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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
one single month, let him pass with us through all the successive hours of necessary
toil, terror and aright, let him watch with us, his musket in his hand, through
tedious, sleepless nights, his imagination furrowed by the keen chisel of every
passion; let his wife and his children become exposed to the most dreadful hazards
of death; let the existence of his property depend on a single spark, blown by the
breath of an enemy; let him tremble with us in our elds, shudder at the rustling of
every leaf; let his heart, the seat of the most aecting passions, be powerfully wrung
by hearing the melancholy end of his relations and friends; let him trace on the map
the progress of these desolations; let his alarmed imagination predict to him the
night, the dreadful night when it may be his turn to perish, as so many have perished
before. Observe then, whether the man will not get the better of the citizen, whether
his political maxims will not vanish! Yes, he will cease to glow so warmly with the
glory of the metropolis; all his wishes will be turned toward the preservation of his
family! Oh, were he situated where I am, were his house perpetually lled, as mine
is, with miserable victims just escaped from the ames and the scalping knife, telling
of barbarities and murders that make human nature tremble; his situation would
suspend every political reection, and expel every abstract idea. My heart is full and
involuntarily takes hold of any notion from whence it can receive ideal ease or relief.
I am informed that the king has the most numerous, as well as the fairest, progeny
of children, of any potentate now in the world: he may be a great king, but he must
feel as we common mortals do, in the good wishes he forms for their lives and
prosperity. His mind no doubt often springs forward on the wings of anticipation,
and contemplates us as happily settled in the world. If a poor frontier inhabitant
may be allowed to suppose this great personage the rst in our system, to be exposed
but for one hour, to the exquisite pangs we so often feel, would not the preservation
of so numerous a family engross all his thoughts; would not the ideas of dominion
and other felicities attendant on royalty all vanish in the hour of danger? The regal
character, however sacred, would be superseded by the stronger, because more
natural one of man and father. Oh! did he but know the circumstances of this horrid
war, I am sure he would put a stop to that long destruction of parents and children.
I am sure that while he turned his ears to state policy, he would attentively listen
also to the dictates of nature, that great parent; for, as a good king, he no doubt
wishes to create, to spare, and to protect, as she does. Must I then, in order to be
called a faithful subject, coolly, and philosophically say, it is necessary for the good
of Britain, that my children’s brains should be dashed against the walls of the house
in which they were reared; that my wife should be stabbed and scalped before my
face; that I should be either murdered or captivated; or that for greater expedition
we should all be locked up and burnt to ashes as the family of the B—- -n was? Must
I with meekness wait for that last pitch of desolation, and receive with perfect
resignation so hard a fate, from ruans, acting at such a distance from the eyes of
any superior; monsters, left to the wild impulses of the wildest nature. Could the
lions of Africa be transported here and let loose, they would no doubt kill us in order
to prey upon our carcasses! but their appetites would not require so many victims.
Page | 418