Chapter VI: Introduction: By George Perry Morris (4)

Under the stern rule of Endicott the old Puritan town had banished Quakers and Baptists and Episcopalians, but in the early years of this century her sons were intimate with Buddhist and Mohammedan and Parsee merchants. In 1785 “Lord” Derby, as Hawthorne called him, sent out the _Grand Turk_ which, nearly two years later, brought back the first cargo direct from Canton to New England. At this time it is with peculiar interest we read that in 1796 this same “Lord” Derby sent the _Astrea_ to Manila, which returned the following year with a cargo of sugar, pepper and indigo upon which duties of over $24,000 were paid. That was the time when a sailing-vessel after a long voyage might enter the harbor any day, and therefore the boys of the town lay on the rocks at the Neck, eager to sight the incoming ship, and earn some pocket-money for their welcome news. Significant is the motto on the present city seal: _Divitis Indiæ usque ad ultimum sinum_. They were a hardy race--these Vikings of New England--bold, self-reliant, shrewd, prosperous, equally ready to fight or trade, as occasion might demand. The sailors of that day were the native sons of Salem, sturdy citizens, often well-to-do, who might have an “adventure” of several hundred dollars aboard to invest in tea or sugar or indigo. At fourteen or fifteen the Salem boy went out in the cabin of his father’s vessel, at twenty he was captain, at forty he had retired and in his stately mansion enjoyed the wealth and leisure he had bravely and quickly earned. In 1816 _Cleopatra’s Barge_, a vessel

of 190 tons burden, was launched in the harbor, and George Crowninshield went yachting in the Mediterranean in this luxurious vessel,--perhaps the first American pleasure yacht, as much admired in Europe as in New England. Many are the traditions of this romantic and prosperous era. Many are the famous names of merchants and sailors--men of great wealth and public spirit, mighty in time of war and influential in affairs of state, as Colonel Timothy Pickering, and Benjamin W. Crowninshield, esteemed at home and abroad for their enlightened, progressive, humane, public-spirited services to town and State.

Many of their stately mansions still remain to attest the wealth and fashion and gracious hospitality of that period. The spacious rooms, rich in mahogany furniture, carved wainscoting, French mirrors, and Canton china, were the scenes of elegant and memorable entertainments when Washington, Lafayette, and many other celebrated men of Europe and America visited the old town. As regards the beautiful objects of interior decoration,--now so eagerly sought, and often purchased at high prices,--Salem is one vast museum, almost every home boasting its inherited treasures, while a few houses are so richly dowered that the envy of less fortunate housekeepers can be easily pardoned.

The commerce in time went to Boston, and many of the sons of Salem followed it to help build up the wealth and character of the larger city. In fact where have not the sons, like the vessels, of Salem gone? Their memory is green in the old town and the citizen points with pride to the former residence-site of many a distinguished man she calls her son; of Bowditch, mathematician and author of the famous _Navigator_, of Judge Story and his no less eminent son, the poet and sculptor, of W. H. Prescott, the heroic historian of Spain, of Jones Very, poet and mystic, and of many another man of mark in law and literature.

But of all the distinguished sons of Salem no one makes so eloquent an appeal to the popular heart as Nathaniel Hawthorne. Visitors are particularly interested in the places associated with his life and romances. Of these

there are many, for the novelist lived at one time or another in half a dozen Salem houses, while several are identified with his stories. To appreciate Hawthorne one should read him here, in the old Puritan town with its ancient houses, several of which date from the seventeenth century, its commemorative tablets, ancient tombstones, family names, and the collections of the Essex Institute. With magic pen he traced the greatness and the littleness of the Puritan age, its austere piety, its intolerance, its stern repression of the lighter side of human nature, its moral grandeur and its gloomy splendor. He did for our past what Walter Scott did for the past of the mother-country. Another “Wizard of the North,” he breathed the breath of life into the dry and dusty materials of history; he summoned the great dead again to live and move among us.

The visitor will be interested in all the houses associated with his name,--the modest birthplace on Union Street, the old residence on Turner Street popularly but erroneously called the House of the Seven Gables, the Peabody homestead, beside the Old Burying Point, where he found his wife and also _Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret_. The visitor will be most interested, however, in the three-story, wooden building with the front door opening into the little garden at the side, after the fashion of many Salem houses, where he lived when Surveyor of the Port and wrote the immortal romance of Puritan New England. Here his wife wept over the woe of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, and hither came James T. Fields to hear the story which he so eagerly accepted. After one has read the facts of history in Felt and Upham and the diaries and chronicles of the seventeenth century, it is well to turn to Hawthorne for the realistic touch that makes the Puritan characters live once more for us. His sombre genius was at home in the Puritan atmosphere. How clearly its influence over him is acknowledged in the Introduction to _The Scarlet Letter_! He had the literary taste and the literary ambition, and he found his material in the musty records of the Custom-house, in the town pump so long a feature of Salem streets, in the church steeple, the ancient burying-ground, the old gabled houses, even the Main Street that had witnessed the varied pageants of more than two centuries. He was always leaving Salem and always returning, drawn by the “sensuous sympathy of dust for dust.” Here his ancestors lay buried, and here, although he has said he was happiest elsewhere, lay his inspiration. The strange group of Pyncheons, Clifford, Hepzibah and the Judge, the _Gentle Child_, the _Minister with the Black Veil_, _Lady Eleanore_ in her rich mantle, and the tragic group of _The Scarlet Letter_--these are not simply the creations

of a delicate and somewhat morbid imagination, even more are they the marvellous resurrection of a life long dead.

The old town has a genuine pride in her great son whose fame, assured in England as in America, has added to her attractions. But owing to his invincible reserve and long absences he had only a limited acquaintance in Salem, and there is comparatively little of reminiscence and anecdote among those who remember him. He chose his companions here, perhaps in reaction from the intellectual society he had had in Concord, perhaps in search of literary material, from a jovial set with many a capital tale to tell of the old commercial days when the Custom-house with its militant eagle aloft was the centre of a bustling, cosmopolitan life that surged up and down its steps and over the long black wharves of Derby Street. Like many men of genius his character had more than one side and can now be studied in the abundance of material which the unwearied industry of his children has given us.

The novelist has gone, as the merchant and sailor went, as the Puritan magistrate and minister went. Another set of priceless

associations is added to the old town which now must confess to factories and a foreign population like many another New England seaport. The resident of Salem lives in a modern, progressive, handsome city, made the more attractive by eccentric roofs, “Mackintire” doorways, carved wooden mantels and wainscoting, ever suggestive of the venerable and impressive past, a past that may well serve as a challenge to the children of Viking and Puritan, inviting them to a fine self-control and a broad public spirit.

BOSTON

THE TRIMOUNTAIN CITY

BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

The summer traveller who approaches Boston from the landward side is apt to notice a tall and abundant wayside plant, having a rather stiff and ungainly stem, surmounted by a flower with soft and delicate petals and of a lovely shade of blue. This is the succory (_Cichorium Intybus_ of the botanists), described by Emerson as “succory to match the sky.” But it is not commonly known in rural New England by this brief name, being oftener called “Boston weed,” simply because it grows more and more abundant as one comes nearer to that city. When the experienced Boston traveller, returning to his home in late summer, sees this fair blossom on an ungainly stem assembled profusely by the roadside, he begins to collect his parcels and hand-bags, knowing that he approaches his journey’s end.

The original Boston, as founded by Governor John Winthrop in 1639, was established on a rocky, three-hilled peninsula, in whose thickets wolves and bears were yet harbored, and which was known variously as Shawmut and Trimountain. The settlement itself was a sort of afterthought, being taken as a substitute for Charlestown, where a temporary abode had been founded by Winthrop’s party. There had been much illness there, and so Mr. Blackstone, or Blaxtone, who had for seven years been settled on the peninsula, urged the transfer of the little colony. The whole tongue of land then comprised but 783 acres--an area a little less than that originally allotted to Central Park in New York. Boston now includes 23,661 acres--about thirty times the original extent of the peninsula. It has a population of about 500,000--the State Census of 1895 showing 496,920 inhabitants. By the United States Census of 1890

TRINITY CHURCH.]

it had 448,477, and was then the sixth in population among American cities, being surpassed by New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and St. Louis; and the union of New York and Brooklyn probably making it now the fifth. In 1880 it ranked fifth, St. Louis having since outstripped it. In 1870 it was only seventh, both St. Louis and Baltimore then preceding it. As with most American cities, this growth has been partly due to the annexing of suburbs; but during the last fifteen years there has been no such annexation, showing the increase to be genuine and intrinsic. The transformation in other ways has, however, been more astonishing than the growth. Of the original three hills, one only is now noticeable by the stranger. I myself can remember Boston, in my college days, as a pear-shaped peninsula, two miles by one, attached to the mainland by a neck a mile long and only a few yards wide, sometimes actually covered by the meeting of the tide-waters from both sides. The water also almost touched Charles Street, where the Public Garden now is, and it rolled over the flats and inlets called the Back Bay, where the costliest houses of the city now stand.

The changes of population and occupation have been almost as great as of surface. The blue-jacketed sailor was then a figure as familiar in the streets as is now the Italian or the Chinese; and the long wharves, then lined with great vessels, two or three deep, and fragrant with spicy Oriental odors, are now shortened, reduced, and given over to tugs and coasters. Boston is still the second commercial port in the country; but its commerce is mainly coast-wise or European only, and the picturesque fascination of the India trade has passed away. Even on our Northwest Pacific coast the early white traders, no matter whence they came, were known by the natives as “Boston men.” The wealth of the city, now vastly greater than in those days, flows into other channels--railways, factories, and vast land investments in the far West--enterprises as useful, perhaps more lucrative, but less picturesque. It is a proof of the vigor and vitality of Boston, and partly, also, of its favorable situation, that it has held its own through such transformations. Smaller cities, once powerful, such as Salem, Newburyport, and Portsmouth, have been ruined as to business by the withdrawal of foreign trade.

FROM A DRAWING BY GOVERNOR POWNALL.]

Boston has certainly, in the history of the country, represented from an early time a certain quality of combined thrift and ardor which has made it to some extent an individual city. Its very cows, during its rural period, shared this attribute, from the time when they laid out its streets by their devious wanderings, to the time when “Lady Hancock”--as she was called--helped herself to milk from the herd of her fellow-citizens in order to meet a sudden descent of official visitors upon her husband, the Governor. From the time when Boston was a busy little colonial mart--the epoch best described in Hawthorne’s _Province House Legends_ and _My Kinsman Major Molineux_--through the period when, as described in Mrs. Quincy’s reminiscences, the gentlemen went to King’s Chapel in scarlet cloaks,--down to the modern period of transcontinental railways and great manufacturing enterprises, the city has at least aroused a peculiar loyalty on the part of its citizens. Behind all the thunders of Wendell Phillips’s eloquence there lay always this strong local pride. “I love inexpressibly,” he said, “these streets of Boston, over which my mother held up my baby footsteps; and if God grants me time enough, I will make them too pure to be trodden by the footsteps of a slave.” He survived to see his dream fulfilled. Instead of the surrendered slave, Anthony Burns, marching in a hollow square, formed by the files of the militia, Phillips lived to see the fair-haired boy, Robert Shaw, riding at the head of his black regiment, to aid in securing the freedom of a race.

During the Revolution, Boston was the centre of those early struggles on which it is now needless to dwell. Faneuil Hall still stands--the place from which, in 1774, a letter as to grievances was ordered to be sent to the other towns in the State; the old State House is standing, where the plans suggested by the Virginia House of Burgesses were adopted; the old South Church remains, whence the disguised Indians of the Boston Tea-Party went forth, and where Dr. Warren, on March 5, 1775, defied the British officers, and when one of them held up warningly some pistol-bullets, dropped his handkerchief over them and went on. The Old North or Christ Church also remains, where the two lights were hung out as the signal for Paul Revere’s famous ride, on the eve of the battle of Lexington.

So prominent was Boston during this period that it even awakened the jealousy of other colonies; and Mr. Thomas Shirley, of Charleston, South Carolina, said to Josiah Quincy, Jr., in March, 1773: “Boston aims at nothing less than the sovereignty of this whole continent.... Take away the power and superintendence of Britain, and the colonies must submit to the next power. Boston would soon have that.”

One of the attractions of Boston has long been, that in this city, as in Edinburgh, might be found a circle of literary men, better organized and more concentrated than if lost in the confusion of a larger metropolis. From the point of view of New York, this circle might be held provincial, as Edinburgh no doubt seemed from London; and the resident of the larger

“OLD CORNER BOOKSTORE.”]

community might scornfully use about the Bostonian the saying attributed to Dr. Johnson about the Scotchman, that “much might be made of him if caught young.” Indeed, much of New York’s best literary material came always from New England; just as Scotland still holds its own in London literature. No doubt each place has its advantages, but there was a time when one might easily meet in a day, in one Boston bookstore--as, for instance, in the “Old Corner Bookstore,” built in 1712, and still used for the same trade--such men as Emerson, Parker, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Sumner, Agassiz, Parkman, Whipple, Hale, Aldrich, and Howells; such women as Lydia Maria Child and Julia Ward Howe. Now, if we consider how much of American literature is represented by these few names, it is evident that if Boston was never metropolitan, it at least had a combination of literary ability such as no larger American city has yet rivalled.

I remember vividly an occasion when I was required to select a high-school assistant for the city where I then lived (Newport, Rhode Island), and I had appointed meetings with several candidates at the bookstore of Fields & Osgood at Boston. While I was talking

with the most promising of these--the daughter of a clergyman in northern Vermont--I saw Dr. O. W. Holmes pass through the shop, and pointed him out to her. She gazed eagerly after him until he was out of sight, and then said, drawing a long breath, “I must write to my father and sister about this! Up in Peacham we think a great deal of authors!”

Certainly a procession of foreign princes or American millionaires would have impressed her and her correspondents far less. It was like the feeling that Americans are apt to have when they first visit London or Paris and see--in Willis’s phrase--“whole shelves of their library walking about in coats and gowns”; and, strange as it may seem, every winter brings to Boston a multitude of young people whose expressed sensations are very much like those felt by Americans when they first cross the ocean.

The very irregularity of the city adds to its attraction, since most of our newer cities are apt to look too regular and too monotonous. Foreign dialects have greatly increased within a few years; for although the German element has never been large, the Italian population is constantly increasing, and makes itself very apparent

to the ear, as does also latterly the Russian. Books and newspapers in this last tongue are always in demand. Statues of eminent Bostonians--Winthrop, Franklin, Samuel Adams, Webster, Garrison, Everett, Horace Mann, and others--are distributed about the city, and though not always beautiful as examples of art, are suggestive of dignified memories. Institutions of importance are on all sides, and though these are not different in kind from those now numerous in all vigorous American cities, yet in Boston they often claim a longer date or more historic associations. The great Public Library still leads American institutions of its class; and the Art Museum had a similar leadership until the rapid expansion of the Metropolitan Museum of New York City. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the New England Conservatory of Music educate large numbers of pupils from all parts of the Union; while Boston University and Boston College hold an honored place among their respective constituencies. Harvard University, Tufts College, and Wellesley College are not far distant. The Boston Athenæum is an admirable model of a society library. The public-school system of Boston has in

times past had a great reputation, and still retains it; though it is claimed that the newer systems of the Western States are in some degree surpassing it. The Normal Art School of the State is in Boston; and the city has its own Normal School for common-school teachers. The free lectures of the Lowell Institute are a source of instruction to large numbers every season; and there are schools and classes in various directions, maintained from the same foundation. The great collections of the Boston Society of Natural History are open to the public; and the Bostonian Society has been unwearied in its efforts to preserve and exhibit all memorials of local history. The Massachusetts Historical Society includes among its possessions the remarkable private library of Thomas Dowse, which was regarded as one of the wonders of Cambridge fifty years ago, and it possesses also the invaluable manuscript collections brought together by Francis Parkman when preparing his great series of histories. The New England Historic-Genealogical Society has a vast and varied store of materials in the way of local and genealogical annals; and the Loyal Legion has a library and museum of war memorials.

For many years there has been in Boston a strong interest in physical education--an interest which has passed through various phases, but is now manifested in such strong institutions as the Athletic Club and the Country Club--the latter for rural recreation. There is at Charlesbank, beside the Charles River, a public open-air gymnasium which attracts a large constituency; and there is, what is especially desirable, a class for women and children, with private grounds and buildings. It is under most efficient supervision, and is accomplishing great good. There are some ten playgrounds kept open at unused schoolhouses during the summer vacations, these being fitted up with swings, sand-pens, and sometimes flower-beds, and properly superintended. A great system of parks has now been planned, and partly established, around Boston, the largest of these being Franklin Park, near Egleston Square; while the system includes also the Arnold Arboretum, the grounds around Chestnut Hill Reservoir and Jamaica Pond, with a Marine Park at South Boston. Most of these are easily accessible by steam or electric cars, which are now reached from the heart of the city, in many cases through subways, and will soon be supplemented or superseded, on the more important routes, by elevated roads. The steam railways of the city are also to have their stations combined into a Northern and a Southern Union Station, of which the former is already in use and the latter in process of construction.

This paper is not designed to be a catalogue of the public institutions and philanthropies of Boston, but aims merely to suggest a few of the characteristic forms which such activities have taken. Nor is it written with the desire to praise Boston above her sisters among American cities; for it is a characteristic of American society that, in spite of the outward uniformity attributed to the nation, each city has nevertheless its own characteristics; and each may often learn from the others. This is simply one of a series of papers, each with a specific subject and each confined to its own theme. The inns, the theatres, the club-houses of a city, strangers are likely to discover for themselves; but there are further objects of interest not always so accessible. For want of a friendly guide, they may miss what would most interest them. It is now nearly two hundred years since an English traveller named Edward Ward thus described the Boston of 1699:

PHILLIPS BROOKS.]

“On the southwest side of Massachusetts Bay is Boston, whose name
is taken from a town in Lincolnshire, and is the metropolis of all
New England. The houses in some parts joyn, as in London. The
buildings, like their women, being neat and handsome. And their
streets, like the hearts of the male inhabitants, being paved with
pebble.”

The leadership of Boston in a thousand works of charity and kindness, during these two centuries, has completely refuted the hasty censure of this roving Englishman; and it is to be hoped that the Boston of the future, like the Boston of the past, will do its fair share in the development of that ampler American civilization of which all present achievements suggest only the promise and the dawn.

REVOLUTIONARY BOSTON

“Then and there American Independence was born.”

BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE

The American Revolution began in Boston. Different dates are set for the beginning. John Adams says of Otis’s speech in 1761 in the Council Chamber of the Old State House, “Then and there American Independence was born.” The visitor to Boston should go, very early in his visit, into the Old State House; and when he stands in the Council Chamber he will remember that as distinguished a person as John Adams fixed that place as the birthplace of independence.

But one does not understand the history of the opening of the great struggle without going back a whole generation. It was in 1745 that Governor William Shirley addressed the Massachusetts General Court in a secret session. He brought before them a plan which he had for the conquest of Louisburg in the next spring, before it could be re-inforced from France. The General Court (which means the general assembly of Massachusetts) at first doubted the possibility of success of so bold an attempt; but eventually Shirley persuaded them to undertake it. The Province of New Hampshire and that of Connecticut co-operated, and their army of provincials, with some assistance from Warren of the English navy, took Louisbourg, which capitulated on the 17th of June, 1745. Observe that the 17th of June is St. Botolph’s day; and that he is the godfather of Boston.

When Louis XV. was told that this handful of provincials had taken the Gibraltar of America, he was very angry. In the next spring, the spring of 1746, with a promptness and secrecy which make us respect the administration of the French navy, a squadron of more than forty ships of war, and transports sufficient to bring an army of three thousand men, was fitted out in France and despatched to America, with the definite and acknowledged purpose of wiping Boston from the face of the earth:

“For this Admiral D’Anville
Had sworn by cross and crown
To ravage with fire and steel
Our helpless Boston town.”

AFTER A PORTRAIT IN POSSESSION OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ONCE THE PROPERTY OF JONATHAN MAYHEW.]

It was a disgrace to the military and naval organizations of England at the same time, that they had so little information there on the subject.

They found out at last that this immense French fleet had sailed or was sailing. I think that it was the strongest expedition ever sent from Europe to America between Columbus’s time and our own. Some blundering attempts to meet it were made by the English Admiralty. But their admiral had to make the lame excuse that seven times he tried to go to sea and seven times he was driven back by gales. Whatever the gales were, they did not stop D’Anville and his Armada, and poor Boston, which was to be destroyed, our dear little “town of hen-coops,” clustering around the mill-pond, knew as little of the fate prepared for it as the British Admiralty. It was not until the month of September, 1746, that a fishing-boat from the Banks, crowding all sail, came into Boston and reported to Governor Shirley that her men had seen the largest fleet of the largest vessels which they had ever seen in their lives, and that these were French vessels. Shirley at once called his Council together and “summoned the train bands of the Province.” The Council sank ships laden with stones in the channels of the harbor. Hasty fortifications were built upon the islands, and Shirley mounted upon them such guns as he could bring together. The “train bands” of the Province promptly obeyed the call, and for the next two months near seven thousand soldiers were encamped on Boston Common, ready for any movement which the descent of D’Anville might require. Cautious, wise, and strong beyond any of his successors in his office, Shirley put his hand upon the throttle of the newspapers. D’Anville should not learn, nor should anybody learn, that he had an army in Boston or that he knew his danger. And so you may read the modest files of the Boston papers of that day and you shall find no reference to these military movements of which every man and woman and child in Boston was thinking. It is not till his young wife dies that, by some accident in an editorial room, the confession slips into print that the train bands of the Province accompanied her body to its grave.

It was the only military duty which was required of that army of six thousand four hundred. The people of the times would have told you, every man and woman of them, that the Lord of Hosts had other methods for defending Boston.

What happened, or, if you please, what

BUILT IN 1729.]

transpired, was this: Among his other preparations for his enemy, Shirley proclaimed a solemn Fast Day, in which the people should meet in all their meeting-houses and seek the help of the Almighty, and they did so. Thomas Prince, of the Old South Meeting-house, tells us what happened there. In the morning, a crowded congregation joined in prayer, and Prince told them of their danger and exhorted them to their duty. In the afternoon the assembly met again. As Prince led them in their prayer, what seemed a hurricane from the southwest struck the meeting-house. A generation after, men remembered how the steeple above them shook in the gale, and Prince went on, calmly, in his address to the God who rides on the whirlwind:

“We do not presume to advise, O Lord, but if Thy Providence requires that this tempest shall sweep the invaders from the sea, we shall be content.”

And this was precisely what happened: This southwest gale tore down the Bay. This side Cape Sable, just off Grand Manan, it found D’Anville’s squadron in its magnificent array. It drove ship against ship. It capsized and sank some of the noblest vessels. It tore the masts out of others. It discouraged their crews and their officers. All that was left of this gallant squadron (which was to burn our “hen-coops” here) took refuge in Halifax Bay or crept back under jury-masts to France. In the harbor of Chebucto, as they called Halifax, the wrecks of the fleet were repaired as best they might be. D’Anville and his first officer both died, one as a suicide, and the other from the disgrace of the discomfiture. It is said in Nova Scotia that you may see some of the ships now, if you will look down at the right place in the clear sea, off Cape Sable. A miserable handful of the vessels straggled back to France at the opening of the winter.

The colonists of New England had thus learned two lessons, one in 1745, and one in 1746. In 1745 they had learned that without any assistance from their own king they could storm and take the strongest fortress in America. In 1746 they learned that the anger of the strongest prince in Europe was powerless against them. Those who believed in the immediate providence of God thought that He stretched out His arm in their defense. Those who did not, thought that in the general providence of God, a people who were three thousand miles away from the greatest sovereign of the world might safely defy his wrath. Curiously enough, in the next year, 1747, the people of Boston had an opportunity to learn a third lesson by measuring strength with their own sovereign.

In that year Admiral Knowles, in command of the English squadron,--rather a favorite till then, I fancy, with the people here,--happened to want seamen. He availed himself of that bit of unwritten law which held in England till within my own memory, by impressing seamen from the docks. A memorial of the General Court says that the English government had carried this matter so far that, as they believed, three thousand Americans were at that time in the service of the British navy, having been unwillingly impressed there. But Knowles carried it farther yet. He took on board his fleet some hundreds of ship-carpenters, mechanics, and laboring men; and Boston broke out into a blaze of excitement and fury. There followed the first of the series of proceedings which, with various modifications, lasted for thirty years, until General Howe withdrew the British fleet and army from

Boston. It was a combination of riots and town-meetings, the town-meetings expressing seriously what the rioters did not express so well, the rioters giving a certain emphasis, such as was understood in England, as to the intention of the town-meetings of Boston. We have the most amusing details of this affair in a very valuable and interesting history just published by Mr. John Noble. The rioters seized Knowles’s officers whom they found in the town, and shut them up for hostages. Knowles declared that he would bombard the town. But what with the General Court and the town-meetings and the magistrates and the rest, he was soothed down, the people gave up their hostages, and he gave up the men whom he had seized. Boston had measured forces in this affair with King George. Both were satisfied with the result; and, if I may so speak, this first tussle ended in a tie.

Here were three trials of strength in three years. And the Boston people learned in each of them the elements of their real power. When, nearly twenty years after, Otis made his eloquent protest against the Writs of Assistance, he did not succeed. The Court

decided that the Province must permit the officers to make the searches in private houses which the Crown asked. But there was a point gained, in the confession that the Crown must ask, and thinking men took note of that confession.

“Sam” Adams, as he was always affectionately called, had graduated at Harvard College in 1740. There is no direct evidence known to me, but without it I believe that almost from that time Sam Adams was the inspiring genius of one or more private clubs in which the young men of Boston were trained in the fundamental principles of independence. On the other side it may be said that from the moment when Quebec fell the home government of England did everything that can be conceived of to disgust and alienate the people of Boston. The disgust showed itself now in grumbling, now in physical violence. In the midst of it all there was one quiet leader behind the scenes. Sam Adams had the confidence of the gentry and of the people both. When he wanted a grave and dignified expression of opinion he had a town-meeting called, and then this town-meeting heard speeches and passed resolutions of such dignity and

gravity as were worthy of any senate in the world. On the other hand, if Sam Adams needed to give emphasis to such resolution, the mob of Boston appeared in her streets, did what he wanted it to do, and stopped when he wanted it to stop. It is fair to say that George III.’s ministers lost their heads in their rage against the riots of Boston. The Boston Port Bill, the maddest and most useless act of vengeance, was aimed at the Boston mob; and yet in the thirty years between Louisbourg and Lexington this riotous mob of Boston never drew a drop of human blood in all its excesses. And this, though once and again the soldiers and sailors of England killed one and another of the people.

Now to follow along step by step the visible memorials of the war, I advise you to go to Roxbury through Washington Street by one of the Belt-line cars. The very name, Washington Street, should remind you that Washington rode in in triumph by this highway on the 17th of March, 1776, the day when General Howe and the English troops evacuated the town. Let the car drop you at the Providence railway crossing in Roxbury and take another car to

Brookline; or go on foot. All this time you have been on the track of the English general, Lord Percy, who was sent out with his column to reinforce Colonel Smith, who had charge of the earlier column sent against Concord, on the day of the battle of Lexington. You can, if you choose, on your wheel or on your feet, go into Cambridge with this column; but take care not to cross Charles River by the first bridge, but by that where the students’ boat-houses are, on the road which becomes Boylston Street as you enter Cambridge. You may then go on to Lexington and Concord.

On another day, start from Cambridge at the Law School. This stands on the very site of the old parsonage--General Ward’s headquarters. The evening before the battle of Bunker Hill, Prescott’s division was formed in parade here and joined in prayer with the minister of Cambridge before they marched to Bunker Hill. Anybody will show you Kirkland Street, which is the name now given to the beginning of “Milk Row,” the road over which they crossed to Charlestown. If you are afraid to walk, take your wheel. Two miles, more or less, will bring you eastward to Charlestown Neck. Then turn to your right

and walk to Bunker Hill Monument, which you can hardly fail to see.

It is quite worth while to ascend the monument. It gives you an excellent chance to obey Dr. Arnold’s rule and study the topography on the spot. You cannot fail to see the United States Navy Yard just at your feet. Here Howe’s forces gathered for the attack on Prescott’s works on the day of the battle. And to the shore they retired after they were flung back in the first two unsuccessful attacks.

In the mad attack on Prescott’s works, General Gage lost, in killed and wounded, one quarter of his little army. What was left became the half-starved garrison of Boston. I say “mad attack,” because Gage had only to order a gunboat to close the retreat of the American force, and he could have starved it into surrender. But such delay was unworthy of the dignity of English generals, or, as they then called themselves, “British” generals. It is to be remembered that this use of the word “British,” now much laughed at, was the fashionable habit of those times.

The date of the battle was June 17, 1775. Oddly enough, this had long been the saint’s day of St. Botolph, the East Anglian saint

for whom Boston in England was named. It seems probable, however, that this odd coincidence was never noticed for a hundred years. Since the majority of the people of Boston and Charlestown have been Catholics, it has attracted attention.

From that date to March 17, 1776, the date just now alluded to, Boston and the English army were blockaded by the American troops. They had gathered on the day after Lexington, commanded at first by Artemas Ward, the commander of the militia of Massachusetts, and afterwards by Washington, with Ward as his first major-general. The English retained their hold on Charlestown, but once and again the Americans attacked their forces there. They never marched out beyond Boston Neck or Charlestown Neck.

On the south, their most advanced works were where are now two little parks, Blackstone Square and Franklin Square, on the west and east sides of Washington Street, respectively. They had a square redoubt on the Common, where is now a monument to the heroes of the Civil War. A little eastward of this was a hill called Fox Hill, which was dug away to make the Charles Street of to-day. Farther west, where the ground is now covered with buildings, were two or three redoubts, generally called forts, by which they meant to prevent the landing of the Americans.

At that time Beacon Hill was much higher than it is now. Exactly on the point now marked by a monument, a monument was erected after the Revolution, in commemoration of the events of the year when it began. The present monument--completed lately--is an exact imitation of the first, but that this is of stone, and that was of brick. This has the old inscriptions.

Washington drove out the English by erecting the strong works on what was then called Dorchester Heights, which we now call South Boston. The places where most of these works existed are marked by inscriptions. Independence Square is on the site of one of them.

The careful traveller may go out to Roxbury, follow up Highland Street and turn to the right, and he will find an interesting memorial of one of the strong works built by General Ward. From this point, north and east, each of the towns preserves some relic of the same kind. In Cambridge one is marked

by a public square, on which the national flag is generally floating.

At the North End of Boston, where is now, and was then, the graveyard of Copp’s Hill, the English threw up some batteries. These are now obliterated, but the point is interesting in Revolutionary history, because it was from this height that Gage and Burgoyne saw their men flung back by the withering fire of Bunker Hill.

CAMBRIDGE

BY SAMUEL A. ELIOT

“There is no place like it, no, not even for taxes.”
_Lowell’s Letters_, ii., 102.

The early history of New England seems to many minds dry and unromantic. No mist of distance softens the harsh outlines, no mirage of tradition lifts events or characters into picturesque beauty, and there seems a poverty of sentiment. The transplanting of a people breaks the successions and associations of history. No memories of Crusader and Conqueror stir the imagination. Instead of the glitter of chivalry we have but the sombre homespun of Puritan peasants. Instead of the castles and cathedrals on which time has laid a hand of benediction we have but the rude log meeting-house and schoolhouse. Instead of Christmas merriment the voice of our past brings to us only the noise of axe and hammer, or the dreary droning of Psalms. It seems bleak, and destitute of poetic inspiration; at once plebeian and prosaic.

But I cannot help feeling that if we look beneath the uncouth exterior we shall find in New England history much idealism, much that can inspire noble daring and feed the springs of romance. Out of the hard soil of the Puritan thought, out of the sterile rocks of the New England conscience, spring flowers of poetry. This story of the planting of Cambridge has--if I might linger on it--a wealth of dramatic interest, not indeed in its antiquity,--it is but a story of yesterday,--but in the human associations that belong to it and the patriotic memories it stirs. The Cambridge dust is eloquent of the long procession of saints and sages, scholars and poets, whose works and words have made the renown of the place. First the Puritan chiefs of Massachusetts; then the early scholars of the budding commonwealth; then the Tory gentry who made the town in the days before the Revolution the centre of a lavish hospitality, and who maintained a happy social life of which the memories still linger in the beautiful homes which they left behind them; then the patriot

army surging about Boston in the exciting year of the siege, with the inspiring traditions of what Washington and Warren and Knox and Greene and the rest did and said; and finally the later associations of our great scholars and men of letters, chief of whom we rank Lowell and Holmes and Longfellow, whose lives were rooted deep in the Cambridge soil and whose dust there endears the sod.

The first figures on our Cambridge stage are those of the leaders of the Massachusetts colony. While Boston was clearly marked for prominence in the colony because of its geographical position, there was not at first the intention to make it the seat of government. It was too open to attack from the sea; a position farther inland could be more easily defended, not indeed from the Indians, but from the enemy most to be dreaded,--the war-ships of an irate and hostile motherland. Accordingly Governor John Winthrop and his assistants, shortly after the planting of Boston, journeyed in the shallop of the ship in which they had come from England, four miles up the Charles River behind Boston until they came to a meadow gently sloping to the riverside, backed by rounded hills and protected by wide-spreading salt marshes. There on the 28th of December, 1630, they landed and fixed the seat of their government. To quote the old chronicle:

“They rather made choice to enter further among the Indians than to
hazard the fury of malignant adversaries who might pursue them, and
therefore chose a place situated upon Charles River, between
Charlestown and Watertown, where they erected a towne called
Newtowne, and where they gathered the 8th Church of Christ.”

It was agreed that the Governor, John Winthrop, the Deputy Governor, Thomas Dudley, and all the councillors, except John Endicott, who had already settled at Salem, should build and occupy houses at Newtowne, but this agreement was never carried out. Winthrop, Dudley and Bradstreet built houses, and the General Court of the colony met alternately at Newtowne and at Boston until 1638, when it finally settled in Boston. Yet in spite of the superior advantages of Boston the new settlement evidently flourished, for in 1633 a traveller--the writer of _New England’s Prospect_--describes the village as “one of the neatest and best compacted towns in New England, having many fair structures, with many handsome contrived streets. The inhabitants, most of them, are rich and well stored with cattle of all sorts.”

This is doubtless an extravagant picture and true only in comparison with some of the neighboring plantations which were not so favorably situated. Newtowne was really a crude and straggling settlement made up of some sixty or seventy log cabins or poor frame houses stretching along a road which skirted the river marshes and of which the wanderings were prescribed more by the devious channel of the Charles than by mathematical exactness. The meeting-house, built of rough-hewn boards with the crevices sealed with mud, stood at the crossing of the road with the path that led down to the river, where there was a ladder for the convenience of landing. So primitive was the place that Thomas Dudley, the chief man of the town, writing home, could say, “I have no table nor any place to write in than by the fireside on my knee.” Such was the splendor of the whilom capital of New England.

Like most of the Massachusetts towns, Cambridge began as a church. Though Dudley and Bradstreet and Haynes were high in the councils of the infant commonwealth, holding successively or simultaneously the offices of governor and military chief, yet the leading personality of the village was the minister. The roll of Cambridge ministers begins with the great name of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, and the man who first visioned and did much to make possible our American democracy. Hooker, with his congregation from Braintree, in Essex, England, came to Massachusetts in 1632, and after a short stay at Mount Wollaston, settled at Newtowne, raising the population to nearly five hundred souls. But the stay of the Braintree church was short. Some adventurous spirits had penetrated the wilderness of the interior until they discovered the charm and fertility of the valley of the Connecticut, and soon Hooker and his company were impelled by “the strong bent of their spirits” to remove thither. They alleged, in petitioning the General Court for permission to remove, that their cattle were cramped for room in Newtowne, and that it behooved the English colonists to keep the Dutch out of Connecticut; but the real motive of the exodus was doubtless ecclesiastical. Hooker did not find himself altogether in accord with the Boston teacher, John Cotton. “Two such eminent stars,” says Hubbard, writing in 1682, “both of the first magnitude, though of different influence, could not well continue in one and the same orb.” Hooker took the more liberal side in the antinomian controversy which had already begun to make trouble, and his subsequent conduct of affairs in Connecticut shows that he did not approve the Massachusetts policy of restricting the suffrage to church members. In the spring of 1636, therefore, Hooker and most of his congregation sold their possessions, and driving one hundred and sixty cattle before them, went on their way to the planting of Hartford and the founding of a new commonwealth.

This was the first of many separations by which Cambridge has become the mother of many sturdy children. The original boundaries of the town stretched from Dedham on the south all the way to the Merrimac River on the north. Gradually, by the gathering of new churches and peaceable partition, this territory has been divided, and out of the original Newtowne have been formed, besides the present Cambridge, Billerica, Bedford, Lexington, Arlington, Brighton and Newton. Governors Dudley and Bradstreet removed to Ipswich, and Simon Willard went to be the chief layman of Concord and a famous builder and defender of towns.

The rude houses of Hooker’s congregation were bought by a newly arrived company, the flock of the Rev. Thomas Shepard. This firm but gentle leader, who left a deep impress on the habit of the town, was a youth of thirty-one, and a graduate, like many of the Massachusetts leaders, of Emanuel College, at Cambridge. He came to New England with a company of earnest followers, actuated, as he wrote, by desire for “the fruition of God’s ordinances. Though my motives were mixed, and I looked much to my own quiet, yet the Lord let me see the glory of liberty in New England, and made me purpose to live among God’s people as one come from the dead to His praise.” His brave young wife died “in unspeakable joy” only a fortnight after his settlement at Cambridge, and was soon followed by the chief man of his flock and his closest friend, Roger Harlakenden, another godly youth of the manly type of English pioneers. At once, too, Shepard was plunged into the stormy debates of the antinomian controversy which nearly caused a permanent division in the Congregational churches. The general election of 1637, which was held on the Common at Newtowne, was a tumultuous gathering, and discussion over the merits of “grace” and “works” ran high till John Wilson, minister of the Boston church, climbed up into a big oak tree, and made a speech which carried the day for John Winthrop to the confusion of the heretical disciples of Anne Hutchinson. Through these stormy waters Shepard

steered his course so discreetly that he came into high favor among all people as a sound and vigilant minister, and Cotton Mather tells us that “it was with a respect unto this vigilancy and the enlightening and powerful ministry of Mr. Shepard, that, when the foundation of a college was to be laid, Cambridge, rather than any other place, was pitched upon to be the seat of that happy seminary.”

The founding of Harvard College by the little colony was surely one of the most heroic, devout and fruitful events of American history. Upon the main entrance to the college grounds is written to-day an inscription taken from one of the earliest chronicles, entitled _New England’s First Fruits_. We read that:

“After God had carried us safe to New England and wee had builded
our houses and provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared
convenient places for God’s worship and settled the Civil
Government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after
was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to
leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present
ministers shall lie in the dust.”

Accordingly, on the 28th day of October, 1636, Sir Harry Vane--Milton’s “Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old”--being the Governor, the General Court of the colony passed the following memorable vote: “The Court agrees to give £400 towards a school or college--whereof £200 shall be paid the next year and £200 when the work is finished.” In the following year this vote was supplemented by a further order that the college “is ordered to be at Newtowne, and that Newtowne shall henceforth be called Cambridge.” This is the significant act that marks the distinction between the Puritan colony and all pioneer settlements based on material foundations. For a like spirit under like circumstances history will be searched in vain. Never were the bases of such a structure laid by a community of men so poor, and under such sullen and averted stars. The colony was nothing but a handful of settlers barely clinging to the wind-swept coast; it was feeble and insignificant, in danger from Indians on the one hand and foreign foes on the other; it was in throes of dissension on the matter of heresy which threatened to divide it permanently, yet so resolved were the people that “the Commonwealth be furnished with knowing and understanding men and the churches with an able ministry,” that they voted the entire annual income of the colony to establish a place of learning. Said Lowell:

“This act is second in real import to none that has happened in the
Western hemisphere. The material growth of the colonies would have
brought about their political separation from the mother country in
the fulness of time, but the founding of the first college here
saved New England from becoming a mere geographical expression. It
did more, it insured our intellectual independence of the old
world. That independence has been long in coming, but the chief
names of those who have hastened its coming are written on the roll
of Harvard College.”

But even the self-sacrificing zeal of the colonists would have been almost unavailing had it not been for the coming to Massachusetts at this time of a young Puritan minister, another graduate of Emanuel, upon whom death had already set his seal. Says the chronicler: