Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel: And Other Stories of a Young Nation Read Free Page B

became so nervous that all you had to do was to mention the Constitution and he turned white as a ghost. It even got to a point where a good many Americans began to feel sorry for the British, the way their whole proud navy was being run off the seas by just one old pine-board frigate.
    Well, it went on that way, with the Constitution capturing boat after boat until the war was over. The British sort of curled up and granted that it wasn’t any use fighting with stubborn, senseless Yankees. They made their peace with us, and the Constitution sailed into Boston harbor, and the people cheered their heads off at her. They cheered for a long time, and then they got some rope and tied the frigate up to a dock.
    As my grandmother says, people have a way of forgetting. You wouldn’t believe how quickly they forgot about the spirit of liberty and about Patrick Henry sitting down to rest on the keel timbers of the Constitution . Instead, they were picking apart Patrick Henry’s speeches, to show you that he didn’t really mean what he said.
    Time passed, and things weren’t so bad as long as some of the spirit of liberty remained in some of the people. These people kept things going. But about that time, the country began to spread, and it was a wonder to see the way people flocked west and kept flocking west. Folks got spread out, and along with that the spirit of liberty became thinner and thinner.
    And then, just the way it had been before—different parts of the country began scrapping like cats and dogs. It was enough to make a body sick, the way folks forgot the things they had fought for a long time back. And the Constitution didn’t get about to keep spreading the spirit of liberty; it just stayed tied up to a dock in Boston, gathering green weeds and barnacles all over its bottom.
    Finally, it came to a pass where just about nobody had any of the spirit of liberty left in him. Things had gone from bad to worse, and the government at Washington said to itself, “Here’s an old frigate called the Constitution rotting away in Boston Harbor, with us paying out money for a man to watch it. It’s a nuisance and an eyesore and it gets in the way of things. Why don’t we break it up and sell it for old fire wood?”
    You can see what a pass things had come to when they decided to go ahead and get rid of the Constitution . Instead of the people standing up and raising their voices against it, they just nodded their heads and agreed that it was an economical thing to do.
    And it might have been done, except for the poet. This poet was a very wise man, and he had heard about the spirit of liberty, and he set out to find it. Of course, he didn’t know about the Constitution , because folks forgot that the spirit of liberty had ever resided in that old, rotten hulk, but he did know that at one time the spirit of liberty had blown like a fresh wind through the land, and that now it was gone. He made up his mind that if he found the spirit of liberty he would put it into a song, and that the song would be on everyone’s lips.
    He set off to search for it, and he had a mighty hard time. He went around asking folks if they had heard about the spirit of liberty, and people looked at him as if he was crazy. They explained to him very carefully that a man had enough to do making a living and putting away a little for the future without bothering about the spirit of liberty. Those were good Yankee qualities, they explained to him. When he insisted that the spirit of liberty was a Yankee quality too, they turned around and stared and said they were a lot too busy to bother with the likes of him.
    Well, he became so downright discouraged that he decided to give it all up. He turned around to go home, and when he got home, he read in the papers how they were going to break up the Constitution and sell her for old wood because no one cared for her any more.
    He said to himself, “I reckon