CHAPTER XXXXII.
The changes in the militia system of Massachusetts within my memory have been great, but in my judgment not materially for the better. There are always those who are anxious to tinker existing methods of doing things and
“Who are apt to view their sires
In the light of fools and liars,”
and the organization of the militia has not escaped their meddlesome hand. Under the militia law in force when I was a boy, every man between the ages of eighteen and forty-five was enrolled, and was required to appear at an annual inspection and drill. The volunteer militia and some specified persons, were exempted from this service. These enrolled men were called militia men, and on the day fixed by law those in Plymouth appeared on Training Green, and after being duly inspected, were generally dismissed. But this was not invariably the case. I remember one year when a newly chosen captain determined to exact of his company all the duties, which the spirit, if not the letter, of the law required. Much to the discomfort of his men he marched them through town and nearly out to Seaside, and made it known that the legal fine would be imposed on all delinquents. I have a distinct recollection of their march up North street, their line extending in single file from Water to Court street. The younger men in the ranks enjoyed the fun, each carrying his musket as was convenient to himself, and some wearing knapsacks of domestic manufacture, displaying devices intended to excite the applause of the accompanying crowd. Apples and peanuts were freely indulged in, while long nine cigars and pipes of extraordinary proportions left a trail of smoke like the steam from a locomotive. It was not, however, the law, but the method of enforcing it, which made the annual inspection a farce, and if it be necessary to inculcate a martial spirit in the community and maintain a volunteer militia, it would be well to revive the old law and re-establish the old militia from which volunteers could be drawn.
Under the old system, the volunteer militia was in a healthy condition, and was at the height of its glory when the Civil War broke out. It was divided into divisions, brigades and regiments, and for many years there were in Plymouth an infantry and an artillery company; an infantry and artillery company in Abington, and infantry companies in Carver, Plympton, Halifax, Middleboro, Bridgewater, and I think Hingham. There were in those days annual brigade or regimental musters, and the musterfield in Plymouth was what is now the Robbins’ field, opposite to the house of Gideon F. Holmes. Those musters were great occasions for the boys, and we were always on hand, not caring whether school kept or not. We carried out our programme for the day to the minutest detail. We were on hand in Town square when the Carver company abandoned their wagons and began their march to the tented field. We then inspected the caparisoned horses of Col. Thomas Weston of Middleboro and his staff in the yard of Bradford’s tavern, and when under escort of the Standish Guards and the Plymouth Artillery, they marched to the music of the Plymouth Band, we followed, and perhaps reached the field in time to witness the arrival of the Halifax Light Infantry and the Plympton Rifle Rangers. A few cents in our pockets were sufficient to carry us through the day. The company drills, the dress parade and the sham fight received our careful attention, and the casualties in the last were on one occasion less than they would have been had not a ramrod fired by a careless soldier found a target in a distant barn. When I recall my experience at muster I am reminded of a remark made by Edward Trowbridge Dana, a brother of the late Richard H. Dana, after a service at the old Trinity church in Summer street, in Boston, in which Bishop Eastburn officiated. The Bishop was an Englishman, a handsome man, and splendid horseman, whom I have often seen riding in Boston streets wearing top boots, and looking as if he had been accustomed to following the hounds. He was as showy in the pulpit as in the saddle, and impressed his hearers more by his voice and gestures than by the matter of his discourse. On the occasion referred to, Dana, when asked by a friend on coming out of church, how he liked the Bishop, replied, “I feel as I used to when a boy on the muster field, belly full of watermelon, and head full of bass drum.” It was at one of the musters above referred to held in Dedham that a new, slangy name was introduced. It was when the temperance movement was active, and the sale of intoxicating liquor was kept as much as possible out of public sight. One of the side show tents at the muster in question exhibited over its entrance a large canvass bearing a picture of a striped pig, which could be seen for a fee of ninepence. This new zoological specimen attracted great attention, and crowds learned novel lessons in Natural History. The exit from the tent was in the rear, and it was observed that every zoological student came out wiping his lips, while a large number returned for a second sight of the “critter.”
I have said that at the time the Civil War broke out the volunteer militia was in its prime. Under the law each company furnished its own uniforms, while the state furnished to the privates arms and equipments. Such men as George T. Bigelow, afterwards Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, Lincoln Flagg Brigham, afterwards Chief Justice of the Superior Court, Ivers J. Austin, John C. Park, and Elbridge Gerry Austin, attorneys at law, Newell A. Thompson, merchant, and Charles O. Rogers, editor of the Boston Journal, were captains of companies. With a population in the state of less than thirteen hundred thousand, the militia force was 5,593 officers and men, while in 1905, with a population of three millions, it is no larger, which is equivalent to a falling off of fifty per cent. The idea underlying the plan of the reformers of the militia was to bring it up to the standard of the regular army, which any practical man must see cannot be done, with volunteer enlistments, small pay and an exaction of service which busy men cannot afford to render. The first blow struck at the life of the militia by the meddlers, was to make the regiment instead of the company the unit of organization, and have all the companies in the regiment uniformed alike.
Under this system the individuality of the company was lost at once, its pride and esprit de corps were extinguished. Even the names of company commanders became practically unknown, and as galley convicts are known by their number, the companies were only known by their letter. Before the war every boy in Boston knew the New England Guards, the City Guards, the Boston Light Infantry, and the Fusileers, and as each paraded in the streets, every man was ambitious to have his company excel in numbers, in dress, and in march. On one occasion the Boston Light Infantry with Dodworth’s Band marched up State street one hundred and seventeen strong, and the next day the City Guards with the Brigade Band marched up the same street with one hundred and eighteen in the ranks. The flourishing condition of the Independent Corps of Cadets, shows what the Volunteer Militia might have been without the so-called reform to which I have alluded. The death blow to the volunteer militia was struck when the present armory law was enacted. The requirement that towns, in which companies are chartered, shall furnish armories, has extinguished the militia in the towns, in only five of which, out of three hundred and twenty-one, companies now exist. To make the army law the more destructive in its effect on the militia, the most extravagant demands were made by the authorities for accommodations, in many instances including the equipment of club houses, which towns with a due view to economy were not disposed to meet. Aside from all other considerations the armory law is not only oppressive in its operations, but it violates the underlying principles of our constitution, to wit: equality of taxation and the enactment of equal laws, inasmuch as it imposes for the support of a state institution, burdens on a few towns and exempts all the rest. It is not an answer to this objection to say that towns incurring armory expenses receive certain reimbursements from the state, inasmuch as the reimbursement ceases with company disbandments, and towns losing it are left with an armory on their hands for the erection of which they have incurred large expense; and inasmuch, also, as the towns maintaining armories, are also taxed for their share of the reimbursements. It is not a rash prophecy that if the present militia laws continue in operation, not many years will elapse before militia organizations will be confined to the cities of the Commonwealth. In closing the foregoing narrative concerning the militia, it will be proper to refer more particularly to the Plymouth volunteer companies. The Plymouth Artillery was organized January 7, 1777. Thos. Mayhew was the first commander, and as far as I have been able to ascertain, it was commanded afterwards until its disbandment about the year 1850 by the following captains: Geo. Drew, 1804-09; Wm. Davis, 1810-15; Southworth Shaw, 1816-20; John Sampson, 1821-24; Nathaniel Wood, 1825; Joseph Allen, 1826-29; David Bradford, 1830-32; Eleazer Stephens Bartlett, 1833-35; Wm. Parsons, 1836-39; Ephriam Holmes, 1840-41; David Holmes, 1842; Wendell Hall, 1843-45; Samuel West Bagnall, 1846-47; Ebenezer S. Griffin, 1848; and Lt. Robert Finney, 1849. The field pieces furnished to the company by the state were kept for many years in a gun house located by permission of the town on the northeast corner of Training Green, which on the disbandment of the company was sold to Henry Whiting, Jr., who made of it the house in which he lived and died on the east side of Sandwich street, next to the south corner of Winter street.
The Standish Guards was chartered in 1818, and its commanders up to the time of its disbandment in 1883 were: Coomer Weston, Bridgham Russell, James G. Gleason, John Bartlett, Wm. T. Drew, Jeremiah Farris, Coomer Weston, Jr., Barnabas Churchill, Benjamin Bagnall, Sylvanus H. Churchill, Charles Raymond, Joseph W. Collingwood, Charles C. Doten, Josiah R. Drew, Stephen C. Phinney, Herbert Morissey and Joseph W. Hunting. The present Plymouth company was chartered in 1888, and attached as Company D to the Fifth Regiment. In 1770 a powder house was built by the town at the northwesterly end of Burial Hill, which was removed within the memory of the present generation. It was intended as a place of deposit for powder belonging to the town, but a vote was passed by the town requiring all powder brought into town by any person to be placed in it, excepting amounts not exceeding fifty pounds in the hands of any trader, and twenty pounds in the hands of any other inhabitant. The tablet containing an inscription, which was originally placed in the wall of the building is now in Pilgrim Hall.
I do not intend to say much more concerning Boston, but as every eastern Massachusetts person looks on that city as his own, I have ventured to say more than I otherwise would. Until about the time of the Revolution there were no sidewalks in the city, and most of the streets were paved with cobble stones and sloped toward the centre, thus forming a surface drain. That style of street was rather Dutch than English, and may still be seen in Holland. It was universal in New York until the middle of the eighteenth century, when Madam Provost laid down flagstones called walking-sides, for the convenience of visitors to her business offices. The surface drainage above referred to was universal in Plymouth until after South Pond water was introduced in 1855, when the numerous wells in town were converted into cesspools, and initiated the first step in the present sewage system of the town.
Before leaving Boston a few words about its theatres and its harbor and navigation will not be out of place. The first theatre was established in 1792 in Hawley street, but though its representations were advertised as moral lectures, it was suppressed as violating the law. The law was repealed in the same year, and on the 3rd of February, 1794, the Federal street theatre, on the corner of Franklin and Federal streets was opened, and burned in 1798. It was at once rebuilt and reopened in the same year, continuing until 1833, under various managers as a popular resort. During its career Edmund Kean, Macready, J. B. Booth, and John Howard Payne, appeared on its stage, and in 1832 I attended a performance there by the Ravels in a play called “The Skaters of Smolenska,” of which I have a vivid recollection. In later years I had the pleasure of an intimate acquaintance with John Howard Payne, who at the age of twenty created a sensation in the theatrical world under the soubriquet of the youthful Roscius, and who later was the author of “Sweet Home.” He was born in Easthampton, Long Island, June 9, 1792, and appeared at the Park theatre in New York, February 24, 1809, as “Young Norval.” On June 4, 1813, he appeared at the Drury Lane Theatre in London. He left the stage after a few years, but remained in London engaged in writing plays, among which were “Brutus,” which still holds its place on the stage, “Therese” and “Charles the Second.” He also wrote “Clari, or the Maid of Milan,” which was produced as an opera, and contained the song which gave him special distinction. In 1832 he returned to the United States, and in 1841 was appointed Consul at Tunis. On his removal from office by Polk in 1846, he started for home, but lingered in Paris while efforts were making for his restoration to the Consulate. In the autumn of that year I formed an acquaintance with him, which became intimate. We were in the habit of dining together frequently at Tavernier’s restaurant in the Palais Royal, and one day while we were strolling through the quadrangle of the Palais where fountains were playing, bands performing, and children amusing themselves, he called my attention to a round window in the rear attic of the Palais, where, separated from the main building, rooms were let for various purposes, and said, “In that room with a scene like this before my eyes, I wrote ‘Home Sweet Home.’” He further said that he had come over from London discouraged, in want and almost in despair, and with the thought of home the words came to his lips and were uttered like a sigh for the scenes of his youth, which he feared he should never see again. He was restored to his Consulate, and died in Tunis, April 10, 1852. How easy it is to imagine him looking from that window on the gay scenes below and uttering the words:
“An exile from home, pleasure dazzles in vain,
Ah, give me my lowly thatched cottage again;
The birds, singing sweetly that came to my call,
Give me them and that peace of mind dearer than all.”
His body was brought home and buried, I think, in Washington.
In 1827 the Tremont theatre was built and opened on the 24th of September. In 1842 it was sold to the Baptist Society, of which Rev. Dr. Colver was pastor. In 1831 a building on Traverse street, known as the American amphitheatre was built by W. and T. L. Stewart, which was opened in July as the Warren Theatre, but replaced in 1836 by the National Theatre, which was burned in April, 1852. It was again rebuilt, and finally destroyed March 24, 1863. In January, 1836, the Lion Theatre was opened on Washington street, on the site of the present Keith’s Theatre, and later as the Melodeon, was the scene of performances by Macready, Charlotte Cushman and others. In 1841 the Eagle Theatre was built on the corner of Haverhill and Traverse streets, but was soon abandoned. In 1841 the Boston Museum was established on the corner of Tremont and Bromfield streets, and in 1846 was removed to the site which it recently occupied north of King’s Chapel Burial ground. During the Millerite excitement in 1843, the Miller Tabernacle was built on Howard street, and converted into the theatre called the Howard Athenæum, in 1845. It was opened October 13 in that year, and was burned in February, 1846, in which year the present Howard Anthenæum was built. In 1848 the Beach Street Museum was erected, but had a short life. The present Boston Theatre was built in 1854, and at that time was exceeded in capacity by only six theatres in the world. To return to the Federal street theatre, which I have said was abandoned for dramatic purposes in 1833, the building passed in 1834 into the possession of the Academy of Music, and was called the Odeon. In 1846 it was leased for a time again as a theatre, and was afterwards occasionally used for short seasons by Italian Opera companies, by the Central Church, and by the Lowell Institute, until it was taken down in 1852.
In connection with the theatres it will not be out of place to speak of Concert Hall, which once stood on the corner of Hanover and Court streets, built about 1750, and taken down a few years ago to widen the first mentioned street. Before and during and after the Revolution it was a famous place for concerts, balls and other entertainments. I have a card of invitation issued by the officers of the French fleet, then in Boston harbor, to a ball to be held there. It is printed on the back of a playing card, showing the straits to which Boston was reduced during the Revolution. In my boyhood I saw there an exhibition by Maelzel of his famous diorama of the “Conflagration of Moscow,” and of his “automaton chess player,” which beat Boston’s best players, but was finally discovered to have a small humped-backed dwarf concealed inside. There, also, I saw an exhibition of legerdemain by a colored man named Richard Potter, who also exhibited in Pilgrim Hall about 1831. He was born in Hopkinton, Mass., on the estate of Sir Harry Frankland, one of whose slaves named Dinah, and brought from Guinea, was his mother. After attending school he went to England with a Mr. Skinner of Roxbury, and there learned the magician’s art. In 1836 Concert Hall was taken by Peter B. Brigham, and occupied as a hostelry, where could be found the best oysters and the most famous drinks. He was notable for the concoction of new alcoholic mixtures, to which he gave such names as “Tip and Ty,” “I. O. U.,” “Paris White,” “Fiscal Agent,” “Free Soiler,” “Same Old Coon,” “Clay Smash,” “Webster eye-opener,” and “Deacon Grant.” He made a fortune, a large part of which was bequeathed for the erection of a hospital now building.
It may be asked how, before the introduction of railroads, the producers in remote sections of New England found a market. Every valley and hillside yielded bountiful crops, and every water privilege had its little mill, and of course the farmer and manufacturer depended for returns from their labor on the markets of the seaboard. The market gardeners of Waltham and Brighton and Cambridge found no difficulty in supplying daily the markets of Boston, and the brigs, schooners and sloops, plying as packets between Boston and the various ports along the shores of New England, brought to the metropolis the products of a considerable territory lying along the banks and head waters of the Penobscot, the Kennebec, Merrimac and Connecticut rivers. But the large district beyond the reach of these outlets was obliged to largely depend on teams and baggage wagons for transportation. While I was in college, from 1838 to 1842, there was a ceaseless procession of these teams passing through Cambridge from Vermont, New Hampshire and distant parts of northern Massachusetts. They brought butter, cheese, lard, eggs, poultry, potatoes, apples, cider, hams, pork, shoes, wooden ware, chairs, and other articles of the field and shop, and returned with supplies needed at home. Teamsters put up their teams at one of the numerous taverns in the immediate neighborhood of Boston and, discharging their freight in the city early the next morning, reloaded their wagons and returned to their putting up place, starting for home the next day. The taverns, which depended for support almost entirely on these teamsters, were the Norfolk House in Roxbury, the Cattle Fair Hotel in Brighton, the Punch-bowl in Brookline, Porter’s Tavern in North Cambridge, and others in Cambridgeport, Medford, Watertown, Waltham, East Cambridge and Charlestown. The best known of these were Porter’s and the Cattle Fair, and hardly a night did they fail to find numerous patrons who sat around a huge wood fire playing checkers or loosening their tongues with plentiful libations of mulled wine or flip. In the vicinity of Porter’s there was for some years a race course, which afforded to the students of Harvard frequent opportunities to violate the rules of the college. Both at Porter’s and the Cattle Fair house weekly cattle fairs were held, and cattle, horses and sheep and hogs, were sold to customers, who with fat wallets had come from many scores of towns to buy. These customers were market men and stable keepers from towns within a radius of at least fifty miles, and drove their purchases home over the roads and yarded them until ready for slaughter or sale. I have heard it said that no keener eye, or shrewder judgment of the value of a fat yoke of oxen than those of the late Amasa Holmes of Plymouth were to be found in the cattle yards of Cambridge and Brighton.
Having referred to the taverns in the vicinity of Boston, supported by the commerce on the road, and by the cattle fairs, I am led to speak of the hotel system in Boston, as I remember it seventy years ago, when the population was eighty thousand. At that time, omitting only very small taverns, I remember Doolittle’s Tavern in Cambridge street, the Pemberton House in Howard street, the Pavilion, the Albion and the Tremont House in Tremont street, the New England House in Clinton street, two taverns near Haymarket Square, the American and Webster Houses in Hanover street, Wilde’s Tavern in Elm street, the City Tavern in Brattle street, the Stackpole House on the corner of Milk and Devonshire streets, the Exchange Coffee House in Congress Square, the Pearl Street House on the upper corner of Milk and Pearl streets, the Commercial Coffee House on the lower corner of Milk and Battery March streets, the Bromfield House on the south side of Bromfield street, the Marlboro Hotel in Washington street, nearly opposite Franklin street, the Washington House on the east side of Washington street, a little south of Milk street, and the Lamb Tavern on or near the site of the present Boston Theatre. The United States Hotel which comes a little within the seventy years, was built by a company not far from 1840 on land bought of the South Cove Company. The South Cove Company owned flats bought of the city in 1833, extending from Essex street to the old Federal street bridge, measuring about seventy-three acres, and bounded on the west by Harrison avenue as far as Dover street bridge, including lands which for many years were the sites of the Boston and Albany and Old Colony Railroad stations. While workmen were excavating for the foundations of the United States Hotel, I remember seeing in the trench the timbers of an old wharf. Some of the houses I have mentioned have been historic. Paran Stevens, who kept the New England House, was engaged to keep the Revere House, when it was opened in 1844, and was the landlord later of the Tremont House, the Battle House in Mobile, and the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York, in the last of which he made an ample fortune. The Tremont House was opened by Dwight Boyden in 1829, and with the exception of Mr. Stevens, he alone made the house profitable. The United States Hotel was opened and kept some years by Albert Clark and Ralph W. Holman. Mr. Clark went from the United States to the Brevoort House in New York, and retired a millionaire. Up to the time during the Civil War, when the cost of living was advanced, the highest price per day for transients was two dollars, but on the claim that the cost of maintaining a boarder had doubled, the daily charge was doubled, and consequently the profits were also doubled. In 1845 I boarded at the United States Hotel, and paid for room and board five dollars a week, and during the winters of 1858 and 1859, while in the Senate, I boarded at the Tremont House and paid for board and room eight dollars per week. It is true that the comforts and conveniences in hotels have vastly improved. It is difficult to realize that at that time a visit to the lavatory involved in the winter an uncomfortable, if not dangerous exposure to the outer air. The sewage arrangements for hotels as for other houses, were entirely inadequate to the demands of the city, and the vaults were emptied by teams from Brighton, which were not permitted to enter the city until ten o’clock at night. In very many private yards there were pumps in close proximity to these vaults, and it is a wonder that the health of the city was not seriously impaired. The teams I have referred to were nightly strung along on Cambridge bridge, waiting for the hour, and were called by the college boys, “Brighton Artillery.” The sewage question was an unsolved one in Boston for many years, and the necessity of ventilating sewers was little realized or understood. When water closets and set bowls were introduced, it was supposed that traps with standing water would prevent the passage of deleterious gas. It was, however, discovered at last, that while odors might thus be excluded, the dangerous gases, which were inodorous, could not be kept back by water. Thus two things became necessary, to wit, individual ventilators connected with bathroom plumbing, and a proper ventilation of public sewers. I remember that many years ago the city Government in response to complaints of water spouts which discharged their water on the sidewalks, passed an ordinance requiring all spouts to enter the sewers. The Board of Health at once protested against the adoption of such an arrangement on the ground that spouts would discharge sewer gases through the house gutters in the immediate vicinity of sleeping room windows; but it was soon discovered that such a general ventilation of the sewers prevented the formation of gases, and was a conservator of health.