USA > New Hampshire > Grafton County > Haverhill > History of the town of Haverhill, New Hampshire > Part 9
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This pledge was signed by Lieut. Charles Nelson for Lyme; Daniel Tillotson, Esq., for Orford; Lieut. Jonathan Chandler, Lieut. John Weed for Piermont; Timothy Bedel, Esq., Capt. Oliver Sanders, William East- man for Bath; John Young for Gunthwaite, (Lisbon); Joseph Peverly, Esq., for Northumberland; Capt. Edward Beakman for Lancaster; James Bayley, Simeon Goodwin, Timothy Barron, Charles Johnston for Haverhill.
These men proceeded at once to take action. They voted to organize a regiment for service to consist of enlistments from the several towns,
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and also chose committees to send scouting parties to Canada or elsewhere as may be thought proper. Officers appointed for the regiment were: Colonel, Timothy Bedel; lieutenant-colonel, Charles Johnston; first major, Jonathan Childs; second major, James Bayley; adjutant, Simeon Goodwin; quartermaster, John Young; surgeon, Samuel Hale. It was provided that the company officers, captain, lieutenant, and ensign, be appointed by the several towns, and it was further voted, that "each and every person belonging to our said towns do put themselves under com- mand, and submit themselves unto such commanding officers as are and shall be chosen by this committee and each particular town." Ezekiel Ladd was appointed to represent the committee in the provincial congress, and that Charles Johnston, clerk of the committee, was directed to trans- mit a copy of the proceedings of the meeting to the fourth provincial congress to be convened at Exeter on the 17th of May, 1775.
It does not appear that Ezekiel Ladd served as a delegate, and it may be that Ephraim Wesson and John Hurd were appointed in his place, as Wesson appears to have been in attendance on this fourth congress fifty-nine days, and Hurd six days, before its dissolution, November 15. Colonel Johnston, in transmitting his report of the proceedings of the meeting to the fourth congress as directed, mentioned the reports prevalent that men were being invited by Governor Carlton of Que- bec, and that Indians were being engaged, for the invasion of Coös, and further wrote:
How near the borders of the enemy we are, every one knows who is acquainted with the boundaries of our province. As to the position of defence, we are in difficult cir- cumstances; we are in want of both arms and ammunition. There is little or none worth mentioning, perhaps one pound of powder to twenty men, and not one half of our men have arms. Now, gentlemen, we have all reason to suspect, and really look upon, ourselves in imminent danger of the enemy, and at this time in no capacity for a defence for want of arms and ammunition. . . We refer the matter to your mature con- sideration, whether it is not necessary to give us assistance in case of invasion. We have a number of men in these parts of the country who have not any real estate, who will certainly leave us unless some assistance is given; and who are ready to assist and stand by our cause with their lives, provided encouragement is given them. If you shall think it necessary to raise forces to defend this our Province, if you will give orders in what manner assistance can be provided, please to inform us as expeditiously as the nature of things will allow. There is no doubt of enlisting numbers without distressing or much interfering with towns near the seacoast provided we have the platform to act on.
In response to this appeal, the provincial congress voted, June 3, that a company of sixty men be raised of the inhabitants of the western fron- tiers to be commissioned by the Committee of Safety, and that these, and two companies out of the two thousand men raised in this colony, be stationed as soon as the Committee of Supplies procure stores for them by the Committee of Safety, on said frontiers and remain until further
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orders. Timothy Bedel, who had a month before, as has been seen, been appointed by the representatives of the Coos towns colonel of a regiment to be raised, was appointed to the command of these companies now authorized. July 7, he was commissioned captain, and later in the month mustered his men at Haverhill, which was made the place of rendezvous. In September, commissioned colonel of a force of about 1,200 men, he joined the army of General Schuyler who was invading St. Johns, Canada. This regiment rendered brilliant service. The patriotic spirit was dom- inant. The citizens of Haverhill were ready to act at the very outset; they only wanted authority, and though the men raised for defence were used for aggression it was little more than authority that was granted. So seemingly neglectful were the Exeter authorities in making provision for Colonel Bedel's troops, that down to the fall of St. Johns in November, 1775, it was uncertain whether his command belonged to the military establishment of the province or that of the Continental government, the result being that both governments neglected to pay his men, a neglect due partly to lack of ability on the part of both.
At the beginning and indeed all through the struggle for independence, Haverhill and her sister towns were made to feel that they had little to expect in the way of material aid from the Exeter government.
During the entire war the town maintained a Committee of Safety, composed of her most substantial citizens; and these committees were constantly on the watch. Haverhill was the rendezvous from which troops, scouting parties, rangers and supplies were sent out. There were frequent alarms from threatened invasion from Canada. Four stockade forts were built in 1776 to secure the people from sudden attacks. Two of these were on the Plain (North Haverhill), one on Ladd Street and one at the Corner, built around the Colonel Johnston homestead. At all times there was a lack of arms and ammunition. The Exeter authorities responded to some of the appeals made for such supplies, mostly, how- ever, during the later years of the war, but the records show that the town was, at its annual and special meetings, making the best provision possible for defence. Powder, lead and firearms were the aid sought. The town paid the expenses of scouting parties, and furnished horses for the same. Supplies were voted for the families of those absent from home on military service. Captain Wesson, in 1775, gave his personal note to the Exeter authorities for fifty pounds of gunpowder for the use of the town. The town at its meeting March 14, 1780, voted to reimburse him. At this same meeting it was voted to allow James Ladd £21, 17s, 6d for himself and five men one month and seventeen days each scouting to be paid in wheat at 6s per bushel; Charles Bailey, 12s for running 98 pounds lead into bullets, also £4, 6s for journey and expenses to Hanover in the previous January. Conferences were frequently held with committees
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of safety of other towns, and the scouting parties were under the general direction of these committees of safety.
The break of Haverhill with the new state government began in 1776. When Col. John Hurd, who had been a member of the fifth provincial congress which met at Exeter December 21, 1775, arrived home in Haver- hill in July, 1776, he found affairs in a most unsatisfactory state. Few men had been more prominent and influential in the proceedings of the congress and the legislature, into which the congress soon after meeting was resolved, than he. Before its adjournment he had been given almost the entire control of military operations in Coös. Haverhill was to be the rendezvous for soldiers intended for service in Canada, for defence of the frontiers, and for scouting service. In connection with Col. Israel Morey of Orford, he was to enlist and muster the men, form the companies, give orders to the scouts and rangers, and deliver commissions to those whom the soldiers had chosen as officers. But in July, 1776, the army in Can- ada was retreating before the superior force of General Burgoyne. Colonel Bedel who, after the fall of St. Johns in the latter part of 1775, had in January, 1776, returned to Haverhill, raised in the Coos county another regiment and taken it through the woods on snowshoes to the Cedars, near Montreal, was under arrest, shortly to be dismissed from the service. Coös was in a state of alarm. Haverhill, as previously stated, had been fortified to some extent; the towns to the north were practically deserted, and many had left Haverhill for their old homes. Among these was Mrs. Hurd, whom her husband met at Concord on his way home, and from which place he sent back to Exeter urgent appeals for help, while he hastened on to Haverhill.
Arriving home he found the new government, of which he was so impor- tant a member, regarded with anything but high esteem by his constitu- ents. And the causes of the disaffection existing were not of recent origin. The government of none of the colonies had been more arbitrary than that of New Hampshire. A president and council had been appointed by royal authority, in 1679, to govern what has since been known in history as the Mason Grant, and the form of government then set up, depending on no written charter, had continued without virtual change till John Wentworth abandoned his post in 1775.
The original province of New Hampshire as granted to John Mason was a tract but sixty miles square, but when the royal commission was issued to Benning Wentworth, as its governor, it described the province as bounded on the west and north by "our other governments." Went- worth thus not only laid claim to the territory which constitutes the pres- ent state of New Hampshire but also to that within the present boundaries of Vermont. Wentworth proceeded to grant townships in the King's name in this new territory, with powers and privileges similar to those of
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the Massachusetts and Connecticut towns from which it was expected settlers would be drawn. The controversy which arose between New York and New Hampshire, relative to jurisdiction over this territory, led to the issuance of an order by the King in Council, in 1764, establishing the west bank of the Connecticut River as the boundary line between the two provinces. The towns granted by the New Hampshire governor, on both sides the river, were many of them rapidly settled, but neither of the Wentworths seems to have taken any pains to make them really a part of the body politic, known as the Province of New Hampshire.
The provincial government, based on royal commission, was pretty nearly absolute. The power of its assembly had from the first been cir- cumscribed by the will of the governor, and its office had been little more than to register his decrees. Only such towns were allowed representa- tions in it as were selected by him. In 1680, only four towns were given representation, and the precepts sent to them expressly named the electors who were to choose the representatives. In 1775, the list of favored towns had only grown to forty-three, while upwards of one hundred had no voice in legislation at all. Only three in all the region to the north and west of the watershed between the Merrimack and the Connecticut had ever had representatives admitted to seats. One result of this policy was that, in the later years, the assembly had become even more exclusive than the governor, and had refused to admit representatives from towns to which he had sent precepts.
At the outbreak of the Revolution the government of the province had become a practical oligarchy. Its controlling spirits were the aristocratic merchants and professional men of the seaport town of the county of Rockingham which, down to 1760, contained more than half the popu- lation of the province.
The settlers of the Connecticut Valley towns were mostly from Massa- chusetts and Connecticut towns and were imbued with a spirit of democ- racy. Among them were men of means and liberal culture, graduates of Harvard or Yale, eminently fitted to mould the institutions of a state and guide its destinies. Dartmouth College was chartered and located at Hanover, and naturally became, with its professors and other educated and influential men with admitted capacity for public affairs, the centre of political influence in the valley. The river was no more than nominally a dividing line between separate provinces. The government of New York was too remote to make itself much felt on the west side, and that of New Hampshire was scarcely more than a name on the east side. It issued a few commissions to justices of the peace and to militia officers and exacted a trifling tax in return. It left the towns, however, pretty much to shift for themselves. Representation in government, dear to the hearts of the men who settled these towns, was denied, and when the new
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revolutionary government provided for it, the provision was regarded by the towns interested as unfair and unequal. Representation in the house of representatives in the new government set up at Exeter was based on population. Grafton County was given but six representatives in a total of eighty-nine, and for purposes of representation towns were classed.
The towns in the valley had been settled by men who held to the prin- ciple that the town should be the unit of government, entitled to repre- sentation in a legislative assembly in its capacity as a town. Hanover, and the five towns classed with it, had refused to send a member to the congress which met in December, 1775, and during the spring and sum- mer of 1776. Hanover men, led by Col. John Wheelock and Bezabel Woodward, had been active in stirring up disaffection with the Exeter government in the towns to the north. Haverhill among the others. The seeds of dissention thus sown fell naturally into fertile soil, and by the time the Exeter legislature adjourned many of the Grafton County towns were in a state of incipient revolt against it.
In fact Colonel Hurd had hardly arrived home before the famous Dresden convention met in Hanover July 31. Haverhill and nine other towns of Grafton County sent their committees of safety or delegates. Its ostensible purpose was to devise means for protection against invasion from Canada, but its real purpose was to protest against the authority assumed to be exercised over them by the government at Exeter, and to take the initial steps for the formation of a new state in the Connecticut Valley. An ingeniously framed address to the people was issued by this body which was calculated to work great mischief and increase the spirit of revolt against the new government of New Hampshire. The devotion of the men comprising the convention to the patriot cause was unques- tioned. They were in double revolt-openly against their King, and hardly less openly against their state. Haverhill was in growing sym- pathy with this latter only partially concealed revolt. Colonel Hurd was devotedly loyal not only to the Continental Congress, but also to the Exeter government. The state of affairs in Haverhill caused him great concern, and he exerted all his influence to combat the growing disaffec- tion. His Boston birth and training had naturally made him an ardent revolutionist, but John Wentworth had been his patron; he was one of the four men in the grants who had been high in favor with the provincial government, and one of the few men who had come to Coös, not direct from Massachusetts or Connecticut towns, but by way of Portsmouth, where he had been in full fellowship with the exclusive set that had con- trolled the province. He was disposed to look upon disloyalty to the Exeter government as disloyalty to the country, and had little apprecia- tion of the causes of dissatisfaction which existed in Haverhill and the other Coös towns.
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Colonel Hurd discovered, or thought he discovered, that his neighbor and former associate on the Grafton County bench, Col. Asa Porter, was engaged in a plot to throw Coös under the portection of General Burgoyne. The evidence is not clear that Colonel Porter was engaged in any such plot. A man of large means, liberal education, aristocratic in his tastes and habits, he probably had little sympathy with the revolutionary acts of his neighbors-Johnston, Hurd, Bedel, Ladd, Wesson, Barron, Woodward and others. He certainly had little sympathy with the Exeter govern- ment, and he made little effort to disguise this fact. Human nature was much the same in 1776 as now. He had been, on the reorganization of the county court by the new government, dropped from his office as a jus- tice, while his neighbor, Colonel Hurd, had not only been retained as chief justice, but had been made councillor for Grafton County, recorder of deeds, county treasurer, and had returned home as chief military author- ity for the section. It is just possible, too, that Colonel Hurd may have shown signs of consciousness of his own importance as a monopolist of county offices, and repository of military authority, and this may have made his reception by his neighbor and former judicial colleague less enthusiastic than he wished. This much is certain: Colonel Porter was a positive man and was beyond question outspoken in his criticism of the Exeter government for its neglect to send aid to the seriously threatened people of Coös, and while Colonel Hurd must have felt under obligations to his neighbor and fellow alumnus of Harvard for his efforts to secure him justice from the Haverhill proprietors in the matter of his claim to the thousand acres of land voted him, while, as adherents of the Estab- lished Church, they had labored together to secure minister and glebe rights for that church, he could not overlook criticisms of the Exeter government. In the mind of Colonel Hurd that government represented the patriot cause of the country, and criticism of one was criticism of the other. The conviction that fastened itself in his mind that his friend Porter was "practicing things inimical to his country" was not a pleasant one, and his duty in the case was still more unpleasant in its performance. He did not hesitate, however, but caused Porter's arrest, and after exam- ination of the charges against him by the safety committees of Bath, Haverhill and other towns, he was sent, with the witnesses in the case, to Exeter for trial. Colonel Hurd, without doubt, acted from the most patriotic motives, but the sympathies of many were such that he undoubt- edly greatly damaged his own influence and popularity in the county by his action, and at the same time greatly increased the growing disaffection with the Exeter government.
Colonel Porter was tried by the Committee of Safety at Exeter at our expense to the rate of £42, 18s. He was placed under bonds, obtained sureties, appealed to the legislature, which after much delay permitted
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him to go to his father's farm in Boxford, and later in November, 1777, by vote of the legislature, he was permitted to return to his home in Haverhill "to attend to his private concernments, he being of good behavior, according to his bonds." The Porter case, the Dresden address, the threatened dangers from the north, gave Colonel Hurd a summer full of anxieties, but he attended to his work of organizing companies of rangers and directing operations for the defence of Coös. In September he returned to Exeter to resume his activity as a member of the council, but this was his last work there as he was not again elected. Indeed, there was no representation of Haverhill in either branch of the legisla- ture for the next seven years.
The address of the Dresden convention bore its fruit in the refusal of the inhabitants of Grafton County to obey the precepts issued in the name of the council and house of representatives for the choice of a coun- cillor and representatives at the election of 1776. Meetings were held in obedience to the precepts issued, but the towns refused to act except to choose committees to return the precepts together with the reasons for non-compliance. These reasons were similar in each case and were, doubtless, inspired at Dresden. The voters of Haverhill gave reasons which may be summarized as follows: The plan of representation was inconsistent with the liberties of a free people; the classification of towns for purposes of representation was in violation of undoubted rights inher- ing in towns as units of government; none but free holders were entitled to election; no bill of rights had been drawn up, or any form of govern- ment established subsequent to the Declaration of Independence by the Colonies; a council having power to negative proceedings of the house of representatives was dangerous to the liberties of the people; if a council was to be authorized at all, it should be elected on a general ticket by the whole people, instead of by districts. This latter objection was raised not only by the towns in the western part of Grafton County, but there was a strong sentiment against it in other sections of the state and to the method of its election. Indeed, the name chosen for this branch of the state government was unfortunate, since the old provincial council had been regarded by the people as identified with many abuses in the admin- istration of justice and of public affairs. The fact that the congress of December, 1775, took it upon itself to elect the council for which the con- stitution of January, 1776, provided, from its own membership, did not tend, either, to increase the popularity of this body.
In the legislature of 1777, Haverhill was unrepresented. In the dis- organized state of affairs there were no judicial duties requiring Colonel Hurd's attention as chief justice of the court. The feeling of revolt against the state government was general, and in his loyalty and devotion to it he probably had but a small following. His residence in Haverhill
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was becoming more and more unpleasant for him. He might have sought relief in military service had not the state of his health forbidden, as appears from the following letter of his to Captain Thornton, under date of Haverhill, September 30, 1777:
I am extremely chagrined that my infirm limbs will not permit me to share the toils and dangers of the field with my countrymen. I have spared two of my family and sent them off with horses and provisions for nearly a month; one of them, my son Jacob, though hardly of age sufficient, but a well grown lad of good heart and disposition to supply his father's place.
The return of Colonel Porter in November, 1777, to his home near Hurd's residence, must have made his surroundings doubly unpleasant. He certainly could hope to accomplish little for the New Hampshire government by remaining in Haverhill, and he must have left town soon after the return of Colonel Porter. By so doing he promoted his own peace of mind, if anything may be judged from the tone of an extract from a pamphlet which appeared in December, 1778, entitled "A Public De- fence of the Right of the New Hampshire Grants (so called) on Both Sides Connecticut River to Associate Together and Form an Independent State." Its reference to Colonel Hurd is as follows:
As to those who have applied for relief, etc., we know of none, except Col. John Hurd of Haverhill at Cohos (who to the great joy of the people has removed out of that part of the country, a mutual dissatisfaction having arisen between him and the people) who has made application to the assembly of New Hampshire and from them obtained a summons or order to notify a certain gentleman living in said Haverhill to appear before said assembly to answer to certain defamation some time or other laid in by him against said Hurd. Also one Nathaniel Hovey, lately living in Enfield (who is well known to have been a litigious person from his youth up, and consenting to be a tool for said Hurd to assist him in holding certain lands which he claims in Enfield) who occasioned such disturbance in the town that they warned him to depart, and after some time (he not obeying the order) the constable by warrant from the selectmen proceeded to remove him and family towards his last settlement.
Grafton County was evidently not a pleasant place of residence for Colonel Hurd or for his avowed friends in the year 1778. It is significant of the bitterness of the feeling against him that of the names appended to this document was that of his former colleague on the bench, Bezabel Woodward, and another that of his old time friend, Col. Jacob Bayley.
Haverhill, however, was fully committed to the movement to separate the river towns from the jurisdiction of New Hampshire. The county was unrepresented in the council or the general committee of safety of the state for the years 1777 and 1778, and Haverhill refused to be repre- sented in the assembly until 1783. During these two years the move- ment for the Union of the towns lying west of the Mason Grant and east of Connecticut River with Vermont, advanced so far that sixteen of these towns, Haverhill included, with James Bailey, were duly represented in
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