USA > Vermont > Rutland County > Rutland > Centennial celebration of the settlement of Rutland, Vt., October 2d, 3d, 4th and 5th, 1870, including the addresses, historical papers, poems, responses at the dinner table, etc. > Part 6
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
How does colonizing cultivate? Through a change of base men secure a vantage-ground for a new start after failure, they gain a fair field for new experiments, they plunge into that necessity which is mother of invention,-they cast off in their long march valueless heirlooms, mental no less than material,-they are roused to the utmost endeavors by new hopes, new havings, new potentialities of progress. O, the blood more stirs to rouse a lion than to start a hare. Looking forth on new heavens and a new earth, they become new men themselves, rejuvenated where all is young, as if they had discovered the fountain of youth for which the alchemists and Ponce De Leon sought so long.
In the occupation of the new world by the old, so far as these tendencies of colonization have had free course, they have been glorified. However inferior the Spanish colonies may be to old Spain, the creoles there seem neither inferior to their own ancestors nor lower in culture than they would have been, had those ances- tors never crossed the sea. The Irish by emigration have inherited what is often called "Kingdom come," as truly as the Israelites did by their journey to Egypt before the King arose who knew not Joseph. In only three Irish counties do the highest wages of farm laborers amount, besides board, to twenty-five cents a day.
It is a puzzle to many that the bubble of Mormonism proves so permanent a delusion. There would not be truth enough in it to make a lasting lie, were it not that colonization is a physical bless- ing to almost all Mormons. They whom their overcloyed countries vomit forth, come from the workhouses of England, from the mines
,
.
.
.
52
RUTLAND CENTENNIAL.
of Wales, from the marshes of Denmark, or from soils where they must sow a bushel in order to reap a peck. Here they have bread enough and to spare, they own houses and lands .- possessions at home beyond their dreams. They have discovered America and America has discovered them. Their hearts with glad surprise to higher levels rise.
Thus removal to America has lifted Europeans to a higher level than they could have attained on the continent of their nativity. For the same reason, a similar advancement has been promoted by subsequent colonizations which I may call intra-continental, or within the continent. Just one century ago England essayed by paper proclamations and surveyors' chains to dam up the migrational wave which then first began to roll inland from the Atlantic States.
"She might as well go stand upon the beach, And bid the main flood bate its usual height."
Now had she been able to keep all whites east of the Alleghanies, then at this day how few our numbers, how small our territory, how scanty our exports, how effete our elements of prosperity. But what have our domestic wanderers sought? Mines as in California, furs, lumber, water privileges,-but above all, land privileges,- broad acres for grain or grazing. They were born too late to mas- ter land,-at least much of it, in the homes of their birth-but in new States it was within their grasp. Becoming landlords, they became lords of the land. They reached the standpoint which Archimedes sighed for in order to move the world. No sooner are farmers established in any region than all varieties of artisans, traders and professional men flock thither-to build their houses, furnish them clothing, furniture, foreign gewgaws, buy their produce, as well as dose them with pills and preaching, pumps and politics, lectures and liquors.
In this rise and progress of society every member comes to face that experience which, according to the proverb, teaches even fools. The fleas which vex a dog as he lies in his kennel he does not notice when he is chasing game. No man long mistakes his calling, but the chances multiply that he will be placed in the niche he was ordained to fill.
In new communities wages, measured by the price of wheat, are enormous. They are also high in money, With a view to keep
.
1
1
·
53
RUTLAND CENTENNIAL. -
them down, one of the earliest laws in Massachusetts forbade any one to give or take more than two shillings for a day's work. Mauger all this, prices went up. When the carpenter had finished the town stocks, his charge seemed so exorbitant that the indignant magistrates forced him to sit as the first culprit, with his own feet fast in his own handiwork.
In States new born no tall trees keep down the underbrush,- every man's energies find ample room, an exciting object, and often an ideal element in whose ennobling stir he feels himself self- exalted. Hence an idler is there a monster, and pauperism is well- nigh unknown. A boy who had grown up in Ticonderoga as a pauper migrated to St. Louis and there became worth more than all the inhabitants of his native town. Like Saul, he went out seeking asses, but he found a kingdom. Crimes, also, in new States,- except those springing from sudden passion,-are few.
"So the pure limpid stream when foul with stains Of rushing torrents and descending rains, Works itself clear, and as it runs refines, And a new heaven in its fair bosom shines."
The first steps of the movement, intra-continental and trans-con- tinental, I date just one century ago, and simultaneous with the planting of Rutland.
Two years before, in 1768, Carver returned to New England from exploring the upper Mississippi, and first proposed opening a passage across the continent, as the best route for communication with China and the East Indies. In 1769, Pontiac, the evil genius so long repressive of western adventurers, perished. In the same year, Daniel Boone first saw the Kentucky. In 1770, forty Virginians reached the Cumberland, Carolinians penetrated to Natchez, Con- necticut men were at Wyoming,-were seeking land grants on the lower Mississippi,-were claiming eight hundred miles west of the Alleghanies. Hear the prophecy of these last knights errant,-one that we see more than fulfilled:
"In fifty years," said they, "our people will be more than half over this tract, extensive as it is; in less than one century the whole may become even well cultivated. If the coming period bears due proportion to that from the landing of poor distressed fugitives at Plymouth, nothing that we can fancy of the state of this country at a period equally future, can exceed what it will then be."
.
54
RUTLAND CENTENNIAL.
Besides all this, I have chanced to discover an event that took place on the self-same year and month and day which we now com- memorate,-one hundred years ago this day,-and which emphatic- ally marks that era as the day-spring of colonization breaking over the limits of the Atlantic colonies. In the very hours when the first comers to Rutland were here arriving, George Washington on horseback was making his first day's march in a nine weeks' expedi- tion beyond the Virginia mountains in search of western lands,- farms which had been granted his soldiers by the Legislature. His journal thus opens:
"October 5th, 1770 .- Began a journey to the Ohio in company with Dr. Craik, his servant and two of mine. Dined at Towlston and lodged at Leesburg, distant from Mount Vernon about forty- five miles."
This coincidence in the movements of Washington and of the Rutlanders should seem to us as remarkable as a cat's eyes coming just where there are holes in her skin, then seemed to the liege lord of both of them, George III. Neither Rutlanuer nor Washington was content to vegetate like the rhubarb pie-plant under a barrel and see the world only through its bung-hole.
The hamlet here a hundred years ago was Lilliputian, almost con- temptible in itself. Yet it was the baby figure of a giant mass, henceforth to come at large. It was among the first outbreaks, or rather inbreaks, of the irrepressible Yankee. That Yankee spirit,- colonizing in order to cultivation and culture,-my eyes have seen its miracles beyond the Missouri, beyond the Sierra Nevada, in Hawaiian Honolulu, in Egyptian Thebes, in Syrian Beyroot.
Thus the spring which here gushed forth, a century ago, was one head of a river that was to flow on and on making glad the cities of the world. To what shall I compare this fountain? It seems to me like a picture of the signing of the Declaration of our Inde- pendence,-small to the eye, great to the mind. To the eye it is fifty men in plain clothes, in a room plainly furnished, writing their names. To the mind it is nothing less than the laying of the cor- ner-stone of the empire of hope,
She that lifts up the manhood of the poor,
She of the open heart, and open hand,
With room enough about her hearth for all mankind.
Mr. Hall's pictures of Rutland in its swaddling-clothes seem to
.
55
RUTLAND CENTENNIAL.
me the best that can be painted by one shut up to his sources of knowledge. But he was not an eye-witness how Rutland began to be, and I doubt if he ever had an historical talk with no more than one ante-revolutionary settler, or if he ever entered a town not yet five years old.
Nevertheless, the truth is that history repeats itself. What Ver- mont was in 1770 Nebraska is in 1870, or rather all social eras are co-existent and contemporaneous. Accordingly whatever Mr. Hall has described from tradition my eyes have seen beyond the Mis- souri. Voyaging up that river I have sailed up the stream of time. Let Mr. Hall go out West, and there, names and dates being changed, he shall behold as waking realities what, after all antiqua- rian researches here, must remain the baseless fabric of a vision. The Rutland " of the dark backward " he shall there survey cut out of the distant past and brought safe into the present. How shall I pardon him that he has not long ago pilgrimed where such ravish- ing views of settlements in babyhood are as familiar as babies them- selves? Why seeks he the living among the dead?
Many years ago, happening by lucky chance to procure a license for myself and friends to inspect the iron crown of Lombardy, on arriving at the cathedral where it is enshrined I discovered a score of people in the treasury admiring a fac simile of that hoop of gold lined with the iron which is reputed to have formed one of the nails by which Christ was crucified, a crown which Lombard kings and German emperors for twelve centuries have worn at their corona- tions. Astonished at the interest these devotees manifested in the mock diadem, I invited them one and all to enter the sanctuary with me and delight themselves with its time-honored original. That vision was to them beatific.
Mr. Hall's mosaic has shown you a fac simile of an incipient commonwealth. In the great valley of the West such beau ideals are daily realized, so that your bodily eyes may gaze in broad day upon whatever he has contemplated only through the moonlight of memory, and has shown only to your mind's eye.
It were, perhaps, natural to expect that a speaker in the position now assigned me, would contrast Rutland to-day with its aspect in 1770. But the Rutland of to-day is known to you and unknown to me. If, therefore, I should expatiate on that theme, I must fare
56
RUTLAND CENTENNIAL."
as I did two years ago in the University of Athens, when showing the students how to pronounce their vernacular Greek. Again, how shall one contrast something with nothing? and in 1770 Rut- land was still nothing in respect to the works of man, while, as to the works of God,-aside from the destruction of forests,-all things remain as at the first. The mountain forms and their sky lines, here as round about Jerusalem,-thank Heaven,-can never be much changed. I see them to-day just as I saw them when my eyes first learned to delight in them as the heaven-kissing wall of a valley embosoming all the sweets of nature, while excluding the cares and sorrows of the world. I see them as my father saw them in 1786, and as the first comers saw them sixteen years before. Well has some one asserted that no man is ever homesick for his natal soil, unless its scenery is such that he can find his way home without a guide-board. The reason is that only in such places are the features of Mother Nature unmistakable. When a man born on a prairie, or in Chicago, returns to it after long absence, the places that had known him know him no more. Nor yet does he know the places. He cannot recognize the face of his own mother.
It is on this account that the highlanders have a contempt for lowland regions. Accordingly, when a Dutchman was quoting the grandiloquent hexameter of a patriotic Holland poet, Tellurem fecere Dii, sua litora Belgae, the English of which is that, "while the Gods made all the rest of the world, the Dutch created Hol- land," he provoked my Green Mountain pride so that I could not help retorting, "The Dutch made Holland, did they? I should really think they did ; it looks as if a Dutchman had made it."
"Holland that scarce deserves the name of land, As but the offscouring of British sand, This undigested vomit of the sea, Fell to the Dutch by just propriety."
But the characteristic features of Rutland, even to the utmost bounds of its everlasting hills, the trinity of goodly mountains, Killington, Pico and Shrewsbury, were not made by hands, or only by His hands "which by His strength setteth fast the mountains being girded with power."
But while the earth abideth forever, one generation passeth away and another generation cometh. Our fathers, where are they?
" Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep."
-
57
RUTLAND CENTENNIAL. -.
Meeting lately in Iowa a Rutlander who forty years ago was living , here with me, we sat down and talked over the occupants of every house at that time in this village. Only two or three could we remem- ber as dwelling where they then dwelt,-"a gleaning of grapes when the vintage is done." The pioneer Madame Williams, mother of the Governor, the lady ancient and honorable, of whom my earliest feeling was,-"Nor spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in her autumnal face," had already passed away. We recalled Temple, the excellency of dignity; Williams, the genial judge, whom I have seen weep as he sentenced a culprit; Walker, the minister, who was to me more awe-inspiring than the whole papal conclave in after years; Hodges, our merchant prince; Strong, rightly named, for he was strong indeed; Royce, the most popular of men, and Ormsbee, the most acute; Alvord, from whose cabinet shop Congressman Meacham had just gone to college, and who was just about to send General Benjamin Alvord to West Point.
Senator Foot we first saw when, the Castleton Seminary proving bankrupt, he was admitted to the Rutland bar. Who then could prophesy that he would live to preside over the national Senate? As little did Page, in the bank, foresee that he was training up a Governor. Green, Porter, Fay, Lord, Burt, Gove, Hall, with more others than I can mention, crowded upon our memories and tongues,
" And every lovely feature of their life
Did come appareled in more precious habit, Than when they lived indeed."
I see here a centenarian city, but my eyes seek in vain a cente- narian citizen. I saw one ten years ago in the capital of Wisconsin. I was there making a Fourth of July oration, and there sat before me the only revolutionary pensioner surviving in the State,-a hun- dred years old,-his youth passed in New England, his middle life in New York, his age on the Mississippi. I called him a three-fold man,-who had fought his country's foes on the land and on the sea, and, if his Maker had given him wings, he would have fought them in the air. "Look," I cried, "with all your eyes on what you never saw before, and never will see hereafter!"
The people took the horses out of the old man's carriage, and drew him themselves in triumph round the park.
Thus would we delight to honor a Rutland centenarian, did Heaven vouchsafe us one at this centenary.
--
58
RUTLAND CENTENNIAL. -
On this day of commemorating our ancestors who stood here a century ago, it is impossible not to contrast the world as they saw it with what our eyes to-day behold.
-
1770! In that year George the Third, who, according to English wits, reigned as long as he could, and then mizzled and misted, and who, even when crazy and clapped into a strait jacket, refused to believe himself a limited monarch, chose Lord North for his prime minister, who for a three penny tax on tea bartered away the bright- est jewel of the crown, and, on the next morning after the time we are hallowing as the birthday of Rutland, the British monarch, see- ing a cannon fired twenty times in a minute, pronounced it an argu- ment no Bostonian could resist. Yes, a hundred years ago all England hugged the delusion that five thousand of her soldiers could subjugate America. She had just bullied Spain into evacuat- ing the Falkland Islands, but was not without fears of France. In Paris the Abbe Raynal was just propounding his theory that Americans had "degenerated through transplanting, as if nature had punished men for crossing the ocean." He fortified his philosophy by the facts that Indians have no beards, and so passed for men half finished, as well as that "of those Americans educated in Europe not one had risen to any great perfection in the slightest pursuit; and of those who had staid in their own country not one had distinguished himself by superiority in those talents which lead to fame." Austria, loving darkness rather than light, rebuffed the emperor who strove to deliver her, till he wrote as his own epitaph, "Hic jacet one who failed in all that he ever undertook." Prussia, which up to the Seven Years war had been asking pardon of her neighbors for being born, had already aggrandized herself by shar- ing in the first partition of Poland. Russia had just banished the Jews, and for the first time gained decided advantages over Turkey, and was sending a fleet into the Mediterranean. Denmark bom- barded Algiers, but so feebly as to embolden the pirates there. Capt. Cook was cireumnavigating the globe, though as yet only a lieutenant. The first Napoleon and Wellington,-both children of the same year,-were still unweaned in their cradles. The two first settlers in one Vermont township had been in it almost a year before either knew that the other was there. Their non intercourse was of a piece with that in the great world. Countries separated by a
59
RUTLAND CENTENNIAL. -
hundred miles of geographical distance were put asunder a thousand miles by mutual contempt, and then touched one another at only a few points, while now no king can turn over in his bed without dis- turbing the slumbers of a dozen neighboring potentates.
1770! Then the natural sciences were still in embryo. . It was eleven years afterward when Cavendish, by decomposing water, laid the corner-stone of chemistry. It was sixteen years afterward before the twitching of a frog's leg led Galvani to originate the science which embalms his name, and which now, like Puck, puts a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. It was seventeen years afterward when Werner published those ideas on stratification which gave birth to geology.
1770! One year before, Arkwright had invented the spinning jenny,-a contrivance surpassing the hand wheel as much as the sewing machine surpasses the hand needle, but which has itself been improved every year since. It was twenty-three years after- ward when Whitney devised the cotton gin, without which the jenny would have been idle half the time for lack of cotton to spin.
1770! One year before, and when Fulton was four years old, Watt had obtained his first patent for the steam engine, which has done more for England than all the treaties she ever made and all the battles she ever fought. It was eighteen years afterward when Darwin uttered the poetical prophecy,-
"Soon shall thine arm, unconquered Steam ! afar, Drag the slow barge or drive the rapid car " --
a prediction not fulfilled till the first passenger railway was com- pleted fifty-five years after. Two years after 1770, Bridgewater, the originator of the canal system, died in full faith that the chief end for which rivers were created was to feed canals, and that canals could never be superseded.
1770! Forty-four years were to roll on before the first issue by steam of the London Times, a thunderer whose peals the news- paper press the world over has always been proud either to echo or to counterblast.
1770! The death of Whitefield befell on the fifth day before that which we keep as the birthday of Rutland, and the death of Benning Wentworth, the New Hampshire Governor who chartered it, was on the sixteenth day after. Up to this time no Bible had ever been
1
60
RUTLAND CENTENNIAL. -
printed in America. That very year the first missionary was sent to Labrador by Moravians, but none went abroad from non-Mora- vian England till 1793, nor from the United States till nineteen years later, 1812.
1770! Though Berkeley had four and forty years before sung in poetic rapture,
"Westward the course of empire takes its way,"
the thirteen colonies had then no more than nine institutions which had even the name of colleges,-and New England only four,-one of those, Dartmouth, born that same year, and still an Indian school.
1770 was a dark year for America. Then martial law was declared in Massachusetts. Then its royal governor offered £100 for the name of the author of a pasquinade on the royal judges, posted on Boston town house. Then, on the 5th of March, was the Boston massacre, described in all sermons as the blood of innocence crying from the ground. Then the liberty pole in New York was cut down by red-coats. Then tyrannical taxation drove to non-importation, tea-totallers gave up tea, as sea-tottlers give up every thing in heave-offerings, and all the Harvard and Princeton graduates were dressed in homespun. The commencement themes at Princeton were, "Non importation the glory of America." "The right to resist a bad King." "All men by nature free." The air was full of rumors about France and Spain combining against Eng- land, and myriads were longing to see their stepmother fall into such a necessity as would prove their opportunity. Such was 1770!
What is 1870? That truly is a blind man's question, like asking, "Why does beauty please us?" The answer ought to be that epi- taph of Sir Christopher Wren which we read beneath the dome, radiating toward every quarter of the earth and directing its con- vergent curves to Heaven, which he had reared so broad and high as to transcend all others save the miracle of Michael Angelo. The felicity of its position gives sublimity to Wren's epitaph, namely : Si monumentum requiris, circumspice !- If you seek his monu- ment, look around you! When we look around us here, where can we turn that our eyes do not rest on monuments of the last century ? In Rutland we see such monuments not only in every human work, everything whatever graven by art and man's device, but in most of the inventions of which these works are specimens. I mean
61
1
RUTLAND CENTENNIAL.
agricultural machinery, which has made farming a sedentary pur. suit ; postal facilities "which waft a sigh from Indus to the pole;" drawing-room cars like the Queen City, combining in one the bed of Morpheus, the boudoir of Venus and Apollo's chariot of fire; photography, which makes the sun stand still and paint our por- traits; locomotives, megatheria mightier by far than all the mam- moths of Siberia; and the telegraph, which, though it hath no tongue, doth speak with most miraculous organ.
It is no more than sixty-five years since the first whites crossed the continent in our latitude. Last year an iron river had flowed across it from ocean to ocean. Already its banks swarm with set- tlers, even as an unbroken oasis skirts the Suez canal all through the desert. Rutland had seen twenty one years when the first new State was added to the original thirteen. Twenty-four have now been added. Vermonters are in them all, and everywhere at home. Long after Rutland began to be, a Vermont judge was in a minority. of one when he refused to recognize any title to a slave except a bill of sale in the handwriting of the Lord Almighty, but we behold all Americans concurring in his opinion, and by the Fifteenth Amendment filling up the "great gulf fixed" which so long severed the North and the South. African enfranchisement was as though the Vatican Laocoon should be released from the serpent who has so long held him in stony coils,
" As if he whom the asp, in its marble grasp, Kept close and for ages strangled, Got loose from the hold of each serpent fold, And exulted, disentangled."
Time fails me to descant on the increase within a hundred years of churches at home and of missions abroad, like the spring-time, leaving no corner of the world untouched; on common schools, good enough for the best, while cheap enough for the poorest ; and of travel, long the luxury of the few, now the necessity of the mil- lions, and confessed to be, next to falling in love, the best means of making up for the lack of a liberal education.
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.