Chapter IV: The First Settlers

After they were settled at Plymouth, the Pilgrims found the Cape both a blessing and a nuisance. It was a blessing as a granary, from which friendly Indians supplied them with corn; but geographically it was a nuisance because it lay across the water route to New York and trade with the Dutch. The voyage around the Cape was too dangerous; was there no easy way across it?

On one of his voyages to the Cape for corn, Bradford had landed at Bourne and had seen how nearly the Cape was cut in two at that point by Scusset Creek on the north and Manomet River, emptying into Buzzards Bay, on the south. The idea of avoiding the passage round the Cape by using these streams, with the short carry overland from the one to the other, now occurred to him, and by 1627 the settlers were employing this channel as an established trade route and had erected a house and a palisade near the headwaters of the Manomet River. Here they kept two men, and built a shallop large enough to navigate the waters of Nantucket Sound. This new passage was so successful that in a few years Plymouth was trading with the Connecticut River and New York.

The colonists now ceased to think of the Cape as a hindrance to their voyages, and by degrees began to realize that it was a good place to live in. The Plymouth men were not the only ones, however, who had this idea. Enthusiasts in Scituate and Lynn and Ipswich were also turning their backs on their hardly completed cabins and heading for newer pastures on the Cape. Furthermore, in 1630, Bradford at last received his patent from the Earl of Warwick, President of the Council for New England. In this document the whole Cape was annexed to the territory of the Plymouth Colony, and settlements could now be made on it with perfect legality.

Naturally Sandwich was the first site that was selected. For one thing, it was far up the Cape and close to the Manomet trading post; but more important was the extent of salt marsh that bordered it on the north. The problem of fodder for their cattle was always an urgent one with the settlers. They had no time for turning forests into meadows green with English hay. They had enough to do in building their houses and clearing land for their corn. The acres of Sandwich marshes, therefore, which yielded more salt hay than they could possibly use, to be had for the cutting, were in themselves reason enough for choosing this spot. Here, too, was a stream with herring and water-power enough for a mill. Wood in prodigious quantities was at hand whichever way they turned. There was no harbor, to be sure, but a creek navigable for small vessels served well enough instead. So Sandwich it was.

Edward Freeman, of Lynn, was the father of the new town. He had the pioneer’s restlessness to an exaggerated degree. He arrived from England in 1635, lived a year at Lynn, made his way to Plymouth in 1637, and, staying there only long enough to obtain the Governor’s consent to start a new settlement at Sandwich, set out with ten others, most of them like himself from Lynn, and, making his way over the old Indian trail through the woods, arrived at his goal with his axes and his cattle and began to clear land and build houses. The Governor had authorized him and his companions to take enough land for sixty families, and almost immediately recruits began to arrive, swelling the numbers of the ‘ten men of Saugus.’ Twenty or thirty families from Lynn, Duxbury, and Plymouth came straggling in during the year that followed Freeman’s arrival. Their purpose was ‘to worship God and to make money.’

As the numbers in the new town grew, the question of dividing the land became acute. Not everybody, by any means, was entitled to hold land. The old order had not changed, and as yet freedom and equality were not even theories of government. But even among the potential landholders, disputes--or at least problems that bade fair to become disputes--frequently arose. They therefore wisely shifted the responsibility to the Plymouth Court, and the Court with equal wisdom ordered Captain Miles Standish to go to Sandwich and arrange the matter in an equitable fashion. John Alden went with the Captain, and between them they did the job to the satisfaction of all hands--doubtless by the usual method of drawing lots. Sandwich grew and prospered, and in 1639, two years after Edward Freeman and his little band of followers arrived, the settlement was regularly incorporated, and named Sandwich after the old town in Kent.

The story of Yarmouth, which was the next town to be established on the Cape, begins with an heroic failure. The Reverend Stephen Bachiler had for several years prior to 1638 been leading a stormy life in Lynn. He was one of those fiery malcontents whose utter unwillingness to compromise with authority defeats the very progress it strives for. He had been dissatisfied with the Church in England; he was still dissatisfied with the Church in Lynn, and tried, with the support of a handful of followers, to start a new one. He was warned to confine his preaching to the satellites he already had and to accept no new converts. He refused, and decided to move away to some spot where he would be left alone with his doctrine. Such was the man who at the age of seventy-five set out on foot for Yarmouth at the beginning of the winter of 1637-38. With him went a few of his unregenerate flock.

Such an enterprise was foredoomed to failure. Yarmouth was a wilderness, relieved only by a few Indian clearings. The flats and forests were the only possible sources of food. A wise man would have waited for spring, but wise men are never guilty of dramatic rebellion. Bachiler and his friends would certainly have starved or frozen that winter but for the Indians. As it was, their sufferings were such that they departed in the spring--just when they might have begun to be comfortable; and this admirable madman spent the last years of his life in continual religious hot water in various parts of New England. His frantic effort to settle at Yarmouth has no bearing on the town’s history, but as an heroic gesture it deserves mention.

Bachiler had hardly departed when the first real settlers made their appearance. These were Anthony Thacher, John Crow, and Thomas Howes, who arrived in the late winter of 1639. Stephen Hopkins, one of the Mayflower band, also built a house that same year, but soon sold it and returned to Plymouth. Within a year other recruits arrived from various parts of the Bay Colony and built houses on the shores of the millpond. The town was incorporated almost as soon as the first settlers arrived in 1639, the same year as the incorporation of Sandwich and Barnstable, and the Indian name of Mattacheese was officially changed to Yarmouth. The new name was given, like the names of so many other Cape towns, as a reminder of the port from which a number of its citizens had doubtless embarked when leaving the old country.

Except for a few clearings that the Indians had made, and the marshes alongshore, the Yarmouth pioneers were confronted by an unbroken expanse of woods; their first labor, therefore, was with the axe. As soon as their houses were built, there arose, as there had arisen at Sandwich, the troublesome question of dividing the land. Thacher, Crow, and Howes had received somewhat embarrassing instructions in this regard from the Plymouth Court; they had been told to divide the land on the ‘to-him-that-hath’ principle, which was easy enough, but they were also to take into consideration each man’s ‘quality.’ Here was a problem to daunt the most dogmatic. A committee was formed, however, and the land was divided; but nobody was satisfied. Captain Miles Standish was added to the committee, and another division was made; the citizens were no better content than before. In desperation the Court ordered the fiery Captain to act alone and gave him autocratic power. Thus armed, he proceeded to cut the Gordian knot. Half of the landholders were ejected, the claims of the others went unheeded, and Standish began again, making a complete redistribution of all the real estate. Still nobody was happy, naturally enough, but their grumbling could not pierce the armor of the Captain’s plenipotentiary powers, and the landholders settled down resentfully on their new estates, while Standish made his way back to Plymouth.

It was natural enough that the troubles over land should have been greater in Yarmouth than they had been at Sandwich, for the men who settled Yarmouth were not in any department of life a unit. They had come from various parts of the Bay Colony, and for various reasons. Thacher was the only one who, after the departure of Hopkins, could be called a Pilgrim. The rest were of miscellaneous doctrines and belonged to different walks of life. A few were restless spirits from Sandwich. The one bond that could hold them together was their common interest in their new town, a bond which, as has been seen, had to be forged on the anvil of fiery misunderstanding; and Miles Standish was no gentle blacksmith.

In spite of an early restriction forbidding any man to own two house lots unless they were both occupied; in spite, too, of the alliterative dictum that the first settlements were compact in order to bring the inhabitants near the ‘mill, the market, and the meeting,’ it is certain that the town straggled over a large area. Richard Sears, and some friends who came about 1640, lived several miles from the rest of the settlers, and some adventurous spirits built their houses on the shore of Bass Pond, some distance off in the woods. This wide geographical distribution reflects in a striking, though perhaps accidental, fashion the divergence of interests and opinions that long kept the Yarmouth men disunited.

Their lack of unanimity was made the more conspicuous by the harmony that reigned throughout the first years of the history of Barnstable. This town, like Yarmouth, had a forerunner who arrived before the main body of settlers and played an almost lone hand against the wilderness. The Barnstable pioneer was the Reverend Joseph Hull, with whom was associated Thomas Dimock. Hull came from England in 1635 and took up his ministry in Weymouth, where he eked out his salary by trading in cattle. Whether it was his activity in this field of endeavor or his doctrine that offended the Weymouth church does not appear; very likely both. At all events, they decided that he was ‘contentious’ and dismissed him. Nowhere in Massachusetts are there more extensive salt marshes than at Barnstable; these ‘hay grounds,’ as they were called, acted as a magnet to the cattle-raising pastor, and to Barnstable Hull came with a small number of followers. The precise date of his arrival is not known, but he was well established there in the fall of 1639. The lease which the Plymouth Colony gave him and Dimock was dated June 4, 1639 (old style), and in the following December his settlement was incorporated as a town. But he probably did not wait to receive this grant before occupying; he occupied first and got permission afterwards.

Hull was happy in his new location, and divided his time between his cattle and the souls of his diminutive congregation, some of whom were Indians. Then there arrived, on October 11, 1639, the Reverend John Lothrop and a large part of his church from Scituate. Mr. Hull welcomed them with enthusiasm and invited the whole band to dinner--some at Mr. Mayo’s, some at Mr. Lombard’s, and some at his own house. The newcomers far outnumbered Hull’s little band, and were united in their affection and loyalty to Lothrop. Inevitably they took charge, and little by little Hull found himself a nonentity. It was nobody’s fault. There was no room for two preachers--even if the Court had allowed it--and Hull’s congregation--ever eager, like the Athenians, for some new thing--began to listen to Lothrop’s sermons. Hull stood this neglect for a year or so and then moved to Yarmouth, where he began preaching to a few loyal friends from Barnstable and a group of malcontents from the Yarmouth church. For this act the Barnstable church excommunicated him, and the civil authorities supported the church by issuing a warrant for his arrest. He moved to Dover and later to the Isles of Shoals, where he died.

Meanwhile, Barnstable was flourishing under the wise and competent leadership of Mr. Lothrop. The remarkable thing about Lothrop--and the highest tribute to his character as a pastor--is the way in which his church followed him from point to point throughout his wanderings. Many of his original London congregation had sat under him in Scituate, and with him left Scituate for Barnstable. History can show few more perfect examples of the Shepherd and his flock. It is not without reason that the present Congregational Church in West Barnstable, which is the same organization that Lothrop brought down with him three hundred years ago, assert that their church has the longest uninterrupted history of any church of that denomination in the world. This statement would be true were it not that Henry Jacob’s church in London, the first Congregational church ever founded, continued for a few years after Lothrop’s departure from it.

The propriety of naming the new town after the English Barnstaple is obvious to any one who has seen the shore fronts of the two places at low tide--miles of sand flats in a long narrow harbor, crooked channels twisting their way seaward, and low, easy shore lines on both sides. Such is the aspect of both harbors, and so forcibly did their new surroundings remind the settlers of the old English town that they named it Barnstable forthwith.

Eastham, the last of the original four Cape towns to be founded, has one point in its early history in common with Barnstable; it was settled by a solidly united group of church members. They came from Plymouth, and thus was Eastham endowed at birth with a richer strain of Pilgrim blood than Sandwich, Yarmouth, or Barnstable. By 1640, Plymouth had begun to suffer from the loss of a handful of her citizens here and a handful there, as they had emigrated to one or another of the many new settlements that were everywhere springing up with bewildering speed. Business in the old town was not what it had been; men began to grumble, and for want of a better grievance, declared that the trouble was the poor soil; besides, they said, they were cramped for acreage. The truth was that they, like the rest of the early New-Englanders, were still goaded by the gadfly that later sent the prairie schooners heading westward toward the Rockies. But the soil was a good enough pretext, and satisfied everybody. It had been used to justify almost every emigration in Massachusetts so far. The Plymouth men, however, were more radical and more ambitious than their predecessors. They decided to move in a body--to transplant the entire population--and leave Plymouth, as the Indians had left it before them, a prey to the winds and the wolves. The question was, Where should they go?

It so happened that Bradford, in making over to the Colony the patent he had received in 1630 from the Earl of Warwick, had reserved for the use of the Purchasers and the Old Comers three tracts of land, one of which was Nauset. This region had for twenty years been to the Pilgrims what the Promised Land was to Moses--a land flowing with milk and honey. The Nauset soil purported to be the best in the Colony. These two considerations, therefore--the fact that it was peculiarly their own land, and that it was very fertile--induced the authorities to send a small party down the Cape to look the property over and report.

They returned with the discouraging verdict that there was room at Nauset for only about one half the population of Plymouth. The Governor and town fathers heard this statement and hoped that the matter was closed; they could not contemplate without a shudder the prospect of losing half the already depleted population of their town. A good many of the older citizens agreed with them; but there was no stopping the younger element. As Bradford ruefully put it, ‘neither could the rest hinder them, they having made some beginning,’ and in April, 1644, Plymouth saw, with a heavy heart, the more vigorous half of her population depart for Nauset. They had made suitable arrangements with the Purchasers and Old Comers, and their hopes were high as they began their fifty-mile journey; but they left something very like despair behind them. As Bradford puts it, ‘Thus was this poore church left, like an ancient mother, growne olde and forsaken of her children.... Thus she that had made many rich became her selfe poore.’

The pioneers from Plymouth arrived at Nauset in time to plant corn and beans, and had the spring before them to build their houses. The soil came up to their expectations, and they were happy in their new location. But freedom from the immediate vigilance and restraint of the Old Colony seems to have gone to their heads, for they hacked down the forests in such a wanton fashion that the generations which followed found the soil blown bare. The ‘blackish and deep mould’ which Bradford had seen there twenty years before had become dry and sandy waste, blown this way and that with no forests to break the force of the wind. Almost literally, when the Nauset forests were demolished, the surface of the soil was blown away, and the loose sand which lay below it was laid bare, an easy prey to every gale.

However, for some years the crops were good and the town prospered. The land had been ‘legally’ bought from the Indians, as it had been in the earlier Cape towns, but it is hard to take such transactions seriously or to see anything but the mere letter of the truth in the proud boast of Governor Winslow, who proclaimed that ‘The English do not possess one foot of land in the Colony but was fairly obtained by honest purchase from the Indian proprietors.’ The traders who give Congo natives glass beads for ivory have never been lauded for their ethics, yet their practices differ in no way from the dealings of our ancestors who gave a hatchet for a square mile of land.

At Nauset the settlers showed themselves even more avaricious than usual, and the Indians more than usually compliant; for when they were asked who owned Billingsgate, they replied that it belonged to nobody. ‘In that case,’ said the settlers, ‘it is ours’; and the Indians believed them. Perhaps the men from Plymouth quieted their consciences with the reflection that they had paid George and Mattaquason, the sachems of Nauset and Monomoyick respectively, something (they prudently refrain from saying how much) for most of the territory that is now Eastham and Orleans.

When the settlement was two years old, and the watchful eye of the Old Colony officials saw that it prospered, they consented to its being incorporated. Five years later, in 1651, its name was changed from Nauset to Eastham, though the old name is still used for the beach, the lighthouse, and the life-saving station.

On these four solid pillars--Sandwich, Yarmouth, Barnstable, and Nauset--rested the early civilization of the Cape. From these sprang all the other towns, sometimes by gradual segregation, sometimes by a deliberate exodus, until, like Plymouth, they had made themselves weak to make the Cape strong. And by a curious chance, which the devout Plymouth fathers would have called divine retribution, Eastham, whose inhabitants had so weakened Plymouth by their departure, was the town that herself suffered worst from such losses.

What manner of men were these who started civilization on the Cape? They were, first of all, men to whom Democracy, as a theory of government or as a way of life, was unheard of. No royal parent ever scanned the eligibility of the suitors for the hand of his daughter with greater care than the Plymouth Government scanned the applicants for admission to its towns. Before any man might own land or build a house in these new settlements, he must pass inspection by the General Court or its local representatives. This law was no dead letter in the statute book--it was vigorously and unceremoniously enforced. Every town appointed a couple of substantial citizens to the unpleasant duty of ejecting undesirables. If a newcomer, whether through ignorance, arrogance, or mere thoughtlessness, failed to consult these officials and began to build his house unsanctioned, he was promptly ‘warned out of the town,’ regardless of his desirability, and was obliged to leave his house unfinished until he should have complied with the law. [See note 1 to Chapter IV.] Such was the fate of Richard Child, of Yarmouth--a worthy character who subsequently was admitted and allowed ‘to enjoy his cottage.’ In 1639, the committee on personnel took exception to ‘Old Worden (dead), Burnell, Wright, and Wat Deville.’ Two early guardians of Barnstable’s exclusiveness--William Crocker and Thomas Huckins--found themselves called upon to perform the same ruthless duty. If the town official proved too tolerant in judging applicants for admission, the watchful eye of Plymouth detected the weakness and promptly let the town know of its displeasure. In 1639, some recruits slipped by the local authorities in Sandwich and established themselves as landowners in the town. Instantly Sandwich was complained of for having admitted men who were ‘unfit for church society.’ The Colonial Court was entirely arbitrary in making decisions of this sort. Every man must have the ‘leave and liking’ of the Governor and his assistants, or out he went.

Such an apparently hostile attitude toward strangers took deep root in the Cape soil. In fact it never entirely disappeared. As late as 1810, the selectmen and town clerk of Brewster remonstrated against the appointment of Edward O’Brien as postmaster, ‘he being a foreigner a catholik and, in the opinion of the town, an alien.’ Even to-day the old suspicion lives, and appears in the instinctively critical way in which every newcomer is scanned by the townspeople. The fact that their ready censure is often justified does not make the phenomenon less interesting. It is a direct inheritance from the old days--a ghost of the former vigorous practice of ‘warning out.’

There was nothing democratic, either, in the first assignments of land. The town of Yarmouth affords a good illustration of the aristocratic fashion in which this was done. Anthony Thacher and a number of associates were chosen as a committee to apportion lands there, but the Colonial Court stipulated that they should assign them in accordance with each man’s ‘estate and quality.’ This close scrutiny of strangers and particularly the ‘to-him-that-hath’ principle for dividing land, were direct inheritances from Plymouth, where lands were apportioned according to each man’s ability to contribute toward paying off the Colony’s debt to the Merchant Adventurers who had financed the Mayflower’s voyage.

There were other good reasons, too, for all the anxiety which the settlers showed in regard to the quality of the men they admitted as householders, for the communities were alarmingly small and surrounded by a wilderness where Indians skulked and wolves howled. Under such conditions it was imperative for the safety of all hands that the inhabitants of each town should stand together. Plymouth had already had in 1624 a bitter experience with newcomers in the persons of John Lyford and John Oldham, who, as soon as they had established themselves in the new settlement, set to work to undo the very thing the Pilgrims had come for; they tried to start a ‘reformation in Church and Commonwealth.’

Titles on the Cape were bestowed even more charily than citizenship; and consequently they meant something. Not every Tom, Dick, or Harry was dignified with a ‘Mr.’ before his name. This was a distinction reserved for a very few--the minister and perhaps one or two more. ‘Reverend’ was seldom used in the early days of the settlements; John Lothrop was commonly called ‘Mr.’ Lothrop. ‘Goodman’ or ‘Yeoman’ was the extent of dignity usually ascribed to ordinary citizens. As for ‘Squire,’ it was a title that carried with it something not very far removed from the awe with which European vassals used to look up from their cluster of wretched huts at the castle that crowned the hilltop. There was never more than one squire in a town. Wealth was the usual foundation of his glory. Ability and unselfishness, though they were no obstacle to a man’s achieving the honor, were not in themselves sufficient. Titles and rank followed men to church, where they were seated according to their quality. Planning the proper arrangement was a ticklish business, and the men whose duty it was to allot the pews gave long and earnest thought to the problem. The method varied somewhat between town and town. Harwich at one time adopted the prudent scheme of allowing the richest man to have first choice of pews, the next richest the second choice, and so on. Truro showed a little more democracy by placing the town officers in the front row, the military veterans next, and the highest taxpayers behind them. In the rear sat the soldiery, the strategic position in case of an Indian raid. Another method that was suggested at Truro was to allow every man to build his own pew after whatever fashion and at whatever cost he saw fit. This was an entertaining scheme, though the results may have been architecturally unconventional; however, it seems not to have been practiced widely or for very long. Perhaps, indeed, it remained only a suggestion.

The women sat by themselves on one side of the meetinghouse, while across the center aisle were the men, perhaps fortifying themselves against the hour-long sermon by a glance or two into forbidden territory. If the year was 1696 or later, and the town was Eastham, the young bachelors may have thought of the number of blackbirds they were required to kill annually as long as they remained unmarried, for by such expedients did the town authorities encourage an increase in population and at the same time help to save their corn. A man’s pew in church was as much a part of his real estate as his barn or his woodlot, and had a pretty definite cash value. Sometimes he sold it, in which case regular papers were passed and the transaction was encumbered with as much legal phraseology as if it had been a farm.

An unpleasant sequel to the aristocratic principles of the early Cape men was their ownership of slaves. This subject may as well be disposed of now as later, for the settlers brought a belief in slavery with them from Plymouth and the Bay Colony as part of their social background. It is no great shock, therefore, to find them cheerfully owning slaves in such numbers as they could afford. Here again Plymouth, that stern disciplinarian and pattern for all things good and bad, led the way by declaring as early as 1646 that it was her intention, as a last resort, to sell Indians or exchange them for Negroes in punishment for offenses--real or fancied. The fact that the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony some ten years before had sold captives taken in the Pequot War into slavery in Bermuda is no excuse for Plymouth, any more than Plymouth’s performances are any excuse for the Cape. The old adage, ‘the Plymouth saddle is always on the Bay horse,’ seems to have worked both ways occasionally. At all events, from 1640 until well after the Revolution, slaves were common in all parts of the Old Colony, and if there were fewer on the Cape than elsewhere, it was only because there were fewer rich men or extensive landowners.

Not even white men were safe. In 1640, at the very beginning of the history of Barnstable, Henry Coggin rented his servant, James Glass, to a Plymouth man for five years. The price was fifty shillings and twenty bushels of corn. Obviously Glass was an indentured servant of some sort who had even less to say about his disposal than a professional ball-player has to-day. In 1678 three Indians, Canootus, Symon, and Joel, stole twenty-five pounds from Zachariah Allen, of Sandwich, and spent the money. The Court immediately decreed that they should be made perpetual slaves, and empowered Allen to sell them for as much as he could get. After King Philip’s War, Jonathan Hatch, of Falmouth, bought an Indian family, father, mother, and son, from Captain Church. The parents were subsequently ransomed by their native friends for three pounds apiece, but their boy was to work for his freedom until he was twenty-four. In 1697, Mr. Cotton, the Yarmouth minister, allowed the church to employ his Indian slave, Saxuant, as janitor, and pocketed the proceeds, one pound a year, for himself. At the same time that Mr. Cotton was profiting by Saxuant’s labors in Yarmouth, the Hinckleys of Barnstable were dying and leaving slaves and tableware in their wills, as items of the same list. Joseph Hinckley, who lived at Great Marshes and died there in 1753, bequeathed to a daughter his slave girl ‘Sarah, bought of Hopkins, and his biggest silver porringer.’ Ebenezer Hinckley, his brother, who lived in Barnstable, left to his wife all the property which she brought to him ‘excepting her clock and negro woman.’

Wills are, in fact, the most fertile source of our information on this subject; few of them, however, contain such whimsical disposition of slaves as John Bacon’s, of Barnstable, who looked far into the future in his desire to control other people’s destinies. The will was registered in 1731, and contains among other chattels the following bequest to Bacon’s wife: ‘... she shall have the whole use of the negro Dinah and Calash during her life and after her desease, if said Dinah be living she shall be sold by my executors and all that she is sold for shall be improved by my executors in buying Bibles and they shall give them equally alike unto each of my said wives and grandchildren.’ John Gorham, who died at Barnstable in 1769, lists along with sundry ‘indoor moveables and provisions,’ his Negro girl Peg and half the use of the man ‘Cezer.’

Truro was never a very wealthy community, yet the town records for February 8, 1753, refer to a bill of sale for ‘Old Moll,’ a Negro woman about whom ‘there has been so much controversy.’ A few years earlier, a distinguished citizen of Truro, Jonathan Paine, sold his Negro Hector to Benjamin Collins for thirty pounds. Hector, we are told, lived to be an old man and became something of a local celebrity--his name being given to such places as Hector’s Nook and Hector’s Stubble, spots which were once well known to Truro men. Paine had a less happy experience with another slave, a Negro named Pomp, who was kidnapped from the Congo by the crew of a Truro whaler and sold to Paine at the end of the voyage. The poor fellow never became reconciled to his new way of life. The bleak shores of Truro supported no vast plantations where a hundred darkies worked by day and found solace in singing wild melodies together at twilight. Pomp suffered silently until loneliness conquered, and he hanged himself to the limb of a tree.

This tragedy undoubtedly hastened the abolition of slavery on the Cape. Faint streaks of light had already begun to appear in the east. As far back as 1719, Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, of Boston, had written an eloquent letter on the subject to Judge Addington Davenport, who had asked his advice in regard to a difficult case which he with some other judges was about to hear in Sandwich. A certain Samuel Smith of the town had killed his slave and was held for trial, and Davenport, before rendering a verdict, consulted the Chief Justice. A few lines of Sewell’s letter will suffice to indicate the tenor of the whole: ‘... the poorest Boys and Girls in this Province, such as are of the lowest condition; whether they be Indians or English or Ethiopians: they have the same Right to Religion and Life, that the Richest Heirs have. And they who go about to deprive them of this Right, they attempt the bombarding of Heaven, and the shells they throw, will fall down on their own heads.’

The records that could have told how Smith fared in the trial are lost. In theory he was punishable by death; but it would have taken a courageous judge to render such a verdict in 1719. However, a beginning had been made, and little by little the sentiment against slavery on the Cape grew. James Otis, the West Barnstable patriot, struck a blow at slavery in his great Writs-of-Assistance Speech in 1761. In this oration he included the Negro along with white men in his vehement assertion that all persons should be free. That Otis was ahead of his time in this respect, as in all others, is shown by John Adams’s comment. Adams heard the speech and ‘shuddered at the doctrine he taught....’

A dozen years later, the town of Sandwich continued the good work by voting to instruct its representative to work for an act which should prohibit the importation of slaves to the Colony and should free at the age of twenty-one the children of those who were already slaves. To be sure, the act was not passed, but it shows the growing tendency toward abolition. Sandwich, indeed, has a better record in regard to the treatment of slaves than many of the New England towns. The Reverend Abraham Williams offered his slave, Titus Winchester, his freedom, but Titus was so devoted to his master that he refused to leave him. Not until Williams’s death in 1784 did his slave depart to become a sailor. When he died, he left money for a clock in the tower of the First Parish Church of Sandwich. In Falmouth at about the same time, another slave named Titus was virtually free, though nominally the property of the Reverend Samuel Palmer. This clergyman was an enthusiastic though inexperienced farmer, and showed his wisdom by meekly obeying Titus in all agricultural activities, just as indoors Titus accepted the spiritual guidance of his master. Thus the two lived on a coöperative basis that bore little resemblance to slavery in its accepted sense.

But the evil continued in Massachusetts until well after the Revolution, and not until March, 1788, was the selling of slaves in the American market prohibited in Boston. In fact, no records of the buying or selling of slaves on the Cape are found after the Revolutionary War, but this is undoubtedly owing to the impoverished condition of all the towns rather than to any sudden access of humanitarianism on the part of the citizens. Nothing is more dangerous, however, than ascribing single motives to the actions of human beings. It is entirely possible that, with the enjoyment of their own hard-won liberty, the Cape men saw the indignity of bondage more clearly than ever before, and were therefore less inclined to enslave others. The last faint echo of this once common practice died away on the Cape about 1840 with the vanishing of a few elderly Negroes who were still vaguely referred to as ‘old slaves.’

Our country has always been given to extremes, even before it became a separate nation; but only once in their history have our ancestors tried to embrace simultaneously two ends of social organization so far removed from each other as Slavery and Communism. The one period when they did try it came during the early days of Plymouth, and Plymouth’s experiment was of course forced upon the Cape. By the time it reached there, it had taken on a greatly modified form, to be sure. Slavery had won, and Communism had pretty much vanished. Yet there remained enough of it in certain departments of life to cause an apparent incongruity. But this, like most of the incongruities in human nature, contained a certain strange reasonableness, and appears, on examination, to be not entirely incongruous, after all. The origin of this communism, at any rate, was sensible, and since it began in Plymouth, it must be examined there first, before the remnants of it on the Cape are discussed.

Up to April, 1623, no man in Plymouth had owned any land privately--it had all been held and harvested in common, and the produce justly divided. But in the spring of this year there was an alarming shortage of food. The settlers argued that if they were given land of their own, and each man was allowed to keep all that he raised, the crop would be greater than it was under the existing arrangement. This was not the first time that such suggestions had been made. They had been already so numerous that in 1621 Robert Cushman preached an eloquent if unconvincing sermon in reply. Bradford, though he heard with concern the citizens’ complaints, could not help being impressed with the force of their arguments. Like Winslow, he had begun to realize that even in this chosen band of pioneers egotism endured. To put it in another way, the Plymouth men, though they were zealots and idealists, had not ceased to be human beings; the Governor’s dream of a Utopia was shattered by ‘that self-love wherewith every man in a measure more or less, loveth and preferreth his own good before his neighbors.’ He yielded to the importunity of the citizens, and in April, 1623, assigned to each man his parcel of land for one year to be planted and reaped for the owner’s own private benefit.

The result was a revelation and a delight to Bradford. At the end of the year a far larger supply of corn was stored in the houses than any of them had dared to hope. In view of this success, each man was given an acre for his own.

Such in brief was Plymouth’s experience with Communism, and such was the inheritance that the Cape settlers took with them to their new towns. Thus it happened that a communistic tendency appeared there, but it manifested itself only in the form of common lands. This does not mean that private ownership was tabu, but that in addition to every man’s personal allotment of land, there was in every town a large area reserved for the benefit of all. Usually this tract included both marsh and woodland, so that the citizens might cut salt hay for their cattle and chop wood for the winter hearth. Such an arrangement was natural enough. It would have been silly for a dozen or twenty men to have had exclusive titles to the miles of hay grounds in Barnstable, or to the hundreds of acres of standing timber. Sometimes, too, there were particular reasons for declaring certain pieces of land to be common property. At Yarmouth the best place to watch for whales was a strip of upland along the north shore of the town close to what is now the Dennis line. This land was therefore quite properly thrown open to the free use of all citizens, and was called the ‘Whaling Grounds.’ When the rest of the common lands in Yarmouth were divided, this area was kept as public property, and has remained so ever since. Shanties were built there for the use of those who were watching for whales, and men often lived in them for considerable periods of time.

A similar reservation was made in Barnstable on the outer beach of Sandy Neck. The whole Neck was common land until 1715; then it was divided among the heirs of the Proprietors, with reservation of four spots where any citizen of the town who was engaged in whaling might erect a try-house and have room enough for his blubber barrels, lumber, and other gear. A part of Sandy Neck is still called the ‘Try Yard,’ although no one knows exactly where it is. These four ‘spots or pieces’ have never been divided. Neither has a wide strip of the outer beach running the whole length of the Neck; this strip was reserved at the same time as the ‘Try Yards’ for the use of any citizen of the town who wished to put up fish houses there, and it may still be legally used by them for that purpose.

For two generations the plan of having common lands in each town worked well. Abuses occurred, but that was to be expected. Cattle were turned loose ‘to range the Commons’; the minister’s winter supply of wood was cut on the public woodlot and delivered to him in his own back yard; salt hay was boated ashore or stacked on staddles in the marshes. Chatham, about 1670, even had a whaleboat that was common property. But as the towns grew, complications began to arise. Experiments can succeed in small communities where the citizens’ interests are largely the same; but they are doomed as soon as the settlements grow large enough to include many trades and professions. A cattleman finds common pasture land very convenient; a miller has small use for it; a lawyer, none at all.

And so it happened that, beginning about 1700, dissatisfaction with the arrangement began to be heard. Nobody had any objection to the division, but the question was, exactly who owned the common land and was therefore entitled to make allotments. In theory it belonged to the Proprietors. The Proprietors were originally the men to whom the Plymouth Government had granted the land in each town to make settlements on; but by 1700 these dignitaries had two generations of descendants; many newcomers, besides, had been admitted to full citizenship and consequently to rights in the commons. The citizens of Barnstable held a town meeting in 1701 on purpose to solve some of these conundrums. ‘Does the bare admission of a man to the state of _townsman_ give him a share in the Commons?’ they asked. ‘Has all the Common Land been already divided?’ ‘Do rights granted in the Commons extend to the grantees’ heirs?’ The men who attended this famous meeting would have grown old in debate (since they could not send to heaven for Miles Standish) had they not wisely chosen a committee of fifteen to work out answers to these questions. The committee girded up their loins and went valiantly to work, with the result that after another town meeting in 1702, in which it was decided to divide the commons, a new committee was chosen and the grand division was made in 1703 on as fair a basis as could be devised. In this way town after town unsnarled the tangle into which the public ownership of land had involved it and started afresh, each man the richer for the division. In 1713, after three years of hard work deciding who were the proper persons, Yarmouth handed over to the heirs of the Proprietors and other qualified persons most of its common lands except the whaling grounds. The Proprietors of Truro, indignant at the wanton way some men cut more wood than they could use and left it to rot on the commons, put an end to the practice in 1715 by ordering further division of common land. Eastham began to divide its common upland the same year.

So vanished the last substantial traces of the Pilgrims’ valiant experiment with Communism. [See note 2 to Chapter IV.] The name ‘Common Fields’ is still used for a good-sized tract of land bordering Barnstable Harbor, though it has been in private hands for generations, and a few barren regions that the towns have forgotten remain still undivided--a strip of sand hills somewhere in Barnstable and the still unclaimed whaling grounds between Yarmouth and Dennis. In truth we are a young country!