History of Worcester County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I, Part 208

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton)
Publication date: 1889
Publisher: Philadelphia : J.W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1576

USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > History of Worcester County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I > Part 208

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they could wish, and as to William Crawford, it ap- peared to the committee that he was wholly unfriendly and inclined rather to take up arms for the King. Mr. Morse came before the town to answer for himself. He had prayed with much fervor in his pulpit for the King and royal family, and this was well known be- fore to all the town. He now, in open town-meeting, declared himself a loyalist and reproved his fellow- townsmen for disloyalty. The town thereupon di- rected the committee to take away the arms, ammu- nition and warlike implements of both Mr. Morse and Crawford, and voted that said Morse do not pass over the lines of the Second Parish on any occasion whatever without a permit, and that said Crawford remain within the bounds of his own land except on Sabbath-days, and then not go out of his parish without a permit. There is nothing in the town records, nor has anything come down to our time by tradition to indicate that any other inhabitants of Shrewsbury were ever " suspected of Toryism," and it was doubtless due to Rev. Ebenezer Morse, of the Sec- ond Parish, who was a strong man and had previously possessed the entire confidence of his people, that there was any opposition in any part of the town to the prevailing spirit of resistance to the British Crown.

In the time of the Revolution, regiments in Massa- chusetts were territorial-so many towns to a regi- ment. The county of Worcester was divided into seven regiments, and Shrewsbury, Grafton, North- borough, Westborough and Southborough were the Sixth Worcester Regiment, Jonathan Ward, of South- borough, colonel. Artemas Ward, of Shrewsbury, formerly colonel of this regiment, was elected by the first Provincial Congress, of which he was a member, with two others, to organize and command the mili- tia, and the next Congress issued to him a commission as commander-in-chief of all the forces of Massachu- setts and the other colonies, and shortly afterwards he was appointed by the Continental Congress major- general and commander-in-chief. Meantime the war had begun, and Captain Job Cushing, of Shrewsbury, had marched with his company to Lexington. About ten o'clock in the forenoon of April 19, 1775, passed like a flash through Shrewsbury a white horse, bloody with spurring and dripping with sweat, bearing a post-rider shouting as he rode : " To arms! to arms ! the war has begun! " I have often heard my grand- father, Nathan Howe, the younger of that name, tell the story. He was then a boy fourteen years old, at work in the field with his father plowing, the team being a pair of oxen and a horse. His father, Ensign Howe, of the last war, now lieutenant of Captain Cushing's company, immediately detached from the team and mounted his horse and set off to rally the company.

There was hurrying to and fro and mounting in hot haste. The younger Nathan wanted dreadfully to go, too, and cried because his father would not let him.

Of course the company, like many others as remote, did not arrive in time to take part in the fight. 1m- mediately after the Lexington alarm the principal occupation of able-bodied men in the province of Massachusetts Bay was organizing and drilling, and before the battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775, a large body of troops was at Cambridge, under com- mand of General Artemas Ward, of Shrewsbury. Captain Ezra Beaman and Captain Job Cushing, with three companies from Shrewsbury, were both there.

Who commanded at Bunker Hill ? There was General Artemas Ward over at Cambridge, comman- der-in-chief-such was his sonorous title-but this was before his commission by the Continental Con- gress, and all his authority was subordinate to that of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, nine in num- ber, who occupied the same headquarters with him,1 and " planned the battle." And there was Putnam, and Prescott, and Warren, and Pomeroy and Stark, each fighting the British on his own hook, and with very little regard to what others were doing. Plainly there was nobody in command-in the sense of giving direction to the battle as a whole-that is, to compare small things with large, as Meade and Lee commanded their respective forces at Gettysburg. If only there had been somebody in command-some competent body-who had ordered over from Cambridge Cap- tain Beaman and Captain Cushing, with their com- panies, and put them where they could do the most good, the author of this history might have had some- thing to say about the men of Shrewsbury at Bunker Hill. The reason why re-enforcements were not sent over from Cambridge is not far to seek. The Com- mittee of Safety made a mistake in supposing the at- tack of the British at Charlestown was a mere feint, and held fast where they were, expecting that the real attack would be directly made at Cambridge. In his " History of Shrewsbury " Mr. Andrew H. Ward -evidently in defence of his ancestor from criticism -gives a prolix and not very satisfactory explanation, of which the substance seems to be that General Ward's order-book shows that Colonel Jonathan Ward, with his regiment, was sent over by way of Lechmere's Point to Charlestown during the battle. For some reason it never reached its destination. Captain Aaron Smith, of Shrewsbury, whom we met in the last war returning home sick from Crown Point, whom also we shall shortly meet again, and who, on the 17th of June, 1775, was a private in Cap- tain Cushing's company, and ran away without orders from Cambridge over to Charlestown, and alone, of all the Shrewsbury men, actually fought at Bunker Hill, fighting on his own hook, as every body else did, is given as authority for the statement that Colonel Ward, on his march, was met and halted by Dr. Ben- jamin Church, a member of the Committee of Safety, who afterwards turned out to be a traitor.

1 The house in our times known as the birth-place of the poet Holmes.

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HISTORY OF WORCESTER COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

General Washington arrived at Cambridge July 2, 1775, having been promoted over General Ward, and took command of the American army-abont twenty thousand men. General Ward continued in the ser- vice as a subaltern under Washington till the evacua- tion of Boston by the British, May 17, 1776, when he resigned. The position of the British in Boston had become untenable by Washington's occupation of Dorchester Heights. Here Nathan Howe, of Shrews- bury, commanding a company, performed a service of great value, of great hardship also, working nights and in the cold rains of the spring months of 1776, throwing up fortifications on the heights, and con- tracted a severe cold that gradually developed into pulmonary disease and finally resulted in his death. In the latter part of the year 1777 he came home to die, but directly sent his son and namesake, then sixteen years old, to serve as a private in his regimeut.

The cause of General Artemas Ward's resignation was a painful disorder,1 which rendered all active exercise, particularly horseback-riding, an excruciating torture. At the request of Washington, who, after the evacua- tion of Boston by the British, went with the greater part of the ariny to New York, General Ward remained in command of the Eastern Department till December 31, 1777, when his resignation was accepted by Congress. Notwithstanding the superhuman pinnacle now occu- pied by Washington in public esteem, certain it is that in his life-time he was quite human and not at all reticent in his correspondence of unworthy reflec- tions upon the personal courage of the officer over whom, for reasons of public policy, he had been pro- moted, and between whom and himself he was obvi- ously conscious of popular comparison. Some time afterwards, when Washington was President and Ward was a member of Congress, then sitting in New York, the latter having obtained one of Washington's letters containing offensive allusions to him, proceeded to the President's house and asked him if he was the author of the letter. Washington looked at it for some time without making any reply. While he was still looking at it, Ward impatiently said, " I should think the man that was base enough to write that would be base enough to deny it," and abruptly turn- ing on his heel, left the house.2

Job Cushing, of Shrewsbury, was promoted from rank to rank in the Sixth Regiment till he became its colonel. This regiment was from time to time re- cruited partly from the towns where it was originally formed and partly elsewhere. I think most of the Shrewsbury soldiers served in this regiment. After

the success of Burgoyne at Ticonderoga public alarm was at the highest pitch, and Colonel Cushing went with his regiment to reinforce General Schuyler and took part in the battles of Bennington, August 16th, and Saratoga, October 16, 1777, when Burgoyne sur- rendered to General Gates, who had superseded Gen- eral Schuyler in command. Ezra Beaman, of Shrews- bury, was also present at Burgoyne's surrender (but in what rank I am unable to say), and probably also at Bennington. Colonel Job Cushing, of Shrews- bury, and his regiment were a part of the body of troops that General Benedict Arnold undertook to betray to Sir Henry Clinton at West Point. The materials for giving details of the service of Shrews- bury men in the Revolutionary War are as meagre as for the French Wars. Before the Government gave pensions, besides the many who had died or been killed in the service, many more had doubtless died in the course of nature. A list of pensioners, pre- pared by Nathan Howe, who for many years acted as agent for his comrades in the army in obtaining pen- sions, contains exactly forty names. Of course, it is a mere remnant of the whole number who were in the Continental service from Shrewsbury.

In the time of President Madison, when occurred the War of 1812, a large majority of the people of Shrewsbury were of the Federal party, and wholly disapproved of the war, and I cannot find that the town or any citizen thereof in any manner partici- pated therein.

And the Mexican War was generally considered morally wrong by the people of the town, always very radical in their opposition to slavery. Not a single citizen of Shrewsbury volunteered to go to Mexico, and I think the views of Mr. Hasea Biglow as to the Mexican War and its recruiting service, then newly printed for him in the Boston Courier, were exactly coincident with those of the whole town.

CHAPTER CVI.

SHREWSBURY-(Continued.)

SHOWING THE PART WHICH SHREWSBURY TOOK IN THE SHAYS' REBELLION.

DANIEL SHAYS had a strong following in Shrews- bury-in numbers. The regulators, as the Shays' men were called, controlled the action of the town with ir- resistible majorities ; but its two most eminent citizens, Gen. Artemas Ward and Col. Job Cushing, were con- spicuous by pronounced opposition, and had entered on the town-records, where one may read it to day, their protest against the insurrectionary proceedings of the town adopted at a town-meeting in 1786. Wisdom may have been with the minority, but the men who took up arms with Shays were not unprincipled and aban-

1 Gravel.

2 This story, having been preserved only by tradition, and having passed for now for generations of men from one to another, has come to have slightly differing versions. The one above given is taken from " Remi- Discences of Rev. George Allen, by F. P. Rice, 1883." Another, differing in some details, may be seen in "Drake's Historic Mansions and Fields of Middlesex," page 260.

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doned wretches of the criminal class, and it was not for nothing that they took up arms. Shays himself, as well as Ward aud Cushing, was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, and so also were every one of his captains, so far as I have been able to ascertain. Adam Wheeler, of Hubbardston, who in Shays' absence acted in this county as commander of the regulators, was a captain of the Continental Line and deacon of the Congregational Church in Hubbardston. He was born in Shrewsbury and was the great-great-grandson of the famous Captain Thomas Wheeler, of the Indian fight at Brookfield in 1675, and the great-grandson of Thomas Wheeler, the younger, also a hero of the same fight, who, himself severely wounded there, rescued his more severely wounded father from the Indians, who were about to dispatch him, threw him upon the horse of the slain Shadrach Hapgood, and with his father escaped by flight. Captain Wheeler, of the Shays' Rebellion, was also on his mother's side a great- grandson of the slain Shadrach, four of whose de- scendants settled in Shrewsbury.1

The leader of the Shrewsbury regulators was a brother-in-law of Wheeler, having married his sister, and a veteran whom we first met as a boy serving his apprenticeship as a soldier in the French War, and who fought for the independence of his country from Lexington to Yorktown-Captain Aaron Smith, and the company which he raised for Shays in Shrews- bury were his former companions-in-arms. They were the identical men who rallied to Lexington and Bunker Hill, Bennington and Saratoga. Their pur- pose was not to overthrow the government, but merely to restrain the courts temporarily from entering up judgments and issuing executions. The people of Shrewsbury were very poor. They had spent their little all for country. Acting under the advice of Governor Bowdoin and influenced by speculating Bos- ton lobbyists, the General Conrt had laid an enormous tax with a view to pay off the public debt. Most of the public creditors were holders of State securities or soldiers' certificates purchased at less than twelve per cent. of their face value. Claims against the bank- rupt citizens of the town were in the hands of lawyers and deputy-sheriffs, who held them under contracts for large percentages if collected. In the year 1784 and 1785 abont four thousand suits were entered in the courts at Worcester. Lawyers' offices were thronged with suitors, and the neighborhood of them presented the appearance of a public fair. Real and personal property was sold on execution at ruinous prices, nobody having money to bny with at sales. And the jails were crowded with debtors. Only twelve years before exactly the same thing had been done at Worcester-with universal approval-which the regn- lators now attempted. In 1774 about five thousand men, mostly armed, had assembled at Worcester to prevent and did prevent the sitting of the courts, and

no courts were held for two years. This then recent precedent suggested to the distressed people of Shrews- bury the means of relief from their distresses.

The first demonstration of the insurgents at Wor- cester, in September, was successful in preventing the sitting of the courts. It was upon this occasion that General Artemas Ward, of Shrewsbury, then chief justice of both the Courts of Sessions and Com- mon Pleas, performed the act which will go to pos- terity as the crowning act of his life. Wheeler's company, which had marched into Worcester on Monday afternoon, September 4, 1786, the day before the courts were to sit, took up quarters in the court- house Monday night, so as to be sure to be in possession when the judges should arrive next morning. Smith's company marched in from Shrewsbury early Tuesday morning, and was deployed and posted as sentries on Court Hill and around the court-house. An im- mense crowd of people had assembled thereabouts. Approaching the court-house, the judges were chal- lenged by an armed sentry at the foot of Court Hill. At the order of his old commander, now chief jus- tice, the sentry recovered his musket, presented arms, and the judges proceeded past him to the court- honse. There, npon the broad step at the south en- trance, stood Captain Wheeler and Captain Smith, with drawn swords in their hands, and five soldiers with fixed bayonets. Right well did Artemas Ward know the men he had to deal with. Smith was his near neighbor, and lived on the opposite side to him of the Great Road through Shrewsbury. Wheeler, who was abont Ward's age (nearly sixty years), had been his schoolmate in youth, and had formerly been a member of the same church. In his younger days, as a militia captain, Ward had drilled, in left foot and shoulder arms on Shrewsbury Common, the very men now in array against him. Smith and Wheeler had both served under Ward at Cambridge and at the siege of Boston, and long after his retirement as major-general he knew that they had, in humbler rank, endured the hardships of the Revolutionary War like good soldiers to its very close, and had been paid off in Continental paper. And he knew, too, that they were both poor, deeply involved in debt and harassed with suits.

Proceeding to mount the court-house steps, the further progress of the judges was, by order of Cap- tain Wheeler, arrested by the soldiers, who brought their bayonets to bear directly on the chief justice's breast, so that their points even penetrated his clothes. After a parley, the officers consented to al- low him to mount the steps and address the crowd. Though Artemas Ward, of Shrewsbury, had been much in public life, he was a man nsually of slow and hesitating speech, had rarely taken part in de- bates and had never been accounted an orator. He was a graduate of Harvard College, but, though a judge, he was not a lawyer by profe-sion. As soon as he had looked his audience in the face there

1 See page 785.

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HISTORY OF WORCESTER COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

seems to have come over him a sort of inspiration, and, with great fluency, fervor and eloquence, he forthwith proceeded to reason with the people, whose grievances he did not deny upon their mistaken method of relief. The newspaper man was not there to report, nor had the speaker in his pocket an extem- poraneous manuscript to privately send to the press, and only by tradition has any word of what he said survived the more than hundred years since the event ; but more than anything he did say or could say-more than anything the greatest of orators could have said-was the dauntless courage and dig- nity of his conduct as a magistrate,1 of which to find a historical parallel you will have to make a far research-reminding one of Horace's " Just and deter- mined man, unshaken in his firmness either by wrath of citizens commanding wrongful things or by ty- rant's frown or raging seas or thunder-holt of Jove, whom the ruins of a crumbling world would strike undismayed."-Carmina, III. 3. But Captain Wheel- er was as unshaken as his old commander, and con- tinued firm in his determination that the judges should not enter the court-house, and they did not. At the conclusion of the chief justice's speech, which had been interrupted by cries "Adjourn without day," the judges retired to the United States Arms, opened court there and adjourned.

In the last week of November following, Shrews- bury became the rendezvous of all the insurrection- ary forces.

Rub a dub dub, Rub a dub dub, The sojers are coming to town.

And what with the drumming and fifing, marching and countermarching, tented fields and the ear-split- ting fife of morning reveille breaking slumber, you would have thought it a garrison town. Col. Cush- ing, chairman of the selectmen, had prudently re- moved the town's stock of gunpowder from the pow- der-house and concealed it. The regulators sur- rounded and searched his house, but found neither powder nor selectman. The purpose of this as- sembling of the Shays' men was to prevent the sit- ting of the courts at Worcester on the first Monday of December, and both courts were adjourned to Janu- ary the 23d. The crisis and climax of the rebellion was a week of unprecedented snow-storms; without blankets, rations, quarters or money, in the public highways of Worcester, in the dead of winter, with the snow three feet deep under foot and more falling, what could the Shays' men do but disperse ? It was the weather and the elements that put down the Shays' Rebellion, and not the distracted and ineffi- cient Gov. Bowdoin and his militia, who, before the dispersement of his followers at Worcester, had

shown their heels to Daniel Shays every time they caught so much as a glimpse of him.

The Governor crowed lustily over his victory, ar- rested great numbers of the rebels and had fourteen of them convicted of treason and sentenced to death. But the Shays men shortly had their in- nings-at the spring election of 1787, when Gov. Bowdoin and his party were overwhelmingly de- feated by the popular vote. In the previous year James Bowdoin had received a large majority of the votes of Shrewsbury ; this year his votes in that town bore the exact ratio of one to five to those for John Hancock, who, after taking his seat as Governor, par- doned all his predecessor's convicts.

Aaron Smith, of Shrewsbury, like Shays himself, and many of the more prominent of the rebels, went into exile in unknown parts-somewhere out of Massachusetts, doubtless-till after passage of the amnesty act, when he returned, and spent the re- mainder of his days (not a few) in Shrewsbury. He died May 9, 1825, aged eighty-nine years, and to his last expiring breath gloried in the part he took with Daniel Shays. Less than a year , before his death he walked to Worcester to meet his old commander, the Marquis Lafayette, who immediately recognized and greeted him with kisses and embraces, bringing tears into the eyes of all who witnessed the fraternal salu- tation. None of the regulators that I ever heard of ever took the attitude of repentant rebels. Within the recollection of the writer a considerable number of them were still living, among the rest his grand- father Howe, who was no more ashamed of his part in the Shays Rebellion than he was of his part in the Revolutionary War, and God forbid that his grandson should offer apologies for him and his com- rades or tell their story otherwise than he told it himself.

· CHAPTER CVII.

SHREWSBURY-(Continued.)

THE SLAVEHOLDERS' REBELLION.

THE news of Sumter taken came to Shrewsbury Saturday, April 12, 1861. Before the people of this town will feel such another shock as this news gave them, generations will come and go. Somehow or other the people of this town, until they heard this news, had never really believed that the slaveholders actually meant war. When, on the morning of the 19th of April, 1775, the post-rider just from Lexing- ton Common, on his foaming steed, dashed through Shrewsbury and rallied her minute-men to arms, it was just what everybody expected,- just what the min- ute-men were for. But when the news of Sumter came to town there were no minute-men listening for rallying cry to arms. Nevertheless, as soon as the

1 McMasters says be cursed and swore, but an examination of the authorities he cites only shows that in his parley with Captain Wheel- er, before he mounted the steps and commenced his speech to the people, tbe judge said he did not care a damn for their bayonets. Hist. People of the U. S., Vol. I., p. 307.

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SHREWSBURY.

news was duly authenticated, the people of Shrews- bury were just as resolved on what to do as their fathers had been eighty-six years before. And such a perfectly unanimous determination as there was ! When one looked in his neighbor's face he saw fight in his eye before he had time to speak. And Shrews- bury, in this respect, probably did not much differ from other towns. But there is an aspect in which this town seems to me quite unique-different from other towns. In all the other towns that I know of, somebody, taking advantage of the war spirit so sud- denly awakened, started round with an enlistment paper to raise a company and be captain of it. Here patriotie spirit was wholly unalloyed with any taint of self-seeking or personal ambition. Plenty of vol- unteers there were already to enlist as soon as they could find out how to do it and meet somebody will- ing to be an offieer and take command of them.

May 2, 1861, was held in Shrewsbury a war-meet- ing, first of many. At this and subsequent meetings held during the four years of the war, money was ap- propriated to pay volunteers for drilling, to pay for uniforms, to support the families of volunteers, to pay bounties, to bring home the bodies of deceased soldiers, to refund money contributed by citizens for bounties, and for like purposes to the amount of about twenty-two thousand dollars. According to the "Record of our Soldiers," kept by the town elerk of Shrewsbury, pursuant to an act of the General Court of 1863 (ch. 65), this town furnished one hundred and forty-seven volunteers. No man was drafted in Shrewsbury during the war, the quotas demanded of the town being filled even before they were demanded, and at the elose of the war it was found that the town had furnished twenty men above its requirement. Tbe one hundred and forty-seven volunteers of Shrewsbury enlisted, a few in this regiment and a few in that, the earliest in the Thirteenth Massachusetts. They and their deeds are eredited to companies raised in other towns and cities, largely to so-called Worces- ter companies, and the services of our soldiers refleet honor on our neighbors of Worcester and other plaees.

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History of Worcester County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. I, Part 208

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton) Publication date: 1889 Publisher: Philadelphia : J.W. Lewis & Co. Number of Pages: 1576

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton)
Publication date: 1889
Publisher: Philadelphia : J.W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1576