History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 63

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton) ed
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1534

USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men > Part 63

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Before Mr. Wibird's pastorate closed he was, through bodily infirmity, disabled from preaching, so that on Feb. 5, 1800, exactly four months before the pastor's death, the Rev. Peter Whitney was ordained

as his colleague. Like all his predecessors in that pulpit, except Tompson and Flynt, Mr. Whitney was a Harvard graduate, belonging to the class of 1791, and at the time of his ordination he was thirty-two. His pastorate lasted through forty-three years, and during it the separation of church and state took place in New England. Quincy town and precinct were divided. Intellectually, Mr. Whitney was in no way remarkable; a worthy, easy-going divine of lib- eral tendencies, while Dr. Storrs, of the Middle Pre- cinct, held his church and its people firmly to the strict faith of the fathers, the old North Precinct- the church of Wheelwright and Briant-was allowed to drift, as it was fit and proper that it should, quietly and easily in Channing's wake. The change to Unita- rianism was then almost unnoticed, and in 1827 Mr. Whitney was able to record that " for the last thirty years this society has been more united, perhaps, than any other in our country. No ' root of bitterness' has in any measure sprung up to trouble them ; none of that ill-will which sectarianism so often produces has been found among them; nor have any of those sources of division arisen which in so many of the towns of New England have cut the happiest societies asunder."

These words were written at the very time when the old epoch had come to a natural close, and the new one was about to begin. The silence of the West Quincy hills was now broken by the sharp ring of the sledge' on the drill, and loud blasts told of quarries from which gangs of busy men were taking huge blocks of stone to be carried off on the newly-devised railway, which, opened only the year before, was daily examined by curious visitors from far and near. Forces destined in a few years to wholly revolutionize the town were thus already actively at work. Though the mass had not yet been celebrated in Quincy, and, indeed, no new religious society had been organized there for more than a century, the. church and the town were no longer one. The separation had taken place seven years before. Most significant of all, the old church edifice of 1732, in which three whole gen- erations of townspeople had worshiped together as one civil and religious family,-this plain, wooden meeting-house was even then being removed to give place to that more pretentious temple of stone which was in a few years to be known only as the church of one, and not the most numerous, of the half-dozen religious societies into which the people of the town had divided.

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CHAPTER XXVIII.

QUINCY-( Continued).

LIFE IN THE COLONIAL TOWN.

IN speaking of the town of Braintree, then newly incorporated, Capt. Edward Johnson, in his " Wonder- working Providence," remarked : "Some of Boston retain their farms from being of their Town, yet do they lye within their bounds, and how it comes to pass I know not." It will also be remembered that at the time of the incorporation two thousand acres had been "set apart at the Mount" for the use of Boston, " in the most convenient place unallotted." For several years thereafter Boston continued to make allotments in Braintree, until in January, 1644, a tract of three thousand acres was granted to John Winthrop, Jr., and others for the encouragement of some iron-works then projected. Thus a quarter of the entire town- ship, large as it was, had been either reserved to Boston, or set aside as common lands, or given away in large private allotments. It has already been remarked that the actual settlers in Braintree seem as a rule to have been poor persons who received small grants of land. On these fell the burden of the town's charges.

Those charges, it is true, were in the earlier period practically limited to the support of the clergyman ; but a contribution of £60 a year for that purpose was a heavy burden in itself, and naturally the exemp- tion of the Boston allotments from their share of the charge was from the beginning a source of conten- tion. The arrangement was one which could not pos- sibly last. Accordingly, an order was passed, as early as 1641, that no house or land in the town should be sold to any one not an inhabitant until it had first been offered to " the men appointed to dis- pose of town affairs ;" and in case they did not see fit to purchase, it could then be sold " only to such as the townsmen shall approve on." Nor could any one not received as an inhabitant build within the town limits without permission. In the case of Braintree this rigorous restriction of non-resident ownership and new settlement had probably a four- fold object. In the first place, it was an outgrowth of the Antinomian excitement and its alien law. All elements of civil and religious discord were to be excluded. Above all things, the peace of the church was not to be disturbed. Church and town were one; and it was thus reserved for the members of the church to say who might be inhabitants of the town. So important was this exclusive power centred in church-government and church-membership, that it is

I not too much to describe it as the corner-stone of the earliest Massachusetts polity. Its formal recognition on the first pages of the Braintree records was fit and proper. It hedged the Lord's people securely in against intruders.

The legal inhabitancy of the town, moreover, car- ried with it certain rights and privileges in the com- mon lands, then supposed to be of value. Further on these will be more particularly referred to. Then came in the question of the support of the poor and the helpless, under that system of English law and cus- tom which the settlers had brought over with them as their rule of conduct. Every one had a right to insist on being kept by some one from starving and freezing. That right was established by legal resi- dence. From the beginning, therefore, it has been matter of deep concern with all Massachusetts towns to prevent the poor and dependent from becoming legal inhabitants within their limits. This is still the case. The order of 1641 was intended to provide against this danger. Finally, it was also intended to meet in a certain degree the vexatious question pe- culiar to Braintree of non-resident ownership. The people of the town wished to purchase among them- selves all lands and tenements offered for sale, so that neither land nor tenement should in future be held by any one who did not actually live in Braintree and share in its parish burdens.

The evil of non-residency could not be remedied in this way. Accordingly, in 1647 another attempt was made to correct it. Upon a commutation pay- ment of £50 in five equal annual instalments, " to be made in merchantable corn, as wheat, rye, peas, and Indian, at fifty shillings in each of them," Boston agreed that all land owned by its inhabitants in Braintree should, when laid out and improved, be accounted as Braintree lands, and as such be liable to all common town charges. But this agreement, also, failed to settle the question. The unsurveyed and unimproved lands next became the bone of contention. Inhabitants of Boston, going back to the loose grants freely made in earlier times, claimed ownership. A vexatious and endless litigation seemed imminent. On a greatly reduced scale, it was the question which during that century and the next involved England and France and Spain in war upon war. A wilder- ness was in dispute, with a paper title set up against actual occupancy. Fortunately the parties to the con- flict were not in a position to go to war; but in January, 1698, seventy freeholders of Braintree formally and in writing covenanted one with another " to defend our ancient rights, and oppose in a course of law those and all those that shall by any means

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disturb, molest, or endeavor to dispose" any of their number; and they promised to bear as a common burden all charges which might arise out of the law- suits expected to ensue.

This determined front naturally brought about a compromise, and in the year 1700 a body of the Brain- tree freeholders agreed to purchase all the waste land by inhabitants of Boston, paying therefor £700. In order to effectually prevent a repetition of the non- resident experience, it was at the same time, and at a public meeting, further voted that no purchaser of these lands should make any conveyance of them to any outsiders, " thereby to let them have a foothold

earls, a viscount, three barons, and nineteen knights were parties to the arrangement. King James drew the lot for Buckingham, who chanced not to be pres- ent. The region in which Braintree and Quincy lies fell to Lord Gorges. The Earl of Warwick drew Cape Ann.

This and many other similar attempts were made

within the town limits a title to which was claimed ; to introduce into New England the system which

or interest in said purchase or any other way." The | mained with them; and it represented that slow in- purchase-money was raised by voluntary subscription through the efforts of an association consisting of one hundred inhabitants of Braintree, and the Boston claims finally extinguished. It was noticeable, also, and characteristic of the time and of the people, that the committee of the town of Boston appointed to execute the deed for these lands, and to receive the purchase-money therefor, was further instructed to lay out " the said money in some real estate for the use of the Public Latin School."

Thus ended a controversy the importance of which to Braintree cannot be exaggerated. It involved a vital question,-that of a fixed rent charge to be for- ever paid by the actual occupant of land to a technical owner. English and Irish experience had sought to repeat itself on new soil. From the time of King James' grants to the Virginia companies in 1606 downwards, one grantee after another of large tracts of American wilderness had thought to secure forever some annual return from them, just as English ad- venturers and court favorites had secured similar re- turns from the grants of William the Conqueror, Henry VIII., and Elizabeth. The idea was to trans- plant the feudal system to America. The future increase, at least, in land value was to be appropriated. A succession of organized efforts were made to bring this about. These efforts also were authorized by the king, and the greatest names in England were associated with them. For instance, on Sunday, the 29th of June, 1623, eleven men met together in a room at Greenwich, near London. King James was present with them. A small map of New England was laid upon a table. On that map the whole coast Meanwhile the freeholders had been called upon to pass through another experience in the same matter of title. At the time this seems to have occasioned no little alarm ; but it reads now like a burlesque on those national claims then so freely asserted and from the St. Croix to Buzzard's Bay had been divided off by lines into forty parts not unequal in size. The eleven men then drew two lots each, the lots repre- senting divisions on the map. They thus parceled out New England. One duke, two marquises, six bloodily argued. In August, 1665, certain inhabit-

Strongbow had introduced into Ireland four centuries and a half before. That these attempts failed was, it may safely be asserted, the making of the New Eng- land people. The occupants of the soil became the owners of it. Paying no rent, what they would under another system have been forced to pay as rent re- crease of substance which built up the community. The increased value which the laborer's toil gave to the land belonged to the toiler, and not to his landlord.

This is not the place to discuss in detail the cause of the failure of these attempts. That failure was probably due to natural economical influences ; for it clearly was not due to any prejudice against the sys- tem itself in the minds of the early settlers. The allotments at " the Mount" afford conclusive evidence on that point. Landlordism depends on a monopoly of land; and it was the abundance of cheap lands, combined with the want of accumulated capital, which made such a monopoly impossible in America. But while this is true of the country as a whole, it is not true of Braintree. The net of the law was thrown over the people there in 1637, when provision was first made for a church, and again in 1640, when a town was incorporated. From that net the people had to extricate themselves. The agreement of Jan. 10, 1698, was accordingly their declaration of inde- pendence of landlordism. The contract of 26th Jan- uary, 1700, was the recognition of that independence, The long struggle between the paper claimants of the soil on the one side and its actual occupants on the other side runs through sixty years of the town records. It was only an episode in the history of an insignificant New England village, and as such is be- neath the notice of history. Yet it had great histor- ical significance. In a natural way, all unconsciously to those composing it, a single member in a community of towns was asserting itself in the line of common development.

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ants of Quincy, on behalf of the whole, took of the Indian descendants of Chickatabut a deed of the Braintree township, duly signed and sealed, with de- livery "by turf and twig." It was probably done in excess of caution, as a muniment of title in the controversy with Boston then going on. Among the eight grantees was one Richard Thayer. By virtue of this Indian deed, Thayer, in 1682, laid claim for himself to the whole township, and actually petitioned the Privy Council to have the property put in his hands. In his petition he claimed to have long en- joyed quiet possession by virtue of his Indian deed, but that more recently, " under pretence of an imagin- ary line," the Massachusetts colony had usurped jurisdiction and dispossessed him. The General Court had then, he asserted, disallowed the deed, and refused to give him his appeal to the king. Accord- ingly, having now been driven from his property " to his bitter Ruin," he made his appeal in person.

The Privy Council in due course referred the paper to the Committee of Trade and Plantations, and it was by them sent to Joseph Dudley and John Rich- ards, the agents of the colony in London, to report thereon. Massachusetts at this time was not in favor at court, and it was impossible to know what secret influences might be at work behind a distant and all-powerful tribunal like the Privy Council. The freeholders of the town seem, accordingly, to have been greatly stirred up when tidings reached them of this new assault. An address to the king was at once prepared and " subscribed by an hundred and thirty- four hands out of this small town, consisting of ninety or a hundred families at the most." The re- monstrance which accompanied this address seems to have been final, for, in January, 1683, Dudley and Richards filed their answer, in obedience to the order of the Council, and it seems to have ended the Thayer claim. But the remonstrance of the town was a highly characteristic document. It was not only illustrative of the people and times, but it is still entertaining reading. It was drawn up apparently by Col. Ed- mund Quincy, that " true New England man," who died Jan. 8, 1698. Thayer's history, character, and belongings are there described with much particularity. It is declared untrue that he

" went into New England" in 1641 ; but it is agreed that " his very poor father, with eight poor children, of which this Rich- ard was one, came two-and-forty years ago, in exceeding mean and low condition, and was suffered to sojourn, as a poor man and stranger, in a remote and obscure part of the town untill he adventured to purchase only four acres of land, which at that time and in that place might be bought for a very small mat- ter, yet more than the poor man was able or willing to pay. The grantor, yet living with us, now saith he is not paid for it

to this day. . . . His father's shoppe, who was a cobler, would now hardly contain him with his arms a kembow. And of a mushrome hee's swolne in conceipt to a Coloss, or giant of State, and dreams of a Dukedome or petty province, since at first essay hee hath gotten a Maister-shippe. The vast tract of land he makes such a puther about is a mere Utopia, or, if more, a derne solitary desert, and his share therein can hardly reach the five hundredth part. . . . The body of the town are of one soule as to satisfaction with the present Government (that of Charles II.), and looke at themselves as basely tra- duced by Thayer's reports. Whose cards, had they been good, hee had the less need of cheating, fraud, and falsehood to helpe him out." As to his complaint of the " utter ruin" brought on himself and family, the remonstrants asserted vigorously that he had brought it upon himself, "having expended that little estate he had in contention and litigation," so making himself "one of the forlorn hope among men of desperate fortunes, . . . and can find nothing for his living but by this way of lying and romancing about his vast dominions and territories of lands, plantations, and towns to prosecute his fictitious claims, while his wife and family live in sordid poverty at home."

The town spoke in this way of Richard Thayer not without reason. The authorities had become ac- quainted with him and his ways during King Philip's war, when, in company with several others, he was impressed from Braintree. There was a sort of ad- vanced station, or picket-post, in Bridgewater, of which Thayer had charge, and he soon proved him- self a timorous braggart. He evidently belonged to a class peculiar neither to that time nor to New Eng- land,-noisy, scheming men of great pretension and small performance. As a soldier, he kept the country in a state of continuous alarm, and was always scout- ing to no purpose. Nor did he forget at the end of the war to bring in what in those days was looked upon as an exorbitant bill for extra services, which the military committee of the town promptly disallowed.

Returning to the question of the town lands, the matter of title being disposed of, it remains to speak of the commons. In the original Braintree there were three of these, comprising some fifteen hundred acres in all, and known as the South and North Com- mons and the ministerial lands. When it is said that the settlers of Massachusetts were as a body common people of the purest English blood, much naturally follows. The English are a tenacious race, not easily adapting themselves to new conditions. They brought to New England, therefore, together with their lan- guage and families and household stuffs, a mass of customs and usages which dated back to the Saxon days of Kings Ceawlin and Ine, but were little ap- plicable to the new surroundings. Of these usages and customs many yet remain in the more remote towns, strange relics of the almost forgotten communal system of early German life. Antiquarians from time to time come across them, and when they do so they

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are apt to expatiate, as if it were matter of surprise that the first settlers, in bringing with them their Saxon tongue, also brought their Saxon village ways. Yet such was the fact. They not only brought those ways, but, after their natures, they were slow to see that in many respects such ways did not fit into their new life. In the matter of town commons, for in- stance, the original settlers came from a country in which all the land was occupied to a country in which, except in choice localities, land hardly repaid the cost of fencing. The cultivator could certainly afford to pay no rent. Consequently the Braintree com- mons, like those of most other towns, early proved a source of quarrel and vexation. The privilege of taking stone, timber, and thatch off of those com- mons, as well as pasturing cows upon them, was long regarded as valuable. It was one of the advantages per- taining to legal inhabitancy. As early as 1646 a vote was passed, and now stands upon the record, author- izing legal inhabitants to take timber off the commons for any use in the town, but imposing a penalty of five shillings a ton on any sold out of the town. For years votes of a similar character were from time to time recorded, especially in regard to stone for building material. Then, not satisfied with the commons they had within their own limits, with genuine Anglo- Saxon land-hunger, a number of the Braintree free- holders petitioned the General Court in 1666 for a grant of six thousand acres elsewhere. The reason they assigned was that the town lands were worn out, and could not afford them a comfortable support ; but it was, in fact, an outbreak of the general and indis- criminate land-appropriation fever which then and ever since has prevailed in America. The petition was granted, and the six thousand acres assigned. Nothing more was then done in the matter for half a century, when another generation had the curiosity to look the title up, and, finding it still good, they got the grant located in Worcester County ; and at last, but not until 1757, the town of New Braintree was organized from it.

Meanwhile, year by year the townsmen were called upon to take action either to defend or to improve the town lands. In 1662 a part of them were fenced in, and litigation ensued. Then, in 1682, a committee was instructed to lease a portion to Benjamin Tomp- son, the schoolmaster, and son of the first minister, for a term of twelve years. Then, in 1699, it was again voted that the town " would stand by the persons who have the town Lands leased to them, in defend- ing them from Mr. Tompson, their late Schoolmaster, they paying rent of said Land to the Town Treasurer for the present school." Tompson also had given to

him " a piece of land to put a house upon on the com- mon." The lands were then leased to others, and the rent applied to the support of the school. But this plan of improvement failed in its turn. The lessees complained bitterly of trespasses and encroachments, finally throwing their lease up. In their memorial they particularly referred to one open way which had been recently laid out through these lands ; and they add that, "although we repeatedly attempted to fence against the same by a sufficient stone wall, yet we were as often prevented by certain unknown evil- minded persons, who, as fast as we built up the wall by day, did in the night-time throw the same down again."

Under these circumstances both the lessees and the town were discouraged. However it might be in Eng- land, the remains of the communal land system, beyond the limits of a training-field and graveyard, were not productive of satisfactory results in Massachusetts. It was accordingly proposed that the commons should be sold ; and this question divided the town for years, just as it has since divided the Parliament of Great Britain and the Congress of the United States. The problem which Burke and Benton debated on a large scale was, on a smaller scale, and before they were born, discussed in the Braintree town-meetings. John Adams has told the rest of the story :

" In 1763 or 1764 the town voted to sell their common lands. This had been a subject of contention for many years. The south parish was zealous, and the middle parish much inclined to the sale ; the north parish was against it. The lands in their common situation appeared to me of very little utility to the public or to individuals; under the care of proprietors where they should become private property, they would probably be better managed and more productive. My opinion was in favor of the sale. The town now adopted the measure, appointed Mr. Niles, Mr. Bass, and me to survey the lands, divide them into lots, to sell them by auction, and execute deeds of them in be- half of the town."

This was accordingly done, and an element of dis- cord and jobbery was once for all removed from town affairs. Perhaps the most singular circumstance con- nected with the subsequent fate of the North Com- mon was that a large portion of it, including that re- gion immemorially known as Mount Ararat, in which the leading stone-quarries have since been developed, was afterwards bought by John Adams himself. To- wards the end of his life he deeded it back to the town in endowment of an academy. It has always been locally known as " the common," and the rents re- ceived from it for pasturage and rights of quarry have again in this way been appropriated to school purposes.

Like most primitive settlements which are not themselves seminal,-like Boston, Salem, and Ply-

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mouth,-Braintree grew up naturally at certain more favored or fertile points on the line of a main thoroughfare which connected places beyond its limits. In this case the thoroughfare connected the Massachusetts and the Plymouth colonies, and the line followed by it was dictated in advance by the lay of the land, the points of ferriage or fording, and the course of the brooks. The construction of a great coast road from Newbury, on the Merrimac, to Hing- ham-the northern and southern limits of the Massa- chusetts Bay colony-had been ordered by special vote of the General Court in November, 1639, two months after the Braintree church was gathered. Those deputed to lay out the new road were em- powered to do so wherever it might " bee most con- venient, notwithstanding any man's propriety, or any corne ground, so as it occation not the puling downe of any man's house or laying open any garden or orchard." Its width was not specified, except in the common lands or where the lands was wet and miry ; it was there to be six, eight, and even ten rods wide. At first designed to connect all the outlying coast towns of the Massachusetts Bay with Boston, it naturally was almost immediately continued along the shore to Plymouth. South of Boston it doubtless followed almost exactly the old Indian trail, seeking the fords, avoiding morasses, clinging to the uplands,

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History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 63

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton) ed Publication date: 1884 Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & Co. Number of Pages: 1534

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton) ed
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1534