The Chaplain Prepares
The necessity of a just & speedy retaliation for British & savage barbarity prompts the Army to encounter every fatigue & surmount every difficulty. Havock – devastation & waste salute our Eyes where – flourishing, now desolated Country. -- & these objects create strange feelings in the breast – a just indignation & deep abhorrence of pretended British Clemency once so much boasted of – now blended with savage barbarity. Upwards of one hundred & fifty widows [sic] were here made upon this ground – in the spaced of one hour and a half about a year from this time. Are these the fruits & effects of thy Clemency O George – thou tyrant of Britain & scourge to Mankind! May he, to whom Vengeance belongs pour forth his righteous Indignation in due time.
Rev. Samuel Kirkland
Chaplain of the S/C Campaign
On the Way into Iroquoia
July 5, 1779
Yankee Origins...
The White Man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load of thought, with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked up, knowing well what he knows, not guessing but calculating; strong in community, yielding obedience to authority; of experienced race; of wonderful, wonderful common sense; dull but capable, slow but persevering, severe but just, of little humor but genuine; a laboring man despising game and sport; building a house that endures, a framed house. He buys the Indian's mocassins and baskets, the buys his hunting grounds, and at length forgets where he is buried, and plows up his bones. And here town records, old, tattered, time-worn, weather-stained chronicles, contain the Indian sachem's mark, perchance, an arrow or a beaver, and the few fatal words by which he deeded his hunting grounds away. He comes with a list of ancient Saxon, Norman and Celtic names, and strews them up and down this river... and this is New Angle-land, and these are the new West Saxons, whom the Red Men call, not Angle-ish, but Yengeese, and so at last they are known for Yankees.
Henry David Thoreau
A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers
September, 1839
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