History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 78

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 78

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vigor of stone-cutting. The shoemaker worked day in and day out in the little ill-ventilated cobbler's room attached to the dwelling, which in winter was heated by a stove and smelt of burnt leather. He stuck to his last ; and, in doing so, he talked a great deal of politics and political issues, thoroughly can- vassing all men in public life from President Jackson down to Mr. Greenleaf, the traditional moderator at town-meeting. The shoemaker was, as a rule, not a Federalist ; but he did not vote the Democratic ticket in the same way the quarryman voted it. His was not that rough and somewhat turbulent independence. Intellectually he was of a finer, keener type; physi- cally he did not sustain the comparison well. He was apt to be round-shouldered and hollow-chested, thin and long-limbed. He lacked the muscle of the stone-cutter. In politics he was inclined to admire what he called "smartness" rather than grasp, and though he would not vote for a convicted knave, he felt a good deal of inner kindness for the successful rascal, and an absolute contempt for the well-inten- tioned dolt. He loved political intrigue and combi- nation, and could be depended upon by the wire- puller ; though he soon saw through the merely loud-voiced demagogue.

Such were the political elements which between 1830 and 1840 began to mingle and contend for mas- tery in the Quincy town-meeting. First were the old colonial, native stock, living by agriculture, slow, con- servative, and generally disposed to show much defer- ence to the opinions of the gentry. Next came the quarry-men, composed of noisy, muscular, hard-living native Americans, with small reverence. Then the foreign-born Catholics who instinctively sided against all settled political traditions. Lastly, the shoemakers, mainly Americans, but disinclined to the old ways and the old leaders, and disposed to manage things by intrigue and combination without much regard to precedent. It is almost needless to say that in the presence of such elements as these the downfall of the local gentry influence was a mere question of time. The spirit of democracy was afloat in the land, and the movement which had carried Jackson into the Presidency on the larger theatre, on the smaller was destined soon to drive Thomas Greenleaf out of the management of town affairs. The growth year by year of the vote cast for Marcus Morton marks the advance of the tide. In 1829 he received one ballot only, and in 1832 he had but twenty. In 1835 he had got up to forty-two, and the next year to one hundred and forty-eight. Two years later the revo- lution in public opinion was complete, and Marcus | Morton polled two hundred and sixty votes to one

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hundred and seventy-two for Governor Everett. The size of the vote showed also the rapid increase of the population under the new business development. In 1830 only one hundred and thirty-six ballots were cast in the election for Governor ; in 1840 the num- ber had increased more than five-fold, aggregating seven hundred. This, it is true, was a Presidential election, and a very exciting one,-the famous hard- cider and log-cabin campaign. But the Presi- dential election of 1828 was also an exciting one, in which a Quincy man was a candidate. Yet in 1828 only one hundred and twenty-three votes were cast, or scarcely a sixth part of those cast in 1840.

In the town, as in the nation, the process of absorp- tion and amalgamation were now to be gone through with. The inrush of foreign elements had been too rapid. It tended to unsettle everything. Nor did it soon stop. Up to this time the agriculturalists- the farm-hands-had been mainly Americans. The Irish now began to take the place of these men in the fields, while the new generation of Americans either found employment in shops and mechanical pursuits or became shoemakers. The more adventurous and enterprising went to the cities, or sought their for- tunes in the West. But the result of it all was a The schools also felt this influence. A change for the worse is reflected in the reports of the school com- mittee. This committee dates from 1827, when the time to the present the annual reports are consecu- tive. The first was signed by Mr. Greenleaf, as chairman, and was a well-expressed, sensible paper. The following is an extract from a report made some ten years later : complete change in the character of the town. It was a change also for the worse. The old order of things was doubtless slow, conservative, traditional, , law passed the year before took effect, and from that but it was economical, simple, and business-like. The new order of things was in all respects the re- verse of this. The leaders in it prided themselves on their enterprise, their lack of reverence for tra- dition, their confidence in themselves ; but they were noisy, unmethodical, in reality incompetent, and altogether too often intemperate.

Accordingly, neither the business record nor the moral record of the town were now creditable. There was, as respects the first, no absolute corruption ; the method of doing business was simply loose. The town debt was an illustration. It was a small affair, amounting to only a few thousand dollars, when, in 1837, Congress passed an act for the distribution of the surplus national revenue. Under the operation of this act no less a sum than $5148 fell to the share of Quincy, and was regularly appropriated to the payment of the town debt. It should have sufficed to extinguish it ; yet the very next year the debt was larger than ever. The surplus was muddled away. The expenses exceeded the appropriations; the de- ficiencies were not provided for, the treasury was falling into a system of yearly arrears. So also as respects the moral question. In 1835, and again in 1836, a movement was made in the direction of

temperance reform. There was an article in the warrant of each of those years to see if the town would instruct the selectmen not to license places for the sale " of Rum, Brandy, Gin, or other Spirituous liquors." There was a sharp struggle, and the prop- osition was rejected by a majority of two only in a total vote of 158. At the election of that year 138 votes were thrown for Governor Everett to 42 for Marcus Morton. The next year Morton's vote increased to 148, and the proposal not to license was defeated by 32 majority ; nor was it again renewed. The growth of sentiment, on the contrary, was dis- tinctly in the other direction. Three years later, in 1839, Morton received 326 votes to 231 cast for Everett; the Jackson Democracy were in full ascen- dancy. And now the seventeenth. article in the warrant for the annual meeting was "to know if the Town will allow a temperate use of ardent spirits to the Paupers when they work on the road or farm," and by a vote of 86 to 76 it was so ordered. The same year the mysterious disappearance of the con- tents of a cask of rum stored at the almshouse was made the subject of a jocose paragraph in a formal report made to the town by one of its committees.

" The school in the Centre District has been less satisfactory. The Committee think well of the literary qualifications of the Master, and were satisfied with the course of instruction pur- sued in the School and believe that a large portion of the Scholars have made improvement, but the behaviour of a part of the School at the examination was very unbecoming. About half a dozen of the largest Boys distinguished them- selves not for their good behaviour, but for their bad behaviour, for which conduct they received the unqualified censure and disapprobation of the Committee."

But the slow phase of transition through which Quincy was now passing is marked more distinctly on the record in the support it accorded to John Quincy Adams than in any other one thing. It is hardly necessary to repeat that the phase referred to was not peculiar to Quincy. It was a popular movement which originated in the West, and spread all over the country. Andrew Jackson was its political exponent. His methods were its methods. The nation was its field, therefore ; but its spirit and peculiarities can be most closely studied in the town. It is needless to

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say, also, that J. Q. Adams was no less obnoxious to the new spirit than the new spirit was to him. He had met it before in the country at large, and been forced to succumb to it. He was now to meet it in his own town. Unlike his father, Mr. Adams had never been closely identified with his birthplace. In- deed, from the time he sailed to Europe, in Novem- ber, 1779, to the time when, in 1829, he came home a defeated President,-a period of half a century, -he was an almost complete stranger in Quincy. Yet he had a strong hold on the old native population. They saw in him one of themselves. Accordingly, in 1825 the town gave the Adams electoral ticket a unanimous vote, and in the campaign of four years later his victorious opponent received only three bal- lots in Quincy. Between 1830 and 1836, Mr. Adams was four times elected to Congress from the Plymouth district, of which Quincy was then a part. At each election he had almost the entire vote of the town.1 In 1833 he was the candidate of the Anti-Masonic party for Governor, and in Quincy he had 149 votes to 97 for the two other candidates. In 1836 the change began, and two years later Morton, for Gov- ernor, had 98 majority over Everett in a vote of 432. Notwithstanding this, Mr. Adams still held the town, receiving 183 votes to 76 cast for three other candi- dates. Two years later, in the Harrison campaign, Quincy was closely contested. Mr. Adams, owing to his anti-slavery course in Congress, was peculiarly ob- noxious to the Democrats. The Harrison ticket had a majority of five votes in the town out of a total of 695, but Marcus Morton for Governor ran 48 votes ahead of John Davis. Mr. Adams, though receiving more votes than Governor Davis, yet fell three behind his own opponent, William M. Jackson, who had 349 votes. In 1842 there was a general collapse of the Whig party. John Tyler was President, and the De- mocracy were altogether in the ascendant. In Quincy Morton had a majority of 29, and Mr. Adams was again beaten, Ezra Wilkinson receiving 289 votes, or four more than he. Philosophizing over this result in his diary, he remarked that " the people are a wayward master." In 1844 took place the exciting struggle which preceded the Mexican war, and Polk was elected over Clay. In his district Mr. Adams had two opponents, and as the election drew near he looked forward " with scarcely doubting anticipation" to his own defeat. In Quincy the vote was close, but the

1 The exact votes at each election were as follows : Nov. 1, 1830. Adams, 76 ; Baylies, 2; Thompson, 10. April 1, 1833. Adams, 164; Lincoln, 39; Doan, 11. Nov. 10, 1834. Adams, 125; Brewer, 1. Nov. 14, 1836. Adams, 175; Lincoln, 9; Burrell, 1.

Democrats maintained their ascendancy, though " con- sisting," as Mr. Adams wrote, " of transient stone- cutters from New Hampshire." Mr. Bancroft re- ceived eight votes more than Governor Briggs. But this time Mr. Adams had the satisfaction of running considerably ahead of the Presidential ticket, receiv- ing 345 votes to 312 cast for Isaac Hull Wright, his Democratic opponent. The election of 1846 was the last in which Mr. Adams was concerned. That was a year of Whig triumph, and even in Quincy the Whig candidate had a large majority. As for Mr. Adams, he seemed to have outlived the opposition to him, and his parting majority from Quincy was a gratifying one. It spoke of earlier times. He re- ceived 232 votes to 213 cast for five different oppo- nents.

Like the others, this last vote in Quincy was sig- nificant. To a certain degree only was it personal. The town was entering upon a new and distinct phase | of transition which already began to show itself in the election returns. In November, 1845, the Old Col- ony railroad was opened to travel, and from that time Quincy became a suburb of Boston. Not, of course, that the change made itself felt at once. The people went on in their accustomed ways; but none the less, from the beginning of 1846 the country village (for it still was a country village then) and the city were in quick and easy connection. The rest was a mere question of time; and, indeed, it was twenty-five years before the transition was complete. The suc- cessful organization of a suburban land company in the northern part of the town in 1870 marked the event. Boston had again, just two hundred and forty-five years later, had enlargement at Mount Wollaston, and Quincy became a species of sleeping apartment conveniently near to the great city count- ing-room.

In 1875 the population was returned at 9155, or a little more than fourfold what it was (2201) in 1830, and the order of change from the agricultural village to the suburban town can be briefly recapit- ulated. Upon the original yeoman and farm-hand basis the quarry-men had first came in from outside ; while at the same time the young townsmen had gone out of the fields into the shop, abandoning the plow and the scythe for the awl and the last. Then came the Irish laborer, working in the quarries, on the roads and as farm-hand, bringing with him the Catholic Church, and combining with the stone-cutter to vote the Democratic ticket. Last of all appeared the dweller near the city, having store, office, or counting-room in Boston, and regarding Quincy sim- ply as a place convenient, at which his family lived

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and he slept. This last class to a very great degree while the Democratic, except in its foreign vote, was honey-combed with anti-slavery sentiment. The absorbed the descendants of the original settlers, and the whole mass gradually resolved itself into the | Free-Soilers, as they were called, held the balance of modern town community. But certainly the change from Parson Tompson and teacher Flynt and Judge Quincy and Deacon Bass to the modern stone-cutter, clerk, and merchant was noticeable. Nor as an his- torical study were the characters of the several periods devoid of interest, though the stage was small.

The final change in the character of the town thus began with 1846. Less than two years later John Quincy Adams died. The annexation of Texas had then been effected, and the war with Mexico was over. A new political question had forced its way to the front, and slavery was the impending issue. Quincy was never a pro-slavery town. The quarry- men and the Irish voted the Democratic ticket ; but the old native element had always sympathized with Mr. Adams during his long struggle in Congress, and among his townsmen his teachings had not been lost. Many of them were Democrats ; but they were the old Jackson Democrats, who had grown up opposed to the local Federalist and gentry rule of men of the Thomas Greenleaf type, and once they were satisfied that Democracy meant the spread of African slavery, their revolt was a foregone conclusion. But they were slow in coming to that conviction, for these men | were closely identified with the leather interests, and the Quincy boot-makers dealt largely with the South. The break came in 1848. The conscience Whigs of Massachusetts then refused to vote for Gen. Taylor, and the Barn-burners of New York refused to vote for Lewis Cass. The two factions met at Buffalo in August of that year, and nominated a separate ticket with Martin Van Buren at its head. The political effect of this in Quincy was singular, and showed how the Congressional action of J. Q. Adams had sunk into the minds of the people there, though the major- ity of them had twice voted against him. In Novem- ber, 1848, the Democratic party practically disappeared in the town. The Whig party, which had always sup- ported and elected ex-President Adams, for the time being retained its strength. It cast 246 votes for Gen. Taylor, having cast 314 for Mr. Clay four years before. But the Democratic strength fell from 324 to 212, while the new liberty party rose from 68 to 170. Horace Mann, Mr. Adams' successor in Con- gress, received a majority of 458, in a total vote of 558. A week later came the State election, and the Democratic vote fell to 34, while the Free-Soil ran up to 250, just failing of a plurality.

The work of political disintegration had now fairly begun. The Whig organization was crumbling away,

power. So things went on until 1854. Then the general collapse came, and in Quincy it was complete. As usual, the result of political disintegration was at first in no way what those who had been engaged in bringing it about either anticipated or desired. For more than a dozen years they had been working to break up the old parties, 1.either of which could in the least be depended on when any question of slavery was at issue. Both were afraid of it, and the Democ- racy were at heart false upon it. To break up the old organizations and form a new one on an anti-slavery basis was the darling wish of the agitators. Promi- nent among these was Charles Francis Adams, who, all his earlier life a resident in Boston and one of its representatives in the Legislature, had upon his father's death become a citizen of Quincy. Mr. Adams in 1848 broke away from the Whig party, and was a candidate for the Vice-Presidency on the ticket with Van Buren. He was now laboring to build up the Free-Soil party, and in 1853 he had in Quincy been made the victim of a wretched political in- trigue among the foreign Democratic voters of the town.

A convention was then to be held to revise the Constitution of the State. Quincy was entitled to two representatives, and it was understood in the town that the Democrats and Free-Soilers would unite, each party naming one delegate. The Free- Soilers were true to their part of the agreement, and on the first ballot a Democrat was chosen. Mr. Adams was the candidate of the Free-Soilers; but the Irish faction had been worked upon by certain utterly false stories as to his course in the Legislature, and they refused to vote for him. It was simply a case of bad faith and village intrigue. Mr. Adams was accord- ingly defeated. But in the town this act of the foreign voters excited deep feeling; nor was it for- gotten.

The incident occurred in March, 1853. The fol- lowing November the proposed revision of the Consti- tution was rejected in Quincy by an overwhelming majority, and eighteen months later the town was swept from its moorings by the Native American up- rising of the year 1854. The old party lines disap- peared. In Quincy the Know-Nothing (as it was called) candidate for Governor, a man never before heard of in politics, received 549 votes to 130 for three other candidates. The foreign vote stood help- less and alone. The old party leaders were not so much sent to the rear, as they were left out of sight

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and mind in the senseless rush. The slavery issue was forgotten in the presence of race prejudice. It was but one phase of political disintegration. The old collapsed ; the new crystallized. But for the moment it seemed to the anti-slavery workers as if their labors had resulted in chaos ; they had endeavored to inspire the popular mind with the spirit of liberty, and instead they had evoked a demon of hate.

Nowhere did this spirit of intolerance rage more strongly than in Quincy. It required four whole years to allay it, and now in 1857, when the Know- Nothing candidate for Governor was overwhelmingly defeated in the State at large, in Quincy he had more than one hundred plurality. The quarrymen and the shoemakers were united against the Irishmen. At last, in 1858, the anti-slavery issue asserted its su- premacy. Even then Quincy, reflecting its unassim- ilated constituency, came but slowly back to its moor- ings. The foreign, as distinguished from the local element, still preponderated, though they could not act together. Accordingly, in the great Lincoln campaign of 1860, when the Republican ticket re- ceived a majority of forty-four thousand in the State, in Quincy it had only a plurality. Again in 1862, the year of deepest discouragement during the war, Quincy was one of those towns in which Governor Andrew fell behind, his Whig and Democratic op- ponent receiving eighty-four more votes than he. Yet in the State Andrew had over twenty-eight thousand majority. This did not happen again, and in the cru- cial election of 1864 Quincy at last squarely ranged itself on the loyal side, the Lincoln ticket receiving a majority of two hundred and thirty-four in a total vote of less than a thousand. Indeed, all the other elements were then united against the foreign vote and that large faction, composed of the croakers, the fault-finding and the otherwise-minded, which never fails to make its presence felt under the wearisome pressure of war.

First and last Quincy did its full share in the work of educating New England and the North up to the point of facing and overcoming the Rebellion. It also was not wanting later. Yet, as in the war of independence so now, the largest contribution of the town was neither in men nor in money, though as re- spects both the calls were honored. As John Adams was the great contribution of Braintree North Pre- cinct to the Revolution, so his grandson, Charles Francis Adams, was the great contribution of Quincy in the Rebellion. When the war broke out Mr. Adams represented the Quincy district in Congress. He had been elected in 1858, on the final subsidence of the Native American flood, and in 1860 he was

re-elected on the Lincoln ticket.1 In March, 1861, his first Congressional term was just completed. He was then nominated by Mr. Lincoln as minister to Great Britain. In May he left the country, and he remained abroad until the summer of 1868. His ser- vices in London are part of the Quincy war record, but they do not belong to local history.

In other respects the record of Quincy in the Re- bellion was in no way remarkable. The town did its share. It freely contributed money and supplies, and it sent out men. But of the men it sent out, whether to the army or the navy, there were none who rose to distinction. At the close of the Rebellion as before it, Deacon Joseph Palmer, the Revolutionary brigadier-general, was still Quincy's ranking officer.2 During the war, that is, between the years 1861 and 1865, the population of the town was about 6750, while its valuation was returned at a little less than four millions of dollars. It could number probably 2200 men capable of bearing arms. First and last it sent into the field almost one entire regiment, or 954 men, 757 of whom enlisted for the full term of three years. Of the whole number, 39 were killed in battle and 18 died in rebel prisons. In all 105, or one in every nine who went out, lost their lives. Still others were maimed. But a Quincy lad, a member of one of the families the name of which is most often found in the more recent records of the town, fell in the very first action of the war. On the 10th of June, 1861, occurred the affair at Big Bethel, Va., and young Theodore Winthrop was killed. For days after the country rang with his name ; nor is it yet forgotten. At the same time Francis L. Souther, of Quincy, was mortally wounded. A mere boy, he was a member of the Hancock Light Guard, as the Quincy company was called, and had gone with it when the Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts militia was rushed off to Fortress Monroe. His companions presently sent his body home, and it was buried in his native town. Afterwards many others were killed or died, and war's mortality became a thing of course. But it was the sudden tidings of young Souther's death, coming in

1 In neither of these elections did Mr. Adams receive a ma- jority vote in Quincy. In both he received more votes than any one else on the ticket with him, but while in the election of 1858 he had a plurality of fifty-nine votes, in that of 1860 his opponent, Leverett Saltonstall, had seventeen votes more than he, 465 to 448, with 7 scattering.

2 The highest commission issued to a Quincy man in the Re- bellion was that of colonel. There were three colonels, Packard, Walker, and Adams, the two former of infantry and the last of cavalry. The service of Col. Adams was the longest, covering three years and a half. At the close of the war he was among the large number who received the brevet of brigadier-general.

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those early days of June, 1861, which first caused the | appropriation for necessary town expenses was $4500. people of Quincy to realize that their young men had gone out to actual battle.

It has been seen how this sum was voted by a small body of men, all knowing each other well, having a community of interest, and acting under a usage which had the force of law. Forty-five years later, in 1876, the annual appropriation was $116,000, and the articles in the warrant had swollen from half a dozen in number to nearly forty. The char- acter of the town-meeting also had changed. In place of the few score rustics following the accustomed lead of the parson and squire, and asserting them- selves only when they thought that their traditions or equality were ignored,-in place of this small, easily- managed body, there was met a heterogeneous mass heavy expenditure followed the Rebellion rather | of men numbering hundreds, jealous, unacquainted,

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History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 78

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