USA > Massachusetts > Barnstable County > Sandwich > Two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration of Sandwich and Bourne, at Sandwich, Massachusetts, September 3, 1889 > Part 5
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here. There are seven Allens in this roll of fame. The fines of William Allen alone amounted to near £87. An in- cident in his fate may be in place ..
William Allen found a good estate gone into his fines. Of all his movables a cow, left out of pity, the little corn remaining and a bag of meal with a few articles of furniture were all that remained and he was living on bread and water in Boston jail. The heartless marshal came to collect ad- ditional fines, this time drunk. He seized the cow and the meal, but that was not enough. When he seized the good- wife's only copper kettle with a mock, he said, "Now Pris- cilla how will thee cook for thy family and friends, thee has no kettle." The brave, sweet answer was " George, that God who hears the ravens when they cry, will provide for them. I trust in that God, and I verily believe the time will come when thy necessity will be greater than mine." The goods were carried away and the drunken marshall lived to fulfil the prophecy.
The Quakers do not appear to have flinched. They had tough hearts of English oak, and the scourging marred but did not rend. They held their meetings in an Allen's house and as the tradition goes in Cristopher's Hollow, well known to many of us, a charming spot, well chosen, with this advantage, that Plymouth Court could not fine the greenwoods of Al- mighty God 40s. for entertaining a harmless people, made outlaws by the public code, and in the name of the patient one of Nazareth, who himself had not where to lay his head. Sept. 9, 1661 by order of King Charles II, all persecution ceased in both colonies, and the suffering ended.
While I am not called upon to discuss, in all ways, the nature of this lamentable controversy, the time is now late enough to make, in a mixed audience like this, composed largely, as it must be, of descendants of both parties to the transaction, a few reflections, without offence to any. First, then, there is no law of historical criticism more fixed than this ; that the men of any age are to be judged by the ethics of that age, and not by the ethics of any other. We are all agreed that persecution for opinion is altogether wrong. But in the 17th century all the churches persecuted ; An- glican, Roman, Puritan. If we do not blame the Puritan
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for his part, neither have we a right to blame any other church for its part in this saddest of religious tragedies. Again, the Puritan, up to a certain point, could make out a very strong case for his own conduct. He might say " I char tered this ship of state and hold the helm, and you Quakers have come on board and refuse to obey orders. If the ship goes ashore I am shipwrecked, and you as well, and I mean to make my own voyage in my own way and at my own hazard. If you Quakers rise in mutiny I will put you down with a strong hand, as a matter of self-preservation, which is a supreme law with all men." He would not even listen if told that his charts were wrong or that he was off his course. He simply said, "I sail this ship."
By the Quaker theory the Puritan ship was to be pulled in pieces by its own crew in mid-seas, and an entirely new one built, which had never been tried. I think the Quaker was right by the Puritan chart, but both were proved wrong by the actual shore. For instance, the Puritan had said to the English Church, "I will not have you or any other church as a daysman between me and the author of my salvation. Therefore I build my own church in my own way with just those ordinances and no others, which give me grace and comfort. My soul shall reach my Maker by my personal vo- lition and in my chosen way. The logical Quaker made an- swer " Certainly, the soul itself touches God, simply because God touches it personally, soul with soul. That is my doc- trine of the inner Light. Why then need of your ordi- nances of baptism and a supper, your pulpits and your steeple houses, if the Christian is he who carries Christ in his own soul, and so to speak, beneath his own waistcoat." So far and upon Puritan grounds the Quaker was quite right. Nay, he had a right, at least to be let alone to go his way, upon the basis of 300 years of the Lollard movement in England. In my judgment, George Fox proved the final incoherence and im- possibility of the whole ecclesiastical system of Puritanism. That system has already passed. Only this further ; our mother, the earth, covers speedily with her mantle of green, the fiercest battlefield, the foot of the whipping post, the spot where the martyrs' ashes cooled from the fire, and where the blood of the best or worst dripped from the scaffold. So let
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the mantle of a great human charity cover the memory of all those of every creed, who in any age, smote their fellows with persecutions in the name of God, and let those who still stand outside their graves, lay in religion what stress they like upon another's conscience, provided that stress be only the heart throbs of those eager to persuade their fellows to truth and duty.
In 1675 King Phillip's war began and created the second great crisis in the history of this ancient town. It was very much a war of extermination on both sides. Your town records, I believe, have not many passages of interest, touch- ing this war, as often the town appears to have been too busy to do much writing. Indeed, the fact came very near being left to outside witnesses, that Sandwich joined with her sis- ter towns of the Cape, at the height of the common distress, in inviting the outlying towns of the colony most exposed, to come with their families and live with them until the dan- ger was overpast. Nor can we fail to admire the courage with which the same afflicted towns answered, after due thanks, that they could not leave their post, but would take what God sent them there. Sandwich paid its assessments of men and money and went its way. The four colonies en- gaged in that war, Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island and Connecticut, had a population of from 35,000 to 50,000, with which to confront the Indian tribes ; Plymouth reckon- ing 7500. In that war 600 of the best died, twelve or thir- teen towns were destroyed and the war debt of Plymouth Colony nearly equalled all its personal property. Boston and Connecticut made donations and there came, curi- ously enough, a single gift from abroad, £125 from the city of Dublin. I do not know under exactly what circumstances that money was sent out of the chief city of the warm- hearted, ever-generous, Irish race. But it may be noted as an instance of the subtle interchange of forces in human history that more than a century after, in the Irish famine, the descendants of the same Puritans sent wheat to Ireland, and to be further noted that by a movement and a dogma, now six centuries old the men of Puritan stock are bound to hold that the people are always to be let alone to rule themselves, whether at Berlin, St. Petersburgh or Dublin.
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All know that the theatre of King Phillip's war was never transferred to the Cape. No Cape tribe ever joined Philip, nor had the Cape any outbreak. On the other hand, many of the Cape Indians served against Philip, and pris- oners were kept by the friendly tribes until the war was over. But it may not be generally known that this good fortune was chiefly due to Christian missionaries, like Richard Bourne, Thomas Tupper, Thornton of Yarmouth, Treat of Eastham, and the Mayhews of Martha's Vineyard, or that Bourne and Tupper were of this town. I have been able to find but comparatively few historical facts about Tupper, more than he was of the Sandwich church, that his field of labor was among the Herring River Indians and along Buzzards Bay, and that he died in old age greatly missed. Sandwich and Barnstable, at that time, abounded in Indians and the rem- nant of two tribes out of the four still surviving in this Com- monwealth live to day within their ancient limits. But Rich- ard Bourne was easily chief missionary on the Cape. Indeed he seems to have had a general oversight of the Indians from Middleboro to Provincetown. I suppose him to have been the ancestor of the Sandwich Bournes. He began his labors about 1658, and his lands lay along the Manomet river on the north side, from what is now Bournedale to Buzzards Bay, with an additional right to take yearly 12,000 herrings. He was ordained pastor of the church in Mashpee, about 1670, the apostles, Eliot and Cotton, assisting at his ordination. In his report made to Major Gookin from this town, Sept. 1, 1674, (the year before King Phillip's war,) he names twenty- two places where Indian meetings were held with an attend- ance of about 500. Of these, 142 could read Indian and so Eliot's Bible, seventy-two could write, and nine could read English. These Praying Indians increased in the eleven years following, (1685) to 1014, and there were in his limits, at least 600 warriors. These he controlled by his just and Christian behavior to them. Both English and Indians al- ways took his advice in land sales between them as long as he lived. The Bournes, as the record shows, had a habit of free- ing their slaves. So great was the Indians regard for the Bourne family, that long after his death, as late as 1723, when a Bourne child was prostrated by an appalling dis-
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ease, said by the physicians to be incurable, the Indians came with medicine men and their incantations, the mother submitted her child to their simple remedies, and it was made whole. This story is vouched for by a highly respect- able authority. I may sum up what Richard Bourne was to this town and Plymouth Colony, in the words of one of our Cape antiquarians, Amos Otis, a man, who by nature was "our Old Mortality," busy with cleaning the moss from Cape Cod families and gravestones, with gifts to have set him among the best in his favorite calling.
"The fact is Richard Bourne, by his unremitted labors for 17 years, made friends of a sufficient number of Indians, nat- urally hostile to the English, to turn the scale in Plymouth Colony and give the preponderance to the whites. He did this, and it is to him who does, that we are to award honor. Bourne did more, by the moral power which he exerted, to defend the old colony, than Bradford did at the head of his army. Laurel wreathes shade the brows of military heroes, their names are enshrined in a bright halo of glory, while the man who has done as good service for his country, by moral means, sinks into comparative insignificance and is too often forgotten."
Justice, as yet, has not been done to our great Sandwich missionary to the Indians, Richard Bourne. No man in Massachusetts did more for that doomed and vanishing race, than he. I would take no shred of honor from Eliot's fame ; I am sure final history will do our townsman justice. But one thing some day should be done by somebody. West- ward yonder where the gates of the hills end at the water- shed between our bays, on that rounded hill where Samuel Sewall built his Indian meeting-house, and where the Indian graves are many, and looking down the Cape and across your bay thence visible, a statue should be raised to Richard Bourne and Thomas Tupper, Sandwich men, to tell the travellers as they speed by its base, how the men of the Pilgrim blood will not cease to honor their own who sacrificed themselves for their fellowmen, in all their generations.
In 1692, in the reign of William and Mary, Plymouth Colony, and so this town, became, by the order of the English government, a part of the Province of Massachusetts. The
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change had, no doubt, its advantages, but it must have crossed sharply, the trend of Puritan politics, which was and is towards local government, and must have seemed an un- necessary centralization, and so an offence against the pure democracy of Plymouth Colony. The crown profited be- cause it thus gathered into its own hands the lines of the already, uncertain movements of both colonies, and could better overlook, and if necessary, control their insubordina- tion, or, as it might judge, their usurpations. Here may also close the first, or pioneer age of Sandwich. I have devoted so much time to this period of our town history, because in it are the roots of all the others, and it is the formative and mother period of our afterhistory.
The next period may be made to extend, as a conven- ience, from 1692 to 1776. As before, so now, Sandwich was slowly evolving itself from the wilderness and under the British Crown. In this period were politically, the French and Indian wars, and chronic and rather unsuccessful at- tempts to reconcile the antagonistic Puritan temper with the claims of the English government. There are two general reflections that may be made upon this period of Sandwich history. First, there was everywhere, in the Province of Massachusetts, a tendency to a decadence in what I may call personal character. This showed itself generally in the third generation. The original settlers were men out of England, who had touched, and to a degree, been mellowed by its an- cient civilization - men who had felt the repose, at least, of an old realm and had been educated there. But their chil- dren and grandchildren knew only a wilderness -its hard- ship, penury, solitude and austerity. King Phillip's war had soured and hardened them greatly. Their pastors were, in- deed lighthouses of learning, and instructed as best they could ; but schools were intermittent, and often distant, the struggle for bread was always upon them to bury them in their farms; in many, the old Puritan fervor had burnt it- self out, leaving the shell ; and in general it may be said the wilderness was dragging these men down to it as the tropi- cal plenty, South, dominated the Spanish blood to enervate. You may see, if you look closely, this fact in the portraits of the two Winslows - father and son -now in the rooms of
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the Massachusetts Historical Society, two strong faces, where grace goes with the father.
The second general reflection is this; that in such a state of affairs, the connection of our people with the Brit- ish crown, was a positive blessing many ways. It kept them, especially in political centres, like Boston, in contact with the civilized world elsewhere; it compelled them to keep the run of European politics, when a new war might imperil every Cape Cod fishing smack, and the timbers which they shipped to the Barbadoes, might become the prize of any foe to England. If the crown, through its royal governor, like Andros, put their property or liberty in jeop- ardy, it also roused them and sometimes stung them into dis- covering new ways of evading tyranny and toned them up to confront injustice with a firm and not over-courteous re- sistance. Witness the repeated refusal of the General Court of the Province to vote any governor any salary, except for one year, that they might hold the power of the purse in their own hands. All this made Massachusetts a training school for statesmen, and when time was, such men as .Samuel Adams and Otis showed that they had been to school. There is writ of One in Scripture, that he causes even the wrath of man to praise him ; and often in human affairs, the wrong done, by a subtle law of progress, enures to the benefit of those who suffer.
The recorded public events of this period, which, in any striking way add to the romance or interest of your history, are not many. July 20, 1756, there appeared at Manomet, near the old fort, of 1627 a strange company of people, speaking French, and in seven two-masted boats. Silas Bourne, Esq., wrote to Col. Otis, then in Boston : "They pro- fess to be bound to Boston and want their boats carted across to the opposite bay. They have their women and children with them and say they were last from Rhode Island but previously from Nova Scotia." Mr. Bourne says, " I fear they may continue, when once in the bay, to miss Boston, and think it safe, therefore, to detain them." Ninety of them were accordingly distributed among the several towns, for safe keeping, until the matter could be better understood. Later on and the General Court ordered "that the canoes
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left at Sandwich by the French neutrals, who deserted from the southern government, shall be sold." These people were Acadians, some of those 7000 broken-hearted, homeless peo- ple who were scattered from Maine to Geogia, of whom Longfellow tells us in Evangeline. It was the most misera- ble business, in my judgment, in the history of all this land. I have read their general fate in other town histories, where I find families broken up, children bound out to service, and themselves treated as paupers, until they have all disappeared leaving neither sign nor name. These wanderers in Mano- met river were evidently Acadians who were trying to es- cape from the South to their old home. We may be sure they went no further. The late Deming Jarves once told me that in a great storm some year before 1820, the sand on Scus- sett beach, somewhere near the hills west, was washed away and disclosed the piles of their wharf and other relics. I think that in digging near there lately, they have found timbers, perhaps of the tide way of their mill. Strangers, ignorant of the language spoken here, Catholics of an ancient Church, without a priest, and doomed to live and die amongst men of an alien religion, who neither understood nor loved their faith, homesick for their native land beyond the bay which they would never see, and I can hardly imagine a fate more full of tears. God give them rest !
An old town like this is full of romance and pathos. How many life stories which if read would move our tears, forever to be unwritten, had for their last brief chapter, a grave in your ancient burying ground. How still and un- complaining they all are in this day's festival ; all passions cold in their ashes, regrets ended, their life's hunger for something better, or the love never returned or the presence that never came back from sea or camp appeased ; a broken, meagre life, perhaps, yet ever-aspiring ; poets, as most are, who never wrote their song, but often thought one; maid and man, husband, wife, lover ; all at rest two hundred years or so, by the pond, there in their stately sleep, in their voice- less palace with the unlighted lamps, at whose door no king knocks with a command ; no mendicant care grovels with a request ; whose sentinels are the birds and the stars which to- night, as ever, will keep vigil over the sacred ashes of what is
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dead, while One keeps that which cannot die, and heard long ago the story.
When Capt. Mathew Fuller at Scorton died in 1678, his Scotch servant, Robert, was wrongly charged with having stolen his master's jewels. The charge so worked upon him, that he finally died of grief and starvation. The snow was so deep that the bearers halted to bury him on the north- east side of Scorton hill. I am told that of late years, two rough stones have been set to mark his grave and that the plough has, so far, spared the mound. Here, at least, was a man of honor and with self-respect. They manage these things otherwise, now-a-days. Now when a man steals a bank or a railroad, he seldom thinks of going to his grave. He goes to Canada.
I may show you several colors of your old town life by making an extract from Judge Sewall's diary, under date of "Seventh Day, April 3, 1714. Major Thaxter and I rid to Sandwich, accompanied by Mr. Justice Parker, Capt. John Otis, our pilot, Mr. John Denison, our chaplain. It did not rain, but wet, being an out wind," i. e. a wind off shore. " Got to Newcomb's, where we dined. (Sewall had been in the old Newcomb house by your lower pond several times before. I treated the Barnstable gentlemen. Mr Cotton, (then your minister) " Came to us and invited Maj. Thaxter and myself to his house. He had invited me at Plymouth. Mr. Justice Lynde returned homeward, having Mayo for his pilot." Guides you see were then necessary to strangers be- tween here and Plymouth. Now we can get a glimpse into a Pilgrim minister's home, and so partly into the other homes here, then. "In the evening Mr. Cotton, (his wife had been a widow and a Saltonstall, and the Cottons raised a large family) made a short speech of God's mercies in the week past, sung part of the 103 Psalm to the tune of Winsor." The Pilgrims here had only four tunes and this was one. " Prayed." It was Saturday night. "Lord's Day," April 4. Mr. Cotton in the family reads Deut. 29th, sings the 12th, 13th, 14th verses of the 19th Psalm, to the tune of York ; "an- other of the four tunes aforesaid. "Evening sung Psalm 118 4th part to the tune of St. David," Another. Then follows in Sewall's record a synopsis of Mr. Cotton's sermon from 2nd
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Cor. 4: 4. It must have been a long one, a Gospel sermon, full of meat, as your forefathers judged spiritual food, full of shrewd applications to the hearers and shows Mr. Cotton to have been a clever, painstaking preacher. The sermon, as most then were, was probably written on small sheets of paper, the lines close together, to save expense, for paper was then high; and has probably long since gone where so many sermons, alas ! are sure to go.
With this glimpse of the old Pilgrim life I proceed to some others. Mr. Cotton died in 1722, and the name if not the blood is extinct here. The same year Rev. Benjamin Fessenden became your minister, and his blood, happily for this town, is not extinct. Mr. Fessenden was, undoubtedly, a gentleman well educated, as all the clergy then were, a man of peace - as all his clerical brethren seem to have been before him-a man of strong character, I gather, and in- clined to gather up the incidents of life before him here and might, had fate ordered, have shown a good hand at local history. He died August 7, 1746. I have often wished that Mr. Fessenden had kept a diary, as Sewall did. I wish he had told us what went on in these old houses roundabout ; whether some Toby babe had blue eyes or black, when he baptized it; how some Pope bride looked and exactly what dress she wore when he married her, and whether the groom, Bassett, Chipman, Swift, Nye, or of whatever name, fumbled at his vest pockets and looked a trifle disconcerted during the ceremony ; what time the swallows came ; how cold the meet- ing-house was in winter, with nothing but a footstove, which the dames carried, and filled with coals between services, from his kitchen fire, as his house was near the meeting; whether the communion bread ever froze and rattled in the plates when the deacons carried it round, as it did in the Old South Church, Boston ; indeed, a thousand trifles then, but precious stones, rubies and diamonds now. Old White of Selbourne, England, parson, wrote a book on his own parish, its natural life and antiquities, which will last as long as English is read. Here in this town, just at your feet, all around you are the same sort of riches, waiting for some one, with patience and craft enough to garner, to come and equal fame. Some young life, perhaps today, here present, will brace itself and make
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ready. There is discovery possible in Sandwich, more use- ful than most in Africa or within the Antarctic Circle.
In the absence of any Fessenden diary, and indeed, of any other Sandwich man's, known to me, I will try to sketch some traits of our Sandwich home life, at least possible, both before and after 1700. I suppose that a full home bases itself on marriage and children. In looking over your town records, I am, first of all, struck by the fact that everybody is related by either birth or marriage to everybody else. Sandwich folk of the old stock seem to be all, more or less, cousins. I only limit the assertion by saying that, for obvious reasons, the Society of Friends seem to have married among themselves, although there are exceptions. Of course Sand- wich people in general married at home, having good taste. But there were marital prisals and re-prisals, so to speak, going on between the neighboring towns, both west and east of us. I hope every one drew a prize in that sweet, danger- ous lottery. I may assume that every one who won a Sand- wich bride did. But the marriages were most frequent between Sandwich and Barnstable. I think those two towns, as the blood runs, were and came to be in the old days, very intimately mixed and intermarried. May our sister town, behind her sand barrier of her famous beach, and with her Great Marshes, for a thousand years send forth brides as charming as those who crossed Scorton Hill long ago. That stretch of road between Barnstable town and Sandwich, in the old days must have seen many a lover coming or going to his sweetheart ; many a bride won and riding on a pillion behind the groom, somewhither. I hope no Sandwich man on such an errand ever came back crestfallen, and that no Barnstable bride ever found her-groom to have sailed under false colors when he came to her harbour for a helpmate in this lonely world. I have reason to love people both sides of Scorton Hill. I always feel, when I travel over that road like wearing a buttonhole bouquet and putting on holiday apparel. I fancy to stand, hat in hand, by the roadside and salute with my profoundest bow these brides and grooms coming home to this old town. Some of them bear names that I learned to love fifty years ago. I even venture through the veil of a hundred years or so to kiss some babies
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