Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
frontiers, our fate cannot be far distant: from Lake Champlain, almost all has been
conagrated one after another. What renders these incursions still more terrible
is, that they most commonly take place in the dead of the night; we never go to
our elds but we are seized with an involuntary fear, which lessens our strength
and weakens our labour. No other subject of conversation intervenes between
the dierent accounts, which spread through the country, of successive acts of
devastation; and these told in chimney-corners, swell themselves in our arighted
imaginations into the most terric ideas! We never sit down either to dinner or
supper, but the least noise immediately spreads a general alarm and prevents us
from enjoying the comfort of our meals. The very appetite proceeding from labour
and peace of mind is gone; we eat just enough to keep us alive: our sleep is disturbed
by the most frightful dreams; sometimes I start awake, as if the great hour of danger
was come; at other times the howling of our dogs seems to announce the arrival of
the enemy: we leap out of bed and run to arms; my poor wife with panting bosom
and silent tears, takes leave of me, as if we were to see each other no more; she
snatches the youngest children from their beds, who, suddenly awakened, increase
by their innocent questions the horror of the dreadful moment. She tries to hide
them in the cellar, as if our cellar was inaccessible to the re. I place all my servants
at the windows, and myself at the door, where I am determined to perish. Fear
industriously increases every sound; we all listen; each communicates to the other
his ideas and conjectures. We remain thus sometimes for whole hours, our hearts
and our minds racked by the most anxious suspense: what a dreadful situation, a
thousand times worse than that of a soldier engaged in the midst of the most severe
conict! Sometimes feeling the spontaneous courage of a man, I seem to wish for
the decisive minute; the next instant a message from my wife, sent by one of the
children, puzzling me beside with their little questions, unmans me: away goes my
courage, and I descend again into the deepest despondency. At last nding that it
was a false alarm, we return once more to our beds; but what good can the kind
sleep of nature do to us when interrupted by such scenes! Securely placed as you
are, you can have no idea of our agitations, but by hear-say; no relation can be
equal to what we suer and to what we feel. Every morning my youngest children
are sure to have frightful dreams to relate: in vain I exert my authority to keep
them silent, it is not in my power; and these images of their disturbed imagination,
instead of being frivolously looked upon as in the days of our happiness, are on the
contrary considered as warnings and sure prognostics of our future fate. I am not
a superstitious man, but since our misfortunes, I am grown more timid, and less
disposed to treat the doctrine of omens with contempt.
Though these evils have been gradual, yet they do not become habitual like
other incidental evils. The nearer I view the end of this catastrophe, the more I
shudder. But why should I trouble you with such unconnected accounts; men
secure and out of danger are soon fatigued with mournful details: can you enter
with me into fellowship with all these aictive sensations; have you a tear ready
to shed over the approaching ruin of a once opulent and substantial family? Read
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