USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 17
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The voyage of the " Arbella " and her consorts was a tedious one, and it was not until the seventy-sixth day that they came to anchor in the harbor of Salem. On the 12th of June, old style, or, as we should count it, the 22d of June, 1630, Governor Winthrop, with the Massachusetts Company, and with the Charter, are fairly arrived on the shores of New England. The Chief Government of Massachusetts was now established on her own soil, and there was no longer to be any subordination to a Governor and Company in London. John Endieott, who had been a devoted and vigorous ruler of the little Plantation, of which he had been appointed Governor a year before, but whose jurisdiction was now merged in the General Government of the Massachusetts Colony, of which he had been
1 Doubtless of the family of Fiennes, Lord Say and Sele, one of whose daughters married the young Earl of Lincoln, a brother of the Lady Arbella Johnson.
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
elected one of the Assistants, seems to have come at once to welcome Winthrop, and to offer to him and the Company all the hospitalities in his power. The relations of Endicott and Winthrop were of the most cordial character as long as they both lived. The account of the arrival and landing of the Company is thus simply and pleasantly recorded by Governor Winthrop in his Journal : -
" Saturday, 12. About four in the morning we were near our port. We shot off two pieces of ordnance, and sent our skiff to Mr. Peirce his ship (which lay in the harbor, and had been there -days before). About an hour after, Mr. Allerton came aboard us in a shallop as he was sailing to Pemaquid. As we stood towards the harbor, we saw another shallop coming to us ; so we stood in to meet her, and passed through the narrow strait between Baker's Isle and Little Isle, and came to an anchor a little within the islands.
" Afterwards Mr. Peirce came aboard us, and returned to fetch Mr. Endecott, who came to us about two of the clock, and with him Mr. Skelton and Capt. Levett. We that were of the assistants, and some other gentlemen, and some of the women, and our captain, returned with them to Nahumkeck, where we supped with a good venison pasty and good beer, and at night we returned to our ship, but some of the women stayed behind.
" In the mean time most of our people went on shore upon the land of Cape Ann, which lay very near us, and gathered store of fine strawberries."
Among the most noteworthy incidents of the long voyage which had thus happily been brought to an end, was the Discourse written, and prob- ably delivered, by Governor Winthrop, and which came to light less than half a century ago, with the following title evidently prepared by some other hand than that of the author: --
" A Modell of Christian Charity, written on board the 'Arbella,' on the Atlantic Ocean, by the Hon. John Winthrop, Esq., in his passage (with a great company of Religious people, of which Christian tribes he was the Brave Leader and famous Governor ;) from the Island of Great Brittaine to New-England in the North America, Anno 1630."
In this discourse,1 after an elaborate discussion of Christian charity or love, the Governor procecded to speak of the great work in which they had embarked, and of the means by which it was to be accomplished. The spirit of the whole is condensed in the following passage from the conclusion : -
"Thus stands the case between God and us. We are entered into a Covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these and those ends, upon these and those accounts. We have hereupon besought of Him favor and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified this Covenant and sealed our Commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it ; but if we shall neglect
1 ['The original MS. is in the library of the N. Y. Historical Society. - ED.]
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BOSTON FOUNDED.
the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dis- sembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us; be revenged of such a (sinful) people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a Covenant.
"Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other's necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make other's condition our own ; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways. So that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies ; when he shall make us a praise and a glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations, 'The Lord make it likely that of New England? For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. Soe that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a-going.
" I shall shut up this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel (Deut. 30). Beloved, there is now set before us Life and good, Death and evil, in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Command- ments and his Ordinance and his Lawes, and the articles of our Covenant with him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship and serve other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them ; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it ; Therefore let us choose life, that we and our seed may live, by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him, for He is our life and our prosperity."
When the Massachusetts Company arrived at Salem, with the Charter of the Colony, in June, 1630, the ever-honored Pilgrims of Plymouth had already, for nine years and a half, been in happy and quiet possession of a part of the territory now included within the State of Massachusetts. They were an independent colony, however, and continued such until the Pro- vincial Charter of Oct. 7, 1691. Coming over in a single ship, and count- ing only about a hundred souls, in all, at their landing from the "May
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Flower," their numbers had increased only threefold during this first decen- nial period ; and the population of Plymouth, when Winthrop arrived, is accordingly estimated as not exceeding three hundred, - men, women, and children. The settlement at Salem, it seems, had reached about the same number. Higginson, in his New England's Plantation, gives the number of persons in the colony, previous to his own arrival in 1629, as only about one hundred. But he brought two hundred persons with him, and he was thus able to say, in September of that year: "There are in all of us, both old and new planters, about three hundred ; whereof two hundred of them are settled at Nehum-kek, now called Salem, and the rest have planted themselves at Massathulets Bay, beginning to build a town there, which we do call Cherton or Charlestown." Roger Conant had presided over the Naumkeag plantation for two years, and had been succeeded or superseded by Endicott in 1628. Endicott had been sent over, at first, in the ship " Abigail," as the agent of the Massachusetts Company and the leader of a small band, under the patent obtained from the Plymouth Council, March 19, 1628. In the following year, after the royal charter had been obtained, March 4, 1629, a commission was sent out to him, dated April 30 of the same year, as " Governor of London's Plantation in the Mattachusetts Bay in New England." In the exercise of this commission he was subordinate to "the Governor and Company" in London, by whom he was deputed, and who, from time to time, sent him elaborate instructions for the regu- lation of his conduct. Massachusetts, as we have seen, was a very little colony at this time, still in embryo; but it seems to have taken two governors to rule her! Cradock and Endicott were governors simultane- ously from April 30, 1629, or, more correctly, from the time when Endi- cott's commission as governor reached Salem, two or three months later, until the 20th (30th) of October of the same year; and Winthrop and Endicott were simultaneously governors from that date until the arrival of the " Arbella " at Salem. There was thus a chief governor in London, and a subordinate or local governor in the Plantation. The Instructions to Endicott, dated April 17, and May 28, 1629, are among the most valuable of our carly colonial papers, as showing precisely the relation which existed between the Plantation at Naumkeag and the Governor and Com- pany in England.
But all this double-action machinery had now been abolished. The chief government had been transferred, agreeably to the Cambridge Agreement, and the local government was, of course, absorbed in it. Winthrop came over at once as the Governor of the Company, and to exercise a direct and personal magistracy over the colony. Not less than a thousand persons were added to the colony about the period of his arrival. Seven or eight hundred of these came with him, or specdily followed as a part of his immediate expedition. Two or three hundred more arrived almost at the same time, though not in vessels included in the Company's fleet. A second thousand was soon afterwards added under
113
BOSTON FOUNDED.
the same influence and example. A precarious Plantation was thus trans- formed at once into a permanent and prosperous Commonwealth; and henceforth, instead of two or three hundred pioneer planters, thinly scat- tered along the coast, looking to a governor and company across the ocean for their supreme authority and instructions, two or three thousand people are to be seen, with a governor and legislature upon their own soil and of their own selection, -erecting houses, building ships, organizing villages and towns, establishing churches, schools, and even a college, and laying broad and deep the foundations of an independent Republic. Such was the result of that transfer of the chief government which Matthew Cradock, the first Governor of the Massachusetts Company in Old England, proposed on the 28th of July, 1629, and which John Winthrop, the first Governor of the Company in New England, was the instrument of carrying out to its completion on the 12th (22d) day of June, 1630. On that day the transfer was consummated, and the consequences soon began to develop themselves.
But there was much to contend against at the outset. Thomas Dudley, who had come over as Deputy-Governor to Winthrop, in the place of John Humfrey who had declined the service, in a letter to the Countess of Lincoln, the mother of the Lady Arbella Johnson, dated March 28, 1631, writes of the condition of things as follows : -
"We found the Colony in a sad and unexpected condition, above eighty of them being dead the winter before, and many of those alive weak and sick ; all the corn and bread amongst them all hardly sufficient to feed them a fortnight, insomuch that the remainder of a hundred and eighty servants we had the two years before sent over, coming to us for victuals to sustain them, we found ourselves wholly unable to feed them, by reason that the provisions shipped for them were taken out of the ship they were put in ; and they who were trusted to ship them in another failed us, and left them behind : whereupon necessity enforced us, to our extreme loss, to give them all liberty, who had cost us about £16 or £20 a person, furnishing and sending over."
It would thus appear that of the residents under Endicott, one hundred and eighty had been the bond-servants of the planters who were to follow, and that one of the first acts of Winthrop's administration was to emanci- pate all who had survived the winter; not from any abstract considerations of philanthropy, but from absolute inability to provide for their main- tenance. The little Colony was clearly in a weak and almost starving condition when the " Arbella" arrived, and it is by no means surprising that Dudley speaks of the " too large commendations of the country," and adds, "Salem, where we landed, pleased us not." Five days only after their arrival we find Governor Winthrop recording in his Diary: "Thurs- day, 17 (June). We went to Mattachusetts to find out a place for our sitting down." This journey of exploration, made on foot, resulted in the immediate removal of the Governor and Company to what is now called VOL. 1 .- 15.
114
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Charlestown. " A great House " had been built here the year before, and in this " the Governor and several of the patentees dwelt," as we learn from the old records of the town, while "the multitude set up cottages, booths, and tents about the Town Hill."
Here, in Charlestown, on the 30th of July, six weeks after their landing at Salem, after appropriate religious exercises, Governor Winthrop, Deputy- Governor Dudley, Isaac Johnson, and John Wilson, adopted and signed the following simple but solemn church covenant : -
"In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in obedience to his holy will, and divine ordinances :
"We, whose names are here underwritten, being by his most wise and good providence brought together into this part of America, in the Bay of Massachusetts ; and desirous to unite into one congregation or church, under the Lord Jesus Christ, our head, in such sort as becometh all those whom he hath redeemed, and sanctified to himself, do hereby solemnly and religiously, as in his most holy presence, promise and bind ourselves to walk in all our ways according to the rule of the Gospel, and in all sincere conformity to his holy ordinances, and in mutual love and respect to each other, so near as God shall give us grace."
Jo: withND Joa: Johnfor ..
John wilson
The study.
AUTOGRAPHS OF THE SIGNERS.1
The Church thus formed is now known as the First Church of Boston, on one of the painted windows of whose new and beautiful house of worship this covenant is inscribed ; while among its ancient communion plate may still be seen an embossed silver cup, with "The gift of Governor Jnº. Win- throp to y I' Church" engraved on its rim.2
And here, at Charlestown, on the 23d of August, 1630, was held the earliest " Court of Assistants" on this side of the Atlantic, at which the
1 [This group does not represent the actual signatures of this document, but reproduces other autographs of the signers. Wilson was at this time forty-two years old, and had grad- uated at King's College, Cambridge. He was ordained at Charlestown, August 27, and again in Boston in November. Ile returned to Eng- land for his wife the next year, and was a third time installed in November, 1632. - En.]
2 [The heliotype herewith given of this cup
was made by the kind permission of the present pastor, and shows it on a reduced scale. It measures eleven and three-fourth inches high, of which the bowl makes five inches, and the diameter at the top is four and three-quarters inches, and at its base four inches. The Church Records have the following account of it: " A tall embossed cup, with engraving and figures in relief. Weight, 16 oz., I dwt. No date." - ED.]
Gov. WINTHROP'S FARM.
TEN HILLS, 1637.
THE WINTHROP CUP.
2
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BOSTON FOUNDED.
very first matter propounded was, "How the Ministers should be main- tained," -when it was ordered, that houses should be built for them with convenient speed, at the public charge. Everything so far seemed thus to indicate that Charlestown was to be the capital of the colony, and, accordingly, the town records tell us that the Governor " ordered his house to be cut and framed there." There is reason, however, for thinking that the " Great House " was still the Governor's abode on the 25th of October,
WINTHROP'S FLEET.1
when he entered in his Diary the following record of what was unques- tionably the original temperance movement in Massachusetts, if not in America : -
" The Governour, upon consideration of the inconveniences which had grown in England by drinking one to another, restrained it at his own table, and wished others to do the like, so as it grew, by little and little, into disuse."
Meantime discouragements and afflictions were falling heavily upon the Colony. Sickness and death had begun their ravages. The following entry in Winthrop's Journal, under date of September 30, tells its own sad story in language which could not be improved: "About two in the
1 [This cut is a reduction, by permission, from an oil-painting recently completed by Mr. Wil- liam F. Halsall, representing a part of the fleet which brought Winthrop and his company to Salem just as they had come round to Boston Harbor, and were dropping anchor. The ves- sels are a careful study of the ships of the period. The " Arbella," the admiral of the feet, a ship of three hundred and fifty tons,
carrying twenty-eight guns and fifty-two men, is in the foreground, being towed to her anchor- age. The "Talbot," the vice-admiral, riding at anchor, hides Governor's Island from the spec- tator. The " Jewell," the captain of the fleet, is the distant vessel on the right, where Castle Island appears. The time is late in a July day. The spectator's position is between Boston and East Boston. - ED ]
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THIE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
morning Mr. Isaac Johnson died; his wife, the Lady Arbella, of the house of Lincoln, being dead about one month before. He was a holy man and wisc, and died in sweet peace, leaving some part of his substance to the Colony." About the same time, also, died "good Mr. Higginson," the zealous and devoted minister of Salem; Dr. William Gager, the chosen physician of the Company, and one of the deacons of the little church; and others of both sexes, more or less conspicuous among the colonists. The loss of associates and friends, however, was not the only trial to which the com- pany were subjected at this carly period. Provisions had again been growing scarce, and the springs at Charlestown seemed beginning to fail. Edward Johnson, an eye-witness, speaks of this precise period in his Wonder-working Providence, as follows : -
" The griefe of this people was further increased by the sore sicknesse which befell among them, so that almost in every family, lamentation, mourning, and woe was heard, and no fresh food to be had to cherish them. It woukl assuredly have moved the most lockt-up affections to teares, no doubt, had they past from one hut to another, and beheld the piteous case these people were in. And that which added to their present distresse was the want of fresh water; for although the place did afford plenty, yet for present they could finde but one spring, and that not to be come at but when the tide was downe."
This want of water it was which finally determined Governor Winthrop and others to abandon their present location, to quit Charlestown, and to establish themselves on the neighboring peninsula. Of this step, the following brief but ample account is found in the carly records of Charles- town : -
"In the meantime, Mr. Blackstone, dwelling on the other side Charles River alone, at a place by the Indians called Shawmutt, where he only had a cottage, at or not far off the place called Blackstone's Point, he came and acquainted the Governor of an excellent Spring there ; withal inviting him and soliciting him thither. Where- upon, after the death of Mr. Johnson and divers others, the Governor, with Mr. Wilson, and the greatest part of the church removed thither : whither also the frame of the Governor's house, in preparation at this town, was also (to the discontent of some) carried ; where people began to build their houses against winter ; and this place was called BOSTON."
William Blackstone had until now been the only known white inhab- itant of Shawmut, as the peninsula was called by the Indians, and will always be remembered as the pioneer settler of the peninsula.1
The order of the Court of Assistants, - Governor Winthrop presiding, -"THAT TRIMONTAINE SHALL BE CALLED BOSTON," was passed on the 7th of September, old style, or, as we now count it, the 17th of September, 1630.2 The name of Boston was specially dear to the Massachusetts colonists
1 [The story of Blackstone's residence is told at length in Mr. C. F. Adams, Jr.'s section of the present volume. - ED.]
2 [By favor of the llon. Henry B. Peirce, Secretary of the Commonwealth, a heliotype of this famous order is herewith given. - ED.]
58
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117
BOSTON FOUNDED.
from its associations with the old St. Botolph's town, or Boston, of Lincoln- shire, England, from which the Lady Arbella Johnson and her husband had come, and where John Cotton was still preaching in its noble parish church. But the precise date of the removal of the Governor and Company to the peninsula is nowhere given.
The Court of Assistants continued to hold its meetings at Charlestown until the end of September; but on the 19th (29th) of October we find a General Court holden at Boston, and on the 29th of November we find Winthrop for the first time dating a letter to his wife in England, " Boston in Mattachusetts," in which he says: "My dear wife, we are here in a paradise. Though we have not beef and mutton, etc., yet (God bc praised ) we want them not; our Indian corn answers for all. Yet here is fowl and fish in great plenty." In a previous letter he had said to her : "We here enjoy God and Jesus Christ. Is not this enough? What would we have more? "
ST. BOTOLPH'S CHURCH.
Boston, however, was not destined to be " a paradise " quite yet, to any one except its hopeful and brave-hearted founder. The Winter, then just opening, was to be one of great severity and continued suffering. The Charlestown records tell us that " people were necessitated to live on clams and muscles, and ground-nuts and acorns." The Governor himself " had the last batch of bread in the oven," and was seen giving " the last handful
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
of meal in the barrell unto a poor man distressed by the wolf at the door." A ship had been sent to England for provisions six months before, but nothing had been heard of her. A day had been appointed for a general humiliation, " to seek the Lord by fasting and prayer." And now, at the last moment, in the very hour of their despair, the ship is descried entering Boston Harbor, and " laden with provisions for them all." The Governor's Journal, accordingly, has the following entry: " 22 (February). We held a day of Thanksgiving for this ship's arrival, by order from the Governour and Council, directed to all the Plantations." This must have been the first regularly appointed Thanksgiving Day in Massachusetts.
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