The Proud and the Free by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

barest essentials of our work were complete, for we were trying to remake not only the Pennsylvania Line of the Revolutionary Army but, in a fashion we only vaguely understood, our lives and our destiny and the lives and the destinies of all folk within our land; and that, you will agree, was no small undertaking for a handful of wretched and hungry soldiermen. So when it comes to what we made and what we failed to make, you should measure the target we shot at as well.
    One of the first steps we took was to appoint a Committee, to act for the Congress of the Line, which had come into being spontaneously and without plan or direction, but simply out of grief and anger over the death of the drummer lad, of the soldier Kelly, and of our own tired hopes. A Congress of fifty or sixty persons could hardly accomplish what we needed to accomplish before dawn broke, and that was readily agreed to and understood; so we created a Committee of Sergeants, which would have a sergeant – or in some cases a corporal, since many of those were good men, held back by the hate they had earned from the gentry – to represent each of the ten infantry regiments, with an eleventh to speak for the artillery company. A twelfth was added to the Committee, and that twelfth was myself; the purpose was to ensure discipline and protection. First, I was designated provost, but the name itself was compounded out of such hate and fear and terror and misery, that it sat uneasily with me and with them as well.
    We could not do as the provosts did. If we were not all of us hanged or shot down by noon of the next day, we would begin to bring something new into being; it would be a new army with a new discipline and a new law and a new hope, and it would have no officers, but a discipline out of itself – which was not a matter we understood too well, but somehow felt in the marrow of our hopes. All that long night and morning, we were changing, and somehow we had the assurance that all the soldiers of the Line would change too. Yet for all of that, we knew that in the first stages at least, there would be an iron hand needed – not I but a group, a Committee, to enforce decisions; and if they chose me first, it was because I was Pennsylvania and Scotch too, free but born in bondage, native yet bound blood and body to the foreign brigades. And another thing, if I say it – I was a soldier, and I would know my work. If they chose me, it was because the pattern of toil and trouble was rubbed into me – and they knew I would not leave them in the lurch.
    So my committee was given the title Guard of the Citizen-soldiery, and I myself was called President of the Guard.
    It may seem strange to you that everything we did was done through committees and you may have heard folk who malign us say that we took not a step or an act without making a committee first; but it should also be remembered that, before the gentry took over, the Revolution arose from committees of the plain people; and for five years, the lesson had been driven home that war is not made by heroes or by gallant officers in blue and white uniforms, but by the men of the Line, standing shoulder to shoulder. It is true that we created committees for care of the women, the children, the ammunition, the commissary – yes, and we even had a Committee of Moral Purpose for Citizen-soldiers, and a Committee of Propaganda, and a Committee for the General Good of the Common Weal; and it is also true that few enough of these committees ever functioned; but that is not to say that what we did was wrong. We did only what we knew how to do, and that was little enough.
    First the Committee of Sergeants was formed. Names were raised; they were discussed – some at length, some hardly at all. Billy Bowzar was elected from the 10th, Danny Connell from the 11th, Lawrence Scottsboro from the 1st. These were all unanimous, but there was a good deal of discussion over Leon Levy of the 5th. Many