Historic Towns of New England
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Title: Historic Towns of New England
Editor: Lyman P. Powell
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 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 ha
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