USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Litchfield > The bi-centennial celebration of the settlement of Litchfield, Connecticut, August 1-4, 1920 > Part 8
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to deviate essentially from the goverment as established by their fathers. They who judge of men by their influence upon public happiness and by the services they render to the human race will never cease to honor the memory of Hooker and Hayneş".
Any careful examination of Colonial conditions will reveal the fact that the oppressive and intolerant actions for which the fathers have been judged at the bar of posterity were ordi- marily regarded by them as measures of political necessity, and not the exercise of ecclesiastical tyranny.
The experience of Roger Williams is a case in point. The current opinion concerning him is that he stood forth as a champion of liberty, a defender of equal rights, an opponent of the stringent restrictions of the theocratic form of govern- ment, and that he was therefore suppressed and exiled by the narrow bigotry of the Massachusetts Council. He is painted in winsome outline and attractive color. His opponents are portrayed with a black crayon, and in sour and repellant lines. Roger Williams was indeed a brave and scholarly gentleman, of high ideals, and noble breadth of view. But, says John Fiske, "he was overfull of logical subtleties, and delighted in controversy". He was temperamentally pugnacious, and as we all know when one shies his hat into the ring and announces himself the champion of every idea that slaps the face of accepted convention and constitutional privilege, an able-bodied scrimmage is the next thing on the programme. Roger Wil- liams always carried a chip on his shoulder, of a size which was easily visible to the naked eye. Our forebears were not the men who feared to take a dare. Under the circumstances effervescence was as inevitable as when acid is mixed with alkali. There was a terrific battle of tongues. There was a fierce and endless chopping of logic. At length Williams conmitted the great political imprudence of writing a pam- phlet in which he picked a flaw in the Colonists' title to their holdings under the King's grant, insisting that a legitimate title could not issue from the throne, but could only be obtained by purchase from the Indians. Such a theory, true or false, could only be regarded in England as an assault upon the royal prerogative, and must inevitably draw down upon the Colonists the thunderbolts of the royal displeasure, for the
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fulmination of which the King was at that very moment seek. ing in every corner for a pretext. To make matters worse, Endicott, a rabid hater of every suggestion of papacy, sent the already fevered temperature several degrees higher by cutting from the flag of the Salem Company of militia the red cross of St. George, with which it was blazoned, an act which would find its parallel in tearing the stars from the field of our national colors. This performance was instantly construed by all loyal Englishmen as a defiance of the royal authority, and was very generally, and quite naturally, represented as the inevitable fruit of Roger Williams' criticism of the prerogatives of the throne. The spark was sputtering at the very door of the powder magazine. Prompt and drastic measures were necessary to avert a political explosion that would wipe the New England colonies off the map. Endicott was reprimanded and suspended from office. Roger Williams was summoned to Boston, and was directed to return to England. Retreating into the forest to escape jurisdiction, he wintered in a wigwam with a friendly Indian. In the Spring he received a private, and not unkindly, hint from Gen. Winthrop, that if he should steer his troublous course to Narragansett Bay, he would be free from all molestation.
It is to be deplored that the temper of the times was such that a more sympathetic treatment could not have been given to this representative of advanced ideas concerning freedom of thought and liberty of soul, but it should be clearly under- stood that his expulsion from the Massachusetts Colony was not on account of his theological opinions, but upon the ground of his being accounted an enemy of the public welfare, a menace to the continuance of the life of the colony. The spirit in which the Colonies dealt with him is illuminated when it is remembered that had he announced in Old England the same opinions which he ventilated in New England, he would have been pilloried, his property confiscated, and his ears and nose cropped. Had he promulgated them in Continental Europe he would have been burned at the stake. It was a scant twenty years since Edward Wright suffered death by fire under good King James, patron saint of the Authorized Version of the Holy Scriptures, for uttering precisely similar sentiments. At the very hour when Winthrop was advising Williams of
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an asylum where he might settle in sheltered security, the prisons of the mother country were being overstocked with Baptists. To the twelve years' imprisonment of one of them we owe the celestial vision of "The Pilgrim's Progress". To refuse. Williams the freedom of the colony in view of the situa- tion which he had created, was no more irrational nor intol- erant than it was for the landlady of Isaac Taylor, the Pla- tonist, to decline to permit him to sacrifice a bull to Jupiter in her back parlor.
The story of Mistress Anne Hutchinson strikingly illus- trates the same point. Anne Hutchinson was a lady from Lincolnshire, England, endowed with rare mental gifts, and of great personal charm, although, as Fiske says, "impulsive and indisereet". She signalized her advent into Boston by lectur- ing upon certain abstruse themes in theology. Thus early did the genius of Boston exhibit itself. The polite entertainment of that infant city was lectures. The lecturer was a learned lady. The themes were of that transcendental sort for which the brain nourished upon the bean displays such peculiar proclivity. Madame Hutchinson's deliverances filled the city with excitement until the town was fairly boiling, like a The community became divided into hos- witches' cauldron.
tile camps. Leaders in the Church and in society ranked themselves on opposite sides, and faced each other as with levelled bayonets. No wonder that Winthrop marveled at hearing that social; distinctions had become of very little moment, and that the community at large was sharply, and militantly, rent asunder into belligerent theological camps, under a covenant of grace, and under a covenant of works, handing out to one another anathema and excommunication, as fervently and profusely as they were bandied about in other countries by Papists and Protestants. In spite of this philo- sophical clamor and theological hubbub, he sagely ventured to doubt "whether any man could really tell what was the actual question in debate". Meantime, tidings came pouring in from every quarter of the compass that the Indian tribes were massing for a general attack upon the Colonists, in the hope of driving them back into the sea, across which they had come. When the call to arms was sounded, and the Colonial Militia was summoned to rally to the colors, and it was found that the men of Boston would not march, because
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they had suspicion that their Chaplain was under a covenant of works, it was not unnaturally believed to be high time to call a halt upon Mrs. Hutchinson's lucubrations, and she was ordered to leave the Colony. It was a most unpardonable and unhappy act of oppression, but as Fiske, that most cautious and impartial of chroniclers, remarks, "Of all such acts which stain the history of Massachusetts in the 17th Century, it is just the one for which the plea of political necessity may really be to some extent accepted".
When the conditions in the Colonies are measured against contemporancous conditions in the Old World, instead of being compared with the standards of our day, it is found that our fathers led the world in all that makes for the advancement of the race.
Compared with the practices of the lands they had left, and with the principles of the then civilized world, their advanced position with regard to theories of government, the rights of man, and the elevation of the individual, provoke equal admiration and surprise. To find fault with our ances- tors for failing to measure up to the standards of the present day which have been wrought out during the two strenuous centuries since their dust mingled with that soil, which their life has made forever famous, were as rational as to find fault with tallow dips, because they do not blaze like are lights, or with ox carts, because they are not so luxurious as limousines; or with flintlocks, because they lack the effectiveness of Win- chester rifles.
Another charge which quarters a bar sinister upon our ancestral escutcheon is the hard-hearted treatment of the Quakers. When the recital of the seemingly wanton barbari- ties with which the Colonists treated the Quakers is reviewed, it must not be forgotten that in the 17th Century the name of "Quaker" was not associated with the gentle and lovable company who move among us with quiet tread and shining faces, but that they were then universally regarded as lawless enthusiasts, defiant of all restraints, outraging all rights, and stirring in the community a general feeling of horror and dread. Persecution was not shunned by them. They coveted it. They did not seek a retreat in which to worship ummol-
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ested, as the Colonists had crossed the seas to do, but they deemed it their supreme business to readjust Christendom, and where they were least welcome, there they felt the strongest call to go. In this spirit they resorted to Massachusetts. The Quaker theories of social order were flatly antagonistic to the Puritan ideals. Their coming to Boston was the deliberate invasion of a hostile country, and was so understood by both parties to the unhappy contest. They challenged controversy. They courted martyrdom. Rhode Island offered them peaceful asylum, but the heavy penalties which the Massachusetts Col-
ony imposed upon them was a lure that drew them. The Puri- tan Government was a "Man of Sin", and they felt a call to demolish it. They assumed an attitude of sheer anarchy. It became a point of duty with them to violate the consciences of all from whom they differed. They hooted the Governor on his way to worship. They chopped wood on the Church steps. They ran their spinning wheels in the Church vestibules. They rushed down the Church aisles proclaiming their vagaries. Some of them practiced the questionable grace of nudity, and, remov- ing their clothing, paraded the streets in Adamic simplicity- in order that they might testify in the sight of the Lord. The mass of the followers of George Fox seem to have taken small part in these bizarre proceedings, but, as always, the many were compelled to bear the burden of the few extremists, and the odium of this fanaticism attached to the entire Quaker body, and they were universally regarded as a set of pestilent and dangerous insurrectionaries. In the mother country they were crammed into gaol by the thousands. At one time
the prison registers contained twelve thousand of their names, and so inhuman was their treatment that at least one-tenth of them died of gaol fever. Cromwell was indisposed to annoy them, and was friendly to Fox, but in spite of his sympathy he was compelled by their defiance of legal restraints to sub- ject many of them to rigorous punishment. According to John Fiske, they were proceeded against "not for preaching heresy, but for violating the peace". A quotation from an official document will reveal the contemporaneous atmosphere. In 1708 the English Quakers petitioned the English government against the Colonial laws which had been levelled against them. Governor Saltonstall, of Connecticut Colony, wrote in reply to Sir Henry Ashurst, as follows,-"I may observe from
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the matter of their objections that they have a further reach than to obtain liberty for their own persuasion, as they pre- tend (for many of the laws they object against concern them no more than if they were Turks or Jews) ; for as there never was, that I know of, for this twenty years that I have resided in this government, any one Quaker, or other person, that suffered upon the account of his different persuasion in religi- ous matters from the body of this people".
The most well known and the gravest charge in the indict- ment against the founders of the Colonies is the persecution and the execution of alleged witches. The contrast in this respect between the American Colonists and the world they left behind their backs is most striking. Persecution for witchcraft began in the mother country long before the settle- ment of America, and persisted for more than a quarter of a century after the delusion had been exposed, and the night- mare had vanished from Massachusetts. The first English statute against witches was enacted in the reign of Henry VIII, dubbed Defender of the Faith, in virtue of being the head and front of the Anglican Reformation. Under the direct per- sonal influence of James I, who appears in history with a tinsel halo because of his accidental association with the Authorized Version of the Holy Scriptures, -- the witch law was made more stringent, and under its elaborate provisions a vast number of people were put to death under circumstances of revolting atrocity. In 1644, after the Restoration of the Stuarts, occurred a classic trial for witchcraft, in which Sir Thomas Browne, a learned physician, and perhaps the most accomplished scholar of his time, gave testimony; and the celebrated jurist Sir Matthew Hale, Chief Justice of England, echoed the witness from the bench. It is a significant fact that all the great English thinkers, Shakespeare, Bacon, Sel- den, Raleigh and Browne, believed in witches, and none of them was a Puritan. Between 1660 and 1718 more than twenty-four books were published in England in support of this dire delusion,-a gruesome Five-foot Bookshelf. As late as 1711 the refined and cultured Joseph Addison came out in its defence. At a later day John Wesley asserted his unbounded belief in witchcraft, asserting in language not unfamiliar to our own cars, "that when he gave it up, he must
0
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abandon his Bible". The latest execution for witchcraft by law in England was 1716; in France, 1718; in Scotland, 1722; in Germany, 1749; in Switzerland, 1760; in Poland, 1793.
This direful nightmare which, brooding over Europe throughout the Middle Ages, held England in its fell clutch from Henry VIII to 1716, seized the Massachusetts Colony in 1644, but was completely exorcised in 1692, a period of less than fifty years. In the Colonies twenty-seven persons suf- fered death for witchcraft during this half century, while dur- ing this same period in England, in a single year, in a single county, sixty poor wretches were executed upon this charge with all due process of law.
The attitude of the Colonists toward Indians, toward Quakers, and toward Witches were mere excrescences upon the surface of their life. At heart it was pure and sweet. These things were gnarls in the bark, not knots in the grain. They were survivals of another age and or a former environ- ment, like the dodo and the kangaroo, that are the tokens to us of what Saurians once roamed this now hospitable earth. The Colonists were narrow, but their's was a narrowness with depth to it, and "it has been a narrowness for which the Puri- tan has suffered in the diminution of his fame more than others for conspicuous crimes".
With characteristic insight James Russell Lowell has writ- ten, "Our Puritan ancestors have been maligned and mis- represented by persons without imagination enough to make themselves contemporary with and therefore able to under- stand the men whose memories they strive to blacken". Their errors were many. Their faults were neither few nor light. They wanted the breadth of vision and the genial warmth of humanity that belongs to a later day, and which their very blood has bred in their descendants. But the acts which are alleged in evidence of their cruelty and bigotry are not of the essence of their nature. They were the survival of the con- ditions under which they had been born, the unhappy heritage of the age in which they lived. Their blunders were the blunders of the pioneer. When the American Colonies were being founded, humanity was emerging from a condition of mental and spiritual enslavement. Society was in bonds to the divine right of kings. The Church was in captivity to
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the tyranny of papacy. The very definition of liberty was yet to be formulated. The great-hearted men who moulded Colo- nial life were busy in translating the Reformation into a political form. It was a task for giants. Like Atlas, they lifted the world on their shoulders. It was inevitable that they should follow many a false lead before they found the open road. It was certain that they would wander into many a side track before they struck the straight and shining trail of truth. That they should have cast off so many of their swaddling bands, that they should slough off so many of their inherited habits, that they should have set to themselves such starry goals, that they should have pressed toward them with such a consuming and unexhaustible ardor, this is the marvel. They were unable in a few decades to free themselves from modes of thought and principles of action which bad been engrained by centuries, but they did succeed in sounding the trumpet call by which all after generations have guided their onward march.
It is written that when darkness enfolded Egypt as with a pall, the children of Israel had light in their dwellings. Such a situation was strikingly reproduced in the Colonial period. The shadows lay thick upon the older world, while these Western shores of the Atlantic were aglow with light. Upon these sterile and rock-set coasts were kindled the shin- ing tokens of a new day,-a great, a glorious, a planetary day, like one of those mighty world-days whose record is written in the story of the earth's creation. The light was not the unclouded glory of the noontime, but was chequered with those straggling mists of the night which always cling about the gate- ways of the dawn. The growing radiance did not bathe the whole waiting land with its splendor. Many a low-lying valley and far-stretched plain lay wrapped in the shade, but the lofty crests of the sentinel peaks were robed with a glow which told to all men that a new morning had come.
GEORGE C. WOODRUFF AND THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL OAK
OFFICIAL PROGRAM
MONDAY, AUGUST SECOND. State Day
10:45 a. m .- His Excellency, Governor Marcus HI. Hol- comb and Staff received with full military honors at Play- house.
11:00 a. m .- Parade starts from Playhouse composed as follows: 2nd Co. Governor's Foot Guard, 1st Co. G. F. G., New Haven Grays, Putnam Phalanx, Governor Holcomb, Staff and special guests in automobiles.
Line of March-West street to Meadow; Meadow to West- over; Westover to South; South to Phelps' Tavern; East street to North, to head of street; countermarch down North, past reviewing stand, down West street to the Park where luncheon will be served. Officers, Governor and others entertained elsewhere.
2:00 p. m .- Playhouse, addresses by Governor Holcomb, former Governor Weeks, Hon. Thomas F. Reilly and Major John L. Gilson.
2:00 p. m .- Congregational Church-Addresses by Lyman Beecher Stowe, Congressman James P. Glynn, United States Senator Frank B. Brandegec.
3:30 p. m .- Playhouse-Reception to Governor Holcomb, Staff and Officials.
4:30 p. m .- Regimental Drill in Center Square with review by Commander-in-Chief.
STATE DAY : GOV. MARCUS H. HOLCOMB AND STAFF
ADDRESS BY GOVERNOR MARCUS H. HOLCOMB.
The Playhouse, August 2, 1920.
I have not prepared a speech. I simply came up to the old town to see the people of Litchfield on their 200th anniver- sary celebration.
I am here to bear testimony to what these States United know of the town of Litchfield. It is one of the old conserva- tive New England towns and represents that class of citizens who, during the nineteenth century, have developed the United States of America from thirteen feeble colonies into the great- est and most powerful republic there is in the world. The great problem with us is to keep it so. Our Revolutionary forefathers established here a government based on the Con- stitution, which was followed closely until recent times. Now Litchfield has always been conservative, but in these days in our country, there appears to me to be a tendency and a pre- valent disposition to accomplish some result by going cross- wise and ignoring Constitutional methods. I do not care how worthy any object is, if it is gained at the expense of a viola- tion of the Constitution it is too high a price to pay for it.
This old town of Litchfield has been one of the most influ- ential towns in the country. It was the fiftieth town in the State of Connecticut to be incorporated. It was the second town in the County to be incorporated, and later the County was incorporated and named after the town. I was admitted to the Bar in the Court House which stood on the site where the present Court House stands, fifty years ago next October. I am getting to be in the ancient class. At that time there were thirty-seven lawyers in Litchfield County, twelve here on Litchfield hill.
The Governor's Foot Guard dates back with the town of Litchfield to colonial times. The First Regiment was formed in 1771. The Second Regiment was chartered in 1775. They are almost the two oldest military organizations in existence in the United States.
This town has always been a source of strength to the
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State of Connecticut and what the State of Connecticut has always represented. I was looking up records for it and find that the town of Litchfield has furnished three governors to the State of Connecticut, one of them a signer of the Decla ration of Independence. It has furnished five Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the State, two United States Senators, and eleven Congressmen. There is no other town in the state that can begin to show the proud record for achievement that the town of Litchfield can. It was the birthplace of Henry Ward Beecher and of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the birthplace of Ethan Allen. It was the birthplace of many other men and women who have won a reputation throughout the world. So that today, in my opinion, this old town of Litchfield is the most beautiful town and the most representative town of the old conservative conditions that there is in the State of Connecti- cut, and that means it is the most beautiful town there is in the United States of America.
Now I hope that the State will always be governed by the sentiment that is represented in the majority of the citizens of old Litchfield. . If it is, we shall continue to be a government of the people and by the people, the government Lincoln repre- sented, the government Washington represented. I am glad to be here to felicitate the people of Litchfield and the State of Connecticut for what this old town has been and what it is.
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ADDRESS BY FORMER GOVERNOR FRANK B. WEEKS. The Playhouse, August 2, 1920.
At the outset I want to say that I rejoice with the people of Litchfield on this beautiful day of celebration. Undoubtedly, the prayers of the committee have been answered.
It is a great pleasure to me to come again to beautiful Litchfield, and I use that word "beautiful" advisedly, for it must have been attractive here two hundred years ago when our forefathers selected the site to found a township, to build houses and prepare for those who should follow them. It must have been beautiful here fifty years later when some of those old houses were residences of people whose patriotism and intel- ligence could not be beaten anywhere throughout the American Colonies. It is beautiful today, nestled among great hills, its noble streets and stately elms sheltering homes of patriotic and God-fearing people. Sweet memories and beauties of the past and of the present justify me in calling Litchfield beautiful. Litchfield was my home for a month or more during the sum- mer of 1909, and I can never forget the kindly hospitality shown Mrs. Weeks and myself at that time. The executive office was located in yonder Court House and the good people made it comfortable and attractive for the executive. You will believe me when I say I am doubly pleased to be here today to add my voice to those who congratulate you on your 200th birthday.
For two hundred years Litchfield was a shining star to the commonwealth. Litchfield-the home of Oliver Wolcott, Major Seymour, Henry Ward Beecher-Litchfield was second to none throughout the colonies. When the statue of the Eng- lish king was brought to Litchfield, the women of Litchfield with their own hands, made bullets from the melted lead. Their contribution was gladly received and we have no doubt the bullets did effective work. In looking up history we find the culture and refinement of the men and women of Litchfield unrivalled throughout the colony.
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