Chapter VII: Introduction: By George Perry Morris (5)

“As we were thinking and consulting how to effect this great work,
it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. John Harvard, a
godly gentleman and a lover of learning then living amongst us, to
bequeath the one half of his estate, in all about £1700, toward the
erection of the college, and all his library.”

Was ever a gift so marvellously multiplied as the bequest of this obscure young scholar?

By this one decisive act of public-spirited and well-directed munificence this youth made for himself an imperishable name and enrolled himself among the foremost of the benefactors of humanity. In acknowledgment of Harvard’s bequest the General Court voted in 1638 “that the College at Cambridge be called Harvard College.”

It is the presence of the college that has given distinctive atmosphere to Cambridge. The character of the place has been determined by the fact that for more than two centuries and a half it has been the home of succeeding generations of men devoted not to trade and manufacture, but to the cultivation of the intellectual and spiritual elements in human life. Over the college gate stands an iron cross and upon the gate-post is the seal of the college with “Veritas” written across its open books. The Harvard life and spirit and teaching are all adapted to lead young men to the love and service of truth and to send them out to a ministry as wide and varied as the needs of humanity. The influence of the scholars and teachers and administrators that have been drawn into the service of the college is paramount, even if it is unconsciously exercised and felt, in the community about the college. Here have always been--inevitable in a town which is the resort of the chosen youth of the country--a healthy, wholesome independence of spirit and a high-minded earnestness. Here has always been the refined simplicity of life natural to a community composed of, or influenced by, men of quiet tastes and modest incomes. Here is that touch of sentiment which binds men to the place of their education and to the memories and friendships of youth. Here are the associations with great events and names which inspire patriotism and ambition of worthy service. Then, too, it has been said:

“Cambridge is an interesting place to live in because the poetry of
Holmes, Longfellow and Lowell has touched with the light of genius
some of its streets, houses, churches and graveyards, and made
familiar to the imaginations of thousands of persons who never saw
them, its rivers, marshes and bridges. It adds to the interest of
living in any place that famous authors have walked in its streets,
and loved its highways and byways, and written of its elms, willows
and ‘spreading chestnut tree,’ of its robins and herons. The very
names of Cambridge streets remind the dwellers in it of the
biographies of Sparks, the sermons of Walker, the law-books of
Story, the orations of Everett, and the presidencies of Dunster,
Chauncy, Willard, Kirkland and Quincy.”

The place is not unworthy of the wealth of affection and poetic tribute that has been lavished upon it. The old Puritan church records, with their quaint entries about heresies and witchcraft, about ordinations where “four gallons of wine” and bushels of wheat and malt and hundredweights of beef and mutton were consumed, and about funerals conducted with solemn pomp; and the town records with notes about the “Palisadoe” and the Common rights and “the Cowyard” and the building of “The Great Bridge,”--a vast undertaking,--have more than merely antiquarian interest, for they reveal the intelligent and sturdy democracy and broad principles of government upon which the American republic rests.

But if these ancient records seem uninviting, let the visitor turn to the annals of the stirring time of the Revolution. General Gage called Harvard College “that nest of sedition.” In that nest were hatched John Hancock, James Otis, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Joseph Warren and many another of the patriot leaders. The town was the abode of many of the leading Tory families, but as early as 1765 the town-meeting voted “that (with all humility) it is the opinion of the town that

the inhabitants of this Province have a legal claim to all the natural, inherent, constitutional rights of Englishmen and--that the Stamp Act is an infraction upon these rights.” And after an argument on the merits of the question it was further ordered “that this vote be recorded in the Town Book, that the children yet unborn may see the desire their ancestors had for their freedom and happiness.” For the next ten years there is scarcely a proceeding in the preliminary debates and contests that led up to open revolution that is not illustrated in the resolutions recorded by the Cambridge town clerk. Vote followed vote, as the restrictive measures of Parliament irritated the townsmen, till at the town-meeting of 1773 it was resolved “that this town--is ready on the shortest notice, to join with the town of Boston and other towns, in any measures that may be thought proper, to deliver ourselves and posterity from slavery.” The 2d of September, 1774, just escaped the historic importance of April 19th in the next year. On that day several thousand men gathered on Cambridge Common and proceeded in orderly fashion to force the resignation of two of His Majesty’s privy councillors,

and then, marching up Brattle Street to the house of the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province, Thomas Oliver--the house that was afterwards the home in succession of Elbridge Gerry, Rev. Charles Lowell and his son James Russell Lowell--they extorted from him, too, a pledge to resign. “My house in Cambridge,” he wrote, “being surrounded by about four thousand men, I sign my name--Thomas Oliver.” Both the first and second of the Provincial Congresses met in Cambridge, and at last the running battle of April 19, 1775, swept through the borders of the town. Twenty-six Americans were killed within the boundaries of Cambridge, six of them citizens of the place, and the American militia who followed the British retreat from Concord on that momentous evening lay on their arms at last on Cambridge Common.

For eleven months after the Concord fight, Cambridge was a fortified camp. The college buildings, the Episcopal church and the larger houses were occupied as barracks. General Ward established his headquarters in the gambrel-roofed house which was afterwards the birthplace of Oliver Wendell Holmes. On the lawn before the house, in the hush of the June evening, Prescott’s men were drawn up, while President Langdon of the college, in cap and gown, prayed for the success of their arms ere they marched to Bunker Hill. Two weeks later Washington reached the camp, and on July 3d, under the spreading elm at the western end of the Common, unsheathed his sword and, as the inscription reads, “took command of the American Army.” Washington lived

for a while in the president’s house, but soon made his headquarters in the fine old mansion of the Vassalls which was later the home of Longfellow.

After March, 1776, when Boston was finally evacuated by the British, Cambridge ceased to be involved in the military events of the Revolution, but in 1777 the captured troops of Burgoyne were quartered in the town, the soldiers swinging their hammocks in the college buildings and the officers occupying the deserted mansions of “Tory Row.” Burgoyne lived in the house sometimes called, in derision of its first clerical occupant, “The Bishop’s Palace,” and Riedesel and his accomplished wife in the Lechmere house. “Never have I chanced,” wrote Madame Riedesel, “upon such a charming situation,” and never has our colonial life been more charmingly described than by this brave and vivacious German lady in the letters written from her pleasant prison to her distant home.

For fifty years after the Revolutionary epoch, Cambridge was a country town of quiet habits, its only distinguishing characteristic being the scholastic and literary atmosphere that hung about the college. It was a good

place to be born in, and it was surely good to live in the place where Everett and Quincy ruled the academic world; where Longfellow wrote his poetry, and Palfrey his history, and Sparks his biographies; where Washington Allston painted and Margaret Fuller dreamed; where William Story and Richard Dana and Lowell and Holmes and the rest walked to church and stopped to gossip with the neighbors at the post-office.

“No town in this country,” says Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “has
been the occasion of two literary descriptions more likely to
become classic than two which bear reference to the Cambridge of
fifty years ago. One of these is Lowell’s well-known _Fireside
Travels_ and the other is the scarcely less racy chapter in the
_Harvard Book_, contributed by John Holmes, younger brother of the
‘Autocrat.’”

To these happy descriptions we may now add the accounts of Colonel Higginson’s boyhood in his _Cheerful Yesterdays_, and Dr. Holmes’s loving story of his birthplace in the _Poet at the Breakfast Table_.

“Cambridge,” wrote Lowell, “was still a country village with its
own habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the force
of suburban gravitation. Approaching it from the west, by what was
then called the New Road, you would pause on the brow of Symond’s
Hill to

enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay
the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had
seen Massachusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to
emigrate with the Tories, by whom, or by whose fathers, they were
planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the square,
brown tower of the Episcopal Church, and the slim, yellow spire of
the parish meeting-house. On your right the Charles slipped
smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and
there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded
cloud-shadow. To your left upon the Old Road you saw some
half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all
comfortably fronting southward.... We called it ‘the Village’ then,
and it was essentially an English village--quiet, unspeculative,
without enterprise, sufficing to itself, and only showing such
differences from the original type as the public school and the
system of town government might superinduce. A few houses, chiefly
old, stood around the bare common, with ample elbow-room, and old
women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows
from which they had watched Lord Percy’s artillery rumble by to
Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia general who
had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. The hooks were to be
seen from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne’s captive
red-coats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed
clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia. One coach
sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis.”

Cambridge is no longer the idyllic village of Lowell’s boyhood, but a great suburban city bustling with many activities. So rapid has been the growth that Lowell on his return from Europe in 1889 wrote:

“I feel somehow as if Charon had ferried me the wrong way, and yet
it is into a world of ghosts that he has brought me. I hardly know
the old road, a street now, that I have paced so many years, for
the new houses. My old homestead seems to have a puzzled look in
its eyes as it looks down--a trifle superciliously methinks--on
these upstarts.

“The old English elms in front of my house haven’t changed. A
trifle thicker in the waist, perhaps, as is the wont of prosperous
elders, but looking just as I first saw them seventy years ago, and
it is balm to my eyes. I am by no means sure that it is wise to
love the accustomed and familiar as much as I do, but it is
pleasant and gives a unity to life which trying can’t accomplish.”

Cambridge is to-day the abode of as happy, comfortable and progressive a people as the world contains. It presents a unique example in this country of a city thoroughly well governed. It is now a quarter-century since partisanship has been tolerated in city affairs. In the City Hall, erected under the administration of Mayor William E. Russell, who here got his training for the splendid service he afterward rendered to the State, and might, had his

life been spared, have rendered to the nation, no liquor license has ever been signed. So excellent has been the record of successive non-partisan administrations in the city that the very phrase, “The Cambridge Idea,” has become well known even outside the limits of Massachusetts as signifying the conception of public office as a public trust and the conduct of municipal affairs on purely business principles. Yet in spite of its municipal expansion and business enterprises, Cambridge is still pre-eminently the place where the lamp of learning is kept lighted. Though the college waxes great in numbers and its buildings multiply, and the jar of business invades the academic quiet, yet the purposes and habits of the scholar’s life still distinguish the community. It is said that when Cambridge people are at a loss for conversation one asks the other, “How is your new book coming on?” and the question rarely fails to bring a voluble reply. There is an entire alcove in the City Library devoted to the works of Cambridge writers. “Brigadier-Generals,” said Howells, himself once a resident of the town, “were no more common in Washington during the Civil War than authors in Cambridge.” It is an interesting illustration of the persistence of good tradition that the place where was established the first printing-press in America, set up by Stephen Daye in 1639, should still be a centre of book-production. Not only do John Fiske and Charles Eliot Norton and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and a score of others maintain the literary reputation of the place, but the great establishments of the Riverside Press, the University Press and the Athenæum Press put forth a constant stream of high-standard publications, and send a most characteristic Cambridge product all over the world. Still is Cambridge one of the shrines of pilgrimage. The antiquarians ponder over the mossy gravestones in the little “God’s Acre” between the “Sentinel and Nun,” as Dr. Holmes called the two church towers which front the college gate, and there they read the long inscriptions that tell the virtues of the first ministers of the parish and the early presidents of the college. The patriots come and stand under the Washington elm, or linger by the gates of the Craigie house or Elmwood, or pace the noble Memorial Hall, which declares how Harvard’s sons died for their country, while visitors flock to the great museum which the genius and energy of Louis Agassiz upbuilt, and to the garden where Asa Gray taught and botanized. Thousands of men all over the country think of Cambridge with grateful love as they remember the years of their happy youth; and the citizens of the place, while they look backward with just pride, look forward with confidence that there is to be more of inspiring history and true poetry in the city’s future than in its fortunate past.

CONCORD

FIRST IN MANY FIELDS

BY FRANK B. SANBORN

Old this New World is,--geologically more ancient, perhaps, than that hemisphere from whose western edge Columbus set sail, four centuries ago, and found our continent lying across his way, as he plodded to Cathay. Yet, uncounted as our barbarous centuries and antediluvian æons are, real history begins only with the opening of the seventeenth century, when the English Puritan and the French Jesuit transferred to these shores the unfolding civilization and the rival religions of Western Europe. When we see at Plymouth the wooded glacial hillsides, under which the Pilgrims landed and established democracy in their wilderness, we may remember that their venture, though bolder, because earlier, than that of Bulkeley and Willard, who planted the Concord colony, was yet but fifteen years in advance, and was made beside a friendly ocean, bearing succor and trade, and feeding them from its abundance. But the Concord colonists sat down in the gloomy shadow of the forest, amid trails of the savage and the wolf. Still more heroic was the crusade of the Jesuit in New France; but while romance and martyrdom were his lot, our Puritans planted here the germs of a grand republic.

“God said, ‘I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor.
I will divide my goods,
Call in the wretch and slave;
None shall rule but the humble,
And none but Toil shall have.’”

The first event in the history of Massachusetts was this planting of a territorial democracy. The colony of Concord was granted by Winthrop and his legislature in September, 1635, to Peter Bulkeley, a Puritan minister, from the little parish of Odell or Woodhill (colloquially called “Wuddle”) in English Bedfordshire, and to Simon Willard, a merchant, from Hawkshurst in Kent. Twelve other

families were joined with them in the grant, and another minister, Rev. John Jones, brought other families from England, aiming towards Concord, in October, 1635. The situation was doubtless chosen by Major Willard, an Indian trader and in after years a fighter of the Indians; who also selected and partly colonized two other towns, farther in the wilderness,--Groton and Lancaster. But the true father of this Concord, and probably the giver of its name (altering it from the Indian Musketaquit), was Rev. Peter Bulkeley, ancestor of its most celebrated citizen, Waldo Emerson. Of this worthy, whose grave, like that of Moses, is unknown to this day, something should be said, before we come to later heroes. Peter Bulkeley was the son of Rev. Edward Bulkeley, a doctor of divinity in English Cambridge,--a scholar and man of wealth, who was rector of the Bedfordshire parish just named, where his son was born in 1583. He succeeded his father there in 1620.

It is in the country of John Bunyan and Cowper the poet, this little parish of Odell. Like Concord River, the Ouse, on which it stands, is unmatched for winding, even in England. Below the old castle of Odell, and the church, still standing, where the Bulkeleys preached, runs this crooked stream, murmuring as it meanders through its fringe of meadowland, green as the richest strip of English pasture can be, which lies between such a river and the low hills that come down towards its edge. This Ouse (there is another in Yorkshire) flows from Bucks, the county of John Hampden, through Bedford, the county of the Russells, and Huntingdon, where Cromwell lived, and finally into the North Sea at Lynn. On the north bank lies the hill upon which Odell stands,--the highway from Sharnbrook to Harrold and Olney (long the home of Cowper) running from east to west along the breast of the hill. The old church standing amid trees--conspicuous is a chestnut of surpassing size and beauty--is directly opposite the ancient castle, now a comfortable and handsome mansion, built some two hundred years ago,--or about the time the oldest houses in Concord were built.

It was no love of adventure, we may be sure, that brought Peter Bulkeley, at the age of fifty-two, from this lovely country into a land of forests and of poverty; but a desire to escape the ecclesiastical tyranny of Laud and his bishops, and to establish a true church in the wilderness. Some difficulties attended even this, for when, in July, 1636, Mr. Bulkeley was about to organize his church at Cambridge, in order to have Sir Henry Vane and John Winthrop (Governor and Deputy Governor that year) present at the ceremony, lo and behold! these great men “took it in ill part, and thought not fit to go, because they had not come to them before, as they ought to have done, and as others had done before them, to acquaint them with their purpose.” Again, in April, 1637, when Mr. Bulkeley was to be ordained (also in Cambridge), Winthrop says that Vane and John Cotton and John Wheelwright, and the two ruling elders of Boston “and the rest of that church which were of any note, did none of them come to this meeting.” “The reason was conceived to be,” adds Winthrop, “because they counted the Concord ministers as _legal_ preachers,”--that is, believers in a covenant of works (of the Law) instead of a covenant of grace. This was the issue upon which Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson were banished, soon after.

Indeed, the ordination of Mr. Bulkeley took place in the very height of that fierce controversy between John Cotton and his former supporters, Wheelwright and Vane, which came near breaking up the little colony; and the Concord minister was one of the synod which, the next August, or perhaps later, specified some eighty doctrinal opinions as erroneous or heretical,--about one error for every two white persons in Concord. The covenant of the village church, however, breathes a more liberal spirit; for in it we find these words, evidently from the hand of Bulkeley:

“Whereas the Lord hath of His great goodness brought us from under
the yoke and burdening of men’s traditions, to the precious liberty
of His ordinances, which we now do enjoy,--we will, according to
our places and callings, stand for the maintenance of this liberty,
to our utmost endeavor, and not return to any human ordinances from
which we have escaped.”

And the spirit of his oft-quoted sermon is also a witness to his true piety, whatever his doctrinal narrowness:

“There is no people but will strive to excel in something; what can
we (in Concord) excel in, if not in holiness? If we look to number,
we are the fewest; if to strength, we are the weakest; if to wealth
and riches, we are the poorest of all the people of God through the
whole world. We cannot excel nor so much as equal other people in
these things; and if we come short in grace and holiness too, we
are the most despicable people under Heaven.”

Let us hope that the wish of the good pastor was granted, and that he lived to see the fruit of his labors. Yet there is a letter of his, written in 1650 to John Cotton, in which Bulkeley seems to regret the democratic liberty which Emerson, his descendant, never ceased to approve. The Concord minister writes:

“The Lord hath a number of holy and humble ones here amongst us,
for whose sakes He doth spare, and will spare long; but, were it
not for such a remnant, we should see the Lord would make quick
work amongst us. Shall I tell you what I think to be the ground of
all this insolency which discovers itself in the speech of men?
Truly, I cannot ascribe it so much to any outward thing, as to the
putting of too much liberty and power into the hands of the
multitude, which they are too weak to manage; many growing
conceited, proud, arrogant, self-sufficient.... Remember the former
days which you had in old Boston; yet the number of professors is
far more here than there. But tell me, which place was better
governed? When matters were swayed there by your wisdom and
counsel, they went on with strength and power for good. But here,
where the heady or headless multitude have gotten the power into
their hands, there is insolency and confusion; and I know not how
it can be avoided, unless we should make the doors of the church
narrower.”

This was the caution and reversion of age,--for the doubting Peter was then sixty-seven. But Emerson, at the age of sixty, could say, with unabated faith in Freedom:

“Call the people together!
The young men and the sires,
The digger in the harvest field,
Hireling and him that hires;
Lo now, if these poor men
Can govern the land and sea,
And make just laws below the sun,
As planets faithful be.”

The experience of the ages has shown that the Puritans were right in making the doors of the church wider, not narrower; though we still hear the complaint of aged men, or young men born with a call to be old, that the former times were better than ours, and the “headless multitude” must be deprived of a voice in their own destiny.

When Emerson in 1835, at the two hundredth anniversary of Concord, proposed to requite England’s gift of her printed Doomsday Book by presenting her and the other European nations with our yet unpublished town records, he said: “Tell them the Union has 24 States, and Massachusetts is one; that in Massachusetts are 300 towns, and Concord is one; that in Concord are 500 rateable polls, and _every one has an equal vote_.” To-day there are 45 States; Massachusetts has 322 towns, besides nearly 30 cities; and instead of 500 ratable polls, Concord has now 1200; but each one still has an equal vote.

FROM A SKETCH BY ROWSE.]

Men are carried along, in spite of themselves, by the doctrine or system which they embrace; their life principle, once adopted, has more force than their temporary wish or will. So Calvinism, of which Peter Bulkeley was a fervent disciple, with its constant stress laid on the worth of the individual man, led inevitably to democracy, no matter how much the innate aristocratic feeling of the English gentleman--the class to which Bulkeley belonged--might revolt thereat. It was the same in both countries, the mother and the daughter; Old England and New England found John Calvin leading them along towards the Commonwealth of equal rights and abolished privileges,--towards Sidney and Locke, Franklin and Jefferson, Lincoln and Gladstone.

This, then, is the first historic lesson of Concord, as of all New England,--Democracy through Calvinism, in spite of recalcitrant gentry and reactionary ministers. Philanthropy, too, that modern invention, which may almost be said to have come in with the eighteenth century, and to have had Franklin for its first missionary, began to show itself in our meadowy town, whose very name prefigured it. The epitaph of Rev. John Whiting, parish minister here for twenty-six years (dying in 1752), records that he was “a gentleman of singular hospitality and generosity, who never detracted from the character of any man, _and was a universal lover of mankind_.” This would have been no compliment in Bulkeley’s time, when the saints were entitled to be loved, and sinners were excluded; but the eighteenth century set up a higher standard, which has been maintained till now, when the votaries of evolution and the survival of the fittest are teaching a return to the old doctrine,--only reversing it; for now it is the sinners whom we are expected to admire, and to hate the saints.

The second historic lesson of Concord is like unto the first,--but more startling and brilliant. It was the lesson of Revolution, which has been thoroughly learned since 1775. The embattled farmers who, at yonder bridge,

“Fired the shot heard round the world,”

were conservative revolutionists, and as far from anarchy as from atheism. In the instructions given by this town to its representative in 1774,--or rather, in a report made in town-meeting, January 20th of that year, in view of

REDRAWN FROM RALPH EARLE’S SKETCH OF 1775.

1. THE BRITISH.

2. AMERICANS.]

the Boston Tea-Party,--it was declared as the voice of the town:

“That we will, in conjunction with our brethren in America, risk
our fortunes, and even our lives, in defence of his Majesty King
George the Third, his person, crown, and dignity; and will also,
with the same resolution, as his freeborn subjects in this country,
to the utmost of our power and ability, defend all our
charter-rights, that they may be transmitted inviolate to the
latest posterity.”

Three months after this, when the Boston Port Bill was in agitation, and two months later, when it had passed Parliament, the farmers of Concord took a bolder tone,--“conscious,” as they said in town-meeting, “of no alternative between the horrors of slavery, and the carnage and desolation of a civil war,” except non-importation of British goods, to which the good citizens bound themselves. Still later, in a county convention which met in Concord, August 31, 1774, it was resolved:

“That we by no means intend to withdraw our allegiance from our
gracious Sovereign; that when our ancestors emigrated from Great
Britain, charters and solemn stipulations expressed the conditions,
and what particular rights they yielded; what each party had to do
and perform, and what each of the contracting parties were equally
bound by. Therefore a debtor may as justly refuse to pay his debts,
because it is inexpedient for him, as the Parliament deprive us of
our charter privileges, because it is inexpedient to a corrupt
administration for us to enjoy them.... And a sense of our duty as
men, as freemen, as Christian freemen, united in the firmest bonds,
obliges us to resolve that every civil officer in this Province,
now in commission, and acting in conformity to the late act of
Parliament, is not an officer agreeable to our charter--_therefore
unconstitutional, and ought to be opposed_.... As we are resolved
never to submit one iota to the Act, we will not submit to courts
thus constituted, and acting in conformity to said Act.... In
consequence of this resolve, all business at the Inferior Court of
Common Pleas, and Court of General Sessions of the Peace, next to
be holden in Concord, _must cease_.”

This was peaceful revolution, proceeding, not upon any vague notion of a general “Social Contract,” but on formal violations of a written contract, the Colony Charter, as explicitly stated. I ask attention to this, because it has been a favorite fancy of some modern writers, who praise the Puritans and disparage Jefferson and Franklin, that our Revolutionary fathers had gained through those two latitudinarians a glimpse of the levelling French doctrines, and gave themselves up to be guided by Rousseau and Voltaire, in dereliction of their Puritan ancestry. Precisely the opposite is true; the French author whom Jefferson may have had in mind, when he was not thinking of Pym and Hampden, Sergeant Maynard, Locke, and Algernon Sidney,--I mean Montesquieu,--having derived his theories more from the English constitutionalists than they from him. Probably not one of the men of Middlesex, who thus led the way to revolution in this law-abiding town of Concord (the seat of county justice), ever heard of Rousseau; but they were lawyers, deacons, country justices and farmers, accustomed to sit on juries; and they understood the law of contract and the obligations of fair trade as well as any English lord could tell them.

They voted further, on this eventful summer day, that “a Provincial Congress is absolutely necessary, in our present unhappy situation,”--and they named October, and Concord, as a suitable time and place for its assembling. This first Provincial Congress did meet, October 7th, at Salem, but adjourned to Concord that day; it first met here, October 11, 1774, and, finding the county court-house too small for its three hundred members and clerks, and the people who gathered to support them, it moved over to the parish meeting-house (built in 1712), and remained in session there five days, when it removed to Cambridge, for the sake of being nearer Boston, then held as a garrison by British troops. The second Provincial Congress, of 1775, also met in Concord for four weeks of March and April; and it had only been adjourned four days when the British grenadiers made their midnight march from Boston to Lexington, hoping to catch there the arch-rebels Hancock and Sam Adams, who had gone to Lexington as members of the Committee of Public Safety (of which Dr. Warren was chairman), then the executive of Massachusetts under the new revolutionary government. The Provincial Congress, the legislature of the Province, met again for the last time in Concord, April 22, 1775, to consider the results of the eventful 19th. It finally dissolved May 31st, after hearing a sermon from Dr. Langdon, the President of Harvard College; and Concord ceased forever to be the legislative capital of Massachusetts. It became temporarily, however, the seat of Dr. Langdon’s College, which in October, 1775, began its recitations in the court-house and meeting-house, and so continued till June, 1776.

Even Harvard College was at that time revolutionary; it gave up its few buildings in Cambridge to the army of Washington, and its president, a cousin of the wealthy New Hampshire patriot, John Langdon, made the prayer for Bunker Hill battle, as the troops marched out of Cambridge to give a feeble support to Prescott and his Middlesex farmers, entrenched on the hill. Washington had not yet reached Cambridge, to take command; had his strategic eye taken in the situation that morning, the result at Bunker Hill would have been different.

Lexington, the town which gave its name to the battle of April, 1775, more decidedly than Concord,--though both names occur from the first,--was an offshoot from the older towns of Cambridge, Watertown and Woburn, rather than an original church seat, and was not established as a town until 1712. A range of hills separates it from the valley of the Musketaquit, and Paul Revere, in his night ride of April 18th, celebrated by Longfellow, could not cross those hills, but left his message of war to be borne on to Concord village by young Prescott, distantly related to Prescott of Bunker Hill. But Lexington, though little more than half so populous as Concord at that time, had a warlike people, many of them descended from the fighting Monros of Scotland, captured by Cromwell, and exiled for their loyalty to the Stuarts. In Lexington they again turned out against the house of Hanover, and they were commanded that April morning by the grandfather of Lexington’s most famous son, Theodore Parker. Captain John Parker, though ill on the 19th of April, did his soldier’s duty from two in the morning till midnight; and some of his men returned the British fire in early morning, against hopeless odds. Their turn came in the afternoon, when the retreating British were only saved from total defeat by the cannon of Lord Percy. Those first heroes of the Revolution, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who had been at the Provincial Congress in Concord, at Lexington were in the early morning in the parsonage of Rev. Mr. Clark, a kinsman of Hancock, and narrowly escaped capture by the British soldiers, who had special orders to seize them.

John Pierpont, a poet whose Pegasus balked now and then, in his verses at Acton, April 19, 1851, anticipated Longfellow by this Wordsworthian version of Revere’s ride to Lexington:

“The foremost, Paul Revere,
At Warren’s bidding has the gauntlet run
Unscathed, and, dashing into Lexington,
While midnight wraps him in her mantle dark,
Halts at the house of Reverend Mister Clark.”

As compared with Concord, though both were rural towns, Lexington was then, and long remained, more rustic than its westward neighbor; with less trade, less culture and fewer of the tendencies toward literature which early showed themselves in the parish of the Bulkeleys and Emersons. When Theodore Parker, in his career of scholarship and reform, began to look outward from his father’s Lexington farm, it was towards Concord, as well as towards Boston, that he turned his eyes; he taught a district school in Concord, and preached in its pulpit as a candidate to stand beside Dr. Ripley, the pastor of the Old Manse. In after years he thus described the event which gave Lexington its chief title to fame, before Parker’s own birth there:

FROM AN OLD PRINT.]

“The war of Revolution began at Lexington, to end at Yorktown. Its
first battle was on the Nineteenth of April. Hancock and Adams
lodged at Lexington with the minister. In the raw morning, a little
after daybreak, a tall man, with a large forehead under a
three-cornered hat, drew up his company of 70 men on the
Green,--farmers and mechanics like himself; only one is left now
(1851), the boy who played the men to the spot. (It was Jonathan
Harrington the fifer.) They wheeled into line to wait for the
Regulars. The captain ordered every man to load his piece with
powder and ball. ‘Don’t fire,’ were his words, ‘unless fired upon;
but if they want a war, let it begin here.’ The Regulars came on.
Some Americans offered to run away from their post. Captain Parker
said, ‘I will order the first man shot dead that leaves his place.’
The English commander cried out, ‘Disperse, you rebels! lay down
your arms and disperse!’ Not a man stirred. ‘Disperse, you damned
rebels!’ shouted he again. Not a man stirred. He ordered the
vanguard to fire; they did so, but over the heads of our fathers.
Then the whole main body levelled their pieces, and there was need
of ten new graves in Lexington. A few Americans returned the shot.
British blood stained the early grass which waved in the wind.
‘Disperse and take care of yourselves!’ was the captain’s last
command. There lay the dead, and there stood the soldiers; there
was a battle-field between England and America--never to be forgot,
never to be covered over. The ‘Mother-country’ of the morning was
the ‘enemy’ at sunrise. ‘Oh, what a glorious morning is this!’ said
Samuel Adams.”

Seven men had been killed on the spot, nine wounded,--a quarter-part of all who had stood in arms on the Green, under the eyes of Hancock and Adams.

One of the Lexington Munroes, Ensign Robert, was the first man killed by Pitcairn’s volley; he was sixty-four years old, and had been color-bearer in the capture of Louisburg by assault in 1745. Two of his sons and two sons-in-law were in his company on Lexington Green, and eleven of the Munroe clan were in arms that day. Captain Parker did not long survive the battle, dying the next September; but when the Civil War came on, his grandson Theodore had bequeathed to Massachusetts, and Governor Andrew had placed in her Senate Chamber, beside the trophies sent by Stark from Bennington,

“two fire-arms, formerly the property of my honored
grandfather,--to wit, the large musket or King’s arm, which was by
him captured from the British in the battle of Lexington, and which
is the first fire-arm taken from the enemy in the war for
Independence; and also the smaller musket used by him in that
battle.”

Theodore Parker had died in May, 1860.

Pitcairn and his redcoats, delayed only half an hour by this bloody overture to Washington’s grand career, marched on towards

Concord, little knowing what would meet them there. As they climbed the hills in Lexington and Lincoln, they could surmise, however, that the country was rising, for the church-bells were ringing an alarm of fire. Pierpont, at Acton, overlooking the neighboring towns named by him, gave the geography of this rising in spirited couplets:

“Now Concord’s bell, resounding many a mile,
Is heard by Lincoln, Lincoln’s by Carlisle,
Carlisle’s by Chelmsford,--and from Chelmsford’s swell
Peals the loud clangor of th’ alarum bell,
Till it o’er Bedford, Acton, Westford spreads,
Startling the morning dreamers from their beds.”

These are the small towns lying along the Concord and Merrimac rivers, and their tributaries, which sent forth the minute-men to fight at Concord Bridge.

Prescott had done his warning work well; and as Emerson said in 1835:

“In these peaceful fields, for the first time since a hundred years
(King Philip’s War), the drum and alarm-gun were heard, and the
farmers snatched down their rusty firelocks from the kitchen walls,
to make good the resolute words of their town debates. These poor
farmers acted from the simplest instincts; they did not know it was
a deed of fame they were doing.”

It was Emerson’s grandfather, the town minister, who met them on Concord Green, before his church, and who entered that night in his almanac the events he had witnessed, as soon to be quoted.

By the 17th of June, Massachusetts had an army; but when the Concord farmers made their appeal to arms, two months earlier, it was the spontaneous uprising of an armed people to maintain their own votes and defend their threatened homes. This it is, and not their military achievement, striking as that was, which gives their town a place in martial history. The unregenerate imagination of mankind still delights, after so many centuries of barbarous warfare, in the recital of deeds of battle and the conquering march of great soldiers; Alexander and Cæsar--even Hannibal and Bonaparte--continue to receive admiration for their victories; but the purer fame of Washington rests on the accomplishment of that for which the men of Middlesex rushed to arms on the 19th of April, 1775. As Emerson, our Washington in the field of literature, said, “If ever men in arms had a spotless cause, they had.”

“Behold our river bank,
Whither the angry farmers came
In sloven dress and broken rank,--
Nor thought of fame:
Their deed of blood
All mankind praise;
Even the serene Reason says
‘It was well done.’”

War had been the normal state of Europe; and from the hour when Bulkeley and Willard made here their honest bargain with the red landlords of these game preserves, cornfields, and fishing-places, down to the Franco-German campaigns of 1870,--235 years,--there had been scarcely a period of twenty peaceful

FRENCH’S FIRST STATUE.]

years in that hemisphere. With us it was different; but for the strife between France and England, in which the colonies were more or less entangled, Massachusetts had seen no warfare in her borders for nearly a century, when the insolence of the mother-country forced independence upon us against our will. Yet the fight at the North Bridge was no impromptu affair, as the utterances of our Concord yeomen show. They had declared they would fight for King George or against him, as His Majesty might elect; and when he had made his foolish choice they did not hesitate,--much as they had reason to dread the ordeal by combat. And here again came in the spirit of Calvinism, rallying to the Old Testament, rather than to the New with its gospel of peace and love,--its _amnistie générale_, as poor Trilby says. The grandfather of Emerson (who was also the great-great-great-grandson of Peter Bulkeley) was parish minister of Concord; he had been chaplain to the Provincial Congress, and he died in Vermont, as chaplain in the Revolutionary army of General Gates. Five weeks before the invasion of his parish by the redcoats, he had preached to the militia companies gathered in this town for review, a famous sermon from the text, “And behold, God Himself is with us for our Captain, and His priests with sounding trumpets to cry alarm against you.” He was as good as his word, for he was one of the first to take his musket and join the minute-men in the early morning of the 19th of April; and returning to the Old Manse (then the new manse, for it was built for him and his bride a few years earlier) to protect his family, he saw the brief fight at the bridge from his study window, and wrote of the day’s doings this brief chronicle of an eye-witness. His grandson found it in a page or two of his family almanac, where, at the end of April, he wrote, “This month remarkable for the greatest events of the present age.”

“This morning, between 1 and 2 o’clock, we were alarmed by the
ringing of the bell, and upon examination found that the troops, to
the number of 800, had stole their march from Boston, in boats and
barges, from the bottom of the Common over to a point in Cambridge,
near to Inman’s Farm, and were at Lexington Meeting-house, half an
hour before sunrise, where they fired upon a body of our men, and
(as we afterward heard) had killed several. This intelligence was
brought us first by Dr. Samuel Prescott, who narrowly escaped the
guard that were sent before on horses, purposely to prevent all
posts and messengers from giving us timely information. He, by the
help of a very fleet horse, crossing several walls and fences,
arrived at Concord at the time above mentioned; when several posts
were immediately despatched, that returning confirmed the account
of the regulars’ arrival at Lexington, and that they were on their
way to Concord. Upon this, a number of our minute-men belonging to
this town, and Acton, and Lincoln, with several others that were in
readiness, marched out to meet them; while the alarm company were
preparing to receive them in the town. Capt. Minot, who commanded
them, thought it proper to take possession of the hill above the
Meeting-house, as the most advantageous situation. No sooner had
our men gained it, than we were met by the companies that were sent
out to meet the troops, who informed us that they were just upon
us, and that we must retreat, as their number was more than treble
ours. We then retreated from the hill near the Liberty Pole, and
took a new post back of the town upon an eminence, where we formed
into two battalions, and waited the arrival of the enemy.

“Scarcely had we formed, before we saw the British troops at the
distance of a quarter of a mile, glittering in arms, advancing
towards us with the greatest celerity. Some were for making a
stand, notwithstanding the superiority of their number; but others,
more prudent, thought best to retreat till our strength should be
equal to the enemy’s, by recruits from the neighboring towns that
were continually coming in to our assistance. Accordingly we
retreated over the bridge; when the troops came into the town, set
fire to several carriages for the artillery, destroyed 60 bbls.
flour, rifled several houses, took possession of the Town-house,
destroyed 500 lb. of balls, set a guard of 100 men at the North
Bridge, and sent a party to the house of Col. Barrett, where they
were in expectation of finding a quantity of warlike stores. But
these were happily secured just before their arrival, by
transportation into the woods and other by-places.

“In the meantime the guard set by the enemy to secure the pass at
the North Bridge were alarmed by the approach of our people; who
had retreated as before mentioned, and were now advancing, with
special orders not to fire upon the troops unless fired upon. These
orders were so punctually observed that we received the fire of the
enemy in three several and separate discharges of their pieces,
before it was returned by our commanding officer; the firing then
became general for several minutes; in which skirmish two were
killed on each side, and several of the enemy wounded. (It may here
be observed by the way, that we were the more cautious to prevent
beginning a rupture with the King’s troops, as we were then
uncertain what had happened at Lexington, and knew not that they
had begun the quarrel there by first firing upon our people, and
killing eight men upon the spot.) The three companies of troops
soon quitted their post at the bridge, and retreated in the
greatest disorder and confusion to the main body, who were soon
upon their march to meet them.

“For half an hour the enemy, by their marches and countermarches,
discovered great fickleness and inconstancy of mind,--sometimes
advancing, sometimes returning to their former posts; till at
length they quitted the town and retreated by the way they came. In
the meantime, a party of our men (150), took the back way through
the Great Fields into the East Quarter, and had placed themselves
to advantage, lying in ambush behind walls, fences and buildings,
ready to fire upon the enemy on their retreat.”

This account differs slightly from others, and omits many particulars; it is the most valuable single version of the memorable skirmish at the Bridge,--in itself trifling, but momentous in its results. Parson Emerson was himself one of those who wished to meet the troops near his own meeting-house, but was wisely overruled. He says that two British soldiers were killed at the Bridge--Shattuck, the town historian, says three; the difference is accounted for by a dismal tale which Hawthorne was perhaps the first to print. He derived it, he says, from Lowell, the poet, who had picked it up, no doubt, in his short residence at Concord in the spring of 1838, when “rusticated” here from Harvard College. It may be read in the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, wherein is found one of the best pictures of our peaceful scenery,--so far removed from thought of bloodshed.

“A youth,” says Hawthorne, “in the service of the clergyman [Parson
Emerson], happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the
back door of the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side
to side of the Bridge, he left his task and hurried to the
battle-field, with the axe still in his hand. The British had by
this time retreated, the Americans were in pursuit; and the late
scene of strife was thus deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay
on the ground--one was a corpse--but, as the young New Englander
drew nigh, the other Briton raised himself painfully upon his hands
and knees, and gave a ghastly stare in his face. The boy--it must
have been a nervous impulse, without purpose--uplifted his axe, and
dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head.”

To a certain extent, Bancroft, in his account of the fight, confirms this tale, saying:

“The Americans acted from impulse, and stood astonished at what
they had done. They made no (immediate) pursuit, and did no further
harm,--except that one wounded soldier, rising as if to escape, was
struck on the head by a young man with a hatchet. The party at Col.
Barrett’s might have been cut off, but was not molested.”

It is traditional that when this party, which had been sent to destroy the military stores at Colonel James Barrett’s, two miles to the westward, came back to the Bridge, alarmed by the firing, and saw their countrymen lying dead there, one of them with his head laid open, they were struck with fear and ran on to the main body in the village, telling of what they had seen. And it was this single incident, very likely, which led the English officers, and Lord Percy himself, to report “that the rebels scalped and cut off the ears of some of the wounded who fell into their hands.” Bancroft indignantly denies this, saying, “The falsehood brings dishonor on its voucher; the people whom Percy reviled were among the mildest and most compassionate of their race,”--which is true.

It is no wonder that the British troops on

their flight back to Boston that day, pursued and ambuscaded by hundreds and thousands of the aroused militia of Middlesex and Essex counties, should themselves have committed some barbarities,--for their defeat and humiliation were great. They lost in course of the day 273 men and officers,--more than had fallen on that glorious day, sixteen years before, when Wolfe died in the arms of victory at Quebec. The loss of the yeomanry was only ninety-one--a third of the British loss,--while all the trophies and circumstances of victory were on the American side. From that day, the Revolution was begun,--to end only with the creation of a new republic. Concord, as President Dwight said, “prefaced the history of a nation, the beginning of an empire.” “Man,” he added, “from the events that have occurred here, will in some respects assume a new character; and experience a new destiny.” Hence the interest with which the world, from that day forward, began to look on this little town.

Yet the prominence of Concord in the revolutionary century that followed her skirmish at the Bridge and along the Lexington road was in part accidental; for Boston and Virginia were the two _foci_ of the American revolt, and Concord became famous chiefly because it was near Boston. It was otherwise with the literary revolution that began sixty years later, with Emerson for its Washington,--and with results that seem as permanent, and in some sort as important, as those which Washington secured to his countrymen. In 1835, when Emerson’s literary career may be said to have fairly begun, America had maintained her political independence, but had lost much of her political principle: she was powerful without moral progress, and without either a profound philosophy or an original literature. The beginnings of poetry and art were visible, but they were more in promise than in performance. Our political writings, though disparaged by Jeremy Bentham, were coming to be recognized as among the foremost; but we had little else that Europe cared to read,--a few sketches by Irving, a dozen novels by Cooper, two or three sermons and as many essays by Channing.