The King's Protection

The company called him the Farmer, and he had decided, after some thought, to let it.

It had begun on the first day, at the muster in Dover, when Captain Lewis read his name off the roll between a Dickerson and a Dill, and a man at the end of the rank said, loud enough, that he had not known the Farmer was a Kent County man. Some of them laughed. Dickinson had written twelve letters, ten years before, under the name of a Pennsylvania farmer, and they had been read in every colony and printed in London and put into French, and they had made him for a few years the most famous man in America after Mr Franklin; and here, in the Lower Counties, among men who actually were farmers, it had become a joke about a thin lawyer in a new hunting shirt who did not know how to stand in a rank. He had laughed too, a little late. After that they called him the Farmer, and showed him how to stand in a rank, and he was grateful for both.

He was forty-four. He was the oldest private in the company by fifteen years, and the only one who had been to Oxford, or rather to the Middle Temple, which the company did not distinguish from Oxford and he did not trouble to explain. He had a musket of his own, a good one, and a cartridge box and a blanket and a canteen, and he carried them as the others did, and he had learned to sleep on the ground, which he had not known could be learned.

On the morning of Thursday the eleventh of September he was standing a picket at the edge of a cornfield above the Appoquinimink, two miles from Middletown, in a fog so thick he could not see the man on his left. It was very quiet. Somewhere up the country, thirty miles to the north, General Washington’s army and General Howe’s were very likely looking at each other across a creek, and everybody in the camp at Noxontown knew it, and nobody could hear a thing.

---

The brigade was General Rodney’s, and it was three hundred and seventy men of Kent County, with a troop of light horse, and its business was to hang on the rear of the King’s army and be a nuisance.

Howe had landed at the Head of Elk with two hundred and sixty sail behind him. The Kent militia came when called; the New Castle men mostly did not. Rodney’s letter about them was one Dickinson would rather not have read. From the woods behind Middletown they sent light horse to watch the roads. Washington wrote from the other side of the British army, asking Rodney to get between Howe and his ships if he could.

He could not. Nobody could. On the third of September the King’s light troops had pushed up the road towards Christiana and fought the Continental light infantry at Cooch’s Bridge, and by the end of the week the whole army had gone north, away from them, towards Kennett Square and the Brandywine and Philadelphia, and left the militia of Kent County in the woods behind it, being a nuisance to nobody.

Dickinson did not mind that as much as he had expected to. He had found that he did not much want to kill anybody. He had found too that he was very willing to be shot at, if it came to that, which surprised him more.

---

He knew how he had come to be here, and he had stopped being angry about it, mostly, some time in the spring.

He had won. That was the absurd part. Two weeks after the vote he was in camp at Elizabethtown in the Jerseys at the head of his battalion of Associators, lodging every night within half a mile of the King’s army on Staten Island, when the new convention of Pennsylvania put him out of the Congress. The convention was the work of the men who had pulled down the old Assembly in June. They had wanted independence and had not got it, and they knew whom to thank. They did not answer his letters. In September they named two brigadiers of the Associators over his head, and he resigned his battalion two days later in writing, which was the only form of words left to him. In November he led what was left of the old interest in the Assembly against their new constitution, and lost, and resigned his seat. In December he packed his wife and his daughter and his papers into two carriages and came down here, to Kent County, to the house where he had grown up, and his tenant there spared them two rooms.

He had meant to serve as a private in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania had made that impossible as well, since a man could not serve in a militia whose oath required him to swear to a constitution he had spent a winter calling illegal. So he had done it here instead. In the spring he had put his name down in Captain Stephen Lewis’s company, and when the company was called out he had marched with it.

Men who had been for him in July offered him a regiment, a seat, a commission. He refused each. He could not argue that the war must be fought until they were heard and leave other men to fight it. And he had seen his battalion cease looking at him for orders. In Captain Lewis’s rank there was no difficulty about whose command to obey.

If anyone asked, he would say that he had served with his musket upon his shoulder. It would be true.

---

On the twenty-eighth of August, three days after the King’s army came ashore at the Head of Elk, he had sat at the table in the room his tenant had spared him and signed a deed. It set free the thirty-seven men, women and children at Poplar Hall who belonged to him, as they had belonged to his father, and it named them, by families, as they lived. It set them free on condition that they serve him until 1798, which was twenty-one years. It required that the children under ten be taught to read and to write.

His wife’s people, who were Friends, had told him for twenty years that he must, and last July he had sat in the Congress and said nothing while the slave-trade charge was struck out. So he had done it now, with the condition, because without it Poplar Hall could not be worked and he could not make himself believe he could live on what was left. A man of forty would be sixty-one. He had done the sum.

He had done it on the twenty-eighth of August, three days after the King’s army came ashore fifty miles off, and he did not pretend that the date had nothing to do with the army. Some on the other farms had already gone towards it, on no promise at all, and more would. He had wanted to be the man who did it before they went. He was ashamed of that, and signed anyway, because being ashamed of the reason for a good act was not a reason to leave it undone.

The fog was lifting. He could see the man on his left now, a long-jawed boy named Cahoon, who was eating an apple and watching the road.

---

The express came in on the Friday afternoon, a rider from Chester on a horse that was finished, and Rodney read the letter standing in front of his tent with the brigade watching him, and then read it out, because there was no point in doing anything else.

There had been a battle on the Brandywine on the Thursday. The King’s army had come up to Chadds Ford in the morning under a fog, and made a show of crossing there, and while General Washington watched the ford the greater part of it had marched round by the upper fords, out of sight, a long day’s march, and come down on the right flank of the army in the afternoon at a Quaker meeting house called Birmingham. General Sullivan’s wing had been broken. General Greene had come up and held the road until dark. The army had gone back to Chester in the night, in good order, the letter said, which Dickinson took to mean in some order, and had lost a great many men and some guns, and was not destroyed, and would fight again.

Nobody in the brigade said anything for a while. Then somebody said that the Pennsylvania militia had been on the left at the lower fords and had hardly been engaged, and somebody else said that was the Pennsylvania militia all over, and some of them laughed, and Dickinson, who had commanded a battalion of the Pennsylvania militia himself, said nothing.

He went to the camp’s edge and looked north. Thirty miles from the battle, on a picket in fog, while Philadelphia was decided. At Elizabethtown he had lived closer to the enemy than that for weeks. He went back when Lewis called him.

---

On the Saturday morning they heard that the King’s troops were in Wilmington.

A battalion of Highlanders had marched in on the Friday night, without a shot fired, and taken the town, and two of the King’s ships lay off it in the river. The Highlanders had gone to the house of Mr McKinly, whom the new government of the Lower Counties had made its President, and taken him out of his bed in his nightshirt and carried him off to the ships; and they had seized a sloop in the creek and loaded it with the public money of the Lower Counties, the papers of the loan office and the treasury and a great part of the public records, and sent that down the river after him.

With McKinly a prisoner, Read absent and the treasury and records taken, nobody could give orders for the Lower Counties. After some days McKean, the Speaker, agreed to act until Read returned. Dickinson waited for the brigade’s instructions.

He had spent the week before the battle riding about the country collecting arms and powder for the brigade, because he had a horse and could write a receipt that a farmer would believe, and he knew where there was ammunition stored in New Castle County, a good deal of it, near enough the river to be in danger now. On the Monday he went to Rodney and asked for fifty men to bring it off.

Rodney was sitting on a camp stool outside his tent, with his back very straight to ease his breathing, and the green silk over the side of his face, and a map on his knees that he was not looking at. He heard Dickinson out.

“Fifty men,” he said.

“Fifty would do it. With carts.”

“You had a battalion once.”

“I had several hundred men who did not look at me,” said Dickinson. “I should prefer fifty who do.”

Rodney almost smiled. He did not smile often; it hurt him, Dickinson supposed, on that side. “John, the enemy have been in possession of Wilmington for a day or two. Whatever was within reach of Wilmington, they have. Whatever they have not got, they will have by the time your fifty men and your carts are halfway there. I will not send fifty Kent men to look at an empty barn under the guns of a frigate.” He folded the map. “It was a good thought. It was a good thought last week.”

“Yes,” said Dickinson. “Most of mine were.”

He went back to the company. Captain Lewis, who had seen him go to the General’s tent, asked him what the General had said, and Dickinson told him that the General had said no, and Lewis said, kindly, that generals generally did.

---

Mr McKean came into the camp on the twenty-fourth.

He came as the acting President of the Lower Counties, in a borrowed carriage with a borrowed escort, because the King’s troops had the President’s own, and he came to see Rodney about the militia; and when he had seen Rodney he sent for Private Dickinson of Captain Lewis’s company, and received him in Rodney’s tent with Rodney looking on.

McKean had voted for independence. He had stood at the table in the State House on the fourth of July of last year and said aye before anybody asked him, and had watched Rodney say no, and had sat down like an old man. He had forgiven Rodney in a month, as Rodney had said he would. He had never, so far as Dickinson knew, forgiven Dickinson, and he did not now. He held out a paper instead.

“A commission,” McKean said. “Brigadier-general of the militia of the Lower Counties. It is in my gift until Mr Read comes home, and I give it to you. The President is a prisoner, the treasury is in a frigate, and there is no one in the Lower Counties who knows more about militia, or has written more about it, or has been more expensively right about everything. I do not like you, John. I should like you to command the militia.”

Dickinson looked at the paper and did not take it.

“I am obliged to you,” he said. “I cannot.”

“Cannot.”

“I have refused everything for a year, Mr McKean. If I take this I shall have refused the rest only until something better came. I am a private in Captain Lewis’s company. I propose to stay one.”

McKean looked at Rodney. Rodney, who had known them both for twenty years, said nothing at all, with great care.

“You are the most obstinate man in America,” McKean said at last, “and that is a competitive title.” He put the commission back in his coat. “If you change your mind, it will be in my desk. Or the King’s, if he gets to Dover first.”

“Then I shall know where to find it.”

When McKean had gone, Rodney said, without looking up from his map, that it had been a good commission, and that Dickinson would have done it well. Dickinson said that he knew. It was the first time in a year he had said a thing like that out loud, and he found that it did not make him feel any better.

---

The letter came on the twenty-ninth, by a Friend of his wife’s acquaintance who had a pass from the King’s army to go about his lawful business, and whose lawful business had brought him, by a remarkable coincidence, to Noxontown.

It was from Joseph Galloway, and it was dated at Philadelphia.

Galloway and Franklin had wanted a royal province in 1764, and Dickinson had opposed them. In 1774 the Congress had struck Galloway’s plan for an American legislature under the Crown out of its minutes, and he had never forgiven the Congress, which was now fighting for very nearly the same thing. Last winter he had gone over to General Howe, and on the twenty-sixth he had ridden into Philadelphia with the army.

The Congress had run. It had gone in the night of the eighteenth, the members riding out in the dark after a warning from one of the General’s aides that the enemy might be in the city by morning; it had sat for a day at Lancaster, in the courthouse, and was on its way across the Susquehanna to York, a county town of German farmers who had not expected it.

Galloway’s letter was very civil. It said that the Congress, fled beyond the Susquehanna, had no more authority over Pennsylvanians than over the people of Lisbon, and that Dickinson alone had stood against independence and defeated it, and should now finish what he had begun. Hundreds of men of property in Philadelphia were ready to sign an address and wanted only his name. Let him come in under the King’s protection, which General Howe had authorised Galloway to promise. His property at Fairhill, the letter added, would of course be secure.

Dickinson read it twice, sitting on his blanket in the last of the light, and then he took a sheet of paper from his cartridge box, where he had taken to keeping it, and wrote an answer on his knee.

He wrote that he thanked Mr Galloway for his civility, and General Howe for his offer. He wrote that he had never been out of His Majesty’s protection, and so had no occasion to come into it, by that door or any other. He wrote that the grievances of the colonies had been laid before His Majesty by the Congress of the colonies, in a paper adopted on the fourth of July of last year, and that they would be heard, when they were heard, as the grievances of the Congress, and not as the grievances of one man who had found it convenient to come in. He wrote that a settlement made by a few hundred men of property in an occupied city was not a settlement but a surrender, and that he had spent the last two years trying to prevent a surrender on either side. And he wrote, because he could not help it, that he was at present a private soldier in the militia of the Lower Counties and was not at liberty to make engagements of any kind without the leave of his captain.

He read it over. It was the best thing he had written in a year, and it gave him a good deal of pleasure, and he left it in anyway.

He gave it to the Friend, who put it in his hat and went away north on his lawful business, and Dickinson sat for a while and looked at the place in the dark where the road went.

It occurred to him that somebody in London had planned all this: had looked at the vote of last July on a map, and seen that the colonies against independence lay south of the Hudson, and concluded that the moderate men would come in. It was not a stupid idea. It had left out only the one thing about moderate men that nobody who was not one understood: that they had been moderate for a reason, and the reason had not been the King’s army.

---

On the last day of the month the brigade’s time was up, and the company was to march home to Dover.

Captain Lewis called the roll before they went, in the field at Noxontown, in the rain, reading the names off the paper as he had read them at the muster in August. Most of them were there. Some had gone home already to see to the harvest, as militia did, and one had been taken by the King’s light horse on the road to Middletown and nobody knew where he was. Lewis read the names in the order he always read them, which was the order the clerk at Dover had written them down, which was the alphabet’s.

He came to the D’s. Dickerson. Dickinson.

“Here,” said Dickinson.

Somebody said, “Farmer,” and Lewis went on to Dill. Dickinson put his musket on his shoulder and walked home to Kent in the rain with a company of men who had never once asked him what he had meant by any of it.