USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Ipswich > The celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, August 16, 1844 > Part 3
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It was a stock, to be sure, which, so far as its own direct members were concerned, immediately afterwards almost entirely disappeared. That intellectual dark day which came
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over all the rest of New England in its second and third gen- erations was experienced likewise here. And though the town has never been without a fair number of worthy citizens, though in the Revolution it had its Farley, Wade, Hodgkins, Wigglesworth, and Dane, and in later years its Dana, Frisbie, Oakes, Manning, Hammatt, Heard, Choate, Lord, and Shats- well, they were mostly of other connections, and no one will claim that it can show a list now which will compare at all for eminence with that of its earliest generation; so that it would seem at first glance as if blood had been only a very slight force in the town's evolution, and its children no indi- cation of how noble was
"The planting of its parent tree."
But Nature's method of using blood is not that of confining it to a few special families. It is intensely democratie. Its ob- ject is to build up the race ; and it uses here precisely the same methods and principles that it does in building up a continent. We all know how it is in the natural realm. First a great mountain-chain is thrown up high above the sea ; then winds, rains, snows, frosts, suns, waves, all the powers of nature, begin to wear down its peaks, and spread their material out on a common level. By and by there is another upheaval, but in a different place, then another wearing-down ; and the pro- cess goes on till at last we have not any individual mountains so high as those at first, but a whole continent rich in soils, waving with harvests, and filled with life. So with the human race. First a few great families are thrown up with talents far above their fellows. But the next step is not to lift their children still higher up, but - by marriage, emigration, the use of their vitality for the common weal, a thousand subtle influences -to wear them down and to mingle their blood with that of the common people, lifting them all up. By and by comes a new series of mountain souls, not this time the old Endicotts, Denisons, and Winthrops, but an Otis, Adams, Henry, Warren, and Washington, fresh out of the people ; then the same wearing-down in the next generations ; and by
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and by, in some great social convulsion, another series, this time a Sumner, Phillips, Garrison, Farragut, and Lincoln, used in a like way ; and at last we have, not a few great families towering in splendor to the skies, with the rest only mudsills at their feet, but a whole race lifted above the sea of appetite and passion, waving with the rich harvests of civilization, and filled with a diviner life.
It is in this way precisely that the good blood of its first settlers has counted in the growth and development of our town. We have not the old families with us; but we do have the old virtues. They are not concentrated in a few indi- viduals, but scattered far and wide in the whole community. The sum of intelligence, morals, publie spirit, social courtesy, and domestic worth, is greater now - all statistics show it - than it ever was before. And who shall say that this is not real progress ? Who say, in spite of Carlyle, that a connu- nity of three thousand good men and women on the level of our common humanity is not worth more in the sight of God and of a true civilization than one of thirty families lifted into prominence, and all the others left in ignorance ? who, that we ought not to honor the fathers of our town most of all to-day, because they have transmitted their virtues, not to their own children exclusively, but impartially to all its citizens ?
II. Passing now from the seed to the soil, from the people to the PLACE ITSELF as an ageney in its development, a factor known in science as " the influence of the enviroment," its site seems from the very start to have attracted attention. The famous Captain John Smith, sailing along the New England coast in 1614, was struck with "the many rising hills of Agawam." The Pilgrim Fathers heard of it in 1620 as a desirable locality where to found a settlement. Governor John Winthrop declared in 1632 that it was "the best place for cattle and tillage in the land." Wood, in his "New England's Prospect," written shortly after, described it as "abounding in fish and flesh, meads and marshes,
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plain ploughing-ground, and no rattlesnakes;" and Jolm- son in 1616 referred to it as situated on "a faire and delightful river," and as having "very good land for husbandry."
But these favorable descriptions are only comparative, and must not blind us to the fact that when Mascomomet, saga- more of Agawam, its old Indian chief, sold it for twenty pounds to John Winthrop, it was essentially in a state of nature, and of nature not as we think of it to-day, -"a realm of shaven lawns, pleasant groves, bowers of honeysuckle and rose, bab- bling streams, and lowing herds," civilized, poetic, and uplift- ing, a friend of man, - but nature savage, wild, and dreary, man's bitter foe. In the centre of the town for many years was a huge swamp. The soil, except at the few openings cultivated by the Indians, was covered with a dense forest, not only living trees, but the accumulated rubbish, through long ages, of their dead and fallen companions. Where the river now winds as a thread of silver through the emerald meadows was a thick morass, described by an early writer as "famous for bears." There were no bridges, and no roads, only Indian paths creeping through the forests, so imperfect, even after the road to knowledge had been opened, that an Ipswich boy going to Harvard College, in 1666, lost his way, and was out in the woods all night. Then, worse than any material dis- comforts and savagery was the very atmosphere of the wilder- ness itself, gloomy, harsh, and weird. Imagination lent new horrors to reality, and as Edward Everett graphically says, describing New England as a whole, besides the actual dan- gers which beset its settlers from howling wolf and ravening bear, " unearthly cries were sometimes heard in the crackling woods ; glimpses were caught at dusk of animals for which natural history had no names; and strange footmarks, of which men did not like to speak, were seen in the winter's snow."
Is it any wonder that our fathers, environed with such influences as these, should have been borne down at first by their awful weight ? Any wonder that their stock in the
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THE TOWN OF IPSWICHI.
second and third generations should seem to have degenerated, that their religion assumed new sterimess and gloom, and that a delusion like the Salem witchcraft threw over them its bewildering blight ? Any wonder that their town, with the cessation of its European immigration, should apparently come to a stand in its growth ?
But these darker effects were only for a while. Its settlers, animated with the courage, grit, skill, and industry which ages of like war had incorporated into their Aryan blood, went to work to subdue their huge foc, repeating on these western shores, under other names, the battles against the great nature giants which their Norse ancestors had sung in the legends and imagery of the weird Scandinavian mythology a thousand years before. Beginning in our own town at Jeffries' Neck, and working their course up the river as the only practical highway, they built their houses and homes along its bank, cleared a space back of it for their gardens and fields, holding much of the land at first in common, and established on the. hill their church and school. The sound of the axe, sharpened with its owner's " ancestral feud of trees," rang bravely through the woods. The soil, unclothed of the forest, was taught to nourish at its dark breast, side by side with its own Indian corn, a large foster family of European grains, - barley, wheat, oats, and rye. The Indian trail was converted, with many an argument of gravel, to a Christian road. The fair river, dallying hitherto loosely with the shore, was wedded to its embraces with a proper bridge. The matted and tangled vales were combed and brushed, and freed from vermin with the plough and harrow, and the crack of musket-balls. The shaggy- browed hills, shorn of their locks by the clicking axe, had their heads baptized with honest Puritan names. And thus year by year, and little by little, the rough possibilities of the savage Agawam were wrought into the charming realities of the civilized Ipswich. Among the many instructive features of our town-records, not the least valuable are their references every now and then to the various stages of this physical growth, -the five shillings apiece paid at first for all the
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wolves' heads nailed up on the meetinghouse-door (how much more attractive, doubtless, to the boy attendants than the heads of the long sermons !) ; the laying-out and improvement of the various roads, not, indeed, so direct and scientific as the ones begum now,
1779158
" Vexing Me Adam's ghost with pounded slate,"
yet richer, how much! in historie suggestiveness and in real artistic beauty, following, as they did, the trail, ages old, of wild Indians and wild beasts, winding, as they had to, around the hills, and along the streams, and made, as they were, by each man's working on them with his own hands; the exist- ence of the Common Lands, the historic tap-root of the town idea, running deep down into the buried centuries amid the mould of old Teutonic forests ; the laws and customs connected with their use, full of value as being the same toe-marks on the soil that our ancestors made all over Northern Europe as the record of their wanderings there ages before they came to America ; 1 and their final surrender by the commoners to the town to pay its Revolutionary debts, a most honorable act ; the names given to our different localities, some of them, as Goose Village, Turkey Shore, Hog Lane, and Pudding Street, not remarkably romantic and high-sounding, though with one exception, in Heartbreak Hill, yet all honestly significant. and in reason's car rejoicing far more than the sentimental titles, with no appropriateness at all, attached so often to other places ; the building of the famous stone bridge
" That filled the county with renown, And did with honor Ipswich crown, Whose beauty and magnificence Considering the small expense,"
as its poet finely said, were unequalled by any ever done before ; the gathering around it, when completed, of its opponents and sceptics fully expecting to see its arches, as they had predicted,
1 See Professor II. B. Adams's valuable paper published in the Johns Hop- kins University Studies on the Germanic Origin of New England Towns.
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crash down, with the first test of a loaded team, into the river below, and the saddled horse of Colonel Choate, its builder, secreted near by, ready to gallop him away from their inevi- table " I told you so's " in case the prophecy should be fulfilled, so doubtful was the experiment ; the difficulty of getting the wooden bridge at Warner's Mills, the conelusive argument against it of one old gentleman being, " What would the rest of the country do afterwards for lumber ?" so vast then was the undertaking; the narrowing of the town's domain by the dowry given to its two lovely daughters when they set up for themselves, - Hamilton, formerly " the Hamlet," in 1793, and Essex, formerly " Chebacco," in 1819; and the endless discus- sions in town-meeting about fences, lanes, lots, and gravel-pits, mingled with votes on the great doctrines of religion, and decisions on the foundation principles of government.
Looking at'the town as it is to-day, at its busy stores, its pleasant homes, its smooth roads, its graceful elms, its fruitful fields, its noble hills, its lovely river, its convenient bridges, its woods prowled through by no beasts more deadly than the mosquito, and at its soil haunted by no ally of the Evil One more terrible than witch-grass, at this casket of nature so worthy of holding the jewel of civilization, and comparing it with its state at first, how can we do otherwise than be pro- foundly impressed with the immensity of the labor by which the result has been attained, - the weary hands which for two hundred and fifty years have cleared up swamp and field into beauty, and the busy brains which for eight generations have put their life and thought into dwelling, bridge, and street ? We praise our fathers for what they have done in procuring our liberties, and establishing our institutions; and it is well. But they have done not less in building up the very soil on which we live; and, if there were nothing else to make us honor their memories to-day, we should have enough for it in every view of beauty before our eyes and in every rod of earth beneath our feet.
The material town, however, is only a part of the result of their struggle with nature; its outward beauty, only one of
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the ways in which the inthience of the environment has made itself felt. The outcome of action here, the same as every- where else, has been twofold: one the visible Ipswich, its houses, streets, and fields ; the other, the unseen town, its spirit, life, and character. Had our fathers found the place all ready made when they came to its shores, found a paradise here, and not a wilderness, it might have done for them some other special work, might have developed them into more luxury, refinement, and culture; but it would never have become a full New England town, never a fit atom in the body of a great republic. Cultivating the soil, the soil in turn cultivat- ed them. Fighting Indians and bears, the Indians and bears taught them, when the time came, to fight Englishmen. The strength of the white-oak stumps they pulled out of the fields went into their arms and into their characters. Every blow struck in making a better road and better bridge was a blow struek also in making a better citizen. And, building up the outer town of wood and earth, the outer town reacted, and built one within of manhood and womanhood, - built that townly spirit without which the best streets, houses, and fields would be only as a fair body without a living soul.
III. But what inspired them to undertake this struggle with the wilderness ? what strengthened and upheld them in carry- ing it on ? Foremost of all and notoriously it was RELIGION; and looking at religion simply as an earthly force, to be judged of in the same way as all other earthly forees, by its effects, what a tremendous factor it has been in the evolution of our whole New England life ! It began its work with the selection of the material for its settlement; it being naturally not the weak, the mercenary, and the conservative, but only the brav- est, strongest, freest, most progressive souls, that would dare under its influence break the bonds of the past, encounter the opposition of an Established Church, and launch out on the sea of an untried faith, -just the ones with which to start a new world. Taking on the one side the form of religious persecution, and on the other the equally powerful one of re-
ПО- Лет
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ligious persistence, it supplied between their action the one tremendous force that was needed to drive them away from the comforts of their old home to the privations of a far-off savage shore. Arrived on its borders, what else could have sustained them there, amid the awful toils and hardships of its wilderness life, but a sublime religious trust ? And then, not content with merely teaching them to endure life till they should be called out of it into the kingdom of heaven, it went to work to create for them the kingdom of heaven right here among its pine-trees, Indians, wolves, and bears.
It was this influence which operated with all its force on the little band of men and women who laid the foundations of our own community. Their first act was to organize a church, - the ninth oldest in the Colony, and for a long time a leading one in all its affairs. A succession of able ministers - Ward, Norton, Cobbett, Hubbard, and the four Rogerses in the First Parish (the last a most remarkable case of natural apostolie succession), Dana at the South Parish, and Wise at Chebacco, men who would have been a glory to any place - filled their pulpits; Governor Winthrop himself, also, on one occasion, walking all the distance from Boston to " exercise among them in the way of prophecy." All the distinctive characteristics of Puritanism, - its two ministers, pastor and teacher, its deacons, its tithing-men, its timing of the preaching by the hour-glass, its seating of the men on the one side and the women on the other, its peculiar dress, its call to service by the drum-beat, its weapons stacked at the door, its long sermons (at least an hour, with salary shortened if the sermon was), its hard doctrines, and its rigid virtues - all these were to be found here in their grand completeness. " How many are the elect ?" " Is the soul immortal before its union with Christ?" " Whether a person may not attain to sanctification, and yet be damned ?" " Did God make hell when he did the rest of the universe ?" "Will immersion here save from fire hereafter ?"- these, mingled with polities, manners, and dress, were some of the topics preached upon, these their daily meat and drink. Everything was severe,
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stern, square. There was no toleration allowed for differences of opinion - none, at least, outside of their own ranks. Ward writes, in his "Simple Cobbler of Agawam :" " It is said men ought to have liberty of conscience, and that it is persecution to debar them from it. I can rather stand amazed than reply to this. It is an astonishment to think that the brains of men should be parboiled in such impious ignorance. No practical sin is so sinful as some error of judgment ; no man so accursed with indelible infamy and dedolent impenitency as authors of heresie." And in harmony with this kind of teaching a poor Quaker-woman, Lydia Wardwell, stripped to the waist, was publicly whipped in front of the tavern, amid a large cirele of men and boys; her naked breasts being torn by the rough post to which she was tied as she writhed beneath the blows. Everybody was obliged to attend church; the seven selectmen being ordered in one instance, 1661, to sell the farm of a man and woman who made distance from the sanctuary an excuse for their absence, and to move them within a more convenient reach of its blessed privileges -apparently a mnost arbitrary proceeding, but having politically a most powerful influence in evolving the town's unity.1 No distinction was
1 A good illustration of how things, which judged apart from their surround- ings and at the standpoint of a later age seem harsh and uncalled for, are in their direct relations and for their own time exceedingly wise and proper. The great danger to which isolated settlers were then exposed, even when safe from other foes, was that of being overpowered by the wilderness around them, and relapsing into barbarism. In spite of all efforts to prevent it, there were some such stragglers. For instance, white settlers, among them Jeffries, owner of Jeffries' Neck, had evidently come to Ipswich before Winthrop's au- thorized settlement in 1633. But here, as in all other such cases, they seem to have become lost to civilization, and to have counted for nothing in the conntry's subsequent development. The early colonists were like an army marching through an enemy's territory, - safe only when kept in close ranks, yea, even then, as their degeneracy in the third and fourth generation shows, barely able to resist the touch of their awful foe. And it was a sense of this danger which led their leaders, as we have frequent evidence in the annals of Massachusetts, to be chary about forming new settlements, to hold those formed close together, and to recall parties who had wandered off too far from the main centres, - a course in which they were powerfully aided, as above, by their re- ligion, which bound them fast to the meeting-house, and by their common lands, which enabled them, while cultivating large fields, to live in compact villages.
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made at first between civil and ecclesiastical affairs; the same pages of the record containing votes about the removal of errors from religion and of rubbish from the roads, the salary to be paid for ministers and tlie bounty to be paid for wolves. The town and the parish, the town-house and the meeting- house, were all one, and that one the church. Only professing Christians were made freemen, and allowed to vote, and hold office. A person could not be a hog-reeve till he had expe- rienced a change of heart. Fence-viewers, to be elected in town-meeting, had first to have been elected from all eternity in the counsels of heaven; and it was of no use for a man to aspire to be a town-crier who was not sound on the ques- tion of original sin; or the bugler to a training-band, if his moral trumpet gave "an uncertain sound." To make the town a small theocracy, and to keep the devil out of its corn by putting the Lord into all its fences-that everywhere was the aim.
It was an effort which in the nature of things could not be wholly successful. The people, having been nursed on the fine meal of conscience, found it hard to feed on the coarse grass of authority, even though its spears were raised in their own gardens ; and so the records here, the same as in other places, are full of indications, that under the hard Puritan crust there lurked often the soft places both of heresy and of immorality. Two of the original twelve municipal apostles who came here with John Winthrop proved afterwards to be traitors to the cause of temperance. As early as 1639, eighty errors of doctrine were found to have crept into the Puritan
It was an instinct - or was it profound statesmanship, or, perhaps, both ?- which has been fully vindicated by its results. The South, which had no Puritanism and no common lands, developed necessarily the country's southern type of society ; and we owe not only the New England town, but with it a large element of our New England civilization, to this apparently arbitrary Puritan interference with individual liberty, so closely connected are often the profoundest principles and the most trivial events. A similar explanation is to be given of many other things in Puritan statesmanship which seem to us now utterly harsh and intolerant. They were the tyrannies of an hour, but the liberties of the ages ; the bigotries of a religion, but the seeds of a civilization.
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faith itself; so that it became a serious question who should keep the keepers. Henry Walton was fined five pounds in 1660 for saying he had " as lieve heare a dogg barke as Mr. Cobbitt preach," while shortly after Thomas Bragg and Edward Coggswell had to pay ten shillings apiece for "fighting in the meeting-house on the Lord's Day." Nicholas Easton de- clared that "all the elect had an indwelling devil" as well as "an indwelling Holy Ghost;" and when Roger Williams, "with a windmill in his head," and Anne Hutchinson, with a firebrand on her tongue, came along, proclaiming the great truths of toleration and religious liberty, they found some sympathizers even here in Ipswich. In 1664, other persons besides professing Christians having been admitted to the right of municipal voting, the separation of the town from the church began. With the increase of people and their spread into the out districts, new societies were necessarily formed, -four Congregationalist ones very early, at Chebacco, Linebrook, the Hamlet, and over the river, and a Methodist, Unitarian, and Episcopal one more recently at the centre, each not without the pangs of parturition in the mother- church ; an increasing body, also, of the unchurched. And little by little the old Puritanism has been softened, broad- ened, and loosened into the charity, the liberality, and, it must be confessed, the indifferentism, of religion to-day.
Yet, with all the imperfections of Puritanism, no one can study our town-records, and not admit the grandeur of its work the same here as elsewhere, and on the community even more than on the individual. Winning the people into bondage to the church at home, it helped to free them from bondage to the king abroad. Failing in the virtues of charity, gentleness, and love, it excelled in those of honesty, purity, self-denial, and earnestness. It imparted to its adherents exactly those qualities which are needed as the foundation of a state, -sobriety, thoughtfulness, obedience to law, regard for the public good, and, best of all, a new moral fibre deep down in the soul itself. Even its sternness, bigotry, intoler- ance, and persecution had their vital uses in the community's
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