Wessagusset and Weymouth

To make this intelligible, so far as Weymouth is concerned, we must keep in mind a few dates connected with the great course of world occurrences. The events referred to in this extract from Hubbard’s history, took place during the summer of 1638. A church tumult in Edinburgh on Sunday, July 23, 1637, a year previous, had brought matters in England to a crisis; and from that day Sir Ferdinando Gorges was wholly impotent, shorn of all influence. Thenceforth, he ceased to be in any degree an active factor in Massachusetts affairs; and his people in New England, no longer looking to him, must, as they best could, take care of themselves. Already, six months before the Edinburgh tumult, on the 29th of January, 1637, the Rev. John Wheelwright, the favorite divine of Mistress Hutchinson, had, on a day of special fast, preached in Boston that occasional discourse which was later made the pretext for a sweeping political proscription. On the 27th of May, 1637, the Massachusetts charter election, the equivalent of our annual State election, had been held at Cambridge, as the result of which young Sir Harry Vane had been superseded as governor by Winthrop, with the harsh and uncompromising Dudley as deputy. It was a political as well as a church upheaval; for Vane was, socially, the friend of Maverick, and, while in doctrine he sympathized with Wheelwright, he was the cynosure of the Hutchinsonian cult.

The conservative, or clerical, party thus found itself in complete political control; a control cemented and confirmed by the triumphant conclusion of the Pequot war, and the return of young Vane to England, both which events occurred in August. Every condition now pointed to the adoption of a policy of “thorough”—the stamping-out process was to begin. It did begin; and it was carried out. John Wheelwright, the first minister of those inhabiting part of the region two years later incorporated as Braintree, but which a century and a half later became Quincy, was the initial victim. He was banished, and his supporters made to see light,—real orthodox light! Next came Mistress Hutchinson. Her story has been told, by myself among others, in all possible detail.[104] I need only allude to it here. She, and all those who stood by her, were “sent away,”—in other words, driven into exile. This had occurred in March, 1638. And now, the stamping-out process being completed in Boston, the party in political control turned its attention to the out-lying districts. Weymouth was the traditional plague centre of prelatical poison,—we designate it Episcopacy,—the seat of the Gorges settlement, the abiding place of Morell, the spot whence Blackstone and Walford had emerged. No mercy was to be shown it. The last vestige of the ritual was to disappear from within the limits of the colony of Massachusetts-bay. Thus, with Weymouth, in 1638, it was much as with some French city in the days of The Terror, when a committee of the Convention of ’93 there put in an appearance. So far as dissent and the suspects were concerned, it meant the end.

It is needless to revert to colonial records, and again to tell the story of what was then done. Mr. Lenthal appears to have been a worthy man and a devout minister of God’s word, as he read it; but he did differ from the powers that then were on certain abstract doctrines of baptism, re-ordination and justification by faith, whatever those terms may have signified. They have small meaning to us; but then, they implied heresy: and for heretics there was in 1638, and the years ensuing, no place in Massachusetts. He and his followers were summarily dealt with. Wise in his day and generation, Mr. Lenthal made haste to see the light, and to express a realizing sense of the error of his ways. He then took refuge in Rhode Island. His followers were sternly disciplined, reprimanded, threatened, fined, disfranchised, and “openly whipt.” The insubordination was crushed out; so also were freedom of speech and religious liberty. But order reigned in Weymouth; conformity was thenceforth there complete.

The late Matthew Arnold was accustomed vigorously to declare that the great middle class of England, the kernel of the nation, was in Tudor times so disgusted with the cowled and tonsured Middle Ages that, during the first half of the seventeenth century, it “entered the prison house of Puritanism, and had the key turned upon its spirit there for two hundred years.” The result was, he further declared, “a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners.” Into the discussion which this utterance invites, I do not propose here to enter. I merely call attention to what all the study, investigation and thought of thirty years lead me to consider one of the most interesting and suggestive of the minor episodes of our early Massachusetts history, the final advance of the puritanical glacier over the last lingering vestige of an earlier attempt at a distinctly more cultured New England civilization. I institute no comparison; I make no criticism. To discuss the might-have-been is, to my mind, hardly worth while. I call attention only to one still unwritten page of our Massachusetts history; a page the existence as well as the possible meaning of which had altogether escaped me, if indeed it had even as yet glimmeringly dawned upon me, when I addressed you here in Weymouth in response to your invitation of thirty years ago.

Thus, as I have since come to see it, the history of Weymouth, that local history which is the peculiar province and charge of the Society I to-night address, naturally divides itself into three parts—first, the Adventurous, in which Thomas Weston and Miles Standish, Squanto and Pecksuot, play their parts, and dramatic enough those parts were: second, the Feudal and Episcopal, in which Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Governor John Winthrop hold the stage, in London and at Boston, in Wessagusset and at Shawmut: and, finally, part the third, that Puritanic period of slow growth and gradual change which lasted for two whole centuries, from 1640 to 1840, and which Matthew Arnold has likened unto detention in a prison-house. My earlier utterances on the earliest and second periods I have passed in review; and now, in closing, I have something to say in criticism of the conclusions I then reached as respects the third, or final, period.

My former treatment of this later period,—that extending from 1640 to 1840,—I find was of the purely conventional character; a method of treatment, whether by myself or others, for which I have since come to feel a very pronounced contempt. Why is it, I would like to ask, that such undue prominence is in anniversary addresses always given to times and episodes connected with wars and military operations? Take for instance, your own case. Weymouth now boasts a corporate and continuous history of some 270 years,—as such things go, a very respectable antiquity; and, during that time, its women have never seen, except perhaps a hundred and thirty years ago, or, just possibly, on one occasion nine years less than a century back, the flash of a hostile gun or the gleam of an enemy’s flag. It is within the bounds of possibility that a grandmother, or, more probably, a great-grandmother, of some one among you did, on those days of April in the year 1775, watch from some summit of the town the smoke of burning Charlestown; or, again, like Abigail Adams from Penn’s hill in Braintree, your progenitors on the distaff side may in March of the following year have looked curiously on that “largest fleet ever seen in America,” numbering upwards of one hundred and seventy sail, and looking “like a forest,” as, with Howe’s evacuating army on board, the British ships lay in the outer harbor. Finally, on June 1, 1813, Weymouth men and women may from the Great hill have followed with anxious eyes the ill-fated frigate Chesapeake move out to her disastrous duel with the Shannon. But, not since Miles Standish grappled with the savage Pecksuot in the wooden block-house at Old Spain on the 6th of April, 1623, has an armed conflict between hostile men occurred on Weymouth soil. Yet in every narrative of the town, accounts and details of its part in war, and of its contributions thereto, occupy the place of prominence. In point of fact, no war or its operations, its successes or reverses, since the death of the Wampanoag, King Philip, in 1676, has exercised any direct influence on Weymouth history, or affected to any appreciable extent the town’s development. In the war of the Rebellion, as in Queen Anne’s war, in the French wars, and in the war of Independence,—though in far less degree in the first than in any one of the latter,—Weymouth was called on for contributions in material, in money and in men; but after those struggles, as during them and before, life here moved on absolutely undisturbed in the even tenor of its way,—quite unchanged! The same people lived in a like manner, pursuing their wonted occupations; generations were born, went to school, were married and had offspring, grew old and died, as their fathers and mothers had done before them, as their sons and daughters were to do after them. Of great, far away events only echoes reached the town; and yet, what the town then did in connection with those distant great events becomes the staple of its story. This I submit is not as it should be; in fact it is not history at all.

Moreover, I am further disposed to contend that the record of Weymouth, as of its sister towns of Massachusetts without exception, whether in the War of Independence, or, more recently, in our Civil War, was not in all respects ideal, or in conformity with reason, experience and the everlasting fitness of things. Never, whether in Independence-day orations or in occasional addresses, does the declaimer weary of expatiating on the public spirit and self-sacrifice then displayed and evoked; but, on the other hand, read the record as set forth by Mr. Nash in the pages of his history, or registered in your town-books. Referring to the Revolutionary war, and its direct results on Weymouth, Mr. Nash puts first among them the excessive use of intoxicating liquors “which then became well-nigh universal.” He speaks of this as a public “calamity,” most far-reaching in its destructive effects on both the minds and estates of that generation, and of those that succeeded. My own investigations have led me to believe that what we term the “drink habit” with our Massachusetts race dated from a period long anterior to any Revolutionary troubles. In this respect I think Mr. Nash greatly exaggerates the influence of army life. Assuredly, however, stimulating the alcoholic appetite cannot be accounted one of those features of the soul-stirring time in which posterity can take a justifiable pride. But, in saying what I have said, I wish to be explicit. I do not want to be misunderstood. For, on this head, communities are, I have found, sensitive; nor, I freely admit, does such sensitiveness on their part furnish any just occasion for surprise. On the contrary, it is very human,—altogether natural.

Not long ago, in Lincoln, where I now live, I expressed myself on this subject to the same effect; and I afterwards found I, in so doing, had occasioned pain, as well as surprise. I had seemed to speak depreciatingly of the dead, and of a period the memory of which was sacred. Nothing could have been further from my thought. The criticism I then made, and now make again, applies to all of our Massachusetts, I may say our New England, towns. Their records tell me the same story. Turn, for instance, to your own town books covering those heroic periods, whether Revolutionary or of the Civil war. Should you do so, you will find in them a wearisome repetition. In the first flush of excitement, volunteers, in each case, enrolled themselves in crowds, they were eager to get to the front; then came the cold reaction, and the consequent haggling. Call follows call for men—and yet more men; for war is insatiable,—and these calls are grudgingly responded to by votes providing for the payment of bounties, and by complicated plans for the procurement of substitutes. Never once in all those annals do you read of a stern exaction. On the contrary, the question always is as to how cheapest to avoid it. The heroic chord is rarely struck. That there were individual cases, many and touching, of self-sacrifice and lofty patriotic impulse, I am the last to deny. Was I not witness to them? Such you do well to commemorate and recall; nor can they be held in too green a memory. It is not to those I refer, but to the system under which war was carried on; it was weak, unscientific, to the last degree wasteful of blood and of treasure,—moreover, it was cruel to those in the field. Through it much unnecessary agony was caused; and the necessary agony, at best quite enough, was unduly prolonged. Properly studied, your town record, like the records of all your sister towns, teaches on this head a lesson of utmost value. No nation has any right to enter upon a war, domestic or foreign, unless it is ready promptly to meet the cost thereof in flesh and blood, as well as in money. It should not be a question of voluntary enlistment, or of mercenary service; but, if a community elects to fight, it should put its fighting force at the absolute disposal of its government. Conscription and the draft should be the order of the day,—the unmarried first, the married next; and, for the able-bodied, no exemption. Never, in the whole history of Massachusetts, was the ordeal of a war thus systematically met. On the contrary, as studied in your Weymouth annals, or those of your sister towns, after the first fierce outburst of ardor cooled, it is one long wearisome record of services sold and bought.

What was the result? The ranks of your regiments were never full; the morale of the men at the front suffered. The saddest sights I ever saw were those skeleton battalions in the last campaign against Richmond, that of 1864,—those few survivors grouped about the tattered colors, thrust into action yesterday, decimated again to-day, doomed to-morrow: and no recruits! Those were the men who went forward voluntarily, and at the first call to arms. No better material was ever mustered; no braver troops ever returned an enemy’s fire: but, under the system which always prevailed, the community from which they came either left them to take that fire to the end, or sent forward to associate with them the bounty-bought sweepings of your municipal gutters, the dregs of your civic cesspools. I speak of that whereof I know. It was not right, nor was it war: but it made war costly, long, murderous. Life was simply flung away.

Do you ask what course should have been pursued? What ought to have been done? I will tell you. With 30,000 men in the field, the State should have had 20,000 always at home in the training-camps; and when, after such terrible struggles as those at Gettysburg or in the Wilderness, word came that a regiment had lost 150 men, dead or disabled, on the notifying click of the wire the message should have flashed back that 175 men were on the way to make full the depleted ranks. The next day 175 fresh men, bearing as yet uncalled numbers in the draft, should have been ordered forthwith to report at the depots. That is business; that would be war. In place of it, you let your old regiments dwindle to skeletons, while you ever organized new; and, as the indecisive warfare dragged itself along, your towns competed with each other for bounty-bought flesh and blood. It was quoted at so much a pound.

This is the side of the record to be studied in your town-books; but it is a side of the record men do not like to study. Even reference to it is misconstrued. It is not popular! Yet here is the lesson to be borne in mind, that valuable to learn. That our young men rushed eagerly to arms in the early days of each conflict, no one denies; that they fought bravely and fell frequently, the names on your monuments and the flags in your cemeteries give proof. But, under your methods of carrying on warfare, two of them died where one only need to have died; two indecisive battles had to be fought, where one vigorously followed up would have sufficed. It was so in the Revolution; it was so in the Civil War. That in either case it would have been so had the struggle been over your own hearth-stones, I neither suggest nor believe. Then, however, the outcome would have directly influenced home existence, and Weymouth development; not so a remote war, the echoes only of which disturbed the monotony of your daily village life.

Thus, with Weymouth as with other Massachusetts towns, the battles and campaigns, whether of 1776 or of 1864, and the sufferings and sacrifices incident thereto, were not momentous factors of fate. Indeed, as I now see it, since 1644 there has been but one considerable event in your history, one only which marked an epoch of far-reaching change. That event occurred on the 1st of January, 1849, when the South Shore railroad was opened to traffic, bringing Weymouth into direct and easy intercourse with the outer and active world. That inaugurated for you as a community a revolution in life, in occupation, in education, in religion and in thought;—that date, two hundred and fourteen years from the incorporation, marks the dividing line between the Weymouth of the provincial period, and your Weymouth of to-day. Already, in 1804, nearly half a century earlier, your first post-office had been established; quite an incident in your history. What facts has your Society preserved concerning it? Late in the eighteenth century stage coaches put in their appearance. They were a factor of change; what do you now know of the influence they exerted? The daily newspaper is one of the great educational forces of modern times; when did it first find its way generally to Weymouth? Not, I fancy, before 1850. What great economical crisis, affecting every phase of life, has occurred in the history of the town? Once, and almost within the memory of men now living, Weymouth was commercial, as well as agricultural. It had been so almost from the beginning. It had iron-works in colonial times, and later a few small mills; but when was it, and from what causes, that it passed from an agricultural and a commercial to the manufacturing stage? Presumably, the coming of the railroad worked the change; and, in working it, modified the whole character of the town.

And here I submit, in these industrial, economical, social, religious and educational phases is the true field of study and accumulation, to which the local historical society should devote itself. The present is always familiar and commonplace; it is the past which interests. But our present will be the next century’s past; and it is the mission of societies like this of yours to make the record of to-day fuller, more exact and more intelligible than is that of yesterday.

Of that “yesterday” of yours, extending practically from the 2d of January, 1644, the date of the ordination of the Rev. Thomas Thatcher, which closed the primitive period, to the 1st of January, 1849, which witnessed the opening of the South Shore railroad,—of that “yesterday,” covering five years more than two centuries, I thus delivered myself on King-oak hill in my 1874 address:

Speaking now in the light of subsequent investigation and long study, I can bear testimony that this passage was written neither in a depreciatory spirit, nor in one of pessimistic exaggeration. I have learned more since writing it. I acknowledge I do not, on better acquaintance, fancy that “prison-house of Puritanism” wherein our race had “the key turned upon its spirit for two hundred years.” Frankly, I see truth in Matthew Arnold’s indictment,—“a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners.”

Let us for a moment, in a realistic mood, face the facts of that unlovely period. And first, of morals. The early church records of Weymouth no longer exist; and, perhaps, it is well for the good names of not a few of your families that the fire of April 23, 1751, swept away the old Meeting-house, and with it the documents there stored. The records of the Braintree church remain in part; and, of such as remain, I have made historical use. Those who care so to do may familiarize themselves with my conclusion.[105] So far as morality is concerned, the picture presented is not of a character which would lead us to covet for our sons and daughters a recurrence of that past.

Next, temperance:—As respects the in-temperance of that colonial period, I myself caught a youthful glimpse of its vanishing skirts. Distinctly do I recall the village tavern, the village bar-room,—for in Quincy, in my youth, bar-room and post-office were one,—and, moreover, the village drunkards. They were as familiar to eye and tongue as the minister, the squire, or the doctor. I see them now, seated in those wooden arm-chairs on the tavern porch, waiting to see the Plymouth stage drive up. The drunkard reeling home in broad daylight is an unknown spectacle now; then, he hardly excited passing notice.

Take religion next:—I submit in all confidence that the world has outgrown eighteenth century theology. It is a cast-off garment; and one never to be resumed. Bitter, narrow, uncharitable, intolerant, an insult to reason, the last thing it preached was peace on earth and good will among men. I have had occasion to examine into its utterances and to set forth its tenets. Those curious on the subject may there inform themselves.[106] You would not sit in church to-day, and listen to what was then taught,—an angry, a revengeful and an unforgiving God.

Schools:—Prior to 1850 the schools of Massachusetts were archaic, the primitive methods alone were in vogue; and not until after that time was any attention at all paid either to scientific instruction, or to the laws of sanitation. Charity! the care of the insane! the treating of the sick! In your Weymouth records for the town meeting of March 17, 1771, you will find the following: “Voted, to sell the poor that are maintained by the town for this present year at a Vendue to the lowest bidder.” Do you realize what that meant, and who were included in the “poor that are maintained by the town?” It was the old-time substitute for the asylum, the almshouse and the hospital. In those days the care of the demented was farmed out to him or her who would assume it at the lowest charge to the public. Even as late as 1843, and in the immediate neighborhood of Boston, naked maniacs could be seen confined in cages, or unlighted sheds, connected with the almshouse or abutting on the public way.[107] Or take this other Weymouth record of August 28, 1733, exactly one year before my ancestor, Rev. William Smith, was ordained your minister.

Twenty pounds in those days was $66.60 of the money of our days; and that in old tenor bills! A public inducement to baby-farming is not now held out. And so I might go on to the close of the chapter, did time permit. But Macaulay has said it all before, and why now repeat in more prosaic terms the tale of ancient wrong? Rather let me close with this passage from his History: