“From Greenland’s icy mountains,
From India’s coral strand,”
he can easily imagine himself back in the days when Derby Street was the fashionable thoroughfare and its fine mansions overlooked the beautiful harbor, the long black wharves with their capacious warehouses and, moored alongside, the restless barks and brigantines for the moment quiet under the eyes of their hardy and successful owners.
Thanks to the historic spirit and the painstaking, loving labors of her citizens, Old Salem is easily deciphered under the handsome, modern, progressive city of thirty-four thousand inhabitants with factories, electric plants and Queen Anne cottages. Thanks to the genius of her distinguished son Nathaniel Hawthorne, the interpreter of the Puritan spirit, an invisible multitude of figures in steeple-hats and black cloaks and trunk-breeches, with here and there some gallant whose curling locks and gay attire are strangely out of place in the sober company, may always be suspected on the sleepy back-streets with their small, wooden, gambrel-roofed houses, or musing under the ancient willows in the venerable cemetery since 1637 known as “The Burying Point,” where were laid the bodies of Governor Bradstreet and many another Puritan. There are few American cities in which it is so easy to feel the influence of a great past and to call up the images of Puritan minister and magistrate, for in Salem we are surrounded by their memorials, the houses they built, the church in which they first worshipped, their charter and title-deeds, their muskets and firebacks, even the garments they wore.
Salem really dates from 1626, when Roger Conant and a little band of English farmers and fishermen, in discouraged mood, left the bleak shore of Cape Ann and came to this region, then called by the Indians Naumkeag, a large tract of land, heavily wooded to the westward, and at the east running in irregular, picturesque manner out into Massachusetts Bay. Hither came in September, 1628, Captain John Endicott and a hundred adventurers, bringing with them a charter from the English company that claimed ownership of this territory, and many articles of English manufacture to exchange with the Indians for fish and furs. Endicott had been appointed Governor by the company, and immediately began to display the strength of character and readiness in resource that justified the wisdom of the directors and made him during his lifetime one of the commanding figures of the Bay Colony.
It was a busy time for these serious immigrants, who came in the fall and had to make hurried preparation for the winter. Behind them extended the vast, unknown forest, tenanted by savages and wild beasts, while in front stretched the three thousand miles of salt water they had just traversed. They built houses, they felled trees, they made treaties with the Indians, they hunted, fished, and ploughed the land they cleared. Apparently little had been done by Conant and his discouraged friends, but they had left a “faire house” at Cape Ann which was now brought to Naumkeag for the Governors use.
Some of the colonists were actuated by love of religious freedom and some by hopes of gain. A strong hand was needed to enforce order and to give the settlement that religious character which its founders desired. It was found in Endicott, then in the prime of life, sternest of Puritans, quick of temper, imperious of will, and fortunately of intense religious convictions.
Hawthorne is the poet of the Puritan age. After reading the events of that memorable century in Felt’s Annals of Salem and Upham’s Salem Witchcraft, the student should turn to the pages of the romancer for vivid pictures of the Puritan in his greatness of spirit and severity of rule. In The Maypole of Merry Mount Hawthorne has shown us, as only this Wizard of New England could, the dramatic moment when Endicott, accompanied by his mail-clad soldiers, presented himself at Mount Wollaston, near Quincy, and abruptly ended the festivities of the young and thoughtless members of the colony whom the lawless Morton had gathered around him. Nor would the portrait of Endicott be complete without the touch that shows him, in fierce anti-prelatial mood, cutting out the blood-red cross from the English flag, for which daring deed the General Court, fearing trouble with the home government, condemned him, then ex-Governor, to the loss of his office as assistant, or councillor, for one year.