Violence Theme Analysis

‘Uncle Lorne is upset. He says the printers will not be able to go on with the newspapers. He won’t be able to collect subscriptions, or get any advertising. He won’t be able to buy paper nor ink.’

‘He’s sending the Webb twins home?’

‘Yes. Back to Chelmsford. But he and I can manage. The Observer is to be half-size. He won’t give up. He’ll keep on printing, printing and printing about our wrongs—and our rights—until he drops dead at his press—or gets hanged.’

Rab, for instance, all that spring had been going to Lexington once or twice a week to drill with his fellow townsmen. But he could not beg nor buy a decent gun. He drilled with an old fowling piece his grandsire had given him to shoot ducks on the Concord River. Never had Johnny seen Rab so bothered about anything as he was over his inability to get himself a good modern gun.

‘I don’t mind their shooting at me,’ he would say to Johnny, ‘and I don’t mind shooting at them… but God give me a gun in my hands that can do better than knock over a rabbit at ten feet.’

Johnny liked the old woman all the better that in the end she had been unable to see a considerate master, whom she had served for thirty years, a young woman whom she had taken care of since she was a baby, humiliated, tossed about, torn by a mob. Sam Adams might respect her the less for this weakness. Johnny respected her more.

‘Rab! How’d you do it? How’d you get away?’

Rab’s eyes glittered. In spite of his great air of calm, he was angry.

‘Colonel Nesbit said I was just a child. “Go buy a popgun, boy,” he said. They flung me out the back door. Told me to go home.’

Then Johnny laughed. He couldn’t help it. Rab had always, as far as Johnny knew, been treated as a grown man and always looked upon himself as such.

‘So all he did was hurt your feelings.’

‘…For men and women and children all over the world,’ he said. ‘You were right, you tall, dark boy, for even as we shoot down the British soldiers we are fighting for rights such as they will be enjoying a hundred years from now.

‘…There shall be no more tyranny. A handful of men cannot seize power over thousands. A man shall choose who it is shall rule over him.

‘…The peasants of France, the serfs of Russia. Hardly more than animals now. But because we fight, they shall see freedom like a new sun rising in the west. Those natural rights God has given to every man, no matter how humble…’

‘Each shall give according to his own abilities, and some’—he turned directly to Rab—‘some will give their lives. All the years of their maturity. All the children they never live to have. The serenity of old age. To die so young is more than merely dying; it is to lose so large a part of life.’

Johnny put his hands to his face. It was wet and his hands were shaking. He thought of that blue smock his mother had made him, now torn by bullets. Pumpkin had wanted so little out of life. A farm. Cows. True, Rab had got the musket he craved, but Pumpkin wasn’t going to get his farm. Nothing more than a few feet by a few feet at the foot of Boston Common. That much Yankee land he’d hold to Judgement Day.

The first two boats were filled with privates. They had been packed in, and now were being tossed ashore, like so much cordwood. Most of them were pathetically good and patient, but he saw an officer strike a man who was screaming.

Johnny’s hands clenched. ‘It is just as James Otis said,’ he thought. ‘We are fighting, partly, for just that. Because a man is a private is no reason he should be treated like cordwood.’

‘I’ll never forget it. He said… so a man can stand up.’

‘Yes. And some of us would die—so other men can stand up on their feet like men. A great many are going to die for that. They have in the past. They will a hundred years from now—two hundred. God grant there will always be men good enough. Men like Rab.’

‘Will it be good enough to hold this gun?’

‘I think I can promise you that.’

‘The silver can wait. When can you, Doctor Warren? I’ve got the courage.’

‘I’ll get some of those men in the taproom to hold your arm still while I operate.’

‘No need. I can hold it still myself.’

The Doctor looked at him with compassionate eyes.

‘Yes, I believe you can. You go walk about in the fresh air, while I get my instruments ready.’