Besides the quilting bee which has been mentioned, there were
formerly many other kinds of bees, some within my own time, and
others that I have heard about from my elders. There were the
chopping and stone bees, by which a new comer in a settlement was
assisted by all his neighbors in clearing the land for his house and
farm; the apple gathering bee and the woodpile bee, in which under
the full moon the fiddle and the dance played an important part.
There was also the raising bee, when a house completely framed was
ready to be set up, in which all the carpenters joined and found
under the stimulating influence of Medford rum that in lifting plates
and studs and rafters their yoke was easy, and their burden light.
In raising the house on the upper westerly corner of High and Spring
streets in 1799, the frame fell, precipitating from thirty to forty
carpenters to the ground, twenty-one of whom were seriously, though
none fatally injured. In that case the rum proved to be a little
above proof, and the treenail fastenings a little below. The last
house in Plymouth raised with the Medford accompaniment, was that now
standing on the southerly corner of Howland street, built in 1834.
The great bee, which was celebrated all over the corn growing parts
of our country in olden times, was the husking bee, not the sham
frolic of present days when, like the fox bought in a bag by Newport
hunters, a load of corn on the stalk is bought for the occasion and
piled on a floor glistening under electric lights, but the genuine
husking frolic in a barn of ample proportions, where piles of
pumpkins furnished the decorations, and cornstalk fiddles enlivened
the scene. There the lads and lassies sat around the diminishing
heap, and all knew the dangers and delights which attended the
finding of a red or a smutty ear of corn.
“In the barn the youths and maidens
Strip the corn of husk and tassel,
Warm the dullness of October
With the life of spring and May;
While through every chink the lanterns
And sonorous gusts of laughter
Make assault on night and silence
With the counterfeit of day.”
The literature of the husking bee is extensive, and there are
mysterious legends of ancient date about the red ear of corn. As
early as the year 1700, in the ceremony of marriage among the
Caughnawaga Indians, the husband gave the wife a deer’s leg, and the
wife gave the husband a red ear, and in Hiawatha, Longfellow speaks
of the husking as if it were a usage among the Indians.
“When’er some lucky maiden
Found a red ear in the husking,
Found a red ear, red as blood is,
Mushka; cried they altogether,
Mushka; you shall have a sweetheart,
You shall have a handsome husband.”
John Barlow in his hasty pudding poem written in 1792 said:
“The laws of husking every wight can tell—
And sure no laws he ever keeps so well;
For each red ear a general kiss he gains,
With each smut ear he smuts the luckless swains;
But when to some sweet maid a prize is cast,
Red as her lips, and taper as her waist,
She walks the round, and culls one favored beau,
Who leaps the luscious tribute to bestow.”
In “traits of American humor” a writer said, “there was a corn
husking, and I went along with Sol. Stebbins. There was all the
gals and boys setting around and I got sot down so near Sal Babit
that I’ll be darned if I didn’t kiss her before I knowed what I was
about.” In the South the corn husk was called a shuck, and President
Lincoln showed his familiarity with southern terms, when, after his
conference at Fortress Monroe with Alexander H. Stephens, the vice
president of the Confederacy, who was a very small man, weighing not
more than ninety or a hundred pounds, and on that occasion wore an
immense borrowed overcoat, which came down to his heels, he described
Mr. Stevens as the smallest ear in the largest shuck he had ever seen.
Husking time among the negroes of North Carolina was always a season
of relaxation and frolic. The following now no longer heard was among
the husking songs they sang.
“Oh boys! Come along and shuck the corn;
Oh boys! Come along to the rattle of the horn!
We’ll shuck and sing to the coming of the moon,
And den we’ll ford the river.
Oh Bob Ridley, O! O! O!
How could you fool the possum so!”
There can be little doubt that at one time the harvest husking
festival degenerated into noisy scenes, which called for earnest
condemnation and earnest appeals for reform. Cotton Mather wrote in
1713 that “the riots that have too often accustomed our huskings,
have carried in them fearful ingratitude and provocation unto the
glorious God.” But all through my boyhood pumpkin pie and sweet cider
alone remained as relics of the ancient feast.
Christmas during my day came and went without observance or notice.
It was not a holiday, presents were not exchanged, schools were kept,
and the wish for a “Merry Christmas” was never heard. Puritan soil
was not a favorable one for its observance. In 1659 any observance of
Christmas “either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way”
was forbidden under a penalty of five shillings for each offence.
Though this law was repealed in 1681 the leaders of the Massachusetts
Colony, including Judge Samuel Sewall, still looked on Christmas
revels as offensive to the Holy Son of God. During my boyhood the
St. Andrews church in Scituate, which was later removed to Hanover,
where it is now a flourishing church, was the only Episcopal church
in Plymouth county. It is singular that in its early years it
derived its membership and support from the Winslows and the Whites,
descendants of Mayflower Pilgrims. As far as I can learn nearly all
bearing those names in Marshfield and Scituate, among whom I include
my own kinsmen, were Episcopalians, and some of those residing in
Plymouth, were members of St. Andrew’s church. The records of the
Plymouth First Church contain a petition of my great aunt, Joanna
Winslow, and her daughter, Mrs. Henry Warren, to be admitted to the
Plymouth fold, on account of the distance of St. Andrew’s from their
homes in Plymouth. It is an anomaly difficult to understand that so
many of Pilgrim blood should have returned to the faith from which
their ancestors were glad to separate. With regard to Christmas I am
inclined to think that its observance has found its way through its
appeal to the æsthetic rather than the religious sense of the people.
Of the many cults and isms and doctrines, which have appeared within
my recollection, I do not propose to speak. In the Bibliographia
Antiquariana may be found, I think, nearly a hundred of their names
terminating in “mancy,” which at various times have found lodgment
in the minds of men. Some of these still have their followers, and I
am willing to accord to them as sound reasons for their faith as I
claim for my own. The only limit to my tolerance is that set by the
followers themselves in the contradictory acts of their every day
life. Not long ago in a casual conversation with a devotee of an ism,
the name of which I do not know, I incidentally said, “it is a stormy
day, Madam,” to which she answered, “It seems so, but it isn’t.” To
my inquiry, “Why, then, do you carry an umbrella,” she made no reply,
and I bade her good morning.
In my early boyhood the primitive methods of kindling a fire were
only a little in advance of the method of rubbing two sticks
together, practised by the Indians. Until 1829, so far as my own
observation went, the tinder box, with the flint and steel, was in
use. Some used what was called the chemical match, a stick dipped
first in sulphur, and then into a composition of chlorate of potash,
and other ingredients, which dipped in a vial of sulphuric acid
produced fire as the result of chemical action between the acid and
potash. In 1829 it was found that sticks coated with chlorate of
potash and phosphorus could be instantly ignited by rubbing them on
sandpaper. This was the first step leading to the manufacture of the
lucifer match, now in almost universal use. The lucifer match was at
first called locofoco, a name derived from the Latin “_loco foci_,”
meaning “In the place of fire.” The name loco foco applied to the
democratic party had its origin in 1835 in the incident of relighting
by means of matches the burners in a hall in New York, where a
democratic meeting was held, and the light had been extinguished by
party opponents. In recent years safety matches have been extensively
used, the best of which are made in Sweden, which can be ignited only
on the boxes in which they are sold. With the frequency of fires
occasioned by the lucifer match, it is a wonder to me that either
by law or by rules of insurance companies, some restriction is not
put on its use. It is estimated that more than six million gross of
lucifer matches, with 14,400 to a gross, are annually consumed in
the United States. A story was told me by the late Rev. Dr. George
E. Ellis, about John Quincy Adams who died in 1848, nineteen years
after the lucifer match came into use. Dr. Ellis attended with Mr.
Adams about 1840 an historical meeting in New York, and occupied with
him a double bedded room at the Astor House. In those days only a few
rooms in hotels were ever heated, and those by means of a coal grate,
which was kept full of kindlings and coal ready to be lighted by
matches, of which there was always a supply on the mantel. When Mr.
Adams got into bed, though the fire had not been lighted, he opened a
window much to the discomfort of Mr. Ellis, who planned to close it
when his room-mate fell asleep. But Mr. Adams talked for an hour, and
then said, “I am going to repeat aloud the prayer which I have said
every night since I was nine years old, and then turn over and go to
sleep.” He then said:
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Amen.”
After he was safely asleep, Dr. Ellis arose quietly and shut the
window. He was awakened in the morning by some noise, and looking
over his bedclothes, he saw Mr. Adams on his knees by the side of his
open valise, from which he had taken his tinder box, and was getting
a spark to touch off the kindlings in the grate. He scorned the use
of the matches on the mantel, preferring the friends of his youth and
age, which had been his faithful attendants through life.
There were few articles in domestic use in my youth more popular
than the apple, and few performing such a variety of parts in the
performances of the kitchen. A New England supper would have been
incomplete without an apple pie. The English sneer at our corn,
saying it is only fit for horses, while they worship their oats,
which are more fit for the horse trough than the table. So, while
they condemn our apple pie, made with a crust thoroughly baked, they
gorge themselves in July and August and September with gooseberry and
green gage tarts, which no armored war ship could resist if fired
from a Whitworth gun at the distance of a mile. Behold the products
of the apple, a roasted apple, a Marlboro pudding, looking like an
ordinary pie without crust, a pan-dowdy, or apple grunt baked with
molasses in a deep pan, and the crust broken in, pork and apples cut
up together and cooked, called by the Dutch “speck and apple jees,”
plain apple sauce, apple butter or Vermont apple sauce boiled with
cider and put up for winter, apple brandy warranted to kill at thirty
paces, called in New Jersey “Jersey lightning,” and apple pudding. To
the apple then, notwithstanding John Bull, let the toast go round.
Perhaps in the history of man no article in common use has undergone
greater changes than that used in writing, and many of those changes
have occurred within my memory. The stylus of the ancients used on
waxen tablets, has become a factor in the advance of civilization,
until it may now be said that:
“Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.”
The stylus on waxen tablets gave way to reeds used with a fluid on
papyrus, and reeds to quills of swans and geese and crows. For a
long time geese were raised chiefly for their quills, and it is said
that in one year twenty-seven millions of these quills were sent to
England from St. Petersburg. Until the steel pen was introduced in
my later youth, the goose quill held undivided sway in the United
States, and for some years afterwards the price of the steel pen was
not sufficiently reduced to admit of its popular use. In all the
schools which I ever attended the teachers spent a large portion of
their time in mending pens, an occupation so constant and universal
as to introduce into our vocabulary the name “pen knife,” which
still holds its place, though the use for which it was designed has
departed. As late as 1858 and 1859, when I was in the senate, among
the articles of stationery distributed among the members, were a
bunch of quills and a pen knife. As John Quincy Adams once wrote in a
lady’s album:
“In days of yore the poet’s pen
From wing of bird was plundered,
Perhaps of goose, but now and then
From Jove’s own eagle sundered.”
Of the successive steps taken in the manufacture of pens until the
steel pen, the gold pea with diamond point, and at last the fountain
pen came into use, which was followed by the typewriting machine
I do not propose to speak. In business the machine seems to be
coming rapidly into use, and is even finding its way into social
correspondence. I have an old man’s notion, which if I live I may
outgrow, that only with the hand should a letter of friendship be
written. By the use of the typewriter I fear that the accomplishment
of letter writing has become a thing of the past.