USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Ipswich > The celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, August 16, 1844 > Part 4
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THE TOWN OF IPSWICHI.
development, as, under evolution, we are beginning to learn, they always have. They were political rather than moral, defensive rather than offensive, the iron-hooped buckets with which to hold the waters of liberty to their own lips rather than the denial to others of the right to draw them up from the wells of God, the rough bark and sharp burs with which to keep the nut of the new civilization from being devoured before it was ripe by the animals of the outside world, -- the same thing that we find in nature, - and not the instruments with which to force its sweetness on unwil- ling souls.
It is a system which has passed away now, and some mourn over its loss; think that because it was good once it would have been good always, and that the laxity of doctrine, falling-off of church attendance, and secularization of Sunday, which have taken its place, are an indication that religion itself in our old town is less than it was at first. But they, too, equally with its assailants, lose sight of God's higher truth. Disintegration, not less than integration, is a phase of religious growth, is only the crumbling of the barren rock with which to make the fruitful soil. The real essence of religion is here to-day just as truly as it was under Puritan- ism, only now, the same as with the virtues of our ancestors, it is spread through the life of the whole community rather than concentrated in a few hard doctrines. And as we owe the beauty and fertility of our natural town to the fact that a layer of hard granite was deposited here ages ago as a foun- dation, and that since then a large portion of it has been dis- solved by the elements, and mixed up as our common earth, so we owe all that is fairest and best in its moral character to-day to the twin-fact that it had the old Puritan faith here to begin with, and that now a large fraction of it has been disintegrated into the dust of its daily life.
IV. With the separation of its civil from its religious affairs, its MUNICIPAL FACTOR, that is, the force concerned in its structure and organization as a political body, comes natu-
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rally the next in order, a feature constituting, not, indeed, the whole town, yet a vital part of it, what the bones are to the animal economy, that on which all its other parts depend, and which, more than aught else, determines its species. And in studying this, too, we must go back to the Old World for its seed. Its. fundamental idea - the meeting of the people to make their own laws, and the making of them in the very place where they were to be administered - was not a new creation on our own soil, as some have thought, but one brought to it in our Anglo-Saxon blood; was not made by Congregationalism, as some have said, but the town idea that made Congregationalism made also the Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian polities, for they all have it as their com- mon base. Simple as it now seems, it took centuries for its growth and the best blood of the race for its nourishment; can be traced back of America to England, and back of England to Northern Europe, and back of Europe to Western Asia and the Caspian Sea. Julius Caesar found it in the forests of Germany among the Cimbri and Suevi, even in his day ; and all through the history of the Teutonic races it has been the one leading idea which has antagonized that of kingship, and is the key to a large part of their wars and convulsions. The trouble was, however, that in the Old World it never had a really fair chance to unfold itself in actual practice, was kept down by the weight of tradition, by the power of the church, and by the ignorance and negligence of the people themselves. What it needed for its full development was a new and free field, a religion in sympathy with its spirit, and a popular soil rich enough to give it nourishment - all of which it found in the New England wilderness. And, brought to it in the cabins of the "Mayflower" and the " Arbella," it was just as inevitable that the government organized by their voyagers on these shores should take the town shape as that an apple- seed planted here should grow up an apple-tree; just as inevitable that it should become more perfect here than else- where as that an apple-tree in the broad country should be larger and richer than in the cramped and darkened city.
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TIIE TOWN OF IPSWICHI.
The operation of this fundamental idea in the growth and development of our own town is to be traced on every page of its records. As soon as the Colony, which at first was only a single extended town, became too large for the meeting of all its freeholders in Boston (that is, about 1664), Ipswich, in common with its other settlements, began the direct manage- ment of its own affairs,1 its people coming together from time to time in a local meeting formally called, where each citizen, irrespective of wealth or station, had the same right as every other to speak and vote on all matters which came before it, -the most perfect democracy, with the single exception of its sex limit, that is possible on earth. And the town thus organized became at once a vital unit in the body politic, acting not only on its special local interests, but on the larger ones which it had as a part of the Colony, making its deputies at the General Court only the agents of its carefully expressed will at home, and joining heartily with the other towns in the struggle then impending against the tyranny of the mother- country.
Its history in this respect is exceedingly honorable. As early as 1685 it voted to a man that it did not want the colonial charter surrendered to Charles II. of England. In 1687, under the lead of its citizens, John Wise, then minister at Chebacco, John Appleton, John Andrews, Robert Kinsman, William Goodhue, and Thomas French, -six names which de- serve to be immortal, - it voted to resist the tax of a penny on a pound which Andros, the royal governor, had levied upon it, because, as the record says, it "infringed their liberty as
1 A most important and delicate step in the history of all the carly towns of Massaelinsetts, - the evolution of the original homogencous citizenship of our political solar system into its separate municipal worlds, - and as scientifically beautiful as when our physical earth went through a similar process. It dif- ferentiated the popular government, made it partly democratie and partly rep- resentative, or republican ; was a normal phase in the development of our national Constitution ; and the fact that it took place so readily and easily, and that the towns took charge of their own affairs so smoothly and wisely, shows how thoroughly polities, even then, had got into our New England blood, and how plainly our government, and indeed all government, is a natural evolution rather than a deliberate mannfacture.
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free English subjects of his Majesty, and the statute law that no taxes should be levied upon his subjects without the con- sent of an Assembly chosen by the freeholders for assessing the same;" for which vote its instigators were imprisoned and fined by the governor, - a vote a hundred years before the days of James Otis, yet which embodies almost exactly the great fundamental principle of the Revolution, so early out of this little town had reached the hand which defied the King of England on his throne, and before which at last all thrones are to go down. In 1755 it instructed its representative, Dr. John Calef, to do all in his power to maintain the charter- rights of the Colony against the encroachments of the Eng- lish Parliament; for disobeying which, a little later, he was promptly rebuked, and another man, Michael Farley, with more of the true town spirit, put in his place. Its records all through the stormy period of the Revolution fairly bristle with patriotic votes, - the ordering that tea, " that pernicious weed," as it is called, should not be sold or used within its limits ; the pledging the lives and fortunes of its inhabitants to support the Continental Congress in declaring the Colo- nies independent of Great Britain; and the repeated raising of money and troops with which to carry on the war. And since the recognition of the independence which it thus helped to secure, and the formation of the Federal Constitu- tion which it voted to accept, down to our own times, when again and again it raised its quota of troops for the Union war, it is the town as a town that has shown itself a vital part of the state and the nation:
And how powerfully has all this reacted on the place itself! Its annual meetings for two hundred and fifty years have been its people's great school of citizenship. In the State House at Boston and in the Capitol at Washington, everything is necessarily done for the people and by their representatives ; but here, and here alone, the people are brought face to face with their rights and duties, and made to decide upon them in their original capacity. Giving cach man a voice and vote on all public questions has interested each one, as noth-
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ing else could, in their study. Public spirit has been devel- oped ; and each man, while taught more and more to respect his own manhood, has been taught more and more to submit to the will of the majority, -two things equally essential in a true republic. Governor Andrew, somewhat derogatively, called our soldiers, when they went down to Bull Run at the beginning of the civil war, "a collection of town-meetings." And such, doubtless, they were. But the town-meetings in the end conquered the plantations. They went in at Bull Run, but they came out at Appomattox Court House ; and we are a free country to-day very largely because our soldiers had had for generations the town-meeting training, had had that personal interest in its safety incorporated into their very blood, which in the long-rim is mightier for its defence than any military discipline. There is no other organization which can take their place, no city charter, however needful it may be for large communities, which is not in some degree a sepa- ration of the people from the direct management of their municipal affairs, - a loss, therefore, of political training, and a source of political corruption. And so long as New Eng- land would keep its chief glory, the nation its most powerful safeguard, and liberty its oldest and surest embodiment, we shall honor, preserve, and magnify our town organizations, and with them, as their very life-centre, our town-meetings.
V. But, with every person a sovereign and a legislator, it is evidently needful that every person shall have some EDU- CATION, so naturally do all these great factors go together, and equally evident that the public in some capacity must pro- vide its means. It is a necessity which Ipswich recognized at a very early date. Within two years after its incorporation, it started a grammar-school, voting lands for its support, and appointing feoffees for its management ; and this institution, aided by annual appropriations and by the generous Manning gifts of 1874, has developed into our magnificent High School of to-day, -one of the oldest in the country, and with a record equally long of noble service. Six years later, so early
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that the children on their way to it had to be protected from the wolves, it voted that there should be an English free school -a slip from the tree of knowledge, doubtless at first very slender and imperfect, but out of which, nourished in later years by the State, has grown our whole system of common schools, one of New England's chiefest glories to-day, and as truly a, part of the town as its houses and its hills. Fifty years ago, opening in 1826, its famous Young Ladies' Seminary was started, a pioneer in the cause of female educa- tion, which, under its able teachers, seut forth for years, not only thousands of pupils over the world at large, but a sweet, refining influence of priceless value all through the town itself. And then, from the very start, its citizens took an active interest in collegiate education. During the first fifty years after its settlement, it had not less than thirty-eight of its sons graduate at Harvard; and one of the most touching things in its records is the fact that in 1644 each of its families gave one peck of corn to Harvard University, atid that in 1681 it put nineteen pounds' worth of grain on board of John Dutch's sloop, bound to Cambridge, for the same noble purpose- so early, in default of money, did the farmers here use the seed of the soil, garnered with their own hard hands, out of which to raise an institution of learning. It is worthy of notice, also, that the close connection of the schools with the town's very life was at the beginning fully recog- nized. The selectmen were especially enjoined to see that the children were taught to " understand the capital laws of their country;" and the reason given for making their support a public burden was that "skill in the tongues and liberal arts is necessary for the well-being of a commonwealth." It is well for us to keep this original purpose, too often forgotten, still in mind. Our public schools were instituted first of all, not to make scholars, or Christians, or business men, but to make citizens. It is the only ground on which their support can be fairly exacted from all religions and all people. And, no matter what else they teach, they will do their full work as a factor of the town and the state, only when their
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foremost study is the laws of the land, and when their fruit from year to year is the golden one of every boy and girl out of them a patriotic, intelligent, and public-spirited citizen.
VI. But, while giving their due place to these higher ele- ments in the building-up of a community, it will not do to forget one that both religion and philosophy have often de- spised and overlooked, yet which has more to do with some parts of its growth than all others, and that is its BUSINESS. Jolin Winthrop relates, in his " History of New England," that a white man, being inquired of by an inquisitive Indian as to what are the first principles of a commonwealth, replied, " Salt is the first principle; for by means of it we keep our flesh and fish to have it ready when it is needed, whereas you, for the want of it, are often ready to starve. A second principle is iron ; for thereby we fell trees, build houses, and till our land. A third is ships; for by them we send away such commodities as we have to spare, and bring home such as' we lack." - " Alas !" said the Indian, "then I fear we shall never be a commonwealth ; for we can neither make salt, iron, or ships." And Cotton Mather also tells the story, in his " Magnalia," that when a Puritan minister addressed a congregation of Marblehead fishermen, and exhorted them to get religion, otherwise the main end of their planting the wilderness would be lost, one of the fishermen spoke up and said, "You are mistaken, sir, you think you are preaching to the people of the Bay ; but the main end of our planting Marblehead is to catch fish." The two answers are both significant. Salt, iron, and ships, with the other material things they represent, are, beyond question, one of the corner-stones of the Common- wealth; and among all the grand religious motives which animated our fathers in coming to America, it is not to be ignored, and not at all to their discredit, that many of them came largely to transact business, and to get here on earth an honest living. Money was put into their enterprises then with the hope of gain, the same as into stock companies now. Rev. John White was himself one of the shareholders in the
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Massachusetts Company. Higginson and Skelton were paid to come over at the rate of forty pounds a year. With religion at the core, fisheries and fur were held out on either side as inducements in filling up their ranks. Ministers, turkeys, salt-makers, wheelwrights, seed-grain, pewter plates, brass ladles, quart-measures, hymn-books, and Bibles are among the itemis that composed the cargo of the "Arbella." The whole thing was conducted, not as a wild fanaticism, but on sound business principles, had its lofty Puritan sails reaching on high to catch the airs of the spirit-world upheld below with a ballast of sturdy English common sense. And it was this shrewd business energy of the early colonists, often lost sight of by their culogists, as if somehow it was inconsist- ent with their exalted spiritual motives, -this, not less than their religious zeal, which made their undertaking a final success.
Ipswich seems at first to have shared fully in this business spirit. Houses were rapidly put up. Johnson speaks of them in 1646 as "very faire-built with pleasant gardens." Its rich soil opened to the sunlight was made, like the good ground of Scripture, to bring forth abundantly. The fishing business, " the apostles' own calling," as King James had piously named it, was carried on here, the same as elsewhere, very largely and lucratively ; the incident being told, that the approaching settlers, while becalmed off the coast, on the " Arbella," " caught sixty-seven cod in two hours, some of them a yard and a half long and a yard round" - such was the tendency of fish even then, and on the sober Puritans, to excite the imagination. Clams appeared on the scene at a very early date, their digging being then, as often since, the one last ditch into which poverty could always retreat before yielding to starvation. Shipbuilding was soon started, both here and at Chebacco; mills were erected on the river for sawing lumber, and grinding grain ; various branches of manufacture were entered upon ; and a profitable trade in furs was opened with the Indians. One of the great diffi- culties encountered by all the early colonists in conducting 4
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THE TOWN OF IPSWICH.
business was a lack of currency. This was shrewdly obviated in their dealings with the red men by the deliberate manufac- ture of wampum out of shells, the first fiat money probably ever known on the Continent, and a very early instance of Yankee ingenuity ; but in dealing with each other they had to employ bullets, divided coin, bills of credit, and very largely farm-produce.
Under the influence of this active business spirit the town for seventy years developed rapidly both in prosperity and population. As early as 1639 the curious vote appears on its records, " that it refuse to receive Humphrey Griffin as an inhabitant, the town being full;" which means, however, not that it had no more room for Humphrey's body, but that all its land had been taken up. In forty years its population had increased to fourteen hundred. During the Revolution it was forty-five hundred. In 1670 it was spoken of, side by side with Boston, as " one of our maritime towns;" and at the end of its first hundred years its county valuation was second only to that of Salem. Then followed its long period of stagnation - business dead, commerce fled, houses dilapi- dated, and the great body of its people crusted over with conservatism, and content simply with hard work to earn their daily bread, till finally the chief thing that poetry and business could say of it, even with their combined effort, was -
" In Agawam, a wondrous place For knitting socks and bobbin-lace, For river curving through the town, Where alewive nets scoop up and down, Feeding a factory, and distils, And saw, and grist, and fulling mills."
It was a state of things which lasted till the end of its second hundred years. Then came the railroad-train skil- fully flanking the bar to commerce Nature had placed at the mouth of its river, and opening a new artificial port on dry land right at its heart; then with it all the wonders of modern discovery and invention, sending into its veins their
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quickening life. And to-day, with two hundred and fifty years on its brow, it stands forth, not a city, not a com- mercial metropolis, not a large manufacturing place, but an active, healthy, up-with-the-times New England town, radiant with all the combined beauty of ripened age and vigorous youtlı.1
Is this failure of its early business promise wholly to be regretted ? A certain amount of trade is indeed necessary for a town's development; but who will say that a line of huge factories along our river, with their smoke and din, their close corporations and their foreign workmen, neither having any interest or root in our traditions, their petty tyrannies of agent and overseer, and their wide contrasts of wealth and poverty, would have made it really a better town ? The true business of every community is not to make cloth or machinery, but to make manhood and womanhood; not to raise wheat and corn, but to raise souls; not to have commerce with Europe or Asia alone, but with'all the realms of thought
1 The recent outward growth of the town is indicated somewhat by the following statistics, showing that it is not spasmodic or over rapid, but normal and healthy : -
Its population in 1860 was 3,349; in 1870, 3,674; in 1880, 3,699; in 1884, about 3,900.
Its number of voters in 1860 was 714 ; in 1870, 786 ; in 1880, 877.
Its taxable valuation of real and personal estate was in 1860, $1,332,719 ; in 1870, $1,632,488 ; in 1884, $1,961,545.
Its taxable valuation of real estate alone, a much better indication of actual growth, was, in 1860, $932,597 ; in 1870, $1, 125, 841 ; in 1884, $1, 494, 372.
Its money raised for town expenses was, in 1860, $10, 483.19; in 1870, $16,939.30 ; in 1884, $23,664.76.
Its tax-rate for 1860 was $8.15 per thousand ; for 1870, $14.50 per thou- sand ; for 1884, $13.50 per thousand.
But its most striking and valuable recent growth has been in the public spirit of its citizens and in the change of its policy with regard to public im- provements. New streets have been laid out ; new schoolhouses built, and two new bridges thrown across the river. Its town-hall has been remodelled into a spacious and commodious edifice ; its ancient graveyard enlarged and beautified into what will prove one of the loveliest cemeteries of the country ; a new ambition aroused to make private premises contribute to the good look of the town ; and the common talk of the people has become that of pride and hopefulness in its prospects and its possibilities.
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THE TOWN OF IPSWICHI.
and life. It is only a varied industry, only a business which appeals to all the faculties and powers of our nature, only churches and schools, pleasant homes and beautiful seenes, blended with factories and workshops, which can accomplish these higher results. And an industry of this kind Ipswich has always had. Even in its darkest days, even in its times when it has sent forth little grain and eloth into the world, it has sent forth richly its men and women. All its natural advantages are in this direction. The unmarred beauty of its stream will turn larger mills, and weave finer textures,1 than its polluted and dammed-up waters ever can; the tides of learning and civilization sweeping along its shores bring it a commerce that no sand-bar between its wharves and the sea ean shut out : improvements that offer rest and refreshment to weary workers out of the crowded city prove more profitable even by the money standard than those which attract to it only drudgery and toil. Use these advantages; build it up, not as a huge factory, but as a pleasant home, - and then, though its boys and girls may leave it a while for more active scenes of labor, they will come back to it in after-years as to a loving mother, eager to lay their gains at its feet, and their ashes at last in its dust.
VII. Mentioning the citizens it has raised up and sent abroad brings up inevitably the thought of those who have served it on battlefields - of how far they have been an element in its growth. It seems at first glance as if the men who are made SOLDIERS must necessarily be a lost force to the world, and as
1 The town is peculiarly rich in legendary lore, almost every locality in it being associated with some tradition, - not all so romantic as the story which gave its name to Heartbreak Hill, or so fantastic as the one connected with the footprints on the rock in front of the First Parish Meeting-honse, but all with a savor of the soil and helping to show that the town has had something in its scenery to quicken the imaginative as well as the industrial faculty. They are legends too much a matter of detail to be more than alluded to here ; but, when our full fortheoming history of Ipswich is written, it is hoped that they will all be gathered into it as illustrating the character of our ancestors hardly less than their actual deeds, and as affording the atmosphere through which alone many of its real events can be properly seen.
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