recreancy

recreancy (plural recreancies)

1. The quality or state of being recreant; shameful cowardice; perfidy.
   • 1824, Harrison Gray Otis, Letters in Defence of the Hartford Convention and the People of Massachusetts. Letter II:

     What must be the feelings of the sons of Massachusetts when, on any public occasion requiring a statement of her claims, the boast of her former deeds shall be met with the reproach of her later recreancy?

   • 1832, Charles J. Faulkner, The Speech of Charles James Faulkner (of Berkeley) in the House of Delegates of Virginia, on the Policy of the State with Respect to Her Slave Population:

     Sir, can it be possible, that I correctly understood a gentleman from the Valley, to say on the first day of this debate, that he was instructed to vote against any and every possible scheme of emancipation which might be brought forward this winter […] I did not suppose there was that single individual west of the Blue Ridge, who was not disposed to cooperate with our eastern brethren in the accomplishment of this great and beneficent purpose—still less, sir, did I expect such recreancy from the cause of philanthropy, and from the vital policy of the west, in the great and public spirited county of Frederick.

   • 1865, William Lloyd Garrison, "The Death of Slavery," The Liberator (February 10, 1865):

     At last, after eighty years of wandering and darkness,—of cruelty and oppression, on a colossal scale, towards a helpless and an unoffending race—of recreancy to all the heaven-attested principles enunciated by our revolutionary sires in justification of their course; through righteous judgment and fiery retribution; through national dismemberment and civil war; through suffering, bereavement and lamentation, extending to every city, town, village and hamlet, almost every household in the land; through a whole generation of Anti-Slavery warning, expostulation and rebuke, resulting in wide-spread contrition and repentance; the nation, rising in the majesty of its moral power and political sovereignty, has decreed that liberty shall be proclaimed throughout all the land, to all the inhabitants thereof, and that henceforth no such anomalous being as slaveholder or slave shall exist beneath the stars and stripes, within the domain of the republic.

   • 1892, Frederic William Maitland, "Glanville Revisited," Harvard Law Review (April 1892):

     [T]he punishment for recreancy falls on the champion himself unless his hirer raises him from the field. By coming to the aid of the carven whom one has hired one exposes oneself to the recreancy fine.

   • 1981, C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (rev. by D.J. Enright), Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, Part Two: "Swann in Love":

     Swann remained silent, and, by this fresh act of recreancy, spoiled the brilliant dialectical contest which Mme Verdurin was rejoicing at being able to offer to Forcheville.