“Voted That Doctor Baker be desired to leave this Town, also
“Voted, that the eight men that Doctor Baker gott a warrant for go immediately and Deliver themselves up to Justice.”
Fifteen days later, at another meeting held on the 30th of March, this matter again presented itself, and the following entry records the action taken:—
“A motion was made to chuse a Committee to be Ready to appear and make a stand against any vexatious Law suit that may be brought against any of the Inhabitants of this Town by Doctor Moses Baker Then,
“Voted, that Thomas Penniman, Esqr. Colo Edmund Billings, Mr. Azariah Faxon, Capt. John Vinton and Capt. Peter B. Adams be a Committee to use their Influence with proper authority to suppress, any vexatious Law suits that may be brought by Doctor Moses Baker against any of the Inhabitants of this Town and that said Committee shall be allowed by the Town for their time.
“Messrs William Penniman and Joseph Spear entered their dissent to the Last Vote, as being Illegal and Improper, as there was no such article in the warrant only in General Terms.”[23]
I have endeavored to learn something of the transaction to which these mysterious entries of over a century ago relate, and the result of my inquiries seems to indicate a state of affairs then existing in the neighborhood of Boston very suggestive of those “White-cap” and “Moonshiner” proceedings in the western and southern States, accounts of which from time to time appear in the telegraphic despatches to our papers. Dr. Moses Baker lived and practised medicine in what is now the town of Randolph, and in 1777 he was one of two physicians to whom the town voted permission to establish an inoculating hospital. In 1779 he was about forty years of age, and married. At the time there dwelt not far from where Dr. Baker lived a woman of bad reputation, with whom Dr. Baker was, whether rightly or not, believed to have improper relations. Certain men living in the neighborhood accordingly undertook to act as a local committee to enforce good morals; and this committee decided to ride Dr. Baker and the woman in question together on horseback to a convenient locality near the meeting-house, and there tar and feather them. A broken-down old hack, deemed meet and appropriate for use as a charger in such case, was accordingly procured; and going to the woman’s house, the vigilantes actually took her from her bed, and, without allowing her to clothe herself, put her on the horse, and then proceeded to Baker’s house. He in the mean time had received notice of the proposed visit; and when the party reached their destination they found him indignant, armed and resolute. He threatened to shoot the first man who laid hands on him. This was a turn in affairs which the self-constituted vindicators of public morality had not contemplated, and accordingly they proceeded no further in their purpose. Dr. Baker was not molested, and the woman was released.
It is immaterial, so far as this paper is concerned, whether there was, or whether there was not, ground for the feeling against Baker. In the emergency he does not seem to have demeaned himself either as one guilty or afraid; and, as the action of the town meetings shows, he did not hesitate to bring the whole matter before the courts and into public notice. But for my present purposes this is of no consequence; the significance of the incident here lies in the confirmatory evidence which the extracts from the records afford of the inferences drawn from the facts set forth in the earlier part of this paper. The offending female in this case seems to have been what is known as a woman of bad or abandoned character; the man’s relations with her are assumed as notorious. Here was a state of things which public opinion would not tolerate. Probably more than half of those who took part in the proposed vindication of decency and morals looked with indifference on the custom of “bundling.” That was in anticipation of marriage, and in its natural results there was nothing which savored of promiscuous incontinence. The extraordinary entries in the records show how fully the town sympathized with and supported the vigilantes, as they would now be called in Mexicanized parlance of the extreme Southwest. The distinction I have endeavored to draw between the excusable, if not permissible, incontinence of the New England country community of the last century, and the idea of promiscuous immorality as we entertain it, is clearly seen in this Baker episode.
Having now made use of all the original material the possession of which led me into the preparation of the present paper, it might at this point properly be brought to a close; but I am tempted to go on and touch on one further point which has long been with me a matter of doubt, and in regard to which I have been disposed to reach opposite conclusions at different times,—I refer to the comparative morality of the last century and that which is now closing. Has there been during the nineteenth century, taken as a whole, a distinct advance in the matter of sexual morality as compared with the eighteenth? Or has the change, which it is admitted has taken place, been only in outward appearance, while beneath a surface of greater refinement human nature remains ever and always the same? It is unquestionably true that in a large and widely differentiated community like that in which we live the individual, no matter who he is, knows very little of what may be called the real “true inwardness” of his surroundings. Any one who wishes to satisfy himself on this point need only seek out some elderly and retired country doctor or lawyer of an observing turn of mind and retentive memory, and then, if the inquirer should be fortunate enough to lead such an one into a confidential mood, listen to his reminiscences. It has been my privilege to accomplish this result on several occasions; and I may freely say that I have always emerged from those interviews in a more or less morally dishevelled condition. After them I have for considerable periods entertained grave and abiding doubts whether, except in outward appearance and respect for conventionalities, the present could claim any superiority over the past. A cursory inspection of the criminal and immoral literature of the day, which the printing-press now empties out in a volume heretofore undreamed of, tends strongly to confirm this feeling of doubt,—which becomes almost a conviction when, from time to time, the realistic details of some Lord Colin Campbell or Sir Charles Dilke or Charles Stewart Parnell scandal are paraded in the newspapers.