, and they crowded around the dead wildcat where it lay beside him on the ground. ^ ^Killed it with one shot! Hit it right in the heart!" they exclaimed, looking up then to tell Dan how plucky he had been, but the boy was not there. He had a kind of play shack farther on in the forest that he had built for himself of logs. He had gone there and was sitting in the door- way. A brave lad of the middle of our eighteenth century ..wearing a squirrel skin cap, a shirt and trousers and leggins of deer- skin, and holding his large, clumsy gun be tween his knees! J He was not looking back in the direction of the big game he had just bagged and his home. Dan Boone was look- ing forward through the wilderness, beyond and toward the west that had no road as yet. THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 133 It was known only to wild beasts and to the most savage tribes of the American Indians; there were no settlements; it was a vast, unexplored, unmeasured place. Thinking of it, though, its adventure possibilities and its dangers, the boy's eyes shone. He stood up and lifted his musket as he looked westward. That was the place for him, he decided. He was going to, some day, start a wilderness road that would go west. In the year 1769, when he was still only a young man, Daniel Boone started out to open this westward road of his dreams. His only equipment was a little flour and salt, flint and tinder for making a camp fire, his gun, powder horn, shot pouch, tomahawk and scalping knife that hung from his belt. With a few friends he set off on foot on what he knew might be his greatest or his last adventure. Every day brought its hazards and sur- prises. The Colonies at that time clung to the Atlantic sea coast and no one knew the west except as an unexplored tract to which the savages had retreated from the march of the white man's civilization. Daniel Boone, 134 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST tracking it, slept on dried leaves and bear- skins; his only shelter was a hollow tree, and he had to cut his way through man-high forest growth as he went. Boone's wilderness road was the longest, hardest, blackest trail of all our pioneer days. He and his men could not build a fire more than one night in one place, but had to creep on farther to escape the Indians. The black bear, cougar, and wolf followed them. They never knew whether it was a deer or a savage in wait for them at a game lick, the wild turkey's call or that of an Indian imitating it to lure them on to their death. But Daniel Boone was a mighty hunter and a man of gigantic courage. He kiUed bears and smoked their meat for bacon; as he pro- gressed he came to streams where wild duck could be shot, and still farther on toward the west he had glimpses of open spaces where wild cattle and buffaloes grazed. He was our first buffalo hunter and killed many, pickling the beef for his winter use in camp. He beat back the Indians and once, when he was surprised and taken prisoner by a hunting Boone's wilderness road was the longest, hardest, blackest trail of all our pioneer days. THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 135 party, he escaped in the night and found his way back to his trail with padded footsteps like a panther's. Always, the wilderness road that Daniel Boone started went westward. It was a gloomy, hopeless way but Boone kept straight on from Pennsylvania through the wilds of Virginia and Tennessee, over mountains, fording streams and wading through swamps. It was not much more than a blazed foot path that he made, but suddenly it stopped. Daniel Boone saw before him the finish of his adventure; the narrow path opened upon a fair, smiling land, its groves pink with laurel and white with dogwood blossoms. The earth was fertile and green with pasturage, lying along the richest river valley America pos- sessed, the Kentucky Valley. In the year 1775 Daniel Boone and his party built some rough hamlets here, surrounded by log stock- ades, and named the settlement Boones- borough. This was the beginning of the permanent settlement of Kentucky. It was not possible that so valiantly blazed a trail should stop. The colonists were an 136 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST adventure loving people and they wanted to continue this westward road. Behind Daniel Boone came a peaceful army of thousands of settlers, marching and broadening his road with the wheel ruts their wagons made. They did not all stop in Kentucky, for they felt the spell and had dreams of the west which kept them moving. As early as the year 1788 this notice was posted in one of the frontier settle- ments of Kentucky: "A large company will meet at the Crab Orchard the 19th of November in order to start the next day through the wilderness. As it is very dangerous on account of the Indians, it is hoped each person will go well armed." So the prairie schooners, great, clumsy wagons with a covering of thick canvas or blankets started west. The men and boys rode ahead on horseback to break a trail, and the mothers and little ones were crowded inside the schooner with a supply of bedding, food, tools, and dishes. They had to carry, too, a spinning wheel and a loom, a cook stove, seeds for the spring planting, a supply THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 137 of healing and medicinal herbs in case the children should be ill, the family Bible and the year's almanac. Sometimes a cow would be tied to the back of the wagon and the cackling of hens would come from inside the wagon. The way was still a trackless wilder- ness. Each day brought the dread that the covering of the wagon might be pierced in a dozen places by the arrows of the Indians, and each night these western emigrants rested within hearing of the calls of coyotes and panthers. But there came always some sunrise on the plains when a prairie schooner stopped. Or perhaps the sun rose for them in the timber land near a great lake with a trout stream running through a gully and plenty of game to be had in the woods. A fire was built on the edge of the stream and coffee made and fish cooked on hot stones. That was one of the first hearth fires of the west. A claim of land was staked out by driving in stumps at its boundaries, the wagon was unloaded and the family lived in a tent until their log house was put up. Everybody helped to 138 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST clear and plow the land and put in the seed- grain. Here was the second station on the western road, where wheel tracks stopped and a farm began. Did the road end at this farm? Not a bit of it. It went right on, farther west all the time and marked now by the hoof prints of cattle and horses and sheep. It was the middle of the nineteenth century and the western trail was much broader, taking its way through open prairie lands where the cattle ranger who was blazing the trail pitched his camp uiider the stars at night. He was up and on at daybreak, though, his face turned westward as he drove his herds toward the place of plenty he felt the road would lead him to. The herd was lean, active, muscular, broad of horn and fierce. It took skilful riding and driving to keep the cows together, but they gave great promise for the nation in producing food, hides and leather. At last this herdsman, too, stopped. He had come to a land with springs in the hills THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 139 and ridges and woods for shelter. There was unmeasured pasturage of buffalo grass and black corn for the herd. The herdsman, with other cattle rangers who joined him, made a great log corral for the animals and mounted guns at the corners to keep off mountain lions and grizzhes. They built themselves a house of thick pine boards with one great room, their bunks ranged around the sides and the walls hung with their saddles, bridles and ropes. They built a great cook house, too, with a long table in the centre flanked by benches, and a tin plate and cup for each man. The door of their main building was twice as thick as the walls and made of unmatched, unplaned boards. At any time an arrow or a bullet might imbed itself near the latch. That was the third station on the western road, where hoof prints had led the way in the early eighties, to our first ranch. Still the road went on. Pony hoofs were marking it now. A man equipped for a new kind of work mounted a wiry little horse and rode westward. He wore rough, serviceable 140 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST clothes, a slouch hat and high, stout boots. He carried, in a pack, and hung from his saddle a frying pan, a small iron pot, a knife, fork and spoon, some bacon, flour, salt, beans, a few candles, a shovel and a pick. At last his trail stopped at the foot of a mountain with a glimpse of the blue sea to be had from its top. The man lost no time in getting to work. He pitched camp where a stream flowed down the mountain and began mining. He thought that it might, also, be a good plan to utilize the water power, so he got help from other pioneer trail riders who followed him and built a saw mill at the foot of the mountain, made a dam, dug the race and put the gates in place. He turned the water into the race one day to carry away some of the loose dirt and gravel and then turned it off again. A short time later he saw some shining yellow particles lying on the bed rock of the mill race and picked them up to look at them. They were bright, smooth, and the size of wheat grains. He put a few of these strange bits of metal in his kitchen fire and saw that THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 141 they did not lose their yellow color. He pounded them and found that they were malleable. Then this miner had an idea. He took a gold coin from his pocket and compared it with the metal he had discovered. Then he could hardly believe the wonder that his eyes showed him. That was where the western road ended, at a gold mine in CaHfornia in the year 1848. It had been a Icng, brave way of progress for the American people, a trail two thousand miles along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, then hundreds of miles away across plains and flowered prairies. It covered what were later the vast states of Texas, Kansas, Wyoming and Montana. It went as far west as Utah, Nevada and bent back to the fertile lands of Missouri, Iowa and Illinois. It would have liked to go on always, but the best that it could do when it reached California, was to turn around and come back east. It is a triumphant way that the road takes back. Shining steel rails carrying great locomotives, passenger and freight trains 142 THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST cover the old wheel ruts and hoof prints. Steamboats cross the rivers and lakes where there were only fords in those early days. Gold and silver are brought over it to our national mints, coal for our factories, public works, schools and homes, timber, iron, copper and lead for our own manufacturing and building and to supply the Old World as well. The road steaming back east passes the place where the lonely rar.chman corraled his herd. It is a thousand miles of ranches now with cattle and sheep that cannot be counted and huge cities built in their midst for prepar- ing and packing and shipping the meat and leather and wool they yield to our people and our neighbors across the sea. The little, poor farm where the plucky prairie schooner stopped has spread and enriched itself until it covers millions of acres of fertile grain and orchard land where our flour, cereals, apples, oranges, peaches and grapes are ripening to feed us and the world when it asks us for food. Schools and colleges, the chimneys of great factories, lights from homestead windows where immigrants who have come to our THE ROAD THAT WENT OUT WEST 143 shores to be free Americans live, forests of timber for every kind of building, deep oil wells, vast parks where our little brothers in feathers and fur live in peace and freedom, these too mark the way of one of the greatest roads in history — our road that went out west. IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT When Robert Fulton was a boy in Lan- caster, Pennsylvania, they called him Quick- silver Bob and it was a very good nickname for him.% He not only collected just as much of that strange, fascinating metal as he could to experiment with, but he was somewhat like quicksilver himself, bright and active, never content to stay long in one place, but anxious to go farther on and do something that would be important and essential. The war for American independence was almost over and we were already a very busy people. The Colonies were thinking about making themselves over for peace and wider farming and bigger business. They were trying to cut loose from their old, slow way of doing things. Manufacturing on a small scale was beginning and the spirit of invention was everywhere. IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 145 There was an ammunition factory in Lan- caster where guns for the Continental army- were made and Bob Fulton in his teens had the run of it. The workmen liked him. There was a Hessian prison camp in Lancaster, and Bob amused the munition workers in the noon hour by making quaint, life-Uke sketches of these German soldiers. He wanted, in return, to be allowed to see the working drawings for guns and learn just what kind of mechanism was needed for carrying bullets a given distance. No one minds having a bright boy who is really interested in a man's work around, so Bob spent a good deal of time at the gun factory and learned more than he ever could have in school about machinery. He was an outdoor lad, also, and loved to go fishing. One could step from the main street of Lancaster right into a forest wilder- ness in those days, splendid for sport because the mountains sent down countless trout brooks in every direction, but slow trailing for the fisherman. A hundred years before a boy would have done the best he could in cutting a trail through the woods to his fishing 146 IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT hole, but our point of view was now changed. Bob Fulton put his mind to work trying to find some quicker mode of travel that would not only save his time and win for him a longer string of fish, but would do the same for other boys. So he got together what scrap materials and tools he could find and he built a new kind of a boat. Up to that time navigation by water had been a slow mode of travel. One had to wait for a favorable wind to fill the sails, or carry- food stuffs and other necessaries in a drifting scow or canoe. But Quicksilver Bob had an idea about water locomotion. He built a wheel that combined the usefulness of several sets of oars or paddles and attached it to the side of his boat. By working this paddle wheel with his hands the lad was able to travel down a river for a fishing trip much more quickly than any boy ever had before. Everybody liked Bob Fulton. They did not pay very much attention to his boat, for it was an awkward, clumsy sort of craft, difficult to steer and apt to get stuck in low water, but they were interested in the boy IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 147 himself who continually surprised them with his inventions. As he grew from boyhood to manhood he did anything at hand to earn money for the materials he needed for his tinkering. He drew plans for machinery, designed houses and the family coaches which were quite elaborate in those days, and he painted signs for the inns and taverns on the Lancaster post road. Between times he experimented with a machine for cutting marble, one for spinning flax, a contrivance for twisting rope and an earth scoop for digging canals and helping with irrigation. All the time, though, Robert Fulton's eyes were on the water and his hands touched, in his imagination, a propeller. An Englishman, James Watt, had made a valuable discovery not so many years before. He had found out that a tea kettle of boiling water was good for something more than making a cup of tea. There was power enough in the steam generated by the water to force off the cover of the tea kettle, and by using this new found steam power in a large way. 148 IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT James Watt had been able to build a high pressure engine in which a piston, moved by the force of steam, pushed a wheel and made it revolve. This was the beginning of the steam engine upon whose perfection men were putting great hopes. There was need in England of finding a new way of working the coal mines and of transporting the coal to market. It had to be hauled from the pit of the colliery to a shipping place, and it was heavy and of great bulk. James Watt was building steam engines early in the nineteenth century to carry the coal from the mine, and other inventors were working on a plan for moving it along level ground, also by steam power. Robert Fulton watched and studied the development of the steam engine. Suddenly his great idea came and he returned to America. New York was a young giant in those days with feet firmly planted on the docks that were beginning to line the seaboard, and hands stretching up the Hudson and west, even, for the grain and ore and skins that IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 14 9 Europe was asking for and which the colonies also needed. It still had a green post road and clustering farms along a bowery way whose gardens divided the town like a brightly colored ribbon, but the lanes were broadening into highways, and the buildings were a story higher now. New York had begun to have suburbs, too. There was the Spitting Devil, a little north of the Broad Way, so called because the river beat and frothed so against its banks at that point. There was also Greenwich Village on the North River where all sorts of people were to be seen on the wharf, from Dutch traders smoking their long pipes to an occasional red face, still brave in his paint and feathers. There was an especially large and motley crowd of onlookers along the Greenwich Village wharf one summer afternoon in the year 1807. It was the seventeenth day of August and it seemed as if every house in the Village and every tavern and shop had emptied itself. The traders and farmers were talking to each other about some expected event and their comments differed. Some were anxious, 150 IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT others were making a joke of it, and the Indians were apprehensive. ^1 have seen Fulton's Folly/' a canny Dutchman said, between cloudy puffs from his pipe. ^^She looks for all the world like a back woods saw mill perched up on a scow and set on fire.'' Two Indian hunters trembled as they spoke to each other and looked down the North River: "A monster moving on the waters, fighting the winds and tides and breathing fire and smoke" one of them said. Then they fell to their knees, praying for deliverance, and the other men crowded to the edge of the wharf until they almost pushed each other off, for the expected was about to happen. The smoking, fiery monster came slowly up the North River like some old world dragon, walking the waters. Fulton's Folly was in sight. It was a boat without sails, clumsy beyond description, and having exposed machinery that groaned and creaked with every turn of the paddle wheels. These wheels splashed IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 151 about so much that they reminded one of the Spitting Devil farther on, and the tiller was not very well placed for steering. Pine wood, which was being used for fuel, sent a shower of sparks shooting up into the sky whenever the fire was stirred. But the boat moved, as no boat had before in the Hudson, without the aid of man^s hands to push her, or the winds of heaven to fill her sails. On the deck stood a man, tall and straight, the air from the hills blowing his dark hair back from his high forehead, and his deep, far seeing eyes set on the course up the Hudson he was taking. It was Robert Fulton, who had invented and built our first steamboat which was to be copied by all the nations and work wonders in making travel quicker and transportation of necessities to the uttermost parts of the earth possible. This first steamboat was called the Cler- mont, and she made her first trip from New York to Albany that long ago August day successfully under her own steam. Robert Fulton had built her a boiler of the same pattern that Watts used in his steam engines 152 IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT and set in masonry. There was only a short deck and the engine was open to view. Back of the engine there was a kind of cabin such as we use now on a canal boat and this sheltered the boiler and had a room for the ship's captain and engineer. The old saiHng packet rudder was used, moved on a tiller, and the boat was very unwieldy. The Cler- mont had the heart of the ocean Hner of today, however; she moved under the power and control of steam. Robert Fulton was quick to improve her mechanism and in a short time she was making regular trips up the Hudson and back, carrying passengers and freight. Every throb of this long-ago little steam boat's engine was a promise of the future greatness of the American people. She was going to deepen her hold and broaden her deck until she was able to carry tools and building materials to the west along the great waterways of America and bring back grains and ore. She was the intrepid younger sister of every colossal American steamship launched since her day and uniting IN T HE WAKE OF THE FIRST STEAMBOAT 153 US with the other nations of the world by- transporting our manufactured goods, our food and our men to whoever needs them. CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD Cyrus McCormick's great grandfather had been an Indian fighter in the colony of Penn- sylvania. His grandfather had moved to Virginia and fought in the Revolution, and his father had built a log house and tilled a farm in that strip of arable Virginia land that lay between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany Mountains. He prospered until he added two neighbor- ing farms to the original one; he had two grist mills, two saw mills, a blacksmith shop, and a smelting furnace. The McCormick house and farm was almost a small village in itself. There were eight children, and their shoes were cobbled, their clothes woven and their beds and chairs and tables were made, and well made too, at home. What- ever was needed could be done; the family was always busy within doors or without, and the spirit of invention was in the air. Here copyright George W. Jacobs & Company, Philadelphia all rights reserved CUTTING TPIE WORLD'S BREAD 155 in the year 1809, Cyrus McCormick was born. He went to one of the Old Field Schools, so called because it was built on ground that had been abandoned for farm use. He learned what other boys and girls were learning in country schools at that time, but he studied harder than most of them, because he had a keen desire to understand thoroughly what- ever subject he started. At eighteen he began studying surveying, and soon won a good reputation in the neighborhood as an engineer. Much of his time he spent in the fields with his father, and here he soon learned that reaping wheat was no easy task, and that swinging a wheat cradle under the summer sun was hard on both the temper and the back. The world up to this time had cut its bread, in the grain, by hand, a slow, laborious way. This boy on the McCormick farm who had been brought up to tackle any job that the day brought, from drawing a map to resoling his shoes, decided to try and solve the problem of how to harvest wheat by machine. There were some almost unsurmountable 156 CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD difficulties that faced him in this task. There was the problem of how to separate the grain that was to be cut from that which was to be left standing. His father had built a machine that would cut but left the wheat after cutting in a badly tangled shape. Cyrus saw that this was not efficient. A reaper to be of real use must dispose of the grain prop- erly as well as shear the stalks. He finally added a curved arm, or divider, to the end of his reaper's blade. In this way the grain that was to be cut could be properly fed to the knife. But the grain was apt to be badly tangled before the reaper reached it, and Cyrus wanted his machine to be able to cut the stalks that were pressed to the ground and out of shape as well as it cut the straight stalks. He decided that his reaping blade must have two motions, one a forward cut, and the other sideways. He tried countless plans before he finally hit upon the right one. It was a straight knife blade that moved forward and backward, cutting with each motion. Yet, even though the reaper could divide CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD 157 the grain properly and the knife cut with a double motion, there was still the danger that the blade might simply press the grain down and so slide over it. That was very apt to be the case after a rain, or when the grain had been badly blown about by the wind. The problem now was how to hold it upright. Cyrus discovered how to do this by adding a row of indentations that projected a few inches from the edge of the knife and acted like fingers in catching the wheat stalks and holding them in place to be cut. These three ideas, the divider, the blade that would work backward or forward and the fingers, met the question of how the grain was to be cut. To these Cyrus added a re- volving reel that would lift any grain that had fallen and straighten it, and a platform to catch the grain as it was cut and fell. His idea was that a man should walk along be- side the reaper and rake off the grain as it fell upon the platform. Two more devices, and his first reaper was completed. One was to have the shafts placed on the outside so that the horse would pull it sideways. The 158 CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD other was to have the whole machine operated by one large wheel that bore the weight and moved the knife and the reel. It had taken young McCormick a good many months to work out all these problems and there were only one or two weeks each year, the harvest weeks, when he could actually try his reaper. He wanted to have it ready for a final test the spring when he was twenty-two years old, but the work of getting all the parts together was very great. He begged his father, though, to leave a small patch of wheat for him to try to cut, and at last, in the early summer, he drove his cumbersome machine into the field. All his family watched as the reaper headed toward the grain. They saw the wheat gathered and swept down upon the knife, they saw the blade move back and forth and cut the grain, and then saw it fall on the little platform. The machine worked not nearly so smoothly or so fast as it should, but it did work. It gathered the grain in and it left it in good shape to be raked off the platform. The young inventor drove it proudly back CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD 159 to his workshop and made certain changes in the reel and in the divider. Then, several days later, he drove it over to the little settle- ment of Steele's Tavern and cut six acres of oats in one afternoon. That was a marvelous feat and caused great wonder throughout the entire countryside. At that time labor was very scarce in the great central region of our country and the farms were enormous. The wheat was going to waste, for there were not enough scythes and sickles to cut it. Cyrus McCormick believed that every farm needed one of his reapers, but it had taken all his savings to build the first one, and it was not until 1840 that a stranger rode up to his door and offered to pay him fifty dollars for a reaper. But he had faith, and worked on the farm to earn money for more materials and he patented his reaper. Then he discovered a small deposit of iron ore in the neighborhood and built himself a furnace and began to make iron. His log workshop became a factory on a small scale, and orders for reapers at higher prices began to come in from the farms in the 160 CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD far west. The little home factory was being pushed to the utmost. Chicago in 1847 was still not much more than a frontier town. It had fought gamely with floods and droughts, cholera and panics, pirates and land thieves. But it was bound to grow, for railroads would have to come to bring the wheat and others to carry it away. Cyrus McCormick needed a central point for building his reapers and shipping them. He studied this matter with the greatest care, and finally decided that the best place was the little town of Chicago, lying on a great lake, and halfway between the western wheat fields and the mills and docks of the eastern seaboard. He had to borrow money to move his machinery and set up manufacturing in Chicago, but he knew that this hazard was part of the game. Cyrus McCormick was not only an inven- tor, but a business builder, one of those great pioneers in the field of United States manu- facturing that was, later to make our nation so essential and far reaching in its influence CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD 161 on the world. He knew he had a machine that would lessen labor and increase wealth wherever wheat was grown, and he felt that it was his work to see that the reaper did its share in speeding the progress of the world. Just as he had studied the problem of cutting wheat, so he studied now the pro- blem of selling his reapers in such a way that every farmer should own one. He believed in advertising, and he had some posters printed with a picture of the reaper at the top and underneath a statement telling just what the machine would do. There was a space beneath this for the signature of the farmer who bought it, and the man who sold it, and two witnesses beside. The price of a reaper was now one hundred and twenty dol- lars. The farmer paid part of this down and the balance at the end of six months, provided the reaper would cut one and a half acres an hour. This guarantee, with the chance to have the money back if the reaper proved a failure, was a new idea and seemed to the farmers an honorable way of doing business. More th^ this, Cyrus McCormick printed 162 CUTTING THE WORLD'S BREAD in newspapers and farm journals, letters he had received from farmers telling what their reapers were doing for them. In these new ways, the foundation of an enormous business was laid. So important an invention as the reaper was certain to need improvements, but for a number of years the only additions were seats for the driver and the raker. How to bind the grain was more difficult. McCormick was deep in the study of this when a man named Withington came to him from Wisconsin and said that he had a machine for binding grain. He showed it to McCormick, two steel arms, which would catch each bundle of grain, pass a wire about it, and twist the ends of the wire, cut it loose and throw the sheaf on the ground. Cyrus McCormick bought the rights to manu- facture the binder in connection with his reaper and tried it on a farm near Chicago. It worked perfectly, cutting fifty acres of wheat and binding it into sheaves. At last only one person was needed to harvest the wheat, the one who sat on the driver's seat and had, simply, to guide the CUTTING THE WORLD'3 BREAD 103 horses. A boy could do all the work of harvesting that it had taken a score of men to do twenty years before. The reaper was needed, first, in America because farm labor was scarce and the wheat fields enormously fertile. We would never have been able to open the west as soon as we did if men had been obliged to cut grain by hand as they did at first. Cyrus McCormick, through his invention, was one of the builders of our nation and he also helped us to help other nations get their daily bread. Before long the American reaper began to whir in the wide wheat fields of European Russia and Liberia, in Germany and France and in the Slavic countries, in India, and in the Argentine. Today we can be heard reaping wherever in the world there is grain to be cut. The reaper made the output of grain many times what it had been before and it had its part in our development as a great, free people. Wherever an invention is able to release man's hands for more skilled uses a step forward in national progress has been taken. WHEN JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN SHOOK HANDS The Knickerbocker folk who lived in Wash- ington Square near the New York University in the early eighties would have told you that either a toymaker or a magician had a work- shop there in the University building. Almost any one could have repeated something weird and unusual about Mr. Samuel Morse, who went into the building early in the morning, began tinkering in the room he had rented there and sometimes did not go home until the man who lighted the street lamps came along with his torch and ladder. Mr. Morse had patronized the small shops that hung out their signs along the edges of Washington Square and had bought many different kinds of materials for his work. Among these were the wheels of an old wooden clock, a wooden pendulum, some bees wax, a great deal of wire from the milliner who made JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 165 bonnet frames, some carpet binding, an electro magnet, an old picture frame and other things as old and apparently useless. A few persons who had been inside Mr. Morse's workroom in the University described it as an uncanny kind of place. They said that there were wires suspended there, extend- ing from one end of the room to the other and returning many times until they covered a length of several hundred feet. The electro magnet was fastened in the wooden picture frame, set up vertically and connected with the wires. In front of the magnet was a wooden lever or arm jBtted so that it would hold a pencil in the end. What could be the meaning of this attempt at invention? Mr. Morse was known to have been very much interested in electricity when he was a boy at Yale College. He felt that it could be made to accomphsh wonders for the world. But what was he doing with it up there among his cobweb lines of wires? At last not even the lamp lighter saw Mr. Morse at supper time, because he was living in his workroom and even sleeping there. 166 JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN He seemed to be very poor, the groceryman who sold him his supplies said, for he bought his food in such small quantities. Sounds of a metallic tapping issued from his room, and it was said that the pencil he had attached to his magnet could make zigzag markings on paper without the aid of human hands. The whole matter was amazing and might have been set down as being of a part with sorcery but for the fact that Mr. Morse left New York at last with his materials and went to Washing- ton. The Congress was sitting in Washington in December of the year 1842 with a great deal of business in its hands. The United States was making money and spending money and this particular session of the Congress was trying to vote wisely on its last day on over one hundred different bills. Some of the lawmakers had seen Mr. Morse's ingenious electrical toy four years before when he had exhibited it there and asked the Congress to appropriate some money so that he might perfect it, but none of them had much faith in the wizardry he believed he had invented. Before the representatives of George III, stood Benjamin Franklin, our first American Diplomatist. JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 167 Still Mr. Morse kept appealing to the Congress forlielp, and one of the bills before it on this special day had to do with his magnets and wires and strange tappings. Samuel Morse, himself, sat in the gallery listening to the voting of the Congress until it was evening. There was little use of his doing anything else for he would have less than a dollar when he paid his hotel bill. One after another the bills before it were voted on by the Congress and at last Mr. Morse left. He had decided to give up this dream that he had for his country. But the next morning news was brought to him that just before it adjourned. Congress had voted thirty thousand dollars^ to test and develop his invention — the electric telegraph. Then there was excitement throughout the States. If Samuel Morse's telegraph idea worked, news would travel like lightning. The postrider, the pony express, the railroad train and the steamboat would all be out- distanced. The mills of New England where calico was made could hear almost instantly what to expect from the South in the way of 168 JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN cotton crops. A family living in Boston or Philadelphia could have quick word of the safe arrival of the boy who went out to Cali- fornia to the mines. Such dangers as train robberies, railroad accidents, fires, sudden illness, floods and devastating storms could be reported at once and aid sent. The tele- graph would bring the states together in a way that no one had dreamed of their being united before. Could such wonders be ac- complished though? That was the question, and the American people went to work to find out. Samuel Morse had discovered that there was almost no limit to the distance which electricity will travel along a wire. He had also invented a system of breaking this electric current at certain points on his wires and producing a spark. He thought that a spark might stand for a letter in the alphabet, and the absence of a spark for another letter. The length of the space between the sparks might indicate still a third letter. In this way he had built an alphabet which his pencil in the old New York workshop had JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 169 recorded automatically by means of signs, and the transmission of messages, unseen, by wire had been invented. An overhead telegraph line of wires strung on poles was constructed between Washington and Baltimore. There was an electrical sending battery at one end and a receiving battery at the other. Through the help of Mr. Alfred Vail, a friend of Samuel Morse, the method of sending messages by telegraph was improved. Dots and dashes of varying lengths were used to indicate the letters and these were recorded on paper by a sharp pointed piece of metal instead of by a pencil, making the message more permanent. At last this first, crude telegraph line was com- pleted and the first message was transmitted on May 24, 1844 from Washington to Balti- more. It was this: ^^What hath God wrought?'' The words were received in Baltimore successfully. The mystery of Samuel Morse's Washington Square junk shop had become the reality of the telegraph. It was going to 170 JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN weld together, by its unseen power, families and friends who were separated, far distant states, nations thousands of miles apart, bring almost instantaneous news of war and of peace, of danger, and of success and happiness. Since the American people had begun play- ing wizard in this wonderful way of sending messages from one to another by electricity, they decided that more marvels could be accomplished. Why not have an under-sea telegraph, Mr. Cyrus W. Field thought, that would make it possible for the Old World to talk to the New just as the states could talk to each other? That was a great thought and a daring venture, for England and America were separated by thousands of miles of deep, stormy ocean. England wanted to help, though. She was interested in the man-size nation that had grown up from her fighting apprentice, the American Colonies, and she thought that a fine way of getting better acquainted would be this Atlantic cable which Mr. Field, an JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 171 American business man, believed could be laid. There were great difficulties in preparing a wire that could be placed at the bottom of the ocean. It had to be a particularly heavy kind of wire securely wrapped up in gutta percha bound with tape and yarn, brass and tarred hemp, and over all these coverings coils of stout wire had to be wound to protect the cable from the rocks. England supplied two ships and the United States two, and Mr. Field crossed the ocean thirty times in making arrangements for this gigantic enter- prise of trying to lay the cable. If the first ships setting out from England, their decks loaded with these great coils of heavy wires, had been successful in placing the cable safely at the bottom of the ocean, this story would not be so exciting. If.the second expedition had not broken the cable and nearly lost its ships, we would not have had another story about two nations that never like to give up. It was the third expedition, though, that made historyf Four ships, two English and two American, met in 172 JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There, midway between the nations, they spliced the cable, dropped it, and started on their perilous routes back, two ships going to Great Britain and two to America, laying the cable as they went. It was almost as if we had shaken hands with England out there in mid-ocean. One day in the summer of the year 1858, the President of the United States, James Buchanan, received the first cablegram that had ever been sent to our country. It made its way by electricity along the successfully laid Atlantic cable under the deep seas and among the rocks of all those miles of ocean. It was sent by Queen Victoria of England to us and it read: '^The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great work, in which the Queen has taken the deepest interest. ^The Queen is convinced that the President will join with her in fervently hoping that the electric cable which now connects Great Britain with the United States will prove an There, midway between the nations, they spliced the cable. JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 173 additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded upon their common interest and reciprocal esteem. *The Queen has much pleasure in thus communicating with the President and renew- ing to him her wishes for the prosperity of the United States/' It was a very great day for us and every- body felt like taking a holiday and celebrating, just as we do sometimes now. Work stopped in all the Government buildings at Washing- ton and the city was red, white and blue for the day. They were laying out Central Park in New York City, but the workmen put their spades and rakes over their shoulders and had a parade down Broadway. Out in the western cities they rang the church bells, fired cannon, and burned barrels of tar at the street corners. Torchlight processions were held everywhere that evening, and the people who marched carried transparencies that were very popular at that time. They were made in box shape of oiled paper, lettered, lighted inside and strung on poles. One of these transparencies had a very important message about the 174 JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN newly laid Atlantic cable, even if it was a kind of joke. It read: '^Lightning Caught and Tamed by Benjamin Franklin. Taught to Read and Write and go on errands by Samuel Morse. Started in the Foreign Trade by Field, Cooper and Co., with Johnny Bull and Brother Jonathan as Special Partners.'^ There were, of course, delays and dis- couragements in perfecting our telegraph and cable systems. The Civil War interfered, because a fight to disrupt the Union pre- vented all these steps for bringing the states closer together. But in a few years there was a telegraph line built and in use that spanned the entire North American Continent and we had also united Great Britain and the United States so successfully that the Atlantic cable was in constant use. Slowly but steadily the giant trees of our American forests left their centuries old home in the woods to take their places along new roads and hold the network of telegraph wires that were charged every minute, night and day, with our nation's messages. Tele- JOHNNY BULL AND BROTHER JONATHAN 175 graph offices were built, not only in our large cities, but wherever the railroad stopped. A new American, the telegraph operator, took his place in each telegraph office with a key board in front of him on which to send and receive messages that flashed in a few minutes across distances covered so slowly in the former years by the man on horseback and the stage coach. The telegraph and the cable quickened American business. It made American life safer and closer. The greatest thing it did, though, was to unite Johnny Bull and Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam's elder brother, in a s'pecial kind of partnership which they had not shared before. A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a crossroad's post office called Hale's Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. My life had its beginning in the midst of most desolate and discouraging surroundings. This was not because my owners were especial- ly cruel, for they were not, as compared with many others. I began life in a log cabin about fourteen by sixteen feet square. In this cabin I lived with my brother and sister till after the Civil War, when we were all declared free. The cabin was not only our living place, but was also used as the kitchen for the plantation. My mother was the plantation cook. The cabin was without glass windows; it had only openings in the side which let in the light, and also the cold, chilly air of winter. A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 177 There was a door to the cabin — that is, some- thing that was called a door — ^but the un- certain hinges by which it was hung, and the large cracks in it, to say nothing of the fact that it was too small, made the room a very uncomfortable one. There was no wooden floor in our cabin, the naked earth being used as a floor. In the centre of the earthen floor there was a large, deep opening covered with boards, which was used as a place for storing sweet potatoes during the winter. There was no cooking-stove on our plantation, and all the cooking for the whites and the slaves my mother had to do over an open fireplace, and mostly in pots and skillets. The early years of my life were not very different from those of thousands of other slaves. My mother snatched a few moments for our care in the early morning before her work began, and at night after the day's work was done. We three children had a pallet on the dirt floor. I cannot remember having slept in a bed until after our family was de- clared free by the Emancipation Proclamation. I have been asked to tell something about 178 A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES the sports I engaged in during my youth. Until that question was asked it had never occurred to me that there was never any time in my Hfe for play; almost every day was occupied with some kind of labor. During my period of slavery I was not large enough to be of much service, still I was kept busy most of the time in cleaning the yards, carry- ing water to the men in the fields, or going to the mill with corn once a week to be ground. This trip I always dreaded. The heavy bag of corn would be thrown across the back of the horse, and the corn divided about evenly on each side. But in some way, almost without exception on these trips, the corn would so shift as to become unbalanced and would fall off the horse, and I would fall with it. As I was not strong enough to reload the corn upon the horse I would have to wait sometimes for hours, until a passer-by came along who would help me out of my trouble. I would be late in reaching the mill, and by the time I got my corn ground and reached home it would be far into the night. The road was a lonely one A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 179 and led through dense forests. I was always frightened. Besides, when I was late in getting home I knew I would always get a severe scolding or a flogging. I had no schooling whatever while I was a slave, though I remember going on several occasions as far as the school-house door with one of my young mistresses to carry her books. The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression on me, and I had the feeling that to get into a school-house and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise. One may get the idea from what I have said that there was bitter feeling toward the white people on the part of my race because of the fact that most of the white population fought in a war which would result in keeping the negro in slavery if the South was successful. In the case of the slaves on our place this was not true, and it was not true of any large portion of the slaves in the South that were treated with any kind of decency. During the Civil War one of my young masters was 180 A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES killed and two were brought home severely wounded. The sorrow in the slave quarter was only second to that in the *^big house.'* Some of the slaves begged to sit up at night and nurse their wounded masters. The slave who was selected to sleep in the '^big house" during the absence of the men was considered to have a place of honor. In order to defend and protect the women and children who were left on the plantation, the slaves would have laid down their lives. But the slaves wanted freedom. I have never seen one who did not want to be free, or one who would return to slavery. I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery. No one section of our country was wholly responsible for its introduction and, besides, it was recognized and protected for years by the General Government.. Then, when we rid ourselves of prejudice and race feeling, and look facts in the face, we see that the ten million negroes of this country who them- selves or whose ancestors went through slav- A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 181 ery, in spite of it, are in a better and more hopeful condition than the black people in any other part of the globe. Ever since I have been old enough to think for myself, I have thought, in spite of the cruel wrongs inflicted upon us, the black man got nearly as much out of slavery as the white man did. The slave system, on our place, took the self reliance and self help out of the white people. My old master had many boys and girls but not one, so far as I know, ever learned a single trade. The girls were not taught to cook, sew or to take care of the house. All this was left to the slaves. The slaves, of course, had little interest in the life of the plantation, and they were too ignorant to do things in the most improved and thorough way. So the fences were out of repair and the gates hung half off their hinges, doors creaked, window panes were out, plaster- ing fell and weeds grew in the yard. There was a waste of food and other materials, too, that was sad. Finally the war closed, and the day of freedom approached. It would be a moment- 182 A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES ous day to all upon our plantation. We had been expecting it. Freedom was in the air, and had been for months. As the great day grew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring in it, and lasted far into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom. True, they had sung these same verses before, but they had felt that the freedom in these songs referred to the next world and not to the freedom of the body here. The night before the eventful day, word was sent to the slave quarters to the effect that something unusual was going to take place in the '^big house" the next morning. There was little, if any, sleep that night. All was excitement and expectancy. Early the next morning word was sent to all the slaves, young and old, to gather at the house. In company with my mother, brother, and sister, and a large company of other slaves I went to our master^s house. All of our master's family were either standing or seated on the veranda of the house, where they A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 183 could see what was to take place and hear what was said. There was a feeling of deep interest, or perhaps sadness, on their faces but not bitterness. They did not seem to be sad because of the loss of property, but rather at parting with those who they had reared and who were in many ways very close to them. The most distinct thing that I now recall in connection with the scene was the presence of a United States officer who made a short speech and then read a rather long paper — the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that we were free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She ex- plained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long pray- ing, but fearing that she would never live to see. For some moments there was great rejoicing and thanksgiving, but there was no feeling of bitterness. The wild joy of the emancipated 184 A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES colored people lasted for only a brief period and I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change of feeling. The great responsibility of being free; of hav- ing charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children took possession of them. It v^as very much like turning a boy of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great question with which the Anglo-Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to solve — how to get a home, a living, how to rear their children, how to provide schools, establish citizenship and support churches. To some it seemed that, now they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it. Some of the slaves were seventy or eighty years old; their best days were gone. They had no strength with which to earn a living in a strange place and among a strange people, even if they had been sure where to find a new place of abode. Besides, deep down in A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES 185 their hearts there was a strange and peculiar attachment to **old Missus/' and to their children v^hich they found it hard to think of breaking off. With these they had spent in some cases nearly half a century, and it was no light thing to think of parting. Gradually, one by one, stealthily at first, the older slaves began to wander from the slave quarters back to the "big house' ' to have a whispered conversation with their former owners about the future. ONE FLAG OR TWO? Andy sat beside his drum under an apple tree in a Gettysburg orchard. The drum was almost as large as he and his head nodded over it. It was still dark and he was very tired. But the far away whistling of bullets that came to him once in awhile kept him awake. He was wondering too what was happening back home in Kentucky and remembering a day there two years before. He had thrown down his school books and enlisted on the day when he was thirteen years old. Andy was a drummer boy in our Civil War in which brothers were fighting brothers, and there were two flags, one for the North and one for the South. Kentucky in 1861 when Andy had enlisted could remember its old ways of wilderness and blood. There were still log cabins along its turnpikes and Andy had seen two, not so very far apart, that made the state notable. ONE FLAG OR TWO? 187 In one of these cabins Abraham Lincoln had been born and in the other Jefferson Davis. That was another strange thing about this war, there were two presidents, Abraham Lincoln at Washington and Jefferson Davis at Richmond. There were also two groups, now, of states, a northern and a southern group. That had been a wonderful morning when Andy had first strapped his drum over his shoulder and marched along beside his com- pany in a new blue uniform. The younger boys who ran through the street beside the troops wore red, white and blue neckties, and the girls followed too, helping to carry the Stars and Stripes. There was cheering and hand shaking and the band played ^When Johnny Comes Marching Home'^ as the troop train rolled out of the station with Andy on board. A good many other boys had joined the armies, also, from southern plantations and from the manufacturing towns of the north. They were beating drums and play- ing bugles and bearing flags and carrying water and hardtack to the soldiers under fire. 188 ONE FLAG OR TWO? and making their way through the Union and the Confederate lines with messages of information and warning. They were doing something else too. The first pink light of the sunrise came down through the leaves of the apple tree and touched Andy's face with a brave morning courage as he re- membered an order that his conmianding officer had given him: '^Drummer boys, during a battle, are to take off their drums and help carry the wounded from the field on stretchers. This is their duty in a time of engagement and is just as important as taking a hand at a gun." Andy struggled to his feet, trying to brush the dust of yesterday's march from his blue shirt. His shoes were ragged and his cap was torn where a bullet had ripped through the blue cloth. Two years of soldiering had almost made a man of him; his long trousers were above his shoe tops now. But the day and night tramping in every kind of weather, and living in a leaky tent among bayonet scabbards and tinware, greasy pork and dirty biscuits had taken the fun out of the adven- ONE FLAG OR TWO? 189 ture. Andy asked himself what this Civil War was all about. So far, for him, it had been a backache from his heavy knapsack, and the sound of the crying of wounded men, and a long red trail of blood wherever the two armies met. But a loud ^Torward*' rang through the orchard and the boy slipped his drum strap over his shoulder. There was no time to wonder. He must go on with his battalion. / It was now July of the year 1863. Regiment I slier regiment in their worn, ragged blue / poured over the hills and toward the httle Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. Andy kept up with his men, beating out *The Girl I Left Behind Me," until he and the other drummer boys saw little white puffs of smoke down in the valley just ahead. Then came the faint boom and the nearer thunder from the cannon. Still the drumming kept up bravely and the army of the North advanced in double quick time toward the smoke and the mouths of the cannon. Dp another Hill and across a stream on a pontoon bridge, tearing down fences and trampling gardens 190 ONE FLAG OR TWO? it went, as Andy followed with the rest. Then, in a bright strip of meadow land, the regi- ments halted an^ he heard the quick, sharp order: ^ ^tt^fX^ ^^Unfurl the flag! Load! Fire!^' In an instant the meadow was a battle- ground. The explosion of shells and the sing- ing of bullets mingled with shouts of the soldiers and the groans of the dying. The sunshine was obscured by the smoke from the guns. Andy sat down on his drum on the edge of the field and when the smoke lifted a little he could see the men running, sighting, ramming their guns, firing, swabbing out the cannon and then sending more shells shrieking over the field in the direction of those that were bursting toward them. Quite often a shell whizzed past the drummer boy, or dug up the earth beside him, but he waited there all day behind the line without moving until he saw, as the smoke lifted again, that the ranks were thinning fast and there was need of him. So Andy got up from his drum, motioned .to another boy to follow him and ONE FLAG OR TWO? 191 they went out into the midst of the fighting with a stretcher. Andy led the way, dodging the shell fire as best he could, keeping close to a rail fence, but going straight toward an advancing line of gray that was pouring a rain of lead followed by a deadly artillery fire into the regiments of blue. All ovQr the field there lay men dead and "dying. /The two boys crouched and crept through this tempest of battle until they were able to lift a wounded soldier onto their stretcher, stagger away with him, and grope along in the smoke to the back of the line where they could lay him down in safety on the grass. They looked at him, plainly out- lined in the summer sunshine. A thin stream of blood trickhng from his chest stained his uniform. They saw that his coat was not blue. It was gray. Andy spoke first, to the other boy. ''Get him some water from my flask," he said 'Svhile I bandage his arm." To himself he exclaimed. 'Tve brought in a Con- federate!" After the soldier had drunk from Andy's 192 ONE FLAG OR TWO? tin cup and had rested a minute he looked up, amazed, in the drummer boy's face, and Andy looked down at him. Why, there was only the difference of a few years in their ages. ^, ''Anything I can do for you?'' Andy asked. ' ''I'd like to go home," the Confederate boy smiled a little as he spoke, "home to Dixie." "What's it like?" Andy asked. "The best place in the world," the boy in gray said, half talking to himself. "I'd like to have you see it — a big white house with pine woods all round it and pretty nearly a mile of cotton fields, and roses and fruit grow- ing in the garden. We've everything we want right there in the house that has so many rooms you could hardly count them. You ought to see the drawing room with aU our old family pictures, and the music room where we have concerts and charades, and the store- room full of things that we buy for the planta- tion, tools and new saddles and bridles, calico dresses and overalls and shoes for the negroes and nails and screws and pocket knives, whatever we need. I'd like to be ONE FLAG OR TWO? 193 there tonight/' the boy in gray stopped for breath and then went on. '^The cotton fields are as white as snow and you never saw stars Kke those that shine over the South. The Hghts twinkle out from the cabin windows and the banjoes are playing — at least they were — " the soldier raised him- self a little as he spoke bitterly, ''until the North interfered with our way of living. We raise the cotton that the North makes into cloth, and we need our slaves to work in the cotton fields. We have to buy our tools and our food, and the North spends the money we pay it in building the factories and railroads and docks that we ought to have. ! That's why this war is being fought, to show that the South has rights in the Government and the right to secede from the Union too and live the way it began, on a plantation.'' It had been a long speech for the wounded Southern boy. He lay down on the grass and then pointed to something back of Andy. The drummer boy turned and saw a soldier in a blue uniform dragging himself along over the ground, wounded too, like his brother in gray. 194 ONE FLAG OR TWO? Andy tried to help him and the Northern soldier dropped down at last not so far from the other. In a minute, though, he tried to go on again. ^'Hold on. You can't walk, you know," Andy warned him. ^'YouVe got a bullet in your back. Where were you trying to go?'' '^Home, I guess," the soldier in blue gasped, dropping down on the ground but trying, too, to smile. '^Home where I could get a clean white shirt," he went on, ^^for I won't be any more use at fighting. We make shirts in our town up north from the loom to the sewing machine. I'd like to get a copy of The Tribune or that book of Mr. Longfellow's, Hiawatha, that everybody's reading, from our town library. I'd like to go to the town meeting and tell them how I helped the North to try and keep the Union together, and I'd go to our white meeting house on Sunday. I wish I could have a piece of my mother's apple pie — I should like to see my mother — " he was too weak to say anything more. Andy kneeled down on the grass beside the quivering boy in blue and held the same tin ONE FLAG OR TWO? 195 cup of water to his lips from which the other soldier had drunk. He could understand now why there was a Civil War. The North and the South, like two children who had grown up, had, each, built its own home and raised its own, new family. They were different, because the soil on which they had been born and lived was different. The South was a place of springing green cotton shoots and roses and ease and sovereignty. The North was a place of rocks and clattering machinery and industry and intolerance. There was mutual misunderstanding, dislike, and con- tempt between the two. Each of these new families wish to exclude the other from control in the federal government. It was a war to decide if one of these branches of the Union, the South, had a right to withdraw its family of states from the home roof that the Stars and Stripes had spread over it. Taps! Andy heard the sound of the bugle coming back faintly from the battleground, for the day was over and with sunset had come a respite in the bloodshed. He looked at his two soldiers resting side by side there on 196 ONE FLAG OR TWO? the grass behind the lines. They were half asleep now, so he went over to a spring, filled his water flask and set it with the tin cup between them. Then he shouldered his knapsack and his drum and went through the gathering dusk over to the field of Gettysburg. It was no longer a green field, but a field of gray and blue; gray, the color of the sky just before the dawning of a beautiful sunrise, and blue, the sky color that holds the most sunshine. Forty three thousand American men killed, wounded or missing! The field of Gettysburg was red with the blood of the North and the South. Andy couldn't bear to look at it, at first. Then he remembered something that his grandfather had said to comfort him when he had been quite a little fellow and afraid that an adventure in the woods he had been looking forward to was going to be spoiled by a storm: ' 'Evening red and morning gray — A sure sign of a pleasant day." Andy's grandfather had said. That was the promise of the battlefield of Gettysburg before him in which so much blue ONE FLAG OR TWO? 197 intermingled with the gray, as if for hope, and the Stars and Stripes still waved above it. It was the Fourth of July, 1863, when the long, hard road of our Civil War began to turn toward the common home and the com- mon brotherhood of the Union. UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE "And what happened then?'^ the small boy curled up in old Aunt Betsy^s chimney corner asked, his eyes wide with wonder. "Brer Rabbit en Brer Tarrypin, dey went home wid de gals/' Aunt Betsy finished as she took down her jar of ginger cookies from a shelf in the corner of the little Georgia cabin and offered Joel a handful. Joel munched the cookies happily as he looked out of Aunt Betsy's door and across the fields of snow white cotton. He felt as if he were the most contented boy in all Putnam County, even if it was hard grubbing sometimes in the tiny home where he and his mother lived. Aunt Betsy was ready to welcome him down there at her cabin in the pine grove and tell him stories and make him sweet potato biscuits any day. She welcomed the other village boys as well and when she was busy at work out in the fields there was Uncle UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 199 Ben, the old negro mail rider, to entertain the boys. Uncle Ben rode from their town of Eatonton to Monticello, but he sometimes had time to stop outside of the Eatonton post office to tell Joel a new adventure of Brer Bear or Brer Wolf. JoeFs imagination was full of the stories he so loved as he started home through the grove. The rustling of the grass was like the foot- steps of little Brer Rabbit and OV Molly Hare, his wife, going home to their cabin on the other side of the brier patch. The yellow flowering jasmine reminded him of the party dresses of Miss Meadows and the girls. A flash of rusty red on the edge of the hickory woods was Brer Fox loping along, all ready to play tricks on some one. Hospitality, plenty, and friendship with all, even with these humble beasts of the wild, were the qualities that characterized the South when Joel Chandler Harris was a boy of twelve in the Georgia of 1861. He had reached the village now. How he did love every familiar bit of its green and white hominess. Eatonton, and all the rest 200 UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE of the cotton belt for that matter, had not changed much since its first cotton field had been planted and its first colonial house built, surrounded by the cabins of the slaves and forming a plantation in the seventies. The plantation was a peculiar and necessary kind of settlement in the South. It sheltered the owners, the workers, the business of house- keeping, farming, and raising and shipping the cotton which filled the huge flat barges that took their slow way down the muddy, yellow streams of the Southern states. So the Southern town and Southern manner of living had grown, from the very necessities of the climate and products, to be quite dif- ferent from those of the North. Joel had never been North and he did not see any real need of going. Eatonton, he thought, as he walked slowly down its tree lined streets was pleasant enough for any boy. It was a peaceful little place with a white court house, a green square in the centre, and beautiful old colonial houses. They had stood for decades behind their tall green hedges among sweetly odorous cedars and UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 201 oleanders, their doors wide open to their neighbors and to this Httle red haired boy and his hard working and loving mother. He reached their white front gate at last, stopped and Ustened. Yes, he recognized that sound; a blue jay was cracking the acorns it had hidden in the knot holes of the wood shed. He heard the pattering foot- steps of a squirrel as it ran along the shingles of their shabby little frame house. One learned those outdoor ways in the South. After Joel had finished hoeing the potato patch he was going to peep at the partridge's nest in the meadow beyond the garden. There was going to be a chicken pie for supper; he could smell it baking in the brick oven. What a happy day it had been, and Joel looked forward to so many more! Suddenly, though, like a storm that blights the cotton crop, the plantations of the South were shocked from their century old peace. Joel Harris, a boy in his teens, felt the storm at the very beginning. He heard tales of run-away slaves and their depredations, although he was told that planters who 202 UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE treated their negroes justly had nothing to fear from them. He saw boys from Putnam County, only slightly older than he, march away from the town green in the gray uniform of the Confederacy for the battle fields of Virginia. Very few of these young soldiers ever came home again. Joel wanted to do something to help his homeland of the South, but he was only a lad and growing poorer every day as the pinch of the war came to be felt in Putnam County. Cotton fields were running to weeds. The old houses were in need of repair. Food was scarce. The ladies of the plantations were burying their silver in their gardens, and the men were hiding the horses and mules in the swamps. Then, in the fall of 1864, two officers in the blue uniform of the Federal army clattered out of Atlanta and rode up through middle Georgia with the ominous word that a com- pany of troops under the leadership of General Sherman would follow on the way to the sea. Joel Harris, terrified, but eager to know what the news meant, tramped over neglected fields until he found a place near Milledgeville UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 203 on Sherman^s direct line of march. He climbed a fence there at the edge of the road, and waited. All at once, Sherman's army appeared. A long blue column that choked the road and crowded the ditches at the side swung along in the wake of the couriers. It was a vast horde, bringing consternation to the planta- tions. The Twentieth Army Corps under the command of General Slocum came down the high road past Joel, grim fighters, over- coming all resistance. They displayed no flying banners or any of the gay trappings of war such as Joel had read of. They were just a body of tramping soldiers, tired horses and lumbering wagons that ploughed their way through the deep mud of the clay roads. They brought with them a confused array of captured mules, cows, food supplies and am- munition. Their rear was crowded with fleeing negroes. Some of the soldiers laughed at the boy on the fence as they passed. When the last mule and the last slave had passed, Joel got down and went home. He felt dazed at first, for everything was so 204 UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE strangely deserted. The stock was gone, the cabins were empty and the hearths were cold. The town itself was still, as if it had died in its sleep. Had this life struggle between the brothers in gray and the brothers in blue killed the South, Joel wondered? Suddenly he heard a soft breath like low laughter in the pine grove, and the odor of jasmine came to him like a dream. Miss Meadows and the girls, who made up the beautiful nature family of outdoors, had not followed Sherman to the sea. They waited in every old garden and forest haunt to com- fort Joel. He heard an odd little chuckle beneath his feet. That was Brer Rabbit who had just made his escape from a brier patch again to show Joel that the humble often get the best of a bad situation, and it is always a good plan to look on the funny side of ones troubles. Beside Joel, in the road torn by the Federal troops, Brer Terrapin crawled slowly. He raised his head and twisted it knowingly at the boy. '^There is still wisdom left,^' Brer Terrapin UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 205 seemed to say, "and a long life in which to practise it." Joel rubbed his eyes to see if he was dream- ing. Why, the old plantations were still alive, just as they had been in his former days. What if he was penniless, and with no pros- pects for his young manhood? There was a friend waiting for him in one of those empty cabins, Uncle Remus. Joel went in and sat down beside Uncle Remus, himself the little boy he used to be. Through the years of reconstruction that followed Joel Chandler Harris mustered a jolly company of animals and birds and outdoor folk who went out into the world in the Uncle Remus stories, from the South to the North and at last reached the White House. One day in the year 1907 when the Civil War was only a memory and Mr. Harris an elderly man, there came a letter to him at Snap-Bean Farm, his beautiful estate in Georgia, from the President of the United States. Mr. Harris had been telling stories of the South to the children of the Union for many years. Children and their parents, too, 206 UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE had read and loved his stories in the Century Magazine, in the Saturday Evening Post, that Mr. Benjamin Franklin had founded, in our Youth's Companion and in many other publi- cations. His books of stories with the funny pictures that you know, were in many homes. They were in the White House as well, for the mother of the family of children there read out loud to them almost every night about Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and the rest. The letter to Mr. Harris said among other things, ''Won^t you come up and have dinner with us? Theodore Roosevelt.'' Mr. Harris could hardly make up his mind to go. He had never traveled much and he dreaded leaving his boys and girls, his horses and dogs and his farm. Most of all he dreaded such an important visit. But at last he was persuaded to accept the President's invitation and he made the trip from Atlanta to Wash- ington. There was a little Roosevelt boy waiting to greet him on the steps of the White House; he had been allowed to stay up UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE 207 beyond his bedtime just for this and Joel Chandler Harris felt no longer like a stranger. There was an ovation for him the next day. He stood with the President on the balcony of the White House and looked down into the eyes of a great, affectionate populace. There was also a state luncheon for him at the White House at which Thedore Roosevelt said: 'Tresidents may come and presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put. Georgia has done a great many things for the Union, but hais never done more than when she gave Joel Chandler Harris to American literature.'^ It was a wonderful visit, and Mr. Harris wrote home about the White House: *^It gave me a feeling as if I had been there before/' he said. ^^It's a kind of feeling that you can have in your own house if youVe lived right; but if anybody had told me that I'd find it in full flower in the White House, a house that ten million politicians and a good part of the public have tramped through, I never would have believed them. "It's a home; it'll come over you like a 208 UNCLE REMUS AT THE WHITE HOUSE sweet dream the minute you get in the door, and you'll wonder how they sweep out all the politics and keep the place sweet and wholesome." All sorts and kinds of forces work together to build a great nation. If you should go to Atlanta, Georgia, some day you might have an opportunity to read these words engraved on a granite rock there and describing Joel Chandler Harris: '^I seem to see before me the smiling faces of thousands of children — ^some young and fresh and some bearing the friendly marks of age, but all children at heart — and not an unfriendly face among them. And while I am trying hard to speak the right word, I seem to hear a voice lifted above the rest, saying 'You have made some of us happy.' And so I feel my heart fluttering and my lips trembling and I have to bow silently, and hurry away into the obscurity that fits me best." So we know that the stories of Uncle Remus had and still have a place in the mak- ing of our history. They bring the children of the South, the North, the East and the UNCLE REMU9 AT THE WHITE HOUSE 209 West together in happiness without a single unfriendly face. They make us believe in beauty, in the wisdom of the humble, in the good in everything and in the realness of things that we cannot touch or see. UNCLE SAM^S BIRTHDAY PARTY The year, 1876, when Uncle Sam was one hundred years old, seemed a very suitable time for him to give a birthday party. It was just a century since the declaration of indepen- dence had been signed, a most eventful century, too, for it had seen the beginning of the United States, the great national struggle of the Civil War and the gradual rebuilding of the Union as time and industry and good feeling brought the people together again. There was another reason, also, for giving this anniversary party. Uncle Sam had a beautiful young daughter whom he desired to introduce to the society of the nations. Her cheeks were the color of the roses of the South and her hair was as golden as the wavmg fields of grain in the West. She had the sturdy independence of her Pilgrim ancestors and the grace of the cavaliers of Virginia. UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 211 Her coronet was encircled with the stars of the Union, her dress was our flag and she always carried the torch of liberty, for her name was Columbia. Uncle Sam was justly proud of his daughter and he believed that the Old World would be as well if only it might see ^ and become acquainted with Columbia. ^^'" That was why he gave our Centennial exhibition at Philadelphia, the first capital of the federal repubhc, in the year 1876. It was possible for the Congress to spend quite a sum of money in preparing for this coming-out party of Columbia's and four million dollars was appropriated. Stately buildings were erected on Philadelphia's green land in Fairmount Park for welcoming the guests and for holding the birthday gifts which Uncle Sam surmised would be offered on this ervrentful occasion. These buildings with the roads and pleasure grounds and flower gardens that surrounded them covered almost a hundred acres, and the entire space was so gay with our Stars and Stripes and the flags of other nations which were used in the 212 UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY decorative plan that the whole was a place of color such as history had almost never seen. Varied kinds of preparation were begun for this Centennial party as soon as Uncle Sam issued his invitations. Queen Victoria of England made some etchings to send as her offering to Columbia, and our beloved poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, wrote his Centennial hymn. Mr. Sydney Lanier of Georgia com- posed a cantata for the school children of Philadelphia to sing. China began packing chests of fragrant tea, and the old German workmen of the Black Forest made cuckoo clocks to send to America. The drivers of the rattling little horse cars that went through the streets of Philadelphia had new blue uniforms and put red, white and blue rosettes on the harness of their horses. Old Mr. Wise and his niece and his little grandson, John, brought their balloons to the Centennial Exhibition. Ballooning was a new and danger- ous as well as a thrilling sport, and the Wise family was in great demand at circuses and other outdoor entertainments. A new rail- road route from New York to Philadelphia UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 213 and one from Buffalo were completed. Ameri- cans had not travelled very much or very far up to this time, but here was a great op- portunity for them to meet. As the gates of the Centennial exhibition opened, Uncle Sam, mingling with the va'st crowd that thronged the grounds, knew that his party was a success. It was a crowd that looked like the colored pictures in that pile of Godey's Ladies' Books that you like to look over up in your great grandmother's attic. The ladies wore very full skirts, their polonaises caught up with little bunches of flowers, and a great deal of fringe hung down from their close fitting basques and bright shawls. The little girls had on striped stockings and high kid boots with tassels, and the boy's' neckties were much larger and of brighter colors than any boy of today would select. They were tied in bows, and large bows too, underneath their round collars. The men had tortoise shell watch chains made with large links, and they wore very tall beaver hats. Here and there in the mass of people a Manchu 'cloak, a Cossack 214 UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY uniform, a suit of English tweed, or the bright bonnet of a French woman was to be seen, for almost all Europe had come to our Centennial. The most amazing part of it, though, was Columbia's gifts. The original buildings were not adequate for holding them all and some of the foreign nations had to erect their own for the carvings of India, France's jewelry, embroideries from Egypt, the new Swiss watches, Africa's ivories and skins, Hawaiian shells and corals, Bohemian glass- ware, Italian mosaic and the hundreds of other exhibits brought from the Old World. Wonderful as these examples of hand skill were, however, they were equalled and excelled by the gifts to civilization that our own United States showed. We exhibited the use of exploding gun- powder in excavating, driving piles and min- ing, a monster engine of fourteen hundred horse power that could move all the machinery in the Centennial Exposition; pneumatic tubes for transporting small parcels which were going to be used later for carrying cash UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 215 receivers in our department stores; even such novelties and wonders as typewriters and airbrakes for railroad trains were demon- strated. Those everyday objects, of which we scarcely think but always need, were new then and were looked upon with wonder and something of awe by the Centennial visitors. The people were able to see the manufacture of bricks, boots and shoes, newspapers, pins, nails, candy, tacks, shingles, corks, dress goods and envelopes. The patent office showed five tho^usand models of useful things that Americans had invented. Looking quietly into one room of the Educational building Uncle Sam saw his first kindergarten. In another room, boys and girls were learning to use tools in carpentry and other manual training. Still another room showed how beautiful and homelike a school can be made through the use of good pictures and growing plants. All these sug- gestions to teachers were going to help in making the American school system, later, the best in the world. One of the most interesting exhibits was 216 UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY that which showed our contribution to the world^s pantry. The Western States sent fruits and food grains of all kinds. The South- ern states showed the use of the incubator in raising chickens. New England offered farm- ing implements and machinery from its busy factories that were vastly better than any in use in Europe. Several model bake shops were going, turning out hot loaves and rolls by the minute. The visitors from Europe discovered the value of our Indian corn, and even Asia began buying it of Uncle Sam after the Exposition. They wanted our dried fruits, as well, and dressed beef that we were able soon to ship by the refrigerating method in steamships. Uncle Sam changed from an importer to an exporter after the Centennial. He had more to sell than he had need of buy- ing. No one wanted this great birthday party of a new nation to come to an end. The only reason for its stopping was that every one needed and wanted to get back to work. The farmer from Illinois had seen a Massachusetts plough that he was anxious to try out. A UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY 217 Connecticut miller had decided to move out West, nearer the wheat fields. A Southern lady had decided to spend a winter North and offer the warmth of her Carolina hospitality and the sweetness of her cakes to her New York friends. And several Northern men had made up their minds that they would like to try raising cotton and oranges in the South. The last day of the Centennial Exhibition found Uncle Sam sitting in the office building in the grounds going over his accounts. He was counting admission tickets and could scarcely believe the results. It was probable, of course, that a great number of the nation's own people and its foreign guests had come through the gates several times, but there were about nine million admissions. How we were growing! Then Uncle Sam checked up the foreign countries who had travelled with their offer- ings to this coming out party for Columbia, and the result was quite as surprising. Thirty- three nations had come! And the States, Columbia's own family of brothers and sisters who had forgotten former quarrels and 218 UNCLE SAM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY journeyed in seven league boots to do her honor. There had been only thirteen states for a long time, but twenty-six were repre- sented at the Centennial. Outside, our new fireworks were being sent up over the grounds. Colored fire and huge rockets that made a design as they shot up into midair had been perfected, and one could see a tree of liberty and a great star, made up of smaller stars to represent the Union, illuminated over the old City of Independence. There was hardly, ever, so pleasant or so significant a birthday party as this one had been. It had not only introduced us to the other nations as a self supporting, progres- sive, growing people. It had, amazingly, shown ourselves that we were common citizens of a common country, brought closely to- gether in one united family by our common impulse to work and to achieve. THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED A giant in American history! There has been none in any history since the days of GoHath, you say. Magic and the black arts! These, too, you say are never to be found between the covers of a nation^s history; their only place is on the illuminated pages that tell of the Arabian Nights. Yet two giants grew in our United States during the years that followed the Civil War. They are here with us today, and the wonders they have done and are yet to work make a story stranger than any that was ever written in fairy lore. One of these giants built an American city. The tall chimneys of the city^s factories were his castle towers, and to the factories he brought riches which our earth from East and West, and from the North to the South hid in her bosom for whoever was able to extract them. There was iron which made the steel 220 THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED framework of the city and coal for firing the great blasting furnaces that turned the iron, like black magic, into steel. The giant brought timber , copper, the precious metals, rubber, stone, flour, meats, vegetables and fruit to the city to make it a place of con- venience and comfort in which to live. He surrounded the factories with homes and sky- high office buildings and stores. His auto- mobiles rolled over stone highways. Electric cars and steel bridges and steam railroad systems linked the city with other American manufacturing centres and with the fair, open country. It was an amazing piece of construction and in accomplishing it the giant grew more and more colossal. His panting breath rose in smoke out of the factory chimneys, and the red hot metal that poured from the furnaces of the iron factories was like his life blood. He had such an impulse to grow and add to his possessions that his garments became dingy with the fog and dirt of the city, and he could hot spare time to cleanse them and his mighty voice could be heard in the factory siren, the THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 221 roar of traffic and in the shriek of steamboats and train whistles. This was our American giant, wealth. Then the second giant came to the American city. Like the other, Wealth, he was a creature of the earth and came from the mountains, the forests and the farm lands. His skin was the color of all the races of the earth, white, black, yellow, and brown; and his clothing was that of the American, the Irish, the Italian, the Pole, the Armenian, the Hungarian, the Scotch, the Japanese, the Chinese and all other men. This giant came to the American city from the uttermost boundaries of the United States and from the four quarters of the globe as well. He was so hardy that he could stand in front of an open furnace door and ladle out melted iron without flinching, and he was so huge and so heavy that he wore out the stone pavements of the city on his way to and from the factory where he worked. He, too, became dirty, smirched with charcoal and metal filings. And he, also, grew daily more of a colossus 222 THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED and his voice could be heard in the rumble and din of the city day and night. The American city, also, grew as these two giants met and worked together in it. It was so big that it towered higher in the centre and began spilling over the edges. New and intricate machinery came. The city was tunnelled underneath and an elevated road was built, because there was not room enough for the traffic in the streets. Wealth hired Labor to run the cars and trains, mend the streets, build, tend machinery, bake, weld rubber and make its gas and electricity. So the American city grew bigger and more gigantic and was a wonder to the other countries of the world who knew how young it was. No one knows where its growth would have ended, for it began building aeroplanes that could wing their way up above the clouds, but the two giants fell, all at once, at odds with each other. This was quite natural, because two large bodies, especially two giants, are not able to stand together in the same place. So the THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 223 Giant, Wealth, and the Giant, Labor, who each, continued to grow and puff himself out in a most stupendous manner, began to separate. Wealth put on new clothes and sat behind a desk in an office, and occasionally he spent a day at home, planning his work and telephoning about it. But it was still necessary that some one should tend the oven door in the iron factory and carry on the other work of the city that had to be done with hands, so Labor stayed where he had begun and did the same kinds of work that he had taken up in the beginning. The city offered the same parks, the same schools, the same hospitals, picture galleries, libraries, theatres, music and friends to both the giants and to their families, but when the two met after the day's work Labor was in overalls and Wealth had on a diamond scarf pin, and Labor remembered when the city began and Wealth had been dirty. What it forgot was that this had been the honest dirt of building a city from the ground up to the soot that poured out of a factory chimney. What it failed to understand was that Wealth 224 THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED was using a large share of his gold and brains to build more cities and longer transit lines and to string telephone and telegraph wires and put up factories with brighter sunshine and better machinery for Labor to work in. '1 want more money/^ the giant, Labor began to shout. 'Then you must work for it," the giant, Wealth, urged. So the two began to fight. It was a dif- ferent and quite as disastrous fighting as our Revolution or our Civil War, because it stopped for intervals our American business of manufacturing and building and running our cities and our transportation lines; and these were what made us a great nation. Suddenly, though, in the year, 1917, a great cry came to the ears of our two Ameri- can giants from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. It was made up of many smaller voices, Ihe crying of those who were hungry, and mothers who had no homes, and young soldiers who were dying on a battlefield for freedom^s sake. And all these smaller cries united in one mighty voice that no free nation THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 225 could fail to hear. It called the United States to go back, over the course that our ship of freedom, the Mayflower^ had taken three centuries before, to the help of the Allied nations who were fighting for the ideals of freedom on the earth. "We must go quickly and we shall need a new and different ship for the voyage/^ Wealth said, and began to build a shipyard. Such a shipyard as it was; none but a giant could have erected it! Marsh land on the sea was filled in and covered in a few months' time with huge docks, administration buildings and others for receiving the materials for the ships and coal and all kinds of freight, and for housing the workmen. There were great, light rooms built where the working drawings of a ship could be made. Factories whose furnaces sent up their towers of fiery smoke every night rose out of the marsh like magic. Rail- roads stretched their steel rails to reach the new shipyard, and telegraph and telephone wires connected it with the important Ameri- can cities. When it was finished, this 226 THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED American shipyard extended for miles along the Atlantic coast and touched other new shipyards and spread itself over an island not far from the land. It was a splendid begin- ning, but a ship could not be built without Labor. That was the next need, for thousands of workmen, and for steel that made the sinews and grip of our country. This is the second magic of the story, how the ship was built, for it was done not only by the shipbuilders but by many other workmen as well who left their places in factories and steel mills and along the roads to have a hand in this colossal American undertaking. Our][men poured from the mines, from the foundries, the factories and the steel mills, each one with his tools and a part of a ship in his hands. The steel mills all over the country had been turning out special parts that were needed for our great structural enterprises, for building skyscrapers, bridges, under and over ground transportation lines, power plants and water front ports. Now these steel units were brought to the shipyard to be fitted t. gether and fastened, rivet hole THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 227 meeting rivet hole, in the most wonderful ship building the world had ever known. The keel of the ship was one of the huge steel girders of a great railroad bridge, and its framework and decks were made like the steel beams and flooring of one of our office buildings. The boilers and engines were built and brought from long distances to the shipyard. Hundreds of thousands of steel rivets came by carloads for fastening the different parts to each other. The ship was measured and joined by steel, a single, master steel tape by which all other measuring tapes and forgings of the far away mills were gauged. Moulders, pattern makers, machinists, bridge builders and men from other trades who had never worked in a shipyard before toiled day and night to join and unite the keel, the framework and the floors. A man who had no trade but wanted to help in this building was taught by labor experts in the yard the work of a shipfitter, a riveter, a holder-on, or a heater. Along the miles of our new shipyards there arose a din so piercing that it was louder than the roaring of the two giants had been in the 228 THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED days before. It was the sound of steel ham- mering steel as everybody worked together to drive in the rivets of the new ship. Then the ship was completed and ready to launch. "What shall we call her?'' the giants asked themselves. And together they discovered that the work had named the ship while it was growing. Our new ship of freedom was the American Fabricated Freighter. She was a part from steam to stern of the fabric of the American nation, an iron framework of capital and labor and steel. None of these, alone, could have brought the materials of her fabric to the yard, assembled her parts and driven her rivets in less time than any ship had been built before. Shoulder to shoulder the two giants pushed their ship off the slip and she took to the sea, flying the Stars and Stripes proudly as she was launched on Decoration Day, 1918. More and still more fabricated ships followed this first one. The cry from the battlefields of Europe came to our shores again : THE SHIP THE GIANTS LAUNCHED 229 ^We must have food or we shall starve. We must have wood to rebuild our homes. We need coal, because our miners are fighting with the colors. Send us these or we shall perish and the war for freedom will be lost.^' So the new line of our ships, their wide steel supported decks loaded with wheat and fuel and building materials and courage and hope started across the Atlantic Ocean; and the two American giants, Wealth and Labor, side by side, watched them proudly from our docks until the smoke from their funnels was lost in the great gray trough of the sea. THE TOWN CALLED AFTER HIM "The town of Bismarck, Pa., has changed its name to Quentin." Quentin, young Quentin Roosevelt, Has a town called after him! Some way, as we read the word It makes the eyes grow dim. How brave they were, how young they were! Our boys who went to die! Children who played in field and street So short a time gone by Now reach the stature of the stars! Ah, none of us can say How many heavenly places Are named for such as they. But romping children here, through years Secured from horrors grim. Will speak the name of Quentin In the town called after him. Mary Stewart Cutting. THE LAST FIGHT ''Hurry there! All aboard — all aboard!^' The American Boy in khaki hurried down the gang plank and boarded the great troop- ship as he heard the warning. The scene of embarkation at the Atlantic port was so thrill- ing that he had stopped as long as he could to watch it. He was a small-town boy, not so long through High School, and the war spirit and the war bustle of the city on the Atlantic coast to which his troop train had brought him was more exciting than anything he had ever seen in all his life before. Mingled with cases of ammunition and machinery, carts, and horses, and mules, all waiting their moment for embarkation, the Boy had seen a pressing throng on the wharf made up of all the Americans he had ever read of in his school history or known and made heroes of in his everyday life. Painted Feather, an Indian boy of direct 232 THE LAST FIGHT descent from a Choctaw chief of the old Colonial days, stood beside a cowboy there on the dock; their ranches lay side by side out in Montana. The Boy himself had touched shoulders with a stalwart colored lad wearing the same uniform as his. And there had been that glorious mob of other Americans; big league ball players and the famous men of the College gridirons, automobile and motorcycle racers, the men who dared any adventure in making the movies, fearless railroad engi- neers, truck drivers who loved danger, the boys who held in their hands the trust of our wealth which their fathers had earned, and the boys who could work tractors and dig and build and shape machinery. It was a pretty fine crowd to be one of, the Boy thought, all wearing khaki and all lined up under the Stars and Stripes. The best part of it all, though, he decided, as the gang plank was hauled up, was to be steaming off for Europe in this particular kind of way. France had asked them all to come and England had sent this troopship from her big gray fleet to bring them. It was the beginning THE LAST FIGHT 233 of the greatest adventure they had ever known. No, that wasn't quite the way he wanted to put it, the American boy began to feel, as his home shore sUpped out of sight and there was nothing to be seen but sky and sea and the convoys that guarded them from the night and day hazard of foes beneath the water. France had sent for him. England had come for him with her ship. It was his adventure, the American boy knew. He could hardly wait for it as the ship throbbed on her long way, slowed, and then made her triumphant docking at a French port. France, as the Boy had read of it, and looked at its pictures, was a kind of fairyland place of unfailing plenty and pleasant living and peace. As the troop train which was to carry him to the battle front started and he pushed to a place where he could look out of a window, he knew exactly what he was going to see. There would be little thatched, green villages nestling in the hollows of hills that were thick with sheep and fragrant with orchards. Every French village would have 234 THE LAST FIGHT its square towered church, and the larger gray towns with their factories and smoking chimneys, each had its beautiful cathedral whose lace-like towers were higher than the chimneys. There would be miles of neat little farms and storied castles lying securely in their old parks and guarded by century old trees. Nearly every one would be busy ploughing and planting and tending quaint shops and keeping their cottages thriftily and making precious things with their hands. Surely no enemy force, however strong, would hurt such a life as that. But the American Boy, straining his eyes from the window of the troop train, saw noth- ing of this. He saw instead empty, shell torn fields and broken roads. The only landmarks were the ruins of what had once been homes and churches. From time to time a road would be filled with rickety wagons pulled by slow farm horses, and spilling over with their loads of furniture and household utensils. Very old men and women and little children walked beside these and they all had their arms full of the things they held most dear, From the window of the troop train, he saw ruins of what had once been homes and churches. THE LAST FIGHT 235 the babies who couldn't walk, their tools for gardening, their pet rabbits and their birds in wicker cages. Some of these refugees were crying, and all had a look of fear and horror and despair in their faces that was new to the American Boy. Something must have hurt them almost beyond healing; something that was their right had been taken away from them, he realized. He had not thought very seriously before why America was send- ing an army to France. He had been so thrilled at the thought of being a part of it, himself, of perhaps meeting the German's flying circus in the air. Now he knew. The American Expedi- tionary Force had come to help take that look of terror out of the faces of the refugees and to see to it that no free born American ever experienced the same horror. It was more than an American adventure. It was a fight to preserve the freedom that had begun with the landing of the Pilgrims. It was parti- cularly his fight, the fight of the American Boy who had inherited freedom as his birth- right. 236 THE LAST FIGHT The Front, too, was very different from what he had imagined it would be hke; it was so colossal, so gigantic, so like a great new business. Wiring telephone lines, rebuilding roads and bridges, cooking, nursing, and burying the dead was going on as if for a whole state. The Boy had never felt so alone in his life, and never had he been in such a crowd. Every highway was a tangle of loaded ambulances, gray motor-trucks, the officers' cars, endless lines of artillery, supply trucks, field kitchens and motor cycles that zig-zagged their course through the smallest spaces in the mass of traffic. Marching toward his command, the Boy was dazed by the turmoil he found himself in; the shouting of mule drivers, the cracking of whips, the popping of the cycles, and the horns of the motors mingled, and there was the incessant cannonade of the guns toward which they were moving that grew louder every moment. The Boy was glad when the march ended and the time came for him to begin his work. Even there, at the front of the Front, it was THE LAST FIGHT 237 the same; an organized business of the advance. Every one had his own part in it, and was doing it vaHantly, as if it was his war. Painted Feather was scouting. A famous American baseball player had shown that he could throw hand grenades under fire. Some of the movie men were painting a hospital in camouflage, also under fire, and a football hero was rushing into machine gun nests to bring back the wounded of his company. Everything was ready for the Boy the day his part came. His aeroplane, eager for the wind, and as clumsy on the field as a sea fowl unused to the land, was oiled and already throbbing with the mighty whir of the screw. "She's working like a bird,'' the machinist said as the Boy climbed in between the planes. There was a gasp, like a cry of mingled fear and hope, as the engine and the aeroplane rose from the field and began climbing as up a spiral staircase, farther and farther away from the earth. Everything below shrunk to toy-size as the Boy glanced down. The soldiers ran to and fro like puppets, the red 238 THE LAST FIGHT cross on the hospital roof was only a patch of color, and then a gust of air met him and shook him as if his machine had been a straw. He was rising in enormous leaps and making his entry into the land of the clouds. It was colder, although it had been summer down below on the earth. The Boy^s hands felt like stones and his heart thumped in time with the steady drum beat of the engine. All around him was a thick white curtain of fleece, impenetrable to the eye, but the planes guided him through it and into mazes of cloud, always higher and farther on. Still he drove ahead until he was several miles within the German lines. He wished he could see something. Strangely enough he remembered a verse that he had heard once in church: ^Tet thy servant, I pray thee, turn back again that I may die in mine own city !^^ But the Boy suddenly heard the deafening burr of another propeller almost upon him. An enemy plane nosed its way through a cloud bank and was upon him in an instant. THE LAST FIGHT 239 Just one thought flashed through the mind of the boy. ^'We're both hke birds. I^m the eagle, and that German plane marked with black is a buzzard like those that fly over the dead. — Here goes the American eagle !^' Then he dived, rose, touched his gun, fired, and watched the buzzard drop, its trail marked by a line of flame. There wasn't any time to lose, he knew, as he turned his machine, took the course back and skimmed along through the white banks. A rain of fire pursued him, but he circled, rose, banked, dropped and escaped it. At last the firing stopped and his land of clouds became very still. And there, in front of him, he could see the white spires of a city. It was an American town, just like his home town. There were the same elm trees almost touching across the streets, and the same comfortable houses with service flags hang- ing in the windows. Children were racing home from school, the factory was running and the stores were full of food. Everybody seemed just as usual, busy and happy and 240 THE LAST FIGHT free. The only thing that made this town in the clouds different from his, the American Boy saw, was the crowd of strangers on the edge of it, reaching out their hands toward its homes and smiling with a wonderful kind of joy. Where had he seen those people before, the Boy wondered? Then he remem- bered. He had seen them as refugees along the broken roads of France. Just a dream picture, of course! The Boy dipped, and suddenly saw the trenches that made the foreground of his section of the line. He dropped safely, but as he looked his aeroplane over he thought again of that city in the clouds. It was more than an American town, it was a world city now. It was built of the same logs that the Colonists had hewed and made into a stockade of freedom. That was why it had heard the call of a people in captivity and had sent its sons to help in a war to pre- serve the world^s freedom. ''My fight!'' the American Boy said, ''and I did my best in it.'' A PROCLAMATION Everything for which America fought has been accomplished. It will now be our fortunate duty to assist by example, by sober, friendly counsel, and by material aid in the establishment of Just democracy throughout the world. By the President of the United States, November eleventh, nineteen hundred and eighteen. CHRONOLOGY OF MAIN EVENTS Referred to in Broad Stripes and Bright Stars The Landing or the Pilgrims 1620 Our First Peace Table .1621 Dutch Purchase of Manhattan 1626 England Grants a Charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony 1629 The Sailing of the Puritans with John Winthrop 1630 The Founding of Harvard College 1638 English Occupation of New York 1664 The Destruction of Jamestown 1676 Benjamin Franklin Represents the American Colonies before the English Parliament . . 1766 Daniel Boone Starts the Wilderness Road . . 1769 The First Permanent Settlement in Kentucky . 1775 Washington Takes Command of the Continental Army 1775 The Signing of the Declaration of Independence 1776 The Battle of Trenton 1776 CHRONOLOGY— Continued Adoption by the Congress of the Flag . . . 1777 CoRNWALLis Surrenders to Washington . . . 1781 Treaty of Peace Between Great Britain and the United States Signed at Versailles .... 1783 The Inauguration of George Washington, the First President of the United States . . . 1789 The Appointment of Alexander Hamilton as the First Secretary of the Treasury .... 1789 'Establishment of the First National Bank . . 1791 Establishment of the Mint 1792 The Trip of the First Steamboat up the Hudson 1807 Patenting of the Reaper 1834 Samuel Morse Perfects his Invention op the Telegraph 1844 England and America United by the Atlantic Cable 1858 The Battle of Gettysburg 1863 Sherman's March to the Sea 1864 The Centennial Exposition 1876 The United States Enters THE World War . . 1917 The Launching of Our Fabricated Ship . . . 1918 A Proclamation by the President of the United States 1918