USA > Massachusetts > Barnstable County > Sandwich > Two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration of Sandwich and Bourne, at Sandwich, Massachusetts, September 3, 1889 > Part 4
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young man also. I have always pitied him going out afield with his gun. Birds and a wife or no birds and no wife ; so the law said. How could he shoot straight, so perturbed ! I am sure - was he not a Pilgrim ?- that he got his birds and she smiled on her husband. Old men over 70 years of age were excused from the blackbirds.
Let me make these blackbirds the text for a digression. Unfriendly critics are always saying that the Puritans were a quarrelsome set and given to war. Suppose they were. Was there not a cause ? They had quarrelled with an an- cient church and crown, but unless our American democracy is a mistake, they took therein sides with man and his great destiny. Here in New England, the Puritan was by fate, a war- rior ; always either preparing arms or using them. Why not ? On this sea-board, going out with his vessel on the high seas often, never in those days vacant of pirates, he was exposed at home and on his voyage to the fate of war, on every occasion when the British crown involved itself in a struggle with Dutch, French or Spaniard. He was alone on the edge of the sea, and England three thousand miles away, in an unknown wilderness, peopled with savages, strong tribes of which dwelt almost at his door. Is it any wonder that Edmund Freeman gave twenty corslets of steel to his townsmen, or that Sandwich in time of peace and in its pov- erty, agreed to pay butter and meal to the man going to buy them arms? If at any time, prior to the end of the last French war, they had disarmed or forgot to drill, they would have been reckless beyond any measure of common prudence, and even then, the rumble of the coming Revolution was heard by the wiser sort. I am not ready to deny that a weaker race, like the French or Spanish might not have suc- cessfully encountered any one of the distresses, which the Puritan underwent. Their colonial history shows that they never could have conquered them all. The Puritan carried about with him a heavy pack of trials. Take the vermin and enemies of his crops for instance. Wild pigeons in flocks, blackbirds, then as now, clamorous and greedy, wolves more than enough, foxes to kill his lambs, and the forest teeming with multitudes of meaner brutes, by day and night gnawing away at his success in farming ; and he killed right and
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left, whatever in land or water molested him, as grimly and industriously as though he were in a campaign. In the year 1792 all the men of this town were called out to hunt a wolf. The Spanish colonists over the southern half of this western continent succumbed to the overplus of the land's natural riches and became shiftless and lazy. The Puritan wrestled with an adverse soil and climate, to live and grow rich in a society full of frugality, industry and economic foresight, -- moulding his circumstance to his will. Is it any wonder that, in this constant strife for life, he was sometimes hard, stiff-necked, wilful or even cruel ? "No man," said Gæthe, "should judge another until he has stood in his place." Again ; they blame the Puritan that he did not affil- iate with the Indians as the French in Canada, or even the Spaniards did. Well, they have the hopeless mixed race of the peons in Mexico, and the half-breeds in Canada. One thing, at least, is true of the Puritans, except those of the baser sort. He was too proud of his blood to taint it. He carried himself with a haughty reserve in his intercourse with the friendly but abject race which was about him, but he never incurred the danger, so frequently seen in history, where the inferior race subdues the civilization of its con- querors by an admixture of servile blood. It is not the least of his virtues that the Puritan left New England to the English.
The Pilgrim had a great respect for the laws, for he made them, and in them, he respected his own sober judg- ment. The same respect for law to this day, abides deep- seated in the men of that stock. If the Pilgrim law could punish, it could also protect, and our forefathers always stood upon their rights. If a man would plough across his neighbor's line, there was either a lawsuit or an arbitration. Dexter, who built your first mill sued Gov. Endicott in his own colony for striking him, and at the March term of court in 1648-49 he had eight cases, and recovered in seven. The same Dexter held out six years against the town of Barnsta- ble, as to his rights on Scorton Neck, and gained his case but lost money. I may as well illustrate the current temper of your ancestors in law matters by quoting Gov. Endicott's answer to the court in Boston, 1631. " I hear I am com-
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plained of by goodman Dexter, for striking him, understand- ing since, it is not lawful for a Justice of the Peace to strike. But if you had seen the manner of his carriage, with such daring of me, with his arms akimbo, it would have provoked a very patient man. He has given out, if I had a purse he would make me empty it, and if he cannot have justice here, he will do wonders in England ; and if he cannot prevail there, he will try it out with me here at blows. If it were lawful for me to try it at blows, and he a fit man for me to deal with, you would not hear me complain." In the last sentence of the governor's, you may see what I am calling the English bloodgoing close to dominating the Puritan creed. Dexter recovered from Gov. Endicott £10 as damages. Your forefathers were always jealous of their town limits. If there was any trouble with Barnstable, as there was at Scorton, the towns sent trusty men promptly to the ground travelled over it, argued it, settled it on the spot or referred it. Sandwich folk put themselves in the place of the King in the matter of drift whales - whales then abounding in yonder bay. These whales belonged from time immemorial to the crown. Plymouth claimed them as such ; but Sand- wich took them - divided the profits among the townsmen - later on gave them by town vote, to their pastor, Rev. Rowland Cotton, as part of his salary, just as they voted the revenue they derived from a tax on mackerel to the support of the public schools. All this, you see, was only a Primary school to teach their posterity, when time was Revolution against George III. I have said before as much - this Pil- grim or Puritan had come in six hundred years to think that a man-a human being-a soul, is a divine unit, a holy molecule for which all things were, never to be abated in his privilege, and over whom, by an eternal fitness, there should be but one sovereign - God, and under him he would inherit liberty as a birthright.
The economic and every-day phases of the old Sandwich life, as they show across two centuries and a half are pictur- esque and many-colored, not a few high-colored. An old race in a new land is apt to beget strong contrasts, and it was so here. Into or through this town have come and gone men of high station, out of old lands, and the story of their lives,
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if we could read it, would sound like the wildest romance. There are names of citizens, on your old records. like that of Garrett, which connect themselves, as the student of history perceives at a glance, with some of the bitterest passages of the English Reformation. The name of Dorsetshire, for in- stance, in a genealogical table of any family of this town, opens the gate to a flood of meditation. Upper Cape Cod was full of the men of Kent, to the student of history a fact leading to some singular speculations. I wish, just here, to point out one curious felicity, if it may be called so, in the mixed but English population of the Old Colony. Every English shire, as is well known, in the old days had its own peculiar customs, legends and folklore coloring its social life. But here our people were out of all the shires and by conse- quence here was a singular medley of legends, superstitions, › old saws, household customs and furniture, very interesting to the student curious in such matters. There are those now living, who touched a generation, believing in witches and the fabled gold of Capt. Kidd, in elves and fairies fond of moon- light and the grass rings afield, where was dancing not of this world - just as men believed in English cottages twenty centuries back. I have heard ancient women scare a naughty child into good behavior by the threat " I will send old Tilly after you," and I fancy that this somehow is out of the Thirty Years war in Germany where Count Tilly, as at Magdeburg, used the cruelest sword of any upon German Protestants, and that so came this threat into the mouths of English mothers here and abroad. Nearly all these old cus- toms of speech and thought have passed away and are not re- corded. Their prototype and copy are undoubtedly still ex- tant in England or at least recorded in their local and shire histories. It is there, I take it, that these more evanescent elements of our old Colonial life still left, must be explained and verified.
There are at least two names still on this Cape, which illustrate a singular and sinister fact in English history ; Higgins and Kelly, both Irish names. A law was passed in the first year of William and Mary (1688) by which the in- dustries of Ireland were substantially wiped out. By conse- quence thousands of North of Ireland men emigrated to these
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colonies, Higgins and Kelley being two of them. I fancy the Presbyterians of North Carolina, who proclaimed their in- dependence, sometime before the Continental Congress, were among the victims of this injustice, and that wherever these emigrants were they were found implacable enemies of the English crown -another instance of the old saw that " curses like chickens fly home to roost."
Let me sketch for you a brief picture of this old-time life and shade it with such colors as your records show. We will make it, if you like, the third day of September in al- most any year you choose, between 1650 and 1700. We will make it also - for we are masters of our own imagination, a yellow, hazy, autumn day, when the golden rod bends gra- ciously towards the late grasses and the Cape sky has put on its cool robe of liquid blue. We will stand in the rough square, fronting the meeting-house and watch what comes along, or is in sight. It is a little curt village round about. Houses there are among the hills and scattered at long in- tervals, from Sagamore hill to Scorton. Yet everybody likes to live near the mill, the market and the meeting. Perhaps we hear the rumble of the mill-wheel at the pond and know that the stream below is swift running over the old stones, as it has run for the amaze and joy of all the children of the town. We see the cattle are on Town neck, lazy and busy. The meeting-house has, for us, some rather singular embellish- ments. There is a wolf's head nailed up in plain sight, for all to see it. Wolves have troubled the fathers of this town not a little. They have thought to build a palisade wall from Scusset bluffs to Buzzards Bay, but on having had it proved to them that this wall will keep in more wolves than it will keep out, they have given up the plan. And here is coming along just now a squad of Mashpee Indians with a wolf's head among them, bareheaded, blanketed - one long heavy gun in the crowd, with plenty of bows and arrows, and a squaw with a papoose in a basket on her back, who has joined these hunters to share their good luck in a little white man's firewater, after they are paid the £2 this wolf's head calls for out of the town treasury, which is never over full. They have had better luck than Benjamin Bodfish on the north side of Scorton hill, when he struck at a wolf
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in his trap with a rotten club, and the wolf sprang at him, broken trap and all, so that only a swift dodge saves him a whole skin, or enables him ever to eat another dinner. The selectmen and hunters will keep at these wolves and have their hands full to boot, until the last Sandwich wolf is laid on the town hall steps, and your selectmen pay the last bounty in 1838. But in 1654 the Old Colony will bag nine- teen wolves; in 1655, 31; 9 in Barnstable; in 1690, 13; in 1691, 19.
There are also some curious machines we see near the meeting-house door. They are the stocks and whipping post; very useful furniture, our fathers thought, to hinder men from stealing chickens or their neighbors' provisions, to keep a scold's tongue quiet, or a lazy fellow from the work-house, or a mean man from beating his wife; and besides, there is no county jail to send them to and pay their board out of the county tax. There is no punishment going on today - very few ever suffer so in any town of the Cape; but there are the implements to enforce the law, and woe to the offend- er. We shall, therefore, miss the crowd which would have assembled ; the constable with his sword and other badge of office - the grave, grim Pilgrim in his round hat, over his long hair, with dogs and some stray, mute Indians in the background. It gives us a good look into our forefathers' larders, as well as court matters, that one hungry thief took from a house, venison, beef, butter, cheese, bread and tobac- co, value, 12d, and was whipped at the post with 28s costs. This very week down Plymouth road came armed men, going down the Cape to look out for some shipwrecked pi- rates ; a family going the same way to settle, the big boys and men on foot ; and the other way went an Indian scout from an Eastham chief; two farmers, with a quarrel, to the court ; an executor, with a will for probate, and sundry others. Since we have stood here there have passed a husband and wife on horseback, she on a pillion behind him (for there is not a carriage in the county) going up the Falmouth road, by the old Academy lot, to take the hill road to Barnstable town, on a visit to a married daughter who is sick. And here comes two Puritan maidens, red cheeks, russet hands, good, whole- some, healthy girls, who helped their father in the late har-
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vest ; with a red hood over the blonde hair, and were it cold- er, a red cloak of good honest wool homespun; but in Sep- tember they wear a lighter fabric, checked, the neatest of starched aprons, with a colored kerchief about the neck and crossed over the bust ; and other raiment not to be too closely inspected by masculine eyes at least - but anyhow, two young women who will do their share in building up this town. They are not laughing, and all the young men are afield - they are demure, self-contained, reticent, as Pilgrim maidens are. Sweet sleep and a happy future to them both.
Of course there are other Pilgrim folk at home, of a more select toilet and strain, Madam Cotton, for instance, the parson's wife, with her relations with the Saltonstalls and Boston Cottons ; and dames like her, will have one elaborate silk and brocade dress, which they will devise to their eldest daughters for two or three generations. They have mourn- ing rings, not much jewelry, no silver forks nor any other ; but there is silver plate and more of it comes in as times pros- per, and this plate is like a bank book, easily turned into money. I doubt whether there is what we call a looking glass in the whole town. What the Puritan maidens substi- tuted for one is past my finding out ; for one of some sort most certainly they had, being Eve's daughters. I know, however, the most charming one hereabouts. It is the spring at the hill foot, near the house, when going like Rebecca to the well she may see in that clear mirror of living waters, with the throbbing white sand below, a Pilgrim maiden's face. Grace to the face, say I. Who would not like to have gone to the spring with such a charming foremother and brought back, with a bow, the pitcher, well paid with a smile ? Perhaps some fastidious descendant of such simplicity starts back from such rusticity in her ancestors. Since she will not start back in her own career, I take it, from her ancestors' perennial grace and virtue, I will soothe her pride with the assurance that few of that age in New England but were, so to speak, in the same boat. Gov. Dudley of Massachusetts Bay tells us that his ink freezes while he writes at his kitchen fire, and the Winthrops, gentlemen above most, had often, not one candle to their name in Boston town, and were not below turning an envelope, sent them, inside out and return-
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ing it, in lack of other paper, to some other correspondent. The world does move, and it moves on and up. Queen Elis- abeth would hold a bit of chicken in her fingers and after, throw the bone down among the rushes on the floor, though Burleigh and her cabinet were by, and typhus fever would come to England's palaces, as it had come, one fall, in her sister Mary's reign, when nearly the whole of the English episcopate died in consequence. Charlemagne was not as comfortably lodged at Ingleheim as many a mechanic in your town today, nor were the medieval barons fed as well as many a thrifty citizen of Sandwich now. The old days may be days of romance, but the full feast of creature comforts stands with us.
Yet our ancestors insisted that every man and woman should keep his own place in his own class ; in this loyal to English custom but not to the Lollard drift. At one time there was only one man in this county ranked as a gentle- man, and entitled to be writ down Esquire. Only a few here were called Mr .; a few more are described as Goodman or Goodwoman So and So, and the rest as plain John Smith or Brown. It was very much later on - in fact since 1800, that a certain lady in a neighboring town held up both hands in holy horror because the blacksmith put on a Sunday suit of black, saying the times were out of joint, when a mechanic could wear a dress belonging to a class above him. I think there was a deal ofthis temper both at Sandwich and Barn- table, and that the division of your common lands, differing- as it did from your neighbors, especially shows it.
The first great problem put to the Sandwich Pilgrim as a citizen of Plymouth Colony came to him in what are known as the Quaker troubles. I ask leave of the venerable Society of Friends, as they have always loved to call them- selves, to use a term which was given them as a reproach, but out of which the sting has long since gone. I use it with a gesture of life-long respect for a most peaceable and gracious body of men and women, whom I learned to honor long ago, and who have remained for generations here, and are held to be among our most worthy and thrifty citizens. I think that their Sandwich Quarterly meeting is almost the oldest in the world. The four great years of this bitterness were from
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1657 to 1661; but the trouble was brewing long before 1656, when the first Quakers came to New England. Men of a cer- tain quality of mind were dissatisfied with the church rule which disfranchised so many. They did not like laws which, as they thought, were always needlessly hampering their personal behaviors. They wanted a more mellow and rounded life than that which Puritan fanaticism proposed, and were ready to join forces with any who would assist in change. The Quaker came and his theory of religion, un- dermined, if carried out, the whole civil and ecclesiastical polity of the Puritans. The men dissatisfied already, not Quakers, nor Puritans, according to men like Gov. Hinckley, welcomed them, or at least were averse to meddling with them. There were more Quaker troubles in Sandwich than in any other town in Plymouth Colony, not because the Sandwich men were more cruel (the exact opposite is true) but because there were more Quakers here. There were more Quakers here, partly because persecution begets sym- pathy and breeds converts, and Sandwich folk have never liked to be let or hindered by anyone. The greater part, many of the better kind especially, were averse to troubling them. My proof is that the Selectmen refused to oversee or order the flogging of them, and some, in consequence, were taken to Barnstable to undergo that punishment and that the Ply- mouth Court sent a stranger, George Barlow, to be marshal here, to carry out the law, and forced him as a citizen upon the town ; that Edmund Freeman, easily the first Sandwich man of his day, was left off seven years as an assistant, and others were put back from office, and above all the history of the Sandwich church, almost from the beginning. Mr. Lev- erick was minister -a peacable man and who must have been while in office, in harmony with the Plymouth officials, and who left his parish for Long Island, probably in order to get rid of the turmoil around him. Your next settled minister was Rev. John Smith, formerly of Barnstable, and later of Long Island, in 1676. The tradition in his family is that he went to Long Island because he would not persecute Quakers in the colony, and came to Sandwich be- cause this parish could settle nobody who had been implicated in these persecutions, and upon the explicit understanding
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that he would lift no hand against them. On these two grounds rested the chronic struggle in the Sandwich church which went on almost to the Revolution viz: a general dissent on the part of some, from current Pilgrim politics, and a special aversion to harming Quakers; as I put it, the English Lol- lard temper pitted against the narrower Genevan Calvinism. Of course the memory of the wrongs done here to the Quakers kept alive the bitterness and accounts for the general drift of church affairs in Sandwich. If I am asked, how, if Sandwich people in general were averse to persecution, the Quakers suffered so much, the answer is, that on the first alarm the Plymouth authorities disfranchised every Quaker, and would allow no new citizen to be made here, except he sympathised with the persecutors, that the Sandwich church members at this time were not numerous, and finally, that it was inevitable, according to the law of chances, that the outside pressure should weigh down the scales in such a state of affairs, in favor of the standing order and persecution. You will allow me perhaps to fortify my position, and to ex- plain the general view of the mal-contents, by quoting from a letter written in 1658 by Gen. James Cudworth, at one time of Barnstable - one of the most useful and honest men ever in the Old Colony, who died, as the agent of the colony, in London, 1682, first premising, that for this letter and his general position he was put under heavy bonds to stand his trial, which was never had, and for a time kept out of office, as Edmund Freeman and others were.
He writes, "As for the state and condition of things amongst us, it is sad, and like so to continue ; the anti-Chris- tian persecuting spirit is very active, and that in the powers of this world. He that will not whip and lash, persecute and punish men that differ in matters of religion, must not sit on the bench nor sustain any office in the Commonwealth. Last election Mr. Hatherly and myself left off the bench, and myself discharged of my captainship, because I had enter- tained some of the Quakers at my house (thereby that I might be the better acquainted with their principles. ) I thought it better to do so, than with the blind world to censure, condemn, rail at and revile them, when they neither saw these persons nor knew any of their principles. But the Quakers and
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myself cannot close in diverse things ; and so I signified to the court I was no Quaker, but must bear my testimony against sundry things, that they held, as I had occasion and opportunity. But withal, I told them, that as I was no Quaker, so I would be no persecutor." Elsewhere in this letter he says: "Diverse have been whipped with us in our patent ; and truly, to tell you plainly, that the whipping of them with that cruelty, as some have been whipped and their patience under it, has sometimes been the occasion of gaining more adherence to them than if they had suffered them openly to have preached a sermon. In the Massa- chusetts, after they have whipped them they cut their ears ; they have now, at last, gone the fatherest step they can, they banish them upon pain of death, if they ever come there again. We expect that we must do the like ; we must dance after their pipe. Now Plymouth saddle is on the bay horse, we shall follow them on their career. For it is well, if in some there be not a desire to be their apes and imitators in all their proceedings in tnings of this nature."
The laws against Quakers were indeed cruel. If any entertained a Quaker, though but a quarter of an hour, the fine was £5, or as money then was, a year's pay of a laboring man. If anyone saw a Quaker, and did not inform the con- stable, though six miles away, he was to be punished by the court, as it saw fit. If there was a Quaker meeting in any man's house, he was fined 40s., the preacher 40s., and every hearer 40s., though not a word was said. When caught they were sent to prison and kept on bread and water ; no Friend might bring them food or speak with them, nor might they spend their own money to buy a bit of meat. They were fined for every Sunday they did not go to the Pilgrim meet- ing, and for every time they went to a Quaker one. Indeed how any Quaker managed to come out of this persecution with a shilling or a foot of land, passes my understanding, except that Sandwich folk managed not to carry out the law and the cruelty was brief. As it was, there were taken from them in three years, one hundred twenty-nine cattle, three horses and nine sheep, in value about £700. The names of twenty-one of these victims are given, of which the names of Allen, Gifford, Jones, Jenkins, Ewer, Perry, Wing, are still
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