The Proud and the Free Read Online Free PDF

Congress sitting in the hut of Jamie Stuart, and they should not send any damned navvies, but good men in respectful standing.
    That was how our Congress came about.
    We let the fire die to embers, for – the way that hut was packed with humankind, their smell and their breath and their warmth – we wanted no other heat; and on the table we lit a tallow lamp. The year turned. We had no watch among us, having long ago bartered away the last for food and drink, but the sound of the New Year came up, fretful and uneven, with a huzza here and there through the encampment, and then with the tolling of the bells from the village church. The door was opened to let us have a breath of air, and as the swirling snow eddied in, we saw a man or two run across the moonlit parade, in a grotesque imitation of what a New Year’s Eve should be.
    The tallow wick lashed and flickered, and in a voice as sober as a parson’s on Sunday morn, Jack Maloney spoke and said:
    By the rights invested in me by the race of mankind – to which I have tried to do some good, for all the whoring and drinking I have done – and by a part of that holy right which made me, a deserter from the tyrant George III, master sergeant in the army of this republic of Pennsylvania, in the name of the Line and the 6th Regiment, where every lad is a comrade of mine and calls me by name, I do call into being and session this Congress of the Pennsylvania Line.…
    No one laughed. Our being there and our listening to those pompous words of Handsome Jack’s had already committed us, and our necks were inside of fifty nooses and our hearts were beating faster.
    Representing who? someone asked.
    The Line.
    Not enough.
    The people of Pennsylvania.
    We lie in Jersey now.
    Is there a Jersey lad here? asked Jack Maloney.
    There arose the Dutchman Andrew Yost, who said, That I am, and my father before me.
    Then what in hell are you doing in a Pennsylvania regiment? asked Sean O’Toole.
    Pulled in by my neck, by God, with a promise of twenty-dollar bounty I never got, a promise of a suit of clothes, I never see, a promise of a pint of rum a week I never even smell, and a promise of twelve-dollar-a-month pay I never get paid, not even once, you hear, not even once, God damn it to hell!
    And are ye fit to speak for yer land and folk?
    Maybe yes, maybe no, the Dutchman answered slowly. What we do will make me able to speak later.
    That’s good enough, nodded Jack Maloney, and if it’s yer pleasure, I will put this Congress in your hands to elect a board and a president. But I would solemnly advise ye first to choose a protector, and let him beat up a corporal’s guard of honest lads, so that we’ll have no gentry walking in on us.
    This was done. Angus MacGrath was made protector of the Congress, and he left to find a dozen true lads who would patrol the hut, watching for any dirty informer with his nose in the eaves or any of the officer gentry with a nose in the door. Then we set about discussing form and shape for the Congress, everyone trying to talk at once, until Danny Connell roared us down, and Chester Rosenbank, the pinch-nosed German schoolteacher from Philadelphia, advised:
    You must have a chairman pro tempore.
    And what in hell is that?
    It is Latin and means “for the time being,” and how else will you have each one talk in turn instead of together?
    Then let it be Jamie Stuart in whose hut we are, said Maloney, and if ye talk, make it cutty and sharp.
    So I was chairman, and then for an hour, instead of turning our thoughts to what we intended to do, we debated the point of what we were and whom we represented and what our form should be. Maloney and Rosenbank and the Gonzales brothers, and the black man Goulay, and three buckskin men from the 1st Regiment and a handful of others all held that we represented the people, and that therefore we were a Congress of the people; but the rest of us opposed this, pointing out