History of Bedford, New Hampshire, from 1737 : being statistics compiled on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the town, May 15, 1900, Part 4

Author: Bedford (N.H. : Town)
Publication date: 1903
Publisher: Concord, N. H. : The Rumford Printing Co.
Number of Pages: 1202

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Permit me now for a moment to turn to another and a very large and interesting division of the Presbyterian Church of the United States; I mean the accessions which have been made to its numbers directly from Scotland.

The great influx of Scotch emigrants to this country began in 1747. It was the year which followed the battle of Culloden. It is hardly necessary to repeat a very familiar historical account of the ill-advised efforts of Charles Edward, the grandson of James II, who so ingloriously fled from his kingdom sixty years before, to re- gain for his family the crown which his ancestor had so foolishly and so basely lost.

With a few friends, a few stands of arms, and very little money or means, this enthusiastic young prince landed in Scotland, on the 16th of July, 1745. A portion of the Highland clans, and some others from an inherent principle or impulse of loyalty for the legit- imate heir to the crown, and some, perhaps, from a mere spirit of adventure, rallied around his standard. At his first appearance, wild and impracticable as his scheme seemed, to the sober and judi- cious, he occasioned, nevertheless, much excitement. It will occur to you at once that this is the same personage referred to in the popu- lar song of the times, which was, "Who'll be king but Charlie ?" George II, then king of England, became alarmed at the progress of Charles Edward, and his followers, and sent the Duke of Cumber- land, with an army, to chastise the invader, and to punish his rebel- lious subjects in the north. The hostile parties met at Culloden, near Inverness, in Scotland. The party of the Pretender was totally defeated, the principal escaping barely with his life. Cumberland pursued the fallen foe with unnecessary, with even brutal, severity, killing in cold blood the unfortunate adherents to Charles, and burn- ing their houses over their heads. He received the name of " the butcher " on account of the atrocities of which he was then guilty. He carried many of his prisoners to London. Many were publicly

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executed as a warning to the rest of the king's subjects. The offend- ers were, however, so numerous that George II at length changed his course towards them, and granted a general pardon upon the condition that they would first take the oath of allegiance to him and his house, and then emigrate to the plantations.

Preferring expatriation to an ignominious death they, of course, availed themselves of the royal clemency. Soon they began to land on the shores of America. The first important settlement which they made was on the Cape Fear river in North Carolina. This settlement proved to be a very valuable acquisition to the Presbyte- rian church, and ultimately to the country. Industry, frugality, intelligence, and consequently correct moral deportment, were then as now, characteristics of the Scotch. These qualities belonged eminently to the Cape Fear settlement. They were strict conscien- tious Presbyterians. They had taken the oath of allegiance to their king. It was the condition of their pardon.

It will not then be thought so wonderfully at variance with the standard of morality if many of these people are found at the com- mencement of the War of the Revolution too reluct at taking arms against the government they had so solemnly sworn to support. Nor will it be considered so uniformly an offense altogether unpardona- ble, if they are at first, found to raise their voices and their arms in the cause of their anointed sovereign. When we censure, with our accustomed severity, all those who did not heartily unite at the out- set, with the popular party of '75, we must remember that these Scotchmen, of all the rest of the world, had the best reason to dread the very name of civil war and revolution. Besides, the course then adopted was unquestionably with many of them, the result of an irrepressible feeling of loyalty, as well as sense of religious obliga- tion to keep faith with the government which protected them. Does it become us to stigmatize with opprobrious epithets all those pious and conscientious persons, clergymen and laymen, who fled the country, or who refused to lend their aid to the Revolutionary party in our incipient struggle with the mother country? Is it not much more charitable and abundantly more rational to suppose that many of them, our own countrymen as well as the Scotch, acted from high moral and religious principle ?

We had a remarkable instance of political defection very near home ; our first minister, the Rev. John Houston, refused to sub- scribe to the Association Test. He was the only man in the town who did not pledge himself, body and soul, to the cause of freedom. Let us, before we utterly condemn his course, look for a single mo- ment at the circumstances attending his acts. He was alone in his views ; nobody sustained him, not a single member of his church or congregation ; look at him when the doors of his church were shut upon him, when he was forbidden ever again to ascend to the sacred desk ; when the officers arrested him, and required bonds for his detention within the limits of the county; when he was spurned by

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his former friends ; when all the insults of an excited and indignant people were cast upon his defenceless head,-and then say, in can- dor, whether he probably endured all this simply because he was an enemy to a republican form of government, or, rather, whether he was not acting under the belief that he was forbidden, by one whose commands he dared not disobey, to resist and levy war upon the "powers that were ?" Let us be kind, let us be charitable ; let us at least be just to the memory of our long since departed, sincere, but sadly mistaken spiritual guide and minister in holy things. He has gone, as have the early settlers on Cape Fear river, and thou- sands of others, who fell into the same error, to their final account. And we, who have been made happy in the triumph of liberty, in the overthrow of despotism, in the glorious results which have suc- ceeded the efforts which they opposed, after all, feebly and ineffec- tually, can afford to forget and forgive. Nil mortuis nisi bonum.

I am strongly tempted, even at the hazard of your reproof for trespassing too long upon your kind indulgence, to introduce a sin- gle Scotch Presbyterian emigrant, who came here as late as '75 and joined her friends in North Carolina, a woman, one whose name has adorned the pages of history and of romance, and has been rendered immortal by the best pen that ever described Scottish scenery or Scottish character,-she is none other than Flora MacDonald.

Go with me, in imagination, to an island called South-Uist, one of the Hebrides, near the western shore of Scotland. There we shall find, hid away in a cavern by the seaside, the prince, Charles Edward, just escaped from the hot pursuit of the soldiers and spies of the Duke of Cumberland, after the disasters of Culloden. He is here, under the care of the Laird of Clanranald, though in imminent peril, every moment, of falling into the hands of his enemies, who have pursued him like blood hounds, and are now searching the island for his hiding-place. Various expedients have been devised to effect his safe removal. In the midst of anxious deliberation among his friends, Flora. MacDonald, a relative of Clanranald, accidentally arrived on a visit. A young lady just returned from Edinburgh, where she had been to be educated, beautiful, kind-hearted, and devotedly attached to the cause of Charles. Her father was dead. Her mother, who had married a second time, lived on the neighbor- ing Isle of Skye, where Flora was born, and where was then her home.

A romantic scheme was now proposed for the deliverance of the Pretender. This was, that he should put on the dress of an Irish serving-woman, and leave for the Isle of Skye in the company of a female. Flora was requested to take the principal part in this peril- ous enterprise. Such was her zeal for her fallen though still her "rightfu' lawfu'" prince and heir to the throne, that she consented. With the utmost difficulty the party escaped in the night in a boat, the prince attired as a female servant, and assuming the name of Betsey Burke; with nothing but the feeble arm and woman's wit of

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Flora MacDonald for his protection. They encountered a storm of much severity during the navigation of that fearful night. At early dawn the next morning, they attempted to land at Point Weternish, on Flora's home island. They were suspected by some soldiers, who fired upon their little bark. They retreated, and soon gained the. shore at another place in safety. Here again, in another seaside cave, this young man, the object of so much solicitude, was carefully secreted, while Flora hastened to procure food and relief for him. By the advice of her friends, as soon as they were refreshed, Flora, still accompanied by Charles, in the dress of Betsey Burke, made all haste to reach the town of Kingsburg, on the opposite side of the island, a distance of twelve miles, which they performed on foot that day. The danger was now considered past, the prince was saved. At parting he kissed his fair guide and said to her: "Gentle, faith- ful maiden, I entertain the hope that we shall yet meet in the royal palace." But they never met again. The poor, broken-hearted prince was doomed to die in obscurity. Flora was soon after arrested and, with many others who had participated with her in this bold and romantic adventure, carried to London and imprisoned in the Tower on a charge of aiding and abetting attempts against the life of King George II.

During her imprisonment many of the English nobility became interested in the fate of this high-spirited and noble-hearted girl. Learning that she was a Presbyterian, and of course not a partisan of the Pretender, whose life she had saved by her courage and her sagacity, the king was prevailed upon to pardon her. She was sent back to her native island, literally loaded with the richest presents. She was married four years after her release to Allen MacDonald, and continued to reside in the Isle of Skye. She be- came the mother of a numerous family, and in 1775 came to this coun- try and settled in North Carolina. The time of her arrival here was unfortunate for her; the Revolution had but just begun. Her kins- man, Donald MacDonald, who had been an officer in the '45 of her favorite Charles, and who had taken the oath of allegiance to George II, and emigrated to save his life, was already a military officer in this country, in the king's service, by the appointment of the governor of North Carolina. Flora MacDonald was therefore at once surrounded by such influences as to induce her to lend her aid to the royal party in the Carolinas. Her friends, including her husband, who opposed the patriots, were soon defeated as disastrously as they had been at Culloden. After much suffering, great priva- tions, and pecuniary loss, she, with her family, left our shores for the place where, thirty years before, she had bid farewell to Prince Charles. She had hazarded her life, first for the House of Stuart, and then for the House of Hanover, and she had the best reasons for saying, with the good-natured Mercutio in the play, "A plague o' both the houses." She was an exemplary woman in all the rela- tions of life, modest, gentle, and retiring in her manners, and Dr.

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Foote says : "Her memory will live in North Carolina while noble- ness has admirers and romantic self-devotion to the welfare of the distressed can charm the heart," and adds : "Massachusetts has her Lady Arabella, Virginia her Pocahontas, and North Carolina her Flora MacDonald."

I ought to mention the fact, in this connection, that in the old north state, to this day, the original character, habits, and even the language of the Scotch are preserved and continued, with less of change than in any other part of the United States. In some of the churches in the presbytery of Fayetteville, the gospel is still preached in the native tongue of the Highlanders, the Gaelic.

It was in Fayetteville where Flora MacDonald resided for some time. Her house, which had become an object of great interest to visitors, was unfortunately destroyed a few years ago, by fire.

I cannot forego the pleasure of referring to one other Presbyterian heroine, who has been connected with events of a much more recent date, and the account of whose courage and intrepid conduct I have very lately received from her own lips, much more in detail than I can now repeat it. Franklin Chase, our consul at Tampico, just after the battles on the Rio Grande, received peremptory orders to leave the town and Mexican territory in six hours, and not to dis- obey, upon the peril of his life. The order was in direct violation of the treaty between the two countries; yet, from the revengeful char- acter of the people, he knew it would be executed to the letter. He was largely engaged in trade. All his property consisted of a house, and a store filled with valuable goods. He prepared, of course, to leave all; but his wife, Ann Chase, refused to go with him. He entreated and commanded her, but to no purpose. At length, tear- ing himself away, he was enabled to reach an American sloop of war lying in the offing, just in season to comply with the tyrannical order of the Mexican general. Mrs. Chase was now left alone. There was not an American in the place. She was surrounded by excited and bitter enemies, a defenceless woman. But she did not falter or flinch, or droop in despondency. She was equal to the emergency. She soon began to make preparations to effect the sur- render of the town to the naval forces of the United States, then cruising in the Gulf of Mexico. She engaged certain Mexican pilots to give her the exact soundings over the bar at the mouth of the river on which the city stands. With the aid of this information, and an old English chart, she constructed a plan of Tampico and its neighborhood. She then contrived to open a correspondence with the commodore of the American fleet. She was carried herself in an open canoe, rowed by two Indians, twenty miles to sea in the night, to the commodore's ship. She there furnished him with the plan already prepared, and made arrangements to raise a signal in the town when the proper time should arrive for a safe landing. She returned unobserved and unharmed, and immediately set to work to redeem her pledge to the commodore. One bright morning soon

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after, to the utter astonishment and dismay of the Mexicans, she was seen on the highest point of the roof of her dwelling-house, her arm encircling and sustaining a flagstaff from which floated in the breeze the American stars and stripes.

In vain the people shouted to her and threatened her with instant death if she persisted in maintaining her position. She replied, in her accustomed calm and collected manner: "You can do me but little harm ; you can only rob me of a few short years of life by any death you can inflict. I have raised this flag of my country over my house, and here it shall remain. I have taken my stand under its folds, and it shall be my shroud if I perish upon this roof." And there she did remain, until relieved by a detachment of officers and men from the American squadron, accompanied by her husband. The result is well known. The Mexicans became alarmed, panic- stricken, and finally fled in all directions. The town was completely deserted before a single boat had landed. Mrs. Chase alone, had put to rout the inhabitants, soldiers and all, and was sole mistress of Tampico.

For this daring and brilliant exploit she deserved, and has received, the highest commendations, the praise and the thanks of the people of the United States. The city of New Orleans pre- sented to her a splendid service of plate. The ladies of Cincinnati sent her a beautiful flag. Others have honored her by forwarding to her swords, firearms, and even pieces of artillery, in token of respect for this deed of heroism.

It is almost impossible to disconnect in our own minds such a female from all that is masculine, ferocious, and passionate. Yet, if you should ever have the good fortune to meet this lady, you will find her quiet, modest, and retiring, intelligent, kind, and benevolent, a pious, devoted Presbyterian, and just the last person one would have selected at first sight, for the warlike service in which she was involved.

It is hardly necessary for me to add that she is descended from the same stock we have considered so much to-day, that she is one of the very best of that people who are "brave as they are gentle, and gentle as they are brave." She is Scotch-Irish ; her parents are of Londonderry, on the Foyle, and she is related in no very distant degree, to the noble house of the Red Douglas.

We had, but a few months since, here in our midst, an eminent and striking example of the high moral and intellectual qualities of the Scotch-Irish character in a female, a native of this town, one whose presence we sadly miss now. It is true, she had never endured the horrors of a beleaguered town, she had saved no fallen prince from an untimely death; she had captured no city. No emergency ever occurred connecting her name with any perilous or romantic adventure. She was no heroine in the common accepta- tion of the term. Hers was a life of calm, quiet, steady, but earnest devotion to one great end and purpose, namely, the moral, religious,

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and intellectual culture of the youth of her time. In this cause she labored and toiled, in comparative obscurity, to be sure, for the last fifty years. It is perhaps praise enough to say, that at the time of her death she could undoubledly have summoned around her more well instructed pupils than any female of her age in New England.

There are few natives of Bedford who came upon the stage since the commencement of the present century, who do not remember with grateful affection the valuable instruction, the kind advice, the pious and excellent precepts and example of Ann Orr. Who of us does not feel to-day that we should experience an additional thrill of pleasure, if we were able once more to cluster around our kind- hearted, strong-minded and sensible old school-mistress, take her by the hand, and ask of her the continuance of the approbation and the blessings which she bestowed upon us when we were her "boys."

But this cannot be. She, too, has left us. She sleeps on yonder rising ground, never to awake until all are summoned, the teacher and the taught, the master and the pupil, the learned and the igno- rant, the wise and the foolish, to render a final account to the great Judge, whose name she told us to reverence, and whose example she prayed we might imitate.

Presbyterianism, that is the government of the church by elders, and the utter negation of all prelatical power in ecclesiastical affairs, dates very far back. It was found, according to Dr. Miller, among the simple-minded Paulicians in the seventh century. It was the church government of the Albigenses, and of the Waldenses, includ- ing the Bohemian Brothers. It can be traced even to the syna- gogues of the Jews, before the Saviour's advent. It has been sus- tained by the most eminent believers in Christendom. By Luther and Melancthon and Bucaer, in Germany. By Favel, Calvin, and others, in France and Geneva. By Zuingle, in Switzerland. By Peter Martyr, in Italy. By A. Lasco, in Hungary. By Junius and others, in Holland, and by a decided majority of the enlightened and pious friends of the Reformation, in England.

Here it is comparatively modern and new. We derive it from Scotland, its "homestead," in Great Britain, and principally through the Scotch-Irish of Ulster, although we are largely indebted to the Scotch, the Huguenots, and the Hollanders for many professors.

We must not forget that it first began on this continent, with Francis Mackemie, only one hundred and fifty years ago, on a nar- row strip of land between the Chesapeake and Delaware,-that then, hardly venturing to show its face in the light of day, it was seen begging of the cavaliers of Virginia for a license to assert its doc- trines ; that it was punished by imprisonment in New York, and spurned by the church of England as "a religion not fit for a gen- tleman."

The Separatists, Independents, or Congregationalists, as they are now everywhere known, had occupied all the ground in New Eng- land long before Presbyterianism made its appearance. Carver,

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Bradford, and Standish came one hundred years before MacGregore, Cornwell, and Boyd. The Speedwell had, indeed, been driven back by the tempests of the ocean, like the Eagle Wing, but the May- flower had weathered the storms and brought with her to our own shores the representatives of one great division of the Puritans of Great Britain. These men, the "Pilgrim Fathers," had established a spiritual democracy, under the name of Congregationalism, a sys- tem of church government which originated here, and with them, and which so well accorded with the prevailing sentiment of the times, that it was almost universally accepted in the New England colonies. Republican Presbyterianism had, therefore, to seek another field for her labor. That field she found in the vast terri- tory of the middle, southern, and ultimately, of the western and southwestern states. The progress and relative condition of the two systems may be learned very readily, by consulting the religious sta- tistics of the country. In 1843 there were in the United States 3,584 Presbyterian churches, only eleven of them being in New England, and nine of that eleven in New Hampshire, the other two in Massachusetts. There were 2,672 ordained ministers, and prob- ably 900 licentiates and candidates, and 279,782 communicants. There were at the same time, stated upon the same authority, not far from 1,500 Congregational churches; the Presbyterians exceed- ing them by 2,084. Of these 1,500 churches, more than 1,000 were in New England. The number of Congregational ministers was about 1,350, against 3,572 ministers and licentiates of the Presby- terian church, the balance in favor of the latter, being 2,222. The Congregational communicants are stated at 180,000, being nearly 100,000 less than those of the Presbyterians at the same time. This estimate of the Congregational churches and ministers does not in- clude those which have rejected what are called the doctrines of the Reformation, better known as Unitarian. The churches of this last description are nearly all confined to Massachusetts, where Congre- gationalism first began. I believe there is no instance where a Pres- byterian church has directly and openly adopted the faith and forms of Unitarianism. The Federal Street church in Boston, which was the second Presbyterian church ever organized in New England, and which was successively under the pastoral care of Morehead and Annin, two zealous disciples of Knox and Calvin, might seem to be an exception. But the members of that church voted to change, and did change, the form of its government to that of Congrega- tionalism, before it became Unitarian.

In view of this very imperfect, brief, and hasty sketch of the origin, progress, character, and success of Presbyterianism in New England and throughout the United States, which has been attempted to-day, who is prepared to estimate the value of the labors, the sacrifices, and the sufferings of its early founders? Who does not perceive and acknowledge the vast importance of the mis- sion of the Scotch-Irish to our shores ? Failing in their first attempt

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to reach us, from physical causes altogether above and beyond their control, they hastened back upon that Eagle Wing, which proved too frail to sustain them in the wider transatlantic flight which they meditated, not to repair and refit for a second voyage the feeble craft in which they had hazarded their lives, but to fit and prepare themselves, their countrymen, and their posterity for the great work which, although postponed for a time, they foresaw must sooner or later devolve upon them. That work was to raise the standard of their religion in the vast wilderness of America. Hither, in God's own time, they came, bringing with them what was better than silver and gold, their habits of untiring industry, of frugality, and strict economy ; bringing with them that unconquerable energy of charac- ter which overcomes all opposition ; bringing with them minds enlightened and enriched by the best learning of the age, and a re- ligious profession and a faith drawn from the Bible and tested by the sufferings and the martyrdom of thousands of its converts. With such habits, and with such moral and religious principles, they could not fail of success.

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History of Bedford, New Hampshire, from 1737 : being statistics compiled on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the town, May 15, 1900, Part 4

Author: Bedford (N.H. : Town) Publication date: 1903 Publisher: Concord, N. H. : The Rumford Printing Co. Number of Pages: 1202

Author: Bedford (N.H. : Town)
Publication date: 1903
Publisher: Concord, N. H. : The Rumford Printing Co.
Number of Pages: 1202