THE TOWNS
I
Whether just or not, the summary punishment dealt out by Standish all
but destroyed the natives’ confidence in the whites; and as such a
situation was particularly bad for trade, the whites, too, got their
reward. Yet the Indians, when occasion offered, were ready to be
kind. In December, 1626, the ship Sparrowhawk, London to Virginia,
as far out of her reckoning as the Mayflower had been, bumped over
the shoals of Monomoyick and grounded on the flats. Her master was
ill, crew and passengers knew not where they were, and being out of
“wood, water, and beer,” had run her, head on, for the first land
that hove in sight. Night was falling, and as canoes made out from
the shore, “they stood on their guard.” But the Indians gave them a
friendly hail, asked if they were “the governor of Plymouth’s men,”
offered to carry letters to Plymouth, and supplied their needs of
the moment. Plymouth duly notified, the Governor led out a relief
expedition, and, it being no season to round the Cape, landed at
Namskaket, a creek between Brewster and Orleans, “whence it was not
much above two miles across the Cape to the bay where the ship lay.
The Indians carried the things we brought overland to the ship.” The
Governor bought corn from the natives for the strangers, loaded more
for his own use, and returned to Plymouth. But hardly was he there
than a second message came that the ship, fitted out to proceed,
had been shattered by a great storm; and the upshot was that the
travellers, bag and baggage, came to Plymouth and visited there until
the spring. The region of the wreck was called “Old Ship Harbor,” men
had forgotten why until, two hundred and thirty-seven years later,
shifting sands disclosed the hull of the Sparrowhawk. And at another
time the natives had opportunity to show their good-will when Richard
Garratt and his company from Boston, which was rival of Plymouth for
the native corn supply, were cast away on the Cape in a bitter winter
storm; and all would have perished there had it not been for the
savages who decently buried the dead, though the ground was frozen
deep, and, having nursed the survivors back to life, guided them to
Plymouth.
Plymouth trade, not Only with the mother country, but with other
colonies, grew apace. As early as 1627, in order to facilitate
communication to the southward with the Indians and with the Dutch
settlement on the Hudson, the Pilgrims may be said to have made the
first move toward a Cape Cod Canal. “To avoid the compassing of
Cape Cod and those dangerous shoals,” wrote Bradford, “and so to
make any voyage to the southward in much shorter time and with less
danger,” they established a trading post with a farm to support it,
and built a pinnace, at Manomet on the river flowing into Buzzard’s
Bay. Their route lay by boat from Plymouth to Scusset Harbor, where
they landed their goods for a portage overland of three or four miles
to the navigable waters of the river and the coasting vessel there.
And in September of that same year, Isaac de Rasieres, secretary of
the Dutch Government at New Amsterdam, landed at Manomet with sugar,
stuffs, and other commodities, and was duly convoyed to Plymouth
in a vessel sent out by the Governor for such purpose. De Rasieres
entered Plymouth in state, “honorably attended by the noise of his
trumpeters,” and wrote a fine account of the town which is preserved
for our interest.
The colony, by 1637, had grown to comprise the towns of Plymouth,
Duxbury, and Scituate; in no long time it included the present
counties of Plymouth, Bristol, and Barnstable, and a bit of Rhode
Island. Traders, fishermen, an adventurer now and again had visited
the Cape, even a few settlers, unauthorized by Plymouth, had broken
ground there; but up to 1637 its early history is indissolubly bound
up with that of Plymouth. In April of that year the first settlement
was organized at Sandwich when certain men of Saugus, who were of a
broader mind than their neighbors of Massachusetts Bay, wished to
emigrate to the milder rule of Plymouth. Under due restrictions,
they were granted the privilege to “view a place to sit down, and
have sufficient land for three score families.” They chose Sandwich.
And with the first ten of Saugus came fifty others of Saugus and
Duxbury and Plymouth. All was duly regulated; and two men who were
found clearing ground without permission, and without having
fetched their families, were charged with “disorderly keeping house
alone.” If the Saugus men expected a free hand in their new home,
they were to be undeceived: the chief ordering of their affairs was
from Plymouth, and in 1638 certain prominent townsmen were fined as
“being deficient in arms” and for not having their swine ringed.
It was the law of the colony “that no persons shall be allowed to
become housekeepers until they are completely provided with arms and
ammunition; nor shall any be allowed to become housekeepers, or to
build any cottage or dwelling, without permission from the governor
and assistants.” Rightly, no doubt, Plymouth meant to avoid the
danger of any such disorderly element as had infested Weymouth.
[Illustration: A FIRST COMER]
In March John Alden and Miles Standish were directed to go to
Sandwich, “with all convenient speed, and set forth the bounds of
the land granted there.” In October Thomas Prince and again Miles
Standish were appointed to pass upon questions affecting land tenure.
Complaint, however, seems to have been then not so much in regard to
the division of land as to certain members of the community who were
deemed “unfit for church society.” And for the adjustment of future
dangers, “evils or discords that may happen in the disposal of lands
or other occasions within the town,” it was agreed that some one of
the Governor’s Council should sit, in an advisory capacity, with the
town committee to determine who should be permitted to hold land.
John Alden and Miles Standish served many times as such advisers; in
1650 Standish received a tract of some forty acres for his trouble
in settling land disputes. It is interesting that Freeman, historian
of Cape Cod, claims Priscilla Mullins for Barnstable, and allows us
to suppose that the visits there of Alden and Standish led to the
acquaintance that ended in the discomfiture of Standish, and to the
particular glory of Priscilla, with her thrust: “Why don’t you speak
for yourself, John?” Another love story is told by Amos Otis, in
his “Barnstable Families,” of Thomas Hatch, who was among the first
landowners in Yarmouth and Barnstable, a widower and rival with
another for the hand of a neighbor’s daughter. All three were expert
reapers, and Grace agreed to marry the man who should worst her in
the field. Three equal portions were set off and the contest began;
but when Grace saw that she was likely to come out ahead, with Thomas
a bad third, she slyly cut over into his plot; and he, fired by such
encouragement, justified her favor.
The system of government and land tenure in the later settlements
were patterned after Plymouth: there were individual holdings of
land and common lands which from time to time were apportioned to
the townsmen, not only in accord with “necessity and ability,” but
“estate and quality”: fertile ground, one might guess, for difference
of opinion. By 1651, at Sandwich, “the conditions on which the
grant of the township was made having been fulfilled, a deed of the
plantation was executed by Governor Bradford to Mr. Edmund Freeman,
who made conveyance to his associates,” a process which resembled the
taking over of Plymouth from the Merchant Adventurers of London.
Within a few years, on the general conditions of settlement granted
to Sandwich, the four original townships of the Cape came into
being. Scattering colonists had broken the ground. In 1638 “liberty
was granted to Stephen Hopkins [one of the Mayflower men] to erect
a house at Mattacheese and cut hay there this year to winter his
cattle—provided, however, that it be not to withdraw him from the
town of Plymouth.” Two other men were granted a like privilege. The
rich salt meadows of the Cape were coveted by Plymouth for cattle,
which seem to have been brought over from England first by Edward
Winslow in a voyage made in 1624; and it was not uncommon later for
cattle to be sent out to the colony as a speculation, for one half
the profits of their increase.
In the early winter of 1637-38 an attempt at settlement was made in a
portion of Barnstable known as “Old Town,” by one Stephen Batchelor,
who for some twenty years was a stormy petrel among the clergy of
New England. In 1632, at the age of seventy-one, lured no doubt by
the hope of freedom—there were not lacking those who accused him of
license—he had arrived in Boston and went on to Lynn, where he was
soon in trouble with the authorities. “The cause,” writes Governor
Winthrop, “was for that coming out from England with a small body
of six or seven persons, and having since received in many more
at Saugus”—in short, his flavor of liberalism did not please the
elders, and after a long wrangle, upon his “promise to remove out of
town within three months he was discharged.” It is said that among
the settlers at Sandwich were some relatives of his little flock;
and whether for that reason or not, in the bitter cold of an early
winter, he led them, on foot, the weary hundred miles from Lynn to
Mattacheesett. But the settlement, rashly undertaken, was not a
success, and in the spring Batchelor was off to Newbury. Thence he
went to Hampton and Exeter, and at eighty was formally excommunicated
by the Puritans. His life here had been “one constant scene of
turbulence, disappointment, discipline and accusation,” and home
again in England, in peace we may hope at the last, he died at the
age of ninety.
In 1639 came the formal permission to settle Yarmouth. Stephen
Hopkins’s farm was incorporated in the new settlement, and the
group of undertakers was headed by Anthony Thacher, who four years
previously had been cast away on Thacher’s Island, Cape Ann, in a
memorable storm. His children were among those lost; but he and his
wife, and, quaintly, a covering of embroidered scarlet broadcloth
that is still an heirloom in the family, were saved. Thacher had been
a curate of Saint Edmund’s, Salisbury, and after his tragic entry
into the country, had settled first at Newbury and then at Marblehead.
In the early part of 1639 lands in Barnstable were granted by
Plymouth on the usual terms; and in October of that year some
twenty-five families, under the leadership of the Reverend John
Lothrop, came there from Scituate that had become “too straite for
their accommodation,” a phrase which meant probably that in the
growing settlement grazing land was becoming restricted. Lothrop was
of notable personality. A man of Christ Church, Cambridge, he had
taken Anglican orders and then had gone over to the Independents
and had become the second pastor of their church in London. After
eight years there, he and fifty of his congregation were arrested
and imprisoned for two years; but in 1634, in company with some of
his former parishioners, he came to New England on the same ship, as
it chanced, with the famous Anne Hutchinson, whose chief offence,
in the days before persecution swung her mind awry, seems to have
been a disconcerting personal charm. It is reasonable to suppose
that Mr. Lothrop may not have enjoyed his long voyage the less by
reason of such a fellow-traveller. In December, 1639, there was held
at Barnstable, the first thanksgiving service, which resembled an
earlier celebration of the same congregation at Scituate, when after
prayer and praise, so Mr. Lothrop informs us, there was “then making
merry to the creatures.” At Barnstable, likewise, “the creatures”
were enjoyed when the congregation divided into “three companies to
feast together, some at Mr. Hull’s, some at Mr. Mayo’s, and some at
Brother Lumbard, senior’s.” Lothrop was a man of vigorous mind, with
some worldly wisdom as befitted a pioneer, “prudent and discreet”;
he was learned, tolerant, kindly, typical of the early leaders in
town affairs. It was those of the second and third generation, when
the fires of consecration had burned low and the influence of
Massachusetts Bay was potent, who baited their heretics; and then
men said of old Elder Dimmock of Barnstable that he kept to the
teachings of his beloved pastor, John Lothrop, and “if his neighbor
was an Anabaptist, or a Quaker, he did not judge him, because he held
that to be a prerogative of Deity which man had no right to assume.”
Lothrop’s church members needed to sign no creed or confession of
faith: they professed belief in God and promised their endeavor to
keep His commands, to live a pure life, and to walk in love with
their brothers.
Lothrop’s ministry at Barnstable had its smaller difficulties that
are not peculiar to his time. Of a jealous, backbiting woman he
writes: “Wee had long patience towards her, and used all courteous
intreatyes and persuations; but the longer wee waited, the worse
she was.” The woman, “as confidently as if she had a spirit of
Revelation,” kept to her slanders: “Mrs. Dimmock was proud, and
went about telling lies,” so did Mrs. Wells; and Mr. Lothrop and
Elder Cobb “did talk of her” when they went to see Mr. Huckins.
At their wits’ end to stop her slanders, they very likely held
counsel regarding her. She was “perremtorye in all her carriages,”
the harried parson affirms, and finally, in 1649, milder measures
exhausted, she was excommunicated. Another trouble-maker had come
with the first settlers from Scituate. He had the training of a
gentleman and knew some Latin, we are informed, but was a vulgar
creature and obstreperous of manner. He, too, was excommunicated,
among the lesser reasons given therefor that he was “much given to
Idleness, and too much jearing,” and “observed alsoe by some to bee
somewhat proud.” Lothrop, in his record, adds that William Caseley
“took it patiently,” which, belike, was but another manifestation of
William Caseley’s arrogance.
Lothrop kept in touch with affairs across the water; and on March
4, 1652, appointed a day of “thanksgiving for the Lord’s powerful
working for Old England by Oliver Cromwell and his army, against the
Scots.” He loved his books, and by his will, in 1653, gave one to
each child in the village, and directed that the remainder be sold
“to any honest man who could tell how to use it.” His house is still
used for a library.
Another bequest of public import was that of Andrew Hallett, of
Yarmouth, first of the name, who left a heifer and her progeny, from
year to year, to the use of the most needy in the town, no mean loan
at a time when a cow was worth a farmstead. Hallett, in the precise
classification of the day, was rated among the few “gentlemen.” He
speculated in land as did the best of his neighbors, from parson to
cobbler, and was no stranger to contests at law. His son Andrew,
though a gentleman’s son, did not learn to write until he came to
Yarmouth. He bought of Gyles Hopkins a house which without doubt was
that built by Stephen in 1638, the first built here by whites—a poor
thing, very likely: for it was said that some of the Indian wigwams
were more comfortable than many houses built by the English. But
in no long time Hallett was building another house more in keeping
with his estate; and of one of his descendants in the mid-eighteen
hundreds the gracious memory was preserved that he delighted in
keeping “great fires on his hearth.” Andrew Hallett, the younger,
unlike his father, seems to have kept clear of legal entanglements,
and though a member of the Yarmouth church, preferred at times to sit
under the gentler teaching of Mr. Lothrop of Barnstable.
The Reverend Marmaduke Matthews, first minister of Yarmouth, was a
fiery Welshman, witty, but indiscreet in his speech, who kept his
parish in hot water for the six years of his tenure. He quarrelled
with the constable; again, four of his opponents were haled before
the court as “scoffers and jeerers at religion and making disorders
at town meeting,” and were acquitted. Some schismatics tried to
form a new society under Mr. Hull, who had been supplanted in the
Barnstable church by Mr. Lothrop, but was still a member thereof;
whereupon, perplexingly, Barnstable excommunicated him for “wilfully
breaking his communion with us, and joining a company in Yarmouth to
be their pastor contrary to the counsel and advice of our church.”
Hull made an “acknowledgment of sin,” was reinstated, but soon
after went to Dover. Lothrop was now supreme at Barnstable, but
Yarmouth was not at peace, and under Matthews’s successor, John
Miller, another Cambridge man, matters came to the pass of calling a
council of conciliation drawn from the distinguished clergy of the
two colonies—John Eliot of Roxbury among them—to pass upon these
ecclesiastical difficulties.
In 1644 came the settlement of Eastham: indeed, there had been some
talk of transferring the seat of government thither. There had been
growing dissatisfaction with Plymouth; some said that they “had
pitched upon a spot whose soil was poor and barren,” and Nauset had
long been known to them as a granary whence they drew many of their
supplies. On further reflection the place was judged too cramped and
too out of the way for a capital town; but seven families of Plymouth
adhering to their wish to remove there, land was purchased from the
Indians, and a grant was made to them of “all the tract of land lying
between sea and sea, from the purchasers’ bounds at Namskaket to the
herring brook at Billingsgate, with the said herring brook and all
the meadows on both sides the said brook, with the great bass-pond
there, and all the meadows and islands lying within said tract.”
Among the men coming to Eastham was Thomas Prince, who had come over
in the Fortune, and married for his first wife the daughter of Elder
Brewster. Prince took up a farm of two hundred acres, that ran from
sea to bay, and later when he was elected Governor a dispensation
was made in his case, as the law held that the Governor should be a
resident of Plymouth. In 1665, however, public affairs forced him
to return to the capital, but he still held his Eastham farm. Those
who knew Prince testified that “he was a terror to evil-doers, and
he encouraged all that did well.” Among “evil-doers” there is reason
to believe he included men of other theological views than his
own. But the colony elected him three times its governor, and the
Plymouth Church set the seal of its approval on his administration.
“He was excellently qualified for the office of Governor. He had a
countenance full of majesty.”
Here, then, were the original four townships, extending from
Buzzard’s Bay to the Province Lands; and it is particularly
fortunate, no doubt, that these settlements sufficiently isolated
the Indian communities of the Cape before the great conflagration
of King Philip’s War, when any concentration of fire there would
have been a troublesome matter for the colonists to handle. In 1685,
when the colony was divided into its three counties, four more
villages—Falmouth, Harwich, Truro, and Chatham—are mentioned, but not
until some years later were they set off and incorporated as towns.
Later still Dennis, Brewster, Orleans, and Wellfleet were divided
from the mother townships, and in 1727 the Province Lands at the tip
of the Cape were incorporated as Provincetown, with certain peculiar
rights therein reserved to the Government.
The setting-off of Brewster, previously the North Parish of Harwich,
in 1803, led to an amusing complication that illustrates the fine
stiff-necked obstinacy of these men of “the bull-dog breed.” A battle
royal was waged between those who did and those who did not advocate
the division; and finally the best possible compromise to be had
was that he who would not budge from his old allegiance should be
permitted his citizenship there, though his estate should lie in the
new. Harwich was divided; in the process the new town was splashed
with angry patches of the old, and more than one conservative of the
North Parish found his freehold tied to the mother town only by a
ribbon of winding road. Such a one looked from his windows across
jewelled marshes to the alien waters of the bay; and on election day,
turning his back on home, crossed the trig waist of the Cape, and
cast his ballot in the town set on the sandy inlets of the sea.
II
The general grounds of contention, ecclesiastical and
political,—questions of land tenure and fishing rights, the
division and government of parishes,—remained for the children and
grandchildren of the first settlers. It was not that they were a
quarrelsome people, but, rather, that they had a healthy, vivid,
proprietary interest in the civic and religious development of their
common life. Every man in a town had his criticism for each act
of the General Court, for the management of his neighbor, and the
religious slant of his minister; every man expressed his personal
view of the general comity in no uncertain words, with a result that
sometimes presented a picture of confusion when it was in reality no
more than the process of boiling down to a good residuum. Nor has
this early spirit died. The strongly protestant temper of the Pilgrim
Fathers has survived in their descendants; even to-day if one alien
to the community penetrates beneath the tranquil surface of things
commotion may be discovered. And from time to time, one may venture
to suppose, a spirit of joyful wrangling has swung through this town
or that when the pugnacious Briton has cropped out in men finer tuned
by a more stimulating atmosphere, who waged the combat not always for
righteousness’ sake, but for pure pleasure of pitching into the other
fellow.
In the early days, at any rate, there was some scope for the talent
of an arbiter, and in the Reverend Thomas Walley who, after a stormy
interval of ten years, followed Mr. Lothrop in the pastorate of
Barnstable, his people had cause for gratitude as “the Lord was
pleased to make him a blessed peacemaker and improve him in the work
of his house.” In 1669 Mr. Walley carried his peacemaking farther
afield, and preached before the General Court a sermon entitled “Balm
of Gilead to Heal Zion’s Wounds.” Among other wounds were listed
the “burning fever or fires of contention in towns and churches.”
Occasionally outside powers took a hand in these difficulties and
the Boston clergy were called into council. And shortly after the
incumbency of Walley, when one Mr. Bowles seems to have officiated at
Barnstable for a time, John Cotton wrote thus to Governor Hinckley
at Plymouth: “This last week came such uncomfortable tidings from
Barnstable hither, that I knew not how to satisfy myself without
troubling you with a few lines.... It does indeed appear strange
with men wiser than myself that such discouragements should attend
Mr. Bowles.... I need tell you, worthy sir, that it is a dying time
with preachers ... and there is great likelihood of scarcity of
ministers.” And so on, in favor of Mr. Bowles.
Schism, pure and simple, sometimes clove a church asunder, and
the dissenters, under the man of their choice, retired to form
a new parish; but natural division came about as a settlement
spread to the more remote parts of a township. Such a group might
remain a subdivision “within the liberties” of the mother town,
but as frequently the younger parish became the nucleus of a
growing settlement that might, in turn, be duly incorporated as a
town. Nor was the process likely to be consummated without some
heartburning. In 1700 the Reverend Jonathan Russell of Barnstable
sent a tart communication to the town meeting that had divided his
parish and desired his pleasure as to a choice of churches. “On
divers accounts,” wrote Mr. Russell, “it seems most natural for me
to abide in the premises where I now am; yet since there is such
a number who are so prejudiced or disaffected or so sett against
my being there”—in short, being a wise man, he elected peace and
chose “the Western Settlement if it may by any means comfortably be
obtained.” And Mr. Russell took occasion to remind the parish that
he should require some provision for “firewood or an Equivalent,
having formerly, on first settlement, been encouraged by principal
Inhabitants to expect it.”
These early clergymen were usually Cambridge or Oxford men, the
liberals of their time, sure to stand for the encouragement of
learning among the simple people with whom they had cast their lot.
And whether or not by their influence, the sons of those who had set
their names to the Compact were ready in 1670 to make some provision
for schools. Looking about for a source of revenue, they perceived
that “the Providence of God hath made Cape Cod commodious to us for
fishing with seines,” and thus encouraged the General Court passed
an act that taxed the fishing, and, further, contained the germ of
our public school system: “All such profits as may and shall accrue
annually to the colony from fishing with nets or seines at Cape Cod
for mackerel, bass, or herring to be improved for and towards a free
school in some town in this jurisdiction, for the training up of
youth in literature for the good and benefit of posterity.” And the
colony continued its work by requiring that children should be taught
“duely to read the Scriptures, the knowledge of the capital laws, and
the main principles of religion necessary for salvation.” Idleness
was punished as a vice; wilful ignorance was an offence against
“the safety and dignity of the commonwealth.” Read into the simple
precepts what modern interpretations you will, and one finds the
elements necessary for training the citizens of a state to be justly
governed by the consent of the governed.
Less significant laws reached out to regulate the personal life of
the people: a talebearer was liable to penalty; a liar, a drunkard, a
Sabbath-breaker, a profane man might be whipped, branded, imprisoned,
or put in the stocks. It cost Nehemiah Besse five shillings to “drink
tobacco at the meeting-house in Sandwich on the Lord’s day.” For
the man taken in adultery there was a heavy fine and whipping; the
woman must wear her “scarlet letter,” and for any evasion the device
should be “burned in her face.” And to curb the spirit of “divers
persons, unfit for marriage, both in regard to their years and also
their weak estate,” it was decreed that “if any man make motion of
marriage to any man’s daughter or maid without first obtaining leave
of her parents, guardian or master, he shall be punished by fine
not exceeding five pounds, or by corporal punishment, or both at
the discretion of the court.” As a sequence, it is written that a
Barnstable youth was placed under bonds “not to attempt to gain the
affections” of Elizabeth, daughter of Governor Prince. In Eastham a
man was mulcted a pound for lying about a whale; elsewhere one paid
five pounds for pretending to have a cure for scurvy. Men were had up
for profiteering when beer was sold at two shillings a quart which
was worth one, and boots and spurs which cost but ten shillings were
sold for fifteen. Certain leading citizens were licensed to “draw
wine”: Thomas Lumbert at Barnstable, and Henry Cobb; Anthony Thacher
at Yarmouth; at Sandwich Mr. Bodfish, and “when he is without, it
shall be lawful for William Newlands to sell wine to persons for
their need.” Constructive work was done in the way of building
roads and bridges, for which Plymouth was willing the towns should
pay; and a committee of the four Cape towns was appointed to draw
therefrom, for such funds, “the oil of the country.” Representative
government in the growing colony was practically coincident with
the incorporation of the Cape towns, which sent representatives to
the General Court and had local tribunals to settle disputes not
“exceeding twenty shillings.”
The people neither had nor needed sumptuary laws: gentle and simple,
they dressed in homespun. As late as 1768 a letter from Barnstable
tells of the visit of some ladies “dressed all in homespun, even
to their handkerchiefs and gloves, and not so much as a ribbon on
their heads. They were entertained with Labrador Tea; all innocently
cheerful and merry.” Men worked hard, and “lived” well: wild fowl and
venison, fish in their variety throughout the year were to be had for
the taking; and the farmers had homely fare a-plenty—seasoned bean
broth for dinner, an Indian pudding, pork, beef, poultry. It was a
life meagre, perhaps, in the picture of it, but all deep concerns
were there—love, loyalty, birth, death, a conviction of personal
responsibility for what should follow—and the whole web of it was
shot through with a rich, racy humor. They could be neither driven
nor easily led, these people; and justice they meant to exact and
cause to be done. In the old time their fathers had turned misfortune
to the profit of their souls, and in the new country the natural
energy of the children led them to succeed in what they might
undertake.
The Independents were men who, if they had not loved many luxuries,
had loved one with a consuming zeal; and it was perhaps excusable
that those of the second generation should dole out with a more
sparing hand the freedom that had been purchased at so great a price.
Yet were they, again, for their time, liberals; and it seems to have
been true that the prospect of universal salvation brightened in
proportion to the distance from Salem and Boston. Plymouth, at any
rate, even in its “dark age,” between 1657 and 1671, was a bad second
to Massachusetts Bay when it came to the persecution of heretics or
witchcraft hysteria, although for the latter there might be people
here and there who indulged themselves, without fear of molestation,
in playing with the idea of magic.
There is a story of Captain Sylvanus Rich, of Truro, who, shortly
before getting under weigh in a North Carolina port, bought from
an old woman a pail of milk, and no sooner was he at sea than the
ship was as if storm-bedevilled. The hag who had sold him the milk,
declared Captain Rich, had bewitched him and his craft. Every night,
he told his mates, she saddled and bridled him and drove him up hill
and down in the Highlands of Truro. Far out of their course, they
swept on to the Grand Banks and were like never to make port, when,
by good luck, they fell in with a vessel commanded by the captain’s
son who supplied their needs and as effectually broke the spell of
the witch.
James Hathaway of Yarmouth was a stanch believer in “witchcraft
and other strange fantasies”; but Hathaway was no puling mystic,
and lived out ninety-five hale, hearty, vigorous years. A kinsman
of his could give proof of the family strength by picking up a rum
barrel in his own tavern and drinking from the bung; and the family
eccentricity he evidenced by quietly dropping out of sight to save
himself the trouble of defending a suit brought against him for
embezzlement by a sister, and as quietly, after an interval of
twenty-one years, returning to his wife and home. It had been thought
he was drowned in the bay and to no avail “guns were fired, sweeps
were dragged, and oil poured on the waters.” This same sister was a
clever, well-read, witty creature, who married well, and for many
years “associated with the intelligent, the gay and the fashionable.”
She contributed to her popularity in the drawing-rooms of Boston and
Marblehead by recounting with a lively tongue stories of witches she
had seen and known, their tricks, their strange transformations. To
the end, she vowed, she was a firm believer in witchcraft.
At Barnstable, one Liza Towerhill, so called because her husband
came from that region of London, was reputed to be a witch, able at
will to transform herself into a cat, and having constant commerce
with the devil even though to the casual eye she were industrious,
hardworking, and pious.
The colony does not have so clean a slate in respect of the
persecution of Quakers. As early as 1656 the trouble began at
Massachusetts Bay; but Plymouth lagged in the enactment of
prohibitive laws against heretics, the execution of which, in the
end, were more often than not evaded. Yet Plymouth had drifted far
from the teachings of old John Robinson, who had charged his flock
to keep an open mind “ready to receive whatever truth shall be
made known to you.” The First Comers, who had heard and followed
his words, were succeeded by men less well disciplined in mind
and spirit, who were the more inclined to the strait doctrine of
Massachusetts Bay. Then Rhode Island, under Roger Williams, became
the citadel of tolerance; but Quakers, exiled from the north,
continued to stream into the colony, to the no small discomfiture
of its officers. The visitors, maddened by their wrongs, were not
too courteous with those of high estate, and Winslow, particularly,
was irritated by their demeanor, “sometimes starting up and smiting
the table with a stick, then with his hand, then stamping with his
foot, saying he could not bear it.” “Let them have the strapado!”
cried he. Norton, arraigned by the General Court, had, in his turn,
arraigned the Governor, whose “countenance full of majesty” in this
instance, at least, availed him nothing. “Thomas, thou liest,” cried
the Quaker. “Prince, thou art a malicious man.”
But, for the most part, the Quakers did no more than describe, in
Biblical terms as was the custom of the day, the soul-state of their
persecutors. They had been bred Puritans, and spoke the Puritan
language. If Mary Prince called Endicott, as he passed her Boston
prison, “vile oppressor and tyrant,” she spoke the truth mildly.
“There is but one god, and you do not worship that god which we
worship,” fulminated Juggins, the magistrate, in the trial of Lydia
Wright. “I believe thou speakest truth,” returned the accused calmly.
“For if you worshipped that God which we worship, you would not
persecute His people.” “Take her away!” cried the court. “Away with
him, away with him,” had been the only recourse left an earlier
tribunal.
It was natural that the seemly magistrates of Plymouth objected to
these new citizens who, when summoned “for not taking the oath of
fidelity to the government,” announced that they “held it unlawful to
take the oath”; and they flatly refused to pay tithes for the support
of a clergy they despised. Nor were they without sympathizers in
that contention. “The law enacted about ministers’ maintenance was a
wicked and devilish law,” declared Doctor Fuller, of Barnstable. “The
devil sat at the stern when it was enacted.” And for his vehemence,
though a true believer, he was fined fifty shillings by the General
Court, which at the same term had the even mind to elect him, for
his ability, one of the war council, and later to appoint him
surgeon-general of the colony’s troops.
Quakers held parsons in light esteem, yet not one of the Cape clergy
could have conceived such a plan as Cotton Mather, in 1682, spread
before Higginson of Salem. “There be now at sea a skipper,” wrote he,
“which has aboard a hundred or more of ye heretics and malignants
called Quakers, with William Penn, who is ye scamp at ye head of
them.” Mather went on to recount that secret orders had gone out
to waylay the ship “as near ye coast of Codde as may be and make
captives of ye Penn and his ungodly crew, so that ye Lord may be
glorified, and not mocked on ye soil of this new country with ye
heathen worship of these people.” Then the astounding proposition:
“Much spoil can be made by selling ye whole lot to Barbadoes, where
slaves fetch good prices in rumme and sugar. We shall not only do ye
Lord great service by punishing the Wicked, but shall make gayne for
his ministers and people.” The precious scheme somehow miscarried,
the threatened engagement off “Codde” did not take place, and
Philadelphia was founded.
When the Quakers Holden and Copeland, driven from Boston and whipped
at Plymouth, came to Sandwich, they found soil ready tilled for their
planting. The church there, said to have been “the most bigoted in
the county,” had been wrecked by the bitter feud between liberals and
“hard shells,” and its minister, a graduate of Emmanuel, Cambridge,
“a man of great piety and meekness,” had retired to the more
congenial atmosphere of Oyster Bay, Long Island. But the churchmen
of Sandwich, as was the custom of their race, thirsted for religion,
and in reaction against the old doctrines, the liberals there went
over in a body to the simple tenets of the Quakers. In a year no less
than eighteen families professed the new faith; but in the meantime
authority had not slept.
The marshal of Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth, was one George
Barlow, a renegade Anglican priest; nor had his colonial record
been a savory one. At Boston, in 1637, he had been “censured to be
whipped” for idleness; at Saco, on complaint that he was “a disturber
to the peace,” he was forbidden “any more publickly to preach or
prophesy”; and later when he turned lawyer at Plymouth, it was
affirmed in open court “that he is such an one that he is a shame
and reproach to all his masters; and that he, the said Barlow,
stands convicted and recorded of a lye att Newbury.” When Copeland
and Holden arrived at Sandwich, Barlow had been prompt to hale them
before the selectmen, to be duly whipped. But the village fathers,
“entertaining no desire to sanction measures so severe towards those
who differed from them in religion, declined to act in the case.”
Nothing daunted, Barlow presented his prisoners at Barnstable before
Thomas Hinckley, then assistant to Governor Prince and later to
succeed him in office.
Hinckley was the best-read lawyer in the colony, just and honorable
some held, others that he was apt at running with the hare and
hunting with the hounds. He had his enemies, Otis admits, and adds:
“Barren trees are not pelted.” All are agreed that his second wife
who was his helpmeet for more than forty years, was a beautiful
and accomplished woman, and possessed, moreover, of “a character
excellently suited to correct the occasional impetuosity of his own.”
Whether or not that impetuosity had been galled by the Quakers,
Hinckley permitted Holden and Copeland to be whipped, and in his
presence. The scene, described by Bishop with simple eloquence,
is typical of many a Quaker punishment by the magistrates in the
presence of a more compassionate people. “They being tied to an
old post, had thirty-three cruel stripes laid upon them with a new
tormenting whip, with three cords, and knots at the end, made by the
marshal, and brought with him. At the sight of which cruel and bloody
execution, one of the spectators (for there were many who witnessed
against it) cried out in the grief and anguish of her spirit, saying:
‘How long, Lord, shall it be ere thou avenge the blood of the elect?’
And afterwards bewailing herself, and lamenting her loss, said: ‘Did
I forsake father and mother, and all my dear relations, to come to
New England for this? Did I ever think New England would come to
this? Who would have thought it?’ And this Thomas Hinckley saw done,
to whom the marshal repaired for that purpose.”
Barlow was a ready tool for the hand of the reactionaries. Sent
by the Court to Manomet to apprehend any refugees who might come
there by sea—it was a law of the colonies that any captain bringing
heretics should deport them at his own expense—Barlow included the
more lucrative affair of raiding well-to-do farms. At East Sandwich
a man was mulcted eighty-six pounds, and in default of payment,
eighteen head of cattle, a mare, and two colts: in effect, all his
property save his house, his land, one cow and a little corn, “left
out of pity for his family.” But on a second visit Barlow, being warm
with liquor, regretted his leniency, and took the corn, the cow, and
the only remaining copper kettle. “Now, Priscilla, how will thee cook
for thyself and thy family?” jeered he. “George,” she retorted, “that
God who hears the young ravens when they cry will provide for them. I
trust in that God and verily believe that the time will come when thy
necessities will be greater than mine.” The event proved her right,
and in his old age, brought low with drink and evil ways, Barlow
often craved charity of Priscilla Allen, and was never refused.
As in the old days, the “blood of martyrs was the seed of the
church,” and persecutions, petty or great, did but serve to increase
the number of heretics, who as time went on not always practised
the pacifism they preached. Two women were sentenced to be publicly
whipped for “disturbance of public worship, and for abusing the
minister”; there were fines for “tumultuous carriage at a meeting of
Quakers.” There were fines, also, for sheltering Quakers; Nicholas
Davis, of Barnstable, and others, were banished on pain of death.
A Cape man, chancing to be at Plymouth when Nicholas Upsall, the
aged Boston Puritan who had been outlawed for protesting against
the persecutions, was driven thence, took compassion on him and
brought him to Sandwich only to be ordered to “take him out of
the government.” In no long time, however, reaction set in; the
fair-minded of the community were roused to protest at the senseless
persecution; and men were beginning to say that such intolerance
was not in accord with the spirit of their faith. Mr. Walley, the
parson, and Cudworth, driven from Scituate for his liberalism, and
Isaac, the third son of old John Robinson of Leyden, spoke up for
the oppressed. Edmund Freeman and others, of Sandwich, were fined
for refusing aid to the marshal in his work. And later, when Quakers
resisted the payment of tithes, it even became the custom to make up
the required sum by levying an additional tax upon churchmen. Nor
were the Quakers, for the most part, strangers, though refugees
were harbored: for converts were many among the first settlers of
the region, and we are told that after the laws against them were
relaxed they were “the most peaceful, industrious, and moral of
all the religious sects.” And in 1661, when King Charles sent his
injunction against the persecutions by the hand of Samuel Shattuck,
the Quaker who had been banished from Massachusetts Bay on pain of
death, Plymouth welcomed the occasion to restore those whom she had
disfranchised, and returned to the milder government that better
suited her temper.
III
In these years of the early settlements the Indians had given little
trouble, and they had been willing enough to sell their lands for
considerations that were valuable to them and not ruinous to the
whites. The matter of the natives’ claim to the soil was reasoned
out in certain “General Considerations for the Plantation in New
England.” “The whole earth is the Lord’s garden and he hath given it
to the sons of Adam to be tilled and improved,” ran the ingenuous
document. “But what warrant have _we_ to take that land which is,
and hath of long time been possessed by others of the sons of Adam?
That which is common to all is proper to none,” is the answer
thereto. “This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or
property.... And why may not Christians have liberty to go and dwell
amongst them in their waste lands and woods (leaving them such places
as they have manured for their corn) as lawfully as Abraham did
among the Sodomites?” Fortified by such doctrine, the settlers took
up the waste lands, paid for the corn, and went on, when need arose,
to pay for the cleared land; though later Andros, characteristically,
was to declare that these Indian deeds were no better than “the
scratch of a bear’s paw.” Prices were easy of adjustment. “A great
brass kettle of seven spans in wideness round about and one broad”
fell to one Paupunmuck, of Barnstable, who, however, reserved “the
right freely to hunt in the lands sold, provided his traps did no
harm to the cattle.” And of Monohoo, the Reverend Mr. Walley, lover
of justice and peace, bought some threescore acres for “ten yards of
trucking cloth, ten shillings in money, one iron kettle, two knives,
and a bass-hook.” And so were matters arranged to the satisfaction
of all concerned: to the settler his farmland; to the Indian a brass
pot and bass-hook, and often a small plot was reserved to him for
tillage. But his right to hunt or fish was inevitably encroached upon
as the settlements absorbed more and more of the wild lands, and
before 1660 Richard Bourne, of Sandwich, perceived that some special
reservation should be made for the fast dwindling tribes.
The settlers had lived comfortably enough with their pagan neighbors;
and so busy were they about their own affairs, temporal and
spiritual, that they were not annoyingly zealous in proselyting.
But when John Eliot, apostle to the Indians, came down from Boston
to arbitrate the parochial troubles of Sandwich, he improved the
occasion to forward the work nearest his heart. An Indian of the Six
Nations shrewdly observed to a Frenchman that “while we had beaver
and furs, the missionaries prayed with us; but when our merchandise
failed they thought they could do us no further good.” No such
charge could be brought against Eliot. “We may guess that probably
the devil decoyed these miserable salvages hither,” set forth the
“Magnalia,” “in hopes that the gospel should never come here to
destroy or disturb his absolute empire over them. But our Eliot was
on such ill terms with the devil as to alarm him with sounding the
silver trumpets of heaven in his territories and make some noble
and zealous attempts ... to rescue as many as he could from the old
usurping landlord of America.” The silver trumpets sounded in vain at
Sandwich. Eliot was baffled by the difficulties of the local dialect,
by the too pliant acquiescence of one sagamore, and by the ironic
compliance of a huge sachem known as Jehu who stalked into meeting,
stood silent at the door, and, silent still, went forth again never
to reappear there. Eliot returned to Boston, but it is probable that
his hope was the inspiration of much good that followed.
Richard Bourne took hold of the matter by the right handle: he was “a
man of that discernment that he conceived it was in vain to propagate
Christian knowledge among any people without a territory where they
might remain in peace.” And he proceeded to obtain for his wards a
tract of over ten thousand acres on the “South Sea,” where in time,
as birds to the safety of some southern island, flocked Indians from
far and near; and where still, though of deteriorated breed, may be
found a few Mashpee Indians. “There is no place I ever saw so adapted
to an Indian town as this,” wrote the Reverend Gideon Hawley in 1757.
“It is situated on the Sound, in sight of Martha’s Vineyard; is cut
into necks of land, and has two inlets by the sea; being well watered
by three fresh rivers and three large fresh ponds lying in the centre
of the plantation. In the two salt water bays are a great plenty of
fish of every description; and in the rivers are trout, herring &c.
In the woods, until lately, has been a great variety of wild game
consisting of deer &c., and adjacent to the rivers and ponds otters,
minks, and other amphibious animals whose skins have been sought for
and made a valuable remittance to Europe ever since my knowledge of
these Indians.” The description of the land on the thickly settled
south shore of to-day is clearly recognizable; there are trout in the
brooks, and fish in the sea, though the Indian and the “amphibious
animals” be rarer denizens.
Mr. Hawley had been deflected by the French wars from work among the
Iroquois, in contrast to whom the Mashpees “appeared abject,” he
thought. “A half naked savage were less disagreeable than Indians who
had lost their independence.” But he might better have been thankful
for that civilization which his predecessors had made possible: for
the less trouble was his, and his Indian parishioners gave him,
moreover, valid title to two hundred acres of their best land. He
lived among them for fifty years, and is said to have “possessed
great dignity of manner and authority of voice, which had much
influence.” And his Indians, though “abject,” did him credit. In 1760
one Reuben Cognehew presented himself at the Georgian court with a
protest against the colonial governor, and returned with orders to
treat the Indians better; and in the Revolution, Hawley said, more
than seventy of the Mashpee women were made widows. In his old age
he wrote a letter full of a humorous philosophy that must have stood
him in good stead through his long ministry: “Retired as I am, and
at my time of life I need amusement. I read, but my eyes soon become
weary. I converse, but it is with those who have my threadbare
stories by rote. In such case what can I do? I walk, but soon become
weary. I cannot doze away my time upon the bed of sloth, nor nod in
my elbow chair.” He contemplates his fowl and observing “how great
an underling one of the cocks was made by Cockran and others of the
flock I pitied his fate, and concluded to take an active part in
his favor.” Whereupon Master Cockerel “gathered courage with his
strength, sung his notes, and enjoyed his amours in consequence of my
action. But alas! to the terror and amazement of the whole company
he in his turn became an intolerant tyrant. The Archon had better
understanding than I and I have determined not to meddle in the
government of hens in future, nor overturn establishments. Cocks will
be cocks. As the sage Indian said, ‘Tucks will be tucks, though old
hen he hatch ’em!’” As for other animals, though “Milton, full of his
notions, supposes that a change in consequence of Adam’s fall passed
upon them,” Mr. Hawley notes them much of the “same nature that they
had before the Revolution in this country, and that important one now
regenerating the Old World, as it is called; and under every form of
government and dispensation, men will be men.”
But to return to Bourne: having obtained for the Indians their land,
in 1665 he furthered their “desire of living in some orderly way of
government, for the better preventing and redressing of things amiss
among them by just means,” and a court was set up consisting of six
Indians, under his guidance, reserving, however, that “what homage
accustomed legally due to any superior sachem be not infringed.”
In 1670 Bourne was ordained by Eliot as their pastor. And his son,
following the father’s example, procured an act of the Court guarding
the tenure of their land, which might not be “bought by or sold to
any white person or persons without the consent of all the Indians.”
And in the ministry Bourne was succeeded by men, sometimes Indians,
sometimes whites, who had due regard for their charges, “the Praying
Indians,” they were called.
At Eastham, the Reverend Samuel Treat was at pains to learn the
language of his Indian neighbors, and translated the Confession of
Faith into the Nauset dialect. Mr. Treat was an old-school Calvinist,
whose chief means to grace was the threat of eternal damnation.
“God himself shall be the principal agent in thy misery,” he could
thunder out in the little meeting-house with a voice that carried far
beyond its walls. “His is that consuming fire; his breath is the
bellows which blows up the flame of hell forever; he is the damning
fire—the everlasting burning; and if he punish thee, if he meet thee
in his fury, he will not meet thee as a man, he will give thee an
omnipotent blow.” Whether Mr. Treat dealt out such red-hot doctrine
to his Indians, we cannot know; perhaps they were warmed by the
fervor rather than alarmed by the tenor of his words. At any rate,
they loved him; and when he died during the Great Snow of 1716, they
tunnelled a way to the grave and bore him to his rest.
There were old ordinances forbidding the whites to give or sell
firearms, ammunition, canoes, or horses to Indians. There was also
a provision that “whoever shall shoot off a gun on any unnecessary
occasion, or at any game except at an Indian, or a wolf, shall
forfeit five shillings for every shot.” Evidently all was not love
and trust between the races. The Indians steadily dwindled in numbers
until at Eastham in 1763 there were but five Indians, and at Truro
in 1792 only one family, although an old lady then remembered that
there used to be as many Indian children at school as whites, and
“sometimes the little Injuns tried to crow over ’em.” Early in the
nineteenth century the pure-breed Mashpees were extinct; but in 1830
William Apes, an “Indian” preacher, succeeded in enlarging their
religious liberties; in 1842 their common lands were apportioned
in sixty-acre lots; in 1870 Mashpee became a town with full
self-government, though still with some special grants of state aid
for schools and highways.
“Rum” here, as elsewhere, played its important part in undermining
the stamina of the natives; and its evil, as in any age, exhorters
to virtue were prone only too vividly to depict. “Mr. Stone one very
good preacher,” commented a Mashpee, “but he preach too much about
rum. When he no preach about rum, Injun think nothing ’bout it; but
when he tells how Injun love rum, and how much they drunk, then I
think how good rum is and think no more ’bout sermon, my mouth waters
so much for rum.” And when asked whether he preferred Mr. Stone or
“Blind Joe,” a Baptist, he said: “Mr. Stone he make best sermons,
but Blind Joe he make best Christians.” And as in other and later
times the whites made their profit in selling drink to the Indians.
As early as 1685 Governor Hinckley writes of the Indians: “They have
their courts and judges; but a great obstruction to bringing them to
more civility and Christianity is the great appetite of the young
generation for strong liquors, and the covetous ill-humor of sundry
of our English in furnishing them therewith notwithstanding all the
court orders and means used to prohibit the same.”
The Indians were inveterate gamblers, and although they could sit
solemnly enough through a church service, they were as likely to go
forth to game away all they had even to their precious knives and
kettles. And the whites, as in the early days before they had made
good Christians of the “salvages,” were ready to suspect them of
petty thievery: for which, however, the savages were not without
examples to imitate. An Indian, reproved for taking a knife from an
Englishman’s house, retorted: “Barlow steals from the Quakers. Why
can’t I steal?” At Yarmouth, late in the seventeen hundreds, near the
mouth of Bass River, was a little cluster of wigwams; and whether
for reason or not, an irate deacon, suspecting some of the community
of robbing his henroost, visited them in the early morning, only to
be abashed by finding them at prayer. He stole away without further
inquiry about his hens. And the Indian deacon, one Naughaught,
nettled, perhaps, by such suspicions, upon finding a purse of money
one day, would not open it save in the presence of witnesses at the
tavern. “If I were to do so,” he told them, “all the trees of the
forest would see and testify against me.” And this same Naughaught
had a marvellous adventure that must have made a fine story for
drinkers at the tavern. Walking one day far from the habitations
of man, went the tale, he was set upon by a great number of black
snakes—a common and harmless reptile in the Cape Cod meadows to-day,
but going about their business there in smaller companies. Unarmed,
Naughaught saw that his defence lay only in a steadfast spirit. He
quailed not when the snakes writhed up his body, even to the neck;
and when one, bolder than the rest, faced him eye to eye, he opened
his mouth and straight snapped off its head. Whereupon its companions
withdrew and left Naughaught master of the field.
It is matter of record that the Cape Indians were more friendly to
the whites, more humane, and more easily converted to Christianity
than their brothers of the mainland, and in like measure were the
more despised by them. “The Praying Indians were subjects,” said
Philip, son of the great Massasoit, when there was question of
taking the oath of fidelity to the English sovereign. But not he or
his fellows; his kinsmen had ever been friendly with the Plymouth
Government: his father and brother had made engagement to that end,
but it was only for amity, not subjection. And by 1662 Philip was
ready to defy Plymouth. “Your government is only a subject of King
Charles II of England,” he told them. “I shall treat only with the
king, my brother. When Charles of England comes, I am ready.”
As early as 1642 rumored unrest among the Indians and a well-grounded
fear that the mother country might draw the Plantations into her
quarrels with the Dutch or French, had knit the colonies closer
together, and in 1643 a protective league that was the prototype of
the later confederacy of states was formed among the New England
colonies. Two commissioners from each colony, six of the eight to
make a majority rule, were to meet annually in September; a common
war chest and a colonial militia were provided for; but none were to
fight unless compelled to do so, or only upon the consent of all. The
Plymouth quota, under command of Miles Standish, was to be thirty
men, of whom the Cape should furnish eight.
In 1675 trouble with the Indians came to a head in King Philip’s
War, in which the Cape, although criticised by Plymouth, bore her
due share. It was charged of Sandwich that “many of the soldiers
who were pressed came not forth.” As a fact, Sandwich, the frontier
town of the Cape, was well occupied in seeing to her own defences
that must separate the Praying Indians from the hostile natives of
the mainland; nor was the town of Richard Bourne, with its large
Quaker element, likely to be as eager to fight the Indians as
Plymouth or Massachusetts. The Cape Indians were restive enough
to cause apprehension, and the towns were constantly on watch for
attack without and treachery within. Restriction upon the Indians
was tightened, account of them was kept the easier by providing that
“every tenth Indian should have particular oversight over his nine
men and present their faults to the authorities.” The five or six
hundred men capable of bearing arms could have made trouble enough
for the whites if they had had the will; but whether for gratitude
or lack of spirit, they were loyal—some even joined the troops. Mr.
Walley, who was ever friendly to the Indians and ready to give them
their due, observed that so well did they fight that “throughout the
land where Indians hath been employed there hath been the greatest
success,” and pondered how affairs might go without their aid. “I
am greatly afflicted to see the danger we are in,” he wrote Mr.
Cotton, of Plymouth. “Some fear we have paid dearly for former acts
of severity.” Nor were there lacking heavenly portents of disaster:
in 1664 a great comet had appeared, and three years later, “about an
hour within the night,” another “like a spear,” and again another in
1680. “When blazing stars have been seen,” said Increase Mather,
“great mutations and miseries have come upon mortals.”
The price which Mr. Walley apprehended was sufficiently heavy, yet
the outcome was as might have been expected. In August, 1676, when
Philip of the Wampanoags was killed, “Thus fell a mighty warrior,”
and then ended his war. In the sparsely settled colonies six hundred
men were slain, twelve or thirteen towns destroyed, and a huge debt
contracted. Plymouth shouldered a burden that exceeded the entire
personal estate of the citizens, which she met by vigorous taxation
and partly, it may be said, by the sale of lands that had belonged
to the exterminated Indians. The aftermath of war meant peculiar
suffering for the devastated districts; the Cape, fortunate in its
remoteness, offered asylum, which was, however, gratefully declined,
to Rehoboth, Taunton, and Bridgewater. It is interesting that “Divers
Christians in Ireland” sent over a relief fund of something over a
hundred pounds. It is also interesting that no encouragement or aid
had been received, or asked or expected, from the mother country;
and another useful lesson in self-dependence had been learned by the
colonies.
The Cape forces had been ably led by John Gorham, of Barnstable. A
letter to the council, written in October, 1675, shows something of
his temper as a man: “Our soldiers being much worn, having been in
the field this fourteen weeks and little hope of finding the enemy,
we are this day returning toward our General, but as for my own
part, I shall be ready to serve God and the country in this just war
so long as I have life and health. Not else to trouble you, I rest
yours to serve in what I am able, John Gorrun.” Three days later the
Court appointed him captain of the second company of Plymouth, of
which Jonathan Sparrow, of Eastham, was lieutenant.
The commander-in-chief was James Cudworth, of Scituate, who had
been a member of John Lothrop’s flock, and had lived for a time in
Barnstable and owned salt-works there. He had been disfranchised for
his sympathy with the Quakers, and bound over in five hundred pounds
to appear at court “in reference unto a seditious letter sent to
England, the coppy whereof is come over in print,” which, however,
was no more than a full setting-out of the unlawful persecutions.
But he was too valuable a man to lose: Scituate was nearly unanimous
in his favor, as were Barnstable and Sandwich. In 1666 the Scituate
militia, against the will of the Court, chose him captain; in 1673 he
was unanimously made captain of the Plymouth forces in a contemplated
expedition against the Dutch. His declination of the honor, which he
was later to undertake in the Indian war, was not, he declared, “out
of any discontent in my spirit arising from any former difference. I
am as freely willing to serve my King and Country as any man, but I
do not understand that a man is called to serve his country with the
inevitable ruin and devastation of his own family.” Cudworth pleaded
the care of his farm and his wife’s illness. “She cannot lie for
want of breath,” wrote he. “And when she is up she cannot light a
pipe of tobacco, but it must be lighted for her. And she has never a
maid. And for tending and looking after my creatures; the fetching
home of my hay, that is yet at the place where it grew; getting of
wood, going to mill; and for the performance of all other family
occasions I have now but a small Indian boy, about thirteen years
of age, to help me.” “So little of state was there,” is Palfrey’s
comment on the artless narrative, “in the household economy of the
commander-in-chief in a foreign war.” And again: “It is amusing and
touching at once to see how hard, in those days, it was to induce men
to be willing to be great.”