THE FRENCH WARS
I
The so-called French and Indian Wars, a series of conflicts
reflecting the entanglements of England overseas, lasted well on to
seventy-five years after the accession of William and Mary in 1689.
Political history in Massachusetts was making in the meantime: Andros
had reigned and been deposed; the Earl of Bellamont, a good friend of
King William and a just man popular with the colonists, had served a
brief term, wherein he had captured and shipped to England for trial
the notorious Captain Kidd; and Sir William Phips, a native of New
England acceptable to the people, was the first Governor under the
charter of William and Mary that, in 1692, formally united Plymouth
and Massachusetts Bay. Plymouth had fought well for her independence
as against absorption either by New York or Massachusetts Bay; but
when the skill of Increase Mather won her as prize, Governor Hinckley
had the good sense to thank him for his work, as Massachusetts
was preferable to New York. Maine, Massachusetts, and Plymouth,
then, were united under the rule of Governor, Deputy Governor,
and Secretary appointed by the king, and twenty-eight Councillors
chosen by the people. On Cape Cod, at the time of the union, there
were about four thousand whites grouped in six towns—Sandwich,
Barnstable, Yarmouth, Eastham, Falmouth, and Mannomoit—which sent
nine representatives to the first Provincial Assembly.
It is interesting that at about this time began the advent of men of
Irish blood, who, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, have been
among the most thrifty and prosperous of the Cape people. Early in
the reign of William and Mary laws were put afoot to turn Ireland
from manufacturing to agriculture. Swift gibed at the policy of
“cultivating cattle and banishing men”; Lord FitzWilliam protested
that a hundred thousand operatives were forced to leave the country.
Many, the vanguard of a mighty host, came to the American colonies.
Few of these early immigrants, probably, were of pure Celtic blood:
they were the Scotch-Irish of the north, the Anglo-Irish and the
French of the south, artisans rather than farmers, who were to play
an enormous part in the development of our country. Among the early
settlers of the Cape were many Irishmen: Higgins, Kelley, Belford,
Delap, Estabrook, Wood, and the Reverend Samuel Osborn who succeeded
Mr. Treat at Eastham. Mr. Osborn taught his parishioners the use
of peat as a fuel and some improvements in farming; but, alas, in
that orthodox community, he was suspected of liberalism. Thoreau
says: “Ten ministers with their churches sat on him and spoiled his
usefulness”—but only for Eastham. In Boston he became a successful
schoolmaster, and lived there to be near a hundred years of age.
Life at the Cape flowed on with simple annals to mark its course. In
1687 a mill for grinding corn was set up at Barnstable, to the wonder
of the Indians who took it for a monster with arms—the precursor of
the winged mills that once dotted the Cape from shoulder to tip and
played no small part in the charm of its picture. At Barnstable, too,
was the first mill to “full and draw the town’s cloth on reasonable
terms,” to the satisfaction, one may suppose, of busy workers at
spinning-wheel and loom. And the erection of a mill at Yarmouth was
even celebrated in verse:
“The Baxter boys they built a mill,
Sometimes it went, sometimes stood still;
And when it went, it made no noise,
Because ’twas built by Baxter’s boys.”
In 1694 Harwich was set off from Eastham, and it is said that
Patrick Butler walked all the way to Boston to secure the act of
incorporation. In 1709 Truro, also, with the usual stipulation that
it “procure and settle a learned and godly minister,” was set off
from Eastham, which, indeed, as Pamet, it had long antedated in
settlement. In 1705 there had been an abortive attempt to incorporate
this district as Dangerfield, and in 1718 there was a motion to set
off the future Wellfleet as Poole; but nothing further was heard of
these names. There had always been wrangling over the settlement at
Mannomoit, at the elbow of the Cape: first attached to Yarmouth,
then to Eastham, in 1688 it was made an independent “constablerick,”
and in 1712 was incorporated as Chatham. In 1714 the Province Lands
became the Precinct of Cape Cod under the “constablerick” of Truro,
and there was a tax of fourpence for the upkeep of a minister
there. But evidently Truro had trouble with her ward—the population
was a drifting one, for the most part irresponsible fishermen and
adventurers—and in 1715 she petitioned the General Court that the new
Precinct be “declared either a part of Truro or not a part of Truro,
that the town may know how to act in regard to some persons.” From
the beginning, with a care to the preservation of crops, householders
were required to kill blackbirds and crows, and there was a large
bounty on wolves. In 1717 there was even talk of building “a high
fence of palisades or boards” across the Cape between Sandwich and
Wareham “to keep wolves from coming into the county.” But there were
two points of view for that question, and the scheme, opposed by
some within on the score of expense and by others without who did
not “wish all the wolves to be shut out of the county upon their own
limits,” was soon abandoned. In 1721 there was a fearful epidemic
of smallpox throughout the State; and Cotton Mather, who favored
inoculation, was held by the pious to prefer “the machinations of men
to the all-wise providence of God.”
As the Cape became more closely settled, men of the pioneer spirit
were again feeling themselves cramped for room; and in 1727 certain
lands which the Government had been ready to give as bounty to
veterans of King Philip’s War, were, at length, granted to their
heirs—a township ten miles square to each one hundred and twenty
persons where claims thereto were established within four months
of the act. Seven townships were taken up. Number Seven, in Maine,
assigned to the heirs of men who had served under Captain John
Gorham, was named after him, and his grandson, Shubael, ruined
himself in promoting the enterprise. Amos Otis writes that “he lost
his property in his endeavors to secure to the officers and soldiers
in King Philip’s War, or their legal representatives, their just
dues. In his strenuous efforts to do justice to others, he was
unjust to himself, and involved himself, for the benefit of others,
in liabilities which he was unable to meet.” Of John Phinney, one
of these pioneers of Gorham, a son of one of the conquerors of the
Narragansetts, it is recorded that “he disembarked from his canoe
on the Presumpscot River, with his axe and a small stock of simple
provisions, attended by a son of fourteen years of age, with a design
to make a home for himself and family in the then wilderness. Having
selected a spot for his future dwelling, that son Edmund, afterwards
distinguished as a colonel in the war of the Revolution, felled the
first tree for a settlement.” Nearly every town on the Cape sent men
to the new country, and here the old Cape Cod names were perpetuated:
Bacon, Bangs, Bourne, Freeman, Knowles, Paine, Sturgis.
In 1727 the Precinct of Cape Cod was incorporated as Provincetown,
with important reservation of rights to the Government in exchange
for which the inhabitants were held exempt from all but local taxes
and from military duty. The Province held title to the land; and
it was not until 1893, when the State surrendered its holdings
in the village that a Provincetown man could be said to own his
home, or give more than a quitclaim deed for its transfer. In 1740
Provincetown seems to have added some grazing to her activities by
sea, and is presented for so carelessly herding cattle that the
“beaches were much broken and damnified, occasioning the moving of
the sands into the harbor to the great damage thereof.” The French
wars were working havoc in the fortunes of her fishermen and the
population melting away until, in 1755, there were not more than
three houses in the village and then increasing until the Revolution,
when there were twenty. In 1763 that part of Eastham known as
Billingsgate—Poole it never was to be—became Wellfleet. And a year
earlier the Mashpee Indians, feeling the push for fuller political
rights, petitioned for and obtained their Mashpee District, eight
miles by five or six, comprising two hundred and thirty-seven souls
and “sixty-three wigwams.” To the Yarmouth Indians had been granted
the greater part of South Yarmouth on Bass River. Mr. Freeman records
that 1749 was known as the year of the Great Drought which destroyed
the early crops of hay and feed; but in July the weather broke, the
bare earth miraculously put forth its green, and there were as many
thanksgivings as there had been intercessions for Divine aid.
Martha’s Vineyard had been found particularly adapted to
sheep-raising, and wool was ferried over to Falmouth to keep the
Cape women busy at their looms. In 1738 a Barnstable man founded
Marston’s Mills, and a letter from Newport in a later year speaks of
the woollen factory at Barnstable which receives from the spinners
it employs sometimes five hundred skeins a day and clears in a year
three thousand dollars, “which is the most profitable of any business
now carried on in America according to the stock improved in it”;
broadcloth “selling for three dollars a yard in London may be had
here for a dollar and a half.” This public industry supplemented the
one that a family conducted on its own account: for nearly every farm
had its sheep, and homespun was the wear. The moors of Truro were
dotted with sheep, and very likely some of its surplus wool was sent
to the Barnstable mills.
That the Cape people, in parsonage or farm, followed the custom of
the day and kept slaves is evidenced, among other ways, by many
wills. Mr. Bacon, of Barnstable, for instance, directs that in case
his negro Dinah be sold, “all she is sold for be improved by my
executors in buying Bibles,” which are to be distributed among his
grandchildren. Mr. Walley had his slaves; the Reverend Mr. Avery,
of Truro, whose farm and forge were near Highland Light, was able
to bequeath a considerable estate to his children; and among the
assets were his negro “girl named Phillis,” his Indian girl named
Sarah, and the negroes Jack and Hope who were never to be sold out
of the family. Old Totoo, slave to Mrs. Gorham, of Barnstable,
survived her eight years and, dying, begged that he might be buried
at his mistress’s feet. In 1678 two Indians of Sandwich, convicted
of stealing twenty-five pounds, were sentenced to be sold, for the
profit of their victims, somewhere in New England as “perpetual
slaves.”
And that apprenticeship in the early days was sometimes practical
slavery is shown by the case of Jonathan Hatch, a Yarmouth lad,
bound out at the age of fourteen to a Salem man, from whose harsh
service he fled only to be caught in Boston, sentenced to be severely
whipped, and returned as a slave to his master. Again escaping, he
reached Yarmouth where he was arrested, condemned to be whipped,
and passed from constable to constable back to Salem. Appeal was
made to the Plymouth Court which made an excuse of “doubting its
jurisdiction” to evade the issue, and the boy was “appointed to dwell
with Mr. Stephen Hopkins” at Yarmouth. In due time he married and
went to live at South Sea, near the sachem of the Mashpees, with whom
he became on very good terms. In 1652 he was had up for furnishing
an Indian with gun and ammunition, and later befriended the Indian
Repent who was charged with threatening to shoot Governor Prince.
From the South Sea, with Isaac Robinson, he became a squatter at
Falmouth, but soon was duly granted a plot of eighty acres. He was
to act, moreover, as the land agent of the proprietors, and ended
the career that had begun as a runaway slave by becoming a respected
measurer of metes and bounds.
For these early farmers slavery seems to have been the solution of
their problem of trying to tie a laborer to his job. While land
was available in practically unlimited amount and money was scarce,
any man might find himself a proprietor, a point illustrated by an
amusing story of Winthrop’s. A certain man, lacking cash, paid off
his farmhand by giving him a pair of oxen. The laborer was willing
to continue such service. “But how shall I pay you?” asked the man.
“With more oxen.” “And when the oxen are gone?” “Then you can work
for me and earn them back again.” But in the North, as time went on,
and land was taken up in comparatively small farms that could be
profitably worked by owners who could pay for necessary labor, the
convenience of slaves was easy to forego, and the public conscience
began to work for abolition. As early as 1733 Sandwich voted: “that
our representative is instructed to endeavor to have an act passed
by the Court to prevent the importation of slaves into this country;
and that all children that shall be born of such Africans as are now
slaves among us, shall after such act be free at twenty-one years
of age.” Five years later selling slaves in the American market was
prohibited at Boston. It is at Truro, one may believe, that one of
the last slave trades on the Cape was consummated when, in 1726,
Benjamin Collins bought from a neighbor Hector, aged three, for
thirty pounds, and in due time made a Christian of him, as the parish
records show. Hector grew to a great age, and evinced confidence in
salvation, among other ways, by praying in loud tones as he went
to his labor in the fields of the Truro Highlands where, sure gage
of notability, certain expressions to commemorate him crept into
the vernacular—“Old Hector,” “black as Hector,” “Hector’s Nook,”
“Hector’s Stubble,” “Hector’s Bridge.”
In the later years, preceding the Civil War, it was natural that
among a people which had always counted many progressives, there
should be Abolitionists. They were kindly folk, it is said, “with
strong convictions, never attending church because the sermons did
not condemn slavery”—the early racial touch cropping out, it seems,
in this later generation. Some of the ships of an Osterville owner
even landed runaway slaves on the south shore whence they passed
along by “underground railway” to a certain house in Barnstable.
One remembers that as a boy he used to go there to teach them their
letters; and he also remembers that “they were treated as equals; but
sometimes they made their way to ‘Mary Dunn’s Road’ where they found
rum and congenial companions.”
Finance, swinging from stringency to inflation of the currency, was
an ever-present problem in the colony during the French and Indian
Wars. In the mid-eighteenth century, a land bank was proposed in the
hope of using land as the basis for credit in a country where gold
and silver were so lacking, with a result disastrous to many farmers
on the Cape. In 1748 paper was called in and the “piece of eight,”
or Spanish dollar, made the standard; but again the easy issue of
paper was too great a temptation, again there was depreciation and
instability, again the struggle back to a standard dollar. In 1749,
after “King George’s War,” England liquidated the war debt of
the Province by paying into the treasury at Boston a fund of some
one hundred and eighty thousand pounds that were carted through
the streets in seventeen truckloads of silver and ten of copper.
Henceforth it was provided that all debts should be paid in coined
silver, which is said to originate the term “lawful money.”
II
All these fifty years since the accession of William and Mary had
been complicated by more or less participation in the foreign wars of
the mother country; and the hereditary hatred of France and England
lived on, with new occasions, in their colonies. Those of France had
been planted and fostered by the crown; those of England largely by
her rebels; Catholic France never could sympathize with the English
heretics; and now that the power of Spain was broken, French and
English traders and fishermen were the chief rivals for domination
of the new countries and the seas, east and west, north and south,
the world over. In 1689 the principle of colonial neutrality had
been proposed by France and rejected, to her considerable subsequent
cost, by England. And at the beginning of “King William’s War,”
so-called, Massachusetts, commanded by the Governor, Sir William
Phips, set forth on her adventure for the reduction of Port Royal and
Quebec. Port Royal fell, its loot paying for the expedition, but was
retaken by the French. France’s reply was an invasion of the border,
assisted by her Indian allies; and now and thereafter throughout
the French wars there was great apprehension, particularly by Cape
Cod in its defenceless state, of French sea-raids on the New England
coast. After the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, France claimed all the
fisheries east of the Kennebec and all English boats there found were
forfeit by order of the king—fruitful cause, one may suppose, for
fresh quarrels. And no later than 1702 “Queen Anne’s War” revived
the Indian raids, and the sacking of Deerfield roused the colonies
to a holy war. On the Continent, meantime, “Malbrough s’en va-t-en
guerre” and in 1713 the Peace of Utrecht ended the French wars for
thirty-three years’ breathing space; in the new world France lost
forever Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the Hudson Bay Territory.
In these wars five expeditions had been fitted out by the colonies
to attack the enemy on the east, under Colonel Benjamin Church,
and in his command were found the Cape Cod men. Thomas Dimmock, of
Barnstable, fell, fighting gallantly, at the battle of Canso. He
would not shelter himself, as did the other officers, but stood
boldly out in the open cheering on his men—a conspicuous mark for
sharpshooters. Major Walley, son of the old minister, was another
officer—a gallant figure, handsome and debonair, as a portrait of
him, in fine surtout, ruffles and periwig, testifies; and there was
Caleb Williamson in command of the Plymouth forces, and Captain
Gorham, later lieutenant-colonel, son of the old Indian fighter of
Philip’s War. And Gorham, especially, did unique and valuable service
in command of the “whaleboat fleet.” These light-draft boats, manned
by whalemen and Indians, could transport men and supplies up the
shallow bays and rivers to the spot where they were most needed; and
without such a device, the enemy, stationed for the most part where
the transports could not land troops, would have been hard come at by
marches overland through the wilderness. At night, or in bad weather,
the boats were taken ashore and turned over to serve as shelter. In
1704 Church called for fifty of these boats, and that winter visited
every town on the Cape to recruit men. “For years after,” writes Amos
Otis, “these old sailors and soldiers, seated in their roundabout
chairs, within their capacious chimney-corners, would relate to the
young their adventures in ‘the Old French Wars.’”
In 1739 there was an abortive war with Spain when Cape men enlisted
for an expedition to the Spanish Main where many died of disease, and
there was no result beyond a further impoverishment of the country.
And by 1745 England and France, drawn as they were into the War of
the Austrian Succession, were fighting out in America “King George’s
War.” In April of that year thirty-five hundred troops, chiefly
“substantial persons and men of beneficial occupations,” sailed
from Boston under another fighting Governor, Sir William Pepperell,
to attack Louisburg, the “Gibraltar of America.” In this force the
Seventh Massachusetts was known as the “Gorham Rangers” under the
command of a Gorham of the third generation. With him, as it chanced,
was a descendant of Richard Bourne, William by name, whom an Indian
medicine-man had cured in childhood when white doctors had given him
up as dying. William came scathless through the wars to die in old
age, rich and respected, at Marblehead.
In the following June Louisburg fell. Colonel Gorham commanded a
whaleboat fleet as had his father under Churchill; and the first
man to enter the Grand Battery, was one of the thirteen Indians in
Captain Thacher’s Yarmouth contingent, who, for the bribe of a bottle
of brandy, crawled through an embrasure and opened the door to the
besiegers. The exploit was the less glorious as it was apparent that
the enemy had evacuated the place.
Great was the joy throughout New England at the successful outcome
of the siege, and not least in the Old Colony which had contributed
so many men to the enterprise. Pæans of praise ascended from
the pulpits; bards broke forth into verse. “The Wonder-working
Providence” recites the prowess of certain heroes from the Cape:
“Lieutenant-Colonel Gorham, nigh of kin
To his deceased Head, did honor win;
Unite in nature, name, and trust, they stood—
Unitedly have done their country good.
May Major Thacher live, in rising fame
Worthy of ancestors that bear his name,
And copy after virtuous relations
Who so well filled their civil, sacred, military stations.
Now Captain Carey, seized with sickness sore,
Resigned to death when touched his native shore;
And Captain Demmick slain by heathen’s hand
As was his father under like command.”
Rejoicing was shortly tempered by wholesome dread of reprisals. As a
fact France, enraged at the loss of her stronghold, was sending out a
great armament under command of the Duc d’Anville, not only to retake
Louisburg, but to ravage the New England coast. There were eleven
ships of the line and thirty smaller vessels, as well as transports
for three thousand men. But Providence was to intervene for the
humbling of French pride and the salvation of the faithful. Storms
reduced the armada one half before it could even make port, disease
swept away most of the troops, the two commanders died suddenly, by
suicide men were ready to say, and the remnant of the fleet, without
striking a blow, sailed back to France. The Cape, especially, had
been alarmed at the prospect of such a punitive expedition: she urged
the danger to her long coast-line; Truro petitioned the General Court
for protection, and received a four-pound cannon, some small arms and
ammunition.
The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, ended the general conflict,
and in the negotiations overseas hard-bought Louisburg, to the
great displeasure of the colonists, was traded for more valuable
considerations elsewhere. In America guerrilla warfare, a raid here,
a raid there, continued; and in three years’ time, the greatest
conflict of the series, when Washington and other young officers got
their training for a greater war to follow, was raging all along the
border. It terminated, in 1763, with the Peace of Paris, when France
gave over to England her last American holdings. The colonies had
learned painfully lessons to their great advantage in the struggle
with the mother country that was even then beginning; and when the
clash came, France was glad to range herself with the colonists for
another blow at her old enemy England.
It was during this war that England broke up some of the French
communities that had remained unmolested since Nova Scotia was
ceded to her by the Peace of Utrecht; and the “neutral French,” as
they were called, were scattered throughout the colonies from New
Hampshire to Georgia. Longfellow’s poem of “Evangeline” tells the
story of those pathetic exiles; and we know that in July, 1756,
a little band of Acadians, ninety souls in all, men, women, and
children, landed from seven two-mast boats at Bourne. They were
tenderly received, we may believe, by the people who had never
refused shelter to the unfortunate. Silas Bourne wrote to James Otis
asking what should be done with them, and eventually their boats
were sold and they were distributed among the neighboring towns. It
is not improbable that Peter Cotelle, of Barnstable, was of this
company—a Frenchman who lived in a gambrel-roofed cottage set in a
pretty garden. He was a tinker by trade, and made shrewd use of his
imperfect English, it is said, in driving a bargain.
[Illustration: THE CREEK]
The Cape seems to have furnished no leaders in this war where so many
famous men fought, but, steadily, she gave her quota of men and her
money; and Amos Otis has preserved for our delectation the stories
of many of the humbler folk of the time. There was a Barnstable
man who had shipped as carpenter aboard a privateer which soon
brought into Boston as prize a Spanish ship laden with dollars and
bullion. By some means the ship was made out to be French property,
and the Yankee captain offered each of his men for prize money as
much silver as he could carry from Long Wharf to the head of State
Street, with the chance of forfeiting the whole if he stopped to rest
by the way. Barnstable, apparently, cut his cloth to fit his stature
and came off with some two thousand dollars and a little hoard of
silver to boot which he discovered in a ship’s boat he had purchased.
At any rate, he had enough to lay the foundation of a snug fortune
which he augmented by becoming something of a usurer in his native
town. As a young man his marriage had been delayed from year to year
through a difference with his sweetheart as to where they should
live. He preferred the village where he had learned his trade, she,
being well-to-do, her own good farm at Great Marshes. In the end
she prevailed; and no doubt, as one who knew her will and practised
effective methods to obtain it, contributed her due share to the
family fortune. The grandchildren, Otis implies, “having no reverence
for antiquity or love of hoarding,” made the dollars fly.
A Gorham of this generation seems to have had an over-supply of
such “reverence for antiquity”: he was so wedded to the customs of
his fathers that he would not use a tipcart because they had none,
and drove his team with a pole as they had done; he farmed by their
methods, and made salt, though it were bad salt, by their mode of
boiling. He had other oddities, such as fastening his shirt in the
back with a loop and nail, and eschewing rum in a time when the best
kept tavern and drank thereat; he lived on salt-meat broth, bread
and milk, hasty-pudding and samp; he was honest, industrious, a good
neighbor and citizen, as valuable to the community, perhaps, as his
more brilliant kinsmen.
A somewhat younger man than he, born in 1739, a doctor by profession,
who seldom practised, had no such antipathy to rum, though it is
said he never got drunk save at another’s charge. At such times he
obliged the company with “Old King Cole,” his only song, and also
with well-worn stories of some earlier adventures in Maine. There
is record of a certain Christmas party at Hyannis when at midnight,
song sung and story told, he was helped on his old gray mare for the
journey home. Left to herself the mare would have taken him safe
there, but he must needs turn into a narrow lane, where, in the
brilliant moonlight he spied the mild phosphorescence of a rotten
log. A fire, thought he, very likely his own fire, and drew off his
boots to warm his chilled feet. Resuming his journey, at dawn he
came upon the highway and lashed his mare to the gallop, but, as it
chanced, in the wrong direction. “Gentlemen,” cried he, drawing up
to accost some early travellers, “can you tell me whether I am in
this town or the next?” They answered cavalierly enough: “You’re in
this town now, but ’t won’t be long before you’re in the next at that
rate.” And perceiving his state, they saw to it that he straightway
had breakfast and boots. Nor was this the end of the affair, which
the village boys improved for their amusement. A ring at his bell:
“Doctor, just wanted to ask if you’d found your boots.”—“Doctor,
am I in this town or the next?” And they never failed to dodge the
lash of his whip which he kept handy to the door for such visitors.
He was the first village postmaster, and during the wars, when men
were eager for the news which came bi-weekly from Boston, it was on
mail nights that the boys and men of the village gathered about his
fire and listened to his old stories of Maine. He was a genial soul,
a little simple-minded, one who liked to make a show of business by
laying out spurs and saddle-bags of a night as if ready for a call.
The village library was kept at his house, and administered by his
daughter.
The stories go on, with a touch here and a touch there to accent the
village flavor. The Bodfishes, huge father and huge sons, lived a
patriarchal life on their farm; for more than seventy years their
estate was held in common, the father acting as trustee and granting
his sons only as much as would qualify them for voters. And a scion
of the less illustrious branch of a prominent family was ready to
argue his claim for preëminence: “We’ll discuss that,” he would
thunder with swelling port. And won the sobriquet of “Scussion Sam”
for his pains. There was another member of the same family whose
shrewd humor served as well as roguery. He was master of the little
packet nicknamed Somerset after the British man-of-war, which carried
to Boston onions, among other cargo, for the West Indies market.
“Gentlemen,” said he persuasively to some possible buyers, “these
are what are called ’tarnity’ onions; they’ll keep to all eternity.”
But a week out of port on their way to the south, the onions had to
be thrown overboard. At another time he outsailed a neighbor who
was shipping onions to a Salem trader, and presented his own cargo
in their stead. “But how about Huckins?” asked the trader. “My
son-in-law,” returned the captain glibly. “Here are the onions.” One
may fancy that tavern and living-room buzzed with the news of this
trick when the discomfited Huckins made the home port. Still another
member of the family was of different mould—one who gloried in the
ease his poverty gave him. “I’m thankful I don’t own that number of
cattle,” commented he, watching a neighbor laboring over his stock
on a snowy day. “Squire and I,” said he again genially, “keep more
cows than any other two men in town.” Squire, his brother, had twenty
cows, he one.
But the account of Barnabas Downs best typifies, perhaps, the
tranquil village life that flowed on amid the outer turmoil of war
and politics and finance. He was born in 1730 and lived long and
laborious years on his thirty-acre farm, which supported some cattle,
a horse or two, a large flock of sheep, and produced sufficient grain
and vegetables. His stock ran at large through the summer; his winter
hay he cut in the salt meadows. His clothing was made from the wool
of his sheep; the surplus produce of his farm he traded for groceries
at the village shop, and exchanged labor for labor with blacksmith,
shoemaker, and carpenter. Sometimes he shipped onions to Boston; but
he had little money, and needed little. And at this time his class of
small farmers made perhaps more than half the population in any one
of the Cape towns except those, like Truro, where practically every
man in the community “went to sea”—simple, industrious creatures,
who lived comfortably by another standard than ours, and were not
unmindful of larger interests than their own. “He was the most
independent of men,” is the comment of Otis. “Six days he labored and
did all his work, and the seventh was a day of rest.”