USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 19
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The court opened and had an irregular case on its hands in the demand of Shays, who was in town with a scrub troop of a thousand or more, that no indictments should be found against his men for their acts, that no civil suits should be tried unless both parties were willing and that the militia then in the field should not be paid for their services. The court adjourned after no other business than refusing these demands, discreetly concluding not to try holding the usual session in Berkshire.
General Shepherd moved his troops up the hill to the arsenal. The insurgents continued for days milling about the town, enjoyed the possession of the courthouse and then dispersed. At Concord and at Cambridge in November, the performance was repeated. In Decem- ber, Worcester was the scene of a demonstration, with threats upon the whole state government, and Boston was put under defence.
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Northfield had made slight contribution to the unruly demonstra- tions but it kept up its representation at conventions and when one was called at Hadley for November 7th, a town-meeting was held to choose a delegate. It was beginning to be felt that the convention method was not making headway towards relief and the selectmen were persuaded to put into the warrant a more orderly proposal-"to choose a committee to prepare a petition to the General Court with that just and suitable address as may not fail to be effective of the publick relief." No Shays' leader framed such a return to the orderly and dignified way of bringing about relief-Northfield was showing some respectability even though it should not be so unneighborly as to refuse to join the other towns in one more convention.
The Hadley convention lasted three days, adjourned to meet in Hatfield in January and again in Hadley in March. It showed the sense that the Northfield meeting had displayed by issuing an address, from its Hatfield meeting, advising the insurgents to lay aside arms and petition the legislature for "redress of our grievances." It was the last of the long series. Insurgency continued, however, and in Jan- uary went up in disorderly formation against the militia of the county, a thousand strong, under General Shepherd, holding the arsenal in Springfield. When Shays advanced late in the afternoon of the 26th he was met by four or five shots from cannon which put his troops to flight. Four men among them were killed, two of them, Ezekiel Root and Solomon Root, from Gill, the new town just across the river, the others from Shelburne and Leyden, near neighbors.
The flight continued through Hadley, where shots from an out- house of the tavern killed a man from Montague and wounded one from Palmer. There was some pillaging of houses, in retaliation, but the march away from trouble kept on through Amherst and to the hills of Pelham. Governor Bowdoin had sent an army to the insur- gent country, under command of General Benjamin Lincoln. He fol- lowed Shays' line of retreat as far as Hadley, encamped there, billeted his three thousand men on the residents, placed field pieces around the meeting-house and had Dr. Lyman come over from Hatfield to preach to the army from an outdoor pulpit built of snow. He sent a demand to Shays to surrender and save bloodshed and had in return a request from the Pelham leader that hostilities cease until "our united prayers may be presented to the General Court and we receive an answer."
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General Lincoln had no purpose to await legislative prayers and performance and put his army in motion. Shays had slid away from Pelham to the greater heights of Petersham, towards which point Lincoln marched his men in a driving snow storm and intense cold, thirty miles without a halt. Shays was taken by surprise in the houses he had appropriated in Petersham and his forces quickly scattered. Three days later he was at Winchester, six miles from Northfield, with only three hundred men. Lincoln withdrew to the valley, made an excursion into Berkshire to quell disturbances there and kept his reduced force in down-river towns against further outbreaks.
Northfield was now served with a reminder of old days by the arrival of General Shepherd and his army late in January to be posted here as a base for sending out parties to capture refugee rebels in Vermont towns. There the sympathy of the settlers was so strongly with the Shays men that arrests proved impossible. On February 6th he sent a party across the river to arrest Captain Jason Parmenter of Bernardston. A skirmish resulted, in which Jacob Walker, a govern- ment horseman, and Parmenter fired at each other simultaneously and Walker was killed. Deep snow defeated for a time the pursuit of Parmenter and his men. In April at a session of the supreme court in Northampton, Parmenter and five others were convicted of high treason and sentenced to be hanged.
A detachment from General Shepherd's command, which was still at Northfield, was sent to Northampton to guard the prisoners. The execution was set for June 21 and people thronged the town to witness the hanging. With the prisoners, who were under strong guard, they stood in the street in front of the meeting-house to share in the reli- gious service, the prayer being said and the sermon preached from the windows. When the gallows was reached, the high sheriff produced a paper which proved to be a reprieve and the prisoners were escorted back to the jail, to be pardoned three months later. As Mr. Judd of Southampton moderately stated in his journal, "People are much Chagrined at the Prisoners being reprieved." They had missed a spectacular multiple hanging.
The rebellion petered out, with no more serious outbreak than an incursion from New York into Berkshire, in late February, with a brief battle at Egremont, promptly met by the state's capture of prisoners and the flight back home of the other marauders. There were sundry outbreaks of plundering and stealing and the capture, one by one, of
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the leaders of the late war for the people, not including Shays, who reached a town in New York, there to spend the rest of his days in a respected fashion.
No Northfield name was so identified with the rebellion as to be recorded for future blame or glory. The nearest approach to such distinction was reached by Dr. Medad Pomeroy, who now practiced medicine in Warwick. He was seized, May 21, 1787, by a party of rebels from over the Vermont line, as was also Joseph Metcalf of Orange, and carried to that state to be held as hostages for Parmenter and the others who were to be hanged at Northampton, and their stay was made short by the reprieve of the prisoners.
CHAPTER XXIV AT PEACE, WITHIN AND WITHOUT
Progress in Numbers and Common Interests
IN COMMON WITH EVERY OTHER COMMUNITY in the new nation, Northfield was being tested by a strain not only upon its resources but upon its patience. Its home needs and burdens were extreme but to them was added the test of its faithfulness to a government which was proving incapable of meeting the problems the new order of affairs forced upon it. Nothing short of a devoted patriotism could carry the people through the exasperating period. The town had its share of men who could keep calm and counsel confidence in eventual triumph of state and national self-government. They had succeeded in keep- ing the town's people out of the violent demonstrations into which their neighbors had been led by agitators like Ely and Shays. There was no denying the distress upon which these disturbers had based their revolt against the government; but the course of wisdom was through orderly protest and appeals to the General Court for redress.
As to the confederation of the states, some confidence must be placed in such men as John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, not to mention General Washington, for whom there was a devotion amount- ing to veneration. Presently came the federal constitution. It was read with a care as great as if its acceptance depended upon this town's decision. Sentiment was strong for its acceptance and the rati- fication by Massachusetts was hailed with joy.
Meanwhile, during the trying period, the town's own affairs were pressing enough to occupy thought and command public spirited action. Town-meetings were frequent and animated. These the voters attended even while they showed their indifference to state affairs by neglecting or scorning to vote for state officers. In 1780, only thirty votes were cast in the state election; two years later only ten. When in 1784, there were twenty who voted and in 1788 there were twenty-
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two, it showed no marked revival of interest, for there were at least one hundred and seventy who had the right to vote. Representatives were being sent to the General Court-men like the merchant, Aaron Whit- ney, in 1782, 3 and 4, even though he had been at one time suspected of inheriting his father's Toryism, and Captain Elisha Hunt, the tavern-keeper, in the years following almost without a break down into the nineties.
That would do for a showing of concern in state government. Occasionally even this display was guarded-or emphasized-by the election of a committee of leading citizens to give instructions to the representative "in those things which may be agitated and acted upon by the General Court." One such in Whitney's time (1782) had ten members, Seth Field, town clerk, and Dr. Samuel Mattoon, the treas- urer, among them. Again, when the governor asked for the town's recommendation of a person to be appointed justice of the peace, the town-meeting responded by suggesting Ebenezer Janes, the middle- aged maker of gravestones, who had been its delegate to the provincial congress the first year of the Revolution, representative in '78 and a lieutenant in the continental army. Seth Field, who had been justicia pacis, as he always subscribed himself, under the authority of His Majesty the King, continued in commission.
Town finances were full of difficulty. Taxes could be laid but not so easily collected. Year by year, the collector had to be credited with uncollectable items and lists of citizens were excused from paying for the obvious reason that they could not pay or be made to. Certain of the collectors, reputable citizens, were made to suffer the ignominy of suits for the uncollected portions of their warrant, the dutiful treasurer going so far as to secure execution against them, the terms of which were that their property should be levied upon and if this proved insufficient that they should be committed to the court gaol, there to remain until the amount of the judgment was paid. None of them reached the gaol but certain of them had to give their notes to the town which were gradually paid, perhaps in the course of years, by instalments. Others were excused but with the proviso, which they signed, that they would try to the best of their ability to collect the unpaid taxes of named persons.
The town was perpetually in arrears on its payments. Even the minister was made to wait, the selectmen's order being endorsed with
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payments made as the treasury permitted. Late in this troubled period, the singing master, having a selectmen's order for teaching the town singing-school and the keeping of his horse, amounting to $37.25 and dated April 22, realized $7.50 on it July 29, and $9 August 19, the rest of it only as he recovered in the suit of Sever v. Northfield in October with costs of one dollar. All this was not slothfulness ; it was stress. Annually, in the face of the pressure, the town made effort to "call in its debt" and shared with state and nation the perplexity of liquidation without repudiation.
New items were creeping into town expense. The schools were an increasing burden with a problem as to how far sections of the town could be brought to make personal contributions towards the neigh- borhood school. The roads were now to be provided for, as carts had supplanted the mounted horse, and the ways had to be provided for outlying sections and for communication and traffic to other towns and towards centres like the county seat and Boston. The bridge over Mill brook, in the heart of the town, had to be rebuilt. The church bell, which had been in service from before the Revolution, had to be replaced. The town's poor were to be provided for. Boun- ties had to be increasingly paid for noxious beasts.
The killing of wild cats had become such a pursuit, with the town underwriting it at a rising scale of bounty, that, as a voter might have been heard to observe in one day-long town-meeting, it was the "preencipal means of livelihood" for certain trappers and hunters. When the guns were all employed in the recent war, the woods back of the town had come to be reinfested. The wild cat was a menace to men and to herds. The town entered upon extermination, and kept it up for several years. Its early payments were 6 shillings per "catt"; but the rate advanced until it reached £2, or, as it was translated on the town order, $6.67. In the last year of the century one citizen received the selectmen's order for $6.65 for "a wild catt he cytched and we cropt."
As the bounty advanced, the wild cats increased-if not in the woods, at least on the town books. In 1795, there were six caught, cropt and paid for. In December, 1799, Hezekiah Stratton killed four on the 4th and one on the 27th. The bounty system had been extended to crows and in 1795 a town order was issued to Eliphaz Wright for three shillings (67 cents) for his destruction of these
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corn-eating birds ; but not because of the scarcity but due to the small return, this enterprise did not develop to a great sum.
Adjustment to the new decimal system in currency was an added difficulty, which was met slowly. Pounds, shillings and pence con- tinued until the century's end in common calculation, even though the dollar had been established in Revolutionary days. There was no deep respect for the word, dollar. It suggested continental currency and figures that had no stable relation to value. To a much later period, common speech ran on in the old style and sons and grandsons of the Revolutionary patriots would speak of nine shillings a day for work, or a shilling a pair for the hand-knit wool socks that came down from Vermont. Frequently bills against the town made out in the old style, would be endorsed with a town order in the new, but even this translation was not made until in the last years of the century. Accus- tomed to three denominations, pounds, shillings and pence, the town's officials recognized the mill as an item of value. Captain Hopni King was paid for work on the meeting-house in 1798, two dollars, thirty- six cents and one mill, on a selectmen's order.
By 1790, the town's population had increased to eight hundred and sixty-eight. This was the first national census, but a local count of inhabitants had occasionally been recorded. The town had doubled since 1765. Hampshire county was now the most populous in the state, with 59,681 people. Suffolk, which prior to 1793 included Norfolk, had 44,875. To be rated in the geographies as a "chief town," no more than 1,000 population was needed ; Hampshire had two such, Northampton with 1,628 and Springfield with 1,574. Bos- ton had a population of 18,038; Salem, 7,921 ; Newburyport, 4,837; Sherburne (Nantucket Island) the fourth in size, 4,620, more than twice Worcester, with its 2,095.
After the four-year disturbance over the minister's Tory inclination, ended by the gracious treaty of peace of November, 1779, the town and the church moved on in peace and accord. The war had settled differences as to independence and if the saintly John Hubbard treas- ured any remorse over the changed political order he gave his devoted people no occasion to complain. The "colouring" of the meeting- house was not the only evidence of the pride that was taken by the town in liberal provision for strict religious observance. Since 1768, a bell had hung in the belfry and the town paid one and another
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citizen to ring it on Sunday and for the numerous town-meetings. It was now a matter of memory that the psalm-singing had been led by a deacon. The "lining-out" method had been discarded by a vote in town-meeting in 1770 to the effect that thereafter "the singers shall sing altogether without the deacon reading the psalm line by line except at the Lord's table when the deacon is to read and at no other time."
It was apparent that the singing must have some system and a part of the congregation was constituted a choir. For a few years cer- tain of the pews in the gallery had been let out to people from the nearby towns, who were not taxpayers here, and four of these in the front gallery were taken "for the convenient seating of the singers." After several months of chance development of singing by this group, the town concluded some training was needed and voted to hire Seth Hastings, one of a Warwick family, "to teach the art of singing." Thenceforth there was annual appropriation for instruction in "psal- mody," that reverent term presently being changed to teaching the young people in singing, which came to include some forms of song not used in church.
Morning and afternoon Sunday services were maintained as a matter of course and Mr. Hubbard's sermons showed no tendency to abbreviation. The intermission was varied, however, to suit the sea- son. In 1783, the town voted that William Field, familiarly known as "Billy," was to ring the bell on the Lord's day precisely at nine o'clock in the forenoon and that the intermission should be for one hour from October I to April 1, a half-hour longer in April, May and September, and two hours in July and August.
The noon hour gave only the families living near the meeting- house time to return to their homes and, in the winter time, to warm up for another stay in the frigid house of worship. Foot stoves were in common use but there was no tolerance for the occasional sugges- tion that the church be heated. When, years later, a stove was favored by more of the people, it was opposed by those who regarded it as an unholy innovation and a sign of modern effeminacy, one of them saying he would favor it when some device was employed to keep the "meetin'-house" cool in summer.
Seating the meeting-house was revised every six or eight years by the town-meeting on the report of a committee who had given careful
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consideration to the distinction due leading citizens. It was a matter of such importance that in some instances it was the only busi- ness of a town-meeting called for the purpose. Only heads of families and old people, numbering one hundred and thirty-three in 1786, were given seats in the body of the house. In the gallery front were the twenty-five singers, and the other gallery seats were assigned to the young folks, each of whom was instructed to take the seat given him or her. The tithing men presided over their good order. It was the boast of the town that the office was an idle one, the young people not coming under such reproval as in older Northampton, where every so often the town-meeting had to condemn the gallery's dis- orderly conduct and finally to add constables to help the tithing men to suppress it.
The beloved and revered John Hubbard died, November 28, 1794, at the age of sixty-eight. He had ministered to this people forty-four years. In this long period he had given a spiritual leader- ship not only acceptable to the people in all their varying fortunes, their stresses and their perils, their periods of quiet and progress, but with such guidance as to be reflected in the good order and piety of the common life.
Coming to the town a young bachelor, soon after his graduation from Yale college, Mr. Hubbard had developed in scholarship and spirituality, with corresponding strength of influence in secular as well as sacred affairs. He had been content to guide without direct par- ticipation in town affairs. He held no town office in his entire lifetime and had no share in the conflicts which animated the town-meetings. His loyalty to the King in the early Revolutionary days had caused the one disturbance of his relations to the people and the strain had been entirely removed by the "accommodation" reached in 1779.
Dependent entirely upon the town's allowance for his "encourage- ment," unrepleted by such an income from another profession as made his one predecessor, Benjamin Doolittle, a landed proprietor, Mr. Hubbard amassed no wealth, except that of esteem in the hearts of his people. The expenses of his funeral, down to the last item, were borne by the town. A year after it, the selectmen gave Captain Medad Alexander an order on the treasurer for nineteen shillings, eight pence, "being his due for beef for Mr. Hubbard's funeral." Another year, and a belated order was issued to James Merriam "for
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making a coffin for Mr. Hubbard," twenty-three shillings. In time, an imposing stone was erected in the old cemetery, with an epitaph para- phrased from the contemporary Goldsmith to begin ---
A man he was to all his people dear
And passing rich with eighty pound a year.
The Goldsmith line read "forty pound a year." The license taken in increasing the monetary phrase by a hundred per cent was justified out of fairness to the town's provision for its minister, none too liberal even at that.
The town again took its time in the selection of a minister. Before Mr. Hubbard's death there had come to town, and of course to church, a young man of pious character and scholarly ambition, who was employed as early as 1792 to keep school in the north district, Samuel Clesson Allen. His home was in Bernardston, where his father, Zebulon, had moved in youth from Deerfield, and he was now a student at Dartmouth, the rather new college up the river at Han- over. There he was graduated the year Mr. Hubbard died and he immediately came to the mind of some of the townsmen who had made note of him as a prospect for the ministry. Along with others, he was invited to preach here and by October, 1795, was given a call, being then twenty-four years old.
Mr. Allen was a descendant in the fourth generation from a sol- dier in Cromwell's army, who came to America upon the restora- tion. In the new fashion of adding middle names, he bore that of his grandmother, a Northampton Clesson, and was thus descended from one of that trio of Irishmen, another of whom was Northfield's old hero, Cornelius Merry. Young as he was when settled, indeed two years before graduation from college and about the time he was keeping the north district school, he had married a Bernardston girl and when he came here as minister there was a Samuel Clesson, Jr., aged two, and an infant Joseph.
Installation of a new minister was so rare an event, this being the third in a century, it deserved to be made a grand occasion, and it was. The council was made up of representatives of churches far and near. The hospitality of the town was generous. The new tavern of Captain Elisha Hunt, a towering three-story building at the corner of the Warwick road, was opened to the visitors and the captain was
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paid by a town order for fifty lodgings, for one hundred seventy-two meals and for keeping fifty-eight horses overnight. His bill included a charge of £4, 10 shillings for sundries. There was only one sort of sundry dispensed at a tavern and an amount such as fifteen dollars would cover a generous flow of it at a time when "rhum" was four shillings and a penny (sixty-eight cents) a quart and brandy one and sixpence (twenty-five cents) a pint.
Perhaps it was just as well that the singers were dined at Shammah Pomeroy's, even though his hospitality was not so dry as to be out of keeping with the times and the day. The president of Dartmouth College came down for the ordination, as did others of the faculty and Mr. Allen's classmates. Rev. Allen Pratt of Westmoreland, New Hampshire, a town which was in a sense an offspring of Northfield, preached the sermon and there was grand singing of hymns and anthems, showing the proficiency to which Northfield voices had been brought under the direction of the chorister regularly employed by the town.
Mr. Allen's preaching was of a new order. It was scholastic in the modern style. Most marked in its contrast to that of Mr. Hubbard was its rigorous Calvinism. While Mr. Hubbard, in his long minis- tration, had avoided any such theological outbreak as had marred the peace of Parson Doolittle's pastorate, he was consistently liberal. The reassertion of orthodoxy now brought by the scholarly young minister was accepted without open dissent, the people being deeply impressed by his intellectual and oratorical power. It would not do, however, to say that his doctrinal stiffness did not contribute to assent to the dismissal which he asked, after only two years. He was dis- missed by a council, much less numerous and impressive than that at his ordination, January 31, 1798. That the quality of the town's hospitality had suffered no decline was shown in an order to another tavern-keeper, paid by the town, which read-
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