Drake Samuel Adams
Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast
"We are the Jasons; we have won the fleece?"
The procession of the Pilgrims to their church was a sight that must have exceedingly stirred the sluggish blood of the Dutch emissary. He found them attentive to proffers of trade; acute, as might be expected of the first Yankees, where profits were in question; but there was no doubt about the quality of their piety. At the hour of worship the silent village was assembled by drum-beat, as was befitting in the Church Militant. At this signal the house-doors open and give passage to each family. The men wear their sad-colored mantles, and are armed to the teeth, as if going to battle. Silently they take their places in front of the captain's door, three abreast, with matchlocks shouldered. The tall, stern-visaged ones, we may suppose, lead the rest. In front is the sergeant. Behind the armed men comes Bradford, in a long robe. At his right hand is Elder Brewster, with his cloak on. At the governor's left marches Miles Standish, his rapier lifting up the corner of his mantle, and carrying a small cane in his hand. The women in sober gowns, kerchiefs, and hoods, their garments poor, but scrupulously neat, follow next; the lowlier yielding precedence to those of better condition. At command, they take their way up the hill in this order, and, entering within the rude temple they have raised, each man sets down his musket where he may lay hand upon it. "Thus," says De Rasieres, "they are on their guard night and day."
Thomas Lechford, "of Clement's Inn, Gent," in his "Plain Dealing," says he once looked in the church-door in Boston where the sacrament was being administered. He thus noted down what he saw: "They come together about nine o'clock by ringing of a bell. Pastor prayed for a quarter of an hour. The teacher then readeth and expoundeth a chapter; then a psalm is sung, which one of the ruling Elders dictates. Afterward the pastor preaches a sermon, or exhorts ex tempore."
This is the way in which they made contributions: "On Sundays, in the afternoon, when the sermon is ended, the people in the galleries come down and march two abreast up one aisle and down the other, until they come before the desk, for pulpit they have none. Before the desk is a long pue where the elders and deacons sit, one of them with a money-box in his hand, into which the people, as they pass, put their offering, some a shill, some 2s., some half a crown, five s., according to their ability. Then they conclude with a prayer."
Lechford adds that the congregation used to pass up by the deacon's seat, giving either money, or valuable articles, or paper promises to pay, and so to their seats again, the chief men or magistrates first. The same author describes the method of excommunication practiced in some of the New England churches. "At New Haven, alias Quinapeag," he says, "where Master Davenport is pastor, the excommunicate is held out of the meeting, at the doore, if he will heare, in frost, snow, and raine."
The Pilgrims are often called Puritans, a term of reproach first applied to the whole body of Dissenters, but in their day belonging strictly to those who renounced the forms and ceremonies while believing in the doctrines and sacraments of the Church of England. Boston was settled by Puritans, who, according to Governor Winthrop, adhered to the mother-church when they left Old England. It is curious to observe that the Boston Puritans became rigid Separatists, while the Plymouth Separatists became more and more moderate. The Pilgrims were originally of the sect called Brownists, from Robert Brown, a school-master in Southwark about 1580, and a relation of Cecil, Lord Burghley.186 Cardinal Bentivoglio erroneously calls the Holland refugees a distinct sect by the name of Puritans. Hutchinson, usually well informed, observes, "If all in England who called themselves Brownists and Independents at that day had come over with them (the Pilgrims), they would scarcely have made one considerable town." Yet in 1592 there were said to be twenty thousand Independents in England.
The Church of the Pilgrims, formed, in 1602, of people living on the borders of Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire, made their way, after innumerable difficulties, into Holland. Their pastor, John Robinson, is usually regarded as the author of Independency. A residence on the scene of the Reformation softened, in many respects, the inflexible religious character of the Brownists. They discarded the name rendered odious on many accounts. It is stated, on the authority of Edward Winslow, that Robinson and his Church did not require renunciation of the Church of England, acknowledging the other reformed churches, and allowing occasional communion with them. It is also evident from what Bradford says that the Pilgrims chose the Huguenots as their models in Church affairs.187
Both in regard to civil and ecclesiastical affairs the Pilgrims were placed in a situation of serious difficulty. The King of England promised not to interfere with them in religious matters, but would not acknowledge them by any public act under his hand and seal. Some of the most influential of the company of English merchants, by whom they were transported to New England, did not sympathize with them in their religious views, and at length broke off from them, and left them to struggle on alone as best they might. This is apparent in the plan to prevent the remnant of the Church of Leyden from coming over. It is also clear that neither the motives nor the intentions of the Pilgrims were well understood by the adventurers at the outset, and that as soon as these were fully developed, the merchants, or a majority of them, preferred to augment their colony with a more pliant and less obnoxious class of emigrants than the first-comers had proved. In examining the charges and complaints of the one, and the explanations of the other, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a good deal of duplicity was used by the Pilgrims to keep the breath of life in their infant plantation.
It appears that the settlers in Massachusetts Bay were not acquainted with the form of worship practiced by the Pilgrims, as Endicott writes to Governor Bradford from "Naumkeak, May 11th, 1629: I acknowledge myself much bound to you for your kind love and care in sending Mr. Fuller among us, and rejoice much that I am by him satisfied touching your judgments of the outward form of God's worship; it is (as far as I can yet gather) no other than is warranted by the evidence of truth, and the same which I have professed and maintained ever since the Lord in his mercy revealed himself unto me, being far differing from the common reports that hath been spread of you touching that particular."188
I have thought it worth mentioning that the church at Salem was the first completely organized Congregational church in America. It was gathered August 6th, 1629, when Rev. Mr. Higginson was ordained teacher, and Mr. Skelton pastor.189 Governor Bradford and others deputed from the church at Plymouth, coming into the assembly in the hour of the solemnity, gave them the right hand of fellowship. Robinson never having come over, Plymouth was without a pastor for some years.
Under Charles I. the Pilgrims fared little better than in the preceding reign; but they had seated themselves firmly by the period of the Civil War. On the day before his arrival at Shrewsbury, the king caused the military orders to be read at the head of each regiment. Then, mounting his horse, and placing himself in the midst, where all might hear, he made a speech to his soldiers, in which this passage occurs:
"Gentlemen, you have heard these orders read; it is your part, in your severall places, to observe them exactly… I can not suspect your Courage and Resolution; your Conscience and your Loyalty hath brought you hither to fight for your Religion, your King, and the Laws of the Land; you shall fight with no Enemies, but Traitours, most of them Brownists, Anabaptists, and Atheists, such who desire to destroy both Church and State, and who have already condemned you to ruin for being Loyall to vs."
Here, then, were a handful of men repudiated by their king, cast off by their commercial partners, a prey to the consequences of civil war at home, and living by sufferance in the midst of a fierce and warlike people, compelled at last to work out their own political destiny. What wonder that with them self-preservation stood first, last, and always! All other settlements in New England were made with the hope of gain alone, few, if any, colonists meaning to make a permanent home in its wilds. We may not withhold the respect due to these Pilgrims, who were essentially a unit, embodying the germ of civil, political, and religious liberty. They beheld from the beach the vanishing sail of the Mayflower as men who had accepted what fate may bring to them. They did not mean to go back.
CHAPTER XVIII.
PLYMOUTH, CLARK'S ISLAND, AND DUXBURY
"Ay, call it holy ground,
The soil where first they trod!
They have left unstain'd what there they found —
Freedom to worship God!" – Mrs. Hemans.
Let us now take a walk in Leyden Street. Until 1802 the principal street of the Pilgrims was without a name; it was then proposed to give it the one it now so appropriately bears. In my descent of the hill into the town square, I passed under the shade of some magnificent elms just putting forth their spring buds. Some of those natural enemies of trees were talking of cutting down the noblest of them all, that has stood for nearly a hundred years, and long shaded Governor Bradford's house.190
Consulting again our old guide, De Rasieres, I find he tells us, "New Plymouth lies on the slope of a hill stretching east, toward the sea-coast, with a broad street about a cannon-shot of eight hundred [yards] long leading down the hill; with a street crossing in the middle northward to the rivulet and southward to the land. The houses are constructed of hewn planks, with gardens, also inclosed behind and at the sides with hewn planks; so that their houses and court-yards are arranged in very good order, with a stockade against a sudden attack; and at the ends of the sides with hewn planks; so that their houses and court-yards are arranged in very good order, with a stockade against a sudden attack; and at the ends of the streets there are three wooden gates. In the centre, on the cross-street, stands the governor's house, before which is a square inclosure, upon which four pateros [steenstucken] are mounted, so as to flank along the streets." We are standing, then, in the ancient place of arms of the Pilgrims.
Nearest to us, on the north side of the square, is the site of Governor Bradford's house, with the Church of the Pilgrimage just beyond. The dwelling of the governor was long ago removed to the north part of the town, and this, its successor, does not fulfill our want, as the veritable habitation of the much-honored magistrate would do. Nearly opposite is the old county court-house, erected in 1749. Up at the head of this inclosed space, which long custom miscalls a square, is the First Church, its pinnacles appearing dimly through the interweaving branches of tall elms. There is a coolness as well as a repose about the spot that makes us loiter.
After the tragic death of his first wife, Bradford bethought him of Mrs. Southworth, whom he had known and wooed in old England as Alice Carpenter. She was now a widow. He renewed his suit, and she hearkened to him. But as the governor could not leave his magistracy, the lady, ceding her woman's rights, took ship, and came to Plymouth in August, 1623. In a fortnight they were married.
Bradford tells how the passengers of the ship Ann, of whom Mistress Southworth was one, were affected by what they saw when they first set foot in Plymouth. They were met by a band of haggard men and women, meanly appareled, and in some cases little better than half-naked. The best dish they could set before their friends was a lobster or piece of fish, without other drink than a cup of water. Some of the newly arrived fell weeping; others wished themselves in England again, while even the joy of meeting friends from whom they had long been separated could not dispel the sadness of others in beholding their miserable condition. The governor has not told us of the coming of Alice Southworth, but says simply there were "some very useful persons" on board the ship Ann.
Here the governor entertained Père Gabriel Dreuillettes, in 1650 with a fish dinner, because, says the good old Jesuit, it was a Friday. The governor was equal to the courtesy; yet, I fancy, fish dinners were often eaten in Plymouth.
Bradford's second wife survived him thirteen years. With her came his brother-in-law, George Morton, her sister, Bridget Fuller,191 and two daughters of Elder Brewster. She lived thirty years with her second husband, and, from the tribute of Nathaniel Morton,192 must have been a woman of an exemplary and beautiful character. Her sister, Mary Carpenter, lived to be ninety years old. She is referred to in the church records of Plymonth as "a godly old maid, never married."
Apropos of the governor's wedding, I extract this notice of the first marriage in the colony from his history: "May 12th, 1621, was ye first marriage in this place, which, according to ye laudable custome of ye Low Countries, was thought most requisite to be performed by the magistrate, as being a civill thing, upon which many questions aboute inheritance doe depende," etc.
When Edward Winslow was in England as agent of the colony, and was interrogated at the instance of Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, before the Lords Commissioners of the Plantations, he was, among other things, questioned upon this practice of marriage by magistrates. He answered boldly that he found nothing in Scripture to restrict marriage to the clergy. He also alleged that the plantation had long been without a minister, and finished by citing, as a precedent, his own marriage by a magistrate at the Staat-haus in Holland. Morton, who appeared as an accuser of Winslow, says, "The people of New England held the use of a ring in marriage to be a relique of popery, a diabolical circle for the Devell to daunce in."
As soon as they had definitely settled upon a location, the colonists went to work building their town. They began to prepare timber as early as the 23d of December, but the inclemency of the season and the distance every thing was to be transported – there were no trees standing within an eighth of a mile of the present Leyden Street – made the work painfully laborious and the progress slow. On the twenty-eighth day the company was consolidated into nineteen families, the single men joining some household in order to lessen the number of houses to be built. They then staked out the ground, giving every person half a pole in breadth and three in length. Each head of a family chose his homestead by lot, and each man was required to build his own house. By Tuesday, the 9th of January, the Common House wanted nothing but the thatch to be complete; still, although it was only twenty feet square, the weather was so inclement that it took four days to cover it. They could seldom work half the week.
Captain Smith says, in 1624, the town consisted of two-and-thirty houses and about a hundred and eighty people. The Common House is believed to have stood on the south side of Leyden Street, where the abrupt descent of the hill begins. In digging a cellar on the spot, in 1801, sundry tools and a plate of iron were discovered, seven feet below the surface of the ground. This house is supposed to have served the colonists for every purpose of a public nature until the building of their fortress on Burial Hill. Mourt calls it their rendezvous, and relates that a few days after completion it took fire from a spark in the thatch. At the time of the accident Governor Carver and William Bradford were lying sick within, with their muskets charged, and the thatch blazing above them, to their very great danger. In this Common House the working parties slept until their dwellings were made ready.
It was worth living two hundred years ago to have witnessed one street scene that took place here. John Oldham, the contentious, the incorrigible, dared to return to Plymouth after banishment. He had, with Lyford, tried to breed a revolt among the disaffected of the colony. A rough and tough malignant was Oldham, fiercely denouncing the magistrates to their teeth when called to answer for his misdeeds. He defied them roundly in their grave assembly. Turning to the by-standers, he exclaimed:
"My maisters whar is your harts? now show your courage, you have oft complained to me so and so; now is ye tyme if you will doe any thing, I will stand by you."
He returned more choleric than before, calling those he met rebels and traitors, in his mad fury. They put him under guard, until his wrath had time to cool, and set their invention to work. He was compelled to pass through a double file of musketeers, every one of whom "was ordered to give him a thump on ye brich, with ye but end of his musket," and was then conveyed to the water-side, where a boat was in readiness to carry him away. They then bid him go and mend his manners. The idea of the gantlet was, I suspect, borrowed from the Indians.
This little colony of pilgrims was at first a patriarchal community. Every thing was in common. Each year an acre of land was allotted to every inhabitant to cultivate. The complete failure of the experiment ought to stand for a precedent, though it seems somehow to have been forgotten. Men, they found, would not work for the common interest as for themselves, and so the idea of a community of dependents was abandoned for an association of independent factors. From this time they began to get on. The rent-day did not trouble them. "We are all freeholders," writes Edward Hilton home to England. In 1626 the planters bought themselves free of the undertakers, who oppressed them with ruinous charges for every thing furnished the colony. Allerton, who was sent over in 1625 to beg the loan of one hundred pounds sterling, was obliged to pay thirty pounds in the hundred interest for the two hundred pounds he had obtained. In the year 1627 they divided all their stock into shares, giving each person, or share, twenty acres of land, besides the single acre already allotted.
It is time to resume our walk down Leyden Street. On reaching the bluff before mentioned the street divides, one branch descending the declivity toward the water, while the other skirts the hill-side. The Universalist Church at the corner marks the site of the Allyne House, an ancient dwelling demolished about 1826. By the Plymouth records, it appears that, in 1699, Mr. Joseph Allyne married Mary Doten, daughter of Edward, and granddaughter of that Edward Doten who had come in the Mayflower. Among the children of Joseph Allyne born in the old homestead was Mary, who became the mother of that "flame of fire," James Otis. The house commanded a fine view of the bay, its foundations being higher than the chimneys in the streets below. It may not, perhaps, be generally known that James Otis, after completing his studies in the office of Jeremiah Gridley, then the most eminent lawyer in the province, came from Boston to Plymouth, where he took an office in the main street. He practiced there during the years 1748-'49, when his talents called him to a broader field.
Mercy, the sister of James Otis, married James Warren, a native of Plymouth. He succeeded General Joseph Warren as president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, but is better known as the author of the celebrated "Committee of Correspondence," which he proposed to Samuel Adams while the latter was at his house. Mrs. Warren, at the age of seventy, was visited by the Duke De Liancourt. "She then retained," he says, "the activity of mind which distinguished her as a sister of James Otis; nor had she lost the graces of person or conversational powers, which made her still a charming companion." For reasons apparent to the reader, she resolved not to send her "History of the Revolution" to the press during her husband's lifetime.
Going beyond the church, we come upon the open space of greensward, intersected by foot-paths, known as Cole's Hill. Some defensive works were erected on this bank in 1742, in the Revolution, and again in 1814. I have already traversed it in imagination, when standing on the summit of Burial Hill. It is no longer a place of graves, nor does it in the least suggest, by any monumental symbol, the tragedy of the Pilgrims' first winter here, when, as Bradford touchingly says, "Ye well were not in any measure sufficient to tend ye sicke; nor the living scarce able to burie the dead." Their greatest strait was in May and June, when there were no wild fowl. Winslow says they were without good tackle or seines to take the fish that swam so abundantly in the harbor and creeks.
We may not disguise the fact. The least attractive object is the Rock of the Forefathers. The stranger who comes prepared to do homage to the spot the Pilgrims' feet first pressed, finds his sensibility stricken in a vital place. The insignificant appearance of the rock itself, buried out of sight beneath a shrine made with hands, and the separation of the sacred ledge into two fragments, each of which claims a divided regard, give a death-blow to the emotions of awe and reverence with which he approaches this corner-stone of American history.
Plymouth Rock, or rather what is left of it in its original position, is reached by following Water Street, which, as its name indicates, skirts the shore, conducting you through a region once devoted to commerce, now apparently consigned to irretrievable decay. Near Hedge's Wharf, and in close vicinity to the old Town Dock, is the object of our present search. A canopy, designed by Billings, has been built above it. I entered. In the stone pavement is a cavity of perhaps two feet square, and underneath the uneven surface the rock appears. I had often wished to stand here, but now all enthusiasm was gone out of me. I had rather have contented myself with the small piece so long treasured, and with the loom of the rock as my imagination had beheld it, than to stand in the actual presence of it.
By the building of street and wharf on a higher level the rock is now at some little distance from high-water mark.193 At one time the sea had heaped the sand upon it to the depth of twenty feet, but the tradition of the spot had been well kept, and at the dawn of the Revolution the sand was cleared away, and the rock again laid bare. This was in 1774. In the attempt to remove it from its bed it split asunder, the superstitious seeing in this accidental fracture a presage of the division of the British empire in America. The upper half, or shell, of Forefathers' Rock was removed to the middle of the village, and placed at the end of a wall, where, along with vulgar stones, it propped the embankment. In 1834 the fractured half was removed from the town square to its present position in front of Pilgrim Hall, where it is now lying.
The honor of having first set foot on this threshold of fame is claimed for John Alden and Mary Chilton. The question of precedence will probably never be settled. It is also claimed for the exploring party who landed from the shallop on Monday, the 21st of December, commonly called Forefathers' Day.194
For more than two hundred years the 22d of December had been observed as the day of the landing; that is, in effect, to say, it had been so observed by the Pilgrims themselves, by their descendants around their firesides, and had received the sanction of formal commemoration, in 1769, by the Old Colony Club. Men were then living who were within two generations of the first comers, and retained all their traditions unimpaired. After this long period had elapsed, it was assumed that the Pilgrims had designed to signalize the landing of the exploring party of eighteen, rather than that from the Mayflower, and upon this theory, by adopting the new style, the landing was fixed for the 21st, a substitution which has been generally acquiesced in by recent writers. Unless it is believed that the landing of the party of discovery possessed greater significance to the Pilgrims, and to those who lived within hearing of the voices of the Mayflower, than the disembarkation of the whole body of colonists on the very strand they had finally adopted for their future home, the presumption of error in computing the difference between old and new style has little force.
For six weeks these explorations had continued all along the coast-line of Cape Cod, and nothing had been settled until the return of the last party to the ship. The Mayflower then sailed for Plymouth, and cast anchor in the harbor on the 16th; but the explorations continued, nor was there a decision until the 20th as to the best point for fixing the settlement. Moreover, there are no precise reasons for saying that the first exploring party landed anywhere within the limits of the present town of Plymouth, nor any tradition of its making the rock a stepping-stone.
We prefer to believe that the Pilgrims meant to illustrate the landing from the Mayflower– the event emphasized by poets, painters, and orators – as marking the true era of settlement; that the 22d of December was intelligently adopted by those best able to judge of their intentions; and that an unbroken custom of more than two centuries should remain undisturbed, even if it had originated in a technical error, which we do not believe was the case. "This rock," says the gifted De Tocqueville, "has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and the stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation; its very dust is shared as a relic. And what has become of the gate-ways of a thousand palaces? Who cares for them?"
The skeleton of a body was here before them, but, as Carlyle says, the soul was wanting until these men and women came. Mr. Sherley, writing to Bradford, says, "You are the people that must make a plantation and erect a city in those remote places when all others fail and return."
I do not find such conspicuous examples of intolerance among the Pilgrims as afterward existed in the Bay Colony. Lyford said they were Jesuits in their ecclesiastical polity, but they permitted him to gather a separate church and perform the Episcopal service among them. Beyond question, they were not willing to see the hierarchy from which they had fled establish itself in their midst. The intrigues of such men as Lyford within the colony, and Weston in the company at home, kept back the remnant of their own chosen associates, and re-enforced them with churchmen, or else men of no particular religion or helpfulness.
In November, 1621, the planters received an accession of thirty-five persons by the Fortune.195 It was the custom in the plantation for the governor to call all the able-bodied men together every day, and lead them to their work in the fields or elsewhere. On Christmas-day they were summoned as usual, but most of the new-comers excused themselves, saying it was against their consciences to work on that day. The governor told them if they made it a matter of conscience he would spare them until they were better informed. He then led away the rest. When those who had worked came home at noon they found the conscientious observers of the day in the street, at play; some pitching the bar, and some at stool-ball and like sports. The governor went to them, took away their implements, and told them it was against his conscience they should play while others worked. If they made keeping the day a matter of devotion, they must keep their houses, but there must be no gaming or reveling in the streets. Assuredly there was some fun in William Bradford, governor.
Hutchinson – after all the abuse of him, the fairest historian as to what transpired in advance of the Revolutionary period – gives the Plymouth colonists credit for moderation. When Mrs. Hutchinson was banished by Massachusetts, she and her adherents applied for and obtained leave to settle on Aquidneck, then acknowledged to be within the Plymouth patent. Before this, Roger Williams, who had been their minister, was, after his banishment from Salem, kindly used, though requested to remove beyond their limits, for fear of giving offense to the Massachusetts colony. Many Quakers probably saved their lives by fleeing to Plymouth, although the Pilgrims detested their worship and enacted laws against them. The town of Swanzey196 was almost wholly settled by Baptists.
The relations of the Pilgrims with the Indians were founded in right and justice, and stood on broader grounds than mere policy. This is shown in the unswerving attachment of Massasoit, the fidelity of Samoset, and the friendship of Squanto. The appearance of Samoset in the Pilgrim village was of good augury to the colony, and is worthy of a more appreciative pencil than has yet essayed it.
About the middle of March, after many false alarms of the savages, an Indian stalked into the town. Passing silently by the houses, he made straight for the rendezvous. I think I see the matrons and maids peeping through their lattices at the dusky intruder. He was tall, straight of limb, and comely, with long black hair streaming down his bare back, for, except a narrow girdle about his loins, he was stark naked. When he would have gone into the rendezvous the guard intercepted him. He was armed with a bow, and in his quiver were only two arrows, one headed, the other unheaded, as indicating the pacific nature of his mission. His bearing was frank and fearless, as became a sagamore. "Welcome, Englishmen," he said to the by-standers, astounded, as well they might be, on hearing such familiar salutation from the lips of a savage.
