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A Short Story of
Three Centuries of Salem
1626-1926
JOSEPH B. SAUNDERS
-
Gc 974.402 Sa32s 1281945
M. L
GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01095 5588
C
A Short Story of
Three Centuries of Salem, Mavd .
1626-1926
1
E PUBLIC
11
by
JOSEPH B. SAUNDERS
Copyright, 1926 By JOSEPH B. SAUNDERS
1926 Deschamps Bros., Printers. Salem, Mass.
1281945 CONTENTS
Chapter
Page
I. Historical Background 7
II. The Settlement Period 19
III. Gallows Hill 35
IV. The Shipping Period
51
V. Our Reply to Gage
69
VI.
Our Literary Heritage
82
VII.
Past and Future
97
ILLUSTRATIONS
Facing page
Statue of Roger Conant
6
John Endecott 18
House of Philip English 26
Gallows Hill, site of Locust Trees
Trial of George Jacobs
34
42
Crowninshield's Wharf, Salem, built 1798
50
Cleopatra's Barge
58
Capt. George Crowninshield
60
Chocolate Mug Presented to George Crowninshield by Napo-
leon's Mother
62
Sofa from the Cabin of Cleopatra's Barge 64
Liqueur Case from Cleopatra's Barge 66
Col. Timothy Pickering 68
Chesapeake and Shannon, War of 1812
Nathaniel Bowditch
74
82
Salem Atheneum
84
Nathaniel Hawthorne at Bowdoin College
88
Seal of the City of Salem 102
Undr $ 5.00
12-11 21
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The illustrations are by courtesy of The Essex Insti- tute and the Peabody Museum.
By the Institute :
Gov. John Endecott. House of Philip English. Gallows Hill. site of Locust trees. Trial of George Jacobs. Col. Timothy Pickering.
Salem Atheneum. Nathaniel Hawthorne at Bowdoin College.
By the Museum :
Crowninshield Wharf, Salem, built 1798. Cleopatra's Barge.
Capt. George Crowninshield. Chocolate mug presented to George Crowninshield by Napoleon's mother.
Sofa from the cabin of Cleopatra's Barge.
Liqueur case from Cleopatra's Barge. Chesapeake and Shannon, War 1812. Nathaniel Bowditch.
The Statue of Conant is by courtesy of The Salem Evening News and the City Seal by courtesy of the City Clerk.
To the several authors of histories, historical sketches, pamphlets and other publications dealing with local sub- jects and consulted in the preparation of this story, some of whom are herein cited by way of authority or referred to by name, grateful acknowledgment is made and credit given for valuable assistance.
J. B. S.
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FOREWORD AND DEDICATION
T HE following chapters were intended for serial pub- lication during the celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of the settlement of our city. Assured that they ought to be assembled in book form as a permanent contribution to the occasion, this compilation is the result. Much detail of great interest in the history of Salem is omitted, of course, in keeping with the design of the writer. This design was merely to give some interpretation to the important periods of our history and prepare an outline of our three hundred years of existence for the convenience and possible bene- fit of those who would observe the occasion and enjoy it most in a mildly reflective mood. Because the im- portance of the occasion and the very great wealth of material call for careful preparation by anyone venturing to deal with it, it becomes necessary to say that this outline was prepared during brief periods of leisure, that it is not written with the authority or responsibility of an historian and that it presents only a personal point of view!
To my fellow citizens, native and foreign born, this little publication is affectionately dedicated.
Salem, Mass, April, 1926.
J. B. S.
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CHAPTER I.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
S ALEM is spoken of as an ancient city, but if our minds dwell on Thebes, Homer's city "of the hun- dred gates whence sallied forth warriors with horses and chariots" a thousand years before Christ, or if we ponder on Memphis, buried in the sands of Egypt, "with temples vast and magnificent" equally long ago, we seem to have neither age nor grandeur. But this is a fleeting thought; the grandeur of the cities of the New World is the greater because it is a human rather than a material grandeur ; because, with the birth and growth of New World settle- ments, men were elevated to a common sovereignty and power,
Very ancient cities were the possessions of despots and masters and the men who worked to build them were servile and debased, bending low to those who ruled them and crouching under the whip and lash of their op- pressors. There was no thought then of human rights, personal liberty or equality among men. Thus it was with the civilization along the Nile, thus, also, with the Roman Empire, and the Feudal System with its invidi- ous distinctions of kings, barons, lords, vassals, serfs, churls, and bondmen.
Under the Roman Empire, cities grew in number, wealth and power and aided in the spread of civiliza- tion. To the exclusion of what we call the rural popu- lation, the Empire was composed of municipia, and,
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along many lines, high stages of perfection in adminis- tration were reached but the mass of the people remained in subjection.) A proposition to give the slave a costume that would distinguish him was once defeated in the Roman Senate because "it was considered dangerous to show them how numerous they were." Slaves were often among the spoils of war. They had no rights and could be tortured and killed by their masters. They were con- demned to fight with wild beasts and were often lashed, branded and crushed between stones. The death method was usually crucifixion. "The elder Cato used not infre- quently to put one of his slaves to death in the presence of his fellows to cow them into absolute subservience" and "Augustus crucified a slave for killing a favorite quail". (When Christianity came the condition of human- ity was improved and laws made under it softened a little the fiendish cruelty.
Succeeding the Empire, (feudalism came, and cities were enclosed in the domains of the barons and the peo- ple paid tribute and rendered service. By bribe and pur- chase some immunities were periodically given and so there were developed grants, privileges, bestowals, bills of rights, treaties of peace, and charters, and in these chartered cities of Europe there were nursed, very slowly, the principles of free government. But in the old order popular rights were denied, disregarded and violated. For any attempted assertion of them, severe penalties were paid to autocratic power, These charters from the overlord gave some relief, but no guarantee, from op- pression and, with every decline of municipal vigilance, the vulture of royal power descended, bloody hands of rulers exacted more tribute and force again ruled and ruined.
In our day of easy independence, we do not, in any appreciative way, recall the time when homage was paid
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to imperious rulers steeped in every infamy ; when au- thority was ruthlessly administered by the few and bond- age was the heritage of the many; when the people, be- nighted and ignorant, and often famished and in rags, cried for long life to the richly robed tyrants who were to begin their rule over them; when innocence cowered and guilt was triumphant and justice languished and was prostrate. The imperialistic form of government bred grave social injustice. It made man a slave and a beast of burden. Humanity, as Markham expresses it, was "betrayed, plundered, profaned and disinherited". But all this was doomed to pass before the advance of hu- man rights, the education of the masses, the growing light of liberty, the growing freedom of the soul.
England was among the last of the places to come un- der the domination of the Romans and among the first to be relieved of it and there was no particularly per- manent impression left on the people of our mother coun- try by this invasion; also, the germ of personal liberty was always active in the Saxon element of the racial ad- mixture.) It is pointed out that the Saxons came from lands "where the Roman eagle had never been seen or seen only during momentary incursions". So in time, but very gradually, men began to understand, and desire, and contend for, and finally acquire, the privileges we call civil and religious liberty, From our modern point of view these privileges seem natural and inalienable, but they are the outcome of a long struggle in the mother country and a measurably long one on our own soil.
Tyranny's great ally always was ignorance, ignorance of the many. When the discovery of America came in 1492, it "awakened the spirit of investigation and enter- prise and gave an immense impetus to intellectual de- velopment". And scholars like Erasmus employed them- selves in writing books described as "most tender and
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affecting appeals" to the conscience; and, as a result, history records, that "more schools were founded than in three centuries before". Modern civilization was now beginning to take hold.
At this time Thomas More wrote "Utopia", picturing an American Commonwealth with "comfortable homes, a system of public schools in which every child received a good education" and where there were "an individual ballot, religious toleration and universal suffrage". Cen- turies after this dream was fulfilled and Salem was among the very early settlements of such a Common- wealth.
It is said of our founders that "they had sacrificed all to find and to make a country for themselves and they meant to keep it for themselves; their resolve was in- exorable not to suffer dissent or any discordant element to get foothold among them". Archbishop Hughes says in this connection, of the Puritans, "they had suffered much from persecution on account of their religion and they did not deem it extravagant to claim, in the wilder- ness, at least, the privilege of being united and undis- turbed in their worship by the inroads of sectarians and by doctrines at variance with their own". Civil and reli- gious liberty, meaning by the latter an exemption from enforced worship at the command of Church or State against personal conscientious conviction, did not begin at once with us or attain suddenly to present legal per- fection. Rufus Choate speaks of the "whole train of causes from the Reformation downwards which prepared us to be republicans". But civil and religious liberty had reached an interesting development at the time of the settlement of our city and both movements in the old country, seemingly converging here, an abbreviated summary along these lines may help illuminate the back- ground of the founders.
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Salem was an English settlement and the Feudal Sys- tem obtained in early England, as elsewhere, and it some- times buttressed and sometimes menaced the throne of Kings, as various interests seemed to indicate. This sys- tem lasted with declining power until after the War of the Roses in 1460. This war desolated in numbers and power the nobility of the country but before the war the barons had forced Magna Charta from King John in 1215, and before the war, also, came the first House of Commons in which representatives from counties and cities took their seats with the prelates and the nobility. The provisions of Magna Charta are declared to be "the basis and the bulwark of those rights and immunities that make England and America the most free and happy countries on earth".
In 1381 there was a noticeable protest against social injustice in the form of a peasants' revolt called Wat Tyler's Rebellion. It was quickly suppressed but con- trasting, as it did, the condition of the rich and poor, the spirit of it has never died and it often finds forceful ex- pression today against certain social inequities. John Ball said in Wat Tyler's time,
"Good people, things will never go well in England so long as goods be not in common and so long as there be vassals and gentlemen; they are clothed in their velvet and warm in their furs and ermine while we are covered with rags; they have wines and spices and fair bread, and we eat oat cake and straw and have water to drink; they have leisure and fine houses, and we have pain and labor and the rain and the winds in the fields; and yet it is of us and our toil that these men hold their state".
From the War of the Roses down to the time of King James (1603-1625) during whose regnancy the Pilgrims came to America, there was little advance in Constitu- tional liberty, but his reign marked the advent of its re- newal and in 1628 the Petition of Right, the second
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great charter of liberties was framed, prohibiting benevo- lences to the crown, illegal taxation and martial law and requiring obedience to the law from the ministers of the crown as well as from others. With this advance in popular rights the people of England thought there was an end of royal oppression) and bells were tolled and blazing fires sent the message to the skies. When the people's struggle for civil liberty in England had ad- vanced to this point the Pilgrims had arrived at Ply- mouth. And there was a fishing village at Cape Ann, Gloucester, established by the Rev. Mr. White of Dor- chester, England. From Gloucester, Roger Conant in 1626, with a band of about twenty-five, came to Salem, then called Naumkeag, and described as a place for those who "on account of religion" might be willing to settle here. An additional motive for the removal from Cape Ann to Salem was the failure of the little settlement to prosper there. This religious motive in the matter of our settlement was probably one growing out of the un- willingness of some to agree to so utter a separation from the Church of England as the Pilgrims practiced at Plymouth.) (The religious development in the mother country, like the civil development there, which led to the presence of the Pilgrim and Puritan on our shores, covered centuries. The name Pilgrim was one given to the religionists because of their wanderings in search of a place to worship in peace.) The names Puritan and Separatist were wholly religious designations growing out of the controversy attending the Reformation and the separation of Church and State in England. Only a running review from Cæsar to the Separatist is needed for our purpose. England, when invaded by Julius Cæsar, practiced Druidism. In deep forest shades the Druids performed their rites and gave human life in sacri- fice. Christianity crept in during the Roman occupation
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only to disappear after the Anglo-Saxon conquest. But two handsome boy captives in the Roman market place were pointed out to the Christian priest, Gregory, and he, impressed by their fair complexion and delicate beau- ty, exclaimed, "not Angles but Angels". When Gregory later became Pope he sent monks to England and Chris- tianity was again established.
Then the Norman invasion came and with it William the Conqueror. He has been described as "a true Catholic" but of him, also, it was said that "he bluntly refused to obey the command of the Pope to do fealty for his realm". He also removed bishops from the civil benches, an early act in the separation of Church and State. And there was some further conflict between these two bodies in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189) when the Council of Clarendon gave certain jurisdiction to the civil courts over the ecclesiastical ones. The Archbishop of Cante- bury, Thomas A. Becket, is said to have first assented to this change and then to have rejected it. These were very dramatic times; the Archbishop was murdered at his altar and King Henry, in token of his sorrow, walked barefooted to the tomb of the Archbishop and submitted himself to the lash of the monks, thus helping to appease the popular clamor and the general abhorrence of the crime. King John, from whom Magna Charta was wrest- ed in 1215, ejected the monks from their houses because they accepted the Pope's appointment of Langton as Archbishop of Cantebury. John claimed the monks had previously endorsed his nominee or choice for the office. The Pope placed England under the Interdict and the churches were closed and the throne declared vacant. Troops were expected from France to enforce the Pope's decree. John arranged for peace and then decided to avenge himself on the barons who had refused to join him in a war on France. The barons had secretly
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leagued together. Langton joined them and became their leader and John was forced at Runnymede to sign the Great Charter called "the most remarkable instru- ment known in English history" ... With Wickliff, in the reign of Richard II, (1377-1399) began the First Re- formation. In 1401, William Salter, preacher and heretic, was burned at the stake in the reign of Henry IV who had "the unenviable reputation of being the first king of England to impose the death penalty by fire on account of religious belief". The historian observes "thus was inaugurated the system of horrible intolerance that black- ened the pages of English history of which Catholics and Protestants were guilty alike".
America had been discovered when the Second Refor- mation came with Martin Luther in Germany in 1517, and within the scope of Protestantism fell Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. King Henry VIII was then reigning in England (1509- 1547). In his Catholic zeal he wrote a book against Luther. Henry had great academic interest in religious matters and revelled in points of canon law. He proved himself a zealous Catholic as against Luther but when his personal interests became involved and he looked upon Anne Boleyn, maid of honor to the Queen, and saw that she was fair, he invoked one of these canonical points in his favor, to the effect that his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, then living, who was his brother Arthur's widow, a marriage forbidden by the Levitical law and the canons of the Church but per- mitted by the dispensation of the Pope, was at the start and always since then, illegal. The Pope overruled him in this claim and under Henry there began an official separation of Church and State in England that has since continued.
Under Henry VIII was instituted the Established Church, sometimes called the Episcopal, and it was against
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the tyranny of this church in the later reign of King James that both Pilgrims and Puritans rebelled. King James proposed to "harry them from the land". ) Henry was succeeded by his Catholic daughter Mary who at- tempted to restore officially the Catholic religion and the persecutions under her drove many English Protestants to Switzerland where they were under the influence of the Swiss reformers who had abandoned all forms and ceremonies in religious worship. These English Protes- tants returned to England during the reign of Elizabeth, King Henry's Protestant daughter, and became active and prominent.
A religious distinction is drawn between the Pilgrims who came to Plymouth and the Puritans who came to Salem. The Pilgrims were Separatists, believing that "a single congregation of godly persons, however few or humble, regularly organized for Christ's work, is of right, by Divine appointment, the highest ecclesiastical authority on earth". The Puritans simply wanted a plainer or purer form of religious ceremony. Puritanism was defined as "a form of Episcopacy and middle ground between Catholic and Separatist". However this distinc- tion may have obtained in England, the Puritans coming here were in effect Separatists, so much so that Endecott in Salem cut the cross from the English flag, just as the cross had been abandoned in the form of worship by the Swiss reformers. That this act of hasty irreverence was not endorsed by all is evidenced by a letter written by James Cudworth at the time. The letter reads,-
"One thing I cannot but relate & that not only with grefe for. & with feare of, what will be the event of a strange thinge put in practice by sum in the church of Salem; but by whome I heare not, and that is they have Cut out the Crosse in the Flage or Ansient that they cari before them when they trayne. Indeed it is contrary to the mindes & willes of all that I cann heare of. Captaine Indicat there Captaine is a holy, honest, man & dus utterly aban- don it & who are the Aegentees in it I cannot heare".
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There is no need, because it is familiar history, to dwell on the religious persecutions and bloody struggles in the old world following the reign of Henry VIII. Queen Mary persecuted the Protestants; Queen Elizabeth per- secuted the Catholics; King James persecuted the Puri- tans and King Charles, following him, was beheaded by the Puritans, then led by Cromwell, under whom they reached their greatest strength and after whom they de- clined. But pressing forward in the mind as a warning, and expressing our deepest reflection on the religious controversies of the past, come the words of Charles Phillips, the graceful Irish orator, who says, "the hostili- ty of her sects has been the peculiar disgrace of Chris- tianity; the Gentoo loves his caste, so does the Mo- hametan; but Christianity alone exhibits her thousand sects, each denouncing his neighbor here in the name of God and damning him hereafter out of pure devotion; each has his anathema, his accusation, and his retort, and in the end Religion is the victim. The victory of each is the overthrow of all and Infidelity, laughing at the contest, writes the refutation of their creed in the blood of the combatants".
The Puritans here are charged with some inconsis- tency and with some of the intolerance from which they fled. They did persecute the Quakers and enslave the Indians and they did not at once separate Church and State. There was such a union of both as to form what has been called a "theocratic state"; the clergy "exercised a powerful influence over the magistrates as well as over the people; civil, political, and even military questions were usually submitted to their consideration". And in England the Puritans progressed to that point where they became more of a political than a religious force and they beheaded a king and established a temporary Commonwealth. Of their effort here our Commonwealth
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was born but class distinctions and social injustice, im- itating the royal order and faintly reflecting the Feudal System, marked our colonial development, the Harvard catalogue until 1772 arranging the students' names "not alphabetically or according to attainments, but so as to indicate the social rank of their families"; also "the in- dentured servants, very numerous in several colonies, differed little from slaves"> But it was in the South for the most part that aristocracy flourished and the cavalier flaunted his fraility.
And there was religious intolerance among the Puri- tans in Salem. Roger Williams was exiled for his protest against both church and magistrates. He maintained "for every man the right of absolute freedom in matters of conscience and, for all forms of faith, equal tolera- tion". And under Lord Baltimore in Maryland, as early as 1649, "equal privileges were enjoyed by Christians of all creeds". Thus early the Separatist minister and the Catholic lord saw the futility of this form of intolerance) and both may be called the pioneers of religious liberty V in this country.
Our Puritan ancestors were called narrow and, indeed, they were, but breadth and liberality of thought did not characterize the times.» The idea that all men were cre- ated free and equal, free in their civil and political rela- tions, free in their religious allegiance, was a late flower- ing plant, and the idea of personal liberty "was unknown among the Romans, unknown to nearly all the civiliza- tions of antiquity and unknown in the Christian church". The Puritans have had their detractors and their cham- pions ; some have greatly admired, some greatly con- demned, them. How the elements were mixed in the Puritan is well conveyed in Lord Macauley's estimate. He says, "he caught a gleam of the Beautific Vision or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire but
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when he took his seat in the council or girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them; he prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker but he set his foot on the neck of his king". No analysis of the Puritan character has ever been generally satisfactory, but we think it may be said, a little in compliment to the religious spirit of the Puritans, that it could not be satisfied, after rejecting a Papal head, in mildly accepting in his place a libertine like Henry VIII or a drunken monarch like King James of England. Let us say of the Puritans for the present that they took a courageous step at first in coming to this wilderness, a step far reaching for human advance- ment, and then, under generous influences, widening thought, and popular education and a war for freedom, our civil and religious lines were laid broad and deep. The Puritan descendants came to understand and realize that they were not infallible and that they could not de- mand religious toleration for themselves and not extend it to others, and it was true here, probably, as in England, that the Puritans were really more of a political than a religious force, virile and unyielding as they were in reli- gious matters.
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