USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Greenfield > History of Greefield, shire town of Franklin county, Massachusetts, Vol. II > Part 36
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CHAPTER LXXII
ADDRESS OF
HON. HENRY CABOT LODGE
" Seventeen hundred and fifty-five, Georgius Secundus was then alive,- Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible earth-quake day That the Deacon finished his one-hoss shay."
I T was a busy time just then at the very middle of the Eighteenth Century. And two years before this Annus Mirabilis described by Dr. Holmes, two years before the Deacon finished his master-piece, or Lisbon was ruined, or a British Army was destroyed by French and Indians because it would not heed the advice of George Washington, in 1753, on the eve of a war which was to convulse Europe, decide the fate of India and give North America finally to the English speaking people, certain loyal subjects of George II on this spot established a new town government. The homes and the people had been here from a much earlier time. But now the moment had come when the village of the Green River felt that it should be independent. The consent of Deerfield had been obtained, the State had assented and thereupon Green- field became a town and entered on her separate life. It was neither an unusual nor an extraordinary occurrence-this birth
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of a new town achieved in the orderly, quiet way characteristic of New England. Among the great events then crowding and crushing together to settle the destiny of nations and make up the world's history, it passed quite unnoticed except by those engaged in the undertaking. Yet we meet here to-day to cele- brate the foundation of that town and it is just and right to do so for it was a deed wholly worthy of commemoration. I do not mean by this the mere act of organizing a town government, for that was simple enough. That which is and ought to be memorable to us is that men and women at this place had so far conquered the wilderness that they were able to form a town and that ever since they have been able to carry on their town government in peace, order, prosperity and honor. It is neither the place nor the time that we would celebrate, but the men and their work of which the place and time are but the symbol and expression.
"ως ουδεν ουτε πύργος ούτε ναϋς, "έρημος ανδρών μή ξυνοικούντων έσω."
" Neither citadel nor ship is of any worth without the men dwelling in them."
What we commemorate are these men and their deeds and their founding a town was a good piece of honest work which represented much. It has abundant meaning if rightly under- stood and we may well pause to consider it. The work was begun by breaking into the wilderness and in solitude and hard- ship subduing the untouched earth to the uses of man. It was continued for half a century under the stress of savage and desolating war. Then it was crowned with success and permanency.
It is not for me to trace in detail that story of adventure and persistent toil, of courage and of hope. That has been done already and will be done again still more amply by those who live here and who have given to the annals of this region the study they deserve. Tempting as all this is, it lies beyond the narrow scope of an address. All I can hope for is to bring
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before you quite imperfectly, rather disconnectedly, I fear, two or three facts which have risen up to me charged with a somewhat deep significance as I have reflected upon the his- tory of this Connecticut Valley and of this town of Greenfield. It is not the hundred and fifty years which has struck me as at all important. Periods of time are all comparative. A century and a half constitutes a remarkable age in America. It is youth in England and in Western Europe. But the oldest town of England is modern compared to Rome ; Rome is of yesterday when put by the side of Egypt, and the Roman law which runs far beyond our Christian era is a new inven- tion when placed beside the six thousand year old code of the Babylonian King Humarabbi. On the other hand, time can- not be computed for us by the calendar alone. The Aruwhimi dwarfs of the African forests were noted by Herodotus and then again by Stanley after a little interval of some three thousand years. If it had been three hundred or thirty thou- sand it would have been just as important, for nothing had happened. As they were when Herodotus mentioned them so they still were when Stanley stumbled upon them in the tropical forest.
" Better fifty years of Europe Than a cycle of Cathay."
It is the rate at which men live which must be counted as well as the calendar when we reckon time. The years of the French Revolution covered a wider space in life and experience and meaning than the entire century which preceded them. The American people lived more and lived longer between 1861 and 1865 than in all the years which had passed since Yorktown. So our century and a half of town existence looks very short when we put it side by side with the long proces- sion of the recorded years fading away into a remote distance in the valleys of the Tiber and the Nile. Yet for all that it is not brief. Properly regarded it is a very long time for it is with nations even as with men :
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" One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name."
The last one hundred and fifty years have witnessed politi- cal and economic changes more rapid and more profound than five previous centuries could show. The same period has seen a revolution in the affairs of the world and in the relations of men, due to the annihilation of time and the reduction of space by electricity and steam, which separates us further in certain ways of life from the men who fought at Waterloo than from those who died at Thermopyla and in all the history of this wonderful time there is no chapter more wonderful than that which we ourselves have written.
Let us look at it once more as it comes out here in the his- tory of this town. Where we stand was once a frontier, not a mere boundary line between one state or one country and an- other, but a true frontier, the far-flung line of advance against the savage and the wilderness. I have often thought that a book which told the story of the American frontier would be of intense interest. As one thinks of it in what seems to me the true fashion, one comes to personify it, to feel as if it were a sentient being, struggling forward through darkness and light, through peace and war, planting itself in a new spot, clinging there desperately until its hold is firm and then plung- ing forward again into the dim unknown to live over the old conflict. Frontiers such as ours have been do not go slowly forward building one house next another in the manner of a growing city. The Puritan Englishmen of Massachusetts Bay had scarcely fastened their grip upon the rugged shore where they had landed before Pyncheon had pushed out from the coast and established his outpost on the Connecticut. From Springfield the little settlements spread slowly up and down the river and thus the new frontier was formed. The older plantations along the coast were then no longer outposts and the space between them and the western line lay ready to be filled in. Gradually the villages planted themselves and
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crept northward up the river subduing the wilderness and reap- ing the harvest of the rich valley. They were just beginning here when the red man came to the aid of the yielding forest and the savage war known by the name of Philip broke upon them and went raging and burning, hither and thither along the river, thrusting itself down between the towns to the eastward and into the very heart of the coast settlements. Many were the fights close by here, most conspicuous the bloody defeat at the Brook and the shining victory at the Falls, which still bear the victor's name. For weary months and years the war blazed red and wild, then it began to flicker, flaring up only to sink down again into smoldering embers until it finally died away leaving ashes and desolation as its monuments.
Again the pioneers worked their way up the river, again the houses rose and the meadows smiled and the forest was cleared. This time the settlers took a firmer grip. Grants of land were made here, mills built and Deerfield sent her representative to Boston to sustain the cause of William against James. But William of Orange had more serious enemies than his poor, confused father-in-law. Louis XIV made war upon him and again the storm of savage invasion broke on the New England frontier, guided now by the in- telligence of France. Much fighting and burning ensued, but the settlers held on or came back after the Peace of Ryswick in 1697. Then a brief lull, then a disputed Spanish throne, once more France and England fought and again the French and Indians poured down upon the valleys and hillsides of New England. Here the worst blow fell. Deerfield was al- most swept from the map already so deeply scarred. It was such a long war too. It went on for some ten years after the sack of Deerfield. Men's hearts began to fail. They were ready almost to think that this was an accursed spot, dogged by misfortune and haunted by slaughter and pillage. But the stout hearts did not fail entirely. The men made their way back again after all. They held on to this beautiful valley
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and over the ruined homesteads they finally planted them- selves more conclusively than ever. War was not over by any means. There was peace in Europe, but the Jesuit mis- sionaries had not made peace and Father Rasle's War, as it was called, led to sharp and bloody fighting in New England, chiefly to the eastward, but with enough of ambush and mur- der and sudden death in these valleys to make the people realize the hard tenure by which they held their lands. When the war of the Austrian succession . came, Deerfield was still on the edge, but the fighting frontier had moved forward and the little hill towns, each with its fort, formed a line of out- works. Before the " old French war " as we have been wont to call it, broke out ten years later, Greenfield had been born and the line of frontier swung to the north and ceased to be a frontier when Canada passed into English hands. Now, too, it stretched away westward until it joined that other advance guard of settlements which had crept up the Hudson and then turned to the west along the Mohawk. The frontier days of the Connecticut valley were over and it had taken half a century to do it. Children had been born and had grown to be elderly men and women who had known nothing but more or less constant war. They had passed their lives in fighting to hold their own here among their peaceful hills facing the wilderness, listening nightly for the war whoop and watching daily for signs of a lurking foe. What a splendid story it is and have we not the right to be proud of the men who made it possible ?
But the unresting frontier sprang forward, much lengthened now and running north and south along the Alleghanies when the Revolution began. Then George Rogers Clarke carried the country's boundary to the Mississippi and after peace came, the frontier moved slowly and painfully after it across the " Dark and Bloody Ground," along the Great Lakes at the north and the Gulf at the south. Then there was a pause while all that vast region was taken into possession and then
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the frontier leaped onwards again in the southwest and pushed the boundary before it far down to the Rio Grande. Another pause while the settlements slowly shot out beyond the Mis- sissippi and then came the war with Mexico, the Pacific coast was ours and a second frontier began to move eastward toward that which had been travelling westward for more than two hundred years. In our time we have seen them meet. It is only a few years ago and the meeting was hardly noticed. Men scarcely realized that there had ceased to be a frontier in the United States, that there was no longer a line where the hardy pioneers stood face to face with an untamed wilderness, ever pressing forward against it. Indian wars had ended, the red man was finally submerged by the all-embracing tide of the white civilization. Those wars had lasted for more than two hundred and fifty years, they sank into a final peace and silence and the hurrying American world did not stop to note it. But history will note it well and ponder upon it, for it marked the ending of a long struggle and the beginning of a new epoch. The American frontier had ceased to be, the con- quest of the continent was complete, the work which the men of Greenfield and Deerfield had carried on for fifty hard fight- ing years was finished at last far out upon the western plains. If you would know what that fact meant ask yourself how it is that American enterprise in the last six years, leaping over our own borders, has forced its way into every market of the globe and why the flag floats now from Porto Rico to Manila ?
This making and moving of a frontier has been a mighty work and that part of it which was done here during fifty years of conflict, remote, unheard of in the great world of the eight- eenth century, seems to me both fine and heroic. There was no dazzling glory to be won, no vast wealth to be suddenly gained from mines or wrested from the hands of feeble natives. The only tangible reward was at the utmost a modest farm. But there was a grim determination not to yield, a quite set-
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tled intention to conquer fate, visible still to us among those men, silent for the most part, but well worth serious contem- plation in these days when success is chiefly reckoned in money value.
Consider, too, how this work of these old pioneers wrought out here in this distant corner as it then was of the British Empire, formed, as all labor worth the doing must form, part of the work of the race and of the world. See how it touched and responded to the events of the world as the pulse beats with the heart and how these men, consciously or uncon- sciously, it matters not, lived the life of their time which to all men who are real must be the supreme test. Just before Par- sons built his mill here England was deciding whether James Stuart or William of Orange should rule over her ; whether she would continue free or sink back to an autocratic mon- archy, and Deerfield, not knowing how the issue might turn, sent her man across the forests to Boston and cast in her lot with the Dutch Prince. Louis XIV and William of Orange grappled on the plains of Flanders and at once the war whoop of the savage and the crack of the English musket broke the stillness of these valleys. Such free, representative govern- ment as then existed rested solely in the keeping of the Eng- lish speaking people. France represented despotism and the power of France was its bulwark. The struggle broke out again under Anne, nominally over the Spanish succession, really to determine whether France should dominate Europe and America. For this cause of English freedom Malbor- ough won Blenheim, Deerfield went up in flames and Massa- chusetts farmers fell dead by their plows or hunted their French and Indian foes through the forests of New England.
The struggle between France and England did not end, however, with the Peace of Utrecht. France was checked and beaten but not crushed and the century was little more than forty years old when the long standing conflict was re- newed. Again the frontiersmen fought and this time New
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England took Louisburg, the one serious triumph of an ill- conducted war. And during all this time, in peace and war alike, the people of New York and New England slowly pushing forward, slowly gathering strength, were determining who should be the masters of America. The final decision could not be long postponed and it came to the last arbitra- ment in 1756. It was a great war, that "war of seven years" as it was called. It settled many questions of mighty import ; that Frederick the Great of Prussia should not be crushed but should rise in victory over Bourbon and Hapsburg and Romanoff; that India should become a possession of Great Britain and India's millions her subjects, as well as sundry other matters of less meaning to us to-day. But it also deter- mined finally that North America should belong to the English- speaking people and not to France, something more momen- tous to the world's future, politically and economically, than any other event of that time.
Pitt said that he " conquered America on the plains of Ger- many." It is true enough that the death struggle then in progress between the English and North German people on the one side and the Bourbon and Hapsburg monarchies on the other had to be sustained in every quarter of the globe. But the effort to gain sole dominion in North America for the English-speaking people would have been utterly vain if it had not been for the labors of that same people in America itself. The English colonies in America founded and built up slowly and painfully by men whose existence England at times almost forgot, were the efficient cause of the overthrow of France in the New World.
" The Lilies withered where the Lion trod ; "
but the Lion would never have reached the Lilies if his path had not been cleared for him by the stubborn fighters of the American colonies clinging grimly to the soil they had won and ever pressing forward the restless frontier behind which towns gathered to mark the progress of the march.
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So the half centuty of conflict ended. Another George was on the throne, the northern danger had passed away and men began to consider their relations with the mother country. We know well what followed. Ignorance and arrogance in London bred resistance in America until at last revolution was afoot and the American people determined to make a new nation in the new world. The movement now was toward independence and democratic government. In the latter di- rection all the western world was soon to take part, but the first step was ours. As in the earlier days when the question was whether English freedom should prevail over Bourbon monarchies, so now Greenfield lived the life of the time. She sent her men to Boston to join Washington's army. She re- sponded vigorously to the call that came later over the moun- tains to go forth and help to compass the destruction of Burgoyne. And from the days of revolution onwards, so it has always been. You have always lived the life of your time. You have stood the supreme test. You helped to make the State. You sustained the Constitution upon which the nation was founded. From these valleys in generation after genera- tion men and women have gone forth to carry forward the frontier and subdue the continent even as your ancestors did over two hundred years ago. When the hour of stress and peril came you have not failed. When the life of the nation was at stake your sons went forth and fought for four years to save the Union. In the war of five years ago soldiers from this town were at the front in Cuba and the last sacrifice of young life was offered up at El Caney for flag and country. You have a right to be proud of your record, for you have done your share to the full and no one can do more. You have never sunk back in ignoble ease and held aloof from your fellows. In the advance columns of the nation you have always marched. The stern cry of "Forward " has never fallen here upon deaf ears or been disobeyed by faint hearts.
Yet there are some persons, native alas, and to the manner
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born, who can see nothing of interest, nothing picturesque, nothing romantic in this history of the United States, one little fragment of which I have tried faintly to outline. Such beings, steadily declining in numbers in these later years, al- ways remind me of the tendrils which a vine sometimes thrusts through the crevices of a house wall into some cellar or un- used chamber. They grow there in the twilight very fast, quite perfect too in form for they are in shelter there where the winds do not beat upon them nor the sun scorch nor in- sects gnaw them. But they are pale things, white of leaf and shoot, when they should be dark and green. And then winter comes and the vine sleeps and when it awakes in the spring the hard brown trunk and branches which have been twisted and whipped in the storms and faced cold and heat and sun- shine and cloud, fill with sap and burgeon with leaves and rich young life, but the tendrils which have crept into the sheltered dimness of the cellar are withered and dead and bloom no more.
So the pallid souls who can see nothing, read no meaning in all this history of the United States have dwelt so long in the twilight of the past, in the shelter of foreign lands far from the rude, vigorous, exuberant life of this new world of ours that they have grown feeble of sight and extinct of feeling. They must have ruins and castles and walled towns and all the heaped up riches of the centuries about them before they can believe that there is any history worth the telling. He would indeed be dull of soul who could walk unmoved of spirit among the tombs of Westminster or gaze indifferently upon the cathederal of Amiens or look out unstirred over the Roman Forum or behold from the Sicilian shore without a quickening of the pulse, the crags which Polyphemus hurled after Ulysses. Man's work on earth is of profoundest in- terest to man and where his monuments are gathered thick- est memories cluster most and we seem nearest to those who - have gone before. But those who think that this is all mis-
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take the vesture for reality. They are still believers in the doctrine of clothes explained once by Thomas Carlyle in a manner which it would profit them to read. Like Lear they would do well to tear off " these lendings," come to the naked facts and find the soul which inhabits them.
There is something older than walled towns and castles and ruins and that is the history of the race who built them. It is well to give the plays of Shakespeare all the splendors of mounting and costume and scenery which the resources of the modern theatre can bestow, but these things are not Shakespeare. The immortal poetry, the greatest genius among men were all there on the bare platform of the "Globe" playhouse when a sign alone told the audience what the scene of action was. The background is important, very pleasur- able too, but the drama of humanity is what gives it value and the scenery is secondary to the actors and the play. The trappings and the clothes of history count for much no doubt in Europe or Asia or Egypt chiefly for what they tell us of those who made them, but man himself and of our own race is and has been here too for some three hundred years just as in those older lands. Come out of the twilight then into the noonday and look at him and his deeds. Here we have seen in our history men engaged in that which was the very first battle of humanity against the primeval forces of nature before there was any history except what can be read in a few chipped flints. Here in this America of ours in the last three centuries we have had waged the bitter struggle of the race against the earth gods and the demons of air and forest, but it has been carried on by civilized men, not skin-clad savages, upon a scale never known before and which, in our little globe now all mapped and navigated, will never be seen again. Our three centuries have watched the living tide roll on, pushing the savage who had wasted his inheritance before it, and sweeping off to one side or the other rival races which strove with it for mastery. Here has been effected the conquest of
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a continent, its submission to the uses of man and there is no greater achievement possible than this with all its manifold meanings. Here the years have seen a new nation founded, built up and then welded together in the greatest war of the last century at a vast sacrifice dictated only by faith in country and by the grand refusal to dissolve into jarring atoms. To me I declare there is here an epic of human life and a drama of human action larger in its proportions than any which have gone before. To those who can discern only crude civiliza- tion, unkempt, unfinished cities, little towns on the border, unbeautiful in hasty and perishable houses, rawness and rough- ness and a lack of the refinements of more ancient seats of the race, I say, you are still under the dominion of the relig- ion of clothes. You hear only the noise of the streets and you are deaf to the mighty harmonies which sound across the ages.
There is a majestic sweep to the events which have befallen in this Western Hemisphere since the founding of Jamestown and Plymouth which it is hard to rival in any movement of mankind. And it is all compact of those personal incidents which stir the heart and touch the imagination more than the march of the race because we are each one of us nearer to the man than to the multitude. These are the events which in the mass make up human history and wherever human history has been made we find them, whether on the windy plains of Troy or in an American forest. No need to go beyond this valley to show my meaning. The little group in Queen Anne's War holding the Stebbins house in smoke and flame against overwhelming odds, the women and children in Mr. Williams's home murdered shrieking in the darkness are as tragic in their way as Ugolino in the Tower of Famine but they have had no Dante to tell their tale. The farmer slain at his plow, the stealthy scouting through the dusky woods, the captives dragged over ice and snow to Canada are as full of deep human interest as the English adventurer or the Ital-
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