USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Salem > Reminiscences of Salem, Massachusetts : embracing notices of its eminent men known to the author forty years ago > Part 5
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After the death of Richard Derby this property was
2 Rev. John Higginson, born at Claybrook, Aug. 6, 1616, came with his father to Salem in 1629, and in 1641 assisted Rev. Henry Whitfield (whose daughter Sarah he married) in the ministry at Guilford. Conn. He returned to Salem in 1659 and was ordained as pastor of the church, which his father had founded some thirty years before, and continued the respected minister until his death. Dec. 9, 1708.
II John born at Guilford, 1646, a merchant, settled in Salem; Lient. Col. of the regiment, a member of the Governor's council, etc., died March 23, 1719.
III John born Aug. 20, 1675, educated a merchant, lived in Salem, died April 26, 1718.
IV John born Jan. 10. 1697-8, graduated at Harvard College, 1717; sustained chief offices of the town, County Register, etc. ; died July 15, 1744.
For a sketch of this family see Hist. Coll. Essex Inst., vol. V, p. 33.
" This name appears in deeds, but it should be " Picton " named for Thomas Picton to whom the land was originally granted. Sometimes spelled Pigden.
4 For a sketch of the Derby Family, see Hist. Coll., Essex Inst., vol. III, pp. 154, 201, 283.
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assigned to John Derby towards his portion of his father's estate, who conveyed the same by deed to Edward Allen, Dec. 13, 1793 (see Reg. Deeds, Essex, vol. clvii, fol. 73). After the death of Edward Allen, July 27, 1803, and of his wife Margaret, Aug. 13, 1808, this estate passed into the possession of his son Edward Allen, who sold the same to Josiah Orne Feb. 26, 1810 (see Reg. Deeds, Essex, vol., clxxxviii, fol. 177). Josiah Orne, April 6, 1816, conveyed the same to Jonathan Dustin of Danvers (see Reg. Deeds, Essex, ccx, fol. 86). Eliza Sutton, Hazen Ayer and Serena his wife, in her own right, all of Peabody, being heirs of the late Jonathan Dustin, conveyed the same to Daniel B. Gardner, jr., of Salem, Sept. 24, 1875 (Reg. Deeds, Essex, vol. dccccxli, fol. 233), who has since had the land surveyed, constructed streets and avenues, and sold many lots upon which have been built a large number of seaside residences.
The forenoon of the day was devoted to visiting the various places of interest in the neighborhood. The in- spiration of the occasion was not wholly in the memories of the past, but bright sunlight, refreshing breezes, the lovely green of the shore and the deep blue of the bay, dotted with the white sails of many yachts, engaged in their annual regatta that morning, added much to the enjoyment of the large number who participated in the celebration. At 1 p. M. lunch was served in the spacious and handsome dining hall upon the second floor of the Pavilion ; at 2.30 o'clock the formal exercises we , held in the hall below in the following order :
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ADDRESS.
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By ROBERT S. RANTOUL.
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THE Present and the Future are measurably of our own making. No act of ours, be it ever so trivial, but has its ever-widening circle of remote results. Not so the Past. We find that ready to our hands. It spreads be- fore us like the canvas of the limner, inviting study, stimulating aspiration, inspiring thought; but, like the canvas of the limner, it makes no answer to our fascinated gaze. It lies revealed, like some crystal rescued from the caverns of the earth, immutable and perfect, and we contemplate it as something wholly outside of and beyond ourselves, -as something of which we had no hand in the making, and for which we are in no way to be called on to account. Nothing that we may do can make it other . than it is. Nothing which we have done, -nothing which we have omitted to do, has helped one jot to make or mar its everlasting mould. It looms up before us, forever fixed, like some awful form unfolded in a vision, remote, inexorable, silent, and at rest forever.
Yet there is a sense in which all this is otherwise. If our children ally us with the future, so do our ancestors ally us with the past. The ancient precept, "Honor thy father and thy mother," is still in force. We are what we are, in great measure, because of what they were. And we may not study their acts as the acts of beings without personality, -as occurrences which entrance the
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mind but cannot move the heart. On closer knowledge, the soul warms towards the actors of the past. As we walk among them familiarly, they seem to return our ardor. They reward our devotion. They reflect our feeling. And at last dry fact becomes living reality, - naked bones put on a fleshly garment, and the scenes that have been of old seem to breathe and glow again with quickened and responsive life.
It has been thought fit to commemorate to-day, by be- coming observances at this spot, the advent of John Winthrop upon the shores of Massachusetts Bay. It is good to pause, on a day so marked, so fateful, in our colonial annals, and give ourselves up for an hour to the reflections which crowd upon the mind. It is wise to call up to the fancy the picture of that auspicious scene, -to recite the perils of the voyage, -the hopes, the fears, the aspirations of those engaged in it, -the as- pect of the country they approached, and the condition of the settlements which were to be their future home. Especially has it been thought becoming, in the descend- ants of these actors in the past, to devote a portion of the day, consecrated as it is to heroic memories, to an effort to disclose and emphasize, if we may, the true significance of the occurrence we recall, -to an endeavor to compute the value of the contribution made to the great sum-total of American nationality by the little band who touched our shores two centuries and a half ago.
On Saturday, June 12, 1630, a date corresponding with the close of the third week of the fairest month of our New England summer, the hamlet which stood where we now live was roused at early dawn by the unwonted sound of cannon in the offing. Early risers paused in their homely avocations, and stood listening at their cabin thresholds ; and the startled red-man, crouching for
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wild-fowl behind these very ledges, forgot his aim and strained his unassisted vision seaward. Among the wooded islands of the outer harbor was descried, sharply defined against the background of the glowing East, a single craft of no mean tonnage, flaunting at peak the red cross of England, standing in by the North Chan- nel between Baker's Island and the lesser Misery, and dropping anchor as the sun reddens the horizon. The Lyon, Capt. Pierce, is lying within the islands, and that "Palinurus of the Bay" is not slow to hail the new arri- val, a skiff from whose side had boarded him at early dawn. There is hasty interchange of salutations. Mas- ter Allerton, he who gave his name to the outer headland of Nantasket in Boston Harbor, is on his way in a shallop from Plymouth to Pemaquid, now Bristol, near Casco Bay, and as he sails by, having taken the wings of the morning, he boards the new-comer, within an hour of. sunrise. Another shallop bears down the harbor from Salem,-there were early risers in those days, in Salem,-and at last the welcome story reaches the little hamlet of the presence of the "Arbella," flag- · ship and pioneer of the expected fleet, of three hundred · and fifty tons burthen, manned by fifty-two seamen and mounting twenty-eight guns, after a tempestuous, seventy- six days' passage from the Isle of Wight, bearing John Winthrop and the Charter of the "Governour and Com- pany of London's plantacion in the Massachusetts Bay in New England." Local self-government had struck its roots in Massachusetts soil. Those morning guns, still echoing along our breezy headlands, had announced the possibility, now assured by five half centuries of suc- cessful trial, of tranquillity with freedom; of a demo- cratic commonwealth without class privilege; of an equitable land tenure without primogeniture; of the
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independence of church and state and of political stability without hereditary office. The purpose for which God had at last unveiled the western world was about to be achieved and the destiny of America was determined.
It would be delightful, did the hour permit, to picture what Winthrop found here, with the fidelity of graphic art. The material is at hand. We know who were here, for the settlers of Salem had only moved up from Stage Point, between what are now known as Norman's Woe and Gloucester Harbor, fours years before, when the fingers of the two hands were enough for numbering the heads of families among them, and, since then, they had been successively reinforced by Endicott and by Higginson, with only a chosen few of England's best. We know where these worthies lived, for the restless zeal of our antiquarian students has left no record unexplored, which could correct the outline map of the early town. We know what our fathers wore, what arms they carried, with what tools they wrought; for all they had of tex- tile fabric or mechanical design came from old England, and invoices and bills of lading, detailing fashion and make and quality and price, are extant yet. Finally, we know well what manner of men they were, -what their purposes in life, -what their impressions of the new world, for they were neither idle triflers nor uncultured boors, but set themselves at once about recording obser- vations and transmitting intelligence to friends left behind. Nothing is more delightful than the perusal of these co- pious details. They unlock heart-secrets ; they repro- duce the age. And when, at "about two of the clock" on this anniversary day, so the narrative proceeds, "Mas- ter Endecott," whom Master Peirce had returned to Salem to fetch, boarded the Arbella, and with him his pastor Skelton and one Capt. Levett his adjutant, perhaps, it
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is not difficult to picture the scene which followed. "We that were of the assistants," continues Winthrop in his journal, "and some other gentlemen, and some of the women, and our captain, returned with them to Nahum- keek." It is not recorded how they came up the harbor, but that they came in sloop-boats, then called shallops, and in common use, is a fair presumption. Nor are we told just where they stepped ashore,' although tradition and conjecture point strongly to the curious metamorphic rock, near the old Bass River ferry and the present Bridge, as the probable landing. Somewhere along that grassy eight-foot lane which skirted the Planters' Marsh and hugged the margin of the stream, and which led on to the Governor's "fayre house" and the Arbor Lot Fort, that notable company must have disembarked and taken their stately way on foot, to enter upon the mission of their lives. They were men who had turned their backs upon much that was worth living for in England, -men whose eminent connections, whose intelligence, whose character and whose means, made possible the establish- ment of a state and the building of a capital town in this untrod waste, -men who were pioneering the largest and best appointed fleet ever yet put forth for a port in America, -men who meant, peaceably if they could but forcibly if they must, to make fast and strong the foot- hold of the Saxon race on this continent, and to make the discomfiture of Richelieu's ambition absolute and final. There is a native dignity in these men, arbiters of a con- tinent, as they walk in sober state along the sunny stream. No pomp attends their way. The hundred or more of the village, old and young, are at hand to greet them; but with conflicting feelings. The winter had been hard and the help of the new comers is welcome. But the powers which Conant and his men had, not without jealousies and
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regrets, made over to Endicott, two summers before, Endicott must in turn surrender to another. Hardly corn enough remained for a fortnight's supply, and yet the Arbella brought no succor. No joy-bells pealed, for as yet no monitory church-spire cleft the clouds. The oaks, which were to frame the venerable church structure preserved to us through the beneficent liberality and zeal of a former President of the Institute, were tossing their branches in the vernal air. No cheerful salvos from Darbie's Fort or the Arbor Lot echoed the Arbella's sun- rise guns, for then powder was precious, like dust of ' gold, and gunners were "fishers and choppers and plow- men" also.
Notable indeed was the seaworn company which sat at meat that day in the new-built Endicott cottage, and looked out from under its peaked gables and through its diamond-leaded windows upon the Indian village in North Fields and the grassy slopes of what we call Orne's Point, and supped there, as Winthrop does not fail to tell us, with a smack of the lips quite pardonable in one just landed from seventy-six days on shipboard, "with a good venison pasty, and good beer." And thus the "fayre house" which Higginson, in 1629 found newly-built for Governor Endicott was the first habitation in the colony to open its hospitable doors to his successor.
Winthrop, the central figure of this group, was in his early prime, at forty-three. A man of rare grace of per- . son and bearing, he was not more marked by those traits which make men engaging in their intercourse with others, than by those more robust attributes which fit us to de- termine, to withstand, and to prevail. The ladies, at least, will allow me that he was no ordinary person when they know that at the age of seventeen he was a husband, and had embarked upon his third matrimonial venture at
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the age of thirty. At eighteen he was a justice of the peace, and at twenty-one, father of three sons, one of whom was afterwards Governor of Connecticut, and another of whom was drowned, near the scene of Leslie's Retreat, on the day after his landing. He had been edu- cated at Cambridge, the liberal University of England ; had ceased, in June, 1629, to be an attorney of the Court of Wards,-indeed, he belonged to a family learned in the law from the time of the Sth Henry, as well as pillars of the reformed faith even in the bloody days of Mary ; he had joined Matthew Cradock's company of adventurers in September, 1629, on condition that its patent and en- tire concerns should be transferred to America, and had been chosen Governor in October, with the greatest con- fidence and hope, as Cradock's successor.
I dare not trespass on your time, to attempt a charac- terization of this distinguished personage. Such an at- tempt, limited by the narrow necessities to which I am bound, would do injustice to his name. Nor is there need of tribute at my hands. A descendant of his, whom we hoped for the pleasure of seeing and hearing to-day, has dealt in his own graceful, delicate and exhaustive way, with this eminent magistrate and man; and while no family portrait could be more fit to inspire ancestral rev- erence and pride, nothing which my researches have brought to light would prompt me to modify, in a single line, the noble features thus delineated, nor to question the exalted estimate put upon the character of his ancestor by our esteemed contemporary, Mr. Winthrop of Boston, in his Life and Letters of Gov. Winthrop. But the chronicles of the time display the true proportions of the man. The record of his election to be the chief officer of the enterprise does not omit to say what was thought and expected of him by his associates. It reads as follows :
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"And now the Court, proceeding to the election of a new Governor, Deputy and Assistants, * * and having received extraordinary great commendations of Mr. John Winthrop, both for his integrity and sufficiency, as being one every way well fitted and accomplished for the place of Governor * the said Mr. Winthrop was, with a general vote and full consent of this court, by erection of hands, chosen to be Governor for the ensuing year, to begin on this present day; who was pleased to accept thereof and thereupon took the oath to that place apper- taining."
The civil, political and military functions, now attaching to the chief magistracy of Massachusetts, have come to overshadow all others and are the only ones now associ- ated, in the mind, with the title of Governor. The word "Court," too, as used by us has another sense than that attaching to it in these records. When Conant, Endicott, and after them Winthrop, were selected and qualified as "Governor," the choice was made by a small body of corporators, and the electors were discharging not more a political than a commercial function. Analogies are not wanting which throw light upon this point. The title of "President," we apply in common to our highest offi- cial dignitary and to the chief officers of banking, com- mercial and manufacturing corporations. The word "Governor" was and is used, in England, as we use the word "President," and carries with it, of necessity, no political significance whatever. Thus the Bank of Eng- land to-day calls its executive board, as the Massachusetts adventurers did theirs, the "Governor, Deputy Governor and Company," and also holds its "Court of Directors.""
I return from this digression, to quote from the files of her Majesty's Public Record Office in London, these words referring to the Winthrop emigration : "This year
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there went hence six ships with one thousand people in them, to the Massachusetts, having sent, two years before, between three and four hundred servants to provide houses and corn against their coming. These servants, through idleness and ill-government neglected both their building and planting of corn, so that if those six ships had not arrived, the plantation had been broke and dissolved. Now, so soon as Mr. Winthrop was landed, perceiving what misery was like to ensue through their idleness, he presently fell to work with his own hands, and thereby so encouraged the rest that there was not an idle person there to be found in the whole plantation, and whereas the Indians had said they would shortly return as fast as they came, now they admired to see in what short time they had all housed themselves, and planted corn suffi- cient for their subsistence."
"It is true," wrote the famous Capt. John Smith, in 1631, "that Master John Winthrop, their new Governor, a worthy gentleman both in estate and esteem, went so well provided (for six or seven hundred people went with him) as could be devised. But at sea, such an extraor- dinary storm encountered his fleet, continuing ten days, that of two hundred cattle which were so tossed and bruised threescore and ten died; many of their people fell sick, and in this perplexed estate, after ten weeks they arrived in New England at several times, where they found threescore of their people dead, the rest sick, nothing done, but all complaining, and all things so con- trary to their expectation, that now every monstrous humor began to show itself. Notwithstanding all this, the noble governor was no way disanimated, neither re- pents him of his enterprise for all those mistakes, but did order all things with that temperance and discretion, and so relieved those that wanted with his own provision, that
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there is six or seven hundred remained with him, and more than sixteen hundred English in all the country, with three or four hundred head of cattle."
' Still another contemporaneous account is found in a letter of Thomas Wiggin to Sir John Cooke, Knight, principal secretary to his Majesty, and member of the most honorable privy council, dated 1632, which also gives the impression of an eye-witness : "For the planta- tion in the Massachusetts, the English there being about . two thousand people, young and old, are generally most industrious and fit for such a work, having in three years . done more in building and planting than others have done in seven times that space, and with at least ten times less expense. Besides, I have observed the planters there, by their loving, just and kind dealing with the Indians, have gotten their love and respect, and drawn them to an outward conforming to the English, so that the Indians repair to the English Governor there, and his Deputies, for justice. And for the Governor himself, I have ob- served him to be a discreet and sober man, giving good example to all the planters, wearing plain apparel, such as may well beseem a mean man, drinking ordinarily water, and when he is not conversant about matters of justice, putting his hand to any ordinary labor with his servants,-ruling with much mildness to the great con- tentment of those that are best affected, and to the terror of offenders."
Dudley, himself thirteen times chosen Deputy Gov- ernor, and four times chosen Governor over Winthrop, wrote thus from Boston in 1630, to his patroness and friend the Countess of Lincoln:
"We sent Mr. John Endicott, and some with him, to begin a plantation and to strengthen such as he should find there, which we sent thither from Dorchester and
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some places adjoining. From whom the same year, re- ceiving hopeful news, the next year, 1629, we sent divers ships over, with about three hundred people, and some cows, goats and horses, many of which arrived safe. These, by their too large commendations of the country and the commodities thereof, invited us so strongly to go on, that Mr. Winthrop, of Suffolk, who was well known in his own country and well approved here for his piety, liber- ality, wisdom and gravity, coming in to us, we came to such resolution that in April, 1630, we set sail from old England with four good ships, and May following eight more followed, two having gone before in February and March, and two more following in June and August, be-
sides another, set out by a private merchant.
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seventeen ships arrived all safe in New England, for the increase of the plantation here this year 1630, but made a long, a troublesome and costly voyage. Our four ships, which set out in April, arrived here in June and July, where we found the colony in a sad and unexpected con- dition, above eighty of them being dead the winter before ; many of those alive weak and sick; all the corn and bread amongst them all hardly sufficient to feed them a fortnight, insomuch that the remainder of a hundred and eighty servants we had the two years before sent over, coming to us for victuals to sustain them, by reason that the provisions shipped for them were taken out of the ship they were put in, and they who were trusted to ship them in another failed us and left them behind. Where- upon necessity enforced us, to our extreme loss, to give them all liberty, who had cost us about £16 or £20 a person, furnishing and sending over."
John Winthrop, as his biographer well says, was fully justified by these varied testimonies in saying of himself, in a statement of his reasons for joining the New England
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enterprise, "It is come to that issue as, in all probability, the welfare of the plantation depends upon my assistance. For the main pillars of it, being gentlemen of high qual- ity and eminent parts, both for wisdom and Godliness, are determined to sit still if I desert them."
But Winthrop did not desert them and they did not sit still. Here too, on this June afternoon, was Dudley the Deputy, chosen on board the Arbella to the second place in the government, after it became certain that his prede- cessor, Humfrey, must take passage later. He had been associated, in a responsible charge, with the House of Clinton and Lincoln, now dukes of Newcastle, the best family of the time, Mather says, in the British Peerage : a family out of which such friends of America as Hum- frey, the ill-starred Johnson and the young heir of Sir Ferdinando Gorges had chosen consorts. Thomas Dudley was now fifty-three. He had read law ; fought as a captain, both for English Queen Bess and French King Harry of Navarre ; had extricated, by his prudent administration, the estates of the young Earl of Northampton from dis- astrous entanglements, and was now to become the founder of Cambridge, in New England, and the first Major Gen- eral of Massachusetts, and to be elected year after year, either Governor, Deputy Governor or Assistant of the Colony.
Here, too, was Saltonstall, Winthrop's first assistant, "that excellent knight" as Mather calls him, a figure not less conspicuous, from his rank, resources and character, than any other after Winthrop in the company. He was a person of sufficient consideration to have been the first- named associate of six original patentees of Massachusetts . Bay. When Gov. Cradock's proposal for the transfer of the government of the colony to our soil was to be de- bated, pro et contra, before a general court, convened for
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that end at Master Deputy Goffe's house in London, Aug. 29, 1629, at 7 o'clock in the morning, Sir Richard Saltonstall was the first-named of the committee selected to advocate the transfer; and at a general court, held Oct. 15, 1629, he was chairman of a committee to arrange and draw up the terms of the transfer, to be executed "between the adventurers here at home and the planters that are to go over." Joining Cradock's enterprise a year before, and now 44 years of age, he took, at once, the leading place to which his rank, his gifts, his fortune and his legal training entitled him; was the first signer and promoter, if not the writer, of liberal church covenants, and of letters of wise instruction to Governor Endicott and the Salem clergymen, and was destined on his return to England to sit in judgment at the trial for high treason of five peers, in the High Court of Justice.
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