书城外语美国公民读本(彩色英文版+中文翻译阅读)
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第70章 谁统治我们(6)

Then did the rebels try their best our soldiers to surround,But they could not accomplish this because there was a pond,To which our men retreated and covered all the rear,The rogues were forced to flee them,although they skulked for fear.

Two logs there were behind them that close together lay,Without being discovered,they could not get away;Therefore our valiant English they traveled in a row,And at a handsome distance as they were wont to go.

’Twas ten o‘clock in the morning when first the fight begun,And fiercely did continue until the setting sun;Excepting that the Indians some hours before ’twas night,Drew off into the bushes and ceased a while to fight.

But soon again returned,in fierce and furious mood,Shouting as in the morning,but yet not half so loud;For as we are informed,so thick and fast they fell,Scarce twenty of their number at night did get home well.

And that our valiant English till midnight there did stay,To see whether the rebels would have another fray;But they no more returning,they made off towards their home,And brought away their wounded as far as they could come.

Of all our valiant English there were but thirtyfour,And of the rebel Indians there were about fourscore.And sixteen of our English did safely home return,The rest were killed and wounded,for which we all must mourn.

Our worthy Captain LOVEWELL among them there did die,They killed Lieut.ROBBINS,and wounded good young FRYE,Who was our English Chaplain;he many Indians slew,And some of them he scalped when bullets round him flew.

Young FULLAM too I‘ll mention,because he fought so well,Endeavoring to save a man,a sacrifice he fell:

But yet our valiant English in fight were ne’er dismayed,But still they kept their motion,and WYMAN‘S Captain made,Who shot the old chief Paugus,which did the foe defeat,Then set his men in order,and brought off the retreat ;And braving many dangers and hardships in the way,They safe arrived at Dunstable,the thirteenth day of May.

26.The Africans.The blacks in our country“colored people,”or “negroes”are of African descent.They live mostly in the states south of Pennsylvania and of the Ohio River,in Texas,and in the states on the west bank of the Mississippi,as far north as Missouri.

27.Just as the white settlers in America came from Europe,so the black settlers came in the first place from Africa.But there was this difference:the Europeans came of their own accord,because they thought they could do better here;but the Africans were brought over by force,in whole shiploads,as slaves of the whites.

28.By a slave we mean one who is not free to work as he pleases,butwhose work belongs by law to some one else.The owner gives the slave food and clothing and lodging,and takes care of him when sick.But beyond this the slave gets no wages,and he must work just when and where his master pleases.Slaves are bought and sold,too,about as horses are.

29.It was some dozen years after Englishmen made their first settlement at Jamestown,in Virginia,when a Dutch ship came into that harbor with a cargo of negroes.Some of these were traded off to the settlers.These negroes were found very useful for working the tobacco fields,and it was not many years before more negroes were brought over from Africa,not only into Virginia,but also into all the other colonies.

30.We must remember that at that time the laws of about every nation permitted slaves to be owned.And they were owned at one time in every one of the thirteen colonies which were the beginning of the United States.

31.But there never were many negroes north of Maryland,and not long after the revolutionary war the laws of those northern states had been changed so that people were not permitted to have slaves.In the southern states,however,there were many negroes,and they were kept as slaves until only a few years ago.

32.New states were admitted into the Union,and those north of the Ohio River had laws forbidding slavery,while the new southern states had laws permitting slavery.Then the free states and the slave states began to quarrel over slavery.The main dispute was about the territories.The freestate people believed that congress had the right to make laws forbidding slavery in the territories.The slavestate people thought that congress had no such right.And in 1860and 1861,when it seemed likely that such laws would be passed,many of the southern states decided to leave the Union and to form a new republic of their own.They called it “The Confederate States of America”.

33.But the rest of the states insisted that no state had a right to leave the Union without the consent of the others.Armies were formed on both sides,and there was a great civil war,which lasted four years.The armies of the Confederate States were finally defeated and broken up,and so the attempt to leave the Union failed.Then the Constitution ofthe United States was changed so as to forbid slavery anywhere in the republic.In this way all the negro slaves became free,and now black men have the same rights at law as white men.

34.The civil war was a very terrible and a very sad thing.Hundreds of thousands of men were killed and wounded in the battles,or died of diseases caused by the hardships of the campaigns.A vast amount of property was destroyed,and,as we saw,the nation piled up a debt of thousands of millions of dollars,which is not yet all paid.The people on both sides were honest in thinking that they were right,and both northern and southern soldiers fought very bravely in the battles.We shall hope that our land will never again see a civil war.