USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 29
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Democrat, Franklin Pierce, in 1852, was the death knell of the Whig party.
Throughout this period Northfield kept true to her record of being different from her neighbors. The towns about were consistently Whig, some of them solidly so. It was said in one of them, that when the ballot box was opened for the counting a Democratic ballot was found and it was thrown out on the ground that it must have been a mistake. Meanwhile a new factor had appeared, a secret party, call- ing itself American and called by everybody else "Know-nothing." Unproclaimed and unobserved it gave the old Commonwealth a shocking surprise by electing a governor, Henry J. Gardner, in 1854, and with him a legislature with a Know-nothing majority in both branches, the senate not having lawyers enough in its membership to make up a judiciary committee of the usual number. Northfield shared in the overturn and to its own amazement gave Gardner a majority over all the other candidates. The next year, although Gard- ner was re-elected, Northfield had returned to the Democratic fold. Steadily but for this diversion the town had been voting for candi- dates for governor who were not elected.
Now came a striking change. The anti-slavery party had been for ten years in third place in the town's alignment but had held true and constant. When the Republican party appeared in the election of 1856, with the dashing John C. Frémont for its presidential candidate, the town swung to the new party, giving it 238 votes, drawing in enough former Democrats to reduce the Buchanan vote to 106.
The town remained true to its new faith in the state elections of the following years, in 1858 giving the youthful Nathaniel P. Banks, the "bobbin boy" of Waltham, 129 votes to 82 for Erasmus D. Beach, the perpetual Democratic candidate. When the crucial election of 1860 arrived, with its division into four parties, it voted for Lincoln, 182 to 107 for all the others. By about the same vote it supported John A. Andrew for governor.
In its representative elections, the town had reached a higher pitch of excitement than over national and state contests. In 1850 no candidate had a majority on election day and a special election two weeks later had the same outcome, when Charles Mattoon, its one lawyer, had 142 votes; Captain Henry Alexander, 81 ; and Zebulon Allen, son of the distinguished former congressman, 64. Again in 1852, a second election was called at Amos Alexander's tavern and
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Dr. Marshall S. Mead had but one more than the required number. In the Lincoln year, it chose as representative, Albert C. Parsons, an original and outright anti-slavery man, who had been with the Liberty party of 1844, a Free Soiler of 1848, and a Republican from the first moment of the new party's existence.
To the governor's council was elected Hugh W. Greene, now for some years a gentleman resident of the town, who with his charming family, including two daughters quite the belles of the town, occu- pied the imposing house built by the distinguished lawyer of other days, Obadiah Dickinson, Esq. Mr. Greene was an ardent Republi- can. Thus Northfield had good share, in the person of two loyal supporters of Governor Andrew, in the state government which was to face the new and serious problems of threatening war.
An unwelcome and unfortunate result of the attraction to the cities and large towns was reduction in the number and quality of the young men in the town. In consequence the women had come to be the leaders in social affairs and intellectual superiority was on their side. There were no professional opportunities for young men and only limited business ones. Not for years had any of the sons of even the best families been given a college education. Apparently it was reckoned that to send a boy to college was to send him away for good and all. The last instance had been the sending to Amherst of Caleb Clesson Field, to graduate in 1833 and after medical training to settle in Leominster for practice. It was seemingly taken as a warning.
It was a period of change in about all directions, in none more clearly marked than as to the churches. Long pastorates went out with Priest Mason. His successor, Hosmer, stayed but six years. In turn, the Rev. Oliver Capen Everett, settled over the First Parish, now Unitarian, in 1837, remained until 1848 and left to accept a ministry at large in Charlestown. He had been faithful, revered and valued. He mingled slightly in civic affairs but was a helper in every case of need among his people. Near the end of his stay, he had taken an interest in the family of Edwin Moody, who had died, leaving his wife, Betsey Holton Moody, with a mortgage-burdened farm and numerous children. One of the boys, Dwight, had been taken into the family of Mr. Everett and remained with him up to the time of the minister's change of settlement. This boy had been plentifully christened Dwight Lyman Ryther Moody. The first two of his names had no family significance but the Ryther came from Dr. Gideon
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Ryther, long ago the village schoolmaster, later a practicing physi- cian in Bernardston, who had married one of Col. Medad Alexan- der's sisters, the aunt of Isaiah Moody, the boy's grandfather.
After Mr. Everett came the Rev. William C. Tenney, as to whom the parish developed a varying regard but who was thoroughly in favor with the spirited social set that the town had developed. His stay was as long as the newer fashion of shifting scenes seemed to demand, some ten years, and then the church took a sharp turn in its choice by calling Rev. John Murray, as Scotch as his name, a bit heavy in preaching but four-square, serious, devout, about whom there could be no division, so good a man was he. He was the min- ister of the old parish when came the days of a troubled public mind, with the nation verging fast towards conflict between the states.
The Orthodox church, for so the second church was familiarly and fairly named in common speech, had shifted ministers more swiftly. Its first pastor, Rev. Eli Moody, of the same valley stock as the Northfield Moodys but not closely related, had stayed but four years. Then came a succession of college men, Rev. Bancroft Fowler, Yale 1796, for five years ; Horatio Lombard, Williams '15, four years ; Nathaniel Richardson, Amherst '36, two years; Luther Farnham, Dartmouth '37, less than a year; Willard Jones, Dartmouth '35, coming in 1845, and still here in 1860, a deeply revered man.
It was a period of doctrinal variations in the Massachusetts towns and Northfield was an exception in not having divisions which multi- plied the spires in even smaller communities. The Methodists had lost their foothold on the Mountain. The Baptists had withdrawn an outpost at the Farms. The two village churches, the one liberal and the other conservative, met religious needs and held within their communions the people of whatever shades between.
As ambitious in its courses of study as in its name the Northfield Institute of Learning was the product of another effort to revive and maintain the Academy. Principal Bruce instructed in ancient lan- guages, mental and moral sciences. His assistants were a cultured group of young women, among them one Northfield girl of a family that was marked for its intelligence, public spirit and piety, the Dut- tons, descendants of the leading merchants of a generation or two before-Miss Lucie Dutton. Her department was mathematics and French. In the catalog of the third year were Miss Gordon, English
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branches and music; Miss Hurd, natural sciences and drawing; Miss Taylor, English branches and French.
There were one hundred and thirty-five students in the Institute in 1853, almost equally from Northfield and from other towns, some of them as remote as Boston, Roxbury, Keene, New Hampshire; Taftsville, Vermont; and even western towns, Quincy, Illinois; and Summit, Indiana. In the Northfield group, the old family names appeared numerously. Evidently Mr. Everett's interest in the educa- tion of the Moody boy carried beyond his stay, as in 1853 one of the students was Dwight L. Moody, now sixteen years old.
In the catalog the merits of the town as a seat of learning were glowingly set forth. "The town of Northfield is situated on the Con- necticut River, about midway between Greenfield and Brattleboro, and is furnished with almost every variety of beautiful scenery to attract the eye and impress the mind. Within a short distance and in almost any direction from the village are eminences, from which may be had enchanting views of the river in its meandering course, the fertile meadows along its banks and the mountains arising in the distance around ... one of the most quiet, healthy and delightful of the Connecticut valley."
The old Academy building had been refurnished and the grounds developed so that it could be described as "large, commodious, and well adapted to the use to which it is applied. The piazza affords a pleasant prospect and an agreeable promenade," while "adjoining the building are the playground of the students and the Seminary garden, pleasantly laid out with walks and adorned with a fountain, trees, and flowering plants, interspersed with various shrubbery."
To all this was added the practical attraction that board may be had in respectable families at from one dollar and a half to two dol- lars a week, including fuel, lights and washing, while those desiring it can be accommodated with the Principal and be under his imme- diate care. There was an Institute fund, intended to make it perma- nent, with Northfield men as trustees-Charles Osgood, who had been a preceptor of the former Academy; Jonathan Minot, the Bos- tonian in retirement ; Elisha Alexander, "Uncle Elisha" to many of the tribe and an imposing deputy sheriff; and two of the village doctors, Philip Hall and Elijah Stratton. So outfitted, Principal Bruce could say of his Institute in 1853, that it had "received such marks of popular favor in increasing prosperity, as to attest the wis-
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dom of its location and given assurance of future permanency." Vain hope! Five years later the Institute was only a memory.
One social feature which had in other years been cherished by the leading men of the town, the Masonic lodge, returned to life in 1850. Masonry had been under a blight since the outbreak against it in 1830. Harmony Lodge, which had been chartered in 1796, sus- pended its meetings at that time but held its charter, which bore the signature of Paul Revere, as grand master. The demand that it give up this precious instrument was refused in 1836 by the Worshipful Master, Richard Colton. There had been a mysterious disappearance and it was not known until later years that the charter had been con- cealed in the hollow trunk of a tree in the master's orchard, after the style set in Hartford's concealment of its colony charter in early his- tory, the only variation being from an oak to an apple tree. No meeting was held from February 17, 1836, until February 20, 1850, when the remaining members were called together by Squire Colton.
The lodge had passed its fiftieth birthday in eclipse. It was on May 5, 1796, that a convention of brethren in the order met in the hall of Brother Houghton's tavern and voted to petition the grand lodge of Massachusetts for a charter. The charter granted, the in- stallation of the officers October 13, of the same year, furnished the first grand occasion, with Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, the temporary grand master, making a spirited charge to the officers and Rev. Sam- uel C. Allen, then the town's minister, preaching a sermon. The lodge had as its first master, Solomon Vose, Esq., and among its charter members such other outstanding citizens as Samuel Brewer, the merchant; Dr. Samuel Prentice and Foster Alexander, a lawyer of Northfield birth. It had raised and advanced to its highest degree such men as Thomas Power, who became its master and, in the last year of his residence, the district deputy grand master and from 1821 to 1826 the recording grand secretary of the grand lodge; General John Nevers, admitted in 1813; Justin Field, admitted the same Christmas day in 1813 as his brother-in-law, Thomas Power; Frank- lin Ripley, Esq., who was the master in 1815 to '16; and, along the way, an honored list of the town's best men. It now resumed its place as an important institution of the town and gloried in the unbroken possession of the original instrument bearing the autograph of the patriot of April 19, 1775.
CHAPTER XXXV CIVIL WAR AND AFTERMATH
Patriot Spirit Shown at Home and on Battlefield
THE SPIRIT OF DEFENCE of the Union which expressed itself politi- cally in the vote for Lincoln in November, 1860, flared into response to the assault upon Fort Sumter in April of '61. The first call for troops was met in Massachusetts by the immediate sending to the front of the regiments which the new and alert governor, John A. Andrew, had put into marching readiness. The first command into which Northfield men, prompt as was their enlistment, could be mus- tered was the Massachusetts Tenth, made up from the five western counties, called into action in early summer and going to the front July 25th. It saw action at Manassas, Yorktown, Williamsburg, dis- tinguished itself at Savage's Station and Malvern Hill, was in numer- ous other engagements and was discharged June 25, 1864.
The twentieth and twenty-first Massachusetts, mustered in the early fall, had several Northfield men in their ranks, which meant that they would be in the major battles of Antietam and Gettysburg. In larger number they were in the ranks of Company B of the Twenty-Second, of which Fred R. Field was lieutenant and became captain. Of the 17 men from Northfield in this company, two were killed in battle, Calvin T. Field at Gettysburg and William H. Johnson at Gaines' Mill.
Ten men were enrolled from the town in Company C of the 27th, mustered in October and known as the "Second Western Regiment." They were in many engagements along the coast, then inland, and at Cold Harbor. Other volunteers were on the rolls of various regiments, while the largest number of all made up a large part of Company F of the 52d, of which Marshall S. Stearns was lieutenant. The Fifty-Second encamped at Greenfield in October, 1862, had a rough passage by sea to join General Banks' expedition up the Red River, was in the battle of Port Hudson and was sta-
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tioned at the Louisiana capitol at Baton Rouge, in charge of con- traband negroes, at the time that building was burned. The regiment suffered a loss of over ten per cent of its men, chiefly by malarial sickness.
Fourteen Northfield men were in Company H of the 36th, whose service was in the Mississippi valley, which took a large toll through the marches under the hot sun as far down as Vicksburg, where it shared in the trying campaign that led to that city's significant sur- render.
The distinction that a New England town brought out of the Civil War was that of having done its abundant share in supplying to the nation's service the full measure of its youth to become the new impersonation of that distinctly American hero, the citizen- soldier. In the main, and to its greatest glory, the army had been one of volunteers. Its ranks were recruited out of the same patriotic peo- ple who had risen at every need to exemplify the spirit of the frontier fighters of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and of the minute men of the Revolution. They were without military training and with no military ambition beyond doing the duty of privates in the file. It was rare that among them rose any to personal distinction in title. They went in as privates, as non-commissioned officers of local companies or at the highest as company commanders. They came out with the same rating. It was rare and only by circumstances other than their own devotion to duty that they gained promotion. Nor was the honor due them and gratefully paid them any the less because they displayed at the end only the decoration of honorable discharge.
Northfield had furnished one hundred and twenty-one men to the Union service. One had risen to a captaincy. The highest rank of any other was that of lieutenant, so taken at the beginning and so carried at the end. Conditions, little noted at the time, had in the years before the war fore-ordained such absence of personal advance- ment. Military spirit had been lost in the round of other concerns in life, mainly the every-day business of earning an honest living.
In these years the state had kept up only the formal enrolment of men from eighteen years upwards in a possible militia. The local company, which early in the century had made a military display in training, had long since become an idle show, with officers often
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chosen half in joke, and had even ceased this empty performance. When the war came, the Massachusetts towns were rare that had a company that could be for a moment regarded as ready for service. Northfield had not even the shadow of such a body. A generation had come that knew no tactics and cherished no ambition for soldiery.
It might well have been suspected that the conditions which had drawn seriously upon the supply of matured youth in the town would lessen the prospect of personal military distinction. Moreover, through the years when the men for an army to be raised in the early 'sixties were coming on, there was a real lack of spurs to ambition of any sort. Some connection might be found between the fact that not a Northfield boy had been sent to college in twenty years before the war and the new fact that none of them rose above a minor rank in the whole war period. Such relation would rest not in the college gate being in the path of generalship, or even of colonelcy, but in the significance that there was an actual narrowing of interest, the logi- cal outcome of an arrested town development, only less true in North- field than in many a country town but measurably true and discover- ably so in this one.
Northfield's sacrifice by death in the Civil War was relatively small. There were indeed names to be held in perpetual honor be- cause of the supreme gift. That the roll was not long was due to the chance that the divisions in which her men served were in fields where the engagements were less costly. The Fifty-Second Massachusetts, in which more than in any other these men were enlisted, saw no sharper encounter than the relatively bloodless siege of Port Hudson, in Mis- sissippi, while its losses by sickness were extremely high.
Civilian services, which gave an outlet to patriotic spirit and in practical help in field and camp, drew sparingly upon the small town. The war nurse, a new figure in military aid, was from the centres where some slight measure of training had been gained. The two organized features, the Sanitary Commission, whose ministrations were as glorious as they were new, and the Christian Commission, with its primary purpose to provide a spiritual help, were likewise the product of the cities where wealth and manhood were ample in extent to meet such demands.
Northfield could only make note that in one of these civilian bodies one of her sons had gone from Chicago into the field in the
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person of Dwight L. Moody and that he had rendered the active, unresting service in the Christian Commission to be expected of him by those who remembered the sort of youth he was when he left the town in the early 'fifties to make his way in the world. In the town, from the first to the last, there had been constant activity by the women, in the making of garments and the scraping of lint and in fairs to raise money for the aid that depended on private interest and devotion.
During the war a town might be doing its full duty in encourage- ment of enlistment and in all manner of home activity to cheer and help its sons in the service and at the same time carry along political differences, centering on war issues. Massachusetts had full share of opponents to the war at the outset. Advocates of peace, even with consent to secession, were outspoken in 1861. Wendell Phillips, leader among abolitionists, made an astonishing speech, favoring non- resistance to the South. At a great peace convention in Faneuil Hall, the principal speech in opposition to war was made by a man in whom Northfield took an almost paternal interest, Benjamin R. Cur- tis, and delegates were chosen to a national peace conference. The firing on Fort Sumter subdued but did not silence the protestors and through the years of strife President Lincoln was under constant criti- cism. The election of 1864 was dreaded for what it might show and Lincoln was known to be almost in despair. In it he faced as his opponent the Commander of the Army of the Potomac, whom after infinite patience with his inactivity he had been compelled to re- place. General McClellan ran on a platform declaring the war a failure.
Patriotic feeling was too strong in a real New England town to permit outspoken disloyalty. No opprobrium could fall upon one of its citizens greater than to be labelled a Copperhead-bitter term borrowed from the South where it belonged to the most venomous snake. When the crucial mid-war election came, the peace-at-any- price man could express himself in a vote for McClellan, and it proved that Northfield had one hundred and seventeen such. The Lincoln vote was two hundred and one. The proportions were identical with those of 1860. They may have signified no more than that the old- line Democrats were too fixed in their voting habits to make new departures. The town had elected one representative during the war
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and its choice of Deacon Dutton showed that it stood fast by its sup- port of Governor Andrew and the President. In 1864 it had the rare distinction of naming the state senator and sent Albert C. Parsons, who thus had a share in the state government in the first and last years of John A. Andrew's governorship. There was no question about his politics.
The war had not only laid heavy burdens of taxation but had weakened national credit, and paper money had so far depreciated that gold was at a premium of nearly three to one. Internal revenue had been so expanded that almost nothing escaped federal taxation. The family carriage, the horse, the watch in the pocket, paid tribute in a searching schedule. But out of the nation's needs had come the national bank system and an end to uncertainty of the worth or worthlessness of currency. Coin had disappeared and in its place had come the fractional currency, bits of paper down to ten and even five cents, dirt-accumulating "shin-plasters."
Prices of the commodities to be bought at the village store had gone distressingly high and somehow wages and the prices of farm products had not kept pace. There could be no idling on the farm or in the household. A new industry in which women could add to family earnings had arrived, the making of straw bonnets and hats. Northfield produced thirty thousand of them in the year of 1865. The palm leaf was delivered and the hats gathered by teams from hat-making towns such as Petersham and Amherst. Meanwhile, broom-making had developed as a home industry for men and the town produced one hundred and sixty thousand brooms the same year. With an average price of eleven or twelve cents per broom, the "tyer" was not in peril of great wealth. The forests on the hills were being made to yield a revenue, with a thriving pail factory on the Warwick road producing thirty thousand pails and tubs in a year and ten saw-mills turning out four hundred and sixty thousand feet of finished lumber.
Industrious use of the land shared in the compulsion and North- field acres were never so diligently tilled. Tobacco had come to be a main reliance and two hundred and thirty-seven acres were now devoted to it. There were five hundred and eighty-three acres of corn, two hundred and eighty-two of oats, one hundred and eighty-eight of rye and smaller numbers in broom corn and hops. Stall-feeding of
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cattle for market had grown to the point where 197,745 pounds of dressed beef were sold.
Somewhat of the burden of farm labor was being relieved by machinery, the mowing machine having arrived just before war time. That lofty building of varied fortunes, the "Bee Hive," had fallen from its educational dignity to be the place of manufacture of the horse-hoe. The maker of this implement was an addition to the town's characters in the person of Amos W. Ross, who carried along with a weight of three hundred pounds the varied distinction of being a dancing master, who could play the violin and simultaneously dem- onstrate the polka, schottische or waltz, a shrewd trader and an out- right infidel in religion, as well as ardent demonstrator of the Ross- hoss-hoe.
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