USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 4
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Sergeant had no time to listen to stories. He walked with God, hurrying from Hill to Plain, now reading the Scripture, which he had translated into Indian, to a group in his study, now calling on the sick, and teaching classes even in the evening. "A Person of but few words in Generale," Abigail wrote, "and agreeable to ye beautiful Description ye wise man gives us of those yt are fittly spoken, they were like apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver." Two days a week it took him to prepare his two-hour Sunday sermon for the Indians, the exhausting climax of his week, for pronouncing Indian, Abigail said, was extremely hard on the stomach. "He was generally Exceedingly spent and tired so as hardly able to Speak after his Publick Exercises." For he had not only to
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preach to the Indians but to the English, and Timothy Woodbridge says his people were not entertained with "unconnected and undigested matter but with excellent discourses." Closely reasoned and substantial, thirty-five pages of a sermon come down to us, on the Causes and Danger of Delusions in the Affairs of Religion, no Christianity in a sugar-coated pill, but a careful exposition of his stand on the burning issue of the day. The stone which Jonathan Edwards had thrown into the theological pool by reasserting the old Calvinist doctrines had formed ripples that were extending all over New England. But Sergeant, in his "Solitary abode in this Howling Wilderness," as Abigail dramatically over- stated it, could not believe or preach such a religion. In his world, values had to be very simple and distinct, with evil painted very black, virtue very white, and punishments and rewards handed out by a reasonable Deity. The Williamses and the Joneses and the Woodbridges up on the Hill, were rough and hearty folk, hewing the town of Stockbridge out of the primeval forest, and liking their religion in good strong doses. Two hours of stiff preaching was none too much for them, but they liked to be told of God as a beneficent Father who loved them and would reward their labors in a happier world, where there would be peace for the righteous and surely a crown for John Sergeant.
David Brainerd, a pupil of Edwards, used to come over from Kaunameek, about twenty miles away from Stockbridge, where he was teaching a neighboring tribe. He came osten- sibly to take lessons in Indian, but perhaps really to gain strength from the halo that Sergeant carried so unconsciously around his head. A sufferer from tuberculosis, this neurotic young man was destroyed by his faith, not upheld by it like Sergeant. Neither physically nor spiritually did he have the stomach for the Edwards creed and his journal is a heart- breaking account of sickness of the soul. "I had no idea of
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joy from this world. I cared not where or how I lived or what hardships I might have to endure if I might only gain souls to Christ . . . [but] to an eye of Reason everything that respects the conversion of the Heathen is dark as midnight and yet I cannot but hope in God for the accomplishment of something glorious among them." It was hard for him to see a light for the savages that flickered so to his own despairing gaze. The Dutchmen were as uncooperative at Kaunameek as at Stockbridge. "All their discourses turn upon Things of the world," he complained. "Oh what a hell it would be to spend an Eternity with such Men." Sergeant soothed and sympathized and told him that the Devil had always his temptations and instruments to promote his cause, and added that anyone who had much to do with Indians had need to fortify himself with an obstinate patience. Sergeant looked out upon the evil in the world, and with the energetic Abigail at his side, laid briskly about him to subdue it.
One bright spot that Brainerd noticed in the gloom was the Indian's fondness for music, and he arranged several prayers and psalms in metrical form and taught the Indians to sing. Some of the bottled-up wildness and love of natural beauty poured into their singing, and spontaneous bursts of song would often drift up on the evening air from the wigwams by the river to Sergeant's house on the Hill. Years later, a stranger passing through Stockbridge was so enchanted by some Indians singing in a neighboring house that he excused himself from the dinner table to listen to them. He came back to apologize rapturously to his hostess, "Do you think I can deny myself the pleasure of being in Heaven for the sake of eating?"
Sergeant now began to consider an even more ambitious scheme for the regeneration of the Indians. Their way of life, he felt, was completely hindside-before. The women shouldered the axe, planted the corn, and gathered the crops,
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while the men, when they were not hunting, wallowed in slothful idleness-"a seed-plot of all manner of vice" among them. The women looked up to the thrifty housewives on the Hill with admiration but with a strong conviction that such domesticated virtue was not for them. Sergeant was beginning to see that to change the habits of the older generation would be impossible, but by taking the children young enough and instilling into their minds simultaneously ideas of cleanliness and godliness, he had hopes that the next generation might be raised to the level of "a civil, industrious and polish'd people." His successful experiment with Mr. Hollis's twelve boys seemed to point the way to an extension of this idea, and the establishment of a boarding school, where manual labor would be combined with the regular studies. The Indians would build the schoolhouse them- selves, a substantial building with the luxuries of a cellar and three rooms with fireplaces. From the first the children would cultivate their own crops and take care of the cattle, sheep and hogs. The girls (for it was to be coeducational in spite of Mr. Hollis's predilection for boys) would spend the long winter evenings sitting by the generous fireplaces, carding wool and spinning it for the manufacture of their own clothes. They would be under the supervision of a "faithful Mistress, who should instruct them in all sorts of business suitable to their sex." He intended to open the school not only to chil- dren from Stockbridge but also to the children of any other tribes who wished to come. Mohawks, Oneidas, and Dela- wares would all be gathered in, until the Lord should indeed receive the heathen for His inheritance. "I design the dis- cipline to be used with them shall be as strict as those will bear who know nothing of government among themselves and have an aversion to everything that restrains their liberty," Sergeant wrote. With the kindest of hearts, he was building the prison walls a little higher, clipping their wings a little closer.
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The only trouble was that the time and place were very poorly chosen for such a grandiose scheme. Unmistakable rumblings of another war with the French penetrated the protecting wall of hills, and even Sergeant had to admit that Stockbridge was situated right in the Indian warpath between Canada and Connecticut. With terror the white settlers gazed north, where stretched "that great and terrible wilderness of several hundred miles extent" which reached to Canada. Their own Indians were loyal, they knew, but what of the ever-vacillating Six Nations? In a conference with the Mahican Indians at Stockbridge they had solemnly declared their intentions. "The white people are about to enter into war. We only destroy ourselves by meddling with their wars ... while they fight let us sit and smoke together." But with pressure from the French would they not yield, menacing Stockbridge with a deadly and treacherous enemy to the west?
Ephraim Williams was the first to see that this notion of Sergeant's for a charity school might be used with profitable effect as a means of protection to the town. For if the Mohawks could be tamed and brought to heel, as the Mahicans had been, they would no longer be potential murderers. The Mohawks safely tethered to the boarding school, with presents of blankets and bits of mirrors handed out to them judiciously, was a comforting thought to the anxious settlers, and Sergeant had no difficulty in raising the large sum of £115 among the eight white settlers for his school. All over the colonies went out an appeal for money in the small meticulous handwriting of Dr. Colman-to the governors of the colonies, presidents of the colleges, and any influential people that he could think of who would be interested in Indian uplift. But this eighteenth-century advertisement, a long-winded pamphlet, lay unopened on these dignitaries' desks, for the souls of the Indians was not an appealing topic. Even to such friends as Governor
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Belcher and John Stoddard, the spotlight was turned off the little mission on to a larger theater of events. Governor Belcher was busy adjusting the New Hampshire-Massachu- setts boundary line in such a way that a strip of territory fourteen miles wide and fifty miles long was handed over to New Hampshire. Massachusetts was indignant over this injustice, and he was recalled to England. Stoddard, in charge of the whole western frontier, had the protection of all Hampshire County to think of, and his mind was moving more in terms of forts than of charity schools. He had a scheme in his head to run a line of forts at intervals of five miles from the Connecticut River to the western limit of the county.
In comfortable London drawing rooms, the plight of the red-skinned savages, bright with paint and feathers, seemed more romantic than ever. Dr. Watts hurried around and collected £70 from his Dissenting friends. A naval gentle- man, Captain Coram, who had interest at Court, wrote an impassioned plea to the Prince of Wales, who graciously put himself down for £20, and pity for the Indians was raised in such exalted breasts as those of the Lord Chancellor, the Duke of Dorset, and Lord Gower.
As for Mr. Hollis, his heart became centered entirely in Stockbridge and, in spite of the Atlantic ocean, he supervised the spending of every penny. His friends became quite worried about him and Dr. Watts wrote confidentially to Dr. Colman: "He is of so religious and pious a temper as to devote his life and all he has to the service of God and goodness, but in such a peculiar way as borders on enthusiasm, and has been many years . . . so exceedingly scrupulous that he cannot trade or merchandize . . . Tho he is a very good man, yet his excessive scrupulosity and his conduct were a matter of great concern to his relatives." He ordered a dozen more heathen boys clothed, fed, and educated at Mr. Sergeant's earliest
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convenience. "Pray let the gentleman that has care of the boys be desired to pray with them every morning and every night, and before and after every meal." And again a few months later, he fussed: "Please inform me how it has gone with the lads instructed at my expense some time ago. If some prove naughty, others may come to good. As to the war with France, let that not hinder the education of children at my expense. I request it may be done speedily, if there are Indian parents willing to have their children educated." He was impatient at the lack of interest shown in this country. "You at Boston might save it out of your fine Hollands, silks and laces and superfine woolen cloths, and have a school erected for heathen children," he reproached the callous Bostonians.
The Reverend Doctor Francis Ayscough, Clerk of the Closet and First Chaplain to his Royal Highness, sent the Indians a present of a brown leather Bible, large and magnifi- cent and beautifully illustrated. This Bible made them feel a direct personal link with the Court of St. James's. It bore the following inscription on the outside in gilt letters: "To the use of the Congregation of Indians, at or near Housotonic, in a vast Wilderness part of New England, Who are at present under the Voluntary Care and Instruction of the Learned and Religious Mr. John Sergeant, And is to Remain, to the use, of the Successors of those Indians from Generation to Genera- tion . . This struck some dim ancestral chord in their imaginations. So much that was intangible, legends and customs and precepts, all the baggage that they carried with them in this world, had been handed down to them from father to son, so much that was now being forever destroyed. So a present sent to them personally from the chaplain of the King, who lived far away over the great salt lake, was something to be prized indeed from generation to generation.
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Many years later, when they left their old hunting ground of the Housatonic and set forth on their flight from civiliza- tion, they took the Bible with them-their most treasured possession. In 1830, after many migrations and vicissitudes, they landed upon the banks of the Fox River, in northwestern Wisconsin. An English traveler, the Reverend C. Colton, visiting them there observed their Bible, safely kept in a sort of ark at their place of worship. "Here it is a perpetual monument of their fear of God, and of their love of His word and ordinances. Their reverence for this volume and for the ark, which contains it, is almost superstitious. Nay, I had almost said-it is idolatrous." Like the Hebrews of old, they carried the ark of the covenant before them into the wilderness.
The schoolhouse, on a beautiful bow of the river, a 200- acre tract that the Indians had given, was still unfinished, but Mr. Hollis's impatience would brook no delay, so twelve boys were sent to Mr. Martin Kellog in Newington, Connecticut. He turned out to be a most unsuitable master, but Sergeant, so guileless himself, was slow to suspect guile in others. Full of trust in Mr. Kellog, he sent the boys off. Kellog was an elderly army captain, retired on half pay, who had been much in the government service as an interpreter to the Indians. His knowledge of the Indian language was his only qualifica- cation. He was illiterate and not particularly honest. The manual part of the boys' training he found highly lucrative to himself, as he employed them to work his farm, which enabled him to be absent from home a great part of the time. Far away in London, Mr. Hollis painted a rosy picture to himself, and continued to send money and pious advice freely.
In the meantime the white settlers in Stockbridge could not sleep easily in their beds at night, until every precaution was taken to secure them against invasion. That cold draft that blew down out of the north over the old Indian warpath
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caused them to shiver. Memories of the Deerfield massacre and the burning of Springfield were either first-hand, or at furthest second-hand, experiences. Not one of them but had some relative who had either been victim of the scalping knife or taken captive to Canada. Rumors, wild and usually unfounded, flew through the Housatonic townships. Samuel Hopkins, in Great Barrington, was wakened out of his bed at midnight, to be told by a breathless rider that Stockbridge was beset by a multitude of Indians. "This news," he wrote, "alarmed the whole house and the whole town in an instant." Even though this proved a false alarm, and the excitement simmered down, mothers looked at their children and wondered whether it would not be wiser to abandon these isolated townships. But their men possessed hearts of oak and determined to stick it out.
In such a crisis Ephraim Williams was the man to turn to and he gave the orders. Sergeant's house, as the most sub- stantial in town, was made into a fort and sixteen soldiers were sent by Stoddard to man it. Connected by blood with all the bigwigs of the Connecticut valley, Williams, shrewd, and hard-headed, by no means confined his activities to the infant town of Stockbridge. Through the network of his Williams cousins, he was well informed as to all the important military operations. Most important from their point of view, he told his neighbors on the Hill, was the line of forts which Stoddard was building across the northern frontier- one at Colrain, another at Heath, a third at Rowe, and at the western extremity of the line, Fort Massachusetts, which was the nearest to Stockbridge. This fort would lie right in the enemy's path, a formidable rat-trap. The regular route followed by the Indians down from Canada led down from Lake Champlain and across the Hoosac River at the junction of the Waloomsac. Here they crossed by a ford which Fort Massachusetts would command. William Williams, his
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cousin, was in charge of the building of the forts, and during the cold winter of 1745 Ephraim Williams, sometimes accom- panied by Ephraim Jr., used to ride over to get the latest news for Stockbridge.
The recent arrival home of this eldest son, brother to Thomas, now a doctor in Deerfield, and half brother to Abigail, greatly enhanced the Williams prestige. Ephraim, Jr., was an easy, affable gentleman, with a pleasant taste in reading and an appreciation of the good things of this world, which endeared him to Abigail. He had traveled extensively in Europe for a number of years, and now returned to find his father settled in a mission station, in what appeared to him to be the Far West. Not his cup of tea at all, and he at once began to look about him for a more congenial field for his activities. Stockbridge, much impressed with the air of sophistication that hung about his corpulent and genial person, sent him as representative to the General Court. Although the conversion of the Indians was not a matter of much interest to him, he was well aware that any juicy military plum in that part of the world was apt to fall his way through his large and devoted family connection. He did not have to wait long for his opportunity. It was the great year of the siege of Louisburg, and William Williams being called to the colors, a messenger from John Stoddard rode into town, appointing Ephraim Williams commander of the forts with the proud rank of captain.
Stockbridge's first success story centers around Captain Williams. The war did not mean to the town primarily the spectacular prize of Louisburg laid at the feet of the English King, for this took place too far beyond their horizon. But the star of Captain Williams's military career-as it rose, sank, and mysteriously reappeared-was a matter of passionate local pride. He seems to have combined a talent for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, with a happy faculty of never
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having to pay for his mistakes, of never having it even appear very conspicuously that he had made mistakes. Perhaps his famous will, leaving the money which founded Williams College, threw a luster for posterity over his previous career, perhaps his influential family covered up his blunders, or perhaps his amiability won all hearts. It is said that he was extremely popular with his men: "He entered into the pas- times of the soldiers on an equal footing and permitted every decent freedom, and again when the diversions were over, he with ease and dignity resumed the Captain." Resplendent in his new uniform, Captain Williams rode off to his command, early in June, 1745. His duties were to go from one fort to another, supervising the supplies of ammunition, drilling the men and, through the ears of his scouts who circulated north of the forts, to listen for signs of the approaching enemy. The bait offered was £100 for every Indian scalp they brought in. With him sometimes would go the chaplain, the Reverend John Norton, or Dr. Thomas Williams, who by a curious coincidence occupied the post of doctor to the forts.
With the victory of Louisburg ringing in their ears, and the northwestern frontier guarded by their own gallant Captain Williams, Stockbridge began to breathe more easily. Tales drifted back into the hills through the Williams network, giving information of the glories of the battle, first-hand accounts from the lips of William Williams, and even from the magnificent Brigadier General Joseph Dwight of Brook- field, who sometimes rode over to Stockbridge. He had played a major rôle in the drama, and as a friend of the Williams family was not above accepting a cup of tea from the shapely hand of Abigail Sergeant. To Captain Ephraim, patroling the frontier from Fort Shirley to Fort Massachusetts, the winter of 1746 was disappointing. It was long and cold and dull. Companies of snowshoe men endlessly scouted for an apparently non-existent enemy. The troops were restive,
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cooped up in the wooden blockhouses on the monotonous army diet of pork and beans. As winter dragged into spring, the men looked wistfully toward Boston, where excitement was boiling up again. A French fleet had been sighted off the coast, and destruction of the city was an appalling possi- bility. Colonel William Williams and Brigadier General Dwight marched off again at the head of their columns, and Captain Ephraim cursed the luck which confined him to a scene as quiet as a churchyard. All eyes fastened nervously upon Boston, where the French fleet dipped in and out of the harbor. The forts had been somewhat depleted of their garrisons by the Louisburg expedition, and now again there was a call for men. There certainly seemed no harm in reducing the number of soldiers from this peaceful frontier. The August heat beat down upon those that remained. At Fort Massachusetts the low swampy land by the river was so unhealthy that the men sickened, and early in August the ever kind-hearted Williams allowed the garrison to dwindle to twenty-two men. However, he directed Dr. Williams to take from Fort Shirley fourteen raw recruits to reinforce this fort, which he well knew was the key to the whole valley below. With this order, Captain Williams seems to have disappeared into space, and he is heard of no more during the exciting days that followed. When Dr. Williams arrived there on August 15th, he heard a disquieting report from Sergeant Hawks, who was in command. Eleven of his men were sick, their ammunition was low, and through the damp stillness of the August heat ominous sounds of the approach of the enemy were heard.
Dr. Williams consulted with Mr. Norton and Sergeant Hawks and they decided desperate measures must be taken to relieve the fort. With the fourteen best soldiers as body- guard, Dr. Williams would go to Deerfield the next day for help, leaving in the fort the Chaplain, Sergeant Hawks, eight
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able-bodied men, fourteen sick ones, and a few women and children. On the morning of August 16th, Dr. Williams and his men set off. They walked out of the gate and down the slope that led to the river. At that moment the Indians were so close to them that they could have touched them with the butts of their guns. Sharp, black, animal eyes watched them from the underbrush, but not a sound broke the stillness of the morning air. They were allowed to walk into a trap and out of it again, and out of earshot of the bedlam that was presently to break loose. The French, supposing the fort to be heavily manned, did not wish to apprise the garrison of their presence until their whole army was assembled. For they had a high opinion of this Fort Massachusetts, which so obstinately blocked the old Indian warpath, and had collected a redoutable army of 900 men-Indian and French-to demolish it.
Three days after the last crackle of twigs from the marching feet had died away, the air was suddenly rent by 500 savage voices, singsonging the hideous Indian war whoop. Into the clearing around the fort they danced and, down from the woods above in regular formation, marched the blue-and- white uniformed troops of General Vaudreuil. By some miracle of audacity, Sergeant Hawks and his men kept this army at bay for almost two days. Their little store of ammu- nition was strategically used where it would do the most good. A fatal aim at the chief Sachem broke the Indians' morale. A messenger, riding out from the French ranks to tell them to capitulate or they would all be scalped, received a telling bullet in his shoulder. But finally not a round of ammunition was left, and they were about to succumb to their fate when another messenger from the French came with an offer of truce-on condition that they go into captivity in Canada. The truce was accepted, although the militant chaplain wrote ruefully, "Had we all been in health or had there been only
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those eight of us that were in health, I believe every man would willingly have stood it out to the last. For my part I should." The handful of half-sick men walked out of the fort to the disgust and confusion of General Vaudreuil. The next day the French retreated into Canada with their captives. Nothing was left of Fort Massachusetts but its charred remains-with the bones of the dead men strewn about as if left by dogs. Only a note, written by Mr. Norton and pinned to a tree, told the sad tale.
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