History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. II, Part 237

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton) ed
Publication date: 1888
Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1672

USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. II > Part 237

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Then came the Pequot War, and the stern and inexor- able destruction of that tribe, infusing the wholesome terror of the white man's power and resolution, which kept the peace for more than a generation. These were the years in which the beneficent works of Eliot and his associates were wrought ; but, as has already been intimated, those labors were not regarded with universal favor. But they made the presence of the Praying Indians familiar in the white settlements. Familiarity bred contempt. The Indian was lazy ; he was always willing to be drunken. Meanwhile, he sold his peltry to the traders, he got guns and ammu- nition and learned how to use them. When King Philip's War broke out, these besotted loafers, familiar with the English towns and ways, became dangerous.

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As villages burned and war-whoops sounded, the ter- ror and rage of our good fathers were intense and equal. They seem to have determined to rid themselves of their noxious neighbors as far as possible. They killed as many as they could, and they reduced a large number of the rest to slavery. These terrible measures did their perfect work in Southern New England. There was no more Indian warfare in that region. The Indians of the Islands and the Cape, who stayed at home during Philip's War, though he was their over- lord, ever after lived at peace with their white neigh- bors, and have been treated not unkindly by them. But peace has been more fatal to them than war. Not a man of absolutely pure Indian lineage remains among them.

The scene of Indian hostilities was now transferred to the North, and the people who suffered lived in the outskirts of the English settlements, like the men of Haverhill.

The men of Haverhill found few or no Indians in the territory of Pentucket. They took alarm at the first rumor of outbreak and bought the Indian title of those who had or claimed the right to sell it, with the professed assent of the tribal chieftain. Their dealings with the natives were certainly very slight, apparently nothing. They were poor themselves and hard-working, but they were contented and were steadily progressing when King Philip's War broke. Then, though not themselves immediately involved in its horrors, they began to feel all the anxieties of war. Rumors came thick and fast. They could al- most see the flame and smoke of the burning villages at night .. And soon their turn eame, too.

Involved as these unlucky American colonists were in the dynastie quarrels of Europe, they were obliged to participate in a horrible warfare at the caprice of their sovereigns.

It must be supposed that Ward and White and Clement, their associates and their children, did not consider that they had done any wrong to the red men. The red men to whom the forests and streams of Pentucket onee belonged had passed away. The survivors had sold their title. Their enjoyment of these thousands and thousands of aeres had been only transitory, for a little hunting and a little fishing in its season, and the rude cultivation of a few acres near the mouth of Little River.

The white man, on the other hand, was making the wilderness bloom and blossom as the rose. In the half-century of his occupation he had subdued more acres than all the red men of New England would skim over, with their clam shell hoes and skin-deep cultivation, in a thousand years. He had brought in the European civilization ; he was attaining content- ment and abundance; he was looking on to gain lux- ury and refinement in due time. Most of all and best of all, he was doing God's appointed work. There was no doubt about that.

Who were these Indians again, who came with ter-

rible war-whoop and painted faces and unfathomable savagery ? They were not the original Pentuckets- most of them had never seen Pentucket till they came to plunder, slay and scalp. They were the Abenakis of the East, the wild Hurons and Algonquins of the distant North, who traversed great wildernesses to at- tack a peaceful and unoffending people. They were not Praying Indians, such as we had formerly con- , templated with amused and undisguised contempt. They were pagans, heathen; worse, they were the creatures of Romanism, the puppets of the hated Jesuit priests. They were idolaters.

They came to burn the cabin, to scalp the women, to throw red-hot embers into the mouths of babes. They harried the settlements, not only to destroy property and make life insecure-they made life a torment. It was not worth having at such a price- of perpetual vigilance. The husband went forth to the field, to the village, to the town-meeting-what agony to the wife, living on the edge of the cleared lands, when he did not return at sunset ! And to the husband and father, accidentally and imperatively delayed. What anxiety ! how slow the good horse is ! As he climbs the last hill, shall he see his dwell- ing in flames? Shall he find it in ashes, wife and the little ones already far on the way to the wilderness and Canada as captives ?

Again, the Indian fought by surprise, approaching by stealth till near his prey, and then springing upon it with leaps and bounds and the cries of the beasts of the forest. It was the fashion most of all repulsive to the open, straightforward, bull-dog nature of the Englishman, though after a generation he learned to match the red man at his own arts.

And now what wonder that the frontiersman came to look upon his Indian foe as he looked upon the noxious creatures of the forest-the rattlesnake whom he crushed beneath his heel, the wolf for whose head he offered bounties? Rev. Solomon Stoddard, of Northampton, wrote to Governor Dudley in 1703: " They don't appear openly in ye feeld to bid us bat- tle ; they use those cruelly that fall into their hands ; they act like wolves and are to be dealt with all as wolves." And so Mr. Stoddard proposed that the English " may be put into ye way to hunt ye Indians with dogs as they doe bears."

There was nobody in that day to point out the gen- eral good treatment of captives by the savages-their scrupulous respect to the chastity of their female prisoners. In truth, their clemency and their fantas- tic humors were too uncertain to make the position of a captive with them altogether pleasant. Still, a pretty good brief could be made in their behalf and from their point of view, in looking over their trans- actions with the Haverhill people. But there was nobody then certainly who could be invoked " to put yourself in his place." Even now, one needs be care- ful. As the historian Palfrey, who had made a pains- taking study of the Indian character, wrote of Father

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Ralle, the Jesuit whom "the Bostoners" slew and scalped. " Men of this century not in danger of the tomahawk which his zeal lifted against the wives and children of a hundred years ago, can afford to be just to his good qualities, such as they were, and to be sen- timental over his grave."

We shall not be sentimental. It was a case of self- preservation. One party or the other had to go to the wall. It was a question of the survival of the fitt- est. It would ill-become the descendants of old Haverhill to doubt that in this case, the fittest sur- vived.

There certainly is no trace of resentment towards the French Canadians, a hundred of whom appar- ently came here in arms on the fateful Sunday morn- ing in August, one hundred and eighty years ago. Their descendant is in Haverhill to-day. He is wel- come, and, it is believed, is doing good and is being done good unto.

But the people from 1675 to 1730, the Hannah Dustons and Hannah Bradleys and the children they bore in those terrible days of bloodshed, captivity and terror, and the generations who listened to the night-mare tales of Indian atrocities, became deeply imbued with impressions of the cruelty, treachery and worthlessness of the Indian character. The fifteen millions of people descended from the New England pioneers, have carried these impressions to the Pacific slope, and they are not extinct to-day. The Indian philanthropist is actuated, no doubt, by the highest motives of humanity, and, in the immeasurable supe- riority of our race and civilization, we cannot do too much to save the fragments of the people, whom we have practically dispossessed of the continent. But the ordinary American is very listless about the cause.

The door through which Pastor Rolfe was wound- ed, was preserved until destroyed by fire, nailed up in the porch of the First Parish meeting-house.

The indirect influence of the Indian wars upon the morals of the community was unfavorable. All war is demoralizing. The presence of the garrison sol- diers was not propitious. Danger, anxiety, despera- tion, do not ordinarily promote temperance or self- restraint. If a man strikes a sturdy blow in the hour of peril, his frailties will be overlooked for a while. And what is overlooked in him, is apt to become chronic in the community. Haverhill was not the same orderly, devout society in the eighteenth as it had been in the seventeenth, century.

Even in perilous times people occasionally smile, and it would seem that grim-visaged war sometimes smoothed his wrinkled front, even at the garrison- houses. As at Jonathan Marsh's fort on Broadway, when the brave sentinels fired till their ammunition was about gone, at a supposed Indian discovered within the palisadoes, and found in the morning it was only an old maid's petticoat, hung on the clothes' line to dry !

Or at Thomas Duston's garrison, when Joseph Whittaker surprised ,the state of Mary Whittaker's feelings towards himself by feigning to have thrown bis person in despair into the fortress well. Still more pleasant is it to read of Thomas Whittier, a Friend, and the ancestor of the most eminent Friend in the world, who lived near the garrison house of James Sanders, but would not seek shelter there for himself and family at night-fall, as was the prevail- ing custom. Hle built no palisade wall about his house, he never carried a gun with him, and he al- ways treated the Indians kindly. In return, they never molested him or his. Thus it happened that in the evening when the family gathered about the chimney corners, and the fitful shadows danced, guttural whispers were heard outside the rude win- dows. Keen eyes shone like fireballs, and copper skins glistened. But no fear was ever felt, and no harm was ever done. The tradition is a charming one; we may as well believe it, as nobody has ever had the hardihood to deny it !

CHAPTER CLV.

HAVERHILL - (Continued).

Witcheruft-Crime-Wur about the Commons.

IT has been said, with some pride, that the witch- craft delusion of 1692 had no currency either in Haverhill or Newbury. But among the " Witchcraft Papers" in the clerk's office of Essex County is a power of attorney to Stephen Sewall " to procure us a copy of the act in favor of us in respect of our reputa- tions and estates and to act for the reception of what is allowed us, and to transaet any other thing refer- ring to the premises on our behalf that may be requisite or convenient." This paper is signed, among numerous others, by Joseph Emerson, in be- half of his wife. Martha Emerson, of Haverhill. The inference would naturally be that Martha Emerson had, at some time, been implicated in those unhappy proceedings. Stephen Sewall was clerk of the court at Salem and brother of Judge Sewall, who sat in the trials at Salem, and afterwards made confession in the Old South Meeting-House. As to Newbury, Cotton Mather, in his " Remarkable Providences," gave an account of the "troubles preternatural" in the house of William Morse, of Newbury, Mass., in 1679, for which Mrs. Morse, in 1680, was sentenced to be hung, though she was never executed.1

If no witchcraft prosecutions originated in Haver- hill, it could not boast an entire immunity from

1 On the 27th of September, 1692, John Shepard, of Rowley, was bound over to Court for assisting to convey Mary Green of Haverhill, a person charged with witchcraft, out of Ipswich jail.

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IHISTORY OF ESSEX COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

criminals and crime. Samuel Sewall, December 25, 1674, entered in his all-containing diary that "Sam- nel Guile, of Havarel," had committed at Amesbury a capital offence against chastity. September 25, 1691, he records : " Elizabeth -, of Havarill, is tried for murdering her two female bastard children. September 26 .- She is brought in guilty by the jury, Mr. Crisp, Foreman. Mr. Stoughton was not in Court on Friday afternoon when the trial was, and went off the bench on Saturday."

"Thursday, June 8, Elizabeth Emerson, of Hava- rill, and a negro woman were executed (at Boston), after lecture, for murdering their infant children. Mr. Cotton Mather preached from Job 36: 14; made a very good sermon to a very great auditory." Eliza- beth Emerson was that unhappy daughter of Michael Emerson whom he beat so cruelly in 1674. The town recorder entered in his records the birth of her two illegitimate children, May 8, 1691, and adds: "The mother lay long in prison, but at the long run, in the year 1691, as I take it, was executed at Boston for the murthering of the two babes, or one of them."

Mention has been made of the action formerly taken to seeure the town's undivided lands to the original proprietors and their heirs and assigns. In 1705, on motion of Captain Samuel Ayer, a declara- tory motion was carried,-"That before any vote or act pass for the disposing of the land or timber in Haverhill, it may be known who by law have right to vote in the affair." A committee of five were chosen "to run lines and settle bounds between indi- viduals and the Common lands," and " the moderator gave notice of a meeting of the proprietors of the common or undivided lands in Haverhill for April 2."? April 2d, " at a meeting of the Commoners," the old committee chosen to examine the claims of persons to these lands was dismissed, and a new one was chosen : Captain Samuel Ayre, John White, Joseph Peaseley, Sr. And this committee was ordered "to do it as speedily as possible." The commoners did not meet again till July 21, 1707, when nothing was done except to adjourn to September 2d. A commit- tee was then chosen to prosecute all trespassers on the common-lands, and the town clerk was em- powered, as "clerk of the Proprietors in Haverhill Commons," to execute a power of attorney for the committee, who immediately began suits against sev- cral persons.

In the spring of 1709, another Commoner's meeting was held, at which John White, who was town clerk, was also chosen "Proprietors Clerk," and it was voted to hold a meeting on the first Tuesday in April, an- nually. It appears, from the record of this meeting, that at a former meeting the committee previously chosen for that purpose had reported the names of all those who were entitled to vote as proprietors of com- mon land. The same person being clerk for the town and also for the commoners, the record of their meet- ings was kept in the town book of records until April

13, 1713, when they began keeping them in a separate book and so continued until they ceased to meet as such. Having now organized themselves as a sep- arate body, and denying the right of a town's man in the Commons, unless he also represented one of the original proprietors, by purchase or descent ; the ab- surdity of keeping their records with the towns', must speedily have become apparent. In 1711, the Com- moners "voted and granted that the cow common may be fenced in from the Pond Bridge, and so by Ephraim Guile's, and as far as the river runs by Eph- raim Roberts' sawmill and so to Thos. Duston's "- that is, the fence followed the stream from the outlet of Lake Kenoza to Duston's, which was near the june- tion of Fishing and Little Rivers. The Cow Common continued in this direction to "the Lane by Jonathan Emerson's " - Winter Street,- But the Commoners were not to be allowed their claims without any chal- lenge. At the annual town meeting, in 1719, it was voted " to make all the inhabitants of this Town, proprietors in Common lands according to the changes they have borne in the town in the time of the war ; " and a committee was chosen " to examine whit every man paid to the rates, in the time of the war in this town." This was a proper form for the non-com- moners to test the question, but the proposition was never carried out. In June, 1719, " Upwards of twenty of the inhabitants and Free-holders " peti- tioned the selectmen to call a town meeting " to pre- vent the disposing of any more of the common-lands belonging to said Town by a few men contrary to a former vote of said Town ; " and also, "to choose a committee to prosecute any that have or shall en- eroach upon any of the lands, at the Town's cost." The selectmen refusing to call a meeting, a warrant was issued by " Joseph Woodbridge, Justice of the Peace." Nothing was done at the meeting so called, except to dismiss all committees previously chosen by the town, and to choose a new committee to prosecute encroachments upon the common lands of the town. From this it appears that the non-commoners liad de- termined to try conclusions with the commoners, or those who claimed to own the common lands. This was a vote of war, and the dispute npon the subject waxed warm. The commoners were refused the key of the meeting-house to hold their meetings in, and, after organizing at its door, they adjourned to the tavern of James Pecker, where they held subsequent meetings. This was natural enough. It was hardly to be expected that the voters whom they proposed to exclude from any participation in the common lands, would permit them to hold their meeting to effectu- ate that purpose in the town's building.

At the annual meeting in 1720, the town unani- mously voted to make the following proposal to the commoners : " That the inhabitants or non-common- ers so called, should have their right in all the com- mon or undivided lands in said Haverhill, lying on the west side of the way from William Johnson's to

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Jonathan Clough's, in proportion with the commoners according to the rates and taxes they have borne from the year 1694, to the year 1714.

" Nathan Webster was chosen to prefer this request to the commoners or proprietors of the common land in Haverhill."

This was clearly a weakening on the part of the non-commoners ; it seems like a recognition of the claim of the commoners to prefer such a request to them. And accordingly, at an adjourned meeting May 29, " the commoners' answer to the town's propo- sal was brought into the town meeting and read ; and the commoners therein signify to the town that they can't see reason to grant their proposals at present." The non-commoners now made an effort to recover their lost ground. The first vote at the next town meeting was "to sell some common-land to pay the town's debt or charges." The second was: " voted and granted that that tract of land lying beyond Hoghill Mill, that lyeth within our Township not intruding on the fourth division land, shall be laid out to those men that have been out in long marches in the time of the war, and to others of the inhabitants of this town that will make speedy settlement on the same." _1 committee of five was chosen to lay it out forthwith, in fifty acre lots. At a meeting in, July, Samuel Hasel- tine was granted a piece of common-land for work done in "enlarging the galleries of the meeting- house." Various other grants and sales of common- lands were made at the same meeting. Probably they considered that the commoners had rejected the olive branch held out by themselves ; and were pre- pared now to throw down the gauntlet of defiance. At the next meeting they voted " to defend the land that they have sold or shall sell " ; also to " bear all the charges that any man or men shall be put to, to defend the land that he hath bought or shall buy of the town, by any suits in law until the title of said land shall be tried out." At an adjourned meeting December 11, another great step was taken about common lands : " Voted and granted that the com- mon-land in Haverhill, except the cow-common and the land beyond Hoghill Mill, shall be laid out into rate lots, according to the charges or rates that every persons in this town has paid from the year 1692 to 1712, except those persons that removed out of the town in the time of the war ; and excepting some land to make good old grants, if any do appear to be justly due from the town."

"Voted and granted that every five pounds that has been paid in public charges of rates in this town by any person within the time above mentioned shall draw one acre of land in the rate lots ; and so propor- tionally according to what sum they have paid within the time above prefixed. A committee was chosen to take an account of the rates paid during the year specified, and also to lay ont the land according to the above votes."

Of course, these proceedings lead to the inference

that the proprietors and their representatives, who now called themselves the commoners, had entirely lost control of the town-meetings. The new-comers now outvoted them. The non-commoners had begun by granting lands to the soldiers, next to actual settlers, They now proposed to divide the remaining lands among the rate or tax-payers during the Indian troubles, proportionately to the tax paid, with an exception which shows that there were some persons who were faint-hearted during the war, and moved out of town.

In the mean time the commoners were going for- ward, as if assured of their rights. At their meeting January 2, 1721, Samnel White and William White, eldest sons of John White, were granted permission to set up a grist-mill and a fulling-mill on Sawmill River. They desired to remove their mill from Mill Brook to the river, because of the scarcity of water during a part of the year at Mill Brook. This defect of Mill Brook was in part remedied at least when an ontlet was made from Round Pond into Plug Pond, thus increasing the water available for the brook, its outlet. And at the same meeting a fifth division ot land was ordered, to include all the undivided lands in the town, except the cow-common.

At a meeting in February the "island or islands just above Spicket Falls " were sold to Asa and Rich- ard Swan for two pounds ten shillings.

At a meeting in June the following petition was presented, which is of importance historically :

" HAVERHILL, June 26, 1721.

"To ye commoners or proprietors of ye common lands in Haverhill, ye petition of Ebenezer Eastman, of ye sd Town, humbly sheweth yt for as much as Trading by sea is one way whereby I expect to gett my living and furnish out my good neighbors with many snch nessisarys of lite as are most convenient, and ye Incouragment of shipping being of very great consequence and a great interest to this town as well as iny own. I would humbly request yt I may have liberty to erect a wharft some what above ye house where I now dwell, yt soe navigation may be promoted, and yt Thereby ye whole town of Haverhill as well as myself may receive an annuall Income Thereby, and you infinitely oblidge your humble petitioner.

" EBENEZER EASTMAN."

This is doubtless the first proposition to build a wharf in Haverhill; and, indeed, is said to contain the first reference to commerce, or " trading by sea." It is believed Eastman was the first who made a business of trading on the river. When Mr. Rolfe's successor was ordained, Deacon White brought the wine and sugar on horseback from Boston. The lime for plastering the parsonage-house, in 1719, was hauled from Newbury by oxen, and the town clerk went to Ipswich on horseback to get nails for the building of the watch-house. We know that Simon Wainwright had traded in town before 1708, and he probably kept some nails, sugar and wine; but for great enterprises like those to which we have just referred, it is evident that special expeditions were thought advisable. And taking all these things into consideration, with the silence of the records, it seems altogether probable that hitherto there hid

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HISTORY OF ESSEX COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

been but little, and no regular, use of the river in a commercial way.

The lots in the fifth division of land were drawn November 20, 1721. The list is of great importance, as showing once more the original proprietors or their representatives. It is as follows :

" The first lot to Jno. Ayer.

2. Mr. Clemens' Executors.

3. Mr. Joseph Jewitt.

4. . Ino. Page.

5. Thomas Davis.

30. Jno. Ayer.

6. Jno. Williams, sen.

31. Jno. Hutchins,

7. Robert Ayer.

8. James Davis, jun.

9. Tho. Whittier.

33. Rob. Swan.

IO. John Johnsen.

34. Jno. Chenary.

35. proprietors.

36. Richd. Littlehale.

13. Willm. Holdrig.

37. Tho. Eatton.

38. To Nath" Ayer, on his father Jolını Ayer's right.

39. Edward Clark.

40. Dand Lad.

41. James Davis, Sen.

42. James fisk.

19. Matthais Button.

43. Georg Corliss.

44. John Eatton.

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History of Essex County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. II, Part 237

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton) ed Publication date: 1888 Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & Co. Number of Pages: 1672

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton) ed
Publication date: 1888
Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1672