USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume II > Part 47
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53
832
WORCESTER COUNTY
stamp was cut from every sheet, and by a coincidence, which caused the authorities to regard with assured suspicion the Yankee printer, the same night someone hung to the town gallows an effigy of the commissioner appointed to collect the tax. There were other acts disloyal to the King, and the sheriff called on Isaiah Thomas with the purpose of extorting confession by threats. But he got small satisfaction out of his visit.
The crowning affronts followed the arrival in Halifax of the Philadel- phia Journal, dressed with mourning pages, and adorned with death's heads, crossbones, and other emblems of mortality, and announcing its own death from a complaint known as the stamp act. The imagination of the boy was stirred, and he proceeded to combine his courage and adroitness. The col- umns of the Gazette were set between heavy black rules, the title was sur- mounted by a skull, a death's head was substituted in the place the stamp should have been, and at the foot of the last page reposed a coffin. Then, in the attempt to justify his work, was the notice: "We are desired, by a num- ber of our readers, to give a description of the extraordinary appearance of the Philadelphia Journal of the 30th of October (1765). We can in no better way comply with this request, than by the exemplification we have given of that Journal in this day's Gazette." For some unexplained reason the gov- ernment permitted young Thomas to remain at large. But a copy of the paper reached England and was read by the Ministers, perhaps by King George himself. Whatever happened, in March, 1767, we find the boy in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and soon after in a brief resumption of his association with Fowle in Boston. Following a sailing voyage south and to the West Indies, whence he hoped he would find a way to reach London, he again was in Boston, in partnership with Fowle, publishing a little newspaper which had a short life.
The partnership was dissolved and the younger man bought the printing equipment, and from the press, on March 7, 1771, came the first copy of the Massachusetts Spy and Oracle of Liberty, which soon became the leading advocate of Whig principles, in other words, a strong anti-Royalist news- paper. In our chapters on the Revolutionary period we have told the story of Isaiah Thomas' experiences with the royal officers and, just before Con- cord and Lexington, the removal of the press and type to Worcester in the night, and the resumption of publication there on May 3, 1775.
In 1776 Mr. Thomas moved to Salem, but two years later returned to Worcester to make it his permanent residence. He resumed the publication of the Spy which in the meantime had been issued under a lease of the prop- erty. Much of his printing equipment had been sacrificed in his hasty removal from Boston in 1775, but as the affairs of the new republic became prosperous again new types and apparatus were purchased. The business
833
GREAT MEN AND WOMEN
began to expand in a large way. "Uniting the employments of printer, pub- lisher and book-seller, establishing the first bindery and building the second paper mill in the county, the relations of a business which may well be called vast, as they extended to almost every part of the Union, were conducted with that systematic and methodical arrangement which gave successful action to the complex machinery. At one period, under his own personal direction and that of his partners, sixteen presses were in constant motion, seven of them working in Worcester ; three weekly papers and one monthly magazine issued ; and five bookstores in Massachusetts, one in New Hamp- shire, one in New York, and one in Maryland, almost supplied the literary sustenance of the country. One of the most liberal publishers of the age, he produced and distributed works whose titles formed a voluminous annual catalog. The great folio edition of the Bible in 1791, illustrated with copper- plates, was unrivalled, at the period, for neatness, accuracy, and general elegance and excellence of execution. The whole types for small copies of the Holy Scriptures were kept standing and often used."
Previous to the Revolution, in 1773, Mr. Thomas established the Essex Gazette at Newburyport, and in January of the following year commenced the publication of the Royal American Magazine, the last of the Boston periodicals under the provincial governors. After the war, in 1793, he founded the Farmers Magazine, which was enlivened by the spirit of Prentiss, Dennie, Fessenden and the coterie of wits gathered at Walpole, New Hamp- shire. In 1799 he established the Farmer's Journal at Brookfield, and from 1783 to 1795, in partnership with Ebenezer T. Andrews, published the Mas- sachusetts Magazine in Boston.
Because of the resemblance of a Federal excise tax to the abhorred stamp act, he discontinued publication of the Spy in 1787-88, and during this time printed the news in the Worcester Magazine, founded for the purpose. In 1802 Mr. Thomas turned his business over to his son, Isaiah Thomas, Jr., and retired to devote the rest of his life to literary and kindred labors. He wrote and published in 1810 an exceedingly valuable work, The History of Printing, in two octavo volumes. He devoted himself to the collection of a library, and this led to the founding of the American Antiquarian Society, that these books, many of them rare and valuable, might be kept together. With his books, he gave the land and the first Antiquarian Hall, which stood on the easterly side of Summer Street, near Lincoln Square. William Lincoln spoke the truth when he wrote, a century ago: "The institution will remain, an imperisable monument to his memory, when the very materials of the hall reared by his generosity shall have crumbled."
Wor. 53
834
WORCESTER COUNTY
There are those who consider Isaiah Thomas as the most remarkable man who ever lived in Worcester County, and one of the most permanently useful, as given constant evidence by the Antiquarian Society. He would have liked to know that seven Presidents of the United States have been members, that one of them, Calvin Coolidge not long out of the White House, was its presi- dent at the time of his sudden death. One would study history a long time before he found the counterpart of a six-year-old lad, destined to educate himself all alone, with never a schoolmaster, defying a royal government, establishing newspapers which played an important part in shaping the Nation's destinies, becoming a publisher of an ability and enterprise unex- celled in any generation, a writer of books which even today are standard ; establishing a society whose fame and membership are international. And finally, let us consider the long ascending road traveled by the ignorant little six-year-old to the day when Dartmouth College conferred upon him the honorary degree of Master of Arts, and Alleghany College the degree of Doctor of Laws.
David I. Walsh, United States Senator from Massachusetts, 1872- David Ignatius Walsh was born in Leominster, graduated from Holy Cross College in 1893, and has a Bachelor of Laws degree from Boston University in 1897, in which year he was admitted to the bar. He has practiced law in Clinton, which has been his home town from his infancy, in Fitchburg, and, in later years, in Boston. His long and successful political career has been made remarkable by the fact that he has always been a Democrat running for office in a Republican State. Time and again he has been elected in years when the other important offices were filled by men of the opposing party.
He was elected Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts in 1913, and Gov- ernor in 1914-15. His first election to the United States Senate was in 1919, and he is now serving his third term which will expire in 1936. Five times his party has chosen him its delegate-at-large to the National Democratic Convention.
The degree of Doctor of Laws has been conferred upon him by his alma mater, Holy Cross College, and by Notre Dame University, Fordham College and Georgetown University.
Artemas Ward, Soldier, Jurist, Legislator. First Commander of the American Army Besieging Boston, Major-General in Continental Army, Second in Command to Washington. Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas-Artemas Ward of Shrewsbury was one of the strong men of Massachusetts of the generation centered in the American Revolution. He was of the sturdy Puritan stock, and his own life was governed by the
835
GREAT MEN AND WOMEN
uncompromising and courageous adherence to principle which characterized his ancestors. His neighbors early learned that here was a man, educated at Harvard, but without aristocratic pretensions, of much native ability, and a natural leader. He was a lawyer by profession. He was trained as a soldier, too, as were most able-bodied, red-blooded men of his day, for he was past his young manhood before the French wars, with their bloody campaigns and Indian atrocities, had come to an end. As an officer of the Provincial Militia, he won the confidence of the soldiery. In the Abercrombie campaign of the French and Indian War he went out as a major, saw hard fighting, and returned the colonel of a Massachusetts regiment.
In the stirring, epochal years which preceded the Revolution, his useful worth brought him quick prominence in the councils and activities of the patriot party, and equal prominence in the black books of the Crown officers. An incident bearing upon his unpopularity with the Royal Governor is worth relating. One day in 1766 the Shrewsbury townsmen were assembled to tear down the old meetinghouse, when a red-coated mounted messenger appeared, who had ridden post-haste from Boston. He enquired for Colonel Ward and upon his appearing from among the villagers handed him a sealed packet. The horseman lingered and men crowded about as the colonel read aloud the following :
Boston, June 30, 1766.
To Artemas Ward, Esqr.,
Sir,-I am ordered by the Governor to signify to you that he has thought fit to supersede your Commission of Col. in the Regiment of militia lying in part in the County of Worcester and partly in the County of Middlesex- And your said Commission is superseded accordingly.
I am Sir, your most ob't and humble serv't
JNO COTTON, Deputy Secretary.
"Give my compliments to the Governor," said Colonel Ward to the red- coat, "and say to him that I consider myself twice honored, but more in being superseded than in being commissioned, and that I thank him for this, since the motive that dictated it is evidence that I am what he is not, a friend to my country." And the crowd jeered the messenger as he galloped away.
Through these pre-war years General Ward represented his town in the General Court, and took a conspicuous part in the controversies of that body with the Royal representatives in the Bay Colony. Elected to the Council, as a protestant against obnoxious measures imposed by the British govern- ment, his appointment was twice vetoed by Governor Hutchinson, but not a third time, and he took his seat in that body. He was the sort of upstanding, fearless man who naturally was chosen to membership in committees to pre-
836
WORCESTER COUNTY
sent the peoples' protests to the Governor. When the final break came, he became a leader in the Provincial Congress, one of the inner circle, in the councils of John and Samuel Adams, Hancock, Otis, Joseph Warren, Moses Gill of Princeton and the others.
When the need of military preparations became of uppermost moment, the Provincial Congress, in October, 1774, appointed Ward senior major- general. As such he was commander-in-chief of all Massachusetts forces. And so, when Concord and Lexington had been fought and the British Army driven into Boston, and the pursuing minutemen and militia had concentrated in front of the town, it was General Ward who assumed command of what was to be the besieging army.
He was then a militia officer of Massachusetts. Soon afterwards, when the Continental Congress made George Washington commander-in-chief of all the American forces, Ward was commissioned the senior major-general, which made him second in command, ranked above the turbulent and untrust- worthy Charles Lee, who at the time was held in highest regard as a trained soldier. When Washington took command at Cambridge, he gave to Ward the command of the right wing of his army, a post of gravest responsibility, for it included the still unfortified Dorchester Neck, and Boston Neck, over which the British must pass were they to attack the Provincial forces by land. When, following the evacuation of Boston, he was compelled by the inroads of a painful disease to resign his high commission in the Continental Army, it was at Washington's solicitation that he made the physical sacrifice of assuming command of the defenses of Boston. Even before he had turned over this military duty to another, he was appointed Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas of Worcester County. His intrepid stand in 1787, when Shays' soldiers opposed with bayonets the entrance of the judges into the Courthouse at Worcester, must be mentioned to emphasize the metal of the man. In his later life he was elected to the United States House of Rep- resentatives where he served his district for a number of years before his death in 1799. He was honored by his town, his county, his State and his country.
Yet down through the generations has come a sometimes embittered con- troversy as to General Ward's military skill and ability as an organizer dur- ing his service as commander of the American Army, which covered the period from April 20 to July 3, 1775-less than eleven weeks. George Ban- croft, recognized authority on the American Revolution, in his History of the United States, declared him incompetent, and later historians accepted Ban- croft's conclusions. Historians of Worcester County have avoided this period of his life, as something which was better not to discuss.
837
GREAT MEN AND WOMEN
Apparently injustice has been done him. In 1921 there appeared The Life of Artemas Ward, First Commander-in-Chief of the American Revolu- tion, written by Charles Martyn, a painstaking research historian and com- petent author, and published by the late Artemus Ward of New York, the general's great-grandson. Mr. Martyn, by persistent research, brought forth letters and documents which shed new light on many circumstances and incidents of the siege of Boston. Had Bancroft had access to these it seems unlikely that he would have persisted in his unfavorable opinion of Ward as a general officer in the conditions which surrounded him.
There has been much of hindsight in the criticism by military experts, particularly as to the wisdom of fortifying Bunker Hill, or rather Breed's Hill, the advance eminence of the Charlestown peninsular. This undertaking we now know was an emergency measure, adopted in the knowledge that the reinforced British Army proposed to occupy both Bunker Hill and Dor- chester Heights, the two commanding hills either one of which, equipped with artillery, would dominate the town of Boston. General Ward's decision was inspired by the urgent demand of the Committee of Safety, and had the unanimous approval of his council of war. Whether or not it was a wise decision, as military strategy, is open to dispute, of course. General Ward was harshly criticized for not concentrating his forces for the reinforcement of the position. Here, again, is a matter for debate. But few will question that the slaughter of British soldiers in the battle was an all-important factor in the eventual evacuation of Boston.
But there seems to be little of justice in the charge of incompetence in the few weeks immediately following the sudden and wholly unanticipated assembling of a horde of soldiers at Cambridge. No general ever lived who, under such circumstances, in so short a time, could have whipped this con- glomerate force into an organized, disciplined army. Yet critics began to be heard before a month had passed, demanding the impossible.
The commander was without everything which an army requires-can- non, bayonets, powder, clothing, transport, shelter and camp utensils-liter- ally everything excepting food. There was plenty of that. There were scores of companies of minutemen and militia each with officers elected by the soldiery, but there were no battalion or regimental formations or officers. To quote from The Life of General Ward: "The men, having answered the alarm and pursued the enemy as far as pursuit had been deemed possible by their officers, felt no obligation to remain any longer than their own and their companies estimates of the necessities of the situation; or than suited their own needs, or desires, or conscience. As the entire force was a body of their own building and officering, and they had come out on their own initiative,
838
WORCESTER COUNTY
they felt that, instead of awaiting permission to return to their homes, they could stay or go according to their own volition.
"They had dropped everything on the alarm, many of them marching in the clothes they had been wearing in the fields, and without a farthing in their pockets. After a few hours in camp they began to think of their unfin- ished work, their untilled fields ; and many of them decided to go home-for a while at all events. Each one reasoned that there was no imperative neces- sity to remain, for the redcoats showed no indication of coming out-and that anyway there were plenty of his fellows who would stay! The especially conscientious private arranged with some one else-generally a relative or townsman-to take his place before he left camp, but a great deal more fre- quently this precaution was overlooked."
And the Commander-in-Chief was without power to restrain this free and easy manner of military service, until men were formally enlisted. Yet, be it said, before General Ward relinquished his command some excellently trained and well-disciplined regiments had been organized, which constituted the nucleus upon which the famous Continental Line was built.
Let us see what Artemas Ward's life had been before, at the age of forty- seven, he took over the unexpected, and, for him, extraordinary responsi- bility of the strangely assembled army. He was born in Shrewsbury, November 26, 1727, the son of Nahum Ward. The father, then generally known as "Lieutenant Ward" from his militia rank, was a man of importance in the little group of farmers which made up the Shrewsbury community. He had been one of its founders. His grandfather, a Puritan exodist, had been one of the first settlers of Sudbury and Marlboro. The Lieutenant held many town offices. Upon the incorporation of Worcester County he was made a justice of the peace and was admitted to the bar. Later he was commis- sioned colonel in the Colony service and a justice of the Common Pleas.
Artemas attended the village school in its short sessions, and was instructed at home by the village minister. Writes his historian: "Nor, for their influence on an imaginative young mind, let us forget the evenings of the New England winters as the family sat within the glow of the big log fire, and Lieutenant Ward (or Colonel Ward, as his father became while Artemas was still a small boy), told of the dangers and adventures and hard- ships encountered and overcome during the first century of the history of Massachusetts ; dwelling much in the early Puritan days, and what had been lost, and what had been saved, of their works and faith; and recounting tales of the French and Indian Wars, which had blazed and devasted.
"He told of his grandfather's house in Marlboro, garrisoned as a fort in King Phillip's War ; and of his uncle, Eleazer, who in the same conflict was killed by Indians on the highway between Marlboro and Sudbury. Of the
839
GREAT MEN AND WOMEN
township of Worcester, only five miles away, twice abandoned because of the Redskin danger; Lieutenant Ward was twenty-nine years of age when it was finally resettled in 1713, and for yet another dozen years it was inter- mittently in peril of being again blotted out. Of the slaying or capture of his brother Elisha by Indians, and how his mother never gave up hope of Elisha's return ; when she died eleven years later her will contained a remem- brance for him if he 'shall ever come again.' Of other relatives and many friends who had lost their lives in frontier skirmishing or along the Indian trail."
As he passed into his 'teens the development of his character set him some- what apart from his brothers, and suggested and justified his father's decision to send him to Harvard College. He was sixteen years old when he was admitted in 1744. In Ward's day Harvard had about one hundred students. Customs of the period seem strange enough to us of today. The breakfast served at Commons consisted of bread and a "cue of beer." Equally distinc- tive was the "placing" of students by the social rank of their families-a custom closely related to the New England practice of "dignifying" the meetinghouse. The stations then assigned held good everywhere within college jurisdiction, in chapel, at recitations, at Commons. Of the twenty- nine freshmen of the class of 1748, Ward was placed as seventh, which shows the esteem in which his family was held in the Province.
After graduation he taught school for a time at Groton, Massachusetts, then returning to Shrewsbury opened a small general store in the family home. In 1851 he started upon his public career, through election as tax assessor. Three months later, at the age of 25, he entered upon a lifetime of service as justice of the peace, his commission coming from the Crown. As a justice he sat in general sessions in Worcester, and in Shrewsbury in his home, where he married many couples, and tried a large class of minor offenders. Under the Province laws a justice of the peace had power to punish up to the whipping post and the stocks. Drunkards, profaners of the Sabbath, and peace-breakers had to deal with Justice Ward.
It was characteristic of the man that the profaner of the Sabbath fared badly in Shrewsbury. Anyone rash enough to travel on Sunday excepting in an easily proved and forgivable emergency, found himself in the Ward sitting room "telling it to the judge." Nor did he relax his "early sabbatical vigi- lance ; we find him a generation later, a man of sixty-one years, a general and a chief justice, standing in the Shrewsbury highway to halt infractors of the Sunday law." Which would be a very dangerous place for him to stand on a twentieth century Sunday.
There followed his service in the militia, and his commission as major in Colonel William Williams' Massachusetts regiment, and the participation with
840
WORCESTER COUNTY
that body in the disastrous Abercrombie campaign against Fort Ticonderoga. During that year he received promotion in the field to lieutenant-colonel. He returned home a colonel-and with health broken by the hardships of the campaign, and suffering from a disease which was to plague him through the rest of his life.
In the following fifteen years, until the outbreak of the Revolution, we find him occupying one public office after another, among them judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and membership in the Provincial legislative bodies. His participation in various patriotic activities is related in other chapters of this book. Finally, on the eve of Concord and Lexington, we find him senior major-general of the Massachusetts military forces. It is not difficult to realize that his training for sudden leadership of probably the largest mili- tary force America had ever seen, was wholly inadequate as judged by the standards of professional soldiers.
"General Ward lay ill in bed when the express rider galloped through Shrewsbury with news of the clash at Lexington," wrote Mr. Martyn. "But next morning at daybreak he mounted his horse and set out toward Boston, joining and passing company after company of the militiamen filling the roads as they also hurried eastward to the capital.
"From Shrewsbury to Cambridge is now a pleasant motor trip, but on horseback over the rough highway of the year 1775 it could have been no holiday jaunt for a middle-aged man afflicted with bladder-stone. Yet Ward unhesitatingly journeyed it to direct the dangerous enterprise of rebellion against the world-famed power of Great Britain. Those men of New Eng- land who thus unflinchingly accepted duty's call to leadership, and, leading, dared, arms in hand, to oppose the power of the King and Parliament of England, risked a fate more bitter than death on the battlefield. They dared also the hangman's gallows-and beyond, perchance, the horrors of the sev- ered head and limbs rotting by the roadside. Such things have been impos- sible in England for a century or more-but they were not impossible then. Nor did they seem so to Ward and his associates, for they had been young men grown at the time of the Jacobite hangings and beheadings of 1746.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.