USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1913 > Part 8
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The Cambridge ministers continued to be prominent in the Colony. Mr. Shepard died in August, 1649, when he was but forty-three years old. Almost a year passed between his death and the settlement of his successor. In the meantime, the town decided to build a new meeting-house. The old one had stood for less than twenty years, but it must have been hurriedly and poorly constructed, for already it was falling into decay; besides, it had never been quite large enough for the congregation. Accordingly, five of the leading citizens, in- cluding Edward Goffe and Thomas Danforth, were appointed in March, 1650, a committee to build a new house, and a location was selected on what was known as the Watch House Hill, which was a slight elevation on what is now the southwest corner of the college yard, where Dane Hall stands. The next year Jonathan Mitchell was ordained the second minister of the church. He was a graduate of the college in the class of 1647, and was, therefore, well known to the members of the community. He had begun his preaching at Hartford, and was invited to settle there as Hooker's suc- cessor, but upon receiving the invitation from Cambridge he declined the call to Hartford and was ordained at Cambridge, August 21st,
1650. For eighteen years he served the congre- gation and by the testimony of his contem- poraries was distinguished for learning and eloquence. Cotton Mather describes him as "the matchless Mitchell." Shortly after his coming to Cambridge he married Mrs. Shepard, the young widow of his predecessor, and went to live in the house which had sheltered both Hooker and Shepard.
The deplorable episode of President Dunster's heresy fell within the ministry of Mr. Mitchell. There is abundant testimony that President Dunster was faithful and judicious in the dis- charge of all his duties. He was held in high favor in the community. His scholarship was of the best and his neighbors treated him with marked reverence. His theological opin- ions appear, however, to have undergone a gradual change. He came to feel that the practice of the baptism of children was not in accordance with the Scriptures. Accord- ingly he failed to present for baptism a child born to him in 1653. The debates which arose over this stand have no interest for us today, but one cannot but admire the unflinching way in which Dunster stood by his opinions. A conference between Dunster and nine of the leading ministers produced no result and a resolution of the General Court advising the overseers of the College not to employ any who have "manifested themselves unsound in faith" led to Dunster's resignation, which, after being once rejected, was finally accepted on October 25, 1654. Dunster continued to occupy the President's house until the next spring and then removed to Scituate where he died four years later. He was buried in the Cambridge graveyard.
It required rare firmness and courage on the part of Mr. Mitchell when it became necessary for him as minister of the church to admonish his chief parishioner and the greatly-respected president of the college from which he had recently graduated. It is also greatly to Mr. Mitchell's credit that he did this without losing President Dunster's friendship. Dunster made Mitchell one of the executors of his estate. It is a curious coincidence, if the suggestion of Dr. Palfrey, supported by Dr. Paige, the his- torian of Cambridge, is correct, and that the monument erected in honor of Dunster in
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the graveyard really covers the grave of Mitchell.
The next heretic in the Cambridge church was more troublesome than the gentle Dunster. The court record shows that on the 19th of June, 1656, Benanuel Bower was admonished for absenting himself from the ordinance of baptism. This Bower, or Bowers, had married a cousin of President Dunster, and evidently shared Dunster's belief about infant baptism. He lived on the Menotomy Road, and later moved into what is now Somerville, but his relations continued with the Cambridge church and community. He became a Quaker and was called to account almost every year and subjected to fine and imprisonment for the absenting of himself and family from public worship, and for maintaining the obnoxious principles of the Quaker fraternity. In spite of persecution he remained stalwart in his independency and repeatedly petitioned the County Court and the General Court for relief. He gave vent to his indignation at his treat- ment not only by repeated remonstrances, but also in doggerel verses, and it was his practice as soon as he was released from im- prisonment to interrupt the public worship of the Cambridge church and insist upon being permitted to describe his grievances. He was certainly a vigorous independent, and continued to be such until his death in 1698. His wife seems to have been tolerated during her old age, for there is a record of the court, dated December 26, 1693, which declares that Mrs. Bowers "being a Quaker took no oath." I is also suggestive of growing tolerance in the community that the three witnesses to Mr. Bowers' will were three Orthodox ministers.
Shortly after Mr. Mitchell's death in 1668, the town decided that the time had come to build a house for the minister at public ex- pense. The selectmen and deacons and three others were, therefore, appointed a committee to build "a convenient house for the entertain- ment of the minister that the Lord may please to send us to make up the breach that an afflicting Providence hath made in this office." This new house, which was for many years the parsonage of the church, stood next to the house which the former ministers had occupied, that is, on the northerly side of Massachusetts
Avenue, a little east of where Boylston Hall now stands.
For three years the pulpit had no regular occupant, but was supplied for the most part by the distinguished clergyman who had suc- ceeded Dunster in the presidency of the college. Charles Chauncy was inaugurated on November 29, 1654, and remained in office for seventeen years. He was a scholar of much renown. He had been successively professor of Hebrew and professor of Greek at the English Cambridge, and was profoundly learned in both classical and oriental languages. He had suffered much persecution in England, and, finally, deprived of his living, emigrated to Plymouth in the spring of 1638. Here he was heartily welcomed and employed as the associate minister of the Plymouth church. After three years there, he became minister of the church at Scituate and was there re-ordained to the ministry, indicating that his original Episcopal ordina- tion was, in his judgment, invalid. During his stay at Scituate the Revolution in England had been completed and the people of the English parish which he had formerly served, holding him in affectionate remembrance, invited him to return and minister to them. He was just on the point of embarking when he was invited to accept the presidency of Harvard College.
In his service at Cambridge he fully sustained the reputation which led to his choice. He continued to be an indefatigable student. He is spoken of as having "conveyed all the liberal arts" to his pupils, and we have no record of any associate teacher. He "moderated their disputations and other exercises" in person, wittily, as Cotton Mather says. He gave his instruction, for the most part, in Latin. The Hebrew Scriptures were still read in the hall every morning, and the Greek in the evening, followed by a learned exposition by the presi- dent, who on Sunday mornings extended it to nearly twice the normal length of a modern sermon. He was greatly prized as a preacher, and justly so; for, as Mather tells us, "he was an exceeding plain preacher." The discipline and management of the College went on very much as in Dunster's time. Nor does there seem to have been any abatement of interest in the College on the part of the community,
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or any decline of the president's popularity and influence with his declining years. The last class that graduated under him was the largest since the foundation; and though it numbered but eleven, those eleven probably bore a greater ratio to the population of the Colony than all the graduates of our colleges for the present year will bear to the population of the State.
Dr. Chauncy was succeeded in the presidency by Leonard Hoar, the first graduate of the College to assume this office. He had a brief and troubled experience, and was succeeded in 1675, by Urian Oakes, who was already the minister of the Cambridge church in succession to Mitchell. The pastorate of the church and the presidency of the college were thus united in one man. Mr. Oakes, after graduating at Harvard, had returned to England and was settled there, and the Cambridge church sent repeated invitations to him and waited three years for his coming. It is an evidence both of the importance of securing just the right minister and also of the comparative wealth of the community that the church was able to offer to Mr. Oakes a larger salary than most ministers of the time received, and to pay the entire cost of the transportation of his family from England. Like his predecessors, Mr. Oakes died when he was still comparatively a young man, his service terminating in 1681. The next year, Nathaniel Gookin became the minister and served for ten years. In 1680 the town reported one hundred and twenty-one families living within its boundaries, and a total of one hundred and sixty-nine citizens. This probably meant a total population of between six hundred and eight hundred.
The two leading laymen of Cambridge during the last half of the seventeenth century were Thomas Danforth and Daniel Gookin. Daniel Gookin apparently came to Cambridge about 1647, and lived at first on the easterly side of Holyoke Street between Harvard and Mt. Auburn Streets. Later he built the mansion, afterwards familiar as the Winthrop estate, on the southerly side of Arrow Street, which is still standing. He was at once prominent in the military service and was elected captain of the Cambridge train-band as early as 1652. In 1676 he became major of the Middlesex
regiment and was very active throughout the troubles of King Philip's War. In 1681, he was appointed major-general of all the military affairs of the Colony, and was the last who held that office under the old charter. For twelve years he was a selectman of Cambridge, repeatedly a representative in the General Court, and for thirty-three years an assistant. He was twice employed upon public service in England and was trusted by Oliver Cromwell as a confidential agent. It was upon his return from his last visit to England that he had for his fellow-passengers the two regicides, Goffe and Whalley, and they accompanied him to Cambridge. General Gookin stood side by side with Judge Danforth in the fight for the Massachusetts charter, and he is also to be remembered not only as the military com- mander who fought the hostile Indians in King Philip's War, but also as the dauntless friend of the so-called "praying Indians." He was John Eliot's chief helper, and for many years general superintendent of Indian affairs.
The whole history of the relation of the Cambridge people with the Indians is a creditable one. There were very few Indians in the neighborhood when the first settlers arrived. These were under the general control of the widow of the Chief Nanepashemet. She was known as the Squaw-sachem. The Cambridge and Watertown territory was purchased of this Squaw-sachem and Cambridge further agreed "to give the Squaw-sachem a coate every winter while she liveth." It was within the bounds of Cambridge that John Eliot began his famous mission among the Indians. He labored long and hard to acquire a competent knowledge of the Indian dialects, and began his difficult labors among them on October 28, 1646, when he gathered some wandering Indians at the wigwam of Waban on the Nonantum hillside south of the river, in what is now the city of Newton. Thomas Shepard, the Cambridge minister, was one of Eliot's most active assistants in his missionary labors. In Shepard's tract entitled "The Clear Sunlight of the Gospel breaking forth upon the Indians in New Eng- land," which was printed in London in 1648, he said, "as soon as ever the fierceness of the
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winter was past, March 3, 1647, I went out to Nonantum to the Indian lecture where Mr. Wilson, Mr. Allen of Dedham, Mr. Dunster, besides many others were present." Eliot's great work, "The Translation of the Bible into the Indian Tongue," was the most im- portant book issued from the Cambridge "Printery."
Provision was early made by the president and fellows of Harvard College for the educa- tion of the Indian youth. A modest building, known as the Indian College, was built to the north of the original college building, and several students were enrolled. Only one Indian name is, however, carried on the list of graduates of the College. In the list of the class of 1665, we read the name of "Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, Indus."
In King Philip's War, the converted Indians, who had been gathered by Eliot into a village at Natick and other places, naturally fell under suspicion. They were removed to a safer residence on one of the islands in Boston Harbor. General Gookin fell for a time into disfavor in the Colony because of his earnest and disinterested efforts to protect these un- fortunate Indians. He even failed of election in 1676 as one of the Assistants, but next year the tide of feeling changed in his favor and he was re-instated in his former honors.
Gookin's connection with the coming of the regicides to Cambridge is part of a romantic story. Edmund Whalley had been a distin- guished soldier in Cromwell's army, one of the major-generals, and a member of Parlia- ment. William Goffe was his son-in-law, also a member of Parliament, and a major-general of the Parliamentary army. Both of them were members of the court which condemned Charles I to death. When Charles II entered London in May, 1660, these two men fled from the vengeance which they knew was in store for them if they remained in England. They crossed the Atlantic with Daniel Gookin, and came with him to his house in Cambridge. They were proscribed fugitives, but they were welcomed to Cambridge with open and hearty hospitality. The high rank which they had sustained in the Puritan party in England, together with the dignity of their own manners, secured for them general respect. They went
abroad freely, and were made welcome in the Cambridge meeting-house, as well as in the homes of the people. They remained in Cambridge until the 21st of February, 1661, when they privately went on their way to New Haven where they were kindly received. The pursuit of them later grew hot, and they went into retirement and concealment in the minister's house at Hadley. This friendly minister was John Russell, a Cambridge man and a Harvard graduate. In spite of the hospitable reception which the regicides in New England received, it should be remembered that all the New England colonies carefully abstained from any public approval or dis- approval of events in the home country. The New Englanders doubtless approved the execu- tion of Charles I, but they never gave formal expression to that approval. When the Puri- tan Parliament came into power in England, Massachusetts never formally admitted its authority, and even when Oliver Cromwell became protector, Massachusetts still remained silent. When Charles II was restored, no proclamation of that event was made in Boston for more than a year. These facts indicate the settled policy of the founders of New England to lay the foundations of what was practically an independent state.
Thomas Danforth was the most useful and prominent citizen of Cambridge in the second generation. He was the son of Nicholas Dan- forth who came to Cambridge as early as 1635 and built a house about where Massachusetts Avenue now runs. Beck Hall and the Bap- tist church now stand on the land that was part of the Danforth farm. This Nicholas Danforth was evidently a good citizen, for he was immediately elected a selectman and served for two years as a deputy of the General Court, and died in 1638. His son Thomas inherited the homestead, but sold it in 1642, and bought a house originally built by Rev. John Phillips, on the north side of Kirkland Street, near Oxford Street. His estate ulti- mately covered the whole territory, from the Somerville and Charlestown line to where the college library now stands. It included, that is, all the northeasterly part of the college yard and the land bordering on Oxford Street for its entire length. This property was after-
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wards well known as the Foxcroft estate. Mr. Danforth throughout his long life was a most energetic citizen of the town and of the Colony. He was for twenty-seven years a selectman of Cambridge, twenty-four years town clerk, twenty years a magistrate and assistant, and for nine years deputy- governor of the Colony. Except for the prolonged life of the ven- erable governor, Simon Brad- street, he would certainly; have been governor. Later Mr. Dan- forth was a mem- ber of the Pro- vincial Council and judge of the Supreme Court. He was one of the members of the governing board of the United Colonies from 1662 to 1678, and he was for nineteen years the treas- urer at Har- vard College. This extraordi- nary record of public service indicates the confidence of the community and attests the wisdom and integrity with which he despatched these varied public functions. He was prob- ably the most active citizen of Massachusetts during the last half of the century, and he was
the leader of the patriot party which strove to retain the original charter of Massachusetts.
The attacks upon the Massachusetts charter had been not infrequent from the earliest days. After the restoration of the Stuarts, there was constant effort to deprive the New England Colonies of their liberties. In 1678 the Crown lawyers gave a legal opinion that the Charter of Massachu- setts had been justly forfeited by the offences committed by the colonial government under it. The authorities of the colonies, under the leader- ship of Thomas Danforth, of Cambridge, and Increase Mather, of Boston, did everything in their power, by petition and re- monstrance, to ward off the catastrophe, but in 1684 the Charter was finally declared to be null and void, and soon after, a royal governor arrived to take over the control of what was no longer the Colony, but now the royal Province of Massachu- setts Bay. With the loss of the Charter ends the colonial period of New England history.
HONOURABLE SAMUEL SEWALL
Chief Justice of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Born in England, March 28, 1652. Came to New England in 1661. Member of the Council under the Provincial charter, 1692-1725. One of the Assistants under the Colonial charter, and ex officio a Judge of the Supreme Court. Appointed Judge of Superior Court in 1692, and Chief Justice in 1718. Chosen it 1699 one of the Commissioners of the Society in England for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, Some- time Resident Fellow, afterwards one of the Board of Overseers of Harvard College.
VII
THE VILLAGE
A FTER the withdrawal of the Massa- chusetts charter a change came over the life of the community. The new generation lacked something of the heroic impulses of the founders. The proportion of educated men and of natural leaders was not so high as in the first generation. Life was easier than in the colonial period, but it was more material. The village of Cambridge grew more comfortable to live in, and the houses were better built and better furnished. The prosperity of the community steadily increased, but the physical changes were few; the population remained nearly stationary for more than a hundred years, and plain living and steady toil were still the lot of the inhabitants. More and more the woods were cut off and the pasture land was broken by the plow, but the wildness of the region outside of the village itself may be judged by the fact that the town records show rewards paid for the killing of wild animals within the limits of the town almost down to the Revolution. In the one year 1690 there is a record of fifty-two wolves killed in Cambridge and six years later rewards were paid for the killing of seventy- two wolves. A bear was shot in what is now East Cambridge, as late as 1754.
The story of the first half of the eighteenth century, though it abounds in political and industrial interest, is still in its central elements a continued chapter of religious history. Its hopes and heroisms were still those of the religious life; its controversies and dissensions were still those of the theologians. Life was still measured in terms of moral rectitude and the subtle temptations of luxury and ease were far in the distance. The College and the Meeting-house remained the centers of Cambridge interest. Harvard College was founded for the specific purpose of training ministers, or, as the first appeal declared, "that the Commonwealth may be furnished with knowing and understanding men, and the
churches with an able ministry." In the first list of college regulations-called, as now seems curious, "the liberties" of the College,-the first rules are these: "Every scholar shall con- sider the main end of his life and study to know God and Jesus Christ. Every one shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day, that they be ready to give an account of their proficiency. And all sophis- ters and bachelors shall publicly repeat sermons in the hall whenever they are called forth." The institution was founded by men in whom the sense of God was the controlling impulse, and to whom his glory was the end of education, and when the families of the Colony brought out of their poverty their offerings to the Col- lege,-the one of five shillings, and the other of a few sheep, and the other the fourth part of a bushel of corn, or "something equivalent thereto,"-it was not as an offering to culture, but as an offering to religion.
For more than two hundred years, in its discipline and courses of study, the College followed mainly the lines traced by its founders. Its influence did more than any other, perhaps more than all others, to make New England what it is. During the one hundred and forty years preceding the War of Independence it supplied the schools of the greater part of New England with teachers. What was even more important, it sent to every parish in Massa- chusetts one man,-the minister,-with a certain amount of scholarship, a belief in culture, and a considerable collection of books, by no means wholly theological. "Simple and godly men were they," said Mr. Lowell in his oration at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the College, "receiving much, sometimes all, of their scanty salary in kind, and eking it out by the drudgery of a cross- grained farm where the soil seems all back- bone. They contrived to save enough to send their sons in turn through college, to portion their daughters,-decently trained in English
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literature of the more serious kind, and perfect in the duties of household and dairy,-and make modest provision for their widows, if they should leave any. With all this, they gave their two sermons every Sunday of the year, and of a measure that would seem ruinously liberal to these less stalwart days, when scarce ten parsons together could lift the stones of Diomed which they hurled at Satan with the easy precision of lifelong practice. Their one great holiday was the College Commencement, which they punctually attended. They shared the many toils and the rare festivals, the joys and the sorrows of their townsmen as bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, for all were of one blood and of one faith. They dwelt on the same brotherly level with them as men, yet apart from and above them by their sacred office. Preaching the most terrible doctrines, as most of them did, they were humane and cheerful men, and when they came down from the pulpit seemed to have been merely twisting their 'cast-iron logic' of despair, as Coleridge said of Donne, 'into true-love-knots.' Men of authority, wise in counsel, independent (for their settlement was a life-tenure), they were living lessons of piety, industry, frugality, temperance, and, with the magistrates, were a recognized aristocracy. Surely, never was an aristocracy so simple, so harmless, so ex- emplary, and so fit to rule."
The original college building having fallen to pieces, a new Harvard Hall was built in 1682 on the site which is now occupied by the building of the same name. That was the first year of the brief presidency of John Rogers. The experience of Mr. Rogers is a good illus- tration of the necessary frugality of the teachers and students of Harvard in the seventeenth century. It appears that young Rogers, remaining at the College as a resident graduate, had driven from the farm of his father-the minister of Ipswich-a cow, to serve by barter for the payment of his charges. The bursar's record debits him with two shil- lings for the pasturage of this cow before her appraisal for sale. It must have been a question whether the young man or the College should be at the expense of getting the animal into condition for the hungry students. Those years of severe training and meager nourish-
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