“I sincerely thought I was serving the interest of my country”
The next stretch of the little book begins:
I continued in my chamber till ten o’clock, my usual hour of rising, then came down and desired my breakfast might be got ready by my return, which would be in about half an hour.I fully sympathize with the man as a late riser, but can’t imagine going out in the morning without having had breakfast.
Later, the narrative shows the gentleman starting midday dinner at 4:00 P.M., and the editor adds a footnote to assure readers this is common “for these kind of gentry.” That suggests readers of 1774 would have found the character’s habits unusual but not impossible to believe.
The narrator continues:
Afterwards I took a walk (which hath lately been my practice) round the camp in the common, having a card of permission…There was indeed a contingent of the British army camped on Boston Common; this was the first time I recall reading about a “card of permission” letting civilians walk around that camp.
The gentleman asks a “Captain ———” about any mysterious noises the night before. The captain responds, “you know you was very drunk last night.” Another officer steps in to say, “I was in company with him, and assisted in carrying him part of the way home.” A colonel invites the narrator to dine with him the next day. These details show that the narrator is friendly with the army in October 1774, and thus a Loyalist.
The narrator’s politics come to the foreground in the following pages. He rereads “the late acts of parliament” but “could not discover…that the parliament had any design of distressing the people of America.”
At 12:30 A.M., the gentleman hears “a most terrible shout,” and a Devil appears at his bedroom door. (This apparition carries a book and halter, as shown in the accompanying woodcut, but those details are never significant in the text, suggesting the booklet was written around illustrations printer John Boyle had on hand.) This Devil says he has been ordered there by the Angel “to converse with you concerning the crimes you have been guilty of towards your country.”
The gentleman insists he is “one of the best friends the country has.” As an example, he mentions writing letters to London supporting laws “whereby the inhabitants of the American colonies might be upon an equal footing with their brethren in Great-Britain.” A footnote to this line says acidly, “In regard to TAXES, I imagine.”
The Devil and the man discuss the Stamp Act, Declaratory Act, Townshend duties, and the destruction of the tea. The gentleman complains about how mobs attacked “our late worthy governor H[utchinson], lieutenant-governor O[liver], the honourable Mr. H[allowell], Justice S[tory], &c.” The booklet thus lays out the preceding nine years of conflict through Loyalist eyes, concluding that the Patriots “will expose themselves to the severest punishment in this world, and to damnation in the next.”
The editor pushes back against this view in the footnotes, but the Devil simply tells the gentleman he’s wrong. If he continues to stick to that political position, he’s bound for hellish torment. Rather than try to tempt the man into further wrongs, this unusual Devil says, “I conjure you desist, before it is too late.”
The next night the gentleman receives his third supernatural visitor, a “GHOST of one of my deceased ancestors” (shown here). This specter voices a standard argument of the New England Patriots, still echoed today: that the early English settlers, “for the sake of of enjoying that liberty which was denied them at home, were content to leave everything else that was dear behind, and seek it in the hospitable wilds of America.” The sacrifices of that generation gave the people of 1774 “their liberties and properties,” which they had to preserve and pass on.
The Ghost thus shames his descendant, and the gentleman finally bursts out:
VENERABLE SHADE! ’Tis true, (with shame I acknowledge it) I have gone on in the way you have described; but believe me, I never till the last night had the least apprehension that I was doing wrong, I sincerely thought I was serving the interest of my country.The narrative closes with its central character “determined, if I could withstand the shining temptation, to be once more an honest man.”
The supposed editor then adds a paragraph hoping the man’s repentance sticks, and the publication ends with thirteen lines about the reality of hell from the British poet Elizabeth Rowe.
All in all, the booklet leaves me wondering about its intended audience. Though there are a couple of hints that the gentleman was paid by a secret cabal to promote stricter laws on America, it never shares details of that conspiracy or how it worked. Instead, it presents the main character as sincere in his belief that obeying those laws is the colonists’ best course. Was this written for other Loyalists who needed converting? For Patriots who enjoyed the sight of an opposing gentleman scared into submission? Did its author mean to change anyone’s mind or confirm readers’ righteousness?
2 comments:
Given your timing on posting this story, John, I can't help but thinking of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" and the three ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future.
Yes, even though this visitation was pegged to October 1774, I took advantage of the December publication date to share it around Christmas Carol time.
Dickens’s story had four ghosts including Marley, and visions rather than serious talks in the bed chamber, but there are unmistakable parallels.
Since Dickens couldn’t possibly have come across this little-known American political booklet, I wonder if there were a lot more ghost-visitation moral-reform stories before Dickens, and his was so good it eclipsed all the others.
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