USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Andover > Andover, Massachusetts : Proceedings at the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the town, May 20, 1896 > Part 3
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Albert Post.
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THE ORATION
BY ALBERT POOR, ESQ.
MR. PRESIDENT AND FELLOW CITIZENS :
The Reformation in England in the sixteenth century was greatly furthered by the vices and ambitions of Henry VIII. In the early years of his reign, this monarch held his conscience in the keep- ing of the church, and the book that the royal hand compiled, in which the cause of Leo X. was sustained against the theses of Luther, won for its author and all his successors on the English throne, the title of Defender of the Faith. But, when later the popes either refused to aid him in his ambitious designs upon the continent, or were too slowly inclined to facilitate that rapid rotation of wives this uxorious monarch demanded, the royal lust and ambition, becoming impatient of restraint, cast aside the supremacy of the pope, and the king, scarce better or other than an anti-pope, assumed the headship of the spiritual affairs of his kingdom. Devoid of moral significance as this act of Henry's may have been, it no doubt at once opened England to the reception of those reform doctrines that Luther was inculcating, and with which the atmosphere of European thought was densely charged. From this beginning the Reformation grew apace, and before the end of the reign of Edward VI., son and successor of Henry, the Church of England had been established, with its services and rituals, in the same form substantially as they exist today. The five years of Mary, who succeeded her brother Edward in 1553, were indeed a time of sore torment and distress to the growing cause of reform; the fires of Smithfield, lighted by her, desolated many a home in England, and her decrees, like the fabled laws of Draco, may be said almost to have been written in blood. During her reign it is esti- mated that almost three hundred victims perished at the stake. What measure of Romanist zeal might not be expected of her who was at once the wife of Philip II. and the granddaughter of Ferdinand and Isabella! What bitter vengefulness might not well inhere in the spirit of the daughter of Catharine of Aragon !
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With the accession of Elizabeth, however, the protestant church was restored, and the acts of Parliament passed immediately upon her accession to the throne, confirmed to her the sole leadership of the Established Church. With the new sovereign came back to England the hordes of protestants who had taken refuge in Geneva, Amster- dam, and other continental strongholds of free thought ; they brought back with them their own ideas of forms of worship, and soon the Established Church, in alarm over the great and increasing numbers of the Nonconformists, created its Star Chambers and High Commis- sions that in their turn became almost as oppressive as had been Mary and her Romish bishops. Everywhere the spirit of independent free thought was abroad, and finally, in very fear for the well-being of the Establishment, was passed in 1593 the Act of Conformity. The pur- pose of this statute was to compel attendance upon the services of the Established Church, and those who failed to obey its enactments were doomed to abjure the realm and go into perpetual banishment, or, declining to leave, or if, having departed, they should be so bold as to return, the penalty was death. The congregations founded in England for the time were broken up; many of the Nonconformists went to Holland, where they founded churches according to their own ideas, "walking," as they claimed, "in all the ways which God had made known or should make known to them." And here it is that Scrooby and Delft Haven, Amsterdam and Leyden, the Speedwell and the Mayflower, John Robinson, Elder Brewster, and Plymouth Rock, become names at the mere mention of which New England hearts fill with pride, and in the long retrospect of almost thrice one hundred years are the luminous points where begin the annals of American history. Here comes into being the wonderful compact on the Mayflower, that fruitful germ out of which has been evolved all our modern constitutions ; and here begins in the spirit of godliness, with fervent prayer, and a fortitude known only to heroes' breasts, the first settlement of New England, that was destined in the fulness of time to grow into the great republic.
The strict proprieties of this occasion do not permit me to enter into any detail of the early history of Plymouth ; our immediate con- cern is with the Massachusetts Bay settlement, which, with its greater wealth and vigor, was destined to absorb its sister colony of Plymouth. But back of all this movement to New England, was a high moral
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insistence on freedom of thought and practice in matters religious, and no doubt the persecutions by the heads of the Establishment in England, and the tyrannous statute of 1593, were the bitter con- straint that led most of the early settlers to leave the comforts of England and to undergo the privations of life in the new world. Too much cannot be said in praise of the exalted piety and religious fervor of the forty-one immigrants with their families on the Mayflower, but it has often seemed to me that the voyage itself was not undertaken with due regard to the difficulties to be met, or with such knowledge as its projectors might have easily attained ; their voyage began too late in the season, their numbers and supplies were inadequate, and they settled on unfertile soil. Hence their slow progress, and hence it was that at the end of ten years they numbered scarcely three hun- dred souls. But still they had no dictation in matters of religion; though their trials were great, still, as Brewster wrote, "it is not with us as with those whom small things can discourage ;" and from England came back the cheering words : " Let it not be grievous unto you that you have been instrumental to break the ice for others : the honor shall be yours to the world's end." And so with encouraging words, and such supplies as could be furnished, the Puritans in Eng- land had constantly in mind the little settlement in Plymouth ; eagerly they sought to obtain a larger settlement, and finally in 1629 King Charles granted the charter for the Massachusetts Bay.
With the issuing of the charter, the zeal for New England grew apace. Among the country gentry and the tradespeople prospectuses were issued, containing a description of Massachusetts ; and upon the lists of those interested in the movement appear names, no longer of poor men and artizans, as in the case of Robinson ten years before, but of professional men, the proprietors of landed estates, as well as prosperous tradesmen. Sir Richard Saltonstall, Bradstreet, Dudley, the Winthrops, Ward, Cotton, Hooker and Roger Williams are a sufficient guaranty of the respectability of the movement. First came two hundred men; then April 11th, 1630, came Winthrop in the Arbella, and with. him eight hundred carried in a flotilla of eleven ships. "The fleet," says Hubbard, the historian of New England, " was filled with passengers of all occupations, skilled in all kinds of faculties needful for the planting of the new colony." Before the end of the first year, it is estimated that fully fifteen hundred people had
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landed on these shores : and the moral tone of the immigrants was such as to forbid, for a time a least, the approach of mere adventurers. In numbers like this there was certainly an adequate self defence, and the means of the immigrants, the supplies they brought with them, were sufficient to repel harsh physical suffering.
And what was the aspect of the country to which they came? No doubt the beach at Manchester responded musically to the tread of the hunter and the fisherman; the rocks at Marblehead and Swampscott and Nahant reared their gigantic strength against the terrors of the waves; the long stretches of marshes at Newbury and Revere were reflecting to the sun with the various months their neutral tints; but no husbandman then gathered into ricks their abundant growths; no cities then were crowding upon their virgin domain; over them the wild fowl screamed, and the eagle and the hawk swept over their broad expanse in flight high poised above the hazard of the Indian's arrow ; while beyond the reach of salt waves, on the higher land forest followed forest in endless succession, save where here and there an Indian encampment had been planted on hill or headland, and the Indian squaw had cleared a bit for the indifferent agriculture, that supplied the needs of her scanty home; the Ipswich, the Merrimac and the Charles flowed unpolluted and unfettered to the sea that gave them birth. Still the sun rose in splendor from the ocean, and sank down to his rest in the forest, flooding the earth and the sky with the majesty of his glory, and, as he withdrew his beam, timidly still the moon and stars came forth that the circle of beauty might be made complete. Yes, it was nature, nature ever beautiful, perhaps not always kindly, arrayed in her native attire, that our ancestors met upon these shores : to her harsher moods they accommodated themselves with fortitude; but her more genial seasons they utilized with foresight and industry.
The advent of so many immigrants as came within the first five years following 1630, necessitated a removal from the coast, and, as there was naturally an eager quest for desirable sites, the availability of Cochichawick as a place of settlement soon became known ; for we find as early as March 4, 1635, a vote of the General Court, whereby "it is ordered that the land about Cochichowicke shalbe reserved for an inland plantacon and that whosoeuer will goe to inhabite there shall have three yeares imunity from all taxes, levyes, publique
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charges and services whatsoeuer (military discipline onlly excepted)," and three commissioners were appointed to "license any that they thinke meete to inhabite there, and that it shalbe lawfull for noe pson to goe thither without their consent or the maior pte of them." Though set apart thus early as an inland plantation, settlers, deterred no doubt by the falls in the Merrimac and the trackless woods, did not come forward to acquire what was lying ready at their hands. As the settlers, however, stretched outward more and more, the merits of the location became better known, and soon citizens of Newtowne, now Cambridge, presented a petition for their own occupation, and their request might have been granted but for the intervention of that element of personal influence which goes so far today in shaping the course of practical legislation.
In the year 1639 there was living in Ipswich a minister of the name of Nathaniel Ward; originally bred to the bar in his native country, on arriving in New England he gave up a profession that was not much needed in the early settlements, and turned himself to the ministry ; his training at the bar made it an easy task for him to write "The Body of Liberties," a masterly statement of the duties and privileges of the freeman of New England, the first Blue Book of Massachusetts, and his ready wit flowed out in a genial satire en- titled " The Simple Cobbler of Agawam." Now, this Mr. Ward had a son John who had been bred to the pulpit ; also a son - in - law, who had studied medicine ; for both these men places were needed, and what more natural than that the father should avail himself of his acquaintance with the distinguished Mr. Winthrop, who had been his neighbor at Ipswich, and was a relative by marriage, to secure for the members of his family and their friends the as yet unappropriated region about Cochichawick? In December 1639 therefore, he wrote a letter to Winthrop reminding him of his promise not to encourage any plantation at Quichichacke or Penticutt, till he and some others had time to speak or write further regarding it. This letter was followed immediately by one from the son - in - law, Dr. Fyrmin, who expressed his favorable opinion of Pentuckett or Quichichwick by Shawshin. Meanwhile, Mr. Ward had engaged in an active canvass for settlers, and soon wrote again to his distinguished friend that his company, which was preparing to go to Quickichwick the next week to view the spot, then consisted of twenty families of very good
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Christians, "and," he adds " in the meantime we crave your secresy and rest ;" he remarks also that "our company increases apace from divers towns of very desirable men, whereof we desire to be very choise." The appeals thus made resulted in a vote passed May 13, 1640 (Colony Records), by which the entire question was committed to the friendly care of the Governor, Deputy Governor and Mr. Winthrop, with full power to grant the request of Mr. Ward and his followers, provided that they give their answer within three weeks, and that they build in Cochichawick before the next session of the General Court. It seems probable that immediately after this vote preparations were made for a settlement in Cochichawick, for we find that in a letter from John Woodbridge to Winthrop written in March, 1641, he says that some of his company had "sold themselves out of house and home," and were greatly desirous of securing a settlement as "soone as may be." The relationship existing between John Woodbridge and Governor Dudley1 gave a certain assurance that the desires of the settlers would be granted. It is noticeable that Nath- aniel Ward has entrusted the matter to John Woodbridge ; it was not prudent for the Wards to disturb the authorities too often with their requests, and in the meantime, Ward had received a grant of six hun- dred acres on the Merrimac, and his son was put down for the adjoin- ing parish of Penticutt. It was through the influence of Messrs. Ward and Woodbridge that men from Newbury and Ipswich were licensed to settle in Cochichawick, and it is likely that the settlement began there as early as 1641 or 1642. It is a fact that on September 19, 1644, meetings were called at Rowley to form the church at Haverhill and at Andover, and as the various delegates were unable to agree,2 they separated to meet again October 2, 1645, and then the churches were formed, and Mr. Woodbridge was appointed to the church at Andover.
The settlement here was small at this time, for Hubbard says that the meeting was called at Rowley because Andover and Haver-
1 Woodbridge married Dudley's daughter.
2 Hubbard's History of New England. Ed. 1828. Chap. 48. "But when they were all assembled most of those who were to join together in church fellowship at that time refused to make the confession of their faith and repentance, because, as was said, they declared it openly before in other churches upon their admission into them. Where- upon the members of the churches not being satisfied, the assembly broke up, before they accomplished what they intended."
The name of all the forms a hould ons in order as they came to conna
) Bradstreet John Ofgood Jogorh narbon Richard Barpor John Stavove pirmolas Holt
Boriannis wood Proda John As
Robert Bannoor
Jamale pouv nathan parker Horasy Jaques John Aflott Fechasão Blaba William Ballon John Sauvion Thomas grazie Jasper
And rou Allon Andarow Holgu Chomas Chan(su
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hill, " being then but newly erected were not capable to entertain them that were likely to be gathered together on that occasion." With his church about him, there was nothing further for Mr. Wood- bridge to do than to acquire the legal title to his settlement, and accordingly he sought out Cutshumache, the sagamore of the Massa- chusetts Indians, and for the sum of £6 and a coat Cutshumache sold his title, and on the 6th May, 1646, the Indian went before the general court at Boston and confirmed the sale. The story of the transaction is complete in the Colony Records.1 The final words are as follows, " This purchase ye Corte alowes of and have granted ye said land to belong to ye said plantation for evr, to be ordred and dis- posed of by them." From this time disappears the old Indian name Cochichawick, and Andover, name dear to the settler from Hants, name now known throughout the world, was the name applied to the new community ; the brook is still called Cochichawick brook, while the pond itself, which to - day as in the earliest times, draws down to its placid bosom the forests and the adjacent hills and the sky, bears its old Indian name.
So on the 6th day of the 3rd month of the year 1646, after the gathering of a church, by peaceful barter with the Indians, and by enactment of the general court, Andover as a legal entity came into being, and in commemoration of this event come into this presence today all who are bound to her by whatever ties of kinship or of filial regard. To many of us it is the birthplace of ourselves, and of our ancestors in six or seven generations, and therefore to us it is a day of fond retrospect in matters having an immediate family interest. Here the first settlers selected their home, and here were worked out those puritan ideas for the establishment of which they left their native land. On this festival day there is no place for criticism ; the occasion calls rather for fervent gratitude that patience, fortitude and
1 Colony Records, Vol. 2, p. 159. " At a Genrall Corte at Boston the 6th 3th mo 1646 Cutshamache, sagamore of ye Massachusetts came into ye Corte & acknowledged yt for ye sume of 6/ & a coate wch he had already received, hee had sould to Mr John Woodbridge, in behalfe of ye inhabitants of Cochicawick, now called Andiver, all his right, interest, & priviledge in ye land 6 miles Southward from ye towne, two miles Eastward to Rowley bounds, be ye same more or lesse, Northward to Merrimack Ryver, pvided yt ye Indian called Roger & his company may have librty to take alewifes in Cochichawick River for their owne eating; but if they either spoyle or steale any corne or other fruite, to any considrable value of ye inhabitants there, this librty of taking fish shall forever cease & ye said Roger is still to enjoy foure acres of ground where now he plants. This purchase " ut supra.
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self-reliance have here triumphed over enormous discouragements, and that sublime faith has been the inextinguishable torch that guided many a weary heart through difficulties otherwise too great to be borne. Besides, what is there to criticise? Did not our puritan an- cestors live up to the full height of such intelligence and character as they possessed ? Were they not working out their own plans, in their own methods, and in their own habitation? It is true that they visited upon Quakers harsh inflictions ; they fell into the awful delu- sion of witchcraft ; they expelled Mrs. Hutchinson as a teacher of doctrines they believed to be ruinous; they drove out Roger Williams as a disturber of their political tenets. So far as charges against the Puritans are based upon facts, they stand freely confessed ; there is no disposition here to make them appear other than what they are ; modes of thought change in like measure with conditions of life, and that is all the answer that we today need to make to any criticism from within or without. Our methods are not as the methods of our ancestors ; our thoughts not as their thoughts : true progress, alike in physical and intellectual well-being, forbids that they should be.
To the student of history it must ever be a matter of wonder how and where our ancestors learned their method of self-government. In the country from which they came they had, and could have had, no experience in a form of government so salutary and so completely their own as that which they established in New England. As a con- gregation of worshippers they had, and insisted upon, a government by themselves of all matters relating to their church, and when, after their settlement in this country, they found themselves charged with civic as well as religious duties and obligations, it was but natural that the congregational system should be extended to the civil government ; and thus, from the day of the earliest settlement, where or when we cannot say, the town meeting became the means by which the civil and ecclesiastical affairs of the settlement were regulated, and through it the communities enjoyed complete self-government. Scarcely less wonderful than this was the practice of making record of everything that was transacted in the church and town alike. Beyond the recording of births and marriages, their experience had given them nothing of this kind, yet it was necessary that the grants of land should be recorded, and the practice of recording them developed soon after the settlement into the system of county registries, while an
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equal utility would easily convince them that the records of town meetings might be very convenient for reference. Besides this, one cannot avoid the thought that our ancestors felt they were engaged in a unique and heroic undertaking, and that therefore they must trace clearly all the stages of their progress. Andover forms no exception to these excellent practices, and from the first beginnings of the town, no doubt records were kept. But in those early days the records were always in the custody of the town clerk, and as the incumbent of the office changed from time to time the books suffered in the transmis- sion, and the result is that for the first fifteen or eighteen years, after the birth of Andover, we have no consecutive record. The leaves of such portions of it as are left are stained yellow with age, and their edges are often worn. This is true alike of the records of the town meetings and of the grants of land. It is not a fact, as is sometimes asserted, that the early records were burned ; but April 10th, 1698, it was voted that Capt. Dudley Bradstreet, Capt. Christopher Osgood and Mr. Andrew Peters be a committee to "receive anew ye records of ye towne lands according to what papers may be found that have been upon record before, our towne record being taken away by ye enemy indians." The record from 1661 down to the present time is legible and entirely consecutive. But whatever befell the records for the first eighteen years had happened to them as early as 1656, for the clerk of the meeting held on the 9th of March of that year at the house of John Osgood, had written in his record, as a justification for having a new book before him, that the old book was rent and in many places defective ; and he further states that the meeting " was chiefly warned and intended for the entering and recording of Towne orders now in force and particular mens graunts of Land," and the vote is written down requiring the names of all persons who had con- tributed to the rates and charges of the town to be entered in the new book. But later, this vote was "disannulled " "by the major part of voats at a lawfull town meeting the 2 of December 1661," and two lines are drawn across the original record ; of this latter meeting how- ever there is no trace.
While we are thus deprived of any extended knowledge of any- thing that happened, let us say from 1643 to 1661, one leaf of great value is found in the old records and is now in a form available to all ; however reminiscent this list may have been in its origin, of its an-
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tiquity there can be no doubt; that is confirmed alike by the hand- writing, by the discoloration, and by the condition of the margin of the sheet ; but there is no date upon it and nothing by which its exact time can be determined. It purports to give the names of "all the free househoulders in order as they came to towne." No date is fixed when they or any of them arrived in Cochichawick, but we know that Richard Barker was settled here as early as 1643, for the industry of Miss Bailey has discovered a deed running to him and bearing that date, in which he is described as of Cochichawick. The records of the North Parish Church, gathered in 1645, give the names of the ten persons who gathered at the foundation ; in that list is found the name of Richard Blake who stands fifteenth in the roll of the early settlers ; if therefore full credence is to be given to this list of freeholders, it would fix the date of the arrival of Blake and of all on the list prior to him as sometime preceding October, 1645.
The words " in order as they came to towne " are to be under- stood as meaning in the order in which land was granted to them. This would make Mr. Bradstreet the first grantee of land in the town, which is not unlikely to be the fact, though from records available elsewhere, it would seem that as late as 1645 he was a citizen of Ipswich, and in the history of Ipswich his removal to Andover is noted in 1645.
The growth in population was not rapid ; the list of the first free- holders is probably accurate as the list of rateable polls, say up to the year 1650. It contains only twenty-three names, but by a vote passed in town meeting January 6, 1672, requiring every citizen to run the bounds of his estate with his "naybors" before the last of May, on the penalty of forfeiting five shillings and the same amount for each month's delay thereafter, a list is found of thirty who had run their bounds in accordance with the order, while fifteen are marked under the unequivocal heading of "Delinquents." To the honor of four of the unfortunate fifteen it should be said that they afterward did their duty, and a line was drawn through their names. At the time of this town order the number of freeholders may be taken as forty-five, but whether the list was made out in 1672 or 1676, when the vote was reaffirmed, no man can tell, for the list is without a date. Abbott1 states the rateable polls in 1679 as 88, and from year to year they increase at an average rate of about four freeholders per year.
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