USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 18
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Captain Thomas Alexander brought home a story both stirring and sad of the futile expedition to Canada-and he brought it on crutches. Brave old man that he was, a hero in the eyes of the boys of the town who were keen for his tale, he had first to tell of his own misfortune, the broken hip. On his way home from New Jersey, he had slipped on the ice at Peekskill, in York state, and dislocated the hipbone. It was plain to see that he would be somewhat crippled the
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rest of his years. He had done his task for his country-and would the country some day recognize it?
Captain Alexander was from the tough Scotch stock that in the three generations of his family had largely made the town possible. Moreover he was a Wright, his mother, Azubah, being the grand- daughter of a brother of Captain Ben. He was the son of the hero of Louisburg, Captain Ebenezer, under whom he had marched once before to Canada, back in '58, that time against the French. If he had been prone to humor, he could have said that marching to Can- ada was the stock folly of fool strategists; but he had a grim story to tell of the retreat from Quebec, when, in his own words, "the army passed thru unparallelled scenes of danger, hardships and dis- tress." And there was the broken hip. Even so, he could tell the boys about "Gineral Washington," already the great warrior, for he had been with him at Morristown.
While Captain Alexander was still out with his company, another leader, Samuel Merriman, had recruited a company from the north- ern Hampshire towns, fourteen of them from Northfield, and as its captain had gone on an expedition to Ticonderoga in July. This fort was the gathering-point of numerous companies that came up to join in the Canadian expedition. Merriman's company here joined with Alexander's but was not called into action. Another Alexander, given his mother's name, Mighills (transformed into Miles), had gone into the company of Captain Agrippa Wells, mustered at Greenfield, September I, as second lieutenant and with him a Holton, Nathan, son of Captain William.
Enlistment for the war ran on throughout the year, 1776. It took in thirteen of the town's young men, out for two months from Sep- tember, at White Plains, in New York. The Field family furnished three of them-Reuben and Nathan, sons of Pedajah, the horse doc- tor-and Levi, son of Dr. Ebenezer. The familiar names of Root, Billings, Stratton, Janes, Tiffany and Morgan were on the roll. This company, in Colonel Moseley's command, marched to Horse Neck, in Connecticut, then to join Washington's army in New York and was thus in battle at White Plains. Another contingent went in at mid- winter, joining a company that was to go to Danbury.
As the war ran on, boys coming to a possible age for service were accepted on new muster rolls, such as one under Captain Peter Proc-
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tor, out for a month to reinforce "the northern army" in midsummer of '77, and the reorganized company of Captain Merriman in response to General Gates' call in September. Ebenezer Janes, of the old family, was lieutenant in the former and Eldad Wright, who had led the minute men to Cambridge in April of '75, accepted second place in Merriman's company. The company was at the battle of Bennington, August 16, and on its second march reached the main army in the Hudson Valley and was a part of the so-called New Hampshire regiments which shared in the defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga and witnessed that turning event in the war, the Burgoyne surrender. By 1778, the inducement of a bounty from the town came to play a part in recruiting the revolutionary army, £120 in lawful money for four men to serve eight months, advanced in the next year to £120 each to five more to serve "for the present war." Successive enlistments for definite expeditions followed rapidly-for service at West Point, for services ending in January '79 at New London, for service at Claverack, the last in October, with Captain Samuel Merri- man again in command. In 1780, there was a definite quota for new enlistments, twelve men to go to West Point, and upon the town's prompt vote to hire them the requisition was met in June. They were at West Point at the time of the treachery of Benedict Arnold.
There was again the enlistment of ten men in December. Another requisition, and the last one, for eight three-month men, was quickly met in a town-meeting of July, 1781. The later companies marched to the Hudson region, to join in the protection against possible rein- forcements from Canada, were chiefly occupied in scouting and stayed in service until the surrender of Cornwallis brought an end to the war.
Meanwhile, the unanimity of sentiment with which the town's people had watched the tightening of the King's oppression of the colony suffered a serious breach the moment that arms were taken up in resistance. It was caused by the gentle and beloved minister who for a quarter century had served their spiritual needs and kept quite aloof from interference in secular affairs.
On the Sunday following the departure of Eldad Wright and his minute men, Mr. Hubbard offered the customary prayer for God's blessing on His Majesty the King. The inconsistency of a town send- ing men, carrying guns the town had paid for, to be discharged at the
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King's troops, and joining in prayers for his protection, was glaring. It immediately stirred a protest. The town's committee of safety found an unexpected task at home on its hands. Four of its five mem- bers favored immediate and drastic action, the one dissenting being Seth Field, the schoolmaster and town clerk. Squire Field was no Tory but had respect for the established order-and George was still their ruler, perhaps in greater need of prayers than in all the years they had been regularly offered.
On the second Sabbath day after Lexington, just as the morning service was about to begin, the venerable Deacon Samuel Smith arose in the deacon's seat directly in front of the pulpit, and, addressing the minister, forbade the offering of the petition for the King's blessing, instructing him to confine himself to reading the scripture and preach- ing the sermon. Mr. Hubbard responded that the committee had no authority over him and that he should continue the prayer so long as he continued his ministry and the King his reign over the colony. The immediate result was a conflict between the town and the church, now revealed to be distinct entities, each with its field of authority. The town, in a majority of its voters, stood by the committee. The church membership stood by the minister.
The issue developed into one of the independence of the church and continued a divisive one far beyond the declaration of independ- ence of the colonies. Mr. Hubbard's supporters included men whose sons had entered the Revolutionary army long before the church con- troversy ceased. Squire Field was staunch in Mr. Hubbard's support at a time when three of his own sons were in the colonial forces. He could disagree with the minister's conservative opinion without deny- ing his right to be a Tory, if he chose to be.
It was less of a strain for other defenders of Mr. Hubbard. Dr. Samuel Mattoon was a conservative by force of ancestry and relation- ship and had no sons old enough to enter the army. The doctor was a nephew of that Colonel Partridge who had distinguished himself at Boston by opposing James Otis and was still standing for the Crown. Aaron Whitney, the young storekeeper, had a Tory father, who had been driven from his pulpit in Petersham, just as Hubbard was in peril of being in Northfield. Shammah Pomeroy was in more trying posi- tion. He was a nephew of General Seth Pomeroy, who was rising to the highest distinction as a patriot soldier and was close to General
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Washington ; but his wife was a cousin of both Dr. Mattoon and of Rev. John Hubbard himself. If there was latent Toryism here, it was happily concealed under the issue of church against town, on either side of which men might array themselves without outrightly incur- ring the shame of disloyalty to the Colonial cause.
In the controversy between the two entities, the town had the advantage that it held the purse. There had been for years great irregularity in the payment of the minister's salary and when the controversy arose the payments were badly in arrears. The town showed a high measure of magnanimity in a special effort to bring the payments up to time and succeeded in very nearly doing so, at the moment it might have starved the church and its minister.
After two years, during which the war of the Revolution had become real and independence its one issue, the minister persisting in saying things which kept alive patriot resentment, a faction lead by the two venerable Deacon Samuels, Smith and Root, withdrew from communion and absented themselves from meeting. Another two years, in which the major occupation of the New England mind was the business of war, brought along repeated efforts to adjust the church difficulty, uniformly fruitless. Then came a solution brilliantly reflecting the high-mindedness and essential tolerance of townsmen who for four years had been in unrelenting conflict.
In November, 1779, a great council of churches met in Northfield and continued in session four days, exclusively devoted to a discus- sion of the church and town conflict. The town held the upper hand in its constituency, which was drawn from churches as remote from each other as Brattleboro, up the valley, Suffield, Southampton and West Springfield, a good day's journey to the south, Barre, Brookfield and Athol, over the hills in Worcester county, Belcher and Granby, hardly less remote. The minister's friends challenged only two in this list, making no complaint that the mother town, Northampton, and the related ones such as Hadley and Hatfield were passed by. The list was safely progressive and patriotic. The council was pondering its decision, when on the fourth day there was presented to it a docu- ment signed by committees of church and town, five each, and as well by the Rev. John Hubbard, entitled "An Accommodation be- tween ye Pastor of ye Church in Northfield and His Adhering Brethren and ye People Who are Dissatisfied with His Conduct."
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In stately form, scholarly English and gracious compromise, the "Accommodation" put the issue squarely upon differences between the pastor and the majority of the people of the town as to the con- troversy between Great Britain and "these United States," touched gently upon the words, acts and omissions of the minister which had "afforded great disquietude in the minds of his people," and while confessing to mistaken measures by the people, bound the pastor to obedience to the authority of the independent states, to support of the constitution, even to pray publicly for the prosperity of the American arms against "our British enemies," and to embrace with affection those who had been in opposition to him. The reciprocal promise was to acknowledge Mr. Hubbard as the sincerely respected pastor, to endeavor to walk with him as Christians and to act towards him with all that love and esteem which is due to the faithful ministers of our Lord's Kingdom.
One man only in the town could have composed the reverent treaty of peace which reunited its people and its spiritual servant. Ten citizens signed it but its scholarship bore the mark of the village schoolmaster, graduate of Yale forty-seven years ago, guide and leader in the days of the town's distresses, selectman in ten scattered terms, town clerk continuously for just forty years-Seth Field. While he had reverently stood by the minister, he had unqualifiedly been a sup- porter of the patriot cause and given his sons in tender years to its support.
CHAPTER XXIII TIME OF DEEP DISTRESS
Vigorous Protests but No Share in Armed Revolt
HAVING DISCHARGED ITS FULL DUTY as a patriot town, Northfield came out of the Revolutionary period to take its share in the distress the war brought upon the country. The Revolution dwindled in interest towards the end, leastwise in local interest. The battlefields were now in the south. Reliance upon New England's fighting strength was diminished, relatively to the demands upon other sections. The surrender of Cornwallis was hailed as settling the issues but it had less reality and would be granted less importance than that of Bur- goyne, which Northfield men could describe as eye-witnesses, and it was two years from the seeming end to the actual one at Yorktown. Men were still being drawn into service by the bounties provided by the town in full response to whatever quota was placed upon it and levies of beef and clothing were made in the fashion of substitution for money-money, the scarcest of all material things. In the gradual relaxation there was time to take account of the new order and the means at hand to establish it in a town which had long ago and repeatedly learned how to settle affairs after war's disturbances.
Everybody was in debt. Not everybody, for if there were debtors there must be creditors, and certain citizens, whose names were not to gather glory in the eyes of the future, had given full heed to the security for their loans. Even they would have to wait. There was no money, at least none that was worth having, with a currency in which dollars were shrunken beyond recognition. The minister, who of all men must have equivalents, was passed seventy-one dollars for every face dollar of his "encouragement." Even he was liable to find that he would have to give a hundred to one and get his satisfaction in not having to give two hundred.
As there was no money worth taking, the foreclosure on property was poor business when what was captured could not be sold. More-
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over the enforcement of debts was causing disturbance so great that it threatened to upset the foundations upon which all value rested and in the process destroy the only instrument for collecting debts, the courts. The worst-hated citizen was the lawyer. Northfield had none but it could share in the enmity by debtors towards those in down- river towns who were employed to turn down the screws upon them. There were those who had felt the force of the law's processes and could sympathize with the rising rebellion against the courts ; but when Daniel Shays from Pelham, a town not twenty miles away, gathered an army of malcontents and tried to drive the courts to destruction, they furnished no recruits.
That Northfield kept the peace when all about a new sort of war, disorderly, riotous, pillaging and having no discoverable end but anarchy, was being waged almost within gunshot hearing, was due to the saving counsel of certain sound-minded citizens, the now vener- able Seth Field for instance, and further to the fact that it was not hit as hard by the common calamity. Its fields, which might now be fully tilled, were yielding, its forests were good for limitless demands, there was wool and flax and wood and timber; and if money was lacking or of no certain value, the old device of barter and trade could meet the demands of life. The town was actually growing, not rapidly but substantially. It was improving, even in the years which were full of riotous disturbance in the region. New and finer houses were being built, and supplied with strong furniture having lines of grace in pleasing contrast to the rough devices of that period, well within common memory, when the settlement was being racked and impoverished in the Indian Wars.
The houses now being built along the street were two stories high, with great attics under the shingled pitch roof, and the lean-to was replaced by an ell, opening from the kitchen, one step down, in which were the washroom, the wood-shed and room for storage or, it might be, for the "shop," with its outfit of tools for home carpentry or weav- ing and, presently, for broom-tying. Four large rooms divided the space of each floor, with steep stairway rising at angles on each land- ing from the narrow entry at the front, and another coming down to the kitchen from a rear room.
Such was an imposing house built before the Revolution by Dea- con Ebenezer Janes on the lot, far down the street, which had long
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been the homestead of the descendants of the first preacher in the earliest settlement. Such another was the Alexanders', quite at the other end of the town, finished by Deacon Elisha in 1782. The Janes house set a new fashion in being placed back from the street line. From the older houses, there was but a single step from the front door into the street, with the economical advantage that for such space as the house occupied it was not necessary to build a fence. Deacon Alexander followed the old rule, wasting no land space in a useless front yard. He carried out another old fashion by building the barn on the street line, with the space between it and the house used for a barnyard. In that respect the Janes place had also added the barn- yard to the charm of the street view. Front fences were necessary for protection from the cattle, sheep and swine which had the run of the main street. Now that the saw-mills were in operation on the brooks all about the town, the Virginia fence of hewn rails or small logs laid at angles had given way to fences of broad boards nailed to posts with one side hewn to a flat surface.
A new fashion was setting in of painting the outside of the houses. In 1787, the town voted £12 to repair and "colour" the meeting- house, which up to this time had been left to the weather's coloring. It was a preliminary to the raising of an extra supply of flaxseed the next year, the town buying the surplus, at three and a sixpence (three and a half shillings) and sending forty-two and one-half bushels to Boston by team to be exchanged for linseed oil and dry red. The "colouring" was done in 1789 and some house owners followed the example. It soon extended to the schoolhouses. In the main, however, structures of all sorts took on the brown of exposed boards, varied only by the gray which in the course of seasons would be the effect of the sun on southern exposures.
Luxuries in furnishings and household utensils unknown in the earlier years of the final settlement were now becoming commonplace. It was no longer good form to eat from the plate with the fingers; forks had come into general use. Nor were the tables bare of linen, certainly not when there were guests. The kitchens were provided with wooden trays and kneading troughs and such articles of steel as wood- handled knives of various sizes and chopping knives. The bedrooms had commonly taken on elegancies which formerly had been seen only in the most pretentious houses, sheets of linen, pillow cases, counter-
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panes and gorgeous quilts, canopies on the best of the high-posted beds, while the floors were being adorned with rag rugs, in the draw- ing of which there was competition in elaborate designs.
When Captain Thomas Alexander, the veteran of Revolutionary campaigns "into Canady and with Ginr'l Washin'ton in Jarsey," drew up a list in 1790 of the articles he had given his daughters in the recent years, as their parts in his possessions he could include, to Lydia, such items as a bed and furniture, valued at £8/17/5-an appraisal that indicated an extreme elegance; four pairs of sheets at £I a pair; three table-cloths, at six shillings each; a dozen towels, fourteen shillings ; two pairs of pillow cases at three shillings a pair ; and such a list of household articles as a brass kettle, a flat-iron, a warming-pan, a looking-glass, a wine glass, a tumbler, a half-dozen earthern plates, three pewter platters, a pewter tea-pot, pewter plates, a case of knives and forks, a set of teaspoons, chairs, chest, pails, churn, kneading trough, salt mortar, table, foot-wheel, skillet, tub and a pair of shears (nine pence), including also a pillion. Sylvia had been given, and duly receipted for in her married name of Ryther, similar articles, plus "crocra ware," four Windsor chairs, snuffers, a rug (£1) and fourteen pounds of feathers. Lavinia had been given in 1783, among other things, twelve towels, a chopping knife and a great wheel. Captain Thomas was not a man of unusual wealth but a persistent petitioner for a pension, which the congress was spar- ingly granting him. His gifts were of the sort possible in the average or better family.
Along with a certain independence, which kept it from being in- volved in the more turbulent outbreaks of a trying period, the town kept itself in political contact with the towns of the county, the broad domain which Hampshire covered, from Worcester county to the New York line and from New Hampshire and the New Hampshire settle- ments (west of the Great River) to the Connecticut state line below Springfield. Throughout the Revolutionary period and extending beyond its end the committees of correspondence had been the supreme local official bodies in all matters of outside relationship. As early as 1776, there had begun what developed into a common prac- tice, the holding of conventions of these committees. One was held in July of 1779 at Concord, on the invitation of the Boston committee, to regulate prices and devise means for the relief of the people. It was
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followed by one in Northampton in September, to consider uniformity of prices. Even earlier the Hampshire committees had met Northamp- ton to consider, among other proposals, one that the court of general sessions should be dissolved. In the early eighties, conventions became frequent and all manner of proposals in the name of the general welfare were considered, none more persistently than the abolition of the existing courts.
Northfield was represented in many if not all of the conventions which met with increasing frequency. Presently, in place of the com- mittee, delegates were elected at duly called town-meetings. Her representatives arrived late at the earliest one and failed to share in the vote to abolish the court of general sessions. Town-meetings soon became frequent with no other business than the response to letters from other towns to join in conventions to consider "the publick wel- fare"-one such in November, 1780, to hear the request from a com- mittee of the town of Amherst, and by 1782 to consider others of like tenor from one or another sister town.
Seven such conventions were held in the county during the years 1782 and 1783, and Northfield was rather regularly represented. One at Hadley in April, 1782, lasted several days, considered many sub- jects of grievance and voted that there be no county court of the sessions of the peace. In August a committee from the General Court, consisting of Samuel Adams, foremost patriot of the period, General Artemas Ward and Nathaniel Gorham, came to the county, which was now in a rebellious state, met the delegates at Hatfield and suc- ceeded in producing a calm, which proved of short duration. By March of the next year, a convention at Hatfield voted that no taxes should be paid the state. In September, at Deerfield, the northerly towns of the county united to demand the removal of all courts from Springfield to Northampton or, as an alternative, a division of the county. The local regulators were simultaneously demanding that courts be abolished and that they be moved nearer.
The climax of convention performances was reached in the sum- mer of 1786. An invitation issued from Pelham, the home of Daniel Shays, now the leading agitator, for a convention at Hatfield, to be held August 22nd. The Northfield selectmen called a meeting for August 14th to choose delegates. This body was in session three days and adopted a list of seventeen grievances, including the existence of a
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state senate, the mode of representation, which was on a property qualification, the fee system for public services, the method of appro- priation of import and excise duties and, chiefly of all, the existence of courts. The senate was in Boston, the property qualification was in the constitution, but the court was as near as Northampton, or would be within a week. Captain Shays was now in full command of an uncounted mob. It poured into Northampton on the 29th, took possession of the courthouse and compelled the honorable court to assemble at the tavern, there to continue all its business to a session in Springfield the second Tuesday in November. If the court could continue to another day so could the insurrection, and to the same day and place.
Meanwhile, a mob ran the courts of common pleas and of ses- sions out of Worcester and another did the same service to the cause of human rights at Concord. At Great Barrington, in the other direc- tion, a mob of eight hundred not only prevented the court from sitting but advanced the cause of liberty by releasing all the prisoners in the jail. Not to confine their assaults on the judicial system to the familiar lower courts, the design was announced by the leaders to prevent the supreme judicial court from holding its session at Springfield, Sep- tember 26th. Governor Bowdoin had tried proclamations against the rebellious performances but now turned to the persuasion of guns. The militia of the county was ordered to the defence of the courthouse under command of General Shepherd of Westfield.
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