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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
my family. I wanted nothing more than to live at home independent and tranquil,
and to teach my children how to provide the means of a future ample subsistence,
founded on labour, like that of their father, This is the career of life I have pursued,
and that which I had marked out for them and for which they seemed to be so well
calculated by their inclinations, and by their constitutions. But now these pleasing
expectations are gone, we must abandon the accumulated industry of nineteen
years, we must y we hardly know whither, through the most impervious paths,
and become members of a new and strange community. Oh, virtue! is this all the
reward thou hast to confer on thy votaries? Either thou art only a chimera, or thou
art a timid useless being; soon arighted, when ambition, thy great adversary,
dictates, when war re-echoes the dreadful sounds, and poor helpless individuals
are mowed down by its cruel reapers like useless grass. I have at all times
generously relieved what few distressed people I have met with; I have encouraged
the industrious; my house has always been opened to travellers; I have not lost a
month in illness since I have been a man; I have caused upwards of an hundred
and twenty families to remove hither. Many of them I have led by the hand in the
days of their rst trial; distant as I am from any places of worship or school of
education, I have been the pastor of my family, and the teacher of many of my
neighbours. I have learnt them as well as I could, the gratitude they owe to God,
the father of harvests; and their duties to man: I have been as useful a subject;
ever obedient to the laws, ever vigilant to see them respected and observed. My
wife hath faithfully followed the same line within her province; no woman was
ever a better economist, or spun or wove better linen; yet we must perish, perish
like wild beasts, included within a ring of re!
Yes, I will cheerfully embrace that resource, it is an holy inspiration; by night
and by day, it presents itself to my mind: I have carefully revolved the scheme; I
have considered in all its future eects and tendencies, the new mode of living we
must pursue, without salt, without spices, without linen and with little other
clothing; the art of hunting, we must acquire, the new manners we must adopt,
the new language we must speak; the dangers attending the education of my
children we must endure. These changes may appear more terric at a distance
perhaps than when grown familiar by practice: what is it to us, whether we eat
well made pastry, or pounded alagriches; well roasted beef, or smoked venison;
cabbages, or squashes? Whether we wear neat home-spun or good beaver; whether
we sleep on feather-beds, or on bear-skins? The dierence is not worth attending
to. The diculty of the language, fear of some great intoxication among the
Indians; nally, the apprehension lest my younger children should be caught by
that singular charm, so dangerous at their tender years; are the only considerations
that startle me. By what power does it come to pass, that children who have been
adopted when young among these people, can never be prevailed on to readopt
European manners? Many an anxious parent I have seen last war, who at the
return of the peace, went to the Indian villages where they knew their children
had been carried in captivity; when to their inexpressible sorrow, they found them
Page | 422