CHAPTER III

FONTENOY

In the springtime of the year 1804 the spectacle of human conduct ranged from grave to gay, from gay to grave again much as it had done in any other springtime of any other year.  In France the consular chrysalis was about to develop imperial wings.  The British Lion and the Russian Bear were cheek by jowl, and every Englishman turned his spyglass toward Boulogne, where was gathered Buonaparte’s army of invasion.  In the New World Spanish troops were reluctantly withdrawing from the vast territory sold by a Corsican to a Virginian, while to the eastward of that movement seventeen of the United States of America pursued the uneven tenor of their way.  Washington had been dead five years.  Alexander Hamilton was yet the leading spirit of the Federalist party, while Thomas Jefferson was the idol of the Democrat-Republicans.

In the sovereign State of Virginia politics was the staple of conversation as tobacco was the staple of trade.  Party feeling ran high.  The President of the Union was a Virginian and a Republican; the Chief Justice was a Virginian and a Federalist.  Old friends looked askance, or crossed the road to avoid a meeting, and hot bloods went a-duelling.  The note of the time was Ambition; the noun most in use the name of Napoleon Buonaparte.  It seemed written across the firmament; to some in letters of light and to others in hell fire.  With that sign in the skies, men might shudder and turn to a private hearth, or they might give loosest rein to desire for Fame.  In the columns of the newspapers, above the name of every Roman patriot, each party found voice.  From a lurid background of Moreau’s conspiracy and d’Enghien’s death, of a moribund English King and Premier, of Hayti aflame, and Tripoli insolent, they thundered, like Cassandra, of home woes.  To the Federalist, reverencing the dead Washington, still looking for leadership to Hamilton, now so near that fatal Field of Honour, unconsciously nourishing love for that mother country from which he had righteously torn himself, the name of Democrat-Republican and all that it implied was a stench in the nostrils.  On the other hand, the lover of Jefferson, the believer in the French Revolution and that rider of the whirlwind whom it had bred, the far-sighted iconoclast, and the poor bawler for simplicity and red breeches, all found the Federalist a mete burnished fly in the country’s pot of ointment.  Nowhere might be found a man so sober or so dull as to cry, “A plague o’ both your houses!”

In the county of Albemarle April was blending with May.  The days were soft and sunshiny, apt to be broken by a hurry of clouds, of slanting trees, and silver rain.  When the sun came out again, it painted a great bow in the heavens.  Beneath that bright token bloomed a thousand orchards; and the wheat and the young corn waved in the wet breeze.  The land was rolling and red in colour, with beautiful