History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 68

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 68

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But if in the matter of schools constant effort has in the lapse of time worked a vast improvement in Quincy, the improvement as respects the tavern has been yet more marked. None the less during the colonial period the tavern, and the tavern-going habits of the people also, were a marked feature in New England life, and exerted a powerful political and educational influence. In the days before railroads, Later in life Mr. Adams was wont often to say that it was in silently listening to these tavern talks among farmers as he rode the circuits that he first came to realize that American independence was both inevitable and close at hand. But the school, though effective, was dangerous. The intemperance of the - colonial period is a thing now difficult to realize ; and it seems to have pervaded all classes from the clergy to the pauper. Cider was the beverage of the soil ; but the people of New England had inherited mails, and newspapers the tavern was the common gathering-place of the town, where the news was cir- culated and the events of the day discussed. The modern caucus is a substitute for it. Here the poli- ties of the village were arranged, and here the ques- tions at issue between the colonies and the mother- country were debated. From his early life John Adams detested the public houses. He declared that in them "the time, the money, the health, and the modesty of most that were young and many old were | a love of strong drink direct from their Saxon ances- wasted ; here diseases, vicious habits, bastards, and try, and cider failed to satisfy it. They craved some- legislators were frequently begotten." Yet of their | thing more potent. Their West India trade soon potency as a political educator and influence he was a supplied it. Here is an extract from a sermon of living witness. More than thirty years afterwards he | Increase Mather's delivered in March, 1686, before a thus described one of these colonial tavern debates : criminal awaiting execution for murder :

"Within the course of the year before the meeting of Con- gress, in 1774, on a journey to some of our circuit courts in Massachusetts, I stopped one night at a tavern in Shrewsbury, about forty miles from Boston, and as I was cold and wet, I sat down at a good fire in the bar-room to dry my great coat and saddle bags till a fire could be made in my chamber. There presently came in, one after another, half a dozen, or half a score, substantial yeomen of the neighborhood, who, sitting down to the fire after lighting their pipes, began a lively con- versation upon politics. As I believed I was unknown to all of them, I sat in total silence to hear them. One said, 'The people of Boston are distracted.' Another answered, 'No wonder the people of Boston are distracted. Oppression will make wise men mad.' A third said, 'What would you say if a fellow should come to your house and tell you he was come to take a list of your cattle, that Parliament might tax you for them at so much a head ? And how should you feel if he was to go and break open your barn, to take down your oxen, cows, horses, and sheep ?' ' What should I say ?" replied the first; ' I would knock him in the head.' 'Well,' said a fourth, ' if Parliament can take away Mr. Hancock's wharf and Mr. Rowe's wharf, they can take away your barn and my house.' After much more reasoning in this style, a fifth, who had as yet been silent, broke out, ' Well, it is high time for us to rebel ; we must rebel some time or other, and we had better rebel now than at any time to come. If we put it off for ten or twenty years, and let them go on as they have begun, they will get a strong party among us, and plague us a great deal more than they can now. As yet, they have but a small party on their side.' . I mention this anecdote to show that the idea of independence was familiar even among the common people much earlier than some persons pretend."

This is a reminiscence long after the event ; but it only confirms what he wrote in 1761, describing what he then daily saw going on before his eyes :

" If you ride over this whole province you will find that taverns are generally too numerous. In most country towns in this country you will find almost every other house with a sign of entertainment before it. If you call, you will find dirt enough, very miserable accommodations of provision and lodging for yourself and your horse. Yet, if you sit the evening, you will find the house full of people drinking drams, flip, toddy, carousing, swearing ; but especially plotting with the landlord, to get him at the next town-meeting an election either for selectman or representative."

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" It is an unhappy thing that later years a kind of strong Drink called Rum has been common amongst us, which the poorer sort of People, both in Town and Country, can make themselves drunk with. They that are poor and wicked too, can for a penny or two pence make themselves drunk. I wish to the Lord some Remedy may be thought of for the prevention of this evil."

One hundred and ten years later, speaking of the work on his farm in Quincy, John Adams describes how one of the hands got drinking, and he adds :

" A terrible drunken distracted week he has made of the last. A beast associating with the worst beasts in the neighborhood, running to all the shops and private houses, swilling brandy, wine and cider in quantities enough to destroy him. If the ancients drank wine and rum as our people drink rum and cider, it is no wonder we read of so many possessed with devils."

Not until after 1830 did the great temperance movement make its influence felt, and for a century and a half, therefore, it is not too much to say that rum was the bane of New England. Braintree seems to have been scourged by it, even more than most of her sister towns. . At the very time the town was in- corporated, at the May General Court of 1640, Mar- tin Sanders, who a year before had been " alowed to keepe a house of intertainment" at the Mount, and whose name was one of the eight subscribed to the church covenant there, was " alowed to draw wine at Braintree." In 1731 the third church was " raised," and the North Precinct records state that " after con- siderable debate at the meeting, concerning the raising of the new meeting-house, the question was put whether the committee should purchase Bread, Cheese, Sugar, Rum, Sider and Beer at the cost of the pre- cinct, and it passed in the affirmative." In 1754, Tutor Flynt made his journey to Portsmouth. He was seventy-eight years old, an instructor in the col- lege, and he had for his companion an undergraduate of twenty. At every public house at which they stopped this venerable preceptor took a " nip" of punch ; and when, " in full view of Clark's Tavern" near Portsmouth, the old gentleman was tumbled headlong out of the chaise, nearly breaking his neck, he was revived by " two or three bowls of lemon punch, made pretty sweet," which, as they "were pretty well charged with good old spirit," made him " very pleasant and sociable." In 1758, Samuel Quincy and John Adams were admitted to the prov- ince bar. After the oath had been administered on motion of Gridley and Pratt, the leading lawyers of their day, the two young men " shook hands with the bar, and received their congratulations, and invited them over to Stone's to drink some punch, where the most of us resorted, and had a very cheerful chat." It is not easy to imagine leading counsel of to-day drink-

ing with students in a tap-room. Again, in 1778 Count d'Estaing came to Boston with the French fleet. Mrs. Adams visited it and could not sufficiently express her admiration of the bearing of officers and men, which she said ought to make Americans " blush at their own degeneracy of manners." What de- lighted her most was, that " not one officer has been seen the least disguised with liquor since their arrival."

So bad had the condition of affairs grown about the year 1750 that John Adams declared that several towns within his knowledge had " at least a dozen taverns and retailers." Suffolk County he asserted was worse than any other, and in Braintree within a circuit of three miles there were "eight public houses, besides one in the centre." Within three- quarters of a mile on the main road there were three taverns, besides retailers, or those who supplied the " neighborhood with necessary liquors in small quantities and at the cheapest rates." These houses, frequented as they were by a " tippling, nasty, vicious crew," had become "the nurseries of our legislators," for there were many who could " be in- duced by flip and rum to vote for any man whatever." Aroused to the necessity of doing something to re- strain this growing evil, the young village lawyer had an article looking to some reduction of the number of licensed houses inserted in the warrant for the May town-meeting of 1761. A full debate was had upon it and a vote passed, which is chiefly curious now as indicating what that condition of affairs was for which this measure was regarded as one of reform. The vote reads as follows :

" Voted, That, although Licensed Houses, so far as they are couveniently situated, well accommodated, and under due Regu- lation for the Relief and Entertainment of Travellers and Strangers, may be a useful Institution, yet there is Reason to apprehend that the present prevailing Depravity of Manners, through the Land in General, and in this Town in particular, and the shameful neglect of Religious and Civil Duties, so highly offensive in the sight of God, and injurious to the peace and Welfare of Society, are in a great measure owing to the unnecessary increase of Licensed Houses.

" Voted, That for the future, there be no Persons in this Town Licensed for retailing spirituous Liquors, and that there be three persons only approbated by the Selectmen as Inn- holders, suitably situated, one in each Precinct.

" Voted, That the Persons who are approbated as Innholders for the coming year, oblidge themselves by written Instru- ments, under their Hands and Seals, to retail spirituous Liquors to the Town Inhabitants, as they shall have occasion therefor, at the same price by the Gallon or smaller Quantity, as the same are usually sold, by Retail, in the Town of Boston, and upon the performance of the above condition there be no Person or Persons approbated by the Selectmen as Retailers."

It hardly needs to be said that these measures of reform produced no result. The Revolutionary

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troubles then shortly ensued, and John Adams was called away to larger fields of usefulness. Long afterwards, referring to this experience, he wrote :

" Fifty-three years ago I was fired with a zeal, amounting to enthusiasm, against ardent spirits, the multiplication of taverns, retailers, and dram-shops and tippling-houses. Grieved to the heart to see the number of idlers, thieves, sots, and consump- tive patients made for the use of physicians, in those infamous seminaries, I applied to the Court of Sessions, procured a com- mittee of inspection and inquiry, reduced the number of licensed houses, etc. But I only acquired the reputation of a hypocrite and an ambitious demagogue by it. The number of licensed houses was soon reinstated, drams, grog, and sotting were not diminished, and remain to this day as deplorable as ever. You may as well preach to the Indians against rum as to our people."

When John Adams made his futile attempt at tem- perance reform, and for seventy years thereafter, the town in which he lived was as respects intemperance no better and no worse than her sister towns. In every store in which West India goods were sold, and there were no others, behind the counter stood the casks of Jamaica and New England rum, of gin and brandy. Their contents were sold by the gallon, the bottle, or the glass. They were carried away, or drunk on the spot. It was a regular, recognized branch of trade ; and when during the Revolution Mrs. Adams sent a list of current prices to her husband she always in- cluded rum, looking upon it as just as important a farm staple as meat, or corn, or molasses. Three shillings a gallon, or ninepence a quart was a high price ; and John Adams wrote back to her from Philadel- phia, " Whisky is used here instead of rum, and I don't see but it is just as good."

Rum or whisky for home and farm consumption were here spoken of; for among laboring men rum was served out as a regular ration, and during the early years of the present century a gallon of it a month was considered a fair allowance for each field hand. It was used especially during the haying season and at hog-killing; for the latter it was mixed with molasses and known as " black-strap," while, com- pounded for the former with cider, the result was called "stone-wall." Even as late as 1838 it was voted in Quincy town-meeting that " the paupers be allowed a temperate use of ardent spirits when they work on the road or farm."

For consumption at home and on the farm, rum was bought from the retailers, and they thus constituted one distinct class of licensed sellers. The inn-holders were another class ; and upon the main street of the North Precinct, in its most thickly settled part, there were three taverns standing at convenient points. They were buildings of a type still not uncommon in the |they were drunk they did not as a rule fight or ravish more remote and older New England towns. Two

stories high, they faced the road, and before them was the hitching-rail ; while stables and covered standing- sheds stretched away on either side or to the rear. A piazza or gallery ran along the front, on which sat in summer those who most frequented the house ; while in winter they gathered around the bar-room fires. The village topers were as much recognized characters as the minister and the magistrate. They remained so in Quincy down to the beginning of the railroad period. The children all knew them, nor as they reeled through the streets did they attract more than a passing glance. Prematurely old, they drank them- selves into their graves, and another generation of the same sort succeeded them.

At a later period great numbers of the more ener- getic youth of the town went out to California and the West, a portion of the New England migration. It was astonishing and lamentable to note the destruc- tion then wrought by this inherited vice. Failure was the rule ; and in the majority of cases the failure was due to drink. In this matter it is easy to charge exaggeration, and neither the gravestone nor the reg- istry bear witness to the facts. Those who remember the old condition of affairs also are fast passing away. Yet any man of middle life who has talked of his townspeople and of their families with a Massachu- setts man or woman born near the close of the last century, has been exceptionally placed if he has not heard the same old tale of lamentation. As the name of one after another is recalled, the words " He drank himself to death" seem so often repeated, that they sound at last not like the exception but the rule. | It was certainly so with Braintree and Quincy.

Where there is drunkenness there is vice and crime. It of course does not follow that in communities where there is no intemperance crime is unknown. The experience of all ages and many countries dem- onstrates the falsity of this proposition ; but none the less the other proposition is true. In New England the enforced industry, the religious training, and the law-abiding habits of the people during the colonial period modified to some extent the evils of intemper- ance. The New Englander was neither an Irishman nor an Indian ; and so he did not in his cups become fighting drunk like the first, or sodden drunk like the last. The habits and traditions and inground train- ing of a race assert themselves even through liquor. Consequently, a Donnybrook fair was in Yankee in- ebriety as unknown a feature as a Mohawk war-dance. When they were sober the people were not quarrel- some or lawless or shiftless ; and consequently when or murder. But that the earlier generations in Mas-

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sachusetts were either more law-abiding, or more self- restrained than the latter, is a proposition which accords neither with tradition nor with the reason of things. The habits of those days were simpler than those of the present ; they were also essentially grosser. The community was small ; and it hardly needs to be said that where the eyes of all are upon each, the general scrutiny is a safeguard to morals. It is in cities, not in villages, that laxity is to be looked for. Of course, it hardly needs to be said that in old Braintree and early Quincy the thought of robbery or violence scarcely entered into the heads of the people. They did not require bolts to their doors nor bars to their windows ; neither, under similar circumstances, do they require them to-day. On the other hand, now and again, especially in the relations between the sexes, we get glimpses of incidents in the dim past which are as dark as they are suggestive. Some such are connected with Quincy,-incidents which for long years have caused houses to be looked upon as haunted, and have given to old and once honored names a weird-like, uncanny sound. The illegitimate child was more commonly met with in the last than in the present century, and bastardy cases furnished a class of business with which country lawyers seem to have been as familiar then as they are with liquor : of the age to deteriorate, have from the very beginning cases now.

raged fearfully, and again in 1751. Indeed, in this latter year more than a hundred and twenty died of it in the neighboring town of Weymouth out of a population of only twelve hundred. In 1761 an epidemic raged among the old people of Brain- tree, carrying off seventeen in one neighborhood. In 1775, during the excitement of the siege of Boston, a chronic dysentery prevailed to such an extent that three, four, and even five children were lost in single families, and Mrs. John Adams, writing from amid the general distress, could only say, " The dread upon the minds of the people of catching the distemper is almost as great as if it were the small- рох."

Notwithstanding such facts as these, it ever has been, and probably always will be, the custom to look back upon the past as a simpler, a purer, and a better time than the present; it seems more Arcadian and natural, sterner and stronger, less selfish and more heroic. As respects New England and Massachu- setts, this idea is especially prevalent among those of the later generations, and, indeed, has been almost sedulously inculcated as an article of faith. The growing laxity of morals, the decay of public spirit, the vulgarity of manners and the general tendency of New England been matters of common observation. Each generation has observed these symptoms with alarm ; and each generation has in turn held up its fathers and mothers before its children as models, the classic severity and homely, simple virtues of which they might well imitate, but could scarcely hope to equal. Those fathers and those mothers were not for days like these.

Nor was the physical health of the people what it has since become. People did not live so long. This is opposed to the common belief, because exceptional cases of old age in each family are always remem- bered, while the average death is ignored. Some grandparent, uncle or aunt, who nearly completed a century, will cause a whole race to be reputed long- lived, though half those belonging to it died before Yet a careful study of the past reveals nothing more substantial than filial piety upon which to base this grateful fiction. The earlier times in New Eng- land were not pleasant times in which to live; the earlier generations were not pleasant generations to live with. One accustomed to the variety, luxury, and refinement of modern life, if carried suddenly back into the admired existence of the past would, the moment his surprise and amusement had passed away, experience an acute and lasting attack of home- sickness and disgust. The sense of loneliness incident to utter separation from the great outside world, the absence of those comforts of life which long habit has converted into its necessities, the stern conventionali- ties and narrow modes of thought, the coarse, hard, monotonous existence of the old country town would, to one accustomed to the world of to-day, not only forty. As might have been expected, the drinking habits of the last century generated a class of dis- eases of their own, besides delirium tremens. Men broke down in middle life, dying of kidney and blad- der troubles, or living with running sores which could not be closed. It is singular to find how common it was for fathers to die at an age between forty and fifty. Rheumatism was more prevalent then than now. A closer and more scientific observation has given new names to old ills, tracing them back to their sources ; but, referring to the frequent cases of Bright's disease brought to his notice during the latter part of his life, the last and shrewdest medical prac- titioner in Quincy of the old, country-doctor school was wont to remark that he had known the new dis- ease for fifty years, but they " used to call it dropsy, and the patients died." Not only were visitations of | seem intolerable, but actually be so. He would find the smallpox periodical, but in 1735 the diphtheria no newspapers, no mails, no travelers, few books,

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and those to him wholly unreadable, Sunday the sole holiday, and the church, the tavern, and the village store the only places of resort. Last week's politics at home and last month's abroad, the weather, the crops, | sion would be dispelled. If his experience chanced to the births, the deaths, and the Sunday sermon would be the subjects of droning talk. Braintree had been settled more than a century and a half, and the town of Quincy had for three years been set off from it before a post-office was established in the North Precinct. That it was established here even then was probably due to the fact that John Adams was Vice-President. His brother-in-law was appointed postmaster. The postage on a letter from Quincy to Boston was then six cents ; to Springfield, it was ten ; to New York, fifteen. Before 1830 not a single copy of a daily paper found its way regularly to Quincy. As regards books the case was not much better. A library, in the sense in which the word is now used, was a thing unknown. Harvard College possessed one, it is true, and by 1830 the Boston Athenaeum had reached a certain degree of growth ; but in Quincy, only after 1800 was there even a poor collection of ordinary standard books of the day, which, owned by a social club, were allowed sluggishly to circulate among its members. After 1788, John Adams had a valuable private collection, which he subsequently left to the town; but the works in it were little adapted for gen- eral reading, and the restrictions put upon its use were such as made it available only to scholars. Had it been otherwise, it would have made no difference. Before 1830 the people of the town, as a whole, never having been accustomed to books and reading, did not really know what a library was or how to use it. Two generations of newspapers, railroads, and book- stores were needed to convert the New Englanders of the interior into a really reading race.

Going back to the earlier period, the Bible, and that alone, seems to have been found everywhere ; while in the houses of the gentry might be seen copies of Shakespeare and Milton, a few volumes of the classics, the "Spectator" and the " Tatler," the philosophical works of Locke and of Bolingbroke, a number of sermons and theological works now wholly forgotten, and, if the owner was a lawyer, a doctor or a minister, a few professional books. As a young man, on a Sunday, John Adams, in the old house at the foot of Penn's Hill, read Baxter's " Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul," and, for amusement, " Ovid's ' Art of Love' to Mrs. Savil."

The sensations of John Adams when he came back to this vegetating existence after having for thirty | might be offered him. All day he would look in years been part of great events have already been alluded to. He longed to hibernate as a dormouse.

Yet he at least knew what he went back to, and ex- pected nothing else. It would be otherwise with a visitor bred to modern usages. In his case an illu-

fall on a Sabbath, he would pass a day of veritable torture. Were the period during the last century, in order to escape the tedium of the dwelling, if for no other reason, he would be forced to spend weary hours in a building scarcely as weather-proof and far less comfortable than a modern barn, in which the only suggestion of warmth was in that promise of an hereafter which was wont to emanate from the ortho- dox pulpit. The remaining hours of the dreary day he would pass seated in a wooden, straight- backed chair, roasting one-half of his person before a fire of blazing wood, while the other half shivered under the weight of an overcoat. In his bedroom he would find no water for washing; for if exposed overnight, it would be solid ice in the morning. If among personal virtues cleanliness be indeed that which ranks closest to godliness, then, judged by nineteenth century standards, it is well that those who lived in the eighteenth century had a sufficiency of the latter quality to make good what they lacked of the former. Prior to 1830 there certainly was not a bath-room in the town of Quincy, and it is very questionable whether there was any utensil then made for bathing the person larger than a crockery hand- bowl. The bath-room is a very modern institution ; nor was the ordinary laundry wash-tub, of which it is an outgrowth, by any means in family requisition each Saturday night. In 1650 it is recorded that those dwelling in certain portions of the British Isles did "not wash their linen above once a month, nor their hands and faces above once a year." As compared with these the New Englander was cleanly, but even his ewers and basins were strictly in keeping with a limited water supply.

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History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 68

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