Chapter 21

"For thee they fought, for thee they fell,
And their oath was on thee laid;
To thee the clarions raised their swell,
And the dying warriors pray'd."

Percival.

The distaste for each other which existed between the people of New
England and those of the adjoining colonies, anterior to the war of the
revolution, is a matter of history. It was this feeling that threw
Schuyler, one of the ablest and best men in the service of his country,
into the shade, a year later than the period of which we are writing.
This feeling was very naturally produced, and, under the circumstances,
was quite likely to be active in a revolution. Although New England and
New York were contiguous territories, a wide difference existed between
their social conditions. Out of the larger towns, there could scarcely
be said to be a gentry at all, in the former; while the latter, a
conquered province, had received the frame-work of the English system,
possessing Lords of the Manor, and divers other of the fragments of the
feudal system. So great was the social equality throughout the interior
of the New England provinces, indeed, as almost to remove the commoner
distinctions of civilised associations, bringing all classes
surprisingly near the same level, with the exceptions of the very low,
or some rare instance of an individual who was raised above his
neighbours by unusual wealth, aided perhaps by the accidents of birth,
and the advantages of education.

The results of such a state of society are easily traced. Habit had
taken the place of principles, and a people accustomed to see even
questions of domestic discipline referred, either to the church or to
public sentiment, and who knew few or none of the ordinary distinctions
of social intercourse, submitted to the usages of other conditions of
society, with singular distaste and stubborn reluctance. The native of
New England deferred singularly to great wealth, in 1776 as he is known
to defer to it to-day; but it was opposed to all his habits and
prejudices to defer to social station. Unused to intercourse with what
was then called the great world of the provinces, he knew not how to
appreciate its manners or opinions; and, as is usual with the
provincial, he affected to despise that which he neither practised nor
understood. This, at once, indisposed him to acknowledge the
distinctions of classes; and, when accident threw him into the
adjoining province, he became marked, at once, for decrying the usages
he encountered, comparing them, with singular self-felicitation, to
those he had left behind him; sometimes with justice beyond a doubt,
but oftener in provincial ignorance and narrow bigotry.

A similar state of things, on a larger scale, has been