USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 12
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Land grants were in high favor. Northfield lost in one direction and gained in another. It suffered no serious loss by the creation of Arlington and it stood in excellent chance of eventually acquiring the grant to William Hack of Taunton, who was given one hundred and fifty acres near Millers river on account of his great losses in an expedi- tion against Canada in 1690. A tract of two hundred acres, lying south of the highest mountain in the region, which some time gained the name of Mount Grace, was given to Joseph Severance of Deer- field and three hundred acres on Swift river, off to the east, was passed to Nathaniel Alexander of Northfield. South of the Northfield boundary, three hundred acres went to Joseph Clesson of Deerfield, son of the companion of Cornelius Merry in a memorable scorn of Irishmen in Northampton. Three Northfield patriots, Benoni Moore, Joseph Petty and Robert Cooper, persuaded the General Court to give them two hundred acres each on Millers river, a dozen miles up from its mouth. The town of Pembroke, in the Plymouth country, was awarded five hundred acres, just below Northfield, to enable it to keep and maintain a grammar school, this tract being sold promptly to Reuben and Noah Morgan, with the practical certainty it would fall within Northfield bounds. In the same region and bordering on the town, John Quincy of Boston was presented with one hundred and eighty-five acres.
CHAPTER XV HOLDING DIFFICULT GROUND
Only a Brave Captain Prevents Desertion
THE INDIANS BEST KNOWN to Northfield people were the Scati- cooks, a tribe that had lingered in the region and shown a friendly feeling, at least to the extent of being ready to trade and barter. News came in the early spring that Gray Lock had enticed even these away. From this time there was no reliance placed upon Indian help, at any price. The latest defection only made clearer the need of full pro- tection and Captain Kellogg's company in the town was steadily kept at 45 men or more.
Under such seemingly sufficient guard the meadows were planted in the spring of 1724. Colonel Partridge learned in mid-June that Gray Lock had started for the valley with a small company and thirty Obenakis had also set out upon raids. The sly old chieftain took account of Northfield's garrison and paid Fort Dummer due respect by avoiding both. He passed them by and fell upon the haymakers down at Hatfield where, on June 18, he killed one man, took two cap- tive and slaughtered the oxen. A scouting party of 17 started up the valley after him but, as the story of scouting usually ran, they found only "signs."
Even while they were scanning the woods, up the valley, Gray Lock's scattering strokes fell upon one after another of the lower towns, and settlers were picked off at Northampton, Deerfield and Westfield. Late in June, Kellogg's scouts found signs of a party of Indians, guessed to be as many as forty, as near to Northfield as the Ashuelot valley, but made sure they had gone off towards Monad- nock.
Connecticut had thus far kept aloof from the continuing conflict. It was for New Hampshire and Massachusetts to look out for them- selves, as they were doing actively. Governor Dummer's direct appeal to Governor Saltonstall finally met with a response, taking form in
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a company of seventy-five men under Captain Goodrich and another, made up of thirty white men and forty-two Mohegan Indians, under Captain Walter Butler. These were billeted on Northfield, leastwise the English soldiers, the Indians being sent further on to scout. The red men would have found poor welcome in the town.
So sheltered, largely through the unceasing demands of Captain Kellogg, the summer passed in peace and under armed protection the ample meadow crops were harvested. How long the town would have to go on in its peaceful pursuits under an armed force, the sub- sistence of which was a heavy burden, was of all things the most uncertain. It was irksome at best and the rumbling of discontent was constant, its outbreak and the giving up of the effort to hold the place being held down by Kellogg's unflagging efforts.
In August news came of the success of the eastern troops in breaking up the Kennebec stronghold of the enemy in a battle in which Sebastian Râle, chief instigator of the whole malicious busi- ness, met his death. In all reason, this effective event should have ended the matter ; but Vaudreuil did not so treat it, as was revealed by his efforts to ally the western Indians, those of the Hudson valley, along with the St. Francis tribe, and his continued backing of Gray Lock, who kept up his colony at the top of Lake Champlain.
Northfield went into the winter, an armed camp. With the rest, there was a company of twenty-four snowshoe men, the General Court having allowed ten shillings each to them for snowshoes and moccasins. The forts were kept fully manned and the snowshoe scout- ing parties were constantly in action.
To Captain Benjamin Wright this perpetual defensiveness was a weak performance. There would be no end to it until the hornets' nest on Champlain was broken up. In January, 1725, he proposed an expedition to destroy Gray Lock utterly. He met another of the recurring discouragements from the government. A scouting party did, however, set out from the lower towns in the early spring and was gone a month, the only notable result being that on the return one of the canoes which tried to run the rapids at French King was upset and six of the men drowned. Captain Wright kept up his demands and in mid-summer at Governor Dummer's request, he raised a company. He started up the river late in July with fifty-nine men.
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Wright and his men disappeared into the woods for weeks. He arrived home September 2 and displayed his journal of each day's events. It told of hardships, of long marches, of struggles with the forces of nature, of difficulties and sufferings, and with no nearer approach to Indian encounter than when they saw three Indians, whom they mistook for friends, and allowed to escape, the only fea- ture that seemed to make any impression upon the government at Boston.
"It is certain the Indians are near our borders and about to fall upon our towns and will do great damage by burning barns." So said Colonel Partridge in his report to the General Court. It was never his fault if that governing body at Boston lapsed into calm about the valley situation. The barns had particular value now that the harvest had been gathered, mostly without disturbance. The General Court responded with an order to dispatch a company of forty or fifty men to scout the borders for a week or ten days.
Old Gray Lock knew as much of Captain Wright's long tour into the woods as appeared in that commander's journal and reckoned on the towns being weakened by the absence of so many men as went with him. It was his opportunity to work his sniping craft and here and there in the valley his tactics were displayed in the picking off of a detached harvester or two or, it might be, killing a mare and her colt, a master stroke that occurred just below Northfield the preceding August, within the sight of four men who shot at the Indians and had the rare fortune to wound one of them.
Governor Dummer sent an appreciative message to Captain Wright in September, having been moved by Colonel Stoddard's recommendation that he and his men be kept under pay, a rare stroke of humor, inasmuch as they had thus far been kept quite outside of pay. He sent three hundred pounds for their recompense, which about half-way discharged the debt to them. He expressed his appre- ciation of the scout leader by saying he had good opinion of his courage and displayed his memory of events by adding that the new commission was "in way to retrieve your former error in letting those three Indians escape."
Captain Wright thus had cause for the moment to regret that he had kept such a minute record of his prior expedition. He set about getting a new troop enlisted, fifteen from Kellogg's defenders of the
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town, ten from Fort Dummer, and was at Northampton for other recruits, when news came of a scouting sally from the fort, the six men coming upon a party of Indians and shooting two of them, in return having two of their party killed and three taken captive, leaving a single one to get back to the fort with the story. Again some Indians had been seen in the corn near Deerfield. It did not seem to the down-valley people that it was necessary to set out on long tours of search for enemies, the Indians being amply evident in the immediate neighborhood; and they declined to enlist. He had to start on his expedition with a scout company of poorly equipped and reluctant men. This time he kept no journal and, for all he ever told, there would have been no thrilling events to record, not even Indians seen and mistakenly spared.
The war, if such term can be applied to the scattering murders by Gray Lock, and the tireless scouting, fruitful only of "signs" of Indians who were ever somewhere else, was coming to a wearisome end. Vaudreuil died October 25, 1725, and Father LaChasse, Râle's old partner, was left standing alone against efforts at peace. His persuasion fell upon the deaf ears of Indians who had found that there was no gain for them in the business, and a treaty of peace with the Eastern tribes was concluded at Boston, December 15.
Gray Lock was deficient in recognition of treaties and in the fol- lowing months gathered an army to keep up his marauding. The military force at Fort Dummer, which this last survivor of Indian command did not know was being kept up with great difficulty, according to Stoddard's reports, and the resolute defensive of Captain Kellogg, kept him in restraint and, for all that appeared, he never set his army in motion.
Peace came thus to a wearied valley people. Its proclamation was informal and negative- simply a cessation of the personal assaults and the disappearance of "signs." Captain Kellogg was relieved at Northfield and sent to the command of Fort Dummer. Northfield had for the few years been naught else than a military post. It had been overpopulated with armed men. It had borne the heavy burden of standing at the farthest front of New England's western advance. Its own people, in moments of warranted discouragement, would have followed the example of the settlers of the sixteen-eighties and given up the effort to maintain a town. To Captain Joseph Kellogg falls
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the credit of preventing an end to the third settlement as ignominious as the desertion of the region terminating the second settlement.
When Captain Joseph Kellogg left Northfield, in 1740, to succeed Captain Dwight in command of Fort Dummer, the town parted with the man to whom it owed, as to no other, its preservation during the strain and stress of its recent years. He was now in his fiftieth year, too young to remember the dreary, wasting years of the second settle- ment. It took an old hero like Captain Benjamin Wright, who had known all three settlements, to picture the contrast and tell his fellow townsmen how great was their debt to the departing commander. This veteran was of even age with Kellogg's father and in full mem- ory of Kellogg's grandfather, the first Joseph, who had been brought by Martin, the immigrant head of the family, from Essex in Old England, and who was an officer of Turner's company in the Falls fight.
Moreover, the aged captain and the younger one conformed to fashion in being related, even though somewhat indirectly. Captain Wright's mother, in the triple wedding of 1684, had married Nathan- iel Dickinson, brother of that Joseph, who was the messenger sent by the first settlers to Hadley for relief and never returning nearer than to Beers Plain. Nathaniel had a brother John, and Captain Kellogg's mother was a daughter of John Dickinson. The exact relationship of the two captains was never clearly stated; it was enough that they were kin.
The boy, as Captain Wright was entitled to call him as he told the story of Kellogg's life, was one of the Deerfield captives of 1704, when he was a dozen years old, of the six children of Martin Kellogg to be victims of that fearful raid. The youngest boy was killed outright and the others carried off. They were in Canada ten years and Joanna was still there, the wife of an Indian chief. Rebecca had married an Ashley, over in Westfield, and was now turning her Canadian educa- tion in Indian ways and speech to account as an interpreter at the Indian school in Stockbridge. The oldest, Martin, a half-brother, who was also a captain, had settled in Suffield, as had Anna, who had married Joseph Severance.
Joseph Kellogg shared Captain Wright's unyielding enmity towards the Indians, only somewhat less violently, and was all the more useful commander because he knew all the Indian ways and
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their language, an outfit that would turn to good account in dealing with them at the trading station at Dummer.
The important fact was that he had saved Northfield. He had guarded it for years, trained its young men at arms, persistently demanded that the defences and garrison be kept up and spread his own resolute spirit among its troubled people. But for him, the dreary story of the second settlement's decline and end would have been repeated in the dismal wasting away of the third.
Captain Kellogg, from 1740, was the general interpreter for the frontier towns. When he was sixty-five years old, he yielded to the call of Governor Shirley to go with him on a journey to Oswego, in New York, for conference with the Indians, died on the expedition and was buried at Schenectady. His wife was Rachel Devotion of Suffield, and they had five children-Jonathan, born 1721 ; Rachel, 1724; Joanna (named for the aunt, the Indian chieftain's wife), 1727; Rebecca, 1729; Martin, 1734.
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CHAPTER XVI RELIGION A NEW BATTLEGROUND
Parson Doolittle Resists Jonathan Edwards' Leading
PHYSICAL PEACE, WHICH NOW FOR A FEW YEARS prevailed in the Connecticut Valley, furnished the opportunity for another sort of warfare-religious controversy. It was precipitated by the leadership of the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, first rocked the church and commu- nity of Northampton, presently disturbed every related town and had schismatic consequences throughout New England. Northfield had close kinship to Northampton and it had a population of warriors, as piously ready for such a conflict as they had proved bravely ready for defence of their homes.
For many years Northampton had been under the noble minis- tration of Rev. Solomon Stoddard, whose doctrinal tendencies were distinctly liberal. He had gone so far as to develop and put into effect the idea that church communion, instead of being reserved to those fully accepted through their faith, should be the starting point of religious experience. Now in his advanced age, the Northampton people, who were as loyal to him as he was devoted to them, decided to provide an associate pastor and sought the services of his grand- son, who was then a tutor in Yale college.
Edwards was born at South Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703, but had become well known to the Northampton people. He became Mr. Stoddard's colleague in August of 1726 and, upon the aged minister's death in 1729, was chosen his successor. Scholarly, philosophical, as vigorous in speech as he was learned, the young minister promptly set about to overcome the liberal tendencies resulting from his grand- father's preaching. In 1731, in a series of lectures in Boston he made his first public attack upon Arminianism, the opprobrious term under which various departures from Calvinism were grouped. Two years later he led a religious revival in Northampton, which reached such intensity as to absorb the people's attention, divide them into conflict-
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ing camps and threaten not only the peace but the business of the town.
Within six months, three hundred members were admitted to the church but by the next year a reaction set in, which, however, only incited Edwards to greater effort. In 1739 and the following year occurred "The Great Awakening," carrying forward the revival to greater achievements. Edwards' efforts met with the disfavor both of the cautious Orthodox and of the liberal ministers of the province's churches. The General Conference of Congregational Churches in the Province of Massachusetts protested against "disorders in prac- tice which have of late obtained in various parts of the land," a rebuke aimed at Edwards and at that "part of the land" which was within the bounds of the Connecticut valley.
Northfield was almost instantly thrown into the controversy. Rev. Benjamin Doolittle had served the people to their deep satisfaction for seventeen years but now his doctrinal views came under closer observation. He was found to be tainted with the doctrines of the Dutch reformer, Arminius, whose life (1560 to 1609) had been dis- tinguished by dissent from the dogmas of John Calvin. He asserted that the divine decree relative to persons saved or condemned depends upon the acts of the persons themselves; that the providence of God is exercised in harmony with the nature of the creatures governed ; that man is by original nature free, able to will and perform the right ; that divine grace originates, maintains and perfects all the good in man ; that every believer may be assured of his own salvation; and that it is possible for a regenerate man to live without sin.
How far such views were at variance with the dogmas of the Northampton preacher was displayed in Edwards' sermons on "The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners" and that on "Hell Fire," preached in Enfield in 1741, which pictured "sinners in the hands of an angry God." The Congregational churches of New England were split asunder by the issues Edwards had raised, the Northfield church with the rest and all the more violently because of the kinship of its people with the town where he proclaimed his philosophy.
The venerable Captain Benjamin Wright was in the array against the liberal minister. His relative, Deacon Eleazer, formulated the statement upon which the removal of Mr. Doolittle was sought. Deacon Eleazer Mattoon, who had been the prime mover in bringing
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the minister to Northfield, was now against him and became so dis- turbed by the loyalty of the people to him that he left town to spend the rest of his days in Hadley.
With these were arrayed in opposition the other Wrights and Mattoons, Jonathan Janes, Joseph Stebbins, Eleazer Holton, Samuel Smith, Nathaniel Dickinson and Daniel Shattuck. Families aligned with or against the minister, although the Holtons divided, William differing from Eleazer. With Mr. Doolittle were the Alexanders, Fields, Strattons, Beldings, Hunts, Evenses, Pettys and Beamans.
Other issues than doctrinal were thrown into the controversy. Leftenant Wright's enumeration of the reasons for the removal of the minister included the fall of money, the burden of supplying so much wood, an action Mr. Doolittle had taken against the town in court, although he had withdrawn his suit, his refusal to join in a council, his acting as proprietors' clerk for Winchester, the new town over the hills, and his practice of doctoring and chirurgery.
The leftenant was not quite frank in his omission of the chief item of complaint. It was the minister's doctrine or his avoidance of doctrinal themes that was at the heart of the matter. He had, indeed, been in active practice as doctor and chirurgeon and Deacon Wright alleged that he had told the town he would not lay it aside under four hundred pounds a year. None believed, however, that his practice of medicine would have been made a ground for removal if his preach- ing had followed Edwards instead of Arminius ; nor would the supply of wood have seemed excessive if he had not been reserved in his picturing of Hell's fires.
Greater frankness was shown in a document handed Mr. Doolittle, February 26, 1739, the authorship of which was not revealed-joint product as it was of the opposing agitators,-Benjamin Wright and eighteen others. It began with the perfectly safe assertion that he had "a long time been acquainted with the uneasiness we labor under respecting some of the doctrines you have delivered from the pulpit and in private conversation." Upon this issue, the minister's consent to a mutual council was asked, as it could not have been upon issues of depreciated money and wood supply.
Around the question of calling a council of churches, the agitation continued through two or three years. The Hampshire Association, the recognized religious conference of the towns, held a meeting at
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Northfield, May 3, 1739, and heard the story from Captain Wright and his orthodox associates. It recommended the calling of a mutual council but only after the objectors should have held a "calm con- versation" with the minister, along with careful attendance upon his ministry for the space of half a year. It might as well have condi- tioned the calling of a council upon admission by Captain Wright that he and his associates were in the wrong. Calm conversation was out of fashion among the church people. Attending upon Doolittle's preaching for six months was inconceivable.
There was one resort left. If the Association could offer nothing better than a conversational remedy, the county court might apply a legal one. It was given the chance at its session in Springfield in April, 1740, but found the affair was not within its province. It ventured the advice, quite extra-judicially, that the people comply with the Association's recommendations, without making any addi- tions thereto or putting any strained construction thereupon. Which- ever way the warring factions turned they met only recommendations of peace. And there was no peace.
At the close of the Sabbath afternoon sermon on a winter's day, when all the townspeople might have been present and shared in the decision, Mr. Doolittle read a demand that all those who "had any- thing to object against my (his) Principals" should come to him and tell him the very particular article they objected "against," adding, "to see if I can't satisfie them, and if I don't satisfie them, then bring it to the church, or else to hold your peace forever hereafter."
This demand for conversation, with evident confidence on the minister's part that he could "satisfie" his critics, was put to vote by the congregation and it was voted in the affirmative. It was settled that the majority were with the revered minister. Whatever conversa- tion followed was between the townsmen, unsanctified and not alto- gether in terms that would have been used in the minister's presence.
At Northampton the contest ran on for some years longer but came to its end in 1748, when a candidate for admission to the Northampton church refused Mr. Edwards' tests and was backed by the church, with the result that Mr. Edwards went to Stockbridge, beyond the Hampshire hills, and devoted himself to instructing the less resistant Indians and to writing his philosophical masterpieces.
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Somewhat more of a town, taking on the features of the long settled communities, and somewhat less the exposed outpost, North- field approached the middle of the eighteenth century. It had a school, but not until it had been cited before the county court for not having one. It had its first paupers, but with town support only until they should be able to leave. It had its first representative in the General Court, but the only thing he undertook to do for the town, the extension of its border to Millers River on the south and to the new Arlington line on the northeast, was "passed in the negative."
No Massachusetts town could avoid provision for the education of its children. The provincial law requiring it was enacted in 1640, the corner stone of the American free school, having its pious purpose in making possible the reading of the Bible and its impulse as an object of support by taxation in the contact the Pilgrims had made with the Dutch in their first step out of England. Northfield was but hastened to it by the action of the court, acted promptly, drew on the province bills of credit for its support, chose Seth Field as the first teacher and planted the school house in the street against Samuel Hunt's home lot, thus further encumbering the band of land which was in way of becoming everything else than a street. Seth was just out of Yale College, being graduated in 1732, was twenty years old, the oldest son of Captain Zechariah and that Sarah Mattoon who had been a cap- tive in Canada, taken there from Deerfield at the time of the massacre. He had been the special object of Parson Doolittle's interest and preparatory instruction.
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