passed. The sachems and their squaws have vanished, and on the
hill-slope where once their lodges stood a town has sprung up.
Warehouses line the shores and wharves, at which lie whalers and
merchantmen loading and discharging their cargoes. A large proportion of
black faces appears among the passers-by in the streets, and many
straight-skirted coats, broad-brimmed hats, gowns of sober hue and
poke-bonnets of drab. Friends abound as well as negroes, not to mention
Jews, Moravians, Presbyterians and “Six-Principle” and “Seven-Principle”
Baptists; for, under the mild fostering of Roger Williams, Newport has
become a city of refuge to religious malcontents of every persuasion.
All the population, however, is not of like sobriety. A “rage of finery”
distinguishes the aristocracy of the island, and silk-stockinged
gentlemen, with scarlet coats and swords, silver-buckled shoes and lace
ruffles, may be seen in abundance, exchanging stately greetings with
ladies in brocades and hoops, as they pass to and fro between the
decorous gambrel-roofed houses or lift the brazen knockers of the
street-doors. It is a Saint’s-Day, and on the hill above, in a quaint
edifice of white-painted wood, with Queen Anne’s royal crown and a
gilded pennon on its spire, the Rev. Mr. Honeyman, missionary of the
English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, is conducting the
service in Trinity Church. The sermon begins, but is interrupted by a
messenger who hurries in with a letter which he hands to the divine in
the pulpit. The clergyman reads it aloud to his audience, pronounces a
rapid benediction, and “wardens, vestry, church and congregation” crowd
to the ferry-wharf, off which lies a “pretty large ship,” just come to
anchor. A boat rows to the shore, from which alights a gentleman of
“middle stature, and an agreeable, pleasant and erect aspect,” wearing
the canonicals of an English dean. He leads by the hand a lady; three
other gentlemen follow in their company. The new arrival is George
Berkeley, Dean of Derry, philosopher and scholar, who, on his way to
Bermuda with the project of there planting an ideally perfect
university, “for the instruction of the youth of America” (!), has
chosen Rhode Island as a suitable vantage-point from which to organize
and direct the new undertaking. His companions are his newly married
wife and three “learned and elegant friends,” Sir John James, Richard
Dalton and the artist Smibert. Not every Saint’s-Day brings such
voyagers to Newport from over the sea. No wonder that Trinity Church
services are interrupted, and that preacher and congregation crowd to
the wharf to do the strangers honor!
The Berkeley party spent the first few months of their stay in the town
of Newport, whence the Dean made short excursions to what Mrs. Berkeley
terms “the Continent,” meaning the mainland opposite. Toward the close
of their first summer, James, Dalton and Smibert removed to Boston, and
the Berkeley family to a farm in the interior of the island, which the
Dean had purchased and on which he had built a house. The house still
exists, and is still known by the name of Whitehall, given it by its
loyal owner in remembrance of the ancient palace of the kings of
England.
[Illustration: GEORGE BERKELEY, DEAN OF DERRY.]
The estate, which comprised less than a hundred acres, lies in a grassy
valley to the south of Honeyman’s Hill, and about two miles back from
what is now known as the “Second Beach.” It commands no “view” whatever.
Dean Berkeley, when asked why he did not choose a site from which more
could be seen, is said to have replied that “if a prospect were
continually in view it would lose its charm.” His favorite walk was
toward the sea, and he is supposed to have made an outdoor study of a
rocky shelf, overhung by a cliff cornice, on the face of a hill-ridge
fronting the beach, which shelf is still known as “Bishop Berkeley’s
Rock.”
Three years the peaceful life of Whitehall continued. Two children were
born to the Bishop, one of whom died in infancy. The house was a place
of meeting for all the missionaries of the island, as well as for the
more thoughtful and cultivated of the Newport society. At last, in the
winter of 1730, came the crisis of the Bermuda scheme. Land had been
purchased, the grant of money half promised by the English Government
was due. But the persuasive charm of the founder of the enterprise was
no longer at hand to influence those who had the power to make or mar
the project; and Sir Robert Walpole, with that sturdy indifference to
pledge, or to other
[Illustration: WHITEHALL, THE BERKELEY RESIDENCE, BUILT 1729.]
people’s convenience, which distinguished him, intimated with fatal
clearness of meaning, that if Dean Berkeley was waiting in Rhode Island
for twenty thousand pounds of the public money to be got out of _his_
exchequer, he might as well return to Europe without further loss of
time. The bubble was indeed broken, and Berkeley, brave still and
resolutely patient under this heavy blow, prepared for departure. His
books he left as a gift to the library of Yale College, and his farm of
Whitehall was made over to the same institution, to found three
scholarships for the encouragement of Greek and Latin study. These
bequests arranged, his wife and their one remaining child sailed for
Ireland. There, a bishopric, and twenty years of useful and honorable
labor, awaited him, and the brief dream of Rhode Island must soon have
seemed a dream indeed. Few vestiges remain now of his sojourn,--the
shabby farmhouse once his home, the chair in which he sat to write, a
few books and papers, the organ presented by him to Trinity Church, a
big family portrait by Smibert, and, appealing more strongly to the
imagination than these, the memory of his distinguished name as a friend
of American letters, still preserved by scholarship or foundation in
many institutions of learning--and the little grave in Trinity
churchyard, where, on the south side of the Kay Monument, sleeps “Lucia
Berkeley, daughter of Dean Berkeley, _obiit_ the fifth of September,
1731.”
The traveller who to-day is desirous of visiting Whitehall may reach it
by the delightful way of the beaches. Rounding the long curve of the
First Beach, with its dressing-houses and tents, its crowd of carriages
and swarms of gayly clad bathers, and climbing the hill at the far end,
he will find himself directly above the lonely but far more beautiful
Second Beach. Immediately before him, to the left, he will see Bishop
Berkeley’s Rock, with its cliff-hung shelf, and beyond, the soft
outlines of Sachuest Point, the narrow blue of the East Passage, and a
strip of sunlit mainland. The breezy perch where _Alciphron_ was written
is on the sea-face of one of the parallel rock-formations which, with
their intervening valleys, make up the region known as “Paradise Rocks.”
Near by, in the line of low cliffs which bounds the beach to the
southward, is the chasm called “Purgatory,” a vertical fissure some
fifty feet in depth, into which, under certain conditions of wind and
tide, the water rushes with great force and is sucked out with a hollow
boom, which is sufficiently frightful to explain the name selected for
the spot. The rocks which make up the cliffs are in great part
conglomerate, of soft shades of purple and reddish gray. Beyond, the
white beach glistens in the sun. And to the left, the road curves on
past farmhouses and “cottages of gentility.” Away on the valley slope,
the slow sails of a windmill revolve and flash, casting a flying shadow
over the grass. A mile farther, and the road, making a turn, is joined
to the right by what seems to be a farm-lane shut off by gates. This is
the entrance to Whitehall. The house can be dimly made out from the
road--a low, square building with a lean-to and a long, steep pitch of
roof, fronting on a small garden overgrown with fruit-trees. The present
owner holds it from the college under what may truly be called a long
lease, as it has still some eight hundred and odd years to run. He has
built a house near by, for his own occupation, and, alas! has removed
thither the last bit that remained of the decorative art of the old
Whitehall, namely, the band of quaint Dutch tiles which once
[Illustration: “PURGATORY.”]
surrounded the chimney-piece of the parlor. But the parlor remains
unchanged, with its low ceiling and uneven floor; the old staircase is
there, the old trees, and, in spite of the tooth of time and the worse
spoliation of man, enough is left to hint at the days of its early
repute and to make the place worth a visit.
One more glimpse through the mist before we come to the new times of
this our Isle of Peace. It is just half a century since Berkeley, his
baffled scheme heavy at his heart, set sail for Ireland. The fog is
unusually thick, and lies like a fleece of wool over the sea. Absolutely
nothing can be seen, but strange sounds come, borne on the wind from the
direction of Block Island--dull reports as of cannon signals; and the
inhabitants of Newport prick up their ears and strain their eyes with a
mixture of hope and terror; for the French fleet is looked for; English
cruisers have been seen or suspected hovering round the coast, and who
knows but a naval engagement is taking place at that very moment. By and
by the fog lifts, with that fantastic deliberation which distinguishes
its movements, and presently stately shapes whiten the blue, and,
gradually nearing, reveal themselves as
[Illustration: ROCHAMBEAU’S HEADQUARTERS.]
the frigates _Surveillante_, _Amazone_ and _Guêpe_, _The Duke of
Burgundy_, and _The Neptune_, “doubly sheathed with copper”; _The
Conquerant_, _The Provence_, _The Eveillé_, also “doubly sheathed with
copper”; _The Lazon_ and _The Ardent_, convoying a host of transports
and store-ships; with General Rochambeau and his officers on board,
besides the regiments of Bourbonnais, Soissonais, Saintonge and Royal
Deux Ponts, five hundred artillerists and six hundred of Lauzan’s
Legion, all come to aid the infant United States, then in the fourth
year of their struggle for independence. Never was reinforcement more
timely or more ardently desired. We may be sure that all Newport ran
out to greet the new arrivals. Among the other officers who landed on
that eventful 11th of July, was Claude Blanchard, commissary-in-chief of
the French forces--an important man enough to the expedition, but of
very little importance now, except for the lucky fact that he kept a
journal,--which journal, recently published, gives a better and more
detailed account of affairs at that time and place than any one else has
afforded us.
It is from Blanchard that we learn of the three months’ voyage; of
sighting now and again the vessels of the English squadron; of the
Chevalier de Fernay’s refusal to engage them, he being intent on the
safe-conduct of his convoy; of the consequent heart-burnings and
reproaches of his captains, which, together with the stings of his own
wounded pride, resulted in a fever, and subsequently in his death,
recorded on the tablet which now adorns the vestibule of Trinity Church.
The town was illuminated in honor of the fleet. “A small but handsome
town,” says Blanchard, “and the houses, though mostly of wood, are of an
agreeable shape.”
The first work of the newly arrived allies was to restore the redoubts
which the English had dismantled and in great part destroyed. It was at
this time that the first fort on the Dumplings, and the original Fort
Adams, on Brenton’s Reef, were built. The excellent Blanchard meanwhile
continues his observations on climate, society and local customs.
One of his criticisms on the national characteristics strikes us oddly
now, yet has its interest as denoting the natural drift and result of
the employment of a debased currency.
“The Americans are slow, and do not decide promptly in matters of
business,” he observes. “It is not easy for us to rely upon their
promises. They love money, and _hard_ money; it is thus they designate
specie to distinguish it from paper money, which loses prodigiously.
This loss varies according to circumstances and according to the
provinces.”
Later we hear of dinners and diners:
“They do not eat soups, and do not serve up ragouts at their
dinners, but boiled and roast, and much vegetables. They drink
nothing but cider and Madeira wine with water. The dessert is
composed of preserved quinces and pickled sorrel. The Americans eat
the latter with the meat. They do not take coffee immediately after
dinner, but it is served three or four hours afterward with tea;
this coffee is weak, and four or five cups are not equal to one of
ours; so that they take many of them. The tea, on the contrary, is
very strong. Breakfast is an important affair with them. Besides
tea and coffee, they put on table roasted meats, with butter, pies
and ham; nevertheless they sup, and in the afternoon they again
take tea. Thus the Americans are almost always at table; and as
they have little to occupy them, as they go out little in winter,
and spend whole days alongside their fireside and their wives,
without reading and without doing anything, going to table is a
relief and a preventive of _ennui_. Yet they are not great eaters.”
On the 5th of March, 1781, General Washington arrived in Newport.
Blanchard thus records his first impressions of the commander-in-chief:
“His face is handsome, noble and mild. He is tall--at the least, five
feet eight inches (French measure). In the evening I was at supper with
him. I mark, as a fortunate day, that in which I have been able to
behold a man so truly great.”
After the war came a period of great business depression, in which
Newport heavily shared. The British, during their occupation of the
town, had done much to injure it. Nearly a thousand buildings were
destroyed by them on the island; fruit-and shade-trees were cut down,
the churches were used
[Illustration: LIFE MASK OF WASHINGTON.
MADE BY HOUDON IN 1785.]
as barracks, and the Redwood Library was despoiled of its more valuable
books. Commerce was dead; the suppression of the slave-trade reduced
many to poverty, and the curse of paper money--to which Rhode Island
clung after other States had abandoned it--poisoned the very springs of
public credit. Brissot de Warville, in the record of his journey
“performed” through the United States in 1788, draws this melancholy
picture of Newport at that time:
“Since the peace, everything is changed. The reign of solitude is
only interrupted by groups of idle men standing, with folded arms,
at the corners of the streets; houses falling to ruin; miserable
shops, which present nothing but a few coarse stuffs, or baskets of
apples, and other articles of little value; grass growing in the
public square, in front of the court of justice; rags stuffed in
the windows, or hung upon hideous women and lean, unquiet
children.”
Count Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, writing ten years later, calls the place
“_cette ville triste et basse_,” and further ventures on this remarkable
criticism of its salubrity:
“The healthfulness of the city of Newport and its environs is
doubtless the result of the brilliancy and coolness of its climate,
but this coolness proves fatal to its younger inhabitants, and the
number of young men, and, above all, of young women, who die yearly
of consumption is considerable. It is noteworthy that the
inscriptions on the tombstones in the cemetery indicate in almost
all cases that the person interred is either very young or very
old--either less than twenty years of age or more than seventy.”
Whether this statement of Count Rochefoucauld’s bears the test of
examination would be impossible now to determine, for the century since
his visit has made changes in the city of the dead as marked as those
effected in the city of the living. But the “cool and brilliant” air
with which he finds fault has since been proved by many invalids to be
full of health-giving properties. Consumptives are more often sent to
Newport for cure, nowadays, than away from it. Asthma, diseases of the
chest and throat, nervous disorders, insomnia, excitability of brain,
are in many cases sensibly benefited by the island climate, which,
however, is less “brilliant” than sedative. This is attributed to the
relaxing effects of the Gulf Stream, which is popularly supposed to make
an opportune curve toward the shore and to produce a quality of air
quite different from that of other New England seaside climates.
Whatever may be the truth as to the bend of this obliging current, it is
certain that something has given to the place an exceptional climate,
pure, free from malaria and exempt equally from the fiercer heats of
summer and the severer colds of winter.
[Illustration: THE PARSONAGE OF MRS. STOWE’S “MINISTER’S WOOING.”]
It was not till about the year 1830 that the true source of Newport’s
prosperity was realized to be her climate. Since then she has become
more and more the Mecca of pilgrims from all parts of the country. Year
by year, the town has spread and broadened, stretching out wide arms to
include distant coigns of vantage, until now the summer city covers some
miles in extent, and land, unsalable in the early part of the century,
and but twenty years ago commanding little more than the price of a
Western homestead, is now valued at from ten to fourteen thousand
dollars an acre! Every year adds to the number of cottages and villas
and to the provision made for the accommodation of strangers. The
census, which in winter counts up to less than twenty thousand, is
during the four months of “the season” swelled by the addition of
thousands of strangers, many of whom are in a manner residents of the
place, owning their own houses and preserving their domestic privacy.
A walk in the older and more thickly settled parts of the town is not
without its rewards. There are to be found well-known objects of
interest,--the Jewish burial-ground, with its luxurious screen of
carefully tended flowers; the Redwood Library, rich in old books and the
possession of the finest cut-leaved beech on the island; and the old
Stone Mill, on which so much speculative reasoning in prose and verse
has been lavished. Some years ago, those ruthless civic hands which know
neither taste nor mercy, despoiled the mill of the vines which made it
picturesque, but even thus denuded, it is an interesting object. There
is old Trinity, with its square pews and burial tablets, and a
last-century “three-decker” pulpit, with clerk’s desk, reading-desk and
preaching-desk,
[Illustration: DOORWAY OF OLD HOUSE ON THAMES STREET.]
all overhung by a conical sounding-board of extinguisher pattern--a
sounding-board on which whole generations of little boys have fixed
fascinated eyes, wondering in case of fall what would become of the
clergyman underneath it. And, besides these, each westward-leading
street gives pretty glimpses of bay and islands and shipping, and there
is always the chance of lighting on a bit of the past,--some quaint roof
or wall or doorway, left over from Revolutionary times and holding up a
protesting face from among more modern buildings.
Winter or summer, the charm which most endears Newport to the
imaginative mind is, and must continue to be, the odd mingling of old
and new which meets you on every hand. A large portion of the place
belongs and can belong to no other day but our own, but touching it
everywhere, apart from it but of it, is the past. It meets you at every
turn, in legend or relic or quaint traditionary custom still kept up and
observed. Many farm-hands and servants on the island still date and
renew their contracts of service from “Lady-Day.” The “nine-o’clock
bell,” which seems derived in some dim way from the ancient curfew, is
regularly rung. The election parade, dear to little boys and
peanut-venders, has continued to be a chief event every spring, with its
procession, its drums, its crowd of country visitors, and small booths
for the sale of edibles and non-edibles pitched on either side the
State-House Square, which, in honor of this yearly observance, is called
familiarly, “The Parade.” One of the oldest militia companies in New
England is the Newport Artillery, and _The Mercury_, established in 1758
by a brother of Benjamin Franklin, is the oldest surviving newspaper in
the United States. Newport also possesses a town-crier. He may be met
with any day, tinkling his bell at street corners and rehearsing, in a
loud, melancholy chant, facts regarding auction-sales, or town-meetings,
or lost property. And, turning aside from the polo-play or the Avenue
crowded with brilliant equipages, a few rods carries you to the quiet
loneliness of a secluded burial-place, with the name of an ancient
family carved on its locked gate, in which, beneath gray headstones and
long, flowering grasses, repose the hushed secrets of a century ago. Or,
fresh from the buzz and chatter, the gay interchange of the day, you may
chance on an old salt spinning yarns of pirates and privateers, phantom
ships or buried treasure, or an antiquary full of well-remembered
stories whose actors belong to the far-gone past,--stories of the
extinct glories of
[Illustration: GENERAL NATHANAEL GREENE. FROM ONE OF MALBONE’S BEST
MINIATURES.]
the place, of family romance and family tragedy, or tragedy just
escaped. What could be finer contrast than tales like these, told on a
street-corner where, just before, perhaps, the question had been about
Wall Street or Santiago, if the French frigate were still in the bay, or
when would be the next meeting of the Town and Country Club! Indeed, it
is not so many years since visitors to Newport might have held speech
with a dear old lady whose memory carried her back clearly and
distinctly to the day when, a child six years old, she sat on
Washington’s knee. The little girl had a sweet voice. She sang a song to
the great man, in recompense for which he honored her with a salute.
“It was here, my dear, and here, that General Washington kissed me,” she
would say to her grandchildren, touching first one and then the other
wrinkled cheek; and to the end of her life, no other lips were suffered
to profane with a touch the spots thus made sacred.
In a country whose charm and whose reproach alike is its newness, and to
a society whose roots are forever being uprooted and freshly planted to
be again uprooted, there is real education and advantage in the tangible
neighborhood of the past; and the Newport past is neither an unlovely
nor a reproachful shape. There is dignity in her calm mien; she looks on
stately and untroubled, and compares and measures. The dazzle and
glitter of modern luxury do not daunt her: she has seen splendor before
in a different generation and different forms, she has shared it, she
has watched it fade and fail. Out of her mute, critical regard, a voice
seems to sound in tones like the rustle of falling leaves in an autumn
day, and to utter that ancient and melancholy truth, _Vanitas
vanitatum_! “The fashion of this world passeth away.” We listen, awed
for a moment, and then we smile again,--for brightness near at hand has
a more potent spell than melancholy gone by,--and turning to our modern
lives with their movement and sunshine, their hope and growth, we are
content to accept and enjoy such brief day as is granted us, nor “prate
nor hint of change till change shall come.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
PROVIDENCE
THE COLONY OF HOPE
BY WILLIAM B. WEEDEN
The capital of Rhode Island, the second city of New England,--an
agricultural village in the seventeenth, a commercial port in the
eighteenth, and a centre of manufacturing in the nineteenth
century,--lies at the head of Narragansett Bay. The mainland of the
State westward to Connecticut, according to Shaler, rests on very old
rocks of the Laurentian and Lower Cambrian series. The greater part of
the bay and the land near Providence is upon rocks belonging to the Coal
measures. These rocks, softer than the older ones, have been cut away
and afford the inlets of the bay. The surface of the State and the
sloping hills of Providence have been profoundly affected by the wearing
course of the glaciers.