ever been signed. So excellent has been the record of successive
non-partisan administrations in the city that the very phrase, “The
Cambridge Idea,” has become well known even outside the limits of
Massachusetts as signifying the conception of public office as a public
trust and the conduct of municipal affairs on purely business
principles. Yet in spite of its municipal expansion and business
enterprises, Cambridge is still pre-eminently the place where the lamp
of learning is kept lighted. Though the college waxes great in numbers
and its buildings multiply, and the jar of business invades the academic
quiet, yet the purposes and habits of the scholar’s life still
distinguish the community. It is said that when Cambridge people are at
a loss for conversation one asks the other, “How is your new book
coming on?” and the question rarely fails to bring a voluble reply.
There is an entire alcove in the City Library devoted to the works of
Cambridge writers. “Brigadier-Generals,” said Howells, himself once a
resident of the town, “were no more common in Washington during the
Civil War than authors in Cambridge.” It is an interesting illustration
of the persistence of good tradition that the place where was
established the first printing-press in America, set up by Stephen Daye
in 1639, should still be a centre of book-production. Not only do John
Fiske and Charles Eliot Norton and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and a
score of others maintain the literary reputation of the place, but the
great establishments of the Riverside Press, the University Press and
the Athenæum Press put forth a constant stream of high-standard
publications, and send a most characteristic Cambridge product all over
the world. Still is Cambridge one of the shrines of pilgrimage. The
antiquarians ponder over the mossy gravestones in the little “God’s
Acre” between the “Sentinel and Nun,” as Dr. Holmes called the two
church towers which front the college gate, and there they read the
long inscriptions that tell the virtues of the first ministers of the
parish and the early presidents of the college. The patriots come and
stand under the Washington elm, or linger by the gates of the Craigie
house or Elmwood, or pace the noble Memorial Hall, which declares how
Harvard’s sons died for their country, while visitors flock to the great
museum which the genius and energy of Louis Agassiz upbuilt, and to the
garden where Asa Gray taught and botanized. Thousands of men all over
the country think of Cambridge with grateful love as they remember the
years of their happy youth; and the citizens of the place, while they
look backward with just pride, look forward with confidence that there
is to be more of inspiring history and true poetry in the city’s future
than in its fortunate past.
[Illustration]
CONCORD
FIRST IN MANY FIELDS
BY FRANK B. SANBORN
Old this New World is,--geologically more ancient, perhaps, than that
hemisphere from whose western edge Columbus set sail, four centuries
ago, and found our continent lying across his way, as he plodded to
Cathay. Yet, uncounted as our barbarous centuries and antediluvian æons
are, real history begins only with the opening of the seventeenth
century, when the English Puritan and the French Jesuit transferred to
these shores the unfolding civilization and the rival religions of
Western Europe. When we see at Plymouth the wooded glacial hillsides,
under which the Pilgrims landed and established democracy in their
wilderness, we may remember that their venture, though bolder, because
earlier, than that of Bulkeley and Willard, who planted the Concord
colony, was yet but fifteen years in advance, and was made beside a
friendly ocean, bearing succor and trade, and feeding them from its
abundance. But the Concord colonists sat down in the gloomy shadow of
the forest, amid trails of the savage and the wolf. Still more heroic
was the crusade of the Jesuit in New France; but while romance and
martyrdom were his lot, our Puritans planted here the germs of a grand
republic.
“God said, ‘I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor.
I will divide my goods,
Call in the wretch and slave;
None shall rule but the humble,
And none but Toil shall have.’”
The first event in the history of Massachusetts was this planting of a
territorial democracy. The colony of Concord was granted by Winthrop and
his legislature in September, 1635, to Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan
minister, from the little parish of Odell or Woodhill (colloquially
called “Wuddle”) in English Bedfordshire, and to Simon Willard, a
merchant, from Hawkshurst in Kent. Twelve other
[Illustration: CONCORD RIVER, BY THOREAU’S LANDING.]
families were joined with them in the grant, and another minister, Rev.
John Jones, brought other families from England, aiming towards Concord,
in October, 1635. The situation was doubtless chosen by Major Willard,
an Indian trader and in after years a fighter of the Indians; who also
selected and partly colonized two other towns, farther in the
wilderness,--Groton and Lancaster. But the true father of this Concord,
and probably the giver of its name (altering it from the Indian
Musketaquit), was Rev. Peter Bulkeley, ancestor of its most celebrated
citizen, Waldo Emerson. Of this worthy, whose grave, like that of Moses,
is unknown to this day, something should be said, before we come to
later heroes. Peter Bulkeley was the son of Rev. Edward Bulkeley, a
doctor of divinity in English Cambridge,--a scholar and man of wealth,
who was rector of the Bedfordshire parish just named, where his son was
born in 1583. He succeeded his father there in 1620.
It is in the country of John Bunyan and Cowper the poet, this little
parish of Odell. Like Concord River, the Ouse, on which it stands, is
unmatched for winding, even in England. Below the old castle of Odell,
and the church, still standing, where the Bulkeleys preached, runs this
crooked stream, murmuring as it meanders through its fringe of
meadowland, green as the richest strip of English pasture can be, which
lies between such a river and the low hills that come down towards its
edge. This Ouse (there is another in Yorkshire) flows from Bucks, the
county of John Hampden, through Bedford, the county of the Russells, and
Huntingdon, where Cromwell lived, and finally into the North Sea at
Lynn. On the north bank lies the hill upon which Odell stands,--the
highway from Sharnbrook to Harrold and Olney (long the home of Cowper)
running from east to west along the breast of the hill. The old church
standing amid trees--conspicuous is a chestnut of surpassing size and
beauty--is directly opposite the ancient castle, now a comfortable and
handsome mansion, built some two hundred years ago,--or about the time
the oldest houses in Concord were built.
It was no love of adventure, we may be sure, that brought Peter
Bulkeley, at the age of fifty-two, from this lovely country into a land
of forests and of poverty; but a desire to escape the ecclesiastical
tyranny of Laud and his bishops, and to establish a true church in the
wilderness. Some difficulties attended even this, for when, in July,
1636, Mr. Bulkeley was about to organize his church at Cambridge, in
order to have Sir Henry Vane and John Winthrop (Governor and Deputy
Governor that year) present at the ceremony, lo and behold! these great
men “took it in ill part, and thought not fit to go, because they had
not come to them before, as they ought to have done, and as others had
done before them, to acquaint them with their purpose.” Again, in April,
1637, when Mr. Bulkeley was to be ordained (also in Cambridge), Winthrop
says that Vane and John Cotton and John Wheelwright, and the two ruling
elders of Boston “and the rest of that church which were of any note,
did none of them come to this meeting.” “The reason was conceived to
be,” adds Winthrop, “because they counted the Concord ministers as
_legal_ preachers,”--that is, believers in a covenant of works (of the
Law) instead of a covenant of grace. This was the issue upon which
Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson were banished, soon after.
Indeed, the ordination of Mr. Bulkeley took place in the very height of
that fierce controversy between John Cotton and his former supporters,
Wheelwright and Vane, which came near breaking up the little colony; and
the Concord minister was one of the synod which, the next August, or
perhaps later, specified some eighty doctrinal opinions as erroneous or
heretical,--about one error for every two white persons in Concord. The
covenant of the village church, however, breathes a more liberal spirit;
for in it we find these words, evidently from the hand of Bulkeley:
“Whereas the Lord hath of His great goodness brought us from under
the yoke and burdening of men’s traditions, to the precious liberty
of His ordinances, which we now do enjoy,--we will, according to
our places and callings, stand for the maintenance of this liberty,
to our utmost endeavor, and not return to any human ordinances from
which we have escaped.”
And the spirit of his oft-quoted sermon is also a witness to his true
piety, whatever his doctrinal narrowness:
“There is no people but will strive to excel in something; what can
we (in Concord) excel in, if not in holiness? If we look to number,
we are the fewest; if to strength, we are the weakest; if to wealth
and riches, we are the poorest of all the people of God through the
whole world. We cannot excel nor so much as equal other people in
these things; and if we come short in grace and holiness too, we
are the most despicable people under Heaven.”
Let us hope that the wish of the good pastor was granted, and that he
lived to see the fruit of his labors. Yet there is a letter of his,
written in 1650 to John Cotton, in which Bulkeley seems to regret the
democratic liberty which Emerson, his descendant, never ceased to
approve. The Concord minister writes:
“The Lord hath a number of holy and humble ones here amongst us,
for whose sakes He doth spare, and will spare long; but, were it
not for such a remnant, we should see the Lord would make quick
work amongst us. Shall I tell you what I think to be the ground of
all this insolency which discovers itself in the speech of men?
Truly, I cannot ascribe it so much to any outward thing, as to the
putting of too much liberty and power into the hands of the
multitude, which they are too weak to manage; many growing
conceited, proud, arrogant, self-sufficient.... Remember the former
days which you had in old Boston; yet the number of professors is
far more here than there. But tell me, which place was better
governed? When matters were swayed there by your wisdom and
counsel, they went on with strength and power for good. But here,
where the heady or headless multitude have gotten the power into
their hands, there is insolency and confusion; and I know not how
it can be avoided, unless we should make the doors of the church
narrower.”
This was the caution and reversion of age,--for the doubting Peter was
then sixty-seven. But Emerson, at the age of sixty, could say, with
unabated faith in Freedom:
“Call the people together!
The young men and the sires,
The digger in the harvest field,
Hireling and him that hires;
Lo now, if these poor men
Can govern the land and sea,
And make just laws below the sun,
As planets faithful be.”
The experience of the ages has shown that the Puritans were right in
making the doors of the church wider, not narrower; though we still hear
the complaint of aged men, or young men born with a call to be old, that
the former times were better than ours, and the “headless multitude”
must be deprived of a voice in their own destiny.
When Emerson in 1835, at the two hundredth anniversary of Concord,
proposed to requite England’s gift of her printed Doomsday Book by
presenting her and the other European nations with our yet unpublished
town records, he said: “Tell them the Union has 24 States, and
Massachusetts is one; that in Massachusetts are 300 towns, and Concord
is one; that in Concord are 500 rateable polls, and _every one has an
equal vote_.” To-day there are 45 States; Massachusetts has 322 towns,
besides nearly 30 cities; and instead of 500 ratable polls, Concord has
now 1200; but each one still has an equal vote.
[Illustration: R. W. EMERSON (1858).
FROM A SKETCH BY ROWSE.]
Men are carried along, in spite of themselves, by the doctrine or system
which they embrace; their life principle, once adopted, has more force
than their temporary wish or will. So Calvinism, of which Peter Bulkeley
was a fervent disciple, with its constant stress laid on the worth of
the individual man, led inevitably to democracy, no matter how much the
innate aristocratic feeling of the English gentleman--the class to which
Bulkeley belonged--might revolt thereat. It was the same in both
countries, the mother and the daughter; Old England and New England
found John Calvin leading them along towards the Commonwealth of equal
rights and abolished privileges,--towards Sidney and Locke, Franklin and
Jefferson, Lincoln and Gladstone.
This, then, is the first historic lesson of Concord, as of all New
England,--Democracy through Calvinism, in spite of recalcitrant gentry
and reactionary ministers. Philanthropy, too, that modern invention,
which may almost be said to have come in with the eighteenth century,
and to have had Franklin for its first missionary, began to show itself
in our meadowy town, whose very name prefigured it. The epitaph of Rev.
John Whiting, parish minister here for twenty-six years (dying in
1752), records that he was “a gentleman of singular hospitality and
generosity, who never detracted from the character of any man, _and was
a universal lover of mankind_.” This would have been no compliment in
Bulkeley’s time, when the saints were entitled to be loved, and sinners
were excluded; but the eighteenth century set up a higher standard,
which has been maintained till now, when the votaries of evolution and
the survival of the fittest are teaching a return to the old
doctrine,--only reversing it; for now it is the sinners whom we are
expected to admire, and to hate the saints.
The second historic lesson of Concord is like unto the first,--but more
startling and brilliant. It was the lesson of Revolution, which has been
thoroughly learned since 1775. The embattled farmers who, at yonder
bridge,
“Fired the shot heard round the world,”
were conservative revolutionists, and as far from anarchy as from
atheism. In the instructions given by this town to its representative in
1774,--or rather, in a report made in town-meeting, January 20th of that
year, in view of
[Illustration: THE FIGHT AT THE BRIDGE.
REDRAWN FROM RALPH EARLE’S SKETCH OF 1775.
1. THE BRITISH.
2. AMERICANS.]
the Boston Tea-Party,--it was declared as the voice of the town:
“That we will, in conjunction with our brethren in America, risk
our fortunes, and even our lives, in defence of his Majesty King
George the Third, his person, crown, and dignity; and will also,
with the same resolution, as his freeborn subjects in this country,
to the utmost of our power and ability, defend all our
charter-rights, that they may be transmitted inviolate to the
latest posterity.”
Three months after this, when the Boston Port Bill was in agitation, and
two months later, when it had passed Parliament, the farmers of Concord
took a bolder tone,--“conscious,” as they said in town-meeting, “of no
alternative between the horrors of slavery, and the carnage and
desolation of a civil war,” except non-importation of British goods, to
which the good citizens bound themselves. Still later, in a county
convention which met in Concord, August 31, 1774, it was resolved:
“That we by no means intend to withdraw our allegiance from our
gracious Sovereign; that when our ancestors emigrated from Great
Britain, charters and solemn stipulations expressed the conditions,
and what particular rights they yielded; what each party had to do
and perform, and what each of the contracting parties were equally
bound by. Therefore a debtor may as justly refuse to pay his debts,
because it is inexpedient for him, as the Parliament deprive us of
our charter privileges, because it is inexpedient to a corrupt
administration for us to enjoy them.... And a sense of our duty as
men, as freemen, as Christian freemen, united in the firmest bonds,
obliges us to resolve that every civil officer in this Province,
now in commission, and acting in conformity to the late act of
Parliament, is not an officer agreeable to our charter--_therefore
unconstitutional, and ought to be opposed_.... As we are resolved
never to submit one iota to the Act, we will not submit to courts
thus constituted, and acting in conformity to said Act.... In
consequence of this resolve, all business at the Inferior Court of
Common Pleas, and Court of General Sessions of the Peace, next to
be holden in Concord, _must cease_.”
This was peaceful revolution, proceeding, not upon any vague notion of a
general “Social Contract,” but on formal violations of a written
contract, the Colony Charter, as explicitly stated. I ask attention to
this, because it has been a favorite fancy of some modern writers, who
praise the Puritans and disparage Jefferson and Franklin, that our
Revolutionary fathers had gained through those two latitudinarians a
glimpse of the levelling French doctrines, and gave themselves up to be
guided by Rousseau and Voltaire, in dereliction of their Puritan
ancestry. Precisely the opposite is true; the French author whom
Jefferson may have had in mind, when he was not thinking of Pym and
Hampden, Sergeant Maynard, Locke, and Algernon Sidney,--I mean
Montesquieu,--having derived his theories more from the English
constitutionalists than they from him. Probably not one of the men of
Middlesex, who thus led the way to revolution in this law-abiding town
of Concord (the seat of county justice), ever heard of Rousseau; but
they were lawyers, deacons, country justices and farmers, accustomed to
sit on juries; and they understood the law of contract and the
obligations of fair trade as well as any English lord could tell them.
They voted further, on this eventful summer day, that “a Provincial
Congress is absolutely necessary, in our present unhappy
situation,”--and they named October, and Concord, as a suitable time and
place for its assembling. This first Provincial Congress did meet,
October 7th, at Salem, but adjourned to Concord that day; it first met
here, October 11, 1774, and, finding the county court-house too small
for its three hundred members and clerks, and the people who gathered
to support them, it moved over to the parish meeting-house (built in
1712), and remained in session there five days, when it removed to
Cambridge, for the sake of being nearer Boston, then held as a garrison
by British troops. The second Provincial Congress, of 1775, also met in
Concord for four weeks of March and April; and it had only been
adjourned four days when the British grenadiers made their midnight
march from Boston to Lexington, hoping to catch there the arch-rebels
Hancock and Sam Adams, who had gone to Lexington as members of the
Committee of Public Safety (of which Dr. Warren was chairman), then the
executive of Massachusetts under the new revolutionary government. The
Provincial Congress, the legislature of the Province, met again for the
last time in Concord, April 22, 1775, to consider the results of the
eventful 19th. It finally dissolved May 31st, after hearing a sermon
from Dr. Langdon, the President of Harvard College; and Concord ceased
forever to be the legislative capital of Massachusetts. It became
temporarily, however, the seat of Dr. Langdon’s College, which in
October, 1775, began its recitations in the court-house and
meeting-house, and so continued till June, 1776.
Even Harvard College was at that time revolutionary; it gave up its few
buildings in Cambridge to the army of Washington, and its president, a
cousin of the wealthy New Hampshire patriot, John Langdon, made the
prayer for Bunker Hill battle, as the troops marched out of Cambridge to
give a feeble support to Prescott and his Middlesex farmers, entrenched
on the hill. Washington had not yet reached Cambridge, to take command;
had his strategic eye taken in the situation that morning, the result at
Bunker Hill would have been different.
Lexington, the town which gave its name to the battle of April, 1775,
more decidedly than Concord,--though both names occur from the
first,--was an offshoot from the older towns of Cambridge, Watertown and
Woburn, rather than an original church seat, and was not established as
a town until 1712. A range of hills separates it from the valley of the
Musketaquit, and Paul Revere, in his night ride of April 18th,
celebrated by Longfellow, could not cross those hills, but left his
message of war to be borne on to Concord village by young Prescott,
distantly related to Prescott of Bunker Hill. But Lexington, though
little more than half so populous as Concord at that time, had a warlike
people, many of them descended from the fighting Monros of Scotland,
captured by Cromwell, and exiled for their loyalty to the Stuarts. In
Lexington they again turned out against the house of Hanover, and they
were commanded that April morning by the grandfather of Lexington’s most
famous son, Theodore Parker. Captain John Parker, though ill on the 19th
of April, did his soldier’s duty from two in the morning till midnight;
and some of his men returned the British fire in early morning, against
hopeless odds. Their turn came in the afternoon, when the retreating
British were only saved from total defeat by the cannon of Lord Percy.
Those first heroes of the Revolution, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who
had been at the Provincial Congress in Concord, at Lexington were in the
early morning in the parsonage of Rev. Mr. Clark, a kinsman of Hancock,
and narrowly escaped capture by the British soldiers, who had special
orders to seize them.
John Pierpont, a poet whose Pegasus balked now and then, in his verses
at Acton, April 19, 1851, anticipated Longfellow by this Wordsworthian
version of Revere’s ride to Lexington:
“The foremost, Paul Revere,
At Warren’s bidding has the gauntlet run
Unscathed, and, dashing into Lexington,
While midnight wraps him in her mantle dark,
Halts at the house of Reverend Mister Clark.”
As compared with Concord, though both were rural towns, Lexington was
then, and long remained, more rustic than its westward neighbor; with
less trade, less culture and fewer of the tendencies toward literature
which early showed themselves in the parish of the Bulkeleys and
Emersons. When Theodore Parker, in his career of scholarship and reform,
began to look outward from his father’s Lexington farm, it was towards
Concord, as well as towards Boston, that he turned his eyes; he taught a
district school in Concord, and preached in its pulpit as a candidate to
stand beside Dr. Ripley, the pastor of the Old Manse. In after years he
thus described the event which gave Lexington its chief title to fame,
before Parker’s own birth there:
[Illustration: THE BATTLE OF LEXINGTON, APRIL 19, 1775.
FROM AN OLD PRINT.]
“The war of Revolution began at Lexington, to end at Yorktown. Its
first battle was on the Nineteenth of April. Hancock and Adams
lodged at Lexington with the minister. In the raw morning, a little
after daybreak, a tall man, with a large forehead under a
three-cornered hat, drew up his company of 70 men on the
Green,--farmers and mechanics like himself; only one is left now
(1851), the boy who played the men to the spot. (It was Jonathan
Harrington the fifer.) They wheeled into line to wait for the
Regulars. The captain ordered every man to load his piece with
powder and ball. ‘Don’t fire,’ were his words, ‘unless fired upon;
but if they want a war, let it begin here.’ The Regulars came on.
Some Americans offered to run away from their post. Captain Parker
said, ‘I will order the first man shot dead that leaves his place.’
The English commander cried out, ‘Disperse, you rebels! lay down
your arms and disperse!’ Not a man stirred. ‘Disperse, you damned
rebels!’ shouted he again. Not a man stirred. He ordered the
vanguard to fire; they did so, but over the heads of our fathers.
Then the whole main body levelled their pieces, and there was need
of ten new graves in Lexington. A few Americans returned the shot.
British blood stained the early grass which waved in the wind.
‘Disperse and take care of yourselves!’ was the captain’s last
command. There lay the dead, and there stood the soldiers; there
was a battle-field between England and America--never to be forgot,
never to be covered over. The ‘Mother-country’ of the morning was
the ‘enemy’ at sunrise. ‘Oh, what a glorious morning is this!’ said
Samuel Adams.”
Seven men had been killed on the spot, nine wounded,--a quarter-part of
all who had stood in arms on the Green, under the eyes of Hancock and
Adams.