When the party brought Philip's head to Plymouth, the Puritan meeting was celebrating a solemn thanksgiving, and quoting, again, the words of old Cotton Mather, "God sent them in the head of a leviathan for a thanksgiving feast." This head was exposed on a gibbet at Plymouth for twenty years, as the arch-enemy of the colony. But things were different afterwards. The "monster" of the seventeenth century became a martyr in the nineteenth century. Irving wrote King Philip's biography; Southey was his bard; and Edwin Forrest nobly impersonated him. Thus the great Metacomet, in the light of history, is regarded as sinned against as well as sinning, for he was trying to drive the invader from his native land. The resistless westward march of the white man overcame him, the first of a long line of famous Indians to fall in front of American colonization.
FALL RIVER.
Across Mount Hope Bay is Fall River, in Massachusetts, now the leading American city in cotton-spinning and the manufacture of print cloths. Its huge granite mills stand in ranks, like the platoons of a marching regiment, upon the successive rising terraces of the eastern shore. Nestling among the hills above the town are the extensive Watuppa ponds, long and narrow lakes, spreading eight or ten miles back upon the higher plateau. These, with other tributary ponds, cover about twelve square miles surface, discharging through a comparatively small stream, yet one carrying a large volume of water. This is the Fall River, dammed at the outlet of the ponds, and barely two miles long, but running so steeply down hill that within about eight hundred yards distance it descends one hundred and thirty-six feet, thus being appropriately named, and in turn giving its name to the town gathered around this admirable water-power. The mills, however, have grown so far beyond the ability of the water-wheels that they now run chiefly by steam, and Fall River has a population approximating one hundred thousand. The prolific granite quarries in the surrounding hills have furnished the stone for these imposing mills, and also for the chief buildings. Although a New England manufacturing city of the first rank, it is not a Yankee settlement, for the operatives are chiefly English, Irish, Welsh and French Canadians. When the settlement began, it was called Freetown, and afterwards Troy, but the name of the stream finally became so popular that the others were discarded, and Fall River was adopted officially upon its incorporation as a city. The rocky environment enabled it to cheaply construct the grand mill buildings, and thus had much to do with its success.
NEWPORT OF AQUIDNECK.
The eastern side of Narragansett Bay is chiefly occupied by Aquidneck, or Rhode Island, upon which is the queen of American seaside resorts, Newport. Aquidneck is the Indian "Isle of Peace," the word literally meaning "floating on the water," and its southwestern extremity broadens into a wide peninsula of almost level and quite fertile land, making a plateau elevated about fifty feet above the sea. The island is fifteen miles long and from three to four miles wide, and this plateau rests upon rock, the strata making cliffs all around it, with coves worked into them by the waters, presenting smooth sand beaches having intervening bold promontories. The southeastern border of this plateau, facing the Atlantic, has an irregular front of little bays and projections, with the waves dashing against the bases of the cliffs and among the rocks profusely strewn beyond them. Behind the western extremity of the island is Brenton's Point, projecting in such a way as to protect the inner harbor of Newport. Here are the wharves, facing the westward, and the ancient part of the town, its narrow streets and older houses covering considerable surface. The harbor is protected by a breakwater, and beyond is Conanicut Island. This was "Charming Newport of Aquidneck," as the colonial histories recorded it, then a leading seaport of New England. Thames Street, fronting it, was, in the eighteenth century, one of the busiest highways of America. Protecting the harbor entrance, upon Brenton's Point, is Fort Adams, which was a formidable fortification before modern-gunnery improvements superseded the old systems, and, next to Fortress Monroe, it is the largest defensive work in the United States, having accommodations for a garrison of three thousand men. It was built during the Presidency of John Adams, and named for him, being then hurried to completion as a defense against French attacks, war with that country seeming to be imminent, and the French particularly desiring to possess Newport. All around the ancient town, and spreading over the plateau, to which the surface slopes upward in gentle ascent from the harbor, is the modern Newport of the American nineteenth century multi-millionaires. From the older town, southward across the plateau, stretches the chief street, Bellevue Avenue, through the fashionable residential district.
William Coddington, whose name is preserved in various ways, but whose descendants are said to have been degenerate, founded Newport. He led a band of dissenters from the Puritan church in Massachusetts and bought Aquidneck from the Indians, starting his colony in 1639. Most of the earlier settlers, in fact, were people of various religious sects driven out of the strictly Puritan New England towns. Having abandoned England because they objected to a State Church, we are told that the Puritans forthwith proceeded to set up in Massachusetts what was very like a State Church of their own, and soon made it hot for the unbelievers. They drove out both William Blackstone and Roger Williams. Blackstone, when he had to go over the border and establish his hermitage at Study Hill on Blackstone River, said: "I came from England because I did not like the Lords Bishops, but I cannot join with you, because I would not be under the Lords Brethren." After Blackstone and Williams, many others came to Rhode Island and settled at Newport, for there they enjoyed the completest liberty of conscience. The Quakers were unmolested and came in large numbers; the Baptists flocked in and built a meeting-house; the Hebrews came, solid business men, originally from Portugal, and established the first synagogue in the United States; the sternest doctrines of the Calvinists were preached; the Moravians held their impressive love-feasts; and orthodox Churchmen fervently prayed for the English King. There were all shades of belief, and dissenters of all ilks, and many having no belief at all, so that the fair town on Aquidneck was pervaded with such an atmosphere of religious toleration and cosmopolitan irregularity that it became famous for its sharp contrast with the stern rigidity of New England. Hence it was not unnatural that at the opening of the nineteenth century President Dwight should have declared that an alleged laxity of morals in Stonington was due to "its nearness to Rhode Island." But despite these peculiarities the Newport colony got on well, so that the growing settlement on the "Isle of Peace" in time came to be designated as the "Eden of America." Dean Berkeley, afterwards Bishop, visited Newport in 1729, remaining several years, and gave the colony an elevated literary tone. An Utopian plan for converting the Indians brought him over from England, but he soon discovered that it was impracticable, and went back home to become a Bishop. His favorite resort is shown at the part of the Newport Cliffs called the "Hanging Rocks," and it is said he there composed his Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, and the noble lyric closing with the famous verse proclaiming the patriotic prophecy which Leutze made the subject of his grand mural painting in the Capitol at Washington:
"Westward the course of empire takes its way."
NEWPORT DEVELOPMENT.
Newport, before the Revolution, was a most important seaport. When Dean Berkeley was there it had about forty-five hundred inhabitants, and they had grown to twelve thousand when the Revolution began. The preceding half-century was the era of its greatest maritime prosperity, when Newport ships circumnavigated the globe. The salubrity of the climate and advantages of the harbor providing safe anchorage but a few miles from the ocean attracted many merchants and a large trade, and in those days the Quakers and the Hebrews were the leading citizens. In 1770 Boston alone surpassed Newport in the extent of its trade, which then was much greater than that of New York. It was about this time that a visitor to New York wrote back to the Newport Mercury that "at its present rate of progress, New York will soon be as large as Newport." The Revolutionary War, however, almost ruined the town, and annihilated its commerce. The port was at first held by the English, and afterwards by the French, both battering and maltreating it, so that it emerged from the conflict in a dilapidated condition, with the population reduced to barely five thousand. The French learned to love the attractive island, and sought earnestly after the war to have it annexed to France, in return for the aid given the Americans, but Washington strongly opposed this and prevented it. The trade was gone, never to return, the merchants went away to Providence, New York and Boston, and it existed in quiet and uneventful neglect until the nineteenth century had made some progress, when people began seeking its pleasant shores for summer recreation. In 1840 two hotels were built, and this began the renaissance. The Civil War made vast fortunes, and their owners sought Newport, and it has since become the great summer home of the fashionable world of America, where they can, in friendly rivalry, make the most lavish displays possible for wealth to accomplish at a seaside resort.
Unlike most American watering-places, Newport is not an aggregation of hotels and lodging-houses, but it is pre-eminently a gathering of the costliest and most elaborate suburban homes this country can show. Built upon the extensive space surrounding the older town, and between it and the ocean, south and east, modern Newport is a galaxy of large and expensive country-houses, each in an enclosure of lawns, flower-gardens and foliage, highly ornamental and exceedingly well kept. Many of them are spacious palaces upon which enormous sums have been expended; and in front of their lawns, for several miles along the winding brow of the cliffs that fall off precipitously to the ocean's edge, is laid the noted "Cliff Walk." This is a narrow footpath at the edge of the greensward that has the waves dashing against the bases of the rocks supporting it, while inland, beyond the lawns, are the noble palaces of Newport. Each is a type of different architecture, and no matter how grand and imposing, each is called a "cottage." The greatest rivalry has been shown in construction, and the styles cover all known methods of building—Gothic, Elizabethan, Tudor, Swiss, Flemish, French, with every sort of ancient house in Britain or Continental Europe, imitated and improved upon, and in some cases widely varying systems being condensed together. Some of these "cottages" have thus become piles of buildings, with all sorts of porticos, doorways, pavilions, dormers, oriels, bow-windows, bays and turrets, towers, chimneys, gambrel roofs and gables, the whole being charmingly elaborated into wide-spreading, imposing and sometimes astonishing houses. Occasionally the villa is elongated into the stable, in an extended house, which includes the family, horses, hounds, domestics and grooms, all living under the same roof. A low and rambling style of architecture, with many gables and prominent colors, is the favorite for various Newport cottages. To the southward of the town are the Ocean Avenue and Ocean Drive, skirting the whole lower coast of the island for some ten miles, and displaying fine marine views.