USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume I > Part 20
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The siege lasted forty-nine days. Four or five assaults were made on the island battery, but without success. After four or five of these repulses, a volunteer force attempted a surprise attack at night, "but now Providence seemed remarkably to frown upon the affair." The party was discovered as it approached the island, and was met by a murderous fire. Only a part of the flotilla reached the shore. There was hard fighting for an hour, but finally the New Englanders were forced to retreat, leaving behind them sixty dead and a hundred and sixteen prisoners.
Yet the morale of the undisciplined Yankee army remained high. The soldiers had no tents or other shelter, and slept on the bare ground. Merci- fully the weather continued for the most part fair and dry. The men amused themselves when off duty in various ways, with fishing and wild-fowl shoot- ing, target practice, racing and wrestling and chasing spent cannon balls from the forts.
But all the while little or no impression was made upon the fortress, whose walls were not weakened by the shot of the feeble cannon directed against them. They might have hammered away for months without doing effective damage. It was finally resolved to storm the place. Fortunately for New England this did not become necessary. There was something about that hesieging army which got under the skin of the French commander and his men. Its stubborn persistence and high-hearted acceptance of conditions and events, good and bad, broke the French spirit. The final straw was the destruction of the French man-of-war Vigilant which was decoyed into the English fleet and sunk after an hour's engagement, under the eyes of the garrison. The French commander sent out a flag of truce, terms of capitula- tion were accepted, and the British flag was raised over city, fortress and battery.
William Pepperell, merchant, became Sir William Pepperell, baronet of England. New England went wild with joy. Ben Franklin for once was wrong, for he had written his brother in Boston "Louisburg was too hard a nut for their teeth to crack." The nest of "pirates" was destroyed, the fish- ing industry was made safe. But the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle which ended the war returned Louisburg to the French.
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County Towns Threatened-As the war proceeded the threat of attack at home became more imminent. An Athol man, going out from a garrison house at night to protect his cornfield from the bears, was wounded by a rifle ball and, helpless on the ground, was tomahawked and scalped. Another man of the same town was wounded and carried away a prisoner. Fort Massachusetts, established at Williamstown, then Hoosic, was captured by the French general Vaudreuil and destroyed. In 1748 a crisis was reached. A horde of savages invaded the Connecticut Valley. Men were waylaid and killed. The garrisons at Northfield and Fort Dummer were threatened. The people of the county were much alarmed, for there was good reason to believe they would be attacked unless prompt measures were taken to protect them.
The wrath of General Joseph Dwight of Brookfield was aroused. On July 16, 1748, he took his pen in hand and wrote the following spirited letter to the Governor of Massachusetts :
"We have constant accounts of the enemy, their lying upon our borders in great numbers, killing and captivating our people; and we suffer ourself to be a prey to them, and through cowardice or covetousness, or I know not what bad spirit in officers and men, we can't so much as bury the slain. It appears to be high time for the Government to exert its Power and give more effectual directions to officers posted on our frontiers ; and if it need be to raise half the militia of the Province. But I beg we have 1000 men to drive the woods, and pursue the enemy even to Crown Point. If it is worth while, to send parties into the enemy's country, and give at the rate of £ 1,000 per scalp. Why when they are so numerous on our borders, should we lie entirely still and do nothing? Can't some troops of horse be sent, and may not commissions be given to such as will enlist as a number of volunteers, and by one way or other so many men raised as will a little discourage our enemy? I doubt not I can find many who would undertake it (even without pay) for the Honor of the Country, and do good service. I wish to hear that something may be done. Excuse my hasty letter. Yr Honour's most obt and humble servt."
The letter brought action. General Dwight raised a hundred men himself. Two hundred were enlisted from the regiment of Colonel Chandler of Worcester. Other county towns sent contingents, and there were volunteers from Hampshire County. General Dwight was in command. They went after the Indians. But the savages had no stomach for a pitched battle with white soldiers, and were quickly driven back toward Canada and were heard from no more. Fort Dummer and Northfield were relieved of danger. Fort Massachusetts, which had been rebuilt the previous year and strongly gar- risoned, was unmolested.
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The French and Indian War-The period of the French and Indian War, enduring formally from 1755 to 1763, was of momentous consequences to the Colonies. The eviction of France from the American Continent, and the opening of vast territories to colonization by English-speaking people, like- wise marked the beginning of the end of Indian hostilities. Worcester County was never again to hear the warwhoop. In these years, as we have said, was trained the nucleus of the army which was soon to give battle to England. The time was epochal in the planning by the King and his Ministers, by Parliament and the Lords of Trade, to impose their will upon the Colonies, and take from them the rights of self-government given them under their jealously cherished charters; to assume control of their finances, and estab- lish a tyrannical system of taxation. The rift between the Mother Country and her American subjects grew broader and deeper.
No accurate figures of the population of the county at this time exist. In 1755 Benjamin Franklin announced a formula of increase of Colonial population, which according to his reckoning, was doubling every twenty years. Probably the county's growth had been more rapid than that, for settlement had been proceeding rapidly to augment the natural increase. Probably twenty thousand souls would not be far from the fact. At any rate, it is close enough for the purpose of vizualizing the man-power of the shire in this period of war, and its financial resources.
In the same year, 1755, a study of the population of the Thirteen Colonies was made from several different angles. It showed a population of 1,165,000 whites and 260,000 blacks, a total of 1,425,000. Massachusetts was the largest province with 207,000 people. New Hampshire had 50,000, Rhode Island 35,000, Connecticut 133,000, New York 85,000, New Jersey 73,000, Pennsylvania with Delaware 195,000, Maryland 104,000, Virginia 168,000, North Carolina 70,000, South Carolina 40,000 and Georgia 5,000.
Of the 20,000 inhabitants of Worcester County, more than 2,000 men fought in the French and Indian War. A great many of them enlisted over and over again. Some hundreds of them were killed in action or died of dis- ease brought on by exposure and improper food and the lack of sanitation which characterized military operations of that day. Scores of these brave men rest in unmarked graves on the battlefields, or in what was then the wilderness.
The people were as patriotically lavish of their money as of their fighting men. In fact they impoverished themselves. They willingly imposed upon themselves taxes which make those of today, high as they are, seem as noth- ing. These frugal people believed in "paying as you go." They disliked the idea of a funded debt. A Colonial stamp tax was imposed in 1759, not by
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the Crown but by the Massachusetts Legislature. "Their tax, in one year of the war, was, in personal estate, thirteen shillings on every male over six- teen." Translated for comparison with rates of today, the income tax from personal property was 6623 per cent., and from real estate 36 per cent. The war poll tax was $3.75. But the Colonists did not complain, or at any rate, left no record of complaints behind them. It was a self-imposed burden. The British Government had nothing to do with it, nor with the spending of the income, which was gall and wormwood to the crown officers of the prov- ince, and to the government across the water.
The people of Massachusetts were fighting a war of self-interest. So long as the French dominated the country to the north and west, with the influence which they exerted on the Indian tribes, the threat of war and Indian war parties and even invasion, would always hang over New Eng- land. The soldiers of the county were fighting for themselves, but they were also fighting for England. They richly deserved the words of Colonel Isaac Barre in the House of Commons, spoken in defense of the Colonies, when he said : "They have nobly taken up arms in your defense ; have exerted a valor amid their constant and laborious industry, for the defense of a country whose frontier was drenched in blood, while its interior yielded all of its little savings to your emoluments."
It is not our intention to itemize the service of the county's manhood in this war. More than one-third of the effective men were enlisted. There were regiments commanded by Colonel John Chandler of Worcester, Colonel Timothy Ruggles of Hardwick and Colonel Samuel Willard of Lancaster, after whose death at Lake George he was succeeded by Colonel John Whit- comb of Bolton. Artemas Ward of Shrewsbury, who was the first com- mander-in-chief of the Continental Army about Boston, was a lieutenant- colonel. Rufus Putnam of Brookfield and Rutland, Washington's most dis- tinguished engineer, rose to the rank of ensign after several campaigns against Canada. Colonel Jonathan Holman and Colonel Ebenezer Learned of Sutton, who gave valiant service in the Revolution, received their military training. The captains and subaltern officers were numbered by scores. Every town gave its full quota. The larger towns sent men in hundreds. The early years of the war were fraught with disaster, in almost every case because of the incompetent leadership of generals sent over from England. In 1755 General William Johnson's army of thirty-four hundred men was saved from disaster at Lake George by the courage and marksmanship of the New England troops, who kept up "the most violent fire that had yet been known in America" and practically annihilated the attacking French army. General Timothy Ruggles of Hardwick was second in command, and it is presumed
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directed the fighting after the retirement of Johnson who was wounded early in the action. But Johnson did not follow up the victory over Dieskau and his French and Indians, and never reached Crown Point, his destination. In July Braddock's army was almost destroyed at Fort Duquesne, and an expe- dition against Fort Niagara came to naught. The Acadian expedition was, of course, successful.
In 1756 the Earl of Loudoun was in command, with Abercrombie leading the army up the Hudson, dallying aimlessly. In 1757 Loudoun himself was at the head of the northern army. The French took Ticonderoga and Fort William Henry, and upon the surrender of the latter there followed a mas- sacre of the surrendered and disarmed English, which the French themselves fought hard to prevent. In 1758 Louisburg was captured for the second time, and Fort Duquesne was taken by George Washington's little army. But Abercrombie's expedition against Ticonderoga ended in a bloody defeat, due to his order of an assault against a position, which, without artillery prepara- tion, was untakable. While his men fought against impossible odds, he him- self "cowered for safety in the sawmills."
But the year 1759 saw the American armies led by competent generals. Lord Jeffrey Amherst advanced slowly but surely on to Canada. Ticon- deroga and Crown Point were abandoned by the French. As a climax came Wolfe's great victory on the Plains of Abraham and the capture of Quebec.
The final service of New England men under the banner of England, was in the siege and capture of Havana in the summer of 1762. A contingent were sent as a reinforcement to the English army. Among them was Israel Putnam. But we find no record of Worcester County men in this service- the one exception in the long history of Colonial warfare.
The Acadian Expedition and the Expulsion and Exile of the Stricken People-In all English history there is no story more cruel than that of the expulsion and exile of the people of Acadia, which we now know as Nova Scotia. It is a story of Worcester County. A large number of the men of the shire were soldiers in the expedition of 1755, they participated in what little fighting there was. Some of them, in obeying orders of the British officers, were forced to play the principal rôles in the burning of farmhouses and villages and otherwise laying waste the countryside, then in the lush beauty of June, and in herding together the miserable peasants for transporta- tion to the English Colonies. At home, too, the county had its close contacts with these impoverished, broken-hearted men and women, for in the dis- tribution of the seven thousand exiles among the Thirteen Colonies, Massa- chusetts was given the custody of one thousand, and these were apportioned among the towns to be cared for.
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The bitter religious intolerance which had marked the relations of the Protestant English and the Catholic French in their American wars had never been permitted to diminish in New England. In Massachusetts the children were still taught to abhor "Popish cruelties" and "Popish supersti- tions." When the Colonial troops sailed for the north their hearts were not tuned to a spirit of kindness and charity. Yet no charge of wanton abuse was ever lodged against them in connection with the Acadian tragedy. The inhuman treatment of the Breton peasants came out of the minds of officers of the English King, at home and in Halifax.
The expedition, with its 1,500 provincial troops, three hundred regulars and a train of artillery, embarked at Boston May 20, 1755. For more than a century and a half the people of Acadia had lived in peace, from the original settlement which was made sixteen years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. For forty years, from the signing of the treaty of Utrecht, they had been British subjects, but had hardly been conscious of the fact, for their lives had continued without change. Now the English proposed to take possession, and make of Acadia a British Colony.
Under the treaty, only the peninsula was yielded to England. The French were established on the isthmus, which, only fifteen miles wide, formed the natural boundary between Acadia and New France as it does today between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. They had two forts on their own territory of the isthmus, one at Gasperaux, near Cape Verde, the other the more con- siderable fortress of Beau Sejour, which had been built and armed at much expense. The English troops disembarked from the ships without difficulty, and after a day of rest, on June 4 forced the intervening Messagouche River. The French commander had neither ability nor courage and made no real defense. In four days Beau Sejour capitulated, and the smaller fort promptly followed suit. Organized resistance was at an end.
The barbarous treatment of the Acadians had begun with the first vigor- ous attempts of the English to colonize the country. "'Better,' said the priests, 'surrender your meadows to the sea, and your houses to the flames, than, at the peril of your souls, take the oath of allegiance to the British government,'" wrote Bancroft. The English to them were heretics. "The haughtiness of the British officers aided the priests in their attempts to foment dissatisfaction. The English regarded colonies, even when settled by men from their own land, only as sources of emolument to the Mother Country ; colonists as an inferior caste. The Acadians were despised because they were helpless. Their papers and records, the titles to their estates and inherit- ances, were taken away from them. Was their property demanded for public service? 'They were not to be bargained with for the payment.' They must
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comply, it was written, without making any terms, 'immediately,' or 'the next courier would bring an order for military execution upon the delinquents.' And when they were delayed in fetching firewood for their oppressors, it was told them from the governor, 'if they do not do it in proper time, the soldiers shall absolutely take their houses for fuel.'
"Under pretence of fearing that they might rise in behalf of France, or seek shelter in Canada, or convey provisions to the French garrisons, they were directed to surrender their boats and their firearms. Further orders were afterwards given to the English officers, if the Acadians behaved amiss to punish them at discretion; if the troops were annoyed, to inflict vengeance on the nearest, whether the guilty one or not, -- 'taking an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.'"
When the inhabitants asked for the return of their guns and boats, prom- ising fidelity, their memorial was rejected as "highly arrogant, insidious and insulting." They were told to "manifest your obedience, by immediately taking the oaths of allegiance in the common form before the Council." The deputies replied that they would do as the majority of the inhabitants should determine ; and entreated for leave to go home and consult their people. The next day they offered to swear allegiance unconditionally; but they were told that "by a clause in the English statutes persons who had once refused the oaths cannot be afterwards permitted to take them but are to be considered as Popish Recussants ; and as such they were imprisoned."
The Chief Justice at Halifax, hearing the case, ruled that the French were now collectively rebels and without exceptions "recusants"; that they num- bered 8,000 as compared to the 3,000 of the English, and stood in the way of "the progress of the settlement" and that "by their non-compliance with the conditions of the treaty of Utrecht, they had forfeited their possessions to the crown"; and that after the departure of the fleet the province would not be in a position to drive them out. So he advised the removal of all of them from Nova Scotia. Further counsel resulted in a decision to set the people down among the several Colonies on the Continent, that any attempt to return to their lands would be prevented. Longfellow has told the heartrending story of the wholesale exile.
"The Acadians cowered before their masters, hoping forbearance; willing to take the oath of fealty to England. The English were masters of the sea, were undisputed lords of the country, and could exercise clemency without apprehension. Not a whisper gave warning of their purpose, till it was ripe for execution. It had been 'determined upon' after the ancient device of Oriental despotism, that the French inhabitants of Acadia should be carried away into captivity to other parts of the British dominions."
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It fell to the lot of Captain Abijah Willard of Lancaster and the men of his company, who were chiefly recruited from that town, to take a principal part in the eviction of these seven thousand men, women and children. The company, of one hundred and five men, was among the troops engaged in the attack on Beau Sejour. Upon its capitulation, Lieutenant-Colonel Monckton, the commanding officer, ordered Captain Willard to proceed with a detach- ment of his company to Tatmagouche, and gave him sealed orders. Arriving at his destination, the captain, scanning his instructions, "to his great surprise and pain found himself assigned to the ungracious and unwelcome duty of laying waste the whole fair district to the Bay of Verts, and removing the inhabitants to Fort Cumberland, the renamed Beau Sejour.
"Amid the wailing of women and children, and the smoke of blazing cottages, barns and storehouses, Captain Willard marched from hamlet to hamlet, leaving desolation behind him, in accordance to the letter of his orders, but tempered them with such mercy as he could, as his journal testi- fies, his kindly heart bleeding for the distress he was compelled to inflict," wrote Henry S. Nourse in his History of Lancaster.
Only once did he meet with resistance. Enraged Frenchmen fell upon his command as they were burning the "mass-house," as the New Englanders called the little Catholic chapel, and one of Willard's men was killed. The Acadian men were marched to Fort Cumberland, the weeping women and children were left amid the smoking ruins of their homes.
The exiles were landed in Boston at the beginning of winter, and were distributed among the towns. The following description annexed to an account rendered by the selectmen of Worcester for the subsistence of the town's quota, indicates a condition which applied to the other towns of the county :
"Eleven French persons ; an aged man and woman 65 or 70 years old, past labor ; the female very weak ; a girl about seventeen years old, who employs her whole time in taking care of the old people. They have four sons who support themselves. In this family are Jean Herbert and Monsieur Lebere. Justin White and his wife, aged about thirty, both very feeble, the man inclining to a consumption and unfit for labor ; they have three small children, the eldest but about five years old, all chargeable ; one of the children has been born very lately, so that the whole number now is twelve."
"These families," wrote William Lincoln, "torn from their homes, reduced from comparative affluence to desolate poverty, thrown among strangers of different language and religion, excited pity for their misfortunes. Their industrious and frugal habits, and mild and simple manners, attracted regard, and they were treated here with great kindness. They cultivated a little tract
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of land, were permitted to hunt deer at all seasons, and aided in their own support by laboring a's reapers and by manufacturing wooden implements. Although they tilled the fields, they kept no animals for labor. The young men drew their fuel and materials for fencing on the ground, with thongs of sinew, and turned the earth with a spade. So deep was the feeling of their sufferings in their violent removal, that any allusion to their native country drew from them a flood of tears. The aged persons died broken-hearted. In 1767, the remnant removed to Canada, among their countrymen."
Some modern historians have attempted to justify the stern measures adopted by the English officials, on the ground that the Acadians refused to take the full oath of allegiance to the crown in so far as it might involve bear- ing arms against their French brethren. These writers deduce that to leave the French in possession was to give them dominance in the territory because of their superiority of numbers compared with the English settlements. The plea is not sound, for while it is true that at first they made such a refusal, later, when driven to it as a last alternative, they volunteered to agree to every condition of the oath. The truth is, the English wanted for their own people this fertile country and the fields and orchards which were the results of many years of hard and loving labor.
The Handwriting on the Wall-Thinking men had begun to see the handwriting on the wall. They realized the growing latent power of the Thirteen Colonies. The English party in power, impelled by mercenary motives, were striving to bring about a condition, the inevitable consequence of which was rebellion. The famous Swedish traveler, Peter Kalm saw it clearly, when he wrote from New York in 1748, while King George's War was still in progress: "There is reason enough for doubting whether the king, if he had the power, would wish to drive the French from their pos- sessions in Canada. The English Colonies in this part of the world have increased so much in wealth and population, that they will vie with European England. But to maintain the commerce and the power of the Metropolis, they are forbid to establish new manufactures, which might compete with the English ; they may dig for gold or silver only on condition of shipping them immediately to England ; they have, with the exception of a few fixed places, no liberty to trade to any parts not belonging to the English dominions, and foreigners are not allowed the least commerce with these American Colonies. And there are many similar restrictions.
"These oppressions have made the inhabitants of the English colonies less tender towards their mother land. This coldness is increased by the many foreigners who are settled among them; for Dutch, Germans and French are here blended with English, and have no special love for Old England.
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