Chapter III: Part 3

Nothing short of the domestic enthusiasm of George Washington could have kept Mount Vernon in order. For sixty years it yielded gradually to the advance of time. Then, through the truly heroic zeal of Miss Ann Pamela Cunningham of Laurens, S. C., and the eloquence of Edward Everett, and the fine spirit of Miss Cunningham’s Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, the estate was purchased, and with searching fidelity to the wishes of its master, restored to the state in which he would have had it. Too fulsome praise can hardly be expressed--certainly not here--for the good sense, discrimination and good organization which combine to maintain the estate. It is as if a hand had touched it lightly on a spring morning in the brightest year of its occupancy, and had held it, fixed forever in the pose, like the castle of the sleeping princess. No prince will come to rouse the place. But better than that, after sixty years of care and a century and a half of life, it re-creates each year to thousands of pilgrims the crises and victories that wrote our creed as a nation. And fortunately no landholder on this great farm of ours will leave Mount Vernon without a deep sense of relief that it is first and last a perfect monument to a country gentleman.

THE QUINCY HOMESTEAD

© D.McK

THE QUINCY HOUSE

which sheltered, among other delicate ornaments, three successive Dorothy Quincys. There are ever so many things in the house today to call up a Quincy tradition, for if you scratch almost any chapter of New England history you will find a Quincy tradition underneath. Take away its Hoars, Lowells, Holmeses, Adamses, Wendells, Hancocks, Sewalls--to mention only a few of the Quincy connections--and what, indeed, becomes of New England?]

THE QUINCY HOMESTEAD

It is perhaps impolite to compare a Massachusetts family tree to a banyan instead of the conventional elm, but no prowler among her old houses can come away without a feeling that almost everything in New England is related to almost everything else. Chicago glances over Boston’s shoulder and finds her reading the Monday _Transcript’s_ genealogy page; Chicago howls with laughter and turns to _Vanity Fair_ to see what is going on in New York. Boston is momentarily interrupted, doesn’t know quite what Chicago is laughing at, returns a well-bred smile of complete detachment, and plunges back into the genealogy page.

This business of keeping track of marriages and deaths, cousinships and children-by-the-second-wife is serious, though bred of no spirit of arrogance, no desire to find a coat of arms for the door of the new town-car. There is brisk mental exercise in chasing an obscure ancestor to his lair and finding that he was what you thought he was when you started out, and not his own grand-nephew-twice-removed. Further, reasons Boston, unless you know to whom a person is related, how can you know to whom that person is related? By this sound process of logic a personal news item in a Boston newspaper worth six agate lines of white paper is so interestingly overgrown with eighteen or twenty lines of genealogical wistaria that the outsider has some trouble peering through the vines to the item itself. He will never understand the irrelevant matter until he understands that it is not irrelevant, that the ever-present landmarks of tradition are bristling with precedents, and that the respect for those precedents is so congenital that they guide the footsteps of New Englanders more than even New Englanders suspect.[A]

[A] I am told by Mr. George Stephenson, of the _Transcript_,
that the bulk of special subscription to the genealogical
issues comes from the Middle West. Again brutal statistics
blunder in to shatter a pleasant theory. I repeat this to a
Boston beldame; she says, “Why of course--those subscribers
are from families who migrated west to make money, and
_now_, of course--” and leaves me to fill out the sentence.
My theory stands, and defies the lightnings.

If the foreigner from beyond the Hudson or the Delaware or the Mississippi will do himself the favor of visiting the Quincy house, he will sense the point, and be paid in full measure by the contemplation of a house with a varied and engaging story.

It began life as a Puritan farmstead, by a brookside in the town of Braintree. Sixteen years after the first settlement at Plymouth, and therefore nearly three centuries ago, William Coddington built three rooms on a kitchen. Bigoted public opinion soon broke up the trio of liberals who used to sit and talk free worship before the great fireplace in that kitchen--Coddington fled, Sir Harry Vane went other ways, and Anne Hutchinson was banished from the colony. Edmund Quincy, the new owner, came out from Boston, with a retinue of six servants. Such a staff was a rare luxury in those ascetic days. It is partially explained by the fact that in an age of large families Edmund Quincy’s was no exception, and four children wanted a lot of looking after. He enlarged the house to accommodate his growing tribe, and about 1685 gave up the Coddington structure to his slaves, while he built a new house a few rods away. (It was this Edmund’s sister who married the master of the Mint, John Hull; he named Point Judith after her, and their daughter Hannah was the maiden who was given in marriage with a dowry of her weight in pine-tree shillings--one hundred and twenty-five pounds avoirdupois and five hundred sterling.)

Another Edmund, the third of the American line and the second in possession of the estate on Quincy Brook, fell heir to it when his father died in 1698. Through his grandmother Edmund was already related to the line which was presently to bring forth John Adams. His thirteen brothers and sisters and numerous cousins connected him by marriage with nearly all the families of the settlement, and out of one of those ceremonies is left to us a glimpse of tragedy: Judge Sewall records in his diary that just after “Cousin Daniel” was being married to Mrs. Shepard, when the guests were singing in the hall, one of them dropped dead. Her body was carried to the room which was to have been the bride’s, “the Bridegroom and Bride ... going away like Persons put to flight in Battel” to spend their honeymoon at a neighbor’s house.

Edmund the Third was a man not only of fortune but of discrimination, which he showed by marrying Dorothy Flynt--the first “Dorothy Q.” In 1706 he invited the whole countryside to the estate by the brook, and around and above the old Coddington house the whole corps of neighbors, abetted by hard cider, raised the huge timbers of a new mansion, the one which stands there today restored to its full dignity. It was a suitable dwelling for a man of eminence in the colony, a man big enough to quarrel with Benning Wentworth over the boundary of New Hampshire. On the rear of the new home he built an extension containing a bedroom and a study, where “Tutor” Flynt, Mrs. Quincy’s brother, could find rest from his duties in Harvard College, and there Tutor Flynt spent most of a crusty, tobacco-perfumed bachelor life as a sort of paying guest, driving down to Braintree from Cambridge in a calèche for week-ends and the longer holidays. (Tutor Flynt, by the way, is the earliest recorded user of the “If-you-are-going-to-Heaven-I-don’t-want-to-go-there” joke, though genuine research would doubtless reveal that Shem made the same remark to Japheth one afternoon when the Ark lay becalmed.)

The light of the household was Dorothy Q, and the source of her radiance was her family of growing children. Three of them claim our attention: Edmund (the Fourth), who inherited the Homestead; Josiah (the first of a series of notable Josiahs); and a second Dorothy, whom her grandson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, described in this way:

“O Damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q!
Strange is the gift that I owe to you;
Such a gift as never a king
Save to daughter or son might bring,--
All my tenure of heart and hand,
All my title to house and land;
Mother and sister and child and wife
And joy and sorrow and death and life!

“What if a hundred years ago
Those close-shut lips had answered No,
When forth the tremulous question came
That cost the maiden her Norman name
Should I be I, or would it be
One-tenth another to nine-tenths me?”

Dorothy Q the Second was a dear child, carrying at fifteen the cares of the household, and apparently pointed down the path of a winsome spinsterhood. But within a few weeks, in the summer of 1737, her grandmother, her mother, and then her father died, and she married Edward Jackson and went to live in Boston, where her husband was a ship-owner in partnership with her brother Josiah.

One of their vessels, the _Bethell_, with thirty-seven men and fourteen guns, fell in with the _Jesus Maria and Joseph_, a Spaniard with 110 men and twenty-six guns. The _Bethell’s_ skipper gambled on the gathering twilight, set up six wooden dummy guns, hung sailors’ caps and hats in the rigging to suggest a numerous crew, and then demanded the Spaniard’s surrender. Down came her ensign! The Spanish crew was set ashore at Fayal, and the _Bethell_ brought back to Josiah and Dorothy one-hundred-and-sixty-one chests of silver, and two of Spanish gold.

With the prize money safely banked, Josiah was able to retire from business at the age of forty. He moved to Braintree, taking up his residence in the Hancock parsonage, across the way from the Homestead. Brother Edmund, the lantern-jawed parson, who had been living in Boston and spending his summers in Braintree, moved to the Homestead in his turn, lost most of his share of the prize money in artless speculation, and turned to farming.

Life in the two families presented diversion aplenty--most of the eligible young men of Boston and Braintree were courting Edmund’s five daughters. A sober young man named John Adams was running perilously close to the charms of Hannah, Josiah’s daughter. He was a marked man when her cousins, Esther and Susan, suddenly “broke in upon Hannah and me and interrupted a conversation that would have terminated in a courtship that would have terminated in a marriage which might have depressed me to absolute poverty and obscurity to the end of my life.” He veered, took a deep breath, went away from there, and two years later was married to Abigail Smith, who alone of American women was the wife and the mother of an American president. Important guests occasionally penetrated the swarm of suitors--such men as Admiral Warren and Sir William Pepperrell, the heroes of Louisburg; or Benjamin Franklin, who sent Squire Quincy cuttings of Rhenish grapevines and a new stove which he had invented; or Sir Harry Frankland, who gave the Squire a fine pear-sapling--the same Sir Harry who married Agnes Surriage, whom he had first seen barefoot, scrubbing floors in a tavern in Marblehead.

And the youngest of all was Dorothy Q the Third, with four big brothers and three boy cousins to pay her court, and four elder sisters to study. Through all the bitter period that followed the Boston Massacre, when her cousin Josiah Junior and John Adams were defending the British captain, and her cousin Samuel was appearing for the Crown, Dorothy Q was on the fringe of the excitement, coquetting with all of the earnest youths who were polishing their arms, but engaging in entangling alliance with none. Not until she was twenty-seven did she make her choice, and then it was John Hancock, the chief figure of pre-revolutionary days in Boston, a vigorous patriot who defied the Crown and became a member of the Committee of Safety. Most of the winter of 1774–75 she spent with his aunt in the Hancock mansion, where came Revere, and Warren, and Samuel and John Adams. By March of ’75 she was back in Quincy, gathering her trousseau, and superintending the application of a new French wall-paper to the walls of the north parlor, where a company of conventional blue Venuses and Cupids, garlanded with delicate flowers, was to preside over the wedding ceremony. The untroubled Homestead presented a strong contrast to the one she had left in Boston: a loyalist rabble stormed the Hancock house, tore down the fence, broke the windows and wrecked the coach-house, and the prospective bridegroom, threatened with arrest, was obliged to escape with little dignity and all possible speed.

He turned up at Concord for the meeting of the Provincial Congress on April 15, and after its adjournment he was joined by Dorothy, Madame Hancock and Samuel Adams at the Rev. Jonas Clark’s house in Lexington. Quietly, in the evening of the eighteenth, British troops assembled in Boston for a march to destroy the stores at Concord. As quietly, Paul Revere rowed across the mouth of the river to Charlestown, slipped by the guard, and rode hell-bent into the sleeping country. He pulled up at the Clark parsonage and called for Adams and Hancock. “Don’t make so much noise,” said a minute-man on guard. “_Noise!_” shouted Revere, “You’ll have noise enough before long--the regulars are coming!”--and he delivered Joseph Warren’s warning to Adams and Hancock to get out of the neighborhood at once. Against their will they fled to Woburn, while Dorothy slept no more that night. At dawn she saw Pitcairn and his scarlet column tramp to the Lexington common and set fire to the Revolution. Then she joined her lover in Woburn, and when he tried to forbid her to go back to Boston, the strain of a sleepless night and the horrors of the day broke the bridle on her tongue and she tossed her head and retorted: “Recollect, Mr. Hancock, I am not under your control yet. I shall go to my father tomorrow!”

Having spoken her mind, she exercised a woman’s privilege in changing it--and did almost as he had asked: set out at once for a safe refuge at Fairfield in Connecticut.

She was still somewhat piqued. She found at Fairfield, in the person of her host’s nephew, an eager listener to her narrative of the skirmish at Lexington--a Princeton graduate who was studying law. He probably gained her confidence at once by asking her just what she thought he ought to do, and by offering to join the colors for her sake. Aaron Burr was very accomplished at that sort of thing, and considered it good exercise, for he was carrying on two other affairs and an anonymous sentimental correspondence at the same time. To Hancock’s affectionate letter from Philadelphia Dorothy made no reply. For the peace offering of silk stockings he sent her she said not even “thank-you.” Then either Madame Hancock or Dorothy’s own conscience stepped in and settled the quarrel. Burr left for Cambridge to enlist, and Hancock came to Fairfield and married the lady.

They took up their home in Boston on the heels of the British evacuation, and until Hancock went back to Braintree to die in 1793 her life was a brilliant panorama of illustrious society. When Washington came to Boston in 1789, Hancock, who was governor of the Commonwealth, invited him to be a guest in the fine house on Beacon Street opposite the Common. Washington declined and the governor offered him an invitation to dinner. On the assumption that within his own state a governor’s position was sovereign to that of the President, he did not call upon Washington before dinner. The hour came, but no President, and Hancock sent a messenger to apologize to Washington for not having paid his respects, and to plead that sudden illness prevented. Washington guessed that the illness was sour-grape poisoning and ate his dinner at home. Later in the evening the lieutenant-governor and two councilmen appeared to repeat Hancock’s apology. “I informed them,” Washington writes in his diary, “that I should not see the governor except at my own lodgings.” The next day Hancock bent his stiff neck to the president, apologized, and the two became friends again.

The Squire had long since sold his rights in the old Homestead, though the family continued to occupy it until his death in 1788. It passed successively through the families of Black, Greenleaf, and Woodward, and then into the hands of the town of Quincy, which was now formally detached from Braintree. For thirty years it was held by the town as part of a trust fund Ebenezer Woodward left to found a girl’s academy to match the boy’s school started by John Adams.

Even before the Squire’s family had dispersed from the house, its earlier liveliness was somewhat dimmed by the crescent line of able Quincys in another Quincy house built by the first Josiah, and now known as the “later Quincy Mansion.” From its windows he recorded the sailing of the British from Boston in 1775; from those windows his children saw the _Constitution_ sail in victorious over the _Guerriere_. There lived Josiah the Second, agent of the provincials at London, who died off Marblehead as the firing at Lexington began, while his wife and the third Josiah were fleeing from a threatened naval attack on Braintree. Josiah the Third grew up to be mayor of Boston and president of Harvard, and if no other distinction remained to him except this passage from his speech in Congress on the embargo in 1808, it would be a proud enough monument for any American:

“But I shall be told, ‘This may lead to war.’ I ask, ‘Are we
now at peace?’ Certainly not, unless retiring from insult be
peace--unless shrinking under the lash be peace. The surest
way to prevent war is not to fear it. The idea that nothing
on earth is so dreadful as war is inculcated too studiously
among us. Disgrace is worse. Abandonment of essential rights is
worse.”

Is it any wonder that Daniel Webster, Lafayette, and the Adamses, father and son, came often to the home of Josiah, or that, given his heredity and achievement, he had such sons as Josiah the Fourth, another mayor of Boston and an able economist, and Edmund, the stanch abolitionist?

The older house by the brook was leading a humble and retired old age when the Colonial Dames took over its custody. Their restoration not only has made the utmost of the material they found, but has brought to the house a collection of articles which are uniformly good and are in some instances rare and beautiful. The long hall has tall spotless wainscoting and hunting paper, a carven balustrade and newel post; in a low-studded dining-room a set of 1770 Dutch chairs surrounds an Empire table, in a corner stands a buffet whose builder died a century and a half ago; at the fireplace are Delft tiles nearly as aged as the fireplace itself, and there is an odd Chinese paper on the walls. In the parlor is the Venus-and-Cupid paper hung for Dorothy Q’s wedding, in the window frames is glass made by a Quincy in the first glassworks in America. You may read in one of those panes the initials “J H” as you may find the writer’s full name on the Declaration of Independence, and in the pane below, in the same hand, “You I love, and you alone.” You will be interested in Tutor Flynt’s bed, built in a recess of the brookside bedroom. You may be mildly thrilled by the Indian-proof shutters, mystified by the secret staircase which follows the course of the chimney, and delighted with the kitchen William Coddington built, with its eight-inch beams, Dutch oven, churn, spinning-wheel, and a musket over the mantel for inviting Indians to dinner.

There are ever so many things in the house today to call up a Quincy tradition, for if you scratch almost any chapter of New England history you will find a Quincy tradition underneath. Take away its Hoars, Lowells, Holmeses, Adamses, Wendells, Hancocks, Sewalls--to mention only a few of the Quincy connections--and you have left hardly enough to make a Monday _Transcript_.

And yet their generic importance was the least of their concerns. “Could I ever suppose,” wrote John Adams, “that family pride were in any way excusable, I should think a descent from a line of vigorous independent New England farmers for a hundred years was a better foundation for it than a descent through royal or noble scoundrels ever since the flood.”

THE TIMOTHY DEXTER MANSION

© D.McK

THE TIMOTHY DEXTER MANSION

Over in a corner of the garden stood an Indian chieftain, next to him William Pitt, and beyond the two the martial figure of General Morgan. The Goddess of Fame, Louis XVI, John Jay, the King of Russia, Solomon, Venus, the Governor of New Hampshire--these were a few of the forty “immortals” in his garden of celebrities. In a prominent position stood a portrait in pine of Lord Dexter himself, labeled “I am the greatest man in the EAST.”]

THE TIMOTHY DEXTER MANSION

Lord Dexter is a man of fame;
Most celebrated is his name;
More precious far than gold that’s pure,
Lord Dexter shine for evermore.

--_Jonathan Plummer._

Yes, Jonathan Plummer wrote that jingle. It is from the only survivor of a gross of eulogies he wrote of Lord Dexter. And quite proper that he should. He was Lord Dexter’s poet laureate, hired, clothed and fed to produce eulogies on demand. His poetry was awful, and the tragedy is that he knew it. Said he didn’t like to read too much good verse because it made his own look sorry. But when a man has given up peddling fish and racy European pamphlets in order to study for the ministry, and neither the ministry nor the melodrama pays, he can’t be blamed, especially if he has the appetite of an ox and the soul of a poet, for going to work for anyone as poet laureate. Lord Dexter outfitted him in a long black cloak with gold stars on the lapels, and fringe, and a black under dress, a huge cocked hat, and a gold-headed cane. There was a great row about the fringe: Jonathan refused to wear it, Lord Dexter pooh-poohed. _Pooh-poohed a poet laureate!_ Still, Maecenas was Maecenas: Jonathan wore the fringe.

Timothy Dexter was a leather-dresser, born in Malden in 1743. Treating leather to simulate “morocco” was a new art, which he mastered, and which, on account of the demand for “morocco” for women’s shoes, built him a nice fortune. He married a thrifty widow, who had a little huckster business of her own. They emerged from the period of the Revolution with a son and daughter, and a few thousand dollars. Continental money had dropped to two-and-sixpence on the pound, and the securities of Massachusetts issued to support the money had tumbled to the same depths. John Hancock and Thomas Russel, Bostonians of large fortunes, bought in many of these securities to oblige their friends and to hearten the public’s morale, which was as low as its money. Timothy Dexter heard of it, and risked every loose dollar he had in the same investment. Then Hamilton’s funding system went into operation and made him a wealthy man, who need never dress another hide as long as he lived.

He had gambled that the United States Constitution was a fixture, and he had won. He played more money on the same color, and won again and again. Charlestown, still convalescing from a severe fire, was not to the liking of this new-laid magnate. He moved to Newburyport, after Salem and Boston the busiest port in the Commonwealth. He bought two fine estates, occupied one for a short time, and then moved to the other. As the property of a prominent merchant it had been one of the fine houses of a community of steady, prosperous people, whose philosophy was drawn from the Old Testament, education from the Three R’s, and deportment from a rigid Puritan ancestry. Into its complacent calm Timothy Dexter came bellowing like a bull in a china shop, and proceeded to build the china shop about him.

You may have wondered about the source of the iron-dog-and-Diana tendency on the lawns of our captains of industry. It dates from Lord Dexter, and in justice to him it should be said that he set a mark that neither posterity nor Adolphus Busch nor Carl Hagenbeck nor Ex-Senator Clark could begin to approach. They may have paid more for their cupolas and summer-houses and plaster-of-Paris bubchen, but Timothy Dexter, the self-made lord, leather-dresser, landscape gardener and architect, finished the race with a permanent world’s record before they were born. He took a square colonial house of straight and dignified proportions, polished it with bright paint, and set gilt balls and railings and minarets upon its roof, till from the sea it looked like a Christmas tree gone mad. There was a magnificent garden between the house and the highway, full of flowers and fruit that were the envy of a community of husbandmen, but mere nature was not allowed to go on unassisted.

“Hear me, good Lord,” he wrote. “I am agoing to let your children know now, good Lord, what has been in the world a great ways back--not old Plymouth, but stop to Adam and Eve.”

Accordingly there rose in the garden clusters of single columns, and groups of wooden arches, about fifteen feet high, and presently the astonished natives of Newburyport saw them capped with wooden effigies. Before the main doorway was a Roman arch, and upon it, reading from left to right, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson--all life size, with John Adams uncovered because Dexter would not permit anyone to stand at Washington’s right with his hat on. Jefferson he thought was a trifle obscure, so he engaged an artist to paint “Declaration of Independence” upon the scroll in its author’s wooden hand. The artist had lashed himself to the column, had spaced the lettering, and had painted the letters “DEC-,” when Lord Timothy, squinting up from below, remarked:

“That’s not the way to spell ‘Constitution’!”

“You don’t want the Constitution,” called the artist. “You want ‘Declaration of Independence’!”

“I want ‘Constitution’!” roared Dexter, “and ‘Constitution’ I will have!”

His recollection of the Declaration of Independence was foggy, but he knew that he had made most of his money by the adhesive properties of the Constitution, and he was not going back on his talisman now. The artist refused to make the statue ridiculous, and Dexter charged into the house, charged out with a loaded pistol, and as the artist left across-country, fired, missed the artist--but hit the house.

Over in a corner of the garden stood an Indian chieftain, next to him William Pitt, and beyond the two the martial figure of General Morgan. Morgan was not quite satisfactory, so a few coats of paint made him over into Bonaparte. The Goddess of Fame, Louis XVI, John Jay, the King of Russia, Solomon, Venus, the Governor of New Hampshire--these were a few of the forty “immortals” in his garden of celebrities. In a prominent position stood a portrait in pine of Lord Dexter himself, labeled “I am the greatest man in the EAST.” Four lions, two _couchant_, two _passant_, stood guard beside him to prove it. This caption originally included the North, South and West, and what sudden access of modesty caused him to censor it is a buried secret. When the hurricane of 1815 toppled most of the figures from their pinnacles, they were sold at auction. Pitt brought one dollar, Fame five, the Traveling Preacher fifty cents, the Indian chief was set up in a cornfield to scare crows, and Lord Timothy, the greatest man in the East, found no bidders. That is fame.

His gallery was the product of expert wood-carvers in Newburyport and Salem, men who were turning out creditable work for the figureheads of the vast merchant fleet that made Salem a port known round the world. It cost him not a cent less than $15,000, twice the price he paid for the estate. Upon the interior of the house he lavished the same attention, and imported from France the last word in flamboyant furniture, voluptuous draperies, and generally meretricious _objets d’art_. His agents had more taste than he, to be sure, but if a worthy piece found its way into the house, it was sure to be stained and damaged in the next carouse. In his business dealings with Hancock and Russel he had caught glimpses of their libraries, and it occurred to him that the greatest man in the East should own fine books, so he bought them by the linear yard in costly bindings. He rarely read them, and guests relieved him of the finer engravings with which they were illustrated. In the same way he filled the house with paintings, which were so bad that not even his guests cared to steal them. The dearest of all his hobbies was a collection of clocks and watches. Once a week they were set running and regulated; each day he visited them all, and gave a word of encouragement or censure to each, from the great Dutch fellow who prophesied approaching rain, to the daintiest enameled chronometer in the hilt of a French fan. The fruits and blossoms of his garden were as keen a source of satisfaction to him as they were to the maidens and urchins of the town. After a few experimental visits had revealed the clumsy vulgarity of his attentions to all women, nice girls never went to see Dexter’s museum. To the small boy, however, he was the personification of all that was grand and fantastic; furthermore, they could scent his berries and plums and melons for a radius of five miles, no matter which way the wind blew.

It is quite right to assume that even a successful speculation in government paper could hardly finance the upkeep of such an outrageously extravagant menâge. Where did the money come from? Everyone in New England, as his notoriety spread, asked the same question. The most picturesque reply is from his own pen--a chapter from a tract called “Pickle for the Knowing Ones,” which he wrote and published, and which, with a few italicized explanatory notes, follows:

HOW DID TIMOTHY DEXTER GET HIS MONEY ye (_he_) says: bying whale bone for staing (_staying_) for ships . in grosing (_gross_) three hundred & 40 tons--bort all in boston, salum and all in Noue york, under Cover . oppenly told them for my ships; they all laffed. so I had at my oan pris. I had four Counning men for Rounners; thay found the horne, as I told them to act the fool . I was full of Cash . I had nine tun of silver on hand at that time--all that time the Creaters (_creatures_) more or less laffing. it spread very fast . here is the Rub--in fifty days thay smelt a Rat--found where it was gone to Nouebry Port--spekkelaters swarming like hell houns--to be short with it I made seventey five per sent--one tun and a halfe of silver on hand and over--

one more spect--Drole a Nuf--I Dreamed of warming pans three nites; that they would doue in the west inges (_Indies_) . (_He did not dream this, but was put up to it by the chaffing of a group of mischievous ship-clerks about the Port. Warming pans were about as necessary in the West Indies as coals in Newcastle._) I got no more than fortey two thousand--put them in nine vessels for difrent ports. that tuck good hold. (_It did: to the astonishment of New England, the warming pans were found to be excellent utensils in which to roast coffee, and the lids equally useful in skimming hot sugar syrup._) I cleared sevinty nine per sent . the pans thay made use of them for Coucking--blessed good in Deade (_indeed_) missey (_monsieur_) got nise handel--very good masser (“_Massa_”) for Coukey (_cooking; he here reproduces the dialect of the French and British West Indian negroes._) Now burn my fase the best thing I Ever see in borne days. I found I was very luckky in spekkelation.

I Dreamed that the good book was Run Down in this Countrey nine years gone, so low as halfe prise and Dull at that--the bibel I means. I had the Ready Cash. by holl sale I bort twelve per sent under halfe pris: thay cost fortey one sents Each bibbel--twentey one thousand--I put them into twenty one vessels for the west inges and sent a text that all of them must have one bibel in every family, or if not thay would goue to hell--and if thay had Dun wiked, flie to the bibel and on thare Neas and kiss the bibel three times and look up to heaven annest (_and ask_) for forgivnes, my Captteins all had Compleat orders--here Coms the good luck: I made one hundred per sent & littel over, then I found I had made money anuf. I hant (_haven’t_) speckalated sence old time, by government secourities I made forty seven thousands Dolors--that is the old afare. Now I toald the all, the sekrett. Now be still, let me A lone; Dont wonder Noe more houe I got my money, boaz (_boys_).

If there were space it could be devoted to his successful corner of the opium market, to his land speculations, and to other sounder investments, such as the Essex Merrimack bridge, which kept his coffers full. But there is not, if we are to have a glimpse of the motley crew who fawned about him and lived at his expense. Plummer, the poet laureate and jingle-monger we have seen, Plummer, who told Dexter that the Druids crowned their laureates with mistletoe, and whom Dexter duly crowned, amidst great ceremony, with parsley, there being no mistletoe in the garden. Then there was a Newburyport schoolmaster who fell out of the graces of the town because he took his pupils to walk in the fields and taught them the names of the birds and flowers, used charts and globes in geography lessons, performed simple chemical experiments which the parents soundly suspected were tricks, and believed in the lecture system more than in the birch rod. With a smattering of astronomy and a fertile imagination this man attached himself to Dexter in the capacity of astrologer and chief confidant. He was probably in league with Madam Hooper and Moll Pitcher, two seeresses of rich local reputation, for Dexter often called upon them to solve his future. There was Burley, called Dwarf Billy, a giant wrestler who stood six-feet-and-seven-inches in his socks when he wore them; Dexter hired him as a sort of watchman, porter and body-guard, to do his fighting for him. It was Dwarf Billy whom Dexter called upon to put a tipsy sea-captain off the place, after he had wagered that no two men Dexter had could put him out. Looking up to Burley’s summit, the sailor put his guinea in his lordship’s hands, saying: “By Jupiter, if this is your dwarf, how big are your giants?”

Hogarth never drew a stranger company. It was downright Elizabethan in its romantic depravity. Barred from the company of intelligent, modest people by the pride which would not permit him to play the hypocrite, Dexter brought his society to him, and cared very little about its ancestry, so long as it gave him adulation and echoed his tipsy amiability. The house was infested with shady adventurers and blowzy females from the ports, come to gather a little money and pass on; no fine day went by but travelers came to see this remarkable man at close hand, to flatter him, to hear him tell the story of conferring upon himself the title of “Lord”; to carry some souvenir of his tireless eccentricity back to the folks at home, and you may believe that it lost nothing in the telling. The riff-raff of the town attended a funeral which he advertised in his honor, and which he watched from behind the curtains of an upper window while a heavy mahogany coffin he had bought was borne to the summer house where he expected some day to rest. He was annoyed that his epileptic son, being drunk enough to weep lavishly, was the only one who mourned, and that Plummer did not put enough genuine fire into the funeral oration.

Once in a while a visitor crossed him, and he rushed to the house for a pistol; one such adventure cost him a term in the Ipswich gaol, though his aim was so poor that he never hit anyone. For a time he held public office, that of “informer of deer,” which carried the duty of arousing the town when deer were seen in the vicinity. Even the beasts of the wilderness laughed at him--no deer ever ventured near during his term. With books to read but no mind to read them with, his wife long since fled from his home, his son half-mad and his daughter wholly so, Dexter, feigning a feverish interest in affairs of which he knew absolutely nothing, became an object of contemptuous amusement even to the gypsies of Dogtown who passed his house to peddle berries. Today the rankness and the nearness of him has passed, and it is hard to find for Timothy Dexter any emotion beyond that of profound pity.

He died in 1806 and was buried in a simple grave in a public cemetery. A sensible, methodical will disposed of his property, and the house passed into other hands, which cleared out his forest of statuary, tore down the gilt balls, and took the masquerade costume off the building whose dignity he had so unceremoniously insulted. In the process Timothy Dexter, “Lord” by his own acclamation, has been sunk without trace. The house today is quite the most imposing in a town unusually blessed with Colonial homes, but it is not Dexter’s. Dexter is wholly dead.

His greatest work, the “Pickle for the Knowing Ones,” must never die. Superlatives can damn it here forever, and any attempt to dissect its philosophy must await the collaboration of a specialist in the psychology of insanity, a student of Chaucerian spelling, and an apostle of tolerance. When those three meet, we shall understand the man. Meanwhile, the “Pickle” is worth reading.

To his second edition he added this postscript:

fouder (_further_) mister Printer the Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops I put in A Nuf here and thay may pepper and salt it as thay plese

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

......................!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.......................

...........................!!!!!!!!!!!!!.............................

...............................!!!!!!................................

..................................!..................................

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

........................??????????????????????.......................
]

THE KENDALL HOUSE

© D.McK

THE KENDALL HOUSE

Here Washington and Rochambeau planned the Yorktown campaign. From the upper windows you may look over the roofs of the town where André and Arnold plotted to betray the United States. Across the Hudson you may see the faint outlines of the village of Tappan, where André was held prisoner, and where Washington shared his breakfast with the convicted spy. At the foot of the hill below you is the landing where British dignitaries came to plead for André’s life.]

THE KENDALL HOUSE

A white house with solid vertigris blinds stands comfortably beside the Post road. There is a little old cannon on the lawn, a sad bell-mouthed field piece with its jaw jutted fiercely out to bark at any British man-o’-war that presumes to come back up the Hudson. A green ridge rises behind the house, setting it off like Wedgwood ware, and a gentle brook idles down the slope toward the river.

Set in a jog of the stone wall at the highway is a memorial tablet which has evidently gone unnoticed by the gentlemen who write histories for primary schools--who are supposed to watch the fires on our national shrines, and to toss a bright epithet, an apt name, or a bit of patriotic tinder on the coals. In missing this Dobbs Ferry house they are clearly guilty of neglect of duty. It has a story that goes clear down to the stuff every American believes he is made of. If we borrow a stock phrase from the supply of the school historian and call this house the “Birthplace of Victory” we shall not be far from the fact, nor serving ill a spot which recalls with rich significance the travail in which our nation was born.

In 1780 there were three invading British armies rooted on the Atlantic coast: Clinton had driven Washington off Manhattan island in 1776 and had already held the city for four years; Cornwallis made Yorktown a base for expeditions into Virginia and the Carolinas, and Tarleton held Charleston. For four years the enemy had hoped to effect a junction between his forces in Canada and those in New York, and the Hudson was to be his highway. For four years Washington had hovered like an eagle over the river, wheeling now into Westchester, now swooping upon Jersey. Inadequately equipped, he dared not take the offensive. He had to be content to wait for the time when Clinton might relax his vigilance upon the city, then to strike, brilliantly and savagely, but the sum of these maneuvers was only to harass the enemy, not to unseat him. Twice since Washington’s time has his fortitude been matched in our history: once by Lincoln, and once by Lee. Once, in our own lifetime, it has been equalled by the French nation. It was from France, in 1780, that our relief ultimately came.

After four years of war, with British patrols making frequent raids through Yonkers and over the upper acres of the Philipse estate, with British warships plying up and down the Hudson at will past the silenced batteries of Forts Washington and Lee, with the Cowboys and Skinners of both armies making life wretched throughout the neutral ground in which Dobbs Ferry lay, the village was in ill temper. It lies opposite the northern end of the Palisades, and while the British held New York it was the most southerly ferry safe for American despatch riders from Westchester County to Jersey and the south--a vital link in the chain of communication between the scattered states. So Dobbs Ferry saw plenty of skirmishing. Earthworks were thrown up in the village; the remains of an ancient redoubt may be discovered today after patient search near Broadway and Livingston Avenue, and the Livingston mansion, the most pretentious house in town, asked neither exemption nor privilege and surrounded itself with trenches. No one knew when the enemy might advance in force up the Albany Post Road, and in Dobbs Ferry’s 1780-temper, no one proposed to let him march without a fight.

Word had gone through the states that Lafayette, the gay French lad who came over to fight with Washington, had gone home. “He’s young,” men said. “It was only a lark for him. He’s had enough. ‘Leave of absence’ was it! ‘French leave,’ more likely.” Lafayette was young, but he had not had enough. How a youth of twenty-two petitioned the court of France for an army, a fleet and a generous loan for the states we need not inquire. He got everything he asked and came back to tell General Washington so and to confer upon him Louis Sixteenth’s commission as lieutenant-general of the Armies of France and admiral of His Majesty’s Navy.

In 1918 the United States transport Leviathan, seven days out of New York, made the harbor of Brest and set ten thousand fighting men ashore. In the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island, on July 11, 1780 eleven French warships and thirty-two transports, three months out of Brest, set six thousand fighting men of France upon American soil. Ponder on those figures: six thousand men are the complement of two modern regiments, the half of a bitter day’s casualty list; six thousand men were the Army of France, the Army of Deliverance. After they had thawed a cool reception, they were welcomed as such, and while the Comte de Rochambeau, at their head, was fêted by the dignitaries of Newport, his disciplined troops pitched their tents in the Rhode Island orchards, and as their commander proudly reported to their King, never even robbed the fruit-trees!

Cumulative bad luck camped down simultaneously on the American cause. Scurvy among the French troops prevented their moving to attack New York. Clinton made a demonstration against them at Newport until Washington frightened him back indoors. Rochambeau found difficulty in conveying his ideas of strategy to American headquarters in Jersey, and it took all of Lafayette’s tact to keep the forces in contented alliance. At last, when the summer was nearly gone, Washington arranged a council of war at Hartford.

The operations of the allied armies planned at that conference hinged upon the co-operation of a second French land force and the French fleet. The land force was even then bottled up in Brest by British warships, the French admiral was in the West Indies and showed no signs of coming north. To make matters worse, there was brewing over on the Hudson a plot which Washington later called “one of the severest strokes that could have been meditated against us.” It was so well known among the British that it now seems incredible that no hint of warning had filtered through the Neutral Ground to American headquarters. London gossip predicted openly throughout the summer a _coup_ which would shortly bring this upstart rebellion to its knees.

One morning in late September four farmer boys from Westchester undertook to watch the Albany post-road north of Tarrytown, and to see that no Tory patrols drove stolen cattle southward. They halted a well-dressed civilian and searched him. In his stockings they found a plan of the fortifications at West Point, an inventory of ammunition, full directions for attacking _and taking_ the forts, and a résumé of General Washington’s most recent statement of the condition and prospects of the American cause. It was suspicious enough to find these papers on an unknown civilian, but when he proved to be Major John André, adjutant-general of the British Army, and when inspection showed that the last two documents were in the handwriting of Benedict Arnold, an American major-general in command at West Point, the matter smelled rankly of treason.

Washington was returning from Hartford to headquarters when he was diverted to West Point. An unexplainable bit of stupidity had allowed Arnold to learn of André’s capture, and when Washington arrived at Arnold’s headquarters opposite West Point he found the traitor’s young wife in a state of collapse and Arnold himself fled to the British frigate “Vulture,” which was already dropping downstream out of range.

From the upper windows of the Livingston house, in Dobbs Ferry, you may look northwest over the roofs of the town where André and Arnold had secretly met and plotted to betray the United States. Across the river you may see the faint outlines of the village of Tappan, where André was held prisoner, and where George Washington shared his breakfast with the convicted spy. At the foot of the hill in Dobbs Ferry you may see the landing where a group of British dignitaries came to plead with General Green for André’s life. If you had been in Tappan the next morning you might have seen André walk to the gibbet, adjust the noose firmly about his own neck, and heard him say: “It will be but a momentary pang.” With a record that included secret service during the siege of Charleston, André was undoubtedly a spy, but if you had watched dry-eyed as this man met death you would have been lonesome, for there were plenty of honest tears from the American officers who stood by and saw him hang.

With the plot exploded, Arnold a turncoat, André dead, the cause at least was safe. “Whom can we trust now?” asked Washington, and proceeded to find out. In spite of a wide-spread feeling of contempt for Arnold, his desertion made an impression upon the faint-hearts in both armies. In an effort to stiffen the morale of his men, and somewhat stung by the vengefulness of Arnold’s threat in a letter presented at the Dobbs Ferry conference that he would make reprisals if André was killed, Washington conceived the idea of kidnapping Arnold in New York. The sergeant-major detailed for this bold stroke had the worst possible luck, missed Arnold by a half-hour, and landed on board a transport filled with a corps of deserters, bound for Virginia, and commanded by the traitor himself.

By June of 1781 the French army was ready for action. They marched across Connecticut, and pitched their tents upon the Westchester hills. That lively, attractive young aide-de-camp who danced with the girls of Westchester was a chap named Berthier, destined to become field marshal under Napoleon and Prince of Wagram; the tall, gallant Saxon aide was the Count de Fersen, later commander of the Swiss body-guard of Louis XVI. Custine commanded the Saintonge regiment--Custine who had served under Frederick the Great; on the ridge east of the Nepperhan were the Viomênil brothers--Count and Baron, soldiers both; over on the hill above White Plains was the charming Lauzun--he was guillotined a few years later. “Gentleman rankers out on a spree,” and leading as gay an army of crimson- and white- and pink- and yellow- and blue- and green-clad troops as Europe could put in the field. What shortcomings they found with the entertainment their American allies offered, what irritation they felt at being served beef, potatoes, lamb and chicken on one plate, they forgot in the real comradeship that sprang up. New days were coming. New York, the stronghold, was to be beaten down by these keen French, and these dogged Americans, and Henry Clinton might well beware.

Washington moved his headquarters into the Livingston house at Dobbs Ferry. There on July 6, 1781 Rochambeau met and joined him and for the first time the armies were formally allied. The two commanders sat late over the plans for the effort which was presently to make Henry Clinton shout to Cornwallis and Tarleton for help. In the back of Washington’s mind was a shrewd manoeuvre, and he kept it in the back of his mind, for if a plan was to be good enough to fool the enemy, it should be good enough to deceive his own men. Clinton was to be thoroughly scared by a demonstration by the combined armies against New York. If he called for reinforcements from the south, good; if they came, better yet. For it was not Clinton in New York whom Washington wanted, nor Tarleton in Charleston, but Cornwallis at Yorktown, the link between the two. And Washington knew that this was to be his last gamble with fate.

On July 18 Rochambeau accompanied him on a reconnoissance of the enemy’s positions north of New York. What they saw led them to throw a protective cordon of troops across the peninsula of Westchester, from the Sound to the Hudson, to keep the British patrols from leaking out. Ten days later Washington heard that three British regiments from South Carolina had been sent to Clinton’s relief. Back of his calm eyes his brain was humming with excitement. He wrote letters about his plans for attacking New York and then saw to it that those letters fell into the enemy’s hands. When the British approached the American lines they found them preparing for battle. Washington allowed his engineers to survey camp sites and build brick ovens within sight of the enemy’s scouts. And then, on August 3, a travel-worn messenger arrived with a letter from Lafayette.

“DeGrasse is sailing with the French fleet from Santo Domingo for Chesapeake Bay” was its message. The moment had come.

To the Livingston house he summoned Robert Morris, who had never failed before, and who must not fail now; and with him Richard Peters, the acting Secretary of State. Washington demanded men. Turning to Peters, he asked: “What can you do?”

“With money, everything. Without it, nothing,” replied the Secretary of State, and looked questioningly toward Morris. The banker produced a loan of $30,000. To Washington it was as good at that moment as a million, for it meant pay and food for his men, a promise of more men, and supplies for a forced march. And the forced march was imminent. Rochambeau came down from his headquarters up over the hill and the two laid their plans. On the eleventh 3000 Hessians from Cornwallis’ forces arrived to defend New York. On August 25 all but 3000 men of the entire American army and the whole French force crossed the Hudson and were half-way to Philadelphia before Sir Henry Clinton knew that he had been tricked.

Two months later Cornwallis surrendered to the Allied armies, and there was no more British army between New York and Charleston. The plan which first saw daylight in the Livingston House at Dobbs Ferry ended the Revolution.