USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 7
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23
73
JONATHAN EDWARDS
entirely acquitted. An unwholesome quiet brooded over the town. In May, Edwards wrote anxiously to the Governor, stressing that this was a matter of importance not only to Stockbridge but to all New England. The Schaghticokes were a mischievous and more than commonly unreliable breed of Indian, and this unavenged murder of Waumpaum- corse was a snowball that would gather momentum. If their resentment spread to the Mahicans and thence to the Mohawks, no one could foretell the consequences, for the French would be quick to take advantage of their disaffection. Already there was an ugly rumor abroad in the village, insti- gated by the French, Edwards said, to the effect "that the English had made fools of [the Indians], had pretended to show kindness, instruct 'em, they had but deceived 'em, that they were only opening a whole mouth to swallow 'em up when there should be a convenient time." Edwards strongly advised a large subsidy to be applied at once to the wounded susceptibilities of the relatives of Waumpaumcorse. The Legislature procrastinated, and finally sent a small sum of money-£20-to the Schaghticokes. They remained in a sensitive frame of mind.
One Sabbath morning that summer as Edwards, with calm and deliberation, was expounding the Gospel to his congre- gation, the door of the meetinghouse was flung open and a man plunged down the center aisle, disheveled and hysterical with fear. The congregation gathered around him to hear, they felt sure, the worst. He had been hurrying over the Hill late to church, he told them. As he passed neighbor Cham- berlain's house, he had seen an Indian slinking out the door, concealing something he was dragging after him. Thinking it to be one of the Stockbridge Indians robbing Chamberlain's house, he hastened to overtake him. It proved to be a Schaghticoke, with one of the Chamberlain children, whom he promptly tomahawked on sight of his pursuer, and then
11
74
STOCKBRIDGE
fled into the forest. The man entered the house to find an infant in its cradle brutally murdered by another Indian, a servant dead upon the floor, and Chamberlain and two little boys, half dead with fright, cowering under a bed in an adjoining room. The second Indian evaporated out of the house and away, before the terrified witness had caught his breath. Later that day word came that the Schaghticokes, making off up the footpath that was the road to Lenox, shot from the bushes a Mr. Stevens, who was hastening toward Stockbridge. Word of the Chamberlain disaster had already reached the few families that constituted the hamlet of Lenox. With these murders the price of the death of Waum- paumcorse had been exacted.
Panic seized the town. Those who lived in outlying districts, such as Lenox and Pontoosuc, crowded into Stock- bridge for protection, while the Stockbridge settlers, feeling any spot safer than home, had a tendency to rush to Great Barrington. The Dwight family moved out bag and baggage, Abigail not even stopping to put shoes or stockings on little John Sergeant, and leaving hurried instructions to the colored servant, London, to bring along the three-year-old Pamela Dwight. A paroxysm of fear caused the servant to drop Pamela in a raspberry bush beside the road and take to his worthless heels. Larry Lynch, carefully escorting the family silver an hour later, discovered the child and, tucking her under his arm, restored her safely to the arms of her mamma.
The story of the Chamberlain massacre, traveling eastward on horrified lips, lost nothing in the telling. Israel Williams, commander of the western Massachusetts troops, and veteran of frontier warfare, realized the strategic position of Stock- bridge. He agreed with Edwards that, if the Schaghticoke distemper spread to the Stockbridge Indians and thence to the Mohawks, the war was lost. When the French had secured
75
JONATHAN EDWARDS
the Six Nations to their interest he wrote: "Farewell peace & prosperity to New England, yea to North America."
There was, however, comfort in the fact that the Stock- bridge Indians were just as much surprised and frightened by the Chamberlain incident as the rest of the community. Nevertheless, in view of the fact that the settlers were obliged to raise their bread in exposed places in the town and that "fearful apprehensions ever attend them," a large number of soldiers were detailed to protect Stockbridge. A fort was built around Edwards's house, and the entertainment of the soldiers fell upon his shoulders. In October, the expenses of such hospitality became crushing, and he was obliged to cry to the General Court for mercy. He had provided "800 meals of victuals, pasturing 150 horses, and 7 gal. of good West Indian rum" as well as food for "all poor people driven from their homes above thro fear." One of these panic-stricken ones, Aunt Cooper, née Jemima Woodbridge and niece of old Timothy, seems to have been an early American village character. She lived just over the Lenox line at the eastern end of town, and declared that she for one could stand such isolation no longer. One day a gentle- man caller had assured her that she was greatly blessed. When she asked why, he told her that in every prayer those at the ends of the earth were always remembered, and he was sure that she and her family were the persons alluded to. She bustled into the middle of town and, with an eye to profit, decided to take boarders in a house of three ground-floor rooms, admitting only gentlemen who could pay well.
The soldiers, beside being a heavy drain on the hospitality of the town, proved to be a hindrance rather than a help. So eager were they in the performance of their duty that they entirely misunderstood the nature of the gentle Stockbridge Indians and accused them of the Chamberlain murders. Two blundering soldiers even exhumed the body of a dead Indian
76
STOCKBRIDGE
from the graveyard and removed the scalp. It was a tribute to the long-suffering patience of the Mahicans that this insult- ing and barbarous behavior was not rewarded by their razing the village to the ground.
Word came that summer that old Ephraim, in his retreat in Deerfield, had passed on to his somewhat doubtful reward. His children were deeply attached to the warm-hearted old reprobate, and they stood around his grave to hear him embalmed for posterity in the usual bombastic funeral oration of the day. "He always bore a testimony against vice," pronounced Jonathan Ashley, "and held a disposition to terrify the workers of iniquity; he was a lover of good men and esteemed them to be the excellent ones in all the earth; he held a great value for the Ministers of the Gospel, and was always ready to give them double honours . . ."
Young Ephraim was now the head of the family, but he was such a man of the world that Stockbridge did not see much of him. He flitted from Fort Massachusetts to Hatfield to Boston, where he was Israel Williams's confidential agent, and hobnobbed with Lieutenant Governor Phipps, Governor Shirley, and the rising young George Washington. He leased his land and The Castle to his brother Elijah, who had just returned from a Princeton education and proposed to settle down on the family acres. Josiah, a lesser light, owned the neighboring farm, and the Dwights had returned to the beau- tiful Sergeant house after their precipitate flight to Great Barrington.
The local feud which had so shaken the town for the past four years suddenly sank into insignificance, as the familiar nightmare of the French and Indians blackened their world. This time they had had an actual taste of bloodshed on their own doorstep. There was the old sickening suspense of waiting for news. Indian marauders molested the entire northwestern frontier, and Dutch Hoosac, a village not ten
77
JONATHAN EDWARDS
miles west of Fort Massachusetts, went up in flames. To the west the French and Indians were sweeping down the Ohio valley. If Fort Massachusetts-their only protection to the north-were to fall, the fate of all the Housatonic townships was sealed.
Lumberingly the machinery of the English offensive was put into motion from the Court of St. James's. Benjamin Franklin had failed in his intelligent attempt to unite the four New England colonies and New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland under one leadership. The King felt that this would give the colonies too much power, and anyway they were unable to come to an agreement as to what had best be done. Three mammoth expeditions were planned in which the British Lion was conclusively to assert his supremacy. They were to take place in a rambling and somewhat dis- jointed manner under separate commands. General Braddock was to attack the French at the fork of the Ohio River; Governor Shirley was to strike the French line farther down at Niagara, while it was hoped that General William Johnson would capture the fort at Crown Point on Lake George. This was of strategic importance, as it controlled the best route from New York to Montreal.
The winter of 1755 saw Stockbridge torn between pride and fear in the forthcoming expedition. Sir William Johnson, the eccentric Irishman who lived up the Hudson, with Hendrik's sister Molly as his mistress, was a familiar name in town, his relation with the Mohawks being of an intimate if not uplifting nature. Hendrik and his men would certainly follow Johnson's banner to the north. Hampshire county was to provide one of the three Massachusetts regi- ments for the expedition, and Stockbridge's white-haired boy, Ephraim Williams, raised to the rank of colonel was to lead it. Israel Williams assured Governor Shirley that only Ephraim's popularity could raise the requisite number of men. The
78
STOCKBRIDGE
Governor wrote to the new colonel: "I desire there be none, but right good men enlisted, and not under five feet five inches without their shoes, unless they are young enough to grow to that height, and none above forty years old." Stockbridge, Pontoosuc, and Fort Massachusetts emptied themselves eagerly of every soldier who met the specifications, and Hendrik promised 300 Mohawks. The staff of young Ephraim's regiment was inevitably composed of Williamses. They were Dr. Thomas Williams of Deerfield as surgeon; Rev. Stephen Williams, chaplain; Perez Marsh (Israel Wil- liams's son-in-law) , surgeon's mate; William Williams (son of Colonel William Williams of Pontoosuc) , surgeon's mate's assistant; another William Williams, quartermaster. Brother Josiah contented himself with enlisting as an ensign.
It appears that Colonel Ephraim's usually bounding spirits drooped as the day of departure drew near. His letters of this period show that despite a scarlet suit made for the occasion, his mind dwelt much upon the mutability of human affairs and presaged a gloomy outcome to the campaign. He was to lead his regiment to Albany to rendezvous with the other regiments and their commander, General Johnson, and proceed northward.
Arriving in Albany early in July, delay and confusion attended the assembling of the troops. It was hard to get supplies over the wretched roads, and in the sizzling heat the men fell sick. News of Braddock's death and defeat filled Colonel Williams's heart with dismay. "It is to be feared that General Braddock is cut to pieces and a great part of his army . .. The Lord have mercy upon poor New England," he wrote. The Mohawks, feeling the shift in the wind towards the French, failed to turn up in the numbers expected. "The defeat of Braddock has had such an effect on them that their has not yet above sixty joined us, tho' more are expected & all tho' they say they are our Brothers and will live and die
79
JONATHAN EDWARDS
with us, I should not choose to venture my life with much dependence on them, for anything but intelligence, unless we could raise in them some confidence of success."
The canker of private disappointment was gnawing at his heart for, if tradition is to be believed, Elizabeth Williams, the daughter of Israel, had turned him down just before he left Hatfield. Crossed in love, it seemed improbable that there would be children and grandchildren to trot upon his knee, while he told them of the dangers and glories of Crown Point. Indeed, with the persistent dark cloud that seemed to hang over the expedition, it seemed improbable that he would be there to tell the tale at all. It would be prudent to prepare for the worst, settle his accounts, and make a will before he left Albany. His father's sins rested heavily upon his conscience and, in a letter to his executor, Israel Williams, he desired him to look into the affair of the Stockbridge Indians, and see that any wrongs inflicted by his father were righted. "I have changed my mind since I left your house," he wrote, "for reasons, as to what I designed to give (which should have been handsome) to one very near you." The unyielding Elizabeth was left only £20, the same amount as her sisters, with a small personal bequest, wistfully reminding her of the domesticity he had missed: "Item. I give and bequeath to my loving cousin, Elizabeth Williams . . . my Silver Cream pot and Tea spoons."
His private life thus disposed of, he turned to posterity. Military exploits and a bouncing family of Williamses were not to be his, but his final gesture of generosity has earmarked him a small corner of immortality. The bulk of his estate by his "will and pleasure and desire" was left for the main- tenance of a "Free School (in a Township west of Fort Massachusetts commonly called the West Township) forever, provided the sd Township [is given] the name of Williams- town." The West Township, shut in to the east by the steep
80
STOCKBRIDGE
barrier of the Hoosac range, and looking south to Greylock towering above the valley, and north to the lofty ranges of the Green Mountains, was a tract for which his father had made the original plan in 1739. Old Ephraim had then remarked that it was "very accomadable for settlements." The Wil- liamses had now stamped it indelibly for their own.
A campaign, which should have been pushed with dispatch and energy, was conducted by the leisurely Sir William Johnson with indecision and a lack of knowledge of border warfare. He loitered at a point halfway between Albany and Lake George for almost a month. The French commander, Baron Dieskau, was able, through the myriad eyes of his swift Indian scouts, to estimate accurately the size and strength of of the English army. Early in September, Johnson advanced to the foot of Lake George, while Dieskau circled around him to the south. The expected clash occurred on September 8. Johnson got wind of the French army camped along the road his men had just traversed, a road they had hewn out of the forest. He detailed Colonel Williams with 1,000 men, and Hendrik with his Mohawks, to reconnoiter and find out just how the enemy lay. At the council of war the night before they were to start, the wise Hendrik shook his head. He picked up a stick which he broke easily, and then picked up several together which he could not break. "If they are to be killed, too many, if they are to fight, too few," he com- mented laconically. Johnson persisted, and the party set out the next morning. After about two hours' march, they walked straight into a carefully prepared French ambush. Indians scattered the hillside which ran up from the road, one behind every rock and every tree, while the French army waited in a bloc, a little ahead of them. Hendrik lifted up his fine old head. "I smell Indians," he sniffed, and a few moments later the first shot sang through the air. Fortune did not favor the brave that day, for imprudent, gallant
81
JONATHAN EDWARDS
Colonel Williams and Hendrik, who had been the only one to see the folly of the expedition, were spotted as the leaders by the enemy, and were shot down as easily as ninepins. As his army swept up in pursuit, the ranks "doubled up like a pack of cards," Dieskau said later. But the day was saved by the rest of the English force arriving in reinforcement to give the French the stiffest fight of the year. Honors were even as the French retreated to the unmolested possession of the Crown Point fortress, while the English settled down for the winter in their newly-built Fort Henry at the foot of Lake George with Dieskau as their distinguished prisoner.
Stockbridge did not gainsay the opinion of Hendrik, which was that of the whole of New England: "If they are to be killed, too many." Dr. Thomas Williams wrote home several days after the battle, "Last Monday, the 8th instant was the most awful day that my eyes have ever beheld, & may I not say, that ever was seen in New England ... " Two months later Abigail wrote to her friend, the merchant Abram Bookee in New York, to order a supply of tea and coarse Irish thread. She digressed from business to criticize sharply the way mili- tary affairs were being run. The death of Ephraim, flower of the flock, stung her to acid indignation. "There was perhaps not a gentleman in the whole army who could have been less easily spared," she wrote. She went on to analyze the situa- tion with masculine clarity of mind. What if they had taken Crown Point at the loss of thousands of precious lives? They would not possibly have been able to hold it against Canada's whole force. If they had burned it, the French would have built it up again in a month. "Upon ye whole it looks as if our Councils were Darkened, wisdom in a remarkable manner hid from those yt Should be Wise." A rational plan of attack- ing Canada on all fronts, so that the enemy's force should be divided, might have some hope of success. Then the men would "fight Ye Common Enemy rather than their own men
82
STOCKBRIDGE
or Ye trees." At the end of the letter, after competently disposing of her business with Mr. Bookee, she confessed that a change of scene would be agreeable. "I long to be with you Eating Lobsters Crabs & Oisters & Drink lemons: But must Content myself with Small Bear & Country fires & yet is to good for me Since I am Suffered to live when So many of my Dearest friends are gone to ye Dead."
The French war was to drag on for almost three years longer, and western Massachusetts had frankly lost the stomach for it. A generation had been born, grown to man- hood and sunk into its grave on a constant diet of fear. Was the new generation to suffer a similar experience?
The year 1756, succeeding the doubtful victory at Lake George, was the darkest Stockbridge had seen. One sergeant and five privates had been left for the protection of the town; the blockhouse which had been established at Pontoosuc was equally weak. An occasional Indian carrier, running in with news from the outside world, did nothing to reassure the settlers. It was said that while the new commander, Lord Loudon, who had been sent over from England, sat at Albany with his army, the enterprising Montcalm had marched on Oswego, where after a short attack he had succeeded in raising the French colors. The soldiers at Fort William Henry were sick and demoralized by the new ruling that no colonial officers should hold a rank above that of captain. Nearer home, the two commanding officers at Fort Massachusetts, on a hunting expedition ten miles from the fort, had been seized by Indians and treated to the usual horror of scalping and tomahawking.
Dr. Bellamy, an old pupil of Edwards, who had the parish at Bethlehem in Connecticut, begged him to bring his family down there. The town was no longer safe. Edwards, who lived in a world entirely independent of the success of the British arms, refused to leave Stockbridge, but sent the six
83
JONATHAN EDWARDS
remaining children of the boarding school down to his friend. Thus finally closed the long and troubled chapter of the Mohawk school. A conviction of its failure must have crept even into the sanguine heart of Mr. Hollis for no more is heard from him. The small number of Mohawks who had finally turned out for the Crown Point expedition-the mission pushing on one side, Sir William Johnson pulling on the other-had caused the Legislature to drop the whole scheme.
So serene was Edwards in the face of danger that he even allowed his daughter, Esther, who was married to President Aaron Burr of Princeton, to come and pay him a visit that September. She left at home in the nursery a little two-year- old son, who was named Aaron after his father, and who was later to make a place for himself in American history. Esther Burr, arrived in Stockbridge after the wearisome and danger- ous journey from Princeton, found it difficult to rise to her father's metaphysical calm. Her diary written at this time is an argument between the flesh and the spirit: "September 2: Almost overcome with fear, last night and Thursday night we - had a watch at this fort and most of the Indians came to lodge here. Some thought that they heard the enemy last night. . . O how distressing to live in fear every moment . September 3: I proposed when I came from home to tarry here till the Second week in October but believe I shall shorten my visit since things are so ordered and I am so distracted with fears . . September 4: Sabbath heard 4 excellent Sermons tho so ill for want of sleep that I am hardly mySelf ... I hant had a nights Sleep since I left New York. . . Since I have been here I may say I have had none. September 5: I grow worse and worse, more afraid than ever ... if I happen to drowse I am frighted to death with dreams, as for sleep, tis gone, and I shall go too if things dont alter . . . September 8: I want to be made willing to die
84
STOCKBRIDGE
in any way God pleases, but I am not willing to be butchered by a barbarous enemy nor cant make myself willing . . . The Lord Reighns and why ant I sattisfied, he will order all for the best for the publick and for me, and he will be glorified let all the power on Earth and Hell do their worst . . September 11: Proposed to my Father to set out for home next week, but he is not willing to hear one word about it, so I must tarry the proposed time and if the Indians get me, they get me, that is all I can say, but tis my duty to make myself as easy as I can . . . "
Battle, murder, and sudden death during these crowded Stockbridge years had not kept Edwards from the clockwork regularity of thirteen hours of study a day at his six-sided table. With the works of the liberals spread before him upon its revolving surface, he waged war against an easy Christian- ity, the religion of a benevolent God. The Freedom of the Will and Original Sin were written at this time. They were great boulders of logic that were to stand guard before the backwater of Calvinism, against the rising tide of liberal thought, for almost a hundred years. In the extradimensional world of the spirit-the only world of clear-cut reality to Edwards-the great drama of the soul was enacted. In The Freedom of the Will he establishes that men are utterly dependent for action on God. This led him into the contem- plation of original sin. If God was in complete control, why was He not then the author of sin? This problem, that has puzzled the philosophers through the ages, Edwards handled with dexterity. Sin was the absence of God, the withdrawal of God, like the sun hiding itself behind a cloud.
Although a God "that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some lothsom insect over the fire"is revolting to modern thought, still He controlled the lives of the Congregationalists as late as 1850. The fear of hell pro- voked the hope of heaven. The wrath of God gave shape to
85
JONATHAN EDWARDS
human life, and under the preaching of Edwards's disciples, who worked out in mathematical formulas what with him had been the inspiration of the spirit, all natural spontaneity and effervescence were carefully ruled out. So-called Puritanism, that dread taint that has clung to New England ever since, was the practical result of those years of merciless thinking that Edwards spent in Stockbridge.
It was with a sense of relief that the more intelligent listened to the preaching of William Ellery Channing at the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. It was the beginning of the return swing of the pendulum. Eagerly they again embraced the idea of God as a loving Father. Straying sheep would be gathered into the fold, and the repentant Prodigal Son was sure of forgiveness. Christ upon the Cross faded into the less compelling figure of Christ as a moral teacher. The emphasis slowly shifted from the per- fectibility of man with the grace of God to the perfectibility of man with the willing help of God, until in our day it has become the perfectibility of man without God at all.
The pendulum has swung away to its logical conclusion. To modern Stockbridge the flight of Edwards's mystical poetry soars very wide of the mark: "To go to heaven fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accom- modations here. Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of earthly friends, are but shadows; but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams, but God is the fountain. These are but drops, but God is the ocean. Therefore it becomes us to spend this life only as a journey toward heaven . . . " Edwards transmuted the green and blue and golden texture of a summer day in Stockbridge into terms of the spirit: "The beauties of nature are really emanations or shadows of the excellency of the Son of God. So that when we are delighted with flowery
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.