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Title: Historic Towns of New England
Author: Various
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Historic Towns of New England" ***
[Illustration: Copyright, 1891, by A. S. Burbank.
_Frontispiece._ PLYMOUTH IN 1622.]
American Historic Towns
HISTORIC TOWNS
OF
NEW ENGLAND
Edited by
LYMAN P. POWELL
Illustrated
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK & LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1898
COPYRIGHT, 1898
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
[Illustration]
PREFACE
In July, 1893, while the first Summer Meeting of the American Society
for the Extension of University Teaching was in session at the
University of Pennsylvania, I conducted the students, in trips taken
from week to week, to historic spots in Philadelphia, the battle-fields
of the Brandywine and of Germantown, and to the site of the winter camp
at Valley Forge. The experiment was brought to the attention of Dr.
Albert Shaw, and at his instance I made a plea through the pages of _The
American Monthly Review of Reviews_, October, 1893, for the revival of
the mediæval pilgrimage, and for its adaptation to educational and
patriotic uses. After pointing out some of the advantages of visits paid
under competent guidance and with reverent spirit to spots made sacred
by high thinking and self-forgetful living, I suggested a ten days’
pilgrimage in the footsteps of George Washington.
The suggestion took root in the public mind. Leading journals commended
the idea. New England people, already acquainted with the thought of
local historical excursions, hailed the proposed pilgrimage with
enthusiasm. Men and women from a score of States avowed their eagerness
to make the experiment; and at the close of the University Extension
Summer Meeting of July, 1894, in which I had lectured on American
history, I found myself conducting for the University Extension Society
a pilgrimage, starting from Philadelphia, to Hartford, Boston,
Cambridge, Lexington, Concord, Salem, Plymouth, Newburg, West Point,
Tarrytown, Tappan, New York, Princeton, and Trenton.
The press contributed with discrimination the publicity essential to
success. Every community visited rendered intelligent and generous
co-operation. And surely no pilgrims, mediæval or modern, ever had such
leadership; for among our cicerones and patriotic orators were: Col. T.
W. Higginson, Drs. Edward Everett Hale and Talcott Williams, Hon.
Hampton L. Carson, Messrs. Charles Dudley Warner, Richard Watson Gilder,
Charles Carlton Coffin, Frank B. Sanborn, Edwin D. Mead, Hezekiah
Butterworth, George P. Morris, Professors W. P. Trent, William M.
Sloane, W. W. Goodwin, E. S. Morse, Brig.-Gen. O. B. Ernst, Major
Marshall H. Bright, and Rev. William E. Barton.
I had planned in the months that followed to publish a souvenir volume
containing the more important addresses made by distinguished men on the
historic significance of the places visited; but as the happy experience
receded into the past a larger thought laid hold of me. Why not sometime
in the infrequent leisure of a busy minister’s life edit a series of
volumes on _American Historic Towns_? Kingsley’s novels were written
amid parish duties, and Dr. McCook has found time, amid exacting
ministerial duties, to make perhaps the most searching study ever made
by an American of the habits of spiders. Medical experts agree
concerning the value of a wholesome avocation to the man who takes his
vocation seriously; and congregations are quick to give ear to the
earnest preacher whose sermons betray a large outlook on life.
A series of illustrated volumes on _American Historic Towns_, edited
with intelligence, would prove a unique and important contribution to
historical literature. To the pious pilgrim to historic shrines the
series would, perhaps, give the perspective that every pilgrim needs,
and furnish information that no guide-book ever offers. To those who
have to stay at home the illustrated volumes would present some
compensation for the sacrifice, and would help to satisfy a recognized
need. The volumes would probably quicken public interest in our historic
past, and contribute to the making of another kind of patriotism than
that Dr. Johnson had in mind when he defined it as the “last refuge of a
scoundrel.”
I foresaw some at least of the serious difficulties that await the
editor of such a series. If all the towns for which antiquarians and
local enthusiasts would fain find room should be included, the series
would be too long. A staff of contributors must be secured, possessing
literary skill, historical insight, the antiquarian’s patience, and
enough confidence in the highest success of the series to be prepared to
waive any requirement of adequate pecuniary compensation. Space must be
apportioned with impartial but not unsympathetic hand, and the
illustrations selected with due discrimination. And, finally, publishers
were to be found willing to assume the expense required for the
production in suitable form of a series for which no one could with
accuracy forecast the sale.
The last and perhaps most serious difficulty was removed almost a year
ago when Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons expressed a willingness to take the
commercial risk involved in publishing the present volume, which will,
it is hoped, be the first of a series. Contributors were then found
whose work has, I trust, secured for the undertaking an auspicious
beginning. Critics inclined at first glance to speak harshly of the
differences among the contributors in style and in literary method are
advised to withhold judgment till a closer reading has made clear, as it
will, the fundamental differences there are among the towns themselves
in history and in spirit. Adequate reasons which need not be stated here
have made it advisable to omit Lexington, Groton, Portsmouth, the Mystic
towns, and other towns which would naturally be included in a later
volume on New England Towns, in case the publication should be
continued.
So many have co-operated in the making of this book that I will not
undertake to name them all. But I cannot forbear to acknowledge the
valuable assistance I have received at every stage of the work from Mr.
G. H. Putnam, Mr. George P. Morris, associate editor of _The
Congregationalist_, and Miss Gertrude Wilson, instructor in history at
the historic Emma Willard School. The Century Company has, in the
preparation of the first chapter on Boston and the chapter on Newport,
kindly allowed the use of certain illustrations and portions of articles
on Boston and Newport, which have appeared in _St. Nicholas_ and old
_Scribner’s_ respectively. Some of the illustrations for the Portland
chapter have been furnished by Lamson, the Portland photographer.
The Essex Institute, with characteristic generosity, has loaned most of
the cuts for the Salem chapter. The Ohio State Archæological and
Historical Society has allowed the reproduction from _The Ohio
Quarterly_ of some of the designs in the Rutland chapter, while certain
of the illustrations in the Cape Cod Towns chapter appeared first in
_Falmouth Illustrated_.
Conscious of the editorial shortcomings of the volume, I still dare to
hope that it may have such a cordial reception as will justify the
publication at some time of a volume on Historic Towns of the Middle
States.
LYMAN P. POWELL
AMBLER, PENNSYLVANIA
September 21, 1898.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION George Perry Morris 1
PORTLAND Samuel T. Pickard 53
RUTLAND, MASS. Edwin D. Mead 81
SALEM George Dimmick Latimer 121
BOSTON {Thomas Wentworth Higginson 167
{Edward Everett Hale 187
CAMBRIDGE Samuel A. Eliot 211
CONCORD Frank B. Sanborn 243
PLYMOUTH Ellen Watson 299
CAPE COD TOWNS Katharine Lee Bates 345
DEERFIELD George Sheldon 403
NEWPORT Susan Coolidge 443
PROVIDENCE William B. Weeden 475
HARTFORD Mary K. Talcott 507
NEW HAVEN Frederick H. Cogswell 553
[Illustration]
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Plymouth in 1622[1] _Frontispiece_
PORTLAND
WHITE HEAD, CUSHING ISLAND 55
DEERING’S WOODS 59
Showing brook which the soldiers had to ford in the fight
with the Indians in 1689.
FIRST PARISH CHURCH 63
Containing the Mowatt cannon-ball.
THE BIRTHPLACE OF LONGFELLOW 67
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW 73
N. P. WILLIS 77
RUTLAND
DR. CUTLER’S CHURCH AND PARSONAGE AT IPSWICH HAMLET,
1787[2] 83
VIEW OF RUTLAND STREET[3] 85
MANASSEH CUTLER[4] 91
NATHAN DANE[5] 92
RUFUS PUTNAM[6] 95
SITE OF MARIETTA AND HARMAR, 1788[7] 101
THE “CENTRAL TREE”[8] 103
THE OLD RUTLAND INN[9] 104
VIEW OF RUTLAND CENTRE FROM MUSCHOPAUGE HILL[10] 107
BRITISH BARRACKS[11] 112
THE RUFUS PUTNAM HOUSE[12] 114
SALEM
GOVERNOR ENDICOTT’S SUN-DIAL AND SWORD[13] 122
THE FIRST MEETING-HOUSE, 1634-39[14] 123
GOVERNOR SIMON BRADSTREET[15] 125
GOVERNOR JOHN ENDICOTT[16] 126
THE PICKERING FIREBACK[17] 128
OLD CRADLE[18] 131
THE ROGER WILLIAMS’ OR “WITCH HOUSE”[19] 137
WITCH PINS[20] 142
TIMOTHY PICKERING 153
SOME OLD DOORWAYS[21] 155
BOWDITCH DESK AND QUADRANT[22] 158
WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT 160
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 163
From an engraving from a painting by C. G. Thompson.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE--BIRTHPLACE OF HAWTHORNE--HOUSE
OF THE SEVEN GABLES--GRIMSHAWE HOUSE--THE
OLD TOWN PUMP[23] 165
SEAL OF THE CITY OF SALEM[24] 166
BOSTON
SUCCORY OR “BOSTON WEED” 167
TRINITY CHURCH[25] 169
BOSTON IN 1757 172
From a drawing by Governor Pownall.
“OLD CORNER BOOKSTORE”[26] 175
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 177
PUBLIC LIBRARY 179
MAP OF BOSTON IN 1722 180
CHARLES SUMNER 182
PHILLIPS BROOKS 184
FANEUIL HALL IN THE 18TH CENTURY 189
GOVERNOR THOMAS HUTCHINSON 190
From a portrait in possession of the Massachusetts Historical
Society, once the property of Jonathan Mayhew.
THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH IN ITS PRESENT CONDITION. BUILT
IN 1729 193
OLD STATE HOUSE 197
JAMES OTIS 199
SAMUEL ADAMS 201
BOSTON MASSACRE 203
From a painting by A. Chappel.
LANDING OF BRITISH TROOPS AT BOSTON, 1768 205
MAP OF BOSTON IN 1775 206
THE FROG POND ON THE COMMON AS IT NOW APPEARS 209
SEAL OF THE CITY OF BOSTON 210
CAMBRIDGE
HARVARD COLLEGE GATE 213
HOME OF LONGFELLOW 215
“THE MUSES’ FACTORIES.”--LOWELL 221
STATUE OF JOHN HARVARD AND MEMORIAL HALL, HARVARD
COLLEGE 225
HOLWORTHY HALL, HARVARD COLLEGE 229
HOME OF LOWELL 231
WASHINGTON ELM 233
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 235
GYMNASIUM, HARVARD COLLEGE 237
WILLIAM E. RUSSELL 240
CONCORD
CONCORD RIVER, BY THOREAU’S LANDING 245
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1858) 252
From a sketch by Rowse.
THE LIGHT AT THE BRIDGE[27] 255
Redrawn from Ralph Earle’s sketch of 1775.
THE BATTLE OF LEXINGTON, APRIL 19, 1775 263
From an old print.
MUSKETS OF CAPTAIN JOHN PARKER 266
THE MINUTE-MAN[28] 269
French’s first statue.
HAWTHORNE’S OLD MANSE 274
REVOLUTIONARY INN[29] 277
HENRY THOREAU (1857)[30] 280
GRAVES OF THE EMERSON FAMILY 283
HOME OF EMERSON 287
A. BRONSON ALCOTT (1875)[31] 292
LOUISE M. ALCOTT 295
SEAL OF THE CITY OF CONCORD 297
PLYMOUTH
FACSIMILE OF A PAGE FROM GOVERNOR BRADFORD’S MANUSCRIPT,
“PLIMOTH PLANTATION” 301
The original is now in the Boston State House.
PULPIT ROCK, CLARKE’S ISLAND[32] 302
THE EARLY NORMAN DOORWAY AT AUSTERFIELD CHURCH 305
THE OLD FORT AND FIRST MEETING-HOUSE, ON BURIAL
HILL, 1621[33] 307
GOVERNOR EDWARD WINSLOW[34] 313
THE HARBOR[35] 321
PLYMOUTH IN 1622[36] 323
THE “MAYFLOWER” IN PLYMOUTH HARBOR[37] 333
From the painting by W. F. Halsall, in Pilgrim Hall.
THE OLD COLONY SEAL 334
THE LANDING OF THE FATHERS, PLYMOUTH, DECEMBER 22,
1620 335
Copied from an old painting on glass.
THE FULLER CRADLE 337
AN OLD ENGLISH SPINNING-WHEEL 338
THE DOTEN HOUSE, 1660[38] 339
The oldest house in Plymouth.
THE GRAVE OF DR. FRANCIS LE BARRAN, THE NAMELESS
NOBLEMAN[39] 342
SEAL OF THE CITY OF PLYMOUTH 343
CAPE COD TOWNS
THE BEACH, FALMOUTH[40] 347
MAP OF CAPE COD SECTION[41] 349
PROVINCETOWN 355
WHARVES AT PROVINCETOWN 359
PROVINCETOWN IN 1839 363
From an old drawing.
HIGHLAND LIGHT 371
OYSTER POINT, WELLFLEET 373
BISHOP AND CLERK LIGHT, HYANNIS 376
OLD WINDMILL, EASTHAM 378
RUINS OF THE CHATHAM LIGHT 383
LIFE-SAVING STATION AT WELLFLEET 386
BASS RIVER BRIDGE, SOUTH YARMOUTH 387
BARNSTABLE INN 389
BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF FALMOUTH[42] 395
THE VILLAGE GREEN[43] 397
SHIRICK’S POND, FALMOUTH[44] 399
THE WHALE-SHIP “COMMODORE MORRIS” AND THE FALMOUTH
CAPTAINS WHO SAILED IN HER[45] 401
DEERFIELD
OLD DEERFIELD STREET, 1671-1898 405
FRARY HOUSE, 1698 408
Oldest in the county.
THIRD MEETING-HOUSE, 1695-1729 419
(Old Indian house on the right.)
PARSON WILLIAMS’S HOUSE 421
Built by the town, 1707--standing 1898.
DOOR OF “OLD INDIAN HOUSE” HACKED BY INDIANS 423
Now in Memorial Hall.
TOMBSTONES OF REV. JOHN WILLIAMS AND HIS WIFE 425
STEPHEN WILLIAMS, 1693-1782 428
A captive of February 29, 1703-4.
GEORGE FULLER, 1822-1884 437
BUFFET FROM “PARSON WILLIAMS’S” HOUSE 439
Now in Memorial Hall.
NEWPORT
THE OLD STONE MILL 445
NEWPORT IN 1795[46] 447
GEORGE BERKELEY, DEAN OF DERRY[47] 451
WHITEHALL, THE BERKELEY RESIDENCE, BUILT 1729 453
“PURGATORY”[48] 457
ROCHAMBEAU’S HEADQUARTERS[49] 459
LIFE MASK OF WASHINGTON[50] 463
Made by Houdon in 1785.
THE PARSONAGE OF MRS. STOWE’S “MINISTER’S WOOING”[51] 466
DOORWAY OF OLD HOUSE ON THAMES STREET[52] 468
GENERAL NATHANAEL GREENE[53] 471
From one of Malbone’s best miniatures.
SEAL OF THE CITY OF NEWPORT 473
PROVIDENCE
VIEW OF PROVIDENCE 477
From the south.
ROGER WILLIAMS RECEIVED BY THE INDIANS 479
From a design by A. H. Wray.
THE ROGER WILLIAMS MONUMENT 483
STEPHEN HOPKINS[54] 490
BROWN UNIVERSITY 493
FRANCIS WAYLAND 499
THE CAPITOL 503
SEAL OF THE CITY OF PROVIDENCE 506
HARTFORD
MAIN STREET 509
OLD CENTER BURYING-GROUND 513
THE CHARTER OAK 520
OLD STATE HOUSE, NOW CITY HALL 529
Built in 1794.
STATUE OF ISRAEL PUTNAM 539
J. Q. A. Ward, sculptor.
KENEY MEMORIAL TOWER[55] 541
THE CAPITOL 543
SOLDIERS’ MEMORIAL ARCH 545
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE 546
DR. HORACE BUSHNELL 547
From a crayon drawing by S. W. Rowse.
J. HAMMOND TRUMBULL, LL.D. 549
ARMS OF THE CITY OF HARTFORD 551
NEW HAVEN
TEMPLE STREET 555
JOHN DAVENPORT 557
From a portrait in possession of Yale College.
ROGER SHERMAN[56] 561
Photographed from statue on the east front of the Capitol
at Hartford.
JUDGES’ CAVE 567
A HUMANE ENEMY 571
PHELPS HALL 573
OSBORN HALL 577
THE ART BUILDING 579
NOAH WEBSTER[57] 581
ELI WHITNEY 583
EAST ROCK PARK 585
SEAL OF THE CITY OF NEW HAVEN 586
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
INTRODUCTION
BY GEORGE PERRY MORRIS
From the earliest days of the New England Colonies down to the present
time, those European analysts of our national life, whose opinions have
been based on personal observation, have usually conceded that in New
England towns and villages one might, at almost any period of their
history, find a higher average degree of physical comfort, intelligence
and mental attainment, and political liberty and power than was or is to
be found in any other communities of Christendom. Thus Alexis de
Tocqueville, in 1835, wrote:
“The existence of the townships of New England is, in general, a
happy one. Their government is suited to their tastes, and chosen
by themselves.... The conduct of local business is easy.... No
tradition exists of a distinction of ranks; no portion of the
community is tempted to oppress the remainder; and the abuses
which may injure isolated individuals are forgotten in the general
contentment which prevails.... The native of New England is
attached to his township because it is independent and free; his
co-operation in its affairs ensures his attachment to its interest;
the well-being it affords him secures his affection, and its
welfare is the aim of his ambition and of his future exertions. He
takes a part in every occurrence in the place; he practises the art
of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms
himself to those forms which can alone ensure the steady progress
of liberty; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order,
comprehends the union of the balance of powers, and collects clear
practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his
rights.”[58]
If this be true, the question inevitably arises, how has it come to
pass? New England, as a whole, is far from fertile. Its winters are long
and severe. Of mineral wealth it has little. The raw materials for its
countless factories and mills, the fuel for its factories, homes, and
railroads, must be obtained in the territory south and west of the
Hudson River. The cereals which furnish the staple diet of its people
come from Western plains. Its best blood and brawn have gone to found
commonwealths ranging from the Alleghany to the Sierra Nevada mountains,
and, into towns once populated and dominated by the purest of English
stock, there have come Irish from Ireland and Canada, French by way of
Canada, Portuguese, Italians, and Jews from Russia, so that, in 1890,
the alien male adult population of the several States was found by the
Federal census takers to be, in Maine, 51.43 per cent.; New Hampshire,
50.5 per cent.; Vermont, 41.25 per cent.; Massachusetts, 46.10 per
cent.; Rhode Island, 49.78 per cent.; Connecticut, 36.52 per cent.
And yet, notwithstanding these economic disadvantages, this depletion of
a population inheriting noble ideals, and the infusion of a class of
settlers holding, in many instances, political and religious convictions
quite at variance with those of the founders of the colonies, the “type”
persists. The New England towns are still unlike, and in some respects
superior to, those of other sections of the country. The New England
States still lead in reformatory legislation. New England’s approval or
disapproval of ideas affecting national destiny still has weight with
Congress and Presidents altogether disproportionate to the number of her
representatives in Congress or her votes in the Electoral College.
If one will walk about New England towns one will find in each a church,
a town-house, and a school, and in most of them a railroad station and a
factory. In the majority of them there will also be a public library,
small perhaps and usually housed in the town-house, but open to all, and
supported from the public funds. In the larger towns, especially in
those where manufacturing is a prominent factor in the communal
prosperity, a hospital, supported by public taxation, is open to all. In
almost every town there is a grass-covered, tree-shaded “common,” which
serves as a village or town park, and on it usually stand memorial
tablets or statues testifying to the valor of the dead who went forth to
fight in the War of the Revolution or in the Civil War.
The church symbolizes that belief in God and that disposition to obey
His will and law which the noblest and wisest men of all ages and climes
have agreed upon as the _sine qua non_ of civic as well as of individual
prosperity, and in this instance it also stands for that separation of
Church and State which our national experience--and that of Canada and
the Australian Colonies as well--shows to be the ideal relation. That
for a time, in the early days of Massachusetts and Connecticut, there
was an unsuccessful attempt to preserve a union of State and Church, an
attempt which had for some of its least commendable incidents the
wholesale hanging of men and women for witchcraft, the expulsion of
Quakers, and the ostracism or exclusion of Roman Catholics and
Anglicans, is not to be denied.
That the people of New England have been duly conscientious is apparent
by the multiplication of churches at home, and by their never-ceasing,
overflowing gifts to establish churches, colleges, schools, and
Christian missions in the South and West and in foreign lands. It is
from the thrifty, prosperous, philanthropic New Englander that the
treasuries of the great Protestant missionary and educational societies
receive their largest average per-capita gifts, and it is to New England
that the steps of the Western and Southern educator still turn for
endowments which his State may not, or the people cannot, or do not,
give.
Peopled by inhabitants given over to introspection, and as fond of
theology as the Scotch, the early New England communities were intensely
religious and sectarian. God to them was a Personal Sovereign,
intimately concerned with their daily life. They were His chosen people,
and, as such, pledged to obedience to His service. The Church was His
Bride; the clergyman was His spokesman, and received the
deference--social as well as official--which was due to one so augustly
commissioned. The social as well as the intellectual life of the
community centred almost exclusively in the life of the church and the
sermons of its clergy. Sectarian animosities were the inevitable product
of a mistaken emphasis put upon the form or utterance of truth, rather
than upon truth itself; or, to put it differently, of a provincialism
and narrowness of vision that made it impossible for the many to
understand that truth is many-sided, that men are different
temperamentally, that revelation is continuous and progressive, and that
religion is not theology. Communities exist in New England where the old
view still obtains, where sectarianism is as rampant as ever, where the
clergyman is the social autocrat as well as the shepherd of souls. But
such towns are becoming fewer and fewer as the years go by, and of
towns of the newer type, where the church is recognized as only one of
the many agents which God has for ushering in His Kingdom on earth, New
England now has quite as many, probably, as are to be found elsewhere.
To those interested in the theological and religious history of
English-speaking peoples, certain New England towns have a peculiar
fascination and value as environments which have affected character.
Northampton, Massachusetts, will ever be a Mecca because of the
identification of Jonathan Edwards with the town. Concord, in the same
commonwealth, has not only the unique glory that belongs to a town where
national history has been made and the best American literature of its
class written by Hawthorne and Thoreau, but also it is the town where
Emerson’s ministerial ancestors lived, where he flowered out and became
that grey-eyed seer
Who in pastoral Concord ways
With Plato and Hafiz walked.
Newport, Rhode Island, with all its present pre-eminence as a place
where “Fashion is a potency ... making it hard to judge between the
temporary and the lasting,” will ever remain most worthy of resort
because it was the birthplace of William Ellery Channing, and, for
thirty years, was the home of the Rev. Dr. Samuel Hopkins, both eminent
as theologians and as brave pioneer antagonists of human slavery. Dr.
Hopkins was the model for the New England pastor described by Harriet
Beecher Stowe in _The Minister’s Wooing_. Northfield, Massachusetts, is
known to thousands of Christians the world over, who have never seen its
rare beauty of river and landscape, because a boy, one Dwight L. Moody,
was born and bred there, and has become the greatest evangelist of
modern times. Litchfield, Connecticut, is famous as the birthplace of
Henry Ward Beecher, and if one wishes flash-light pictures of New
England ecclesiastical and social life at the beginning of this century,
let one read the autobiographic records of Lyman, Henry Ward, Harriet,
and Catherine E. Beecher.
Portland, Maine, is known to thousands throughout the English-speaking
world, who are ignorant of every other fact in its long and honorable
history, because Francis E. Clark there conceived and began that
movement to enlist young people in active Christian service, which is
now known as the International Young People’s Society of Christian
Endeavor, with 54,191 local societies, and more than three and one
quarter million adherents enrolled, Russia alone, of the nations of the
earth, being without a society now. Hartford, Connecticut, with a
discernment and gratitude not always displayed by municipalities, has
named its beautiful municipal park after Horace Bushnell, for many years
its most eminent divine and “first citizen.”
Salem, fascinating as it is because of its connection with the
witchcraft delusion and the early Puritan theocracy; because of its
being for a time the home of Hawthorne, who has preserved its ancient
local color and atmosphere in his fiction; and because of its ancient
glory as a seaport town, whence departed a fleet of sailing craft that
made Salem known throughout the world, in places where Boston and New
York were then unknown, nevertheless derives its chief glory from the
fact that it was the town where Roger Williams, the Welsh statesman and
prophet, found a church willing to sit at his feet. The church’s
loyalty, however, gave way at last to the resistless pressure of the
civil authorities and the zealous ecclesiastical tyrants of the Puritan
commonwealth, and it permitted him to depart, to establish in Rhode
Island a community based upon the principle of entire liberty of
conscience, and majority rule in secular affairs. Massachusetts’ loss
and the world’s gain are thus summed up by Gervinus the German
historian:
“The theories of freedom in Church and State, taught in the schools
of philosophy in Europe, were here [Rhode Island] brought into
practice in the government of a small community. It was prophesied
that the democratic attempts to obtain universal suffrage, a
general elective franchise, annual parliaments, entire religious
freedom, and the Miltonian right of schism would be of short
duration. But these institutions have not only maintained
themselves here, but have spread over the whole Union. They have
superseded the aristocratic commencements of Carolina and of New
York, the High-Church party in Virginia, the theocracy in
Massachusetts, and the monarchy throughout America; they have given
laws to one quarter of the globe, and, dreaded for their moral
influence, they stand in the background of every democratic
struggle in Europe.”
Boston, with all her glories, has none of which she is more proud, than
the fact that within her borders Phillips Brooks was born and labored
most of his life. Those who came within his range of influence said of
him, as Father Taylor said of Emerson, “He might think this or that, but
he was more like Jesus Christ than any one he had ever known.”
To mention Roger Williams, Jonathan Edwards, William Ellery Channing,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, Phillips
Brooks, Francis E. Clark, and Dwight L. Moody, is to name the greatest
spiritual forces which New England has known, and towns fed with manna
by such prophets have not failed to indicate the influence of
personality in transforming environment.
The “town-house,” or town-hall, of the New England town or village, in
its architecture, is a modern structure, often as simple, unpretentious,
and unornamented as the “meeting-house” near which it usually stands on
the village green or “town common.” It is the arena wherein rich and
poor, educated and illiterate, wise and foolish, meet, at least
annually, and as much oftener as occasion demands, to decide those
questions of Home Rule which are most vital to all concerned. Education,
wealth, moral worth, shrewd native sense, oratory, gifts of persuasion,
the stirrings of ambition, civic pride, thrift, foresight, all have
their due weight in this forum, this “school as well as source of
democracy”--as Mr. Bryce aptly phrases it. But when the vote is taken,
the blacksmith and the bank president, the master and the servant, the
principal of the high school and the loafer around the village bar stand
on precisely the same footing. The vote of one is as decisive as that of
the other,--no less, no more.
Debate and procedure which have the qualitative character are followed
by voting of the quantitative character, and the result represents
average intelligence and capacity for self-government. But that result,
because it is the product of the expressed will of all, has an authority
more enduring and inspiring than any that the autocracies, oligarchies,
or constitutional monarchies of Europe have ever displayed or now
possess.
Using the town-meeting as a rapier, Samuel Adams
“fenced with the British ministry; it was the claymore with which
he smote their counsels; it was the harp of a thousand strings that
he swept into a burst of passionate defiance, or an electric call
to arms, or a proud pæan of exulting triumph, defiance, challenge,
and exultation--all lifting the continent to independence. His
indomitable will and command of the popular confidence played
Boston against London, the provincial town-meeting against the
royal Parliament, Faneuil Hall against St. Stephen’s.”[59]
This popular government not only enabled the New England Colonies to
lead all the others in the War of the Revolution, it also furnished men
and ideas for the formidable task of constitution-making after the
Revolution was over and independence won. As early as 1773, the rustic
Solons of the town of Mendon, Massachusetts, had resolved in
town-meeting:
“That all men have an equal right to life, liberty, and property.
“Therefore all just and lawful government must originate in the
free consent of the people.
“That a right to liberty and property, which are natural means of
self-preservation, is absolutely inalienable, and can never
lawfully be given up by ourselves or taken from us by others.”
Naturally, a section of the country where such sentiments were held by
village Hampdens had a preponderant influence, when the time came to
draft the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the
readiness of the towns to submit to taxation and to give their sons when
the call to arms came is a matter of unimpeachable record. In the army
of 231,791 soldiers, furnished by the Thirteen Colonies to combat the
forces of Great Britain in the Revolution, the four New England Colonies
sent 118,251 men, Massachusetts contributing 67,907, Connecticut 31,939,
New Hampshire 12,497, and Rhode Island 5,908.
In the War of 1812, New England, as a section, was not very
enthusiastic, but her quota of troops was, nevertheless, forthcoming. In
the Civil War, 1861-65, her troops were the first to respond to the call
of President Lincoln, and, out of 2,778,304 men who enlisted, 363,161
came from New England. Of these, Massachusetts furnished 146,730, Maine
70,107, Connecticut 55,864, New Hampshire 33,937, Vermont 33,288, and
Rhode Island 23,236. In fact, surveying the history of New England towns
from the time when they contributed their quota of men and money to the
aid of the Mother Country in her fight with France to decide who should
be supreme on the North American continent, down to the recent contest
between the United States and Spain, it can truthfully be said of their
democratic form of government that it “is the most powerful and flexible
in history. It has proved to be neither violent, cruel, nor impatient,
but fixed in purpose, faithful to its own officers, tolerant of vast
expense, of enormous losses, of torturing delays, and strongest at the
very points where fatal weakness was most suspected.” And this, be it
remembered, where “the poorest and most ignorant of every race ... are
the equal voters with the richest and most intelligent.” This, too,
where the newly landed, propertyless immigrant from Italy or Russia, if
able to comply with the generous provisions governing naturalization and
the exercise of the franchise, has the same potentiality at the polls as
the thrifty, well-to-do, heavily taxed citizen whose ancestors,
perchance, may have come over with the Pilgrims on _The Mayflower_.
Considered either in its origin or its development, the New England
town-meeting merits the study of all who are interested in the extension
of principles of democracy. The English settlers of New England were, as
Mr. Bryce says, “largely townsfolk, accustomed to municipal life and to
vestry meetings.” They brought with them, as an inheritance from their
Teutonic ancestors, a habit of self-rule which the peculiar isolation of
the colonies and the separate communities in the colonies strengthened;
hence a form of government in which the town was the unit evolved
inevitably.
The more mixed composition of the population in the Middle Atlantic
Colonies, for the same reason, inevitably caused a mixed type of
government to be created there, in which the county or shire divided the
authority with the town; while in the Southern Colonies the immigrants
were of such a character, and the economic conditions so different from
those in New England, that a more aristocratic form of government
evolved, semi-feudal in its type, and the county, rather than the town,
became the important minor political unit within the State, never,
however, having a vigorous independent life, the colony and afterward
the State becoming the source of authority and the end of government.
Long years afterward, in the Civil War, the two types of government
clashed, and the type prevailed which Thomas Jefferson praised and
wished transferred to Virginia, for, said he:
“Those wards called townships in New England are the vital principle of
their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever
devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government
and for its preservation.”
It is well, however, to note, that Mr. Charles Borgeaud, the eminent
Genevan historian, in his work on the _Rise of Modern Democracy_,
disputes the Teutonic origin of the town-meeting, and contends that it
must be credited to the democratic principles of the New Testament as
interpreted and accepted, first by the Brownists of England, and held
later by the Pilgrim Fathers and those of the Puritans who accepted the
Independent form of church government, rather than to any principle of
communal government first evolved by Teutons. He says:
“At the moment when the colonists of New England quitted the Mother
Country, whatever was left of that old self-government which had
been exercised by their forefathers was under the influence of the
general movement, and was undergoing aristocratic transformation.
The vestries, or meetings of the inhabitants of the parish, were
being replaced by committees known as select vestries, which were
originally elected, and then, before long, recruited by
co-optation. Had the American colonists purely and simply imitated
in their new country the system which they had seen at work in
England, they certainly would not have founded the democratic
government of the town-meeting. In order to explain their political
activity, we must take into account, and that largely, their
religious ideas. And we shall be naturally led to do this if we
remember that, in the beginning, each settlement or town was,
before all things, a congregation, and that the town-meeting was in
most cases the same thing as the assembly of the congregation. In
Virginia, where the colonists remained members of the Anglican
Church, there was no town-meeting, but only select vestries as in
England, and these had certainly lost all family likeness, if they
really were related to the _Thing_ and the _Tungemot_.”
In due time, when pioneers from New England found their way to the then
virgin lands of Central New York, the valley of the Ohio, and the
northern half of the vast valley of the Mississippi, they carried with
them the political and religious ideals of New England. Where they were
a large majority of the settlers within a given territory, or where at
the time when its organic structure was forming they dominated it, the
town was established as the political unit in the territory. Such was
the case in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Where New
England settlers joined with those from the Middle States, or the
border States of Kentucky and Virginia, they often found it necessary to
compromise on a system in which the county and the town were peers, as
in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. But, as experience has proved, the modified
township system, as it is found in Illinois and Michigan, is more
advantageous than the system of divided authority, and many of the
Western States are gradually adopting it, California, Nebraska, and the
Dakotas having recently made it either permissible or mandatory.
Nor are signs lacking that in the South, as its white population
increases by immigrants from the North, as the patriarchal and pastoral
type of civilization gives way to the modern industrial and corporate
type, as cities and towns multiply, and local as well as State pride has
free chance to develop, there will be an adoption of the modified
township system and a gradual abolition of the county system.
Among the changes of the last half-century in New England, one notable
one has been the tendency of the larger towns to adopt the city form of
government as soon as it was deemed that the increase of population
warranted the step and made it necessary. This fact, as well as the
marked increase of urban population in New England,[60] is counted by
some students of her social development as indicative of retrogression,
however inevitable. Certain it is, that if the town of Brookline, with
its population of 16,164, and its property valuation of $64,169,200,[61]
and annual appropriations of more than $900,000, can still work the
ancient machinery of the town-meeting without the slightest loss either
of a pecuniary or a civic sort, other towns, with a smaller population
and much smaller valuation of property, cannot reasonably claim that
mere physical growth is any warrant for the change from a system so
purely democratic to one less so and much more readily adapted to serve
the ends of partisan bosses and those who batten at the public crib.
The third of the indispensable and ever-present institutions found in
every New England town or village is the public school, open to all and
supported by all. Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jew, Caucasian and
African, French Canadian and Irish, Italian and Portuguese, English and
German, mingle in the school-room and learn the essential likeness of
each to the other, their common and peculiar gifts, and their common
duties to God and the State. No man in the community is so rich or
aristocratic as to escape taxation for support of the school, even
though his children may never darken the doors. No man in the community
is so humble or so poor as to be debarred from sending his children to
the highest as well as to the lowest grades. Unsectarian in the sense
that they derive support from taxpayers of all sects and inculcate the
dogmas of none, secular in the sense that religion is not a part of the
curriculum, they ever have been a bulwark to the cause of religion,
partly by reason of the example of the teaching force, who usually are
men and women with religious faith as well as mental attainment, and
partly because they have developed the rational powers of men, and thus
enabled them to discriminate between superstition and truth. Beginning,
in the more favored and advanced communities, with kindergarten
instruction for young children, and not ceasing until the youth or
maiden is prepared to enter the college or university, the State and the
town, co-operating together, make it possible for every parent to give
to his children, or for every ambitious or friendless boy or girl to
secure for himself or herself, at the public expense, a thorough
preparatory education. Nor is there any item of his yearly tax bill
which the typical New Englander pays with greater alacrity and more
certainty of belief as to its equity or economy than his annual
contribution for popular education. For it is ingrained in his very
being, woven into the texture of his life, to believe, as Garfield said,
that “next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education,
without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently
maintained.” Moreover, being shrewd as well as a man of high principles
and a lover of learning for its own sake, the New Englander is convinced
that it pays to be educated, and to have educated neighbors and
children. His reasoning takes this form: The more children in the
schools, the fewer youths and adults in the jails and poorhouses. The
better informed the mill operatives, the larger the output of the
mills. The higher the standard of living, the larger the demand for the
product of the soil and the loom, and the better the home market. The
more intelligent the voter, the less the seductive power of the
demagogue and the “political boss.” In short, the New England people
have always believed, and still believe, what the inscription on the
Public Library in Boston declares:
THE COMMONWEALTH REQUIRES THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE AS THE
SAFEGUARD OF ORDER AND LIBERTY.
That the policy has been a wise one, is indicated by New England’s share
in the various struggles for liberty which the country has seen, the
stability of all her institutions, her exemption from disorder and
industrial disputes which culminate in violence, her inhospitality to
“boss rule” in politics, and the thrift and prosperity of her citizens.
Historically speaking, the “public school” is a very ancient New England
institution. Boston had one as early as 1635, and in 1647 the General
Court of Massachusetts enacted:
“That to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of
our forefathers, it was ordered in all the Puritan colonies that
every township, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of
fifty households, shall appoint one to teach all children to write
and read; and when any town shall increase to the number of one
hundred families, they shall set up a Grammar School, the master
thereof to be able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted
for the University.”
Nine years earlier, in 1638, the same body had founded a college
(Harvard) at Cambridge, in order, as they said, that “the light of
learning might not go out, nor the study of God’s word perish.” These
two acts of the General Court may be reckoned as the germs from which
has developed that system of secondary and higher education which has
given Massachusetts the place of leader in the history of education in
America.
In 1645, Connecticut passed a law similar to the earlier Massachusetts
statute of 1642, but not until 1701 was Yale University founded at New
Haven. Rhode Island did not have a system of popular education until
just as the eighteenth century was closing. New Hampshire, Maine, and
Vermont accepted the Massachusetts methods and ideals, with some minor
variations.
Devout as were the founders of New England, it followed inevitably that
they should establish institutions where their children might obtain a
distinctly religious training as well as a general education. Thus, for
a long period of New England history, the Christian academy, under
denominational control, flourished just as it does now in the West, and
for much the same reason. As the public-school system has expanded, as
town after town has added the high school to the primary and grammar
school, as sectarian fences have toppled over or ceased to be
restrictive, the academy of the old type has ceased to play the part it
once did in New England life. But, in any survey of the history of
education in New England, it should not be overlooked. Many excellent
institutions of this type still survive to meet the demands of those
persons who either distrust the public high school, or else are unable
to send their children to one, owing to residence in towns where the
school system has not developed to that extent. But, as a rule, the New
England boy and girl, no matter what the social station or wealth of his
or her parent, still “derives his or her preparation for college or life
from the community in which he or she lives.” And, as Phillips Brooks
said in his address at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
Boston Latin School:
“That is the real heart of the whole matter.... It constitutes the
greatest claim of the public-school system. It represents the
fundamental idea of the town undertaking the education of her
children.... It educates the thought of law and obedience, the
sense of mingled love and fear, which is the true citizen’s true
emotion to his city. It educates this in the very lessons of the
school-room, and makes the person of the State the familiar master
of the grateful subject from his boyhood.... It is in the dignity
and breadth and seriousness which the sense that their town is
training them gives to their training, that the advantage of the
public-school boys over the boys of the best private schools always
consists.”
Emigrating westward, the pioneers from New England carried with them the
public school, the academy, and the college. Connecticut’s settlers in
the Western Reserve, Ohio, took with them conceptions of duty in this
respect, which profoundly affected the future history of the
commonwealth. Ohio has come to be, in this later day, what Virginia was
in the early history of the country--“The Mother of Presidents”--and has
more colleges within its borders than any State in the Union. It was a
Massachusetts soldier, Gen. Rufus Putnam of Rutland, a Congregational
clergyman, Rev. Manasseh Cutler of Hamilton, Massachusetts, and an
Ipswich, Massachusetts, lawyer, Nathan Dane, who founded Marietta, Ohio,
and induced Congress to put into the epoch-marking Ordinance of 1787
governing the Northwest Territory, this remarkable declaration and
article:
“Religion, and morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good
government and the happiness of mankind, schools and means of
education shall forever be encouraged.”
As early as 1797, Muskingum Academy was founded in the territory
conceded, and in due time came Marietta, Oberlin, Wabash, Illinois,
Knox, Beloit, Olivet, and Ripon Colleges, all Christian institutions
within the territory originally governed by the Ordinance of 1787.
Precisely similar has been the record of New England emigrants beyond
the Mississippi. Wherever they have settled and shaped the civic ideals,
whether in the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, or
in California, there they have laid the foundations of a free
public-school system, and of academies and colleges controlled by
Christian educators and trustees. Nor do they cease to believe in the
academy and the college now that the competition of the State university
in the States of the interior and the West is so intense, and the
reliance of the treasuries of these Western Christian institutions upon
the gifts of their friends in New England increases rather than abates.
Impressed with the need, in all sections of the country, of a
well-instructed and intelligent electorate, and convinced that the South
was too poor to provide for itself the schools that its unfortunate
illiterate whites and blacks needed, New Englanders early began to
contribute to the support of academies and colleges in the South. Not
always welcomed by the ruling class, the pioneers in this work
persevered, and many of them have lived long enough to receive the
thanks of those who at first despised and scorned them. Millions of
dollars have gone from New England for the founding and support of such
institutions as Berea College, Kentucky; Atlanta University, Georgia;
Hampton Institute, Virginia; Fisk University, Tennessee; and Tuskeegee
Institute, Alabama. Three New Englanders, George Peabody of Danvers,
Mass., John F. Slater of Norwich, Conn., and Daniel Hand of Guilford,
Conn., have given between them $5,100,000 in bequests or donations for
the establishment or assistance of schools, colleges, and training
schools for teachers in the South. The Peabody Education Fund, from 1868
to 1897, distributed in the South, from its income alone, a sum
amounting to $2,478,527.
Nor is New England’s influence, educationally speaking, limited to the
United States. The educational system of Honolulu is based on New
England models. Robert College, near Constantinople, has spread the
principles of Christian democracy in Church and State, as they are held
by New Englanders, throughout Bulgaria and the Balkan states, and given
ideals to the Young Turkey party in the land where the Sultan is
dominant. The Huguenot Seminary in South Africa was distinctly modelled
after Mt. Holyoke Seminary, and its first teaching staff was made up of
New England women educated at Mt. Holyoke. Wherever American Protestant
missionaries have gone and established schools and colleges in Asia,
Africa, or Europe, almost invariably the master spirits, the men and
women who have given character to, and established the ideals of, the
institutions, have been graduates of the New England colleges and
academies, even if not New-England-born.
Subtract from the history of education in the United States, during the
latter half of the century just closing, the influence of four men,
Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, Charles William Eliot, and William Torrey
Harris, and you take from it the best that it stands for to-day. All of
these men were born in New England. All were reformers. All showed great
administrative ability. All lived to see their radical views find
general acceptance. Horace Mann did his greatest work in remodelling the
public-school system of Massachusetts. Barnard did a similar work in
Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, but his greatest service to
the cause of education was his masterly editing of the _American Journal
of Education_, from 1855 to 1881. Eliot has transformed the curriculum
of Harvard, the oldest university of the North, has resolutely contended
for the largest measure of election by the student in his selection of
studies, his personal conduct, and his personal attitude toward God, and
he has made “Veritas” in very truth the appropriate motto of the
leading American institution of learning. Harris, as an interpreter of
the philosophy of education, both in his many writings and more numerous
addresses, has lifted the popular conception of the profession of
teaching to a loftier and more rational plane, while his control of the
United States Bureau of Education since 1889 has given it a standing
abroad, and a measure of utility at home, which it is gratifying to
contemplate.
Few towns in New England possess more charm, whether of nature or
society, than the towns in which her long-established institutions of
learning have taken root, flourished, and dominated the life of the
community. New Haven, Cambridge, and Providence are all cities now with
a heterogeneous population and large manufacturing interests, and they
each contain thousands of inhabitants to whom Harvard, Yale, and Brown
are of as little practical benefit or concern as if they were situated
in remote Hawaii or Porto Rico. Nevertheless, the chief glory of each of
these large towns is its institution of learning, and to each there come
added beauty of life and elevation of tone because of the presence
within its borders of so many thirsty and hungry students and highly
educated and apt instructors. It would be idle, however, to claim, for
instance, that Cambridge to-day is quite as unique and charming in its
simplicity and purity of life, or quite as classic in its atmosphere, as
it was in the days when the town was a village, when the university was
a college, and when thought and manners were as ideal as James Russell
Lowell in his essay, _Cambridge Thirty Years Ago_, and Thomas Wentworth
Higginson in his latest book, _Cheerful Yesterdays_, picture them.
To study the American college town at its best, unsullied by the grime
of industrialism and the temptations and conventionalities of city life,
one must go to hill-towns like Amherst and Williamstown, Massachusetts,
or Hanover, New Hampshire. But even there, standards of living and
conduct among students and instructors have been changed and influenced
by the habits and ideals of the universities and the cities. Hence, to
see the American college town in all its pristine simplicity and beauty,
one now has to go to the new New England, and visit such institutions as
Oberlin, Beloit, Knox, Iowa, and Colorado colleges, concerning which,
and others of their type, Mr. Bryce writes:
“They get hold of a multitude of poor men who might never resort to
a distant place for education. They set learning in a visible form,
plain indeed and humble, but dignified even in her humility, before
the eyes of a rustic people, in whom the love of knowledge,
naturally strong, might never break from the bud into the flower,
but for the care of some zealous gardener. They give the chance of
rising in some intellectual walk of life to many a strong and
earnest nature who might otherwise have remained an artisan or
storekeeper, and perhaps failed in those avocations.”[62]
New England has a railroad mileage greater in proportion to its
population and area than any section of the United States. Indeed, it is
greater than that of any European country. In 1895, there were 11.77
miles of railroad for each one hundred square miles of territory, and
14.11 miles for each ten thousand inhabitants, the proportion in
Massachusetts rising to 26.35 miles for each one hundred square miles.
The same year, the number of employés engaged in railway traffic in New
England was 60,593. On January 1, 1840, New England had only 426 miles
of railway. January 1, 1895, it had 7,398 miles of road, which reported
gross earnings of $82,845,401, and 116,069,178 passengers transported
during the previous year.
The significance of these facts is apparent to the casual traveller
through New England as well as to the economist. Nerves of steel and
iron have bound urban and rural populations together, made the cities
and towns accessible to the inland trader, farmer, and producer, and the
country districts accessible to the wares of the merchant and
manufacturer, and to the lover of nature. Suburban residence for the
urban toiler has been made possible and cheap, while New England, as a
whole, has been transformed from an agricultural and seafaring section
to one with great and most varied manufacturing interests. Boston has
come to be next to the largest centre for exports in the country, and
the commercial and industrial as well as the intellectual capital of New
England.
From the standpoint of æsthetics, the railroad station in the average
New England town is a monstrosity, although in all fairness it should
be said that within a decade there has been a notable improvement in
this respect. But from the standpoint of economics and social science,
the railway station is subordinate only to the church and the school in
its service to society; and the degree of civilization in any community
may be accurately computed by the volume and variety of the traffic done
with its station agents. If one is desirous of studying the New England
town, let him frequent the platforms of the railroad station and the
freight-house, ascertain how large a proportion of its inhabitants leave
town daily to do business in the adjacent city, how many travel even
farther in pursuit of pleasure or on business, how many depart on
outings that imply thrift and a desire for recreation and rest. Let him
study the bulk of the raw material as it comes from the wool-markets of
Europe and America, from the cotton fields of the South, and from the
mines of Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, and then inspect it as it
goes forth again, converted into manifold forms of useful tools,
machinery, fabrics, etc., and he will not lack for data respecting the
status of the community. If he finds that pianos, organs, books,
pictures, the latest devices of sanitary science, bicycles, etc., are
arriving, he may justly infer that the inhabitants are in touch with the
outer world and eager to take advantage of the latest discoveries of men
of science. Nor is it imprudent to assert that such a study made in the
average New England town will indicate economic wants, and their
satisfaction, such as no communities elsewhere can display.
Compared with other sections of the country, New England has railroads
which are better supervised by the States, more honestly constructed,
capitalized and administered, and more responsive to public needs.
Concentration of power and responsibility in the hands of the few goes
on apace in New England, as well as elsewhere, so that now there are
only four railway corporations of much importance in New England. But,
through such governmental agents as the Massachusetts Board of Railroad
Commissioners (organized in 1869, and the model for similar bodies
elsewhere in the nation), the people still retain the whip-hand, still
protect the rights of individuals, communities, and investors, and bring
about those reductions in fare and freight charges, and those
improvements in service, which public welfare and safety demand.
No attempt--however brief or superficial--to describe the life of the
New England town of the last decade of the nineteenth century,
especially in the States of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode
Island, could justifiably fail to note the transformation--economic,
physical, and social--which the bicycle and trolley electric railroad
have wrought in the life of the towns of those States.
New England capitalists and New England inventors were the first to put
on the market safety bicycles that were well constructed, adapted for
daily use or pleasure, and reasonably cheap, and New England still
retains the lead in the domestic and export trade in bicycles.
Naturally, then, New England people were the first to purchase the
product of their own factories. Space does not suffice to indicate here
how general now is the use of the bicycle even in the remotest hamlets,
and how it has changed modes of living. Farmers’ boys and girls among
the lakes and hills of Maine and Vermont, fishermen’s children on the
sand-dunes of Cape Cod, run their errands, visit their neighbors, and
get their daily sport with the bicycle. Artisans and professional men
in all the towns and cities go to and from their shops, offices, and
homes on steeds that require no fodder, and while doing it gain physical
exercise and mental exhilaration that transportation in the old ways
never furnished. Horses still are in demand for sport and draught work,
and the few who love horses continue to breed and own them. But for the
multitude a far cheaper and more tractable kind of steed has come, one
which rivals the locomotive as well as the horse and forces
steam-railway managers to face serious problems, mechanical and fiscal.
As to the electric street railway, perhaps a few facts relative to
Massachusetts may indicate a state of affairs that to some extent is
typical now of the section, and will become more so as population in New
Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont drifts townward.
From 1860 to 1889, the number of street-railway companies in
Massachusetts increased only from twenty to forty-six, and the mileage
from eighty-eight to 574, the motor force of course being horse-power.
From 1889 to 1897, the number of companies increased from forty-six to
ninety-three, and the mileage from 547 to 1413, the motor power being
almost exclusively electric. During the same period, the number of
passengers carried on the ten main lines increased from 148,189,403 in
1889, to 308,684,224 in 1897. The total capital invested in these street
railways now amounts to $63,112,800, and, in 1897, earned 7·78 per cent.
on the average.
So much for statistics which are impressive in themselves. But if one
would appreciate the magnitude of this traffic, and the radical
transformation which the new power and improved service have wrought in
the life of the people who patronize these railroads, he must do more
than compare statistics. He must note the result of making the residence
in the suburb and the workshop in the city accessible to a degree that
the steam railway cannot expect to duplicate, of giving city dwellers
opportunities to journey seaward and hillward at a trifling expense, of
providing residents of the villages with inexpensive transportation to
the towns and residents of the towns with transportation to the cities,
of cultivating the knowledge of and love for open-air life and nature
among city dwellers and of enlarging the social horizon and area of
observation of the villager, of giving a poor man a vehicle that
transports him with a speed and a sense of pleasure that vies with that
of the high-priced trotter of the wealthy horseman, of giving to society
a centripetal force that tends to take city workers countryward at a
time when other social forces, centrifugal in their tendency, are
drawing him cityward.
Naught would occasion more bewilderment to the ancient residents of
Marblehead, Hingham, or Plymouth, could they return to their former
places of abode, than the “Broomstick Trains” which Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s fancy pictured thus:
“On every stick there’s a witch astride,--
The string you see to her leg is tied.
She will do a mischief if she can,
But the string is held by a careful man,
And whenever the evil-minded witch
Would cut some caper, he gives a twitch.
As for the hag, you can’t see her,
But hark! you can hear her black cat’s purr,
And now and then, as a car goes by,
You may catch a gleam from her wicked eye.”
These trains whirl through the crooked streets with a mysterious,
awe-compelling power, that would suggest witchery were it not for the
clang of their alarm bells, and the knowledge that fares must be paid.
They disturb the quiet and solemnity of many an ancient village, and
have brought knowledge of evil as well as of good to many a youth. What
railways and steamship lines have done in bringing peoples of all climes
and continents nearer together, and thus at once widened men’s area of
knowledge and sympathy, and contracted the physical area of the earth,
this the electrically propelled motor is doing on a smaller scale for
the people of the towns of the ancient commonwealths of New England.
In ante-bellum days, New England and the South were, perhaps, most
unlike in their attitude toward manufacturing, and the difference was
one that meant far more than a mere incident of difference of climate or
a difference of opinion as to sectional or federal fiscal policy. The
art of manufacturing, as New Englanders had practised it for generations
before what is now known as the “factory system” developed, had been
based on a universal recognition of the nobility of labor, the necessity
for personal initiative, and the duty of thrift. Toil was considered
honorable for men and women alike. Every hillside stream was set at
work turning the wheels of countless mills. Yankee ingenuity was given
free play in the invention of appliances, and Yankee initiative saw to
it that after the raw material was converted into the finished product,
markets were found in the newer settlements of the Interior and West, or
in Europe and Asia. Many a farmer was a manufacturer as well. Home
industries flourished, and no month in the year was too inclement for
toil and its reward.
With the application of steam power to the transportation of freight and
passengers, with the invention of the spinning-jenny and the perfecting
of the cotton loom and the development of the “factory system” of
specialized and divided labor, New England, quick to perceive wherein
her future prosperity lay, at once leaped forward to seize the
opportunity, and the relative superiority thus early gained she has not
lost, even though other sections more favorably situated as to
accessible supplies of fuel and raw materials have, in the meantime,
awakened and developed.
Whether judged by the legislation governing their operation, their
structural adaptability to the work to be done, their equipment of
machinery, the variety and quality of their product, or the intelligence
and earning capacity of their operatives, the New England factories can
safely challenge comparison with those of any in the world, and the
typical factory towns of New England, whether along her largest rivers,
such as Lowell and Hartford, or at tide-water, as Fall River and
Bridgeport, or nestled among the hills, as North Adams or St. Johnsbury,
are the frequent subject of study by the deputed agents of European
governments or manufacturers, anxious to ascertain what it is that makes
the American manufacturer so dangerous a competitor in the markets of
Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Few more interesting movements in the history of man’s upward struggle
have been chronicled than the successive waves of immigration which have
swept into the factories of towns like Lowell, Massachusetts, and
Manchester, New Hampshire. First came from the hill towns and farms the
daughters of the original English, Irish, and Scotch settlers--women
like Lucy Larcom,--then the Irish, specially imported from Ireland, and
then the French from Canada. The Irish came when the original stock
became, in its own estimation, too select for daily toil in the
factory. The French came at an opportune time for the employers, when
the Irish were also stirred by loftier ambitions. And it is already
apparent that, whereas the French came, at first, only to win money to
take back to Canada, now they are settling down to become citizens as
well as residents, aspiring to higher and other realms of activity--in
short, getting ready to give way in turn to some other nationality. Of
course, nothing just stated should be interpreted to imply that the
ideals of New England respecting the honorable nature of toil have
changed, or that her factory operatives have ceased to be men of all
races including the English. She has, however, witnessed or rather been
the scene of a remarkable process of assimilation and transformation of
races such as none of the manufacturing towns of England have seen.
Thus far, consideration has been given to those factors in the life of
the community which it may truthfully be said are to be found in a large
majority of the towns and villages of New England. It would be
necessary, for a complete study of the New England town at its best, to
include other factors, such as the savings-bank, the local lodges of
the fraternal, secret orders, the co-operative bank--known in the Middle
States as the building loan association,--the daily or weekly local
newspaper, and the gossip and wisdom retailed by the habitués of the
“village store,” which, in many of the smaller towns, serves as the
clearing-house of ideas, local and national. Nor could any thorough
study of the New England town as an institution fail to note at least
the beneficent effect which the exclusion of shops where intoxicating
liquors are retailed has had upon all of the States, thanks to that
measure of prohibition which has been made possible through statutory or
legislative enactment. So that, in the towns of the agricultural
districts of New England, the legalized dram-shop is unknown, as are all
the attendant moral and economic evils that follow in its train when the
traffic is tolerated. Nor is the possibility of excluding the saloon
from larger towns--manufacturing and residential--to be gainsaid in view
of the record established by such cities as Cambridge, Somerville,
Chelsea, Brookline, and Newton, Massachusetts. In fact, Cambridge, with
its more than eighty thousand inhabitants, for nearly twelve years now
has enforced local prohibition in a way to make its method of doing so
a model for the country; the secret of the method by which it secures an
annual “No-license vote” and a non-partisan administration of all city
affairs being, in short, the union of temperance men of all degrees of
abstinence, Jews and Christians of all sects, and citizens of all
national parties on the simple platform--“No saloons, and no tests for
local officials other than fitness, and soundness on questions of local
policy.”
But there is one factor in the life of very many of the New England
towns to-day that cannot be passed by without some allusion. It is the
town or city library. In many instances the gift of some private donor,
who was either born in the town, and making a home and fortune elsewhere
desired to testify that he was not unmindful of ancestral environment
and of youthful privileges, or else accumulated a fortune in the town
and desired both to perpetuate his memory and to render a public
service, the library building usually stands as a token of that marked
interest in public education and public welfare which Americans of
wealth reveal by gifts, generous to a degree unknown elsewhere in
Christendom, competent European judges being witnesses. Appleton’s
_Annual Encyclopedia_ records a total of $27,000,000 given to religious,
educational, and philanthropic institutions in the United States, in
sums of $5000 or more, by individuals, as donations or bequests during
the year 1896. In this list are recorded gifts, amounting to $195,000,
to establish or to endow town libraries in New England.
Sometimes the major portion of the contents of the library building is
also the gift of the generous donor of the edifice, but, usually, the
town assumes responsibility for the equipment and maintenance of the
library, deriving the necessary income from appropriations voted by the
citizens in town-meetings or by aldermen and councilmen, members of the
local legislature, and assessed and collected _pro rata_ according to
the valuation of property, just as all other town or city taxes are
collected. But, whether the gift of some private individual or the
creation and property of the town, the fact remains that the handsomest
public buildings in New England to-day are the public-library buildings,
and in no department of civic life are the New England States and towns
so far in advance of those of other sections of the country as in their
generous annual appropriations for the maintenance of this form of
individual and civic betterment. New Hampshire is to be credited with
the first law permitting towns to establish and to maintain libraries by
general taxation. This she did in 1849. Massachusetts followed in 1854,
Vermont in 1865, Connecticut in 1881. Boston, however, deserves credit
for being the pioneer in public taxation for a municipal library, and to
the Hon. Josiah Quincy, grandfather of its present mayor, who, in 1847,
proposed to the City Council that they request the Legislature for
authority to lay a tax to establish a free library, belongs the honor of
having founded in America a form of municipal and town activity, than
which, as Stanley Jevons says, in his book _Methods of Social Reform_,
“there is probably no mode of expending public money which gives a more
extraordinary and immediate return in utility and enjoyment.”
Already, library administrators and far-sighted educators and publicists
foresee a time when it will be as compulsory for towns to establish and
support free public libraries as it now is compulsory for them to
establish and support free public schools. Massachusetts, perhaps,
approaches nearer that ideal now than any other State, only ten of its
353 cities and towns being without public libraries.
Fortunately for the sociologist, the historian, the economist, and the
lover of literature, the inhabitants of New England have not failed to
chronicle in various forms and ways the deeds and thoughts of their
contemporaries. Thus there is a large class of historic documents of
which Bradford’s history of _Plimoth Plantation_ is the _magnum opus_.
Then there are innumerable town histories,--of which the four-volume
history of Hingham, Massachusetts, is a model,--family genealogies,
sermons, diaries, volumes of correspondence, such as that which passed
between John Adams and his wife, memorial addresses, such as Emerson and
G. W. Curtis delivered at Concord, and Webster and Robert C. Winthrop at
Plymouth, which inform and often inspire all who patiently explore their
contents. Last, but not least, there are the products of New England’s
representative authors, who in prose or poetry have recorded indelibly
the higher life of their own or of passing generations. In short, a
literature-loving people has given birth to literature, and the New
England town of the past can never totally fade out of the memory of
future generations so long as men and women are left to read the poetry
of Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Aldrich, Lowell’s _Biglow Papers_,
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s _Oldtown Folks_ and _A Minister’s Wooing_, the
short stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins, Rose Terry Cooke,
Alice Brown, Maria L. Pool, and Jane G. Austin, the prose romances of
Hawthorne and F. J. Stimson, and the histories of Palfrey, Bancroft,
Parkman, and Fiske.
That New Englanders in the past have been and even now are provincial,
is the indictment of Europeans and of some Americans. That they have
developed reason at the expense of imagination, utility at the expense
of beauty, is also affirmed. Their Puritan ancestors are the butt of the
ridicule of the caricaturist, of ultra-Liberal preachers and devotees of
materialistic science, and of those who have never read history,
European or American. No less an authority than Matthew Arnold has
described the life of New England as “uninteresting.” To all such
critics, the New Englander can and will reply with dignity and force
when proper occasion offers, but this is not the place even to
summarize his argument. Suffice it to say that the children of New
England are ever returning to her. They sojourn for a time in Europe,
the valley of the Mississippi, in Southern California, and in Hawaii.
They find more salubrious climes, more beautiful works of ecclesiastical
and municipal art, better municipal government, and sometimes greater
opportunities for investment of capital and ability and choicer circles
of society than those which exist in the towns in which they were born
or reared. But in due time the yearning for the hills, valleys and
seacoast of rocky and rigorous New England, for the established
institutions, the generally diffused intelligence, the equality of
opportunity, the sane standards of worth, and the inspiring historical
traditions of the early home becomes too strong to be resisted longer,
and back to the homestead they come--some on annual visits, some as
often as the exchequer permits, some never to depart. New England has
thousands of citizens to-day who, having either made, or failed to make,
their fortunes in the West, have returned to New England to dwell. Once
a New Englander, always a New Englander, in spirit if not in residence.
Travel abroad, or residence elsewhere, may modify the austerity,
broaden the sympathy, polish the manners, and stimulate the imagination
of the New Englander, but it never radically alters his views on the
great issues of life and death, or makes him less of a democrat or less
of a devotee of Wisdom.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
HISTORIC TOWNS OF NEW ENGLAND
PORTLAND
“THE GEM OF CASCO BAY”
BY SAMUEL T. PICKARD
Portland enjoys a peculiar distinction among New England cities, not
only by reason of the natural advantages of her location, but because of
the historical events of which she has been the theatre, and the men of
mark in literature, art, and statesmanship whom she has produced. Among
the indentations of the Atlantic coast there is no bay which presents a
greater wealth and variety of charming scenery, in combination with the
advantages of a safe and capacious harbor, than that on which Portland
is situated. It is thickly studded with islands which are of most
picturesque forms, presenting beetling cliffs, sheltered coves, pebbly
beaches, wooded heights, and wide, green lawns dotted with summer
cottages. It is of the beauty of this bay that Whittier, who was
familiar with its scenery, sings in _The Ranger_:
“Nowhere fairer, sweeter, rarer,
Does the golden-locked fruit-bearer
Through his painted woodlands stray;
Than where hillside oaks and beeches
Overlook the long blue reaches,
Silver coves and pebbled beaches,
And green isles of Casco Bay;
Nowhere day, for delay,
With a tenderer look beseeches,
‘Let me with my charmed earth stay!’”
The peninsula upon which Portland is located is almost an island. It is
nearly three miles long, and has an average width of three quarters of a
mile--making it in area the smallest city in the United States, and the
most compactly settled, for its forty thousand inhabitants occupy almost
every available building spot. At each extremity of the peninsula is a
hill on the summit of which is a wide public promenade, affording
charming
[Illustration: WHITE HEAD, CUSHING ISLAND, PORTLAND, MAINE.
AS SEEN FROM PEAK’S ISLAND.]
views--to the east, of the bay, the islands, and the blue sea beyond; to
the west and northwest, of the White Mountain range, all the peaks of
which are visible, the intervening distance being about eighty miles.
The Western Promenade is the favorite resort at sunset; the Eastern has
charms for all hours of the day. Both can be reached by electric
railways.
In 1614, Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, came prospecting along
this coast, and gave the name to Cape Elizabeth, which it still bears,
in honor of the Virgin Queen, then recently deceased. The first
settlers, George Cleeves and Richard Tucker, came hither in 1632, and
the settlement was known as Casco until the name was changed to Falmouth
in 1658; it was incorporated as Portland in 1785. There were but few
settlers in the first forty years, and these lived in amity with the
Indians until the time of King Philip’s War.
In 1676, the settlement was utterly destroyed by the savages, and all
who were not killed were carried into captivity. One of the killed was
Thomas Brackett, an ancestor of the statesman who in these later days
has made the name famous--Thomas Brackett Reed. Mrs. Brackett was
carried by the Indians dians to Canada, where she died in captivity.
Two of her grandchildren came back to Falmouth when the place was
rebuilt after the second destruction by the French and Indians, in May,
1690. In 1689, a large body of French and Indians threatened the town.
They were routed in Deering’s Woods by troops from Plymouth Colony,
commanded by Major Church. Eleven settlers were killed and a large
number wounded. It is a curious fact that Speaker Reed is also a
descendant of the first settler, Cleeves. There is something remarkable
in the persistency with which the descendants of the pioneers returned
to the spot where there had been complete and repeated massacres of
their ancestors. There are many families in Portland beside the one
mentioned above who are descended from the pioneers who were killed or
driven off by the savages.
The first minister of Falmouth was the Reverend George Burroughs, who
escaped the massacre of 1676 by fleeing to one of the islands in the
bay. Unfortunately for him, before the place was rebuilt he removed to
Salem; he was too independent, however, to suit the dominant clergy, and
was hanged as a wizard in 1692, on charges incredibly ridiculous. The
speech made by this worthy man on the scaffold brought the people to
their senses and ended the witchcraft craze. His descendants also went
back to Falmouth and are represented in many families of the present
city of Portland, who take no shame from the hanging of their ancestor.
So thorough was the second destruction of the place in 1690, that no one
was left to bury the victims of the slaughter. Their bleached bones were
gathered and buried more than two years after by Sir William Phips,
while on his way from Boston to build a fort at Pemaquid. The settlement
of the peninsula was resumed after the treaty of peace concluded at
Utrecht in 1713, and for sixty years thereafter the growth of the place
was rapid. When the town was bombarded and burned by a British squadron
in October, 1775, there were nearly three hundred families made
homeless--about three quarters of the entire population. For nine hours,
four ships anchored in the harbor threw an incessant shower of
grape-shot, red-hot cannon-balls, and bombs upon the defenceless town,
which had shown its sympathy with the patriot cause in a practical way
after the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill. The
[Illustration: DEERING’S WOODS.
SHOWING BROOK WHICH THE SOLDIERS HAD TO FORD IN THE FIGHT WITH THE
INDIANS IN 1689.]
spirited citizens of Falmouth might have avoided the bombardment by
giving up a few cannon and small-arms; but this, in town meeting, they
refused to do, even when they saw the loaded guns and mortars trained
upon them at short range, and knew that Captain Mowatt had a special
grudge against the place because of an insult put upon him by some of
the citizens a few months earlier. The spirit of the town was not broken
by the terrible punishment it received. A few days after Mowatt sailed
away, while the ruins were still smoking, a British man-of-war came into
the harbor to forbid the erection of batteries, and the demand was met
by the throwing up of earthworks and the placing of guns, which forced
the immediate departure of the ship. The lines of these earthworks are
still to be traced at Fort Allen Park, a beautiful pleasure ground on
Munjoy overlooking the harbor, and they are preserved with care as a
relic of Revolutionary times. Another relic is a cannon-ball thrown from
Mowatt’s fleet, which lodged in the First Parish meeting-house, and is
now to be seen in the ceiling of the church which occupies the same
site. From this ball depends the large central chandelier. There was an
incident of the bombardment which illustrates the simplicity and
coolness of a heroine whose name deserves a place beside that of Barbara
Frietchie. The fashionable tavern of the town was kept by Dame Alice
Greele, and here, during the whole Revolutionary period, the committee
of public safety met, the judges held their courts, and political
conventions had their sessions. It was here that the citizens in town
meeting heroically voted to stand the bombardment rather than give up
the guns demanded by Mowatt. But after making this brave decision they
hastily packed up all their portable possessions and removed their
families to places of safety, some not stopping short of inland towns,
and others finding shelter under the lee of a high cliff that used to be
at the corner of Casco and Cumberland Streets, at no great distance from
their homes. Braver than the bravest of the men of Falmouth, Dame Alice
would not desert her tavern, although its position was so dangerously
exposed that every house in its vicinity was destroyed by bursting bombs
and heated cannon-balls. Throughout that terrible day she stood at her
post, and with buckets of water extinguished the fires on her premises
as fast as kindled. When Mowatt began to throw red-hot cannon-balls, one
of them fell into the dame’s back yard among some chips, which were set
on fire. She picked up the ball in a pan, and as she tossed it into the
street, she said to a neighbor who was passing: “They will have to stop
firing soon, for they have got out of bombs and are making new balls,
and can’t wait for them to cool!” Portland ought to mark with a bronze
tablet the site of Alice Greele’s tavern. The building stood until 1846
at the corner of Congress and Hampshire Streets. It was then removed to
Washington Street.
Portland had a rapid growth of population and increase in wealth during
the European disturbances caused by the ambition of Napoleon. The
carrying-trade of the world was almost monopolized by neutral American
bottoms, and ship-building became then, as it continued to be for a long
time afterward, a leading industry along the Maine coast. Great fortunes
were made by Portland ship-owners. Many fine old-fashioned mansions that
now ornament Congress, High, State, Spring, and Danforth Streets, were
built by merchants in the first years of the present century, and are
[Illustration: FIRST PARISH CHURCH.
CONTAINING THE MOWATT CANNON-BALL.]
reminders of the peculiar conditions of that time. A sharp check to the
rising tide of prosperity was given by the embargo act of 1807. After
the peace of 1815, the trade with the West Indies grew into great
importance, and for fifty years was a leading factor in the commerce of
Portland. Lumber and fish were the chief exports, and return cargoes of
sugar and molasses made this the principal market for those
commodities--the imports in these lines for many years exceeding those
at New York and Boston. West India molasses was distilled in large
quantities into New England rum, until the temperance reform, under the
lead of the Portland philanthropist, Neal Dow, closed up the
distilleries; in their place came sugar factories and refineries which
turned out a more wholesome product. But about thirty years ago, changes
in the methods of making sugar caused the loss of this industry to
Portland.
The development of the canning business has of late years been an
important feature of the industrial prosperity of Maine, owing partly to
the fact that the climate and soil of this State produce a quality of
sweet corn that cannot be matched in other States, and also to the fact
that the system of canning now in use was a Portland invention. All
over the interior of Maine may be found corn factories owned by Portland
merchants, and, on the coast, canneries of lobsters and other products
of the fields and fisheries of Maine.
Portland is the winter seaport of the Canadas, and several lines of
steamships find cargoes of Western produce at this port. For this
business the port has excellent facilities, as it is the terminus of the
Grand Trunk Railway system, which has its other terminus at Chicago.
There is another line to Montreal, through the White Mountain Notch,
which, like the Grand Trunk, owes its existence to Portland enterprise.
Of late years the lakes and forests and sea-coast of Maine have, to a
marked degree, become the pleasure-ground of the Union, and, naturally,
Portland is the distributing point for the rapidly increasing summer
travel in this direction. Its lines of railway stretch northward and
eastward to regions abounding in fish and game; the White Hills of New
Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont are within easy reach.
Steamers from this port ply along the whole picturesque coast to New
Brunswick and Nova Scotia. During the summer months, eight or ten
pleasure steamers make trips between the city and the islands of Casco
Bay, furnishing a great variety of pleasurable excursions. These
islands, except the smallest of them, are the summer homes of a
multitude of families--many of them from Canada and from the Western
States.
The ancient Eastern Cemetery, on the southern slope of Munjoy, is the
burying-place of the pioneers, including the victims of the French and
Indian massacres of two centuries ago. The graves most frequently
visited are those of the captains of the U. S. brig _Enterprise_ and His
Majesty’s brig _Boxer_, both of whom were killed in the naval engagement
off this coast, September 5, 1813. By their side lies Lieutenant Waters,
mortally wounded in the same action. The poet Longfellow was in his
seventh year at the time of this fight, and his memory of it is
enshrined in _My Lost Youth_:
“I remember the sea-fight far away,
How it thundered o’er the tide!
And the dead captains as they lay
In their graves, o’erlooking the tranquil bay,
Where they in battle died.”
Commodore Edward Preble, of Tripoli fame, and Rear-Admiral Alden, who
fought at Vera
[Illustration: THE BIRTHPLACE OF LONGFELLOW (NOW A TENEMENT HOUSE).
SHOWING AT THE EXTREME LEFT THE BIRTHPLACE OF THOMAS B. REED, PORTLAND,
MAINE.]
Cruz, New Orleans, and Mobile, both Portlanders, are buried here. There
is also a monument commemorating the gallant Lieutenant Henry Wadsworth,
who fell before Tripoli in 1804,--a volunteer in a desperate and tragic
enterprise. He was a brother of Longfellow’s mother, and a new lustre
has been added to his name by the nephew who bore it. In this ground
also, but unmarked, are the graves of the victims of the French and
Indian siege and massacre of 1690, and of the eleven men killed in the
more fortunate battle of the previous year.
The first house in Portland built entirely of brick was erected in 1785,
by General Peleg Wadsworth, who was Adjutant-General of Massachusetts
during the Revolution; it is now known as the Longfellow house, and
stands next above the Preble House, on Congress Street. The poet was not
born in this house, but was brought to it as an infant, and it was his
home until his marriage, in 1831. It is now owned and occupied by his
sister, Mrs. Pierce, who has provided that eventually it shall become
the property of the Maine Historical Society, which ensures its
preservation as a reminder that Maine gave our country its most widely
known and best-loved poet. The house in which Longfellow was born is the
three-story frame building at the corner of Fore and Hancock Streets.
Around the corner, on Hancock Street, is the house in which Speaker Reed
was born.
For his services in the Revolutionary War, Massachusetts gave General
Wadsworth a large tract of land in Oxford County, to improve which he
removed to Hiram, and the family of his son-in-law, Stephen Longfellow,
thereafter occupied his residence in Portland. To the end of his life,
the poet made this house his home whenever he visited the scenes of his
youth, and many of his best poems were written there. The central part
of the hotel adjoining was the mansion of Commodore Edward Preble, built
just before his death in 1807, and some of the best rooms in this hotel
have still the wood-carving and other ornamentation given them by the
hero of Tripoli. A grandson of the Commodore was one of the officers of
the _Kearsarge_ when that ship sunk the rebel cruiser _Alabama_, in the
most picturesque naval engagement of modern times.
We have seen that Portland has a history connecting it with the French
and Indian Wars, the Revolution, and the War of 1812. It was also the
scene of a curious episode in the late Civil War--the cutting out of the
United States revenue cutter _Caleb Cushing_, in June, 1863. The cutter
had been preparing for an encounter with the rebel privateer _Tacony_,
which had been capturing and burning many vessels on the coast of New
England. A delay in fitting her out had been occasioned by the illness
and death of her captain. In the meantime, the _Tacony_ had captured the
schooner _Archer_, and transferred her armament to the prize, which,
after burning the _Tacony_, boldly sailed into Portland harbor in the
guise of an innocent fisherman, with Lieutenant Reade in command. His
purpose was to burn two gunboats then being fitted out in the harbor,
but he found them too well guarded. He then turned his attention to the
cutter, which was preparing for a fight with him with no suspicion that
he was lying almost alongside. Captain Clarke had died the day before
Reade’s arrival, and Lieutenant Davenport, a Georgian by birth, was in
command of the cutter. At night, when only one watchman was on deck, a
surprise was quietly effected, and the crew put in irons. With a good
wind the cutter might easily have gotten away from the sleeping town
and slipped by the unsuspicious forts; but she was becalmed just after
passing the forts, and in the morning three steamers were armed and sent
in pursuit. At the time it was supposed that the Southern lieutenant had
turned traitor, but the event proved his loyalty; for he refused to
inform his captors where the ammunition was kept, and they had only a
dozen balls for the guns, which were all spent without injury to the
pursuers. The affair was watched by thousands on the hills and
house-tops, and on yachts which in the dead calm were rowed to the
scene. At length the town was startled by the blowing up and utter
demolition of the cutter; the Confederates had set fire to the vessel
and tried to escape in the boats, but were at once captured by the
steamers which had been circling around them. The _Archer_ was also
captured, with all the chronometers and other valuables of the vessels
bonded or destroyed by the _Tacony_. It proved an important check to the
operations of the Confederacy on the sea, and it came just one week
before the battle of Gettysburg and the capture of Vicksburg.
The first British squadron to enter the harbor of Portland after the
bombardment by Mowatt in 1775, came just eighty-five years afterward to
a day. It was sent to give dignity to the embarkation of the Prince of
Wales in 1860. It was in Portland, at what are now called the Victoria
wharves, that the Prince, then a young man of nineteen, took his last
step on American soil. His embarkation on a bright October day was one
of the finest pageants ever witnessed in this country. Five of the most
powerful men-of-war in the British navy, in gala trim, with yards
manned, saluted the royal standard, gorgeous in crimson and gold, then
for the first and only time displayed in this country. The deafening
broadsides when the Prince reached the deck of the _Hero_ were answered
from the American forts and men-of-war.
Another pageant, this time grand and solemn, was enacted in this harbor,
in February, 1870. A British squadron, convoyed by American
battle-ships, brought the remains of the philanthropist, George Peabody,
in the most powerful ironclad the world had then seen. The funeral
procession of boats from the English and American ships was an
impressive spectacle.
[Illustration: Henry M Longfellow]
It was a bright winter day, immediately succeeding a remarkable
ice-storm, and the trees of the islands, the cape, and the city sparkled
in the sun as if every bough were encrusted with diamonds--a wonderful
frame for a memorable picture. Nature had put on her choicest finery to
relieve the sombre effect of the draped flags, the muffled oars, the
long, slow lines of boats, and the minute guns from ships and forts.
The great fire of July 4, 1866, which burned fifteen hundred buildings
in the centre of the city, also destroyed an immense number of shade
trees, mostly large elms, the abundance of which had given to Portland
the title of “Forest City.” In a few years the buildings were replaced
by greatly improved structures; but the trees could not be improvised so
readily, and the scar of the fire is still noticeable from the absence
of aged trees in the district swept by it. Advantage was taken of the
clearing of the ground in the most thickly settled part of the city, to
lay out Lincoln Park in the centre of the ruins. This is now a charming
spot, with its fountain and flowers, its lawns and shaded walks.
The city is fortunate in the abundance and purity of its water supply,
which is drawn from Lake Sebago, sixteen miles distant. The natural
outlet of this lake is the Presumpscot River, which has several valuable
water-powers along its short course to its mouth in Casco Bay, near
Portland harbor.
It will be remembered that Nathaniel Hawthorne received his collegiate
education, in the same class with Longfellow, at Brunswick, which is in
the same county with Portland, but it is not so generally known that
during his teens his home was at Raymond, on the shore of Sebago Lake,
and in the same county. Part of each year he spent in school at Salem;
but his mother’s home was in the little hamlet in the picturesque
wilderness a few miles from Portland, and here he spent the happiest
months of his youth, as he has testified in many letters. His
biographers have generally failed to take account of this, and, indeed,
have asserted that he was at Raymond only a part of one year. A little
volume recently published, entitled _Hawthorne’s First Diary_, brings
out the facts in this neglected but important episode in the career of
this great master in our literature. While fitting for college,
Hawthorne became, for a single term, the pupil of the Reverend Caleb
Bradley, of Stroudwater, a suburb of Portland. The building in which he
studied is still to be seen at Stroudwater. The house of his mother at
Raymond is converted into a church, but as to exterior remains very much
as when his boy life was spent in it. It was in this same county of
Cumberland that Mrs. Stowe wrote the whole of _Uncle Toms Cabin_, while
her husband was a professor in Bowdoin College. Thus, three of the
greatest names in American literature are linked to Portland and its
immediate vicinity.
Portland can count to her credit many jurists, lawyers, and orators of
national repute, among them Theophilus Parsons, Simon Greenleaf, Ashur
Ware, Sargent S. Prentiss, Nathan Clifford, and George Evans. William
Pitt Fessenden lived and died in the house on State Street now occupied
by Judge W. L. Putnam. Like Fessenden eminent as Senator and Secretary
of the Treasury, Lot M. Morrill spent the last years of his life in
Portland. Still another great Senator and Secretary of the Treasury, who
was also Chief-Justice, honored this city by bearing its name--Salmon
Portland Chase. He was actually named for
[Illustration: Signature]
the town, his uncle, Salmon Chase, being a Portland lawyer, and his
parents were determined that there should be no mistake as to the person
for whom he was named!
At an early period in his career, James G. Blaine edited the _Portland
Daily Advertiser_. Among writers of celebrity, we may name N. P. Willis
and his sister, “Fanny Fern”; John Neal, poet and novelist; Henry W. and
Samuel Longfellow; J. H. Ingraham, whose many novels had a great sale
fifty or sixty years ago; Elijah Kellogg; Mrs. Ann S. Stephens; Seba
Smith, author of the _Jack Downing Letters_, and his more famous wife,
Elizabeth Oakes Smith; Thomas Hill, for a time President of Harvard
University; and the divines, Edward Payson and Cyrus Bartol. The home of
Charles Farrar Brown, “Artemus Ward,” was in an adjoining county, but
like the Chief-Justice just mentioned, he came to Portland for his
baptismal name, his uncle, Charles Farrar, being a Portland physician.
Two sculptors of national fame have gone out from Portland--Paul Akers
and Franklin Simmons, and some of the best works of both these artists
adorn public places in the city. The _Dead Pearl Diver_, by Akers, may
be found in the reading-room of the Public Library; and Simmons has two
bronze statues in the city, one a seated figure of Longfellow, at the
head of State Street, overlooking “Deering’s Woods,” and the other a
noble statue of America, in Monument Square, commemorating the sons of
Portland who died for the Union; no finer soldiers’ monument than this
has ever been erected. Of other artists who have attained distinction,
we may name H. B. Brown, now residing in London, whose landscapes and
marine views have given him a recognized position among the best
American artists; Charles O. Cole, portrait painter; and Charles Codman,
J. R. Tilton, and J. B. Hudson, landscape painters.
Immense sums are being expended on the defences of the city by the
United States government, as it is realized that in case of war with
Great Britain this would be the point of attack, because Portland is the
natural seaport of the Canadas, and Maine is thrust, in a provoking way,
between the Maritime Provinces and the Province of Quebec. Portland can
indulge in no dream of great commercial importance so long as the
country which its position especially dominates is under a foreign
flag; but if ever Maine should be annexed to Canada, or the annexation
takes the alternative form, a great future is assured for a town so
favorably located. In the meantime, the beautiful city must be content
to be the centre of distribution for the pleasure travel of the summer,
and for the other half of the year, by means of its capacious harbor, it
can continue to furnish an outlet for that part of the business of the
Great Lakes which in summer is handled at Montreal.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
OLD RUTLAND, MASSACHUSETTS
THE CRADLE OF OHIO
BY EDWIN D. MEAD
The Old South Historical Society in Boston inaugurated in 1896 the
custom of annual historical pilgrimages. It had learned from Parkman and
Motley and Irving how vital and vivid history is made by visits to the
scenes of history. Its pilgrimages must be short to places near home;
but the good places to visit in New England are many. Great numbers of
people, young and old, join in the pilgrimages. Six hundred went to the
beautiful Whittier places beside the Merrimac, the second year; and as
many the third year to the King Philip country, on Narragansett Bay.
The first year’s pilgrimage was to old Rutland, Massachusetts, “the
cradle of Ohio.” A hundred of the young people went on the train from
Boston, on that bright July day; and when they had climbed to the little
village on the hill, and swept their eyes over the great expanse of
country round about Wachusett and away to Monadnock, and strolled down
to the old Rufus Putnam house, by whose fireside the settlement of
Marietta was planned, a hundred more people had come from the
surrounding villages; and a memorable little celebration was that under
the maples after the luncheon, with the dozen energetic speeches from
the young men and the older ones. It was a fine inauguration of the Old
South pilgrimages, and woke many people to the great possibilities of
the historical pilgrimage as an educational factor.[63]
Ten years before, there was hardly a man in Massachusetts who ever
thought of Rutland as a historical town. The people of Princeton and
Paxton and Hubbardston and Oakham looked across to the little village on
the hill from their villages on the hills, and they did not think of it;
the people of Worcester drove up of a Sunday to get a dinner at the old
village tavern, and they did not think of it; the Amherst College boys
and the Smith College
[Illustration: DR. CUTLER’S CHURCH AND PARSONAGE AT IPSWICH HAMLET,
1787. THE PLACE FROM WHICH THE FIRST COMPANY STARTED FOR THE OHIO,
DECEMBER 3, 1787.]
girls rode past on the Central Massachusetts road, at the foot of the
hill, on their way to Boston, and heard “Rutland!” called, but they
thought nothing of history; and in Boston the last place to which people
would have thought of arranging a historical pilgrimage was this same
Rutland.
Yet when the Old South young people went there on their first
pilgrimage, Rutland had already become a name almost as familiar in our
homes as Salem or Sudbury or Deerfield. The Old South young people
themselves had been led to think very much about it. In 1893, the year
of the World’s Fair at Chicago, the great capital of the great West, a
place undreamed of a hundred years before, when Rutland was witnessing
its one world-historical event, the Old South lectures were devoted to
“The Opening of the West.” Two of the eight lectures were upon “The
Northwest Territory and the Ordinance of 1787” and “Marietta and the
Western Reserve”; two of the leaflets issued in connection were Manasseh
Cutler’s _Description of Ohio in 1787_ and Garfield’s address on _The
Northwest Territory and the Western Reserve_; and one of the subjects
set for the Old South essays
[Illustration: VIEW OF RUTLAND STREET.]
was “The Part Taken by Massachusetts Men in Connection with the
Ordinance of 1787.” These studies first kindled the imaginations of
hundreds of young people and first roused them to the consciousness that
_westward expansion_ had been the great fact in our history from the
time of the Revolution to the time of the Civil War; that New England
had had a controlling part in this great movement, which, by successive
waves, has reached Ohio, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, Oregon, so that
there is more good New England blood to-day west of the Hudson than
there is east of it; and that this movement, which has transformed the
United States from the little strip along the Atlantic coast which
fought for independence to the great nation which stretches now from sea
to sea, began at the old town of Rutland, Massachusetts. This Rutland on
the hill is the cradle of Ohio, the cradle of the West.
It was not, by any means, these Boston lectures on “The Opening of the
West” which reawakened Massachusetts and the country to the forgotten
historical significance of old Rutland. That awakening was done by
Senator Hoar, in his great oration at the Marietta centennial, in 1888.
Senator Hoar’s oration did not indeed awaken Massachusetts to the great
part taken by Massachusetts men in connection with the Ordinance of
1787, or the part of New England in the settlement and shaping of the
West. No awakening to these things was necessary. There is no New
England household which has not kindred households in the West, ever in
close communication with the old home; and the momentous significance of
the Ordinance of 1787, and the decisive part taken by Massachusetts
statesmen in securing it, the Massachusetts historian and orator were
never likely to let the people forget.
“At the foundation of the constitution of these new Northwestern
States,” said Daniel Webster in his great reply to Hayne, “lies the
celebrated Ordinance of 1787. We are accustomed to praise the
lawgivers of antiquity; we help to perpetuate the fame of Solon and
Lycurgus; but I doubt whether one single law of any lawgiver,
ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked
and lasting character than the Ordinance of 1787. That instrument
was drawn by Nathan Dane, a citizen of Massachusetts; and certainly
it has happened to few men to be the authors of a political measure
of more large and enduring consequence. It fixed forever the
character of the population in the vast regions northwest of the
Ohio, by excluding from them involuntary servitude. It impressed on
the soil itself, while it was yet a wilderness, an incapacity to
sustain any other than free men. It laid the interdict against
personal servitude, in original compact, not only deeper than all
local law, but deeper also than all local constitutions. We see its
consequences at this moment, and we shall never cease to see them,
perhaps, while the Ohio shall flow.”
Mr. Hoar spoke as strongly of the Ordinance, in his Marietta oration.
“The Ordinance of 1787 belongs with the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution; it is one of the three title-deeds of American
constitutional liberty.” But the chief merit of his oration was not the
new emphasis with which he said what Webster had said, but the
picturesqueness and the power with which he brought the men and the
events of that great period of the opening of the West home to the
imagination. The oration was especially memorable for the manner in
which it set Rufus Putnam, the man of action, the head of the Ohio
Company, the leader of the Marietta colony, in the centre of the story,
and made us see old Rutland as the cradle of the movement.
Complete religious liberty, the public support of schools, and the
prohibition forever of slavery,--these were what the Ordinance of 1787
secured for the Northwest. “When older States or nations,” said Mr.
Hoar, “where the chains of human bondage have been broken, shall utter
the proud boast, ‘With a great sum obtained I this freedom,’ each sister
of this imperial group--Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois,
Wisconsin--may lift her queenly head with the yet prouder answer, ‘But I
was free-born.’” The moment of this antislavery article of the
Ordinance, in view of the course of our national history during the
century that has followed, it would not be possible to overstate. When
the great test of civil war came, to settle of what sort this republic
should be, who dare contemplate the result had these five States been
slave States and not free!
Massachusetts makes no false or exclusive claims of credit for the
Ordinance of 1787. She does not forget the services of William Grayson,
nor those of Richard Henry Lee. She does not forget Thomas
Jefferson.[64]
The names of Nathan Dane, Rufus Putnam, Rufus King, Timothy Pickering
and Manasseh Cutler are names of the greatest moment in the history of
the West. No other group of men did so much as these Massachusetts men
to determine what the great West should be, by securing the right
organization and institutions for the Northwest Territory and by
securing at the beginning the right kind of settlers for Ohio.
It was really Manasseh Cutler who did most at the final decisive moment
to secure the adoption
[Illustration: MANASSEH CUTLER.]
[Illustration: NATHAN DANE]
of the clause in the great Ordinance which forever dedicated the
Northwest to freedom. Of all these Massachusetts men he was by far the
most interesting personality; and of all revelations of the inner
character of that critical period, none is more interesting or valuable
than that given by his _Life and Letters_. It is to be remembered too
that the first company of men for Marietta--Cutler urged _Adelphia_ as
the right name for the town--started from Manasseh Cutler’s own home in
Ipswich, joining others at Danvers, December 3, 1787, almost a month
before the Rutland farmers left to join Putnam at Hartford. For the
shrine of Manasseh Cutler is not at Rutland, but at Hamilton, which was
a part of Ipswich. The home of Nathan Dane was Beverly.
“It happened,” said Edward Everett Hale, at the Marietta
centennial, “that it was Manasseh Cutler who was to be the one who
should call upon that Continental Congress to do the duty which
they had pushed aside for five or six years. It happened that this
diplomatist succeeded in doing in four days what had not been done
in four years before. What was the weight which Manasseh Cutler
threw into the scale? It was not wealth; it was not the armor of
the old time; it was simply the fact, known to all men, that the
men of New England would not emigrate into any region where labor
and its honest recompense is dishonorable. The New England men will
not go where it is not honorable to do an honest day’s work, and
for that honest day’s work to claim an honest recompense. They
never have done it, and they never will do it; and it was that
potent fact, known to all men, that Manasseh Cutler had to urge in
his private conversation and in his diplomatic work. When he said,
‘I am going away from New York, and my constituents are not going
to do this thing,’ he meant exactly what he said. They were not
going to any place where labor was dishonorable, and where workmen
were not recognized as freemen. If they had not taken his promises,
they would not have come here; they would have gone to the Holland
Company’s lands in New York, or where Massachusetts was begging
them to go--into the valley of the Penobscot or the Kennebec.”
Senator Hoar, in his oration, said of Manasseh Cutler:
“He was probably the fittest man on the continent, except Franklin,
for a mission of delicate diplomacy. It was said just now that
Putnam was a man after Washington’s pattern and after Washington’s
own heart. Cutler was a man after Franklin’s pattern and after
Franklin’s own heart. He was the most learned naturalist in
America, as Franklin was the greatest master in physical science.
He was a man of consummate prudence in speech and conduct; of
courtly manners; a favorite in the drawing-room and in the camp;
with a wide circle of friends and correspondents among the most
famous men of his time. During his brief service in Congress, he
made a speech on the judicial system, in 1803, which shows his
profound mastery of constitutional principles. It now fell to his
lot to conduct a negotiation second only in importance to that
which Franklin conducted with France in 1778. Never was ambassador
crowned with success more rapid or more complete.”
But here, in old Rutland, it is not with Manasseh Cutler that we are
concerned, but with Rufus Putnam. Rufus Putnam was the head of the Ohio
Company, and the leader in the actual settlement of the new Territory.
It was with Putnam that Manasseh Cutler chiefly conferred concerning the
proposed Ohio colony. He left Boston for New York, on his important
mission, on the evening of June 25, 1787, and on that day he records in
his diary: “I conversed with General Putnam, and settled the principles
on which I am to contract with Congress for lands on account of the Ohio
Company.” Of Rufus Putnam, Senator Hoar said in his oration, after his
tributes to Varnum, Meigs, Parsons, Tupper and the rest:
[Illustration: Rufus Putnam]
“But what can be said which shall be adequate to the worth of him
who was the originator, inspirer, leader, and guide of the Ohio
settlement from the time when he first conceived it, in the closing
days of the Revolution, until Ohio took her place in the Union as a
free State in the summer of 1803? Every one of that honorable body
would have felt it as a personal wrong had he been told that the
foremost honors of this occasion would not be given to Rufus
Putnam. Lossing calls him ‘the father of Ohio.’ Burnet says, ‘He
was regarded as their principal chief and leader.’ He was chosen
the superintendent at the meeting of the Ohio Company in Boston,
November 21, 1787, ‘to be obeyed and respected accordingly.’ The
agents of the company, when they voted in 1789 ‘that the 7th of
April be forever observed as a public festival,’ speak of it as
‘the day when General Putnam commenced the settlement in this
country.’ Harris dedicates the documents collected in his appendix
to Rufus Putnam, ‘the founder and father of the State.’ He was a
man after Washington’s own pattern and after Washington’s own
heart; of the blood and near kindred of Israel Putnam, the man who
‘dared to lead where any man dared to follow.’”
Mr. Hoar recounts the great services of Putnam during the Revolution,
beginning with his brilliant success in the fortification of Dorchester
Heights:
“We take no leaf from the pure chaplet of Washington’s fame when we
say that the success of the first great military operation of the
Revolution was due to Rufus Putnam.”
But it was not Senator Hoar’s task to narrate the military services of
General Putnam.[65]
“We have to do,” he said, “only with the entrenchments constructed
under the command of this great engineer for the constitutional
fortress of American liberty. Putnam removed his family to Rutland,
Worcester County, Mass., early in 1780. His house is yet standing,
about ten miles from the birthplace of the grandfather of President
Garfield. He himself returned to Rutland when the war was over. He
had the noble public spirit of his day, to which no duty seemed
trifling or obscure. For five years he tilled his farm and accepted
and performed the public offices to which his neighbors called him.
He was representative to the General Court, selectman, constable,
tax collector and committee to lay out school lots for the town;
State surveyor, commissioner to treat with the Penobscot Indians
and volunteer in putting down Shays’s Rebellion. He was one of the
founders and first trustees of Leicester Academy, and, with his
family of eight children, gave from his modest means a hundred
pounds toward its endowment. But he had larger plans in mind. The
town constable of Rutland was planning an empire.”
Putnam’s chief counsellor in his design at the first was Washington,
whose part altogether in the opening of the West was so noteworthy. Mr.
Hoar tells of the correspondence between Putnam and Washington, and
follows the interesting history to the organization of the Ohio Company,
at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston, in 1786, and the departure of
the Massachusetts emigrants at the end of the next year.
“Putnam went out from his simple house in Rutland to dwell no more
in his native Massachusetts. It is a plain, wooden dwelling,
perhaps a little better than the average of the farmers’ houses of
New England of that day; yet about which of Europe’s palaces do
holier memories cling! Honor and fame, and freedom and empire, and
the faith of America went with him as he crossed the threshold.”
To Rutland, as one who loved the old town and its history has well said,
“belongs the honor of having carried into action the Ordinance of 1787.
Standing on Rutland hill, and looking around the immense basin of which
it forms the centre, it is with conscious pride that one looks upon the
old landmarks and calls up to the imagination the strong and brave and
true men whose traditions have permeated the soil and left their marks
in the civilization which has been the type for the development of the
whole of the great Northwest.” For this old town on the hilltop was
veritably “the cradle of Ohio.” Here was first effectually heard that
potent invitation and command, so significant in the history of this
country in these hundred years, “Go West!” This town incarnates and
represents as no other the spirit of the mighty movement which during
the century has extended New England all through the great West.
As early as 1783, about the time of the breaking up of the army at
Newburgh on the Hudson, General Putnam and nearly three hundred army
officers had proposed to form a new State beyond the Ohio, and
Washington warmly endorsed their memorial to Congress asking for a grant
of land; but the plan miscarried. As soon as the Ordinance was passed,
the Ohio Company, of which Putnam was the president, bought from the
government five or six million acres, and the first great movement of
emigration west of the Ohio at once began. Within a year following the
organization of the territory, twenty thousand people became settlers
upon the banks of the Ohio. But the Pilgrim Fathers of the thousands and
the millions, the pioneers to whom belongs the praise, were the forty or
fifty farmers who from old Rutland pushed on with Putnam through the
snows of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, coming to Pittsburgh just as the
spring of 1788 came, and dropping down the river to Marietta in the
little boat which they had named, by a beautiful fatality, the
_Mayflower_. “Forever honored be Marietta as another Plymouth!”
The men who first settled the Northwest Territory,--as President Hayes,
following Mr. Hoar at Marietta, well called it, “the most fortunate
colonization that ever occurred on earth,”--and who set the seal of
their character and institutions upon it, were of the best blood of New
England.
“Look for a moment,” said Mr. Hoar, “at the forty-eight men who
came here a hundred years ago to found the first American civil
government whose jurisdiction did not touch tide-water. See what
manner of men they were; in what school they had been trained; what
traditions they had inherited. I think that you must agree
[Illustration: SITE OF MARIETTA AND HARMAR, 1788.]
that of all the men who ever lived on earth fit to perform ‘that
ancient, primitive and heroical work,’ the founding of a State,
they were the fittest.”
Here we remember too the words of Washington.
“No colony in America,” said Washington, the warm friend of Putnam,
who was deeply concerned that the development of the West should
begin in the right way, in the hands of the right men, “was ever
settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just
commenced at the Muskingum. Information, property and strength will
be its characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, and
there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of
such a community.”
We honor old Rutland not only because she sent men to open the West, but
because she sent her best, because she pitched the tone for the great
West high.
But Rutland is not only “the cradle of Ohio,” pre-eminent as that
distinction is in her history. She also--like the other towns on the
hills round about her, and like every good old New England town--has her
long line of simple local annals, well worthy the attention of the
summer visitor from Boston or Chicago. Happy are you if you hear them
all from the lips of one or another of the local antiquarians, as you
ride with him through the fields to Muschopauge Pond, or along the
Princeton road to Wachusett, or over Paxton way to see the lot which
Senator Hoar has bought on the top of Asnebumskit Hill,--perhaps finding
the Senator himself on the hill, as we did, where he could see Worcester
in one direction, and in the other, Rutland.
[Illustration: THE “CENTRAL TREE.”]
I remember well the crisp September night when I first saw Rutland, with
the new moon in the clear sky, and the evening star. I remember that the
man who drove me up from the little station to the big hotel on the
hill, while I filled my lungs with Rutland air, proved to be the hotel
proprietor himself, and, which was much better, proved--and proved it
much more the next day--to be the very prince of local antiquarians. He
had himself written a history of Rutland for a history of Worcester
County, and there was nothing that he did not know. If there was
anything, then the good village minister--he has been to Marietta since,
and is president of the Rutland Historical Society--had read it in some
book; or the town clerk knew it; or Mr. Miles remembered it--who was to
Rutland born, and whose memory was good. So in the dozen pleasant visits
which I have made to Rutland since, I have not only taken mine ease with
the benevolent boniface, but have taken many history lessons on the
broad piazzas and the hills.
[Illustration: THE OLD RUTLAND INN.]
The boniface will tell you, sitting in the corner looking toward
Wachusett, how, in 1686, Joseph Trask, _alias_ Pugastion, of Pennicook;
Job, _alias_ Pompamamay, of Natick; Simon Pitican, _alias_ Wananapan, of
Wamassick; Sassawannow, of Natick, and another--Indians who claimed to
be lords of the soil--gave a deed to Henry Willard and Joseph
Rowlandson and Benjamin Willard and others, for £23 of the then
currency, of a certain tract of land twelve miles square, the name in
general being Naquag, the south corner butting upon Muschopauge Pond,
and running north to Quanitick and to Wauchatopick, and so running upon
great Wachusett, etc. Upon the petition, he will tell you, of the sons
and grandsons of Major Simon Willard, of Lancaster, deceased--that
famous Major Willard who went to relieve Brookfield when beset by the
Indians--and others; the General Court in 1713 confirmed these lands to
these petitioners, “provided that within seven years there be sixty
families settled thereon, and sufficient lands reserved for the use of a
gospel ministry and schools, except what part thereof the Hon. Samuel
Sewall, Esq., hath already purchased,--the town to be called Rutland,
and to lye to the county of Middlesex.” The grant was about one eighth
of the present Worcester County, comprising almost all the towns round
about. When the new Worcester County was incorporated, Rutland failed of
becoming the shire town, instead of Worcester, by only one vote--and
that vote, they say in Rutland, was bought by a base bribe. The
antiquarian taverner will point his spy-glass toward Barre for you, and
tell you it was named after our good friend in the House of Commons in
the Stamp Act days; toward Petersham hill, back of it, where John Fiske
spends his summers, and tell you about Shays’ Rebellion; toward
Hubbardston, and tell you it was named for an old speaker of the
Massachusetts House of Representatives; toward Princeton, and tell you
it perpetuates the memory of Thomas Prince, the famous old pastor of the
Old South Church in Boston, founder of the Prince Library; toward
Paxton, and tell you about Charles Paxton, who was something or other;
toward Oakham, and tell you something else. He will tell you that Holden
is so called after that same family whose name is also honored in Holden
Chapel at Harvard College; and he will probably point to Shrewsbury, on
the hill away beyond Holden, and talk about General Artemas Ward, whose
old home and grave are there.
He will tell about the first settlers of Rutland, respectable folk from
Boston and Concord and other places, and how many immigrants from
Ireland there were, with their church-membership
[Illustration: VIEW OF RUTLAND CENTRE FROM MUSCHOPAUGE HILL.]
papers in their pockets. He will tell you of Judge Sewall’s farm of a
thousand acres in the north part of the town, and of his gift of the
sacramental vessels to the church; of the five hundred acres granted to
the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company; of how the road through the
village was laid out ten rods wide, and so remains unto this day; of the
call to the “able, learned, orthodox minister,” Joseph Willard, in 1721,
and how he was “cut off by the Indians”--shot in the field north of the
meeting-house--just before the installation day, so that Thomas Frink,
“an able and learned, orthodox and pious person,” was called instead.
Presently there was “a coolness in affection in some of the brethren”
towards Mr. Frink, because two fifths of the church-members were
Presbyterians, over against the three fifths Congregationalists, and
“contrary to his advice and admonition communed with the Presbyterians
in other towns.” The upshot was a split, and a Presbyterian church in
the west part of the town. These Rutland Presbyterians seem to have come
from Ireland--they were of the same sort as those who founded
Londonderry, New Hampshire just before; and some of them were so
tenacious of their own ordinances that they carried their infants in
their arms on horseback as far as Pelham to have them baptized in good
Presbyterian form.
Rutland had her minute-men, and fifty of them were at Bunker Hill. She
had some hot town-meetings between the Stamp Act time and Lexington, and
passed ringing resolutions and some stiff instructions to Colonel
Murray, her representative to the General Court, whom more and more she
distrusted, and who, when the final pinch came, declared himself a Tory
out-and-out, and fled to Nova Scotia, leaving Rutland “by a back road,”
to avoid a committee of the whole, which was on its way to visit him.
To tell the truth, this Tory Colonel, John Murray, must have been the
most interesting figure ever associated with old Rutland, save General
Rufus Putnam himself; and, curiously enough, the Putnam place had
belonged first to Murray,--the house being built by him for one of his
married daughters, all of Murray’s lands and goods being confiscated,
and this house falling into Putnam’s hands in 1780 or 1782, probably at
a very low figure.
He was not John Murray when he came to Rutland, but John McMorrah. He
came from Ireland with John and Elizabeth McClanathan, Martha Shaw and
others, his mother dying on the passage. He was not only penniless when
he set his foot on the American shore, but in debt for his passage. “For
a short time,” says the chronicle,” he tried manual labor; but he was
too lazy to work, and to beg ashamed.” He found a friend in Andrew
Hendery, and began peddling; then he kept a small store, and later
bought cattle for the army. Everything seemed to favor him, and he
became the richest man that ever lived in Rutland. “He did not forget
Elizabeth McClanathan, whom he sailed to America with, but made her his
wife.” She lies, along with Lucretia Chandler, his second wife, and
Deborah Brindley, the third, in the old Rutland graveyard. “He placed
horizontally over their graves large handsome stones underpinned with
brick, whereon were engraved appropriate inscriptions.” He had a large
family, seven sons and five daughters; and the oldest son, Alexander,
remained loyal to America and to Rutland when his father fled--entering
the army and being wounded in the service. Murray became a large
landholder and had many tenants; he was the “Squire” of the region. He
grew arbitrary and haughty as he grew wealthy, but was popular, until
the stormy politics came. “On Representative day,” we read, “all his
friends that could ride, walk, creep or hobble were at the polls; and it
was not his fault if they returned dry.” He held every office the people
could give him, and represented them twenty years in the General Court.
He was a large, fleshy man, and, “when dressed in his regimentals, with
his gold-bound hat, etc., he made a superb appearance.” He lived in
style, with black servants and white. “His high company from Boston,
Worcester, etc., his office and parade, added to the popularity and
splendor of the town. He promoted schools, and for several years gave
twenty dollars yearly towards supporting a Latin grammar school.” He
also gave a clock to the church, which was placed in front of the
gallery, and proved himself a thoroughly modern man by inscribing on the
clock the words, “A Gift of John Murray, Esq.”
All these things your loyal Rutland host will tell you, or read to you
out of the old books,--where you can read them, and many other things.
And he will take you to drive, down past the Putnam place, to the field
where a
[Illustration: BRITISH BARRACKS.]
large detachment of Burgoyne’s army was quartered after the surrender at
Saratoga. The prisoners’ barracks stood for half a century, converted to
new uses; and the well dug by the soldiers is still shown--as, until a
few years ago, were the mounds which marked the graves of those who
died. Three of the officers fell in love with Rutland girls, and took
them back to England as their wives. Yet none of their stories is so
romantic as the story of that vagrant Betsy, whose girlhood was passed
in a Rutland shanty, and who, after she married in New York the wealthy
Frenchman, Stephen Jumel, and was left a widow, then married Aaron
Burr.
St. Edmundsbury, in old Suffolk, where Robert Browne first preached
independency, has an air so bracing and salubrious that it has been
called the Montpellier of England. Old Rutland might well be called the
Montpellier of Massachusetts. Indeed, when a few years ago the State of
Massachusetts decided to establish a special hospital for consumptives,
the authorities asked the opinions of hundreds of physicians and
scientific men in all parts of the State as to where was the best place
for it, the most healthful and favorable point; and a vast preponderance
of opinion was in behalf of Rutland. On the southern slope, therefore,
of Rutland’s highest hill the fine hospital now stands; and until people
outgrow the foolish notion that a State must have all its State
institutions within its own borders,--until Massachusetts knows that
North Carolina is a better place for consumptives than any town of her
own,--there could not be a wiser choice. The town is so near to
Worcester, and even to Boston, that its fine air, broad outlook and big
hotel draw to it hundreds of summer visitors; and latterly it has grown
enterprising,--for which one is a little sorry,--and has water-works and
coaching parades.
The central town in Massachusetts, Rutland is also the highest village
in the State east of the Connecticut. From the belfry of the village
church, from the dooryards of the village people, the eye sweeps an
almost boundless horizon, from the Blue Hills to Berkshire and from
Monadnock to Connecticut, and the breezes on the summer day whisper of
the White Hills and the Atlantic. It is not hard for the imagination to
extend the view far beyond New England, to the town on the Muskingum
which the prophetic eye of Putnam saw from here, and to the great States
beyond, which rose obedient to the effort which began with him; it is
not hard to catch messages borne on winds from the Rocky Mountains and
the Pacific.
[Illustration: THE RUFUS PUTNAM HOUSE.]
Just at the foot of the hill,--to the west, as is fitting,--stands the
old Rufus Putnam house, the church clock telling the hours above,
Wachusett looming beyond the valley, the maples rustling before the
door, to the west the sough of the pines. Its oaken timbers are still as
sound as when Murray put them in place before the Revolution, each
clapboard still intact, the doors the same, the rooms but little
altered. Could Putnam return to earth again and to Rutland, he would
surely feel himself at home as he passed through the gate.
In 1893, when the enthusiasm re-inforced by our Old South lectures on
“The Opening of the West” was strong, I wrote these words about the
Rufus Putnam house:
“This historic house should belong to the people. It should be
insured against every mischance. It should be carefully restored
and preserved, and stand through the years, a memorial of Rufus
Putnam and the farmers who went out with him to found Ohio, a
monument to New England influence and effort in the opening and
building of the great West. This room should be a Rufus Putnam
room, in which there should be gathered every book and picture and
document illustrating Putnam’s career; this should be the Ordinance
room, sacred to memorials of Manasseh Cutler and all who worked
with him to secure the great charter of liberty; this the Marietta
room, illustrating the Marietta of the first days and the last,
binding mother and daughter together, and becoming the pleasant
ground for the interchange of many edifying courtesies. There
should be, too, a Rutland room, with its hundred objects
illustrating the long history of the town,--almost every important
chapter of which has been witnessed by this venerable
building,--with memorials also of the old English Rutland and of
the many American Rutlands which look back reverently to the
historic Massachusetts town; and a Great West library, on whose
shelves should stand the books telling the story of the great oak
which has grown from the little acorn planted by Rufus Putnam a
hundred years ago. We can think of few memorials which could be
established in New England more interesting than this would be. We
can think of few which could be established so easily. It is a
pleasure to look forward to the day when this shall be
accomplished. It is not hard to hear already the voice of Senator
Hoar, at the dedication of this Rufus Putnam memorial, delivering
the oration in the old Rutland church. Men from the West should be
there with men from the East, men from Marietta, from the Western
Reserve, from Chicago, from Puget Sound. A score of members of the
Antiquarian Society at Worcester should be there. That score could
easily make this vision a reality. We commend the thought to these
men of Worcester. We commend it to the people of Rutland, who,
however the memorial is secured, must be its custodians.”
Just a year from the time these words were written, the pleasing plan
and prophecy--more fortunate than most such prophecies--began to be
fulfilled. It was a memorable meeting in old Rutland on that brilliant
October day in 1894. Senator Hoar and seventy-five good men and women
came from Worcester; and Edward Everett Hale led a zealous company from
Boston; and General Walker drove over with his friends from Brookfield,
his boyhood home near by,--the home, too, of Rufus Putnam before he came
to Rutland; and when everybody had roamed over the old Putnam place, and
crowded the big hotel dining-room for dinner, and then adjourned to the
village church, so many people from the town and the country round about
had joined that the church never saw many larger gatherings. The address
which Senator Hoar gave was full of echoes of his great Marietta
oration; and when the other speeches had been made, it was very easy in
the enthusiasm to secure pledges for a third of the four thousand
dollars necessary to buy the old house and the hundred and fifty acres
around it. The rest has since then been almost entirely raised; the
house has been put into good condition, and is visited each year by
hundreds of pilgrims from the East and the West; and a noteworthy
collection of historical memorials has already been made,--all under the
control of the Rutland Historical Society, which grew out of that
historic day, and which is doing a noble work for the intellectual and
social life of the town, strengthening in the minds of the people the
proud consciousness of their rich inheritance, and prompting them to
meet the new occasion and new duty of to-day as worthily as Rufus Putnam
and the Rutland farmers met the duty and opportunity of 1787. In the
autumn of 1898, there was another noteworthy celebration at Rutland.
This time it was the Sons of the Revolution who came; and they placed
upon the Putnam house a bronze tablet with the following inscription,
written by Senator Hoar, who was himself present and the chief speaker,
as on the earlier occasion:
“Here, from 1781 to 1788, dwelt General Rufus Putnam, Soldier of
the Old French War, Engineer of the works which compelled the
British Army to evacuate Boston and of the fortifications of West
Point, Founder and Father of Ohio. In this house he planned and
matured the scheme of the Ohio Company, and from it issued the call
for the Convention which led to its organization. Over this
threshold he went to lead the Company which settled Marietta, April
7, 1788. To him, under God, it is owing that the great Northwest
Territory was dedicated forever to Freedom, Education, and
Religion, and that the United States of America is not now a great
slaveholding Empire.”
Many such celebrations will there be at the home of Rufus Putnam, and
at the little village on the hill. Ever more highly will New England
estimate the place of old Rutland in her history; ever more sacred and
significant will it become as a point of contact for the East and West;
and in the far-off years the sons and daughters of Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin will make pilgrimages to it, as the
children of New England pilgrimage to Scrooby.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
SALEM
THE PURITAN TOWN
BY GEORGE DIMMICK LATIMER
Salem is what historical students would call a _palimpsest_, an ancient
manuscript that has been scraped and then rewritten with another and
later text. By careful study of the almost illegible characters and
sometimes by chemical treatment, great treasures of the ancient
learning, such as Orations of Cicero, the Institutes of Gaius and
versions of the New Testament, have been discovered under monkish rules
and medieval chronicles. Such a charm of research and discovery awaits
the historical student in this modern, progressive city. The stranger
within our gates is at first impressed by the many good business blocks,
the elegant residences amid beautiful lawns on the broad, well-shaded
streets, the handsome public buildings, many of them once stately
mansions of
[Illustration: GOVERNOR ENDICOTT’S SUN-DIAL AND SWORD.]
the old sea-captains, and a very convenient electric-car service that
makes the city a famous shopping-place for the eastern half of the
county. But here and there the visitor comes upon some memorial tablet
or commemorative stone, some ancient cemetery or venerable
building--faded characters of an earlier text--that brings to mind the
great age of Puritanism or the only less interesting era of our town’s
commercial supremacy; while if he enters the Essex Institute to see its
large and valuable historical collection, it is modern Salem that is
obliterated and the stern poverty and austere piety of the Fathers that
stand out distinctly. With what interest he will look at the sun-dial
and sword of Governor Endicott, at the baptismal shirt of Governor
[Illustration: THE FIRST MEETING-HOUSE, 1634-39.]
Bradford, and at the stout walking-stick of George Jacobs, one of the
victims of the Witchcraft Delusion! The ancient pottery, the old pewter
and iron vessels, the antique fowling-pieces and firebacks, the valuable
autographs of charters and military commissions and title-deeds--all
these survivals of the seventeenth century help to reconstruct that
Puritan settlement under the direction of Endicott and Bradstreet, of
Higginson and Roger Williams. Or if the visitor has entered the Peabody
Academy of Science, rich in natural history and ethnological
collections, it is the proud record of commercial supremacy at the
beginning of this century which the old palimpsest reveals. As he
studies the models of famous privateers and trading-vessels, the oil
portraits of the old sea-captains and merchant princes, the implements
and idols, the vestments and pottery, they brought
“From Greenland’s icy mountains,
From India’s coral strand,”
he can easily imagine himself back in the days when Derby Street was the
fashionable thoroughfare and its fine mansions overlooked the beautiful
harbor, the long black wharves with their capacious warehouses and,
moored alongside, the restless barks and brigantines for the moment
quiet under the eyes of their hardy and successful owners.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR SIMON BRADSTREET.]
Thanks to the historic spirit and the painstaking, loving labors of her
citizens, Old Salem is easily deciphered under the handsome, modern,
progressive city of thirty-four thousand inhabitants with factories,
electric plants and Queen Anne cottages. Thanks to the genius of her
distinguished son Nathaniel Hawthorne, the interpreter of the Puritan
spirit, an invisible multitude of figures in steeple-hats and black
cloaks and trunk-breeches, with here and there some gallant whose
curling locks and gay attire are strangely out of place in the sober
company, may always be suspected on the sleepy back-streets with their
small, wooden, gambrel-roofed houses, or musing under the ancient
willows in the venerable cemetery since 1637 known as “The Burying
Point,” where were laid the bodies of Governor Bradstreet and many
another Puritan. There are few American cities in which it is so easy
to feel the influence of a great past and to call up the images of
Puritan minister and magistrate, for in Salem we are surrounded by their
memorials, the houses they built, the church in which they first
worshipped, their charter and title-deeds, their muskets and firebacks,
even the garments they wore.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR JOHN ENDICOTT.]
Salem really dates from 1626, when Roger Conant and a little band of
English farmers and fishermen, in discouraged mood, left the bleak shore
of Cape Ann and came to this region, then called by the Indians
Naumkeag, a large tract of land, heavily wooded to the westward, and at
the east running in irregular, picturesque manner out into Massachusetts
Bay. Hither came in September, 1628, Captain John Endicott and a hundred
adventurers, bringing with them a charter from the English company that
claimed ownership of this territory, and many articles of English
manufacture to exchange with the Indians for fish and furs. Endicott
had been appointed Governor by the company, and immediately began to
display the strength of character and readiness in resource that
justified the wisdom of the directors and made him during his lifetime
one of the commanding figures of the Bay Colony.
It was a busy time for these serious immigrants, who came in the fall
and had to make hurried preparation for the winter. Behind them extended
the vast, unknown forest, tenanted by savages and wild beasts, while in
front stretched the three thousand miles of salt water they had just
traversed. They built houses, they felled trees, they made treaties with
the Indians, they hunted, fished, and ploughed the land they cleared.
Apparently little had been done by Conant and his discouraged friends,
but they had left a “faire house” at Cape Ann which was now brought to
Naumkeag for the Governors use.
Some of the colonists were actuated by love of religious freedom and
some by hopes of gain. A strong hand was needed to enforce order and to
give the settlement that religious character which its founders desired.
It was found in Endicott, then in the prime of life, sternest of
Puritans, quick of temper, imperious of will, and fortunately of intense
religious convictions.
[Illustration: THE PICKERING FIREBACK.]
Hawthorne is the poet of the Puritan age. After reading the events of
that memorable century in Felt’s _Annals of Salem_ and Upham’s _Salem
Witchcraft_, the student should turn to the pages of the romancer for
vivid pictures of the Puritan in his greatness of spirit and severity of
rule. In _The Maypole of Merry Mount_ Hawthorne has shown us, as only
this Wizard of New England could, the dramatic moment when Endicott,
accompanied by his mail-clad soldiers, presented himself at Mount
Wollaston, near Quincy, and abruptly ended the festivities of the young
and thoughtless members of the colony whom the lawless Morton had
gathered around him. Nor would the portrait of Endicott be complete
without the touch that shows him, in fierce anti-prelatial mood, cutting
out the blood-red cross from the English flag, for which daring deed the
General Court, fearing trouble with the home government, condemned him,
then ex-Governor, to the loss of his office as assistant, or councillor,
for one year.
The beginning of the severe, repressive rule of the Puritan over
domestic and social life, so repellent to modern thought, is found in
the instructions sent to Endicott by the directors of the English
company.
“To the end the Sabbath may be celebrated in a religious manner, we
appoint that all that inhabit the Plantation, both for the general
and the particular employments, may surcease their labour every
Saturday throughout the year at 3 o’c in the afternoon, and that
they spend the rest of that day in catechizing and preparing for
the Sabbath as the ministers shall direct.”
He was also to see that at least some members of each family were well
grounded in religion,
“whereby morning and evening family duties may be well performed,
and a watchful eye held over all in each family ... that so
disorders may be prevented and ill weeds nipt before they take too
great a head.”
For this purpose the company furnished him with blank books to record
the daily employments of each family and expected these records to be
sent over to England twice a year. In our natural dislike and distrust
of such a Puritan Inquisition we should remember that the exigencies of
the time and place go far towards justifying such stern precautions. The
English company wanted a successful settlement, one to which they could
themselves retreat if political and ecclesiastical oppression in the old
country should prove too great for their endurance; and they well knew
that prosperity depended upon order, sobriety, thrift, and piety. The
splendid history and the moral leadership of New England in these three
centuries have justified this painstaking, minute, even exasperating
watch over the welfare of a colony far from the restraints of an old
civilization, in peril from hostile savages and lawless adventurers on
an inhospitable soil.
As a contrast to this gloomy picture of social life, their intentions
towards the Indians shine in a bright light. The company wrote to
Endicott in reference to the land questions certain to arise:
“If any of the savages pretend right of inheritance to all or any
part of the lands granted in our Patent, we pray you endeavour to
purchase their title, that we may avoid the least scruple of
intrusion.”
Great pains were taken to establish just and humane relations with the
red man. One of the objects of the company was the conversion of the
Indians to the Gospel of Christ. Among the wise measures of the day it
was forbidden to sell them muskets, ammunition or liquor, and they were
permitted to enter the settlement at certain stated times only, for
purposes of trade or treaty. As a nation, our treatment of the Indian
has been so barbarous that this sagacious and Christian policy of the
first Puritans calls for the highest praise and reveals another valuable
trait in the heroic character of the Fathers.
[Illustration: OLD CRADLE.]
That first winter at Naumkeag was a severe test of the fortitude of the
Puritans. They suffered from lack of sufficient food and adequate
shelter, and many died from disease. In their great need Governor
Endicott wrote to Governor Bradford and asked that a physician be sent
to them from the Plymouth settlement. Soon Dr. Fuller came and not only
ministered to the sick, but in many conversations with Endicott and his
companions doubtless prepared the way for their adoption of the
Congregational or Independent form of church. The Pilgrims had withdrawn
from the Church of England, averse to its ritual and discipline, and
were known as Separatists. Even before their arrival at Plymouth they
instituted the Congregational form of worship and discipline which they
had already practised in England and Holland. But the Puritans at
Naumkeag had intended to reform and not to give up the Anglican liturgy
to which they were attached by tradition and sentiment. The Episcopal or
the Congregational order of service was a momentous issue in these
formative months and it is significant that on Dr. Fuller’s return to
Plymouth Endicott wrote to Bradford: “I am by him satisfied, touching
your judgement of the outward form of God’s worship; it is, as far as I
can yet gather, no other than is warranted by the evidence of truth.”
In the following spring four hundred immigrants and four Non-conformist
clergymen, among them Francis Higginson and Samuel Skelton, arrived and
steps were then taken for the formal organization of the church. In the
contract the English company made with the Rev. Francis Higginson there
is another evidence of its generous and enlightened policy. He was to
receive £30 for his outfit, £10 for books and £30 per annum for three
years. In addition, the company was to find him a house, food, and wood
for that period, to transport himself and family, and to bring them back
to England at the expiration of the time if it should then be his wish.
He was also to have one hundred acres of land, and if he died his wife
and children were to be maintained while on the plantation.
At this time the Indian name Naumkeag was given up and the settlement
took its present name of Salem, an abbreviation of Jerusalem and
meaning, as every one knows, _Peace_. The important event was the
organization of the church. Services had been held during the winter,
perhaps in that “faire house” of the Governors, and doubtless the whole
or parts of the Anglican liturgy had been used. A radical change now
occurred. After suitable preparation by prayer and fasting the ministers
were examined to test their fitness for the office, and then by a
written ballot, the first use of the ballot in this country, Samuel
Skelton was elected pastor and Francis Higginson teacher or assistant
pastor. Then Mr. Higginson and “three or four of the gravest members of
the church” laid their hands upon the head of Mr. Skelton, and with
appropriate prayer installed him as minister of this first Puritan (as
distinguished from the Pilgrim) church in America. Afterwards, by a
similar imposition of hands and prayer by Mr. Skelton, Mr. Higginson was
installed as teacher. The Plymouth church had been invited to send
delegates, and as one of them Governor Bradford came, delayed by a
storm, but in time to offer the right hand of fellowship. Thirty names
were signed to the following covenant and the First Church of Salem was
organized: “We covenant with the Lord and with one another, and do bind
ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all His ways,
according as He is pleased to reveal Himself unto us in His blessed word
of truth.” The deed was done. The Congregational creed and polity were
adopted and the church that for more than two centuries dominated New
England thought and life was established in Salem.
For several years the youthful church met in a private house. But in
1634 the colonists were ready to build the “meeting-house” and the
small, bare edifice, built of logs and boasting a thatched roof and
stone chimney, was soon erected. “A poor thing, but mine own,” the
Puritan might have said as he recalled the venerable and beautiful
cathedrals of the mother-country. But the Puritan doubtless never quoted
Shakespeare. It is more probable that he thought of the tabernacle with
which the chosen people journeyed in the wilderness, long before
Solomon’s temple crowned Mount Moriah, and rejoiced that the House of
the Lord was at last set up in their midst. The sinewy oak timbers of
this ancient building, within modern roof and walls, _still remain_, one
of the most impressive monuments of this ancient town. Its size, 20 x 17
feet, makes one somewhat skeptical of the familiar statement that
everybody went to church in the good old times. But I doubt not that
both floor and gallery were well filled Sundays and at the great
Thursday lecture, although on both days the preacher had the privilege,
to modern divines denied, of reversing his hour-glass after the sand had
run out and, secure of his congregation, deliberately proceeding to his
“Finally, Brethren.” On one side sat the men, on the other the women and
small children, each in his proper place, determined by wealth or public
office. Even in that religious age four men, it appears, were appointed
to prevent the boys from running downstairs before the Benediction was
pronounced, while the constable, armed with a long pole tipped with a
fox’s tail, was always at hand to rouse the drowsy or inattentive. There
was at each service a collection. Only church-members could vote at the
town-meetings, held at first in the new meeting-house, but every
householder was taxed for the support of the church.
In 1630, John Winthrop, the newly appointed Governor of the Colony,
accompanied by several hundred persons, came to Salem. Disappointed in
the place, they soon moved to Charlestown, and there established the
seat of government. From that date Salem took the second place in the
Colony, but always maintained, then as now, an independent,
public-spirited life.
Hither came, in 1634, Roger Williams, after the vicissitudes in those
days experienced by an original and outspoken man. After the
[Illustration: THE ROGER WILLIAMS’ OR “WITCH HOUSE.”]
death of Mr. Higginson, he became the minister of the First Church. The
original timbers of his dwelling-house, dating from 1635, are still to
be seen, more ancient than the ancient roof and walls that cover them,
and reveal faded characters of the Puritan palimpsest. A double interest
attaches to this venerable building, since as the residence of Judge
Corwin tradition has made it the scene of some of the preliminary
examinations in the witch trials. But the wanderings of Roger Williams
were not yet ended. His attacks upon the authority of the magistrates as
well as his controversies with the ministers brought him under the
condemnation of the General Court. Though the Salem church resisted, it
was obliged to part with its minister who quitted Massachusetts under
sentence of banishment, to become the Founder of Rhode Island. A
remarkable man was Roger Williams, of great gifts and singular purity of
conscience, but his inflexible spirit, opposed to the theocratic rule of
ministers and magistrates, was wisely set at constructive work in
another colony.
This was the eventful age of Puritanism in the mother-country and in the
colonies. All that we read of the austere piety and social restraints
of the Puritan theocracy is found in this period from 1629 to 1700. Much
might be said of the growth of Salem in population and wealth and
influence in this century, but there is no time to tell the story in a
single chapter. We come at once to the close of the century when the old
town earned an unenviable notoriety by the tragic affair known as the
Witchcraft Delusion.
We must think of Salem in 1692 as a town of 1700 inhabitants, in a
delightful situation on Massachusetts Bay, almost encircled by
sea-water, while at the west stretched away the vast forest, broken here
and there by large plantations or farms which it was the policy of the
Governor to grant to those who would undertake the pioneer work of
cultivation. These farms, widely scattered, were known as Salem Village,
and at a place a few miles from Salem, now known as Danvers Centre,
there was a little group of farmhouses surrounding a church, of which
the Rev. Samuel Parris was minister. In this family were two slaves,
John and Tituba, whom he had brought from the West Indies, and two
children, his daughter Elizabeth, nine years old, and his niece Abigail
Williams, eleven years of age. In the winter of 1691-92 these children
startled the neighborhood by their unaccountable performances, creeping
under tables, assuming strange and painful attitudes, and uttering
inarticulate cries. At times they fell into convulsions and uttered
piercing shrieks. Dr. Griggs, the local physician, declared the children
bewitched, and this explanation was soon after confirmed by a council of
the ministers held at Mr. Parris’s house.
Absurd as such an explanation seems to us, it must be remembered that,
with rare exceptions, every one at that time believed in witchcraft. It
found an apparent confirmation in the text, “Thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live” (Exodus xxii., 18), and the great legal authorities of
England, Bacon, Blackstone, Coke, Selden, and Matthew Hale, had given
decisions implying the fact of witchcraft and indicating the various
degrees of guilt. It was easier to accept this explanation since
executions for this crime had already taken place at Charlestown,
Dorchester, Cambridge, Hartford and Springfield. Governor Winthrop,
Governor Bradstreet and Governor Endicott had each sentenced a witch to
death. Governor Endicott had pronounced judgment upon a person so
important as Mistress Ann Hibbins, widow of a rich merchant and the
sister of Governor Bellingham, familiar to us all in the pages of _The
Scarlet Letter_. A few years before, Cotton Mather, the distinguished
young divine of Boston, had published a work affirming his belief in
witchcraft and detailing his study of some bewitched children in
Charlestown, one of whom he had taken into his own family the better to
observe.
It is not surprising, therefore, that these young girls, instead of
being punished for mischievous conduct or treated for nervous
derangement, were pitied as the victims of some malevolent persons and
urged to name their tormentors. Encouraged by the verdict of physician
and ministers, countenanced by Mr. Parris and the church-members, these
“afflicted children,” as they and some other girls and women similarly
affected in the village were now called, began their accusations. The
first persons mentioned were Tituba, the Indian slave, Goody Osborn, a
bedridden woman whose mind was affected by many troubles, physical and
mental, and Sarah Good, a friendless, forlorn creature, looked upon as a
vagrant.
[Illustration: WITCH PINS.]
In March, 1692, the first examinations were held in the meeting-house in
Salem Village, John Hawthorne, ancestor of the novelist, and Jonathan
Corwin acting as magistrates. The accused did not receive fair
treatment--their guilt was assumed from the first, no counsel was
allowed, the judges even bullied them to force a confession. The
evidence against them, as in all the following cases, was “spectral
evidence,” as it was called. It consisted of the assertions of the
children that they were tortured whenever the accused looked at them,
choked, pinched, beaten, or pricked with the pins which they produced
from their mouths or clothing, and in one instance, at least, stabbed by
a knife the broken blade of which was shown by the “afflicted child.” In
one or two cases the children were convicted of deception, as in the
case of the broken knife-blade. A young man present testified that he
had broken the knife himself and had thrown away the useless blade in
the presence of the accusing girl. But with merely a reprimand from the
judge and the injunction not to tell lies, the girls were permitted to
make their monstrous charges against the men and women who stood amazed,
indignant, helpless, before accusations they could only deny, not
refute.
In this first trial Tituba confessed that under threats from Satan, who
had most often appeared to her as a man in black accompanied by a yellow
bird, she had tortured the girls, and named as her accomplices the two
women, Good and Osborn. After the trial, which took place a little later
in Salem, Tituba was sent to the Boston jail, where she remained until
the delusion was over. She was then sold to pay the expenses of her
imprisonment, and is lost to history. The other women were sent to the
Salem jail, which they left only for their execution the following July.
The community felt a sense of relief after the confession of Tituba and
the imprisonment of the other women. It was hoped Satan’s power was
checked. But on the contrary the power of the devil was to be shown in a
far more impressive manner. The “afflicted children” continued to suffer
and soon began to accuse men and women of unimpeachable lives. Within a
few months several hundred people in Salem, Andover and Boston were
arrested and thrown into the jails at Salem, Ipswich, Cambridge and
Boston. As Governor Hutchinson, an historian of the time, stated, the
only way to prevent an accusation was to become an accuser. The state of
affairs resembled the Reign of Terror in France a century later, when
men of property and position lived in fear of being regarded as “a
suspect.”
For the thrilling story of these trials and their wretched victims the
student should turn to Mr. Upham’s authoritative and popular volumes
upon _Salem Witchcraft_. The reader can never forget the tragic fate of
the venerable Rebecca Nurse, George Burroughs, a former clergyman of the
church in Salem Village, and the other victims. Here we can review only
the trial of the Corey family, a fitting climax to this scene of horror.
Two weeks after the trial of Tituba and her companions, a warrant was
issued for the arrest of Martha Corey, aged sixty, the third wife of
Giles Corey, a well-known citizen. She was a woman of unusual strength
of character and from the first denounced the witchcraft excitement,
trying to persuade her husband who believed all the monstrous stories,
not to attend the hearings or in any way countenance the proceedings.
Perhaps it was her well-known opinion that directed suspicion to her. At
her trial the usual performance was enacted. The girls fell on the
floor, uttered piercing shrieks, cried out upon their victim. “There is
a man whispering in her ear!” one of them suddenly called out. “What
does he say to you?” the judge demanded of Martha Corey, accepting
without any demur this “spectral evidence.” “We must not believe all
these distracted children say,” was her sensible answer. But good sense
did not preside at the witch trials. She was convicted and not long
afterward executed. Her husband’s evidence went against her and is worth
noting as fairly representative of much of the testimony that convicted
the nineteen victims of this delusion:
“One evening I was sitting by the fire when my wife asked me to go
to bed. I told her I would go to prayer, and when I went to prayer
I could not utter my desires with any sense, not open my mouth to
speak. After a little space I did according to my measure attend
the duty. Some time last week I fetched an ox well out of the woods
about noon, and he laying down in the yard, I went to raise him to
yoke him, but he could not rise, but dragged his hinder parts as
if he had been hip shot, but after did rise. I had a cat some time
last week strongly taken on the sudden, and did make me think she
would have died presently. My wife bid me knock her in the head,
but I did not and since she is well. My wife hath been wont to sit
up after I went to bed, and I have perceived her to kneel down as
if she were at prayer, but heard nothing.”
It is hard to believe that such statements, most probable events
interpreted in the least probable manner, should have had any judicial
value whatever. Yet it is precisely such a mixture of superstition and
stupid speculation about unusual or even daily incidents that was
regularly brought forward and made to tell against the accused.
Soon after his wife’s arrest Giles Corey himself was arrested, taken
from his mill and brought before the judges of the special court,
appointed by Governor Phipps but held in Salem, to hear the witch
trials. Again the accusing girls went through their performance, again
the judges assumed the guilt of the accused, and tried to browbeat a
confession from him. But in the interval between his arrest and trial
this old man of eighty had had abundant leisure for reflection. He was
sure not only of his own innocence but of his wife’s as well, and it
must have been a bitter thought that his own testimony had helped
convict her. Partly as an atonement for this offense and partly to save
his property for his children, which he could not have done if he had
been convicted of witchcraft, after pleading “not guilty” he remained
mute, refusing to add the necessary technical words that he would be
tried “by God and his country.” Deaf alike to the entreaties of his
friends and the threats of the Court, he was condemned to the torture of
_peine forte et dure_, the one instance when this old English penalty
for contumacy was enforced in New England. According to the law the aged
man was laid on his back, a board was placed on his body with as great a
weight upon it as he could endure, while his sole diet consisted of a
few morsels of bread one day and a draught of water the alternate day,
until death put an end to his sufferings.
The execution of eight persons on Gallows Hill three days later,
September 22, were the last to occur in the Colony. Accusations were
still made, trials were held, more people were thrown into jail. But
there were no more executions, and the next spring there was, according
to Hutchinson, such a jail delivery as was never seen before.
“The smith filed off the chains he forged,
The jail bolts backward fell;
And youth and hoary age came forth
Like souls escaped from hell.”
The tragedy was at an end. It lasted about six months, from the first
accusations in March until the last executions in September. Nineteen
persons had been _hanged_, and one man pressed to death. _There is no
foundation for the statement that witches were burned._ No one was ever
burned in New England for witchcraft or any other crime. But hundreds of
innocent men and women were thrown into jail or obliged to flee to some
place of concealment, their homes were broken up, their property
injured, while they suffered great anxiety for themselves and friends.
It was an epidemic of mad, superstitious fear, bitterly to be regretted,
and a stain upon the high civilization of the Bay Colony. It is
associated with Salem, but several circumstances are to be taken into
consideration. First of all, note the fact that while the victims were
residents of Essex County, of Salem and vicinity, and the trials were
held in Salem, yet the special court that tried them was appointed by
the Governor; the Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony, Stoughton,
presided; and Boston ministers, notably Cotton Mather, the influential
minister of the North Church, were interested observers. Boston as well
as Salem is responsible for the tragedy. In the second place, remember
that this dramatic event with all its frightful consequences led to a
more rational understanding of the phenomena of witchcraft. By a natural
revulsion of feeling future charges of witchcraft were regarded with
suspicion, “spectral evidence” was disallowed, and there were no more
executions for this crime in New England.
Various explanations of the conduct of the “afflicted children” have
been offered. One writer has suggested that they began their proceedings
in jest but, partly from fear of punishment if they confessed, partly
from an exaggerated sense of their own importance, they continued to
make charges against men and women whom they heard their elders mention
as probable witches. In that little settlement there were property
disputes, a church quarrel, jealousies, rivalries, and much
misunderstanding, which had their influence. Another writer lays stress
upon “hypnotic influence” and believes these young girls and nervous
women were improperly influenced by malevolent persons, probably John
and Tituba the Indian slaves. But a more natural explanation is that
they were the victims of hystero-epilepsy, a nervous disease not so well
understood in the past as to-day, which has at times convulsed the
orderly life of a school or convent, and even a whole community. Then,
too, the belief in witchcraft was general. Striking coincidences,
personal eccentricities, unusual events and mysterious diseases seemed
to find an easy explanation in an unholy compact with the devil. A
witticism attributed to Judge Sewall, one of the judges in these trials,
may help us to understand the common panic: “We know who’s who but not
which is witch.” That was the difficulty. At a time when every one
believed in witchcraft it was easy to suspect one’s neighbor. It was a
characteristic superstition of the century and should be classed with
the barbarous punishments and religious intolerance of the age.
Eventually, justice, so far as possible, was done to the survivors. The
Legislature voted pecuniary compensations and the church
excommunications were rescinded. Ann Putnam, one of the more prominent
of the “afflicted children,” confessed her error and prayed for divine
forgiveness. Rev. Samuel Parris offered an explanation that might be
considered an apology. Judge Sewall, noblest of all the civil and
ecclesiastical authorities implicated in this tragedy, stood up in the
great congregation, Fast Day, in the South Church, Boston, and
acknowledged his error in accepting “spectral evidence.”
“Spell and charm had power no more,
The spectres ceased to roam,
And scattered households knelt again
Around the hearths of home.”
Salem grew in wealth and population slowly but substantially. In 1765
there were only 4469 inhabitants. With the rest of the Colony she was
putting forth her strength in the French-Indian wars and also resisting
what she termed the usurpations of the Royalist governors or English
Parliament. It was a public-spirited as well as high-spirited life.
Soldiers and bounties and supplies were generously furnished for the
wars. Pirates were captured or driven from the coast. A valuable
commerce was developed, churches were built and schools increased. In
1768 the _Essex Gazette_ was founded, with the motto, “_Omne tulit
punctum qui miscuit utile dulci_,”--a motto that measures the social
changes from the time of Endicott and Williams.
The citizens of Salem were not wanting in patriotism or courage in the
years immediately preceding the Revolution. They met in the old
town-house to protest against the Stamp Act, to denounce the tax on tea
and the closing of Boston port, and in 1774, in defiance of General
Gage, to elect delegates to the First Continental Congress about to meet
in Concord. As early as 1767 a committee had been appointed “to draft a
subscription paper for promoting industry, economy and manufactures in
Salem, and thereby prevent the unnecessary importation of European
commodities which threaten the country with poverty and ruin.” The
report of the committee was not accepted but the movement was
characteristic of the attitude of Salem.
A just claim is made that the first armed resistance to the British
government was made
[Illustration: T Pickering. (signature)]
in Salem at the North Bridge, Sunday, February 26, 1775, when the
citizens assembled and took their stand on the north bank of the river
to prevent Colonel Leslie and his three hundred soldiers from marching
into North Fields in search of cannon supposed to be concealed there.
The British officer thought of firing upon the citizens who, after
crossing the bridge, had raised the draw and now stood massed on the
opposite bank. But a townsman, Captain John Felt, said to the irate
officer who had looked for an unimpeded march, “If you do fire you will
all be dead men.” His prompt utterance appears to have restrained the
firing. Tradition says that there was a struggle to capture some boats,
one of which at least was scuttled. After an hour and a half of delay,
in which time Rev. Mr. Barnard of the North Church was conspicuous for
his moderate counsels, the vexed and defeated Colonel Leslie promised
that if the draw were lowered and he were permitted to march his men
over it a distance of thirty rods, he would then wheel about and leave
the town, an agreement fairly carried out. A commemorative stone marks
this place and significant event at the beginning of the Revolution.
[Illustration: SOME OLD DOORWAYS.]
The years from 1760 to the War of 1812 were the period of commercial
prestige. At the beginning of the Revolution Washington turned to the
coast towns for a navy, and Salem answered by furnishing at least 158
privateers. Many were the prizes brought into the harbor as the war
continued, and, as a result of this seamanship, an immense impetus was
given to ship-building and the development of foreign commerce. This may
be called the romantic era in the life of the venerable town. At the
close of the war the town could boast of its great merchants and
adventurous captains whose vessels were found in every port. Where did
they not go, these vessels owned by Derby, Gray, Forrester,
Crowninshield, and many another well-known merchant!
Under the stern rule of Endicott the old Puritan town had banished
Quakers and Baptists and Episcopalians, but in the early years of this
century her sons were intimate with Buddhist and Mohammedan and Parsee
merchants. In 1785 “Lord” Derby, as Hawthorne called him, sent out the
_Grand Turk_ which, nearly two years later, brought back the first cargo
direct from Canton to New England. At this time it is with peculiar
interest we read that in 1796 this same “Lord” Derby sent the _Astrea_
to Manila, which returned the following year with a cargo of sugar,
pepper and indigo upon which duties of over $24,000 were paid. That was
the time when a sailing-vessel after a long voyage might enter the
harbor any day, and therefore the boys of the town lay on the rocks at
the Neck, eager to sight the incoming ship, and earn some pocket-money
for their welcome news. Significant is the motto on the present city
seal: _Divitis Indiæ usque ad ultimum sinum_. They were a hardy
race--these Vikings of New England--bold, self-reliant, shrewd,
prosperous, equally ready to fight or trade, as occasion might demand.
The sailors of that day were the native sons of Salem, sturdy citizens,
often well-to-do, who might have an “adventure” of several hundred
dollars aboard to invest in tea or sugar or indigo. At fourteen or
fifteen the Salem boy went out in the cabin of his father’s vessel, at
twenty he was captain, at forty he had retired and in his stately
mansion enjoyed the wealth and leisure he had bravely and quickly
earned. In 1816 _Cleopatra’s Barge_, a vessel
[Illustration: BOWDITCH DESK AND QUADRANT.]
of 190 tons burden, was launched in the harbor, and George Crowninshield
went yachting in the Mediterranean in this luxurious vessel,--perhaps
the first American pleasure yacht, as much admired in Europe as in New
England. Many are the traditions of this romantic and prosperous era.
Many are the famous names of merchants and sailors--men of great wealth
and public spirit, mighty in time of war and influential in affairs of
state, as Colonel Timothy Pickering, and Benjamin W. Crowninshield,
esteemed at home and abroad for their enlightened, progressive, humane,
public-spirited services to town and State.
Many of their stately mansions still remain to attest the wealth and
fashion and gracious hospitality of that period. The spacious rooms,
rich in mahogany furniture, carved wainscoting, French mirrors, and
Canton china, were the scenes of elegant and memorable entertainments
when Washington, Lafayette, and many other celebrated men of Europe and
America visited the old town. As regards the beautiful objects of
interior decoration,--now so eagerly sought, and often purchased at high
prices,--Salem is one vast museum, almost every home boasting its
inherited treasures, while a few houses are so richly dowered that the
envy of less fortunate housekeepers can be easily pardoned.
The commerce in time went to Boston, and many of the sons of Salem
followed it to help build up the wealth and character of the larger
city. In fact where have not the sons, like the vessels, of Salem gone?
Their memory is green in the old town and the citizen points with pride
to the former residence-site of many a distinguished man she calls her
son; of Bowditch, mathematician and author of the famous _Navigator_, of
Judge Story and his no less eminent son, the poet and sculptor, of W. H.
Prescott, the heroic historian of Spain, of Jones Very, poet and mystic,
and of many another man of mark in law and literature.
But of all the distinguished sons of Salem no one makes so eloquent an
appeal to the popular heart as Nathaniel Hawthorne. Visitors are
particularly interested in the places associated with his life and
romances. Of these
[Illustration: Wm H. Prescott]
there are many, for the novelist lived at one time or another in half a
dozen Salem houses, while several are identified with his stories. To
appreciate Hawthorne one should read him here, in the old Puritan town
with its ancient houses, several of which date from the seventeenth
century, its commemorative tablets, ancient tombstones, family names,
and the collections of the Essex Institute. With magic pen he traced
the greatness and the littleness of the Puritan age, its austere piety,
its intolerance, its stern repression of the lighter side of human
nature, its moral grandeur and its gloomy splendor. He did for our past
what Walter Scott did for the past of the mother-country. Another
“Wizard of the North,” he breathed the breath of life into the dry and
dusty materials of history; he summoned the great dead again to live and
move among us.
The visitor will be interested in all the houses associated with his
name,--the modest birthplace on Union Street, the old residence on
Turner Street popularly but erroneously called the House of the Seven
Gables, the Peabody homestead, beside the Old Burying Point, where he
found his wife and also _Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret_. The visitor will be
most interested, however, in the three-story, wooden building with the
front door opening into the little garden at the side, after the fashion
of many Salem houses, where he lived when Surveyor of the Port and wrote
the immortal romance of Puritan New England. Here his wife wept over the
woe of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, and hither came James T.
Fields to hear the story which he so eagerly accepted. After one has
read the facts of history in Felt and Upham and the diaries and
chronicles of the seventeenth century, it is well to turn to Hawthorne
for the realistic touch that makes the Puritan characters live once more
for us. His sombre genius was at home in the Puritan atmosphere. How
clearly its influence over him is acknowledged in the Introduction to
_The Scarlet Letter_! He had the literary taste and the literary
ambition, and he found his material in the musty records of the
Custom-house, in the town pump so long a feature of Salem streets, in
the church steeple, the ancient burying-ground, the old gabled houses,
even the Main Street that had witnessed the varied pageants of more than
two centuries. He was always leaving Salem and always returning, drawn
by the “sensuous sympathy of dust for dust.” Here his ancestors lay
buried, and here, although he has said he was happiest elsewhere, lay
his inspiration. The strange group of Pyncheons, Clifford, Hepzibah and
the Judge, the _Gentle Child_, the _Minister with the Black Veil_, _Lady
Eleanore_ in her rich mantle, and the tragic group of _The Scarlet
Letter_--these are not simply the creations
[Illustration: Nathaniel Hawthorne]
of a delicate and somewhat morbid imagination, even more are they the
marvellous resurrection of a life long dead.
The old town has a genuine pride in her great son whose fame, assured in
England as in America, has added to her attractions. But owing to his
invincible reserve and long absences he had only a limited acquaintance
in Salem, and there is comparatively little of reminiscence and anecdote
among those who remember him. He chose his companions here, perhaps in
reaction from the intellectual society he had had in Concord, perhaps in
search of literary material, from a jovial set with many a capital tale
to tell of the old commercial days when the Custom-house with its
militant eagle aloft was the centre of a bustling, cosmopolitan life
that surged up and down its steps and over the long black wharves of
Derby Street. Like many men of genius his character had more than one
side and can now be studied in the abundance of material which the
unwearied industry of his children has given us.
The novelist has gone, as the merchant and sailor went, as the Puritan
magistrate and minister went. Another set of priceless
[Illustration]
associations is added to the old town which now must confess to
factories and a foreign population like many another New England
seaport. The resident of Salem lives in a modern, progressive, handsome
city, made the more attractive by eccentric roofs, “Mackintire”
doorways, carved wooden mantels and wainscoting, ever suggestive of the
venerable and impressive past, a past that may well serve as a challenge
to the children of Viking and Puritan, inviting them to a fine
self-control and a broad public spirit.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
BOSTON
THE TRIMOUNTAIN CITY
BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
[Illustration: SUCCORY OR “BOSTON WEED.”]
The summer traveller who approaches Boston from the landward side is apt
to notice a tall and abundant wayside plant, having a rather stiff and
ungainly stem, surmounted by a flower with soft and delicate petals and
of a lovely shade of blue. This is the succory (_Cichorium Intybus_ of
the botanists), described by Emerson as “succory to match the sky.” But
it is not commonly known in rural New England by this brief name, being
oftener called “Boston weed,” simply because it grows more and more
abundant as one comes nearer to that city. When the experienced Boston
traveller, returning to his home in late summer, sees this fair blossom
on an ungainly stem assembled profusely by the roadside, he begins to
collect his parcels and hand-bags, knowing that he approaches his
journey’s end.
The original Boston, as founded by Governor John Winthrop in 1639, was
established on a rocky, three-hilled peninsula, in whose thickets wolves
and bears were yet harbored, and which was known variously as Shawmut
and Trimountain. The settlement itself was a sort of afterthought, being
taken as a substitute for Charlestown, where a temporary abode had been
founded by Winthrop’s party. There had been much illness there, and so
Mr. Blackstone, or Blaxtone, who had for seven years been settled on the
peninsula, urged the transfer of the little colony. The whole tongue of
land then comprised but 783 acres--an area a little less than that
originally allotted to Central Park in New York. Boston now includes
23,661 acres--about thirty times the original extent of the peninsula.
It has a population of about 500,000--the State Census of 1895 showing
496,920 inhabitants. By the United States Census of 1890
[Illustration: Copyright by Daniel W. Colbath & Co., Boston, 1898.
TRINITY CHURCH.]
it had 448,477, and was then the sixth in population among American
cities, being surpassed by New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn,
and St. Louis; and the union of New York and Brooklyn probably making it
now the fifth. In 1880 it ranked fifth, St. Louis having since
outstripped it. In 1870 it was only seventh, both St. Louis and
Baltimore then preceding it. As with most American cities, this growth
has been partly due to the annexing of suburbs; but during the last
fifteen years there has been no such annexation, showing the increase to
be genuine and intrinsic. The transformation in other ways has, however,
been more astonishing than the growth. Of the original three hills, one
only is now noticeable by the stranger. I myself can remember Boston, in
my college days, as a pear-shaped peninsula, two miles by one, attached
to the mainland by a neck a mile long and only a few yards wide,
sometimes actually covered by the meeting of the tide-waters from both
sides. The water also almost touched Charles Street, where the Public
Garden now is, and it rolled over the flats and inlets called the Back
Bay, where the costliest houses of the city now stand.
The changes of population and occupation have been almost as great as of
surface. The blue-jacketed sailor was then a figure as familiar in the
streets as is now the Italian or the Chinese; and the long wharves, then
lined with great vessels, two or three deep, and fragrant with spicy
Oriental odors, are now shortened, reduced, and given over to tugs and
coasters. Boston is still the second commercial port in the country; but
its commerce is mainly coast-wise or European only, and the picturesque
fascination of the India trade has passed away. Even on our Northwest
Pacific coast the early white traders, no matter whence they came, were
known by the natives as “Boston men.” The wealth of the city, now vastly
greater than in those days, flows into other channels--railways,
factories, and vast land investments in the far West--enterprises as
useful, perhaps more lucrative, but less picturesque. It is a proof of
the vigor and vitality of Boston, and partly, also, of its favorable
situation, that it has held its own through such transformations.
Smaller cities, once powerful, such as Salem, Newburyport, and
Portsmouth, have been ruined as to business by the withdrawal of foreign
trade.
[Illustration: BOSTON IN 1757.
FROM A DRAWING BY GOVERNOR POWNALL.]
Boston has certainly, in the history of the country, represented from an
early time a certain quality of combined thrift and ardor which has made
it to some extent an individual city. Its very cows, during its rural
period, shared this attribute, from the time when they laid out its
streets by their devious wanderings, to the time when “Lady Hancock”--as
she was called--helped herself to milk from the herd of her
fellow-citizens in order to meet a sudden descent of official visitors
upon her husband, the Governor. From the time when Boston was a busy
little colonial mart--the epoch best described in Hawthorne’s _Province
House Legends_ and _My Kinsman Major Molineux_--through the period when,
as described in Mrs. Quincy’s reminiscences, the gentlemen went to
King’s Chapel in scarlet cloaks,--down to the modern period of
transcontinental railways and great manufacturing enterprises, the city
has at least aroused a peculiar loyalty on the part of its citizens.
Behind all the thunders of Wendell Phillips’s eloquence there lay always
this strong local pride. “I love inexpressibly,” he said, “these streets
of Boston, over which my mother held up my baby footsteps; and if God
grants me time enough, I will make them too pure to be trodden by the
footsteps of a slave.” He survived to see his dream fulfilled. Instead
of the surrendered slave, Anthony Burns, marching in a hollow square,
formed by the files of the militia, Phillips lived to see the
fair-haired boy, Robert Shaw, riding at the head of his black regiment,
to aid in securing the freedom of a race.
During the Revolution, Boston was the centre of those early struggles on
which it is now needless to dwell. Faneuil Hall still stands--the place
from which, in 1774, a letter as to grievances was ordered to be sent to
the other towns in the State; the old State House is standing, where the
plans suggested by the Virginia House of Burgesses were adopted; the old
South Church remains, whence the disguised Indians of the Boston
Tea-Party went forth, and where Dr. Warren, on March 5, 1775, defied
the British officers, and when one of them held up warningly some
pistol-bullets, dropped his handkerchief over them and went on. The Old
North or Christ Church also remains, where the two lights were hung out
as the signal for Paul Revere’s famous ride, on the eve of the battle of
Lexington.
So prominent was Boston during this period that it even awakened the
jealousy of other colonies; and Mr. Thomas Shirley, of Charleston, South
Carolina, said to Josiah Quincy, Jr., in March, 1773: “Boston aims at
nothing less than the sovereignty of this whole continent.... Take away
the power and superintendence of Britain, and the colonies must submit
to the next power. Boston would soon have that.”
One of the attractions of Boston has long been, that in this city, as in
Edinburgh, might be found a circle of literary men, better organized and
more concentrated than if lost in the confusion of a larger metropolis.
From the point of view of New York, this circle might be held
provincial, as Edinburgh no doubt seemed from London; and the resident
of the larger
[Illustration: Copyright by Daniel W. Colbath & Co., Boston, 1895.
“OLD CORNER BOOKSTORE.”]
community might scornfully use about the Bostonian the saying attributed
to Dr. Johnson about the Scotchman, that “much might be made of him if
caught young.” Indeed, much of New York’s best literary material came
always from New England; just as Scotland still holds its own in London
literature. No doubt each place has its advantages, but there was a time
when one might easily meet in a day, in one Boston bookstore--as, for
instance, in the “Old Corner Bookstore,” built in 1712, and still used
for the same trade--such men as Emerson, Parker, Longfellow, Lowell,
Holmes, Whittier, Sumner, Agassiz, Parkman, Whipple, Hale, Aldrich, and
Howells; such women as Lydia Maria Child and Julia Ward Howe. Now, if we
consider how much of American literature is represented by these few
names, it is evident that if Boston was never metropolitan, it at least
had a combination of literary ability such as no larger American city
has yet rivalled.
I remember vividly an occasion when I was required to select a
high-school assistant for the city where I then lived (Newport, Rhode
Island), and I had appointed meetings with several candidates at the
bookstore of Fields & Osgood at Boston. While I was talking
[Illustration: Oliver Wendell Holmes]
with the most promising of these--the daughter of a clergyman in
northern Vermont--I saw Dr. O. W. Holmes pass through the shop, and
pointed him out to her. She gazed eagerly after him until he was out of
sight, and then said, drawing a long breath, “I must write to my father
and sister about this! Up in Peacham we think a great deal of authors!”
Certainly a procession of foreign princes or American millionaires would
have impressed her and her correspondents far less. It was like the
feeling that Americans are apt to have when they first visit London or
Paris and see--in Willis’s phrase--“whole shelves of their library
walking about in coats and gowns”; and, strange as it may seem, every
winter brings to Boston a multitude of young people whose expressed
sensations are very much like those felt by Americans when they first
cross the ocean.
The very irregularity of the city adds to its attraction, since most of
our newer cities are apt to look too regular and too monotonous. Foreign
dialects have greatly increased within a few years; for although the
German element has never been large, the Italian population is
constantly increasing, and makes itself very apparent
[Illustration: PUBLIC LIBRARY.]
to the ear, as does also latterly the Russian. Books and newspapers in
this last tongue are always in demand. Statues of eminent
Bostonians--Winthrop, Franklin, Samuel Adams, Webster, Garrison,
Everett, Horace Mann, and others--are distributed about the city, and
though not always beautiful as examples of art, are suggestive of
dignified memories. Institutions of importance are on all sides, and
though these are not different in kind from those now numerous in all
vigorous American cities, yet in Boston they often claim a longer date
or more historic associations. The great Public Library still leads
American institutions of its class; and the Art Museum had a similar
leadership until the rapid expansion of the Metropolitan Museum of New
York City. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the New England
Conservatory of Music educate large numbers of pupils from all parts of
the Union; while Boston University and Boston College hold an honored
place among their respective constituencies. Harvard University, Tufts
College, and Wellesley College are not far distant. The Boston Athenæum
is an admirable model of a society library. The public-school system of
Boston has in
[Illustration: The TOWN of BOSTON IN _New England_]
times past had a great reputation, and still retains it; though it is
claimed that the newer systems of the Western States are in some degree
surpassing it. The Normal Art School of the State is in Boston; and the
city has its own Normal School for common-school teachers. The free
lectures of the Lowell Institute are a source of instruction to large
numbers every season; and there are schools and classes in various
directions, maintained from the same foundation. The great collections
of the Boston Society of Natural History are open to the public; and the
Bostonian Society has been unwearied in its efforts to preserve and
exhibit all memorials of local history. The Massachusetts Historical
Society includes among its possessions the remarkable private library of
Thomas Dowse, which was regarded as one of the wonders of Cambridge
fifty years ago, and it possesses also the invaluable manuscript
collections brought together by Francis Parkman when preparing his great
series of histories. The New England Historic-Genealogical Society has a
vast and varied store of materials in the way of local and genealogical
annals; and the Loyal Legion has a library and museum of war memorials.
[Illustration: CHARLES SUMNER.]
For many years there has been in Boston a strong interest in physical
education--an interest which has passed through various phases, but is
now manifested in such strong institutions as the Athletic Club and the
Country Club--the latter for rural recreation. There is at Charlesbank,
beside the Charles River, a public open-air gymnasium which attracts a
large constituency; and there is, what is especially desirable, a class
for women and children, with private grounds and buildings. It is under
most efficient supervision, and is accomplishing great good. There are
some ten playgrounds kept open at unused schoolhouses during the summer
vacations, these being fitted up with swings, sand-pens, and sometimes
flower-beds, and properly superintended. A great system of parks has now
been planned, and partly established, around Boston, the largest of
these being Franklin Park, near Egleston Square; while the system
includes also the Arnold Arboretum, the grounds around Chestnut Hill
Reservoir and Jamaica Pond, with a Marine Park at South Boston. Most of
these are easily accessible by steam or electric cars, which are now
reached from the heart of the city, in many cases through subways, and
will soon be supplemented or superseded, on the more important routes,
by elevated roads. The steam railways of the city are also to have their
stations combined into a Northern and a Southern Union Station, of which
the former is already in use and the latter in process of construction.
This paper is not designed to be a catalogue of the public institutions
and philanthropies of Boston, but aims merely to suggest a few of the
characteristic forms which such activities have taken. Nor is it written
with the desire to praise Boston above her sisters among American
cities; for it is a characteristic of American society that, in spite
of the outward uniformity attributed to the nation, each city has
nevertheless its own characteristics; and each may often learn from the
others. This is simply one of a series of papers, each with a specific
subject and each confined to its own theme. The inns, the theatres, the
club-houses of a city, strangers are likely to discover for themselves;
but there are further objects of interest not always so accessible. For
want of a friendly guide, they may miss what would most interest them.
It is now nearly two hundred years since an English traveller named
Edward Ward thus described the Boston of 1699:
[Illustration: Copyright by H. G. Smith, Boston, 1893.
PHILLIPS BROOKS.]
“On the southwest side of Massachusetts Bay is Boston, whose name
is taken from a town in Lincolnshire, and is the metropolis of all
New England. The houses in some parts joyn, as in London. The
buildings, like their women, being neat and handsome. And their
streets, like the hearts of the male inhabitants, being paved with
pebble.”
The leadership of Boston in a thousand works of charity and kindness,
during these two centuries, has completely refuted the hasty censure of
this roving Englishman; and it is to be hoped that the Boston of the
future, like the Boston of the past, will do its fair share in the
development of that ampler American civilization of which all present
achievements suggest only the promise and the dawn.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON
“Then and there American Independence was born.”
BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE
The American Revolution began in Boston. Different dates are set for the
beginning. John Adams says of Otis’s speech in 1761 in the Council
Chamber of the Old State House, “Then and there American Independence
was born.” The visitor to Boston should go, very early in his visit,
into the Old State House; and when he stands in the Council Chamber he
will remember that as distinguished a person as John Adams fixed that
place as the birthplace of independence.
But one does not understand the history of the opening of the great
struggle without going back a whole generation. It was in 1745 that
Governor William Shirley addressed the Massachusetts General Court in a
secret session. He brought before them a plan which he had for the
conquest of Louisburg in the next spring, before it could be re-inforced
from France. The General Court (which means the general assembly of
Massachusetts) at first doubted the possibility of success of so bold an
attempt; but eventually Shirley persuaded them to undertake it. The
Province of New Hampshire and that of Connecticut co-operated, and their
army of provincials, with some assistance from Warren of the English
navy, took Louisbourg, which capitulated on the 17th of June, 1745.
Observe that the 17th of June is St. Botolph’s day; and that he is the
godfather of Boston.
When Louis XV. was told that this handful of provincials had taken the
Gibraltar of America, he was very angry. In the next spring, the spring
of 1746, with a promptness and secrecy which make us respect the
administration of the French navy, a squadron of more than forty ships
of war, and transports sufficient to bring an army of three thousand
men, was fitted out in France and despatched to America, with the
definite and acknowledged purpose of wiping Boston from the face of the
earth:
[Illustration: FANEUIL HALL IN THE 18TH CENTURY.]
“For this Admiral D’Anville
Had sworn by cross and crown
To ravage with fire and steel
Our helpless Boston town.”
[Illustration: GOVERNOR THOMAS HUTCHINSON.
AFTER A PORTRAIT IN POSSESSION OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY,
ONCE THE PROPERTY OF JONATHAN MAYHEW.]
It was a disgrace to the military and naval organizations of England at
the same time, that they had so little information there on the
subject.
They found out at last that this immense French fleet had sailed or was
sailing. I think that it was the strongest expedition ever sent from
Europe to America between Columbus’s time and our own. Some blundering
attempts to meet it were made by the English Admiralty. But their
admiral had to make the lame excuse that seven times he tried to go to
sea and seven times he was driven back by gales. Whatever the gales
were, they did not stop D’Anville and his Armada, and poor Boston, which
was to be destroyed, our dear little “town of hen-coops,” clustering
around the mill-pond, knew as little of the fate prepared for it as the
British Admiralty. It was not until the month of September, 1746, that a
fishing-boat from the Banks, crowding all sail, came into Boston and
reported to Governor Shirley that her men had seen the largest fleet of
the largest vessels which they had ever seen in their lives, and that
these were French vessels. Shirley at once called his Council together
and “summoned the train bands of the Province.” The Council sank ships
laden with stones in the channels of the harbor. Hasty fortifications
were built upon the islands, and Shirley mounted upon them such guns as
he could bring together. The “train bands” of the Province promptly
obeyed the call, and for the next two months near seven thousand
soldiers were encamped on Boston Common, ready for any movement which
the descent of D’Anville might require. Cautious, wise, and strong
beyond any of his successors in his office, Shirley put his hand upon
the throttle of the newspapers. D’Anville should not learn, nor should
anybody learn, that he had an army in Boston or that he knew his danger.
And so you may read the modest files of the Boston papers of that day
and you shall find no reference to these military movements of which
every man and woman and child in Boston was thinking. It is not till his
young wife dies that, by some accident in an editorial room, the
confession slips into print that the train bands of the Province
accompanied her body to its grave.
It was the only military duty which was required of that army of six
thousand four hundred. The people of the times would have told you,
every man and woman of them, that the Lord of Hosts had other methods
for defending Boston.
What happened, or, if you please, what
[Illustration: THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH IN ITS PRESENT CONDITION.
BUILT IN 1729.]
transpired, was this: Among his other preparations for his enemy,
Shirley proclaimed a solemn Fast Day, in which the people should meet in
all their meeting-houses and seek the help of the Almighty, and they did
so. Thomas Prince, of the Old South Meeting-house, tells us what
happened there. In the morning, a crowded congregation joined in prayer,
and Prince told them of their danger and exhorted them to their duty. In
the afternoon the assembly met again. As Prince led them in their
prayer, what seemed a hurricane from the southwest struck the
meeting-house. A generation after, men remembered how the steeple above
them shook in the gale, and Prince went on, calmly, in his address to
the God who rides on the whirlwind:
“We do not presume to advise, O Lord, but if Thy Providence requires
that this tempest shall sweep the invaders from the sea, we shall be
content.”
And this was precisely what happened: This southwest gale tore down the
Bay. This side Cape Sable, just off Grand Manan, it found D’Anville’s
squadron in its magnificent array. It drove ship against ship. It
capsized and sank some of the noblest vessels. It tore the masts out of
others. It discouraged their crews and their officers. All that was left
of this gallant squadron (which was to burn our “hen-coops” here) took
refuge in Halifax Bay or crept back under jury-masts to France. In the
harbor of Chebucto, as they called Halifax, the wrecks of the fleet were
repaired as best they might be. D’Anville and his first officer both
died, one as a suicide, and the other from the disgrace of the
discomfiture. It is said in Nova Scotia that you may see some of the
ships now, if you will look down at the right place in the clear sea,
off Cape Sable. A miserable handful of the vessels straggled back to
France at the opening of the winter.
The colonists of New England had thus learned two lessons, one in 1745,
and one in 1746. In 1745 they had learned that without any assistance
from their own king they could storm and take the strongest fortress in
America. In 1746 they learned that the anger of the strongest prince in
Europe was powerless against them. Those who believed in the immediate
providence of God thought that He stretched out His arm in their
defense. Those who did not, thought that in the general providence of
God, a people who were three thousand miles away from the greatest
sovereign of the world might safely defy his wrath. Curiously enough, in
the next year, 1747, the people of Boston had an opportunity to learn a
third lesson by measuring strength with their own sovereign.
In that year Admiral Knowles, in command of the English
squadron,--rather a favorite till then, I fancy, with the people
here,--happened to want seamen. He availed himself of that bit of
unwritten law which held in England till within my own memory, by
impressing seamen from the docks. A memorial of the General Court says
that the English government had carried this matter so far that, as they
believed, three thousand Americans were at that time in the service of
the British navy, having been unwillingly impressed there. But Knowles
carried it farther yet. He took on board his fleet some hundreds of
ship-carpenters, mechanics, and laboring men; and Boston broke out into
a blaze of excitement and fury. There followed the first of the series
of proceedings which, with various modifications, lasted for thirty
years, until General Howe withdrew the British fleet and army from
[Illustration: OLD STATE HOUSE.]
Boston. It was a combination of riots and town-meetings, the
town-meetings expressing seriously what the rioters did not express so
well, the rioters giving a certain emphasis, such as was understood in
England, as to the intention of the town-meetings of Boston. We have the
most amusing details of this affair in a very valuable and interesting
history just published by Mr. John Noble. The rioters seized Knowles’s
officers whom they found in the town, and shut them up for hostages.
Knowles declared that he would bombard the town. But what with the
General Court and the town-meetings and the magistrates and the rest, he
was soothed down, the people gave up their hostages, and he gave up the
men whom he had seized. Boston had measured forces in this affair with
King George. Both were satisfied with the result; and, if I may so
speak, this first tussle ended in a tie.
Here were three trials of strength in three years. And the Boston people
learned in each of them the elements of their real power. When, nearly
twenty years after, Otis made his eloquent protest against the Writs of
Assistance, he did not succeed. The Court
[Illustration: James Otis]
decided that the Province must permit the officers to make the searches
in private houses which the Crown asked. But there was a point gained,
in the confession that the Crown must ask, and thinking men took note of
that confession.
“Sam” Adams, as he was always affectionately called, had graduated at
Harvard College in 1740. There is no direct evidence known to me, but
without it I believe that almost from that time Sam Adams was the
inspiring genius of one or more private clubs in which the young men of
Boston were trained in the fundamental principles of independence. On
the other side it may be said that from the moment when Quebec fell the
home government of England did everything that can be conceived of to
disgust and alienate the people of Boston. The disgust showed itself now
in grumbling, now in physical violence. In the midst of it all there was
one quiet leader behind the scenes. Sam Adams had the confidence of the
gentry and of the people both. When he wanted a grave and dignified
expression of opinion he had a town-meeting called, and then this
town-meeting heard speeches and passed resolutions of such dignity and
[Illustration: Samuel Adams]
gravity as were worthy of any senate in the world. On the other hand, if
Sam Adams needed to give emphasis to such resolution, the mob of Boston
appeared in her streets, did what he wanted it to do, and stopped when
he wanted it to stop. It is fair to say that George III.’s ministers
lost their heads in their rage against the riots of Boston. The Boston
Port Bill, the maddest and most useless act of vengeance, was aimed at
the Boston mob; and yet in the thirty years between Louisbourg and
Lexington this riotous mob of Boston never drew a drop of human blood in
all its excesses. And this, though once and again the soldiers and
sailors of England killed one and another of the people.
Now to follow along step by step the visible memorials of the war, I
advise you to go to Roxbury through Washington Street by one of the
Belt-line cars. The very name, Washington Street, should remind you that
Washington rode in in triumph by this highway on the 17th of March,
1776, the day when General Howe and the English troops evacuated the
town. Let the car drop you at the Providence railway crossing in Roxbury
and take another car to
[Illustration: THE BOSTON MASSACRE.]
Brookline; or go on foot. All this time you have been on the track of
the English general, Lord Percy, who was sent out with his column to
reinforce Colonel Smith, who had charge of the earlier column sent
against Concord, on the day of the battle of Lexington. You can, if you
choose, on your wheel or on your feet, go into Cambridge with this
column; but take care not to cross Charles River by the first bridge,
but by that where the students’ boat-houses are, on the road which
becomes Boylston Street as you enter Cambridge. You may then go on to
Lexington and Concord.
On another day, start from Cambridge at the Law School. This stands on
the very site of the old parsonage--General Ward’s headquarters. The
evening before the battle of Bunker Hill, Prescott’s division was formed
in parade here and joined in prayer with the minister of Cambridge
before they marched to Bunker Hill. Anybody will show you Kirkland
Street, which is the name now given to the beginning of “Milk Row,” the
road over which they crossed to Charlestown. If you are afraid to walk,
take your wheel. Two miles, more or less, will bring you eastward to
Charlestown Neck. Then turn to your right
[Illustration: LANDING OF BRITISH TROOPS AT BOSTON, 1768.]
and walk to Bunker Hill Monument, which you can hardly fail to see.
It is quite worth while to ascend the monument. It gives you an
excellent chance to obey Dr. Arnold’s rule and study the topography on
the spot. You cannot fail to see the United States Navy Yard just at
your feet. Here Howe’s forces gathered for the attack on Prescott’s
works on the day of the battle. And to the shore they retired after they
were flung back in the first two unsuccessful attacks.
In the mad attack on Prescott’s works, General Gage lost, in killed and
wounded, one quarter of his little army. What was left became the
half-starved garrison of Boston. I say “mad attack,” because Gage had
only to order a gunboat to close the retreat of the American force, and
he could have starved it into surrender. But such delay was unworthy of
the dignity of English generals, or, as they then called themselves,
“British” generals. It is to be remembered that this use of the word
“British,” now much laughed at, was the fashionable habit of those
times.
The date of the battle was June 17, 1775. Oddly enough, this had long
been the saint’s day of St. Botolph, the East Anglian saint
[Illustration: BOSTON, and its _ENVIRONS_ in 1775.]
for whom Boston in England was named. It seems probable, however, that
this odd coincidence was never noticed for a hundred years. Since the
majority of the people of Boston and Charlestown have been Catholics, it
has attracted attention.
From that date to March 17, 1776, the date just now alluded to, Boston
and the English army were blockaded by the American troops. They had
gathered on the day after Lexington, commanded at first by Artemas Ward,
the commander of the militia of Massachusetts, and afterwards by
Washington, with Ward as his first major-general. The English retained
their hold on Charlestown, but once and again the Americans attacked
their forces there. They never marched out beyond Boston Neck or
Charlestown Neck.
On the south, their most advanced works were where are now two little
parks, Blackstone Square and Franklin Square, on the west and east sides
of Washington Street, respectively. They had a square redoubt on the
Common, where is now a monument to the heroes of the Civil War. A little
eastward of this was a hill called Fox Hill, which was dug away to make
the Charles Street of to-day. Farther west, where the ground is now
covered with buildings, were two or three redoubts, generally called
forts, by which they meant to prevent the landing of the Americans.
At that time Beacon Hill was much higher than it is now. Exactly on the
point now marked by a monument, a monument was erected after the
Revolution, in commemoration of the events of the year when it began.
The present monument--completed lately--is an exact imitation of the
first, but that this is of stone, and that was of brick. This has the
old inscriptions.
Washington drove out the English by erecting the strong works on what
was then called Dorchester Heights, which we now call South Boston. The
places where most of these works existed are marked by inscriptions.
Independence Square is on the site of one of them.
The careful traveller may go out to Roxbury, follow up Highland Street
and turn to the right, and he will find an interesting memorial of one
of the strong works built by General Ward. From this point, north and
east, each of the towns preserves some relic of the same kind. In
Cambridge one is marked
[Illustration: THE FROG POND ON THE COMMON AS IT NOW APPEARS.]
by a public square, on which the national flag is generally floating.
At the North End of Boston, where is now, and was then, the graveyard of
Copp’s Hill, the English threw up some batteries. These are now
obliterated, but the point is interesting in Revolutionary history,
because it was from this height that Gage and Burgoyne saw their men
flung back by the withering fire of Bunker Hill.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CAMBRIDGE
BY SAMUEL A. ELIOT
“There is no place like it, no, not even for taxes.”
_Lowell’s Letters_, ii., 102.
The early history of New England seems to many minds dry and unromantic.
No mist of distance softens the harsh outlines, no mirage of tradition
lifts events or characters into picturesque beauty, and there seems a
poverty of sentiment. The transplanting of a people breaks the
successions and associations of history. No memories of Crusader and
Conqueror stir the imagination. Instead of the glitter of chivalry we
have but the sombre homespun of Puritan peasants. Instead of the castles
and cathedrals on which time has laid a hand of benediction we have but
the rude log meeting-house and schoolhouse. Instead of Christmas
merriment the voice of our past brings to us only the noise of axe and
hammer, or the dreary droning of Psalms. It seems bleak, and destitute
of poetic inspiration; at once plebeian and prosaic.
But I cannot help feeling that if we look beneath the uncouth exterior
we shall find in New England history much idealism, much that can
inspire noble daring and feed the springs of romance. Out of the hard
soil of the Puritan thought, out of the sterile rocks of the New England
conscience, spring flowers of poetry. This story of the planting of
Cambridge has--if I might linger on it--a wealth of dramatic interest,
not indeed in its antiquity,--it is but a story of yesterday,--but in
the human associations that belong to it and the patriotic memories it
stirs. The Cambridge dust is eloquent of the long procession of saints
and sages, scholars and poets, whose works and words have made the
renown of the place. First the Puritan chiefs of Massachusetts; then the
early scholars of the budding commonwealth; then the Tory gentry who
made the town in the days before the Revolution the centre of a lavish
hospitality, and who maintained a happy social life of which the
memories still linger in the beautiful homes which they left behind
them; then the patriot
[Illustration: HARVARD COLLEGE GATE.]
army surging about Boston in the exciting year of the siege, with the
inspiring traditions of what Washington and Warren and Knox and Greene
and the rest did and said; and finally the later associations of our
great scholars and men of letters, chief of whom we rank Lowell and
Holmes and Longfellow, whose lives were rooted deep in the Cambridge
soil and whose dust there endears the sod.
The first figures on our Cambridge stage are those of the leaders of the
Massachusetts colony. While Boston was clearly marked for prominence in
the colony because of its geographical position, there was not at first
the intention to make it the seat of government. It was too open to
attack from the sea; a position farther inland could be more easily
defended, not indeed from the Indians, but from the enemy most to be
dreaded,--the war-ships of an irate and hostile motherland. Accordingly
Governor John Winthrop and his assistants, shortly after the planting of
Boston, journeyed in the shallop of the ship in which they had come from
England, four miles up the Charles River behind Boston until they came
to a meadow gently sloping to the riverside, backed by rounded hills and
protected by wide-spreading salt marshes. There on the 28th of
December, 1630, they landed and fixed the seat of their government. To
quote the old chronicle:
[Illustration: HOME OF LONGFELLOW.]
“They rather made choice to enter further among the Indians than to
hazard the fury of malignant adversaries who might pursue them, and
therefore chose a place situated upon Charles River, between
Charlestown and Watertown, where they erected a towne called
Newtowne, and where they gathered the 8th Church of Christ.”
It was agreed that the Governor, John Winthrop, the Deputy Governor,
Thomas Dudley, and all the councillors, except John Endicott, who had
already settled at Salem, should build and occupy houses at Newtowne,
but this agreement was never carried out. Winthrop, Dudley and
Bradstreet built houses, and the General Court of the colony met
alternately at Newtowne and at Boston until 1638, when it finally
settled in Boston. Yet in spite of the superior advantages of Boston the
new settlement evidently flourished, for in 1633 a traveller--the writer
of _New England’s Prospect_--describes the village as “one of the
neatest and best compacted towns in New England, having many fair
structures, with many handsome contrived streets. The inhabitants, most
of them, are rich and well stored with cattle of all sorts.”
This is doubtless an extravagant picture and true only in comparison
with some of the neighboring plantations which were not so favorably
situated. Newtowne was really a crude and straggling settlement made up
of some sixty or seventy log cabins or poor frame houses stretching
along a road which skirted the river marshes and of which the
wanderings were prescribed more by the devious channel of the Charles
than by mathematical exactness. The meeting-house, built of rough-hewn
boards with the crevices sealed with mud, stood at the crossing of the
road with the path that led down to the river, where there was a ladder
for the convenience of landing. So primitive was the place that Thomas
Dudley, the chief man of the town, writing home, could say, “I have no
table nor any place to write in than by the fireside on my knee.” Such
was the splendor of the whilom capital of New England.
Like most of the Massachusetts towns, Cambridge began as a church.
Though Dudley and Bradstreet and Haynes were high in the councils of the
infant commonwealth, holding successively or simultaneously the offices
of governor and military chief, yet the leading personality of the
village was the minister. The roll of Cambridge ministers begins with
the great name of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, and the man
who first visioned and did much to make possible our American democracy.
Hooker, with his congregation from Braintree, in Essex, England, came to
Massachusetts in 1632, and after a short stay at Mount Wollaston,
settled at Newtowne, raising the population to nearly five hundred
souls. But the stay of the Braintree church was short. Some adventurous
spirits had penetrated the wilderness of the interior until they
discovered the charm and fertility of the valley of the Connecticut, and
soon Hooker and his company were impelled by “the strong bent of their
spirits” to remove thither. They alleged, in petitioning the General
Court for permission to remove, that their cattle were cramped for room
in Newtowne, and that it behooved the English colonists to keep the
Dutch out of Connecticut; but the real motive of the exodus was
doubtless ecclesiastical. Hooker did not find himself altogether in
accord with the Boston teacher, John Cotton. “Two such eminent stars,”
says Hubbard, writing in 1682, “both of the first magnitude, though of
different influence, could not well continue in one and the same orb.”
Hooker took the more liberal side in the antinomian controversy which
had already begun to make trouble, and his subsequent conduct of affairs
in Connecticut shows that he did not approve the Massachusetts policy of
restricting the suffrage to church members. In the spring of 1636,
therefore, Hooker and most of his congregation sold their possessions,
and driving one hundred and sixty cattle before them, went on their way
to the planting of Hartford and the founding of a new commonwealth.
This was the first of many separations by which Cambridge has become the
mother of many sturdy children. The original boundaries of the town
stretched from Dedham on the south all the way to the Merrimac River on
the north. Gradually, by the gathering of new churches and peaceable
partition, this territory has been divided, and out of the original
Newtowne have been formed, besides the present Cambridge, Billerica,
Bedford, Lexington, Arlington, Brighton and Newton. Governors Dudley and
Bradstreet removed to Ipswich, and Simon Willard went to be the chief
layman of Concord and a famous builder and defender of towns.
The rude houses of Hooker’s congregation were bought by a newly arrived
company, the flock of the Rev. Thomas Shepard. This firm but gentle
leader, who left a deep impress on the habit of the town, was a youth of
thirty-one, and a graduate, like many of the Massachusetts leaders, of
Emanuel College, at Cambridge. He came to New England with a company of
earnest followers, actuated, as he wrote, by desire for “the fruition of
God’s ordinances. Though my motives were mixed, and I looked much to my
own quiet, yet the Lord let me see the glory of liberty in New England,
and made me purpose to live among God’s people as one come from the dead
to His praise.” His brave young wife died “in unspeakable joy” only a
fortnight after his settlement at Cambridge, and was soon followed by
the chief man of his flock and his closest friend, Roger Harlakenden,
another godly youth of the manly type of English pioneers. At once, too,
Shepard was plunged into the stormy debates of the antinomian
controversy which nearly caused a permanent division in the
Congregational churches. The general election of 1637, which was held on
the Common at Newtowne, was a tumultuous gathering, and discussion over
the merits of “grace” and “works” ran high till John Wilson, minister of
the Boston church, climbed up into a big oak tree, and made a speech
which carried the day for John Winthrop to the confusion of the
heretical disciples of Anne Hutchinson. Through these stormy waters
Shepard
[Illustration: “THE MUSES’ FACTORIES.”--LOWELL.]
steered his course so discreetly that he came into high favor among all
people as a sound and vigilant minister, and Cotton Mather tells us that
“it was with a respect unto this vigilancy and the enlightening and
powerful ministry of Mr. Shepard, that, when the foundation of a college
was to be laid, Cambridge, rather than any other place, was pitched upon
to be the seat of that happy seminary.”
The founding of Harvard College by the little colony was surely one of
the most heroic, devout and fruitful events of American history. Upon
the main entrance to the college grounds is written to-day an
inscription taken from one of the earliest chronicles, entitled _New
England’s First Fruits_. We read that:
“After God had carried us safe to New England and wee had builded
our houses and provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared
convenient places for God’s worship and settled the Civil
Government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after
was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to
leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present
ministers shall lie in the dust.”
Accordingly, on the 28th day of October, 1636, Sir Harry Vane--Milton’s
“Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old”--being the Governor,
the General Court of the colony passed the following memorable vote:
“The Court agrees to give £400 towards a school or college--whereof £200
shall be paid the next year and £200 when the work is finished.” In the
following year this vote was supplemented by a further order that the
college “is ordered to be at Newtowne, and that Newtowne shall
henceforth be called Cambridge.” This is the significant act that marks
the distinction between the Puritan colony and all pioneer settlements
based on material foundations. For a like spirit under like
circumstances history will be searched in vain. Never were the bases of
such a structure laid by a community of men so poor, and under such
sullen and averted stars. The colony was nothing but a handful of
settlers barely clinging to the wind-swept coast; it was feeble and
insignificant, in danger from Indians on the one hand and foreign foes
on the other; it was in throes of dissension on the matter of heresy
which threatened to divide it permanently, yet so resolved were the
people that “the Commonwealth be furnished with knowing and
understanding men and the churches with an able ministry,” that they
voted the entire annual income of the colony to establish a place of
learning. Said Lowell:
“This act is second in real import to none that has happened in the
Western hemisphere. The material growth of the colonies would have
brought about their political separation from the mother country in
the fulness of time, but the founding of the first college here
saved New England from becoming a mere geographical expression. It
did more, it insured our intellectual independence of the old
world. That independence has been long in coming, but the chief
names of those who have hastened its coming are written on the roll
of Harvard College.”
But even the self-sacrificing zeal of the colonists would have been
almost unavailing had it not been for the coming to Massachusetts at
this time of a young Puritan minister, another graduate of Emanuel, upon
whom death had already set his seal. Says the chronicler:
“As we were thinking and consulting how to effect this great work,
it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. John Harvard, a
godly gentleman and a lover of learning then living amongst us, to
bequeath the one half of his estate, in all about £1700, toward the
erection of the college, and all his library.”
Was ever a gift so marvellously multiplied as the bequest of this
obscure young scholar?
[Illustration: STATUE OF JOHN HARVARD AND MEMORIAL HALL, HARVARD
COLLEGE.]
By this one decisive act of public-spirited and well-directed
munificence this youth made for himself an imperishable name and
enrolled himself among the foremost of the benefactors of humanity. In
acknowledgment of Harvard’s bequest the General Court voted in 1638
“that the College at Cambridge be called Harvard College.”
It is the presence of the college that has given distinctive atmosphere
to Cambridge. The character of the place has been determined by the fact
that for more than two centuries and a half it has been the home of
succeeding generations of men devoted not to trade and manufacture, but
to the cultivation of the intellectual and spiritual elements in human
life. Over the college gate stands an iron cross and upon the gate-post
is the seal of the college with “Veritas” written across its open books.
The Harvard life and spirit and teaching are all adapted to lead young
men to the love and service of truth and to send them out to a ministry
as wide and varied as the needs of humanity. The influence of the
scholars and teachers and administrators that have been drawn into the
service of the college is paramount, even if it is unconsciously
exercised and felt, in the community about the college. Here have always
been--inevitable in a town which is the resort of the chosen youth of
the country--a healthy, wholesome independence of spirit and a
high-minded earnestness. Here has always been the refined simplicity of
life natural to a community composed of, or influenced by, men of quiet
tastes and modest incomes. Here is that touch of sentiment which binds
men to the place of their education and to the memories and friendships
of youth. Here are the associations with great events and names which
inspire patriotism and ambition of worthy service. Then, too, it has
been said:
“Cambridge is an interesting place to live in because the poetry of
Holmes, Longfellow and Lowell has touched with the light of genius
some of its streets, houses, churches and graveyards, and made
familiar to the imaginations of thousands of persons who never saw
them, its rivers, marshes and bridges. It adds to the interest of
living in any place that famous authors have walked in its streets,
and loved its highways and byways, and written of its elms, willows
and ‘spreading chestnut tree,’ of its robins and herons. The very
names of Cambridge streets remind the dwellers in it of the
biographies of Sparks, the sermons of Walker, the law-books of
Story, the orations of Everett, and the presidencies of Dunster,
Chauncy, Willard, Kirkland and Quincy.”
The place is not unworthy of the wealth of affection and poetic tribute
that has been lavished upon it. The old Puritan church records, with
their quaint entries about heresies and witchcraft, about ordinations
where “four gallons of wine” and bushels of wheat and malt and
hundredweights of beef and mutton were consumed, and about funerals
conducted with solemn pomp; and the town records with notes about the
“Palisadoe” and the Common rights and “the Cowyard” and the building of
“The Great Bridge,”--a vast undertaking,--have more than merely
antiquarian interest, for they reveal the intelligent and sturdy
democracy and broad principles of government upon which the American
republic rests.
But if these ancient records seem uninviting, let the visitor turn to
the annals of the stirring time of the Revolution. General Gage called
Harvard College “that nest of sedition.” In that nest were hatched John
Hancock, James Otis, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Joseph Warren and many
another of the patriot leaders. The town was the abode of many of the
leading Tory families, but as early as 1765 the town-meeting voted “that
(with all humility) it is the opinion of the town that
[Illustration: HOLWORTHY HALL, HARVARD COLLEGE.]
the inhabitants of this Province have a legal claim to all the natural,
inherent, constitutional rights of Englishmen and--that the Stamp Act is
an infraction upon these rights.” And after an argument on the merits of
the question it was further ordered “that this vote be recorded in the
Town Book, that the children yet unborn may see the desire their
ancestors had for their freedom and happiness.” For the next ten years
there is scarcely a proceeding in the preliminary debates and contests
that led up to open revolution that is not illustrated in the
resolutions recorded by the Cambridge town clerk. Vote followed vote, as
the restrictive measures of Parliament irritated the townsmen, till at
the town-meeting of 1773 it was resolved “that this town--is ready on
the shortest notice, to join with the town of Boston and other towns, in
any measures that may be thought proper, to deliver ourselves and
posterity from slavery.” The 2d of September, 1774, just escaped the
historic importance of April 19th in the next year. On that day several
thousand men gathered on Cambridge Common and proceeded in orderly
fashion to force the resignation of two of His Majesty’s privy
councillors,
[Illustration: HOME OF LOWELL.]
and then, marching up Brattle Street to the house of the
Lieutenant-Governor of the Province, Thomas Oliver--the house that was
afterwards the home in succession of Elbridge Gerry, Rev. Charles Lowell
and his son James Russell Lowell--they extorted from him, too, a pledge
to resign. “My house in Cambridge,” he wrote, “being surrounded by about
four thousand men, I sign my name--Thomas Oliver.” Both the first and
second of the Provincial Congresses met in Cambridge, and at last the
running battle of April 19, 1775, swept through the borders of the town.
Twenty-six Americans were killed within the boundaries of Cambridge, six
of them citizens of the place, and the American militia who followed the
British retreat from Concord on that momentous evening lay on their arms
at last on Cambridge Common.
For eleven months after the Concord fight, Cambridge was a fortified
camp. The college buildings, the Episcopal church and the larger houses
were occupied as barracks. General Ward established his headquarters in
the gambrel-roofed house which was afterwards the birthplace of Oliver
Wendell Holmes. On the lawn before the house, in the hush of the June
evening, Prescott’s men were drawn up, while President Langdon of the
college, in cap and gown, prayed for the success of their arms ere they
marched to Bunker Hill. Two weeks later Washington reached the camp, and
on July 3d, under the spreading elm at the western end of the Common,
unsheathed his sword and, as the inscription reads, “took command of the
American Army.” Washington lived
[Illustration: WASHINGTON ELM.]
for a while in the president’s house, but soon made his headquarters in
the fine old mansion of the Vassalls which was later the home of
Longfellow.
After March, 1776, when Boston was finally evacuated by the British,
Cambridge ceased to be involved in the military events of the
Revolution, but in 1777 the captured troops of Burgoyne were quartered
in the town, the soldiers swinging their hammocks in the college
buildings and the officers occupying the deserted mansions of “Tory
Row.” Burgoyne lived in the house sometimes called, in derision of its
first clerical occupant, “The Bishop’s Palace,” and Riedesel and his
accomplished wife in the Lechmere house. “Never have I chanced,” wrote
Madame Riedesel, “upon such a charming situation,” and never has our
colonial life been more charmingly described than by this brave and
vivacious German lady in the letters written from her pleasant prison to
her distant home.
For fifty years after the Revolutionary epoch, Cambridge was a country
town of quiet habits, its only distinguishing characteristic being the
scholastic and literary atmosphere that hung about the college. It was a
good
[Illustration: J. R. Lowell.]
place to be born in, and it was surely good to live in the place where
Everett and Quincy ruled the academic world; where Longfellow wrote his
poetry, and Palfrey his history, and Sparks his biographies; where
Washington Allston painted and Margaret Fuller dreamed; where William
Story and Richard Dana and Lowell and Holmes and the rest walked to
church and stopped to gossip with the neighbors at the post-office.
“No town in this country,” says Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “has
been the occasion of two literary descriptions more likely to
become classic than two which bear reference to the Cambridge of
fifty years ago. One of these is Lowell’s well-known _Fireside
Travels_ and the other is the scarcely less racy chapter in the
_Harvard Book_, contributed by John Holmes, younger brother of the
‘Autocrat.’”
To these happy descriptions we may now add the accounts of Colonel
Higginson’s boyhood in his _Cheerful Yesterdays_, and Dr. Holmes’s
loving story of his birthplace in the _Poet at the Breakfast Table_.
“Cambridge,” wrote Lowell, “was still a country village with its
own habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the force
of suburban gravitation. Approaching it from the west, by what was
then called the New Road, you would pause on the brow of Symond’s
Hill to
[Illustration: GYMNASIUM, HARVARD COLLEGE.]
enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay
the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had
seen Massachusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to
emigrate with the Tories, by whom, or by whose fathers, they were
planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the square,
brown tower of the Episcopal Church, and the slim, yellow spire of
the parish meeting-house. On your right the Charles slipped
smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and
there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded
cloud-shadow. To your left upon the Old Road you saw some
half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all
comfortably fronting southward.... We called it ‘the Village’ then,
and it was essentially an English village--quiet, unspeculative,
without enterprise, sufficing to itself, and only showing such
differences from the original type as the public school and the
system of town government might superinduce. A few houses, chiefly
old, stood around the bare common, with ample elbow-room, and old
women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows
from which they had watched Lord Percy’s artillery rumble by to
Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia general who
had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. The hooks were to be
seen from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne’s captive
red-coats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed
clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia. One coach
sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis.”
Cambridge is no longer the idyllic village of Lowell’s boyhood, but a
great suburban city bustling with many activities. So rapid has been the
growth that Lowell on his return from Europe in 1889 wrote:
“I feel somehow as if Charon had ferried me the wrong way, and yet
it is into a world of ghosts that he has brought me. I hardly know
the old road, a street now, that I have paced so many years, for
the new houses. My old homestead seems to have a puzzled look in
its eyes as it looks down--a trifle superciliously methinks--on
these upstarts.
“The old English elms in front of my house haven’t changed. A
trifle thicker in the waist, perhaps, as is the wont of prosperous
elders, but looking just as I first saw them seventy years ago, and
it is balm to my eyes. I am by no means sure that it is wise to
love the accustomed and familiar as much as I do, but it is
pleasant and gives a unity to life which trying can’t accomplish.”
Cambridge is to-day the abode of as happy, comfortable and progressive a
people as the world contains. It presents a unique example in this
country of a city thoroughly well governed. It is now a quarter-century
since partisanship has been tolerated in city affairs. In the City Hall,
erected under the administration of Mayor William E. Russell, who here
got his training for the splendid service he afterward rendered to the
State, and might, had his
[Illustration: WILLIAM E. RUSSELL.]
life been spared, have rendered to the nation, no liquor license has
ever been signed. So excellent has been the record of successive
non-partisan administrations in the city that the very phrase, “The
Cambridge Idea,” has become well known even outside the limits of
Massachusetts as signifying the conception of public office as a public
trust and the conduct of municipal affairs on purely business
principles. Yet in spite of its municipal expansion and business
enterprises, Cambridge is still pre-eminently the place where the lamp
of learning is kept lighted. Though the college waxes great in numbers
and its buildings multiply, and the jar of business invades the academic
quiet, yet the purposes and habits of the scholar’s life still
distinguish the community. It is said that when Cambridge people are at
a loss for conversation one asks the other, “How is your new book
coming on?” and the question rarely fails to bring a voluble reply.
There is an entire alcove in the City Library devoted to the works of
Cambridge writers. “Brigadier-Generals,” said Howells, himself once a
resident of the town, “were no more common in Washington during the
Civil War than authors in Cambridge.” It is an interesting illustration
of the persistence of good tradition that the place where was
established the first printing-press in America, set up by Stephen Daye
in 1639, should still be a centre of book-production. Not only do John
Fiske and Charles Eliot Norton and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and a
score of others maintain the literary reputation of the place, but the
great establishments of the Riverside Press, the University Press and
the Athenæum Press put forth a constant stream of high-standard
publications, and send a most characteristic Cambridge product all over
the world. Still is Cambridge one of the shrines of pilgrimage. The
antiquarians ponder over the mossy gravestones in the little “God’s
Acre” between the “Sentinel and Nun,” as Dr. Holmes called the two
church towers which front the college gate, and there they read the
long inscriptions that tell the virtues of the first ministers of the
parish and the early presidents of the college. The patriots come and
stand under the Washington elm, or linger by the gates of the Craigie
house or Elmwood, or pace the noble Memorial Hall, which declares how
Harvard’s sons died for their country, while visitors flock to the great
museum which the genius and energy of Louis Agassiz upbuilt, and to the
garden where Asa Gray taught and botanized. Thousands of men all over
the country think of Cambridge with grateful love as they remember the
years of their happy youth; and the citizens of the place, while they
look backward with just pride, look forward with confidence that there
is to be more of inspiring history and true poetry in the city’s future
than in its fortunate past.
[Illustration]
CONCORD
FIRST IN MANY FIELDS
BY FRANK B. SANBORN
Old this New World is,--geologically more ancient, perhaps, than that
hemisphere from whose western edge Columbus set sail, four centuries
ago, and found our continent lying across his way, as he plodded to
Cathay. Yet, uncounted as our barbarous centuries and antediluvian æons
are, real history begins only with the opening of the seventeenth
century, when the English Puritan and the French Jesuit transferred to
these shores the unfolding civilization and the rival religions of
Western Europe. When we see at Plymouth the wooded glacial hillsides,
under which the Pilgrims landed and established democracy in their
wilderness, we may remember that their venture, though bolder, because
earlier, than that of Bulkeley and Willard, who planted the Concord
colony, was yet but fifteen years in advance, and was made beside a
friendly ocean, bearing succor and trade, and feeding them from its
abundance. But the Concord colonists sat down in the gloomy shadow of
the forest, amid trails of the savage and the wolf. Still more heroic
was the crusade of the Jesuit in New France; but while romance and
martyrdom were his lot, our Puritans planted here the germs of a grand
republic.
“God said, ‘I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor.
I will divide my goods,
Call in the wretch and slave;
None shall rule but the humble,
And none but Toil shall have.’”
The first event in the history of Massachusetts was this planting of a
territorial democracy. The colony of Concord was granted by Winthrop and
his legislature in September, 1635, to Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan
minister, from the little parish of Odell or Woodhill (colloquially
called “Wuddle”) in English Bedfordshire, and to Simon Willard, a
merchant, from Hawkshurst in Kent. Twelve other
[Illustration: CONCORD RIVER, BY THOREAU’S LANDING.]
families were joined with them in the grant, and another minister, Rev.
John Jones, brought other families from England, aiming towards Concord,
in October, 1635. The situation was doubtless chosen by Major Willard,
an Indian trader and in after years a fighter of the Indians; who also
selected and partly colonized two other towns, farther in the
wilderness,--Groton and Lancaster. But the true father of this Concord,
and probably the giver of its name (altering it from the Indian
Musketaquit), was Rev. Peter Bulkeley, ancestor of its most celebrated
citizen, Waldo Emerson. Of this worthy, whose grave, like that of Moses,
is unknown to this day, something should be said, before we come to
later heroes. Peter Bulkeley was the son of Rev. Edward Bulkeley, a
doctor of divinity in English Cambridge,--a scholar and man of wealth,
who was rector of the Bedfordshire parish just named, where his son was
born in 1583. He succeeded his father there in 1620.
It is in the country of John Bunyan and Cowper the poet, this little
parish of Odell. Like Concord River, the Ouse, on which it stands, is
unmatched for winding, even in England. Below the old castle of Odell,
and the church, still standing, where the Bulkeleys preached, runs this
crooked stream, murmuring as it meanders through its fringe of
meadowland, green as the richest strip of English pasture can be, which
lies between such a river and the low hills that come down towards its
edge. This Ouse (there is another in Yorkshire) flows from Bucks, the
county of John Hampden, through Bedford, the county of the Russells, and
Huntingdon, where Cromwell lived, and finally into the North Sea at
Lynn. On the north bank lies the hill upon which Odell stands,--the
highway from Sharnbrook to Harrold and Olney (long the home of Cowper)
running from east to west along the breast of the hill. The old church
standing amid trees--conspicuous is a chestnut of surpassing size and
beauty--is directly opposite the ancient castle, now a comfortable and
handsome mansion, built some two hundred years ago,--or about the time
the oldest houses in Concord were built.
It was no love of adventure, we may be sure, that brought Peter
Bulkeley, at the age of fifty-two, from this lovely country into a land
of forests and of poverty; but a desire to escape the ecclesiastical
tyranny of Laud and his bishops, and to establish a true church in the
wilderness. Some difficulties attended even this, for when, in July,
1636, Mr. Bulkeley was about to organize his church at Cambridge, in
order to have Sir Henry Vane and John Winthrop (Governor and Deputy
Governor that year) present at the ceremony, lo and behold! these great
men “took it in ill part, and thought not fit to go, because they had
not come to them before, as they ought to have done, and as others had
done before them, to acquaint them with their purpose.” Again, in April,
1637, when Mr. Bulkeley was to be ordained (also in Cambridge), Winthrop
says that Vane and John Cotton and John Wheelwright, and the two ruling
elders of Boston “and the rest of that church which were of any note,
did none of them come to this meeting.” “The reason was conceived to
be,” adds Winthrop, “because they counted the Concord ministers as
_legal_ preachers,”--that is, believers in a covenant of works (of the
Law) instead of a covenant of grace. This was the issue upon which
Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson were banished, soon after.
Indeed, the ordination of Mr. Bulkeley took place in the very height of
that fierce controversy between John Cotton and his former supporters,
Wheelwright and Vane, which came near breaking up the little colony; and
the Concord minister was one of the synod which, the next August, or
perhaps later, specified some eighty doctrinal opinions as erroneous or
heretical,--about one error for every two white persons in Concord. The
covenant of the village church, however, breathes a more liberal spirit;
for in it we find these words, evidently from the hand of Bulkeley:
“Whereas the Lord hath of His great goodness brought us from under
the yoke and burdening of men’s traditions, to the precious liberty
of His ordinances, which we now do enjoy,--we will, according to
our places and callings, stand for the maintenance of this liberty,
to our utmost endeavor, and not return to any human ordinances from
which we have escaped.”
And the spirit of his oft-quoted sermon is also a witness to his true
piety, whatever his doctrinal narrowness:
“There is no people but will strive to excel in something; what can
we (in Concord) excel in, if not in holiness? If we look to number,
we are the fewest; if to strength, we are the weakest; if to wealth
and riches, we are the poorest of all the people of God through the
whole world. We cannot excel nor so much as equal other people in
these things; and if we come short in grace and holiness too, we
are the most despicable people under Heaven.”
Let us hope that the wish of the good pastor was granted, and that he
lived to see the fruit of his labors. Yet there is a letter of his,
written in 1650 to John Cotton, in which Bulkeley seems to regret the
democratic liberty which Emerson, his descendant, never ceased to
approve. The Concord minister writes:
“The Lord hath a number of holy and humble ones here amongst us,
for whose sakes He doth spare, and will spare long; but, were it
not for such a remnant, we should see the Lord would make quick
work amongst us. Shall I tell you what I think to be the ground of
all this insolency which discovers itself in the speech of men?
Truly, I cannot ascribe it so much to any outward thing, as to the
putting of too much liberty and power into the hands of the
multitude, which they are too weak to manage; many growing
conceited, proud, arrogant, self-sufficient.... Remember the former
days which you had in old Boston; yet the number of professors is
far more here than there. But tell me, which place was better
governed? When matters were swayed there by your wisdom and
counsel, they went on with strength and power for good. But here,
where the heady or headless multitude have gotten the power into
their hands, there is insolency and confusion; and I know not how
it can be avoided, unless we should make the doors of the church
narrower.”
This was the caution and reversion of age,--for the doubting Peter was
then sixty-seven. But Emerson, at the age of sixty, could say, with
unabated faith in Freedom:
“Call the people together!
The young men and the sires,
The digger in the harvest field,
Hireling and him that hires;
Lo now, if these poor men
Can govern the land and sea,
And make just laws below the sun,
As planets faithful be.”
The experience of the ages has shown that the Puritans were right in
making the doors of the church wider, not narrower; though we still hear
the complaint of aged men, or young men born with a call to be old, that
the former times were better than ours, and the “headless multitude”
must be deprived of a voice in their own destiny.
When Emerson in 1835, at the two hundredth anniversary of Concord,
proposed to requite England’s gift of her printed Doomsday Book by
presenting her and the other European nations with our yet unpublished
town records, he said: “Tell them the Union has 24 States, and
Massachusetts is one; that in Massachusetts are 300 towns, and Concord
is one; that in Concord are 500 rateable polls, and _every one has an
equal vote_.” To-day there are 45 States; Massachusetts has 322 towns,
besides nearly 30 cities; and instead of 500 ratable polls, Concord has
now 1200; but each one still has an equal vote.
[Illustration: R. W. EMERSON (1858).
FROM A SKETCH BY ROWSE.]
Men are carried along, in spite of themselves, by the doctrine or system
which they embrace; their life principle, once adopted, has more force
than their temporary wish or will. So Calvinism, of which Peter Bulkeley
was a fervent disciple, with its constant stress laid on the worth of
the individual man, led inevitably to democracy, no matter how much the
innate aristocratic feeling of the English gentleman--the class to which
Bulkeley belonged--might revolt thereat. It was the same in both
countries, the mother and the daughter; Old England and New England
found John Calvin leading them along towards the Commonwealth of equal
rights and abolished privileges,--towards Sidney and Locke, Franklin and
Jefferson, Lincoln and Gladstone.
This, then, is the first historic lesson of Concord, as of all New
England,--Democracy through Calvinism, in spite of recalcitrant gentry
and reactionary ministers. Philanthropy, too, that modern invention,
which may almost be said to have come in with the eighteenth century,
and to have had Franklin for its first missionary, began to show itself
in our meadowy town, whose very name prefigured it. The epitaph of Rev.
John Whiting, parish minister here for twenty-six years (dying in
1752), records that he was “a gentleman of singular hospitality and
generosity, who never detracted from the character of any man, _and was
a universal lover of mankind_.” This would have been no compliment in
Bulkeley’s time, when the saints were entitled to be loved, and sinners
were excluded; but the eighteenth century set up a higher standard,
which has been maintained till now, when the votaries of evolution and
the survival of the fittest are teaching a return to the old
doctrine,--only reversing it; for now it is the sinners whom we are
expected to admire, and to hate the saints.
The second historic lesson of Concord is like unto the first,--but more
startling and brilliant. It was the lesson of Revolution, which has been
thoroughly learned since 1775. The embattled farmers who, at yonder
bridge,
“Fired the shot heard round the world,”
were conservative revolutionists, and as far from anarchy as from
atheism. In the instructions given by this town to its representative in
1774,--or rather, in a report made in town-meeting, January 20th of that
year, in view of
[Illustration: THE FIGHT AT THE BRIDGE.
REDRAWN FROM RALPH EARLE’S SKETCH OF 1775.
1. THE BRITISH.
2. AMERICANS.]
the Boston Tea-Party,--it was declared as the voice of the town:
“That we will, in conjunction with our brethren in America, risk
our fortunes, and even our lives, in defence of his Majesty King
George the Third, his person, crown, and dignity; and will also,
with the same resolution, as his freeborn subjects in this country,
to the utmost of our power and ability, defend all our
charter-rights, that they may be transmitted inviolate to the
latest posterity.”
Three months after this, when the Boston Port Bill was in agitation, and
two months later, when it had passed Parliament, the farmers of Concord
took a bolder tone,--“conscious,” as they said in town-meeting, “of no
alternative between the horrors of slavery, and the carnage and
desolation of a civil war,” except non-importation of British goods, to
which the good citizens bound themselves. Still later, in a county
convention which met in Concord, August 31, 1774, it was resolved:
“That we by no means intend to withdraw our allegiance from our
gracious Sovereign; that when our ancestors emigrated from Great
Britain, charters and solemn stipulations expressed the conditions,
and what particular rights they yielded; what each party had to do
and perform, and what each of the contracting parties were equally
bound by. Therefore a debtor may as justly refuse to pay his debts,
because it is inexpedient for him, as the Parliament deprive us of
our charter privileges, because it is inexpedient to a corrupt
administration for us to enjoy them.... And a sense of our duty as
men, as freemen, as Christian freemen, united in the firmest bonds,
obliges us to resolve that every civil officer in this Province,
now in commission, and acting in conformity to the late act of
Parliament, is not an officer agreeable to our charter--_therefore
unconstitutional, and ought to be opposed_.... As we are resolved
never to submit one iota to the Act, we will not submit to courts
thus constituted, and acting in conformity to said Act.... In
consequence of this resolve, all business at the Inferior Court of
Common Pleas, and Court of General Sessions of the Peace, next to
be holden in Concord, _must cease_.”
This was peaceful revolution, proceeding, not upon any vague notion of a
general “Social Contract,” but on formal violations of a written
contract, the Colony Charter, as explicitly stated. I ask attention to
this, because it has been a favorite fancy of some modern writers, who
praise the Puritans and disparage Jefferson and Franklin, that our
Revolutionary fathers had gained through those two latitudinarians a
glimpse of the levelling French doctrines, and gave themselves up to be
guided by Rousseau and Voltaire, in dereliction of their Puritan
ancestry. Precisely the opposite is true; the French author whom
Jefferson may have had in mind, when he was not thinking of Pym and
Hampden, Sergeant Maynard, Locke, and Algernon Sidney,--I mean
Montesquieu,--having derived his theories more from the English
constitutionalists than they from him. Probably not one of the men of
Middlesex, who thus led the way to revolution in this law-abiding town
of Concord (the seat of county justice), ever heard of Rousseau; but
they were lawyers, deacons, country justices and farmers, accustomed to
sit on juries; and they understood the law of contract and the
obligations of fair trade as well as any English lord could tell them.
They voted further, on this eventful summer day, that “a Provincial
Congress is absolutely necessary, in our present unhappy
situation,”--and they named October, and Concord, as a suitable time and
place for its assembling. This first Provincial Congress did meet,
October 7th, at Salem, but adjourned to Concord that day; it first met
here, October 11, 1774, and, finding the county court-house too small
for its three hundred members and clerks, and the people who gathered
to support them, it moved over to the parish meeting-house (built in
1712), and remained in session there five days, when it removed to
Cambridge, for the sake of being nearer Boston, then held as a garrison
by British troops. The second Provincial Congress, of 1775, also met in
Concord for four weeks of March and April; and it had only been
adjourned four days when the British grenadiers made their midnight
march from Boston to Lexington, hoping to catch there the arch-rebels
Hancock and Sam Adams, who had gone to Lexington as members of the
Committee of Public Safety (of which Dr. Warren was chairman), then the
executive of Massachusetts under the new revolutionary government. The
Provincial Congress, the legislature of the Province, met again for the
last time in Concord, April 22, 1775, to consider the results of the
eventful 19th. It finally dissolved May 31st, after hearing a sermon
from Dr. Langdon, the President of Harvard College; and Concord ceased
forever to be the legislative capital of Massachusetts. It became
temporarily, however, the seat of Dr. Langdon’s College, which in
October, 1775, began its recitations in the court-house and
meeting-house, and so continued till June, 1776.
Even Harvard College was at that time revolutionary; it gave up its few
buildings in Cambridge to the army of Washington, and its president, a
cousin of the wealthy New Hampshire patriot, John Langdon, made the
prayer for Bunker Hill battle, as the troops marched out of Cambridge to
give a feeble support to Prescott and his Middlesex farmers, entrenched
on the hill. Washington had not yet reached Cambridge, to take command;
had his strategic eye taken in the situation that morning, the result at
Bunker Hill would have been different.
Lexington, the town which gave its name to the battle of April, 1775,
more decidedly than Concord,--though both names occur from the
first,--was an offshoot from the older towns of Cambridge, Watertown and
Woburn, rather than an original church seat, and was not established as
a town until 1712. A range of hills separates it from the valley of the
Musketaquit, and Paul Revere, in his night ride of April 18th,
celebrated by Longfellow, could not cross those hills, but left his
message of war to be borne on to Concord village by young Prescott,
distantly related to Prescott of Bunker Hill. But Lexington, though
little more than half so populous as Concord at that time, had a warlike
people, many of them descended from the fighting Monros of Scotland,
captured by Cromwell, and exiled for their loyalty to the Stuarts. In
Lexington they again turned out against the house of Hanover, and they
were commanded that April morning by the grandfather of Lexington’s most
famous son, Theodore Parker. Captain John Parker, though ill on the 19th
of April, did his soldier’s duty from two in the morning till midnight;
and some of his men returned the British fire in early morning, against
hopeless odds. Their turn came in the afternoon, when the retreating
British were only saved from total defeat by the cannon of Lord Percy.
Those first heroes of the Revolution, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who
had been at the Provincial Congress in Concord, at Lexington were in the
early morning in the parsonage of Rev. Mr. Clark, a kinsman of Hancock,
and narrowly escaped capture by the British soldiers, who had special
orders to seize them.
John Pierpont, a poet whose Pegasus balked now and then, in his verses
at Acton, April 19, 1851, anticipated Longfellow by this Wordsworthian
version of Revere’s ride to Lexington:
“The foremost, Paul Revere,
At Warren’s bidding has the gauntlet run
Unscathed, and, dashing into Lexington,
While midnight wraps him in her mantle dark,
Halts at the house of Reverend Mister Clark.”
As compared with Concord, though both were rural towns, Lexington was
then, and long remained, more rustic than its westward neighbor; with
less trade, less culture and fewer of the tendencies toward literature
which early showed themselves in the parish of the Bulkeleys and
Emersons. When Theodore Parker, in his career of scholarship and reform,
began to look outward from his father’s Lexington farm, it was towards
Concord, as well as towards Boston, that he turned his eyes; he taught a
district school in Concord, and preached in its pulpit as a candidate to
stand beside Dr. Ripley, the pastor of the Old Manse. In after years he
thus described the event which gave Lexington its chief title to fame,
before Parker’s own birth there:
[Illustration: THE BATTLE OF LEXINGTON, APRIL 19, 1775.
FROM AN OLD PRINT.]
“The war of Revolution began at Lexington, to end at Yorktown. Its
first battle was on the Nineteenth of April. Hancock and Adams
lodged at Lexington with the minister. In the raw morning, a little
after daybreak, a tall man, with a large forehead under a
three-cornered hat, drew up his company of 70 men on the
Green,--farmers and mechanics like himself; only one is left now
(1851), the boy who played the men to the spot. (It was Jonathan
Harrington the fifer.) They wheeled into line to wait for the
Regulars. The captain ordered every man to load his piece with
powder and ball. ‘Don’t fire,’ were his words, ‘unless fired upon;
but if they want a war, let it begin here.’ The Regulars came on.
Some Americans offered to run away from their post. Captain Parker
said, ‘I will order the first man shot dead that leaves his place.’
The English commander cried out, ‘Disperse, you rebels! lay down
your arms and disperse!’ Not a man stirred. ‘Disperse, you damned
rebels!’ shouted he again. Not a man stirred. He ordered the
vanguard to fire; they did so, but over the heads of our fathers.
Then the whole main body levelled their pieces, and there was need
of ten new graves in Lexington. A few Americans returned the shot.
British blood stained the early grass which waved in the wind.
‘Disperse and take care of yourselves!’ was the captain’s last
command. There lay the dead, and there stood the soldiers; there
was a battle-field between England and America--never to be forgot,
never to be covered over. The ‘Mother-country’ of the morning was
the ‘enemy’ at sunrise. ‘Oh, what a glorious morning is this!’ said
Samuel Adams.”
Seven men had been killed on the spot, nine wounded,--a quarter-part of
all who had stood in arms on the Green, under the eyes of Hancock and
Adams.
One of the Lexington Munroes, Ensign Robert, was the first man killed by
Pitcairn’s volley; he was sixty-four years old, and had been
color-bearer in the capture of Louisburg by assault in 1745. Two of his
sons and two sons-in-law were in his company on Lexington Green, and
eleven of the Munroe clan were in arms that day. Captain Parker did not
long survive the battle, dying the next September; but when the Civil
War came on, his grandson Theodore had bequeathed to Massachusetts, and
Governor Andrew had placed in her Senate Chamber, beside the trophies
sent by Stark from Bennington,
“two fire-arms, formerly the property of my honored
grandfather,--to wit, the large musket or King’s arm, which was by
him captured from the British in the battle of Lexington, and which
is the first fire-arm taken from the enemy in the war for
Independence; and also the smaller musket used by him in that
battle.”
Theodore Parker had died in May, 1860.
Pitcairn and his redcoats, delayed only half an hour by this bloody
overture to Washington’s grand career, marched on towards
[Illustration: MUSKETS OF CAPTAIN JOHN PARKER.]
Concord, little knowing what would meet them there. As they climbed the
hills in Lexington and Lincoln, they could surmise, however, that the
country was rising, for the church-bells were ringing an alarm of fire.
Pierpont, at Acton, overlooking the neighboring towns named by him, gave
the geography of this rising in spirited couplets:
“Now Concord’s bell, resounding many a mile,
Is heard by Lincoln, Lincoln’s by Carlisle,
Carlisle’s by Chelmsford,--and from Chelmsford’s swell
Peals the loud clangor of th’ alarum bell,
Till it o’er Bedford, Acton, Westford spreads,
Startling the morning dreamers from their beds.”
These are the small towns lying along the Concord and Merrimac rivers,
and their tributaries, which sent forth the minute-men to fight at
Concord Bridge.
Prescott had done his warning work well; and as Emerson said in 1835:
“In these peaceful fields, for the first time since a hundred years
(King Philip’s War), the drum and alarm-gun were heard, and the
farmers snatched down their rusty firelocks from the kitchen walls,
to make good the resolute words of their town debates. These poor
farmers acted from the simplest instincts; they did not know it was
a deed of fame they were doing.”
It was Emerson’s grandfather, the town minister, who met them on Concord
Green, before his church, and who entered that night in his almanac the
events he had witnessed, as soon to be quoted.
By the 17th of June, Massachusetts had an army; but when the Concord
farmers made their appeal to arms, two months earlier, it was the
spontaneous uprising of an armed people to maintain their own votes and
defend their threatened homes. This it is, and not their military
achievement, striking as that was, which gives their town a place in
martial history. The unregenerate imagination of mankind still
delights, after so many centuries of barbarous warfare, in the recital
of deeds of battle and the conquering march of great soldiers; Alexander
and Cæsar--even Hannibal and Bonaparte--continue to receive admiration
for their victories; but the purer fame of Washington rests on the
accomplishment of that for which the men of Middlesex rushed to arms on
the 19th of April, 1775. As Emerson, our Washington in the field of
literature, said, “If ever men in arms had a spotless cause, they had.”
“Behold our river bank,
Whither the angry farmers came
In sloven dress and broken rank,--
Nor thought of fame:
Their deed of blood
All mankind praise;
Even the serene Reason says
‘It was well done.’”
War had been the normal state of Europe; and from the hour when Bulkeley
and Willard made here their honest bargain with the red landlords of
these game preserves, cornfields, and fishing-places, down to the
Franco-German campaigns of 1870,--235 years,--there had been scarcely a
period of twenty peaceful
[Illustration: THE MINUTE-MAN.
FRENCH’S FIRST STATUE.]
years in that hemisphere. With us it was different; but for the strife
between France and England, in which the colonies were more or less
entangled, Massachusetts had seen no warfare in her borders for nearly a
century, when the insolence of the mother-country forced independence
upon us against our will. Yet the fight at the North Bridge was no
impromptu affair, as the utterances of our Concord yeomen show. They had
declared they would fight for King George or against him, as His Majesty
might elect; and when he had made his foolish choice they did not
hesitate,--much as they had reason to dread the ordeal by combat. And
here again came in the spirit of Calvinism, rallying to the Old
Testament, rather than to the New with its gospel of peace and
love,--its _amnistie générale_, as poor Trilby says. The grandfather of
Emerson (who was also the great-great-great-grandson of Peter Bulkeley)
was parish minister of Concord; he had been chaplain to the Provincial
Congress, and he died in Vermont, as chaplain in the Revolutionary army
of General Gates. Five weeks before the invasion of his parish by the
redcoats, he had preached to the militia companies gathered in this
town for review, a famous sermon from the text, “And behold, God Himself
is with us for our Captain, and His priests with sounding trumpets to
cry alarm against you.” He was as good as his word, for he was one of
the first to take his musket and join the minute-men in the early
morning of the 19th of April; and returning to the Old Manse (then the
new manse, for it was built for him and his bride a few years earlier)
to protect his family, he saw the brief fight at the bridge from his
study window, and wrote of the day’s doings this brief chronicle of an
eye-witness. His grandson found it in a page or two of his family
almanac, where, at the end of April, he wrote, “This month remarkable
for the greatest events of the present age.”
“This morning, between 1 and 2 o’clock, we were alarmed by the
ringing of the bell, and upon examination found that the troops, to
the number of 800, had stole their march from Boston, in boats and
barges, from the bottom of the Common over to a point in Cambridge,
near to Inman’s Farm, and were at Lexington Meeting-house, half an
hour before sunrise, where they fired upon a body of our men, and
(as we afterward heard) had killed several. This intelligence was
brought us first by Dr. Samuel Prescott, who narrowly escaped the
guard that were sent before on horses, purposely to prevent all
posts and messengers from giving us timely information. He, by the
help of a very fleet horse, crossing several walls and fences,
arrived at Concord at the time above mentioned; when several posts
were immediately despatched, that returning confirmed the account
of the regulars’ arrival at Lexington, and that they were on their
way to Concord. Upon this, a number of our minute-men belonging to
this town, and Acton, and Lincoln, with several others that were in
readiness, marched out to meet them; while the alarm company were
preparing to receive them in the town. Capt. Minot, who commanded
them, thought it proper to take possession of the hill above the
Meeting-house, as the most advantageous situation. No sooner had
our men gained it, than we were met by the companies that were sent
out to meet the troops, who informed us that they were just upon
us, and that we must retreat, as their number was more than treble
ours. We then retreated from the hill near the Liberty Pole, and
took a new post back of the town upon an eminence, where we formed
into two battalions, and waited the arrival of the enemy.
“Scarcely had we formed, before we saw the British troops at the
distance of a quarter of a mile, glittering in arms, advancing
towards us with the greatest celerity. Some were for making a
stand, notwithstanding the superiority of their number; but others,
more prudent, thought best to retreat till our strength should be
equal to the enemy’s, by recruits from the neighboring towns that
were continually coming in to our assistance. Accordingly we
retreated over the bridge; when the troops came into the town, set
fire to several carriages for the artillery, destroyed 60 bbls.
flour, rifled several houses, took possession of the Town-house,
destroyed 500 lb. of balls, set a guard of 100 men at the North
Bridge, and sent a party to the house of Col. Barrett, where they
were in expectation of finding a quantity of warlike stores. But
these were happily secured just before their arrival, by
transportation into the woods and other by-places.
“In the meantime the guard set by the enemy to secure the pass at
the North Bridge were alarmed by the approach of our people; who
had retreated as before mentioned, and were now advancing, with
special orders not to fire upon the troops unless fired upon. These
orders were so punctually observed that we received the fire of the
enemy in three several and separate discharges of their pieces,
before it was returned by our commanding officer; the firing then
became general for several minutes; in which skirmish two were
killed on each side, and several of the enemy wounded. (It may here
be observed by the way, that we were the more cautious to prevent
beginning a rupture with the King’s troops, as we were then
uncertain what had happened at Lexington, and knew not that they
had begun the quarrel there by first firing upon our people, and
killing eight men upon the spot.) The three companies of troops
soon quitted their post at the bridge, and retreated in the
greatest disorder and confusion to the main body, who were soon
upon their march to meet them.
“For half an hour the enemy, by their marches and countermarches,
discovered great fickleness and inconstancy of mind,--sometimes
advancing, sometimes returning to their former posts; till at
length they quitted the town and retreated by the way they came. In
the meantime, a party of our men (150), took the back way through
the Great Fields into the East Quarter, and had placed themselves
to advantage, lying in ambush behind walls, fences and buildings,
ready to fire upon the enemy on their retreat.”
[Illustration: HAWTHORNE’S OLD MANSE.]
This account differs slightly from others, and omits many particulars;
it is the most valuable single version of the memorable skirmish at the
Bridge,--in itself trifling, but momentous in its results. Parson
Emerson was himself one of those who wished to meet the troops near his
own meeting-house, but was wisely overruled. He says that two British
soldiers were killed at the Bridge--Shattuck, the town historian, says
three; the difference is accounted for by a dismal tale which Hawthorne
was perhaps the first to print. He derived it, he says, from Lowell, the
poet, who had picked it up, no doubt, in his short residence at Concord
in the spring of 1838, when “rusticated” here from Harvard College. It
may be read in the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, wherein is found one of
the best pictures of our peaceful scenery,--so far removed from thought
of bloodshed.
“A youth,” says Hawthorne, “in the service of the clergyman [Parson
Emerson], happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the
back door of the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side
to side of the Bridge, he left his task and hurried to the
battle-field, with the axe still in his hand. The British had by
this time retreated, the Americans were in pursuit; and the late
scene of strife was thus deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay
on the ground--one was a corpse--but, as the young New Englander
drew nigh, the other Briton raised himself painfully upon his hands
and knees, and gave a ghastly stare in his face. The boy--it must
have been a nervous impulse, without purpose--uplifted his axe, and
dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head.”
To a certain extent, Bancroft, in his account of the fight, confirms
this tale, saying:
“The Americans acted from impulse, and stood astonished at what
they had done. They made no (immediate) pursuit, and did no further
harm,--except that one wounded soldier, rising as if to escape, was
struck on the head by a young man with a hatchet. The party at Col.
Barrett’s might have been cut off, but was not molested.”
It is traditional that when this party, which had been sent to destroy
the military stores at Colonel James Barrett’s, two miles to the
westward, came back to the Bridge, alarmed by the firing, and saw their
countrymen lying dead there, one of them with his head laid open, they
were struck with fear and ran on to the main body in the village,
telling of what they had seen. And it was this single incident, very
likely, which led the English officers, and Lord Percy himself, to
report “that the rebels scalped and cut off the ears of some of the
wounded who fell into their hands.” Bancroft indignantly denies this,
saying, “The falsehood brings dishonor on its voucher; the people whom
Percy reviled were among the mildest and most compassionate of their
race,”--which is true.
It is no wonder that the British troops on
[Illustration: REVOLUTIONARY INN.]
their flight back to Boston that day, pursued and ambuscaded by hundreds
and thousands of the aroused militia of Middlesex and Essex counties,
should themselves have committed some barbarities,--for their defeat and
humiliation were great. They lost in course of the day 273 men and
officers,--more than had fallen on that glorious day, sixteen years
before, when Wolfe died in the arms of victory at Quebec. The loss of
the yeomanry was only ninety-one--a third of the British loss,--while
all the trophies and circumstances of victory were on the American side.
From that day, the Revolution was begun,--to end only with the creation
of a new republic. Concord, as President Dwight said, “prefaced the
history of a nation, the beginning of an empire.” “Man,” he added, “from
the events that have occurred here, will in some respects assume a new
character; and experience a new destiny.” Hence the interest with which
the world, from that day forward, began to look on this little town.
Yet the prominence of Concord in the revolutionary century that followed
her skirmish at the Bridge and along the Lexington road was in part
accidental; for Boston and Virginia were the two _foci_ of the American
revolt, and Concord became famous chiefly because it was near Boston. It
was otherwise with the literary revolution that began sixty years later,
with Emerson for its Washington,--and with results that seem as
permanent, and in some sort as important, as those which Washington
secured to his countrymen. In 1835, when Emerson’s literary career may
be said to have fairly begun, America had maintained her political
independence, but had lost much of her political principle: she was
powerful without moral progress, and without either a profound
philosophy or an original literature. The beginnings of poetry and art
were visible, but they were more in promise than in performance. Our
political writings, though disparaged by Jeremy Bentham, were coming to
be recognized as among the foremost; but we had little else that Europe
cared to read,--a few sketches by Irving, a dozen novels by Cooper, two
or three sermons and as many essays by Channing.
Into the stagnation of this shallow pool of American letters, Emerson,
in 1836, cast the smooth stone of his philosophical first
book,--_Nature_. It made little immediate stir; the denizens of the pool
paid small heed to it, and few of them guessed what it meant. It was
written in Concord, and chiefly at the Old Manse, where Emerson dwelt
with his mother and kindred before his second marriage in 1835, and
where Hawthorne afterward made the house and himself widely known. The
fixing of his own residence in this town by Emerson was due in part to
ancestry, and still more to a perception of the fitness of the region
for the abode of a poet and sage. The same perception, by Hawthorne,
Alcott, Ellery Channing and others,--together with the important fact
that it
[Illustration: HENRY THOREAU. (1857.)]
was Emerson’s chosen retreat,--brought those literary men here. Thoreau,
the most original and peculiar genius of the whole group, was born here,
and never had much inclination to leave Concord, although in youth he
talked of adventuring to the wild West,--Kentucky and Illinois at that
time,--whither his friend, Ellery Channing, afterward did in fact go.
Around Emerson, this circle, with many who only lived here temporarily
(like Margaret Fuller and George William Curtis), or not at all,
gathered as friends and brothers, or else as disciples,--and thus the
name of Concord became associated, and justly, with a special and
remarkable school of thought and literature. Thousands now visit the
graves of these worthies, to which, and to their haunts in life--their
walks and seats and sylvan places of resort,--an increasing host of
pilgrims come year by year.
The Arabs have a proverb,--“Though a hundred deserts separate the heart
of the Faithful from the Kaaba of Mecca, yet there opens a window from
its sanctuary into thy soul.” For those who have the true inward
illumination, therefore, pilgrimage is not needful; yet to all it is
agreeable, and it has been the practice of mankind for ages, and will
be, so long as we remain ourselves but pilgrims and wayfarers on this
earth. Nasar, the son of Khosrou, who wrote in the time of Haroun
Al-Rashid, and called his book _The Traveller’s Wallet_, was not the
first, nor Bunyan, with his _Pilgrims Progress_, the last, to look on
life as a journey; but let us hear what that Persian says of it:
“Man, endowed with intellect, must search into the origin of his
existence,--whence he came, and whither he shall go,--reflecting
that in this world he is making a toilsome journey, without stop or
stay,--not even for the twinkling of an eye,--until he has
traversed the measure of that line which marks the time allotted
for his existence. For that we are but pilgrims here on earth, God
has mysteriously declared.”
The attraction of Emerson and the rest of the Concord authors, whose
homes or tombs so many pilgrims visit, comes chiefly from the
recognition by them of this search by mankind after the
Infinite,--their insight into the nature and worth of this pilgrimage of
life which all are making. Man loves and seeks amusement to beguile his
toilsome or monotonous journey,--and hence the pleasure so many take in
the lighter and more graceful or laughable forms of literature. But
sooner or later, and in many persons at all times, what Tennyson calls
“the riddle of the painful earth” is before us all for consideration, if
not for solution. We see that the universe is moral,--even if we cannot
read the moral aright,--and we seek those who can give us “the word of
the enigma,” as the French say. Emerson gave it in his manner, Hawthorne
in his, Thoreau in still another way; and these three Concord authors
not only had much vogue in their lifetime, but are yet more widely read
since their death. Others, like Ellery Channing, found little audience
in youth, and time has not yet essentially enlarged the circle of their
readers. With the same moral view of life which his more successful
friends took, Channing, the poet (who must always be distinguished from
Dr. Channing, the divine, his uncle), had in his style something of that
distraction which Montaigne declares is needful to poets.
[Illustration: GRAVES OF THE EMERSON FAMILY.]
“The precepts of the masters,” says this eccentric Gascon, “and
still more their example, tell us that we must have a little
insanity, if we would avoid even more stupidity. A thousand poets
drawl and languish in prose; but the best ancient prose (and ’tis
the same with verse) glows throughout with the vigor and daring of
poesy, and takes on an air of inspiration. The poet, says Plato”
(and here Montaigne gives his own quaint form to the familiar
passage in Plato’s Laws), “sitting on the Muses’ tripod, pours out
like mad all that comes into his mouth, as if it were the spout of
a fountain; without digesting or weighing it. So things escape him
of various colors, of opposite natures, and with intermittent flow.
Plato himself is wholly poetic; the old theology, say the scholars,
is all poetry; and the First Philosophy is the original language of
the gods.”
To this wild rule more than one of the Concord philosophers conforms;
there is a perceptible lack of method, even when their meaning is fairly
clear. Hawthorne incurs less of this censure than the rest; but he
confessed that he did not always comprehend his own allegories, nor know
exactly the moral he would insinuate. Emerson goes more directly to his
mark; a Frenchman (Chantavoine) has said of him, “In his Essays he is
first of all a philosophic moralist, never quite forgetting that he was
once a preacher.” But, in contrasting him with French writers,
Chantavoine admits that Emerson has something which the light and
brilliant Parisian essayists lack:
“We are afraid, I suppose, of losing touch with things, if we rise
much above them; we do not soar high, content to skim the surface;
we distrust those generalities, however eloquent or edifying, which
might lead us too far aside. Yet, should we borrow something of
Emerson’s manner, French criticism, both historical and literary,
would gain by it; there might possibly be less ease, less lightness
of touch, less glancing wit in our essays; but in return there
would be more earnestness and depth in our judgments on men and
affairs.”
Emerson was a reader and admirer of French prose; he did not find much
poetry in French verse. The glancing of his wit was as quick and
searching as that of Paris; but he belongs more to the literature of the
world than most of the French prose authors since Montaigne and Pascal.
In American literature he is unique; so, in his very different way, is
Thoreau; so is Hawthorne; and no American, not even one of these three,
can be compared with any of them on terms of similarity. There is that
in their best writing which puts us upon our best thinking, and leads us
along the upper levels of life. Particularly is this true of Emerson;
Virtue, radiant, serene and sovereign, sways the realm where Emerson
abides, and to which he welcomes his readers, who become his friends. It
was said of Socrates, in a dubious compliment, that he “brought
philosophy down from heaven to earth”; it might as truly be said of
Emerson that he raises earth to the level of divine philosophy. His
method in this is purely poetic; therefore, while in verse he lacks what
is usually called creative power, he brings with him the atmosphere of
poesy more constantly than any modern poet; nor, since Milton, Spenser,
and Shakespeare, has any English poet excelled him in this. To this
quality, as well as to his courage of opinion and his penetrating
insight, do we owe it that he first proclaimed our intellectual
independence of the mother-country, as Franklin, Washington and
Jefferson declared our political independence. There is, indeed, a
certain resemblance between Washington and Emerson which might escape
the notice of those who look chiefly at the totally different work each
had to do, and the diversity of life and opinion which contrasted
Virginia and New England so sharply.
It must be confessed that, in 1732, Concord was hardly so constituted as
naturally
[Illustration: HOME OF EMERSON.]
to give birth to Washingtons; indeed, Virginia produced but this one,
amid all her great men. The extreme narrowness of Puritan opinion, even
when modified by Baptists and Quakers, was not favorable to the rise of
men like the great Virginians of the eighteenth century. A milder
intellectual climate, a temper less given to disputes about faith and
works, election and reprobation, was needful to produce characters so
broad, so moderate, and yet so firm, as Washington’s. New England did
give birth to Franklin, in the very midst of Mathers and Sewalls; but he
had to slip away to Philadelphia, in order to grow into his full stature
as philanthropist and philosopher. The intolerance of New England
deprived us, for more than a century, of the opportunity to produce
genius and the gentler forms of heroism. We had the Adamses to set the
Revolution on foot, the soldiers of New Hampshire and rural New England
to fight its battles; but its noblest leader must come to us from the
Potomac, and take us back there, when the long fight was won, to
establish our government beside its waters, in sight of his own broad
domain. It was not till this century, now declining, that Concord could
show an intellectual Washington; and Emerson must be born in Boston,
less provincial than our meadowy village, our “rural Venice,” as Thoreau
called it in times of river-freshet.
Naturally, when men appear on earth of Washington’s or of Emerson’s
stamp, there has been a long preparation for their advent. They are not
found among Hottentots or corn-crackers, ‘longshoremen or cowboys; but
in some long-tilled garden of the human species, where certain qualities
have been inbred by descent and betterment for many generations. Poverty
may be their birthright, as in the case of that greatest of Washington’s
successors, Abraham Lincoln, but the experiences that are transmuted by
descent into greatness are quite as often those of poverty as of wealth.
Self-reliance, veracity, courage, and the gift of command are essentials
in the founders and preservers of nations; these are fostered in all new
colonies, and therefore were common qualities in New England, as in
Kentucky and Virginia, in their early years. But among the planters of
Virginia there grew up a form of society, now forever extinct there, in
which these high qualities, together with courtesy and breadth of view,
were cultivated and flourished to an extent which the Calvinistic
rigors and enforced economies of New England never knew. That petty
system of inquiring into creeds and points of doctrine which our
ancestors brought with them from the Puritan parishes of England, and
which was increased here by infusions from Scotland, and the tyranny of
ecclesiastical control in Massachusetts and Connecticut, was not wholly
unknown in Virginia; but its ill effects were dissipated by the customs
of large landholding, outdoor sports, and certain traditions of honor
and breeding which the best of the Virginians brought with them from
England, and kept up by their habit of frequent intercourse with the
mother-country.
It was no sin in Virginia to dance and play the fiddle; the Anglican
Church, while prescribing a formal creed, did not concern itself to
inquire every Sunday, or every Thursday, into all the dogmatic
abstractions of the Westminster Assembly’s Catechism, longer or shorter;
men’s minds were left to take the course most natural to them. But in
New England, along with much acute speculation (the best type of which
is Jonathan Edwards), there went a morbid conscientiousness, turning
its eyes upon inward and even petty matters, and leading to numberless
quarrels about Original Sin, Half-way Covenants, Justification by Faith,
etc. Concord was less infested by this carping, persecuting, quarrelsome
spirit than most of New England; yet the church records, and the
collections of old Dr. Ripley, show there was much of it. Emerson
declares, and justly, that good sense has marked our town annals: “I
find no ridiculous laws, no eaves-dropping legislators, no hanging of
witches, no ghosts, no whipping of Quakers, no unnatural crimes.” But
the spirit which led to these mischiefs in other regions of
Massachusetts and Connecticut was all about us; and it narrowed the
minds and the opportunities of Concord before the Revolution. It was
chiefly in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, where ecclesiastical
domination was less rigid, that mental freedom manifested itself. In the
other colonies of the North, wealth and culture were apt to be on the
side of England, when our troubles began; in Virginia and the Carolinas,
and to some extent in New Hampshire and Maine, wealth took the colonial
side.
We may call the imaginative force and
[Illustration: A. BRONSON ALCOTT. (1875.)]
breadth of the Concord authors “Shakespearian” for lack of a better
word; but there was a man of singular mental penetration sometimes
visiting here,--Jones Very, of Salem,--who once made a wider
generalization--whether wisely or not. When Very was asked to
discriminate betwixt Wisdom and Genius, he said, “Wisdom is of God;
Genius is the decay of Wisdom”; adding in explanation, “To the
pre-existent Shakespeare, wisdom was offered; he did not accept it, and
so he died away into genius.” We had a superior sage here (Bronson
Alcott), who had little of the Shakespearian genius, but much of that
mystic wisdom which Very thought older and nobler than genius. Religion
was his native air,--the religion of identity, not of variety; he could
not be polytheistic, as many Christians are, even while fancying
themselves the most orthodox worshippers of the One God. He had that
intense application of the soul to one side of this sphere of life,
which led him to neglect the exercise of intellectual powers that were
amply his. His gift it was, not to expand our life into
multiplicity,--which was the tendency of Emerson, as of Goethe and
Shakespeare,--but to concentrate multiplicity in unity, seeking ever the
one source whence flow these myriad manifestations. His friends used to
call him, in sport, the “Vortical philosopher,” because his speculations
all moved vortically toward a centre, or were occupied with repeating
one truth in many forms. He was a votary of the higher Reason; not
without certain foibles of the saint; but belonging unmistakably to the
saintly order. Of course he was the mock of the market-place, as all but
the belligerent saints are; but he was a profound, vivifying influence
in the lives of the few who recognized his inward light.
From Alcott, in his old age,--he was in his eightieth year when the
experiment began,--came the impulse to that later manifestation of the
same spirit which had led Emerson and his youthful friends to the
heights and depths of Transcendentalism. I speak of the Concord School
of Philosophy, which, in the last years of Emerson and Alcott, and with
the co-operation of disciples of other philosophic opinion, gave to the
town a celebrity in some degree commensurate with its earlier
reputation. It began in the library of Alcott’s Orchard House, where his
genial daughter, Louisa, had written several of her charming books; it
was continued in a chapel, built for the purpose, under the lee of
Alcott’s pineclad hill, and amid his orchard and vineyard. It brought to
reside in Concord that first of American philosophers, Dr. W. T. Harris;
and it gathered hundreds of eager or curious hearers to attend the
lectures and debates on grave subjects which a learned body of teachers
gave forth. It continued in existence from the summer of 1879 to that of
1888, when its lessons were fitly closed with a memorial service for
Bronson Alcott, its founder, who had died in March, 1888. As was said by
the Boston wit of the fight on the 19th of April,--“The Battle of
Lexington; Concord furnished the ground, and Acton the men,”--so it
might
[Illustration: L. M. Alcott.]
be said of this summer university, that Concord provided chiefly the
place in which St. Louis and Illinois, New York and Boston, Harvard and
Yale, held converse on high topics. Yet Concord gave the school
hospitality, and several of its famous authors took part in the
exercises,--sometimes posthumously, by the reading of their manuscripts,
as in the case of Thoreau.
Along with the events and the literature that have given our town a name
throughout the world, there has flowed quietly the stream of civil
society, local self-government and domestic life; broadened at critical
times by manifestations of political energy, in which families like
those of Hoar, Heywood, Barrett, Whiting, Robinson, Gourgas, etc., have
distinguished themselves. Benefactors like Munroe, who built the Public
Library, Dr. Ripley, who for half a century filled the pulpit and took
pastoral care, and John Tileston, who brought the public schools to
their present useful form; soldiers of the Civil War, like Colonel
Prescott and Lieutenant Ripley, and hundreds of unnamed soldiers in the
battle of life,--women no less than men,--have given their innumerable
touch of vigor and grace to the ever-building structure of Concord
life. Painters of our own have added color, and sculptors like French,
Elwell and Ricketson have adorned the town with art. And so we pass on
into the new century, with no conscious loss of vital power,--yet with a
keen regret for the great men who have gone from among us.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
PLYMOUTH
THE PILGRIM TOWN
BY ELLEN WATSON
“Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong;--
Nay, but she aimed not at glory, no lover of glory she;
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.”
TENNYSON’S _Wages_.
To the stout-hearted Pilgrims who landed here in 1620 this “glory of
going on, and still to be” has been meted in lavish measure. For nearly
three hundred years the fire first kindled in far-away Scrooby in the
hearts of John Robinson, Elder Brewster, Richard Clyfton, the youthful
William Bradford and their devoted followers has burned with a clear
flame; the torch of truth there lit by them has been handed on from
generation to generation.
For the many latter-day pilgrims who visit the shrines of New England,
the gray boulder on Clarke’s Island where the weary voyagers rested
after their stormy cruise in the shallop; the humble rock on our shore
where they at length found shelter; our noble statue of “clear-eyed
Faith” and the not far distant monument on Bunker Hill, will ever bear
like testimony to the courage of that little band of independent
thinkers. Meeting in secret in the Manor-House of Scrooby, these
far-sighted heroes, when they “shooke of the yoake of antichristian
bondage” of the Church of England, made possible for their descendants a
later Declaration of Independence!
And every year, with the new knowledge it brings, adds to the pathos of
that early endeavor after religious and civil liberty. Many English
scholars, generously overlooking the Separation of 1776, have traced on
the mother soil of Old England the very beginnings of the Separatist
movement, and thanks to their careful study of musty records and yellow
parchments we now have a satisfactory, though still incomplete, record
of those few eventful lives to which we proudly owe our present freedom.
One enthusiast even finds the earliest evidences of this movement in the
concerted action of certain rebellious weavers of the twelfth
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A PAGE FROM GOVERNOR BRADFORD’S MANUSCRIPT,
“PLIMOTH PLANTATION.”
THE ORIGINAL IS NOW IN THE BOSTON STATE HOUSE.]
[Illustration: _Copyright, 1893, by A. S. Burbank._
PULPIT ROCK, CLARKE’S ISLAND.]
century--thirty weavers of the diocese of Worcester--who were summoned
before the Council of Oxford to answer a charge of making light of the
sacraments and of priestly power. Though they answered that they were
Christians and reverenced the teachings of the apostles, they were
driven from the country as heretics, to perish of cold. This “pious
firmness” on the part of the council, writes the short-sighted
chronicler, not only cleansed the realm of England from the pestilence
which had crept in, but also prevented it from creeping in again. But
the pestilence did creep in again and again and the weeds grew apace,
for which thanks are chiefly due to John Wyclif and his followers.
Even before the Reformation Foxe tells of “secret multitudes who tasted
and followed the sweetness of God’s Holy Word, and whose fervent zeal
may appear by their sitting up all night in reading and hearing.” But we
must be content to trace our ancestry and our love of liberty to the
early years of the seventeenth century, at which time, as we may now all
read in the clear lettering of Bradford’s own pen,
“truly their affliction was not smale; which notwithstanding they
bore sundrie years with much patience, till they were occasioned to
see further into things by the light of y^{e} word of God. How not
only these base and beggerly ceremonies were unlawfull, but also
that y^{e} lordly & tiranous power of y^{e} prelats ought not to be
submitted unto; which thus, contrary to the freedome of the
gospell, would load & burden mens consciences, and by their
compulsive power make a prophane mixture of persons and things in
the worship of God. And that their offices & calings, courts and
cannons &c. were unlawfull and antichristian; being such as have no
warrante in y^{e} word of God; but the same that were used in
poperie & still retained.”
So these brave men, whose hearts the Lord had touched with heavenly zeal
for His truth,
“as y^{e} Lords free people joined them selves into a church
estate, in y^{e} felowship of y^{e} gospell, to walke in all his
wayes, made known, or to be made known unto them, according to
their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord
assisting them. And that it cost them something this ensewing
historie will declare.”
The charming scene of these secret meetings is now well known. In the
little village of Scrooby, where the three shires of Nottingham, York
and Lincoln join their borders, then stood a stately manor-house, once
the favorite hunting-seat of the archbishops of York. Under this
hospitable but already somewhat crumbling roof William Brewster, who had
been appointed “Post” of Scrooby in 1590, welcomed these sufferers for
conscience sake. Hither they stole through the green country lanes, from
far around to listen to the “illuminating ministry” of Richard Clyfton,
“a grave & reverêd preacher who under God had been a means of y^{e}
conversion of many. And also that famous and worthy man, Mr. John
Robinson, who afterwards was their pastor for many years till y^{e}
Lord tooke him away by death.”
Here, too, from the neighboring hamlet of Austerfield, came the lad
William Bradford, already eager for spiritual guidance.
[Illustration: THE EARLY NORMAN DOORWAY AT AUSTERFIELD CHURCH.]
Walking under the elm-trees of the highroad, and through the yellow
gorse, across green meadows and by the banks of the placid Idle, he
stopped perhaps to admire the mulberry-tree planted there by the
world-weary Cardinal Wolsey. That arch-enemy of the Reformation little
thought that a branch of this tree would one day cross the Atlantic, to
be preserved with Pilgrim relics by friends of that “new, pernicious
sect of Lutherans,” against which he warned the king!
Near Bradford’s birthplace in Austerfield now stands, completely
restored, the twelfth-century parish church where he was baptized in
1590, and from which he “seceded” when about seventeen years old. Did
the quaint old bell-cote with the two small bells, the beautiful Norman
arch of the southern doorway with its rich zigzag ornament and
beak-headed moulding, the wicked-looking dragon on the tympanum, with
the tongue of flame--did this perfect picture of Old-World beauty flash
across his memory when, some thirty years later, he helped build the
rude fort on our Burial Hill, which served as the first “Meeting-House”
in New England?
We like to believe that Bradford belonged to the honest yeoman class,
that he “was used to a plaine country life & the innocente trade of
husbandrey”; we know that he had a natural love of study which led him,
despite the many difficulties he met, to master the Dutch tongue as well
as French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which latter tongue he studied the
more, “that he might see with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in
all their native beauty.”
[Illustration: Copyright by A. S. Burbank.
THE OLD FORT AND FIRST MEETING-HOUSE, ON BURIAL HILL, 1621.]
Associated as teacher here with the venerable Richard Clyfton, “the
minister with the long white beard,” and succeeding him as pastor, we
have found the eloquent John Robinson, that winner of all men’s hearts,
that helper of all men’s souls. A youthful student at Cambridge, living
in an age and in an atmosphere of religious questioning, he was deeply
troubled with scruples concerning conformity. He tells us “had not the
truth been in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, I had
never broken those bonds of flesh and blood wherein I was so straitly
tied, but had suffered the light of God to have been put out in mine
unthankful heart by other men’s darkness.” Happy in finding congenial
spirits in the new community at Scrooby, Bradford tells us he soon
became
“every way as a commone father unto them.” “Yea, such was y^{e}
mutuall love and reciprocall respecte that this worthy man had to
his flocke and his flocke to him that it might be said of them as
it once was of that famouse Emperour, Marcus Aurelious and y^{e}
people of Rome, that it was hard to judge wheather he delighted
more in haveing such a people, or they in haveing such a pastor.
His love was greate towards them, and his care was all ways bente
for their best good, both for soul & body.”
Under his inspiring guidance, and with William Brewster as their
especial stay and help, they were mercifully enabled to “wade through
things.” Some twenty-three years older than Bradford, we learn from that
modest chronicler, who wrote “in a plaine stile, with singuler regard
unto y^{e} simple trueth in all things,” that Brewster had also a wider
experience of the world.
“After he had attained some learning, viz., the knowledge of the
Latin tongue and some insight into the Greek, and spent some small
time at Cambridge, and then being first seasoned with the seeds of
grace and virtue, he went to the Court, and served that religious
and godly gentleman, Mr. Davison, divers years, when he was
Secretary of State, who found him so discreet and faithful, as he
trusted him above all others that were about him, and only employed
him in matters of greatest trust and secrecy.”
After the innocent Davison was committed to the Tower by the treacherous
“Good Queen Bess,” Brewster retired to Scrooby, where he greatly
promoted and furthered their good cause: “he himself most commonly
deepest in the charge, and sometimes above his ability, and in this
estate he continued many years, doing the best he could, and walking
according to the light he saw, until the Lord revealed further unto
him.”
But these assemblies, however humble and secret, could not long escape
the vigilant eye of the law. They were now
“hunted and persecuted on every side, so as their former
afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison of these which
now came upon them. For some were taken and clapt up in prison,
others had their houses besett & watcht night and day, & hardly
escaped their hands; and y^{e} most were faine to flie and leave
their howses and habitations, and the means of their livelihood.”
“Seeing them selves so molested, and that ther was no hope of their
continuance ther, by a joynte consente they resolved to goe into
the Low-Countries, wher they heard was freedome of Religion for all
men.”
This quitting their native soil, their dear friends and their happy
homes to earn their living, they knew not how, in a foreign country, was
indeed considered by many of them to be “an adventure almost desperate,
a case intolerable, & a misserie worse than death.” But after many
betrayals, many delays, many hardships by land and sea, they finally
weathered all opposing storms. At Amsterdam, that friendly city of the
Netherlands Republic, whose Declaration of Independence dates from July
26, 1581, they met together again, with no small rejoicing.
But in the midst of the wealth of this fair city they soon saw “the
grime and grisly face of povertie coming upon them like an armed man,
with whom they must bukle and incounter, and from whom they could not
flye.” For this reason, and to avoid religious contentions already rife
there, in a year’s time they decided to remove to Leyden, “a fair and
bewtifull citie, & of a sweete situation.” Here the story of the long
siege of Leyden, bravely sustained in 1573, must have excited their
ready sympathy, and the city’s choice of a university, offered by
William of Orange, instead of the exemption the city could have had from
certain imposts, must have won the admiration of these scholarly men.
The stay of the English exiles here of some twelve years--the period of
the truce between Holland and Spain--was, though trying, no doubt a good
preparation for the greater hardships they were to endure. While
Bradford wove fustian and his fellow-workers carded wool, made hats and
built houses, Brewster printed “heretical” books, and taught English
“after y^{e} Latin manner.” The harmony of their peaceful and
industrious lives attracted many friends, until some three hundred
kindred spirits joined John Robinson in his prayers for “more light.”
One who soon proved himself to be an invaluable member of the community
was Edward Winslow, a highly educated gentleman from Worcestershire. His
energy, his diplomacy and practical experience of the world, his
influence with Cromwell and other powerful friends in high places,
removed many difficulties in the way of the struggling colony that was
to be. Four times he was their chosen agent in England, and was thrice
elected governor.
Here John Carver, a trusted adviser, who later became the first governor
of New Plymouth, was chosen deacon of their church.
Serving in the troops sent over by Elizabeth to aid the Dutch in
maintaining the Protestant religion against the Spaniards was the
valiant soldier, Myles Standish, of the Dokesbury branch of the
Standishes of Lancashire, who date from the Conquest. There the
beautiful Standish church still bears on its buttresses the family
shield--three standing dishes argent on a field azure--and Standish Hall
is still hung with portraits of warriors in armor, beruffed lawyers with
pointed beards, and gay courtiers of the Queen--the Roman Catholic
ancestors of our plain fighter! Luckily for us all, he
[Illustration: Copyright by A. S. Burbank.
Governor Edward Winslow]
cast in his lot with the plucky workers he met in Leyden, and his cheery
presence and courage must have been of great service in planning the
perilous voyage on which they were about to embark.
For, as the truce with Spain drew to a close, and as the older among
them began to consider the uncertain future that lay before their
children, they longed to take refuge on some freer soil, however far
away. As Bradford writes, with a courage at once humble and sublime:
“Lastly (and which was not least) a great hope and inward zeall
they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some
way thereunto, for y^{e} propagating and advancing y^{e} gospell of
y^{e} kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of y^{e} world: yea,
though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for
y^{e} performing of so great a work.”
So, “not out of newfangledness, or other such like giddie humor, but for
sundrie weightie and solid reasons,” the voyage was determined upon, and
the King’s consent to their emigration to America sought.
Winslow tells us, in his _Briefe Narrative of the True Grounds for the
First Planting of New England_, that when their plans were laid before
King James he remarked that “it was a good and honest notion,” and
asking further what profits might arise, he was answered, “fishing.” “So
God have my soul,” he said, “so God have my soul, ’tis an honest trade;
‘twas the apostles’ own calling!” And we may state here, notwithstanding
Bradford’s statement that in the beginning “we did lack small hooks,”
New England, before 1650, annually sent to Europe £100,000 worth of
dried codfish.
After many weary negotiations, a patent was at length obtained, but the
future colonists were refused a formal grant of freedom in religious
worship under the King’s broad seal. A loan was made by some seventy
“Merchant Adventurers” in England, and late in July, 1620, we find our
future colonists on the quay at Delfthaven, ready to embark on the
_Speedwell_. They are surrounded by their tearful friends, for whom,
Winslow says, “they felt such love as is seldom found on earth.”
Many of their number are to stay at Leyden under the faithful care of
John Robinson, whose touching farewell words Winslow has preserved for
us:
“he charged us before God and his blessed angels to follow him no
further than he followed Christ; and if God should reveal anything
to us by any other instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it
as ever we were to receive any truth by his ministry; for he was
very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth
out of his holy word.”
This sad scene must have been still vivid in Bradford’s memory when he
wrote some ten years later in Plymouth:
“truly dolfull was y^{e} sight of that sade and mournfull parting;
to see what sighs and sobbs and praires did sound amongst them,
what tears did gush from every eye, & pithy speeches peirst each
harte”; “but they knewe they were pilgrimes, and looked not much on
those things, but lift up their eyes to y^{e} heavens, their
dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits.”
After a good run with a prosperous wind they found the _Mayflower_ at
Southampton, but as the _Speedwell_ proved unseaworthy they were again
delayed, and after putting in for repairs to Dartmouth and Plymouth, the
_Mayflower_ finally, on September 16th, sailed alone from Plymouth.
Observe the group of brave voyagers setting forth on an unknown “sea of
troubles,” trustful wives and children, manly youths and blooming
maidens, as they wave a last good-by to dear Old England from the deck
of the _Mayflower_. Their leaders form a notable band: Brewster,
Carver, Bradford, Winslow, Standish, the soul, the heart, the head, the
good right hand, the flashing sword, well-chosen instruments to unlock
the frozen heart of New England, and to found there
“Empire such as Spaniard never knew.”
Perhaps George Herbert, prince of poets, referred to this sailing when
he wrote in his _Church Militant_:
“Religion stands on tiptoe in our land,
Ready to pass to the American strand.”
Of the terrible discomforts and dangers of that perilous voyage of
sixty-seven days who has not read the pitiful story? Have we not, all of
us, “come over in the _Mayflower_,” and rejoiced with these patient
souls when at length, one clear morning in November, the shores of Cape
Cod lay fair before their expectant eyes?
Determining to put in to Cape Cod harbor, and so to land on a territory
where their patent could confer no rights, the leaders of the
expedition, after consulting together in the cabin of the _Mayflower_,
there drew up and signed the historic “Compact” which was to convert the
hundred voyagers into the founders of a commonwealth. There they
solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and of one another,
combined themselves into a civil body politic, to frame and enact such
just and equal laws from time to time as should be thought most meet and
convenient for the general good of the colony, unto which they promised
all due submission and obedience.
While their sloop-rigg shallop of some fifteen tons was made ready for
exploration by sea, those who went at once far into the forest came back
with reports of fine growths of oak, pine, sassafras, juniper, birch and
holly, abundant grape-vines and red cedar, which like sandalwood
“Sheds its perfume on the axe that slays it.”
They found excellent springs, many deer and wild-fowl, and what proved
to be their salvation in the wilderness, “divers faire Indian baskets
filled with corn, which seemed to them a goodly sight.” For this
precious seed-corn the Indian owners were conscientiously paid double
price some six months later.
The weakness and illness natural after the discomforts of such a voyage
now made themselves felt in an alarming manner, and an exploring party
was hastily organized to select the spot for their final settlement.
Setting forth in the frail shallop, a party of eighteen picked men,
after a successful “First Encounter” with the Indians, were driven by a
furious gale to take shelter in the lee of a little island lying in a
friendly harbor to the west of their starting-point. After thawing out
over a good cedar-wood fire and resting for a night, they explored the
island and repaired their boat. Of this island, afterward named for John
Clarke, mate of the _Mayflower_, Bradford writes:
“But though this had been a day and night of much trouble & danger
unto them, yet God gave them a morning of comforte & refreshing (as
usually he doth to his children), for y^{e} next day was a faire
sunshining day, and they found them sellvs to be on an iland secure
from the Indeans, wher they might drie their stufe, fixe their
peeces, & rest them selves, and gave God thanks for his mercies, in
their manifould deliverances. And this being the last day of y^{e}
weeke, they prepared ther to keepe y^{e} Sabath. On Munday they
sounded the harbor, and founde it fitt for shipping; and marched
into y^{e} land and found diverse cornfeilds and litle runing
brooks, a place (as they supposed) fitt for situation; at least it
was y^{e} best they could find, and y^{e} season & their presente
necessitie made them glad to accepte of it.”
So, on the 21st day of December, 1620, was made the now world-famous
landing at Plymouth, of which these few words are the humble record.
After a week of anxious waiting their return must have been hailed with
delight on board the _Mayflower_, and their good tidings warmly
welcomed. As with all sails set the good ship made her way into the
harbor, eager eyes doubtless watched with joy the high hills of Manomet,
the wooded bluffs, the shining, protecting beaches, the fair island, the
low friendly stretch of the mainland sloping back to the picturesque
hillsides, which make Plymouth harbor at all times and seasons a goodly
sight to look upon. And here at length lay safely at anchor the
” ... simple _Mayflower_ of the salt-sea mead!”
And now, “Courteous Reader,” as writes that most faithful secretary of
the Pilgrims, Nathaniel Morton, in his _New England Memorial_ (1669),
“that I may not hold thee too long in the porch,” even in such goodly
company, I bid you welcome to the Plymouth of to-day. For in the harbor,
the sand-dunes, the green hillsides and the fresh valleys and
[Illustration: THE HARBOR.]
meadows, in the blue streams and ponds, the past is inseparably blended
with the present. A small theatre it is, and the actors were but few who
played such important _rôles_ in the building up of a nation, but the
few memorials in which that early struggle for existence is recorded are
here lovingly preserved.
From the Rock where they landed we may follow their weary footsteps up
the steep ascent of the first street, now named for Leyden, their city
of refuge, and which may well be called the Via Sacra of Plymouth.
Running back from the waterside to the foot of Burial Hill, and parallel
to the Town Brook, it formed the centre of their daily toil, the scene
of their early joys and sorrows. Here on either hand were staked out the
homesteads for the nineteen first families; here with sturdy courage and
endless labor they dragged the trees felled outside the clearing, and
built their rude houses, thatching them with swamp-grass.
The site of their first or “Common-House” is now marked, and near the
lot assigned to Elder Brewster still we may stop to drink from the
Pilgrim Spring: the “delicate water” is fresh and sweet now as when our
thirsty forefathers delighted in it.
[Illustration: PLYMOUTH in 1622.
Copyright, 1891, by A. S. Burbank.]
Crossing Main Street, once the King’s highway, we find ourselves in Town
Square, under the shade of beautiful old elm-trees, planted more than a
hundred years ago. To the north was William Bradford’s homestead. Here
came all those who sought advice and help in their sore need, and here
in 1630 were begun those “scribbled writings” which, “peeced up at times
of leasure afterward,” are now printed, in letters of gold in many a
faithful memory! Here, perhaps, or in the vicinity of the Common House,
was concluded their first treaty with a foreign power for mutual aid and
protection, when the noble chief Massasoit, with his sixty Indian
braves, was led thither by Samoset, the friendly sachem, whose English
welcome had surprised the anxious colonists. Through Samoset they
learned that some four years before a pest had devastated that region,
called by them Patuxet. With him came Tisquantum, who became a valued
friend and interpreter, teaching them to plant their corn when the
oak-leaves were the size of a mouse’s ear, and to place three herring in
each hill with the seed-corn, which novel practice awakened serious
doubts in English minds.
In the autumn of 1621, this was the scene of the first Thanksgiving
held in New England, when, their houses built, their crops garnered from
some thirty fertile acres, their furs and lumber safely stored, they
made merry for three days, with Massasoit and ninety Indians as guests.
Even with fish, wild-fowl and deer in plenty, the good housewives must
have spent a lively week of preparation for such a feast!
Farther up the slope was built, in 1637, their first meeting-house, and
at the head of the Square now stands the lately completed stone church
of the first parish. In the belfry hangs the old town bell, cast by Paul
Revere, which for nearly a century has had a voice in the affairs of the
town.
Following the now steep incline, we stop to take breath on the brow of
the hill, the spot so wisely chosen by Captain Myles Standish for the
building of the solid timber fort, whereon he promptly placed his
cannon.
“Unable to speak for himself was he,
But his guns spoke for him right valiantly!”
And most persuasive did their voices prove, inspiring awe in the hearts
of the “salvages” for many miles around!
Here in the shelter of the fort they met for worship; here their hymns
of praise and prayers for guidance arose in the still air of the
wilderness. In four short months one half of these brave souls had been
laid to rest on Cole’s Hill by the waterside. And yet, when one April
morning those who were left to mourn them stood here watching the
_Mayflower_ weigh anchor, to flit with her white sails over the blue sea
which parted them from Old England, not one soul faltered, _not one went
back_!
The sad loss of their good Governor Carver, whose responsible place was
taken by William Bradford, and the daily trials and hardships of that
first long year, shook not their sturdy faith. Each day brought its
absorbing task, and when, one morning in November, the sentry at the
fort shouted, “Sail, ho!” and the _Fortune_ came sailing in by the
Gurnet Nose, bringing the first news from the other side, they were
ready with a return load of lumber, furs and sassafras for the Merchant
Adventurers. Of this load, valued at £500, Edward Winslow modestly
writes in his letter to England: “Though it be not much, yet it will
witness for us that we have not been idle, considering the smallness of
our numbers this summer.”
Two years later, after a trying season of drought and famine, when,
their corn exhausted, “ground-nuts, clams and eels” were their only
food, they still gave thanks to God that He had given them of “the
abundance of the seas, and of the treasures hid in the sand.” When even
the strongest men among them had grown weak for want of food, and their
eyes were wearied with watching for a friendly sail, the good ship
_Anne_ was sighted in the offing. Dear relatives and friends brought
them timely succor and new courage; a season of rejoicing followed, and
many happy weddings were celebrated.
In the _Anne_, perhaps, came the Old Colony record-book, in which was
made the early registration of births, marriages and deaths. The first
of the laws therein enacted, dating from December 27, 1623, established
trial by jury, as may still be seen in the quaint handwriting of these
hard-working heroes. This book, together with the Charter of 1629,
curious old papers concerning the division of cattle brought over in the
_Charity_ in 1624, ancient deeds signed by the Indians, the original
owners of this our goodly heritage, and many another time-stained
treasure, is now carefully preserved and gladly shown in the Registry
of Deeds in the Court House.
Looking to the north, beyond the town of Kingston, lying, with its sweet
rose-gardens, on the pretty winding river named for that arch betrayer,
Captain Jones, of the _Mayflower_, we see Duxbury and the green slopes
of Captain’s Hill, so named in honor of Myles Standish, who from the top
of his gray stone monument still guards us in effigy. Lingering near the
fort and the guns he loved so well, he must often have looked this way,
and admired the fine position this hill offered for a homestead. And as
with years the colony grew larger, as children came to him and Barbara,
and when his first Company of Standish Guards were in perfect training
and could be relied upon to defend the colony at need, he bought out
Winslow’s share in the famous red cow, and led the way to the new fields
he longed to conquer. There he was soon followed by John Alden and
Priscilla, the Brewsters and other families, and at Marshfield, near by,
the Winslows became their neighbors. So some eleven years after the
landing came the first separation, which though not a wide one was a
sore grief to their tender-hearted governor.
Among the now rare gravestones of the seventeenth century on Burial
Hill, we look in vain for the most familiar names: Elder Brewster died
in 1644, lamented by all the colony; Edward Winslow died at sea in 1655,
and in the two years following this sad loss Myles Standish and Governor
Bradford ended their labors. So closed the lives of these leaders of
men. Descendants, brave, wise and strong like themselves, continued
worthily the work they had nobly begun.
From 1630, Plymouth held friendly intercourse with the Boston Bay
Colony. The terrors of the war with Philip, treacherous son of the
friendly Massasoit, had united her with the neighboring colonies against
a common foe, and at length, after seventy-one years of nearly
independent existence, we find her, in 1692, absorbed, with some regret,
into the royal province of Massachusetts, but still ready to take her
part in public affairs.
That the _rôle_ played by her was a worthy one, the tablets about us
testify. Heroes of the expedition against Louisbourg, in 1745, lie here;
more than a score of Plymouth patriots who served in the Revolution, and
many a brave soldier who won his laurels in the War of 1861. Under this
stone, with its quaint urn and willow-branch, rests the famous naval
hero of the Revolutionary war, Captain Simeon Sampson, whose cousin
Deborah spun, dyed, and wove the cloth for the suit in which she left
home to serve as a soldier. Their story, and that of many another hero
and heroine now lying here, have been well told by Mrs. Jane Goodwin
Austin.
Beneath his symbolic scallop-shell we read the name of Elder Faunce, who
knew the Pilgrims, and, living for ninety-nine years, formed an
important link between two centuries. The stone consecrated to the
memory of the Rev. Chandler Robbins, who for nearly twoscore years
toward the close of the last century gave his faithful services to the
first parish, reminds us that at one time the town fathers found it
advisable to request him “not to have more horses grazing on Burial Hill
than shall be really necessary!”
Here, in old times, could be had a grand view of the shipping, come from
the West Indies and all parts of the world; from here the news of many
fatal shipwrecks had been spread through the town, to rouse willing help
for suffering sailors; here, too, no doubt, men’s souls were often
tempted to incur the fine of twenty shillings, the cost of “telling a
lie about seeing a whale,” in those strict days when a plain lie, if
“pernicious,” was taxed at half that price!
Old Father Time with his scythe and hour-glass--symbols of his
power--rules here over seven generations; but lingering while the
setting sun illumines the harbor and the surrounding hills with the same
radiance that rejoiced the first comers, while Manomet glows with a
deeper purple, and the twin lights of the Gurnet shine out, we may still
feel in very deed that
“The Pilgrim spirit has not fled.”
Turning from the story of Plymouth, as written on the lichen-covered
headstones on Burial Hill, let us wend our way under the shady elms of
Court Street to Pilgrim Hall, built in 1824 by the Pilgrim Society,
instituted four years earlier. Here we may trace, in the many treasured
reminders of their daily lives, the annals of those brave souls in whom
” ...persuasion and belief
Had ripened into faith, and faith become
A passionate intuition.”
On broad canvases are portrayed the tearful embarkation from Delfthaven,
the landing on this cheerless, frozen shore. Here are hung charming
pencil sketches of Scrooby and Austerfield, and many interesting
portraits: Dr. Thatcher, the venerable secretary of the Pilgrim Society,
and author of a charming history of Plymouth; the Rev. James Kendall,
for nearly threescore years the beloved minister of the First Church;
Gov. Edward Winslow and his son Josiah; Gen. John Winslow, who by royal
command in 1755 helped to drive from their homes the French Acadians;
Deacon Ephraim Spooner, whose “lining out” of the old hymns formed an
impressive part of “Anniversary Day”; Daniel Webster, who lived in
Marshfield, and whose glowing oration of 1820, in honor of the two
hundredth anniversary[66] of the landing of the Pilgrims, was
epoch-making in Plymouth annals.
Among the many priceless books and documents here we find the lately
acquired _Speculum Europæ_ (1605) by Sir Edwin Sandys, the active friend
of our Separatists in England;
[Illustration: THE “MAYFLOWER” IN PLYMOUTH HARBOR.
Copyright by A. S. Burbank.
FROM THE PAINTING BY W. F. HALSALL, IN PILGRIM HALL.]
two autographs of John Robinson render this volume of special interest.
A facsimile of the Bradford manuscript also is here, and a _Confutation
of the Rhemists Translation_, printed by Brewster in Leyden, in 1618.
Among the old Bibles worn by hands seeking for guidance and comfort is
one belonging to John Alden, dated 1620. Here also are a copy of Robert
Cushman’s memorable sermon on “The Danger of Self-love,” delivered by
him in Plymouth in 1621; one of the seven precious original copies of
_Mourt’s Relation_ the journal written by Bradford and Winslow in
1620-21, and so promptly printed in London in 1622; one of the four
copies of Eliot’s Indian Bible (1685); the Patent of 1621, granted our
colonists by the New England Company, and the oldest state paper in the
United States.
[Illustration: THE OLD COLONY SEAL.]
A large copy of the seal of the colony, in handsomely carved oak,
reminds us that the original seal was stolen in the days of Andros. Its
appropriate motto, “Patrum pietate ortum, filiorum virtute servandum,”
may be found
[Illustration: The landing of the FATHERS Plymouth Dec 22 1620
COPIED FROM AN OLD PAINTING ON GLASS.
CARVER
BRADFORD
STANDISH
BREWSTER
used as a heading of the first _Plymouth Journal_, published by
Nathaniel Coverly in 1785, of which one file is preserved in the library
of rare old books. Here are the Original Records of the Old Colony Club,
founded in 1769, but dissolved four years later when party feeling ran
high between the Whigs and Tories. Its worthy members first instituted
the celebration of “Forefathers’ Day,” and here we may read the bill of
fare of their first dinner, “dressed in the plainest manner,” beginning
with “a large baked Indian whortleberry pudding,” “a dish of Succotash,”
“Clamms,” etc. The Indian dishes, succotash and nokake, and the five
parched corns which recall the time when their last pint of corn was
divided among them, still form part of the “twenty-second” dinner of
every faithful descendant!
Here the sword of the truculent Myles Standish lies at rest, and beside
it, in lighter vein, a bit of the quilt that belonged to his wife Rose,
and a sampler skilfully embroidered by his daughter Lora. Between the
ample armchairs in which Governor Carver and Elder Brewster must have
pondered over many a weighty problem of government for the people and by
the people, is the closely woven little Dutch cradle
[Illustration: THE FULLER CRADLE.]
in which Peregrine White, that most youthful of voyagers, was rocked to
sleep. The large hole worn in the foot of the cradle suggests pleasantly
that the rosy toes of the sturdy baby colonists made early for freedom!
Perhaps the tiny leathern ankle-ties, hardly four inches in length,
which belonged to Josiah Winslow--this was long before they thought of
making him governor--had a hand, or rather a foot, in that bombardment!
Near the shoes is a dainty salt-cellar of blue and white enamel,
delicately painted with pink and yellow roses, suggestive of fine linen
and pleasant hospitality. Here too are
“The wheels where they spun
In the pleasant light of the sun,”
those anxious, lonely housewives, waiting for their good men to return
from dangerous expeditions in the forest or on the sea. Thus varied was
the freight of the _Mayflower_.
[Illustration: AN OLD ENGLISH SPINNING-WHEEL.]
As we walk through the lively main street of the town, we must stop to
admire the fine gambrel roof of the old house where lived James Warren,
that active patriot, who became president of the Provincial Congress,
and whose wife, Mercy Otis Warren, wrote the “rousing word” which
kindled many a heart in Revolutionary days. The line of fine lindens
just beyond, as they rustle in the cool sea-breeze, could whisper many a
charming tale of lovely dames and stately men, of scarlet cloaks and
powdered wigs they have watched pass by under their shading branches, of
treasures of old china and old silver, of blue tiles and claw-footed
furniture, of Copley portraits now packed off to the great city, and of
many changes come about since they came here as young trees from Nova
Scotia, in a raisin-box.
[Illustration: Copyright by A. S. Burbank.
THE DOTEN HOUSE, 1660.
THE OLDEST HOUSE IN PLYMOUTH.]
Overlooking the blue water stands the old Winslow house, the solid frame
of which came from England in 1754. Under its spreading lindens, through
the fine colonial doorway so beautifully carved, many distinguished
guests have passed, and here Ralph Waldo Emerson was married to Lydia
Jackson, who was born in the picturesque house just beyond, almost
hidden in trees and vines.
A drive toward the south will take us by some of the oldest houses. From
the one with a dyke in front, Adoniram Judson, the famous Baptist
missionary, took his departure for Burmah. His devoted sister then vowed
that no one should cross the threshold until his return, and the
door-step was taken away. Grass grew over the pathway, and the front
door remained closed, for he died at sea, in 1850.
As we pass the handsome new building of the High School, it is good to
remember, in this Plymouth of eight thousand inhabitants, paying
thirty-four thousand dollars for last year’s “schooling,” that in 1672
it was decided that Plymouth’s school, supported by the rents of her
southerly common-lands, was entitled to £33, the fishing excise from the
Cape, offered to any town which would keep a _free_ colonial school,
classical as well as elementary. And in that free school began an early
struggle of the three R’s against Latin and Greek. From Plymouth went
Nathaniel Brewster, a graduate of Harvard’s first class of 1642, and the
first of a long line of Plymouth students to enter Harvard.
Past the blue Eel River, flowing gently through shining green meadows to
the sea, we may drive along quiet roads in Plymouth Woods, under sweet
pines and sturdy oaks, by the shore of many a calm pond, sparkling in
its setting of white beach sand. We cross old Indian trails, perhaps,
and skirt acre after acre of level cranberry-bogs, pink and white, like
a sheet of delicate sprig-muslin, when in bloom, and bright with the
crimson fruit in early autumn. In these woods in their season bloom
sweet mayflowers, the rare rhodora, the sabbatia, sundew and corema, and
there many another treasure may be found by those who know how to seek!
When these forests were first explored, an enterprising member of the
_Mayflower’s_ crew, climbing a high tree to see how the land lay, saw
shining before him a blue sheet of water which he took to be the ocean,
and this was called after him “Billington’s Sea.” Following the shore of
this lake, through the leafy paths of Morton’s Park, we come upon the
source of the famous Town Brook, which with its honorable record of two
centuries’ supply of alewives has always played an important part in the
town’s annals, helping to grind the Pilgrims’ first grists in 1636, and
now lending its busy aid in turning complicated machinery. In the
fields on either side--the hunting-grounds of the banished race who once
rejoiced in their possession--are still found the beautifully worked
Indian arrow-heads and hatchets; here the smoke arose from their
wigwams; here they often paddled past in their swift canoes, and here,
perhaps, were shot the five deer that formed their offering in the first
New England Thanksgiving.
[Illustration: THE GRAVE OF DR. FRANCIS LE BARRAN, THE NAMELESS
NOBLEMAN.]
But the manifold charms of Plymouth and Plymouth Woods must be seen and
felt on the soil whence they sprung! So in the hope that the “Courteous
Reader” to whom they are still unfamiliar may care to verify this
truthful statement, we leave in brief and imperfect outline this story
of the Old Colony, whither “they wente weeping and carried precious
seeds; but they shall returne with joye and bring their sheaves.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CAPE COD TOWNS
FROM PROVINCETOWN TO FALMOUTH
BY KATHARINE LEE BATES
“Cape Cod,” wrote Thoreau, “is the bared and bended arm of
Massachusetts; the shoulder is at Buzzard’s Bay; the elbow, or
crazy-bone, at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist
at Provincetown--behind which the State stands on her guard.”
This sandy fist curls toward the wrist in such fashion as to form a
semicircular harbor, famous as the New World haven which first gave
shelter to the _Mayflower_ and her sea-worn company. On the 21st of
November (by our modern reckoning), 1620, the Pilgrims, after their two
bleak months of ocean, cast anchor here, rejoicing in the sight and
smell of “oaks, pines, juniper, sassafras and other sweet wood.” Here
they signed their memorable compact, forming themselves into a “civil
body politic” and covenanting with one another, as honest Englishmen, to
“submit to such government and governors as we should by common consent
agree to make and choose.” Upon the adoption of this simple and
significant constitution, the Pilgrim Fathers, still on board the
_Mayflower_ in Provincetown harbor, proceeded to set in motion the
machinery of their little republic, for “after this,” wrote Bradford,
“they chose, or rather confirmed, Mr. John Carver (a man godly and well
approved amongst them) their Governor for one year.” That same day a
scouting party went ashore and brought back a fragrant boatload of red
cedar for firewood, with a goodly report of the place.
These stout-hearted Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to set foot on
Cape Cod. Legends of the Vikings which drift about the low white dunes
are as uncertain as the shifting sands themselves, and the French and
Florentine navigators who sailed along the North American coast in the
first half of the sixteenth century may have done no more than sight
this sickle of land between sea and bay, but there are numerous records
of
[Illustration: THE BEACH, FALMOUTH.]
English, French and Dutch visits within the last twenty years before the
coming of the _Mayflower_. It may be that no less a mariner than Sir
Francis Drake was the first of the English to tread these shores, but
that distinction is generally allowed to Captain Bartholomew Gosnold,
who made harbor here in 1602 and was “so pestered with codfish” that he
gave the Cape the name, “which,” said Cotton Mather, “it will never lose
till shoals of codfish be seen swimming upon the tops of its highest
hills.” Gosnold traded with the Indians for furs and sassafras root, and
was followed the next year by Martin Pring, seeking a cargo of this
latter commodity, then held precious in pharmacy. Within the next four
years three French explorers touched at the Cape, and a French colony
was projected, but came to nothing. The visit of Henry Hudson, too, left
no traces. In 1614 that rover of land and sea, Captain John Smith, took
a look at Cape Cod, which impressed him only as a headland of hills of
sand, overgrown with scrubby pines, hurts [huckleberries] and such
trash, but an excellent harbor for all weathers.” After Smith’s
departure, Hunt, his second in command, enticed a group of Nauset
Indians on
[Illustration: From map of Massachusetts, copyrighted by Geo. H. Walker
& Co., Boston, Mass.
MAP OF CAPE COD SECTION]
shipboard, carried them off, and sold them into slavery at Malaga,
Spain, for twenty pounds a man. As a consequence of this crime, the
Indians grew suspicious and revengeful, but nevertheless an irregular
trade was maintained with them by passing vessels, until the pestilence
that raged among the red men of the region from 1616 to 1619 interrupted
communication.
The Pilgrims tarried in Provincetown harbor nearly a month. The compact
had been signed, anchor dropped and the reconnoissance made on a
Saturday. The Sunday following, the first Pilgrim Sabbath in America,
was devoutly kept with prayer and praise on board the _Mayflower_, but
the next morning secular activities began. The men carried ashore the
shallop which had been brought over in sections between-decks and
proceeded to put it together, while the women bundled up the soiled
linen of the voyage and inaugurated the first New England Monday by a
grand washing on the beach. On Wednesday, Myles Standish mustered a
little army of sixteen men, each armed with musket, sword and corselet,
and led them gallantly up the wooded cape, “thorou boughes and bushes,”
nearly as far as the present town of Wellfleet. After two days the
explorers returned with no worse injury than briar-scratched armor,
bringing word of game and water-springs, ploughed land and
burial-mounds. William Bradford showed the noose of the deer-trap, a
“very pretie devise,” that had caught him by the leg, and two of the
sturdiest Pilgrims bore, slung on a staff across their shoulders, a
kettle of corn. As the few natives whom the party had met fled from
them, the corn had been taken on credit from a buried hoard. The
following year that debt was scrupulously paid, but a custom had been
established which still prevails with certain summer residents on the
Cape, who are said to make a practice of leaving their grocery bills
over until the next season.
As soon as the shallop could be floated, a larger expedition was sent by
water along the south coast to seek a permanent settlement. Through wind
and snow the Pilgrim Fathers made their way up to Pamet River, in Truro,
the limit of the earlier journey. They did not succeed in agreeing upon
a fit site for the colony, but they sought out the corn deposit and,
breaking the frozen ground with their swords, secured ten bushels more
of priceless seed for the springtime. On the return of the second
expedition there was anxious discussion about the best course to pursue.
Some were for settling on the Cape and living by the fisheries, pointing
out, to emphasize their arguments, the whales that sported every day
about the anchored ship; but the Pilgrims were of agricultural habit and
tradition and had reason enough just then to be weary of the sea. The
situation was critical. “The heart of winter and unseasonable weather,”
wrote Bradford, “was come upon us.” The gradual slope of the beach made
it always necessary to “wade a bow-shoot or two” in going ashore from
the _Mayflower_, and these icy foot-baths were largely responsible for
the “vehement coughs” from which hardly one of the company was exempt.
Once more, on the 16th of December, the shallop started forth to find a
home for the Pilgrims. Ten colonists, including Carver, Bradford and
Standish, together with a few men of the ship’s crew, volunteered for
this service. It was so cold that the sleety spray glazed doublet and
jerkin “and made them many times like coats of iron.” The voyagers
landed within the present limits of Eastham or Orleans, where, hard by
the shore, a camp was roughly barricaded. One day passed safely in
exploration, but at dawn of the second, when, “after prayer,” the
English sat about their camp-fire at breakfast, “a great and strange
cry” cut the mist, and on the instant Indian arrows, headed with
deer-horn and eagles’ claws, whizzed about their heads. But little
Captain Standish was not to be caught napping. “Having a snaphance
ready,” he fired in direction of the war-whoop. His comrades supported
him manfully, their friends in the shallop, themselves beset, shouted
encouragement, and the savages, gliding back among the trees, melted
into “the dark of the morning.” After this taste of Cape Cod courtesy,
the Pilgrim Fathers can hardly be blamed for taking to their shallop
again and plunging on, in a stiff gale, through the toppling waves,
until, with broken rudder and mast split in three, they reached a refuge
in the harbor of Plymouth.
When the adventurers returned to the _Mayflower_ with glad tidings that
a resting-place was found at last, the historian of the party, William
Bradford, had to learn that during his absence his wife had fallen from
the vessel’s side and perished in those December waters. Three more of
the colonists died in that first haven, and there little Peregrine White
began his earthly peregrinations. In view of all these occurrences,--the
signing of the compact in Provincetown harbor, the first landing of the
Pilgrims on the tip of Cape Cod, the explorations, the first deaths and
the first birth,--it would seem that Provincetown is fairly entitled to
a share of those historic honors which are lavished, none too freely,
but, perhaps, too exclusively, upon Plymouth.
When the _Mayflower_ sailed away, carrying William Bradford and his
tablets, the beautiful harbor and its circling shores were left to a
long period of obscurity. Fishers, traders and adventurers of many
nations came and went on their several errands, but these visits left
little trace. The Plymouth colonists, meanwhile, did not forget their
first landing-point, but returned sometimes, in the fishing season, for
cod, bass and mackerel, always claiming full rights of ownership. This
claim rested not only on their original brief occupation, but on formal
purchase from the Indians, in 1654, or earlier, the payment being “2
brasse kettles six coates twelve houes 12 axes 12 knives and a box.” In
process of time, as the
[Illustration: PROVINCETOWN.]
English settlers gradually pushed down the Cape, a few hovels and
curing-sheds rose on the harbor shore, but the land was owned by
Plymouth Colony until Massachusetts succeeded to the title. These
Province Lands were made a district, in the charge of Truro, in 1714,
but in 1727 the “Precinct of Cape Cod” was set off from Truro, and
established, under the name of Provincetown, as a separate township. It
was even then merely a fishing-hamlet, with a fluctuating population,
which by 1750 had almost dwindled away. In Revolutionary times, it had
only a score of dwelling-houses, and its two hundred inhabitants were
defenseless before the British, whose men-of-war rode proudly in the
harbor. One of these, the _Somerset_, while chased by a French fleet on
the Back Side, as the Atlantic coast of the Cape is called, struck on
Peaked Hill bars, and the waves, taking part with the rebels, flung the
helpless hulk far up the beach. Stripped by “a plundering gang” from
Provincetown and Truro, the frigate lay at the mercy of the sands, and
they gradually hid her even from memory; but the strong gales and high
tides of 1886 tore that burial-sheet aside, and brought the blackened
timbers again to the light of day. The grim old ship, tormented by
relic-hunters, peered out over the sea, looking from masthead to
masthead for the Union Jack, and, disgusted with what she saw, dived
once more under her sandy cover, where the beach-grass now grows over
her.
Since the Revolution, Provincetown has steadily progressed in numbers
and prosperity, until to-day, with over four thousand five hundred
inhabitants, it is the banner town of the Cape. During this period of
development, the Province Lands, several thousand acres in extent,
naturally became a subject of dispute. Old residents had fallen into a
way of buying and selling the sites on which they had built homes and
stores, as if the land were theirs in legal ownership. Five years ago,
however, the General Court virtually limited State ownership to the
waste tracts in the north and west of the township, leaving the
squatters in possession of the harbor-front. “The released portion of
the said lands,” stated the Harbor and Land Commissioners in their
report of 1893, “is about 955 acres and includes the whole inhabited
part of the town of Provincetown.”
The present Provincetown is well worth a journey. From High Pole Hill,
a bluff seventy feet high in the rear of the populated district, one
gazes far out over blue waters, crossed with cloud-shadows and flecked
with fishing-craft. Old sea-captains gather here with spy-glasses to
make out the shipping; bronzed sailor-boys lie in the sun and troll
snatches of song; young mothers of dark complexion and gay-colored dress
croon lullabies, known in Lisbon and Fayal, over sick babies brought to
the hilltop for the breezy air; the very parrot that a black-eyed urchin
guards in a group of admiring playmates talks “Portugee.” Leaning over
the railing, one looks down the bushy slope of the bluff to the curious
huddle of houses at its base. Out from the horseshoe bend of shore, run
thin tongues of wharf and jetty. Front Street follows the water-line, a
seaport variety of outfitting stores and shops, mingled with hotels,
fish-flakes, shipyards and the like, backing on the beach, with the
dwelling-houses opposite facing the harbor-view. Back Street copies the
curve of Front, and the two are joined by queer, irregular little
crossways, that take the abashed wayfarer close under people’s windows
and along the very borders of their gardens and poultry-yards. Although
nearly all of the buildings stand on one or the other of these main
streets, there are bunches and knots of houses in sheltered places,
looking as if the blast had blown them into accidental nooks. In general
these houses are built close and low, tucked in under one another’s
elbows, but here and there an independent cottage thrusts its
sharp-roofed defiance into the very face of the weather.
[Illustration: WHARVES AT PROVINCETOWN.]
Up and down the sandy knolls behind the streets straggle populous
graveyards, where one may read the fortunes of Provincetown more
impressively, if less precisely, than in the census reports. Where the
goodly old Nathaniels and Shubaels and Abrahams and Jerushas rest, a
certain decorum of green sodding and white headstone is maintained,
despite the irreligious riot of the winds. The Catholic burial-ground,
too, is not uncared for in its Irish portion. Marble and granite
monuments implore “Lord have mercy on the soul” of some Burke or Ryan or
McCarty, but the Portuguese, wanderers from the Cape Verde Islands and
the Azores, sleep the sleep of strangers, with no touch of tenderness or
beauty about their dreary lodging. Only here and there a little Jacinto
or Manuel or Antone has his short mound set about with fragments of
clam-shell, as if in children’s play. Some lots are enclosed, the black
posts with rounded tops looking like monastic sentries, and a few
headboards, with the painted name already rain-washed out of
recognition, lean away from the wind. In the centre of this gaunt
graveyard, where the roaring Atlantic storms tear up even the coarse
tufts of beach-grass, a great gray cross of wood, set in a hill of
sand, spreads weather-beaten arms. The guardianship of the Church and
the fellowship of the sea these Portuguese fisherfolk brought with them,
and as yet America has given them nothing dearer.
The Portuguese constitute a large proportion of the foreign element in
Barnstable County, where nearly nine tenths of the people are of English
descent. The protruding tip of Cape Cod easily catches such ocean drift
as these Western Islanders, and they have made their way as far up the
Cape as Falmouth, where they watch their chance to buy old homesteads at
low rates. They are natural farmers and even in Harwich and Truro divide
their labors between sea and land. But it is in Provincetown that these
swart-faced strangers most do congregate, gardening wherever a garden is
possible, tending the fish-weirs, working, when herring are plenty, in
the canning factories, and almost monopolizing the fresh fishing
industry. Even those who are most thrifty, building homes and buying
vessels, wear the look of aliens, and some, when their more active years
are over, gather up their savings and return to the Azores; but the
raven-haired girls are beginning to listen to Yankee wooers, and the
next century may see the process of amalgamation well under way. Already
these new Pilgrims have tasted so much of the air of freedom as to wax a
little restive under the authority of their fiery, devoted young priest,
who upbraids them with his last expletive for their shortcomings as
energetically as he aids them with his last dollar in their distress.
In the general aspect of the port, it is as true to-day as when, in
1808, the townspeople petitioned for a suspension of the embargo, that
their interest is “almost totally in fish and vessels.” A substantial
citizen keeps his boat as naturally as an inlander would keep his
carriage. Any loiterer on the street can lend a hand with sweep-seine or
jibstay, but the harnessing of a horse is a mystery known to few. In
1819, there was but one horse owned in Provincetown, and that “an old,
white one with one eye.” In point of fact, however, the fortunes of
Provincetown seem to demand, at present, some further support than the
fisheries. It is believed that, by dint of capital, labor and
irrigation, more could be gained from the soil, and that the advantages
of the place as a summer resort might be developed. The whaling business
has greatly declined
[Illustration: PROVINCETOWN IN 1839.
FROM AN OLD DRAWING.]
since the discovery of petroleum, the mackerel have forsaken their old
haunts, and even cod-fishing, in which Provincetown long stood second to
Gloucester, is on the wane. Wharves and marine railways are falling into
ruin, and the natives of the old Cape seek a subsistence in Western
ranches and crowded cities, leaving their diminished home industries to
the immigrants. Still twoscore or so of vessels go to the Grand Banks,
and as many more engage in the fresh fishing. Emulous tales do these
fishermen tell of quick trips and large catches, for example the clipper
_Julia Costa_, under a Portuguese skipper, which set sail at six in the
morning for fishing-grounds about fifteen miles northeast of Highland
Light, took fifteen thousand pounds of cod, and arrived at her Boston
moorings an hour before midnight. But the “fish-stories” told in
Provincetown are more often legends of the past, before the heroic days
of whaling went out with the invention of the explosive bomb
lance,--legends of fortunes made in oil and ambergris, of hair-breadth
escapes from the infuriated monsters, and especially of Moby Dick, the
veteran whale who, off the coast of Chili, defied mankind until the
whale-gun rolled him over at last, with twenty-three old harpoons rusted
in his body.
The foreign element in Provincetown is not all Portuguese. There is a
sprinkling of many nationalities, especially Irish, and, more numerous
yet, English and Scotch from the British provinces, while sailor-feet
from all over the globe tread the long plank-walk of Front Street. This
famous walk was built, after much wrangling, from the town’s share of
the Surplus Revenue distributed by Andrew Jackson, and the story goes
that the more stiff-necked opponents of this extravagance refused their
lifetimes long to step upon the planks, and plodded indignantly through
the sandy middle of the road. Upon this chief thoroughfare stand
several churches, looking seaward. Sailors in these waters used to steer
by the meeting-house steeples, which are frequent all along the Cape.
Some of those early churches now struggle on with meagre congregations,
and a few are abandoned, the wind whistling through the empty belfries.
Provincetown has a record of ancient strife between the Orthodox and the
Methodists. The established sect resented the intrusion of the new
doctrine to such a degree that they made a bonfire of the timber
designed for the Methodist building. The heretics effectively retaliated
by securing the key to the Orthodox meeting-house, locking out the
astonished owners, and taking permanent possession, triumphantly singing
Methodist hymns to the Orthodox bass-viol. It was thirty-two years
before the discomfited Orthodox rallied sufficiently to build themselves
another church.
Journeying from Provincetown, “perched out on a crest of alluvial sand,”
up the wrist of the Cape, one sees the land a-making. At first the loose
sand drifts like snow. Then the coarse marsh-grasses begin to bind and
hold it, low bushes mat their roots about it, and planted tracts of
pitch-pine give the shifting waste a real stability. The Pilgrims
found, they said,--but perhaps there was a Canaan dazzle in their
eyes,--their landing-place well wooded and the soil “a spit’s depth,
excellent black earth.” But now all sods and garden-ground must be
brought from a distance, and a mulberry or a sycamore, even the most
stunted apple-tree that squats and cowers from the wind, is a proud
possession. When President Dwight of Yale rode through Truro into
Provincetown a century ago, he was amazed at the sterility and bleak
desolation of the landscape, half hidden as it was by “the tempestuous
tossing of the clouds of sand.” He was told that the inhabitants were
required by law to plant every April bunches of beach-grass to keep the
sand from blowing. The national government, stirred by the danger to the
harbor, afterwards took the matter in hand. Between 1826 and 1838,
twenty-eight thousand dollars were expended in an attempt to strengthen
the harbor shores by beach-grass. Of late Massachusetts has become
aroused to the desolate condition of her Province Lands, and is making a
determined effort to redeem them by the planting of trees and by other
restorative measures. These blowing sand-dunes have, however, a strange
beauty of their own, and the color effects in autumn, given by the low
and ragged brush, are of the warmest.
“It was like the richest rug imaginable,” wrote Thoreau, “spread
over an uneven surface; no damask nor velvet, nor Tyrian dye or
stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever match it. There was
the incredibly bright red of the Huckleberry, and the reddish brown
of the Bayberry, mingled with the bright and living green of small
Pitch-Pines, and also the duller green of the Bayberry, Boxberry
and Plum, the yellowish green of the Shrub Oaks, and the various
golden and yellow and fawn-colored tints of the Birch and Maple and
Aspen,--each making its own figure, and, in the midst, the few
yellow sand-slides on the sides of the hills looked like the white
floor seen through rents in the rug.”
The sand has dealt most unkindly of all with Truro, choking up her
harbor, from which a fine fleet of mackerel vessels used to sail. No
longer is her rollicking fishing-song, apparently an inheritance from
Old England, lifted on the morning breeze:
“Up jumped the mackerel,
With his striped back--
Says he, reef in the mains’l, and haul on the tack,
For it’s windy weather,
It’s stormy weather,
And when the wind blows pipe all hands together--
For, upon my word, it’s windy weather.
“Up jumped the cod,
With his chuckle head--
And jumped into the main chains to heave at the lead,--
For it’s windy weather,” etc.
This town, the Indian Pamet, was formally settled in 1709 by a few
English purchasers from Eastham, having been occupied earlier only by
irresponsible fishermen and traders. The new planters took hold with
energy, waging war against blackbirds and crows, wolves and foxes, for
the protection of their little wealth in corn and cattle, while none the
less they dug clams, fished by line and net and watched from their
lookouts for offshore whales. The Cape plumes itself not a little upon
its early proficiency in whaling. In 1690, one Ichabod Paddock, whose
name might so easily have been Haddock, went from Yarmouth to Nantucket
“to instruct the people in the art of killing whales in boats from the
shore.” And when the sea-monster, thus maltreated, withdrew from its New
England haunts, the daring whalemen built ships and followed, cruising
the Atlantic and Pacific, even the Arctic and Antarctic oceans. But the
Revolution put a check on all our maritime enterprises. The Truro
fishermen, like the rest, laid by their harpoons, and melted up their
mackerel leads for bullets. From one village of twenty-three houses,
twenty-eight men gave up their lives for liberty. In religion, too,
Truro had the courage of her convictions, building the first Methodist
meeting-house on the Cape, the second in New England. The cardinal
temptation of Cape Cod is Sunday fishing, and Truro righteousness was
never put more sharply to the pinch than in 1834, when a prodigious
school of blackfish appeared off Great Hollow one autumnal Sabbath
morning. A number of Truro fishermen, from the Grand Banks and
elsewhere, were on their way home in boats from Provincetown, when the
shining shoulders of hundreds of the great fish were seen moving through
the waves. With fortunes in full view, a goodly number of these men
shifted into boats which rowed soberly for their destination, while the
rest, with eager outcry, rounded up the school, and drove the frightened
creatures, with shouts and blows from the oars, like sheep upon the
beach. Church-members who took part in the wild chase were brought to
trial, but a lurking sympathy in the hearts of their judges saved them
from actual expulsion.
This befell within the period of Truro’s highest prosperity. From 1830
to 1855 the wharves were crowded with sloops and schooners, a shipyard
was kept busy, and salt was made all along the shore. At the middle of
the century, the town had over two thousand inhabitants, but the number
has now fallen off by some three fifths. The “turtle-like sheds of the
salt-works,” which Thoreau noted, have been long since broken up and
sold for lumber. There is weir-fishing still, supplying fresh fish for
market and bait for the fishing-fleets of Provincetown and Gloucester.
Rods of the black netting may be seen spread over the poverty-grass to
dry.
Although the sand of Cape Cod is in some places three hundred feet deep,
there is believed to be a backbone of diluvian rock. There is a clay
vein, too, which slants across the Cape and crops out at Truro in the
so-called Clay Pounds, now crowned by Highland Light, shining two
hundred feet above the ocean. This hill of clay thus renders a sovereign
service to that dangerous stretch of navigation. It must be borne in
mind that Cape Cod runs out straight into the Atlantic for twoscore
miles, by the south measurement, and then,
[Illustration: HIGHLAND LIGHT.]
abruptly turning, juts up another forty to the north. The shifty
sand-bars of the Back Side have caught, twisted and broken the hulls of
innumerable craft. One gale of wind wrecked eighteen vessels between
Race Point, at the extremity of the Cape, and Highland Light. The
average width of our crooked peninsula is six miles, but at Truro it
narrows to half that distance. Across this strip the storms whirl the
flinty sand, until the humblest cottage may boast of ground-glass
window-panes. The coast outline is ever changing and the restless dunes
show the fantastic carvings of the wind. The houses cuddle down into the
wavy hollows, with driftwood stacked at their back doors for fuel, and
with worn-out fishnets stretched about the chicken-yards. Here and there
a pine-tree abandons all attempt at keeping up appearances and lies flat
before the blast. The ploughed fields are as white with sand as so many
squares of beach, and the sea-tang is strong in the air. Accustomed,
before their harbor failed them, to depend chiefly upon the sea for
subsistence, the people of Truro now find it no easy matter to wrest a
living from what they have of land. Everything is turned to account,
from turnips to
[Illustration: OYSTER POINT, WELLFLEET.]
mayflowers. Along those sand-pits of roads, bordered with thick beds of
pink-belled bear-berries, or where the dwarfish pines, their wizened
branches hung with gray tags of moss, yellow the knolls, are gathered
large quantities of sweetest, pinkest arbutus for the Boston market.
Wellfleet, which drew off from Eastham in 1763, has also fallen on evil
days. Perhaps the fishermen have overreached themselves with the greedy
seines. There is high controversy on this point between line-fishers and
weir-fishers, but the fact stands that fish are growing scarce.
Wellfleet had once her hundred vessels at the Banks, her
whaling-schooners, built in her own yards from her own timber, and beds
of oysters much prized by city palates. There was a time when forty or
fifty sail were busy every season transporting Wellfleet shell-fish to
Boston. “As happy as a clam” might then have been the device of
Wellfleet heraldry. But suddenly the oyster died and, although the beds
have been planted anew, the ancient fame has not been fully regained. A
town, too, many of whose citizens spent more than half their lives on
shipboard, was sure to suffer from our wars, peculiarly disastrous to
seafaring pursuits. Early in the Revolution, Wellfleet was constrained
to petition for an abatement of her war-tax, stating that her
whale-fishery, by which nine tenths of her people lived, was entirely
shut off by British gunboats, and that the shell-fish industries, on
which the remaining tenth depended, was equally at a standstill. In this
distress, as again in the Civil War, Cape Cod sailors took to
privateering and made a memorable record. Wellfleet, like Truro, has
lessened more than one half in population since 1850, but her shell
roads are better than the sand-ruts of her neighbor, and bicyclists and
other summer visitors are beginning to find her out. She has her own
melancholy charm of barrenness and desolation quite as truly as she has
her characteristic dainties of quahaug pie and fried-quahaug cakes. The
place abounds in dim old stories, from the colonial legend of the
minister’s deformed child, done to death by a dose from its father’s
hand, that child whose misshapen little ghost still flits, on moonlight
nights, about a certain rosebush, to the many-versioned tale of the
buccaneer, ever and anon seen prowling about that point on the Back Side
where Sam Bellamy’s pirate-ship was cast away, and stooping to gather
the coins flung up to him by the skeleton hands of his drowned
shipmates. A volume would not suffice for the stories of these Cape
towns. Their very calendar is kept by storms: as the Magee storm of
December, 1778, when the government brig _General Arnold_, commanded by
Captain James Magee, went down; or the Mason and Slidell storm of 1862,
when the Southern emissaries were brought from Fort Warren to
Provincetown, and there, amidst the protest of the elements, yielded up
to the British steamer _Rinaldo_; or the pitiless October gale of 1841,
when from Truro alone forty-seven men were swallowed by the sea.
[Illustration: BISHOP AND CLERK LIGHT, HYANNIS.]
The quiet little town of Eastham, originally “Nawsett,” settled in 1646,
only seven years after the three pioneers, Barnstable, Sandwich and
Yarmouth, has shared the hard fortunes of the lower Cape. With a remnant
of less than five hundred inhabitants, it finds, under the present
stress, a resource in asparagus, shipping a carload or two to Boston
every morning in the season. To this land industry the ocean consents to
contribute, the soil being dressed for “sparrowgrass” with seaweed and
shells. But no hardship can deprive Eastham of its history. After the
encounter between the Pilgrims and Indians here in 1620, the place was
not visited again until the following July, when Governor Bradford sent
from Plymouth a boatload of ten men to recover that young scapegrace,
John Billington. This boy, whose father, ten years after, was hanged by
the colonists for murder, had come near blowing up the _Mayflower_, in
Provincetown harbor, by shooting off a fowling-piece in her cabin, close
by an open keg of powder, and, later, must needs lose himself in
Plymouth woods. He had wandered into the territory of the Nausets, who,
although this was the tribe which had suffered from Hunt’s perfidy,
restored the lad unharmed to the English. The Nausets further proved
their friendliness by supplying the Pilgrims, in the starving time of
1622, with stores of corn and beans. But the following year, suspecting
an Indian plot against the colonists, Myles Standish, that “little
chimney soon on fire,” appeared upon the Cape in full panoply of war,
executed certain of the alleged conspirators and so terrified the rest
that many fled to the marshes and miserably perished.
[Illustration: OLD WINDMILL, EASTHAM.]
The traveller up the Cape notices still that Eastham has more of a land
look than the lower towns. The soil is darker, small stones appear, and
the trees, although still twisted to left and right, as if to dodge a
blow, are larger. The Indians had maize-fields there and the site seemed
so promising to the Pilgrims that talk sprang up in the early forties of
transferring the Plymouth colony thither. As a compromise, several of
the old-comers obtained a grant of the Nauset land, and established a
branch settlement, soon incorporated as a township. Promptly arose
their meeting-house, twenty feet square, with port-holes and a thatch.
They secured a full congregation by absence penalties of ten shillings,
a flogging or the stocks. One of these sturdy fathers in the faith,
Deacon Doane, is said to have lived to the patriarchal age of one
hundred and ten, rounding life’s circle so completely that at the end,
as at the beginning, he was helplessly rocked in a cradle.
Thoreau was amused over a provision made by the town of Eastham in 1662,
that “a part of every whale cast on shore be appropriated for the
support of the ministry,” and drew a fancy-picture of the old parsons
sitting on the sand-hills in the storms, anxiously watching for their
salaries to be rolled ashore over the bars of the Back Side. One of
these worthies, Rev. Samuel Treat, whose oratory outroared the stormy
surf, shares with Richard Bourne, of Sandwich, the memory of a true
pastoral care for the Cape Indians. He was, in return, so well beloved,
that, on his death, his wild converts dug a long passage through the
remarkably deep snowfall of the time, and bore him on their shoulders
down this white archway to his grave. The Revolutionary War was a heavy
drain on the resources of the staunch little town, but, with the
restoration of peace, whaling and all kinds of deep-sea fishing were
resumed, and a tide of prosperity set in. Salt-works were established,
and presently Eastham was able to afford such luxuries as a pulpit
cushion and a singing-school.
Orleans, set off in 1797 from the southerly portion of Eastham, has an
old-fashioned quaintness that is better than business prosperity. Sand
has partially closed the harbors, and the population has been dwindling
for the past half-century, but the ocean still serves old neighbors as
it can with quahaugs and the seaweed, now collected for paper-making.
The distinction of being the terminus of the French Atlantic Cable from
Brest is in keeping with the name Orleans--a unique instance of a
foreign title among these old Cape towns. The early settlers put by the
melodious Indian words, Succanessett, Mattacheeset, and the rest, and
substituted the dear home names from Devon, Cornwall, Norfolk and Kent.
The christening of Brewster, Bourne and Dennis honored severally the
Pilgrim elder, the Sandwich friend of the Indians and a Yarmouth pastor;
but these are of comparatively recent date. As Wellfleet and Orleans
have been cut, on north and south, out of the original Eastham, so were
Harwich, Chatham, Dennis, Brewster, once “within the liberties of
Yarmouth.”
The history of Yarmouth, too, is so closely allied to the histories of
Barnstable and of Sandwich, with her daughter Bourne, that the story of
all these may be told as one.
These three initial settlements on the Cape were recognized as townships
in 1639. From the outset, the difference in their locations imposed upon
them different tasks. Yarmouth, the elbow town of the Cape, bore the
brunt of wind and wave; Sandwich kept the border, notably in King
Philip’s War, when she guarded the faithful Cape Indians from temptation
and received for safe harborage English refugees from the ravaged
districts; and Barnstable, the aristocratic sister of the group, made
traditions, set examples and produced the Otis family. With Old
Yarmouth, the Cape widens. No longer do householders, as at Truro, own
land in strips from shore to shore. The soil, too, deepens, and the cows
need not with hungry noses brush away the drifted sand to find the
grass. On the Back Side is no marked change in aspect. Still pine grove
after pine grove adds flavor to the salt air, and where the carpet of
needles is trodden through, gleam patches of white sand. The strange
reappearance of the _Somerset_ is out-miracled in Old Ship Harbor,
where, in 1863, long after the significance of the name had been
forgotten, the hull of the _Sparrow-Hawk_, wrecked there in 1626, on her
way from London to Virginia, rose again to view. This portion of the
Cape is in excellent repute with pleasure-seekers, and the seaside
cottage is ubiquitous, especially in beautiful Chatham, whose
ever-changing shore takes the wildest raging of the surf. Harwich, which
has gone through the regular stages of whaling, codding,
mackerel-fishing and salt-making, cultivates in turn the summer boarder,
but somewhat quizzically. Retired sea-captains are not easily overawed
even by golf-sticks, and retired sea-captains, in Harwich, are as thick
as cranberries. Snuffing the brine, they pace their porches like so many
quarter-decks and delight their auditors and themselves with marvellous
recitals. The Cape has not proved friendly to manufactures in general.
Salt-works and glass-works have come to naught,--but the spinning of
sea-yarns is a perennial industry.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE CHATHAM LIGHT.]
Many of the summer guests prefer the north side of the Cape, where fogs
are less frequent, or where, in ancient Indian parlance, old Maushope
smokes his pipe less often. Such find in Brewster and Dennis no less
delightful colonies of ancient ship-masters, living easily off their
sea-hoards. In 1837 that little town of Dennis claimed no fewer than one
hundred and fifty skippers sailing from various American ports, and in
1850 it was said that more sea-captains went on foreign voyages from
Brewster than from any other place in the United States. Often their
wives sailed with them and had thereafter something wider than village
gossip to bring to the quilting-and the sewing-circle. It was a great
day for the children in the village when a sea-captain came home. From
door to door went his frank sailor-gifts, jars of Chinese sweetmeats,
shimmering Indian stuffs, tamarinds, cocoanuts, parrots, fans of gay
feather, boxes of spicy wood, glowing corals, and such great, whispering
shells as Cape Cod beaches never knew. It was a hospitable and merry
time, given to savory suppers, picnic clambakes, and all manner of
neighborly good-cheer. Even the common dread made for a closer sympathy.
Any woman, going softly to her neighbor to break the news of the
husband lost in Arctic ice, might in some dark hour drop her head upon
that neighbor’s shoulder in hearing of a son drowned off the Banks or
slain by South Sea Islanders.
The old town of Yarmouth, dozing thus among children already gray, has
many a thing to dream about, when the surf is loud. She remembers the
terrible gale of 1635, in which the Thacher family were wrecked upon the
island that since has borne their name, the March snow-storm that
destroyed the three East Indiamen from Salem, the stranding of the
English _Jason_, and many a tragedy more. Along that treacherous Back
Side, lighthouse towers are now closely set, and well-equipped,
well-manned life-saving stations have succeeded the rude Charity Houses,
the fireplace, wood and matches, straw pallet, and signal-pole which
used to give what succor they might to hapless mariners. The old
volunteer coast-guard, which rarely failed to pace the beach in storms,
is now replaced by a regular patrol, carrying lanterns and red
hand-lights and thoroughly drilled in the use of shot-line and
breeches-buoy. But still the fierce-blowing
[Illustration: LIFE-SAVING STATION AT WELLFLEET.]
sand cuts their faces to bleeding and still the furious surf makes
playthings of their lifeboats, so that manhood has no less heroic
opportunity than in the earlier days. The crew at one of these stations,
after an exposure of twelve hours on the wintry beach, failed in every
effort to launch the surf-boat and had to see the rescue they should
have made effected by a crew of fishermen volunteers. The keeper brooded
over his disgrace and the following winter wiped out what is known upon
the Cape as the “goading slur” by a
[Illustration: BASS RIVER BRIDGE. SOUTH YARMOUTH.]
desperate launching in a surf that beat the life from his body.
Ever since the day of the Pilgrims, who made the suggestion, and of
George Washington, who furthered the project, there has been talk of a
Cape Cod canal to expedite traffic and avert disaster. A channel between
Eastham and Orleans was once forced by the sea, and various routes
through Yarmouth, Barnstable and Sandwich have been surveyed, and
charters granted, but ships still round Race Point. The railroad,
however, which was built by slow stages down the Cape and reached
Provincetown only a quarter of a century since, has facilitated travel,
doing away both with the red-and-yellow mail-coach, which used, a
hundred years ago, to clatter through to Boston in two glorious days,
and with the packet service of jolly memory. Yarmouth and Barnstable
were sharp rivals in these packet trips, Barnstable putting her
victories into verse:
“The _Commodore Hull_ she sails so dull
She makes her crew look sour;
The _Eagle Flight_ she is out of sight
Less than a half an hour.
But the bold old _Emerald_ takes delight
To beat the _Commodore_ and the _Flight_.”
[Illustration: BARNSTABLE INN.]
Barnstable has pursued from the outset a course of modest prosperity.
She does not ask too much of fortune. If her census-roll has gained only
five in the last decade, that is better than losing, as most of the Cape
towns have done, and, even so, her numbers rank next to Provincetown.
How humble were the beginnings of this sedate and gracious county seat
may be learned from the letter of an early citizen, declining Governor
Winslow’s appointment to lead an expedition against the Dutch. This
quiet colonist, who commanded the Plymouth forces in King Philip’s War,
pleads his domestic cares:
“My wife, as is well known to the whole town, is not only a weak
woman, and has been so all along, but now, by reason of age, being
sixty-seven years and upwards, and nature decaying, so her illness
grows more strongly upon her. Never a day passes but she is forced
to rise at break of day, or before. She cannot lie for want of
breath. And when she is up, she cannot light a pipe of tobacco, but
it must be lighted for her. And she has never a maid. That day your
letter came to my hands, my maid’s year being out, she went away,
and I cannot get or hear of another. And then in regard of my
occasions abroad, for the tending and looking after all my
creatures, the fetching home my hay, that is yet at the place where
it grew, getting of wood, going to mill, and for the performing all
other family occasions, I have now but a small Indian boy about
thirteen years of age, to help me. Sir, I can truly say that I do
not in the least waive the business out of an effeminate or
dastardly spirit, but am as freely willing to serve my King and my
country as any man whatsoever, in what I am capable and fitted for,
but do not understand that a man is so called to serve his country
with the inevitable ruin and destruction of his own family.”
An “effeminate or dastardly spirit” would indeed be a novelty in the
birthplace of James Otis. But it was not only in face of the Indian and
the redcoat that these three old towns showed firm courage. To their
glory be it remembered that they withstood the persecutor and bluntly
refused to enforce the laws against heresy, so that a special officer
had to be sent by Plymouth Court to hunt out and oppress the Quakers.
Under his petty tyrannies, the faith of the Friends gained many
converts, and Quakerism became permanently established on the Cape.
These upper towns have never depended on the sea as exclusively as those
below, and hence the decline of the fisheries has been less disastrous
to them. They need industries to hold their young people at home, but
the marine manufacture of salt by solar evaporation, the discovery of a
Dennis sea-captain, has had its day, and the once famous Sandwich
glass-works are now idle. Sheep-raising and cattle-raising were long
since abandoned, but while the New England Thanksgiving lasts, cranberry
culture bids fair to yield an honest profit. As early as 1677,
Massachusetts presented Charles II. (put out of humor by the pine-tree
shilling) with three thousand codfish, two hogsheads of samp and ten
barrels of cranberries. These last are still good enough for a better
king than the Merry Monarch, and cranberry-picking is one of the most
picturesque sights on the modern Cape. Hundreds of pickers, gathering by
hand or with the newly invented machines, move over a bog in ordered
companies. The “summer folks” flock to the fun, and Portuguese,
Italians, Swedes, Poles, Finns, Russians, troop down from Boston and
over from New Bedford for the brief cranberry season, or they may come
earlier to join the blueberry-pickers that dot the August hills. The
bogs are easily made from the wastes of swamp, which are drained,
sanded, planted and given three years to grow a solid mat of vines. The
crop from a few acres brings dollars enough to carry the thrifty Cape
Codder through the year. Rents are of the lowest, and the shrewd old
seaman who tends his own garden, salts his own pork, raises his own
chickens, milks his own cow and occasionally “goes a-fishin’,” while his
wife cooks and sews, and “ties tags” for pin-money, has no heavy bills
to meet. There is so little actual poverty in these towns that the
poorhouse is often rented.
Even Mashpee, once the Indian reservation, but now a little township
peopled by half-breeds, mulattoes and a sprinkling of whites, grows
tidier and more capable every year. The aborigines of Cape Cod have left
slight traces save the melodious names that cling to bay and creek.
Arrow-heads are scattered about, and now and then the plough turns up
one of the clam-shell hoes with which the Nausets used to till their
maize-fields. The Praying Indians of the Cape deserve our memory, for
they were always faithful to their English neighbors. When the first
regiment was raised in Barnstable County for the Revolutionary War,
twenty-two Mashpees enlisted, of whom but one came home. A Praying
Indian of Yarmouth has won a place in New England song,--Nauhaught the
Deacon, who, hunger-pinched, restored the tempting purse of gold to the
Wellfleet skipper and received a tithe “as an honest man.”
The beauty of the upper Cape, culminating in the lovely town of
Falmouth, is largely rural and sylvan. A system of dyking has, within
the last fifty years, converted much of the salt marsh to good, fresh
meadow, and, from Orleans up, the look of the country is more and more
agricultural. Portions of Yarmouth are well wooded, and in Barnstable,
Sandwich and Falmouth are depths of forest where the fox and the deer
run wild. The wolf alone has been exterminated, and that with no small
trouble, the Cape finally proposing, after grisly heads had been nailed
on all her meeting-houses, to build a high fence along her upper border
and shut the wolves out. But Plymouth and Wareham objected, from their
side of the question, to having the wolves shut in, and this ingenious
scheme had to be abandoned. These woodlands are dotted in profusion with
silvery ponds, which the Fish Commission at Wood’s Holl keeps well
stocked. Often the north side, as in Sandwich, is skirted by long
stretches of unreclaimed marsh, over which the heron flaps, with the
distinguished air of an old resident, and from which the sweet whistle
of the marsh quail answers the “Bob White” of the woods. There is plenty
of rock in this landscape, the backbone of the Cape jutting through.
Barnstable proudly exhibits four hundred feet of wall, two feet in
width, wrought from a single mass of granite found within her limits.
Falmouth arbutus grows pinkest about the base of a big boulder known as
City Rock, and a field of tumbled stones upon her Quisset road is
accounted for on the hypothesis that here the Devil, flying with his
burden over to Nantucket, “broke his apron-string.” The trees, too, are
of goodly size and stand erect. Elms, silver-leaf poplars, balm of
Gileads, great sycamores, spotted with iron-rust lichen,
[Illustration: BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF FALMOUTH.]
and willows, lemon yellow in the sun, shade the waysides. Golden-winged
woodpeckers and red-shouldered blackbirds dart to and fro, while the
abundance of jaunty martin-houses shows that Cape Cod hospitality is not
limited to the human.
The quiet, white homesteads, with green blinds, broad porches and
sometimes a cupola for the sea-view, stand in a sweet tranquillity and
dignity that should abash the showy summer residence. But these
old-fashioned homes keep up with the times. Against the well-sweep leans
the bicycle. The dooryards are blue with myrtle, or pink with
rose-bushes, or gay with waving daffodils. Old age is in fashion on the
Cape. When twilight fades, the passer-by sees gathered about the early
evening lamp the white heads of those whose “chores” are done. And
though death comes at last, the cemeteries are so tenderly kept that the
grave is robbed of half its dread. Even in the oldest burial-grounds,
where the worn, scarred stones lean with the privilege of age, the
staring death’s-heads are cozily muffled in moss, and “Patience, wife of
Experience,” sleeps under a coverlet of heartsease.
All the way from Provincetown to Falmouth
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE GREEN.]
are certain briny signals,--a ship’s figure-head, marble steps whose
stone was washed ashore as wreckage, lobster-pots, herring-nets,
conch-shells set on lintels, a discontented polar bear pacing a
stout-paled yard, ruffling cockatoos, boats converted into flower-boxes,
whales’ vertebræ displayed for ornament, garden-beds marked out with
scallop-shells, everywhere the ship-shape look, the sailor’s handy rig,
and everywhere the codfish used for weathercocks. In Barnstable
court-house a mammoth cod is suspended from the ceiling. Vistas of ocean
outlook, too, from under arches of green branches, flash upon the eye,
the salty flavor is not lost in woodland fragrances, and the rolling
hills and wavy pastures take their model from the sea.
Of the old-timey features of the Cape, no one is more impressive than
the witch-like windmill with its peaked cap, outspread arms and slanting
broomstick, reminding us that the Pilgrims came from Holland. Some of
these antique mills have been bought by summer residents and moved to
their estates for curiosities, but the one at Orleans was in use as late
as 1892, taking its profitable toll of two quarts out of the bushel.
[Illustration: SHIRICK’S POND, FALMOUTH.]
The general history of Falmouth but repeats the story of her sister
towns. The first settlers are believed to have come in boats from
Barnstable, in 1660. They encamped for the night among the flags of
Consider Hatch’s Pond, where a child was born and, in recognition of the
rushes that sang his earliest lullaby, named Moses. The town was duly
incorporated in 1686, next after Eastham, and has steadfastly stood for
piety, wisdom and patriotism. She admitted the Quakers, and if one of
her deacons held a negro slave, as colonial deacons often did, poor
Cuffee was at least brought to the communion table. It is Truro that
contains “Pomp’s Lot,” where the stolen African, with loaf of bread and
jug of water at his feet for sustenance on his new journey, escaped
slavery by hanging. As for learning, it was Sandwich Academy which the
Cape towns held in awe, but our Falmouth men, like the rest, half
sailor, half farmer and all theologian, had a genuine culture, born of
keen-eyed voyaging and of lonely thought, that kept the air about them
tingling with intelligence. When it comes to war stories, if
Provincetown, from her end of the Cape, can tell of her boy in blue that
went down with the _Cumberland_,
[Illustration: THE WHALE-SHIP “COMMODORE MORRIS” AND THE FALMOUTH
CAPTAINS WHO SAILED IN HER.]
and her naval captain at Manila, Falmouth can recall that twice she was
bombarded by the British and twice defended by the valor of her sons,
and when the Civil War broke out, with the larger share of her
able-bodied men at sea, she yet sent more than her quota of soldiers to
the front.
Within the last quarter-century, Falmouth has entered on new activities,
largely due to the increasing fame of Buzzard’s Bay as a summer resort.
The story goes that the town had all gone to sleep, but somebody woke
one day and painted his front fence, and forthwith his neighbors, not to
be outdone, painted theirs, and their houses too, and the new era came
in with a rush. But whatever good fortune the future has in store, Paul
Revere’s bell, that sounds from her central steeple, will hold Falmouth
true to her traditions; for these Cape towns, simple as their record is,
have worked out on unconsciously heroic lines the essential principles
of a God-fearing, self-respecting democracy.
[Illustration]
DEERFIELD
OLD POCUMTUCK VALLEY
BY GEORGE SHELDON
To every one familiar with the history of the old Bay State, the name of
Deerfield naturally brings to mind two diverse pictures: one, the giant
trees of the primeval forest under whose sombre shade the white-haired
Eliot prayed, and the sluggish stream beside whose banks he gathered its
roving denizens for a test of civilization; the other, that scene of woe
and desolation, when, under a wintry sky, the glare of burning houses
lighted up a wide expanse of snow, shaded by dark columns of wavering
smoke, and splashed here and there with red. The first picture suggests
possibilities, the second results. The connecting link between the two
is the fact that out of the labors of Eliot on the river Charles grew
directly the settlement of the English on the Pocumtuck.
Back of all was the interest in the newly discovered heathen, which sent
currents of gold from England across the seas to the Indian missions. Of
all these that of the Apostle Eliot was the head and front. His first
attempt, at Newton, was a failure, from its proximity to a Christian
town. On his petition, the General Court granted him a tract in the
wilderness where he and the uncontaminated native could come face to
face with the God of Nature. This tract was claimed by the town of
Dedham, and, after a successful legal contest, the General Court gave
the claimant in lieu of it the right to select eight thousand acres in
any unoccupied part of the colony. After wide search this grant was laid
out on Pocumtuck River, and the selection was ratified by the Court,
October 11, 1665.
This power, however, was only leave to purchase of the native owners.
The laws recognized the rights of the Indians to the soil, and no
Englishman was allowed to buy or even receive as a gift any land from an
Indian without leave of the General Court. The oft-repeated slander that
the fair purchase of land from the
[Illustration: OLD DEERFIELD STREET, 1671-1898.]
Indians was peculiar to William Penn, can be refuted in general by a
study of our early statute books, and in particular by an examination of
the original deeds from the Indians, now in our Memorial Hall.
It will be seen by these deeds that the Indians reserved the right of
hunting, fishing and gathering nuts--all, in fact, that was of any real
value to them. The critic says that in such trades the price was nominal
and that the Indian was outrageously cheated. Fortunately, in this case
existing evidence proves that Dedham paid the natives more than the
English market price, in hard cash, and besides gave one acre at Natick
for every four here.
The money to pay for the eight thousand acres was raised by a tax on the
landholders of Dedham, the owners paying in proportion to the number of
shares or “cow commons” held; and their ownership of the new territory
was in the same proportion. There were five hundred and twenty-two
shares in all, held in common, covering the whole of Dedham.
In 1671 a committee from Dedham laid out highways, set apart tracts for
the support of the ministry, laid out a “Town Plott,” and large sections
of plow-land and of mow-land. In each of these sections individuals
were assigned by lot their respective number of cow commons. Later the
woodlands were divided in the same manner. For generations this land was
bought and sold, not by the acre, but by the cow common, fractions
thereof being sheep or goat commons, five of these being a unit.
The “Town Plott,” laid out in 1671, is the Old Deerfield Street of
to-day.
The first settlers at Pocumtuck were not, as generally supposed, the
original Dedham owners. The shares of the latter had been for years on
the market, and many had passed to outsiders. But only picked men were
allowed to become proprietors. This fact is illustrated by votes like
the following:
“Dec. 4, 1671. John Plimpton is allowed to purchase land of John Bacon
at Pawcumtucke provided that the said John Plimpton doe settle thereupon
in his owne person.” On the same day the request of Daniel Weld for
leave to purchase was refused. No reason was assigned, and Mr. Weld was
admitted soon after.
“Feb. 16, 1671-2. Lieft. Fisher is alowed libertie to sell 6 cow common
rights and one sheepe common right at Paucomtuck to Nathaniel Suttlife
of Medfield.”
[Illustration: FRARY HOUSE, 1698. OLDEST IN THE COUNTY.]
The pioneer settler here was Samuel Hinsdell, of Medford. He had bought
shares, and, impatient of delay in making the division, he became a
squatter, and in 1669 turned the first furrow in the virgin soil of
Pocumtuck. Samson Frary was a close second, if not a contemporary;
“Samson Frary’s cellar” is mentioned in the report of the Committee,
May, 1671.
The settlers increased rapidly. May 7, 1673, the General Court gave them
“Liberty of a Towneship,” which is Deerfield’s only “Act of
Incorporation.” Soon after, a rude meeting-house was built, and Samuel
Mather served as a minister among them.
A loose sheet of paper has been found dated Nov. 7, 1673, with a record
of a town-meeting. This was signed by the following, who must be called
the earliest settlers:
Richard Weler John Barnard
John Plympton John Weler
Joshua Carter Samuel Herenton
Samson Frary John Hinsdell
Quinten Stockwell Ephraim Hinsdell
Joseph Gillet Moses Crafts
Barnabas Hinsdell Nathaniel Sutley
Robert Hinsdell John Farrington
John Allen Thomas Hastings
Daniel Weld Francis Barnard
Samuel Hinsdell Samuel Daniel
Experience Hinsdell James Tufts.
The action of this meeting was chiefly on the division of land, but it
was voted that “all charges respecting the ministers sallerye or
maintenance bee leuied and raised on lands for the present.” Another
page shows a meeting November 17, 1674, when the plantation was called
Deerfield. We have no clue as to why or by what authority it was so
called.
The newcomers found the meadows free from trees, with a rich soil which
soon yielded abundantly of wheat, rye, peas, oats, beans, flax, grass
and Indian corn. The meadows were enclosed with a common fence to keep
out the common stock, which roamed at will on the common land outside.
The war of 1675 is called “Philip’s War” because Philip was able to
incite the tribes to hostilities against the whites, rather than because
it was carried on under his direction. A seer and a patriot Philip may
have been, but he was not a warrior. It is not known that he was ever in
a single conflict.
When the first blood was shed at far-away Swanzey, in June, 1675, the
men of Pocumtuck were not disquieted. With the Indians about them they
had lived for years in perfect harmony. But when the blow fell on
Captains Beers and Lothrop under the shadow of their own Wequamps, war
became a reality. As a measure of defense two or three houses were
slightly fortified, and none too soon. The village was marked for
destruction. On the morning of September 1, 1675, the Indians gathered
in the adjoining woods, awaiting the hour when the men, scattered about
the meadows at their work could be shot down one by one, leaving the
women and children to the mercy of the Indians. This plan was
frustrated. The Indians were discovered early in the morning by James
Eggleston, while looking for his horse. Eggleston was shot and the alarm
given. The people fled to the forts. These were easily defended by the
men, but beyond the range of their muskets ruin and devastation held
sway.
Deerfield was the first town in the Connecticut Valley to be assaulted,
and the alarm was general. The news reached Hadley the same day while
the inhabitants were gathered in the meeting-house observing a fast;
“and,” says Mather, “they were driven from the holy service they were
attending by a most sudden and violent alarm which routed them the whole
day after.” Their alarm and rout were needless; no enemy appeared. Yet
these words of the historian are the narrow foundation on which Stiles
and others gradually built up the romantic myth of Goffe, as the
guardian and deliverer of Hadley.
September 2, the tactics at Deerfield were successfully repeated by the
Indians at Northfield. Eight men were killed in the meadows, but enough
were left in the village to hold the stockade. September 4, Captain
Richard Beers with his company who were marching to their relief, were
surprised, and himself and twenty men were slain. September 5, Major
Robert Treat, with a superior force, brought off the beleaguered
survivors.
Sunday, September 12, another blow fell upon Deerfield. The place had
now a garrison under Captain Samuel Appleton. The Indians could see from
the hills the soldiers gathering in one of the forts for public worship.
They laid an ambush to waylay the soldiers and people returning after
service to the north fort, but all escaped their fire save one, who was
wounded. Nathaniel Cornbury, left to sentinel the north fort, was
captured, and never again heard from. Appleton rallied his men, and the
marauders, after inflicting much loss on the settlers, drew off to Pine
Hill.
But a sadder blow was to fall upon the dwellers in this little vale. The
accumulated result of their industry and toil was to disappear in flame
and ashes. In their wanton destruction the Indians had spared the wheat
in the field for their own future supply; “3000 bushels standing in
stacks,” says Mather. This wheat was needed at headquarters to feed the
gathering troops, and Colonel Pynchon, the Commander-in-Chief, gave
orders to have it threshed and sent to Hadley. Captain Thomas Lothrop,
with his company, was sent to convoy the teams transporting it.
September 18, 1675, “that most fatal day, the saddest that ever befel
New England,” says a contemporary, “Captain Lothrop, with his choice
company of young men, the very flower of the county of Essex,” marched
boldly down the street, across South Meadows, up Long Hill, into the
woods stretching away to Hatfield Meadows. Confident in his strength,
scorning the enemy, Captain Lothrop pushed on through the narrow path,
with not a flanker or vanguard thrown out. Extending along his left lay
a swampy thicket through which crept a nameless brook. Gradually, the
swamp narrowed, and turned to the right across the line of march. At
this spot the combined force of the enemy lay in ambush, and into this
trap marched Lothrop and his men. While the teams were slowly dragging
their loads through the mire, it is said the soldiers laid down their
guns to pluck and eat the grapes which grew in abundance by the way. Be
this true or not, at this spot they were surprised and stunned by the
fierce war-whoop, the flash and roar of muskets with their bolts of
death. Captain Lothrop and many of his command fell at the first fire.
The men of Pocumtuck sank, the “Flower of Essex” wilted before the
blast, and--
“Sanguinetto tells ye where the dead
Made the earth wet, and turn’d the unwilling waters red.”
The sluggish stream was baptized for aye, “Bloody Brook.”
Captain Samuel Moseley, who was searching the woods for Indians, hearing
the firing, was soon on the ground. Too late to save, he did his best to
avenge; he charged repeatedly, scattering the enemy, who swarmed as
often as dispersed. But he defied all their efforts to surround him. His
men exhausted with their long efforts, Moseley was about to retire, when
just in the nick of time Major Treat appeared, with a force of English
and Mohegans. The enemy were driven westward and were pursued until
nightfall. The united force then marched to Deerfield, bearing their
wounded, and leaving the dead where they fell.
Mather says, “this was a black and fatal day wherein there was eight
persons made widows and six and twenty children made orphans, all in one
little Plantation.” That plantation was Deerfield, and these were the
heavy tidings which the worn-out soldiers carried to the stricken
survivors of the hamlet. Of the seventeen fathers and brothers who left
them in the morning, not one returned to tell the tale. The next
morning, Treat and Moseley marched to Bloody Brook and buried the
slain--“64 men in one dreadful grave.” The names of sixty-three are
known, and also of seven wounded. John Stebbins, ancestor of the
Deerfield tribe of that name, is the only man in Lothrop’s command known
to have escaped unhurt.
The reported force of the enemy was a thousand warriors, and their loss
ninety-six. This must be taken with a grain of allowance.
Deerfield was now considered untenable, and the poor remnant of her
people were scattered in the towns below.
October 5, Springfield was attacked. The Indians laid the same plan as
at Deerfield and Northfield. Only notice given by a friendly Indian
during the night before saved the town from total destruction. The
assailants were Indians who had lived for generations neighbors and
friends of the Springfield people. On the 4th they had made earnest
protestations of friendship, on the strength of which the garrison had
marched to Hadley. This deliberate treachery was probably planned by
Philip.
October 19, a large party made an attack on Hatfield, but was repulsed.
As the spring of 1676 advanced, a large body of Indians collected at
Peskeompskut for the purpose of catching a year’s stock of shad and
salmon. Parties from thence occasionally harassed the settlers below,
who knew that when the fishing season was over, the enemy would
constantly infest the valley, and watch every chance to kill the
unprotected. They therefore determined to take the initiative, and at
nightfall of May 18, a party of about a hundred and fifty men under
Captain William Turner made a night march, surprised the camp at
daylight the next morning and destroyed many of the enemy.
The homeward march was delayed so long that Indians from neighboring
camps began to appear. A released captive reported that Philip with a
thousand warriors was at hand, and as the enemy swarmed on rear and
flank, the retreat became almost a panic. The straggling and the wounded
were cut off. Captain Turner was shot while crossing Green River, about
a mile from the battle-field, and the party, under Captain Samuel
Holyoke, reached Hatfield with the loss of forty-two men.
The warring Indians never recovered from the blow at Peskeompskut.
Besides their slain, they lost their year’s stock of fish, and the
hundreds of acres of Indian corn they had planted with the assurance of
a permanent abode in that region. The broken, disheartened clans drifted
aimlessly eastward. They quarrelled among themselves. Philip, with a few
followers, skulked back to Pokanoket, where he fell, August 12, 1676.
The war ended soon after.
In the spring of 1677, some of the old settlers came back and planted
their deserted fields; preparations for building were well advanced by
some of the more venturesome, when, September 19, they were surprised by
Ashpelon with a party of Indians from Canada, and all were either killed
or captured.
In 1679 the General Court passed an act regulating the resettlement of
deserted towns, requiring the consent of certain authorities who should
prescribe
“In what form, way & manner, such townes shall be settled &
erected, wherein they are required to haue a principal respect to
neerness and conveniency of habitation for securitie against
enemyes & more comfort for Xtian comunion & enjoyment of God’s
worship & education of children in schools & civility.”
By virtue of this act a committee was appointed under whose direction a
resettlement of the town began in the spring of 1682. Induced by grants
of land, new settlers appeared, and the plantation progressed rapidly.
In 1686, sixty Proprietors are named. This year, young John Williams
appears on the scene as candidate for the ministry; and, September 21,
he received a “call.” He was married July 20, 1687, to Eunice, daughter
of Rev. Eleazer Mather, of Northampton. October 18, 1688, he was
ordained, and the First Church was organized.
The second meeting-house was built in 1684, the third in 1695, the
fourth, a very elaborate one, in 1729, the fifth, the present brick
structure, in 1824, and it is still occupied by the First Church. In all
these, save the last, the worshippers were “seated” by authority.
[Illustration: THIRD MEETING-HOUSE, 1695-1729.
(OLD INDIAN HOUSE ON THE RIGHT.)]
In 1688, on the news of the Revolution in England, the seizure of Andros
in Boston and the call for the election of representatives to organize a
new government for the Colony, the men of Deerfield acted promptly.
Lieutenant Thomas Wells, a commissioned officer under Andros, was
selected to represent the town, and the selectmen sent to Boston a
certificate to that effect. These men were fully aware that in the case
of a failure of the movement, the vindictive Andros would wreak his
vengeance upon all concerned. Shrewd men were at the fore, and Randolph
himself might search the town records in vain for any trace of these
proceedings or other treasonable action.
During King William’s War, the town was harassed by the enemy; drought
and insects ruined the crops, and a fatal distemper prevailed. There was
question of deserting the place, but bolder counsels controlled. Baron
Castine with an army from Canada attempted a surprise of the town,
September 15, 1694, but he was discovered just in time to close the
gates, and was driven back with small loss to the defenders. Another
army organized in Canada for the same purpose turned back on being
discovered by scouts. During this trial Deerfield suffered great losses,
but pluck carried her through.
Queen Anne’s War broke out in 1702. The population here was about three
hundred souls. The fortifications on Meeting-house Hill were
strengthened, and the house of the commander, Captain Wells, about forty
rods south, was palisaded. In May, 1703, Lord Cornbury, Governor of New
York, sent word that he had
[Illustration: PARSON WILLIAMS’S HOUSE, BUILT BY THE TOWN,
1707--STANDING 1898.]
learned through his spies of an expedition fitting out against
Deerfield. Soon after, Major Peter Schuyler sent a similar warning to
Rev. John Williams. These warnings were emphasized in July by news that
the Eastern Indians had made a simultaneous attack on all the
settlements in Maine, only six weeks after signing a treaty of peace
with the most solemn declarations of eternal friendship. Twenty soldiers
were sent here to reinforce the home guard, and all were on the alert;
two men, however, were captured October 8, and were carried to Canada.
On the alarm which followed sixteen more men were sent here. October 21,
Rev. John Williams writes, on behalf of the town, to Governor Dudley:
” ...We have been driven from our houses & home lots into the fort.
(there are but 10 houselots in the fort); some a mile, some two
miles, whereby we have suffered much loss. We have in the alarms
several times been wholly taken off from any business, the whole
town kept in, our children of 12 or 13 years and under we have been
afraid to improve in the field for fear of the enemy.... We have
been crowded togather into houses to the preventing of indoor
affairs being carryd on to any advantage, ... several say they
would freely leave all they have & go away were it not that it
would be disobedience to authority & a discouraging
[Illustration: DOOR OF “OLD INDIAN HOUSE” HACKED BY INDIANS.
NOW IN MEMORIAL HALL.]
their bretheren. The frontier difficulties of a place so remote
from others & so exposed as ours, are more than can be known, if
not felt....”
Nothing can add to this simple and pathetic statement.
The months dragged slowly on, and no enemy. The deep winter snows seemed
a safe barrier against invasion. The people, breathing more freely,
gradually resumed their wonted ways; but dark clouds loomed up, all
unseen, just beyond the northern horizon. In the early morning of
February 29, 1703-4, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, an army of
French and Indians under Hertel de Rouville burst upon the sleeping
town, and killed or captured nearly all of the garrison and inhabitants
within the fort. Through criminal carelessness the snow had been allowed
to drift against the palisades, until, being covered with a hard crust,
it afforded an easy and noiseless entrance, so that the enemy were
dispersed among the houses before they were discovered.
The captives were collected in the house of Ensign John Sheldon, which,
being fired by the enemy only on their retreat, was easily saved, and
stood until 1848. It was popularly considered the only one not burned,
and has gone
[Illustration: TOMBSTONES OF REV. JOHN WILLIAMS AND HIS WIFE.]
into history as the “Old Indian House.” Its front door, hacked by the
Indians, is now preserved in Memorial Hall. By sunrise the torch and
tomahawk had done their work. The blood of forty-nine murdered men,
women and children reddened the snow. Twenty-nine men, twenty-four women
and fifty-eight children were made captive, and in a few hours the
spoil-encumbered enemy were on their three-hundred miles’ march over the
desolate snows to Canada. Twenty of the captives were murdered on the
route, one of them Eunice Williams, wife of the minister. The spot where
she fell is marked by a monument of enduring granite.
The desolated town was at once made a military post, and strongly
garrisoned. Of the survivors, the men were impressed into the service,
and the non-combatants sent to the towns below. Persistent efforts were
made to recover the captives. Ensign Sheldon was sent three times to
Canada on this errand. One by one, and against great odds, most of the
surviving men and women were recovered; but a large proportion of the
children remained in Canada. Many of their descendants have been traced
by Miss Baker, author of _True Stories of New England Captives_, among
them some of the most distinguished men and women of Canadian history.
The inhabitants of Deerfield gradually returned to their desolate
hearthstones and abandoned fields, and held their own during the war,
but not without severe suffering and a considerable loss of life. Peace
was established by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.
Nine years of quiet followed, in which the town prospered. The Indians
mingled freely with the people, bartering the products of their hunting
for English goods. A permanent peace was hoped for, but this hope was
blasted on the outbreak of the Eastern Indians in 1722. Incited by the
Canadians, the northern tribes joined in the war; and Father Rasle’s war
brought the usual frontier scenes of fire and carnage; the trading
Indians being the most effective leaders or guides for marauding
parties. Many Deerfield men were in the service, notably as scouts.
Inured to hardship, skilled in woodcraft, they were more than a match
for the savage in his own haunts and in his own methods of warfare.
In 1729, before the new meeting-house was finished, the people were
called to mourn the death of their loved and revered pastor, Rev. John
Williams, so widely known as “The Redeemed Captive.” His successor was
Rev. Jonathan Ashley, who was ordained in 1732 and died in 1780.
[Illustration: STEPHEN WILLIAMS, 1693-1782.
A CAPTIVE OF FEBRUARY 29, 1703-4.]
Rev. Stephen Williams, a son of Rev. John Williams, the first pastor,
was born in Deerfield in 1693, taken captive to Canada in 1704,
redeemed in 1705, graduated at Harvard in 1713, settled as minister at
Longmeadow in 1716, dying there in 1782; he was Chaplain in the
Louisburg expedition in 1745, and in the regiment of Col. Ephraim
Williams in his fatal campaign in 1755, and again in the Canadian
campaign of 1756. His portrait, reproduced on page 428, was painted
about 1748; it is now in the Memorial Hall of the Pocumtuck Valley
Memorial Association, within fourscore rods of the spot where the
original was born, and whence he was carried into captivity.
On the closing of Father Rasle’s war the settlement expanded; trade and
home manufactures flourished. Deerfield remained no longer the frontier
town of the valley, and the brunt of the next border war (of 1743) was
felt by the outlying settlements. The one sad blow upon this town fell
at a little hamlet called The Bars. August 25, 1746, the families of
Samuel Allen and John Amsden, while working in a hay-field on Stebbins
Meadow, with a small guard, were surprised by a party of Indians from
Canada, and five men were killed, one girl wounded and one boy captured.
This followed close on the fall of Fort Massachusetts, and danger of
French invasion was felt to be imminent. Active measures were taken for
defense; the forts were repaired and the woods filled with scouts.
The closing war with France found Deerfield more strongly bulwarked, and
still less exposed to attack. No blood was shed within her narrowed
bounds. Her citizens held prominent positions, and did their part in the
campaigns which resulted in the conquest of Canada and the consequent
immunity from savage depredations. The nest destroyed, the sting of the
hornets was no longer felt or feared. The last raid on Massachusetts
soil is described in the following mutilated despatch to the military
authorities in Deerfield:
“COLRAIN, March y^{e} 21, 1759.
“SIR:--These are to inform you that yesterday as Jo^s McKoon
[Kowen] & his wife were coming from Daniel Donitsons & had got so
far as where Morrison’s house was burned this day year, they was
fired upon by the enemy about sunset. I have been down this morning
on the spot and find no Blood Shed, but see where they led off Both
the above mentioned; they had their little child with them. I
believe they are gone home. I think their number small, for there
was about 10 or 12 came [torn off]”
The most important civil events of this period were the divisions of
the township. In 1753 the Green River District, which included what is
now Greenfield and Gill, was made a distinct municipality. The next year
the construction of a bridge over the Pocumtuck River at Cheapside was a
prominent issue; the discussion ended in establishing a ferry at the
north end of Pine Hill in 1758. That year the people in the vicinity of
Sugar Loaf petitioned the General Court--but without success--for
liberty to form a ministerial and educational connection with the town
of Sunderland, and to be exempted from paying certain town taxes in
consequence. In 1767 the inhabitants of Deerfield-Southwest were set off
into a town named Conway; and Deerfield-Northwest became the town of
Shelburne in 1768. The same year Bloody Brook people caught the division
fever, but it did not carry them off.
A permanent peace being settled and an unstable currency fixed on a firm
cash basis, business projects multiplied, and Deerfield became the
centre of exchange and supply for a large territory. The mechanics, or
“tradesmen” as they were called, and their apprentices, rivalled in
numbers the agricultural population. Here were found the gunsmith,
blacksmith, nailer and silversmith, the maker of snowshoes and
moccasins, the tanner, currier, shoemaker and saddler, the pillion,
knapsack and wallet-maker, the carpenter and joiner, the clapboard and
shingle-maker, the makers of wooden shovels, corn-fans, flax-brakes,
hackels, looms and spinning-wheels, cart-ropes and bed-lines, and pewter
buttons, the tailor, hatter, furrier, feltmaker, barber and wigmaker,
the cartwright, millwright, cabinet-maker, watchmaker, the brickmaker
and mason, the miller, the carder, clothier, fuller, spinner, weaver of
duck and common fabrics, the potter, the gravestone-cutter, the cooper,
the potash-maker, the skilled forger who turned out loom and plow irons,
farm and kitchen utensils. There were doctors and lawyers, the judge and
the sheriff; storekeepers were many, and tavern-keepers galore. To all
these the old account-books in Memorial Hall bear testimony.
Many leading men held commissions from the King in both civil and
military service. These were rather a distinctive class, holding their
heads quite high, and when the Revolution broke out they were generally
loyal to the King, making heavy odds against the Whigs. But new leaders
came to the front, who, so far as they had character and force, held
their own after the war, and the old Tory leaders were relegated to the
rear.
At the opening of the Revolutionary War the parties were nearly equal in
numbers; on one yea and nay test vote there was a tie. Excitement ran
high. In 1774 the “Sons of Liberty” erected a Liberty Pole, and at the
same time a “Tory Pole,” whatever that might be. The mob spirit was
rampant. Through it the fires of patriotism found vent; but it was
always under the control of the leaders, and its most common office was
to “humble the Tories,” and compel them to sign obnoxious declarations
of neutrality, or of submission to the will of the Committees of Safety
and Correspondence. A Tory of this period wrote: “Oh Tempora, all nature
seems to be in confusion; every person in fear of what his Neighbor may
do to him. Such times never was seen in New England.”
In October, 1774, a company of minute-men was organized here as part of
a regiment under the Provincial Congress. November 14, staff-officers
were chosen. David Field, colonel, and David Dickinson, major, were both
of Deerfield. December 5, the town raised money to buy ammunition by
selling lumber from its woodland. January 5, 1775, an emissary from
General Gage was here, advising the Tories to go to Boston. “The
standard will be set up in March,” he said, “and those who do not go in
and lay down their arms may meet with bad luck.” He was discovered, but
had the good luck to escape a mob; another agent who came a few days
later was not so fortunate.
But the culmination of all the secret machinations and open preparations
was at hand. April 20, at a town-meeting, votes were passed to pay wages
to the minute-men for what they had done; “to encourage them in
perfecting themselves in the Military Art,” provision was made for
“practicing one half-day in each week.”
The voters could hardly have left the meeting-house, when the sound of a
galloping horse was heard, and the hoarse call, “To arms! To arms!”
broke upon the air. The horse bloody with spurring and the rider covered
with dust brought the news of Concord and Lexington. The half-day drills
had done their work. Before the clock in the meeting-house steeple
struck the midnight hour, fifty minute-men, under Captain Jonas Locke,
Lieutenant Thomas Bardwell and Lieutenant Joseph Stebbins, were on the
march to Cambridge. This company was soon broken up; Captain Locke
entered the Commissary Department, while Lieutenant Stebbins enlisted a
new company, with which he assisted General Putnam in constructing the
redoubt on Bunker Hill, and in its defense the next day, the
ever-glorious 17th of June. One Deerfield man was killed and several
were wounded.
Independence Day should be celebrated, in Deerfield, June 26, for on
that day in 1776 the town
“Voted that _this Town will (if y^{e} Honorable Congress shall for
y^{e} safety of y^{e} United Colonies declare them INDEPENDENT of
y^{e} Kingdom of Great Britain) Solemnly Engage with their LIVES
and FORTUNES to Support them in y^{e} Measure_, and that y^{e}
Clerk be directed to make an attested copy of this Vote and forward
y^{e} same to Mr. Saxton, Representative for this town, to be laid
before the General Court for their Information.”
Here was treason proclaimed and recorded, and every voter was exposed to
its penalty. Ten days later the Continental Congress issued the
world-stirring Declaration of Independence.
On Burgoyne’s invasion in 1777 a company under Captain Joseph Stebbins
and Lieutenant John Bardwell marched for Bennington. They were too late
for the battle at Walloomsack, and found the meeting-house filled with
Stark’s Hessian prisoners. But they had their share in the work and
glory of rounding up and capturing the proud soldiers of Burgoyne.
Deerfield had statesmen as well as soldiers. May 1, 1780, the town met
to consider the new Constitution of Massachusetts; the clerk read the
instrument “paragraph by paragraph with pauses between.” After due
discussion, a committee was chosen to “peruse the Constitution ... and
make such objections to it as they think ought to be made.” Three
town-meetings were held, the committee reported, and finally a vote was
passed “not to accept the third Article in the Declaration of Rights,”
and that a candidate for governor must “Declare himself of the
Protestant Religion” instead of “Christian Religion.” The term of eight
years instead of fifteen was voted as the time when the Constitution
should be revised. With these changes, our civic wisdom approved of this
important State paper.
Deerfield did her full duty in furnishing her
[Illustration: George Fuller
1822-1884.]
quota of men and supplies through the war. Occasionally, in the later
years of the struggle, the Tories temporarily obstructed the necessary
town legislation. Some of these soon found themselves behind the bars,
and others in enforced silence under penalty of like restraint. The
minister, Mr. Ashley, who had been firm in his loyalty, died in 1780,
and the Tories lost one of their strongest supports. Not until 1787
could the town unite upon his successor, when Rev. John Taylor was
ordained. The uprising called Shays’ Rebellion did much to harmonize the
warring factions, as all united to put it down. Three companies, under
Captains Joseph Stebbins, Samuel Childs and Thomas W. Dickinson, were
sent to the field of action.
From this time, harmony prevailed, and the career of the town was that
of an industrious, hard-working, prosperous, intellectual people.
Libraries and literary societies were established, which are still
flourishing. Deerfield Academy was founded in 1797, and endowed largely
through the liberality of the citizens. Its influence was felt for
generations, as its pupils from far and wide were scions of leading
families. Among its faculty and graduates may be named men of national
reputation, in the scientific, the historical, the ecclesiastical, the
military, the artistic and the industrial world.
Failing health obliged Mr. Taylor to resign;
[Illustration: BUFFET FROM PARSON WILLIAMS’S HOUSE.
NOW IN MEMORIAL HALL.]
and in 1807 the Rev. Samuel Willard succeeded him in the ministry, when,
in the separation of the Congregational churches, Deerfield led the van
on the liberal side.
The political storms of the first two decades of the century raged here
with strength and vigor. In the War of 1812 a “Professor of the Art of
War” was added to the faculty of the Deerfield Academy, and a Peace
Party circulated their protesting publications.
Deerfield was early at the front in the antislavery agitation, and in
the war lost some of her best blood. The names of her dead in that
righteous war are carved on a fitting monument pointing aloft from the
midst of her ancient training-field.
One great attraction in the old town is the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial
Association, chartered in 1870. It owns and occupies the old academy
building, which it secured when the new Free Dickinson Academy was
established in 1878. Its museum occupies the entire structure, and
contains an exhaustive, characteristic collection of the implements,
utensils and general household belongings of the colonial days; and also
of the original lords of the valley, the Pocumtuck Indians.
In the ante-railroad days, Cheapside, at the head of Pocumtuck River
navigation, was a thriving business village, with large imports of
foreign wet and dry goods, and large exports of lumber, woodenware and
brooms; Deerfield was long famous for its stall-fed beef, as many a New
York and Boston epicure did testify; but the advent of the iron horse
soon brought about the departure of the fall boat, and the passing of
the stall-fed ox. The old town is no longer a centre of political power,
or of trade and manufactures. The generous additions of territory to her
original Grant have been bestowed upon the children of her loins, now
flourishing towns about her. The advent of factories has absorbed one by
one her multifarious mechanical industries. Her young men and maidens
are seeking elsewhere spheres of action in fields till now undreamed of.
But Old Deerfield still retains much of her best. Still, as of old, she
is an intellectual centre. Still beautifully situated, she lies in the
embrace of the broad green meadows, with here and there a gleam of
silver from the sinuous Pocumtuck. Her ancient houses, shadowed by
towering elms, hoary with age, her charming wooded heights, her
romantic gorges and tumbling brooks, her restful quiet, her famous past,
all in harmony with the thought and feeling of her inhabitants, still
attract alike men and women of letters, the artist and the historical
student.
[Illustration]
NEWPORT
THE ISLE OF PEACE
BY SUSAN COOLIDGE
The Isle of Peace lies cradled in the wide arms of a noble bay. Fifteen
miles long and from four to five miles in width, its shape is not unlike
that of an heraldic dragon, laid at ease in the blue waters, with head
pointed to the southwest. From this head to the jutting cape which does
duty as the left claw of the beast, the shore is a succession of bold
cliffs, broken by coves and stretches of rocky shingle, and in two
places by magnificent curving beaches, upon which a perpetual surf foams
and thunders. Parallel ridges of low hills run back from the sea.
Between these lie ferny valleys, where wild roses grow in thickets, and
such shy flowers as love solitude and a sheltered situation spread a
carpet for the spring and early summer. On the farther uplands are
thrifty farms, set amid orchards of wind-blown trees. Ravines, each with
its thread of brook, cut their way from these higher levels to the
water-line. Fleets of lilies whiten the ponds, of which there are many
on the island; and over all the scene, softening every outline, tingeing
and changing the sunlight, and creating a thousand beautiful effects
forever unexpected and forever renewed, hangs a thin veil of shifting
mist. This the sea-wind, as it journeys to and fro, lifts and drops, and
lifts again, as one raises a curtain to look in at the slumber of a
child, and, having looked, noiselessly lets it fall.
The Indians, with that fine occasional instinct which is in such odd
contrast to other of their characteristics, gave the place its pretty
name. Aquidneck, the Isle of Peace, they called it. To modern men it is
known as the island of Rhode Island, made famous the land over by the
town built on its seaward extremity--the town of Newport.
It is an old town, and its history dates back to the early days of the
New England colony. City, it calls itself, but one loves better to think
of it as a town, just as the word “avenue,” now so popular, is in some
minds
[Illustration: THE OLD STONE MILL.]
forever translated into the simpler equivalent, “street.” As the veiling
mists gather and shift, and then, caught by the outgoing breeze, float
seaward again, we catch glimpses, framed, as it were, between the
centuries, quaint, oddly differing from each other, but full of
interest. The earliest of these glimpses dates back to an April morning
in 1524. There is the cliff-line, the surf, the grassy capes tinged with
sun, and in the sheltered bay a strange little vessel is dropping her
anchor. It is the caravel of Vezzerano, pioneer of French explorers in
these northern waters, and first of that great tide of “summer visitors”
which has since followed in his wake. How he was received, and by whom,
Mr. Parkman tells us:
“Following the shores of Long Island, they came first to Block
Island, and thence to the harbor of Newport. Here they stayed
fifteen days, most courteously received by the inhabitants. Among
others, appeared two chiefs, gorgeously arrayed in painted
deer-skins; kings, as Vezzerano calls them, with attendant
gentlemen; while a party of squaws in a canoe, kept by their
jealous lords at a safe distance, figure in the narrative as the
queen and her maids. The Indian wardrobe had been taxed to its
utmost to do the strangers honor,--coffee bracelets and wampum
collars, lynx-skins, raccoon-skins, and faces bedaubed with gaudy
colors.
[Illustration: NEWPORT IN 1795.]
“Again they spread their sails, and on the fifth of May bade
farewell to the primitive hospitalities of Newport.”[67]
Wampum and coffee bracelets are gone out of fashion since then, the
application of “gaudy colors” to faces, though not altogether done away
with, is differently practised and to better effect, and squaws are no
longer relegated by their jealous lords to separate and distant canoes;
but the reputation for hospitality, so early won, Newport still retains,
as many a traveller since Vezzerano has had occasion to testify. And
still, when the early summer-tide announces the approach of strangers,
her inhabitants, decking themselves in their best and bravest, go forth
to welcome and to “courteously entreat” all new arrivals.
Again the mist lifts and reveals another picture. Two centuries have
passed. The sachems and their squaws have vanished, and on the
hill-slope where once their lodges stood a town has sprung up.
Warehouses line the shores and wharves, at which lie whalers and
merchantmen loading and discharging their cargoes. A large proportion of
black faces appears among the passers-by in the streets, and many
straight-skirted coats, broad-brimmed hats, gowns of sober hue and
poke-bonnets of drab. Friends abound as well as negroes, not to mention
Jews, Moravians, Presbyterians and “Six-Principle” and “Seven-Principle”
Baptists; for, under the mild fostering of Roger Williams, Newport has
become a city of refuge to religious malcontents of every persuasion.
All the population, however, is not of like sobriety. A “rage of finery”
distinguishes the aristocracy of the island, and silk-stockinged
gentlemen, with scarlet coats and swords, silver-buckled shoes and lace
ruffles, may be seen in abundance, exchanging stately greetings with
ladies in brocades and hoops, as they pass to and fro between the
decorous gambrel-roofed houses or lift the brazen knockers of the
street-doors. It is a Saint’s-Day, and on the hill above, in a quaint
edifice of white-painted wood, with Queen Anne’s royal crown and a
gilded pennon on its spire, the Rev. Mr. Honeyman, missionary of the
English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, is conducting the
service in Trinity Church. The sermon begins, but is interrupted by a
messenger who hurries in with a letter which he hands to the divine in
the pulpit. The clergyman reads it aloud to his audience, pronounces a
rapid benediction, and “wardens, vestry, church and congregation” crowd
to the ferry-wharf, off which lies a “pretty large ship,” just come to
anchor. A boat rows to the shore, from which alights a gentleman of
“middle stature, and an agreeable, pleasant and erect aspect,” wearing
the canonicals of an English dean. He leads by the hand a lady; three
other gentlemen follow in their company. The new arrival is George
Berkeley, Dean of Derry, philosopher and scholar, who, on his way to
Bermuda with the project of there planting an ideally perfect
university, “for the instruction of the youth of America” (!), has
chosen Rhode Island as a suitable vantage-point from which to organize
and direct the new undertaking. His companions are his newly married
wife and three “learned and elegant friends,” Sir John James, Richard
Dalton and the artist Smibert. Not every Saint’s-Day brings such
voyagers to Newport from over the sea. No wonder that Trinity Church
services are interrupted, and that preacher and congregation crowd to
the wharf to do the strangers honor!
The Berkeley party spent the first few months of their stay in the town
of Newport, whence the Dean made short excursions to what Mrs. Berkeley
terms “the Continent,” meaning the mainland opposite. Toward the close
of their first summer, James, Dalton and Smibert removed to Boston, and
the Berkeley family to a farm in the interior of the island, which the
Dean had purchased and on which he had built a house. The house still
exists, and is still known by the name of Whitehall, given it by its
loyal owner in remembrance of the ancient palace of the kings of
England.
[Illustration: GEORGE BERKELEY, DEAN OF DERRY.]
The estate, which comprised less than a hundred acres, lies in a grassy
valley to the south of Honeyman’s Hill, and about two miles back from
what is now known as the “Second Beach.” It commands no “view” whatever.
Dean Berkeley, when asked why he did not choose a site from which more
could be seen, is said to have replied that “if a prospect were
continually in view it would lose its charm.” His favorite walk was
toward the sea, and he is supposed to have made an outdoor study of a
rocky shelf, overhung by a cliff cornice, on the face of a hill-ridge
fronting the beach, which shelf is still known as “Bishop Berkeley’s
Rock.”
Three years the peaceful life of Whitehall continued. Two children were
born to the Bishop, one of whom died in infancy. The house was a place
of meeting for all the missionaries of the island, as well as for the
more thoughtful and cultivated of the Newport society. At last, in the
winter of 1730, came the crisis of the Bermuda scheme. Land had been
purchased, the grant of money half promised by the English Government
was due. But the persuasive charm of the founder of the enterprise was
no longer at hand to influence those who had the power to make or mar
the project; and Sir Robert Walpole, with that sturdy indifference to
pledge, or to other
[Illustration: WHITEHALL, THE BERKELEY RESIDENCE, BUILT 1729.]
people’s convenience, which distinguished him, intimated with fatal
clearness of meaning, that if Dean Berkeley was waiting in Rhode Island
for twenty thousand pounds of the public money to be got out of _his_
exchequer, he might as well return to Europe without further loss of
time. The bubble was indeed broken, and Berkeley, brave still and
resolutely patient under this heavy blow, prepared for departure. His
books he left as a gift to the library of Yale College, and his farm of
Whitehall was made over to the same institution, to found three
scholarships for the encouragement of Greek and Latin study. These
bequests arranged, his wife and their one remaining child sailed for
Ireland. There, a bishopric, and twenty years of useful and honorable
labor, awaited him, and the brief dream of Rhode Island must soon have
seemed a dream indeed. Few vestiges remain now of his sojourn,--the
shabby farmhouse once his home, the chair in which he sat to write, a
few books and papers, the organ presented by him to Trinity Church, a
big family portrait by Smibert, and, appealing more strongly to the
imagination than these, the memory of his distinguished name as a friend
of American letters, still preserved by scholarship or foundation in
many institutions of learning--and the little grave in Trinity
churchyard, where, on the south side of the Kay Monument, sleeps “Lucia
Berkeley, daughter of Dean Berkeley, _obiit_ the fifth of September,
1731.”
The traveller who to-day is desirous of visiting Whitehall may reach it
by the delightful way of the beaches. Rounding the long curve of the
First Beach, with its dressing-houses and tents, its crowd of carriages
and swarms of gayly clad bathers, and climbing the hill at the far end,
he will find himself directly above the lonely but far more beautiful
Second Beach. Immediately before him, to the left, he will see Bishop
Berkeley’s Rock, with its cliff-hung shelf, and beyond, the soft
outlines of Sachuest Point, the narrow blue of the East Passage, and a
strip of sunlit mainland. The breezy perch where _Alciphron_ was written
is on the sea-face of one of the parallel rock-formations which, with
their intervening valleys, make up the region known as “Paradise Rocks.”
Near by, in the line of low cliffs which bounds the beach to the
southward, is the chasm called “Purgatory,” a vertical fissure some
fifty feet in depth, into which, under certain conditions of wind and
tide, the water rushes with great force and is sucked out with a hollow
boom, which is sufficiently frightful to explain the name selected for
the spot. The rocks which make up the cliffs are in great part
conglomerate, of soft shades of purple and reddish gray. Beyond, the
white beach glistens in the sun. And to the left, the road curves on
past farmhouses and “cottages of gentility.” Away on the valley slope,
the slow sails of a windmill revolve and flash, casting a flying shadow
over the grass. A mile farther, and the road, making a turn, is joined
to the right by what seems to be a farm-lane shut off by gates. This is
the entrance to Whitehall. The house can be dimly made out from the
road--a low, square building with a lean-to and a long, steep pitch of
roof, fronting on a small garden overgrown with fruit-trees. The present
owner holds it from the college under what may truly be called a long
lease, as it has still some eight hundred and odd years to run. He has
built a house near by, for his own occupation, and, alas! has removed
thither the last bit that remained of the decorative art of the old
Whitehall, namely, the band of quaint Dutch tiles which once
[Illustration: “PURGATORY.”]
surrounded the chimney-piece of the parlor. But the parlor remains
unchanged, with its low ceiling and uneven floor; the old staircase is
there, the old trees, and, in spite of the tooth of time and the worse
spoliation of man, enough is left to hint at the days of its early
repute and to make the place worth a visit.
One more glimpse through the mist before we come to the new times of
this our Isle of Peace. It is just half a century since Berkeley, his
baffled scheme heavy at his heart, set sail for Ireland. The fog is
unusually thick, and lies like a fleece of wool over the sea. Absolutely
nothing can be seen, but strange sounds come, borne on the wind from the
direction of Block Island--dull reports as of cannon signals; and the
inhabitants of Newport prick up their ears and strain their eyes with a
mixture of hope and terror; for the French fleet is looked for; English
cruisers have been seen or suspected hovering round the coast, and who
knows but a naval engagement is taking place at that very moment. By and
by the fog lifts, with that fantastic deliberation which distinguishes
its movements, and presently stately shapes whiten the blue, and,
gradually nearing, reveal themselves as
[Illustration: ROCHAMBEAU’S HEADQUARTERS.]
the frigates _Surveillante_, _Amazone_ and _Guêpe_, _The Duke of
Burgundy_, and _The Neptune_, “doubly sheathed with copper”; _The
Conquerant_, _The Provence_, _The Eveillé_, also “doubly sheathed with
copper”; _The Lazon_ and _The Ardent_, convoying a host of transports
and store-ships; with General Rochambeau and his officers on board,
besides the regiments of Bourbonnais, Soissonais, Saintonge and Royal
Deux Ponts, five hundred artillerists and six hundred of Lauzan’s
Legion, all come to aid the infant United States, then in the fourth
year of their struggle for independence. Never was reinforcement more
timely or more ardently desired. We may be sure that all Newport ran
out to greet the new arrivals. Among the other officers who landed on
that eventful 11th of July, was Claude Blanchard, commissary-in-chief of
the French forces--an important man enough to the expedition, but of
very little importance now, except for the lucky fact that he kept a
journal,--which journal, recently published, gives a better and more
detailed account of affairs at that time and place than any one else has
afforded us.
It is from Blanchard that we learn of the three months’ voyage; of
sighting now and again the vessels of the English squadron; of the
Chevalier de Fernay’s refusal to engage them, he being intent on the
safe-conduct of his convoy; of the consequent heart-burnings and
reproaches of his captains, which, together with the stings of his own
wounded pride, resulted in a fever, and subsequently in his death,
recorded on the tablet which now adorns the vestibule of Trinity Church.
The town was illuminated in honor of the fleet. “A small but handsome
town,” says Blanchard, “and the houses, though mostly of wood, are of an
agreeable shape.”
The first work of the newly arrived allies was to restore the redoubts
which the English had dismantled and in great part destroyed. It was at
this time that the first fort on the Dumplings, and the original Fort
Adams, on Brenton’s Reef, were built. The excellent Blanchard meanwhile
continues his observations on climate, society and local customs.
One of his criticisms on the national characteristics strikes us oddly
now, yet has its interest as denoting the natural drift and result of
the employment of a debased currency.
“The Americans are slow, and do not decide promptly in matters of
business,” he observes. “It is not easy for us to rely upon their
promises. They love money, and _hard_ money; it is thus they designate
specie to distinguish it from paper money, which loses prodigiously.
This loss varies according to circumstances and according to the
provinces.”
Later we hear of dinners and diners:
“They do not eat soups, and do not serve up ragouts at their
dinners, but boiled and roast, and much vegetables. They drink
nothing but cider and Madeira wine with water. The dessert is
composed of preserved quinces and pickled sorrel. The Americans eat
the latter with the meat. They do not take coffee immediately after
dinner, but it is served three or four hours afterward with tea;
this coffee is weak, and four or five cups are not equal to one of
ours; so that they take many of them. The tea, on the contrary, is
very strong. Breakfast is an important affair with them. Besides
tea and coffee, they put on table roasted meats, with butter, pies
and ham; nevertheless they sup, and in the afternoon they again
take tea. Thus the Americans are almost always at table; and as
they have little to occupy them, as they go out little in winter,
and spend whole days alongside their fireside and their wives,
without reading and without doing anything, going to table is a
relief and a preventive of _ennui_. Yet they are not great eaters.”
On the 5th of March, 1781, General Washington arrived in Newport.
Blanchard thus records his first impressions of the commander-in-chief:
“His face is handsome, noble and mild. He is tall--at the least, five
feet eight inches (French measure). In the evening I was at supper with
him. I mark, as a fortunate day, that in which I have been able to
behold a man so truly great.”
After the war came a period of great business depression, in which
Newport heavily shared. The British, during their occupation of the
town, had done much to injure it. Nearly a thousand buildings were
destroyed by them on the island; fruit-and shade-trees were cut down,
the churches were used
[Illustration: LIFE MASK OF WASHINGTON.
MADE BY HOUDON IN 1785.]
as barracks, and the Redwood Library was despoiled of its more valuable
books. Commerce was dead; the suppression of the slave-trade reduced
many to poverty, and the curse of paper money--to which Rhode Island
clung after other States had abandoned it--poisoned the very springs of
public credit. Brissot de Warville, in the record of his journey
“performed” through the United States in 1788, draws this melancholy
picture of Newport at that time:
“Since the peace, everything is changed. The reign of solitude is
only interrupted by groups of idle men standing, with folded arms,
at the corners of the streets; houses falling to ruin; miserable
shops, which present nothing but a few coarse stuffs, or baskets of
apples, and other articles of little value; grass growing in the
public square, in front of the court of justice; rags stuffed in
the windows, or hung upon hideous women and lean, unquiet
children.”
Count Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, writing ten years later, calls the place
“_cette ville triste et basse_,” and further ventures on this remarkable
criticism of its salubrity:
“The healthfulness of the city of Newport and its environs is
doubtless the result of the brilliancy and coolness of its climate,
but this coolness proves fatal to its younger inhabitants, and the
number of young men, and, above all, of young women, who die yearly
of consumption is considerable. It is noteworthy that the
inscriptions on the tombstones in the cemetery indicate in almost
all cases that the person interred is either very young or very
old--either less than twenty years of age or more than seventy.”
Whether this statement of Count Rochefoucauld’s bears the test of
examination would be impossible now to determine, for the century since
his visit has made changes in the city of the dead as marked as those
effected in the city of the living. But the “cool and brilliant” air
with which he finds fault has since been proved by many invalids to be
full of health-giving properties. Consumptives are more often sent to
Newport for cure, nowadays, than away from it. Asthma, diseases of the
chest and throat, nervous disorders, insomnia, excitability of brain,
are in many cases sensibly benefited by the island climate, which,
however, is less “brilliant” than sedative. This is attributed to the
relaxing effects of the Gulf Stream, which is popularly supposed to make
an opportune curve toward the shore and to produce a quality of air
quite different from that of other New England seaside climates.
Whatever may be the truth as to the bend of this obliging current, it is
certain that something has given to the place an exceptional climate,
pure, free from malaria and exempt equally from the fiercer heats of
summer and the severer colds of winter.
[Illustration: THE PARSONAGE OF MRS. STOWE’S “MINISTER’S WOOING.”]
It was not till about the year 1830 that the true source of Newport’s
prosperity was realized to be her climate. Since then she has become
more and more the Mecca of pilgrims from all parts of the country. Year
by year, the town has spread and broadened, stretching out wide arms to
include distant coigns of vantage, until now the summer city covers some
miles in extent, and land, unsalable in the early part of the century,
and but twenty years ago commanding little more than the price of a
Western homestead, is now valued at from ten to fourteen thousand
dollars an acre! Every year adds to the number of cottages and villas
and to the provision made for the accommodation of strangers. The
census, which in winter counts up to less than twenty thousand, is
during the four months of “the season” swelled by the addition of
thousands of strangers, many of whom are in a manner residents of the
place, owning their own houses and preserving their domestic privacy.
A walk in the older and more thickly settled parts of the town is not
without its rewards. There are to be found well-known objects of
interest,--the Jewish burial-ground, with its luxurious screen of
carefully tended flowers; the Redwood Library, rich in old books and the
possession of the finest cut-leaved beech on the island; and the old
Stone Mill, on which so much speculative reasoning in prose and verse
has been lavished. Some years ago, those ruthless civic hands which know
neither taste nor mercy, despoiled the mill of the vines which made it
picturesque, but even thus denuded, it is an interesting object. There
is old Trinity, with its square pews and burial tablets, and a
last-century “three-decker” pulpit, with clerk’s desk, reading-desk and
preaching-desk,
[Illustration: DOORWAY OF OLD HOUSE ON THAMES STREET.]
all overhung by a conical sounding-board of extinguisher pattern--a
sounding-board on which whole generations of little boys have fixed
fascinated eyes, wondering in case of fall what would become of the
clergyman underneath it. And, besides these, each westward-leading
street gives pretty glimpses of bay and islands and shipping, and there
is always the chance of lighting on a bit of the past,--some quaint roof
or wall or doorway, left over from Revolutionary times and holding up a
protesting face from among more modern buildings.
Winter or summer, the charm which most endears Newport to the
imaginative mind is, and must continue to be, the odd mingling of old
and new which meets you on every hand. A large portion of the place
belongs and can belong to no other day but our own, but touching it
everywhere, apart from it but of it, is the past. It meets you at every
turn, in legend or relic or quaint traditionary custom still kept up and
observed. Many farm-hands and servants on the island still date and
renew their contracts of service from “Lady-Day.” The “nine-o’clock
bell,” which seems derived in some dim way from the ancient curfew, is
regularly rung. The election parade, dear to little boys and
peanut-venders, has continued to be a chief event every spring, with its
procession, its drums, its crowd of country visitors, and small booths
for the sale of edibles and non-edibles pitched on either side the
State-House Square, which, in honor of this yearly observance, is called
familiarly, “The Parade.” One of the oldest militia companies in New
England is the Newport Artillery, and _The Mercury_, established in 1758
by a brother of Benjamin Franklin, is the oldest surviving newspaper in
the United States. Newport also possesses a town-crier. He may be met
with any day, tinkling his bell at street corners and rehearsing, in a
loud, melancholy chant, facts regarding auction-sales, or town-meetings,
or lost property. And, turning aside from the polo-play or the Avenue
crowded with brilliant equipages, a few rods carries you to the quiet
loneliness of a secluded burial-place, with the name of an ancient
family carved on its locked gate, in which, beneath gray headstones and
long, flowering grasses, repose the hushed secrets of a century ago. Or,
fresh from the buzz and chatter, the gay interchange of the day, you may
chance on an old salt spinning yarns of pirates and privateers, phantom
ships or buried treasure, or an antiquary full of well-remembered
stories whose actors belong to the far-gone past,--stories of the
extinct glories of
[Illustration: GENERAL NATHANAEL GREENE. FROM ONE OF MALBONE’S BEST
MINIATURES.]
the place, of family romance and family tragedy, or tragedy just
escaped. What could be finer contrast than tales like these, told on a
street-corner where, just before, perhaps, the question had been about
Wall Street or Santiago, if the French frigate were still in the bay, or
when would be the next meeting of the Town and Country Club! Indeed, it
is not so many years since visitors to Newport might have held speech
with a dear old lady whose memory carried her back clearly and
distinctly to the day when, a child six years old, she sat on
Washington’s knee. The little girl had a sweet voice. She sang a song to
the great man, in recompense for which he honored her with a salute.
“It was here, my dear, and here, that General Washington kissed me,” she
would say to her grandchildren, touching first one and then the other
wrinkled cheek; and to the end of her life, no other lips were suffered
to profane with a touch the spots thus made sacred.
In a country whose charm and whose reproach alike is its newness, and to
a society whose roots are forever being uprooted and freshly planted to
be again uprooted, there is real education and advantage in the tangible
neighborhood of the past; and the Newport past is neither an unlovely
nor a reproachful shape. There is dignity in her calm mien; she looks on
stately and untroubled, and compares and measures. The dazzle and
glitter of modern luxury do not daunt her: she has seen splendor before
in a different generation and different forms, she has shared it, she
has watched it fade and fail. Out of her mute, critical regard, a voice
seems to sound in tones like the rustle of falling leaves in an autumn
day, and to utter that ancient and melancholy truth, _Vanitas
vanitatum_! “The fashion of this world passeth away.” We listen, awed
for a moment, and then we smile again,--for brightness near at hand has
a more potent spell than melancholy gone by,--and turning to our modern
lives with their movement and sunshine, their hope and growth, we are
content to accept and enjoy such brief day as is granted us, nor “prate
nor hint of change till change shall come.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
PROVIDENCE
THE COLONY OF HOPE
BY WILLIAM B. WEEDEN
The capital of Rhode Island, the second city of New England,--an
agricultural village in the seventeenth, a commercial port in the
eighteenth, and a centre of manufacturing in the nineteenth
century,--lies at the head of Narragansett Bay. The mainland of the
State westward to Connecticut, according to Shaler, rests on very old
rocks of the Laurentian and Lower Cambrian series. The greater part of
the bay and the land near Providence is upon rocks belonging to the Coal
measures. These rocks, softer than the older ones, have been cut away
and afford the inlets of the bay. The surface of the State and the
sloping hills of Providence have been profoundly affected by the wearing
course of the glaciers.
The original village skirted along the western side of the ridge, by
which ran the little Moshassuck and Woons-asquetucket Rivers. Eastward
the ridge stretched in a plateau to the larger Seekonk, which cut off
the peninsula. On the eastern side of the Seekonk, Roger Williams had
settled and planted, when Plymouth Colony significantly advised him to
move on. In June, 1636, with five companions, he crossed the Seekonk and
landed on the rock, since raised to the grade of Ives and Williams
streets. Here, as the tradition runs, Indians greeted him cordially,
“What Cheer, Netop! What Cheer!” He had arranged with the Narragansett
sachems, Canonicus and Miantinomi, for deeds of the lands about these
rivers and the Pawtuxet, with certain undefined rights extending
westward and northward.
The canoe kept away from What Cheer or Slate rock, south and westward
around Tockwotton and Fox Point, up the Providence River, to land near
where St. John’s Church stands. The spring of water attracting the
pioneer and kept as public property is in the basement of a house on the
northwest corner of North Main Street and Allen’s Lane. North Main was
the “Towne Streete,” occupied by
[Illustration: VIEW OF PROVIDENCE.
FROM THE SOUTH.]
the little band of settlers. Williams’s “home-lot” stretched easterly,
including the land of the Dorr Estate, at the corner of Benefit and
Bowen Streets. A stone in the rear of the buildings marks the spot where
Roger Williams was buried.
In this man was the germ of Providence, the adumbration of the little
commonwealth of Rhode Island. Whatever drove him from Massachusetts,
however the Puritans enforced their narrow political scheme, the result
was a free State founded on new principles of government. In the words
of Thomas Durfee:
“Absolute sincerity is the key to his character, as it was always
the mainspring of his conduct.... He had the defect of his
qualities;--an inordinate confidence in his own judgment. He had
also the defects of his race;--the hot Welsh temper, passionate and
resentful under provocation, and the moody Welsh fancy.”
The “Plantations of Providence” began in these “home-lots,” reaching
eastward from the “Towne Streete.” It was intended to give each settler
five acres. Some had, moreover, meadow-lands, and there were common
rights, as in all the plantations of New England. Chad Brown, John
Throckmorton, and Gregory Dexter were the committee who made
[Illustration: ROGER WILLIAMS RECEIVED BY THE INDIANS.
FROM A DESIGN BY A. H. WRAY.]
the first allotment. The land had been conveyed from the Indian sachems,
and Williams gave it by “initial deed” to his twelve companions, making
thirteen original proprietors.
“Probably in the autumn of 1638, and certainly prior to the 16th of
March, 1639,”[68] the settlers formed the first Baptist church in
America. Williams was pastor for about four months, with Holyman as
colleague. Chad Brown was ordained in 1642 with William Wickenden. The
latter was succeeded by Gregory Dexter. The present church, adapted by
James Sumner from designs of James Gibbs, architect, was built in 1775.
Earlier than this, though the date is not fixed, the proprietors had
made the following agreement, the importance of which can hardly be
overestimated:
“We whose names are hereunder, desirous to inhabit in the town of
Providence, do promise to subject ourselves in active or passive
obedience, to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for
public good of the body, in an orderly way, by the major assent of
the present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together
into a town-fellowship, and such others whom they shall admit unto
them only in civil things.”
Here was laid the foundation of soul liberty. Let us refer to Diman:
“Thus, for the first time in history, a form of government was adopted
which drew a clear and unmistakable line between the temporal and
spiritual power, and a community came into being which was an anomaly
among the nations.” It was a pure democracy, controlling the admission
of its members.
They soon found that some delegation of power was needed for civil
administration, and in 1640 they elaborated their system somewhat, and
established rudimentary courts. They perceived that they could not
remain safely between the unfriendly colonies of Massachusetts on one
side, and the alien Dutch of New York on the other. They sent Williams
to England, whence he returned in 1644, bringing a parliamentary
charter. Under this, the towns of Providence, Portsmouth and Newport
were united, with the name “The Incorporation of Providence Plantations
in the Narragansett Bay in New England.” In 1645 there were, according
to Holmes, 101 men in Providence capable of bearing arms. Staples thinks
this estimate includes the population of Shawonet or Warwick. In 1663
John Clarke of Newport obtained the royal charter, which was adopted by
the freemen of the towns, and the commonwealth was entitled the “Colony
of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” The oldest tax or rate bill
extant dates from 1650, when Roger Williams was assessed £1.13.4. In
1663 the whole tax was £36. assessed in “Country pay,” which performed
such important functions in the currencies of New England, viz., wheat
at 4_s._ 6_d._, peas, 3_s._ 6_d._, butter, 6_d._
An important factor in the daily life of Providence has always been in
the crossing of the main stream which limited the early village on the
west. Mr. Fred. A. Arnold’s careful investigation[69] shows that a
bridge at Weybosset, “formerly Wapwayset,” or “at the narrow passage,”
was built before 1660. It was repaired and renewed at various times. In
166-7/8 Roger Williams undertook, in a most interesting document, to
maintain it by co-operative labor from the townsmen and tolls from
strangers. It was enlarged until, in the middle of our century,
tradition claimed it to be the widest bridge in the world. Other bridges
spanned the river, and in the present year the old Weybosset is being
replaced by an elaborate steel structure laid on piers of granite.
[Illustration: THE ROGER WILLIAMS MONUMENT.]
In 1675-1676 King Philip’s War, in which the Narragansetts joined, raged
through southern New England, and our little plantation was devastated.
The women and children generally, with the greater part of the men,
sought safety in Newport, Long Island or elsewhere. Thirty houses were
burned, chiefly in the north part of the town. After the Indians were
beaten, the village was slowly rebuilt. At this time the administration
of the settlement was in the hands of the Friends. Their influence was
second only to that of the Baptists, until after the Revolution. The
only original house standing is the interesting Roger Mowry[70] tavern,
built in 1653 or earlier, called also the Whipple or Abbott house.
Guarded by a large elm, it stands on Abbott Street, which runs eastward
from North Main. The town council met there, and tradition says Williams
conducted prayer-meetings in it.
Some of the sites of the early planters are interesting. Richard Scott,
a Quaker and antagonist of Williams, lived on the lot next north of St.
John’s churchyard. Mary Dyre went from here to be hanged on Boston
Common. Near Dexter’s (afterward Olney’s) lane lived Gregory Dexter.
Chad Brown, the ancestor of so many men of mark, lived on land now
occupied by College Street. The purpose of the original allotment was to
give fronts upon the “Towne Streete” and river, and equal shares of
farm-lands. According to Dorr[71]:
“This attempt at democratic equality only created a multitude of
small estates widely separated, and in some instances nearly or
quite a mile apart. Besides his home-lot of five acres, each
proprietor had a ‘six-acre lot,’ at a distance from his abode; and
in a few years one or more ‘stated common lots,’ which he acquired
by purchase from the Proprietary, or by their occasional land
dividends among themselves.”
The chief holdings were on “Providence Neck,” but they gradually
extended into “Weybosset Neck.”
The latter years of Roger Williams were largely occupied by
controversies with his neighbors, including his especial opponent,
William Harris. The germs of a new State, rendered indestructible by the
complete separation of church and state, if slumbering, yet lived in
spite of the petty social stagnation of an agricultural community.
Early in the eighteenth century, the plantation took a new departure.
Nathaniel Browne, a shipwright, had been driven out from Massachusetts,
because he had become “a convert to the Church of England.” In 1711 the
town granted him one half-acre on “Waybosset Neck on salt water,” and
again another half-acre for building vessels. His vessels were among the
first to sail from Providence for the West Indies. Horse-carts and
vehicles had been used before 1700 by the wealthy, but Madame Knight’s
journey to New York from Boston in 1704 shows that the saddle and
pillion were the common conveyance along the bridle-paths. Galloping on
the Town Street was prohibited in 1681. Through Pawtucket, the
Bostonians came by the present North Burying Ground into the Town
Street, then crossed Weybosset Bridge on their way toward the southwest.
In the wider part of Weybosset thoroughfare, there stood a knoll, which
has been levelled away. The road swept around and created the bulging
lines of the street. Travel went on through Apponaug and North
Kingstown, over Tower Hill and by the Narragansett shore, over the
Pequot path toward New York. At this period, the road was opened toward
Hartford, and improved communications were made with the surrounding
towns. It was not until 1820 that a direct turnpike was opened from
Providence to New London.
Of more importance even was the way into the world outward, through the
bay. Pardon Tillinghast had been granted land twenty feet square for a
storehouse and wharf “over against his dwelling-place,” in 1679-80, at
the foot of the present Transit Street. There was struggle and
competition for “lands by the sea-side,” or “forty-foot lots, called
warehouse lots,” throughout this time, and complete division of the
shore privileges was not effected until 1749. All these restless
movements showed that the town was waking up and sending its commerce
abroad into foreign countries. The first effectual street regulations
were in 1736.
The next church organized after the First Baptist followed the faith of
the Six-Principle Baptists. The Friends, as they were expelled from
Massachusetts, settled in various towns of Rhode Island. Mention has
been made of Richard Scott. In 1672 George Fox visited Newport, and he
held a meeting “in a great barn” at Providence. Here was a contestant
worthy of our doughty champion, Williams. They disputed with voice and
pen, recording their angelic moods in these argumentative titles: _The
Fox Digged out of his Burrowes_ begged one side of the question; this
was answered with equal logic in _A New England Firebrand Quenched_. The
Friends built a meeting-house about 1704.
The First Congregational Pedobaptist (now Unitarian) Society was formed
about 1720. They built a house for worship in 1723, at the corner of
College and Benefit Streets, where the Court House now stands. This
building became the “Old Town House,” when the society moved to its
present location at the corner of Benevolent and Benefit Streets.
Meanwhile the adherents of the Church of England, yet to become the
Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, were gathering in our
town. There is some dispute as to the first movements, but Dr. McSparran
of Narragansett affirmed that he “was the first Episcopal minister that
ever preached at Providence.” The society thus formed finally took the
name of “St. John’s Church, in Providence.” The church was raised in
1722, on the spot where the present building succeeded it in 1810. It
will be observed that these new ecclesiastical developments moved along
with the broader commercial life which was animating the community.
Any historical student should examine Rhode Island for what it is, and
even more for what it is not. Roger Williams and his fellows tried a
“lively experiment” as daring as it was fruitful. They severed church
and state, cutting off thereby the help of an educated clergy. They
founded a political democracy, tempering it with the best aristocracy to
be obtained, without the ordinary facilities of education derived
through such help. Neither the Williams Independents nor the Quakers
followed the common formulas of education, which were generally in the
hands of Anglicans or Presbyterians. This does not prove that societies
can safely drop scholastic education. Many communities have failed for
lack of such education. It does prove that the Anglo-American stock
engaged in political and economical development will educate itself. At
first sight, it was hardly to be expected that isolated and unlettered
Providence would be prominent in resisting England, or in forming a new
government. But she did this, in full share, and the embodiment of her
citizenship, the type of her republican character, was in one man,
Stephen Hopkins--“great not only in capacity and force of mind, but
also--what is much rarer--in originative faculty.”
Born a farmer in 1707, removing to Providence in 1731, a member of the
General Assembly in 1732, Chief Justice in 1739, one of the committee to
form Franklin’s plan of colonial union at Albany in 1754, a signer of
the Declaration in 1776--we have here the full measure of a republican
citizen, whether by the standard of Cato, or by the later models of
Franklin and Washington. “A clear and convincing speaker, he used his
influence in Congress in favor of decisive measures.”
[Illustration: Step. Hopkins
FROM “APPLETONS’ CYCLO. OF AM. BIOG.” COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY D. APPLETON &
CO.]
In 1758 the first postmaster was appointed by Dr. Franklin. The State
House on North Main Street was erected in 1759; the Fire Department
began in 1763; a “vigorous effort” was made for free schools in 1767.
A great change was wrought about 1763 by the opening of Westminster
Street. A town named for Mr. Fox’s political district had been projected
on the west side. It was strangled by the influence of the southern
counties. Finally the way across the marsh was laid out. As late as
1771, there were only four houses on the southern and one on the
northern side of Westminster Street.
Joseph and William Russell, Clark and Nightingale, with James Brown, the
father of the four brothers mentioned below, were among the prominent
merchants before the Revolution.
Next to the political change of colony into State, the greatest monument
of the larger Rhode Island is the University. Rhode Island College, to
become Brown University in 1804, was located under President Manning at
Warren in 1766. By the “resolute spirits of the Browns and some other
men of Providence,” University Hall was built in 1770. A government
stable and barrack during the Revolution, it has been a beacon-light
ever since.
We said not much might have been expected of little Rhody, by common
rules of historic proportion, but the overt acts of the American
Revolution began right here in 1772. The oppressive colonial
administration, begun by Grenville, was especially vexatious in
Narragansett Bay. The British cruiser _Gaspee_, attempting an illegal
seizure, ran aground on Namquit, since known as Gaspee Point. The news
ran like lightning through the town, that the _Hawk_ was fettered on our
shore. Four brothers, Nicholas, Joseph, John and Moses, descended from
Chad Brown, were all prominent merchants. John was a man of the time.
Afterward, his powder, seized in a raid in the British West Indies,
arrived in time to be issued in the retreat from Bunker Hill. Brown
planned a daring attack on His Majesty’s vessel in James Sabin’s inn.
The historic room has been transferred bodily by the Talbots to their
home at 209 Williams Street. Eight long-boats were provided by Brown and
moved under the command of Abraham Whipple, afterward a commodore in the
Revolutionary navy. A boat from Bristol joined the party. Lieutenant
Duddingston answered the hail of the patriot raiders and was severely
wounded,
[Illustration: BROWN UNIVERSITY.]
shedding the first British blood in the War of Independence. Whipple’s
men boarded the cruiser, drove the crew below, took them off prisoners,
then fired and destroyed the vessel. It shows the firm temper and new
American loyalty prevailing in the town, that large rewards brought out
no information which would effectively prosecute Brown and Whipple or
their fellow offenders. Brown was arrested and imprisoned during the
occupation of Boston, but for want of sufficient proof he was
discharged.
Providence contributed its full share to the Revolution. Stephen Hopkins
signed the Declaration of Independence with a tremulous hand, but a firm
heart. Troops were freely furnished and privateers brought wealth to the
town. The second division of the French contingent passed the winter of
1782 in encampment on Harrington’s Lane. The street is now known as
Rochambeau Avenue. Newport, hitherto the more important port, lost her
commerce through the British occupation. The natural drift of commerce
to the farthest inland waters available was precipitated by these
political changes. Newport never recovered her lost prestige, and
Providence developed rapidly after the peace. Voyages, which had been
mostly to the West Indies with an occasional trip to Bilbao and the
Mediterranean, soon stretched around the world to harvest the teeming
wealth of the Chinese and Indian seas. The _General Washington_, the
first vessel from Providence in that trade, sailed in 1787. Edward
Carrington sent out and received the last vessels in 1841. In the early
years of the nineteenth century, the profits of the Oriental trade were
very great.
The manufacture of cotton was attempted by several parties, but it was
not established in Providence. Samuel Slater located in Pawtucket in
1790. He was induced to come to our State through the sagacity,
enterprise and abundant capital of Moses Brown. After about a year, a
glut of yarns occurred, and Almy, Brown and Slater had accumulated
nearly six thousand pounds. Brown said: “Samuel, if thee goes on, thee
will spin up all our farms.” The manufacture extended rapidly and became
the chief source of the prosperity of the State. It absorbed the
capital, which was gradually withdrawn from commerce and shipping.
An important element in the development of our city has been the free
banking system. The first institution in our State and the second in
New England was the Providence Bank, chartered in 1791.
Newspapers only slightly affected the life of the eighteenth century.
They began, in a humble way, the great part they were to play in later,
modern development. _The Providence Gazette and Country Journal_ was
first published in 1762 by William Goddard. _The Manufacturers’ and
Farmers’ Journal_, still continuing its prosperous career, appeared in
1820. The _Gazette_ was enlivened by advertisements in verse, of which
this is a specimen, from the year 1796:
“A bunch of Grapes is Thurber’s sign,
A shoe and boot is made on mine,
My shop doth stand in Bowen’s Lane,
And Jonathan Cady is my name.”
Housekeepers in our day consider the servant-girl question a hard
problem, but hear the complaint a century ago. There had been taken away
“from the servant girls in this town, all inclination to do any
kind of work, and left in lieu thereof, an impudent appearance, a
strong and continued thirst for high wages, a gossiping disposition
for every sort of amusement, a leering and hankering after persons
of the other sex, a desire of finery and fashion, a never-ceasing
trot after new places more advantageous for stealing, with a number
of contingent accomplishments, that do not suit the wearers. Now if
any person or persons will restore that degree of honesty and
industry, which has been for some time missing,”
then this rugged censor offers $500 reward.
In 1767 the first regular stage-coach was advertised to Boston. In 1793
Hatch’s stages ran to Boston and charged the passengers a fare of one
dollar, the same sum which the railway charges to-day. In 1796 a
navigable canal was projected to Worcester, John Brown being an active
promoter. The project was not carried through until 1828, when the
packet-boat _Lady Carrington_ passed through the Blackstone Canal. The
enterprise had poor success. John Brown built Washington Bridge across
the lower Seekonk, connecting the eastern shore to India Point, where
the wealth of Ormus and of Ind was discharged from the aromatic ships.
In this period the first steamboat came from New York around Point
Judith and connected with stages to Boston.
The international disputes concerning the embargo and non-intercourse
with Great Britain, which led up to the War of 1812, found Providence
opposed in opinion to the Executive of the United States. But the
opposition was loyal and the government received proper support. Peace
was very welcome when it was proclaimed in 1815. This year, a tremendous
gale swept the ocean into the bay and the bay into the river, carrying
ruin in their path. The waters were higher by some seven feet than had
ever been known. The fierce winds carried the salt of the seas as far
inland as Worcester. Thirty or forty vessels were dashed through the
Weybosset Bridge into the cove above. Others were swept from their
moorings and stranded among the wharves. Shops were smashed or damaged
and the whole devastation cost nearly one million of dollars--a great
sum in those days. It was a radical measure of improvement. New streets
were opened and better stores rose amid the ruins. South Water and South
West Water Streets date hence, and Canal Street was opened soon after.
In 1832 the city government was organized, with Samuel W. Bridgham for
mayor. A serious riot occurring the previous year had shown that the old
town government was outgrown. The railways to Boston and Stonington
changed the course of transportation. In 1848 the Worcester connection,
the first intersecting or cross line in New England, gave direct
intercourse with the West.
[Illustration: FRANCIS WAYLAND.]
We sent out Henry Wheaton, one of the masters of international law, and
we adopted Francis Wayland,--a citizen of the world,--who set an
enduring mark on Rhode Island. President of Brown University, 1827-1855,
his work in the American educational system has not yet yielded its full
fruit. He brought teacher and pupil into closer contact by the living
voice. He projected a practical method for elective studies and put it
in operation at Brown University in 1850. Started too soon, and with
insufficient means, it opened the way to success, when the larger
universities inaugurated similar methods after the Civil War. Nine
hundred and forty-six students now attend where Manning and Wayland
taught.
An armed though bloodless insurrection in 1842 brought our State to the
verge of revolution. The old charter of 1663 limited suffrage to
freeholders and their oldest sons. Thomas Wilson Dorr was the champion
of people’s suffrage. His party elected him governor with a legislature,
by irregular and illegitimate voting. They mustered in arms and tried to
seize the State arsenals in our city. Dorr had a strong intellect; he
was a sincere and unselfish patriot, though perverse and foolish in his
conduct of affairs. The suffrage was widened by a new constitution in
1843, which has just been revised by a constitutional commission.
The early cotton manufacture was fostered by the well-distributed
water-power of Rhode Island. The glacial grinding of the land had left
numerous ponds and minor streams,--admirable reservoirs of
water-power,--just the facilities needed for weak pioneers. As the
century advanced, greater force was needed. About 1847 George H. Corliss
bent his talents and energies to extend the power of the high-pressure
steam-engine. He adapted and developed better cut-off valves, which
preserved the whole expansive force of the steam, stopped off before it
filled the cylinder. It was a new lever of Archimedes, and Corliss’s
machines went over the whole world. This new mastery of force stimulated
all industries.
Our little community showed its customary military spirit in 1861.
Governor William Sprague mustered troops with great energy. After the
famous Massachusetts 6th, the Rhode Island 1st Militia with its 1st
Battery were the first reinforcements which arrived at Washington. In
field artillery, our volunteers were especially proficient.
The growth of the population of Providence is shown in the following
table:
1708 1,446
1730 3,916
1774 4,321
1800 7,614
1810 10,071
1820 11,745
1830 16,836
1840 23,172
1850 41,513
1860 50,666
1870 68,904
1880 104,857
1885 118,070
1895 145,472
We could not notice all parts of Providence in this cursory survey.
Small as well as large implements of iron, jewelry and silver, the
invention and immense production of wood-screws, india-rubber,
worsted,--all these complicated industries have built up an extending
and encroaching city, until now three hundred thousand people dwell
within a radius of ten miles from our City Hall.
Old Providence, the home of Williams and the Quakers, is fading away.
The “Towne Streete,” its meandering curves gradually straightening, will
hardly be recognized a century hence. The Mowry house, the homes of
Stephen and Esek Hopkins, are small, when compared with the mansions of
John Brown, Thomas P. Ives, Sullivan Dorr and Edward Carrington; while
the solid comfort prevailing in the eighteenth century, as embodied in
these houses, is surpassed, though it may not be bettered, by the more
pretentious domestic architecture of our day. The Independent worshipers
in the First Baptist and First Congregational churches would feel
strange under the domes of the beautiful Central Congregational. The
Anglicans of the first St. John’s would be bewildered by the pointed
arches of St. Stephen’s. The few Catholic immigrants, bringing the Host
across the seas with tender care, and resting at St. Peter and St.
Paul’s, would be amazed by the swarm of
[Illustration: THE CAPITOL.]
well-to-do citizens clustering beneath the massive towers of the
Cathedral.
The industrial and economic evolution is fully as great as the æsthetic
and architectural. The crazy little organism of Almy, Brown and Slater
is replaced by the long, whirling shafts, the spindled acres of the
Goddards’ Ann and Hope Mill at Lonsdale. The homely security of the
market house (present Board of Trade), the Providence Bank and the
“Arcade” is overshadowed by the City Hall, the Rhode Island Hospital and
Rhode Island Hospital Trust Company. University Hall burgeons into the
fair arches of Sayles Hall. No medieval builder worked more reverently
than Alpheus C. Morse, as he devotedly wrought at his task, getting the
best lines into stone and lime.
Not always does the work of the modern builders tend toward beauty. The
masterly brick arcades of Thomas A. Teft kept the city’s approaches for
a half-century. Swept away by the more convenient passenger station of
the New York and New Haven Railway, they will leave behind many regrets.
The magnificent marble State House will lift the observer away from and
above all the buildings below.
The growth of Providence runs even with the State’s, except in the
excrescent luxury of Newport in its summer bloom. We cannot stand still
like Holland; we must look outward or decay. The American destiny is
reaching out, notwithstanding the caution of the prudent, perhaps of the
judicious. The mystic Orient, no longer mysterious, beckons from the
West instead of the East. It led the Browns, Iveses, Carringtons,
Maurans, and their captains, the Holdens, Ormsbees, Paiges and
Comstocks, to opulence. Their descendants, with more abundant capital,
ready skill and better organization, ought not to lag in the world’s
march. Men must be forthcoming.
There has been always a cosmopolitan flavor in the little State,
isolated between the restless intellectual energy of Massachusetts and
the steady Puritan development of Connecticut. Boston had more trade
than Providence and Newport; she was not so truly commercial. The larger
Franklin went over to Pennsylvania, but the next man, Stephen Hopkins,
stayed in Rhode Island. The seed which Berkeley planted sprouted in
Channing, and that influence went throughout New England. The little
State has never been without ideas.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
HARTFORD
“THE BIRTHPLACE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY”
BY MARY K. TALCOTT
Among the historic cities of New England, Hartford claims a foremost
place. Not only was its settlement of great consequence at the time, but
for historical importance and far-reaching results this colony’s claims
to attention are second only to those of Plymouth and Boston. The
foundation of Hartford was a further application and development of the
ideas that brought the Puritans to this country, and, to quote the
historian, Johnston,--
“Here is the first practical assertion of the right of the people,
not only to choose, but to limit the powers of their rulers, an
assertion which lies at the foundation of the American system....
It is on the banks of the Connecticut, under the mighty preaching
of Thomas Hooker, and in the constitution to which he gave life, if
not form, that we draw the first breath of that atmosphere which
is now so familiar to us. The birthplace of American democracy is
Hartford.”
This constitution, first promulgated in Hartford, was the first written
constitution in history which was adopted by a people and which also
organized a government. John Fiske says:
“The compact drawn up in the Mayflower’s cabin was not, in the
strict sense, a constitution, which is a document defining and
limiting the functions of government. Magna Charta partook of the
nature of a written constitution as far as it went, but it did not
create a government.”
On the 14th of January, 1639, the freemen of the three towns, Windsor,
Hartford, and Wethersfield, assembled at Hartford, and drew up a
constitution, consisting of eleven articles, which they called the
“Fundamental Orders of Connecticut,” and under this law the people of
Connecticut lived for nearly two centuries, as the Charter granted by
King Charles II., in 1662, was simply a royal recognition of the
government actually in operation. Another writer says:
“We honor the limitations of despotism which are written in the
twelve tables; the repression of monarchical power in Magna Charta,
in the Bill of Rights, and
[Illustration: MAIN STREET.]
in that whole undefinable creation, as invisible and intangible as
the atmosphere but like it full of oxygen and electricity, which we
call the British Constitution. But in our Connecticut Constitution
we find no limitation upon monarchy, for monarchy is unrecognized;
the limitations are upon the legislature, the courts, and
executive. It is pure democracy acting through representation, and
imposing organic limitations. Even the suffrage qualification of
church membership, which was required by our older sister Colony of
Massachusetts, was omitted. Here in a New England wilderness a few
pilgrims of the pilgrims, alive to the inspirations of the common
law and of the British Constitution, so full of Christianity that
they felt the great throb of its heart of human brotherhood, and so
full of Judaism that they believed themselves in some special sense
the people of God, made a written constitution, to be a supreme and
organic law for their State.”
But for the immediate inspiration of this document we must look to a
“lecture,” preached by Mr. Hooker on Thursday, May 21, 1638, before the
legislative body of freemen. Dr. Bacon says of it:
“That sermon, by Thomas Hooker, is the earliest known suggestion of
a fundamental law, enacted, not by royal charter nor by concession
from any previously existing government, but by the people
themselves,--a primary and supreme law by which the government is
constituted, and which not only provides for the free choice of
magistrates by the people, but also sets the bounds and limitations
of the power and place to which each magistrate is called.”
But we must know something of a people to whom such doctrines were
preached--of a people capable of receiving and applying such truths. It
is said that three kingdoms were sifted to furnish the men who settled
New England, and it may also be said that the Massachusetts Colony was
sifted to supply the Connecticut settlers. Three of the eight
Massachusetts towns, Dorchester, Watertown, and Newtown (now Cambridge),
were not in full agreement with the other five, especially on the
fundamental feature of the Massachusetts polity, the limitation of
office-holding and the voting privilege to church-members. At first the
majority were unwilling to grant the minority “liberty to remove.” John
Haynes was made Governor of Massachusetts in 1635, probably with the
hope of retaining his friends in the Colony. But their desire to leave
was too strong; small parties of emigrants made their way to the banks
of the Connecticut during the year 1635, but the main body of the
colonists did not leave until the spring of 1636. Dr. Benjamin Trumbull,
the first historian of Connecticut, writing more than one hundred years
ago, says:
“About the beginning of June Mr. Hooker, Mr. Stone, and about a
hundred men, women, and children took their departure from
Cambridge, and travelled more than a hundred miles thro’ a hideous
and trackless wilderness to Hartford. They had no guide but their
compass; made their way over mountains, thro’ swamps, thickets, and
rivers, which were not passable but with great difficulty. They had
no cover but the heavens, nor any lodgings but those which simple
nature afforded them. They drove with them a hundred and sixty head
of cattle, and by the way subsisted on the milk of their cows. Mrs.
Hooker was borne through the wilderness upon a litter. The people
generally carried their packs, arms, and some utensils. They were
nearly a fortnight on their journey.”
Trumbull adds: “This adventure was the more remarkable, as many of this
company were persons of figure, who had lived in England in honor,
affluence, and delicacy, and were entire strangers to fatigue and
danger.” When dismissing these colonists Massachusetts sent with them a
governing committee, or commissioners, as they were called. At a meeting
of these commissioners, held February 21, 1637, the plantation, which
had been called Newtown, was named Hartford. As Governor
[Illustration: OLD CENTER BURYING-GROUND.]
Haynes was born in the immediate vicinity of the English Hertford, he
probably had much influence in naming the new plantation. On the 11th of
April, 1639, the first general meeting of the freemen under the
constitution was held, and John Haynes was elected the first Governor of
Connecticut. This selection shows his active sympathy and co-operation
with Hooker, and we can entirely agree with Bancroft, when he says:
“They who judge of men by their services to the human race will never
cease to honor the memory of Hooker, and of Haynes.”
But the soil of Hartford has had other occupants; not only the
aboriginal owners of the soil, for when the English came they found a
Dutch trading-post established on what is yet known as Dutch Point. The
English claimed the territory now comprehended in the State of
Connecticut by virtue of the discoveries of John and Sebastian Cabot in
1497, and more especially in 1498. This territory was included in the
grant to the Plymouth Company in 1606, but that organization undertook
no work of colonization. When the settlers of 1635 came they took
possession of this portion of the valley of the Connecticut under the
English flag, and claimed the territory by virtue of patents from the
English crown. They paid Sequassen, the Indian chief, who ruled the
river Indians, for his lands, and when the Pequots, his over-lords,
disputed Sequassen’s right to sell, the colonists attacked them, and
practically exterminated the tribe. The Dutch settlement originated from
discoveries by Adrian Block, who sailed through the Sound in 1614, and
up the Connecticut, or Fresh River, as he called it, in his sloop, _The
Unrest_, as far as the falls, and upon his report to the States-general,
a company was formed for trading in the New Netherlands. Only limited
privileges were granted to this company, and it was afterwards
superseded by the Dutch West India Company, to whom the exclusive
governmental and commercial rights for the territory were granted. The
Dutch were influenced much more by the desire for a lucrative trade with
the natives than by any wish to found a colony, and in 1633 they built a
fort on the spot still called Dutch Point, in Hartford, for the purpose
of protecting their traffic with the Indians, which they had been
carrying on for some ten years. This fort was known as the House of
Hope, and when the English came they settled all about it, but did not
interfere with the Dutch occupation. Naturally, there was friction
between the two nationalities, and petty trespasses of various kinds
were charged by both parties. Finally, after repeated complaints, the
Commissioners of the United Colonies, Massachusetts, Plymouth,
Connecticut, and New Haven, met at Hartford, September 11, 1650, with
Peter Stuyvesant, Director of the New Netherlands, to consult upon the
proper boundaries of the Dutch jurisdiction. The matter was referred to
arbitrators, and resulted in a transfer to the English of all the
territory lying west of the Connecticut except the land in Hartford
actually occupied by the Dutch, the New Netherlands taking the country
east of the river. But this arrangement did not last long, as, in 1653,
war was declared between England and Holland, and the colonies were
required by Parliament to treat the Dutch as the declared enemies of the
Commonwealth of England. Trumbull says:
“In conformity to this order the General Court was convened, and an
act passed sequestering the Dutch house, lands, and property of all
kinds at Hartford, for the benefit of the Commonwealth; and the
Court also prohibited all persons, whatsoever, from improving the
premises by virtue of any former claim or title had, made, or
given, by any of the Dutch nation, or any other person, without
their approbation.”
Even after this change of rulers a few of the Dutch traders remained in
Hartford, as is shown by references to them on the records, but they all
finally returned to the New Netherlands.
During the next thirty years the little settlement on the banks of the
Connecticut continued to grow and prosper, having very little to do with
the affairs of the outside world. In 1675 and 1676, King Philip’s War
caused great alarm and anxiety for a time, but after this conflict was
concluded by the subjugation of the Indians, peace and quietness again
reigned. Soon after the accession of James II., in 1685, this quiet was
however rudely disturbed by the issue of a writ of _quo warranto_
against the Governor and Company of Connecticut, summoning them to
appear before his Majesty, and show by what warrant they exercised
certain powers. In reply, the Colony pleaded the Charter, granted by the
King’s royal brother, made strong professions of their loyalty, and
begged a continuance of their privileges. Two more writs of _quo
warranto_ were issued against Connecticut, but she still refused to
surrender her Charter, and re-elected Robert Treat as Governor. The
Charter of Massachusetts had been vacated, and Chalmers, in his _History
of the American Colonies_, says that “Rhode Island and Connecticut were
two little republics embosomed in a great empire.” Rhode Island,
however, submitted to his Majesty, so Connecticut stood alone in
refusing to surrender her Charter. In the latter part of 1686, Sir
Edmund Andros arrived in Boston, bearing his royal commission as
Governor of New England. After some correspondence with Governor Treat,
who still stood firm, he left Boston for Hartford, with several members
of his Council and a small troop of horse. When he arrived in Hartford,
October 31, 1687, he was escorted by the Hartford County Troop, and met
with great courtesy by the Governor and his assistants. Sir Edmund was
conducted to the Governor’s seat in the council chamber, and at once
demanded the Charter. Trumbull says:
“The tradition is that Governor Treat strongly represented the
great expense and hardships of the colonists in planting the
country, the blood and treasure which they had expended in
defending it, both against the savages and foreigners; to what
hardships and dangers he himself had been exposed for that purpose;
and that it was like giving up his life now to surrender the patent
and privileges so dearly bought, and so long enjoyed. The important
affair was debated and kept in suspense until the evening, when the
Charter was brought and laid upon the table, where the Assembly
were sitting. By this time great numbers of people were assembled,
and men sufficiently bold to enterprise whatever might be
necessary, or expedient. The lights were instantly extinguished,
and one Captain Wadsworth, of Hartford, in the most silent and
secret manner carried off the Charter, and secreted it in a large
hollow tree, fronting the house of the Honorable Samuel Wyllys,
then one of the Magistrates of the Colony. The people appeared all
peaceable and orderly. The candles were officiously relighted, but
the patent was gone, and no discovery could be made of it, or of
the person who had conveyed it away.”
Sir Edmund was disconcerted, but declared the government of the colony
to be in his own hands, annexed Connecticut to Massachusetts and the
other New England colonies, appointed officers, and returned to Boston.
After the downfall of Andros, in 1689, Governor Treat resumed his
position as Governor of Connecticut, and the Charter reappeared from its
seclusion, and continued to be the organic law of Connecticut, although
in Parliament, during the remainder of the colonial period, various
attempts were made to have it abrogated. But the Charter Oak, where
tradition declared that the document was concealed, continued to be a
sacred and venerated object until its fall, August 21, 1856.
[Illustration: THE CHARTER OAK.]
A people that have no history are the happiest, therefore we may assume
that Hartford was a happy and flourishing town during the remainder of
the colonial period, and even during the Revolution there is but little
to tell of Hartford. Its situation, so far removed from the seacoast,
secured it from the attacks of the British troops, and it was for that
very reason a safe and desirable place for the meetings of Generals
Washington and Rochambeau, when they wished to arrange the plans for the
campaigns that ended with the surrender of Yorktown. The first of these
historic meetings took place September 17, 1780. Rochambeau came from
Newport through Eastern Connecticut, and Washington rode from New
Windsor on the Hudson with a guard of twenty-two dragoons. The meeting
took place in the public square on the site of the present post-office,
and as the two tall, fine-looking commanders-in-chief approached each
other bowing, an eye-witness said that it was like the meeting of two
nations. The following year another meeting took place at Wethersfield.
During the colonial period there was very little literary production in
America, except sermons and theological treatises, and Hartford was no
exception to this rule. Her first author was one of her founders, the
Rev. Thomas Hooker, “The Light of the Western Churches.” His writings
consisted exclusively of sermons. They were first published in London,
and but few have been reprinted in this country. No preacher of great
reputation succeeded him, nor any writers whatever. But during the
Revolution a star arose on the horizon,--_McFingal_. The first part of
the poem appeared as independent verses in the _Connecticut Courant_ in
1775. General Gage had issued a fierce proclamation, threatening to
exempt from general pardon some of the Continental leaders, and
Trumbull’s poem burlesqued the manifesto. It was at once reproduced in
the Philadelphia papers, and undoubtedly did a very important work in
stimulating the thought and passion of the American Revolution. About
1782 the whole work was published by Messrs. Hudson & Goodwin, “near the
Great Bridge, Hartford.” Tradition states that the scene of the “Town
Meeting” refers to the old South Church in this city. Nathaniel Patten,
an enterprising, and not over-scrupulous printer in Hartford, issued a
second edition of _McFingal_, without the author’s consent, and it is an
interesting fact that out of this piracy of Trumbull’s work here in
Hartford grew the national copyright law. Trumbull and Noah Webster
both exerted themselves strenuously in favor of such a law, and, in
1783, the General Assembly of Connecticut passed an “Act for the
Encouragement of Literature and Genius,” which secured to authors their
copyright within the State. The personal exertions of Noah Webster in
defense of his spelling-book led to the passage of similar laws by the
legislatures of other States, and finally to the passage of a general
law by Congress, modelled on the Connecticut act of 1783. All the
literature of that period in America bears the impress of the golden age
of Queen Anne, the _Spectator_ and the _Tatler_, Addison and Steele; and
_McFingal_ reminds the reader now of _Hudibras_, now of the _Dunciad_.
John Trumbull was born in Watertown, Connecticut, then Westbury, April
24, 1750. Both on his father’s side and his mother’s he was of the pure
Brahmin stock of New England, and through his mother he was related to
Jonathan Edwards, Timothy Dwight, his fellow-poet, and many other
writers of a later time. He exhibited marvellous precocity, and, his
father being engaged in preparing a youth of seventeen for examination
at Yale, the boy of seven was so eager to join in the elder youth’s
studies that his father allowed him to go through the same course of
Greek, Latin, and Mathematics. Both the lads passed, and were admitted
members of the college, but the boy of seven was not allowed to proceed
with his college course until he was older. He early began writing
essays of a satirical nature, and while a tutor at his Alma Mater he
wrote _The Progress of Dulness_, a keen and stinging satire on
contemporary life. It also shows, like _McFingal_, the technical
precision of the literary artist. The year 1774 Trumbull, spent in the
law-office of John Adams, in Boston, then returned to New Haven, and in
1781 took up his residence in Hartford, where he remained until 1825,
when he went to Detroit to live with a married daughter, and died there
in 1831. In his later life he gave up literature for the law, and was at
different times State Attorney for Hartford County, Representative to
the State Legislature, Judge of the Superior Court (1801-1819), and
Judge of the Supreme Court of Errors (1808-1819).
In the first decade of our independence the “Hartford Wits” made this
little provincial capital a brilliant intellectual centre, and an
important focus of political influence. The original members of the
association or club were, Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, John Trumbull, Joel
Barlow, and David Humphreys. We may call it remarkable, because, at that
time, when Boston was as barren of literary talent as she has since been
prolific, this little town of three thousand inhabitants boasted at
least four poets who had gained a national reputation. Hopkins was born
in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1750, was a distinguished physician, and
one of the founders of the Connecticut Medical Society. He died in
Hartford in 1801, and his grave may be seen in the old Center
burying-ground. No edition of his collected poems has ever been
published. They consisted in great part of his contributions to the
_Anarchiad_, the _Political Greenhouse_, and the _Echo_, which were
serial satires in verse by the Hartford Wits. The _Anarchiad_ resembled
the _Rolliad_ of Frere and Canning, and with the _Echo_ contained a
series of social and political satires. Hartford at this time, became
and for twenty years thereafter was, the literary headquarters of the
Federalist or Conservative party, which favored a strong, general
government, and opposed French democracy. In consequence, as party
feeling ran so high, it became a mark for obloquy and vituperation among
the Jeffersonians, which gave it an honorable resemblance to Boston in
the antislavery times.
David Humphreys was born in Derby, Connecticut, in 1753, served
honorably during the Revolution, and had the distinction of being
Washington’s aid-de-camp. He also held, after the war, the position of
secretary to the commissioners--Franklin, Jefferson, and
Adams--appointed to negotiate treaties of commerce with various European
powers. Joel Barlow is perhaps the best known of any of the Wits, and
but a small portion of his career was passed in Hartford. He took up his
residence in our town in 1782, just after leaving the army. He was then
engaged in writing his best known poem, the epic _Vision of Columbus_,
but he did much other literary work, and was also the editor of a weekly
newspaper, called _The American Mercury_, for which he wrote many
essays, said to be the precursors of the modern editorial. In 1787, he
completed the _Vision of Columbus_, and it was published by subscription
and dedicated to Louis XVI., King of France. During the next year,
1788, Barlow left Hartford to go abroad; he remained in Europe for
seventeen years, and when he returned took up his residence in
Washington. Finally, going abroad as Ambassador to France, he died in
Poland, while following Napoleon then engaged in his Russian campaign.
Richard Alsop and Theodore Dwight, Senior, were admitted into the
coterie of the Hartford Wits, and wrote much of the _Echo_, and a few
lines in this series were also contributed by Drs. Mason F. Cogswell and
Elihu H. Smith. The _Echo_ was a sort of Yankee _Dunciad_. It contained
many local allusions, as to the Blue Laws, the Windham Frogs, etc., and
was also the vehicle of much political satire on the Democrats. Theodore
Dwight, one of the Echo poets, was editor of the _Connecticut Mirror_,
and also secretary of the famous Hartford Convention.
No political subject has ever been the theme of more gross
misrepresentation or more constant reproach than the assembly of
delegates from the New England States which met at Hartford in December,
1814. After the war of 1812 had continued two years, our public affairs
were in a deplorable condition. The army intended for defending the
sea-coast had been sent to the borders to attack Canada; a British
squadron was lying in the Sound to blockade the harbors on the
Connecticut coast, and to intercept our coasting trade; the banks, south
of New England, had suspended the payment of specie; our shipping lay in
our harbors, embargoed, dismantled, and perishing; the Treasury of the
United States was nearly exhausted, and a general disheartenment
prevailed throughout the country. In this situation of affairs a number
of gentlemen in Massachusetts believed that a convention of prominent
men might do good. Many petitions from numerous towns in Massachusetts
were received, stating the sufferings of the country in consequence of
the embargo and the war, and Governor Strong summoned a special meeting
of the Massachusetts Legislature in October, 1814, when a resolution was
passed appointing delegates to a convention to be held in Hartford. The
Connecticut Legislature was in session at the same time, and received a
communication from the Massachusetts body, requesting them to join in
appointing delegates to the convention. This they did, and seven
[Illustration: OLD STATE HOUSE,
NOW CITY HALL.]
delegates were sent. On December 15, 1814, the convention, numbering
twenty-six delegates, representing Massachusetts, New Hampshire,
Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont, met in the council chamber of
the State House, now the City Hall of Hartford. Among the delegates were
men of such assured position as Harrison Gray Otis, George Cabot,
William Prescott, the father of the historian, and Stephen Longfellow,
the father of the poet, from Massachusetts; Chauncey Goodrich, Governor
John Treadwell, Roger Minot Sherman, and James Hillhouse, of
Connecticut. Their deliberations continued for three weeks, and their
sittings were held with closed doors, a fact which was brought up
against them by their political adversaries as evidence of dark and
nefarious designs. During the sessions a small body of recruits for the
army, then in Hartford, were paraded in a threatening manner by the
officer in command. The proceedings resulted in the adoption of a report
and the passage of resolutions recommending amendments to the
Constitution of the United States. Among the recommendations was one
proposing that representative and direct taxation should be apportioned
according to the respective numbers of free persons in the States,
excluding slaves and Indians. This document was immediately published,
and was read with great eagerness. Those who expected to discover
sentiments of a seditious and treasonable nature were disappointed. The
report expressed an ardent attachment to the integrity of the republic,
and its sentiments were liberal and patriotic. A short time after the
publication of this document the news of the declaration of peace was
received. The people, without waiting to hear the provisions of the
treaty, showed their joy by bonfires and illuminations,--a striking
commentary upon the character of the war and the general feeling about
it. The war being over, the work of the Hartford Convention was no
longer needed, and the jarring interests of the State and Federal
governments were harmonized.
During the last century the chief business of Hartford was the trade
with the West Indies. There was also some trafficking with Ireland and
with Lisbon, timber being exported to the first named, and fish to the
latter. From 1750 to 1830, Hartford not only imported goods from the
West Indies, but was also a distributing centre for the surrounding
country, and for the region that stretches northward to the sources of
the Connecticut. During the first thirty years of this century the
wharves on the river bank were bustling with traffic and lined with
vessels, often three or four rows deep. Large warehouses extended along
the banks of the river, where beef and pork were packed for the export
trade, great quantities being brought down the river in brine, and
inspected and repacked here. The numerous scows and flat-boats in which
the up-river trade was carried on, were loaded on their return voyage
with sugar, rum, molasses, coffee, salt and other West Indian
commodities. S. G. Goodrich, in his _Recollections of a Lifetime_,
describes the city as a centre of the West India trade, and as smelling
of rum and molasses. The inland transportation of goods was carried on
by lines of freight-wagons running to Westfield, Granby, Monson,
Brimfield, Norfolk, Canaan, and the towns in Berkshire County. There
were also packet lines running to Boston, New York, Albany, Nantucket,
Baltimore, Norfolk, and Richmond. But the building of the Boston and
Albany, and of the New York and New Haven railroads cut off gradually
all the inland and up-river commerce from Hartford, and diverted trade
into other directions. This obliged the merchants of Hartford to turn
their energies to other lines of business.
One of the most successful of these, and one in which Hartford now holds
a unique position, is the insurance business. Nowhere else has the
business of fire insurance reached such magnitude as in Hartford. The
aggregate capital of the six fire insurance companies in the city is
$10,250,000, which exceeds one quarter of the capital of all the fire
companies in the country. It is supposed that the business began in
marine underwriting, as Hartford formerly had such large shipping
interests and so many vessels concerned in trade with the West Indies.
An insurance office was opened in Wethersfield in 1777 by Barnabas Dean,
presumably for shipping. Fire insurance policies were issued in 1794,
and in 1795 a company was formed for the purpose of underwriting on
“vessels, stock, merchandize, etc.” In 1810 the oldest of the present
Hartford fire insurance companies was formed,--the Hartford, with a
capital of $150,000. All the early insurance companies made the mistake
of dividing profits in periods of prosperity, reserving little or
nothing for a day of adversity. But the Hartford met with a severe
lesson in December, 1835, when the great fire in New York swept away the
capital of the company. All losses were paid in full, and the confidence
inspired by this policy increased the business of the company fivefold.
In 1871 the great Chicago fire endangered the existence of the strongest
Hartford companies, and five of them were forced to discontinue. But the
able management of the four that paid their losses and continued to do
business has given the Hartford companies a good reputation. The life
insurance business was also early organized in Hartford, which was the
earliest place, except the already great cities of New York, Boston, and
Philadelphia, to establish this system firmly, and several of the
Hartford companies rank among the leading institutions in this business
in the country. In Hartford was founded the first accident insurance
company organized in America.
Hartford possesses a number of well-known educational and philanthropic
institutions,--Trinity College; the Wadsworth Athenæum, containing the
Watkinson Library of Reference, the Connecticut Historical Society’s
collections, the picture gallery and public library; the Theological
Seminary, the School for the Deaf, the Retreat for the Insane; all
founded in the first half of this century.
First, chronologically, comes “The American Asylum for the Education and
Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons,” the mother-school of all similar
institutions in this country. In 1887, when the recurring years brought
about the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Hopkins
Gallaudet, the founder of this school for the deaf, the day was
celebrated by all deaf-mutes throughout the United States, and
commemorated by public services and general festivities. In a building
on Main Street, now constituting the southern end of the City Hotel, the
American Asylum gathered its first seven pupils, April 15, 1817. The
starting-point of the enterprise was the eager desire of Dr. Mason F.
Cogswell to secure an education for his daughter, Alice, a deaf-mute,
whose infirmity was caused by an attack of spotted fever. In 1815,
several prominent gentlemen in Hartford took steps towards the
organization of such a school at the instance of Dr. Cogswell, and
decided to send the Rev. T. H. Gallaudet, then just out of the Andover
Theological Seminary, to Europe, for the purpose of acquiring the art of
instructing deaf-mutes. Accordingly, Mr. Gallaudet proceeded to Paris,
where he was cordially received by the Abbé Sicard, the Director of the
famous Institution for Deaf-Mutes, founded some years earlier by the
Abbé de l’Epée. Here every facility was accorded to Mr. Gallaudet, and
when he was ready to return to America, one of Sicard’s pupils--Laurent
Clerc by name,--offered his services as an instructor in the school to
be founded in America, and as he was himself a deaf-mute he was a living
demonstration of the fact that a very high degree of education was
possible to deaf-mutes. In 1818, the number of pupils having increased
to sixty, it appeared to the directors that their work was likely to
become national, and it seemed proper to invoke the aid of Congress. A
petition was accordingly sent to Congress, and was strongly supported by
the Connecticut members, by the Speaker, Henry Clay, and by many other
influential and philanthropic men. Congress responded by an
appropriation of an entire township, comprising 23,000 acres of land.
This grant was judiciously converted into cash and invested, and the
income thus received has enabled the institution to receive pupils at
about one half the actual cost of their education. The building now in
use was completed in 1821. Since 1825 pupils have been received from the
States of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, and Rhode
Island, under an arrangement made with the official authorities in those
States. While a large proportion of the instructors have always been
college graduates, at the same time industrial instruction has, since
1823, been an essential feature in the training, thus rendering the
pupils self-supporting members of society.
Another evidence of the philanthropic feeling animating the citizens of
Hartford about the same date as the foundation of the Deaf and Dumb
Asylum, was the establishment in 1824, of the Connecticut Retreat for
the Insane. At that time there were only two other institutions in the
country for the exclusive care of insane persons, and the importance of
restorative treatment was but little understood.
Many citizens of Hartford signed the petition requesting the General
Assembly to pass an act of incorporation for Washington College, and
when the news of its passage was received, May 16, 1823, their joy was
manifested by the lighting of bonfires and the firing of cannon. The
people of Hartford surpassed all others in raising money for the new
institution. More than three fourths of the sum appropriated by the
State, $50,000, was contributed by them, and their city was therefore
selected as the seat of the College. A fine site was secured on an
eminence overlooking the Little River, the hill now crowned by the
beautiful State Capitol, and in 1825 two buildings were ready for
occupation. The College was opened under the presidency of the Rt. Rev.
Thomas C. Brownell, Bishop of Connecticut, and at all times since its
foundation the institution has been administered by men of learning and
wisdom. The name was changed in 1844 to Trinity College. In 1871, when
the city of Hartford decided to offer to the State a site for the new
Capitol, it was proposed to purchase the College campus for that purpose
and in February, 1872, the trustees sold the grounds to the city,
reserving the right to use them for five or six years. In 1873 a site
of
[Illustration: STATUE OF ISRAEL PUTNAM.
J. Q. A. WARD, SCULPTOR.]
some eighteen acres on the slope of Rocky Hill, commanding a beautiful
view in every direction, was purchased by the College. Ground was broken
on Commencement Day, 1875, with impressive ceremonies, and two large
buildings were ready for occupation in 1878. The erection of the Northam
Gateway, in 1881, unites the buildings and completes the western side of
the proposed quadrangle. The lofty towers have added greatly to the
appearance of the structure. The style of architecture is secular Gothic
of the early French type.
The buildings of the Theological Seminary on Broad Street attract
attention by their size and dignity. The institution was established in
East Windsor in 1833, and was removed to Hartford in 1865, occupying the
old Wadsworth house and other buildings on Prospect Street. In 1879, the
present structure was occupied, and it has since been enlarged by the
addition of the Case Library.
The first great manufacturing enterprise in Hartford, and still perhaps
the best known and most important, is the Colt’s Patent Fire Arms
Manufacturing Company, established by Colonel Samuel Colt in 1848.
Colonel Colt
[Illustration: KENEY MEMORIAL TOWER.]
planned his works on a magnificent scale, and time has proved the wisdom
of his plans. To pistols, rifles, and shotguns the company has added,
from time to time, the manufacture of gun machinery, Gatling guns,
printing-presses, portable steam-engines, and Colt automatic guns. Aside
from the output of weapons and machinery, the Colt works have been of
great value as an educating force in applied mechanics, and they have
turned out many men who have founded large manufacturing establishments.
The armory grounds now include two memorial buildings, the Church of the
Good Shepherd, built in 1868 by Mrs. Colt, in memory of her husband, and
a companion to this, built in 1896, a parish house, in memory of
Commodore Caldwell H. Colt, a structure complete and satisfying in all
its decorations and appointments. Another memorial structure in the city
is just approaching completion,--the Keney Memorial Tower. In this,
Hartford will possess an architectural feature unique in American
cities,--a Norman bell and clock tower, with fine carvings.
The Messrs. Keney have left another memorial of themselves in the Keney
Park, a fine addition to the Hartford park system. The beauty of
Hartford and its desirability as a residence have both been much
increased by the munificence of individual citizens, and the wise policy
of the city government in creating a system of public parks. The first
of these, Bushnell Park, the city owes to the wise forethought of Dr.
Horace Bushnell, one of her most distinguished citizens. Laid out in
1859, it is, probably, after Central Park in New York, the oldest public
city park in the country, and it was obtained in the face of much
opposition by a man possessed of great intellect and foresight--for whom
it was named in 1876. The building of the Capitol on the brow of the
hill overlooking the Park, and the construction of the Soldiers’
Memorial Arch in 1886, have added much to its beauty and completeness.
In 1894, Hartford acquired another park the gift of Col. Albert A. Pope,
the head of the Pope Manufacturing Company. This park is situated in the
south part of the city.
[Illustration: THE CAPITOL.]
Very soon afterwards, by the will of Charles M. Pond, the city became
possessed of a valuable tract of land on Prospect Hill, the former
residence of Mr. Pond. This he desired should be called Elizabeth Park
in memory of his wife. Now the Pope, Elizabeth, Keney, and Riverside
Parks, the latter on the north meadows and near the city water-works,
make a boulevard around Hartford, which will add much in the future to
the beauty of this already beautiful city.
After the brilliant galaxy of the “Hartford Wits” disappeared, a graver
class of literary men took their places: Noah Webster, with his
spelling-book and dictionary (he was born in Hartford, West Division,
Oct. 16, 1758); Samuel G. Goodrich (Peter Parley); Mrs. Lydia Huntley
Sigourney, who obtained the title of “the American Hemans,” an almost
lifelong resident of Hartford, where her first volume of poems was
published in 1815; George Denison Prentice and John Greenleaf Whittier
both lived in Hartford for a time, doing editorial work, when they were
yet young and unknown men; Henry Barnard, LL.D., distinguished for his
labors in the cause of education, was born in Hartford in 1811, and is
still enjoying an honored old age in his native city. But the man of
highest genius in Hartford’s list of authors during the first half of
this century was Horace Bushnell. He came to the city in 1833, as pastor
of the North Church, and remained until his death, in 1876. His sermons
and essays all show
[Illustration: SOLDIERS’ MEMORIAL ARCH.]
great imagination and beauty of style, as well as great power of
thought. In 1864, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had once before lived
in Hartford as a teacher in the famous school of her sister, Miss
Catharine Beecher, again took up her residence in the city, and
continued to live here until her death, in 1896.
[Illustration: H B Stowe]
[Illustration: DR. HORACE BUSHNELL.
FROM A CRAYON DRAWING BY S. W. ROWSE.]
During this period a number of her later works were written.
Of living authors, Charles Dudley Warner and Samuel L. Clemens (Mark
Twain) have a world-wide reputation. Mr. Warner came to Hartford in
1860, as one of the editors of the _Press_, and subsequently became one
of the owners and editors of the _Courant_, with which paper he is still
associated. His _Summer in a Garden_, which first brought him into
notice, appeared in the columns of his newspaper in 1870, and since that
time he has written many essays, novels, and books of travel. Mr.
Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, November 30, 1835, has lived in
Hartford since 1871, and all his books which have appeared since 1872
have been written in our city, except his latest, _Following the
Equator_. John Fiske, the historian and essayist, was born in Hartford
in 1842, but he left the city at an early age, and his reputation has
been won elsewhere. The same can be said of Edmund Clarence Stedman, the
poet and critic, who was born in Hartford in 1833.
James Hammond Trumbull, LL.D., born in Stonington in 1821, but almost a
lifelong resident of Hartford, dying there in 1897, was
[Illustration: J. HAMMOND TRUMBULL, LL.D.]
one of the most distinguished philologists and antiquarians in the
country, and his great familiarity with the Indian tongues made him an
authority on that subject. Dr. Trumbull’s brother, Rev. Henry Clay
Trumbull, D.D., of Philadelphia, since 1875 editor of the _Sunday School
Times_, was a resident of our city from the year 1851 to 1875, and
during that period he published some of his religious and biographical
works. Two other members of the same family, a sister and daughter of
Dr. J. H. Trumbull, Mrs. Annie Trumbull Slosson, and Miss Annie Eliot
Trumbull, have distinguished themselves in literature, by their novels
and short stories, some being character studies of New England life. In
this line also another Hartford writer excelled, Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke,
who was born in Hartford in 1827, and died in Pittsfield, Mass., in
1892. She contributed many graphic stories of rural New England life to
the pages of the _Atlantic Monthly_, _Harpers’_, and other magazines,
which stories were afterwards collected and published in book form.
Richard Burton, born in Hartford in 1858, recently appointed Professor
of English Literature in the University of Minnesota, has already made a
name among the younger men as a poet and critic. Frederick Law Olmsted,
born in Hartford, November 10, 1822, now a resident of Brookline, Mass.,
is well known as one of the foremost landscape-gardeners in this
country, and he has also made valuable contributions to the literature
of travel and horticulture. Many other persons, either natives or
residents of Hartford, have won renown in various fields of authorship.
In the art world, Hartford claims Frederick E. Church and William Gedney
Bunce, the painters, E. S. Bartholomew, the sculptor, and William
Gillette, the actor and playwright, all natives of the city.
Hartford citizens have borne their part in the councils of the nation.
Gideon Welles was Secretary of the Navy under President Lincoln during
the Civil War, and until 1869. Isaac Toucey held the same office under
President Buchanan. Hon. John M. Niles was Postmaster-General in 1840,
under Van Buren, and also Senator for a long period. The Hon. Marshall
Jewell was appointed by President Grant United States Minister to Russia
in 1873, and in 1874 he was recalled to enter the Cabinet as
Postmaster-General. In later years the Hon. James Dixon and General J.
R. Hawley have been prominent in the United States Senate.
Hartford has increased largely in population during the last decade, and
the numerous trolley lines that have been built, running like the spokes
of a wheel into the surrounding country, have contributed much to the
prosperity of the city. Many handsome residences have been built, new
streets have been laid out, and our city appears to have entered upon a
career that promises increased wealth and success.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
NEW HAVEN
“THE CITY OF ELMS”
BY FREDERICK HULL COGSWELL
The main incidents in the history of New Haven have a flavor of romance.
Even the original settlement, usually a prosy affair, was brought about
by the chance letter of a victorious soldier. On the 26th of June, 1637,
a company of wealthy English immigrants sailed into Boston harbor,
undecided as to its final destination. It was led and directed by
Reverend John Davenport, a Non-conformist clergyman of London, and
Theophilus Eaton, a retired merchant of the same town, who had once
represented the British crown at the court of Denmark. The company had
thought to settle near Boston, but a theological controversy that
threatened to envelop the whole jurisdiction led to a change of plan,
and for several months the party remained at Boston in a state of
indecision.
Meanwhile, the Pequod war was raging along the coast of Long Island
Sound, and as the beaten braves were being driven westward toward the
valley of the Hudson, their pursuers came upon a spot of surprising
beauty. Its charms detained them long enough to note its details. There
was a broad wooded plain skirted with green and fertile meadows, bounded
on either side by a gently flowing river, and guarded on the north by
giant cliffs. Here and there the smoke of Indian camp-fires curled
gracefully above the tree-tops, and bark-canoes darted swiftly about in
the placid waters of the bay. The place was occupied by friendly
natives, anxious for protection against their tribal enemies. Game
abounded in the forests; the streams were alive with fish; and the piles
of oyster-shells along the shore told of bivalvian riches beneath the
glistening waves. The English officers, elated with victory and
delighted with the newly discovered land, wrote enthusiastic
descriptions to their friends at Boston. As one with an eye to the
material advantages expressed it: “It hath a fair river, fit for
harboring of ships, and abounds with rich and goodly meadows.”
The immigrants at once determined to
[Illustration: TEMPLE STREET.]
investigate, and Eaton, taking a small vessel, sailed down the coast and
into the harbor of Quinnipiac. He and his companions lost no time in
deciding as to their future home. He left seven men to spend the winter
with the Indians, and returned to Boston. Those who remained lived in a
hut near the shore, and before spring came, one of them died. His name
was Beecher, and he has been claimed as the ancestor of the Beecher
family in this country. His wife and children came with the main party
when the cold weather had passed. A few rods to the west of this first
hut stood, in after years, the forge of Lyman Beecher’s father.
It is uncertain just what name the Indians applied to the town. The
early spelling varied so much that nearly forty different combinations
of letters have come down to us, as representing it. It is apparent that
the settlers were unable to acquire the aboriginal pronunciation, or to
correctly express it in English. They finally adopted “Quinnipiac” as
being more euphonious than “Quilillioak” “Quillipiage” and “Queenapiok.”
It was with feelings not easily described that the newcomers sailed into
the harbor and looked upon their future home. There they were to spend
the rest of their lives, there they would be laid to rest when their
earthly labors were done, and there would dwell their posterity, to
represent the principles for which they had sought a new world. In the
land of their birth they could not worship as they chose. Unless they
followed the rule set down by others, they were not only called heretics
and emissaries of the devil, but were imprisoned and fined, and
subjected to great personal indignity. They felt that they were being
deprived of a natural right, and despairing of better times at home,
came to find a place where they could enjoy uninterrupted the free
exercise of conscience.
[Illustration: JOHN DAVENPORT.
FROM A PORTRAIT IN POSSESSION OF YALE COLLEGE.]
They were obliged for a time to live on the boat in which the voyage had
been made. The first Sunday morning all came ashore to worship under the
branches of an oak-tree which stood on the bank of a small stream that
emptied into the bay. It was in the month of April, 1638, and the leaves
were not far forth, but under that canopy the first sermon ever heard in
that region was preached. This famous tree stood for more than a hundred
years after, and when it fell a tablet was placed on a near-by building
to show succeeding generations where the forefathers first met for
public worship.
A compact was made with the Indians, and the town was laid out by John
Brockett, a civil engineer, whose love of a Puritan maiden had led him
to abandon brilliant prospects of preferment and cross the seas. First,
a large tract was apportioned for a market-place, then the streets were
plotted in regular squares surrounding it. The dwellings ranged from
mere huts to mansions of grand proportions. Eaton’s house contained
nineteen fireplaces, and was one of the few houses in the country where
sufficient books were found to form a library.
Romance soon gave place to tragedy. An Englishman was found murdered in
the neighboring woods, and an Indian so near as to invite suspicion. He
was arrested and brought to the market-place. No laws had been framed,
but an agreement had been made soon after landing, that all disputes
should be settled according to Scripture. An inquiry established the
Indians guilt, but there was doubt as to the Scriptural text to apply.
The Old Testament rule, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his
blood be shed,” made the outlook gloomy for the prisoner, while he saw
hope in the more recent dispensation, “Go and sin no more.” The Puritan
forefathers leaned to the conservative view of the case, laid the Indian
over a log, chopped off his head, and “pitched it upon a pole in the
market-place.”
The first public building to be erected, as might have been expected,
was a meeting-house. This was built near the centre of the market-place,
and the present edifice stands to-day on nearly the same spot. The
meeting-house was not merely a place for public worship, but town-hall,
voting-booth, court-room and forum as well. In summer it was a pleasant
place in which to sit, with bird-songs and odor-laden breezes floating
in through the open windows, and the long-drawn, monotonous drone of the
parson’s voice lulling to dreamy drowsiness. But in winter, with the
mercury twenty degrees below zero; with tingling ears and aching nose;
with shivering frames and feet like cakes of ice, and every man’s breath
showing white on the frosty air, hell-fire seemed less terrible than the
preacher would have it appear.
There were means, however, of getting periodically thawed. Those who
lived in town could repair to their homes at the intermission, while the
farmers sought their “sabbada-housen” (Sabbath-day houses). These were
small huts, each containing a chimney and rude fireplace, and were
grouped irregularly about the meeting-house. Here the stiffened limbs
were rubbed and toasted, and the creature comforts of pies and cakes and
home-brewed ale were enjoyed. Stern times were those, and many a mother
saw her tender child laid away in the little burying-ground, chilled to
death by the bitter cold of the meeting-house.
While the hearts of these early Puritans beat warmly, their rigid views
of life and duty sometimes led to acts of great severity. Public
whipping was resorted to, not only as a punishment supposed to be fit
for the culprit, but as a warning and a deterrent. It is hard
[Illustration: ROGER SHERMAN.
PHOTOGRAPHED FROM STATUE ON THE EAST FRONT OF THE CAPITOL AT HARTFORD.]
to imagine a father handing a child over to the courts for public
humiliation, yet Richard Malbon, a magistrate, sat at the trial of his
daughter Martha, and condemned her to be flogged at the whipping-post.
The shameful performance took place on the northwest corner of the
market-place, close by the schoolhouse, so that the youthful mind need
not fail to understand that the way of the transgressor was hard.
The “Witch Trial” created some excitement in the early days. Elizabeth
Godman was the town scold, and kept her neighbors in a state of
perpetual worry. Her chief delight was in creating and perpetuating
feuds. She had been warned by the magistrates that her way of life was
objectionable and might lead to trouble. One day, in spite of the
judicial warning, she called at Mistress Hooke’s and asked for
home-brewed beer. A mug was given her, but she used only part of it. The
next day the whole barrel of “beare” was found to be sour. Here were
symptoms of witchcraft! Soon after one of Goody Thorpe’s chickens died,
and when they opened it they found its gizzard full of water and worms!
Suspicion began to turn to certainty. This led to a quarrel between
Elizabeth Godman and Mistress Bishop, and in consequence the latter’s
baby was born dead. To cap the climax, Mr. Nash’s boy had a fit of
sickness that puzzled the doctors, and it was thought best, in order to
prevent further calamities, to have Elizabeth Godman arrested and tried
as a witch. In good old Salem her chances of escape might have been
narrow; but while her judges believed in witchcraft and were ready to
punish it by death, she was triumphantly acquitted, and wagged her
spiteful tongue unmolested the rest of her life.
The most dramatic event in the early history of the colony was the
coming of the regicides. Major-Generals Edward Whalley and William
Goffe, distinguished leaders in the parliamentary army, had sat on the
commission that had condemned Charles I. to the block. Both men stood
close to Cromwell during the period of the protectorate, Whalley being
Cromwell’s cousin, and Goffe a son-in-law of Whalley. Both acted as
shire governors and were close personal advisers of the Lord Protector.
At Cromwell’s death Goffe was considered a probable successor, but the
monarchy was restored in the person of Charles II., and all who had
been connected with the trial and execution of the late king were
obliged to flee for their lives. Whalley and Goffe sailed for Boston and
for a time lived there openly, but a royal warrant for their arrest
finally came, and Governor Endicott issued orders for their
apprehension. The only men in the country to whom they could look for
protection were Mr. Davenport, a known sympathizer and a friend of
Cromwell, and William Jones, whose father had been taken as a regicide
and executed in London. The hunted men accordingly started for New Haven
on horseback, arriving on the 7th of March, 1661. They went to the house
of Mr. Davenport and for the next three weeks were concealed there, or
across the street by William Jones. On the 27th, the news of a
proclamation for their arrest reached New Haven, and the two generals
proposed some military tactics to throw possible pursuers off the scent.
They accordingly appeared upon the street the next morning as travellers
just arrived from the north, let their identity be known, made various
inquiries concerning the town, and asked the way to Manhattan. They
departed to the southward and disappeared; but on arriving at Milford,
ten miles below, they entered the woods and returned quietly to the
house of Mr. Davenport. Two weeks later, Kellond and Kirke, two officers
commissioned by Governor Endicott, arrived with a warrant and called
upon Deputy-Governor Leete at Guilford. There were several men in the
Governor’s office when the officers presented their credentials. The
Governor took the papers and began to read aloud, letting out the whole
secret, as he doubtless intended, so that the generals might receive
warning and escape. The officers soon found that both the magistrates
and the people were inclined to shield the regicides, but made desperate
efforts to effect a capture. The fugitives, however, assisted by
Davenport, Jones and others, eluded them at every point. Finally, after
exhausting their patience and ingenuity, the officers gave up the chase
and returned to Massachusetts; but offered large rewards for the
apprehension of the regicides. These rewards stimulated the ambition of
certain persons, and it was even more dangerous for the hunted men to
appear in public, or to let their hiding-place be known. Those who were
befriending them were in equal danger; for by aiding and comforting
“traitors” they were liable to arrest and execution for the crime of
high treason.
The regicides remained in the colony about two years, hiding in the
houses of their friends; in an old mill just outside the boundaries of
the town; in a cave on the side of West Rock; in a pile of rocks on the
top; in a Milford cellar; and other places of more or less doubtful
identity. The best known of these places is the pile of boulders on the
extreme top of West Rock known as “Judges Cave.” It is visited every
year by thousands of people, who regard it as a connecting link between
New Haven and the great tragedy of English history.
About the year 1670 a mysterious gentleman about sixty years old,
calling himself “James Davids,” came to New Haven with the evident
intention of spending the rest of his days in the town. He appeared to
be wealthy, but no one knew anything of his past. He claimed to be a
retired merchant. It is said that one Sunday while Sir Edmund Andros was
attending church on the Green, he noticed a tall, soldierly-looking man
in a neighboring pew, and inquired who he was. “He is a merchant
residing here,” was the reply. “I
[Illustration: JUDGES CAVE.]
know he is not a merchant,” said Sir Edmund; “he has filled a more
responsible position than that!” Governor Andros had not time to follow
up his suspicions, but after the mysterious stranger’s death, twenty
years later, it came to be known that he was Colonel John Dixwell,
another regicide, who had fled from England to escape execution. A
century and a half afterwards, his descendants erected a monument to
his memory behind Center Church on the Green, where it is still an
object of interest to visitors.
New Haven received her baptism of fire during the Revolution in the form
of an invasion by a detachment of the British army, July 5, 1779. The
apparent purpose of this act was to cause Washington to weaken his force
at West Point in order to defend the Connecticut coast. Washington
attacked Stony Point as a counter-irritant, but this did not affect the
British until after they were through with New Haven, which was then a
village of about eighteen hundred inhabitants. The evening previous
(Sunday), arrangements had been made for a celebration of the third
anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but at ten o’clock the
town was startled by the boom of a signal-gun in the harbor. All was
confusion during the night, and about five o’clock Monday morning
President Stiles, from the steeple of the college chapel, saw, by the
aid of a spy-glass, the British fleet embarking at West Haven. A company
of students formed and marched to hinder the invaders, while the
beacon-fires that had been lighted during the night on the neighboring
hilltops brought bodies of armed patriots from the surrounding towns. In
spite of determined opposition, the enemy, led by General Garth, entered
the town at noon and proceeded to plunder and destroy. A pitched battle
was fought on the northwest corner of Broadway, but the defenders were
overpowered by superior numbers. The intention of the enemy was to burn
the town, but it was found that this could not be done without
endangering the property of the numerous Tories. An equal number of
troops (1500) landed at Lighthouse Point and approached the town from
the east, the intention being to crush all opposition by a junction of
the two armies, while Sir George Collier was to bombard the town from
his war-ships in the harbor. It having been decided not to apply the
torch, those who had entered from the west slept on the Green during the
night, and toward morning embarked on the boats at the wharf, after
burning much shipping. The eastern division, under General Tryon,
captured Rock Fort (afterwards named Fort Hale), but were unable to
enter the town. The next day they found the patriots collecting in such
numbers that they decided to withdraw and bestow their attentions upon
the little town of Fairfield, which they burned.
A house still standing on the north side of the Green was used by the
British as a hospital. Under a tree in front, Whitefield once preached
to the multitude, and Jonathan Edwards used to court the daughter of the
house.
Colonel Aaron Burr, then twenty-three years old, took an active part in
defending the town.
Out on the Allingtown heights, to the southwest of the town, stands a
monument to the memory of Adjutant-General Campbell of the British army.
This officer showed such a noble spirit of humanity in the discharge of
a disagreeable duty, protecting the helpless and preventing needless
destruction, that the citizens of New Haven erected this stone to
perpetuate his virtues. While on an errand of mercy he was shot by a
young man, and on his monument are inscribed the words:
“Blessed are the Merciful.”
The Dark Day, immortalized by Whittier, was the 19th of May, 1780. The
Legislature was in session in the old State House on the
[Illustration: A HUMANE ENEMY.]
Green when a sudden darkness fell. Many believed the Judgment Day was at
hand. In the midst of the excitement a motion was made to adjourn, when
Colonel Abraham Davenport, great-grandson of John Davenport, rose and
said: “I am against an adjournment. The Day of Judgment is either
approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for
adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish,
therefore, that the candles may be brought, and we proceed to business.”
“And there he stands in memory this day,
Erect, self-poised, a rugged face, half seen
Against the background of unnatural dark,
A witness to the ages as they pass,
That simple duty hath no place for fear.”
The foundation of Yale, the “Mother of Colleges,” dates back to the
colonial period, and was due to the foresight of John Davenport. Within
ten years of the settlement of the town, a parcel of land was set aside
and known as “college land,” and as early as 1654 the records of the
General Court show “that there was some notion againe on foote
concerning the setting vp of a Colledg here at Newhaven, Wch, if
attayned, will in all likely-hood prove verey beneficiall to this
place.” In spite of Davenport’s efforts, the project was not carried out
during his lifetime, but in 1664, the Hopkins Grammar School, named in
honor of Governor Hopkins, was organized as a collegiate school. The
work of this school being chiefly of a preparatory nature, ten
Congregational ministers organized a society for
[Illustration: PHELPS HALL.]
the conducting of a college, and, in 1700, this was chartered as “A
Collegiate School in his Majesty’s Colony of Connecticut.” The first
rector, or president, was Reverend Abraham Pierson of Killingworth, and
the first student was Jacob Hemingway. For a time the college was
settled at Saybrook, but in 1716 it was removed to New Haven. Two years
later the name Yale College was adopted in honor of Elihu Yale, at that
time its largest benefactor.
The college library had a unique origin. In 1700, the ten ministers
forming the society met at Branford, and each donated a few volumes,
saying as he laid them down: “I give these books for the founding of a
college in this colony.” Forty books were given, forming the nucleus of
the great University Library.
The first public commencement occurred in 1718, the first building
having been erected the year previous. For nearly a century and a half
the college had to endure a hard struggle for existence, but at the
present day, owing to the donations of its graduates and friends, it
ranks as one of the richest colleges in the country, and possesses some
of the finest and best-equipped buildings in the world. Vanderbilt
Hall, given by Cornelius Vanderbilt; Phelps Hall, in honor of William
Walter Phelps; and Osborn Hall, in memory of Charles J. Osborn, are
notable illustrations of combined utility and art. Vanderbilt Hall is
not only the costliest but the most complete college dormitory in
America.
The rare opportunities now offered at Yale for a wide range of study and
original investigation are too well understood to need mention. In 1887,
it was resolved that the college had, in view of the establishment of
the various departments comprised in a university, attained to that
dignity; and since that time it has been known as Yale University.
The Theological Department may be said to have existed from the
beginning, theology having been one of the chief studies for a hundred
years. It has existed as a separate department since 1822, and the Law
Department was established the same year. The Medical Department was
organized in 1812. The Scientific Department originated in 1846 in a
professorship in agricultural chemistry and another in analytical
chemistry, and since 1859 has occupied separate buildings as a distinct
department.
Yale has always been progressive in respect to the Fine Arts. On
receiving the collection of Colonel Trumbull, embracing many pictures of
scenes and participators in the Revolutionary War, a building was
erected for their exhibition on the campus. Lecture courses were given
and interest so far developed that later a large and beautiful building
was erected for the purposes of an art school, which has attained great
success.
Yale shows that she well deserves her reputation by more than doubling
the number of her students within twenty years. The present attendance
is upwards of twenty-five hundred, drawn from all parts of the world.
The only aristocracy at Yale is that of brains and character, and it is
a significant comment on this state of affairs to note that the sons of
millionaires frequently do without the luxuries to which they are
accustomed, to avoid being classed merely as rich men’s sons. The Yale
spirit recognizes manliness and industry as paramount qualities, and
none stands higher among his fellows than the poor boy who courageously
works his way through college, overcoming the obstacles that lie in his
way, and maintaining an honorable rank in his class.
[Illustration: OSBORN HALL.]
New Haven has sought to preserve memories and mementoes of her historic
existence, and the Historical Society building, at the foot of Hillhouse
Avenue, never fails to quicken the pulses of the antiquary. Here he
finds one of Benjamin Franklin’s Leyden jars; Benedict Arnold’s badly
punctuated sign, his account-book, medicine chest, mortar and pestle;
the table on which Noah Webster wrote the Dictionary; a silver spoon
that once belonged to Commodore Isaac Hull (said to have been in his
mouth when he was born); and an almost endless collection of relics,
rare portraits and books.
Of famous houses, many are still standing: two of Benedict Arnold’s; the
dwelling of Roger Sherman, signer of the Declaration of Independence,
the city’s first mayor and a United States Senator; the Trowbridge
house, built in 1642 by an original settler; the Noah Webster house and
others of less interest. One of the “famous spots” is the northwest
corner of Union and Fair Streets, where once stood the house of Isaac
Allerton, a Pilgrim of the _Mayflower_. A tablet has been placed on the
present building bearing the following inscription:
“Isaac Allerton, a Pilgrim of the _Mayflower_, and
the Father of New England Commerce, lived
on this Ground from 1646 till 1659.”
[Illustration: THE ART BUILDING.]
Across the way, on the southeast corner, stands an old house bearing the
announcement that this was the birthplace of Andrew Hull Foote, Rear
Admiral of the United States Navy.
Center Church, near the centre of the Green on Temple Street, stands
over what was formerly a portion of the original burying-ground, and but
a few feet from the site of the first meeting-house. From its historic
associations it is one of the most interesting churches in the country.
Over the principal entrance are these inscriptions:
QUINNIPIAC CHOSEN FOR SETTLEMENT, A.D. 1637.
* * * * *
THE WILDERNESS AND THE SOLITARY PLACE SHALL BE MADE GLAD FOR THEM.
* * * * *
O GOD OF HOSTS LOOK DOWN FROM HEAVEN AND BEHOLD AND VISIT THIS
VINE.
* * * * *
A.D. 1638, A COMPANY OF ENGLISH CHRISTIANS LED BY JOHN DAVENPORT
AND THEOPHILUS EATON WERE THE FOUNDERS OF THIS
CITY. HERE THEIR EARLIEST HOUSE OF WORSHIP WAS
BUILT A.D. 1639.
* * * * *
THE FIRST CHURCH BEGINNING WITH WORSHIP IN THE OPEN AIR APRIL 15
(O. S.), WAS THE BEGINNING OF NEW HAVEN, AND WAS ORGANIZED AUG. 22
(O. S.), 1639. THIS HOUSE WAS DEDICATED TO THE WORSHIP OF GOD IN
CHRIST DEC. 27, 1814.
[Illustration: N. Webster]
Dr. Leonard Bacon was for many years pastor of this church. Underneath
is a crypt containing the remains and tombstones of many of the Puritan
fathers and their families; and here lies the body of Abigail Pierson,
sister of the first president of Yale, and wife of John Davenport, Jr.
While around and beneath Center Church “the rude forefathers of the
hamlet sleep,” the oldest cemetery now existing is that on Grove Street.
Many distinguished sons of New Haven are buried there, among them
Rear-Admiral Andrew H. Foote, General Amos B. Eaton, Admiral Francis H.
Gregory, General Alfred H. Terry, Noah Webster, Lyman Beecher, Benjamin
Silliman, Theodore Winthrop, Jedediah Morse (father of American
geography), the elder President Dwight and President Day, Colonel David
Humphreys, aide on the staff of General Washington, Eli Whitney,
inventor of the cotton-gin, Jehudi Ashmun, first colonial agent at
Liberia, Governors Ingersoll, Baldwin, Edwards, and many others eminent
in business and professional life.
Tottering old men sometimes point to places where Nathan Hale made his
great leap, where
[Illustration: Eli Whitney]
John C. Calhoun got his boots made, where Joel Barlow ate his hasty
pudding, the porch where Commodore Hull liked to sit; and tell no end of
stories about visits of Lafayette, James Monroe and “Old Hickory.” These
are innocent chroniclers, forgetting the present in the glorious past,
and we must allow a little for the play of the imagination; but when
they aver that Noah Webster, as a lieutenant commanding a company of
Yale students, once escorted General Washington through the town and
received a compliment therefor, an approving nod is in order, for the
great lexicographer recorded the incident in his diary “at the day and
time of it.”
Visitors frequently refer to the city as an overgrown village. It is
hard for a New York man to realize as he strolls through the ample
grounds of his New Haven friends, that he is in a city of more than one
hundred thousand inhabitants. The value put upon breathing-places is
shown in the large tracts of land devoted to public purposes. One walks
hardly ten minutes in any direction without coming upon a square shaded
by graceful elms and carpeted by a cleanly shaven lawn; while the
margins of the city by river and sound
[Illustration: EAST ROCK PARK.]
abound in tastefully arranged parks. The transformation of the two great
wooded ridges beyond the dwelling-line into well-graded drives, art
vying with nature to please the eye and win the soul to beauty,
completes the impression sometimes expressed, that New Haven is an
immense village encircled by gardens.
But while all this may suggest a condition of dreamy repose, the city is
by no means given over to _dolce far niente_. The University with its
manifold departments is a veritable hive of industry; the scales of
Justice at the County Court House are tipping endlessly in favor of
right against wrong; while the busy hum of the Winchester Arms and a
hundred other mills, makes a music that dies not out.
Altogether, historic New Haven is a pleasant place in which to live, and
its hospitality is as generous as are its gardens and its parks.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
INDEX
A
Acton, Mass., 262, 266, 272, 294
Adams, John, 49, 187, 228, 524, 526
Adams, Samuel, 12, 180, 200, 202, 228, 259, 261, 264, 265
Agassiz, Louis, 176, 242
Akers, Paul, 78
Albany, 532
Alcott, A. Bronson, 279, 292, 293, 294
Alcott, Louisa, 294
Alden, John, 328, 334
Alden, Priscilla, 328
Alden, Rear-Admiral, 66
Aldrich, Thomas B., 50, 176
Allen, Samuel, 429
Allerton, Isaac, 578
Allston, Washington, 236
Alsop, Richard, 527
Amherst College, 82
Amsden, John, 429
Amsterdam, 310
Andover, Mass., 144
Andrew, Gov. John, 265
Andros, Sir Edmund, 334, 419, 420, 518, 519, 566, 567
Ann, Cape, 126, 127
Anne, Queen, 420, 449, 523
Appleton, Capt. Samuel, 412
Apponaug, R. I., 486
Aquidneck, 444
Arlington, Mass., 219
Arnold, Benedict, 578
Arnold, Fred. A., 206
Arnold, Matthew, 50
Arnold, Thomas, 482
Ashley, Rev. Jonathan, 428, 438
Ashmun, Jehudi, 582
Austerfield, 304, 306, 332
Austin, Jane Goodwin, 50, 330
B
Bacon, Dr. Leonard, 510, 582
Bacon, Francis, 140
Bacon, John, 407
Baker, Miss C. Alice, 426
Baldwin, R. S., 582
Bancroft, George, 50, 89, 276, 514
Bardwell, John, 436
Bardwell, Thomas, 435
Barlow, Joel, 525, 526, 527, 584
Barnard, Henry, 30, 544
Barnard, Rev. Mr., 154
Barnstable, Mass., 376, 381, 388, 389, 393, 394, 397, 400
Barnstable County, Mass., 361, 393
Barre, Mass., 106
Barrett, Col. James, 273, 276
Bartholomew, E. S., 550
Bartol, Cyrus, 78
Bates, Katharine Lee, 345
Bedford, Mass., 219, 266
Bedfordshire, 244, 246, 247
Beecher, Catherine, 8, 546
Beecher, Henry Ward, 8, 11
Beecher, Lyman, 8, 556, 582
Beers, Capt. Richard, 410, 412
Bellingham, Gov. Richard, 141
Bennington, Vt., 265, 436
Bentham, Jeremy, 279
Bentzon, Th., 33
Berkeley, George, 450, 451, 452, 454, 455, 458, 505
Berkeley, Lucia, 455
Berkeley, Mrs. George, 451
Beverly, Mass., 92
Billerica, Mass., 219
Billington, John, 377
Blackstone, Sir William, 140
Blaine, James G., 78
Blanchard, Claude, 460, 461, 462
Block, Adrian, 515
Block Island, 446
Borgeaud, Charles, 17
Boston, 23, 58, 64, 81, 82, 84,
86, 94, 96, 98, 102, 106, 111,
113, 141, 143, 144, 149, 159,
167-210, 230, 234, 248, 256, 259,
262, 271, 277, 278, 289, 294, 329,
364, 374, 377, 388, 392, 419, 434,
441, 451, 484, 486, 494, 497, 498,
505, 507, 518, 519, 524, 525, 526,
532, 534, 553, 556, 564
Boston, England, 207, 250
Boston College, 180
Boston University, 180
Bourne, Mass., 380, 381
Bourne, Richard, 379
Bowditch, Nathaniel, 159
Bowdoin College, 76
Brackett, Thomas, 56
Brackett, Mrs. Thomas, 56
Bradford, Gov. William, 49, 124, 131, 132, 134, 299, 303, 304, 306,
308, 309, 311, 314, 315, 316, 317, 319, 324, 326, 329, 334, 346, 351,
352, 353, 354, 377
Bradley, Rev. Caleb, 75
Bradstreet, Simon, 124, 125, 140, 216, 217, 219
Braintree, Eng., 217, 218
Branford, Conn., 574
Brewster, Mass., 380, 381, 384
Brewster, Nathaniel, 340
Brewster, William, 299, 304, 308, 309, 311, 317, 322, 328, 329, 334, 336
Bridgham, Samuel W., 498
Brighton, Mass., 219
Brimfield, Conn., 532
Brindley, Deborah, 110
Bristol, R. I., 492
Brockett, John, 558
Brookfield, Mass., 20, 105, 117
Brookline, Mass., 204, 550
Brooks, Phillips, 10, 11, 26, 184
Brown, Alice, 50
Brown, Chad, 478, 480, 485, 492
Brown, Charles Farrar, 78
Brown, H. B., 79
Brown, James, 491
Brown, John, 492, 494, 497, 502
Brown, Joseph, 492
Brown, Moses, 492, 495
Brown, Nicholas, 492
Brown University, 491, 499
Browne, Nathaniel, 486
Browne, Rev. Robert, 113
Brownell, Thomas C., 538
Brunswick, Me., 75
Bryce, James, 12, 15, 33
Buchanan, James, 551
Bucks County, Eng., 247
Bulkeley, Rev. Peter, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 253, 268, 270
Bunce, William G., 550
Bunker Hill, 58, 109, 204, 206, 232, 260, 261, 300, 435, 492
Bunyan, John, 246, 281
Burgoyne, Gen. John, 112, 210, 234, 238, 436
Burnet, Jacob, 96
Burns, Anthony, 173
Burr, Aaron, 112, 570
Burroughs, Rev. George, 57, 144
Burton, Richard, 550
Bushnell, Dr. Horace, 9, 11, 542, 544
Buzzard’s Bay, 345, 402
C
Cabot, George, 530
Cabot, John, 514
Cabot, Sebastian, 514
Cady, Jonathan, 496
Calhoun, John C., 584
Calvin, John, 253
Cambridge, Eng., 220, 308, 309
Cambridge, Mass., 140, 181, 204, 208, 211-242, 248, 259,
260, 271, 435, 511, 512
Campbell, William, 570
Canaan, Conn., 532
Canning, George, 525
Canonicus, 476
Cape Cod Towns, 345-402
Carlisle, Mass., 266
Carrington, Edward, 495, 502
Carver, John, 312, 317, 326, 336, 346, 352
Casco, Me., 56
Casco Bay, 66, 75
Castine, Baron, 420
Chandler, Lucretia, 110
Channing, Rev. W. Ellery, 8, 11, 279, 280, 282, 505
Chantavoine, 284
Charles I., 563
Charles II., 391, 508, 563
Charlestown, Mass., 136, 140, 141, 168, 204, 207, 215
Chase, Salmon, 76
Chatham, Mass., 381, 382
Chauncy, Rev. Charles, 227
Chelmsford, Mass., 266
Child, Lydia M., 176
Childs, Samuel, 438
Church, Frederick E., 550
Church, Major, 57
Clark, Francis E., 8, 11
Clark, Rev. Mr., 261, 262
Clarke, Captain, 70
Clarke, John, 319, 481
Clay, Henry, 536
Cleeves, George, 56, 57
Clemens, Samuel L., 548
Clerc, Laurent, 536
Clifford, Nathan, 76
Clyfton, Richard, 299, 304, 307
Codman, Charles, 79
Cogswell, Alice, 535
Cogswell, F. H., 553
Cogswell, Mason F., 527, 535
Coke, Edward, 140
Cole, Charles O., 79
Collier, Sir George, 569
Colt, Caldwell H., 541
Colt, Col. Samuel, 540
Colt, Mrs. Samuel, 541
Conant, Roger, 126, 127
Concord, Mass., 7, 49, 106, 164, 204, 219, 232, 243-297, 434
Conway, Mass., 431
Cooke, Rose Terry, 50, 549
Coolidge, Susan, 443
Cooper, J. Fenimore, 279
Copley, John S., 339
Corey, Giles, 144, 146
Corey, Martha, 144, 145
Corliss, George H., 500, 501
Cornbury, Lord, 420
Cornbury, Nathaniel, 412
Corwin, Jonathan, 138, 142
Cotton, Rev. John, 218, 248, 249, 250
Coverly, Nathaniel, 336
Cowper, William, 246, 247
Cromwell, Oliver, 247, 261, 312, 563, 564
Crowninshield, Benjamin W., 158
Crowninshield, George, 156, 158
Cumberland County, Me., 76
Curtis, George W., 49, 280
Cushman, Robert, 334
Cutler, Manasseh, 27, 84, 90, 92, 93, 94, 115
D
Dalton, Richard, 450, 451
Dana, Richard, 236
Dane, Nathan, 27, 87, 90, 92
Danvers, 92
Danvers Centre, 139
D’Anville, Admiral, 190, 191, 192,194, 195
Dartmouth, Eng., 316
Davenport, Abraham, 571
Davenport, John, 553, 564, 565, 571, 572, 580
Davenport, John, Jr., 582
Davenport, Lieutenant, 70
Davison, William, 309
Day, Jeremiah, 582
Daye, Stephen, 241
Dean, Barnabas, 533
Dedham, Mass., 219, 404, 406, 407
Deerfield, Mass., 84, 403-442
Delfthaven, 315, 332
Dennis, Mass., 380, 381, 384, 391
Derby, Conn., 526
Detroit, 524
Devon, 380
Dexter, Gregory, 478, 480, 485
Dickinson, David, 433
Dickinson, Thomas W., 438
Diman, Rev. J. L., 480
Dixon, James, 551
Dixwell, Col. John, 567
Doane, Deacon, 379
Dokesbury, Eng., 312
Donitson, Daniel, 430
Dorchester, Mass., 96, 140, 511
Dorchester Heights, 208
Dorr, Sullivan, 502
Dorr, Thomas W., 500
Dow, Neal, 64
Dowse, Thomas, 181
Drake, Sir Francis, 348
Duddingston, Lieutenant, 492
Dudley, Gov. Thomas, 216, 217, 219, 422
Dunster, Rev. Henry, 227
Durfee, Thomas, 478
Duxbury, Mass., 328
Dwight, Theodore, 527
Dwight, Timothy, 278, 366, 523, 582
Dyre, Mary, 484
E
Eastham, Mass., 352, 368, 374, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 388, 400
Eaton, Amos B., 582
Eaton, Theophilus, 553, 556, 558, 580
Edinburgh, 174
Edwards, Governor, 582
Edwards, Jonathan, 7, 11, 290, 523, 570
Eggleston, James, 411
Eliot, C. W., 30
Eliot, John, 334, 403, 404
Eliot, Samuel A., 211
Elizabeth, Cape, 56
Elizabeth, Queen, 309, 312
Elwell, J. D., 297
Emanuel College, 219, 224
Emerson, Ralph W., 7, 11, 49, 176, 246, 250, 251,
267, 268, 270, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282,
284, 285, 286, 289, 291, 293, 294, 339
Emerson, Rev. Mr., 270, 274, 275
Endicott, John, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128,
129, 130, 131, 132, 140, 141, 152, 156, 216, 564, 565
Essex, Eng., 217
Essex County, Mass., 148, 277, 413, 414
Evans, George, 76
Everett, Edward, 180, 227, 236
F
Fairfield, Conn., 570
Falmouth, Mass., 345, 361, 393, 394, 396, 400, 402
Falmouth, Me., 56, 57, 58, 60, 61
Farrar, Charles, 78
Faunce, Elder, 330
Felt, Capt. John, 154
Felt, Rev. J. B., 128, 162
Fern, Fanny, 78
Fernay, Chevalier de, 460
Fessenden, William Pitt, 76
Field, Col. David, 433
Fields, James T., 162, 176
Fisher, Lieutenant, 407
Fiske, John, 50, 106, 241, 508, 548
Foote, Andrew Hull, 580, 582
Fox, George, 487
Foxe, Edward, 303
Franklin, Benjamin, 93, 94, 180, 253,
257, 286, 288, 470, 490, 505, 526, 578
Frary, Samson, 408
French, Daniel C., 297
Frink, Rev. Thomas, 108
Fuller, Dr., 132
Fuller, George, 437
Fuller, Margaret, 236, 280
G
Gage, Gen. Thomas, 152, 206, 210, 228, 434, 522
Gallaudet, Thomas H., 535, 536
Garfield, James A., 84, 97
Garrison, William L., 180
Garth, General, 569
Gates, Gen. Horatio, 270
George III., 198, 202, 256, 270
Gerry, Elbridge, 231
Gibbs, James, 480
Gill, Mass., 431
Gillette, William, 550
Gladstone, William E., 253
Gloucester, Mass., 363, 370
Goddard, William, 496
Godman, Elizabeth, 562, 563
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 293
Goffe, William, 411, 563, 564
Good, Sarah, 141, 143
Goodrich, Chauncey, 530
Goodrich, S. G., 532, 544
Gosnold, Bartholomew, 348
Granby, Conn., 532
Grand Manan, 194
Grant, Ulysses S., 551
Gray, 156
Gray, Asa, 242
Grayson, William, 89
Greele, Alice, 61, 62
Greene, Nathanael, 214, 471
Greenfield, Mass., 431
Greenleaf, Simon, 76
Gregory, Francis H., 582
Griggs, Dr., 140
Groton, Mass., 246
Guilford, Conn., 565
H
Hadley, Mass., 411, 413, 416
Hale, Edward Everett, 92, 117, 176, 185
Hale, Matthew, 140
Hale, Nathan, 582
Halifax, 195
Halifax Bay, 195
Hamilton, Mass., 92
Hampden, John, 247, 258
Hancock, John, 172, 228, 259, 261, 264, 265
Hancock, “Lady,” 172
Hand, Daniel, 29
Hannibal, 268
Harlakenden, Roger, 220
Haroun Al-Rashid, 281
Harrington, Jonathan, 264
Harris, William, 485
Harris, W. L., 96
Harris, W. T., 30, 31, 294
Harrold, Eng., 247
Hartford, 9, 92, 140, 219, 486, 507-551
Harvard, John, 224, 226
Harvard University, 24, 106, 180,
222, 224, 226, 228, 242, 259, 260, 275, 340, 429
Harwich, Mass., 361, 381, 382
Hatfield, Mass., 413, 416, 417
Hawkshurst, Eng., 244
Hawley, J. R., 551
Hawthorne, John, 142
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 7, 9, 50, 75,
125, 128, 156, 159, 160, 162, 172, 275, 279, 282, 284, 285
Hayes, Rutherford B., 100
Haynes, Gov. John, 217, 511, 514
Hemingway, Jacob, 574
Hendery, Andrew, 110
Herbert, George, 317
Hertford, Eng., 514
Hibbins, Ann, 141
Higginson, Rev. Francis, 132, 133, 134, 138
Higginson, Rev. John, 124
Higginson, Thomas W., 32, 167, 236, 241
Hill, Thomas, 78
Hillhouse, James, 530
Hinsdell, Samuel, 408
Hoar, George F., 86, 88, 89, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100, 103, 116, 117, 118
Holden, Mass., 106
Holmes, John, 236
Holmes, Oliver W., 40, 50, 176, 178, 214, 227, 232, 236, 241
Holmes, Rev. Abiel, 481
Holyman, Rev. Mr., 480
Holyoke, Capt. Samuel, 417
Honeyman, Rev. Mr., 449
Hooker, Rev. Thomas, 217, 218, 219, 507, 510, 512, 514, 521
Hopkins, Dr. Lemuel, 525
Hopkins, Dr. Samuel, 8
Hopkins, Esek, 502
Hopkins, Governor, 572
Hopkins, Stephen, 490, 494, 502, 505
Howe, General, 196, 202, 206
Howe, Julia Ward, 176
Howells, William D., 176, 241
Hubbard, Rev. William, 218
Hubbardston, Mass., 82, 106
Hudson, Henry, 348
Hudson, J. B., 79
Hull, Isaac, 578, 584
Humphreys, David, 525, 526, 582
Huntingdon, 247
Hutchinson, Anne, 220, 248
Hutchinson, Gov. Thomas, 144, 148
I
Ingersoll, Governor, 582
Ingraham, J. H., 78
Ipswich, Mass., 92, 219
Irving, Washington, 81, 279
Ives, Thomas P., 502
J
Jackson, Andrew, 364, 584
Jackson, Lydia, 339
Jacobs, George, 124
James, Sir John, 450, 451
James I., 314, 315
Jefferson, Thomas, 16, 89, 90, 253, 257, 258, 286, 526
Jewell, Marshall, 551
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 176
Johnston, Alexander, 507
Jones, Capt., 328
Jones, Rev. John, 246
Jones, William, 564, 565
Judson, Adoniram, 340
Jumel, Betsy, 112
Jumel, Stephen, 112
K
Kellogg, Elijah, 78
Kendall, Rev. James, 332
Kent, Chancellor, 244, 380
Killingworth, Conn., 574
King, Rufus, 90
Kingston, Mass., 328
Kirkland, Rev. John T., 227
Knowles, Admiral, 196
Knox, Gen. Henry, 214
L
Lafayette, Marquis de, 158, 584
Lancashire, 312
Lancaster, Mass., 105, 246
Langdon, John, 260
Langdon, Rev. Samuel, 232, 259
Larcom, Lucy, 43
Latimer, George D., 121
Laud, Archbishop, 247
Lee, Richard Henry, 89
Leete, Deputy Governor, 565
l’Epée, Abbé de, 536
Leslie, Col., 154
Lexington, Mass., 58, 109, 174, 202, 204,
219, 238, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264,
265, 266, 271, 272, 273, 278, 294, 434
Leyden, 311, 314, 315, 322, 334
Lincoln, Abraham, 14, 253, 289, 550
Lincoln, Mass., 266, 272
Lincolnshire, 185, 304
Lisbon, 531
Litchfield, Conn., 8
Locke, John, 253, 258
Locke, Jonas, 435
London, 174, 176, 178, 185, 334, 522, 553, 564
Londonderry, N. H., 108
Longfellow, Henry W., 50, 66,
68, 69, 75, 78, 79, 176, 214, 227, 234, 236, 260, 262
Longfellow, Samuel, 78
Longfellow, Stephen, 69, 530
Longmeadow, Mass., 429
Lonsdale, R. I., 504
Lossing, B. J., 96
Lothrop, Capt. Thomas, 410, 413, 414, 415
Louis XV., 188
Louis XVI., 526
Louisbourg, 188, 202, 265, 329, 429
Lowell, James Russell, 32, 50, 176, 214, 224, 227, 231, 236, 239, 275
Lowell, Rev. Charles, 231
Lynn, Eng., 247
M
Magee, Capt. James, 376
Malbon, Martha, 562
Malbon, Richard, 562
Mann, Horace, 30, 180
Manning, Pres. James, 491, 500
Manomet, 320, 331
Marcus Aurelius, 308
Marie Antoinette, 90
Marietta, Ohio, 27, 82, 84, 86, 88,
90, 92, 97, 100, 103, 115, 116, 117, 118
Marshfield, Mass., 328, 332
Mashpee, Mass., 392
Mason, James M., 376
Massasoit, 324, 325, 329
Mather, Cotton, 141, 149, 222, 348, 409, 411, 413, 415
Mather, Eleazer, 418
Mather, Eunice, 418, 426
_Mayflower_, 15, 100, 316, 317, 319, 320,
326, 328, 338, 341, 345, 346, 348, 350, 352, 353, 354, 377, 508, 578
Maynard, Sir John, 258
McClanathan, John and Elizabeth, 110
McKoon, Joseph, 430
McSparran, Doctor, 488
Mead, Edwin D., 81
Medfield, Mass., 408
Medford, Mass., 408
Meigs, Return J., 94
Mendon, Mass., 15
Merrimac River, 219, 267
Miantinomi, 476
Middlesex County, Mass., 105, 258, 260, 268, 277
Milford, Conn., 564, 566
Milton, John, 222, 286
Minot, Captain, 272
Mobile, 68
Monadnock, 82
Monroe, James, 584
Monson, Conn., 532
Montaigne, 282, 284, 285
Montesquieu, 258
Montpellier, 113
Montreal, 65
Moody, Dwight L., 8, 11
Morrill, Lot M., 76
Morris, G. P., 1
Morse, Alpheus C., 504
Morse, Jedediah, 582
Morton, Nathaniel, 320
Moseley, Capt. Samuel, 414, 415
Motley, John Lothrop, 81
Mount Wollaston, 128, 218
Mowatt, Captain, 60, 61, 62, 72
Mowry, Roger, 484
Munroe, Robert, 265
Murray, Alexander, 110
Murray, Col. John, 109, 110, 111, 115
Musketaquit River, 260
Muskingum, 102
N
Nantucket, 368, 394, 532
Narragansett Bay, 81, 475, 481
Narragansett, R. I., 488
Natick, Mass., 104, 406
Nauhaught, Deacon, 393
Naumkeag, 126, 127, 131, 132, 133
Neal, John, 78
New Bedford, 392
Newburgh, N. Y., 99
Newburyport, 171
New Haven, 24, 487, 524, 532, 553-586
Newport, R. I., 7, 176, 443-473, 481, 484, 487, 494, 505, 521
Newton, Mass., 219, 404, 511
Newtown, Conn., 512
Newtowne, Mass., 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 223
New Windsor, 521
New York, 64, 93, 94, 168, 170, 174, 176, 441, 486, 497, 532, 534, 584
Niles, John M., 551
Noble, John, 198
Norfolk, 380
Norfolk, Conn., 532
Norfolk, Va., 532
Northampton, Mass., 7, 418
Northfield, Mass., 412, 415
North Kingstown, R. I., 486
Norton, Charles E., 241
Nottingham, 304
Nurse, Rebecca, 144
O
Oakham, 82, 106
Odell, Eng., 244, 246, 247
Oliver, Thomas, 231, 232
Olmsted, Frederick L., 550
Olney, Eng., 247
Orleans, Mass., 352, 380, 381, 388, 393, 396
Osborn, Charles J., 575
Osborn, Goody, 141, 143
Osgood, James R., 176
Otis, Harrison Gray, 530
Otis, James, 198, 228, 390
Ouse River, 246, 247
Oxford, 302
Oxford County, Me., 69
P
Paddock, Ichabod, 368,
Palfrey, John G., 50, 236
Pamet, 368
Pamet River, 351
Paris, 178, 536
Parker, Capt. John, 261, 264, 265
Parker, Theodore, 176, 261,262, 265
Parkman, Francis, 50, 81, 176, 181, 446
Parris, Elizabeth, 139
Parris, Rev. Samuel, 139, 140, 141, 151
Parsons, Samuel H., 94
Parsons, Theophilus, 76
Pascal, 285
Patten, Nathaniel, 522
Pawtucket, R. I., 486, 495
Pawtuxet River, 476
Paxton, Charles, 106
Paxton, Mass., 82, 103, 106
Payson, Edward, 78
Peabody, George, 29, 72
Pelham, Mass., 109
Pemaquid, 58
Penn, William, 406
Pennicook, 104
Percy, Lord, 204, 238, 261, 276
Peskeompskut, 416, 417
Phelps, William Walter, 575
Philadelphia, 170, 288, 522, 534
Philip, King, 56, 81, 267, 329, 381, 389, 410, 416, 417, 484, 517
Phillips, Wendell, 173
Phipps, Sir William, 58, 146
Pickard, Samuel T., 53
Pickering, Timothy, 90, 158
Pierce, Mrs. Anne L., 68
Pierpont, John, 261, 266
Pierson, Abigail, 582
Pierson, Abraham, 574
Pilgrimage, Historical, v, 82
Pitcairn, Major, 265
Pitican, Simon, 104
Pittsburgh, Pa., 100
Pittsfield, Mass., 549
Plato, 7, 284
Plimpton, John, 407
Plymouth, 131, 243, 299, 343
Plymouth Colony, 57
Plymouth, Eng., 316
Plymouth, Mass., 100, 299-343, 377, 378, 390, 394, 507
Pocumtuck, Mass., 407, 408, 410, 414
Pocumtuck River, 403, 404, 431, 441
Pokanoket, 416
Pompamamay, 104
Pond, Charles M., 543
Pond, Elizabeth, 543
Pool, Maria L., 59
Pope, Albert A., 543
Portland, 8, 53-80
Portsmouth, N. H., 171
Portsmouth, R. 1., 481
Powell, Lyman P., xi
Preble, Com. Edward, 66, 69
Prentice, George D., 544
Prentiss, Sargent S., 76
Prescott, Col. George, 296
Prescott, Col. William, 204, 206, 232, 260
Prescott, Dr. Samuel, 261, 267, 271
Prescott, William, 530
Prescott, W. H., 159
Presumpscot River, 75
Prince, Thomas, 106, 194
Princeton, Mass., 82, 103, 106
Pring, Martin, 348
Providence, R. I., 475-506
Provincetown, Mass, 345, 346, 350,
354-365, 366, 369, 370, 376, 377, 388, 389, 396, 400
Pugastion, 104
Putnam, Ann, 151
Putnam, Israel, 96, 97, 435
Putnam, Rufus, 27, 82, 88, 90, 92,
93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 109, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119
Putnam, W. L., 76
Pym, John, 258
Pynchon, Colonel, 413
Q
Quebec, 200, 277
Quincy, Josiah, 227, 236
Quincy, Josiah, Jr., 174
Quincy, Mass., 128
Quincy, Mrs. Josiah, 172
Quinnipiac, 556, 580
R
Rasle, Father, 427, 429
Raymond, 75, 76
Reade, Lieutenant, 70
Reed, Thomas B., 56, 57, 69
Revere, Paul, 174, 260, 262, 325, 402
Riedesel, von, Baron, 234
Riedesel, von, Baroness, 234
Ripley, Lieutenant, 296
Ripley, Rev. Dr., 262, 291, 296
Robbins, Rev. Chandler, 330
Robinson, Rev. John, 299, 304, 307, 311, 315, 334
Rochambeau, Count, 459, 521
Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Count, 464, 465
Rousseau, Jean J., 258
Rouville, Hertel de, 424
Rowlandson, Joseph, 105
Roxbury, 202, 208
Russell, Joseph, 491
Russell, William, 491
Russell, William E., 239
Rutland, Eng., 116
Rutland, Mass., 81-119
S
Sabin, James, 492
St. Edmundsbury, 113
Salem, 9, 57, 75, 84, 121-166, 171, 216, 258, 385, 563
Samoset, 324
Sampson, Deborah, 330
Sampson, Simeon, 330
Sanborn, Frank B., 243
Sandwich, Mass., 376, 379, 380, 381, 388, 391, 393, 394, 400
Sandys, Sir Edwin, 332
Saratoga, N. Y., 112
Sassawannow, 104
Saybrook, Conn., 574
Schuyler, Major Peter, 422
Scott, Richard, 484
Scott, Walter, 161
Scrooby, Eng., 119, 299, 300, 304, 308, 309, 332
Sebago, Lake, 75
Seekonk River, 476, 497
Selden, John, 140
Sequassen, 515
Sewall, Samuel, 105, 108, 150, 151
Shakespeare, William, 135, 286, 292, 293
Sharnbrook, Eng., 247
Shaw, Martha, 110
Shaw, Robert, 173
Shawmut, 168
Shawonet, R. I., 481
Shays, Daniel, 97, 106, 438
Shelburne, Mass., 431
Sheldon, Ensign John, 424, 426
Sheldon, George, 403
Shepard, Rev. Thomas, 219, 220, 222
Sherman, Minot, 530
Sherman, Roger, 578
Shirley, Gov. William, 187, 191, 194
Shirley, Thomas, 174
Shrewsbury, Mass., 106
Sicard, Abbé, 536
Sidney, Algernon, 253, 258
Sigourney, Lydia H., 544
Silliman, Benjamin, 582
Simmons, Franklin, 78, 79
Skelton, Rev. Samuel, 133, 134
Slater, John F., 29
Slater, Samuel, 495
Slidell, J., 376
Slosson, Annie T., 549
Smibert, John, 450, 451, 454
Smith College, 82
Smith, Colonel, 204
Smith, Elihu H., 527
Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, 78
Smith, Capt. John, 56
Smith, John, 348
Smith, Seba, 78
Socrates, 286
_Somerset_, H. M. S., 356
South Boston, 183
Sparks, Rev. Jared, 227, 236
_Speedwell_, the, 315, 316
Spenser, Edmund, 286
Spooner, Ephraim, 332
Sprague, William, 501
Springfield, Conn., 140
Springfield, Mass., 415, 416
Standish, Barbara, 328
Standish, Lora, 336
Standish, Myles, 312, 317, 325, 328, 329, 336, 350, 352, 353, 378
Standish, Rose, 336
Stark, Gen. John, 265, 436
Stebbins, John, 415
Stebbins, Lieut. Joseph, 435, 436, 438
Stedman, Edmund C., 548
Stephens, Mrs. Ann S., 78
Stiles, Ezra, 411, 568
Stimson, F. J., 50
Stonington, Conn., 498, 548
Story, Joseph, 159, 227
Story, William, 236
Stoughton, Lieutenant-Governor, 149
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 8, 50, 76, 546
Strong, Governor, 528
Stroudwater, 76
Stuyvesant, Peter, 516
Sudbury, 84
Suffolk, England, 113
Sumner, Charles, 176
Sumner, James, 480
Sunderland, 431
Suttlife, Nathaniel, 408
Sutton, Mass., 97
Swanzey, 410
T
Talcott, Mary K., 507
Taylor, Father, 11
Taylor, Rev. John, 438
Teft, Thomas A., 504
Tennyson, Alfred, 282, 299
Terry, Alfred H., 582
Thatcher, Doctor, 332
Thoreau, Henry, 7, 280, 282, 285, 289, 296, 345, 367, 370
Throckmorton, John, 478
Tileston, John, 296
Tillinghast, Pardon, 487
Tilton, J. R., 79
Tisquantum, 324
Tituba, 139, 141, 143, 144, 150
Tocqueville, Alexis de, I
Toucey, Isaac, 550
Trask, Joseph, 104
Treadwell, John, 530
Treat, Major Robert, 412, 414, 415
Treat, Robert, 518, 519
Treat, Rev. Samuel, 379
Trimountain, 168
Trinity College, 534, 538
Tripoli, 69
Trumbull, Annie E., 549
Trumbull, Dr. Benjamin, 511, 512, 516, 518
Trumbull, Colonel, 576
Trumbull, Henry C., 549
Trumbull, James H., 548, 549
Trumbull, John, 522, 523, 524, 525
Truro, Mass., 345, 351, 356, 361, 366-376, 381, 400
Tryon, General, 569
Tucker, Richard, 56
Tufts College, 180
Turner, Capt. William, 416, 417
U
Upham, Charles W., 128, 144, 162
V
Van Buren, Martin, 551
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 575
Vane, Sir Henry, 222, 248, 249
Varnum, J. M., 94
Very, Jones, 159, 292
Vezzerano, 446, 448
Voltaire, 258
W
Wachusett, Mass., 82, 103, 104, 105,114
Wadsworth, Captain, 519
Wadsworth, Henry, 68
Wadsworth, Gen. Peleg, 68, 69
Wales, Prince of, 72
Walker, Gen. Francis A., 117
Walker, Rev. James, 227
Walpole, Sir Robert, 452
Wamassick, 104
Wananapan, 104
Ward, Gen. Artemas, 106, 204, 207, 208, 232
Ward, Edward, 184
Ware, Ashur, 76
Wareham, Mass., 396
Warner, Charles Dudley, 548
Warren, James, 338
Warren, Joseph, 174, 214, 228, 259, 262
Warren, Mercy Otis, 338
Warren, R. I., 49
Warville, Brissot de, 464
Warwick, R. I., 481
Washington, D. C., 241, 527
Washington, George, 93, 96, 98, 99, 102, 154,
158, 202, 207, 208, 214, 232, 260, 265,
268, 278, 286, 288, 289, 388, 462, 471,
472, 490, 521, 526, 568, 582, 584
Waterbury, Conn., 525
Waters, Lieutenant, 66
Watertown, Conn., 523
Watertown, Mass., 215, 260, 511
Watson, Ellen, 299
Wauchatopick, 105
Wayland, Francis, 499, 500
Webster, Daniel, 49, 87, 88, 180, 332
Webster, Noah, 523, 544, 578, 582, 584
Weeden, William B., 475
Weld, Daniel, 407
Welles, Gideon, 550
Wellesley College, 180
Wellfleet, Mass., 351, 374, 375, 376, 380, 393
Wells, Captain, 420
Wells, Thomas, 419
Westbury, Conn., 523
Westfield, Conn., 532
Westford, Mass., 266
West Haven, Conn., 568
West Point, 568
Wethersfield, Conn., 508, 521, 533
Weybosset, R. I., 482, 485
Whalley, Edward, 563, 564
Wheaton, Henry, 499
Wheelwright, John, 248, 249
Whipple, Abraham, 492, 494
Whipple, Edwin P., 176
White, Peregrine, 337, 354
Whitefield, George, 570
Whiting, Rev. John, 253
Whitney, Eli, 582
Whittier, John G., 50, 54, 81, 176, 544, 570
Wickenden, William, 480
Wilkins, Mary E., 50
Willard, Benjamin, 105
Willard, Henry, 105
Willard, Rev. Joseph, 108, 227
Willard, Rev. Samuel, 440
Willard, Simon, 105, 219, 243, 244, 246, 268
William the Silent, 311
Williams, Abigail, 140
Williams, Col. Ephraim, 429
Williams, Rev. John, 418, 422, 428
Williams, Roger, 9, 11, 124, 136, 138,
152, 449, 476, 478, 480, 481, 482, 484, 485, 486, 488, 489, 502
Williams, Rev. Stephen, 428
Willis, N. P., 78, 178
Wilson, Rev. John, 220
Windsor, Conn., 508
Winslow, Edward, 312, 314, 315, 317, 326, 328, 329, 332, 334, 389
Winslow, Gen. John, 332
Winslow, Josiah, 332, 337
Winthrop, Gov. John, 136, 140, 168, 180, 214, 216, 220, 248
Winthrop, Robert C., 49
Winthrop, Theodore, 582
Woburn, Mass., 260
Wolfe, Gen. James, 277
Wolsey, Cardinal, 306
Woodhill, 244
Wood’s Holl, Mass., 394
Worcester County, Mass., 97, 103, 105
Worcester, Eng., 302
Worcester, Mass., 82, 103, 105, 111, 113, 116, 117, 498, 499
Worcestershire, 312
Wyclif, John, 303
Wyllys, Samuel, 519
Y
Yale, Elihu, 574
Yale University, 24, 366, 454, 523, 572, 574, 575, 576, 582, 584, 586
Yarmouth, Mass., 368, 377, 380, 381, 385, 393
Yorkshire, 247, 304
Yorktown, 521
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By CHARLES BURR TODD. With many illustrations and maps. 8º
$1 75
“No American who has pride in his country should fail to read this
book.”--_Lowell Times._
“Its graphic style makes the reader at home in the scenes described. A
series like this must be, if its excellence is sustained, of value as a
stimulus to civic pride and municipal patriotism, an ally to national
spirit.”-_Boston Watchman._
III.--THE STORY OF BOSTON
By ARTHUR GILMAN. With numerous illustrations and maps. 8º
$1 75
“Mr. Gilman is thoroughly at home and fully in love with his theme. A
glow of enthusiasm pervades the volume.... As fascinating as anything in
politics or war are his pictures of private and social life.”--_Critic._
“Here is a work which must interest all Americans, for the history,
especially the early history, of Boston is the history of their
country.”--_Boston Budget._
“The fact remains that it is accurate in matter, fair in tone,
picturesque in coloring-and, best of all, charged through and through
with the sympathetic appreciation which every Bostonian rightfully
expects to find in a local history.”--_Boston Times._
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, New York and London
Records of an Earlier Time
[Sidenote: Some Colonial Homesteads]
Some Colonial Homesteads
And Their Stories. By MARION HARLAND. With 86 illustrations. Second
edition. 8º, gilt top.
$3.00
The book is charmingly written, and is embellished by a large number of
illustrations very carefully selected and engraved. Among the homesteads
presented are: Brandon, Westover, Shirley, Marshall House, Cliveden
(Chew House), Morris House, Van Cortlandt Manor-House, Oak Hill (The
Home of the Livingstons), Philipse Manor-House, Jumel House (Fort
Washington), Smith House (Sharon, Conn.), Pierce Homestead, Parson
Williams’s House, Varina (Pocahontas), Jamestown, Williamsburg.
[Sidenote: Where Ghosts Walk]
Where Ghosts Walk
The Haunts of Familiar Characters in History and Literature. By
MARION HARLAND, author of “Old Colonial Homesteads,” etc. With 33
illustrations. 8º, gilt top.
[Sidenote: The Ayrshire Homes and Haunts of Burns]
The Ayrshire Homes and Haunts of Burns
By HENRY C. SHELLEY. With 26 full-page illustrations from
photographs by the author, and with portrait in photogravure.
Second edition. 16º, gilt top.
$1.25
A book of interest to all lovers of Robert Burns and of Scotland. The
value of this little work is enhanced by the views of the homes and
scenes which are placed by the side of the verses with which Burns has
made them immortal.
[Sidenote: Little Journeys to the Homes of American Statesmen]
Little Journeys
TO THE HOMES OF AMERICAN STATESMEN. Series for 1898. By ELBERT
HUBBARD. Bound in one volume. With portraits. 16º, gilt top
$1.75
Little Journeys to the Homes of
FAMOUS WOMEN }
} 2 vols., flat box $3.50
GOOD MEN AND GREAT }
AMERICAN AUTHORS }
} 2 vols., flat box $3.50
AMERICAN STATESMEN }
Or four vols. in box $7.00
Also sold separately, each $1.75
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, NEW YORK & LONDON
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Reproduced by permission of A. S. Burbank, Plymouth, Mass.
[2] Reproduced by permission of the Ohio State Archæological and
Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio.
[3] Reproduced by permission of C. R. Bartlett, Rutland, Mass.
[4] Reproduced by permission of the Ohio State Archæological and
Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio.
[5] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[6] Reproduced by permission of the Ohio State Archæological and
Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio.
[7] Reproduced by permission of the Ohio State Archæological and
Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio.
[8] Reproduced by permission of C. R. Bartlett, Rutland, Mass.
[9] Reproduced by permission of the _New England Magazine_, Boston,
Mass.
[10] Reproduced by permission of C. R. Bartlett, Rutland, Mass.
[11] Reproduced by permission of the _New England Magazine_, Boston,
Mass.
[12] Reproduced by permission of C. R. Bartlett, Rutland, Mass.
[13] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[14] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[15] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[16] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[17] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[18] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[19] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[20] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[21] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[22] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[23] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[24] Reproduced by permission of the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass.
[25] Reproduced by permission of Daniel W. Colbath & Co., Boston, Mass.
[26] Reproduced by permission of Daniel W. Colbath & Co., Boston, Mass.
[27] Reproduced by permission of the _New England Magazine_, Boston,
Mass.
[28] Reproduced by permission of the W. H. Brett Engraving Co.,
Boston, Mass.
[29] Reproduced by permission of the _New England Magazine_, Boston,
Mass.
[30] Reproduced by permission of the _New England Magazine_, Boston,
Mass.
[31] Reproduced by permission of the _New England Magazine_, Boston,
Mass.
[32] Reproduced by permission of A. S. Burbank, Plymouth, Mass.
[33] Reproduced by permission of A. S. Burbank, Plymouth, Mass.
[34] Reproduced by permission of A. S. Burbank, Plymouth, Mass.
[35] Reproduced by permission of A. S. Burbank, Plymouth, Mass.
[36] Reproduced by permission of A. S. Burbank, Plymouth, Mass.
[37] Reproduced by permission of A. S. Burbank, Plymouth, Mass.
[38] Reproduced by permission of A. S. Burbank, Plymouth, Mass.
[39] Reproduced by permission of A. S. Burbank, Plymouth, Mass.
[40] Reproduced by permission of the Falmouth Board of Industry,
Falmouth, Mass.
[41] Reproduced by permission of Geo. H. Walker & Co., Boston, Mass.
[42] Reproduced by permission of the Falmouth Board of Industry,
Falmouth, Mass.
[43] Reproduced by permission of W. H. Hewins, Falmouth, Mass.
[44] Reproduced by permission of the Falmouth Board of Industry,
Falmouth, Mass.
[45] Reproduced by permission of the Falmouth Board of Industry,
Falmouth, Mass.
[46] Reproduced by permission of Simon Hart, Newport, R. I.
[47] Reproduced, with permission, from Porter’s _Two Hundredth
Birthday of Bishop George Berkeley_, published by Messrs. Charles
Scribner’s Sons.
[48] Reproduced by permission of The Century Co.
[49] Reproduced by permission of Simon Hart, Newport, R. I.
[50] Reproduced, with permission, from the _American Monthly Review
of Reviews_, from the editor’s article on the _Renaissance of the
Mediæval Pilgrimage_, published in October, 1893.
[51] Reproduced by permission of Simon Hart, Newport, R. I.
[52] Reproduced by permission of The Century Co.
[53] Reproduced by permission of Simon Hart, Newport, R. I.
[54] Reproduced by permission of Messrs. D. Appleton & Co.
[55] Reproduced from _Trips by Trolley and A-wheel around Hartford_.
[56] Reproduced, with permission, from Boutell’s _Life of Roger
Sherman_, published by A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, Ill.
[57] Reproduced, with permission, from _Webster’s Dictionary_,
published by G. & C. Merriam Co., Springfield, Mass.
[58] De Tocqueville’s _Democracy in America_, chapter v. Mr. F.
J. Lippitt, who assisted M. de Tocqueville in the preparation
of this work, says that once when they “had been talking about
town-meetings, de Tocqueville exclaimed with a kindling eye (usually
quite expressionless), ‘Mais, c’est la commune!’”--_Cf. The Century
Magazine_, September, 1898, p. 707.
[59] Geo. Wm. Curtis, _Orations and Addresses_, vol. iii.
[60] In 1810, less than 15 per cent. of the population of Rhode Island
was found in towns of 8000 or more inhabitants; in 1890, nearly 80 per
cent. In Massachusetts, in 1790, five per cent. were urban dwellers;
in 1890, 70 per cent. In Connecticut, in 1830, 3 per cent. lived in
cities; in 1890, more than 50 per cent. In 1840, 3 per cent. in New
Hampshire lived in cities; in 1890, more than 25 per cent. In 1820, in
Maine, 4 per cent. lived in cities; in 1890, 20 per cent.
[61] _Cf._ Town Records of Brookline, 1897-98.
[62] Chapter cii., Bryce’s _American Commonwealth_. For an interesting
and significant account of the impression made by one of the
Western Christian colleges upon a friendly and thoroughly trained
French observer, see the translation of an article by Th. Bentzon
(Madame Blanc) in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, printed in _McClure’s
Magazine_, May, 1895.
[63] See Editor’s Preface p. v.
[64] The Ordinance of 1784, the original of the Ordinance of 1787, was
drawn up by Jefferson himself, as chairman of the committee appointed
by Congress to prepare a plan for the government of the territory. The
draft of the committee’s report, in Jefferson’s own handwriting, is
still preserved in the archives of the State Department at Washington.
“It is as completely Jefferson’s own work,” says Bancroft, “as the
Declaration of Independence.” Jefferson worked with the greatest
earnestness to secure the insertion of a clause in the Ordinance of
1784 prohibiting slavery in the Northwest; and the clause was lost
by only a single vote. “The voice of a single individual,” said
Jefferson, who foresaw more clearly than any other what the conflict
with slavery was to mean to the republic, “would have prevented this
abominable crime. Heaven will not always be silent. The friends of the
rights of human nature will in the end prevail.” They prevailed for
the Northwest Territory with the achievement of Manasseh Cutler, Rufus
Putnam and Nathan Dane.
Was it from Jefferson that Putnam and his men at Marietta caught their
classical jargon? There was a great deal of pretentious classicism
in America at that time, new towns everywhere being freighted with
high-sounding Greek and Roman names. The founders of Marietta--so
named in honor of Marie Antoinette--named one of their squares
_Capitolium_; the road which led up from the river was the _Sacra
Via_; and the new garrison, with blockhouses at the corners, was the
_Campus Martius_. Jefferson had proposed dividing the Northwest into
ten States, instead of five as was finally done, and for these States
he proposed the names of Sylvania, Michigania, Assenisipia, Illinoia,
Polypotamia, Cherronesus, Metropotamia, Saratoga, Pelisipia and
Washington.
[65] Rufus Putnam was born in Sutton, Massachusetts, April 9, 1738,
just fifty years before he founded Marietta, where he died May 1,
1824. He was a cousin of General Putnam. Early in life he was a
millwright and a farmer; but he studied mathematics, surveying and
engineering--after distinguished service in the old French war--and
became our leading engineer during the Revolution, and an able officer
in many campaigns. He first planned the Ohio settlement, and at the
outset made it a distinct condition that there should be no slavery in
the territory. Five years after the founding of Marietta, Putnam was
made Surveyor-General of the United States; and his services in Ohio
until the time of his death were of high importance.
[66] The illustration shown on page 335 is from a pen-and-ink copy of
a quaint old painting on glass from China, probably in 1820. In that
country a set of china with this design as decoration was made for
this Plymouth celebration.
[67] _Pioneers of France in the New World._
[68] Arnold, _Rhode Island_, i., 107.
[69] _Proc. R. I. H. S._, July, 1895
[70] Isham & Brown, _Houses_, p. 21.
[71] _Planting of Providence_, p. 43.
* * * * *
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
For eleven months after Concord fight=> For eleven months after the
Concord fight {pg 232}
and Governer Andrew had placed in he=> and Governor Andrew had placed in
he {pg 265}
which was animatting the community=> which was animating the community
{pg 489}
graver class of litererary=> graver class of literary {pg 544}
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Historic Towns of New England" ***
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