And that apprenticeship in the early days was sometimes practical slavery is shown by the case of Jonathan Hatch, a Yarmouth lad, bound out at the age of fourteen to a Salem man, from whose harsh service he fled only to be caught in Boston, sentenced to be severely whipped, and returned as a slave to his master. Again escaping, he reached Yarmouth where he was arrested, condemned to be whipped, and passed from constable to constable back to Salem. Appeal was made to the Plymouth Court which made an excuse of “doubting its jurisdiction” to evade the issue, and the boy was “appointed to dwell with Mr. Stephen Hopkins” at Yarmouth. In due time he married and went to live at South Sea, near the sachem of the Mashpees, with whom he became on very good terms. In 1652 he was had up for furnishing an Indian with gun and ammunition, and later befriended the Indian Repent who was charged with threatening to shoot Governor Prince. From the South Sea, with Isaac Robinson, he became a squatter at Falmouth, but soon was duly granted a plot of eighty acres. He was to act, moreover, as the land agent of the proprietors, and ended the career that had begun as a runaway slave by becoming a respected measurer of metes and bounds.
For these early farmers slavery seems to have been the solution of their problem of trying to tie a laborer to his job. While land was available in practically unlimited amount and money was scarce, any man might find himself a proprietor, a point illustrated by an amusing story of Winthrop’s. A certain man, lacking cash, paid off his farmhand by giving him a pair of oxen. The laborer was willing to continue such service. “But how shall I pay you?” asked the man. “With more oxen.” “And when the oxen are gone?” “Then you can work for me and earn them back again.” But in the North, as time went on, and land was taken up in comparatively small farms that could be profitably worked by owners who could pay for necessary labor, the convenience of slaves was easy to forego, and the public conscience began to work for abolition. As early as 1733 Sandwich voted: “that our representative is instructed to endeavor to have an act passed by the Court to prevent the importation of slaves into this country; and that all children that shall be born of such Africans as are now slaves among us, shall after such act be free at twenty-one years of age.” Five years later selling slaves in the American market was prohibited at Boston. It is at Truro, one may believe, that one of the last slave trades on the Cape was consummated when, in 1726, Benjamin Collins bought from a neighbor Hector, aged three, for thirty pounds, and in due time made a Christian of him, as the parish records show. Hector grew to a great age, and evinced confidence in salvation, among other ways, by praying in loud tones as he went to his labor in the fields of the Truro Highlands where, sure gage of notability, certain expressions to commemorate him crept into the vernacular—“Old Hector,” “black as Hector,” “Hector’s Nook,” “Hector’s Stubble,” “Hector’s Bridge.”
In the later years, preceding the Civil War, it was natural that among a people which had always counted many progressives, there should be Abolitionists. They were kindly folk, it is said, “with strong convictions, never attending church because the sermons did not condemn slavery”—the early racial touch cropping out, it seems, in this later generation. Some of the ships of an Osterville owner even landed runaway slaves on the south shore whence they passed along by “underground railway” to a certain house in Barnstable. One remembers that as a boy he used to go there to teach them their letters; and he also remembers that “they were treated as equals; but sometimes they made their way to ‘Mary Dunn’s Road’ where they found rum and congenial companions.”
Finance, swinging from stringency to inflation of the currency, was an ever-present problem in the colony during the French and Indian Wars. In the mid-eighteenth century, a land bank was proposed in the hope of using land as the basis for credit in a country where gold and silver were so lacking, with a result disastrous to many farmers on the Cape. In 1748 paper was called in and the “piece of eight,” or Spanish dollar, made the standard; but again the easy issue of paper was too great a temptation, again there was depreciation and instability, again the struggle back to a standard dollar. In 1749, after “King George’s War,” England liquidated the war debt of the Province by paying into the treasury at Boston a fund of some one hundred and eighty thousand pounds that were carted through the streets in seventeen truckloads of silver and ten of copper. Henceforth it was provided that all debts should be paid in coined silver, which is said to originate the term “lawful money.”
II
All these fifty years since the accession of William and Mary had been complicated by more or less participation in the foreign wars of the mother country; and the hereditary hatred of France and England lived on, with new occasions, in their colonies. Those of France had been planted and fostered by the crown; those of England largely by her rebels; Catholic France never could sympathize with the English heretics; and now that the power of Spain was broken, French and English traders and fishermen were the chief rivals for domination of the new countries and the seas, east and west, north and south, the world over. In 1689 the principle of colonial neutrality had been proposed by France and rejected, to her considerable subsequent cost, by England. And at the beginning of “King William’s War,” so-called, Massachusetts, commanded by the Governor, Sir William Phips, set forth on her adventure for the reduction of Port Royal and Quebec. Port Royal fell, its loot paying for the expedition, but was retaken by the French. France’s reply was an invasion of the border, assisted by her Indian allies; and now and thereafter throughout the French wars there was great apprehension, particularly by Cape Cod in its defenceless state, of French sea-raids on the New England coast. After the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, France claimed all the fisheries east of the Kennebec and all English boats there found were forfeit by order of the king—fruitful cause, one may suppose, for fresh quarrels. And no later than 1702 “Queen Anne’s War” revived the Indian raids, and the sacking of Deerfield roused the colonies to a holy war. On the Continent, meantime, “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre” and in 1713 the Peace of Utrecht ended the French wars for thirty-three years’ breathing space; in the new world France lost forever Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the Hudson Bay Territory.
In these wars five expeditions had been fitted out by the colonies to attack the enemy on the east, under Colonel Benjamin Church, and in his command were found the Cape Cod men. Thomas Dimmock, of Barnstable, fell, fighting gallantly, at the battle of Canso. He would not shelter himself, as did the other officers, but stood boldly out in the open cheering on his men—a conspicuous mark for sharpshooters. Major Walley, son of the old minister, was another officer—a gallant figure, handsome and debonair, as a portrait of him, in fine surtout, ruffles and periwig, testifies; and there was Caleb Williamson in command of the Plymouth forces, and Captain Gorham, later lieutenant-colonel, son of the old Indian fighter of Philip’s War. And Gorham, especially, did unique and valuable service in command of the “whaleboat fleet.” These light-draft boats, manned by whalemen and Indians, could transport men and supplies up the shallow bays and rivers to the spot where they were most needed; and without such a device, the enemy, stationed for the most part where the transports could not land troops, would have been hard come at by marches overland through the wilderness. At night, or in bad weather, the boats were taken ashore and turned over to serve as shelter. In 1704 Church called for fifty of these boats, and that winter visited every town on the Cape to recruit men. “For years after,” writes Amos Otis, “these old sailors and soldiers, seated in their roundabout chairs, within their capacious chimney-corners, would relate to the young their adventures in ‘the Old French Wars.’”
In 1739 there was an abortive war with Spain when Cape men enlisted for an expedition to the Spanish Main where many died of disease, and there was no result beyond a further impoverishment of the country. And by 1745 England and France, drawn as they were into the War of the Austrian Succession, were fighting out in America “King George’s War.” In April of that year thirty-five hundred troops, chiefly “substantial persons and men of beneficial occupations,” sailed from Boston under another fighting Governor, Sir William Pepperell, to attack Louisburg, the “Gibraltar of America.” In this force the Seventh Massachusetts was known as the “Gorham Rangers” under the command of a Gorham of the third generation. With him, as it chanced, was a descendant of Richard Bourne, William by name, whom an Indian medicine-man had cured in childhood when white doctors had given him up as dying. William came scathless through the wars to die in old age, rich and respected, at Marblehead.
In the following June Louisburg fell. Colonel Gorham commanded a whaleboat fleet as had his father under Churchill; and the first man to enter the Grand Battery, was one of the thirteen Indians in Captain Thacher’s Yarmouth contingent, who, for the bribe of a bottle of brandy, crawled through an embrasure and opened the door to the besiegers. The exploit was the less glorious as it was apparent that the enemy had evacuated the place.
Great was the joy throughout New England at the successful outcome of the siege, and not least in the Old Colony which had contributed so many men to the enterprise. Pæans of praise ascended from the pulpits; bards broke forth into verse. “The Wonder-working Providence” recites the prowess of certain heroes from the Cape: