USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > Duxbury > The Mayflower town : an address delivered at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the town of Duxbury, Mass., June 17, 1887 > Part 1
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Gc 974.402 D95wi 1774744
M. L.
RETI.CZ I. TURICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01105 3409
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1
THE
MAYFLOWER TOWN.
AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED AT
The amo Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary
OF THE
INCORPORATION OF THE TOWN OF DUXBURY, MASS.,
JUNE 17, 1887.
BY JUSTIN WINSOR.
CAMBRIDGE : JOHN WILSON AND SON. University Press. 1887.
1.74744
Winsor, Justin, 1: 1831-1897.
Fr :44225 972 The Mayflower tom, an address delivered at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the town of Duxbury, Mass., June 17, 1887 .. Cambridge,Mass. j1887. 0.
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ADDRESS.
I PRAY you let the dissolving view of another scene than this come to your inner vision. Picture your- selves at the doorstone of Miles Standish in the declining hours of a day in June, two centuries and a half ago. Gaze attentively upon the knots of people looking out upon the placid waters of yonder bay, and turning their eyes upon a mellowing sky beyond the Kingston Hills.
You can hardly mistake the master of the house. His three-and-fifty years have left some, if not heavy, marks upon a frame that in his younger days had borne the severities of campaigns in regular armies, and in his sterner manhood had endured the rigors of the wilder- ness. But you can see that his face still has the volatile lines which mark a nature quick in passion. His eye has still the alertness and his motions the rapidity of those carlier days when he fought in Flanders, and of the later ones when he braved the braggart Pecksuot in the cabin at Wessagusset, or quelled by his daring the revolt of Corbitant. We know by the inventory of his books that . the " Commentaries of Caesar " was a household volume ; and we may well conjecture how, with his children and Hobamok looking on, he could trace upon the sand, and place pebbles to mark, the marches and camps of the .. Roman Legions in Gaul. He was now, as he continued
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to be for a score of years yet left to him, trusted in the counsels of the civil government of the colony, and it may be upon his urgency in the Court of Assistants on the morrow that Duxbury is to enter upon her corporate existence. We may well imagine, in view of this con- templated action, how this little gathering of neighbors was formed as a last conference in the scant community, which for five years had been taking up its house-lots along the margin of the bay, and was now combining, after the promptings of their English birthright, to secure their own local government.
Of the Court which was to decide upon their petition in the morning, there were others besides Standish who might well have attended this supposable conference. There was Edward Winslow, who had settled at Greenharbor, as Marshfield was then called, probably occupying a tem- porary summer shelter there at as early a period as when on the hillocks along the Duxbury shore others of the Plymouth people had begun to build their rude houses. It was just about the time which we are now considering that Winslow had built himself a more commodious lodging, in which he might dare to brave the winter, and had dignified his estate with a name associated with his ancestral line; for he and Standish were the only ones of the first comers whose family stock seems to have been above the yeoman class. There was no definition vet of the bounds of the proposed new town ; and it was to surround if not to include Winslow's grant at Marsh- field, and to stretch, as was determined some years later, to the North River. Much the same reason had lured Winslow to make a permanent abiding place at Green-
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harbor as had brought Standish and the rest to settle along the Duxbury fields, and as three years later Winslow with his neighbors at Greenharbor were to seek incor- poration in the same way ; and as he was to make part of the Court to determine upon the application of those of Duxbury, we may well imagine him to have joined this probable group. The name which had been selected for the new town, and which for some years had been commonly applied to the settlement on this side of the bay, was a reminiscence of Standish's early days and of his connection with an ancestral line which centred its history in family estates in Lancashire, known to this day as Standish Hall and Duxbury Hall. The somewhat lordly promises of Standish's will for the benefit of his son Alexander and his descendants give a little pleasant flavor of baronial state to the decidedly democratic feeling of the early Plymouth records. It helps us to under- stand the two somewhat opposing phases of Standish's character, - the sympathetic, companionable nature that impelled him into the simple ways and homely fortunes of the Pilgrims, and that reserve and perhaps hauteur of individualism which never forgot his inherited rights.
Standish seems, if we may trust the records, to have brought to the Pilgrim store small riches compared with that somewhat profuse wealth which his will represents him as having been surreptitiously deprived of ; or at least he stands on the lists of rate-payers of the little colony far below Winslow, and Collier, the other members of the Court of Assistants for this year, from this part of the bay and beyond. Riches to these carly settlers consisted not so much in land as in the ability to work it, in the cattle
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they could feed, and in the merchandise they could order from England. Now that the settlements of Massachusetts Bay were well established and prospering, the Plymouth people, - who had largely increased their herds and flocks from the small importation of three heifers and a bull, which had been brought over in 1624, - found a quick sale for any surplus in the necessities of the Massachusetts people ; and Bradford offers serious complaint that the accumulation of riches, and the methods to that end, were making sad changes in the quiet, self-centred little com- munity which but a few years before had made the town of Plymouth homogeneous and content. This increase of their stock had induced them to move farther and farther from the town to find pasturage; and where a summer sojourn had sufficed at first, a permanence of settlement, provided with all the relief and aids by which the winter could be combated, necessarily soon followed, breaking up connections with the parent church at Plymouth, and at one time causing almost the desertion of that town. It was not without grievous presentiments of evils to come in this train of events, that Bradford records these beginnings of the towns of Duxbury and Marshfield. His fears that the division of the church would lead to political indepen- dence in local affairs was only too evident some years be- fore it came; and Bradford must confront the inevitable issue at the sitting of the Court on the next day, for which this little conference was preparing.
Plymouth had in fact by this time ceased to be the chief home of the " Mayflower " Pilgrims. Bradford was the only one of the first comers of much consideration remaining in that town. It stirred him deeply to find
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how the chief men had abandoned the places which had been hallowed by their early sufferings. Brewster, Stand- ish, Winslow, Alden, Howland, and two of their compan- ions in that fateful voyage of whom we hear less, George Soule and Henry Sampson, - every one was now living on the Duxbury side and adjacent. Of those who had come later, Collier and Prince and the sons of Brewster were their neighbors here. What Plymouth thus early lost she has never regained ; and the " Mayflower " blood in the male lines, except as descendants of these Duxbury settlers have returned to the old home, make no longer an appreciable part of her population. I recall how forty years ago, as a boy, smitten with the love of genealogy, I traced down the widening lines of descent from the "May- flower," and found, as it seemed to me, half the people of this town possessed of the strain of the Pilgrim blood.
Of more marked bearing, perhaps, than either Standish or Winslow, is he who is the eldest by much of all who are gathered before us, and whose memory goes back for nearly seventy years. How should we like to-day that instrument, which the scientists say we may one day pos- sess, to take from the air still palpitating with the undu- lating words of this reverend man his discourse, as he stands there in reverie, turning aside it may be at times to impart to Ralph Partridge, the new-come minister of the town, the shifting visions of the past ! There was, indeed, little in the scene before him, - the waters streaked with the vagrant breezes, the rosy flush that lay over the dis- tant hills of Plymouth, the purple mass of Manomet, and the woody headland of the Gurnet peering above the dusky outline of yonder island, - little in all this to bring back,
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except by contrast, that village of Scrooby, in Nottingham- shire, where he passed his childhood. Think for a mo- ment of this aged Christian teacher, and of this doughty soldier, passing among his guests and coming to the other's side, and of the contrasts and startling visions which might have come and gone, dissolving in their minds, - Brewster, who might well have copied for Secretary Davison, his master, the death-warrant of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots ; and Standish, with his recollec- tions .of the campaigns in Flanders, where, scion of a Catholic stock himself, we are told that his sword had been wielded against the Spanish Romanists! Think, again, how the hoary associations of the storied halls along the Cam might have poured upon the mind of Brewster, as he recalled his life at the English university, when at Peterhouse College nearly sixty years before he had laid the foundations of a learning which for many years was the most considerable possessed by any among the Pilgrims. As we look upon him now he seems almost like a relic of a by-gone generation. The courtiers he had met, the scholars he had known, must have come and gone in his memory like the stalking shapes of a dream. We can imagine how in his moments of reminiscence, as his thoughts went back to the friends of his early manhood, his heart if not his foot trod the Bay Path to the Massachusetts settlements, over which Partridge had so lately travelled. This new-comer could tell him how the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford had within these seven years sent their most heroic souls into this neighboring wilderness. But nearly all these men were quite a generation the juniors of Brewster. Partridge could tell him of a contemporary at the Univer-
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sity, - Nathaniel Ward, -and of the beginning of his ministry at Agawam in the Massachusetts, where his active intelligence made him a few years later the draftsman of the " Body of Liberties " of that sturdier colony. Par- tridge could tell him, too, of the men of his own college, Trinity ; and every message from the Bay brought word of what John Cotton had said in Boston, or Thomas Welde in Roxbury, or Hugh Peters in Salem. Brewster could point to a fellow collegian of Peterhonse - long after him to be sure - in John Norton, to whom they had listened in Plymouth for the winter, a year or two before.
Recall, if you will, some of the other names which Massachusetts preserves, bearing thither from the Univer- sity of Cambridge the memories of her halls, and awak- ening in the breast of William Brewster the tender affilia- tions of fellowship in learning, as he heard of their coming to carry a stout heart, and to press on with simple, earnest endeavor in breaking out the primordial pathways of a nation. The Pilgrims' shallop, as it explored the coast to the northward, must have brought to him word, even be- fore the coming of Winthrop, of that mysterious recluse, William Blaxton, who pre-empted in 1625 the site of the future Boston. Other Cambridge men whose wandering hither was not unknown to him were Francis Higginson, of Salem ; Roger Williams, who but a year or two before the time we are now considering had fled from Salem to Plymouth, to be hardly more welcome there with the up- heavals of his instincts ; Thomas Hooker, who had but a twelvemonth before led a migrating community from the banks of the Charles to the valley of the Connecticut, - a migration not without influence, as we shall see, upon
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the vote to be passed to-morrow ; the godly Shepard, who had taken the place which Hooker had left, little suspect- ing then that the unknown John Harvard, bringing with him the Puritanism of Emmanuel, at this very moment, when Brewster's reverie might have turned his spiritual eye to the future of learning in New England, was crossing the Atlantic with a dream of the great university shadowy in his mind, and bearing among his books, as we know from the list preserved in the College records, the Essays of John Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrims.
To a man of Brewster's learning, as Bradford describes it to us, the coming of Ralph Partridge to him as a neighbor must have produced grateful recollections of the associations of Cambridge in contrast to a time twenty years later than his own, and when Puritanism had made Emmanuel its stronghold. He could well remember how at Peterhouse he had acquired in the first instance his Puritan tendency, and how, as he left Cambridge for more stirring fields, it was still under the Puritan diplomatist Davison that he got his first glimpses of the Low Countries, so that when some years later he went thither into exile it was not to a land wholly unknown to him. It was this same Puritan Davison who later interceded to get him the office of postmaster in his native village, which his father had held before him, and which, through the control that it gave him of relays on the great post-route to the north, offered him a position of not a little local importance. Here it was in the habitable portion of an ancient manor-house of the archbishops of York, the postmaster William Brew- ster passed nearly twelve years of his early maturity, - years which proved to be the turning-point of his life.
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The motive and effect of that change of life, which had heretofore known its due share of the bustle of the world, we can well understand when we read that tribute to his character which has come down to us from the pen of Bradford, and which enables us from what he was in this cardinal period of his life to conjecture the man he was to become in the ripening of time. His friend tells us of Brewster's grave and deliberate utterance ; of his humble, modest, and inoffensive demeanor; of his cheerful spirit, not dismayed by trial, and always rising above the worst that could beset him ; and of his tenderness, particularly for those who had been driven to extremities for which their life had not prepared them. If such was the native char- acter of the man, it is not surprising that when that flock of English folk scattered about Scrooby in the three connties of Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire had been drawn together and needed a friend earnest to protect them, they found one in William Brewster. The pity he felt for an inoffensive, humble people harried by the min- ions of the law, very easily became, as it happened, joined to the admiration which he could feel for such a servitor and minister as they had in John Robinson. This pastor and his principal follower were sharers by nature in all that was tender, tolerant, and hopefnl in their religious feelings. Of Robinson's scholarship, - for he too was of Cambridge, though a dozen years later than Brewster, - his companion was to know the deepest and to honor the broad- est part. It was through Brewster's welcome in his ancient manor-house that Robinson and his flock now found a place of meeting, when by stealth, or as best they could, they met for mutual comfortings and for the service of prayer.
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We may well suppose that Partridge listened to a story like this with the interest natural to one whom fortune had thrown among a people who had found a common in- heritance in all the tender recollections of such a life as the older of the first comers had experienced. He could but see in the veneration felt for their ancient elder that the wisdom of Brewster, as it had been the guide of his neighbors, must be his own in his ministration to this people in the coming years. From Brewster he must learn their individual traits ; he must know the joys and miseries of each household, the aspirations of one person, the estrangements of another ; and he must walk with him among the graves at Harden Hill, and listen to the com- pletion of the family histories in the enumerations of those that are gone.
I cannot now detail the whole course of that story which Brewster must have told to his new helper when- ever he easily reverted, as old men do, to the memories of their younger days; of the imprisonment which he suf- fered ; of the flight with the congregation of Serooby to Holland, - first to Amsterdam, where they found other English who had preceded them, and in whose contro- versies over the questions of bodices and high heels they were little inclined to join as a thing worth the enduring of exile. Brewster must have told him how they parted with their less spiritual countrymen and passed on to Leyden, destined to be so long their home. You know the straits to which they submitted, - poverty, and hard labor for a living ; but never forgetting the land which drove them forth. They who, as Bradford said, had been used " to a plain country life and the innocent trade of hus-
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bandry," were thus thrown into a strange city and forced to learn a strange tongue. We can well imagine how Partridge, who had been a Church of England clergyman, would listen to this wonderful story, - of Robinson hold- ing all together by his tact and by his love ; of his gaining the respect of the Leyden University, which is illustrious with the names of Arminius, Scaliger, and Grotius ; of his publicly disputing with the professors, when he had been honored with membership of their learned body ; and of his contributing by his acquirements and sweetness to that repute which they enjoyed with the Dutch, and which the honesty and orderliness of the less learned among these outcast English helped to intensify. Brewster might well revert to his honorable calling then as a schoolmaster, teaching English through the Latin to Dutch, Dane, or German, as either required it. He might also recount how when later in their sojourn a young English gentleman had joined them, bringing doubtless some little capital to work with, so that Brewster and Winslow (perchance this same gentleman comes up now to the front to listen to the recital) could set up a press and print for clandestine introduc- tion into England the doctrinal books and tracts that the licensers of the English press had prohibited.
Standish himself might have joined in the talk too, and told what we to-day would be glad to know, -just how he chanced to join this exiled people. It has been claimed of late years with some show of plausibility by Dr. Shea, the most eminent of the native Catholic writers on American history, that the fact ( uncontroverted I believe) that Standish never became covenanted with the Pilgrim Church, coupled to the other fact (equally unchallenged
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I think) that he belonged to a Lancashire family, then as now one of the well-known Catholic families of the realm, afforded ground for holding the Duxbury captain to be one of that faith. These facts do not certainly prove it, nor yet is the allegation positively disproved by anything we know. If Standish were a Catholic, it may or may not have been known to his leading associates in the colony. To suppose they knew it, and because of his helpfulness to have ignored it, is but a step further than to have trusted him as they did when he was without the pale of their covenant. If Bradford had survived him to write his character as he wrote Brewster's, we might possibly have been informed. As it is, we inherit a mystery.
But, see ! there is a new comer to our Leyden group. Who is that fair and rosy woman, bewitching one may well believe her to be, as she dismounts from the pillion behind John Alden, greets Barbara Standish, - the Cap- tain's wife, - as she trips along in the carly develop- ment of her matronly comeliness, glancing at the Captain himself, in remembrance of the incident which Longfellow has immortalized, and draws near to pay her affectionate homage to Elder Brewster, - who but that Priscilla who so witchingly said, " Prithee, why don't you speak for yourself, John ?" She makes in the group a new element, for in her veins 'courses the blood of the Huguenots ; and out of the Church of the Walloons in Leyden came the names of Molines, changed to Mullins, and Delanoye, which we now know as Delano.
And so in these years of their exile in Holland the Pil- grim Church grew to about three hundred souls ; but with all their ontward prosperity there was a spirit of unrest.
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It grieved their English hearts to see their young men growing up with foreign ways, marrying Dutch maidens and joining the Dutch marine. The truce of Holland with Spain, soon to expire, might bring upon them the clash of arms in a country not their own. They said to one another, " Let us go hence to save this English blood of ours." " Let us go and carry Christ to the New World," said Edward Winslow.
There is no time to-day to rehearse the story which the narrative of Bradford has made clear to us, of the hard bargain which some English merchants forced upon them in their negotiations for the money necessary for their transfer to America. Here in William Collier is one of those same London merchants who could tell us the whole story. He is one of the two or three of the seventy merchants who had heart enough in the migration to come over to share its burdens; and he had already settled, in company with Prince and Jonathan Brewster, along the line of what we know as the shore road to Kingston. Prince had married a daughter of Collier, as had also Love Brewster, another son of the Elder. William Brewster himself had participated in those coun- sels for the outfit, but we cannot follow them now. Ilard as the terms were, they were accepted ; and such of them as were to part with the major portion of the Church that remained behind with Robinson passed their last night in Leyden with feasting and psalms. Who would not wish that we had preserved to us in his very words the farewell address which Robinson made to them ; but it unfortunately has only come down to us as it floated in the memory of Edward Winslow many years later, -
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with its exalted tenderness, its far-seeing wisdom, and its lofty, tolerant purpose.
We may suppose Brewster to have retired with the falling dews to his home, and to have left Alden to rehearse to Partridge the continuance of the story. There were three of the " Mayflower " settlers now in Duxbury who belonged to the class of which Alden was the most con- spicuous member, - unless, perhaps, John Howland be excepted. These were men not of the Leyden stock, but hired by the company, or apprenticed or bound to some of the leading men at their immigration. In this way, though at coming a man of twenty-seven, John Howland was a member of Governor Carver's family ; George Soule, at this time soon to become a settler at Powder Point and the ancestor of a numerous family of that name, was bound to Edward Winslow ; and Henry Sampson, a lad of six years at coming, was under the care of his cousins Edward Tilley and wife, both of whom died in that first grievous winter, while the youth Sampson had been at this time a year married, and was to become the ancestor of a numerous family, - though not of all bearing the name. The one person of this class whom Bradford singles out for commendation is John Alden. He tells us that he was hired for a cooper in Southampton, where the " May- flower" fitted, "and being a hopeful young man," he adds, " was much desired, but left to his own liking to go or stay when he came here [to Plymouth]; but he stayed and married here," and what that marriage with his fair Priscilla produced, the genealogical tables of numerous descendants abundantly make plain.
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We can imagine Alden now explaining to Partridge, the new minister, how he was pursuing his trade in Southamp- ton when the " Mayflower " came round from London with such of the Pilgrims as had gathered there to join in the voyage ; and to these Londoners we can probably trace the London designation of landmarks, which in my boyhood were and perhaps still are familiar in this town, - Black- friar's Brook, Billingsgate, Hound's Ditch, and the rest. Alden could tell how the little " Speedwell" had followed her into port for the rendezvous, freighted with the heavy souls made indeed the lighter for the benedictions of Robinson. He would tell of the conference there, when he first came in contact with the noble spirits among whom his life was to be cast; of the trials which he saw them endure as the merchants whom they had trusted for succor turned their backs upon them ; of their departure at last, and of their fears of the smaller ship; their return to Dartmouth for repairs, their venturing again, their seek- ing a harbor once more at Plymouth on the Devonshire coast, their abandonment of the "Speedwell," their final start with all that the " Mayflower " could hold crowded in her narrow quarters, their voyage and its mishaps. Ile could tell of the beam of the deck sprung out of place by the storm that forced them to take in every sail, and how they succeeded in raising it into place by an iron screw which they had brought from Holland ; how John How- land by a lurch of the ship had been hurled into the sea, and by good luck rescued to live many years, as Bradford says in describing the incident, and to become " a profitable member both in Church and Commonwealth."
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