THESE old houses have perhaps detained us too long. They are merely the
crumbling shells of things dead and gone, of persons and manners and
customs that have left no very distinct record of themselves, excepting
here and there in some sallow manuscript which has luckily escaped the
withering breath of fire, for the old town, as I have remarked, has
managed, from the earliest moment of its existence, to burn itself up
periodically. It is only through the scattered memoranda of ancient town
clerks, and in the files of worm-eaten and forgotten newspapers, that
we are enabled to get glimpses of that life which was once so real and
positive and has now become a shadow. I am of course speaking of the
early days of the settlement on Strawberry Bank. They were stormy and
eventful days. The dense forest which surrounded the clearing was alive
with hostile red-men. The sturdy pilgrim went to sleep with his firelock
at his bedside, not knowing at what moment he might be awakened by
the glare of his burning hayricks and the piercing war-whoops of the
Womponoags. Year after year he saw his harvest reaped by a sickle of
flames, as he peered through the loop-holes of the blockhouse, whither
he had flown in hot haste with goodwife and little ones. The blockhouse
at Strawberry Bank appears to have been on an extensive scale, with
stockades for the shelter of cattle. It held large supplies of stores,
and was amply furnished with arquebuses, sakers, and murtherers, a
species of naval ordnance which probably did not belie its name. It also
boasted, we are told, of two drums for training-days, and no fewer
than fifteen hautboys and soft-voiced recorders--all which suggests a
mediaeval castle, or a grim fortress in the time of Queen Elizabeth.
To the younger members of the community glass or crockery ware was an
unknown substance; to the elders it was a memory. An iron pot was the
pot-of-all-work, and their table utensils were of beaten pewter. The
diet was also of the simplest--pea-porridge and corn-cake, with a mug of
ale or a flagon of Spanish wine, when they could get it.
John Mason, who never resided in this country, but delegated the
management of his plantation at Ricataqua and Newichewannock to
stewards, died before realizing any appreciable return from his
enterprise. He spared no endeavor meanwhile to further its prosperity.
In 1632, three years before his death, Mason sent over from Denmark a
number of neat cattle, “of a large breed and yellow colour.” The herd
thrived, and it is said that some of the stock is still extant on farms
in the vicinity of Portsmouth. Those old first families had a kind of
staying quality!
In May, 1653, the inhabitants of the settlement petitioned the General
Court at Boston to grant them a definite township--for the boundaries
were doubtful--and the right to give it a proper name. “Whereas the name
of this plantation att present being Strabery Banke, accidentlly soe
called, by reason of a banke where strawberries was found in this place,
now we humbly desire to have it called Portsmouth, being a name most
suitable for this place, it being the river’s mouth, and good as any in
this land, and your petit’rs shall humbly pray,” etc.
Throughout that formative period, and during the intermittent French
wars, Portsmouth and the outlying districts were the scenes of bloody
Indian massacres. No portion of the New England colony suffered more.
Famine, fire, pestilence, and war, each in turn, and sometimes in
conjunction, beleaguered the little stronghold, and threatened to wipe
it out. But that was not to be.
The settlement flourished and increased in spite of all, and as soon as
it had leisure to draw breath, it bethought itself of the school-house
and the jail--two incontestable signs of budding civilization. At a
town meeting in 1662, it was ordered “that a cage be made or some
other meanes invented by the selectmen to punish such as sleepe or take
tobacco on the Lord’s day out of the meetinge in the time of publique
service.” This salutary measure was not, for some reason, carried into
effect until nine years later, when Captain John Pickering, who seems to
have had as many professions as Michelangelo, undertook to construct a
cage twelve feet square and seven feet high, with a pillory on top; “the
said Pickering to make a good strong dore and make a substantiale payre
of stocks and places the same in said cage.” A spot conveniently near
the west end on the meeting-house was selected as the site for this
ingenious device. It is more than probable that “the said Pickering”
indirectly furnished an occasional bird for his cage, for in 1672 we
find him and one Edward Westwere authorized by the selectmen to “keepe
houses of publique entertainment.” He was a versatile individual, this
John Pickering--soldier, miller, moderator, carpenter, lawyer, and
innkeeper. Michelangelo need not blush to be bracketed with him. In the
course of a long and variegated career he never failed to act according
to his lights, which he always kept well trimmed. That Captain Pickering
subsequently became the grandfather, at several removes, of the present
writer was no fault of the Captain’s, and should not be laid up against
him.
Down to 1696, the education of the young appears to have been a rather
desultory and tentative matter; “the young idea” seems to have been
allowed to “shoot” at whatever it wanted to; but in that year it was
voted “that care be taken that an abell scollmaster [skullmaster!] be
provided for the towen as the law directs, not visious in conversation.”
That was perhaps demanding too much; for it was not until “May ye 7” of
the following year that the selectmen were fortunate enough to put their
finger on this rara avis in the person of Mr. Tho. Phippes, who agreed
“to be scollmaster for the the towen this yr insewing for teaching the
inhabitants children in such manner as other schollmasters yously doe
throughout the countrie: for his soe doinge we the sellectt men in
behalfe of ower towen doe ingage to pay him by way of rate twenty pounds
and yt he shall and may reserve from every father or master that sends
theyer children to school this yeare after ye rate of 16s. for readers,
writers and cypherers 20s., Lattiners 24s.”
Modern advocates of phonetic spelling need not plume themselves on
their originality. The town clerk who wrote that delicious “yously doe”
settles the question. It is to be hoped that Mr. Tho. Phippes was not
only “not visious in conversation,” but was more conventional in his
orthography. He evidently gave satisfaction, and clearly exerted an
influence on the town clerk, Mr. Samuel Keais, who ever after shows a
marked improvement in his own methods. In 1704 the town empowered the
selectmen “to call and settell a gramer scoll according to ye best of
yower judgement and for ye advantag [Keais is obviously dead now] of ye
youth of ower town to learn them to read from ye primer, to wright and
sypher and to learne ym the tongues and good-manners.” On this occasion
it was Mr. William Allen, of Salisbury, who engaged “dilligently to
attend ye school for ye present yeare, and tech all childern yt can
read in thaire psallters and upward.” From such humble beginnings were
evolved some of the best public high schools at present in New England.
Portsmouth did not escape the witchcraft delusion, though I believe that
no hangings took place within the boundaries of the township. Dwellers
by the sea are generally superstitious; sailors always are. There is
something in the illimitable expanse of sky and water that dilates the
imagination. The folk who live along the coast live on the edge of a
perpetual mystery; only a strip of yellow sand or gray rock separates
them from the unknown; they hear strange voices in the winds at
midnight, they are haunted by the spectres of the mirage. Their minds
quickly take the impress of uncanny things. The witches therefore
found a sympathetic atmosphere in Newscastle, at the mouth of the
Piscataqua--that slender paw of land which reaches out into the ocean
and terminates in a spread of sharp, flat rocks, lie the claws of an
amorous cat. What happened to the good folk of that picturesque little
fishing-hamlet is worth retelling in brief. In order properly to retell
it, a contemporary witness shall be called upon to testify in the case
of the Stone-Throwing Devils of Newcastle. It is the Rev. Cotton Mather
who addresses you--“On June 11, 1682, showers of stones were thrown
by an invisible hand upon the house of George Walton at Portsmouth
[Newcastle was then a part of the town]. Whereupon the people going out
found the gate wrung off the hinges, and stones flying and falling
thick about them, and striking of them seemingly with a great force, but
really affecting ‘em no more than if a soft touch were given them. The
glass windows were broken by the stones that came not from without, but
from within; and other instruments were in a like manner hurled about.
Nine of the stones they took up, whereof some were as hot as if they
came out of the fire; and marking them they laid them on the table; but
in a little while they found some of them again flying about. The spit
was carried up the chimney, and coming down with the point forward,
stuck in the back log, from whence one of the company removing it, it
was by an invisible hand thrown out at the window. This disturbance
continued from day to day; and sometimes a dismal hollow whistling
would be heard, and sometimes the trotting and snorting of a horse, but
nothing to be seen. The man went up the Great Bay in a boat on to a farm
which he had there; but the stones found him out, and carrying from
the house to the boat a stirrup iron the iron came jingling after him
through the woods as far as his house; and at last went away and was
heard no more. The anchor leaped overboard several times and stopt the
boat. A cheese was taken out of the press, and crumbled all over the
floor; a piece of iron stuck into the wall, and a kettle hung thereon.
Several cocks of hay, mow’d near the house, were taken up and hung upon
the trees, and others made into small whisps, and scattered about the
house. A man was much hurt by some of the stones. He was a Quaker, and
suspected that a woman, who charged him with injustice in detaining
some land from here, did, by witchcraft, occasion these preternatural
occurrences. However, at last they came to an end.”
Now I have done with thee, O credulous and sour Cotton Mather! so get
thee back again to thy tomb in the old burying-ground on Copp’s
Hill, where, unless thy nature is radically changed, thou makest it
uncomfortable for those about thee.
Nearly a hundred years afterwards, Portsmouth had another witch--a
tangible witch in this instance--one Molly Bridget, who cast her malign
spell on the eleemosynary pigs at the Almshouse, where she chanced
to reside at the moment. The pigs were manifestly bewitched, and Mr.
Clement March, the superintendent of the institution, saw only one
remedy at hand, and that was to cut off and burn the tips of their
tales. But when the tips were cut off they disappeared, and it was
in consequence quite impracticable to burn them. Mr. March, who was a
gentleman of expedients, ordered that all the chips and underbrush in
the yard should be made into heaps and consumed, hoping thus to catch
and do away with the mysterious and provoking extremities. The fires
were no sooner lighted than Molly Bridget rushed from room to room in
a state of frenzy. With the dying flames her own vitality subsided, and
she was dead before the ash-piles were cool. I say it seriously when I
say that these are facts of which there is authentic proof.
If the woman had recovered, she would have fared badly, even at that
late period, had she been in Salem; but the death-penalty has never
been hastily inflicted in Portsmouth. The first execution that ever took
place there was that of Sarah Simpson and Penelope Kenny, for the murder
of an infant in 1739. The sheriff was Thomas Packer, the same official
who, twenty-nine years later, won unenviable notoriety at the hanging of
Ruth Blay. The circumstances are set forth by the late Albert Laighton
in a spirited ballad, which is too long to quote in full. The following
stanzas, however, give the pith of the story--
“And a voice among them shouted,
“Pause before the deed is done;
We have asked reprieve and pardon
For the poor misguided one.’
“But these words of Sheriff Packer
Rang above the swelling noise:
‘Must I wait and lose my dinner?
Draw away the cart, my boys!’
“Nearer came the sound and louder,
Till a steed with panting breath,
From its sides the white foam dripping,
Halted at the scene of death;
“And a messenger alighted,
Crying to the crowd, ‘Make way!
This I bear to Sheriff Packer;
‘Tis a pardon for Ruth Blay!’”
But of course he arrived too late--the Law led Mercy about twenty
minutes. The crowd dispersed, horror-stricken; but it assembled again
that night before the sheriff’s domicile and expressed its indignation
in groans. His effigy, hanged on a miniature gallows, was afterwards
paraded through the streets.
“Be the name of Thomas Packer
A reproach forevermore!”
Laighton’s ballad reminds me of that Portsmouth has been prolific in
poets, one of whom, at least, has left a mouthful of perennial rhyme for
orators--Jonathan Sewell with his
“No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
But the whole boundless continent is yours.”
I have somewhere seen a volume with the alliterative title of “Poets of
Portsmouth,” in which are embalmed no fewer than sixty immortals!
But to drop into prose again, and have done with this iliad of odds and
ends. Portsmouth has the honor, I believe, of establishing the first
recorded pauper workhouse--though not in connection with her poets, as
might naturally be supposed. The building was completed and tenanted in
1716. Seven years later, an act was passed in England authorizing the
establishment of parish workhouses there. The first and only keeper of
the Portsmouth almshouse up to 1750 was a woman--Rebecca Austin.
Speaking of first things, we are told by Mr. Nathaniel Adams, in his
“Annals of Portsmouth,” that on the 20th of April, 1761, Mr. John
Stavers began running a stage from that town to Boston. The carriage was
a two-horse curricle, wide enough to accommodate three passengers. The
fare was thirteen shillings and sixpence sterling per head. The curricle
was presently superseded by a series of fat yellow coaches, one of
which--nearly a century later, and long after that pleasant mode of
travel had fallen obsolete--was the cause of much mental tribulation (1.
Some idle reader here and there may possibly recall the burning of
the old stage-coach in The Story of a Bad Boy.) to the writer of this
chronicle.
The mail and the newspaper are closely associated factors in
civilization, so I mention them together, though in this case the
newspaper antedated the mail-coach about five years. On October 7, 1756,
the first number of “The New Hampshire Gazette and Historical Chronicle”
was issued in Portsmouth from the press of Daniel Fowle, who in the
previous July had removed from Boston, where he had undergone a brief
but uncongenial imprisonment on suspicion of having printed a pamphlet
entitled “The Monster of Monsters, by Tom Thumb, Esq.,” an essay
that contained some uncomplimentary reflections on several official
personages. The “Gazette” was the pioneer journal of the province. It
was followed at the close of the same year by “The Mercury and Weekly
Advertiser,” published by a former apprentice of Fowle, a certain
Thomas Furber, backed by a number of restless Whigs, who considered the
“Gazette” not sufficiently outspoken in the cause of liberty. Mr. Fowle,
however, contrived to hold his own until the day of his death. Fowle
had for pressman a faithful negro named Primus, a full-blooded African.
Whether Primus was a freeman or a slave I am unable to state. He lived
to a great age, and was a prominent figure among the people of his own
color.
Negro slavery was common in New England at that period. In 1767,
Portsmouth numbered in its population a hundred and eighty-eight slaves,
male and female. Their bondage, happily, was nearly always of a light
sort, if any bondage can be light. They were allowed to have a kind
of government of their own; indeed, were encouraged to do so, and no
unreasonable restrictions were placed on their social enjoyment. They
annually elected a king and counselors, and celebrated the event with a
procession. The aristocratic feeling was highly developed in them. The
rank of the master was the slave’s rank. There was a great deal of ebony
standing around on its dignity in those days. For example, Governor
Langdon’s manservant, Cyrus Bruce, was a person who insisted on his
distinction, and it was recognized. His massive gold chain and seals,
his cherry-colored small-clothes and silk stockings, his ruffles and
silver shoe-buckles, were a tradition long after Cyrus himself was
pulverized.
In cases of minor misdemeanor among them, the negros themselves were
permitted to be judge and jury. Their administration of justice was
often characteristically naive. Mr. Brewster gives an amusing sketch of
one of their sessions. King Nero is on the bench, and one Cato--we are
nothing if not classical--is the prosecuting attorney. The name of the
prisoner and the nature of his offense are not disclosed to posterity.
In the midst of the proceedings the hour of noon is clanged from the
neighboring belfry of the Old North Church. “The evidence was not gone
through with, but the servants could stay no longer from their home
duties. They all wanted to see the whipping, but could not conveniently
be present again after dinner. Cato ventured to address the King: Please
you Honor, best let the fellow have his whipping now, and finish the
trial after dinner. The request seemed to be the general wish of the
company: so Nero ordered ten lashes, for justice so far as the trial
went, and ten more at the close of the trial, should he be found
guilty!”
Slavery in New Hampshire was never legally abolished, unless
Abraham Lincoln did it. The State itself has not ever pronounced
any emancipation edict. During the Revolutionary War the slaves were
generally emancipated by their masters. That many of the negros, who had
grown gray in service, refused their freedom, and elected to spend the
rest of their lives as pensioners in the families of their late owners,
is a circumstance that illustrates the kindly ties which held between
slave and master in the old colonial days in New England.
The institution was accidental and superficial, and never had any real
root in the Granite State. If the Puritans could have found in the
Scriptures any direct sanction of slavery, perhaps it would have
continued awhile longer, for the Puritan carried his religion into the
business affairs of life; he was not even able to keep it out of his
bills of lading. I cannot close this rambling chapter more appropriately
and solemnly than by quoting from one of those same pious bills of
landing. It is dated June, 1726, and reads: “Shipped by the grace of God
in good order and well conditioned, by Wm. Pepperills on there own acct.
and risque, in and upon the good Briga called the William, whereof is
master under God for this present voyage George King, now riding at
anchor in the river Piscataqua and by God’s grace bound to Barbadoes.”
Here follows a catalogue of the miscellaneous cargo, rounded off with:
“And so God send the good Briga to her desired port in safety. Amen.”