Chapter XIII: The CIVIL War

The most prosperous and active years in the history of the Cape--those from the thirties to the fifties--were not occupied exclusively with building bridges and dikes, erecting factories and salt works, drying codfish, and greeting deep-water shipmasters on their return from the antipodes. Such activities were marred by a less desirable manifestation of energy--schism in the churches. Not that schism was anything new or particularly undesirable. Usually it is an indication that progress is in the offing. Furthermore, this particular rift in the ranks of the church was brought about by a sufficiently righteous motive on the part of those who left the fold. They refused to support any longer a church which preached Christianity on the one hand and on the other received into membership men who tolerated slavery. Those who broke away were called ‘Come-Outers’ (or ‘Comers Out’), a name which was not restricted to these groups of Abolitionists, but had been given pretty generally to all who for any reason had seceded from an established church.

The Come-Outers were not essentially riotous or seditious people. They merely had the courage of their convictions and refused to remain loyal to a church whose tenets they believed were unchristian. The two camps would doubtless have rubbed along with no more friction than is usual between dissenting organizations, if it had not been for agitators from elsewhere. Such agitators there were, of course, all over New England, and occasionally a band of them invaded the Cape. They did not come often, for the Cape was out of their way; but when they did arrive, trouble was sure to follow.

The most sensational instance of such a visit occurred in Harwich in 1848. A report had been spread in anti-slavery circles in Boston that a Harwich coasting captain, whose name is not recorded, had taken one hundred dollars from a Negro in Norfolk to bring him and a friend North on his schooner, and had then seized him and had him advertised as a runaway slave. Such indignation was aroused by this outrage that a group of distinguished Boston Abolitionists visited Harwich and held an indignation meeting. Among them were Parker Pillsbury, Stephen Foster, and Lucy Stone. No building in Harwich, or for that matter on the Cape, was big enough to hold the crowd that assembled; men and women poured in from the neighboring towns until, according to one estimate, three thousand had gathered in the grove where the convention was held.

The first speaker was Parker Pillsbury--a young enthusiast whose emotions were stronger than his judgment. His share in the programme was to state the case against the captain of the schooner, without mentioning his name. Writing of the event thirty-three years later, when time and age, if not the Civil War itself, should have somewhat calmed his ardor, Pillsbury calls the Captain’s deed one ‘that no Modoc nor Apache Indian under Heaven would ever have done! In cold, unprovoked blood--never!’ Such ringing phrases written in his old age give some notion of what Pillsbury’s oratorical style must have been in his youth. It is no wonder that his speech started a tumult which subsided only when the Captain himself took the platform and said that a friend had just told him that he had been accused of stealing. Pillsbury hedged, declaring that he had named no names and had not used the word ‘steal.’ But the Captain demanded a hearing, and the crowd became silent.

The Captain’s speech was a striking example of the perfectly natural moral blindness that afflicted so many otherwise estimable and pious citizens when they looked at slavery or were mixed up in the slave trade. The phenomenon has not disappeared with the abolition of this particular business: most men are still able to close the shutter that blots from the mental vision a view of the suffering that their profitable ruthlessness creates, and if they keep the shutter closed long enough, they may even forget that there is any suffering and so finally become unaware of any wrongdoing. Something of the sort, at all events, had taken place in the soul of the Harwich Captain. He seems to have pigeonholed his religion even more successfully than most people do nowadays. He calmly told the story from his own point of view, contradicting nothing that Pillsbury had accused him of, and on concluding, took a seat on the platform. One of Pillsbury’s accusations, which the Captain admitted, was that he was a member in good standing of the Baptist Church. Taking this admission as his text, the next speaker, Stephen Foster, launched forth on an invective that evoked from Pillsbury the admiring comment that he seemed to be ‘Father of the seven thunders of Patmos.’ There is little doubt that the tribute is deserved, for his speech provoked such a riot that Pillsbury says, ‘I have seen many mobs and riots in my more than forty years of humble service in the cause of Freedom and Humanity. But I never encountered one more desperate in determination, nor fiendish in spirit, than was that in Harwich, in the year 1848.’

It started when some of the Captain’s friends in the crowd stormed round the platform, calling on him to pitch Foster down to them; but the Captain, who had not commanded vessels in vain, kept calm and told the rioters that he had no need of their interference. Shortly afterwards he left the scene. Foster went on with his speech, declaring that any church which admitted such men as members was no less than the ‘bulwark of American Slavery.’ This was too much for the Harwich Baptists. One of them, ‘a member of the Orthodox Church, who had just come from his meeting (and it was said from the Sacrament) leaped like a lion on to the platform. His eyes flashed fury if not fire; his teeth and fists were clenched, and he seemed a spirit from the pit, who might have been commissioned to lead its myrmidons in a deadly fray for such a faith and such a church as his.... His first note was a shriek; “It’s a lie; what you say is a lie; a damned lie! and I’ll defend the church!”’

He had plenty of support. A group of fanatics jumped to the platform, seized Pillsbury and hurled him to the ground with kicks and blows. Two Harwich Abolitionists, Captain Chase and Captain Smith, who had been seated near him, sprang to his defense and were knocked senseless. Another speaker, William Wells Brown, was thrown over the back of the platform, and Foster, the blasts of whose eloquence had kicked up this ugly sea, was rescued from his assailants only after his ‘Sunday frock coat had been rent in twain from bottom to top, and his body considerably battered and bruised.’

Thus ended a lurid Anti-Slavery Convention. Certain inferences may be drawn from the proceedings.

Seafaring is a broad school where men see customs that are not their own and learn tolerance. Not all Cape shipmasters approved of slavery (Sandwich and Barnstable had anti-slavery societies as early as 1837), but they did approve of minding their own business and letting the slave-owner mind his. There is much to censure in this attitude; it is not one that hastens the millennium; it seems even to suggest that the millennium had arrived and had taken different forms in different places: slaves for the Virginia planter; smart crews for the New England shipmaster. And this view--too tolerant to commend itself in the High Court of Progress--may account not only for the placidity of many Cape Abolitionists, but also for the stubborn stand-patters in the church, who, with an inconsistency almost too perfect for human beings to have achieved, regarded the Come Outers as traitors and the Southerners as within their rights.

Some of the seafaring Abolitionists adopted other measures to show their convictions, and used their vessels to bring slaves North to safety. Among these kind-hearted smugglers was George Lovell, of Osterville, who died in 1861. He was a wealthy and very influential South Side shipowner with strong anti-slavery convictions. It was quite natural, therefore, that he should slip a runaway on board one of his vessels in Norfolk or Savannah now and then, and land him some dark night on the free soil of Cape Cod. The slaves made their way across the Cape, via a pretty well-established ‘underground railroad,’ to Barnstable, where they were always welcome guests at the houses of Ezekiel Thacher and Alvin Howes. Yet the atmosphere of these New England homes seems not always to have proved congenial to the Negroes; for they frequently sought their own level in some hang-out in the woods on Mary Dunn’s road, where rum and a less rarefied environment put them more at their ease.

So matters stood when the opening shot at Fort Sumter cleared the air for all Cape-Codders. Faced by a common enemy, Come Outer and stand-patter alike forgot their differences and joined forces for the coming struggle. The war found greater favor on the Cape than any war had found before. It has been shown with what difficulty men were drafted for Canada to fight the French and Indians. The Revolution revealed Tories in almost every town. The War of 1812 found the Cape hot and rebellious toward the Administration. But when, in 1861, President Lincoln issued his first call for volunteers, the Cape responded with an enthusiasm that, coming from a maritime community, was surprising. War meant that long-voyage trading could be carried on only at great risk; that whalemen stood an excellent chance of being captured on their way home from the Pacific, and that fishermen would find their old markets closed.

Early in the war, R. B. Forbes, that saltiest of Bostonians, found leisure, while patrolling Cape Cod Bay and the North Shore in his four launches, to comment on the effect the war was having on Cape fishermen. He writes:

BARNSTABLE BAY, _July 8, 1861_

I have visited Salem, Beverly, Gloucester, Provincetown,
Barnstable.... In all these ports and many others there are hundreds
of vessels laying idle and thousands of men, second to none in
loyalty, second to none in experience of our Southern Coast, and
second to none in all the elements which constitute the accomplished
seaman--excepting only a want of knowledge of the art of war....
Their fish markets are cut off, and the stock of last season is on
hand to a considerable amount, unsold and unsaleable; ... At this
moment I have in view from my Yacht a hundred sail, more or less, in
Provincetown, Wellfleet and Truro laid up for want of work to do.

Confronted with the prospect of such hard times as Captain Forbes describes, the Cape yet went willingly to war. Sandwich led the way, and on May 8, 1861--about three weeks after Lincoln first called for volunteers--an enthusiastic company that gave itself the name of the Sandwich Guards marched to Boston under the command of Captain Charles Chipman. This organization was the fourth volunteer company in the State to report for service. It was immediately sent to Fortress Monroe and later took part in a number of engagements, including the battles of Antietam and Fredericksburg. The other towns responded valiantly, in almost every case exceeding their quota of men. Provincetown contributed $45,000 and sent two hundred and fifty men, fifty-seven over her quota. Barnstable raised $58,000 and exceeded her quota of men by thirty-five, sending two hundred and seventy-two in all. The prosperity of Harwich is shown by her three hundred and forty-one enlistments and $54,000. The total number of soldiers from the Cape was approximately twenty-five hundred, and her contribution in money amounted to about half a million, $90,000 of which was subsequently refunded.

The Cape’s most distinguished army officer was Major Joseph E. Hamblin. He was born in Yarmouth, where he spent his youth; then he moved to Boston, and at the outbreak of the war he was in business in New York. Beginning as Adjutant of the Fifth New York Volunteers, he was within two years promoted to the ranks of Major, Lieutenant-Colonel, and Colonel. He took part in the battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, not to mention half a dozen minor engagements. As Colonel at the battle of Cedar Creek, though he had received two wounds early in the fight, he held on and was instrumental in turning apparent defeat into victory. After this engagement, Colonel Hamblin, on Sheridan’s recommendation, was promoted to the rank of Brigadier-General, and for brilliant service at Sailor’s Creek, he was brevetted Major-General. He died in 1870 and lies in the family tomb in Yarmouthport.

The sea was, of course, the most appropriate theater for Cape activities during the war, and the only reason why more local names are not found in the naval records is that a large part of the country’s merchant marine was still dodging the Confederates at sea--with Cape-Codders on the quarterdecks. But, even so, a good many Cape men enlisted in the navy. Some of them, indeed, were steered into it. As early as May, 1862, Charles F. Swift offered a set of resolutions in a Yarmouth town meeting to the effect that, since the enemy had showed signs of sending out ‘piratical crafts’ to prey upon the commerce of the country, it was especially proper for the citizens of Yarmouth, whose pursuits and training were largely maritime, to ‘lend cheerful aid in bringing these pests of the ocean to condign punishment.’ These resolutions were not without effect, for fifteen Yarmouth men served their country as officers in the navy, and three acted as pilots in Southern waters.

The effect that the war had on the Cape was to hasten the decline which had already almost imperceptibly begun. No community that depends on the sea for its prosperity can flourish long after it is driven from the sea, and, bit by bit, changing economic conditions were forcing Cape-Codders ashore. Whaling had been virtually abandoned except at Provincetown; fishermen had to begin again with new schooners or else give up entirely; and now the props were being knocked out from under the last and proudest business of Cape men--the merchant marine. No wonder contemporary writers believed the war to be the cause of all their evils. There was probably not a man on the Cape who did not mistakenly curse Jeff Davis as the cause of the hard times--and undeniably the circumstantial evidence against him was strong. Before the war, business had been good; even in the late fifties most shipmasters had had enough to do. Then four years of war, when cargo-carrying was exciting work; and after the war, bad times indeed. The war stood squarely between the good times and the bad; so the war got the blame.

No bright spot appeared, even on the distant horizon; more and more capital kept heading westward; less and less toward the sea and the ships. The inevitable came. Young Cape-Codders, realizing that the sea had failed them, moved inland and became manufacturers or bankers. Writing in 1884, Shebnah Rich says:

Some of the Cape towns have been reduced more than half, Truro
among the number.... I have counted fourteen houses in a little
neighborhood nestled prettily enough for an artist’s pencil. For
forty years not a house had been added or removed.... The next turn
of the road opened another picture, where I counted a dozen houses,
and in imagination, a dozen more, that had been moved away within as
many years. The population of Truro ... in 1860 was 1883 ... in 1880
less than 1000. Over one hundred families from Truro now reside in
Somerville.

What a falling off was there! The fate of Truro is no solitary instance. In the thirty years that followed the war, the population of the whole Cape shrank from 36,000 to 27,000. It has dropped another thousand since, but the damage was done with the first exodus. The Cape has by this time grown used to commercial insignificance. If there had never been a Civil War, this resignation might not yet have been achieved. But the same end would have been reached ultimately and from exactly the same causes.