Historic Boys Part 24

Let me be your _gecommitteerden_ and, in the name of the patroon, demand from your tenantry of Rensselaerswyck provisions and forage for our gallant troops."

"Oh, try it, Uncle, try it--do," young Stephen cried, full of interest; "but will they give so much heed, think you, to my word?"

"Ay, trust them for that," replied the general. "So strong is their attachment to their young patroon that they will, I know, do more on your simple word than on all the orders and levies of the king's Parliament or the Continental Congress."

So, out into the farm-lands that checkered the valley and climbed the green slopes of the Helderbergs, went the orders of the boy patroon, summoning all "our loyal and loving tenantry" to take of their stock and provender all that they could spare, save the slight amount needed for actual home use, and to deliver the same to the commissaries of the army of the Congress at Saratoga. And the "loyal and loving tenantry" gave good heed to their patroon's orders. Granaries and cellars, stables and pigsties, pork-barrels and poultry-sheds, were emptied of their contents.

The army of the Congress was amply provisioned, and thus, indeed, did the boy patroon contribute his share toward the great victory at Saratoga--a victory of which one historian remarks that "no martial event, from the battle of Marathon to that of Waterloo--two thousand years,--exerted a greater influence upon human affairs."

The field of Saratoga is won. Six thousand British troops have laid down their arms, and the fears of Northern invasion are ended. In the Schuyler mansion at Albany, fair Mistress Margery is helping her mother fitly entertain General Burgoyne and the paroled British officers, thus returning good for evil to the man who, but a few weeks before, had burned to the ground her father's beautiful country-house at Saratoga.

Along the fair river, from the Colonie Gate to the peaks of the Katzbergs, the early autumn frosts are painting the forest leaves with gorgeous tints, and to-day, the first of November, 1777, the children are joyously celebrating the thirteenth birthday of the boy patroon in the big manor-house by the creek. For, in Albany, a hundred years ago, a children's birthday party really meant a _children's_ party. The "grown-folk" left home on that day, and the children had free range of the house for their plays and rejoicing. So, through the ample rooms and the broad halls of the Van Rensselaer mansion the children's voices ring merrily, until, tired of romp and frolic, the little folks gather on the great staircase for rest and gossip. And here the fresh-faced little host, in a sky-blue silk coat lined with yellow, a white satin vest broidered with gold lace, white silk knee-breeches, and stockings tied with pink ribbons, pumps, ruffles, and frills, is listening intently while Mistress Margery, radiant in her tight-sleeved satin dress, peaked-toed and bespangled shoes, and wonderfully arranged hair, is telling the group of girls and boys all about General Burgoyne and the British officers, and how much they liked the real Dutch supper her mother gave them one day--"supp.a.w.n and malck[AN] and rulliches,[AO] with chocolate and soft waffles, you know,"--and how General the Baron Riedesel had said that if they stayed till Christmas he would play at Saint Claes (Santa Claus) for them.

"Oh, Margery!" exclaimed Stephen, "you wouldn't have a Hessian for good old Saint Claes, would you?"

"Why not?" said Mistress Margery, with a toss of her pretty head. "Do you think you are the only patroon, my lord Stephen?"

For Santa Claus was known among the boys and girls of those old Dutch days as "the children's patroon" (_De Patroon van Kinder-vreugd_).

"I saw the Hessian baron t' other night, Margarita," said Stephen's best boy-friend, Abram Van Vechten; "he never could play at Santa Claus. He's not the right shape at all. And then a Hessian! Why, I'd sooner have old Balthazar!"

"Oh, dear, what a Saint Claes he'd make!" cried all the girls and boys, for old Balthazar Lydius was the terror of the Albany children in those days--"a tall, spare Dutchman, with a bullet head," a sort of Bluebeard to their imaginations, living in his "big mahogany house with carved beams,"

near the old _Kerk_, and scowling and growling at every _Kind_ who pa.s.sed his door.

"No, no, Abram," protested Margery, "I'd rather have the baron, even if he is a Hessian. Only imagine old Balthazar playing at Saint Claes, girls!

Why, he's as sour as a ladle of Aunt Schuyler's _kool-slaa_. Show us how he looks, Stephen; you can, you know."

"Yes, do, do!" shouted all the girls and boys. "Show us Abram's sour face.

Let's see which is the best patroon."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "SUPp.a.w.n AND MALCK AND RULLICHES, WITH CHOCOLATE AND SOFT WAFFLES, YOU KNOW," SAID MISTRESS MARGERY.]

So the boy lengthened down his face and pulled in his cheeks and looked so ferociously sour that the children fairly shrieked with delight at the caricature, and Abram cried: "That's it; that's old Balthazar as sure as you live! That's just the way he looked at me last winter when I almost ran into him as I was sliding down the long coast at Fort hill. My! I was so scared that I ran as fast as my legs could carry me from way below the _Kerk_ clear past the Van der Hayden palace."[AP]

But, in the midst of the laughter, a quick step sounded in the hall, and General Ten Broek came to the children-crowded staircase. "The Helderberg farmers are here, lad," he said to his nephew; and the young patroon, bidding his guests keep up the fun while he left them awhile, followed his uncle through the door-way and across the broad court-yard to where, just south of the manor-house, stood the rent-office. As the boy emerged from the mansion, the throng of tenants who had gathered there at his invitation gazed admiringly at the manly-looking little lad, resplendent in blue and yellow, and gold lace, and greeted him with a rousing birthday cheer--a loyal welcome to their boy patroon, their young _Opperhoofdt_, or chief.

"My friends," the lad said, acknowledging their greeting with a courtly bow, "I have asked you to come to the manor-house on this, my birthday, so that I might thank you for what you did for me before the Saratoga fight, when you sent so much of your stock and produce to the army simply on my order. But I wish also to give you something besides thanks. And so, that you may know how much I value your friendship and fealty, I have, with my guardian's approval, called you here to present to each one of you a free and clear t.i.tle to all the lands you have, until now, held in fee from me as the patroon of Rensselaerswyck. General Ten Broek will give you the papers before you leave the office, and Pedrom has a goodly spread waiting for you in the lower hall. Take this from me, my friends, with many thanks for what you have already done for me."

Then, what a cheer went up! The loyal tenantry of the Helderberg farms had neither looked for nor expected any special return for their generous offerings to the army of the Congress, and this action of the boy patroon filled every farmer's heart with something more than grat.i.tude; for now each one of them was a land-owner, as free and untrammelled as the boy patroon himself. And, as fair Portia says in the play,

"So shines a good deed in a naughty world,"

that, when young Stephen Van Rensselaer went joyfully back to his children's party, and the Helderberg farmers to black Pedrom's "spread" in the lower hall, it would have been hard to say which felt the happier--the giver or the receivers of this generous and manly gift.

The years of battle continued, but Dominie Doll's boarding-school, smoked out of 'Sopus when the British troops laid Kingston in ashes, found shelter in Hurley; and here the boys repaired for instruction--for school must go on though war rages and fire burns. The signs of pillage and desolation were all around them; but, boy-like, they thought little of the danger, and laughed heartily at Dominie Doll's story of the poor 'Sopus Dutchman who, terribly frightened at the sight of the red-coats, fled wildly across a deserted hay-field, and stepped suddenly upon the end of a long hay-rake left behind by the "skedaddling" farmers. Up flew the long handle of the rake and struck the terrified Dutchman a sounding whack upon the back of his head. He gave himself up for lost. "_Oh, mein Got, mein Got!_" he cried, dropping upon his knees and lifting imploring hands to his supposed captors, "I kivs up, I kivs up, mynheer soldiermans. Hooray for King Shorge!"

Nearly two years were pa.s.sed here upon the pleasant hill-slopes that stretch away to the Catskill ridges and the rugged wildness of the Stony Clove; and then, in the fall of 1779, when the boy patroon had reached his fifteenth birthday, it was determined to send him, for still higher education, to the College of New Jersey, at Princeton. Of that eventful journey of the lad and his half-dozen school-fellows, under military escort, from the hills of the Upper Hudson to the shot-scarred college on the New Jersey plains, a most interesting story could be told. I doubt whether many, if any, boys ever went to school under quite such delightfully exciting circ.u.mstances. For their route lay through a war-worried section; past the dismantled batteries of Stony Point, where "Mad Anthony Wayne" had gained so much glory and renown; past the Highland fortresses, and through the ranks of the Continental Army, visiting General Washington at his headquarters at West Point, and carrying away never-forgotten recollections of the great commander; cautiously past roving bands of cruel "cow-boys" and the enemy's outposts around captured New York, to the battered college buildings which had alternately been barracks and hospital for American and British troops. And an equally interesting story could be told of the exciting college days when, almost within range of the enemy's guns, the boom of the distinct cannon would come like a punctuation in recitations, and the fear of fusillades would help a boy through many a "tight squeeze" in neglected lessons. But this was education under difficulties. The risk became too great, and the young patroon was finally transferred to the quieter walls of Harvard College, from which celebrated inst.i.tution he graduated with honor in 1782, soon after his eighteenth birthday.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE THRONG OF TENANTS GREETED HIM WITH A ROUSING BIRTHDAY CHEER."]

The quiet life of an average American boy would not seem to furnish very much worth the telling. The boy patroon differed little, save in the way of birth and vast estate, from other boys and girls of the eventful age in which he lived; but many instances in his youthful career could safely be recorded. We might tell how he came home from college just as the great war was closing; how he made long trips, on horseback and afoot, over his great estate, acquainting himself with his tenantry and their needs; how, even before he was twenty years old, he followed the custom of his house and married fair Mistress Margery, the "brave girl" of the Schuyler mansion; and how, finally, on the first of November, 1785, all the tenantry of Rensselaerswyck thronged the grounds of the great manor-house, and, with speech and shout and generous barbecue, celebrated his coming of age--the twenty-first birthday of the boy patroon,--now no longer boy or patroon, but a free American citizen in the new Republic of the United States.

His after-life is part of the history of his State and of his country. At an early age he entered public life, and filled many offices of trust and responsibility. An a.s.semblyman, a State Senator, a lieutenant-governor, a member of Congress, a major-general, and the conqueror of Queenstown in Canada in the War of 1812, one of the original projectors of the great Erie Ca.n.a.l, and, n.o.blest of all, the founder and patron of a great school for boys,--the Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst.i.tute at Troy,--he was, through all, the simple-hearted citizen and the n.o.ble-minded man. But no act in all his long life-time of seventy-five years became him better than the spirit in which he accepted the great change that made the great lord patroon of half a million acres the plain, unt.i.tled citizen of a free republic.

"Though born to hereditary honors and aristocratic rank," says his biographer, "with the history of the past before him, in possession of an estate which connected him nearly with feudal times and a feudal ancestry, and which const.i.tuted him in his boyhood a baronial proprietor, he found himself, at twenty-one, through a forcible and b.l.o.o.d.y revolution, the mere fee-simple owner of acres, with just such political rights and privileges as belonged to his own freehold tenantry, and no other." And though the Revolution, in giving his country independence, had stripped him of power and personal advantages, he accepted the change without regret, and preferred his position as one in a whole nation of freemen, to that feudal rank which he had inherited from generations of ancestors, as the Boy Patroon, the last Lord of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck.

From the patrician emperor of old Rome to the patrician citizen of modern America these sketches of Historic Boys have extended. They represent but a few from that long list of remarkable boys, who, through the ages, have left their mark upon their times,--lads who, even had they died "in their teens," would still have been worthy of record as "historic boys." The lessons of their lives are manifold. They tell of pride and selfishness, of tyranny and wasted power, of self-reliance and courage, of ambition and self-conquest, of patience and manliness. History is but the record of opportunities for action availed of or neglected. And opportunities are never wanting. They exist to-day in the cities of the New World, even as they did ages ago with young David in the valley of Elah, with the boy Marcus in the forum of Rome, or with the valiant young Harry of Monmouth striving for victory on the b.l.o.o.d.y field of Shrewsbury.

Whenever or wherever a manly boy says his word for justice and for right, or does his simple duty in a simple, straightforward way, regardless of consequences or of the world's far too-ready sneer or frown, the stamp of the hero may be seen; and however humble his condition or contracted his sphere there is in him the mettle and the possibilities that may make him, even though he know it not, a worthy claimant for an honored place on the world's record of Historic Boys.

THE END.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

FOOTNOTES:

[AL] The Fuyck, or fish-net,--an old Dutch name for Albany.

[AM] Commissioners and sheriffs.

[AN] Mush and milk.

[AO] A kind of chopped meat.

[AP] One of the old Dutch "show houses" of Albany 100 years ago.

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