The enemy was moving westward slowly. He had to hold out a mighty screen northwestward against the American army that now lay beyond the Berkshire Hills, holding the land between western Connecticut and Albany. That army, intact and out of his reach, was a constant, acute danger. It endangered his communications, it endangered his base, it endangered his divisions that occupied Boston. It forced him to advance only in continual readiness for battle on flanks and rear-lines.
During the slow approach the men who had gathered between New Haven and Hartford began to form some sort of an organization. Almost it evolved itself.
The enemy pushing forward along the north, took Springfield with cavalry and artillery. The undefended city surrendered without a blow.
From New Haven and Hartford, to the factory cities of Wallingford and Meriden, Middletown and New Britain, along all the factory-lined valleys, there passed a word that gathered workers from shops and idle men from streets. All one long day, and all one evening, they moved toward the two cities. They seemed aimless enough; but there were leaders who put themselves at their head secretly in the night.
Suddenly they were angry, determined, united bodies of men. Suddenly, like a suddenly awakened wind, they stormed the great arms factories of the two towns.
They came with guns and pistols. They came with crowbars and picks. They came with stones, and with nothing except their bare hands. They hauled their dead aside and withered under the fire of the guards, and burst through and took the works.
In Hartford they seized a whole train-load of rapid-firers and machine guns that had been loaded for the American army. In New Haven they took almost four thousand sporting rifles.
The riot fever spread to Bridgeport. The mob arose and seized the cartridge factories.
It was a mad thing, springing less from purpose than from the insanity that invasion had laid on men’s minds. It could have but one mad end. Yet this army of madmen was moved and molded by a touch of the American ability to “do things”--that very ability on which the people might, indeed, have depended with perfect assurance, if only they had not depended on it wholly.