Read Online Morgan’s Run by Colleen McCullough - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Colleen McCullough
Tags: Fiction
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the eyes of a drunken man can plumb the future? Do I believe in premonitions? Hur hur hur! Call me Cassandra, for I swear I am a silly old woman. Ho ho ho, and off into the Beotian air go my Attic lungs!”
“Mad,” said Dick. “Mad as a March hare.”
The war against the thirteen American colonies went on with, it seemed to the puzzled citizens of Bristol, so many English victories that news must come any day of American surrender. Yet that news never came. Admittedly the colonists had successfully invaded Boston and taken it off Sir William Howe, but Sir William had promptly removed himself to New York, apparently intending to divide and conquer by driving George Washington into New Jersey and placing himself squarely between the northern and southern colonies. His brother, Admiral Howe, had rolled up the fledgling American navy at Nassau and Narragansett Bay, so Britannia ruled the waves.
Until this time Pennsylvania’s colonial government had tried to steer a middle path and reconcile the two warring factions of loyalist and rebel; now, just as—to Bristol eyes, anyway—American defeat seemed inevitable, Pennsylvania repudiated its allegiance to the Crown and joined the rebels wholeheartedly! It made no sense, especially to Bristol’s Quakers, blood relatives.
In August of 1776 the news gazettes reported that the Continental Congress had accepted Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the mooted Declaration of Independence, and signed it into being without the consent of New York. President of the Congress, John Hancock was the first to sign, and with a flourish that his effigy, its emptied skin still dangling from the signpost of the American Coffee House, might well have envied. After General Washington’s ragged troops acclaimed the Declaration, New York ratified it. Independence was now unanimous, though New York around Manhattan remained loyalist. And the flag of the Continental Congress now consisted of thirteen stripes, red alternating with white.
Peace negotiations on Staten Island broke down after the colonists refused to rescind the Declaration of Independence, so Sir William Howe invaded New Jersey with his own English soldiers and 10,000 Hessian mercenaries the King had hired to stiffen his army. All fell before the English advance; Washington crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania, then recrossed it in the teeth of a terrible winter to inflict a crushing defeat on the Hessians, wassailing at Trenton. After a second, smaller victory at Princeton, the rebel army retired into the Morristown hills and the reeling General Howe returned to Manhattan with his equally stunned second-in-command, Lord Cornwallis. Whose family owned Cornwallis House on Clifton Hill, and therefore was dear to every Bristol heart.
For Richard, 1776 had been a year of muskets and money; he had £400 in the Bristol Bank, and the twelve shillings per diem he donated to his father had enabled the Cooper’s Arms to keep its door open when many other taverns had closed theirs for good. Hardship gripped high, middling and low alike. Awful times.
The crime rate had soared beyond belief, and carried with it one peculiar symptom of this bitter, frustrating American war: convicts and the poor-without-a-parish were no longer being shipped to the thirteen colonies and sold there as indentured labor. Time honored and convenient, the practice had enabled the Government to implement the harshest punitive measures in Europe while simultaneously keeping its prison population down. For every Frenchman hanged, ten Englishmen were; for every German hanged, fifteen Englishmen were. An occasional woman was hanged. But the vast majority of those convicted of crimes of lesser degree than highway robbery, blatant murder or arson, were sold in job lots to contractors who hustled them aboard ships—many out of Bristol—transported them to some of the thirteen colonies, and there profitably resold them as white slaves. One difference between them and the
“Mad,” said Dick. “Mad as a March hare.”
The war against the thirteen American colonies went on with, it seemed to the puzzled citizens of Bristol, so many English victories that news must come any day of American surrender. Yet that news never came. Admittedly the colonists had successfully invaded Boston and taken it off Sir William Howe, but Sir William had promptly removed himself to New York, apparently intending to divide and conquer by driving George Washington into New Jersey and placing himself squarely between the northern and southern colonies. His brother, Admiral Howe, had rolled up the fledgling American navy at Nassau and Narragansett Bay, so Britannia ruled the waves.
Until this time Pennsylvania’s colonial government had tried to steer a middle path and reconcile the two warring factions of loyalist and rebel; now, just as—to Bristol eyes, anyway—American defeat seemed inevitable, Pennsylvania repudiated its allegiance to the Crown and joined the rebels wholeheartedly! It made no sense, especially to Bristol’s Quakers, blood relatives.
In August of 1776 the news gazettes reported that the Continental Congress had accepted Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the mooted Declaration of Independence, and signed it into being without the consent of New York. President of the Congress, John Hancock was the first to sign, and with a flourish that his effigy, its emptied skin still dangling from the signpost of the American Coffee House, might well have envied. After General Washington’s ragged troops acclaimed the Declaration, New York ratified it. Independence was now unanimous, though New York around Manhattan remained loyalist. And the flag of the Continental Congress now consisted of thirteen stripes, red alternating with white.
Peace negotiations on Staten Island broke down after the colonists refused to rescind the Declaration of Independence, so Sir William Howe invaded New Jersey with his own English soldiers and 10,000 Hessian mercenaries the King had hired to stiffen his army. All fell before the English advance; Washington crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania, then recrossed it in the teeth of a terrible winter to inflict a crushing defeat on the Hessians, wassailing at Trenton. After a second, smaller victory at Princeton, the rebel army retired into the Morristown hills and the reeling General Howe returned to Manhattan with his equally stunned second-in-command, Lord Cornwallis. Whose family owned Cornwallis House on Clifton Hill, and therefore was dear to every Bristol heart.
For Richard, 1776 had been a year of muskets and money; he had £400 in the Bristol Bank, and the twelve shillings per diem he donated to his father had enabled the Cooper’s Arms to keep its door open when many other taverns had closed theirs for good. Hardship gripped high, middling and low alike. Awful times.
The crime rate had soared beyond belief, and carried with it one peculiar symptom of this bitter, frustrating American war: convicts and the poor-without-a-parish were no longer being shipped to the thirteen colonies and sold there as indentured labor. Time honored and convenient, the practice had enabled the Government to implement the harshest punitive measures in Europe while simultaneously keeping its prison population down. For every Frenchman hanged, ten Englishmen were; for every German hanged, fifteen Englishmen were. An occasional woman was hanged. But the vast majority of those convicted of crimes of lesser degree than highway robbery, blatant murder or arson, were sold in job lots to contractors who hustled them aboard ships—many out of Bristol—transported them to some of the thirteen colonies, and there profitably resold them as white slaves. One difference between them and the
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