Old Cape Cod

I

The difficulties incident to the French wars had given the colonies useful training to prepare them for concerted action against the stupid enactments of the mother country in the reign of George III. England, fully occupied with the great continental wars of which the American conflicts were only a by-product, had been forced largely to let the colonies fend for themselves. When border hostilities were growing to the final French and Indian War, she had suggested the expediency of their coöperating for defence; and just twenty-two years before the Declaration of Independence came into being, Benjamin Franklin had been ready to present to a Colonial Council, called to parley with the Six Nations, a plan of confederation which, being objected to by some as giving “too much power to the people” and by others as conceding “too much to the king,” came to naught. But the fact was established that all the colonies, and not only those of New England, were learning to act together. And the great drift away from mutual understanding with England, which in the beginning, one would think, might have been so easily checked, increased. The colonies knew that by their valor chiefly had been established in America the supremacy of England, and their youthful pride was quick to take offence. In 1760, when a Royal Governor, in his inaugural, cited “the blessings of subjection to Great Britain,” the Massachusetts House was careful to express their “relation” to the Home Government. His predecessor, who had been more sympathetic to the genius of the colonies, lived to warn Parliament that never would America submit to injustice. Yet year by year was injustice done. As early as 1761 oppressive trade acts had brought out the flaming eloquence of young James Otis, of Barnstable. “I argue in favor of British liberties,” cried he in the Massachusetts Chamber. “I oppose the kind of power the exercise of which in former periods of English history cost one king of England his head and another his throne.” For four hours, spellbound, the Court listened to his plea; and well might John Adams, who heard him that day, aver: “American independence was then and there born.” And for the next ten years by his pamphlets, “The Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives” and “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved,” by his letters, and other writings, it has been truly said that Otis “led the movement for civil liberty in Massachusetts.”

As if urged on to foolishness by a decree of fate that America should be a nation, England continued to blunder: she sought to extinguish the military spirit that had been so useful to her by creating a standing army which, although independent of them, the colonies should support; she obstructed manufacturing that the colonies might be dependent upon British markets; by prohibitive foreign duties she restricted trade to British ports, and even taxed trade between colony and colony for the benefit of the imperial treasury. No wonder the colonies were assured that England meant to get an undue portion of the war expense from them. And when Englishmen complained that rich colonists lived like lords while they were impoverished with taxes, the colonists were ready to retort that England had appropriated Canada, the prize won largely through their efforts, and that they had already taxed themselves to the limit to pay their own way. But England, undeterred by warnings at home and plain signs of storm in the colonies, still pleading “the vast debt” incurred “in defence of her American possessions,” in March, 1765, passed the obnoxious Stamp Act which prescribed the use of stamped paper for business and legal documents, newspapers and pamphlets: an annoying enough provision in itself, but the crux of the difficulty was that England, without the consent of the colonies, imposed the tax.

In October a congress of deputies met in New York to “consult on the common interest,” and was presided over by Timothy Ruggles, who had married the Widow Bathsheba Newcomb, of Sandwich, and lived there for some years as lawyer and tavern-keeper. He is said to have been a man of charm and wit, a clever politician, and a patriot who later turned Tory. The congress set forth in no uncertain terms “the rights and liberties of the natural-born subjects of Great Britain ... which Parliament by its recent action has invaded.” And pre-dating the Boston Tea Party, it was another man with Cape affiliations, Captain Isaac Sears, who, in other fashion, defeated the excisemen. “Hurrah, boys,” cried he at the head of a New York mob, “we will have the stamps.” And have them they did, and burned them, too. Sears became head of a Committee for Public Safety, and when Gage was trying to buy material in New York, warned the citizens that America best keep her supplies for her own use. His sobriquet of “King Sears” tells us something of his personality.

England, against the advice of her ablest men, proceeded on her ruinous way. Some parliamentary bombast about “these Americans nurtured so carefully by the motherland” was neatly punctured by Captain Barré, a member who had lived in the colonies: “Planted by your care? No, your oppressions planted them in America,” thundered he. “Nourished by your indulgence? They grew by your neglect. Protected by your arms? They themselves have nobly taken up arms in your defence.” “They are too much like yourselves to be driven,” was his parting shot. And in the Lords, Camden was announcing: “You have no right to tax America; I have searched the matter. I repeat it.... Were I an American, I would resist to the last drop of my blood.” Asked in what book he found such law, he proudly answered: “It has been the custom of England; and, my lords, the custom of England is the law of the land.” At Boston, as in antiphon, James Otis declared: “Let Great Britain rescind; if she does not, the colonies are lost to her.”

A convention of towns, those of the Cape included, calling upon the king for redress, appealed to “the sovereign people.” The king’s ministers answered by garrisoning Boston with four thousand royal troops which the Whigs were now ready to view as a foreign aggression. Non-importation associations, under the motto, “United we conquer; divided we die,” were formed—Boston leading, the Cape towns following close. In the general excitement Massachusetts boiled hottest: for in her capital were the royal troops and here, naturally, was the first clash of arms. The year 1770 brought the “Boston massacre”; and in the same year, under Lord North, all duties were remitted save those on tea—England had bound herself to the East India Company there: to no avail, since the right to tax was reserved. Yet the repeal was welcomed as a partial victory by all but the hot-heads who were determined on separation; and Englishmen, who had taken a burning interest in the struggle of the colonies, rejoiced. London celebrated the event with clash of Bow Bells and dressed ships on the Thames.

Then, in 1773, came the little fleet of tea ships to Boston; and Boston, though she liked tea, promptly threw it into the harbor. Captain Benjamin Gorham, of the Barnstable family, was master of one of the ships, with a cargo of “Bohea”; and it was solemnly reported that “this evening a number of Indians, it is said of his Majesty of Ocnookortunkoog tribe, emptied every chest into the dock and destroyed the whole twenty-eight and a half chests.” And Cape Cod had her private Tea Party: for one of the fleet had run aground on the “Back Side” at Provincetown. John Greenough, district clerk of Wellfleet and teacher of a grammar school “attended by such only as learn the Latin and Greek languages,” busied himself about the task of transferring the cargo to Boston; but no Cape captain, though several were idle, would undertake the job, and boats were had down from Boston for the purpose. The Boston Committee of Correspondence, meantime, sent out a circular letter reporting their Tea Party, and adding: “the people at the Cape will we hope behave with propriety and as becomes men resolved to save their Country.” For it was suspected that not all the wrecked tea had been shipped to Boston; and indeed it soon transpired that Master Greenough, seeing no harm since the Government got no duty, had thriftily retained two damaged cases for himself and a friend. Brought to see his error, his due apology was spread upon the records: “I do declare I had no intention to injure the liberties of my countrymen therein. And whereas the Committee of Correspondence for this district apprehend that I have abused them, in a letter I sent them, I do declare I had no such intention, and wish to be reconciled to them again and to forget and forgive on both sides.” Other tea than Greenough’s hoard was being hunted out. A Truro town-meeting records: “Several persons appeared of whom it had been reported that they had purchased small quantities of the East India company’s baneful teas, lately cast ashore at Provincetown. On examining these persons it appeared that their buying this noxious tea was through ignorance and inadvertance, and that they were induced thereto by the villainous example and artful persuading of some noted pretended friends of government from the neighboring towns.” There is evidence enough that some tea floated into the channels of trade; but any one guilty of the traffic, when apprehended, was quick to place the blame elsewhere.

The Cape was drawn into the great sweep of events. Town meetings were held to consider the alarming conditions; yet, even in the general pinch for money, maintenance was steadily voted for schools and clergy, though it was suggested that a minister might abate his salary “because of the scarcity of money and the difficulties of the times; or wait for the balance.” And one parson, we know, did give up fifty pounds of his stipend. Business was at a standstill, and many persons, for financial rather than political reasons as yet, left Harwich, Chatham, and other towns for Nova Scotia, the better there to trade and carry on the fisheries. “Sons of Liberty” were organized everywhere; each town must report its strength “on the side of liberty.” Yarmouth would have no tea brought into the town; in Chatham “a large number signed against tea”; Wellfleet pledged itself to the “defence of liberty”; Barnstable, Sandwich, Eastham had their resolutions of protest. Falmouth, in 1774, ordered every man from sixteen to sixty years of age to be given arms. Harwich voted to buy arms; Truro voted sympathy with the common cause. And Chatham, in 1772, had declared “civil and religious principles to be the sweetest and essential part of their lives, without which the remainder was scarcely worth preserving.”

England had gone beyond unjust taxation and had dared meddle with the courts—the trial by jury, the appointees to the bench—which was held to vitiate their function. “I argue in favor of British liberties,” had been James Otis’s clarion call; and at Barnstable, in September, 1774, a fine comedy was played out with the connivance, it was suspected, of James Otis, senior, who was chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas. He was to be charged with “holding office during the king’s pleasure” and receiving pay from revenue derived by an “edict of foreign despotism.” On the day preceding the opening of the court men from as far away as Middleborough came flooding into Sandwich; and next morning a small army marched thence to Barnstable to make their protest to the court. At their head was Doctor Nathaniel Freeman, a young hot-head of a Whig, who was leader in many a demonstration against the Tories, and later was to put his martial spirit to good use as brigadier-general in the Federal Army. He was a gallant figure, an eye-witness of the day’s doings remembered, in “a handsome black-lapelled coat, a tied wig as white as snow, a set-up hat with the point a little to the right: in short, he had the very appearance of fortitude personified.” Joined now by Barnstable men, the patriots took their stand in front of the courthouse. They improved the interval of waiting for the court to receive the recantations of several Tories who had been arrested by the Commissioners and when it came to a public declaration of sentiment were disposed, for the most part, as a current doggerel had it, to

Now, behold, the court: Otis, Winslow, Bacon, led by the sheriff with a white staff in his left hand and a drawn sword in his right. “Gentlemen,” demanded Otis, “what is the purpose for which this vast assemblage is collected here?” Whereupon Freeman, from the steps of the courthouse, replied in a fine speech, the upshot of which was that they proposed to prevent their honors from holding court to the end, particularly, that there should be no appeals to the hated higher court of the king’s council, “well knowing if they have no business, they can do no harm.”

“Sirs, you obstruct the law,” thundered Otis. Then, more mildly, “Why do you leap before you come to the hedge?” He ordered them to disperse, and cited his “duty.” “We shall continue to do ours,” countered Freeman. “And never,” cries one who saw the play, “never have I seen any man whatever who felt quite so cleverly as did Doctor Freeman during the whole of this business.”

The court withdrew, and, waited upon later by a committee, signed an agreement not to accept any commission or do any business dependent on those acts of Parliament that tend “to change our constitution into a state of slavery.” The protestants crowned their work by calling upon all justices and sheriffs of the county to sign the agreement, and by adjuring all military officers to refuse service under the captain-general “who is appointed to reduce us to obedience to the late unconstitutional acts and who has actually besieged the capital of this province with a fleet and army.” Barnstable and Yarmouth, having been interrogated as to whether they had dropped the legislators voting against the Continental Congress, their affirmation was received with cheers. That night some damage was done the new Liberty Pole, which was surmounted by a gilt ball, one of the “miscreants” blazoning thereon:

Business ran over into the next day, when one of the suspects in the affair of the Liberty Pole, whether or not the poet is not recorded, was made to apologize. Again the assembly, in committee of the whole and “attended by music,” waited upon Otis, who was lodged at the house of Mr. Davis. Adjured in writing not to sit in the king’s council, but rather as a “constitutional councillor of this province” in the elected General Court at Salem, in writing he expressed gratitude “for putting me in mind of my duty; I am determined to attend at Salem in case my health permits.” To the reading of his message listened “the whole body with heads uncovered and then gave three cheers in token of their satisfaction and high appreciation of his answer as well as esteem and veneration for his person and character.” In final session the company again repudiated the hated acts of Parliament and pledged themselves to the sacred cause of liberty, registered their abhorrence of mobs and violence, warned off any other molesters of the Liberty Pole, and agreed to use their “endeavors to suppress common peddlers.” The last a matter of some mystery until one knows that peddlers were prone to sell tea, and were perhaps suspected of being spies. Barnstable had entertained the host gratis, and the hottest patriot there must have welcomed its withdrawal to Sandwich, where it proceeded to take like action against Tories and possible meddlers with the town’s Liberty Pole. Then, amid cheers for everybody, Doctor Freeman’s company broke up and sifted back to their homes, but he himself was not to come scathless out of his adventure.

Suspecting a ruse when, a few nights later, he was summoned to a dying patient, he was not to be disappointed: for as he passed the tavern, three of the “recanters” appeared as a “Committee of the Body of the People” and demanded his presence within to answer for his actions. Ignoring them, he walked on, but on his return he was set upon by the “Committee,” it is said, and crying out that his sword-cane was his only weapon he laid about him valiantly, but was knocked senseless, and would have been in hard case had he not been rescued by friends. The whole community, it seemed, was against such lawlessness. The so-called Tories who had not fled were arrested, and on the plea of Freeman got off with a fine of one hundred pounds “lawful money.” But the people showed no such clemency. Sandwich, after an indignation meeting of the citizens, rearrested the culprits and forced them, on a scaffold under the Liberty Pole, to sign a confession acknowledging that their conduct was such as “would disgrace the character of a ruffian or a Hottentot,” and engaging themselves in future “religiously to regard the laws of God and man.”

The Tories, for the most part, were no such “Hottentots.” It was natural in such a settlement as Cape Cod that there should be many conservatives: men descended from those who had never failed in loyalty to the English Government, were it Stuart or Roundhead, who had been taught to love England as the home of their fathers, and the source of law and light. As late as 1766 even Franklin was declaring before a parliamentary committee that “to be an Old England man was of itself a character of respect and gave a kind of rank among us,” and “they considered Parliament as the great bulwark and security of their liberties.” There were as a fact four parties: the ardent Whigs like Nathaniel Freeman, who were separatists at all costs; the irreconcilable Tories who, when war was imminent, fled behind the British lines in Boston or New York, or to Nova Scotia and Canada, or to England, and, in the case of Cape Cod, often to the islands southward where they could be in easy communication with British ships. And there were the moderates of both camps: Whigs whose sensibilities were offended by the extreme methods of the radicals; Tories, chiefly men of the older generation, who lacked pliancy and vision to respond to a newer order; and with the latter were ranged, at any rate at the beginning of the trouble, those who loved freedom, they could swear, yet loved better present securities and feared conflict with the might of Britain. As time went on the number of moderate Whigs steadily increased, especially in the Old Colony as befitted the sober temper of the Pilgrim inheritance; even Joseph Otis, of Barnstable, who had rivalled Doctor Nathaniel Freeman in fervor, was to join them, and the lukewarm, patriots or Tories, were ready to declare for the colonies. Even a Tory in exile could be secretly elated by the prowess of his countrymen; and one such in England confided to his diary that “these conceited islanders” may learn to their cost that “our continent can furnish brave soldiers and judicious expert commanders.” It speaks well for the Federalists that after the war was over and many extreme Tories who had left their homes petitioned to return, they were reinstated upon pledge of loyalty to the new State: whether restored as generously to the affection of their neighbors history does not record, but one may fancy children’s gibes to the third generation. In Sandwich there were many Tories who were brought to conform; but it is said there was still much disaffection, and when the Declaration of Independence was read out by the parson on a certain Sunday, a Tory who was much esteemed in the neighborhood “trooped scornfully and indignantly out of meeting.”

At Cape Cod the feud between Tory and Whig took on a comedy aspect in comparison with the vindictive civil war which it presented in many counties of New York and in the southern colonies. At Truro, as late as 1774, the house of a Whig doctor was attacked, and many still refused to employ him; a parson, for receiving a number of prominent Whigs, was admonished by some of his parishioners. At Barnstable the parties had their headquarters in rival taverns; and at Sturgis’s, where Whigs met every evening to comment on the news, the discussion, running high between moderates and radicals, sometimes slopped over into action. After one such meeting a man who had criticised the system of espionage that wasted energy in ferreting out old women’s secret stores of tea, had his fence destroyed by his irate neighbors. Otis and Freeman, it seems, were not popular with the militia who, at a review one day, clubbed muskets instead of presenting arms. “The Crockers are at the bottom of this,” cried Joseph Otis. “You lie,” gave back Captain Samuel Crocker. A fight between the two naturally ensued; in the midst of which Freeman, who was not the man to be an inactive spectator, turned upon another Crocker, a moderate Whig in politics, followed him into his house, slashing at him harmlessly enough, and in his turn was like to have been murdered by a younger member of the Crockers thirsting for vengeance. Freeman’s cutlass took effect only upon the “summer beam” of the house; and years afterwards, when it was used as a tavern, Freeman, who had come from Sandwich to attend court, was refused entertainment there. “My house is full,” quoth Madam Crocker. She pointed to the scars of the “summer beam.” “And if it were not, there would be no room for Colonel Freeman.” “Time to forget those old matters, and bury the hatchet,” protested Freeman. “Very like,” said she, “but the aggressor should dig the grave.”

A certain young woman, suspected of disloyalty, and asked by the Vigilance Committee whether she were a Tory, answered in four emphatic words which the record leaves us to imagine from the dark comment: “The Committee never forgot them and ever after treated her with respect.” This woman, Amos Otis tells us, never lost her youthful vivacity; even in old age she was gay, responsive, able to discuss with equal zest the latest novel or parson’s sermon. Her wit was keen, and the point “never blunted in order to avoid an allusion which prudery might condemn.”

There was a more serious business in the tarring and feathering of the Widow Nabby Freeman of which the towns-people were sufficiently ashamed, evidently, to charge it in turn to Whig and Tory. Freeman, in his history, says she was a Whig, the victim of Tory spite; Otis, with convincing detail, that she was a Tory. She kept a small grocery, and refused to surrender her tea to be destroyed by the Vigilance Committee. She was “a thorn in their sides—she could out-talk any of them, was fascinating in her manners, and had an influence which she exerted, openly and defiantly, against the patriotic men who were then hazarding their fortunes and their lives in the struggle for American independence.” Both narratives agree in the fact: she was taken from her bed to the village green, smeared with tar and feathers, set astride a rail and ridden about the town. We may fancy the tongue-lashing her persecutors received in the process. At last they exacted from her a promise that in the future she would keep clear of politics. The men who carried through this cruel comedy were not eager to be known; yet it is said feeling against the Tories ran so high that even in Sandwich, which had lamented the harsh treatment of Quakers, a strong party justified the act. But that public sentiment did not approve such rowdyism is proved by the fact that it stands out alone in unlovely prominence.

It is probable that many a private grudge was worked off in this cry of “Tory, Tory.” When Joseph Otis, brother of the patriot, cited a prominent townsman for disaffection, the court held the accusation to proceed “rather from an old family quarrel and was the effect of envy rather than matter of truth and sobriety, or any view to the publick good.” And when as a deacon he had been haled before the church for his political opinions, the church decided that it had “no right to call its members to an account for actions of a civil and public nature,” that the protestants “did not charge the deacon with immorality” and that it “begged leave to refer them to a civil tribunal.” It is further recorded in a later month that the affair between the deacon and “the brethren, styled petitioners, was happily accommodated.”

Until the actual clash of arms, many believed that there might be found some ground for reconciliation; but England was blinded by jealous tradesmen and foolish politicians, hot blood in the colonies was all for separation. Events swept beyond the control of statesmen, and all were carried on to the vortex of revolution. In a speech from the throne George III asserted that “a most daring resistance to the laws,” encouraged by the other colonies, existed in Massachusetts. Again Camden spoke in defence of the colonies: “They say truly taxation and representation must go together. This wise people speak out. They do not ask you to repeal the laws as a favor; they claim it as a right.” But Parliament charged the Americans with “wishing to become independent” and as for any danger of revolt, determined “to crush the monster in its birth at any price or hazard.” They were to have a good run for their money.

II

In no long time the king’s men were marching out to Concord and Lexington; and with the actual shedding of blood, messengers, on the Sunday, rode out post-haste to rouse the country. “War is begun,” cried they at church doors. “War, war,” broke in upon hymn or parson’s prayer; and from pulpit and people rose the solemn response: “To arms: liberty or death.”

The radicals were jubilant. Mr. Watson, of Plymouth, wrote to his friend Freeman congratulations upon the spirit of Sandwich, where Freeman had ordered the royal arms burned by the common hangman. “We are in high spirits,” wrote Watson, “and don’t think it is in the power of all Europe to subjugate us.” “The Lord of Hosts fights on the side of the Yankees,” averred he. “I glory in the name.” Yet Watson, an ardent patriot, in the course of a political quarrel of later years, was denounced to Jefferson as an old Tory, and was conveniently removed from office.

But sober men were preparing to meet the cost of choosing between a man’s way and a child’s. Cape Cod, in particular, with a defenceless coast and the probable interruption of her fisheries and commerce, faced ruin; but, four-square, she stood for freedom. Immediately upon the news of fighting, two companies of militia from Barnstable and Yarmouth took the road, but returned on word that the royal troops were held in Boston. With them, that day, piping them out with fifes, were two boys who, when they were sent back, “borrowed” an old horse grazing by the roadside to give them a mount homeward. One boy became solicitor-general, the other a judge, and one day there chanced to be a case of prosecution for horse-thieving between them. “Davy,” whispered Judge Thacher, leaning from the bench, “this puts me in mind of the horse we stole that day in Barnstable.”

As the militia had marched down the county road, an old farmer halted them. “God be with you all, my friends,” said he as one who would consecrate their enterprise. “And John, my son, if you are called into battle, take care that you behave like a man or else let me never see your face again.” A Harwich father, when he had heard of the first blood spilled, cried out to his son: “Eben, you’re the only one can be spared. Take your gun and go. Fight for religion and liberty.” And that boy and others who joined on the instant were ready to fight at Bunker Hill.

Yet there had been no open declaration of cutting loose from the mother country; and the colonists seem to have had no more deliberate intention of founding a nation than had the Pilgrims of declaring a new principle of government. The second Continental Congress had recommended a day of prayer and humiliation “to implore the blessings of Heaven on our sovereign the King of England and the interposition of divine aid to remove the grievances of the people and restore harmony.” The Cape, a sturdy inheritor of the Pilgrim spirit, seems to have been an early advocate of state rights. In 1778 Barnstable appointed a committee to pass upon the proposed union. “It appears to us,” said Barnstable, “that the power of congress is too great.... But if during the present arduous conflict with Great Britain it may be judged necessary to vest such extra powers in a continental congress, we trust that you will use your endeavors that the same shall be but temporary.” “The Plymouth spirit, which nearly a century before had been shy of a union with Massachusetts,” writes Palfrey, “was now equally averse to a consolidated government which should implicate the concerns of Massachusetts too much with those of other states.”

Bunker Hill was fought, and by July Washington, as commander-in-chief, was in residence at Cambridge. When he called for troops to man Dorchester Heights, Captain Joshua Gray marched through Yarmouth with a drummer, calling for volunteers, and eighty-one men responded. The night was spent in preparation, the women moulding bullets and making cartridges, and by dawn the little company, equipped for war, was ready to take the road. As was natural, fishermen and sailors, when they could, enlisted in the infant navy. But the call for men pressed until even Joseph Otis protested: “We have more men in the land and sea service than our proportion,” and “there is scarcely a day that the enemy is not within gun-shot of some part of our coast. It is like dragging men from home when their houses are on fire, but I will do my best to comply.” An additional grievance lay in the fact that the Cape troops seem to have been sent largely to Rhode Island. And Otis added that it was unreasonable “to detach men from their property, wives and children to protect the town of Providence in the heart of the State of Rhode Island.”

Wellfleet, deprived of its fisheries, was all but ruined; Provincetown, with its few inhabitants who had not fled, was entirely at the disposal of the enemy fleet when it rode snugly at anchor in the harbor. But even these towns struggled to furnish their quota to feed the desperate need; and Mashpee Indians, as we know, played their part so nobly that the war’s end saw seventy widows in the little community.

But there were malcontents enough to induce precaution, and the Provincial Congress had immediately provided for disarming the disaffected. In Barnstable there had been so many of little courage that in 1776 it had voted against supporting the Congress if it should declare for independence rather than stand out simply for constitutional liberty; and when the draft was resorted to and some men “refused to march,” their fines and costs were paid by the loyalists of Barnstable and Sandwich. In August Colonel Joseph Otis and Nathaniel Freeman were appointed to round up suspects on the Cape, a task, we may guess, much to their liking. In December Major Dimmock, who had fought at Ticonderoga in the French War, was commanded to “repair to Nantucket and arrest such as are guilty of supplying the enemy with provisions.” Tories from the mainland had fled thither, and they were not only in constant communication with British ships, but manned many of the ships that harried the coast.

The Cape made a brave attempt to keep up its trade, and voyages were made with the permission of the General Court, “always provided that the said fish &c., shall not be cleared out for any of his Britannic Majesty’s dominions.” But affairs were in desperate case, and loyalists plotted with some show of reason that they had chosen the winning side. Otis reports on October 2: “Yesterday the Tories in the Sound, about a league off Highano’s harbor, took a vessel bound out of said harbor to Stonington and drove another ashore on the eastward part of Falmouth. In short the refugees have got a number of Vineyard pilot-boats (about twenty) and man them, and run into our shores and take everything that floats.” Nevertheless, he engages to get two small vessels, if they will give him guns, and “scour the Sound.” On October 12 the head of “a refugee gang in the Sound” sent a flag of truce to ask an exchange of prisoners. And in this same month the General Court appropriated money for four cannon, four to nine-pounders—no formidable armament for the long coast-line of the Cape. But the Sound, especially, was the scene of many an adventure, and enemy raids upon its shores seem to have been prompted largely by a desire for fresh meat. In 1779 marauders drove away some cattle from farms near Wood’s Hole, but were surprised and put off to their ships without their booty; an attack in force was planned against Falmouth, but was received by such hot fire from the shore that the ships were driven out into the Sound; at Wood’s Hole, again, they met with a like reception. But the Sound the Britishers succeeded in making their own. Nevertheless, one hundred men, under Colonel Dimmock, were sent over for the defence of Martha’s Vineyard; and among other exploits Dimmock captured an enemy vessel in Old Town Harbor, and took her crew, under hatches, to Hyannis whence they were sent overland to Boston. A Federal grain vessel, as it entered the Sound one day, fell into the hands of the British; but its captain escaped, roused Captain Dimmock, who got together twenty men and three whaleboats, next morning retook the prize from under the nose of the British at Tarpaulin Cove, and made safe harbor at Martha’s Vineyard.

The outer coast was blockaded, but sometimes a boat from Boston or the fishing-grounds would slip through; sometimes, even, such a one would be allowed to pass. None other than the great Nelson—Lieutenant Nelson he was then, in command of His Majesty’s Ship Albemarle stationed that year in Cape Cod Bay—released the Schooner Harmony, Plymouth owned, to its captain “on account of his good services,” as pilot, we may guess. Nor was the relation of fleet and mainland wholly unfriendly. These straight Britishers were much better liked by the people than the loyalist refugees that, for the most part, manned the hostile boats off Wood’s Hole and Falmouth. English officers often landed and called upon the people, or attended church; one ship’s surgeon even found opportunity to fall in love with a Truro girl, and win her, too; and after the war, he resigned His Majesty’s service, married his sweetheart, and settled down to the village practice. The Reverend “William Hazlett, a Briton,” baptized several children at Truro in 1785. Rich thinks he may have been a retired navy chaplain, but it seems quite as reasonable to suppose that he was the father of William Hazlitt, the essayist, who, at about that time, happened to be in Weymouth. As early as December, 1776, a committee was appointed to “acquaint his excellency, General Washington, with the importance of Cape Cod Harbor and consider with him on some method to deprive the enemy of the advantage they now receive therefrom.” But to the end of hostilities the English fleet continued to enjoy that advantage, though, as we have seen, they were content to use their ships for blockade purposes rather than their men to molest the inhabitants. The British seem to have been able to get needed supplies by purchase instead of bloodshed, although there is some evidence of disturbance ashore. Mr. Rich in his history of Truro tells us of a man who, one fine evening, was enjoying a pipe under an apple-tree on his farm near High Head when stray shots from a man-of-war came ploughing up the ground near him. And once the militia captain at Truro, believing a raid imminent, used the clever ruse of boldly parading his tiny “cornstalk brigade” in and out among the dunes near Pond Village for two hours; and he frightened off the British, he averred, by such a demonstration of strength.

By sea Truro men did not get off so easily. In 1775 David Snow and his son, a lad of fifteen, were fishing off the “Back Side” one day when they were captured by an enemy frigate known, significantly, as “the shaving-mill.” They were taken to England and locked up, with other Yankee prisoners, in the Old Mill Prison near Plymouth, where they set their wits at work on methods of escape. Mr. Snow, one night, proposed a dance, when the fiddle squeaked its loudest and the dancers shuffled noisily in heavy brogans, to drown the noise of the file that willing hands kept hard at work eating at the bars. Thirty-six men, under cover of the hilarity, succeeded in slipping out into the yard, overpowered the guard, walked the fifteen miles to Plymouth Harbor, boarded a scow, and before daylight were afloat in the Channel. There they captured a small boat, and set sail for France where they sold their prize for hard cash, Snow and his son receiving as their share forty dollars. The French Government, when occasion served, set them on the shore of Carolina whence they finally worked their way overland to Boston, took boat for Provincetown, and so home again to Truro. Seven years had been consumed in the adventure, and they had long been mourned as dead. The boy was now a man, but a quick-eyed girl cried, as she saw him: “If that isn’t David Snow, it’s his ghost.” And the father found his wife “spending the afternoon” with her sewing, at a neighbor’s. Another Truro lad was of the crew that rowed Benedict Arnold out to the Vulture, and when he knew the significance of that night’s story, fearing that he might be implicated in a charge of treason, he fled straight to Canada. There he married, and it was forty-eight years before he returned to visit his old home. A Yarmouth man was one of the gallant André’s guards the night before his execution, and lamented his unhappy fate. And Watson Freeman, of Sandwich, who in 1754 at the age of fourteen had joined the expedition to Canada, fought in the Revolution, and was present at the taking of Burgoyne in 1777. The next year he was stationed with General Sullivan on Long Island, where, being one of a “foraging party” that was surprised by the enemy in the relaxation of attending a ball, he received a sabre-cut on the forehead that scarred him for life. Later, having joined an uncle who commanded a privateer, he was taken prisoner by the enemy, wounded in an encounter between them and a French boat, invalided to a hospital at Portsmouth, England, and discharged as incurable. Wandering about the country, he came upon an old herb-woman who proved wiser than the doctors, and he lived to amass a fortune in Boston as an “importer of English goods and concerned also in navigation.”

Nor did the British cruisers have things all their own way. Swift-sailing privateers were fitted out—Cape Cod sailors we may be sure eager for such service—and in the two years between 1776 and 1778 nearly eight hundred prizes had been captured; while during the war nearly two hundred thousand tons of British shipping were taken by privateers that were manned largely by fishermen.

Certainly, whether of men high in council or of the rank and file, Cape Cod furnished her due share in the conflict: unnamed sailors and soldiers, brave men all; Nathaniel Freeman, Joseph Otis, Dimmock; and, greater than all, the James Otises, father and son. From the evacuation of Boston in 1776 to 1780 when the new government was established, Massachusetts affairs were in the hands of the Council that was elected annually as provided by the charter of William and Mary; of this Council Colonel James Otis, as senior member, was presiding officer and virtually the Governor of the Province. James, the patriot, never entirely recovered from the effects of a dastardly assault in 1769, and in 1783 he was killed by a stroke of lightning as he stood in his doorway at Andover. The last years of his life were dark with tragedy. His daughter, to his great grief, had married an English officer, who was wounded at Bunker Hill; his son, James, third of the name, had enlisted as a midshipman and died, at twenty-one, on the notorious British prison-ship Jersey. But the patriot had accomplished his great work. And of him John Adams well said: “I have been young and now am old, and I solemnly say I have never known a man whose love of country was more ardent and sincere—never one who suffered so much—never one whose services for any ten years of his life were so important and essential to the cause of his country as those of Mr. Otis from 1760 to 1770.”

III

Affairs moved on toward peace, and on April 19, just eight years after Lord Percy had set out on his expedition to Concord and Lexington, Washington proclaimed an armistice. But joy in the victory was tempered for thoughtful men: if it had cost England a hundred million pounds and fifty thousand men to lose her colonies, the relative price they paid for independence was far greater. The currency was practically worthless, the soldiers and their families were destitute, the salaries of public officers and clergy but a pittance. Each State wanted to secure its revenue to its own use, which ensured conflict with the Federal Government; the individual, in his meagre circumstances, grudged any contribution to such revenue, which ensured conflict between the State and its citizens. That the general unrest was present in Barnstable County is evident from a proclamation of the Government calling upon “the good people of said county for their aid and assistance” in handling a rumored attempt to “obstruct the sitting of the Court at Barnstable.” But in the main the people who had broken the might of Britain now, war ended, applied themselves with like energy to recovering from its effects. And in spite of war and threatened ruin the Cape had continued its healthy growth.

In 1793 Dennis, which had long functioned as a separate town, was incorporated; its name derived from that of the first minister of the East Precinct of Yarmouth, the Reverend Josiah Dennis. In 1797 Orleans was set off from Eastham; and in 1803 the North Parish of Harwich, the older in point of settlement, became Brewster. It was then that argument for and against division hit upon the extraordinary compromise that irreconcilables of the North Parish, “together with such widows as live therein and request it, have liberty to remain, with their families and estates, to the town of Harwich.” No less than sixty-five persons, including two widows, stiff-necked old conservatives we may guess, filed such request with the town clerk and the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Here was an arrangement well calculated to nourish old animosities, which, in the natural course of things, had to be abandoned. Nor was the new town slow in making her voice heard: in 1810 she was remonstrating against the appointment of a certain postmaster, “he being a foreigner and in the opinion of the inhabitants an alien.” A little later she was petitioning “the Postmaster General, praying him to fix the day of the week and the hour of the day in which the post-rider shall arrive at Brewster on his way down the Cape, and also on his return, and that the Committee of Safety attend to this matter.” And she was one of the loudest to protest against the Embargo Act of 1807.

America had been making no small profit during the Napoleonic wars that wrecked Europe. By wise federal legislation trade and credit gradually righted, and the neutrality of the United States permitted lucrative intercourse with all the belligerents. But American traders took their risks, and by no means came off scatheless: England and France had established mutual blockades; their ships preyed upon the Yankee blockade-runners, their captains impressed captured American seamen. England by the British Orders in Council, France by the Berlin and Milan decrees, all but put an end to our commerce, and the coup de grâce threatened when, in 1807, the United States hoped to save her ships by declaring an embargo on all outgoing shipping. As between England and America, there were accusations and counter-accusations that the other country was not carrying out the provisions of their peace treaty, nor had the old Tory and Whig animosities of the Revolution had time to die; and the whole exasperating state of affairs worked out to a formal declaration of war against England in 1812.

Brewster, in solemn town-meeting assembled, had inveighed thus against the Embargo Act: “That imperious necessity calls upon us loudly to remonstrate” against the embargo laws “as unjust in their nature, unequal in their operation, a cruel infringement of our most precious rights.” In impassioned words she memorialized the General Court: “Whilst the mouth of labor is forbidden to eat, the language of complaint is natural. With ruin at our doors, and poverty staring us in the face, we beseech, conjure and implore your honorable body to obtain a redress of the oppressive grievances under which we suffer.” And Brewster, having thus recorded her protest, felt herself free to join in the sport of evading the new law. It was a boat owned there, captured by a revenue cutter and taken into Provincetown, that was recaptured by the owners who had hurriedly fitted up a packet as a man-of-war, and cleared off for her port of Surinam, while the United States Marshal whistled for any satisfaction he could get.

A more complicated adventure befell two Cape men, Mayo and Hill, who were of the crew of Captain Paine, of Truro. In 1811 they cleared for Mediterranean ports with a cargo of fish, but off the coast of Spain they were boarded and searched by a French corvette, and for some reason Mayo and Hill were taken prisoner and landed in Lisbon. There they were attached to a French force that was to convoy a rich pay train through the enemy country, the most dangerous point of which was a deep defile in the mountains some three miles in length. There a murderous fire was opened upon them from the overhanging cliffs, every officer and all but a handful of men killed, and the rest marched off to a Spanish prison. And among the prisoners were Mayo and Hill who had come through the engagement without a scratch. The Frenchmen were inclined to make game of their Yankee fellow-captives, and something of a race war developed. But Mayo “was, like Miles Standish, small of stature but soon red-hot.” He whipped several “Frenchies,” and offered to fight the lot, an invitation, courteously declined, which left him master of the field. Whether by intrigue or not, Hill was condemned as a spy and marched out to be shot when, in the approved style of romance, a horseman in the nick of time dashed up with a reprieve; and Hill had earned his title to “scape-gallows.” In a few months the two Cape men managed somehow to make their way to Flanders, and, after years crammed with adventure, reached home. “Mr. Mayo,” says Rich who tells the story, “died in good old age, in the peace of Christ, having raised a large family of enterprising boys. Like the patriarch, he saw his children’s children to the fourth generation.”

Captain Isaiah Crowell, of Yarmouth, had successfully run the blockade at Marseilles after the French decrees were in force; and in 1812, knowing that a strict embargo of ninety days, preliminary to war, was imminent, he loaded hastily at Boston with a cargo for Lisbon, cleared for Eastport, where he gave the first news of the embargo, and cleared there for Lisbon. War having been declared, on his return he was captured by an English cruiser, taken into Saint John’s where his ship was condemned, and he was being returned to the United States on the British sloop-of-war Alert when it was captured by the Yankee Essex. But if Crowell lost in this venture, he was to gain by his skill and daring in many another; and he retired from sea with a comfortable fortune, to live out many humdrum years ashore as a bank president and legislator.

When it came to this second war with England, although the United States now proved herself a nation, there was no unanimity of opinion among the people; and as a fact the Americans had been nearly as indignant with their own government for its embargoes as with England and France for their unjust decrees and their seizure of American seamen and ships. Politics seethed hot in New England as elsewhere, and men for or against the war wrangled in high place and low. The majority on the Cape were anti-war. Chatham, remembering old wars and fresh wrongs, addressed the President expressing “the abhorrence of the people to any alliance with France.” Other towns were, at best, lukewarm. Yarmouth never ceased to be bitterly anti-war, and many who had fought devotedly in the Revolution refused to fight now, or only so far as it might be necessary to prevent the invasion of their soil. Yet the county was strongly Federalist, and a powerful minority were able to push through a fine resolution: “It becomes us, in imitation of the patriots of the Revolution, to unite in the common cause of the country, patiently bearing every evil, and cheerfully submitting to those privations which are necessarily incident to a state of war. We consider the war in which we are engaged as just, necessary and unavoidable, and we will support the same with our lives and fortunes.”

The fine old breed of American seamen flocked into the navy, and success on the ocean did much to offset reverses on land. During the first seven months of the war, five hundred British merchantmen were taken; and the Essex, the Constitution, the Wasp had made their kill of English men-of-war. In 1814 Great Britain, relieved from the pressure of continental wars, was ready to turn her full attention to America, Washington was burned, and again a British fleet rendezvoused in Provincetown Harbor and harried the coast of the Cape. A landing party at Wood’s Hole was driven off by the militia; Falmouth, after due notice to remove non-combatants, was bombarded, with considerable loss to buildings and salt-works, but none to life. The contention had been that Falmouth had been annoying British ships with her cannon which Captain Weston Jenkins, the Yankee commander, had thereupon dared the British to come and get. The determined attitude of his militia seems to have discouraged any landing and the British withdrew without their cannon. Several months later Falmouth was to have her revenge. Captain Jenkins, with thirty-two volunteers, set sail in the sloop Two Friends for Tarpaulin Cove, Wood’s Hole, where H.M.S. Retaliation lay at anchor. Brought to by a shot from the ship, Jenkins concealed all but two or three of his men to encourage a boarding party of the enemy. This it was easy to overcome; whereupon he trained his guns upon the ship, overcame all resistance, and returned in triumph to Falmouth with the Retaliation, its crew of twelve men, its plunder, and two Yankee prisoners.

Meantime Yankee merchantmen were running the blockade with even more zest than they had enjoyed in evading their own embargo. At Hyannis, the Kutuzoff, with a full cargo of cotton and rice, came bowling into port followed close by a British privateer-schooner. The cargo safe landed, one hundred militia gathered to repel possible invasion and trained a four-pounder on the enemy who, after an unsuccessful attempt to destroy a beached British prize, prudently withdrew. At Hyannis, again the Yankee landed “upwards of a hundred packages of dry goods”; other boats, without benefit of revenue officers, landed stores of spirits and wine and other products from the South. Coasting vessels tried to keep up a desultory trade with Boston, though Boston was so thoroughly blockaded it was easier to make the run to New York. Fleets of whaleboats followed the old route that Bradford and De Rasieres had used, by way of Sandwich and Manomet, and so, on, hugging the shores of southern New England to their destination. Two Eastham captains, safely landing a whaleboat cargo of rye at Boston, were encouraged by success to exchange for a larger boat and cargo for the homeward voyage. At the Gurnet, however, they were brought to by a “pink-stern” schooner that was masquerading as a fisherman, but proved to belong to H.M.S. Spencer. One captain was sent to Boston for three hundred dollars ransom of their boat; the other, Mayo, was retained aboard the prize as pilot, and orders given him to cruise about the bay. In a stiff gale Mayo counselled taking shelter in the lee of Billingsgate Point, forthwith grounded the schooner on the Eastham flats, quieted criticism with assurance that they would soon be floating over the bar into the safety of inner waters, and advised the officers to go below that their number might not excite suspicion on shore. He had previously secured two pistols for himself and provided for the helplessness of the crew by giving them a gimlet to tap a barrel of rum. He then threw all available firearms overboard, and, when the officers presented themselves in alarm as the boat canted with the receding tide, held them off with his pistols, coolly walked ashore over the sands, and roused the militia who took boat and crew as prize. The crew, later, was allowed to escape to their frigate and the boat was awarded to Captain Mayo, who released it to its owners for two hundred dollars. But the town was not to come off so easily in the affair: for the British commander, in reprisal for the indignity to his men, threatened to destroy boats, buildings, and salt-works, if twelve hundred dollars were not forthcoming as the price of immunity and as recompense for the prisoners’ baggage. The town fathers decided to pay the sum, and made no such bad bargain as their receipt promised to hold Eastham scatheless for the duration of the war.

Brewster, prudently, chose a like alternative, although here the price was raised to four thousand dollars. An emergency town meeting was held in the church to consider the question, scouts sent out to neighboring towns to sound opinion as to the likelihood of help in resisting the demand, the artillery commander directed to “engage horses to be in readiness for the ordnance; and there being a deficiency in that branch of the service a committee should ascertain how many exempts from forty-five to sixty in each school district could be brought to enlist therein.” The scouts returning with the disheartening news “that the town of Brewster can make no dependence on any of our neighbors for assistance in our alarming and distressed situation,” it was decided to employ arbiters rather than ordnance, and that “the committee of safety who went on board his B.M. Spencer, go again this night and make the best terms possible with Com. Ragget.” Ragget held to his demand, and the committee, though they “used their best endeavors,” “could not obtain the abatement of a dollar,” the sum to be paid in specie in two weeks’ time. The tribute money was borrowed, and to reimburse the lenders a tax levied on “salt-works, buildings of every description, and vessels owned in this town of every description frequenting, or lying on, the shore.” It is interesting that the sixty-five irreconcilable alien residents who had adhered to the jurisdiction of Harwich managed to evade their share of the tax, although their property was thus secured from the British guns. The faithful of Brewster bore the burden none too willingly one may guess: three years later they petitioned the legislature to refund the sum paid “Rd. Ragget, Esq. as a contribution,” but received no redress. And when, as a crowning wrong, they were upbraided by fireside patriots for paying tribute to the enemy, they had the valid excuse that since Government and neighbors had left them to fend for themselves, they were justified in saving the town.

Orleans, of bolder kidney, it would seem, rejected a like demand, and repulsed several landing parties. It may be said that the village of Orleans lay inland at a safer distance from ship’s guns. In December the British frigate Newcastle ran ashore near Orleans, and, floated with some difficulty, sent a four-oared barge into Rock Harbor and captured therein a schooner and three sloops, two of which, being aground, were fired but were saved by the natives. Prize crews were put aboard the other sloop and the schooner, and anchor weighed for Provincetown. But the schooner, under command of a Yankee pilot who emulated the example of Captain Mayo, of Eastham, ran her ashore on the Yarmouth flats, and the crew were sent prisoners to Salem. Meantime the Orleans militia had driven off the landing force; and sixty years later the surviving heroes or their widows received a bounty of one hundred and sixty acres of public land for their prowess at “the battle of Orleans.” Boat after boat in the bay was taken by the British, and usually released after the captors had replenished their stores from the cargoes. The Two Friends of Provincetown, taken off Gloucester, was sent to Nova Scotia, as, also, was the Victory of Yarmouth. But the master of the Victory saved his captor, the Leander, from being wrecked on some dangerous shoals and received as reward an order on the Governor of Halifax for his schooner and a safe-conduct home for himself and his crew.

On the other side of the account, many Cape Cod captains made successful ventures in privateering. Captain Reuben Rich, of Wellfleet, captured an East Indiaman on the first day out, and cleared seventeen thousand dollars for his share in the transaction; men from Brewster, Truro, Eastham likewise made satisfactory cruises under letters of marque. Cape Cod fishermen served in these privateers and in the navy, and sometimes were captured, and many a man from Cape Cod was familiar with the interior of Dartmoor Prison. The last survivor of them, at Truro, lived well into the opening of a new era, and died in 1878 at the ripe age of ninety. Two Harwich men were in the fight between the Constitution and Guerrière, and no doubt could sing with gusto: