USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 5
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Where was Captain Williams during these stirring days? Nobody knows exactly. Perhaps he was at Deerfield or Albany or even Boston. But the hard fact stares us in the face that he left his most important and exposed post insuffi- ciently protected in time of war.
When this alarming story reached Stockbridge, the little town shook in its shoes, but the Williamses, father and son, were reassuring. The fort would be built up again in no time, and father Ephraim was dispatched to supervise the new structure. He was to have command of the new Fort Massachusetts, and would interpose his stalwart form between Stockbridge and the enemy, while the young captain would patrol the other forts more vigilantly than before. Sergeant insisted that the town, being predominantly Indian, was safe and that there was too much to do to dwell upon impending disaster. Stockbridge was here today and, on the assumption that it would be here tomorrow, the uphill work of making Englishmen out of Indians must go on.
The Indians had now built seventeen English houses, straggling along what pretended to be a street running east and west through the center of town. The trees were all cleared off it, and if the cows occasionally mistook it for a pasture, still a perceptible path could be made out between the houses. The church at the west end of town was beginning to have a settled air, surrounded by the orthodox
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village green, and abutted at its northeastern extremity by the graveyard where in these early years the English lay down for their long rest democratically side by side with their Indian brethren.
The only road into the village up to this time had been the rough and circuitous trail over Bear Mountain, through Tyringham, where it joined the Albany road leading into Great Barrington. In 1745 the plan of Stockbridge, much as it is today, was formed although to call the blazed trails, threading the wilderness in every direction, "roads" was perhaps an overstatement. A road led west, along what is now Church Street, which would later be punctuated by the village of West Stockbridge. This road was intersected by a second road running over the Hill and entering a highway, which led to the hamlets of Lenox and Pittsfield. The only bridge built at this time was a wooden one with high red sides, crossing the river to the south of the village, and connecting it with a road to Great Barrington and Sheffield. A grist mill, Ephraim Williams's practical suggestion, was turning steadily at the eastern end of the village, by a brook which rippled down to join the river. Encampments of wigwams still per- sisted in little drifts around the edges of the village, melting into the landscape as quietly as heaps of dried leaves.
The newness was wearing off the town and the Indians were finding all this tidiness and morality irksome. Konkapot, who represented their better nature, had died. One wishes that the epitaph reputed to be on his gravestone were not apocryphal:
Here lies Old Konkapot Be kind to him, O God; As he would were he God And God Old Konkapot.
Umpachene had lapsed permanently into drunkenness. Abigail protested with some truth that after all Sergeant did for them, they were nothing but miserable hypocrites who
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returned "as ye dog to his vomit and as ye sow yt was washed to her wallowing in ye mire." Sergeant was wearing thin his slender strength with overwork and worry, for in order to finish the boarding school, to which he now pinned all his hopes, he had to borrow heavily. The Mohawks came to look over the new school with grunts of approval, and asked how much would Sergeant give them if they consented to be educated. He decided that it would be best to keep all the Mahican Indians together with the English, under their old schoolmaster, Mr. Woodbridge, and let the interesting Mr. Kellog, whom he would import from Newington, devote all his powers to the visiting tribes. Abigail could look after the girls.
The Peace of Aix-la-Chappelle in 1748 was at least a truce in the hostilities, but a greater calamity than the war was to befall the mission. John Sergeant, friend to all their little world, English and Indian alike, fell fatally ill of a fever and "canker" in his throat, in the early summer of 1749. He had been the common denominator of the town, explaining each race in terms that the other could understand, and keeping them from splitting wide apart. With a final effort of his aching throat he delivered an admonition to his Indian children, scolding them like an affectionate father. He "fear'd that some of them grew worse and worse, notwith- standing all that God had done for them . . . and there were many ways in which God could, and often did testify his displeasure against a sinful people . .. It may be that God will take me from you, and then my mouth will be shut and I will speak to you no more." These were his last words to them, and he left the church, wearily to climb the Hill for the last time. "I can call myself a most unprofitable servant," he said, as he lay dying. "God be merciful to me, a sinner." During his illness the Indians gathered together of their own
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accord in the meetinghouse, frightened as a flock of sheep suddenly bereft of the friendly bark of the shepherd dog, and earnestly prayed that he might be restored to them. Did he realize at the end the futility of the task he had set himself? Was a corner of the curtain of the future lifted for a moment, and did he glimpse his Indians pushed out of Stockbridge, no longer their old hunting ground, but a thriving American town in which there was no room for them? Or did he die secure in the belief that the boarding school would accomplish the miracle, guided by the capable hands of Abigail and her father?
Chapter III
THE WILLIAMS RING
“H E was a tender parent and a most kind, affectionate and obliging husband," Abigail grieved in a letter to her mother-in-law. "God was pleased to make him a distinguished blessing to the world in general, but remarkably so to this poor bereaved little flock who are incessantly lamenting this judgment upon them." These were the days when the last word was said in an epitaph. The one just decipherable on the worn gravestone marked John Sergeant, although often attributed to the Indians, does not seem in the least characteristic of them. Surely it was written by Abigail, a cry straight from the heart:
"Where is that pleasing form? I ask; thou cans't not show: He's not within, false stone there's nought but death below. And where's that pious soul, that thinking, conscious mind ? Wilt thou pretend, vain cypher, that's with thee enshrined ? Alas, my friends, not here with thee that I can find; Here's not a Sergeant's body, or a Sergeant's mind. I'll seek him hence, for all's alike deception here, I'll go to heaven, and I shall find my Sergeant there."
But sorrow, like fear, was too costly an emotion to be indulged in in the wilderness. Somehow two Sergeant sons must be raised into men of the world and not rough pioneers, and Electa must be brought up a young lady with the proper airs and graces to make an advantageous match. These ends must be attained with no money, for Sergeant had left her only a legacy of debt. Abigail's natural zest for life soon rose to
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these contingencies and mercifully dulled the edges of her grief.
There were moral as well as material problems for her to face, for with Sergeant dead, the basic quarrel between the whites and the Indians flared up. It had long lain just below the surface of their common life, but during his lifetime everyone had behaved a little better than he really was-the Indian was less shiftless, the Englishman less rapacious. Complaints had traveled as far as his doorstep, to be settled with justice and finality. He had been aided, of course, by the invaluable Timothy Woodbridge, who had acted as his second in these matters. But now that Sergeant was gone, Woodbridge found himself unable to assume the leadership, which gravitated easily to the strongest, richest man in town-Ephraim Williams. This gentleman's atti- tude toward the Indians was purely utilitarian. He unconsciously thought of them in terms of a commodity, useful in time of war, and very troublesome in time of peace. Indians could be used most effectively as a protection to the town, and what he didn't use he could throw away. It was Abigail's problem to decide whether to accept this philosophy of her father's or to champion her husband's idealism.
Colonel Williams, back from the rebuilding of Fort Massachusetts, boxed himself up in his new house on the Hill, impervious to the rising murmur of resentment against him in the village. Stately and forbidding, The Castle was really a fort and commanded the sweep of the valley, bidding haughty defiance to the enemy on the prowl from the north. There was even a well in the cellar, so that in case of siege, those seeking the protection of its three-inch, oak-plank walls, would be supplied with water. The Indians, looking up at the house from the Plain, used it as a clock, for the first gleam of sunshine touching its bleak west side marked the stroke of
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noon. Its owner looked around him on the Hill at a goodly property, which he had accumulated in the past ten years by one device or another. One hundred and fifty acres had been the allowance made to him upon his arrival in 1737, but Colonel Williams had ignored the tiresome ruling which forbade the English to buy land in the Indian township, and at the time of Sergeant's death his property within the village alone amounted to over 400 acres. Sergeant had appeased the Indians by explaining that Williams did not really own this land himself, for he had disposed of lots to members of his own family. Substantial slices had been cut off and sold- not given-to his three sons, Ephraim, Elijah, and Josiah, for the Colonel never allowed sentiment to interfere with real estate. Abigail and her children now owned Sergeant's land, and unobtrusively the Williams family was spreading itself over the Hill.
John Stoddard was dead and the new River God, Israel Williams, was cousin to Colonel Ephraim. No help from that quarter, and the Indians' only hope for justice lay in the General Court, far off and indifferent in Boston. In the 1
archives of the State House are the yellowed, dusty documents, penned by faithful Timothy Woodbridge, complaining bitterly of their white neighbors in general, but stressing the iniquities of Ephraim Williams. Complaint: "viz, about eight years ago our worthy and good minister, the Revd Mr. Sergeant made your petitioners an offer if we would pitch on any piece of land that lay common or undivided in the town clear and fence the same he would procure what part of it was fit and proper for plowing to be plowed and what part was suitable for grass he would procure grass seed to sow it. And Mr. Sergeant further observed that the more land was pre- pared as aforesd the better he should be pleased . .. to encourage husbandry . .. your petitioners sent about thirty men to pitch on a proper place for this business . . . and
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applyed to Mr. Sergeant and Mr. Woodbridge for their approbation of the suitableness of the tract we had chosen. They both agreed it was well and encouraged us to work . . . But when the petitioners had accomplished more than one hundred days work in cutting drawing timber and erecting fence on sd land your petitioners were ordered very much to their surprise to desist from going on with their design for no other reason . . . than that sd land lay adjoining the sd Williams land and is good and therefore is more proper for him than for your petitioners . . . to the sd Williams another tract of land thirty acres near the meeting-house- this taken under pretence . . . to secure stream to sd Williams which is dry almost half the year on which Williams has an old useless mill which is no manner of advantage to the town nor ever can be the stream being so small and uncertain . . .
such a piece of unreasonable and unjust conduct in the actor that the great and general court will not countenance it when properly laid before them in its true light." It is hard to pass judgment on this ancient dispute, but there is an unde- niable ring of righteousness to these lamentations of the original owners of the soil.
A committee was appointed to repair to the town of Stockbridge and look into the "Grievances and Difficulties" between Indians and English. Colonel Williams plausibly explained to the gentlemen that the piece of land the Indians referred to was small-but his own. It lay between other lots of land belonging to the English and it was very inconvenient that the Indians should have it. Even now we can feel the tremor of indignation that ran through the Indian commun- ity when the committee decided that the English be allowed to take up this land, as part of their property, paying the Indians £10 for their labor and disappointment. Again they complained that Colonel Williams had eight acres of the intervale which he promised after three years' improvement
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to exchange for upland, but he kept it still. With a shrug, Williams defended himself: He never promised it absolutely, but only in case he could spare it. Finally they complained- and here is the crux of the matter-that they had been told at first that but few families besides the minister and school- master should settle with them. Now, there were many families settled in the place. Upon which the committee told them that it was reasonable to expect that, as the English increased, they would settle their children on their lands. The Indians allowed it was reasonable but said they were not told so at first.
Colonel Williams certainly led the committee by the nose, and it was decided between them that the Indians should divide their lands in severalty, that is, that each Indian should own his property. This had never been their custom. The tribe had always owned the land in bulk, and Umpachene raised his voice for the last time in recorded history to protest. But no one paid attention to him any more, for he was far gone in drunkenness and disgrace, and Timothy Dwight, a surveyor from Northampton and friend of Colonel Williams, came up to survey and divide the land. He drew a neat line through the unappropriated lands of the town and allotted land on the west side of the line to the Indians and on the east side to the English, which he believed would tend to future peace. This was fair enough, once the premise had been accepted that the township was now to be only half Indian. No Indian could own more than 100 acres, a ruling tactfully not extended to the eastern and English side of the line.
But it was not only the children of the original settlers who were taking up the land. Williams was encouraging friends from Springfield, West Springfield and Northhampton to come into the valley, and within a year after Sergeant's death the Indians were bewildered by many new English faces and
-
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names. David Pixley, Stephen Nash, John Willard, Joseph Barnard, Jonathan Devereux, John Taylor, Samuel Brown, and Elnathan Curtis all moved into town with their families, while the glittering figure of Brigadier General Dwight became familiar to Stockbridge's one street. He brought with him, as an extra dash of style, his bodyguard, Lawrence Lynch, a likely young Irishman who had been in his regiment at Louisburg. Pleasure and business were agreeably com- bined in the Brigadier General's visits to the village. He had recently been left a widower, and he found a solace to his loneliness in Abigail Sergeant's black-eyed sparkle, demurely set off by her widow's weeds, as he sat talking mission affairs with her father. Colonel Williams was booming the even then familiar American note of a bigger-and-better Stockbridge
He said the charity school was to be put upon a more ambitious basis, and the government at Boston, realizing the "great Advantage of securing the Indians to the Crown," was donating £500 a year for the education of the Mohawks, while Mr. Hollis's annual bounty of £160 continued to arrive with pleasing regularity. These sums were in addition to the missionary's salary paid by The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Dwight had been recently appointed by the General Court one of a committee of three to supervise the disbursement of the government's money. The others, Joseph Pynchon and Jonathan Ashley, seem never to have been as active as Dwight. Therefore, Colonel Williams was quite easily persuading him that a resident trustee, especially if linked to the family interests, would be most helpful. He had been made one of the Commissioners for The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, while a nephew, Elisha Williams of Wethersfield, Connecticut, had managed to get appointed to the Board in England. Young Captain Ephraim, who found time from his military duties to be in Boston a
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great deal, was on confidential terms with the Governor and Sir William Pepperell. Thus the Indian mission was becom- ing a family affair and the old Colonel, in spite of his unpopularity with the Indians, was gathering its purse strings into his powerful hands. Although his conversation was liberally sprinkled with piety, he was not unmindful of the fact that under his management the boarding school might develop into a sound business proposition.
The Brigadier General's attentions to Stockbridge and to Abigail were flattering, for he was one of the high-lighted figures of his day. During the past ten years his record, both civil and military, had been impressive as he steadily climbed the ladder of success. He had lived for many years in Brookfield, which he had represented at the General Court. Speaker of the House of Representatives, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, Colonel of the Militia, he had finally risen to the rank of Brigadier General in the expedition to Louisburg in 1745. The military bearing, the handsome, finely-cut features, the beautiful hands-which he rather studiously displayed in conversation - proclaimed the gentleman par excellence, as his granddaughter, Catherine Sedgwick, was to remember years later. It is not surprising that Abigail was unable to resist all this magnificence laid at her feet, nor that eighteen months after Sergeant's death she sailed up the aisle once more. Sergeant was put away in the top drawer of her heart, along with youthful idealism, and if her views on the Indian mission were seen to undergo a change in the years that followed, they were more consistent with her character. It had been rather forced for her to strain quite so persistently heavenward as she had in the years of her first marriage. She found herself agreeing with her father that the mission, as Sergeant had envisaged it, was a lost cause, and that it and the town must now be established along more practical lines.
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Two parties were forming themselves in the village, as they have so many times since in the 200 years of its life. The Williams school of thought was upheld by Dwight and the powerful Williams clique, while Timothy Woodbridge, the new English settlers, and the entire Indian population formed the opposition. They clung to the old ideal of Stockbridge for the Indians. The Mohawks had settled their families on the land allotted to them around the charity school, in the hope of giving their children an English education, and were deeply disappointed in the methods of the indolent Mr. Kellog, whom Williams had insisted upon retaining. They began loudly to complain of the unruliness and disorder of their children. They were "neither being dieted, clothed or instructed in industry or any other useful knowledge as they had expected when they delivered their children to be instructed by sd Kellog." Disgruntled, they began to move away, taking their children with them, while Woodbridge and his party pointed accusing forefingers at the Williams faction on the Hill. The charity school was mere fiction, they said, for which elaborate machinery was being constructed, less for the purpose of educating the Indians than for bringing money into the Williamses' pockets.
For almost two years the town limped along in this way, for it had been difficult to find a minister to fill Sergeant's place. Samuel Hopkins, of Great Barrington, unanimously approved by both parties, had been called. But either he did not care to handle a situation so filled with dynamite or he wished to secure the position for his old teacher, Jonathan Edwards, for he refused to come, recommending Edwards in his place. Various strings had tied this celebrated divine to the mission for the past ten years. It will be remembered that he was one of the clergymen who, taking a paternal interest in the new town, had joined Williams in buying out Van Valkenburgh, so that since 1739 he had been owner of a considerable tract of
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land just outside of Stockbridge. Then David Brainerd, on his deathbed in Edwards's house, had talked to him of Sergeant and his Indians, and Samuel Hopkins had been another link keeping him in touch with the mission.
It was a long step down in the world for the famous preacher of Northampton, from a large and prosperous congregation in an established town to a mission station in the wilderness. To an intellect engaged in laying the corner- stone of a faith so compelling that it was to revolutionize the churches of New England for the next hundred years, the salvation of the Indians' souls must have looked like an elementary Sunday school. But, after the defeat and disappointment that the Northampton years had brought, Stockbridge promised a subsistence for his wife and large family, and the solitude he needed for his intellectual life. Here in the quiet hills, with these docile children of the forest and a small English congregation, he would be at peace.
At the time when Edwards went to Northampton, twenty- four years before he enters this history, the church was slipping comfortably down the road to a slack liberalism. The vision of a church and state run in perfect harmony by God's elect, which had brought the Puritans to the New World, was gradually fading. Originally church membership had been confined to those who could give actual proof of personal religious conversion. But as early as 1663 the Halfway Covenant was introduced, broadening the basis of church membership to include all those who intended to lead a sober and godly life. In fact, after the rigid asceticism of the first generation had passed away, religion came more and more to terms with the exigencies of pioneer life. Discipline relaxed, and the struggle for existence on the frontier tended to obscure and soften the lines of the Calvinist doctrine.
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Northampton, when Edwards first came to it, was a merry, full-blooded community, living agreeably off the fat of the Connecticut River valley. Riding to church on the Sabbath, full-bosomed mothers perched on pillions behind their sturdy husbands. They came to render a dutiful service to God, while not acutely repentant of their sins. But when Jonathan Edwards succeeded his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the ministry, he immediately began to preach a gospel which arrested people's attention. A tall, shadowy presence, he stood motionless in the pulpit, and without a rising inflection of his voice, without a gesture, he quietly told them his conception of Christianity. He clothed the harsh Calvinist doctrines in light and color, as he showed them the snowy mountain peaks on which the spirit united with God might dwell, and pointed downward at the yawning abyss of hell waiting to suck in the souls of the unconverted. Backed by a relentless logic, he explained the glory of heaven in terms of the horrors of hell. For how, he asked, could you explain evil except by the fact that God was angry with His children and a majority of them were doomed? "It would be a wonder," he said, "if some that are now present should not be in hell in a very short time. And it would be no wonder if some persons, that now sit here, in some seats of this meeting- house, in health, quiet and secure, should be there before tomorrow morning."
An agony of repentance swept over the terrified farmers and their wives. Wave after wave of emotional excitement broke upon the town, swelling into the Revival of 1735, and into the Great Awakening of 1741. "There was scarcely a single person in the town, either old or young, that was left uncon- cerned about the great things of the eternal world," Edwards wrote. "All other talk but about spiritual and eternal things was soon thrown by; all the conversations in all companies, and upon all occasions, was upon these things only, unless so
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much as was necessary for people to carry on their ordinary secular business." The ferment spread throughout the length and breadth of the Connecticut valley, and Edwards was acclaimed as a prophet, as people everywhere attempted the superhuman leap from sinners to become saints. But religious revivals always have their violent reactions, and nerves, stretched to the breaking point by the high pitch that Edwards had keyed them to, were bound to snap. "The Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us," he wrote, ""and after this time Satan seemed to be more let loose, and raged in a dreadful manner. The first instance wherein it appeared, was a person's putting an end to his own life by cutting his throat . . . After this, multitudes in this and other towns seemed to have it strongly suggested to them . . . to do as this person had done . . . as if somebody had spoken to them, 'Cut your own throat, now is a good opportunity. Now! Now!' "
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