April Morning

“The ground is dry as dust, and I will take the liberty of asking for a little rain. I know that Thou givest with one hand and Thou takest away with the other, but sometimes it seems to me to go beyond the bounds of reason. Amen!”

Moses says grace before dinner in an unorthodox fashion. He is willing to argue with God before the family, and even willing to accuse God of being unreasonable in character.

“My brothers and I were raised…as thoughtful and reasoning creatures, men who honor the written word, who respect intelligent writing, and who, like the ancient philosophers, look upon argumentation and disputation as avenues toward the deepest truth.” 

In Moses’s lecture to Adam he displays the pride of his educated ancestry, and also the exceedingly high ideals he is expecting Adam to adhere to. Notably absent from his list of virtues is the Bible, revelation, or any mention of faith.

“Oh, yes, the pastor will hold that our rights derive from God. That’s his business. He has to. But you and me, we know well enough that it was only because of a lot of stiff-necked people like ourselves that we have got a knowledge of rights.” 

Moses believes that the rights they are fighting for are human defined, not God given. There is also a hint here that Moses feels even the clergy know this but are bound by their profession to say otherwise.

“Father hated guns and only accepted them as a burden we had to bear; closer to his heart was the war of ideas at a time of decision.” 

Moses’s dislike for violence and killing is first seen here, his hatred for these things being a corollary to his love for debate and dialogue. Adam’s characterization of debate as war foreshadows Moses’s role in persuading the Committeemen to stand against the British, which later leads to his death in battle.

“I, for one, have not found very much to admire in moral people, but he was an exception to the rule. His brothers were dead in his eyes; he would never speak about them or refer to them in any way.” 

Adam’s scorn toward “moral” people reflects his views on Christian morality, but he admires Joseph Simmons’s commitment to the antislavery cause. This quote also reveals something of Adam’s principled way of living, which will prove to be a boon during the battle.

“‘Hate him!’ my father exploded. ‘Of all the crazy notions! Of all the idiotic ideas! There a boy, my first-born son—why, how could any man love a son any more than I love that boy? Now where could he have gotten an idea as unreasonable as that?’

‘He could have gotten it from you,’ Granny said.”

Numerous dynamics are at play here. Moses’s temper, Granny’s willingness to push against her son, and Moses’s predilection to put everything through the lens of reason all converge in this scene, but above all this is the book’s first indication of how much Moses really does love Adam.

“Mother began chapter four of Pilgrim’s Progress, which rated almost as highly in our house as the Bible, and most of which I knew by heart. I fell asleep to the sound of her voice. My eyes were wet and my throat thick and full, but I think I felt better as I fell asleep than I had felt in a long time.” 

Chapter 4 of Pilgrim’s Progress shows the protagonist going through the “Valley of the Shadow of Death.” In this way the allusion foreshadows both Moses’s death and Adam’s subsequent journey. This quote concludes the chapter and is Adam’s first moment of happiness in the narrative.

“‘And just where do you think you’re going, Adam Cooper?’

‘Only over to the common, please, Mother.’

‘March right up to bed!’

‘Mother,’ I said, slowly and carefully, ‘you know that I never disobeyed you.’

‘I should think not!’

‘But if you don’t let me go, I got to disobey you. Every house in the village is lit up and all the men are turning out for the common. You can’t make me stay here.’” 

The arrival of the British prompts Adam’s first direct rebellion against his mother. His desire to be seen as a man and his fear of missing out on important events gives him the strength to defy her, although he later wishes he was still considered a boy when manhood arrives all too quickly.

“‘Is our principle flexible? Have we nurtured the Committee only to abandon it the moment it faces a test? Have we drilled a militia only to sweep it into hiding at the first glimpse of a thieving redcoat?’ Father was taken; he could never resist the sound of his own words, and when he saw that the crowd was with him, he just couldn’t bear to stop.”

It is Moses who (appropriate to his name) leads the people to muster against the British over the reverend’s objections. Yet this is less a considered stance on Moses’s part and more an example of getting caught up in the moment. Moses’s pride and, ironically, his inclination to debate get him killed on the common.

“The room was full of silence, and it stretched and stretched, and all the while my father never turned his eyes away from mine. What went through his mind I will never know, but I do know that time there became an eternity. At last, Father looked at Jonas Parker and nodded silently, and Parker pushed the muster book toward me. I bent over the table and signed my name, my hand trembling, the letters all blurred and wiggly.” 

This is the moment that Moses reluctantly accepts Adam’s entry into adulthood. From this point forth Moses asks questions of Adam presuming a man’s intent, whether it be with regard to shooting a soldier or marrying a woman.

“Father stopped at the edge of the common, and took hold of my arm. ‘Adam—’ he began.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I don’t know how to say what I have got to say to you. I’m certain that nothing will happen. But something could happen, and you might have a heavy burden.’

I nodded.

Then Father put his arm around my shoulder and held me to him for a moment.” 

This is the sole moment of affection that Moses gives to Adam in April Morning, and although Adam claims it was the first time Moses ever embraced him in this way, there are hints later that perhaps Adam’s memories are not to be fully trusted.

“Somewhere, away from us, a shot sounded. A redcoat soldier raised his musket, leveled it at Father, and fired. My father clutched at his breast, then crumpled to the ground like an empty sack and lay with his face in the grass. I screamed. I was two. One part of me was screaming; another part of me looked at Father and grasped my gun in aching hands. Then the whole British front burst into a roar of sound and flame and smoke…” 

At the moment of his father’s death, Adam has the experience of becoming two people, one of whom, the child, cannot handle the experience and can only cry out; the other, the adult, observes and reacts by clutching his gun, which is now his only defense.

“We had made a mistake. We were stupid people. We were narrow people. We were provincial people. But over and above everything, we were civilized people, which was the core of everything. We were going to argue with the British, and talk them out of whatever they intended.” 

Adam realizes their naivete with regard to war and the British, but he values the fact that his community is “civilized” and that they only wanted to fight with words and ideas, not with bloodshed.

“Let the tears run freely. Grief should not be denied. Cry until you are free of it, boy. The Almighty knows that you have reason for it. Don’t be ashamed for me. I have six children and nineteen grandchildren, and each one of them is as dear to me as you were to your own father, may he rest in peace.” 

Solomon Chandler is presented as a possible father figure when he first meets Adam. He helps Adam grieve and tells him how to face his fears. However, he is later rejected by Adam as a mentor due to his love of war and taste for revenge.

“Study them, Adam […] and realize their stupidity and ignorance. They have a great contempt for us, and they call us peasants and louts, but not one in ten of them can read or write his letters. A good half of them are convicts, cutthroats and footpads, serving out their time in His Majesty’s colors instead of in jail. The rest of them are poor, ignorant devils, with a religion as cloudy and superstitious as their minds. They are a poor substitute for machines. They do what they are told to do, and when there is no one to tell them, the life goes out of them.” 

Solomon succeeds in getting Adam to conquer his fear of the British by pointing out their flaws. It becomes clearer later how much Solomon despises them. Adam, however, continues to see the British as humans and ultimately rejects this line of thought. Solomon’s speech here does in some respects resemble Moses’s prejudicial thinking about people who are uneducated or superstitious.

“The day before this, I could remember nothing about Father but the birchings and his anger and sarcasm; it was curious that now I recalled so many good things, and discovered that the bad things were not so bad after all.” 

The transition from adolescence to adulthood frequently entails the realization that one’s own interpretation of events is subjective and not always completely reliable. Moses’s death causes Adam to doubt his own characterization of his father as harsh and unloving.

“And one of the things that always plagued me in church was that, no matter how hard I worked at it, I couldn’t truthfully say that I feared God. The way I saw it, He simply did not rate with Father or Mother or darkness or the witch’s house behind the meetinghouse…” 

Adam indicates in a few places that he had made an attempt at faith. Hypocrisy is his greatest hurdle in adopting the Christian faith, but here we see Adam’s inability to feel what he believes to be the proper emotions or reverential attitude toward the God his mother and Granny believe in.

“I told him about the smokehouse and how Levi had found me there; and then he took hold of my hands and told me, plain and quiet, that while nothing could ever replace Moses Cooper in my heart, I could turn to him just as I would to a father. It meant a good deal to me to hear him say that, because he was not just saying it. He meant it.”

Joseph Simmons represents the opposite of everything Adam finds disturbing in the Christian faith. His actions and his words are one and the same, and there is no trace of hypocrisy in him.

“It was my initiation to war and the insane symphony war plays; for what had happened on the common was only terror and flight; but this grinning, broken head, not ten feet away from me, was the sharp definition of what my reality had become.”

The British scout whose mangled body lies near Adam during the first battle makes real the true horror of war and the unsettling nature of violent death in battle. This gruesome moment marks a stark line in the divide between Adam’s childhood and his burgeoning adulthood.

“‘But they shot us first.’

‘That’s an argument, Adam, and we’re past arguments. Gun shooting is a declaration, not an argument. Nobody’s going to be calm and reasonable about who shot first. There’s been too much shooting already to ever trace our way back. Now we’re enemies until one side or another wins its purpose. If we were to back off now they’d come with their gallows rope and hang up maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand, maybe ten thousand.’” 

At different moments during the battle Adam tries to reason his way out of fighting. Each time Solomon points out that there is no turning back, that this is now a war that must be won. This is historically accurate, as this battle is the commencement of the Revolutionary War, but it is also a rite of passage for Adam; a man cannot back out of certain things because they are dangerous in the same way that a child can.

“I was left alone then with my father, who was not my father but a body, with all that was meaningful and important gone out of it. It was the ending of a day when I had seen many bodies, bodies of redcoats and bodies of Committeemen. All my life long, death had only touched me lightly, but I had lived all day with death today. I was too numb to be moved any more. I didn’t even want to weep. Later and many times afterward, I would remember my father, but not the corpse on the bed. I left the room then, closing the door gently behind me.” 

The shock of the reality, even the banality, of death is part of Adam’s transition to adulthood. His realization that our bodies are not who we are is a profound one, and the reader sees Adam gaining wisdom into the nature of life and death as he looks at his father’s remains.

“No one touched such things; tomorrow, they would be burned. A half a dozen books, with pages torn out and fluttering in the evening breeze, as if there could be no barbarism without the destruction of a book. A child’s bonnet—and a shoe. A strange, woeful, pointless litter, where a battle or a massacre had occurred, however it would be recalled and remembered.” 

The aftermath of the British brutality on the common in Lexington is seen by Adam here. It is an image of sadness and the refuse of chaos, with the destroyed books and children’s items signaling the end of reason and childhood in the madness of battle.

“For her, I had to be a man with terrible urgency; there was no time to dream about the games I had played on the common. She had taken a grip on herself, and now when she wept, she would weep out of the sight of others; but she had to tell herself that here was a man, Adam Cooper, fifteen years old, but overnight a man. But I wasn’t. It doesn’t work that way.” 

This thought comes to Adam as his mother insists on feeding him as much as he can eat. He recognizes his mother’s need for him to be the provider for the family as well as the head of the household, but he knows he is not yet up to the task and that the transition will take time.