USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Andover > Andover: symbol of New England; the evolution of a town > Part 17
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Judge Phillips' friendship with George Washington was main- tained through occasional correspondence; and in 1785 the lat- ter sent to Phillips Academy his nephew, Howell Lewis, son of his favorite sister, Betty. The boy did well at school and later became President Washington's private secretary and one of the heirs to his residuary estate. In 1789, following his election to the Presidency, Washington made a tour through New Eng- land, which he had not revisited since his sojourn there with the continental troops in 1775-1776. His carefully planned itiner- ary took him north from Boston to the coastal towns of Salem, Newburyport, and Portsmouth, and then south to Haverhill, where he spent the night of Wednesday, November 4. About sunrise the next morning he set out by carriage, escorted by a cavalcade on horseback, and breakfasted in Andover, at Deacon Isaac Abbott's tavern on Elm Street, in a building still standing. Deacon Abbott, already mentioned as Captain Abbott, the hero of Bunker Hill, had been selectman and town clerk, and was also to be Andover's first postmaster.
According to the pleasing legend related in 1856 by John L.
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Taylor in his Memoir of Samuel Phillips, Washington asked the "little daughter" of Deacon Abbott to mend his riding glove for him and, when she had completed the operation, took her upon his knee and gave her a kiss, which so elated Miss Priscilla that she would not allow her face to be washed for a week. The tale has romantic connotations, but vital statistics invalidate some of the details. Priscilla was then in her twentieth year, and if the Father of His Country held her on his knee, she must have been a lapful. She was a spinster until she was fifty years old, at which time, having presumably forgotten Washington, she married John Kneeland. At her death, ten years later, her husband, with what has been described as "unseemly haste," declared promptly his intention of marrying again. We have no portrait of Priscilla Abbott, and no further information regarding her personality, but the local chapter of the Daughters of the Revolution is named in her honor.
After leaving the Abbott Tavern on that eventful morning of November 5, 1789, General Washington and Judge Phillips rode in an open carriage up the present School Street to the re- cently completed Phillips mansion. There, in the southeast room on the first floor, the President was entertained at lunch- eon. When he had departed, Madame Phoebe Foxcroft Phillips tied the chair in which he had sat with ribbons, so that no one else would ever occupy the same seat. After Washington's death in 1799, she changed the white ribbons to black crepe. The chair is now preserved in the trustees' room in George Washington Hall at Phillips Academy. An alumnus confided to me recently that he had once found his way into the room and sat in the chair, but he refuses to let me reveal his name. He does, however, assure me that no direful consequences followed!
After luncheon, General Washington mounted his horse and rode across the street to the training field, and there from the saddle addressed the Academy undergraduates, who had been marshaled there by Principal Ebenezer Pemberton. He then pro- ceeded, still under escort, down Phillips Street to the Land of
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Nod, Wilmington, and Lexington. So closed one of the earliest of many visits to Andover by great Americans.
The President, it will be noted, did not stop in the North Parish, but paid his visit to an old friend and to a new educational institution. The south end, partly because of the accomplish- ments and distinction of Judge Phillips and partly because of the growing fame of Phillips Academy, had become the more important part of the township, as well as a widely known locali- ty in Essex County. For reasons both of tact and sentiment, Washington could not ignore it on his travels.
When the young nation was having its difficulties with the French Republic and the "X.Y.Z. Papers" had created an inter- national scandal, Judge Phillips, on May 14, 1798, as chairman of a town committee, wrote a letter to President John Adams, concluding:
Confiding in the wisdom, patriotism, and firmness of the consti- tuted authorities of our country, we are determined, at every hazard, to support those measures which they shall prescribe for the defense of these blessings.
Bailey Bartlett, of Haverhill, who had succeeded Theophilus Bradbury in 1797 as Andover's representative in Congress, pre- sented this letter personally to the President, who replied, re- ferring explicitly to the hostile attitude of France:
The unfriendly designs and unreasonable demands of that govern- ment, whom we have been unwilling to conclude our enemy, have been long suspected by many, upon very probable grounds; but nev- er so clearly avowed and demonstrated as of late.
So critical was the situation that Washington was called back from his retirement at Mount Vernon and appointed lieutenant- general and commander-in-chief of a provisional United States Army. In what seemed an emergency, Andover prepared for an- other war, this time ironically with our recent ally, now the French Republic. The trustees of Phillips Academy, on May 25,
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1798, passed a resolution recommending the students, "consid- ering the present state of our public affairs," to form a militia company and to admit to it "town boys of good character." Even Judge Phillips, whose disposition was certainly not warlike, wrote to his son John, on August 3:
No time ought to be lost in providing yourself and me with arms and accoutrements complete; the prospect of our needing them in- creases; it would not be surprising to me, if we should be called upon to use them much sooner than is generally expected.
After all this excitement, the crisis passed without battles or bloodshed. This was fortunate for Phillips, who, although only in middle life, was beginning to break under the strain of his multiple responsibilities.
Esquire Samuel Phillips died on August 21, 1790, at the age of seventy-five, having for some years ceased to participate active- ly in town affairs, and Judge Phillips inherited much of his fa- ther's considerable property, the management of which proved to be onerous. Furthermore, Judge Phillips often found his du- ties as president of the Senate and magistrate burdensome. At a time when he was disgusted with political intrigues and the law's delay, he wrote to his patient wife, March 2, 1795:
If our son John could be a witness to what has fallen within my notice in the last four weeks, public life, or rather General Court life, would be the last object of his wish.
For some years, under the peculiar system then in operation, Phillips had received in each election votes in his own town for governor or lieutenant-governor. In April, 1801, although his health was far from good, he allowed his name to be placed for- mally on the Federalist ticket as a candidate for lieutenant- governor, with his friend, Caleb Strong, who was running for a second term as governor. Strong and Phillips won over their Democratic opponents and were duly inaugurated on New Year's Day, 1802. Unhappily the asthma from which Phillips
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had long suffered became acute, and he died at his Andover home on February 10, 1802. His funeral five days later was prob- ably the most impressive ever held in the town. The pallbearers were Governor Strong, three of his Council, the President of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House. At the services in the South Parish Church, the Reverend Jonathan French offered prayer, and the Reverend David Tappan, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, preached the sermon. The body was placed in the Phillips tomb in the adjacent burying ground. At the time of his death, Judge Phillips was only fifty years and five days old.
Samuel Phillips, Jr., to whom the town owes so much, was tall and quite slender, with a long triangular face and erect and dignified bearing. His manners are said to have been "a happy combination of simplicity and refinement." Temperamentally he was calm and reserved, inspiring confidence in those around him. In what he wrote and said there was no evidence of a sense of humor. Acting in accordance with a carefully formed philoso- phy, he subordinated his private concerns to his numerous pub- lic obligations, and he had a conscientiousness inherited from his Puritan ancestors. His favorite motto was "Be more careful of your hours than misers are of gold" and he adhered strictly to the principle, "Do it now." It hardly needs to be added that he was devoutly religious, with a frank reliance on the efficacy of prayer and an unswerving trust in the Lord God Almighty.
Phillips was destined to receive many honors. He was an over- seer of Harvard College and attended meetings of the board with regularity. He was a charter member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, incorporated May 4, 1780. In 1793, while his son, John, was an undergraduate, Judge Phillips was honored by his alma mater with the degree of Doctor of Laws.
Besides being a public servant and a philanthropist, Phillips was a prudent and very practical businessman. He superintend- ed two stores, one in Andover and the other in nearby Methuen, managed a sawmill, a gristmill, a paper mill, and a powder mill, and conducted agricultural experiments on several estates. He
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was, moreover, a shrewd and economical manager, and in spite of steady drains on his financial resources, left at his death a for- tune of over 150,000 dollars. He was probably the town's richest citizen of that generation.
Judge Phillips was a generous supporter of the church and a believer in the orthodox Calvinist and Congregational theology. Mainly through his intervention, his classmate, the Reverend Jonathan French, who was twelve years older and had been a sergeant in the French and Indian War, came to Andover in 1772 to take over the pulpit just vacated by the death of Phil- lips' grandfather; and for many years the two men, strangely different in temperament, cooperated in their endeavor to strengthen the South Parish. Mr. French was a short, stocky man, unceremonious in his manners, but blessed with common sense. When he was pastor and Phillips was a senator, they used to ride horseback together. Each courteously insisted on giving the other the right-hand position. They finally compromised: the minister consented to take precedence in his own Andover par- ish if Phillips would agree to take the place of honor elsewhere in the Commonwealth. Thus they solemnly changed positions whenever they crossed the town boundaries.
In 1787, Judge Phillips was chairman of a committee appoint- ed to plan the erection of a new meeting house. Even after his health was impaired he kept up a practice of which he was fond, that of reading to the congregation on Sunday noon between the two scheduled church services. In his will he bequeathed to the church a silver flagon, with the hope "that the laudable practice of reading in the house of public worship between services may be continued so long as even a small number shall be disposed to attend the exercise." His favorite theologian was Doddridge, whose works he read and reread, to himself and to others, espe- cially the famous Plain and Serious Address to the Master of a Fami- ly on the Subject of Family Religion, published first in 1749 and many times reprinted. Phillips' biographer wrote of him:
We have not been able to discover a trait or an incident in his ca-
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reer, which has not seemed to us the product of his religion more than of anything else.
Many tributes were paid at the time of his death to Andover's distinguished son. Perhaps the finest summary of Phillips' ex- ceptional qualities was, however, written more than half a cen- tury after his death, by Josiah Quincy:
I have heard his addresses to the school as a Trustee, to the College as an Overseer, and, as a boy and a man, my opportunities for per- sonal intercourse with him have been many; and I can truly say that I have never met, through my whole life, with an individual in whom the spirit of Christianity and of good-will to mankind were so nat- urally and beautifully blended with an indomitable energy and en- terprise in active life. He was a leader in the church, a leader in the state; the young loved and listened to him, the old consulted and deferred to his advice.
Luckily a long, detailed letter has been preserved, written to his son by Thomas Houghton, an Englishman who was the guest of Judge Phillips in the spring of 1789. Certain paragraphs throw much light on his host's character and way of living:
I am now at the house of the Hon'ble Sam'l Phillips, Jun., Esq., pres. of the Senate, one of the Judges in this state, a creditable well- regulated family, and here I purpose staying some time, having agreed with this Gentleman to go into partnership in manufactur- ing of paper .... Mr. Phillips builds the mill and I am to manage the work, my care and management is to stand against the Rent, and we are to share the profits equally. Mr. Phillips has so much in- terest in the state and is a man of such consequence in it, that I flatter myself we shall have advantages that other paper-makers cannot in- joy. The state printers at Boston have promised Mr. Phillips their custom. .. .
I must confess freedom is carried to what I think is too great a pitch. Here is very little subordination. All hold themselves equal in nature, and to call a man or woman a servant is deemed a very great affront. even Judge Phillips addresses his servant men by the appelation of Mr. Such a one, and pray Mr. Such a one, do so and so,
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or dont you think it best to do so and so, the reply in general is yes sir, I conceive it is. You must move y'r Hatt to everyone you meet and have any acquaintance with, and take them by the hand and ask how they do, also enquire after the family. Women are addrest in a stile pretty equal to the Men. One thing I must observe which I think wants rectifying is their pluming pride when adjoin'd to apparent poverty, no uncommon case.
The country all where I have been is well settled and I think as thick of inhabitants as Lincoln in England, in general good houses. There is two places of worship in this town, all such places are called chappels, but those at this place are much larger than Raisin Church, are generally well filled with genteel people and dress intirely after the English fashion, they are very sensible of the impropriety of wearing and using European commodities, but custom and habit are bad to get over all at once, however the rich and great strive by ex- ample to convince the populace of their error, by growing their own flax, having someone in the family to dress it, and all the females spin, several weave and bleach the linen; they also grow their own beefs, pork, and mutton, consequently their own wool, which they get spun, weav'd, and dy'd, and both the Gentleman I am with and his father, who is a Justice of the Peace, generally appear in their own manufacture in imitation of the British ....
Some further comments on the Andover community as com- pared with one of a similar type in England are most enlight- ening:
The country is much broken & very stony, in those parts little or no large timber, but plenty of fine fruitfull woods, fences made from stone taken from the improved land, but every inhabitant a sort of a Macannick, for wages is so very high a person cant afford to hire much, it being common to give a farming man servant from 50 to 60 Dollars yearly & his board, & some even more, and I'le assure you they dont appear to me to work hard, but I am tould they live well; however they appear very civil, deacent, well instructed people, pos- sest with a Sperit of Religion. On Sunday they keep very close, ex- cept when at publick worship, which is forenoon and afternoon & perhaps in the evening, at home reading to one another, when not
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cal'd to family prayers, in singing of Watts psalms & hims. I am told a publican would have his license taken from him and be also fined if he was to suffer tipling on the Lords Day. These are regulations worthy of example, but I don't by any means intend to insinuate that the people are perfect here, any more than in England, only it appears to me they shew fewer publick vices. As to property it seems so well secured from principle in the people that there is not such use of Locks and Bolts as in England, even where I am, we have five out doors & sixty two sash windows, yet all the barage on the doors is a wood latch on the door sneck. At the time of fruit being ready I am told there is no occasion to rob orchards, for here is plenty of apple trees by the road sides, whose branches hang into the road and in a manner invite the traveler to taste; butter is plentiful and good, but their cheese is not equal to the English. Spring sets in later here than in England, for they are now only beginning to garden, so can say very little about gardens, only I find roots are very plentiful and good, but here is very few of my favorite fruits, I mean Goose & Car- ronberries; what trees they have of those seem to have but little care taken of them. Here is great plenty of hickory nutts & other nutts, and the finest cranberries I ever see in great plenty, I am tould either all the year round or nearly so. On the whole I am convinced that a person may live here very comfortably, much cheaper than in Eng- land & to me it seems healthfull, for praise be God, I have not had one day's illness since I left home ....
The Marquis de Chastellux, who visited Andover in 1782, spoke of the North Parish as a charming place, with beautiful houses with "many fields and cattle of the finest kind." But he also spoke of (translated from his French) "a wretched inn kept by a man named Foster," adding, "We were glad to do not more than feed our horses in this miserable tavern."
The first census of the United States, undertaken in 1790, shows Andover with 402 houses, 525 families, and 2,863 inhabit- ants. There were 743 free white males of sixteen years and up- ward, and 612 under sixteen, a total of 1,355. Of free white fe- males, including heads of families, there were 1,414. Even this slight quantitative predominance of females is difficult to ex-
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plain in a community long regarded as "pioneer." But it did result in a high proportion of "spinsters," commonly called "old maids" and sometimes self-styled "unplucked blossoms." Nearly every household had its "Aunt Mehitable" or "Cousin Sarah" who helped with the cooking and made the beds, trying thus to atone for her failure to propagate the race. Abbot (or Abbott) was still the most popular name, with 33 families scattered through the township. The Holts were next, with 24, followed by Fryes, Fosters, Osgoods, Chandlers, Stevens (or Stevins), Barnards, Lovejoys, and Barkers, in that order. Andover was still overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, and the original stock was as fecund as ever. The town was as homogeneous in race and reli- gion as it had been in the seventeenth century. In some quarters it displayed more evidences of culture, and material prosperity was more widely prevalent, but Puritanism, though somewhat modified in its manifestations, still controlled its thinking.
After the death of Lieutenant-Governor Phillips, the con- tribution of Andover as a town to political affairs in the Com- monwealth became less significant. No Andoverian was associ- ated with the Essex Junto, that small, exclusive circle of intelli- gent, aristocratic, and ultraconservative gentlemen, all of them well-to-do, and every one opposed to the new democracy of Thomas Jefferson. The Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts which formed part of Jefferson's policy directly affected the bank accounts of those men whose fortunes had been made and were being fostered by shipping and foreign trade. So much involved were they commercially with Great Britain that they even felt that the embargo was a personal stab at the heart of New Eng- land by the great Virginian. Indeed they hated him in the same degree and for many of the same reasons that their descendants distrusted Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930's.
Essex County shipping interests were damaged, some of them irrevocably, by the Jeffersonian measures. But Andover, al- though a majority of its citizens were opposed to the War of 1812, did not suffer like the harbor towns, Salem, Marblehead,
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Gloucester, and Newburyport. Furthermore, during this period Andover was forging ahead, not only in education and religion but also in manufacturing. The men who controlled the desti- nies of the town for the next half century were not statesmen or politicians but educators and industrialists in strange combina- tion. As the country moved into the new century, textile manu- facturing was to bring a new and unprecedented prosperity to the Andover area.
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CHAPTER XV
Experiment in Education
A NDOVER residents, like most good Puritans, had from the days of the primitive settlement been concerned about educa- tion for their children, and over a long period a succession of teachers had been retained in the local grammar school, some- times called the "Centre School." Among those in the eighteenth century are such well-known figures as Andrew Peters, in 1723; Philemon Robbins (the famous divine), in 1729; Samuel Phil- lips (later Esquire Phillips), in 1734, and his brother, John Phil- lips (afterwards of Exeter, New Hampshire), in 1737; Edward Wigglesworth, in 1764; Stephen Peabody, in 1767; and Elipha- let Pearson, in 1774. The dates in the records indicate when each incumbent was appointed, but few of them remained very long, for the pay was small and the opportunity for advancement negligible. Most of them were young Harvard graduates who had taken up the profession to earn a little money before going on into other pursuits. They must have been competent, for Miss Bailey checked the names of thirty-four native Andoverians who attended Harvard before 1778, including not only the Phillipses but also Jedediah Foster, who was later a Justice of the Superior Court. Most of these must have been prepared in the Andover grammar school, where they were able somehow to secure the necessary acquaintance with the classical languages.
The talented and versatile Samuel Phillips, Jr., early asserted himself as a community leader in religion, politics, and manu- facturing. It now remains to discuss his contribution to Ameri- can education as shown in the creation of the famous academy which still bears his name.
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Not content with the educational facilities available in his own town, Phillips' well-to-do father sent his son in the spring of 1765, at the age of thirteen, to the Dummer School at South Byfield, about fifteen miles away. This had been established on March 1, 1763, in accordance with the will and bequest of the late Lieutenant-Governor William Dummer. The first inde- pendent boarding school to be opened in Massachusetts, it still exists and flourishes under its changed name of Governor Dum- mer Academy. There young Phillips was for two years subjected to the discipline, and the caprices, of a forceful personality, Mas- ter Samuel Moody.
Although Moody was unquestionably eccentric, he was an in- telligent, stimulating, and dynamic teacher. Believing in the ef- ficacy of audible study, he encouraged his pupils to murmur their lessons, with the result that his classroom seemed to be a medley of confused sounds. He kept his students in good physi- cal condition, at least during the summer months, by driving them as a group into the nearby Parker River at high tide, for a dip in the salty stream. Phillips was undoubtedly taught to study at the Dummer School, to which he sometimes referred in later meditations on pedagogical problems.
At South Byfield, Phillips, as we have noted, met Eliphalet Pearson, the sturdy, ambitious son of a Newbury farmer and miller, and the two became intimate friends. Pearson, who was six months younger, did not leave Dummer School until 1769 and was, therefore, two years behind Phillips in entering Har- vard, but the two young men nevertheless kept in touch with one another and often discussed plans for the future.
At Harvard, Phillips was an introspective, serious-minded student, with a gift for leadership. It was said of him that he was "either a founder or a leading member of three select associa- tions devoted to scientific or patriotic pursuits," one of these be- ing the Institute of 1770. He was graduated as class salutatorian and delivered an appropriate oration in Latin.
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