“Ay, dame; but methinks the wife of a governor should show herself more governed than other women; more meek, and recollected, and chastened, rather than more arrogant.”
“Nay, Will, do I lack in these matters?” And Alice looked up in her husband’s face, her blue eyes so swimming in tears that she could not see the smile of tender malice upon her husband’s lips as he folded her in his arms and whispered tender reassurances needless to set down.
Yes, our governor was going a-neighboring to his brother potentates at Boston, for a great change had almost suddenly befallen that pleasant region where William Blackstone had dwelt as a solitary for so long. Let us, as briefly as may be, freshen our memories of these early arrivals, and so understand more clearly the new relations suddenly involving the Pilgrims of Plymouth.
It was in 1628 that Governor Endicott with a large and aristocratic following arrived at Naumkeag, and speedily dispossessed Roger Conant and the other old settlers both of their proprietary rights and their privilege of trading with the natives. The next step was to name the place Salem, and ordain as Independent ministers the men who had left England proclaiming their fealty to her Established Church.
But Salem did not long claim the seat of government, for on the 17th of June, 1630, Governor Winthrop, with near a thousand colonists under his command, sailed into Boston Bay and landed at Charlestown, where a deputation from Salem had already prepared for them. Neither numbers, nor home protection, nor wealth, nor aristocratic pretensions could, however, save this great colony from the very same enemies that had assailed the glorious hundred of Mayflower Pilgrims ten years before, and cut down one half of their number. Ship fever, scurvy, and other diseases incident to the horrors of a sea-voyage in that day seized upon the new-comers, who aggravated their own danger by improper food, treatment, and, so long as they lasted, terrible drugs. In six months Charlestown had become a village of graves and of loathsome insanitation, complicated with the want of pure and sufficient water. Moved at length by the sufferings of his neighbors, Blackstone, who at first had scowled upon their invasion of his solitude, visited Governor Winthrop, and told him of a pure and unfailing spring of water near the southern foot of the hill upon whose western slope lay his own cabin and apple orchard, and suggested that it might be well for the settlement to be removed across the mouth of the Mystic, and reëstablished at Trimountain, as he called the peninsula hitherto his own.
Winthrop gladly accepted the suggestion, came over with Blackstone to view the proposed site, and liked it so well that in October, 1630, he caused the frame of his own house nearly ready for erection in Charlestown to be taken over, and set up close by the spring in question, or, as we might now describe it, on Washington Street, between the Old South Church and the corner of Spring Lane, under whose worn and dusty pavement one still fancies to hear the cool wash and gurgle of those imprisoned waters.
Was Blackstone sorry for his good-nature when, after a little, Winthrop and his council kindly set apart fifty acres of the domain to which he had invited them, as his property, and proceeded to divide the rest among themselves? Cannot one picture the reserved and somewhat cynical hermit smoking his pipe beside his solitary fire in the evening of that day, and smiling to himself as he considered the condescension of the new government? And did haply some herald of coming Liberty suggest certain pithy queries to be more plainly worded on Boston Common a century or so later? Did the lonely man ask himself what right Governor Winthrop or any other man had to come into this wild country and dispossess the pioneer settlers of their holdings? True, the King of England had given him that right. But where did the King of England himself get the authority to do so? He had neither bought the land of the natives, nor had he conquered them in fair fight; he simply had heard of a fair new world beyond the seas, and claimed it for his own by some arbitrary right divine whose source no man could tell. The land was his, he said, and so he had sent these men in his name to take possession, to parcel out, to give, or to withhold, from men as good as themselves who had borne the heat and toil of the earlier days, and who had paid the savages full measure for the lands they held. What was this right divine? Why should kings so control the property of other men—men who only asked to live their own lives, and neither meddle nor make with kingcraft? Why? And as William Blackstone, the forgotten pipe burned out, pondered this “why,” the yellowing leaves of the young Liberty tree a few rods from his cottage door rustled impatiently, as though they felt the breath of 1775 already in their midst.
It did not last very long. Not only were there disputes and heartburnings about proprietorship, but the Puritans who had come to New England professing a stanch adherence to the church, and almost immediately proved false to her, could not forgive the quiet man who made no parade of religion, but never swerved from his adherence to his ordination vows. They tried to persuade him, they tried to coerce him, and at last received the assurance that he who had exiled himself from England to avoid the tyranny of the Lords Bishops was not disposed to submit to that of the lords brethren, but would leave them to dispute with each other.
So selling all that he had, except a plot of land around his old home, Blackstone invested the thirty pounds of purchase money in cattle, packed his books and some other matters upon his cows’ backs, and driving the herd before him passed over Boston Neck and out into the wilderness; nor did he pause until upon a tributary of Narragansett Bay he found a lonely and lovely spot, so far from white men or their ordinary line of travel as to rival the Isle of Juan Fernandez in solitude. Naming his domain Study Hill, Blackstone built another house, planted some young apple trees carefully brought from the old orchard, set up his bookshelves, filled his pipe, and settled himself for forty years of happiness, dying just in time to escape King Philip’s war.
But in September, 1630, when Governor Bradford went up to pay his first visit to Governor Winthrop, Blackstone still lived on Boston Common, and looked upon the new-comers as his guests. They had not yet presented him with the fifty acres of his own land.