USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume I > Part 9
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From the account given by Weeden we learn of the part that dress played, even in the early times, in classifying the people :
"The function of dress in their minds was not only to cover and dress people, but to classify and arrange them. The same conserving prejudice, which marked their treatment of laborers and apprentices, controlled their notions of dress. Social prestige, rank, estate, and breeding, were to be formu- lated in the garments of the wearer. It was not only that the precious capital of the community was wasted by expensive dressing, but the well-ordered ranks of society were jostled and disturbed by the glitter of silver lace, the sheen of silken hoods, the tramp of long boots.
One of the characteristics of the time was the attempt of the towns on the order of the General Court to control the wearing apparel of both men and women and to curtail luxury. Quoting from Weeden :
"They began early in the effort to reform the evil ten- dencies in dress. In 1634 the Massachusetts General Court, along with their prohibition of tobacco, publicly or privately before strangers, forbids the purchase of 'any apparel, either woolen, silke, or linen, with any lace on it, silver gold, silk or thread.' (I shall here take the liberty of using the mod- ern spellings.) They shall not 'make or buy slashed clothes, other than one slash on each sleeve, and another in the back'; there shall be no 'cut works, embroidered or needle work caps, bands and rails ; no gold or silver girdles, hatbands, belts, ruffs.
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beaver hats.' The statute was not to be left to execute itself : 'if any man shall judge the wearing of above new fashions, or long hair, or of the like nature, to be uncomely, or preju- dicial to common good, and party not reforming, next assist- ants shall have power to bind,' etc. In 1636 lace is forbidden, but the binding of a small edging on linen is allowed; and to curtail luxury, buyers of fruit, spice, sugar, wine, liquors, tobacco, must pay one sixth of their value into the public treas- ury ; the next year they repeal the ordinance as to sugar, spice and fruit, leaving the remainder."
RIGGS BROWN HOUSE, RIVERDALE, GLOUCESTER
There are many references in the town records of prosecutions, acquittals and convictions for attempts to break these laws. In Salem in 1652 a man was presented for excess "in bootes, rebonds, gould and silver lace"; in Lynn, "Esther, wife of Joseph Jynkes Junior, ffer wear- ing silver lace"; in Newbury, in 1653, two women were presented because they wore a silk hood and scarf, but the case was dismissed when it was proved that their husbands were worth two hundred pounds each. Anyone who had less than that was held to strict account in dress. That rank as well as wealth condoned these offenses is shown by the case of John Hutchin's wife, who was discharged "upon testimony of her being brought up above the ordinary ranke."
During the latter half of the seventeenth century rank became less important than wealth. Quoting Weeden :
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"New England society was working through its English traditions of rank and prestige, and settling into new codes and manners. These might be more philosophical than the old, but they were adapted to the new nation. The first generation worked most conscientiously and carefully to keep the strong ties of rank and social prestige brought over in the persons of clergymen, squires, merchants, and men of substance. The New Englander showed no less appreciation of these social privileges in so far as they were represented by individuals and consolidated in the form of property. But mark the change he made. He believed that whatever was general, public, social, belonged to all together, and he would have his share, be he poor or rich, high or low in estate. The tendency toward fixed ranks, and anything like nobility of person, to be acknowledged and confirmed by the community, was repudi- ated by the mass of the citizens. There were institutions of property ; no institutions of rank."
It is often said that the early Puritans were strict about morals and very severe in punishing transgressors of their moral laws. The following law is in the Manchester records under the date of 1647 and evidently pertained to the whole colony: "If any young man attempts to address a young women without the consent of her par- ents, or in their absents, the County Court, he shall be fined five pounds; for the second offense ten pounds and impresonment for the third." In 1660 William Walker, of Andover, was sent to prison for a month because he courted a maid without her parents' permis- sion. It was unlawful to do unnecessary labor on the Sabbath or the evening before, and offenders were punished by fines in Essex County until 1785. In 1651 three people of Manchester were presented by the grand jury "for absence from public ordinances three or four Sab- baths, and three for wearing silver lace, silver and gold buttons." Fines were imposed for owning cards in this county as late as 1755. Husbands were forbidden to strike or beat their wives and wives could not strike their husbands.
The law against drinking a health was repealed by the General Court in 1645, but the court in this year forbade laborers to demand strong drink as a part of their wages, a law which was reenacted in 1672. The authorities of Newbury summoned Dr. William Snelling
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before them because he had made the following remark to a health that was drunk to all friends :
"I'll pledge my friends And for my foes A plague for their heels And a poxe for their toes."
Unmarried mothers were fined in Massachusetts till the seven- teen eighties or nineties. Those who owned disorderly houses, places where swearing, playing games, and drinking at unreasonable hours were allowed, were constantly being told to mend their ways or were fined, especially in Boston and Salem.
The Indian, or King Philip's, War of 1775-76 had brought a cer- tain looseness of morals that the government tried to counteract by laws and regulations. The General Court thought that the war itself was the way in which "the most wise and holy God for several years past hath chastized us with rods . . . hereby speaking aloud to us to search and try our ways and turn again to the Lord our God." The people must reform their ways. The men must have their hair cut, and the younger set must be discouraged from "netting, curling and immodest laying out their hair." A fine of ten shillings was to be imposed for "the evil of pride in apparel or vain, new, strange fashions both in poor and rich with naked breasts and armes . . . with the addition of superstitious ribbons both on hair and appare !. " Constables were to be fined four pounds if they did not enforce the laws against the Quakers, "whose damnable heresies and abominable idolatries are . . . . practiced to the scandal of religion." Church doors were not allowed to be opened till after the benediction had been pronounced "because there is so much profaneness among us in persons turning their backs upon the public worship." A renewed attack was to be made on drinking and swearing, and the offenders were to be punished. Shop-keepers, mechanics, and day laborers who had been charging too much for their services were to be made to make double restitution. The following adds a rather modern touch : "Whereas there is a loose & sinful custome of going or riding from toune to toune, and that oft times men & weomen together, vpon pre- tence of going to lecture, but it appeares to be meerely to drincke & reuell in ordinarys & tavernes, which is in itself scandalous, and it is
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to be feared a notable means to debauch our youth and hazard the chastity of such as are draune forth therevnto," such persons who were caught were to furnish a bond of twenty pounds to show that they would behave themselves in the future. The young people had got out of hand during the war, but the court used effective methods to make them "toe the mark."
To quote again from Ford, in Massachusetts :
"Ten crimes were visited by capital punishment : murder, whether or not premeditated, stealing, perjury, treason, bes- tiality, sodomy, idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, and adultery. Subsequently, arson, burglary (third offense), cursing or smit- ing a parent, denial of the word of God (second offense), highway robbery (third offense ), return of Jesuits or Quakers after banishment, man-stealing, rape of a maid or single woman, rebellion and rebellious resistance of a son were added to the list of capital crimes.
"For minor misdemeanors, some of which were slight, cruel penalties were exacted. Cutting off the ears was the pen- alty for burglary and several other offenses. Whipping and putting in the stocks ('bilboes') were common punishments, and the latter was inflicted upon women as well as men with surprising frequency. Drunkenness and cursing as well as infractions of laws governing Sabbath Day observance and other misdemeanors were punished by putting the lawbreak- ers in the stocks. Whipping was a customary penalty for drunkenness, disobedience and certain forms of theft, for lying and arson, as well as for profanation of the Lord's Day. It was the penalty for the first offense in the case of a number of other crimes. Banishment was the penalty for continued heresy and for resistance of authority. Branding was the penalty for robbery and burglary and for vagabond Quakers and rogues. Disfranchisement was the punishment for failure to attend public worship as well as for sexual offense and defamation of magistrates. Fines were the commonest penal- ties and were ordered for a large number of misdemeanors.
"In general, little if any partiality was shown in impos- ing penalties. Public officers and prominent citizens often suf- fered the full penalty of the law. . . . . Several times Gov-
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ernor Endicott was fined forty shillings for assault and battery."
There must have been a good deal of exaggeration about the severity of Puritan punishments, for the records of the Essex County Quarterly Court show that during the years 1636-41 only twenty sentences for whipping were recorded throughout twenty-six town- ships of this county. Quoting from Phillips :
"Of these, fourteen deal with misdemeanors of servants, apprentices, or stubborn children. It is evident that the feel- ing of the times regarded indentured servants as in the nature of slaves. Having no property and having sold their time to their masters, they could neither be fined nor imprisoned without simply punishing their owners. As the offense was usually against the master, it was plainly impossible to take such action, and the obvious and only alternative was to inflict corporal punishment on the servant. It was a defect of the indentured servant system rather than of Puritan severity.
"There were three cases of whipping for family quarrels. John Talbie's wife Dorothy, who frequently 'laid hands on her husband to the danger of his life,' was chained to a post in 1637 until she repented, but the repentance was evidently only skin deep, for in 1638 she was 'whipped for misdemeanors against her husband.' One would be inclined from her early record to feel that she got what she very richly deserved, except for the fact that later she claimed that it had been revealed to her that she should kill her husband and children, so she killed one child, for which she was hanged in Boston. She very probably was insane. In 1641 Hugh Browne's wife, 'for breaking his head and threatening she would kill him . throwing stones at him, causing his face to bleed, calling him a beast and wishing him hanged,' was severely whipped. Prob- ably some sentimentalist will feel that these ladies were denied their just rights when the court endeavored to show them the error of their ways in the only way that would penetrate their thick skins, but more conservative persons will have a strong suspicion that it was not a bad way to handle such terma- gants. The Court showed no partiality in these conjugal
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affairs, for Reuben Guppy, who had deserted his family as well as cursing, lying and stealing, was also severely whipped at the same session that attended to Goody Browne's bad temper.
"The other whippings were applied for contempt of court, unchaste words, and stealing. All cases were evidently of per- sons of poor character, on whom fines and other punishments were not likely to be effective. There were less than five whippings a year in an area now occupied by twenty-six towns and not enough to supply one in each locality in the entire five years.
"Sitting an hour or two in the stocks was inflicted for drunkenness, misdemeanors, and contempt of court in seven of the eleven recorded sentences to this punishment during the five years. In another case Richard Graves and Peter Busgitt had an altercation . ... which resulted in Graves following Bus- gitt into his house and beating him up. He had an hour in the stocks to think it over. Thomas Sims spoke to Emmanuel Downing's maidservant without his consent. It is not recorded what he said to the maid, or whether she was pleased or not, but the court was not, so Thomas spent an hour in the stocks. Last, but not least, Robert Adams was 'set by the heels in the stocks being uncharitable to a poor man in distress, taking his canoe,' etc. No doubt the most modern sentimentalist will approve of this.
"Those cleft sticks which appear on all occasions in stories of these times might perhaps wisely be applied to those who use them with such frequency and fluency, for they were only used twice in the five years, and for premeditated liars. The case of the termagant chained to the post has already been mentioned, and that completes the list of the unusual punish- ments in the largest county of Massachusetts in these five years, and may be taken as a fair sample of Puritan severity. The evidence was carefully taken, the cases were proved, and one cannot help feeling the criminals got no more than they deserved. . .. . One's sympathy goes out chiefly to the officers who had to do the flogging. It could not have been pleasant."
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Quoting from Henry Bamford Parkes, in his article in the "New England Quarterly":
"Breach of the peace was a common offense among all classes of New Englanders. Quarrels often ended in blows and would bring both parties into court. Assaulting the sheriff or the constable was an especially frequent offense. The New Englanders had enough of a frontier spirit to regard the forces of government as alien to themselves and its adminis- trators as potential enemies. Police officers found it difficult to enforce unpopular decisions and often, when they tried to arrest somebody, were compelled to retire with wounds or bruises. A prisoner, moreover, could easily escape from the rudely-constructed jail; in fact a group of friends would often help him to do so. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, villagers frequently took the law into their own hands; there were no actual lynchings, but every few years in each county, after about 1720, some unpopular individual (almost always a native white New Englander ) was beaten, stripped naked, rubbed in the snow, tied to a horse and car- ried out of town, or dragged on a rail. It is illustrative of frontier conditions that women took part in these riots, and that not infrequently a woman was their victim." (Vol. V, pp. 448-49.)
From the words of Rev. George Batchelor, in his chapter on Salem in the 1888 "History of Essex County," there can be gained a picture and an interpretation that I would like to present :
"To do anything like justice to the people of these days [ the latter part of the seventeenth century] we must remem- ber that they were at the same time more happy and, in many ways, more cheerful than we are apt to think, and that they were also more hard and insensible to certain forms of human suffering than we are, and that, moreover, great sensibility could be a trait of the character in which were qualities which, to us, seem quite incompatible with it. We must also remem- ber that many things which to us seem like acts of their free will did not seem so to them. To be obliged to whip an Ana- baptist or a Quaker seemed to many a tender-hearted Puritan as necessary and as grievous as to us seem the unavoidable suf-
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ferings which come by 'act of God.' That a certain brutality was cultivated by such theories is certain. The best argument against the whipping post is that whatever the crimes of the culprit who suffers at one end of the whip, there will always be a brute at the other end of it-probably the worst brute of the two. When Hugh Peter died in England for his political offenses we have a picture of the times which it is now difficult to contemplate without a shudder. As he waited for his turn at the gallows he was compelled to see his friend Cooke cut down and quartered. 'How like you this?' asked the execu- tioner, rubbing his bloody hands. When such things were going on it is hard for us to remember that the sun shone as brightly then as now over the lovely shores and bays of Salem; society went on, as society must, with love-making and marriage, the love of children and the association of friends ; and what men could not prevent, or thought they could not, that they contrived to shut out and forget. In the days of the witchcraft excitement, however, there was no possibility of shutting out or forgetting the grizzly horror that might look in at any window and claim any victim. Whether one believed in all the possibilities of demoniacal possession or only feared the passion of enemies, and the mania of the populace, the danger and the fear were inevitable and oppressive.
"But those unhappy days passed. The common sense and good feeling of the community reasserted themselves, and the humaneness which had never been able to justify itself assumed an authority it had never had before."
The inns or taverns, such as the "Blue Anchor" at Lynn, were social institutions, but were run strictly under the laws of the General Court. The innkeepers had to secure licenses, and their prices were set by the General Court. They were required to keep beer on hand that contained a certain percentage of malt, and they were forbidden to sell "strong water" or allow any person to drink more than one- half pint of wine at a time or to take more than one-half hour to drink it. There was to be no drinking after nine o'clock at night. There was to be no smoking in the inns except in a private room. In 1664 it was decreed that an innkeeper would lose his license if he did · not prosecute those who were in the habit of being "prophane,"
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because "This court being sensible of the great increase of Prophaness amongst us, especially in the younger set, taking their opportunity by meeting together in places of publick entertainment, to corrupt one another by their uncivil and wanton carriages, rudely singing and making a noise." All such "prophaness" was punishable by fine.
By 1692 there were fifty taverns in Essex County, and by 1727 there were one hundred and eight. These places had licenses to sell liquor, but there were many other places that sold it without license. Fines were imposed, and police officers were empowered to enter pri- vate residences and seize and destroy the liquor found there. Selling liquor to Indians was strictly forbidden, but was frequently done.
According to Samuel Roads, in his chapter on Marblehead in the 1888 "History of Essex County" :
"The custom of using intoxicating liquors as a beverage, which prevailed throughout New England until a compara- tively recent date, was one of the besetting sins of the people of Marblehead from its earliest settlement. Not a vessel went from its harbor, whether for a long trip to the 'Banks' or for a few days' fishing in the bay, without a plentiful supply of liquor. Not a vessel arrived with a fare of fish without pro- viding 'something to take' for washing-out day. The custom was so universal that even at town meetings liquor was pro- vided as a matter of course. As a consequence many persons were disorderly, and the meetings were frequently disturbed."
From Lynn comes the following story: During the last sickness of the eccentric Lois Hart the good Doctor Gardner told her that she ought not to expect to live long and suggested that she should invite the minister to call. She responded to this suggestion by saying, "Well, yes, I should like well enough to see him; and when you go up town, call into some of the grog-shops, and when you see him ask him to call." It is said that the jolly minister was found where the old woman said he would be. Although there seems to have been drinking among men of the professional class, it would not be fair to take this story as typical of the whole group of clergy.
Boys who were learning the shoemakers' trade in Lynn acquired the drinking habit early. They usually began to work in these shops at the age of twelve, because by that age they had received all the
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schooling they were to get. When it became time in the morning or the afternoon for the workers to have their "dram" as a bracer against the cold in winter and the heat in summer, the youngest of the work- ers was sent to bring the liquor, and he was entitled to the first drink if his breath did not betray previous drinking on the way.
Strong drink was made in many houses, and rum was manufac- tured in great quantities. Beer was a popular drink among many of the early settlers, but cider came to replace it in some localities. Tea and coffee supplanted cider as a beverage during the first half of the eighteenth century, though it was "little used" at Lynn in 1718. Drinking at funerals was still popular in 1685 in Ipswich, when at the funeral of Rev. Thos. Cobbet a barrel of costly wine and two barrels of cider were consumed. Later, Madeira wine and rum punch were the chief social drinks. Rum became very important in 1750. Quoting from Weeden : "Negroes, fish, vessels, lumber, intercolonial traffic in produce, all feel the initiative and moving impulse of rum."
The mention of negroes needs further explanation. Slavery was not considered an evil in the early settlements, but was regarded as the normal state of the negro. In the church records of Marblehead we find that even the ministers owned slaves, and some of these were baptized and brought into the church. Slave marriages are also found in the records of the church. The beginning of slavery in Massachusetts was in 1638, and slaves were brought to Salem in that year. Negroes were bought in exchange for rum and pipe-staves that had been sent to the West Indies and for the rum and trinkets that had been sent to Africa. Indians were also sent to the West Indies and traded for tobacco, cotton, and negroes. In 1641 the General Court enacted that "There shall never be any bond slaverie, villainage or captivitie amongst us, unless it be lawful captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us." The last part of the law makes it practically meaningless as far as the prohibition of slavery is concerned. These slaves were gen- erally called servants and were used in the houses as chore boys or worked the land. The children of these slaves were thought of as incumbrances and so were often given away, when weaned, like pup- pies. In 1674 there were twenty-five slaves in Haverhill "of sixteen years old and upwards." In 1754 there were four hundred and thirty- nine slaves in Essex County.
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A bill of sale of August 23, 1742, indicates that on that date Nathaniel Cogswell sold his "negro-boy Cæsar" to Samuel Phillips of Andover for one hundred and fifteen pounds. This Samuel Phillips was the son and descendant of eminent ministers of Andover, Row- ley, and Watertown and was the father of Lieutenant Governor Phillips, who gave so much for the founding of Phillips Academy and the Andover Theological Seminary. So it seems obvious that emi- nent piety, usefulness, and slave holding were not at all incompatible
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Philip Englah House Salem. Built it 15. Johan down 1833.
SALEM-PHILIP ENGLISH HOUSE Built about 1683, from a drawing
Courtesy of The Essex Institute
at that time in Massachusetts. The slaves were liberated when the State Constitution was adopted about 1775.
As fishing was one of the main forms of making a living in many of the early settlements, it seems worth while to tell of the stages through which a boy went to become a full fledged fisherman. Using the words of Mr. Roads :
"When a boy had attained the age of eleven or twelve years he was sent to sea, and there were many instances where
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