great middle class of England, the kernel of the nation, was in Tudor
times so disgusted with the cowled and tonsured Middle Ages that,
during the first half of the seventeenth century, it “entered the
prison house of Puritanism, and had the key turned upon its spirit
there for two hundred years.” The result was, he further declared, “a
defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge,
a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners.” Into the
discussion which this utterance invites, I do not propose here to
enter. I merely call attention to what all the study, investigation and
thought of thirty years lead me to consider one of the most interesting
and suggestive of the minor episodes of our early Massachusetts
history, the final advance of the puritanical glacier over the
last lingering vestige of an earlier attempt at a distinctly more
cultured New England civilization. I institute no comparison; I make
no criticism. To discuss the might-have-been is, to my mind, hardly
worth while. I call attention only to one still unwritten page of our
Massachusetts history; a page the existence as well as the possible
meaning of which had altogether escaped me, if indeed it had even as
yet glimmeringly dawned upon me, when I addressed you here in Weymouth
in response to your invitation of thirty years ago.
Thus, as I have since come to see it, the history of Weymouth, that
local history which is the peculiar province and charge of the Society
I to-night address, naturally divides itself into three parts--first,
the Adventurous, in which Thomas Weston and Miles Standish, Squanto
and Pecksuot, play their parts, and dramatic enough those parts were:
second, the Feudal and Episcopal, in which Sir Ferdinando Gorges
and Governor John Winthrop hold the stage, in London and at Boston,
in Wessagusset and at Shawmut: and, finally, part the third, that
Puritanic period of slow growth and gradual change which lasted for
two whole centuries, from 1640 to 1840, and which Matthew Arnold has
likened unto detention in a prison-house. My earlier utterances on
the earliest and second periods I have passed in review; and now, in
closing, I have something to say in criticism of the conclusions I then
reached as respects the third, or final, period.
My former treatment of this later period,--that extending from 1640 to
1840,--I find was of the purely conventional character; a method of
treatment, whether by myself or others, for which I have since come
to feel a very pronounced contempt. Why is it, I would like to ask,
that such undue prominence is in anniversary addresses always given
to times and episodes connected with wars and military operations?
Take for instance, your own case. Weymouth now boasts a corporate
and continuous history of some 270 years,--as such things go, a very
respectable antiquity; and, during that time, its women have never
seen, except perhaps a hundred and thirty years ago, or, just possibly,
on one occasion nine years less than a century back, the flash of a
hostile gun or the gleam of an enemy’s flag. It is within the bounds of
possibility that a grandmother, or, more probably, a great-grandmother,
of some one among you did, on those days of April in the year 1775,
watch from some summit of the town the smoke of burning Charlestown;
or, again, like Abigail Adams from Penn’s hill in Braintree, your
progenitors on the distaff side may in March of the following year
have looked curiously on that “largest fleet ever seen in America,”
numbering upwards of one hundred and seventy sail, and looking “like a
forest,” as, with Howe’s evacuating army on board, the British ships
lay in the outer harbor. Finally, on June 1, 1813, Weymouth men and
women may from the Great hill have followed with anxious eyes the
ill-fated frigate Chesapeake move out to her disastrous duel with
the Shannon. But, not since Miles Standish grappled with the savage
Pecksuot in the wooden block-house at Old Spain on the 6th of April,
1623, has an armed conflict between hostile men occurred on Weymouth
soil. Yet in every narrative of the town, accounts and details of its
part in war, and of its contributions thereto, occupy the place of
prominence. In point of fact, no war or its operations, its successes
or reverses, since the death of the Wampanoag, King Philip, in 1676,
has exercised any direct influence on Weymouth history, or affected
to any appreciable extent the town’s development. In the war of the
Rebellion, as in Queen Anne’s war, in the French wars, and in the war
of Independence,--though in far less degree in the first than in
any one of the latter,--Weymouth was called on for contributions in
material, in money and in men; but after those struggles, as during
them and before, life here moved on absolutely undisturbed in the even
tenor of its way,--quite unchanged! The same people lived in a like
manner, pursuing their wonted occupations; generations were born, went
to school, were married and had offspring, grew old and died, as their
fathers and mothers had done before them, as their sons and daughters
were to do after them. Of great, far away events only echoes reached
the town; and yet, what the town then did in connection with those
distant great events becomes the staple of its story. This I submit is
not as it should be; in fact it is not history at all.
Moreover, I am further disposed to contend that the record of Weymouth,
as of its sister towns of Massachusetts without exception, whether in
the War of Independence, or, more recently, in our Civil War, was not
in all respects ideal, or in conformity with reason, experience and
the everlasting fitness of things. Never, whether in Independence-day
orations or in occasional addresses, does the declaimer weary of
expatiating on the public spirit and self-sacrifice then displayed and
evoked; but, on the other hand, read the record as set forth by Mr.
Nash in the pages of his history, or registered in your town-books.
Referring to the Revolutionary war, and its direct results on Weymouth,
Mr. Nash puts first among them the excessive use of intoxicating
liquors “which then became well-nigh universal.” He speaks of this
as a public “calamity,” most far-reaching in its destructive effects
on both the minds and estates of that generation, and of those that
succeeded. My own investigations have led me to believe that what we
term the “drink habit” with our Massachusetts race dated from a period
long anterior to any Revolutionary troubles. In this respect I think
Mr. Nash greatly exaggerates the influence of army life. Assuredly,
however, stimulating the alcoholic appetite cannot be accounted one
of those features of the soul-stirring time in which posterity can
take a justifiable pride. But, in saying what I have said, I wish
to be explicit. I do not want to be misunderstood. For, on this
head, communities are, I have found, sensitive; nor, I freely admit,
does such sensitiveness on their part furnish any just occasion for
surprise. On the contrary, it is very human,--altogether natural.
Not long ago, in Lincoln, where I now live, I expressed myself on
this subject to the same effect; and I afterwards found I, in so
doing, had occasioned pain, as well as surprise. I had seemed to speak
depreciatingly of the dead, and of a period the memory of which was
sacred. Nothing could have been further from my thought. The criticism
I then made, and now make again, applies to all of our Massachusetts, I
may say our New England, towns. Their records tell me the same story.
Turn, for instance, to your own town books covering those heroic
periods, whether Revolutionary or of the Civil war. Should you do so,
you will find in them a wearisome repetition. In the first flush of
excitement, volunteers, in each case, enrolled themselves in crowds,
they were eager to get to the front; then came the cold reaction, and
the consequent haggling. Call follows call for men--and yet more men;
for war is insatiable,--and these calls are grudgingly responded to by
votes providing for the payment of bounties, and by complicated plans
for the procurement of substitutes. Never once in all those annals do
you read of a stern exaction. On the contrary, the question always is
as to how cheapest to avoid it. The heroic chord is rarely struck. That
there were individual cases, many and touching, of self-sacrifice
and lofty patriotic impulse, I am the last to deny. Was I not witness
to them? Such you do well to commemorate and recall; nor can they be
held in too green a memory. It is not to those I refer, but to the
system under which war was carried on; it was weak, unscientific, to
the last degree wasteful of blood and of treasure,--moreover, it was
cruel to those in the field. Through it much unnecessary agony was
caused; and the necessary agony, at best quite enough, was unduly
prolonged. Properly studied, your town record, like the records of all
your sister towns, teaches on this head a lesson of utmost value. No
nation has any right to enter upon a war, domestic or foreign, unless
it is ready promptly to meet the cost thereof in flesh and blood, as
well as in money. It should not be a question of voluntary enlistment,
or of mercenary service; but, if a community elects to fight, it should
put its fighting force at the absolute disposal of its government.
Conscription and the draft should be the order of the day,--the
unmarried first, the married next; and, for the able-bodied, no
exemption. Never, in the whole history of Massachusetts, was the ordeal
of a war thus systematically met. On the contrary, as studied in your
Weymouth annals, or those of your sister towns, after the first fierce
outburst of ardor cooled, it is one long wearisome record of services
sold and bought.
What was the result? The ranks of your regiments were never full; the
morale of the men at the front suffered. The saddest sights I ever saw
were those skeleton battalions in the last campaign against Richmond,
that of 1864,--those few survivors grouped about the tattered colors,
thrust into action yesterday, decimated again to-day, doomed to-morrow:
and no recruits! Those were the men who went forward voluntarily, and
at the first call to arms. No better material was ever mustered; no
braver troops ever returned an enemy’s fire: but, under the system
which always prevailed, the community from which they came either left
them to take that fire to the end, or sent forward to associate with
them the bounty-bought sweepings of your municipal gutters, the dregs
of your civic cesspools. I speak of that whereof I know. It was not
right, nor was it war: but it made war costly, long, murderous. Life
was simply flung away.
Do you ask what course should have been pursued? What ought to have
been done? I will tell you. With 30,000 men in the field, the State
should have had 20,000 always at home in the training-camps; and
when, after such terrible struggles as those at Gettysburg or in
the Wilderness, word came that a regiment had lost 150 men, dead or
disabled, on the notifying click of the wire the message should have
flashed back that 175 men were on the way to make full the depleted
ranks. The next day 175 fresh men, bearing as yet uncalled numbers in
the draft, should have been ordered forthwith to report at the depots.
That is business; that would be war. In place of it, you let your old
regiments dwindle to skeletons, while you ever organized new; and, as
the indecisive warfare dragged itself along, your towns competed with
each other for bounty-bought flesh and blood. It was quoted at so much
a pound.
This is the side of the record to be studied in your town-books; but it
is a side of the record men do not like to study. Even reference to it
is misconstrued. It is not popular! Yet here is the lesson to be borne
in mind, that valuable to learn. That our young men rushed eagerly
to arms in the early days of each conflict, no one denies; that they
fought bravely and fell frequently, the names on your monuments and
the flags in your cemeteries give proof. But, under your methods of
carrying on warfare, two of them died where one only need to have died;
two indecisive battles had to be fought, where one vigorously followed
up would have sufficed. It was so in the Revolution; it was so in the
Civil War. That in either case it would have been so had the struggle
been over your own hearth-stones, I neither suggest nor believe. Then,
however, the outcome would have directly influenced home existence, and
Weymouth development; not so a remote war, the echoes only of which
disturbed the monotony of your daily village life.
Thus, with Weymouth as with other Massachusetts towns, the battles
and campaigns, whether of 1776 or of 1864, and the sufferings and
sacrifices incident thereto, were not momentous factors of fate.
Indeed, as I now see it, since 1644 there has been but one considerable
event in your history, one only which marked an epoch of far-reaching
change. That event occurred on the 1st of January, 1849, when the South
Shore railroad was opened to traffic, bringing Weymouth into direct and
easy intercourse with the outer and active world. That inaugurated for
you as a community a revolution in life, in occupation, in education,
in religion and in thought;--that date, two hundred and fourteen years
from the incorporation, marks the dividing line between the Weymouth
of the provincial period, and your Weymouth of to-day. Already, in
1804, nearly half a century earlier, your first post-office had been
established; quite an incident in your history. What facts has your
Society preserved concerning it? Late in the eighteenth century stage
coaches put in their appearance. They were a factor of change; what do
you now know of the influence they exerted? The daily newspaper is one
of the great educational forces of modern times; when did it first find
its way generally to Weymouth? Not, I fancy, before 1850. What great
economical crisis, affecting every phase of life, has occurred in the
history of the town? Once, and almost within the memory of men now
living, Weymouth was commercial, as well as agricultural. It had been
so almost from the beginning. It had iron-works in colonial times, and
later a few small mills; but when was it, and from what causes, that
it passed from an agricultural and a commercial to the manufacturing
stage? Presumably, the coming of the railroad worked the change; and,
in working it, modified the whole character of the town.
And here I submit, in these industrial, economical, social, religious
and educational phases is the true field of study and accumulation, to
which the local historical society should devote itself. The present is
always familiar and commonplace; it is the past which interests. But
our present will be the next century’s past; and it is the mission of
societies like this of yours to make the record of to-day fuller, more
exact and more intelligible than is that of yesterday.
Of that “yesterday” of yours, extending practically from the 2d
of January, 1644, the date of the ordination of the Rev. Thomas
Thatcher, which closed the primitive period, to the 1st of January,
1849, which witnessed the opening of the South Shore railroad,--of
that “yesterday,” covering five years more than two centuries, I thus
delivered myself on King-oak hill in my 1874 address:
“We are always accustomed to regard the past as a better and purer
time than the present; there is a vague, traditional simplicity and
innocence hanging about it, almost Arcadian in character. I can find
no ground on which to base this pleasant fancy. Taken altogether I do
not believe that the morals of Weymouth or of her sister towns were on
the average as good in the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth.
The people were sterner and graver, the law and the magistrate were
more severe; but human nature was the same, and would have vent.
There was, I am inclined to think, more hypocrisy in those days
than now; but I have seen nothing which has led me to believe that
the women were more chaste, or that the men were more temperate, or
that, in proportion to population, fewer or less degrading crimes were
perpetrated. Certainly the earlier generations were as a race not
so charitable as their descendants, and less of a spirit of kindly
Christianity prevailed among them.”
Speaking now in the light of subsequent investigation and long study,
I can bear testimony that this passage was written neither in a
depreciatory spirit, nor in one of pessimistic exaggeration. I have
learned more since writing it. I acknowledge I do not, on better
acquaintance, fancy that “prison-house of Puritanism” wherein our race
had “the key turned upon its spirit for two hundred years.” Frankly,
I see truth in Matthew Arnold’s indictment,--“a defective type of
religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of
beauty, a low standard of manners.”
Let us for a moment, in a realistic mood, face the facts of that
unlovely period. And first, of morals. The early church records of
Weymouth no longer exist; and, perhaps, it is well for the good names
of not a few of your families that the fire of April 23, 1751, swept
away the old Meeting-house, and with it the documents there stored. The
records of the Braintree church remain in part; and, of such as remain,
I have made historical use. Those who care so to do may familiarize
themselves with my conclusion.[105] So far as morality is concerned,
the picture presented is not of a character which would lead us to
covet for our sons and daughters a recurrence of that past.
Next, temperance:--As respects the _in_-temperance of that colonial
period, I myself caught a youthful glimpse of its vanishing skirts.
Distinctly do I recall the village tavern, the village bar-room,--for
in Quincy, in my youth, bar-room and post-office were one,--and,
moreover, the village drunkards. They were as familiar to eye and
tongue as the minister, the squire, or the doctor. I see them now,
seated in those wooden arm-chairs on the tavern porch, waiting to
see the Plymouth stage drive up. The drunkard reeling home in broad
daylight is an unknown spectacle now; then, he hardly excited passing
notice.
Take religion next:--I submit in all confidence that the world has
outgrown eighteenth century theology. It is a cast-off garment; and
one never to be resumed. Bitter, narrow, uncharitable, intolerant, an
insult to reason, the last thing it preached was peace on earth and
good will among men. I have had occasion to examine into its utterances
and to set forth its tenets. Those curious on the subject may there
inform themselves.[106] You would not sit in church to-day, and listen
to what was then taught,--an angry, a revengeful and an unforgiving God.
Schools:--Prior to 1850 the schools of Massachusetts were archaic, the
primitive methods alone were in vogue; and not until after that time
was any attention at all paid either to scientific instruction, or to
the laws of sanitation. Charity! the care of the insane! the treating
of the sick! In your Weymouth records for the town meeting of March 17,
1771, you will find the following: “Voted, to sell the poor that are
maintained by the town for this present year at a Vendue to the lowest
bidder.” Do you realize what that meant, and who were included in the
“poor that are maintained by the town?” It was the old-time substitute
for the asylum, the almshouse and the hospital. In those days the care
of the demented was farmed out to him or her who would assume it at the
lowest charge to the public. Even as late as 1843, and in the immediate
neighborhood of Boston, naked maniacs could be seen confined in cages,
or unlighted sheds, connected with the almshouse or abutting on the
public way.[107] Or take this other Weymouth record of August 28, 1733,
exactly one year before my ancestor, Rev. William Smith, was ordained
your minister.
“Voted by the Town to give Twenty pounds to any person who will take
two of the children of the Widow Ruth Harvey (that is) the Eldest
Daughter and one of the youngest Daughters (a twin), and take the care
of them until they be eighteen years old.”
Twenty pounds in those days was $66.60 of the money of our days; and
that in old tenor bills! A public inducement to baby-farming is not now
held out. And so I might go on to the close of the chapter, did time
permit. But Macaulay has said it all before, and why now repeat in more
prosaic terms the tale of ancient wrong? Rather let me close with this
passage from his History:
“It is now the fashion to place the golden age in times when noblemen
were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a
modern footman; when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the
very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern work-house; when to
have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher
class of gentry; when men died faster in the purest country air than
they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men
died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast
of Guiana.... There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter
literature of the seventeenth century which does not contain some
proof that our ancestors were less human than their posterity. The
discipline of work-shops, of schools, of private families, though not
more efficient than at present, was infinitely harsher. Masters, well
born and bred, were in the habit of beating their servants. Pedagogues
knew of no way of imparting knowledge but by beating their pupils.
Husbands, of decent station, were not afraid to beat their wives....
The more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reason
shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age has been
fruitful of new social evils. The truth is that the evils are, with
scarcely an exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence
which discerns, and the humanity which remedies them.”
FOOTNOTES:
[100] Savage’s _Winthrop_, v. 1, p. 194, n.
[101] Concerning this curious and very interesting map, see
_Proceedings Mass. Hist. Soc._ (Second Series), v. 1, pp. 211-214.
There is a reproduction of the map in the large-paper edition of
Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of America_, v. 3, p. 380,
with a descriptive note relating thereto.
[102] As both Maverick and Blackstone were men of education, and
apparently not without some means, belonging distinctly to the upper
class of English life, and as they were also contemporaries of young
Robert Gorges, it would seem more than probable that they were
associates of his, and came over to New England in his party. Morell
certainly was another of the same class. As respects Maverick, though
he distinctly says he came to New England in 1624, yet he makes the
statement forty years after the event, and as a matter of recollection.
He was not speaking exactly, nor apparently from record. He may very
well, therefore, have got the time generally as 1624, when in fact he
arrived here late in 1623; or he may have removed from Wessagusset
to Winnisimmet, and there established himself permanently during the
spring of the following year. Hence his statement. On the other hand,
it has been suggested that he came over with Capt. Christopher Levett,
and plausible grounds can be given in support of such a theory. The
exact date and circumstances of his coming will probably never be
known. The only facts which can be stated with certainty are that he
came about the same time as Robert Gorges, and that he was more or less
associated with Robert Gorges’s father, Sir Ferdinando. That he married
the widow of David Thompson also does not admit of doubt.
[103] _Supra_, p. 36.
[104] See _The Antinomian Controversy_; _Three Episodes of
Massachusetts History_, Part II, pp. 363-581; _Antinomianism in the
Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1636-1638_; Prince Society Publications,
1894.
[105] See paper entitled, _Some Phases of Sexual Morality and Church
Discipline in Colonial New England_, in Proceedings of Massachusetts
Historical Society, June, 1891. (Proceedings, Second Series, vol. vi,
pp. 477-516.)
[106] Massachusetts: Its Historians and its History. Boston, 1893.
[107] See the article entitled, _Insanity in Massachusetts_, by Dr.
S. G. Howe, in _North American Review_ for January, 1843, vol. 56, pp.
171-191.
INDEX.
=Abell=, Robert, 93.
=Aberdeceest=, 9.
=Abington=, 47.
=Acadia=, 120.
=Act= to prevent monopoly, 80.
=Adams=, Abigail, Mrs, 70, 84, 115, 116, 145.
Charles F., Jr., 5, 89, 97, 114.
Henry, 93.
John, 84.
John Q., 38, 57.
=Allen=, John, 93.
=Ann=, Cape, 9.
=Antinomian= controversy, 139.
=Applegate=, Thomas, 91.
=Arnold=, 79.
Matthew, 143, 144, 152.
=Back= river, 62.
=Bacon=, 6.
=Banbury=, England, 108.
=Bare= Cove, 91.
=Barnard=, Elder Massachiel, (First non-conformist minister), 35-37,
97, 99, 112, 131.
=Barnstable=, 100, 102.
Church, 100, 101.
=Bass= River, Beverly, 100.
=Bates=, Elder Edward, 98, 104.
Joshua, 85.
Samuel, 98.
=Bayley=, Nathaniel, 77.
=Beacon= Hill, 135.
=Bent=, Rev. Josiah, 103.
=Bernard=, Gov., 72.
Rev. Mr., 141.
=Beverly=, 100.
=Bicknell=, 36.