Homegrown Terror. Eric D. LehmanЧитать онлайн книгу.
could hardly have picked a better city to find radical politics, full of Enlightenment hallmarks like newspapers, coffeehouses, and an educated population. The largest city in the state, New Haven had boasted its first newspaper, the Connecticut Gazette, though it folded a few years after Arnold moved there. By then a number of other newspapers had sprung up, and folded, throughout the state, with the Green family starting most of them. Thomas Green started the Connecticut Courant in Hartford in 1764 and the Connecticut Journal three years later in New Haven.27 But it was the presence of the state’s only college that made New Haven such a hotbed of Enlightenment ideas.
The president of Yale College, Napthali Daggett, had been one of the first to attack the Stamp Act openly, in pages of the Connecticut Gazette. Daggett had, like Arnold, received “grammar instruction” from Dr. Cogswell of Canterbury, and now he trained many of the students who would go on to become ardent patriots during the Revolution.28 The school was the largest of the nine colleges in the colonies in the 1770s, with approximately two hundred students.29 It was located on the west side of the New Haven green, and in those days consisted of two buildings, Connecticut Hall and Yale College. Connecticut Hall was brick, modeled after Massachusetts Hall at Harvard, with large sleeping chambers that contained small study cells within them. Yale College was a long wooden building with six chimneys along the roof line, originally colored light blue.30 Boys in felted hats and camblet gowns packed like ship cargo into uncomfortable rooms, studying logic, mathematics, languages, physics, oratory, and rhetoric. On good days they crowded into a thin dining hall and ate salted shad, corn bread, beans, peas, and onions, washed down with apple cider. In leaner times they were fed pumpkin and Indian pudding and drank boiled water. Of course, the wealthier students could be seen around town in their buckskin breeches, smoking tobacco and drinking coffee or, if they could afford it, a frothy mug of flip.
Two of the most popular and gifted students in those years were Benjamin Tallmadge and Nathan Hale. Born amid the soft green hills of Coventry in 1755 to a farming family, one of twelve children, Nathan Hale grew into a handsome boy with fair skin, blue eyes, and flaxen hair. By the time Hale reached Yale he was an athlete with a broad chest, solid muscles, and legendary jumping and leaping skills. He could kick a football “over the tops of the trees.” He became a member of the literary Linonian Society and during his second year met a fifteen-year-old named Benjamin Tallmadge.31 Tallmadge’s father had been born in New Haven in 1725 and graduated from Yale in 1747, becoming a minister at Brookhaven on Long Island. That is where Benjamin was born, on February 25, 1754, and he grew into a good-looking, doe-eyed young man with a precocious intelligence. He was so talented, in fact, that President Daggett admitted him to Yale when he was only twelve years old. But his father wisely held him back three years until the autumn of 1769, when he crossed the Sound to New Haven.32
Their friendship became a touchstone in both their lives, with a witty repartee that hid genuine feeling. Tallmadge wrote during their junior year,
In my delightsome retirement form the fruitless Bustle of the Noisy, with an usual Delight &, perhaps, with more than common attention, I peruse your Epistle. Replete as it was with Sentiments worth to be contemplated, let me assure you with the strongest confidence of an affectionate Friend, that with nothing was my Pleasure so greatly heightened, as with your curious remarks upon my preceding Performance.
With his purposefully flowery, college-student prose, Tallmadge pontificates with a wink to his friend, taking issue with the smallest and most amusing points: “You intimated in your last, that my using the Comparative Degree was somewhat needless, alleging that the sincerity of my friendship would not be rendered more conspicuous by the use of the Comparative.” He goes on like this for three pages, on the subject of what degree of language to put their friendship into and on a vague disagreement in a previous letter that is never made concrete, in the drollest rhetoric possible. In other words, he uses the highest and most formal language to say absolutely nothing: a classic college-student prank. At the end he jokes, “I have so far exceeded any design in treating upon the preceding Topicks, that I must omit many things, which I determined to have discoursed upon at this Time, to be considered in some future Paper.”33
At graduation in 1773, Tallmadge spoke at the invitation of President Daggett, and he and Hale participated in a cutting-edge debate on the education of women.34 The two young men left college and looked for employment. Hale first went to teach in East Haddam along the Connecticut River, but moved almost immediately to New London that winter, where he became the preceptor at Union School college preparatory academy and was befriended by one of its benefactors, Nathaniel Shaw. Tallmadge took a job as superintendent of a school in Weathersfield, where he was befriended by Yale alum Silas Deane. These young men had been educated in radical politics and now joined the network of merchants and politicians advocating resistance to British tyranny.
Tallmadge and Hale were not the only Yale graduates to take part in progressive politics. In the 1770s eight of the twelve assistants to the governor were Yale alumni, and, of course, Trumbull himself was a Harvard man. One half of the field officers of the Connecticut militia were Yale graduates, and a majority of the Council of Safety were also. Many of the graduates served as ministers throughout the colonies, and most of these promoted antimonarchist “Whig” policies from the pulpit and to their parishioners.35 These networks were all merging and growing, with Freemasons, Sons of Liberty, and college graduates becoming interdependent and interchangeable. The Connecticut Committee of Correspondence had emerged as a shadow government and was populated by citizens from all these other networks. And they stretched outside of Connecticut, joining others, creating the vast root system that allowed the grass of a new nation to grow.
But people didn’t have to have a college education or be part of these growing networks to understand that the British policy toward America amounted to tyranny. After all, the population of the American colonies was at least half that of England and twenty times that of Canada. That meant almost one-third of the so-called British dominions were ruled by a Parliament in which they had no representation.36 These facts began to seep into the consciousness of the now vaguely united colonists, from the farmers and the craftspeople to the housewives and the innkeepers. This popular support meant governmental sponsorship; as early as 1769 Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania had adopted the strategy of not importing British goods. Those who refused were often pressured by their more progressive colleagues and neighbors.37
The Tea Act in 1773 led to more protests and widespread dumping of tea by Americans, from the housewives who refused to serve it to their guests to the merchants who refused to import it. Nathaniel Shaw wrote in October, “In regard to the tea that is expected from England, I pray heartily that the colonies may not suffer any to be landed.”38 Many burned or discarded tea and other British-made objects in public demonstrations, and Labrador tea or coffee became the drinks of choice. Things seemed to be coming to a head, and Benedict Arnold could not help musing to his wife that winter, “how uncertain life is, how certain Death: may their loud & affecting calls awaken us to prepare for our Own Exit, whenever it shall happen.”39 He had created a new family from the ruins of the old, rebuilt his fortune twice, and now they were threatened by the simmering conflict, which may have been inevitable and just, but not welcome.
The Boston Port Act of 1774 was the fuse that lit the fire. The king and his supporters in Parliament had decided that their only options were capitulation to the American demands or war. Without reason to stand on, tyranny becomes the last refuge. And the Americans gave the king plenty of excuses to enforce that tyranny. When Boston was blockaded and put under military law by the British parliament on June 27, mobs harassed Tory politicians and demagogues throughout New England, while kidnapping, riots, and threats swept the land.40 Special town meetings were held across Connecticut, most of which ended in a denunciation of England and a pledge of support for Boston. Shaw met with the New London town committee and vowed to adhere to the acts of the Continental Congress.41
Elected as a representative from Weathersfield two years earlier, Silas Deane sent a letter in June for publication in the Connecticut Courant that detailed the injustices of the British, asking, “Is there, my Countrymen, any other Alternative now left you but to submit, or