One of the last of these long cures, running through thirty-five years, was that of the Reverend Thomas Dawes, worthy successor of his prototypes, a fine, scholarly gentleman of the old school. The rounded periods of his sermons were sometimes applied to the case of his parishioners with a directness that offended sensitive ears, but is valued rightly in the stock-in-trade of many an urban preacher of to-day. “We of Brewster,” he would roll out with melodious emphasis. His reading of hymn and Scriptures was a remembrance to be treasured, his presence in the pulpit a benediction, and who that had seen him there could forget the shining glory of his face as he “talked with God.” For the children of his parish, through a long season, he made Saul of Tarsus a living personality, and the coasts of the Mediterranean as familiar to them as Cape Cod Bay. He illustrated his instruction by crayon sketches in color, and the scholars saw how Gamaliel’s pupils were grouped about their master’s feet; they knew how a man should adjust his phylactery; and though there were derision of the High Priest’s countenance, there was no confusing the style of his breast-plate with that of a centurion. As he aged, the good pastor became something of a recluse. He loved his books, and through the years amassed in his little study a collection that was typical of the best in his day and generation, with a queer alien blot now and then: for it was said that he could never resist the blandishments of the canvasser and the appeal of the book in his hand. Dying, he left his treasure intact to the village library; nor did he see the necessity for any such stipulation as old John Lothrop’s that his books were only for those who knew how to use them.
The temporal affairs of these good men not infrequently needed mending, nor, as time went on, were the clergy usually recruited from among the natives: Cape Cod men, pursuing their vocations by land and sea, were likely to depute to aliens the less lucrative cure of souls. Versatile Mr. Avery, of Truro, seems to have come out well in the struggle and to have bequeathed a tidy fortune to his heirs. But Jonathan Russell and Timothy Alden, as we have seen, needed to have a care to their firewood; and Oakes Shaw, the successor of Russell and father of the great chief justice, even had recourse to the constable to adjust the arrears of his stipend. Mrs. Shaw, debating with her son his choice of a profession, was betrayed into some ironical appreciation of the clergy which she was quick to regret. “I hope you will not mistake your talent,” wrote she. “I could name several that took upon them the sacred profession of divinity, this profession so far from regulating their conduct, that their conduct would have disgraced a Hottentot. Others we have seen in various professions who have been an ornament to the Christian religion. I was not aware till I had just finished the last sentence that you might construe it into a discouragement of entering upon the study of divinity. This is not my intention, for I do most sincerely hope that you will make it your study through life whether you ever preach it or not.”
Her son chose the law, and gave us one of the two great men, both of them lawyers, whom the Cape has produced. Palfrey quotes one who went so far as to affirm that “no spot has made such a gift to the country as Great Marshes in Barnstable.” There lived James Otis, chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas in the troubled times of the Revolution, and there James Otis the patriot was born. James Otis, the younger, when he grew to maturity, removed to Boston, but he may be counted a son of the Old Colony and an inheritor of its genius. He was far more than a fiery orator whose eloquence was the inspiration of other men’s work; but on a flood of enthusiasm induced by that eloquence he was carried into the House of Representatives. “Out of this election will arise a damned faction,” commented a royalist judge, “which will shake this province to its foundation.” His prediction fell ludicrously short of the event. Otis conducted the patriots’ cause with such “prudence and fortitude, at every sacrifice of personal interest and amidst unceasing persecution,” that the “History of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts” can declare that: “Constitutional government in America, so far as it is expressed in writing, developed largely from the ideas expressed by James Otis and the Massachusetts men who framed the Constitution of 1780.”
And the man who more than any other in Massachusetts was to perfect their work, who stands beside the great Marshall in the history of American jurisprudence, and by the wise decisions of a temperate mind established the flow of justice through the channel of the common law, was also a native of Great Marshes. There, in 1781, when the work of the earlier patriots was accomplished, Lemuel Shaw was born. Slowly, irresistibly, by sheer force of worth and capacity, he advanced to fame. He was graduated from Harvard, he entered the law, and for twenty-six years practised his profession in Boston. At one time and another he served in the General Court, he was firewarden, selectman, a member of the school committee, and of the constitutional convention of 1820; and in 1830, when he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, his sane inheritance, his tempered judgment, his wide experience of law and of men, had forged a mind perfectly adapted to his opportunity. In his thirty years upon the bench he enriched incalculably the sparse records of the common law. In the opinion of a fellow jurist, “The distinguishing characteristic of his judicial work was the application of the general principles of law, by a virile and learned mind, with a statesman’s breadth of vision and amplitude of wisdom to the novel conditions presented by a rapidly changing civilization.” The Pilgrims had brought here and practised the Anglo-Saxon conception of such freedom as is commensurate with justice to all. “They brought along with them their national genius,” wrote Saint John de Crèvecœur in his “Letters from an American Farmer,” in 1782, “to which they principally owe what liberty they enjoy, and what substance they possess.” It was the great American jurists who developed and adapted that conception of justice for the due guidance of the new nation.
Shaw lived in Boston, but, unlike James Otis, he never gave up his hold upon his native town. He loved the village roads and Great Marshes and the sea. And, curiously, as if again the magic of the sea’s charm persisted in the fortunes of its children, Shaw’s daughter married Herman Melville, the author of “Typee” and “Omoo.” Shaw was fond of children, and used to drive his little granddaughter about Boston in his old chaise; there is a story of his being caught by a visitor at a game of bear with the children. But he could be stern enough on the bench; and a sharp practitioner, complaining of his severity, was tartly reminded by a fellow lawyer that “while we have jackals and hyenas at the bar, we want the old lion on the bench with one blow of his huge paw to bring their scalps about their eyes.”
Shaw spoke again and again at local celebrations on the Cape. At one such banquet he might have proposed, or answered, the toast to “Cape Cod Our Home: The first to honor the Pilgrim ship, the first to receive the Pilgrim feet; the first and always the dearest in the memory of her children everywhere.” But it was at Yarmouth that he expressed best, perhaps, the loyalties of his great heart: “There is not one visitor here male or female whose heart is not penetrated with the deep and endearing sentiment, at once joyous and sad, which makes up the indescribable charm of home.”
CHAPTER XI
GENIUS LOCI
I
Otis and Shaw were great, and the qualities that made them so, particularly those of Shaw, were indigenous to the soil. It is interesting to look through a book like Freeman’s “Cape Cod,” and study there the portraits of the men who built this unique community. They are often singularly handsome, with a fine, well-bred, upstanding air. They, preëminently, are not villagers, but men of the world who know their world well and have considered its works. Perhaps in every face, whether it has beauty of line or the homely ruggedness graved by generations of positive character, the dominant feature is a certain poise of mind: these men would think, and then judge; they would look at you straight, and it would be difficult for you to conceal your purpose. It would be easier to be persuaded than to persuade them; and in the end it is probable that your yielding would be justified in wisdom. From such characters could be drawn a composite that might fitly be the genius loci; and lest its secret charm elude us and Cape Cod appear no more than a pleasing sandy offshoot of New England, we should do well to learn of him. He is, as we see him, in essence a follower of the sea: one who pursues romance to mould it to everyday use. For a closer aspect it may be convenient to place him in the eighteen-forties, or earlier, at latest the fifties, in the great days of the clippers.
On the old sailing-vessel there was a constant duel, to challenge the temper of him, between a man’s wit and the lambent will of the sea. And although the steamship has a romance and daring of its own—a puny hull that carries forth upon the waters a little flare of flame to wage the old warfare—it was with sails aloft and no wires from shore that a lad then, who had the gift of using the decisive moment, would best find a career. The master of a ship was master in the markets ashore, and there, or afloat, he must be quick to seize fortune as it came. It is said of such a one that “he had the air, as he had the habit, of success.” He was no reckless adventurer, but aimed to earn an honest living as soberly as any stay-at-home, for whom, and also, perhaps, for fishermen on the Banks, he may have had some easy condescension. He was the aristocrat of the sea. When adventure met him by the way, so much the better if young blood ran hot; but the majority were shrewd cool merchants who sold and bought where their judgment pointed them. They were expert in seamanship because that was one of the tools of their trade; and when they turned a tidy profit on some voyage, they bought shares in the ships they sailed, or others, investing in a business whose every turn was familiar to them, until they could leave the sea to become farmers, or ship-chandlers, or East India merchants. If the seaman founded a house in the city, he sent his boys to college, and took one or two of them into his office to train them as merchants; and in not many decades the same absorbing hazard of trade was to be carried on by other means, or, if by ocean traffic, “steam-kettle sailors” were servants of the counting-rooms ashore.