Littlepage Manuscripts: Satanstoe, The Chainbearer & The Redskins (Complete Edition)
ourselves with credit at the commencement; although I afterwards heard my grandfather tell Mr. Worden, that he was of opinion the addresses would have been more masculine and commendable, had less been said of the surprising growth, prosperity, and power of the colonies. He had no objection to the encouragement of a sound, healthful, patriotic feeling; but to him it appeared that something more novel might have better pleased the audience. This may have been true, as all three of us had something to say on the subject; and it is a proof how much we thought alike, that our language was almost as closely assimilated as our ideas.
As for the Powles Hook Ferry, it was an unpleasant place I will allow; though by the time I was junior I thought nothing of it. My mother, however, was glad when it was passed for the last time. I remember the very first words that escaped her, after she had kissed me on my final return from college, were, “Well, Heaven be praised, Corny! you will never again have any occasion to cross that frightful ferry, now college is completely done with!” My poor mother little knew how much greater dangers I was subsequently called on to encounter, in another direction. Nor was she minutely accurate in her anticipations, since I have crossed the ferry in question, several times in later life; the distances not appearing to be as great, of late years, as they certainly seemed to be in my youth.
It was a feather in a young man’s cap to have gone through college in 1755, which was the year I graduated. It is true, the University men, who had been home for their learning, were more or less numerous; but they were of a class that held itself aloof from the smaller gentry, and most of them were soon placed in office, adding the dignity of public trusts to their acquisitions—the former in a manner overshadowing the latter. But, I was nearer to the body of the community, and my position admitted more of comparative excellence, as it might be. No one thinks of certain habits, opinions, manners, and tastes, in the circle where they are expected to be found; but, it is a different thing where all, or any of these peculiarities form the exception. I am afraid more was anticipated from my college education than has ever been realized; but I will say this for my Alma Mater, that I am not conscious my acquisitions at college have ever been of any disadvantage to me; and I rather think they have, in some degree at least, contributed to the little success that has attended my humble career.
I kept up my intimacy with Dirck Follock, during the whole time I remained at college. He continued the classics with Mr. Worden, for two years after I left the school; but I could not discover that his progress amounted to anything worth mentioning. The master used to tell the Colonel, that “Dirck’s progress was slow and sure;” and this did not fail to satisfy a man who had a constitutional aversion to much of the head-over-heels rate of doing things among the English population. Col. Follock, as we always called him, except when my father or grandfather asked him to drink a glass of wine, or drank his health in the first glass after the cloth was removed, when he was invariably styled Col. Van Valkenburgh, at full length; but Col. Follock was quite content that his son and heir should know no more than he knew himself, after making proper allowances for the difference in years and experience. By the time I returned home, however, a material change had been made in the school. Mr. Worden fell heir to a moderate competency at home, and he gave up teaching, a business he had never liked, accordingly. It was even thought he was a shade less zealous in his parochial duties, after the acquisition of this fifty pounds sterling a-year, than he had previously been; though I am far from insisting on the fact’s being so. At any rate, it was not in the power of £50 per annum to render Mr. Worden apathetic on the subject of the church; for he continued a most zealous churchman down to the hour of his death; and this was something, even admitting that he was not quite so zealous as a Christian. The church being the repository of the faith, if not the faith itself, it follows that its friends are akin to religion, though not absolutely religious. I have always liked a man the better for being what I call a sound, warm-hearted churchman, though his habits may have been a little free.
It was necessary to supply the place left vacant by the emigration of Mr. Worden, or to abandon a school that had got to be the nucleus of knowledge in Westchester. There was a natural desire, at first, to obtain another scholar from home; but no such person offering, a Yale College graduate was accepted, though not without sundry rebellions, and plenty of distrust. The moment he appeared, Col. Follock, and Major Nicholas Oothout, another respectable Dutch neighbour, withdrew their sons; and from that hour Dirck never went to school again. It is true, Westchester was not properly a Dutch county, like Rockland, and Albany, and Orange, and several others along the river; but it had many respectable families in it, of that extraction, without alluding to such heavy people as the Van Cortlandts, Felipses, Beekmans, and two or three others of that stamp. Most of our important county families had a different origin, as in the case of the Morrises, of Morrisania, and of the Manor of Fordham, the Pells, of Pelham, the Heathcotes, of Mamanneck, the branch of the de Lanceys, at West Farms, the Jays, of Rye, &c., &c. All these came of the English, or the Huguenot stock. Among these last, more or less Dutch blood was to be found, however; though Dutch prejudices were a good deal weakened. Although few of these persons sent their boys to this school, they were consulted in the selection of a master; and I have always supposed that their indifference was the cause that the county finally obtained the services of a Yankee, from Yale.
The name of the new pedagogue was Jason Newcome, or, as he pronounced the latter appellation himself, Noo-come. As he affected a pedantic way of pronouncing the last syllable long, or as it was spelt, he rather called himself Noo-comb, instead of Newcome, as is the English mode, whence he soon got the nick-name of Jason Old Comb among the boys; the lank, orderly arrangement of his jet-black, and somewhat greasy-looking locks, contributing their share towards procuring for him the sobriquet, as I believe the French call it. As this Mr. Newcome will have a material part to play in the succeeding portions of this narrative, it may be well to be a little more minute in his description.
I found Jason fully established in the school, on my return from college. I remember we met very much like two strange birds, that see each other for the first time on the same dunghill; or two quadrupeds, in their original interview in a common herd. It was New Haven against Newark; though the institution, after making as many migrations as the House of Loretto, finally settled down at Princeton, a short time before I took my degree. I was consequently entitled to call myself a graduate of Newark,—a sort of scholar that is quite as great a curiosity in the country as a Queen Anne’s farthing, or a book printed in the fifteenth century. I remember the first evening we two spent in company, as well as if the meeting occurred only last night. It was at Satanstoe, and Mr. Worden was present. Jason had a liberal supply of puritanical notions, which were bred in-and-in in his moral, and I had almost said, in his physical system; nevertheless, he could unbend; and I did not fail to observe that very evening, a gleam of covert enjoyment on his sombre countenance, as the hot-stuff, the cards, and the pipes were produced, an hour or two before supper,—a meal we always had hot and comfortable. This covert satisfaction, however, was not exhibited without certain misgiving looks, as if the neophyte in these innocent enjoyments distrusted his right to possess his share. I remember in particular, when my mother laid two or three new, clean packs of cards on the table, that Jason cast a stealthy glance over his shoulder, as if to make certain that the act was not noted by the minister, or the “neighbours.” The neighbours!—what a contemptible being a man becomes, who lives in constant dread of the comments and judgments of these social supervisors! and what a wretch, the habit of deferring to no principle better than their decision has made many a being, who has had originally the materials of something better in him, than has been developed by the surveillance of ignorance, envy, vulgarity, gossiping and lying! In those cases in which education, social position, opportunities and experience have made any material difference between the parties, the man who yields to such a government, exhibits the picture of a giant held in bondage by a pigmy. I have always remarked, too, that they who are best qualified to sit in this neighbourhood-tribunal, generally keep most aloof from it, as repugnant to their tastes and habits, thus leaving its decisions to the portion of the community least qualified to make such as are either just or enlightened.
I felt a disposition to laugh outright, at the manner in which Jason betrayed a sneaking consciousness of crime, as he saw my meek, innocent, simple-minded, just and warm-hearted mother lay the cards on the table that evening. His sense of guilt was purely conventional, while my mother’s sense of innocence existed in the absence