USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 13
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Hardly had the association been formed and medical students started on their more arduous studies than its meet- ings were interrupted by that climax of political events to which the discontent of post-war years had been leading.
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The peace and prosperity which veterans had promised themselves on their return from the war had been a pipe dream. To the soldiers who had come home and the families who greeted them, the snapping of the wartime tension had been only a temporary relief. Taking stock, they found themselves poor. The soldiers had been paid in Continental currency which by now had shrunk to almost nothing, so that a night's lodging cost $40 and $400 was paid for a mug of flip.
Debt hung like a black cloud over the horizon. The state debt alone had jumped from £100,000 before the war to £1,300,000 afterwards. Taxes were unevenly distributed and Berkshire, for its part, felt that its assessments were much too high. Public debt was as nothing to the private liabili- ties. The courts were clogged with lawsuits, so that it sometimes seemed as if the lawyers were the only prosperous men in the county, and they were hated in consequence. Many people were evicted from their houses, and the Great Barrington jail, which had been too weak for Elijah, was quite strong enough for the host of half-starved wretches which now filled it. Country people blamed the city people. Jahleel Woodbridge and Timothy Edwards shook their heads over the way the market was flooded with foreign luxuries so that all the money was leaving the country. "The articles of rum and tea alone," wrote Porcupine, the savage Federa- list journalist, "would pay all taxes, but when we add sugar, coffee, gauzes, silks, feathers and a list of baubles and trinkets, what an enormous expense."
The grievances of the poor were far greater. Now that the war was over they thought that heavy taxation ought to be over likewise. Surely the country had not resisted King George's encroachments only to struggle under a more rigor- ous form of self-imposed tyranny.
In Hatfield, a convention of the delegates from fifty towns, whose proceedings were especially printed for Berkshire's
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benefit, listed eighteen sources of prevalent discontent. It favored the emission of paper money, subject to depreciation -a plausible and popular idea at this time-based upon the theory that the more paper you printed, the more money you had.
Not long after this convention the court-stopping which had been so effective during the Revolution was adopted once more. A mob of 800 men prevented the sitting of a court in Great Barrington, broke open the jail, and released the prisoners. Three of the judges were forced to sign a paper agreeing not to act upon their commissions until the people's grievances had been redressed.
Stockbridge, itself still quiet, waited eagerly for news. The conservative rose under a new name, Friends of Govern- ment, smelled as sweet. Theodore Sedgwick had been rep- resentative to the Legislature for several years and made no bones of his opposition to the popular side. Gradually he was becoming one of the leaders of the new Federalist party in the western part of the state, throwing all the weight of his overbearing personality on the side of constitutional law and order without understanding the just grievances of "the popular mob." Jahleel Woodbridge, Timothy Edwards and Henry W. Dwight all agreed with him. During the Revolu- tion resistance to England had been, except for the Tories, a common political denominator. Now the popular party had lost all leadership from the conservative class. Through- out the rebellion that was to follow it showed a timidity and lack of initiative characteristic of men who have been used to being led. This accounts for "that want of enterprise in the insurgents for which their obstinacy and perseverance was an inadequate substitute" and "that entire lack of moral power" which the historians, Minot and Holland, so priggishly deplore.
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By 1786, resistance to the established government was in full force. Petitions, conventions and court-stoppings had become the order of the day. Daniel Shays, a handsome, plausible fellow, had become the leader of the insurgents, who numbered one third of the entire population of the state. At this critical juncture, Governor Bowdoin acted with firmness, and called out 4,400 men under the command of General Lincoln. Shays had marched to Springfield intend- ing to seize the arsenal there, but Lincoln arrived before this was accomplished and the rebels beat a retreat for Petersham where nearly all of them surrendered.
For Stockbridge all these events were but the prelude to its own drama. The village was convinced that Shays would now take his stand in the Green Mountains, where other followers would join him, and whence he could raid the western counties of Massachusetts to his heart's content. What virtually amounted to a threat of civil war hovered over the community. In the silence of the smaller farmers, the mechanics, and of the very servants in their houses, Jahleel Woodbridge and Josiah Jones read sympathy with Shays. Timothy Edwards taught his son, William, to stand at an attic window and point his gun so expertly that in case the Shays men attacked the village, he could shoot down two of them at the same time. Green hemlock branches worn in the hat meant a Shays man; a white cockade, loyalty to the government. In Pittsfield, Van Schaack prudently decided that he could serve his state better if he didn't wear any badge; his Tory banishment was still fresh in his mind. At Curtis Mills, Abel Curtis, turned an eighteenth century New Dealer, sympathized openly with the rebels, and shocked his conservative entourage. The tension grew rapidly worse. Muddy Brook Road became so infested with rebels, that a company of Sheffield militia did not dare go to Great Bar- rington until that town had sent another company to guard
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its way. To cap the climax, eight sleighs slowly and mysteriously drove out of Stockbridge, carrying supplies to the rebels.
Clearly something had to be done. The government asked the several communities to defend themselves without calling on the state militia. Accordingly 500 men, among them Timothy Edwards's son, William, organized themselves as an independent force and made Stockbridge their head- quarters. Men on guard stopped citizens going to their homes and asked for the password. Soldiers sat in church of a Sunday. Theodore Sedgwick's life was threatened and when he went away from home he thought it prudent to leave his papers at Dr. West's for safe-keeping.
All this military preparation was not wasted for in West Stockbridge Paul Hubbard, one of the Shays men, had suc- ceeded in collecting about 200 followers, and threatened daily to become more powerful. From over the mountain an oncoming tide of sedition, gathering recruits on its way, became more than a possibility.
To meet this contingency three companies were formed in Stockbridge. The central one took the road through Larrywaug, while the others were to converge upon West Stockbridge from the north and south respectively. An advance party of the central division reached the village first, only to find, at the junction where the three roads met, a considerable force lined up against them. The Shays sentries fired and their company was ordered to follow suit. They greatly outnumbered the small body of loyalists, only thirty-seven infantry and seven cavalry in all, who confronted them. Perhaps the sight of the familiar faces of their towns- people, the friends they had drunk with at the Widow Bingham's, the men with whom they had made roads and repaired bridges, gave the rebels a minute's pause. At any rate they did not fire immediately and in that moment a
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solitary figure emerged, riding toward them. As he drew near, they recognized him.
In their hesitation, Theodore Sedgwick seized his oppor- tunity. "Lay down your arms," he commanded in that voice which always seemed to his children like the Thunder of Jove. Their new-found freedom and their courage flickered out. Their ranks broke, vague firing started some- where; some ran away, others surrendered without further struggle. The supporting loyalist divisions now came up. Two rebels only were wounded but eighty-four of them were captured and summarily marched off to Stockbridge. For the most part these men took advantage of the Governor's offer of pardon to all who would lay down their arms. And so ended on an ignominious note the boasted glory of their military career.
The affair at West Stockbridge, damaging as it must have been to the insurgents' morale, did not mean that the rebellion was at an end. On February 5, 1787, General Patterson of Lenox-the same Patterson who had commanded the Berkshire militia in the Revolutionary War-found it necessary to ask General Lincoln to bring his state troops into Berkshire. It was a relief to the loyalists when Lincoln answered that he would immediately "throw a very sufficient force into your county." Before he could arrive, however, 250 rebels had gathered at Lee to prevent the sitting of the court. The militia was called out to meet them and a story goes that a yarn beam, which the insurgents rigged up to look like a cannon, was effective in securing them easier terms in their inevitable surrender.
The rebellion, hitherto marked by no loss of life and practically no bloodshed, was nearing its close. The insults heaped upon the insurgents by contemporary historians are hard to balance with the mildness contained in Shays' petitions, the comparative restraint of the silent court-
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stoppings and the righteous complaints behind the popular conventions. "Their boastings and their threatenings, their insolence and malice, their outrages and their robberies" seems strong language in which to describe the quiet and, at many times submissive, course they pursued. The twentieth century is remote from the fear of governmental paralysis, however, which was a daily consideration in the minds of men at that time, and which accounts in part for the severity with which the dumbly resisting farmers of Shays' Rebellion were treated by their chroniclers.
It remained for Berkshire and particularly Stockbridge to witness a final flare-up of hostilities, which came nearer than any other event to placing the rebels in the violent rôle assigned them. From Lebanon, Eli Parsons, a rebel leader who was known to have 400 men at his command, proclaimed: "Friends and Fellow-sufferers-Will you now tamely suffer your arms to be taken from you, your estates to be confiscated, and even swear to support a constitution . . . which common sense and your consciences declare to be iniquitous and cruel? And can you bear to see . . . the yeomanry of this common- wealth being cut to pieces by the cruel and merciless tools of tyrannical power, and not resent it unto even relentless bloodshed?"
Parsons's plan was a simple one. He proposed first to capture General Shepard's army, then to enter the county of Berkshire to "carry our point, if fire, blood and carnage will effect it."
The words carried horror to the Stockbridge community- horror which still echoes through the pages of its muffling histories. Horror did not strike home to one of its peaceful householders, however, who, shortly after Parsons's edict overheard a passing horseman say to his companion, "Now is our time to come in." To her the stranger was innocent of menace, and his words seemed merely irrelevant. She did
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not guess that he referred to the fact that Stockbridge was doubly exposed, partly because the volunteer army had been disbanded at the approach of Lincoln's regular one, and partly because a company of militia from Sheffield had been marched to Pittsfield where reinforcements were in urgent demand.
In the dark, early hours of February 27, 1787, young Timothy Woodbridge, sleeping with his father, Jahleel, was to remember afterwards how he woke to find the room filled with soldiers, their arms gleaming in the candlelight, and waving green hemlock boughs over his bed. His father had time only to push the little boy into his older sister's arms before being taken prisoner. A party of Shays men, under young Perez Hamlin, had entered the village from Larry- waug and had made for the Widow Bingham's, where they divided themselves into three companies and set off in separate directions to seize what prisoners and property they could. It has been suggested that their motive was deep- dyed and that, knowing their cause to be on the wane, they counted upon procuring prisoners valuable enough to secure them better terms of surrender, but it is difficult from their actions to believe them capable of thinking out any such concerted plan.
After plundering Jahleel Woodbridge's farmhouse, they drove that gentleman out into the snow, where his habitual benevolence towards mankind no doubt temporarily deserted him. They made for Deacon Ingersoll's, where they found the good deacon at his prayers. His wife, more quick-witted than pious, bethought herself of a bottle of brandy which she gave her visitors so that they promptly forgot what they had come for and departed in high spirits. Down on the Great Barrington road, Ira Seymour barely escaped capture by running barefoot out into the snow. On the Hill, the house of Captain Jones was entered. Here the rebels availed them-
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selves of military supplies and drove the Captain, his two sons, a negro servant and a houseboy out into the cold.
Next door, at Dr. Sergeant's, Miss Mercy Scott, the village seamstress, who happened to be staying there, had her silver shoe buckles stolen. The doctor, two medical students and Moses Lynch, son of Lawrence, were captured. The latter was asked, "Why do you wear that white cockade?" When he retaliated appropriately enough, "Why do you wear that green bough?" he narrowly escaped being pinned to the wall by the thrust of a bayonet.
This was the rebels' heyday. The world had turned topsy-turvy for a while and it was theirs-theirs to drink and to take, to threaten and to bully. Did they realize this could not last? For all Eli Parsons's bravado, their leader, Shays, was lurking at Petersham, a defeated man, and young Hamlin must surely have known his cause a lost one.
Yet it is possible that, even in that delirious moment, old ties had not entirely snapped. Perhaps it was timeworn respect that made them spare the house of Dr. West, or merely the fact that it was now time to get back to the village.
On Plain Street, at the office of Theodore Sedgwick, two young law students were led away. The appurtenances of gentility-"ruffled shirts and parlor costumes"-were tossed out of the window. At his house, bayonets were thrust under beds in the hope that the owner might be lurking there, though it is difficult to think of so much autocracy in so undignified a position. Instead of their hoped-for victim the rebels were confronted by the Negro woman, Mumbet.
Mumbet had barely had time to hide the silver in a trunk in her own room and arm herself with a heavy fire shovel, before the house was filled with men searching the closets and drawers and loudly demanding to taste the wine that gentlemen drank. In the cellar they broke the top off a demijohn of porter but Mumbet threatened them with a
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blow of her fire shovel if they tried to break anything else. With elaborate sarcasm she offered to serve them, like gentle- men, with proper glasses. The porter, however, was sour to their taste and, muttering that the "gentlemen who drank such stuff were welcome to it," they returned to their search. When at last Mumbet's room was reached, she tried sarcasm again. "You'd open a poor nigger's trunk, would you, you who consider yourselves so fine." Upon thinking it over, the proposition seemed a little beneath their dignity. After all, it was very unlikely that the room contained anything valuable. "You call me a poor nigger, yet you'd stoop to robbing me," her voice went on, like a gadfly stinging them, until they were glad to leave the house. And the family silver was saved.
Meanwhile the prisoners were being paraded up and down on the green in front of the graveyard. They hadn't had time to dress properly and the cold was intense. They now numbered forty-one in all, and Hamlin was anxious to get them out of Stockbridge. Timothy Edwards's store had been raided for liquor so successfully that by this time several of the rebels had sublimated their efforts into a state of blissful unconsciousness. The expeditious Widow Bingham took advantage of the general confusion to hide Captain Jones in the capacious chimney closet at the Red Lion Inn so that no one missed him when the party finally marched away.
As Perez Hamlin guided his bizarre company, some of them drunken and some of them undressed, along the Great Barrington road, his heart may have misgiven him, but his men's spirits were high. They did not know that the alarm had gone out, nor that Dr. West had told Captain Stoddard of the volunteer corps, that the Plain was full of Shays men and that the Captain had instantly rallied his band for the pursuit. One citizen was so anxious to alarm the neighbors that he is said to have stood up in his sleigh, worn out his
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whip, and then used his ramrod on his horse all the way to Great Barrington to get there in time to spread the news.
When the rebels reached that town, the mood of conquest was still upon them. Their appetites whetted, they wished to taste more of the joys of liberation. They wanted more to drink and they wanted to see the jail which, conveniently enough, was in the same building as the tavern. They wished to be sure it was strong enough to hold their prisoners when the time came to put them there. They set the debtors at liberty and, in the general rejoicing, the double entente of Mrs. Bement-wife of the jailer and sister-in-law to Asa Bement in Stockbridge-was lost upon their simple minds. As she opened the cells for their inspection, she chanted the hymn, Ye living men come view the ground, Where you must shortly lie.
As Great Barrington had by now been thoroughly alarmed, and the rebels knew it would be difficult to obtain any more plunder, their motley crew turned off to Egremont, hoping to get to New York State as quickly as possible. But their hourglass was running low and the triumph of their drunken voices was shortly to be stilled. By the middle of the day, Colonel Ashley of Sheffield, joined by Captain Dwight and Captain Ingersoll of Great Barrington, marched out in pursuit.
It was on the road from South Egremont to Sheffield, where now uncomprehending automobilists pass an awkward stone marker commemorating the last battle of Shays' Rebellion, that the two forces met and the affair of West Stockbridge repeated itself on a larger scale. The rebels formed a line across the road while the government troops converged upon them through the woods and along the open ground, firing as they came. Everything happened so quickly that the Shays men hardly had time to hide behind their prisoners to load their muskets before the whole affair was over. The fire of
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eight or ten government men was sufficient to scatter the entire rebel force. Fifty or sixty prisoners were taken, two were killed, and about thirty, wounded. Among the wounded was young Perez Hamlin, whose heart must have sunk within him at the ease with which his comrades surrendered their cause.
Two of the government men were killed. One of them was Solomon Glezen, a Stockbridge schoolmaster who, finding himself before the enemy's fire, suggested quite prac- tically to one of the Joneses who was beside him, that they run away. In so doing, Glezen was shot in the chin, thereby gaining an immortality which otherwise would have been denied him, since he was thoroughly unpopular both at school and at home. There is a tilted stone in the Stock- bridge graveyard, dutifully stamped with a funeral urn and inscribed with verses which brought a touch of poetry to the unlettered back country and turned the overshadowing pine trees into a classic grove.
Solomon Glezen Made prisoner by the Insurgents, Fell in the battle of Sheffield February 27, 1786
"Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumor of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, Might never reach me more."
So ended the fiercest battle of Shays' Rebellion. From now on the spirit of the insurgents was completely broken, and Governor Bowdoin grasped the reins of government more tightly in his hands. The Shays men were clapped into jail at Great Barrington, where so shortly before they had once hoped to put prisoners of their own. "He who laughs last laughs best," thought young Stockbridge blades, as they picked up the accoutrements the rebels left behind and joined
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the line of sleighs filled with the remaining prisoners. This line was so long that, when the head of the procession passed by the Hill church in Stockbridge on its way to Lenox, its tail had not yet turned the cemetery corner. How amused Mumbet must have been, as she watched it pass up the street. Old neighbors, their late division ended, talked to each other, compared notes, and even joked. The Stockbridge raid and the Sheffield encounter had taken place on the same day. Suspense and tragedy in the morning were followed by comic opera in the afternoon.
Although the rebellion was virtually over, government troops were not disbanded until the following September. The precaution seemed hardly necessary since the last rum- blings shortly died down. Most of the insurgents were promptly pardoned, but fourteen men-six of them from Berkshire-were sentenced to death. These, too, in time were released, with the exception of one Berkshire man whose sentence was commuted to hard labor for seven years. Theodore Sedgwick acted as one of the defense attorneys for the accused. His letters to the General Court, recommend- ing clemency, showed the side of his nature that his children loved, instead of the harsher angle he often turned upon the world. He was by no means alone in his leniency. The mild course pursued by the government at this time reflects the widespread and popular sympathy with the rebels, which expressed itself even after their defeat.
Chapter VIII
THE FEDERALIST PERIOD
I N the quiet that followed the tumult of the rebellion, the patine of civilization smoothed rough frontier edges. When Madam Dwight drove out to call upon her son and daughter, Stockbridge for the first time acquired a past. Although she inspired youth with her "true virtue and piety," she still loved the things of this world. She carried a watch-a badge of authority-and dressed in rich silk, per- sonifying dignity and tradition.
She hardly recognized the village she had known as a girl. New stores had opened along the Plain. A white one near the Red Lion Inn belonged to Daniel Pepoon, while Phineas Ashmun advertised "Twilled Lambskins, Casimers and Satinets-at the new store a few yards west of Hon. Theodore Sedgwick's." In return, he would pay cash for "Old Pewter and Brass, Old Silver, Beeswax, clean cotton and linen rags." Mark Hopkins's brother, John, had gone into trade and undertaken to nourish both man's body and soul. Together with "Jamaica Spirits, good French brandy, Malaga and Teneriffe wines, hyson, skins, and Bohea tea," he offered his customers "the Testaments, psalms and hymns." Under the heading "Comfortable Things," Josiah Dwight offered "French Brandy, St. Croix Rum, and old Jamaica Spirits for ready pay only."
More people were moving into town, some from the eastern part of the state, many from Connecticut. By 1792,
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Jeremiah Buck was settled at the northern end of the Stock- bridge Bowl. By 1800, Jesse Stafford owned a large farm on Goodrich Street, and up on East Street, near the little school, the Carters had become fixtures. A voting list for 1815 contains many names familiar to the town today: Bidwell, Buck, Byington, Carter, Jones, Lynch, Lincoln, Plumb, Pomeroy, Palmer, Seymour, and Smith follow like beads on a string throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
The farming village was becoming more urbane. In 1788, the first newspaper in the county, The Western Star, was published by Loring Andrews, who was recommended as "a sober and ingenious man and a Federalist," and Theodore Sedgwick suggested that a post be established between Stock- bridge and Kinderhook, so that the paper could be sent there. In 1792, the first post office in the county was opened on Plain Street, in a simple white wooden house a little to the east of Timothy Edwards's store. Andrews was postmaster as well as editor and listed in his pages the mail not promptly called for. There, too, could be found detailed accounts of what was happening in Congress, and local items, useful and non- descript. "Whereas my wife Anna," complained Lemuel Hill of Alford, "hath of late behaved herself in an unbe- coming manner, all persons are hereby forbid entertaining or trusting her on my account, as I will not pay any debts of her contracting after this date." Luxuries were advertised to tempt the village palate: "Oysters for sale at the dock . . . of Kinderhook landing." One of the Woodbridges took the opportunity to announce that he wanted to buy some good chestnut rails, while Mr. Pomeroy Noble quite baldly stated, "That elegant stud horse Flag of Truce ... will stand two days in each week . . . three dollars for a single leap, six dollars to warrant a foal." Mr. Noble, a man of few words, believed that "encomiums were fulsome."
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