_The Standish Monument._
The Will of Captain Standish.--His Second Wife.--Captain’s Hill.--
The Monument.--Letters from President Grant and General
Hooker.--Oration by General Horace Binney Sargent.--Sketch
of his Life.--Other Speakers.--Laying the Corner Stone.--
Description of the Shaft.
None of the particulars of the last hours of Captain Standish have
been transmitted to our day. So far as is known he enjoyed good health
until his last sickness. His will was dated March 1st, 1655. In it he
expressed the wish that, should he die at Duxbury, his body should
be buried by the side of his two dear daughters, Lora Standish, and
Mary Standish, his daughter-in law. One-third part of his estate he
bequeathed to his dear and loving wife, Barbara Standish. The following
extract from his will indicates the devout character of the man:
“I do, by this my will, make and appoint my loving friends, Mr. Timothy
Hatherly and Captain James Cudworth, supervisors of this my last will;
and that they will be pleased to do the office of Christian love, to be
helpful to my poor wife and children, by their Christian counsel and
advice; and if any difference should arise, which I hope will not, my
will is that my said supervisors shall determine the same, and that
they see that my poor wife shall have as comfortable maintainance as
my poor state will bear, the whole time of her life, which if you my
loving friends please to do, though neither they nor I shall be able to
recompense, I do not doubt that the Lord will.”
There is a tradition that Captain Standish’s second wife, Barbara, was
a sister of his first wife, Rose. When the Mayflower sailed, she was
left an orphan in England. She afterwards reached the colony a full
grown woman, and became the wife of the Captain.
[Illustration: _STANDISH MONUMENT._]
Captain Standish died the 3d of October, 1656. But his character and
achievements were such that for two hundred years since his death,
his name has been one of the most prominent in our retrospects of the
Pilgrim days. His descendants are very numerous. For some time it has
been, by these his descendants, in contemplation to rear a monument
to his memory. On the 17th of August, 1871, there was a very large
gathering of these descendants at Duxbury, to consecrate the spot on
Captain’s Hill, where the monument was to be reared. Many others, of
the most distinguished men of our land, were also present, who wished
to unite in this tribute to the memory of one of the most illustrious
names in American annals. President U. S. Grant wrote, regretting his
inability to be present:
“I am heartily with your association in sympathy, with any movement to
honor one who was as prominent in the early history of our country as
Miles Standish; but my engagements are such that I regret I am unable
to promise to be present in August.”
In the reply from General Hooker to an invitation to attend the
celebration, he writes:
“I regret to state that my engagements for the month of August are
such as to render it impossible for me to join you on that memorable
occasion. It is unnecessary for me to say that I deeply sympathize
with the object of your meeting. I have been an admirer of the
character of Myles Standish from my boyhood up, and would like to be
identified with any body of gentlemen engaged in commemorating his
great virtues. To me, his civil and military character towers far above
his contemporaries, and they, if I mistake not (when history shall be
truthfully written), will be made to appear to be the most remarkable
body of men that ever lived. Viewed from our present standpoint, in my
opinion, they are now entitled to that judgment. It will be a graceful
act on the part of our friends, to erect a monument to his memory; but
it must not be expected to add to his fame or immortality. Industry,
valor, and integrity were regarded as the cardinal virtues of our
forefathers, and I hope they will never be held in less estimation by
their descendants. One of our gifted poets has happily named ‘Plymouth
Rock’ as the corner-stone of the nation. The superstructure promises to
be worthy of the foundation. With great respect, I have the honor to be
your friend and servant,
“J. HOOKER, _Major-General_.”
Replies of a similar character were returned by Generals Sherman,
Sheridan and Burnside, and by W. C. Bryant. General Horace Binney
Sargent delivered the oration on this occasion. It was very eloquent in
its truthful delineation of the character and career of the illustrious
Puritan Captain. Every reader will peruse with interest the following
graphic sketch from its pages:
“About the time that all Christendom was in mourning for the murdered
Prince of Orange, and deploring in his death the overthrow of the
bulwark of the Protestant faith, a little fair-haired child was playing
among the hedge-rows of England, who was destined to learn the art of
war in the armies of that king’s more warlike son, Prince Maurice, then
a boy of seventeen, and to be a tower of defence to the unsoldierly
Pilgrim colony of Protestant America.
“That child--whose bones, after nearly fourscore years of toil
and war, were laid somewhere on this hill-side, perhaps under our
unconscious feet--was Myles Standish, the great Puritan Captain! He
was born about the year 1580, of English ancestry, dating back to rank
and opulence as far as the thirteenth century. Of his childhood, little
is known. To defeat the title of his line to lands in England, the
rent-roll of which is half a million per annum, the hand of fraud is
supposed to have defaced the page that contained the parish record of
his birth.
“Unjustly deprived of these vast estates, as he avers in his will,
in which he bequeaths his title to his eldest son, it seems probable
that he went to Holland near the time of his majority. Queen Elizabeth
signed his commission as lieutenant in the English forces, serving in
the Netherlands against the cruel armies of the Inquisition. As she
died in 1603, about two years after his majority, it is not improbable
that we are indebted to that first disappointment, which may have
driven him, in his early manhood and some despair, into the army.
“From 1600 to 1609, the year of the great truce between Prince Maurice
and the King of Spain, the contest was peculiarly obstinate and bloody.
In this fierce school the Puritan captain learned the temper and art of
war.
“From 1609 to 1620, a period of truce but not of civil tranquility,
the Low Countries were inflamed by those theological disputes of the
Calvinists and Arminians which brought the excellent Barneveldt
to the scaffold, and drove the great Grotius--a fugitive from
prison--into exile. In this school, perhaps, Myles Standish learned
some uncompromising religious opinions, which brought him into strange
sympathy and connection with the Pilgrim church in Leyden. Both periods
seemed to leave their impress on his character. The inventory, recorded
with his will, mentions the Commentaries of Cæsar, Bariffe’s Artillery,
three old Bibles, and three muskets, with the harness of the time,
complete. His Bibles were old. A well-worn Bible for every musket; and,
thank God, a musket, not an old one, to defend each Bible!
“The schedule of his books, some forty in number, records nearly twenty
which are devotional or religious. With the memory of one act of
singularly resolute daring, when, in obedience to the colonial orders
to crush a great Indian conspiracy, he took a squad of eight picked
men into the forests, and deemed it prudent to kill the most turbulent
warrior with his own hands, we may imagine how the Pilgrim soldier,
friend and associate of Brewster, disciple of the saintly Robinson,
rose from the perusal of one of the old Bibles, or of “Ball on Faith,”
“Spasles against Heresie,” or “Dodd on the Lord’s Supper,” to stab
Pecksuot to the heart with his own knife; a giant who had taunted him
with his small stature, in almost the very words of Goliah in his
insulting sneer at David, long before; and to cut off the head of
Watawamat, which bloody trophy the elders had ordered him to bring home
with him. We can imagine him on the evening of that cheaply victorious
day, taking more than usual pleasure in the exultant psalms of the
warrior David, and in a chapter of Burrough’s “Christian Contentement”
and “Gospell Conversation,” especially as he had his three muskets with
bandoleers, and Bariffe’s Artillery, close at his hand. One can feel
the unction with which the valorous Pilgrim would religiously fulfil
the colonial order to smite the heathen hip and thigh, and hew Agag in
pieces before the Lord.
“Not originally, and perhaps never, a member of the Pilgrim church, and
possessing many traits which might have belonged to the fierce trooper,
in an army whose cavalry was the legitimate descendant of Cæsar’s most
formidable enemies,--the Batavi, celebrated for cavalry qualities,
and long the body-guard of the Roman emperors,--the appearance of the
somewhat violent soldier, in the saintly company of Parson Robinson’s
church, is an anomaly.
“It has been proven many a time, from the days of Bannockburn, when the
Scottish host sank on its knees to receive the benediction of the Black
Abbot of Inchaffray, even to our own late day, when many of the best
fighting regiments were blessed with the most earnest chaplains, that
men never tender their lives more gallantly to God and mother-land than
when they are fervently preached to and prayed for.
“Yet the all-daring contempt for peril, the roughness of temper, the
masterly economy with which Standish saved human life by consumate
indifference to personal homicide upon prudent occasion, his power of
breathing his own fiery heart into a handful of followers, till he made
them an army able to withstand a host in the narrow gates of death,
would lead us to expect such a colleague for the saintly Brewster as
little as we should expect to see Sheridan--
“‘Cavalry Sheridan,
Him of the horses and sabres we sing’--
prominent among the Methodists.
“In truth, with the poem of our sweetest and most cultured bard in our
minds, and with the memory of those fierce monosyllables with which our
great cavalry leader rolled back defeat upon the jubilant rebel host,
and rescued victory at Winchester, fancy can depict the foaming black
horse pressed into the rush of the shell-shattered guidons by the iron
gripe of knees booted in “Cordovan leather,” and imagine that little
Myles Standish rode that day in the saddle of little Phil. Sheridan.
“To the genealogist, who believes that names represent qualities and
things, it is not unpleasing to find in the family record of Standish
and Duxbury Hall, in the parish church of Chorley, Old England, the
name Milo Standanaught. To stand at nothing, in the way of a duty
commanded by the civil authority, seemed the essence of character in
Myles Standish; and thoroughness stamps the reputation of the name and
blood to-day.
“The materials for personal biography are scanty. His wife, Rose
Standish,--an English rose,--whose very name augurs unfitness for a
New England winter on an unsettled cape, died within a month of the
landing. A light tradition exists that his second wife, Barbara, was
her sister, whom he left an orphan child in England, and sent for.
She arrived a woman grown, and the valorous captain added another
illustration to the poet’s story, that Venus and the forger of
thunderbolts were married.
“From the first anchorage, Captain Standish, as the soldier of the
company, was charged with all deeds of adventure. At first, certain
grave elders were sent with him for counsel. But ultimately his repute
in affairs, both civil and military, was such that he was for many
years the treasurer of the colony, and, during a period of difficulty,
their agent in England. As a soldier, he was evidently the Von Moltke
of the Pilgrims. They invested him with the general command. Even in
extreme old age--the very year that he died “very auncient and full of
dolorous paines”--he received his last and fullest commission against
new enemies, his old friends, the Dutch.
“It is singular that among the primitive people, who must often in the
later Indian wars have missed his counsel and conduct, as the poet
describing Venice, sighs,--
“‘Oh! for one hour of blind old Dandole.’
no clear tradition has descended of the place where the war-worn bones
of the soldier-pilgrim lie. Sent, like Moses, to guide and guard a
feeble people to a promised land of power that he might never see, no
man knoweth his burial-place until this day.
“More than one hundred years ago, the following paragraph appeared in
the Boston “News-Letter,” dated Boston, January 22, 1770: “We hear
from Plymouth that the 22d day of December last was there observed
by a number of gentlemen, by the name of the Old Colony Club, in
commemoration of the landing of their ancestors in that place.”
“The fourth toast on that occasion, a hundred and one years ago,
was, “To the memory of that brave man and good officer, Capt. Miles
Standish.”
“Over the graves of the guests at that dinner,--
“‘For fifty years the grasses have been growing.’
But the principle of public fidelity shares the immortality of God
and Truth. Reverence for it never dies till the decay of nations. And
to-day we come together, the dwellers in the city and the dwellers
on the shore, men of every age and all professions, to dedicate one
spot of this parental soil for an enduring monument to the same Myles
Standish of the same unfaded record. The sunlight of near three hundred
years, that has shone fatal on many a reputation since his baby eyes
first saw the light of England, has only brought out the lasting colors
of his fame.
“Believing, as I firmly do, that he was a useful, a necessary citizen,
because he was ‘that brave man and good officer’ at a time when
soldierly qualities were essential to the very life of the infant
colony, it seems to me providential for the colonists that one of their
number was, by temper and training, unable to sympathize with that soft
tenderness for human life which is wont to characterize saintly-minded
men, like the Rev. Mr. Robinson, who, when he heard of the marvelous
conflict where Standish, with three or four others, in a locked room,
killed the same number of hostile chiefs that were gathering their
tribes to exterminate the English, uttered these sorrowful words: ‘Oh!
that you had converted some before you had killed any!’
“The soldier practised that terrible piece of economy which no saint
of the company would have dreamed of doing with his own hand. To borrow
the diction of the time, the gauntlet of the man of wrath was the fold
of the lambs of God. It was fortunate for us who believe in Plymouth
Rock, that one trained soldier, who had faced war conducted by the Duke
of Alva, came out in the Mayflower.
“Myles Standish represented the true idea of public service, vigorous
fidelity, and trained fitness for his place. In his single heroic
person he presented the true idea of the army,--skilled military force
in loyal subordination to the civil authority. The confidence that the
colony reposed in him to execute their most difficult commands as a
soldier, seems to prove that he revered, in the words of Mr. Robinson’s
farewell sermon, ‘the image of the Lord’s power and authority which the
magistrate beareth.’
“To be the founders of states is the first of glories, according to
Lord Bacon. The career of our Pilgrim hero is a beautiful illustration
of an education fitted to the great mission for which he seemed
peculiarly, strangely ordained.
“In grateful memory we consecrate this spot of earth to a monument of
the great Puritan Captain. May its shadow fall upon his grave! For two
centuries the stars have looked upon it. At what moment of the night
the circling moon may point it out with shadowy finger, no mortal
knows. No mortal ear can hear the secret whispered to the night,
‘Beneath this spot lies all of a hero that could die.’”
Several other eloquent addresses were made upon the occasion by General
B. F. Butler, Dr. Loring, and other gentlemen of the highest social
standing. The community is deeply indebted to Stephen M. Allen, Esq.,
one of the prominent citizens of Duxbury, for the time and money he
has devoted to furtherance of this good enterprise. As Corresponding
Secretary of the Standish Memorial Association, he has been one of
the most efficient agents in pushing forward the truly patriotic
undertaking.
On Monday, the 7th of October, 1872, the corner-stone of the Standish
monument was laid. It was indeed a gala day in the ancient town of
Duxbury. It is estimated that ten thousand people were present.
The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, of Boston, acted
as escort to the procession. Several Masonic Lodges, with their
glittering paraphernalia took part in the imposing ceremonies. As
the long procession wound up the slope of Captain’s Hill, thousands
of spectators lined their path on either side. A memorial box was
deposited under the corner-stone with a metallic plate which bore the
following inscription:
THE CORNER STONE
OF THE
STANDISH MEMORIAL,
IN COMMEMORATION OF THE CHARACTER AND SERVICES
--OF--
CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH,
THE FIRST COMMISSIONED MILITARY OFFICER
OF NEW ENGLAND,
Laid on the summit of Captain’s Hill, in Duxbury, under
the Superintendence of
THE ANCIENT AND HONORABLE ARTILLERY COMPANY
OF MASSACHUSETTS,
In presence of
THE STANDISH MONUMENT ASSOCIATION,
BY THE
M. W. GRAND LODGE OF FREE MASONS,
OF MASSACHUSETTS
M. W. SERENO D. NICKERSON, GRAND MASTER,
ON THE SEVENTH DAY OF OCTOBER, A. D. 1872.
Being the Two Hundred and Fifty-second Year since
the First Settlement of New England
BY THE
PILGRIM FATHERS.
SITE CONSECRATED AUGUST 17, 1871.
ASSOCIATION INCORPORATED MAY 4, 1872.
ASSOCIATION ORGANIZED, AND GROUND BROKEN, JUNE
17, 1872.
CORNER OF FOUNDATION LAID AUGUST 9, 1872.
This fine shaft rises one hundred and ten feet from its base, and is
surmounted by a bronze statue of the Captain, in full uniform, twelve
feet in height, and is said to be a truthful likeness. The diameter of
the shaft, at its base, is twenty-eight feet. The structure is of the
finest quality of Quincy granite. I will close this brief narrative
with the eloquent words of Gen. Horace Binney Sargent:
“High as the shaft may tower over headland and bay; deep as its
foundation-stones may rest; brightly as it may gleam in the rising or
setting sun upon the mariner returning in the very furrow that the
keel of the Mayflower made, the principles of common-sense, a citizen
soldier’s education for a citizen soldier’s work, the principles of
moral truth, manly honesty, prudent energy, fidelity incorruptible,
courage undauntable, all the qualities of manhood that compel
unflinching execution of the states’ behest,--are firmer and higher
and brighter still. And to crown them all is reverence to the Supreme
Executive of Earth and Heaven, who knows no feebleness of heart or
hand, and whose great purpose moved the war-worn Pilgrim’s feet to seek
his home upon this rock-bound continent, where the unceasing waves of
two unfettered oceans roar the choral hymn of Freedom.”
THE END.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Winslow’s Briefe Narrative, p. 31.
[2] Bradford, 25, 26.
[3] Works of Sir Walter Raleigh.
[4] Mourt’s Narrative.
[5] Mourt’s Narrative.
[6] A musket with a flint lock.
[7] Johnson’s Wonder Working Providence.
[8] Note to Young’s Chronicles of the Pilgrims.
[9] A Duck.
[10] Mourt’s Relation.
[11] The bill of mortality, according to Prince, which he copied from
Bradford, was as follows: In December, six died; in January, eight; in
February, seventeen; in March, thirteen; total, forty-four.
[12] Made of maize or Indian corn.
[13] James I., then King of England, had been a widower for about a
year.
[14] This was probably the fish called _tataug_.
[15] Abbott’s Life of King Philip.
[16] Mr. Drake, in his History of Boston, supposes that the “cliff”
alluded to must have been that pile of rocks now called “the chapel,”
in Quincy Bay.
[17] The Fortune.
[18] It will be remembered that, as half of their number had died,
seven houses accommodated the survivors.
[19] Morton, in his New English Canaan, writes: “There is a fish, by
some called shads, that at the spring of the year pass up the rivers
to spawn in the ponds, and are taken in such multitudes in every river
that hath a pond at the end, that the inhabitants dung their ground
with them. You may see in one township a hundred acres together set
with these fish, every acre taking a thousand of them. And an acre thus
dressed will produce and yield so much corn as three acres without
fish.”
It was the rule of the Indians to plant their corn when the leaves of
the white oak were as big as the ear of a mouse. They put two or three
fishes in every cornhill.
[20] Probably Martha’s Vineyard, then called Capawock.
[21] Subsequently Mr. Winslow wrote, correcting this statement:
“Whereas, myself and others, in former letters, wrote that the Indians
about us are a people without any religion or knowledge of any God,
therein I erred, though we could then gather no better.”--Winslow’s
Good News.
[22] There is some uncertainty about this word, but this is probably
the true reading.
[23] Mr. George Morton, to whom this letter was addressed, came out
in the next ship, the Ann, which sailed from London about the last of
April, 1622.
[24] Memoir of the Colony of Plymouth, by Francis Baylies. Part the
First, page 91.
[25] Winslow in Young; p. 290.
[26] History of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford, p. 127.
[27] Young’s Chronicles of the Pilgrims, p. 295.
[28] Mr. Weston had formerly befriended the plantation at Plymouth.
[29] Winslow in Young, p. 297.
[30] Young’s Chronicles; p. 299.
[31] Young’s Chronicles, p. 310.
[32] Young’s Chronicles, p. 318.
[33] Young’s Chronicles, p. 320.
[34] Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation; p. 130.
[35] Bradford in Prince, p. 216.
[36] Young’s Chronicles, p. 349
[37] Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation, p. 135.
[38] Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation, p. 211.
[39] Baylies’ Memoir of Plymouth Colony, p. 140.
[40] Blake’s Plymouth Colony, p. 153.
[41] Life of Elder William Brewster, p. 335.
[42] Higginson’s New England Plantation, p. 123.
[43] Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation.
[44] The name of the man thus shot was John Talbot.
[45] Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation, p. 321.
[46] Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation, p. 339.
[47] Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation, p. 363.
[48] Memoir of Plymouth Colony, by Francis Baylies, p. 249.
[49] There is a little uncertainty whether Elder Brewster died in the
year 1640 or 1644.
[50] Morton says, “He was fourscore and four years of age.”
[51] Memoir of New Plymouth, by Francis Baylies, part i, p. 277.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks corrected.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained; occurrences of
inconsistent hyphenation have not been changed.
Page 192: “four hundred of the Indians had been massacred” was printed
that way, but “Indians” may be the wrong word.
Page 243: “so reasonable, that one acre” was misprinted as “so
reasonable, than one acre”.
Page 265: “ascendency” was printed that way.
Page 365: “consumate” was printed that way.