To the guidance of the legislative councils; to the assistance of
the executive and subordinate departments; to the friendly
co-operation of the respective State Governments; to the candid
and liberal support of the people, so far as it may be deserved
by honest industry and zeal, I shall look for whatever success
may attend my public service; and knowing that "except the Lord
keep the city, the watchman waketh in vain," with fervent
supplications for His favor, to His overruling providence I
commit, with humble but fearless confidence, my own fate and the
future destinies of my country.
--_Inaugural Address_
[Illustration: JOHN QUINCY ADAMS]
Nine miles south of Boston, just a little back from the escalloped shores
of Old Ocean, lies the village of Braintree. It is on the Plymouth
post-road, being one of that string of settlements, built a few miles
apart for better protection, that lined the sea, Boston being crowded, and
Plymouth full to overflowing, the home-seekers spread out north and south.
In Sixteen Hundred Twenty, when the first cabin was built at Braintree,
land that was not in sight of the coast had actually no value. Back a
mile, all was a howling wilderness, with trails made by wild beasts or
savage men as wild. These paths led through tangles of fallen trees and
tumbled rocks, beneath dark, overhanging pines where winter's snows melted
not till midsummer, and the sun's rays were strange and alien. Men who
sought to traverse these ways had to crouch and crawl or climb. Through
them no horse or ox or beast of burden had carried its load.
But up from the sea the ground rose gradually for a mile, and along this
slope that faced the tide, wind and storm had partly cleared the ground,
and on the hillsides our forefathers made their homes. The houses were
built facing either the east or the south. This persistence to face
either the sun or the sea shows a last, strange rudiment of paganism,
making queer angles now that surveyors have come with Gunter's chain and
transit, laying out streets and doing their work.
A mile out, north of Braintree, on the Boston road, came, in Sixteen
Hundred Twenty-five, one Captain Wollaston, a merry wight, and thirty boon
companions, all of whom probably left England for England's good. They
were in search of gold and pelf, and all were agreed on one point: they
were quite too good to do any hard work. Their camp was called Mount
Wollaston, or the Merry Mount. Our gallant gentlemen cultivated the
friendship of the Indians, in the hope that they would reveal the caves
and caverns where the gold grew lush and nuggets cumbered the way; and the
Indians, liking the drink they offered, brought them meal and corn and
furs.
And so the thirty set up a Maypole, adorned with bucks' horns, and drank
and feasted, and danced like fairies or furies, the livelong day or night.
So scandalously did these exiled lords behave that good folks made a wide
circuit 'round to avoid their camp.
Preaching had been in vain, and prayers for the conversion of the wretches
remained unanswered. So the neighbors held a convention, and decided to
send Captain Miles Standish with a posse to teach the merry men manners.
Standish appeared among the bacchanalians one morning, perfectly sober,
and they were not. He arrested the captain, and bade the others begone.
The leader was shipped back to England, with compliments and regrets, and
the thirty scattered. This was the first move in that quarter in favor of
local option.
Six years later, the land thereabouts was granted and apportioned out to
the Reverend John Wilson, William Coddington, Edward Quinsey, James
Penniman, Moses Payne and Francis Eliot.
And these men and their families built houses and founded "the North
Precinct of the Town of Braintree."
Between the North Precinct and the South Precinct there was continual
rivalry. Boys who were caught over the dead-line, which was marked by
Deacon Penniman's house, had to fight. Thus things continued until
Seventeen Hundred Ninety-two, when one John Adams was Vice-President of
the United States. Now this John Adams, lawyer, was the son of John Adams,
honest farmer and cordwainer, who had bought the Penniman homestead, and
whose progenitor, Henry Adams, had moved there in Sixteen Hundred
Thirty-six. John Adams, Vice-President, afterwards President, was born
there in the Penniman house, and was regarded as a neutral, although he
had been thrashed by boys both from the North and from the South Precinct.
But at the last, there is no such thing as neutrality.
John Adams sided with the boys from the North Precinct, and now that he
was in power it occurred to him, having had a little experience in the
revolutionary line, that for the North Precinct to secede from the great
town of Braintree would be but proper and right.
The North Precinct had six stores that sold W.I. goods, and a tavern that
sold W.E.T. goods, and it should have a post-office of its own.
So John Adams suggested the matter to Richard Cranch, who was his
brother-in-law and near neighbor. Cranch agitated the matter, and the new
town, which was the old, was incorporated. They called it Quincy, probably
because Abigail, John's wife, insisted upon it. She had named her eldest
boy Quincy, in honor of her grandfather, whose father's name was Quinsey,
and who had relatives who spelled it De Quincey, one of which tribe was an
opium-eater.
Now, when Abigail made a suggestion, John usually heeded it. For Abigail
was as wise as she was good, and John well knew that his success in life
had come largely from the help, counsel and inspiration vouchsafed to him
by this splendid woman. And the man who will not let a woman have her way
in all such small matters as naming of babies or towns is not much of a
man.
So the town was named Quincy, and brother-in-law Cranch was appointed its
first postmaster. Shortly after, the Boston "Centinel" contained a
sarcastic article over the signature, "Old Subscriber," concerning the
distribution of official patronage among kinsmen, and the Eliots and the
Everetts gossiped over their back fences.
At this time Abigail lived in the cottage there on the Plymouth road,
halfway between Braintree and Quincy, but she got her mail at Quincy.
The Adams cottage is there now, and the next time you are in Boston you
had better go out and see it, just as June and I did one bright October
day.
June has lived within an hour's ride of the Adams' home all her blessed
thirty-two sunshiny summers; she also boasts a Mayflower ancestry, with,
however, a slight infusion of Castle Garden, like myself, to give firmness
of fiber--and yet she had never been to Quincy.
The John and Abigail cottage was built in Seventeen Hundred Sixteen, so
says a truthful brick found in the quaint old chimney. Deacon Penniman
built this house for his son, and it faces the sea, although the older
Penniman house faces the south. John Adams was born in the older house;
but when he used to go to Weymouth every Wednesday and Saturday evening to
see Abigail Smith, the minister's daughter, his father, the worthy
shoemaker, told him that when he got married he could have the other house
for himself.
John was a bright young lawyer then, a graduate of Harvard, where he had
been sent in hopes that he would become a minister, for one-half the
students then at Harvard were embryo preachers. But John did not take to
theology.
He had witnessed ecclesiastical tennis and theological pitch and toss in
Braintree that had nearly split the town, and he decided on the law. One
thing sure, he could not work: he was not strong enough for
that--everybody said so. And right here seems a good place to call
attention to the fact that weak men, like those who are threatened, live
long. John Adams' letters to his wife reveal a very frequent reference to
liver complaint, lung trouble, and that tired feeling, yet he lived to be
ninety-two.
The Reverend Mr. Smith did not at first favor the idea of his daughter
Abigail marrying John Adams. The Adams family were only farmers (and
shoemakers when it rained), while the Smiths had aristocracy on their
side. He said lawyers were men who got bad folks out of trouble and good
folks in. But Abigail said that this lawyer was different; and as Mr.
Smith saw it was a love-match, and such things being difficult to combat
successfully, he decided he would do the next best thing--give the young
couple his blessing. Yet the neighbors were quite scandalized to think
that their pastor's daughter should hold converse over the gate with a
lawyer, and they let the clergyman know it as neighbors then did, and
sometimes do now. Then did the Reverend Mr. Smith announce that he would
preach a sermon on the sin of meddling with other folk's business. As his
text he took the passage from Luke, seventh chapter, thirty-third verse:
"For John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, he
hath a devil."
The neighbors saw the point, for a short time before, when the eldest
daughter, Mary, had married Richard Cranch (the man who was to achieve a
post-office), the community had entered a protest, and the Reverend Mr.
Smith had preached from Luke, tenth chapter, forty-second verse: "And Mary
hath chosen that good part which shall not be taken away from her." So
there, now!
And John and Abigail were married one evening at early candlelight, in the
church at Weymouth. The good father performed the ceremony, and nearly
broke down during it, they say, and then he kissed both bride and groom.
The neighbors had repaired to the parsonage and were eating and drinking
and making merry when John and Abigail slipped out by the back gate, and
made their way, hand in hand, in the starlight, down the road that ran
through the woods to Braintree. When near the village they cut across the
pasture-lot and reached their cottage, which for several weeks they had
been putting in order. John unlocked the front door, and they entered over
the big, flat stone at the entry, and over which you may enter now, all
sunken and worn by generations of men gone. Some whose feet have pressed
that doorstep we count as the salt of the earth, for their names are
written large on history's page. Washington rode out there on horseback,
and while his aide held his horse, he visited and drank mulled cider and
ate doughnuts within. Hancock came often, and Otis, Samuel Adams and
Loring used to enter without plying the knocker.
Through the earnest work of William G. Spear, the cottage has now been
restored and fully furnished, as near like it was then as knowledge, fancy
and imagination can devise.
When we reached Quincy we saw a benevolent-looking old Puritan, and June
said, "Ask him!"
"Can you tell me where we can find Mr. Spear, the antiquarian?" I
inquired.
"The which?" said the son of Priscilla Mullins.
"Mr. Spear, the antiquarian," I repeated.
"It's not Bill Spear who keeps a secondhand-shop, you want, mebbe?"
"Yes; I think that is the man."
And so we were directed to the "secondhand-shop," which proved to be the
rooms of the Quincy Historical Society. And there we saw such a wondrous
collection of secondhand stuff that, as we looked and looked, and Mr.
Spear explained, and gave large slices of Colonial history, June, who is a
Daughter of the American Revolution, gushed a trifle more than was meet.
Nothing short of a hundred years will set the seal of value on an article
for Mr. Spear, and one hundred fifty is more like it. On his walls are
hats, caps, spurs, boots and accouterments used in the Revolutionary War.
Then there are candlesticks, snuffers, spectacles, butter-molds, bonnets,
dresses, shoes, baby-stockings, cradles, rattles, aprons, butter-tubs made
out of a solid piece, shovels to match, andirons, pokers, skillets and
blue china galore.
"Bill Spear" himself is quite a curiosity. He traces a lineage to the
well-known Lieutenant Seth Spear, of Revolutionary fame, and back of that
to John Alden, who spoke for himself. The bark on the antiquarian, is
rather rough; and I regret to say that he makes use of a few words I can
not find in the "Century Dictionary," but as June was not shocked I
managed to stand it. On further acquaintance I concluded that Mr. Spear's
bruskness was assumed, and that beneath the tough husk there beats a very
tender heart. He is one of those queer fellows who do good by stealth and
abuse you roundly if accused of it.
For twenty-five years Mr. Spear has been doing little else but studying
Colonial history, and making love to old ladies who own clocks and
skillets given them by their great-grandmammas. There is no doubt that
Spear has dictated clauses in a hundred wills devising that William G.
Spear, Custodian of the Quincy Historical Society, shall have snuffers and
biscuit-molds.
At first, Mr. Spear collected for his own amusement and benefit, but the
trouble grew upon him until it became chronic, and one fine day he
realized that he was not immortal, and when he should die, all his
collection, which had taken years to accumulate, would be scattered. And
so he founded the Quincy Historical Society, incorporated by a perpetual
charter, with Charles Francis Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, as
first president.
Then, the next thing was to secure the cottage where John and Abigail
Adams began housekeeping, and where John Quincy was born. This house has
been in the Adams family all these years and been rented to the firm of
Tom, Dick and Harry, and any of their tribe who would agree to pay ten
dollars a month for its use and abuse. Just across the road from the
cottage lives a fine old soul by the name of John Crane. Mr. Crane is
somewhere between seventy and a hundred years old, but he has a young
heart, a face like Gladstone and a memory like a copy-book. Mr. Crane was
on very good terms with John Quincy Adams, knew him well and had often
seen him come here to collect rent. He told me that during his
recollection the Adams place had been occupied by full forty families. But
now, thanks to "Bill Spear," it is no longer for rent.
The house has been raised from the ground, new sills placed under it, and
while every part--scantling, rafter, joist, crossbeam, lath and
weatherboard--of the original house has been retained, it has been put in
such order that it is no longer going to ruin.
From the ample stores of his various antiquarian depositories Mr. Spear
has refurnished it; and with a ripe knowledge and rare good taste and
restraining imagination, the cottage is now shown to us as a Colonial
farmhouse of the year Seventeen Hundred Fifty. The wonder to me is that
Mr. Spear, being human, did not move his "secondhand-shop" down here and
make of the place a curiosity-shop. But he has done better.
As you step across the doorsill and pass from the little entry into the
"living-room," you pause and murmur, "Excuse me." For there is a fire on
the hearth, the tea-kettle sings softly, and on the back of a chair hangs
a sunbonnet. And over there on the table is an open Bible, and on the open
page is a pair of spectacles and a red, crumpled handkerchief. Yes, the
folks are at home: they have just stepped into the next room--perhaps are
eating dinner. And so you sit down in an old hickory chair, or in the high
settle that stands against the wall by the fireplace, and wait, expecting
every moment that the kitchen-door will creak on its wooden hinges, and
Abigail, smiling and gentle, will enter to greet you. Mr. Spear
understands, and, disappearing, leaves you to your thoughts--and June's.
John and Abigail were lovers their lifetime through. Their published
letters show a oneness of thought and sentiment that, viewed across the
years, moves us to tears to think that such as they should at last feebly
totter, and then turn to dust. But here they came in the joyous springtime
of their lives; upon this floor you tread the ways their feet have trod;
these walls have echoed to their singing voices, listened to their
counsels, and seen love's caress.
There is no surplus furniture nor display nor setting forth of useless
things. Every article you see has its use. The little shelf of books,
well-thumbed, displays no "Trilby" nor "Quest of the Golden Girl"--not an
anachronism any where. Curtains, chairs, tables, and the one or two
pictures--all ring true. In the kitchen are washtubs and butter-ladles and
bowls; and the lantern hanging by the chimney, with a dipped candle
inside, has a carefully scraped horn face. It is a lanthorn. In the
cupboard across the corner are blue china and pewter spoons and steel
knives, with just a little polished-brass stuff sent from England. Down in
the cellar, with its dirt walls, are apples, yellow pumpkins and
potatoes--each in its proper place, for Abigail was a rare good
housekeeper. Then there is a barrel of cider, with a hickory spigot and an
inviting gourd. All tells of economy, thrift, industry and the cunning of
woman's hands.
In the kitchen is a funny cradle, hooded, and cut out of a great pine log.
The little mattress and the coverlet seem disturbed, and you would declare
the baby had just been lifted out, and you listen for its cry. The rocker
is worn by the feet of mothers whose hands were busy with needles or wheel
as they rocked and sang. And from the fact that it is in the kitchen, you
know that the servant-girl problem then had no terrors.
Overhead hang ears of corn, bunches of dried catnip, pennyroyal and
boneset, and festooned across the corner are strings of dried apples.
Then you go upstairs, with conscience pricking a bit for thus visiting the
house of honest folks when they are away, for you know how all good
housewives dislike to have people prying about, especially in the upper
chambers--at least June said so!
The room to the right was Abigail's own. You would know it was a woman's
room. There is a faint odor of lavender and thyme about it, and the white
and blue draperies around the little mirror, and the little feminine
nothings on the dresser, reveal the lady who would appear well before the
man she loves.
The bed is a high, draped four-poster, plain and solid, evidently made by
a ship-carpenter who had ambitions. The coverlet is light blue, and
matches the draperies of windows, dresser and mirror. On the pillow is a
nightcap, in which even a homely woman would be beautiful.
There is a clothespress in the corner, into which Mr. Spear says we may
look. On the door is a slippery-elm button, and within, hanging on wooden
pegs, are dainty dresses; stiff, curiously embroidered gowns they are,
that came from across the sea, sent, perhaps, by John Adams when he went
to France, and left Abigail here to farm and sew and weave and teach the
children. June examined the dresses carefully, and said the embroidery was
handmade, and must have taken months and months to complete. On a high
shelf of the closet are bandboxes, in which are bonnets, astonishing
bonnets, with prodigious flaring fronts. Mr. Spear insisted that June
should try one on, and when she did we stood off and declared the effect
was a vision of loveliness. Outside the clothespress, on a peg, hangs a
linsey-woolsey every-day gown that shows marks of wear. The waist came
just under June's arms, and the bottom of the dress to her shoe-tops.
We asked Mr. Spear the price of it, but the custodian is not commercial.
In a corner of the room is a cedar chest containing hand-woven linen.
By the front window is a little, low desk, with a leaf that opens out for
a writing-shelf. And here you see quill-pens, fresh nibbed, and ink in a
curious well made from horn. Here it was that Abigail wrote those letters
to her lover-husband when he attended those first and second Congresses in
Philadelphia; and then when he was in France and England, those letters in
which we see affection, loyalty, tales of babies with colic, brave,
political good sense, and all those foolish trifles that go to fill up
love-letters, and, at the last, are their divine essence and charm.
Here, she wrote the letter telling of going with their seven-year-old boy,
John Quincy, to Penn's Hill to watch the burning of Charlestown; and saw
the flashing of cannons and rising smoke that marked the battle of Bunker
Hill. Here she wrote to her husband when he was minister to England,
"This little cottage has more comfort and satisfaction for you than the
courts of royalty."
But of all the letters written by that brave woman none reveals her true
nobility better than the one written to her husband the day he became
President of the United States. Here it is entire: