American Historic Towns

HISTORIC TOWNS
OF
NEW ENGLAND

Edited by
LYMAN P. POWELL
Illustrated
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK & LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1898
Copyright, 1898
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London
The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PREFACE

IN July, 1893, while the first Summer Meeting of the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching was in session at the University of Pennsylvania, I conducted the students, in trips taken from week to week, to historic spots in Philadelphia, the battle-fields of the Brandywine and of Germantown, and to the site of the winter camp at Valley Forge. The experiment was brought to the attention of Dr. Albert Shaw, and at his instance I made a plea through the pages of The American Monthly Review of Reviews, October, 1893, for the revival of the mediæval pilgrimage, and for its adaptation to educational and patriotic uses. After pointing out some of the advantages of visits paid under competent guidance and with reverent spirit to spots made sacred by high thinking and self-forgetful living, I suggested a ten days’ pilgrimage in the footsteps of George Washington.

The suggestion took root in the public mind. Leading journals commended the idea. New England people, already acquainted with the thought of local historical excursions, hailed the proposed pilgrimage with enthusiasm. Men and women from a score of States avowed their eagerness to make the experiment; and at the close of the University Extension Summer Meeting of July, 1894, in which I had lectured on American history, I found myself conducting for the University Extension Society a pilgrimage, starting from Philadelphia, to Hartford, Boston, Cambridge, Lexington, Concord, Salem, Plymouth, Newburg, West Point, Tarrytown, Tappan, New York, Princeton, and Trenton.

The press contributed with discrimination the publicity essential to success. Every community visited rendered intelligent and generous co-operation. And surely no pilgrims, mediæval or modern, ever had such leadership; for among our cicerones and patriotic orators were: Col. T. W. Higginson, Drs. Edward Everett Hale and Talcott Williams, Hon. Hampton L. Carson, Messrs. Charles Dudley Warner, Richard Watson Gilder, Charles Carlton Coffin, Frank B. Sanborn, Edwin D. Mead, Hezekiah Butterworth, George P. Morris, Professors W. P. Trent, William M. Sloane, W. W. Goodwin, E. S. Morse, Brig.-Gen. O. B. Ernst, Major Marshall H. Bright, and Rev. William E. Barton.

I had planned in the months that followed to publish a souvenir volume containing the more important addresses made by distinguished men on the historic significance of the places visited; but as the happy experience receded into the past a larger thought laid hold of me. Why not sometime in the infrequent leisure of a busy minister’s life edit a series of volumes on American Historic Towns? Kingsley’s novels were written amid parish duties, and Dr. McCook has found time, amid exacting ministerial duties, to make perhaps the most searching study ever made by an American of the habits of spiders. Medical experts agree concerning the value of a wholesome avocation to the man who takes his vocation seriously; and congregations are quick to give ear to the earnest preacher whose sermons betray a large outlook on life.

A series of illustrated volumes on American Historic Towns, edited with intelligence, would prove a unique and important contribution to historical literature. To the pious pilgrim to historic shrines the series would, perhaps, give the perspective that every pilgrim needs, and furnish information that no guide-book ever offers. To those who have to stay at home the illustrated volumes would present some compensation for the sacrifice, and would help to satisfy a recognized need. The volumes would probably quicken public interest in our historic past, and contribute to the making of another kind of patriotism than that Dr. Johnson had in mind when he defined it as the “last refuge of a scoundrel.”

I foresaw some at least of the serious difficulties that await the editor of such a series. If all the towns for which antiquarians and local enthusiasts would fain find room should be included, the series would be too long. A staff of contributors must be secured, possessing literary skill, historical insight, the antiquarian’s patience, and enough confidence in the highest success of the series to be prepared to waive any requirement of adequate pecuniary compensation. Space must be apportioned with impartial but not unsympathetic hand, and the illustrations selected with due discrimination. And, finally, publishers were to be found willing to assume the expense required for the production in suitable form of a series for which no one could with accuracy forecast the sale.

The last and perhaps most serious difficulty was removed almost a year ago when Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons expressed a willingness to take the commercial risk involved in publishing the present volume, which will, it is hoped, be the first of a series. Contributors were then found whose work has, I trust, secured for the undertaking an auspicious beginning. Critics inclined at first glance to speak harshly of the differences among the contributors in style and in literary method are advised to withhold judgment till a closer reading has made clear, as it will, the fundamental differences there are among the towns themselves in history and in spirit. Adequate reasons which need not be stated here have made it advisable to omit Lexington, Groton, Portsmouth, the Mystic towns, and other towns which would naturally be included in a later volume on New England Towns, in case the publication should be continued.

So many have co-operated in the making of this book that I will not undertake to name them all. But I cannot forbear to acknowledge the valuable assistance I have received at every stage of the work from Mr. G. H. Putnam, Mr. George P. Morris, associate editor of The Congregationalist, and Miss Gertrude Wilson, instructor in history at the historic Emma Willard School. The Century Company has, in the preparation of the first chapter on Boston and the chapter on Newport, kindly allowed the use of certain illustrations and portions of articles on Boston and Newport, which have appeared in St. Nicholas and old Scribner’s respectively. Some of the illustrations for the Portland chapter have been furnished by Lamson, the Portland photographer.

The Essex Institute, with characteristic generosity, has loaned most of the cuts for the Salem chapter. The Ohio State Archæological and Historical Society has allowed the reproduction from The Ohio Quarterly of some of the designs in the Rutland chapter, while certain of the illustrations in the Cape Cod Towns chapter appeared first in Falmouth Illustrated.

Conscious of the editorial shortcomings of the volume, I still dare to hope that it may have such a cordial reception as will justify the publication at some time of a volume on Historic Towns of the Middle States.

Lyman P. Powell

Ambler, Pennsylvania
September 21, 1898.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION
By GEORGE PERRY MORRIS

FROM the earliest days of the New England Colonies down to the present time, those European analysts of our national life, whose opinions have been based on personal observation, have usually conceded that in New England towns and villages one might, at almost any period of their history, find a higher average degree of physical comfort, intelligence and mental attainment, and political liberty and power than was or is to be found in any other communities of Christendom. Thus Alexis de Tocqueville, in 1835, wrote:

“The existence of the townships of New England is, in general, a happy one. Their government is suited to their tastes, and chosen by themselves.... The conduct of local business is easy.... No tradition exists of a distinction of ranks; no portion of the community is tempted to oppress the remainder; and the abuses which may injure isolated individuals are forgotten in the general contentment which prevails.... The native of New England is attached to his township because it is independent and free; his co-operation in its affairs ensures his attachment to its interest; the well-being it affords him secures his affection, and its welfare is the aim of his ambition and of his future exertions. He takes a part in every occurrence in the place; he practises the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms himself to those forms which can alone ensure the steady progress of liberty; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends the union of the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.”[58]

If this be true, the question inevitably arises, how has it come to pass? New England, as a whole, is far from fertile. Its winters are long and severe. Of mineral wealth it has little. The raw materials for its countless factories and mills, the fuel for its factories, homes, and railroads, must be obtained in the territory south and west of the Hudson River. The cereals which furnish the staple diet of its people come from Western plains. Its best blood and brawn have gone to found commonwealths ranging from the Alleghany to the Sierra Nevada mountains, and, into towns once populated and dominated by the purest of English stock, there have come Irish from Ireland and Canada, French by way of Canada, Portuguese, Italians, and Jews from Russia, so that, in 1890, the alien male adult population of the several States was found by the Federal census takers to be, in Maine, 51.43 per cent.; New Hampshire, 50.5 per cent.; Vermont, 41.25 per cent.; Massachusetts, 46.10 per cent.; Rhode Island, 49.78 per cent.; Connecticut, 36.52 per cent.

And yet, notwithstanding these economic disadvantages, this depletion of a population inheriting noble ideals, and the infusion of a class of settlers holding, in many instances, political and religious convictions quite at variance with those of the founders of the colonies, the “type” persists. The New England towns are still unlike, and in some respects superior to, those of other sections of the country. The New England States still lead in reformatory legislation. New England’s approval or disapproval of ideas affecting national destiny still has weight with Congress and Presidents altogether disproportionate to the number of her representatives in Congress or her votes in the Electoral College.

If one will walk about New England towns one will find in each a church, a town-house, and a school, and in most of them a railroad station and a factory. In the majority of them there will also be a public library, small perhaps and usually housed in the town-house, but open to all, and supported from the public funds. In the larger towns, especially in those where manufacturing is a prominent factor in the communal prosperity, a hospital, supported by public taxation, is open to all. In almost every town there is a grass-covered, tree-shaded “common,” which serves as a village or town park, and on it usually stand memorial tablets or statues testifying to the valor of the dead who went forth to fight in the War of the Revolution or in the Civil War.

The church symbolizes that belief in God and that disposition to obey His will and law which the noblest and wisest men of all ages and climes have agreed upon as the sine qua non of civic as well as of individual prosperity, and in this instance it also stands for that separation of Church and State which our national experience—and that of Canada and the Australian Colonies as well—shows to be the ideal relation. That for a time, in the early days of Massachusetts and Connecticut, there was an unsuccessful attempt to preserve a union of State and Church, an attempt which had for some of its least commendable incidents the wholesale hanging of men and women for witchcraft, the expulsion of Quakers, and the ostracism or exclusion of Roman Catholics and Anglicans, is not to be denied.

That the people of New England have been duly conscientious is apparent by the multiplication of churches at home, and by their never-ceasing, overflowing gifts to establish churches, colleges, schools, and Christian missions in the South and West and in foreign lands. It is from the thrifty, prosperous, philanthropic New Englander that the treasuries of the great Protestant missionary and educational societies receive their largest average per-capita gifts, and it is to New England that the steps of the Western and Southern educator still turn for endowments which his State may not, or the people cannot, or do not, give.

Peopled by inhabitants given over to introspection, and as fond of theology as the Scotch, the early New England communities were intensely religious and sectarian. God to them was a Personal Sovereign, intimately concerned with their daily life. They were His chosen people, and, as such, pledged to obedience to His service. The Church was His Bride; the clergyman was His spokesman, and received the deference—social as well as official—which was due to one so augustly commissioned. The social as well as the intellectual life of the community centred almost exclusively in the life of the church and the sermons of its clergy. Sectarian animosities were the inevitable product of a mistaken emphasis put upon the form or utterance of truth, rather than upon truth itself; or, to put it differently, of a provincialism and narrowness of vision that made it impossible for the many to understand that truth is many-sided, that men are different temperamentally, that revelation is continuous and progressive, and that religion is not theology. Communities exist in New England where the old view still obtains, where sectarianism is as rampant as ever, where the clergyman is the social autocrat as well as the shepherd of souls. But such towns are becoming fewer and fewer as the years go by, and of towns of the newer type, where the church is recognized as only one of the many agents which God has for ushering in His Kingdom on earth, New England now has quite as many, probably, as are to be found elsewhere.

To those interested in the theological and religious history of English-speaking peoples, certain New England towns have a peculiar fascination and value as environments which have affected character. Northampton, Massachusetts, will ever be a Mecca because of the identification of Jonathan Edwards with the town. Concord, in the same commonwealth, has not only the unique glory that belongs to a town where national history has been made and the best American literature of its class written by Hawthorne and Thoreau, but also it is the town where Emerson’s ministerial ancestors lived, where he flowered out and became

that grey-eyed seer
Who in pastoral Concord ways
With Plato and Hafiz walked.

Newport, Rhode Island, with all its present pre-eminence as a place where “Fashion is a potency ... making it hard to judge between the temporary and the lasting,” will ever remain most worthy of resort because it was the birthplace of William Ellery Channing, and, for thirty years, was the home of the Rev. Dr. Samuel Hopkins, both eminent as theologians and as brave pioneer antagonists of human slavery. Dr. Hopkins was the model for the New England pastor described by Harriet Beecher Stowe in The Minister’s Wooing. Northfield, Massachusetts, is known to thousands of Christians the world over, who have never seen its rare beauty of river and landscape, because a boy, one Dwight L. Moody, was born and bred there, and has become the greatest evangelist of modern times. Litchfield, Connecticut, is famous as the birthplace of Henry Ward Beecher, and if one wishes flash-light pictures of New England ecclesiastical and social life at the beginning of this century, let one read the autobiographic records of Lyman, Henry Ward, Harriet, and Catherine E. Beecher.

Portland, Maine, is known to thousands throughout the English-speaking world, who are ignorant of every other fact in its long and honorable history, because Francis E. Clark there conceived and began that movement to enlist young people in active Christian service, which is now known as the International Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor, with 54,191 local societies, and more than three and one quarter million adherents enrolled, Russia alone, of the nations of the earth, being without a society now. Hartford, Connecticut, with a discernment and gratitude not always displayed by municipalities, has named its beautiful municipal park after Horace Bushnell, for many years its most eminent divine and “first citizen.”

Salem, fascinating as it is because of its connection with the witchcraft delusion and the early Puritan theocracy; because of its being for a time the home of Hawthorne, who has preserved its ancient local color and atmosphere in his fiction; and because of its ancient glory as a seaport town, whence departed a fleet of sailing craft that made Salem known throughout the world, in places where Boston and New York were then unknown, nevertheless derives its chief glory from the fact that it was the town where Roger Williams, the Welsh statesman and prophet, found a church willing to sit at his feet. The church’s loyalty, however, gave way at last to the resistless pressure of the civil authorities and the zealous ecclesiastical tyrants of the Puritan commonwealth, and it permitted him to depart, to establish in Rhode Island a community based upon the principle of entire liberty of conscience, and majority rule in secular affairs. Massachusetts’ loss and the world’s gain are thus summed up by Gervinus the German historian:

“The theories of freedom in Church and State, taught in the schools of philosophy in Europe, were here [Rhode Island] brought into practice in the government of a small community. It was prophesied that the democratic attempts to obtain universal suffrage, a general elective franchise, annual parliaments, entire religious freedom, and the Miltonian right of schism would be of short duration. But these institutions have not only maintained themselves here, but have spread over the whole Union. They have superseded the aristocratic commencements of Carolina and of New York, the High-Church party in Virginia, the theocracy in Massachusetts, and the monarchy throughout America; they have given laws to one quarter of the globe, and, dreaded for their moral influence, they stand in the background of every democratic struggle in Europe.”

Boston, with all her glories, has none of which she is more proud, than the fact that within her borders Phillips Brooks was born and labored most of his life. Those who came within his range of influence said of him, as Father Taylor said of Emerson, “He might think this or that, but he was more like Jesus Christ than any one he had ever known.”

To mention Roger Williams, Jonathan Edwards, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, Phillips Brooks, Francis E. Clark, and Dwight L. Moody, is to name the greatest spiritual forces which New England has known, and towns fed with manna by such prophets have not failed to indicate the influence of personality in transforming environment.

The “town-house,” or town-hall, of the New England town or village, in its architecture, is a modern structure, often as simple, unpretentious, and unornamented as the “meeting-house” near which it usually stands on the village green or “town common.” It is the arena wherein rich and poor, educated and illiterate, wise and foolish, meet, at least annually, and as much oftener as occasion demands, to decide those questions of Home Rule which are most vital to all concerned. Education, wealth, moral worth, shrewd native sense, oratory, gifts of persuasion, the stirrings of ambition, civic pride, thrift, foresight, all have their due weight in this forum, this “school as well as source of democracy”—as Mr. Bryce aptly phrases it. But when the vote is taken, the blacksmith and the bank president, the master and the servant, the principal of the high school and the loafer around the village bar stand on precisely the same footing. The vote of one is as decisive as that of the other,—no less, no more.

Debate and procedure which have the qualitative character are followed by voting of the quantitative character, and the result represents average intelligence and capacity for self-government. But that result, because it is the product of the expressed will of all, has an authority more enduring and inspiring than any that the autocracies, oligarchies, or constitutional monarchies of Europe have ever displayed or now possess.

Using the town-meeting as a rapier, Samuel Adams

“fenced with the British ministry; it was the claymore with which he smote their counsels; it was the harp of a thousand strings that he swept into a burst of passionate defiance, or an electric call to arms, or a proud pæan of exulting triumph, defiance, challenge, and exultation—all lifting the continent to independence. His indomitable will and command of the popular confidence played Boston against London, the provincial town-meeting against the royal Parliament, Faneuil Hall against St. Stephen’s.”[59]

This popular government not only enabled the New England Colonies to lead all the others in the War of the Revolution, it also furnished men and ideas for the formidable task of constitution-making after the Revolution was over and independence won. As early as 1773, the rustic Solons of the town of Mendon, Massachusetts, had resolved in town-meeting:

“That all men have an equal right to life, liberty, and property.

“Therefore all just and lawful government must originate in the free consent of the people.

“That a right to liberty and property, which are natural means of self-preservation, is absolutely inalienable, and can never lawfully be given up by ourselves or taken from us by others.”

Naturally, a section of the country where such sentiments were held by village Hampdens had a preponderant influence, when the time came to draft the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the readiness of the towns to submit to taxation and to give their sons when the call to arms came is a matter of unimpeachable record. In the army of 231,791 soldiers, furnished by the Thirteen Colonies to combat the forces of Great Britain in the Revolution, the four New England Colonies sent 118,251 men, Massachusetts contributing 67,907, Connecticut 31,939, New Hampshire 12,497, and Rhode Island 5,908.

In the War of 1812, New England, as a section, was not very enthusiastic, but her quota of troops was, nevertheless, forthcoming. In the Civil War, 1861-65, her troops were the first to respond to the call of President Lincoln, and, out of 2,778,304 men who enlisted, 363,161 came from New England. Of these, Massachusetts furnished 146,730, Maine 70,107, Connecticut 55,864, New Hampshire 33,937, Vermont 33,288, and Rhode Island 23,236. In fact, surveying the history of New England towns from the time when they contributed their quota of men and money to the aid of the Mother Country in her fight with France to decide who should be supreme on the North American continent, down to the recent contest between the United States and Spain, it can truthfully be said of their democratic form of government that it “is the most powerful and flexible in history. It has proved to be neither violent, cruel, nor impatient, but fixed in purpose, faithful to its own officers, tolerant of vast expense, of enormous losses, of torturing delays, and strongest at the very points where fatal weakness was most suspected.” And this, be it remembered, where “the poorest and most ignorant of every race ... are the equal voters with the richest and most intelligent.” This, too, where the newly landed, propertyless immigrant from Italy or Russia, if able to comply with the generous provisions governing naturalization and the exercise of the franchise, has the same potentiality at the polls as the thrifty, well-to-do, heavily taxed citizen whose ancestors, perchance, may have come over with the Pilgrims on The Mayflower.

Considered either in its origin or its development, the New England town-meeting merits the study of all who are interested in the extension of principles of democracy. The English settlers of New England were, as Mr. Bryce says, “largely townsfolk, accustomed to municipal life and to vestry meetings.” They brought with them, as an inheritance from their Teutonic ancestors, a habit of self-rule which the peculiar isolation of the colonies and the separate communities in the colonies strengthened; hence a form of government in which the town was the unit evolved inevitably.

The more mixed composition of the population in the Middle Atlantic Colonies, for the same reason, inevitably caused a mixed type of government to be created there, in which the county or shire divided the authority with the town; while in the Southern Colonies the immigrants were of such a character, and the economic conditions so different from those in New England, that a more aristocratic form of government evolved, semi-feudal in its type, and the county, rather than the town, became the important minor political unit within the State, never, however, having a vigorous independent life, the colony and afterward the State becoming the source of authority and the end of government. Long years afterward, in the Civil War, the two types of government clashed, and the type prevailed which Thomas Jefferson praised and wished transferred to Virginia, for, said he:

“Those wards called townships in New England are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government and for its preservation.”

It is well, however, to note, that Mr. Charles Borgeaud, the eminent Genevan historian, in his work on the Rise of Modern Democracy, disputes the Teutonic origin of the town-meeting, and contends that it must be credited to the democratic principles of the New Testament as interpreted and accepted, first by the Brownists of England, and held later by the Pilgrim Fathers and those of the Puritans who accepted the Independent form of church government, rather than to any principle of communal government first evolved by Teutons. He says:

“At the moment when the colonists of New England quitted the Mother Country, whatever was left of that old self-government which had been exercised by their forefathers was under the influence of the general movement, and was undergoing aristocratic transformation. The vestries, or meetings of the inhabitants of the parish, were being replaced by committees known as select vestries, which were originally elected, and then, before long, recruited by co-optation. Had the American colonists purely and simply imitated in their new country the system which they had seen at work in England, they certainly would not have founded the democratic government of the town-meeting. In order to explain their political activity, we must take into account, and that largely, their religious ideas. And we shall be naturally led to do this if we remember that, in the beginning, each settlement or town was, before all things, a congregation, and that the town-meeting was in most cases the same thing as the assembly of the congregation. In Virginia, where the colonists remained members of the Anglican Church, there was no town-meeting, but only select vestries as in England, and these had certainly lost all family likeness, if they really were related to the Thing and the Tungemot.”

In due time, when pioneers from New England found their way to the then virgin lands of Central New York, the valley of the Ohio, and the northern half of the vast valley of the Mississippi, they carried with them the political and religious ideals of New England. Where they were a large majority of the settlers within a given territory, or where at the time when its organic structure was forming they dominated it, the town was established as the political unit in the territory. Such was the case in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Where New England settlers joined with those from the Middle States, or the border States of Kentucky and Virginia, they often found it necessary to compromise on a system in which the county and the town were peers, as in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. But, as experience has proved, the modified township system, as it is found in Illinois and Michigan, is more advantageous than the system of divided authority, and many of the Western States are gradually adopting it, California, Nebraska, and the Dakotas having recently made it either permissible or mandatory.

Nor are signs lacking that in the South, as its white population increases by immigrants from the North, as the patriarchal and pastoral type of civilization gives way to the modern industrial and corporate type, as cities and towns multiply, and local as well as State pride has free chance to develop, there will be an adoption of the modified township system and a gradual abolition of the county system.

Among the changes of the last half-century in New England, one notable one has been the tendency of the larger towns to adopt the city form of government as soon as it was deemed that the increase of population warranted the step and made it necessary. This fact, as well as the marked increase of urban population in New England,[60] is counted by some students of her social development as indicative of retrogression, however inevitable. Certain it is, that if the town of Brookline, with its population of 16,164, and its property valuation of $64,169,200,[61] and annual appropriations of more than $900,000, can still work the ancient machinery of the town-meeting without the slightest loss either of a pecuniary or a civic sort, other towns, with a smaller population and much smaller valuation of property, cannot reasonably claim that mere physical growth is any warrant for the change from a system so purely democratic to one less so and much more readily adapted to serve the ends of partisan bosses and those who batten at the public crib.

The third of the indispensable and ever-present institutions found in every New England town or village is the public school, open to all and supported by all. Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jew, Caucasian and African, French Canadian and Irish, Italian and Portuguese, English and German, mingle in the school-room and learn the essential likeness of each to the other, their common and peculiar gifts, and their common duties to God and the State. No man in the community is so rich or aristocratic as to escape taxation for support of the school, even though his children may never darken the doors. No man in the community is so humble or so poor as to be debarred from sending his children to the highest as well as to the lowest grades. Unsectarian in the sense that they derive support from taxpayers of all sects and inculcate the dogmas of none, secular in the sense that religion is not a part of the curriculum, they ever have been a bulwark to the cause of religion, partly by reason of the example of the teaching force, who usually are men and women with religious faith as well as mental attainment, and partly because they have developed the rational powers of men, and thus enabled them to discriminate between superstition and truth. Beginning, in the more favored and advanced communities, with kindergarten instruction for young children, and not ceasing until the youth or maiden is prepared to enter the college or university, the State and the town, co-operating together, make it possible for every parent to give to his children, or for every ambitious or friendless boy or girl to secure for himself or herself, at the public expense, a thorough preparatory education. Nor is there any item of his yearly tax bill which the typical New Englander pays with greater alacrity and more certainty of belief as to its equity or economy than his annual contribution for popular education. For it is ingrained in his very being, woven into the texture of his life, to believe, as Garfield said, that “next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.” Moreover, being shrewd as well as a man of high principles and a lover of learning for its own sake, the New Englander is convinced that it pays to be educated, and to have educated neighbors and children. His reasoning takes this form: The more children in the schools, the fewer youths and adults in the jails and poorhouses. The better informed the mill operatives, the larger the output of the mills. The higher the standard of living, the larger the demand for the product of the soil and the loom, and the better the home market. The more intelligent the voter, the less the seductive power of the demagogue and the “political boss.” In short, the New England people have always believed, and still believe, what the inscription on the Public Library in Boston declares:

THE COMMONWEALTH REQUIRES THE EDUCATION
OF THE PEOPLE AS THE SAFEGUARD
OF ORDER AND LIBERTY.

That the policy has been a wise one, is indicated by New England’s share in the various struggles for liberty which the country has seen, the stability of all her institutions, her exemption from disorder and industrial disputes which culminate in violence, her inhospitality to “boss rule” in politics, and the thrift and prosperity of her citizens.

Historically speaking, the “public school” is a very ancient New England institution. Boston had one as early as 1635, and in 1647 the General Court of Massachusetts enacted:

“That to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers, it was ordered in all the Puritan colonies that every township, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty households, shall appoint one to teach all children to write and read; and when any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families, they shall set up a Grammar School, the master thereof to be able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the University.”

Nine years earlier, in 1638, the same body had founded a college (Harvard) at Cambridge, in order, as they said, that “the light of learning might not go out, nor the study of God’s word perish.” These two acts of the General Court may be reckoned as the germs from which has developed that system of secondary and higher education which has given Massachusetts the place of leader in the history of education in America.

In 1645, Connecticut passed a law similar to the earlier Massachusetts statute of 1642, but not until 1701 was Yale University founded at New Haven. Rhode Island did not have a system of popular education until just as the eighteenth century was closing. New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont accepted the Massachusetts methods and ideals, with some minor variations.

Devout as were the founders of New England, it followed inevitably that they should establish institutions where their children might obtain a distinctly religious training as well as a general education. Thus, for a long period of New England history, the Christian academy, under denominational control, flourished just as it does now in the West, and for much the same reason. As the public-school system has expanded, as town after town has added the high school to the primary and grammar school, as sectarian fences have toppled over or ceased to be restrictive, the academy of the old type has ceased to play the part it once did in New England life. But, in any survey of the history of education in New England, it should not be overlooked. Many excellent institutions of this type still survive to meet the demands of those persons who either distrust the public high school, or else are unable to send their children to one, owing to residence in towns where the school system has not developed to that extent. But, as a rule, the New England boy and girl, no matter what the social station or wealth of his or her parent, still “derives his or her preparation for college or life from the community in which he or she lives.” And, as Phillips Brooks said in his address at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Latin School:

“That is the real heart of the whole matter.... It constitutes the greatest claim of the public-school system. It represents the fundamental idea of the town undertaking the education of her children.... It educates the thought of law and obedience, the sense of mingled love and fear, which is the true citizen’s true emotion to his city. It educates this in the very lessons of the school-room, and makes the person of the State the familiar master of the grateful subject from his boyhood.... It is in the dignity and breadth and seriousness which the sense that their town is training them gives to their training, that the advantage of the public-school boys over the boys of the best private schools always consists.”

Emigrating westward, the pioneers from New England carried with them the public school, the academy, and the college. Connecticut’s settlers in the Western Reserve, Ohio, took with them conceptions of duty in this respect, which profoundly affected the future history of the commonwealth. Ohio has come to be, in this later day, what Virginia was in the early history of the country—“The Mother of Presidents”—and has more colleges within its borders than any State in the Union. It was a Massachusetts soldier, Gen. Rufus Putnam of Rutland, a Congregational clergyman, Rev. Manasseh Cutler of Hamilton, Massachusetts, and an Ipswich, Massachusetts, lawyer, Nathan Dane, who founded Marietta, Ohio, and induced Congress to put into the epoch-marking Ordinance of 1787 governing the Northwest Territory, this remarkable declaration and article:

“Religion, and morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

As early as 1797, Muskingum Academy was founded in the territory conceded, and in due time came Marietta, Oberlin, Wabash, Illinois, Knox, Beloit, Olivet, and Ripon Colleges, all Christian institutions within the territory originally governed by the Ordinance of 1787.

Precisely similar has been the record of New England emigrants beyond the Mississippi. Wherever they have settled and shaped the civic ideals, whether in the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, or in California, there they have laid the foundations of a free public-school system, and of academies and colleges controlled by Christian educators and trustees. Nor do they cease to believe in the academy and the college now that the competition of the State university in the States of the interior and the West is so intense, and the reliance of the treasuries of these Western Christian institutions upon the gifts of their friends in New England increases rather than abates.

Impressed with the need, in all sections of the country, of a well-instructed and intelligent electorate, and convinced that the South was too poor to provide for itself the schools that its unfortunate illiterate whites and blacks needed, New Englanders early began to contribute to the support of academies and colleges in the South. Not always welcomed by the ruling class, the pioneers in this work persevered, and many of them have lived long enough to receive the thanks of those who at first despised and scorned them. Millions of dollars have gone from New England for the founding and support of such institutions as Berea College, Kentucky; Atlanta University, Georgia; Hampton Institute, Virginia; Fisk University, Tennessee; and Tuskeegee Institute, Alabama. Three New Englanders, George Peabody of Danvers, Mass., John F. Slater of Norwich, Conn., and Daniel Hand of Guilford, Conn., have given between them $5,100,000 in bequests or donations for the establishment or assistance of schools, colleges, and training schools for teachers in the South. The Peabody Education Fund, from 1868 to 1897, distributed in the South, from its income alone, a sum amounting to $2,478,527.

Nor is New England’s influence, educationally speaking, limited to the United States. The educational system of Honolulu is based on New England models. Robert College, near Constantinople, has spread the principles of Christian democracy in Church and State, as they are held by New Englanders, throughout Bulgaria and the Balkan states, and given ideals to the Young Turkey party in the land where the Sultan is dominant. The Huguenot Seminary in South Africa was distinctly modelled after Mt. Holyoke Seminary, and its first teaching staff was made up of New England women educated at Mt. Holyoke. Wherever American Protestant missionaries have gone and established schools and colleges in Asia, Africa, or Europe, almost invariably the master spirits, the men and women who have given character to, and established the ideals of, the institutions, have been graduates of the New England colleges and academies, even if not New-England-born.

Subtract from the history of education in the United States, during the latter half of the century just closing, the influence of four men, Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, Charles William Eliot, and William Torrey Harris, and you take from it the best that it stands for to-day. All of these men were born in New England. All were reformers. All showed great administrative ability. All lived to see their radical views find general acceptance. Horace Mann did his greatest work in remodelling the public-school system of Massachusetts. Barnard did a similar work in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, but his greatest service to the cause of education was his masterly editing of the American Journal of Education, from 1855 to 1881. Eliot has transformed the curriculum of Harvard, the oldest university of the North, has resolutely contended for the largest measure of election by the student in his selection of studies, his personal conduct, and his personal attitude toward God, and he has made “Veritas” in very truth the appropriate motto of the leading American institution of learning. Harris, as an interpreter of the philosophy of education, both in his many writings and more numerous addresses, has lifted the popular conception of the profession of teaching to a loftier and more rational plane, while his control of the United States Bureau of Education since 1889 has given it a standing abroad, and a measure of utility at home, which it is gratifying to contemplate.

Few towns in New England possess more charm, whether of nature or society, than the towns in which her long-established institutions of learning have taken root, flourished, and dominated the life of the community. New Haven, Cambridge, and Providence are all cities now with a heterogeneous population and large manufacturing interests, and they each contain thousands of inhabitants to whom Harvard, Yale, and Brown are of as little practical benefit or concern as if they were situated in remote Hawaii or Porto Rico. Nevertheless, the chief glory of each of these large towns is its institution of learning, and to each there come added beauty of life and elevation of tone because of the presence within its borders of so many thirsty and hungry students and highly educated and apt instructors. It would be idle, however, to claim, for instance, that Cambridge to-day is quite as unique and charming in its simplicity and purity of life, or quite as classic in its atmosphere, as it was in the days when the town was a village, when the university was a college, and when thought and manners were as ideal as James Russell Lowell in his essay, Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson in his latest book, Cheerful Yesterdays, picture them.

To study the American college town at its best, unsullied by the grime of industrialism and the temptations and conventionalities of city life, one must go to hill-towns like Amherst and Williamstown, Massachusetts, or Hanover, New Hampshire. But even there, standards of living and conduct among students and instructors have been changed and influenced by the habits and ideals of the universities and the cities. Hence, to see the American college town in all its pristine simplicity and beauty, one now has to go to the new New England, and visit such institutions as Oberlin, Beloit, Knox, Iowa, and Colorado colleges, concerning which, and others of their type, Mr. Bryce writes:

“They get hold of a multitude of poor men who might never resort to a distant place for education. They set learning in a visible form, plain indeed and humble, but dignified even in her humility, before the eyes of a rustic people, in whom the love of knowledge, naturally strong, might never break from the bud into the flower, but for the care of some zealous gardener. They give the chance of rising in some intellectual walk of life to many a strong and earnest nature who might otherwise have remained an artisan or storekeeper, and perhaps failed in those avocations.”[62]

New England has a railroad mileage greater in proportion to its population and area than any section of the United States. Indeed, it is greater than that of any European country. In 1895, there were 11.77 miles of railroad for each one hundred square miles of territory, and 14.11 miles for each ten thousand inhabitants, the proportion in Massachusetts rising to 26.35 miles for each one hundred square miles. The same year, the number of employés engaged in railway traffic in New England was 60,593. On January 1, 1840, New England had only 426 miles of railway. January 1, 1895, it had 7,398 miles of road, which reported gross earnings of $82,845,401, and 116,069,178 passengers transported during the previous year.

The significance of these facts is apparent to the casual traveller through New England as well as to the economist. Nerves of steel and iron have bound urban and rural populations together, made the cities and towns accessible to the inland trader, farmer, and producer, and the country districts accessible to the wares of the merchant and manufacturer, and to the lover of nature. Suburban residence for the urban toiler has been made possible and cheap, while New England, as a whole, has been transformed from an agricultural and seafaring section to one with great and most varied manufacturing interests. Boston has come to be next to the largest centre for exports in the country, and the commercial and industrial as well as the intellectual capital of New England.

From the standpoint of æsthetics, the railroad station in the average New England town is a monstrosity, although in all fairness it should be said that within a decade there has been a notable improvement in this respect. But from the standpoint of economics and social science, the railway station is subordinate only to the church and the school in its service to society; and the degree of civilization in any community may be accurately computed by the volume and variety of the traffic done with its station agents. If one is desirous of studying the New England town, let him frequent the platforms of the railroad station and the freight-house, ascertain how large a proportion of its inhabitants leave town daily to do business in the adjacent city, how many travel even farther in pursuit of pleasure or on business, how many depart on outings that imply thrift and a desire for recreation and rest. Let him study the bulk of the raw material as it comes from the wool-markets of Europe and America, from the cotton fields of the South, and from the mines of Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, and then inspect it as it goes forth again, converted into manifold forms of useful tools, machinery, fabrics, etc., and he will not lack for data respecting the status of the community. If he finds that pianos, organs, books, pictures, the latest devices of sanitary science, bicycles, etc., are arriving, he may justly infer that the inhabitants are in touch with the outer world and eager to take advantage of the latest discoveries of men of science. Nor is it imprudent to assert that such a study made in the average New England town will indicate economic wants, and their satisfaction, such as no communities elsewhere can display.

Compared with other sections of the country, New England has railroads which are better supervised by the States, more honestly constructed, capitalized and administered, and more responsive to public needs. Concentration of power and responsibility in the hands of the few goes on apace in New England, as well as elsewhere, so that now there are only four railway corporations of much importance in New England. But, through such governmental agents as the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners (organized in 1869, and the model for similar bodies elsewhere in the nation), the people still retain the whip-hand, still protect the rights of individuals, communities, and investors, and bring about those reductions in fare and freight charges, and those improvements in service, which public welfare and safety demand.

No attempt—however brief or superficial—to describe the life of the New England town of the last decade of the nineteenth century, especially in the States of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, could justifiably fail to note the transformation—economic, physical, and social—which the bicycle and trolley electric railroad have wrought in the life of the towns of those States.

New England capitalists and New England inventors were the first to put on the market safety bicycles that were well constructed, adapted for daily use or pleasure, and reasonably cheap, and New England still retains the lead in the domestic and export trade in bicycles. Naturally, then, New England people were the first to purchase the product of their own factories. Space does not suffice to indicate here how general now is the use of the bicycle even in the remotest hamlets, and how it has changed modes of living. Farmers’ boys and girls among the lakes and hills of Maine and Vermont, fishermen’s children on the sand-dunes of Cape Cod, run their errands, visit their neighbors, and get their daily sport with the bicycle. Artisans and professional men in all the towns and cities go to and from their shops, offices, and homes on steeds that require no fodder, and while doing it gain physical exercise and mental exhilaration that transportation in the old ways never furnished. Horses still are in demand for sport and draught work, and the few who love horses continue to breed and own them. But for the multitude a far cheaper and more tractable kind of steed has come, one which rivals the locomotive as well as the horse and forces steam-railway managers to face serious problems, mechanical and fiscal.

As to the electric street railway, perhaps a few facts relative to Massachusetts may indicate a state of affairs that to some extent is typical now of the section, and will become more so as population in New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont drifts townward.

From 1860 to 1889, the number of street-railway companies in Massachusetts increased only from twenty to forty-six, and the mileage from eighty-eight to 574, the motor force of course being horse-power. From 1889 to 1897, the number of companies increased from forty-six to ninety-three, and the mileage from 547 to 1413, the motor power being almost exclusively electric. During the same period, the number of passengers carried on the ten main lines increased from 148,189,403 in 1889, to 308,684,224 in 1897. The total capital invested in these street railways now amounts to $63,112,800, and, in 1897, earned 7·78 per cent. on the average.

So much for statistics which are impressive in themselves. But if one would appreciate the magnitude of this traffic, and the radical transformation which the new power and improved service have wrought in the life of the people who patronize these railroads, he must do more than compare statistics. He must note the result of making the residence in the suburb and the workshop in the city accessible to a degree that the steam railway cannot expect to duplicate, of giving city dwellers opportunities to journey seaward and hillward at a trifling expense, of providing residents of the villages with inexpensive transportation to the towns and residents of the towns with transportation to the cities, of cultivating the knowledge of and love for open-air life and nature among city dwellers and of enlarging the social horizon and area of observation of the villager, of giving a poor man a vehicle that transports him with a speed and a sense of pleasure that vies with that of the high-priced trotter of the wealthy horseman, of giving to society a centripetal force that tends to take city workers countryward at a time when other social forces, centrifugal in their tendency, are drawing him cityward.

Naught would occasion more bewilderment to the ancient residents of Marblehead, Hingham, or Plymouth, could they return to their former places of abode, than the “Broomstick Trains” which Oliver Wendell Holmes’s fancy pictured thus:

“On every stick there’s a witch astride,—
The string you see to her leg is tied.
She will do a mischief if she can,
But the string is held by a careful man,
And whenever the evil-minded witch
Would cut some caper, he gives a twitch.
As for the hag, you can’t see her,
But hark! you can hear her black cat’s purr,
And now and then, as a car goes by,
You may catch a gleam from her wicked eye.”

These trains whirl through the crooked streets with a mysterious, awe-compelling power, that would suggest witchery were it not for the clang of their alarm bells, and the knowledge that fares must be paid. They disturb the quiet and solemnity of many an ancient village, and have brought knowledge of evil as well as of good to many a youth. What railways and steamship lines have done in bringing peoples of all climes and continents nearer together, and thus at once widened men’s area of knowledge and sympathy, and contracted the physical area of the earth, this the electrically propelled motor is doing on a smaller scale for the people of the towns of the ancient commonwealths of New England.

In ante-bellum days, New England and the South were, perhaps, most unlike in their attitude toward manufacturing, and the difference was one that meant far more than a mere incident of difference of climate or a difference of opinion as to sectional or federal fiscal policy. The art of manufacturing, as New Englanders had practised it for generations before what is now known as the “factory system” developed, had been based on a universal recognition of the nobility of labor, the necessity for personal initiative, and the duty of thrift. Toil was considered honorable for men and women alike. Every hillside stream was set at work turning the wheels of countless mills. Yankee ingenuity was given free play in the invention of appliances, and Yankee initiative saw to it that after the raw material was converted into the finished product, markets were found in the newer settlements of the Interior and West, or in Europe and Asia. Many a farmer was a manufacturer as well. Home industries flourished, and no month in the year was too inclement for toil and its reward.

With the application of steam power to the transportation of freight and passengers, with the invention of the spinning-jenny and the perfecting of the cotton loom and the development of the “factory system” of specialized and divided labor, New England, quick to perceive wherein her future prosperity lay, at once leaped forward to seize the opportunity, and the relative superiority thus early gained she has not lost, even though other sections more favorably situated as to accessible supplies of fuel and raw materials have, in the meantime, awakened and developed.

Whether judged by the legislation governing their operation, their structural adaptability to the work to be done, their equipment of machinery, the variety and quality of their product, or the intelligence and earning capacity of their operatives, the New England factories can safely challenge comparison with those of any in the world, and the typical factory towns of New England, whether along her largest rivers, such as Lowell and Hartford, or at tide-water, as Fall River and Bridgeport, or nestled among the hills, as North Adams or St. Johnsbury, are the frequent subject of study by the deputed agents of European governments or manufacturers, anxious to ascertain what it is that makes the American manufacturer so dangerous a competitor in the markets of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Few more interesting movements in the history of man’s upward struggle have been chronicled than the successive waves of immigration which have swept into the factories of towns like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire. First came from the hill towns and farms the daughters of the original English, Irish, and Scotch settlers—women like Lucy Larcom,—then the Irish, specially imported from Ireland, and then the French from Canada. The Irish came when the original stock became, in its own estimation, too select for daily toil in the factory. The French came at an opportune time for the employers, when the Irish were also stirred by loftier ambitions. And it is already apparent that, whereas the French came, at first, only to win money to take back to Canada, now they are settling down to become citizens as well as residents, aspiring to higher and other realms of activity—in short, getting ready to give way in turn to some other nationality. Of course, nothing just stated should be interpreted to imply that the ideals of New England respecting the honorable nature of toil have changed, or that her factory operatives have ceased to be men of all races including the English. She has, however, witnessed or rather been the scene of a remarkable process of assimilation and transformation of races such as none of the manufacturing towns of England have seen.

Thus far, consideration has been given to those factors in the life of the community which it may truthfully be said are to be found in a large majority of the towns and villages of New England. It would be necessary, for a complete study of the New England town at its best, to include other factors, such as the savings-bank, the local lodges of the fraternal, secret orders, the co-operative bank—known in the Middle States as the building loan association,—the daily or weekly local newspaper, and the gossip and wisdom retailed by the habitués of the “village store,” which, in many of the smaller towns, serves as the clearing-house of ideas, local and national. Nor could any thorough study of the New England town as an institution fail to note at least the beneficent effect which the exclusion of shops where intoxicating liquors are retailed has had upon all of the States, thanks to that measure of prohibition which has been made possible through statutory or legislative enactment. So that, in the towns of the agricultural districts of New England, the legalized dram-shop is unknown, as are all the attendant moral and economic evils that follow in its train when the traffic is tolerated. Nor is the possibility of excluding the saloon from larger towns—manufacturing and residential—to be gainsaid in view of the record established by such cities as Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, Brookline, and Newton, Massachusetts. In fact, Cambridge, with its more than eighty thousand inhabitants, for nearly twelve years now has enforced local prohibition in a way to make its method of doing so a model for the country; the secret of the method by which it secures an annual “No-license vote” and a non-partisan administration of all city affairs being, in short, the union of temperance men of all degrees of abstinence, Jews and Christians of all sects, and citizens of all national parties on the simple platform—“No saloons, and no tests for local officials other than fitness, and soundness on questions of local policy.”

But there is one factor in the life of very many of the New England towns to-day that cannot be passed by without some allusion. It is the town or city library. In many instances the gift of some private donor, who was either born in the town, and making a home and fortune elsewhere desired to testify that he was not unmindful of ancestral environment and of youthful privileges, or else accumulated a fortune in the town and desired both to perpetuate his memory and to render a public service, the library building usually stands as a token of that marked interest in public education and public welfare which Americans of wealth reveal by gifts, generous to a degree unknown elsewhere in Christendom, competent European judges being witnesses. Appleton’s Annual Encyclopedia records a total of $27,000,000 given to religious, educational, and philanthropic institutions in the United States, in sums of $5000 or more, by individuals, as donations or bequests during the year 1896. In this list are recorded gifts, amounting to $195,000, to establish or to endow town libraries in New England.

Sometimes the major portion of the contents of the library building is also the gift of the generous donor of the edifice, but, usually, the town assumes responsibility for the equipment and maintenance of the library, deriving the necessary income from appropriations voted by the citizens in town-meetings or by aldermen and councilmen, members of the local legislature, and assessed and collected pro rata according to the valuation of property, just as all other town or city taxes are collected. But, whether the gift of some private individual or the creation and property of the town, the fact remains that the handsomest public buildings in New England to-day are the public-library buildings, and in no department of civic life are the New England States and towns so far in advance of those of other sections of the country as in their generous annual appropriations for the maintenance of this form of individual and civic betterment. New Hampshire is to be credited with the first law permitting towns to establish and to maintain libraries by general taxation. This she did in 1849. Massachusetts followed in 1854, Vermont in 1865, Connecticut in 1881. Boston, however, deserves credit for being the pioneer in public taxation for a municipal library, and to the Hon. Josiah Quincy, grandfather of its present mayor, who, in 1847, proposed to the City Council that they request the Legislature for authority to lay a tax to establish a free library, belongs the honor of having founded in America a form of municipal and town activity, than which, as Stanley Jevons says, in his book Methods of Social Reform, “there is probably no mode of expending public money which gives a more extraordinary and immediate return in utility and enjoyment.”

Already, library administrators and far-sighted educators and publicists foresee a time when it will be as compulsory for towns to establish and support free public libraries as it now is compulsory for them to establish and support free public schools. Massachusetts, perhaps, approaches nearer that ideal now than any other State, only ten of its 353 cities and towns being without public libraries.

Fortunately for the sociologist, the historian, the economist, and the lover of literature, the inhabitants of New England have not failed to chronicle in various forms and ways the deeds and thoughts of their contemporaries. Thus there is a large class of historic documents of which Bradford’s history of Plimoth Plantation is the magnum opus. Then there are innumerable town histories,—of which the four-volume history of Hingham, Massachusetts, is a model,—family genealogies, sermons, diaries, volumes of correspondence, such as that which passed between John Adams and his wife, memorial addresses, such as Emerson and G. W. Curtis delivered at Concord, and Webster and Robert C. Winthrop at Plymouth, which inform and often inspire all who patiently explore their contents. Last, but not least, there are the products of New England’s representative authors, who in prose or poetry have recorded indelibly the higher life of their own or of passing generations. In short, a literature-loving people has given birth to literature, and the New England town of the past can never totally fade out of the memory of future generations so long as men and women are left to read the poetry of Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Aldrich, Lowell’s Biglow Papers, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks and A Minister’s Wooing, the short stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Maria L. Pool, and Jane G. Austin, the prose romances of Hawthorne and F. J. Stimson, and the histories of Palfrey, Bancroft, Parkman, and Fiske.

That New Englanders in the past have been and even now are provincial, is the indictment of Europeans and of some Americans. That they have developed reason at the expense of imagination, utility at the expense of beauty, is also affirmed. Their Puritan ancestors are the butt of the ridicule of the caricaturist, of ultra-Liberal preachers and devotees of materialistic science, and of those who have never read history, European or American. No less an authority than Matthew Arnold has described the life of New England as “uninteresting.” To all such critics, the New Englander can and will reply with dignity and force when proper occasion offers, but this is not the place even to summarize his argument. Suffice it to say that the children of New England are ever returning to her. They sojourn for a time in Europe, the valley of the Mississippi, in Southern California, and in Hawaii. They find more salubrious climes, more beautiful works of ecclesiastical and municipal art, better municipal government, and sometimes greater opportunities for investment of capital and ability and choicer circles of society than those which exist in the towns in which they were born or reared. But in due time the yearning for the hills, valleys and seacoast of rocky and rigorous New England, for the established institutions, the generally diffused intelligence, the equality of opportunity, the sane standards of worth, and the inspiring historical traditions of the early home becomes too strong to be resisted longer, and back to the homestead they come—some on annual visits, some as often as the exchequer permits, some never to depart. New England has thousands of citizens to-day who, having either made, or failed to make, their fortunes in the West, have returned to New England to dwell. Once a New Englander, always a New Englander, in spirit if not in residence. Travel abroad, or residence elsewhere, may modify the austerity, broaden the sympathy, polish the manners, and stimulate the imagination of the New Englander, but it never radically alters his views on the great issues of life and death, or makes him less of a democrat or less of a devotee of Wisdom.

HISTORIC TOWNS OF
NEW ENGLAND

PORTLAND
“THE GEM OF CASCO BAY”
By SAMUEL T. PICKARD

PORTLAND enjoys a peculiar distinction among New England cities, not only by reason of the natural advantages of her location, but because of the historical events of which she has been the theatre, and the men of mark in literature, art, and statesmanship whom she has produced. Among the indentations of the Atlantic coast there is no bay which presents a greater wealth and variety of charming scenery, in combination with the advantages of a safe and capacious harbor, than that on which Portland is situated. It is thickly studded with islands which are of most picturesque forms, presenting beetling cliffs, sheltered coves, pebbly beaches, wooded heights, and wide, green lawns dotted with summer cottages. It is of the beauty of this bay that Whittier, who was familiar with its scenery, sings in The Ranger:

“Nowhere fairer, sweeter, rarer,
Does the golden-locked fruit-bearer
Through his painted woodlands stray;
Than where hillside oaks and beeches
Overlook the long blue reaches,
Silver coves and pebbled beaches,
And green isles of Casco Bay;
Nowhere day, for delay,
With a tenderer look beseeches,
‘Let me with my charmed earth stay!’ ”

The peninsula upon which Portland is located is almost an island. It is nearly three miles long, and has an average width of three quarters of a mile—making it in area the smallest city in the United States, and the most compactly settled, for its forty thousand inhabitants occupy almost every available building spot. At each extremity of the peninsula is a hill on the summit of which is a wide public promenade, affording charming

views—to the east, of the bay, the islands, and the blue sea beyond; to the west and northwest, of the White Mountain range, all the peaks of which are visible, the intervening distance being about eighty miles. The Western Promenade is the favorite resort at sunset; the Eastern has charms for all hours of the day. Both can be reached by electric railways.

In 1614, Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, came prospecting along this coast, and gave the name to Cape Elizabeth, which it still bears, in honor of the Virgin Queen, then recently deceased. The first settlers, George Cleeves and Richard Tucker, came hither in 1632, and the settlement was known as Casco until the name was changed to Falmouth in 1658; it was incorporated as Portland in 1785. There were but few settlers in the first forty years, and these lived in amity with the Indians until the time of King Philip’s War.

In 1676, the settlement was utterly destroyed by the savages, and all who were not killed were carried into captivity. One of the killed was Thomas Brackett, an ancestor of the statesman who in these later days has made the name famous—Thomas Brackett Reed. Mrs. Brackett was carried by the Indians dians to Canada, where she died in captivity. Two of her grandchildren came back to Falmouth when the place was rebuilt after the second destruction by the French and Indians, in May, 1690. In 1689, a large body of French and Indians threatened the town. They were routed in Deering’s Woods by troops from Plymouth Colony, commanded by Major Church. Eleven settlers were killed and a large number wounded. It is a curious fact that Speaker Reed is also a descendant of the first settler, Cleeves. There is something remarkable in the persistency with which the descendants of the pioneers returned to the spot where there had been complete and repeated massacres of their ancestors. There are many families in Portland beside the one mentioned above who are descended from the pioneers who were killed or driven off by the savages.

The first minister of Falmouth was the Reverend George Burroughs, who escaped the massacre of 1676 by fleeing to one of the islands in the bay. Unfortunately for him, before the place was rebuilt he removed to Salem; he was too independent, however, to suit the dominant clergy, and was hanged as a wizard in 1692, on charges incredibly ridiculous. The speech made by this worthy man on the scaffold brought the people to their senses and ended the witchcraft craze. His descendants also went back to Falmouth and are represented in many families of the present city of Portland, who take no shame from the hanging of their ancestor.

So thorough was the second destruction of the place in 1690, that no one was left to bury the victims of the slaughter. Their bleached bones were gathered and buried more than two years after by Sir William Phips, while on his way from Boston to build a fort at Pemaquid. The settlement of the peninsula was resumed after the treaty of peace concluded at Utrecht in 1713, and for sixty years thereafter the growth of the place was rapid. When the town was bombarded and burned by a British squadron in October, 1775, there were nearly three hundred families made homeless—about three quarters of the entire population. For nine hours, four ships anchored in the harbor threw an incessant shower of grape-shot, red-hot cannon-balls, and bombs upon the defenceless town, which had shown its sympathy with the patriot cause in a practical way after the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill. The

spirited citizens of Falmouth might have avoided the bombardment by giving up a few cannon and small-arms; but this, in town meeting, they refused to do, even when they saw the loaded guns and mortars trained upon them at short range, and knew that Captain Mowatt had a special grudge against the place because of an insult put upon him by some of the citizens a few months earlier. The spirit of the town was not broken by the terrible punishment it received. A few days after Mowatt sailed away, while the ruins were still smoking, a British man-of-war came into the harbor to forbid the erection of batteries, and the demand was met by the throwing up of earthworks and the placing of guns, which forced the immediate departure of the ship. The lines of these earthworks are still to be traced at Fort Allen Park, a beautiful pleasure ground on Munjoy overlooking the harbor, and they are preserved with care as a relic of Revolutionary times. Another relic is a cannon-ball thrown from Mowatt’s fleet, which lodged in the First Parish meeting-house, and is now to be seen in the ceiling of the church which occupies the same site. From this ball depends the large central chandelier. There was an incident of the bombardment which illustrates the simplicity and coolness of a heroine whose name deserves a place beside that of Barbara Frietchie. The fashionable tavern of the town was kept by Dame Alice Greele, and here, during the whole Revolutionary period, the committee of public safety met, the judges held their courts, and political conventions had their sessions. It was here that the citizens in town meeting heroically voted to stand the bombardment rather than give up the guns demanded by Mowatt. But after making this brave decision they hastily packed up all their portable possessions and removed their families to places of safety, some not stopping short of inland towns, and others finding shelter under the lee of a high cliff that used to be at the corner of Casco and Cumberland Streets, at no great distance from their homes. Braver than the bravest of the men of Falmouth, Dame Alice would not desert her tavern, although its position was so dangerously exposed that every house in its vicinity was destroyed by bursting bombs and heated cannon-balls. Throughout that terrible day she stood at her post, and with buckets of water extinguished the fires on her premises as fast as kindled. When Mowatt began to throw red-hot cannon-balls, one of them fell into the dame’s back yard among some chips, which were set on fire. She picked up the ball in a pan, and as she tossed it into the street, she said to a neighbor who was passing: “They will have to stop firing soon, for they have got out of bombs and are making new balls, and can’t wait for them to cool!” Portland ought to mark with a bronze tablet the site of Alice Greele’s tavern. The building stood until 1846 at the corner of Congress and Hampshire Streets. It was then removed to Washington Street.

Portland had a rapid growth of population and increase in wealth during the European disturbances caused by the ambition of Napoleon. The carrying-trade of the world was almost monopolized by neutral American bottoms, and ship-building became then, as it continued to be for a long time afterward, a leading industry along the Maine coast. Great fortunes were made by Portland ship-owners. Many fine old-fashioned mansions that now ornament Congress, High, State, Spring, and Danforth Streets, were built by merchants in the first years of the present century, and are

reminders of the peculiar conditions of that time. A sharp check to the rising tide of prosperity was given by the embargo act of 1807. After the peace of 1815, the trade with the West Indies grew into great importance, and for fifty years was a leading factor in the commerce of Portland. Lumber and fish were the chief exports, and return cargoes of sugar and molasses made this the principal market for those commodities—the imports in these lines for many years exceeding those at New York and Boston. West India molasses was distilled in large quantities into New England rum, until the temperance reform, under the lead of the Portland philanthropist, Neal Dow, closed up the distilleries; in their place came sugar factories and refineries which turned out a more wholesome product. But about thirty years ago, changes in the methods of making sugar caused the loss of this industry to Portland.

The development of the canning business has of late years been an important feature of the industrial prosperity of Maine, owing partly to the fact that the climate and soil of this State produce a quality of sweet corn that cannot be matched in other States, and also to the fact that the system of canning now in use was a Portland invention. All over the interior of Maine may be found corn factories owned by Portland merchants, and, on the coast, canneries of lobsters and other products of the fields and fisheries of Maine.

Portland is the winter seaport of the Canadas, and several lines of steamships find cargoes of Western produce at this port. For this business the port has excellent facilities, as it is the terminus of the Grand Trunk Railway system, which has its other terminus at Chicago. There is another line to Montreal, through the White Mountain Notch, which, like the Grand Trunk, owes its existence to Portland enterprise. Of late years the lakes and forests and sea-coast of Maine have, to a marked degree, become the pleasure-ground of the Union, and, naturally, Portland is the distributing point for the rapidly increasing summer travel in this direction. Its lines of railway stretch northward and eastward to regions abounding in fish and game; the White Hills of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont are within easy reach. Steamers from this port ply along the whole picturesque coast to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. During the summer months, eight or ten pleasure steamers make trips between the city and the islands of Casco Bay, furnishing a great variety of pleasurable excursions. These islands, except the smallest of them, are the summer homes of a multitude of families—many of them from Canada and from the Western States.

The ancient Eastern Cemetery, on the southern slope of Munjoy, is the burying-place of the pioneers, including the victims of the French and Indian massacres of two centuries ago. The graves most frequently visited are those of the captains of the U. S. brig Enterprise and His Majesty’s brig Boxer, both of whom were killed in the naval engagement off this coast, September 5, 1813. By their side lies Lieutenant Waters, mortally wounded in the same action. The poet Longfellow was in his seventh year at the time of this fight, and his memory of it is enshrined in My Lost Youth:

“I remember the sea-fight far away,
How it thundered o’er the tide!
And the dead captains as they lay
In their graves, o’erlooking the tranquil bay,
Where they in battle died.”

Commodore Edward Preble, of Tripoli fame, and Rear-Admiral Alden, who fought at Vera

Cruz, New Orleans, and Mobile, both Portlanders, are buried here. There is also a monument commemorating the gallant Lieutenant Henry Wadsworth, who fell before Tripoli in 1804,—a volunteer in a desperate and tragic enterprise. He was a brother of Longfellow’s mother, and a new lustre has been added to his name by the nephew who bore it. In this ground also, but unmarked, are the graves of the victims of the French and Indian siege and massacre of 1690, and of the eleven men killed in the more fortunate battle of the previous year.

The first house in Portland built entirely of brick was erected in 1785, by General Peleg Wadsworth, who was Adjutant-General of Massachusetts during the Revolution; it is now known as the Longfellow house, and stands next above the Preble House, on Congress Street. The poet was not born in this house, but was brought to it as an infant, and it was his home until his marriage, in 1831. It is now owned and occupied by his sister, Mrs. Pierce, who has provided that eventually it shall become the property of the Maine Historical Society, which ensures its preservation as a reminder that Maine gave our country its most widely known and best-loved poet. The house in which Longfellow was born is the three-story frame building at the corner of Fore and Hancock Streets. Around the corner, on Hancock Street, is the house in which Speaker Reed was born.

For his services in the Revolutionary War, Massachusetts gave General Wadsworth a large tract of land in Oxford County, to improve which he removed to Hiram, and the family of his son-in-law, Stephen Longfellow, thereafter occupied his residence in Portland. To the end of his life, the poet made this house his home whenever he visited the scenes of his youth, and many of his best poems were written there. The central part of the hotel adjoining was the mansion of Commodore Edward Preble, built just before his death in 1807, and some of the best rooms in this hotel have still the wood-carving and other ornamentation given them by the hero of Tripoli. A grandson of the Commodore was one of the officers of the Kearsarge when that ship sunk the rebel cruiser Alabama, in the most picturesque naval engagement of modern times.

We have seen that Portland has a history connecting it with the French and Indian Wars, the Revolution, and the War of 1812. It was also the scene of a curious episode in the late Civil War—the cutting out of the United States revenue cutter Caleb Cushing, in June, 1863. The cutter had been preparing for an encounter with the rebel privateer Tacony, which had been capturing and burning many vessels on the coast of New England. A delay in fitting her out had been occasioned by the illness and death of her captain. In the meantime, the Tacony had captured the schooner Archer, and transferred her armament to the prize, which, after burning the Tacony, boldly sailed into Portland harbor in the guise of an innocent fisherman, with Lieutenant Reade in command. His purpose was to burn two gunboats then being fitted out in the harbor, but he found them too well guarded. He then turned his attention to the cutter, which was preparing for a fight with him with no suspicion that he was lying almost alongside. Captain Clarke had died the day before Reade’s arrival, and Lieutenant Davenport, a Georgian by birth, was in command of the cutter. At night, when only one watchman was on deck, a surprise was quietly effected, and the crew put in irons. With a good wind the cutter might easily have gotten away from the sleeping town and slipped by the unsuspicious forts; but she was becalmed just after passing the forts, and in the morning three steamers were armed and sent in pursuit. At the time it was supposed that the Southern lieutenant had turned traitor, but the event proved his loyalty; for he refused to inform his captors where the ammunition was kept, and they had only a dozen balls for the guns, which were all spent without injury to the pursuers. The affair was watched by thousands on the hills and house-tops, and on yachts which in the dead calm were rowed to the scene. At length the town was startled by the blowing up and utter demolition of the cutter; the Confederates had set fire to the vessel and tried to escape in the boats, but were at once captured by the steamers which had been circling around them. The Archer was also captured, with all the chronometers and other valuables of the vessels bonded or destroyed by the Tacony. It proved an important check to the operations of the Confederacy on the sea, and it came just one week before the battle of Gettysburg and the capture of Vicksburg.

The first British squadron to enter the harbor of Portland after the bombardment by Mowatt in 1775, came just eighty-five years afterward to a day. It was sent to give dignity to the embarkation of the Prince of Wales in 1860. It was in Portland, at what are now called the Victoria wharves, that the Prince, then a young man of nineteen, took his last step on American soil. His embarkation on a bright October day was one of the finest pageants ever witnessed in this country. Five of the most powerful men-of-war in the British navy, in gala trim, with yards manned, saluted the royal standard, gorgeous in crimson and gold, then for the first and only time displayed in this country. The deafening broadsides when the Prince reached the deck of the Hero were answered from the American forts and men-of-war.

Another pageant, this time grand and solemn, was enacted in this harbor, in February, 1870. A British squadron, convoyed by American battle-ships, brought the remains of the philanthropist, George Peabody, in the most powerful ironclad the world had then seen. The funeral procession of boats from the English and American ships was an impressive spectacle.

It was a bright winter day, immediately succeeding a remarkable ice-storm, and the trees of the islands, the cape, and the city sparkled in the sun as if every bough were encrusted with diamonds—a wonderful frame for a memorable picture. Nature had put on her choicest finery to relieve the sombre effect of the draped flags, the muffled oars, the long, slow lines of boats, and the minute guns from ships and forts.

The great fire of July 4, 1866, which burned fifteen hundred buildings in the centre of the city, also destroyed an immense number of shade trees, mostly large elms, the abundance of which had given to Portland the title of “Forest City.” In a few years the buildings were replaced by greatly improved structures; but the trees could not be improvised so readily, and the scar of the fire is still noticeable from the absence of aged trees in the district swept by it. Advantage was taken of the clearing of the ground in the most thickly settled part of the city, to lay out Lincoln Park in the centre of the ruins. This is now a charming spot, with its fountain and flowers, its lawns and shaded walks.

The city is fortunate in the abundance and purity of its water supply, which is drawn from Lake Sebago, sixteen miles distant. The natural outlet of this lake is the Presumpscot River, which has several valuable water-powers along its short course to its mouth in Casco Bay, near Portland harbor.

It will be remembered that Nathaniel Hawthorne received his collegiate education, in the same class with Longfellow, at Brunswick, which is in the same county with Portland, but it is not so generally known that during his teens his home was at Raymond, on the shore of Sebago Lake, and in the same county. Part of each year he spent in school at Salem; but his mother’s home was in the little hamlet in the picturesque wilderness a few miles from Portland, and here he spent the happiest months of his youth, as he has testified in many letters. His biographers have generally failed to take account of this, and, indeed, have asserted that he was at Raymond only a part of one year. A little volume recently published, entitled Hawthorne’s First Diary, brings out the facts in this neglected but important episode in the career of this great master in our literature. While fitting for college, Hawthorne became, for a single term, the pupil of the Reverend Caleb Bradley, of Stroudwater, a suburb of Portland. The building in which he studied is still to be seen at Stroudwater. The house of his mother at Raymond is converted into a church, but as to exterior remains very much as when his boy life was spent in it. It was in this same county of Cumberland that Mrs. Stowe wrote the whole of Uncle Toms Cabin, while her husband was a professor in Bowdoin College. Thus, three of the greatest names in American literature are linked to Portland and its immediate vicinity.

Portland can count to her credit many jurists, lawyers, and orators of national repute, among them Theophilus Parsons, Simon Greenleaf, Ashur Ware, Sargent S. Prentiss, Nathan Clifford, and George Evans. William Pitt Fessenden lived and died in the house on State Street now occupied by Judge W. L. Putnam. Like Fessenden eminent as Senator and Secretary of the Treasury, Lot M. Morrill spent the last years of his life in Portland. Still another great Senator and Secretary of the Treasury, who was also Chief-Justice, honored this city by bearing its name—Salmon Portland Chase. He was actually named for

the town, his uncle, Salmon Chase, being a Portland lawyer, and his parents were determined that there should be no mistake as to the person for whom he was named!

At an early period in his career, James G. Blaine edited the Portland Daily Advertiser. Among writers of celebrity, we may name N. P. Willis and his sister, “Fanny Fern”; John Neal, poet and novelist; Henry W. and Samuel Longfellow; J. H. Ingraham, whose many novels had a great sale fifty or sixty years ago; Elijah Kellogg; Mrs. Ann S. Stephens; Seba Smith, author of the Jack Downing Letters, and his more famous wife, Elizabeth Oakes Smith; Thomas Hill, for a time President of Harvard University; and the divines, Edward Payson and Cyrus Bartol. The home of Charles Farrar Brown, “Artemus Ward,” was in an adjoining county, but like the Chief-Justice just mentioned, he came to Portland for his baptismal name, his uncle, Charles Farrar, being a Portland physician. Two sculptors of national fame have gone out from Portland—Paul Akers and Franklin Simmons, and some of the best works of both these artists adorn public places in the city. The Dead Pearl Diver, by Akers, may be found in the reading-room of the Public Library; and Simmons has two bronze statues in the city, one a seated figure of Longfellow, at the head of State Street, overlooking “Deering’s Woods,” and the other a noble statue of America, in Monument Square, commemorating the sons of Portland who died for the Union; no finer soldiers’ monument than this has ever been erected. Of other artists who have attained distinction, we may name H. B. Brown, now residing in London, whose landscapes and marine views have given him a recognized position among the best American artists; Charles O. Cole, portrait painter; and Charles Codman, J. R. Tilton, and J. B. Hudson, landscape painters.

Immense sums are being expended on the defences of the city by the United States government, as it is realized that in case of war with Great Britain this would be the point of attack, because Portland is the natural seaport of the Canadas, and Maine is thrust, in a provoking way, between the Maritime Provinces and the Province of Quebec. Portland can indulge in no dream of great commercial importance so long as the country which its position especially dominates is under a foreign flag; but if ever Maine should be annexed to Canada, or the annexation takes the alternative form, a great future is assured for a town so favorably located. In the meantime, the beautiful city must be content to be the centre of distribution for the pleasure travel of the summer, and for the other half of the year, by means of its capacious harbor, it can continue to furnish an outlet for that part of the business of the Great Lakes which in summer is handled at Montreal.

OLD RUTLAND, MASSACHUSETTS
THE CRADLE OF OHIO
By EDWIN D. MEAD

THE Old South Historical Society in Boston inaugurated in 1896 the custom of annual historical pilgrimages. It had learned from Parkman and Motley and Irving how vital and vivid history is made by visits to the scenes of history. Its pilgrimages must be short to places near home; but the good places to visit in New England are many. Great numbers of people, young and old, join in the pilgrimages. Six hundred went to the beautiful Whittier places beside the Merrimac, the second year; and as many the third year to the King Philip country, on Narragansett Bay.

The first year’s pilgrimage was to old Rutland, Massachusetts, “the cradle of Ohio.” A hundred of the young people went on the train from Boston, on that bright July day; and when they had climbed to the little village on the hill, and swept their eyes over the great expanse of country round about Wachusett and away to Monadnock, and strolled down to the old Rufus Putnam house, by whose fireside the settlement of Marietta was planned, a hundred more people had come from the surrounding villages; and a memorable little celebration was that under the maples after the luncheon, with the dozen energetic speeches from the young men and the older ones. It was a fine inauguration of the Old South pilgrimages, and woke many people to the great possibilities of the historical pilgrimage as an educational factor.[63]

Ten years before, there was hardly a man in Massachusetts who ever thought of Rutland as a historical town. The people of Princeton and Paxton and Hubbardston and Oakham looked across to the little village on the hill from their villages on the hills, and they did not think of it; the people of Worcester drove up of a Sunday to get a dinner at the old village tavern, and they did not think of it; the Amherst College boys and the Smith College

girls rode past on the Central Massachusetts road, at the foot of the hill, on their way to Boston, and heard “Rutland!” called, but they thought nothing of history; and in Boston the last place to which people would have thought of arranging a historical pilgrimage was this same Rutland.

Yet when the Old South young people went there on their first pilgrimage, Rutland had already become a name almost as familiar in our homes as Salem or Sudbury or Deerfield. The Old South young people themselves had been led to think very much about it. In 1893, the year of the World’s Fair at Chicago, the great capital of the great West, a place undreamed of a hundred years before, when Rutland was witnessing its one world-historical event, the Old South lectures were devoted to “The Opening of the West.” Two of the eight lectures were upon “The Northwest Territory and the Ordinance of 1787” and “Marietta and the Western Reserve”; two of the leaflets issued in connection were Manasseh Cutler’s Description of Ohio in 1787 and Garfield’s address on The Northwest Territory and the Western Reserve; and one of the subjects set for the Old South essays

was “The Part Taken by Massachusetts Men in Connection with the Ordinance of 1787.” These studies first kindled the imaginations of hundreds of young people and first roused them to the consciousness that westward expansion had been the great fact in our history from the time of the Revolution to the time of the Civil War; that New England had had a controlling part in this great movement, which, by successive waves, has reached Ohio, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, Oregon, so that there is more good New England blood to-day west of the Hudson than there is east of it; and that this movement, which has transformed the United States from the little strip along the Atlantic coast which fought for independence to the great nation which stretches now from sea to sea, began at the old town of Rutland, Massachusetts. This Rutland on the hill is the cradle of Ohio, the cradle of the West.

It was not, by any means, these Boston lectures on “The Opening of the West” which reawakened Massachusetts and the country to the forgotten historical significance of old Rutland. That awakening was done by Senator Hoar, in his great oration at the Marietta centennial, in 1888. Senator Hoar’s oration did not indeed awaken Massachusetts to the great part taken by Massachusetts men in connection with the Ordinance of 1787, or the part of New England in the settlement and shaping of the West. No awakening to these things was necessary. There is no New England household which has not kindred households in the West, ever in close communication with the old home; and the momentous significance of the Ordinance of 1787, and the decisive part taken by Massachusetts statesmen in securing it, the Massachusetts historian and orator were never likely to let the people forget.

“At the foundation of the constitution of these new Northwestern States,” said Daniel Webster in his great reply to Hayne, “lies the celebrated Ordinance of 1787. We are accustomed to praise the lawgivers of antiquity; we help to perpetuate the fame of Solon and Lycurgus; but I doubt whether one single law of any lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked and lasting character than the Ordinance of 1787. That instrument was drawn by Nathan Dane, a citizen of Massachusetts; and certainly it has happened to few men to be the authors of a political measure of more large and enduring consequence. It fixed forever the character of the population in the vast regions northwest of the Ohio, by excluding from them involuntary servitude. It impressed on the soil itself, while it was yet a wilderness, an incapacity to sustain any other than free men. It laid the interdict against personal servitude, in original compact, not only deeper than all local law, but deeper also than all local constitutions. We see its consequences at this moment, and we shall never cease to see them, perhaps, while the Ohio shall flow.”

Mr. Hoar spoke as strongly of the Ordinance, in his Marietta oration. “The Ordinance of 1787 belongs with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; it is one of the three title-deeds of American constitutional liberty.” But the chief merit of his oration was not the new emphasis with which he said what Webster had said, but the picturesqueness and the power with which he brought the men and the events of that great period of the opening of the West home to the imagination. The oration was especially memorable for the manner in which it set Rufus Putnam, the man of action, the head of the Ohio Company, the leader of the Marietta colony, in the centre of the story, and made us see old Rutland as the cradle of the movement.

Complete religious liberty, the public support of schools, and the prohibition forever of slavery,—these were what the Ordinance of 1787 secured for the Northwest. “When older States or nations,” said Mr. Hoar, “where the chains of human bondage have been broken, shall utter the proud boast, ‘With a great sum obtained I this freedom,’ each sister of this imperial group—Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin—may lift her queenly head with the yet prouder answer, ‘But I was free-born.’ ” The moment of this antislavery article of the Ordinance, in view of the course of our national history during the century that has followed, it would not be possible to overstate. When the great test of civil war came, to settle of what sort this republic should be, who dare contemplate the result had these five States been slave States and not free!

Massachusetts makes no false or exclusive claims of credit for the Ordinance of 1787. She does not forget the services of William Grayson, nor those of Richard Henry Lee. She does not forget Thomas Jefferson.[64]

The names of Nathan Dane, Rufus Putnam, Rufus King, Timothy Pickering and Manasseh Cutler are names of the greatest moment in the history of the West. No other group of men did so much as these Massachusetts men to determine what the great West should be, by securing the right organization and institutions for the Northwest Territory and by securing at the beginning the right kind of settlers for Ohio.

It was really Manasseh Cutler who did most at the final decisive moment to secure the adoption

of the clause in the great Ordinance which forever dedicated the Northwest to freedom. Of all these Massachusetts men he was by far the most interesting personality; and of all revelations of the inner character of that critical period, none is more interesting or valuable than that given by his Life and Letters. It is to be remembered too that the first company of men for Marietta—Cutler urged Adelphia as the right name for the town—started from Manasseh Cutler’s own home in Ipswich, joining others at Danvers, December 3, 1787, almost a month before the Rutland farmers left to join Putnam at Hartford. For the shrine of Manasseh Cutler is not at Rutland, but at Hamilton, which was a part of Ipswich. The home of Nathan Dane was Beverly.

“It happened,” said Edward Everett Hale, at the Marietta centennial, “that it was Manasseh Cutler who was to be the one who should call upon that Continental Congress to do the duty which they had pushed aside for five or six years. It happened that this diplomatist succeeded in doing in four days what had not been done in four years before. What was the weight which Manasseh Cutler threw into the scale? It was not wealth; it was not the armor of the old time; it was simply the fact, known to all men, that the men of New England would not emigrate into any region where labor and its honest recompense is dishonorable. The New England men will not go where it is not honorable to do an honest day’s work, and for that honest day’s work to claim an honest recompense. They never have done it, and they never will do it; and it was that potent fact, known to all men, that Manasseh Cutler had to urge in his private conversation and in his diplomatic work. When he said, ‘I am going away from New York, and my constituents are not going to do this thing,’ he meant exactly what he said. They were not going to any place where labor was dishonorable, and where workmen were not recognized as freemen. If they had not taken his promises, they would not have come here; they would have gone to the Holland Company’s lands in New York, or where Massachusetts was begging them to go—into the valley of the Penobscot or the Kennebec.”

Senator Hoar, in his oration, said of Manasseh Cutler:

“He was probably the fittest man on the continent, except Franklin, for a mission of delicate diplomacy. It was said just now that Putnam was a man after Washington’s pattern and after Washington’s own heart. Cutler was a man after Franklin’s pattern and after Franklin’s own heart. He was the most learned naturalist in America, as Franklin was the greatest master in physical science. He was a man of consummate prudence in speech and conduct; of courtly manners; a favorite in the drawing-room and in the camp; with a wide circle of friends and correspondents among the most famous men of his time. During his brief service in Congress, he made a speech on the judicial system, in 1803, which shows his profound mastery of constitutional principles. It now fell to his lot to conduct a negotiation second only in importance to that which Franklin conducted with France in 1778. Never was ambassador crowned with success more rapid or more complete.”

But here, in old Rutland, it is not with Manasseh Cutler that we are concerned, but with Rufus Putnam. Rufus Putnam was the head of the Ohio Company, and the leader in the actual settlement of the new Territory. It was with Putnam that Manasseh Cutler chiefly conferred concerning the proposed Ohio colony. He left Boston for New York, on his important mission, on the evening of June 25, 1787, and on that day he records in his diary: “I conversed with General Putnam, and settled the principles on which I am to contract with Congress for lands on account of the Ohio Company.” Of Rufus Putnam, Senator Hoar said in his oration, after his tributes to Varnum, Meigs, Parsons, Tupper and the rest:

“But what can be said which shall be adequate to the worth of him who was the originator, inspirer, leader, and guide of the Ohio settlement from the time when he first conceived it, in the closing days of the Revolution, until Ohio took her place in the Union as a free State in the summer of 1803? Every one of that honorable body would have felt it as a personal wrong had he been told that the foremost honors of this occasion would not be given to Rufus Putnam. Lossing calls him ‘the father of Ohio.’ Burnet says, ‘He was regarded as their principal chief and leader.’ He was chosen the superintendent at the meeting of the Ohio Company in Boston, November 21, 1787, ‘to be obeyed and respected accordingly.’ The agents of the company, when they voted in 1789 ‘that the 7th of April be forever observed as a public festival,’ speak of it as ‘the day when General Putnam commenced the settlement in this country.’ Harris dedicates the documents collected in his appendix to Rufus Putnam, ‘the founder and father of the State.’ He was a man after Washington’s own pattern and after Washington’s own heart; of the blood and near kindred of Israel Putnam, the man who ‘dared to lead where any man dared to follow.’ ”

Mr. Hoar recounts the great services of Putnam during the Revolution, beginning with his brilliant success in the fortification of Dorchester Heights:

“We take no leaf from the pure chaplet of Washington’s fame when we say that the success of the first great military operation of the Revolution was due to Rufus Putnam.”

But it was not Senator Hoar’s task to narrate the military services of General Putnam.[65]

“We have to do,” he said, “only with the entrenchments constructed under the command of this great engineer for the constitutional fortress of American liberty. Putnam removed his family to Rutland, Worcester County, Mass., early in 1780. His house is yet standing, about ten miles from the birthplace of the grandfather of President Garfield. He himself returned to Rutland when the war was over. He had the noble public spirit of his day, to which no duty seemed trifling or obscure. For five years he tilled his farm and accepted and performed the public offices to which his neighbors called him. He was representative to the General Court, selectman, constable, tax collector and committee to lay out school lots for the town; State surveyor, commissioner to treat with the Penobscot Indians and volunteer in putting down Shays’s Rebellion. He was one of the founders and first trustees of Leicester Academy, and, with his family of eight children, gave from his modest means a hundred pounds toward its endowment. But he had larger plans in mind. The town constable of Rutland was planning an empire.”

Putnam’s chief counsellor in his design at the first was Washington, whose part altogether in the opening of the West was so noteworthy. Mr. Hoar tells of the correspondence between Putnam and Washington, and follows the interesting history to the organization of the Ohio Company, at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston, in 1786, and the departure of the Massachusetts emigrants at the end of the next year.

“Putnam went out from his simple house in Rutland to dwell no more in his native Massachusetts. It is a plain, wooden dwelling, perhaps a little better than the average of the farmers’ houses of New England of that day; yet about which of Europe’s palaces do holier memories cling! Honor and fame, and freedom and empire, and the faith of America went with him as he crossed the threshold.”

To Rutland, as one who loved the old town and its history has well said, “belongs the honor of having carried into action the Ordinance of 1787. Standing on Rutland hill, and looking around the immense basin of which it forms the centre, it is with conscious pride that one looks upon the old landmarks and calls up to the imagination the strong and brave and true men whose traditions have permeated the soil and left their marks in the civilization which has been the type for the development of the whole of the great Northwest.” For this old town on the hilltop was veritably “the cradle of Ohio.” Here was first effectually heard that potent invitation and command, so significant in the history of this country in these hundred years, “Go West!” This town incarnates and represents as no other the spirit of the mighty movement which during the century has extended New England all through the great West.

As early as 1783, about the time of the breaking up of the army at Newburgh on the Hudson, General Putnam and nearly three hundred army officers had proposed to form a new State beyond the Ohio, and Washington warmly endorsed their memorial to Congress asking for a grant of land; but the plan miscarried. As soon as the Ordinance was passed, the Ohio Company, of which Putnam was the president, bought from the government five or six million acres, and the first great movement of emigration west of the Ohio at once began. Within a year following the organization of the territory, twenty thousand people became settlers upon the banks of the Ohio. But the Pilgrim Fathers of the thousands and the millions, the pioneers to whom belongs the praise, were the forty or fifty farmers who from old Rutland pushed on with Putnam through the snows of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, coming to Pittsburgh just as the spring of 1788 came, and dropping down the river to Marietta in the little boat which they had named, by a beautiful fatality, the Mayflower. “Forever honored be Marietta as another Plymouth!”

The men who first settled the Northwest Territory,—as President Hayes, following Mr. Hoar at Marietta, well called it, “the most fortunate colonization that ever occurred on earth,”—and who set the seal of their character and institutions upon it, were of the best blood of New England.

“Look for a moment,” said Mr. Hoar, “at the forty-eight men who came here a hundred years ago to found the first American civil government whose jurisdiction did not touch tide-water. See what manner of men they were; in what school they had been trained; what traditions they had inherited. I think that you must agree

that of all the men who ever lived on earth fit to perform ‘that ancient, primitive and heroical work,’ the founding of a State, they were the fittest.”

Here we remember too the words of Washington.

“No colony in America,” said Washington, the warm friend of Putnam, who was deeply concerned that the development of the West should begin in the right way, in the hands of the right men, “was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at the Muskingum. Information, property and strength will be its characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, and there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a community.”

We honor old Rutland not only because she sent men to open the West, but because she sent her best, because she pitched the tone for the great West high.

But Rutland is not only “the cradle of Ohio,” pre-eminent as that distinction is in her history. She also—like the other towns on the hills round about her, and like every good old New England town—has her long line of simple local annals, well worthy the attention of the summer visitor from Boston or Chicago. Happy are you if you hear them all from the lips of one or another of the local antiquarians, as you ride with him through the fields to Muschopauge Pond, or along the Princeton road to Wachusett, or over Paxton way to see the lot which Senator Hoar has bought on the top of Asnebumskit Hill,—perhaps finding the Senator himself on the hill, as we did, where he could see Worcester in one direction, and in the other, Rutland.

I remember well the crisp September night when I first saw Rutland, with the new moon in the clear sky, and the evening star. I remember that the man who drove me up from the little station to the big hotel on the hill, while I filled my lungs with Rutland air, proved to be the hotel proprietor himself, and, which was much better, proved—and proved it much more the next day—to be the very prince of local antiquarians. He had himself written a history of Rutland for a history of Worcester County, and there was nothing that he did not know. If there was anything, then the good village minister—he has been to Marietta since, and is president of the Rutland Historical Society—had read it in some book; or the town clerk knew it; or Mr. Miles remembered it—who was to Rutland born, and whose memory was good. So in the dozen pleasant visits which I have made to Rutland since, I have not only taken mine ease with the benevolent boniface, but have taken many history lessons on the broad piazzas and the hills.

The boniface will tell you, sitting in the corner looking toward Wachusett, how, in 1686, Joseph Trask, alias Pugastion, of Pennicook; Job, alias Pompamamay, of Natick; Simon Pitican, alias Wananapan, of Wamassick; Sassawannow, of Natick, and another—Indians who claimed to be lords of the soil—gave a deed to Henry Willard and Joseph Rowlandson and Benjamin Willard and others, for £23 of the then currency, of a certain tract of land twelve miles square, the name in general being Naquag, the south corner butting upon Muschopauge Pond, and running north to Quanitick and to Wauchatopick, and so running upon great Wachusett, etc. Upon the petition, he will tell you, of the sons and grandsons of Major Simon Willard, of Lancaster, deceased—that famous Major Willard who went to relieve Brookfield when beset by the Indians—and others; the General Court in 1713 confirmed these lands to these petitioners, “provided that within seven years there be sixty families settled thereon, and sufficient lands reserved for the use of a gospel ministry and schools, except what part thereof the Hon. Samuel Sewall, Esq., hath already purchased,—the town to be called Rutland, and to lye to the county of Middlesex.” The grant was about one eighth of the present Worcester County, comprising almost all the towns round about. When the new Worcester County was incorporated, Rutland failed of becoming the shire town, instead of Worcester, by only one vote—and that vote, they say in Rutland, was bought by a base bribe. The antiquarian taverner will point his spy-glass toward Barre for you, and tell you it was named after our good friend in the House of Commons in the Stamp Act days; toward Petersham hill, back of it, where John Fiske spends his summers, and tell you about Shays’ Rebellion; toward Hubbardston, and tell you it was named for an old speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives; toward Princeton, and tell you it perpetuates the memory of Thomas Prince, the famous old pastor of the Old South Church in Boston, founder of the Prince Library; toward Paxton, and tell you about Charles Paxton, who was something or other; toward Oakham, and tell you something else. He will tell you that Holden is so called after that same family whose name is also honored in Holden Chapel at Harvard College; and he will probably point to Shrewsbury, on the hill away beyond Holden, and talk about General Artemas Ward, whose old home and grave are there.

He will tell about the first settlers of Rutland, respectable folk from Boston and Concord and other places, and how many immigrants from Ireland there were, with their church-membership

papers in their pockets. He will tell you of Judge Sewall’s farm of a thousand acres in the north part of the town, and of his gift of the sacramental vessels to the church; of the five hundred acres granted to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company; of how the road through the village was laid out ten rods wide, and so remains unto this day; of the call to the “able, learned, orthodox minister,” Joseph Willard, in 1721, and how he was “cut off by the Indians”—shot in the field north of the meeting-house—just before the installation day, so that Thomas Frink, “an able and learned, orthodox and pious person,” was called instead. Presently there was “a coolness in affection in some of the brethren” towards Mr. Frink, because two fifths of the church-members were Presbyterians, over against the three fifths Congregationalists, and “contrary to his advice and admonition communed with the Presbyterians in other towns.” The upshot was a split, and a Presbyterian church in the west part of the town. These Rutland Presbyterians seem to have come from Ireland—they were of the same sort as those who founded Londonderry, New Hampshire just before; and some of them were so tenacious of their own ordinances that they carried their infants in their arms on horseback as far as Pelham to have them baptized in good Presbyterian form.

Rutland had her minute-men, and fifty of them were at Bunker Hill. She had some hot town-meetings between the Stamp Act time and Lexington, and passed ringing resolutions and some stiff instructions to Colonel Murray, her representative to the General Court, whom more and more she distrusted, and who, when the final pinch came, declared himself a Tory out-and-out, and fled to Nova Scotia, leaving Rutland “by a back road,” to avoid a committee of the whole, which was on its way to visit him.

To tell the truth, this Tory Colonel, John Murray, must have been the most interesting figure ever associated with old Rutland, save General Rufus Putnam himself; and, curiously enough, the Putnam place had belonged first to Murray,—the house being built by him for one of his married daughters, all of Murray’s lands and goods being confiscated, and this house falling into Putnam’s hands in 1780 or 1782, probably at a very low figure.

He was not John Murray when he came to Rutland, but John McMorrah. He came from Ireland with John and Elizabeth McClanathan, Martha Shaw and others, his mother dying on the passage. He was not only penniless when he set his foot on the American shore, but in debt for his passage. “For a short time,” says the chronicle,” he tried manual labor; but he was too lazy to work, and to beg ashamed.” He found a friend in Andrew Hendery, and began peddling; then he kept a small store, and later bought cattle for the army. Everything seemed to favor him, and he became the richest man that ever lived in Rutland. “He did not forget Elizabeth McClanathan, whom he sailed to America with, but made her his wife.” She lies, along with Lucretia Chandler, his second wife, and Deborah Brindley, the third, in the old Rutland graveyard. “He placed horizontally over their graves large handsome stones underpinned with brick, whereon were engraved appropriate inscriptions.” He had a large family, seven sons and five daughters; and the oldest son, Alexander, remained loyal to America and to Rutland when his father fled—entering the army and being wounded in the service. Murray became a large landholder and had many tenants; he was the “Squire” of the region. He grew arbitrary and haughty as he grew wealthy, but was popular, until the stormy politics came. “On Representative day,” we read, “all his friends that could ride, walk, creep or hobble were at the polls; and it was not his fault if they returned dry.” He held every office the people could give him, and represented them twenty years in the General Court. He was a large, fleshy man, and, “when dressed in his regimentals, with his gold-bound hat, etc., he made a superb appearance.” He lived in style, with black servants and white. “His high company from Boston, Worcester, etc., his office and parade, added to the popularity and splendor of the town. He promoted schools, and for several years gave twenty dollars yearly towards supporting a Latin grammar school.” He also gave a clock to the church, which was placed in front of the gallery, and proved himself a thoroughly modern man by inscribing on the clock the words, “A Gift of John Murray, Esq.”

All these things your loyal Rutland host will tell you, or read to you out of the old books,—where you can read them, and many other things. And he will take you to drive, down past the Putnam place, to the field where a

large detachment of Burgoyne’s army was quartered after the surrender at Saratoga. The prisoners’ barracks stood for half a century, converted to new uses; and the well dug by the soldiers is still shown—as, until a few years ago, were the mounds which marked the graves of those who died. Three of the officers fell in love with Rutland girls, and took them back to England as their wives. Yet none of their stories is so romantic as the story of that vagrant Betsy, whose girlhood was passed in a Rutland shanty, and who, after she married in New York the wealthy Frenchman, Stephen Jumel, and was left a widow, then married Aaron Burr.

St. Edmundsbury, in old Suffolk, where Robert Browne first preached independency, has an air so bracing and salubrious that it has been called the Montpellier of England. Old Rutland might well be called the Montpellier of Massachusetts. Indeed, when a few years ago the State of Massachusetts decided to establish a special hospital for consumptives, the authorities asked the opinions of hundreds of physicians and scientific men in all parts of the State as to where was the best place for it, the most healthful and favorable point; and a vast preponderance of opinion was in behalf of Rutland. On the southern slope, therefore, of Rutland’s highest hill the fine hospital now stands; and until people outgrow the foolish notion that a State must have all its State institutions within its own borders,—until Massachusetts knows that North Carolina is a better place for consumptives than any town of her own,—there could not be a wiser choice. The town is so near to Worcester, and even to Boston, that its fine air, broad outlook and big hotel draw to it hundreds of summer visitors; and latterly it has grown enterprising,—for which one is a little sorry,—and has water-works and coaching parades.

The central town in Massachusetts, Rutland is also the highest village in the State east of the Connecticut. From the belfry of the village church, from the dooryards of the village people, the eye sweeps an almost boundless horizon, from the Blue Hills to Berkshire and from Monadnock to Connecticut, and the breezes on the summer day whisper of the White Hills and the Atlantic. It is not hard for the imagination to extend the view far beyond New England, to the town on the Muskingum which the prophetic eye of Putnam saw from here, and to the great States beyond, which rose obedient to the effort which began with him; it is not hard to catch messages borne on winds from the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific.

Just at the foot of the hill,—to the west, as is fitting,—stands the old Rufus Putnam house, the church clock telling the hours above, Wachusett looming beyond the valley, the maples rustling before the door, to the west the sough of the pines. Its oaken timbers are still as sound as when Murray put them in place before the Revolution, each clapboard still intact, the doors the same, the rooms but little altered. Could Putnam return to earth again and to Rutland, he would surely feel himself at home as he passed through the gate.

In 1893, when the enthusiasm re-inforced by our Old South lectures on “The Opening of the West” was strong, I wrote these words about the Rufus Putnam house:

“This historic house should belong to the people. It should be insured against every mischance. It should be carefully restored and preserved, and stand through the years, a memorial of Rufus Putnam and the farmers who went out with him to found Ohio, a monument to New England influence and effort in the opening and building of the great West. This room should be a Rufus Putnam room, in which there should be gathered every book and picture and document illustrating Putnam’s career; this should be the Ordinance room, sacred to memorials of Manasseh Cutler and all who worked with him to secure the great charter of liberty; this the Marietta room, illustrating the Marietta of the first days and the last, binding mother and daughter together, and becoming the pleasant ground for the interchange of many edifying courtesies. There should be, too, a Rutland room, with its hundred objects illustrating the long history of the town,—almost every important chapter of which has been witnessed by this venerable building,—with memorials also of the old English Rutland and of the many American Rutlands which look back reverently to the historic Massachusetts town; and a Great West library, on whose shelves should stand the books telling the story of the great oak which has grown from the little acorn planted by Rufus Putnam a hundred years ago. We can think of few memorials which could be established in New England more interesting than this would be. We can think of few which could be established so easily. It is a pleasure to look forward to the day when this shall be accomplished. It is not hard to hear already the voice of Senator Hoar, at the dedication of this Rufus Putnam memorial, delivering the oration in the old Rutland church. Men from the West should be there with men from the East, men from Marietta, from the Western Reserve, from Chicago, from Puget Sound. A score of members of the Antiquarian Society at Worcester should be there. That score could easily make this vision a reality. We commend the thought to these men of Worcester. We commend it to the people of Rutland, who, however the memorial is secured, must be its custodians.”

Just a year from the time these words were written, the pleasing plan and prophecy—more fortunate than most such prophecies—began to be fulfilled. It was a memorable meeting in old Rutland on that brilliant October day in 1894. Senator Hoar and seventy-five good men and women came from Worcester; and Edward Everett Hale led a zealous company from Boston; and General Walker drove over with his friends from Brookfield, his boyhood home near by,—the home, too, of Rufus Putnam before he came to Rutland; and when everybody had roamed over the old Putnam place, and crowded the big hotel dining-room for dinner, and then adjourned to the village church, so many people from the town and the country round about had joined that the church never saw many larger gatherings. The address which Senator Hoar gave was full of echoes of his great Marietta oration; and when the other speeches had been made, it was very easy in the enthusiasm to secure pledges for a third of the four thousand dollars necessary to buy the old house and the hundred and fifty acres around it. The rest has since then been almost entirely raised; the house has been put into good condition, and is visited each year by hundreds of pilgrims from the East and the West; and a noteworthy collection of historical memorials has already been made,—all under the control of the Rutland Historical Society, which grew out of that historic day, and which is doing a noble work for the intellectual and social life of the town, strengthening in the minds of the people the proud consciousness of their rich inheritance, and prompting them to meet the new occasion and new duty of to-day as worthily as Rufus Putnam and the Rutland farmers met the duty and opportunity of 1787. In the autumn of 1898, there was another noteworthy celebration at Rutland. This time it was the Sons of the Revolution who came; and they placed upon the Putnam house a bronze tablet with the following inscription, written by Senator Hoar, who was himself present and the chief speaker, as on the earlier occasion:

“Here, from 1781 to 1788, dwelt General Rufus Putnam, Soldier of the Old French War, Engineer of the works which compelled the British Army to evacuate Boston and of the fortifications of West Point, Founder and Father of Ohio. In this house he planned and matured the scheme of the Ohio Company, and from it issued the call for the Convention which led to its organization. Over this threshold he went to lead the Company which settled Marietta, April 7, 1788. To him, under God, it is owing that the great Northwest Territory was dedicated forever to Freedom, Education, and Religion, and that the United States of America is not now a great slaveholding Empire.”

Many such celebrations will there be at the home of Rufus Putnam, and at the little village on the hill. Ever more highly will New England estimate the place of old Rutland in her history; ever more sacred and significant will it become as a point of contact for the East and West; and in the far-off years the sons and daughters of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin will make pilgrimages to it, as the children of New England pilgrimage to Scrooby.

SALEM
THE PURITAN TOWN
By GEORGE DIMMICK LATIMER

SALEM is what historical students would call a palimpsest, an ancient manuscript that has been scraped and then rewritten with another and later text. By careful study of the almost illegible characters and sometimes by chemical treatment, great treasures of the ancient learning, such as Orations of Cicero, the Institutes of Gaius and versions of the New Testament, have been discovered under monkish rules and medieval chronicles. Such a charm of research and discovery awaits the historical student in this modern, progressive city. The stranger within our gates is at first impressed by the many good business blocks, the elegant residences amid beautiful lawns on the broad, well-shaded streets, the handsome public buildings, many of them once stately mansions of

the old sea-captains, and a very convenient electric-car service that makes the city a famous shopping-place for the eastern half of the county. But here and there the visitor comes upon some memorial tablet or commemorative stone, some ancient cemetery or venerable building—faded characters of an earlier text—that brings to mind the great age of Puritanism or the only less interesting era of our town’s commercial supremacy; while if he enters the Essex Institute to see its large and valuable historical collection, it is modern Salem that is obliterated and the stern poverty and austere piety of the Fathers that stand out distinctly. With what interest he will look at the sun-dial and sword of Governor Endicott, at the baptismal shirt of Governor

Bradford, and at the stout walking-stick of George Jacobs, one of the victims of the Witchcraft Delusion! The ancient pottery, the old pewter and iron vessels, the antique fowling-pieces and firebacks, the valuable autographs of charters and military commissions and title-deeds—all these survivals of the seventeenth century help to reconstruct that Puritan settlement under the direction of Endicott and Bradstreet, of Higginson and Roger Williams. Or if the visitor has entered the Peabody Academy of Science, rich in natural history and ethnological collections, it is the proud record of commercial supremacy at the beginning of this century which the old palimpsest reveals. As he studies the models of famous privateers and trading-vessels, the oil portraits of the old sea-captains and merchant princes, the implements and idols, the vestments and pottery, they brought

“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.

The beginning of the severe, repressive rule of the Puritan over domestic and social life, so repellent to modern thought, is found in the instructions sent to Endicott by the directors of the English company.

“To the end the Sabbath may be celebrated in a religious manner, we appoint that all that inhabit the Plantation, both for the general and the particular employments, may surcease their labour every Saturday throughout the year at 3 o’c in the afternoon, and that they spend the rest of that day in catechizing and preparing for the Sabbath as the ministers shall direct.”

He was also to see that at least some members of each family were well grounded in religion,

“whereby morning and evening family duties may be well performed, and a watchful eye held over all in each family ... that so disorders may be prevented and ill weeds nipt before they take too great a head.”

For this purpose the company furnished him with blank books to record the daily employments of each family and expected these records to be sent over to England twice a year. In our natural dislike and distrust of such a Puritan Inquisition we should remember that the exigencies of the time and place go far towards justifying such stern precautions. The English company wanted a successful settlement, one to which they could themselves retreat if political and ecclesiastical oppression in the old country should prove too great for their endurance; and they well knew that prosperity depended upon order, sobriety, thrift, and piety. The splendid history and the moral leadership of New England in these three centuries have justified this painstaking, minute, even exasperating watch over the welfare of a colony far from the restraints of an old civilization, in peril from hostile savages and lawless adventurers on an inhospitable soil.

As a contrast to this gloomy picture of social life, their intentions towards the Indians shine in a bright light. The company wrote to Endicott in reference to the land questions certain to arise:

“If any of the savages pretend right of inheritance to all or any part of the lands granted in our Patent, we pray you endeavour to purchase their title, that we may avoid the least scruple of intrusion.”

Great pains were taken to establish just and humane relations with the red man. One of the objects of the company was the conversion of the Indians to the Gospel of Christ. Among the wise measures of the day it was forbidden to sell them muskets, ammunition or liquor, and they were permitted to enter the settlement at certain stated times only, for purposes of trade or treaty. As a nation, our treatment of the Indian has been so barbarous that this sagacious and Christian policy of the first Puritans calls for the highest praise and reveals another valuable trait in the heroic character of the Fathers.

That first winter at Naumkeag was a severe test of the fortitude of the Puritans. They suffered from lack of sufficient food and adequate shelter, and many died from disease. In their great need Governor Endicott wrote to Governor Bradford and asked that a physician be sent to them from the Plymouth settlement. Soon Dr. Fuller came and not only ministered to the sick, but in many conversations with Endicott and his companions doubtless prepared the way for their adoption of the Congregational or Independent form of church. The Pilgrims had withdrawn from the Church of England, averse to its ritual and discipline, and were known as Separatists. Even before their arrival at Plymouth they instituted the Congregational form of worship and discipline which they had already practised in England and Holland. But the Puritans at Naumkeag had intended to reform and not to give up the Anglican liturgy to which they were attached by tradition and sentiment. The Episcopal or the Congregational order of service was a momentous issue in these formative months and it is significant that on Dr. Fuller’s return to Plymouth Endicott wrote to Bradford: “I am by him satisfied, touching your judgement of the outward form of God’s worship; it is, as far as I can yet gather, no other than is warranted by the evidence of truth.”

In the following spring four hundred immigrants and four Non-conformist clergymen, among them Francis Higginson and Samuel Skelton, arrived and steps were then taken for the formal organization of the church. In the contract the English company made with the Rev. Francis Higginson there is another evidence of its generous and enlightened policy. He was to receive £30 for his outfit, £10 for books and £30 per annum for three years. In addition, the company was to find him a house, food, and wood for that period, to transport himself and family, and to bring them back to England at the expiration of the time if it should then be his wish. He was also to have one hundred acres of land, and if he died his wife and children were to be maintained while on the plantation.

At this time the Indian name Naumkeag was given up and the settlement took its present name of Salem, an abbreviation of Jerusalem and meaning, as every one knows, Peace. The important event was the organization of the church. Services had been held during the winter, perhaps in that “faire house” of the Governors, and doubtless the whole or parts of the Anglican liturgy had been used. A radical change now occurred. After suitable preparation by prayer and fasting the ministers were examined to test their fitness for the office, and then by a written ballot, the first use of the ballot in this country, Samuel Skelton was elected pastor and Francis Higginson teacher or assistant pastor. Then Mr. Higginson and “three or four of the gravest members of the church” laid their hands upon the head of Mr. Skelton, and with appropriate prayer installed him as minister of this first Puritan (as distinguished from the Pilgrim) church in America. Afterwards, by a similar imposition of hands and prayer by Mr. Skelton, Mr. Higginson was installed as teacher. The Plymouth church had been invited to send delegates, and as one of them Governor Bradford came, delayed by a storm, but in time to offer the right hand of fellowship. Thirty names were signed to the following covenant and the First Church of Salem was organized: “We covenant with the Lord and with one another, and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all His ways, according as He is pleased to reveal Himself unto us in His blessed word of truth.” The deed was done. The Congregational creed and polity were adopted and the church that for more than two centuries dominated New England thought and life was established in Salem.

For several years the youthful church met in a private house. But in 1634 the colonists were ready to build the “meeting-house” and the small, bare edifice, built of logs and boasting a thatched roof and stone chimney, was soon erected. “A poor thing, but mine own,” the Puritan might have said as he recalled the venerable and beautiful cathedrals of the mother-country. But the Puritan doubtless never quoted Shakespeare. It is more probable that he thought of the tabernacle with which the chosen people journeyed in the wilderness, long before Solomon’s temple crowned Mount Moriah, and rejoiced that the House of the Lord was at last set up in their midst. The sinewy oak timbers of this ancient building, within modern roof and walls, still remain, one of the most impressive monuments of this ancient town. Its size, 20 x 17 feet, makes one somewhat skeptical of the familiar statement that everybody went to church in the good old times. But I doubt not that both floor and gallery were well filled Sundays and at the great Thursday lecture, although on both days the preacher had the privilege, to modern divines denied, of reversing his hour-glass after the sand had run out and, secure of his congregation, deliberately proceeding to his “Finally, Brethren.” On one side sat the men, on the other the women and small children, each in his proper place, determined by wealth or public office. Even in that religious age four men, it appears, were appointed to prevent the boys from running downstairs before the Benediction was pronounced, while the constable, armed with a long pole tipped with a fox’s tail, was always at hand to rouse the drowsy or inattentive. There was at each service a collection. Only church-members could vote at the town-meetings, held at first in the new meeting-house, but every householder was taxed for the support of the church.

In 1630, John Winthrop, the newly appointed Governor of the Colony, accompanied by several hundred persons, came to Salem. Disappointed in the place, they soon moved to Charlestown, and there established the seat of government. From that date Salem took the second place in the Colony, but always maintained, then as now, an independent, public-spirited life.

Hither came, in 1634, Roger Williams, after the vicissitudes in those days experienced by an original and outspoken man. After the

death of Mr. Higginson, he became the minister of the First Church. The original timbers of his dwelling-house, dating from 1635, are still to be seen, more ancient than the ancient roof and walls that cover them, and reveal faded characters of the Puritan palimpsest. A double interest attaches to this venerable building, since as the residence of Judge Corwin tradition has made it the scene of some of the preliminary examinations in the witch trials. But the wanderings of Roger Williams were not yet ended. His attacks upon the authority of the magistrates as well as his controversies with the ministers brought him under the condemnation of the General Court. Though the Salem church resisted, it was obliged to part with its minister who quitted Massachusetts under sentence of banishment, to become the Founder of Rhode Island. A remarkable man was Roger Williams, of great gifts and singular purity of conscience, but his inflexible spirit, opposed to the theocratic rule of ministers and magistrates, was wisely set at constructive work in another colony.

This was the eventful age of Puritanism in the mother-country and in the colonies. All that we read of the austere piety and social restraints of the Puritan theocracy is found in this period from 1629 to 1700. Much might be said of the growth of Salem in population and wealth and influence in this century, but there is no time to tell the story in a single chapter. We come at once to the close of the century when the old town earned an unenviable notoriety by the tragic affair known as the Witchcraft Delusion.

We must think of Salem in 1692 as a town of 1700 inhabitants, in a delightful situation on Massachusetts Bay, almost encircled by sea-water, while at the west stretched away the vast forest, broken here and there by large plantations or farms which it was the policy of the Governor to grant to those who would undertake the pioneer work of cultivation. These farms, widely scattered, were known as Salem Village, and at a place a few miles from Salem, now known as Danvers Centre, there was a little group of farmhouses surrounding a church, of which the Rev. Samuel Parris was minister. In this family were two slaves, John and Tituba, whom he had brought from the West Indies, and two children, his daughter Elizabeth, nine years old, and his niece Abigail Williams, eleven years of age. In the winter of 1691-92 these children startled the neighborhood by their unaccountable performances, creeping under tables, assuming strange and painful attitudes, and uttering inarticulate cries. At times they fell into convulsions and uttered piercing shrieks. Dr. Griggs, the local physician, declared the children bewitched, and this explanation was soon after confirmed by a council of the ministers held at Mr. Parris’s house.

Absurd as such an explanation seems to us, it must be remembered that, with rare exceptions, every one at that time believed in witchcraft. It found an apparent confirmation in the text, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus xxii., 18), and the great legal authorities of England, Bacon, Blackstone, Coke, Selden, and Matthew Hale, had given decisions implying the fact of witchcraft and indicating the various degrees of guilt. It was easier to accept this explanation since executions for this crime had already taken place at Charlestown, Dorchester, Cambridge, Hartford and Springfield. Governor Winthrop, Governor Bradstreet and Governor Endicott had each sentenced a witch to death. Governor Endicott had pronounced judgment upon a person so important as Mistress Ann Hibbins, widow of a rich merchant and the sister of Governor Bellingham, familiar to us all in the pages of The Scarlet Letter. A few years before, Cotton Mather, the distinguished young divine of Boston, had published a work affirming his belief in witchcraft and detailing his study of some bewitched children in Charlestown, one of whom he had taken into his own family the better to observe.

It is not surprising, therefore, that these young girls, instead of being punished for mischievous conduct or treated for nervous derangement, were pitied as the victims of some malevolent persons and urged to name their tormentors. Encouraged by the verdict of physician and ministers, countenanced by Mr. Parris and the church-members, these “afflicted children,” as they and some other girls and women similarly affected in the village were now called, began their accusations. The first persons mentioned were Tituba, the Indian slave, Goody Osborn, a bedridden woman whose mind was affected by many troubles, physical and mental, and Sarah Good, a friendless, forlorn creature, looked upon as a vagrant.

In March, 1692, the first examinations were held in the meeting-house in Salem Village, John Hawthorne, ancestor of the novelist, and Jonathan Corwin acting as magistrates. The accused did not receive fair treatment—their guilt was assumed from the first, no counsel was allowed, the judges even bullied them to force a confession. The evidence against them, as in all the following cases, was “spectral evidence,” as it was called. It consisted of the assertions of the children that they were tortured whenever the accused looked at them, choked, pinched, beaten, or pricked with the pins which they produced from their mouths or clothing, and in one instance, at least, stabbed by a knife the broken blade of which was shown by the “afflicted child.” In one or two cases the children were convicted of deception, as in the case of the broken knife-blade. A young man present testified that he had broken the knife himself and had thrown away the useless blade in the presence of the accusing girl. But with merely a reprimand from the judge and the injunction not to tell lies, the girls were permitted to make their monstrous charges against the men and women who stood amazed, indignant, helpless, before accusations they could only deny, not refute.

In this first trial Tituba confessed that under threats from Satan, who had most often appeared to her as a man in black accompanied by a yellow bird, she had tortured the girls, and named as her accomplices the two women, Good and Osborn. After the trial, which took place a little later in Salem, Tituba was sent to the Boston jail, where she remained until the delusion was over. She was then sold to pay the expenses of her imprisonment, and is lost to history. The other women were sent to the Salem jail, which they left only for their execution the following July.

The community felt a sense of relief after the confession of Tituba and the imprisonment of the other women. It was hoped Satan’s power was checked. But on the contrary the power of the devil was to be shown in a far more impressive manner. The “afflicted children” continued to suffer and soon began to accuse men and women of unimpeachable lives. Within a few months several hundred people in Salem, Andover and Boston were arrested and thrown into the jails at Salem, Ipswich, Cambridge and Boston. As Governor Hutchinson, an historian of the time, stated, the only way to prevent an accusation was to become an accuser. The state of affairs resembled the Reign of Terror in France a century later, when men of property and position lived in fear of being regarded as “a suspect.”

For the thrilling story of these trials and their wretched victims the student should turn to Mr. Upham’s authoritative and popular volumes upon Salem Witchcraft. The reader can never forget the tragic fate of the venerable Rebecca Nurse, George Burroughs, a former clergyman of the church in Salem Village, and the other victims. Here we can review only the trial of the Corey family, a fitting climax to this scene of horror.

Two weeks after the trial of Tituba and her companions, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Martha Corey, aged sixty, the third wife of Giles Corey, a well-known citizen. She was a woman of unusual strength of character and from the first denounced the witchcraft excitement, trying to persuade her husband who believed all the monstrous stories, not to attend the hearings or in any way countenance the proceedings. Perhaps it was her well-known opinion that directed suspicion to her. At her trial the usual performance was enacted. The girls fell on the floor, uttered piercing shrieks, cried out upon their victim. “There is a man whispering in her ear!” one of them suddenly called out. “What does he say to you?” the judge demanded of Martha Corey, accepting without any demur this “spectral evidence.” “We must not believe all these distracted children say,” was her sensible answer. But good sense did not preside at the witch trials. She was convicted and not long afterward executed. Her husband’s evidence went against her and is worth noting as fairly representative of much of the testimony that convicted the nineteen victims of this delusion:

“One evening I was sitting by the fire when my wife asked me to go to bed. I told her I would go to prayer, and when I went to prayer I could not utter my desires with any sense, not open my mouth to speak. After a little space I did according to my measure attend the duty. Some time last week I fetched an ox well out of the woods about noon, and he laying down in the yard, I went to raise him to yoke him, but he could not rise, but dragged his hinder parts as if he had been hip shot, but after did rise. I had a cat some time last week strongly taken on the sudden, and did make me think she would have died presently. My wife bid me knock her in the head, but I did not and since she is well. My wife hath been wont to sit up after I went to bed, and I have perceived her to kneel down as if she were at prayer, but heard nothing.”

It is hard to believe that such statements, most probable events interpreted in the least probable manner, should have had any judicial value whatever. Yet it is precisely such a mixture of superstition and stupid speculation about unusual or even daily incidents that was regularly brought forward and made to tell against the accused.

Soon after his wife’s arrest Giles Corey himself was arrested, taken from his mill and brought before the judges of the special court, appointed by Governor Phipps but held in Salem, to hear the witch trials. Again the accusing girls went through their performance, again the judges assumed the guilt of the accused, and tried to browbeat a confession from him. But in the interval between his arrest and trial this old man of eighty had had abundant leisure for reflection. He was sure not only of his own innocence but of his wife’s as well, and it must have been a bitter thought that his own testimony had helped convict her. Partly as an atonement for this offense and partly to save his property for his children, which he could not have done if he had been convicted of witchcraft, after pleading “not guilty” he remained mute, refusing to add the necessary technical words that he would be tried “by God and his country.” Deaf alike to the entreaties of his friends and the threats of the Court, he was condemned to the torture of peine forte et dure, the one instance when this old English penalty for contumacy was enforced in New England. According to the law the aged man was laid on his back, a board was placed on his body with as great a weight upon it as he could endure, while his sole diet consisted of a few morsels of bread one day and a draught of water the alternate day, until death put an end to his sufferings.

The execution of eight persons on Gallows Hill three days later, September 22, were the last to occur in the Colony. Accusations were still made, trials were held, more people were thrown into jail. But there were no more executions, and the next spring there was, according to Hutchinson, such a jail delivery as was never seen before.

“The smith filed off the chains he forged,
The jail bolts backward fell;
And youth and hoary age came forth
Like souls escaped from hell.”

The tragedy was at an end. It lasted about six months, from the first accusations in March until the last executions in September. Nineteen persons had been hanged, and one man pressed to death. There is no foundation for the statement that witches were burned. No one was ever burned in New England for witchcraft or any other crime. But hundreds of innocent men and women were thrown into jail or obliged to flee to some place of concealment, their homes were broken up, their property injured, while they suffered great anxiety for themselves and friends.

It was an epidemic of mad, superstitious fear, bitterly to be regretted, and a stain upon the high civilization of the Bay Colony. It is associated with Salem, but several circumstances are to be taken into consideration. First of all, note the fact that while the victims were residents of Essex County, of Salem and vicinity, and the trials were held in Salem, yet the special court that tried them was appointed by the Governor; the Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony, Stoughton, presided; and Boston ministers, notably Cotton Mather, the influential minister of the North Church, were interested observers. Boston as well as Salem is responsible for the tragedy. In the second place, remember that this dramatic event with all its frightful consequences led to a more rational understanding of the phenomena of witchcraft. By a natural revulsion of feeling future charges of witchcraft were regarded with suspicion, “spectral evidence” was disallowed, and there were no more executions for this crime in New England.

Various explanations of the conduct of the “afflicted children” have been offered. One writer has suggested that they began their proceedings in jest but, partly from fear of punishment if they confessed, partly from an exaggerated sense of their own importance, they continued to make charges against men and women whom they heard their elders mention as probable witches. In that little settlement there were property disputes, a church quarrel, jealousies, rivalries, and much misunderstanding, which had their influence. Another writer lays stress upon “hypnotic influence” and believes these young girls and nervous women were improperly influenced by malevolent persons, probably John and Tituba the Indian slaves. But a more natural explanation is that they were the victims of hystero-epilepsy, a nervous disease not so well understood in the past as to-day, which has at times convulsed the orderly life of a school or convent, and even a whole community. Then, too, the belief in witchcraft was general. Striking coincidences, personal eccentricities, unusual events and mysterious diseases seemed to find an easy explanation in an unholy compact with the devil. A witticism attributed to Judge Sewall, one of the judges in these trials, may help us to understand the common panic: “We know who’s who but not which is witch.” That was the difficulty. At a time when every one believed in witchcraft it was easy to suspect one’s neighbor. It was a characteristic superstition of the century and should be classed with the barbarous punishments and religious intolerance of the age.

Eventually, justice, so far as possible, was done to the survivors. The Legislature voted pecuniary compensations and the church excommunications were rescinded. Ann Putnam, one of the more prominent of the “afflicted children,” confessed her error and prayed for divine forgiveness. Rev. Samuel Parris offered an explanation that might be considered an apology. Judge Sewall, noblest of all the civil and ecclesiastical authorities implicated in this tragedy, stood up in the great congregation, Fast Day, in the South Church, Boston, and acknowledged his error in accepting “spectral evidence.”

“Spell and charm had power no more,
The spectres ceased to roam,
And scattered households knelt again
Around the hearths of home.”

Salem grew in wealth and population slowly but substantially. In 1765 there were only 4469 inhabitants. With the rest of the Colony she was putting forth her strength in the French-Indian wars and also resisting what she termed the usurpations of the Royalist governors or English Parliament. It was a public-spirited as well as high-spirited life. Soldiers and bounties and supplies were generously furnished for the wars. Pirates were captured or driven from the coast. A valuable commerce was developed, churches were built and schools increased. In 1768 the Essex Gazette was founded, with the motto, “Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci,”—a motto that measures the social changes from the time of Endicott and Williams.

The citizens of Salem were not wanting in patriotism or courage in the years immediately preceding the Revolution. They met in the old town-house to protest against the Stamp Act, to denounce the tax on tea and the closing of Boston port, and in 1774, in defiance of General Gage, to elect delegates to the First Continental Congress about to meet in Concord. As early as 1767 a committee had been appointed “to draft a subscription paper for promoting industry, economy and manufactures in Salem, and thereby prevent the unnecessary importation of European commodities which threaten the country with poverty and ruin.” The report of the committee was not accepted but the movement was characteristic of the attitude of Salem.

A just claim is made that the first armed resistance to the British government was made

in Salem at the North Bridge, Sunday, February 26, 1775, when the citizens assembled and took their stand on the north bank of the river to prevent Colonel Leslie and his three hundred soldiers from marching into North Fields in search of cannon supposed to be concealed there. The British officer thought of firing upon the citizens who, after crossing the bridge, had raised the draw and now stood massed on the opposite bank. But a townsman, Captain John Felt, said to the irate officer who had looked for an unimpeded march, “If you do fire you will all be dead men.” His prompt utterance appears to have restrained the firing. Tradition says that there was a struggle to capture some boats, one of which at least was scuttled. After an hour and a half of delay, in which time Rev. Mr. Barnard of the North Church was conspicuous for his moderate counsels, the vexed and defeated Colonel Leslie promised that if the draw were lowered and he were permitted to march his men over it a distance of thirty rods, he would then wheel about and leave the town, an agreement fairly carried out. A commemorative stone marks this place and significant event at the beginning of the Revolution.

The years from 1760 to the War of 1812 were the period of commercial prestige. At the beginning of the Revolution Washington turned to the coast towns for a navy, and Salem answered by furnishing at least 158 privateers. Many were the prizes brought into the harbor as the war continued, and, as a result of this seamanship, an immense impetus was given to ship-building and the development of foreign commerce. This may be called the romantic era in the life of the venerable town. At the close of the war the town could boast of its great merchants and adventurous captains whose vessels were found in every port. Where did they not go, these vessels owned by Derby, Gray, Forrester, Crowninshield, and many another well-known merchant!

Under the stern rule of Endicott the old Puritan town had banished Quakers and Baptists and Episcopalians, but in the early years of this century her sons were intimate with Buddhist and Mohammedan and Parsee merchants. In 1785 “Lord” Derby, as Hawthorne called him, sent out the Grand Turk which, nearly two years later, brought back the first cargo direct from Canton to New England. At this time it is with peculiar interest we read that in 1796 this same “Lord” Derby sent the Astrea to Manila, which returned the following year with a cargo of sugar, pepper and indigo upon which duties of over $24,000 were paid. That was the time when a sailing-vessel after a long voyage might enter the harbor any day, and therefore the boys of the town lay on the rocks at the Neck, eager to sight the incoming ship, and earn some pocket-money for their welcome news. Significant is the motto on the present city seal: Divitis Indiæ usque ad ultimum sinum. They were a hardy race—these Vikings of New England—bold, self-reliant, shrewd, prosperous, equally ready to fight or trade, as occasion might demand. The sailors of that day were the native sons of Salem, sturdy citizens, often well-to-do, who might have an “adventure” of several hundred dollars aboard to invest in tea or sugar or indigo. At fourteen or fifteen the Salem boy went out in the cabin of his father’s vessel, at twenty he was captain, at forty he had retired and in his stately mansion enjoyed the wealth and leisure he had bravely and quickly earned. In 1816 Cleopatra’s Barge, a vessel