So much for Mr. Thomas Morton’s account of this “outragious riot;” now let us see what Captain Standish had to say of the affair:

Whichever of these widely divergent accounts is the more correct, upon one point they both concur, and that is, after all, the vital point, that Morton was arrested, carried to Plymouth and presently sent to England; while the Wollaston settlement was practically broken up, the liquor nuisance abated, and the trade in firearms and ammunition stopped. Peace and security were thus once more restored to Wessagusset, through the agency of Miles Standish. Nor were these blessings won at any unreasonable price, as the whole cost of the expedition was computed at £12 7s., of which sum £2 was assessed on the settlers at Wessagusset, and £2 10s. on the Plymouth colony.[51]

The destruction of the May-pole at Merry Mount took place in the early days of June, 1628, and just two years later Governor Winthrop arrived in Boston harbor and the consecutive annals of the Massachusetts Bay began. It is yet another two years, however, before we again meet with a mention of Weymouth, still under its Indian name. In August, 1632, Governor Winthrop, in company with the Rev. Mr. Wilson and other notables, took ship at Boston and landed at Wessagusset; and thence the succeeding day the distinguished party started on foot for Plymouth, completing their journey by night. Six days later, on the 31st of the same month, they returned; leaving Plymouth at five in the morning and reaching Wessagusset in the evening, where they passed the night, and finished their journey next morning by water.[52] We have Governor Winthrop’s authority for the assertion that, both going and returning, they were here most hospitably feasted on the turkeys, geese and ducks of the neighborhood.[53] Two years later again Wessagusset was summoned by the General Court to assume charge of one of its pauper inhabitants, who had seen fit to fall ill at Dorchester;[54] and in 1635 the Court established a commission to fix the boundary line between what are now Braintree and Weymouth,—then Mt. Wollaston and Wessagusset. Thus through eleven years, from 1624 to 1635, the early settlers of Weymouth only occasionally emerge from the oblivion of the past and are dimly shadowed on the mirror of New England history. But now, at last, in the year 1635, Wessagusset was by the order of the General Court made a plantation under the name of Weymouth, and the Rev. Mr. Hull, with twenty-one families from England, were allowed to establish themselves here.[55] Why the name of Weymouth was adopted I do not find recorded: it may well have been that the Rev. Mr. Hull and his party came from that place in the old country, but there does not appear to be any ground for asserting such to have been the fact.[56] With Mr. Hull, however, began the long succession of clergymen who ministered to the old first parish, of whom the present incumbent is the thirteenth. In the earlier days of New England the pastorates marked epochs in the history of the towns, much as do the reigns of kings and queens in European annals. Nor indeed were certain of the Weymouth pastorates brief in point of time, for two of them covered the long period of one entire century.

To return, however, to the political history of the town; in the same year (1635) in which it was created a plantation, Weymouth was also authorized to send a deputy to the General Court. The next year three deputies made their appearance instead of one; but, considering the size of the place they represented, the delegation with becoming modesty requested that two of their number might be dismissed, and accordingly Messrs. Bursley and Upham received leave to withdraw.[57] From that time forward, through a space of one hundred and thirty years, the political history of Weymouth moved uneventfully along,—a portion of that of the Province,—rendered noticeable only by some question of boundaries, by fines imposed because of the badness of highways or the insufficiency of the watch-house or carelessness in checking the roving propensities of swine, or by the division of a whale found stranded on its shore, or some other equally trifling incident of municipal government. The tax-collector made his annual visits, and his records seem to show that, as compared with others, the town during its earlier years was neither populous nor wealthy. Its proportion was in the neighborhood of one-fiftieth part of the whole amount levied on the colony, ranging from £4 to £10 each year; but in 1637 came the Pequod War, and during that year Weymouth was assessed for £27 in a total levy of £1,500. The town could not even then be said to rank high on the assessors’ books, being thirteenth in a list of fourteen.

As respects population during the first half century of the existence of Weymouth, there is small material on which to form an estimate. In 1637 a levy of one hundred and sixty men was made to carry on the Pequod War; of these Weymouth furnished five as her contingent. Under the system of computation adopted by the highest authority,[58] this would indicate a total of about five hundred souls, which I am inclined to think was not far from the true number. During the next century and a quarter the increase was very slow, so that in 1776 the population but little exceeded 1,400;[59] indeed, it may be said that during the century and a half which succeeded the Pequod War the increase of the town in numbers scarcely exceeded one-half of one per cent. a year. To the Weymouth of to-day,—with its population of 10,000 souls,—1,400, and much less 500, seems a somewhat sparse settlement. It did not so impress the first inhabitants. On the contrary, in 1642 the townspeople of those days thought themselves so numerous as to render expedient the removal of a portion of their number to a new settlement. This was accordingly determined on, and the Rev. Mr. Newman, the clergyman of the time, to prevent all dispute, offered either to go or to remain as his parishioners should decide. A vote was taken, which resulted in favor of the removing party; with them, therefore, he cast in his lot at the place selected for their settlement, to which the pastor gave the name of Rehoboth, which it still bears. In later years other and larger migrations took place, first to Easton and subsequently to Abington, thus accounting for the slow movement of population in the mother town, which, indeed, between 1740 and 1780 rather tended to diminish than to increase. This condition of affairs, however, in no way disturbed the inhabitants. On the contrary, four years after the Rehoboth secession, the town records under the date of April 6, 1646, contain this singular entry, with the significant words “Stand Good,” written against it in the margin:

“Whereas we find by sad experience the great inconvenience that many times it comes to pass by the permitting of strangers to come into the plantation pretending only to sojourn for a season, but afterwards they have continued a while account themselves inhabitants with us, and so challeng to themselves all such priviledges and immunitys as others do enjoy, who notwithstanding are of little use to advance the public good, but rather many times are troublesome and prove a burden to the plantation, the premises considered, together with the straightness of the place, the number of the people, and the smallness of the trade we yet have amongst us, we the townsmen whose names are subscribed for the prevention of this and the like inconveniencys, have thought good to present to consideration the insuing order to be voted by the whole Towne to stande in force as long as they in wisdome shall see just cause.

“First that no inhabitant within this plantation shall presume to take into his house as an inmate, or servant, any person or persons, unless he shall give sufficient bonds, to defray the plantation of what damage may ensue thereuppon, or be as covenant servant, and that for one year at the least without leave first had and obtayned from the whole Towne at some of their public meetings, under the penalty of 5 shillings a week as long as hee shall continue in the breach of this order, to be levied by the constable or other officer, and delivered to the townsmen for the time being, to be improved for the use and benefit of the towne. Also it is further agreed upon by and with the consent of the whole towne that no person or persons within this plantation shall lett or sell any house, or land, to any person or persons that is not an inhabitant amongst us, untill he hath first made a tender of it to the Towne, at a trayning or some lecture day or other public meeting.”

And to show that this was not a mere empty threat, it is but necessary to turn to this other record of thirty-eight years later, April 30ᵗʰ, 1684:

“At a Meeting of the Selectmen they passed a warrant to the Constable John Pratt as followeth:—

Not unnaturally, therefore, with continual migrations of its people taking place, and with the advent of new population sternly discouraged, the growth of Weymouth was slow. Nevertheless, grow it did, and it prospered. I have spoken of the long interval of one hundred and twenty-five years between 1640 and 1765, an interval which includes one-half of the entire history of the town, as a single period. As such it can best be treated, for with Weymouth, as with most other New England towns, it was the time of slow growth, the long period of infancy. It was marked by few events of importance. In 1676 the terror of King Philip’s war swept over Weymouth, as it did over all the other outlying settlements of the colony. That was by far the most cruel ordeal through which Massachusetts has ever passed,—one, of the deep agony of which it is not easy for us, removed from it by two hundred years of time, to form even a dim conception. I shall not pause to dilate upon it here, though, in a far less degree it is true than many of her sister settlements, Weymouth then tasted the horrors of savage warfare. Women were slaughtered and houses were burned within her limits, and the losses she sustained were sufficiently severe to induce the General Court to allow the abatement of a portion of her tax. Again she was called upon to furnish her contingent of soldiers, who doubtless played their part manfully enough at the storming of Narragansett Fort.[61] Indeed, in every warlike ordeal through which Massachusetts has been called to pass,—from the first struggle of Miles Standish, in 1624, to the great rebellion, two hundred and forty years later,—the ancient town may fairly claim that she has contributed of her blood with no stinting hand.

But the war of King Philip was ended, and again Weymouth lapsed into the old, quiet, steady, uneventful life. During the next ninety years I doubt if anything more momentous occurred within her limits than the burning of the town meeting-house, in 1751. That, however, was a very remarkable year,—one still borne in painful recollection,—the saddest in the whole history of Weymouth. It has indeed left its mark on the records, where, under date of May 21st, 1752, in the town meeting that day held, it was—

“Voted to send no representative this present year on account of the great charge of building a Meeting-house, and the extraordinary Sickness that has prevailed in the town in the year past.”

The meeting-house was burned on the 23d of April, and its destruction was impressed on the recollection of those living in the vicinity by a special circumstance. The fathers of the town had seen fit to utilize the loft over the church as a magazine, and in it was stored the supply of town powder to the very respectable amount of three barrels. Naturally, at the proper moment, this brought the conflagration to a crisis, making, as Parson Smith, the clergyman of the period, has recorded, “a surprising noise when it blew up.” The event has also been celebrated in contemporaneous verse by Paul Torrey, the village Milton:

Our powder stock, kept under lock,
With flints and bullets were,
By dismal blast soon swiftly cast
Into the open air.

The poet also intimates grave suspicions as to the origin of the fire, and indeed hints at a personal knowledge of the incendiaries, suggesting very radical measures for their destruction and extirpation:

O range and search in every arch,
And cellar round about;
Search low and high, with hue and cry,
To find those rebels out.

I’m satisfy’d they do reside,
Some where within the Town;
Therefore no doubt, you’ll find them out,
By searching up and down.

On trial them we will condemn,
The sentence we will give;
Them execute without dispute,
Not being fit to live.[62]

History does not record any satisfactory result as attending the poet’s search, but in the succeeding year he was tuning his lyre to sing the dedication of a new and more commodious edifice, erected in place of that which had been destroyed. But the other disaster which made memorable the year 1751 was far more terrible than the destruction of any building the work of human hands. That year was marked by a veritable slaughter of the innocents. Death stalked through the town. Between May, 1751, and May, 1752, a terrible throat distemper so raged among the children as to amount almost to a pestilence. In October, 1751, alone, thirty died, and in all there perished some one hundred and twenty. Out of a population of only twelve hundred, no less than one hundred and fifty persons died in the town during that twelvemonth.[63] During the succeeding year the disease gradually disappeared, and has since been almost unknown in Weymouth. Rarely, indeed, however, even in times of plague, has the death-rate exceeded that of Weymouth in 1751-2.

Broken here and there by such episodes as these, the life of the little settlement flowed on in the general even tenor of its way through the lives of four generations of its children. It was an existence which we now find it difficult to picture. Living as we do in the hurry and bustle of the modern world,—having the record of human life in both hemispheres daily spread before us,—moving with ease over two continents,—in the neighborhood of cities and libraries and galleries and theatres,—belonging to a civilization enriched with all the accumulated wealth of centuries,—accustomed ourselves to large affairs and dealing in millions where in the olden time they talked but of thousands,—we, in the year 1874, can hardly stand here, and, looking around from King-Oak Hill, picture to ourselves the life led in its neighborhood a century and a half ago. To the intense lover of nature, it is true, Weymouth probably then bore a more attractive aspect than now it does, for nature had lavished its gifts upon it with no sparing hand. Eastward the green islands studded the bay, round which the sea sparkled with waters rarely vexed by the keel and never beaten by the paddle,—to the north the town of Boston was hidden from sight as it nestled at the feet of its hills,—to the west the Blue Hills loomed up in their soft, misty beauty even as they do to-day, they alone unchanged,—to the south stretched away the more level forest land in which the beautiful Weymouth ponds lay quietly imbedded in their native framework of virgin green, while around their shores the wolf still lurked and the swift deer bounded. No long rows of piles then broke the swift tide as it ebbed and flowed in the Fore River,—no tall chimneys belched out black smoke on the eastern limit of the town,—no phosphate factory at the foot of the Great Hill poisoned the sweet native atmosphere, but the waves rippled on the beach, and rose and fell amid the haunts of the seal and the sea-fowl, even as they did when Thomas Morton of Merry Mount thus described the land: “And when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be paralel’d. For so many goodly groues of trees; dainty fine round rising hillucks: delicate faire large plaines, sweete cristall fountaines, and cleare running streames, that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweete a murmering noise to heare, as would even lull the sences with delight a sleepe, so pleasantly doe they glide upon the pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where they doe meete; and hand in hand runne downe to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearely tribute, which they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the springs.”[64]

During the early days of the settlement the township was covered with a natural growth of timber, in which the oak, the elm, the chestnut, the ash, the pine and the cedar were mingled; and through many years the town records bear frequent trace of the jealous care with which the townsmen preserved this great source of beauty and of wealth.[65] As timber, however, became more valuable, the forests were encroached upon, until in the third quarter of the last century they had been well nigh destroyed. But, during the earlier years, as one stood on King-Oak Hill, the whole broad panorama must have appeared an almost unbroken wilderness of wooded hill and dale, and azure sea and verdant shore; while here and there, few and far between, could have been discerned the rude belfry of a colonial church; or the long, brown, sloping roof and hard angular front of some farmer’s house, surrounded by barns and buildings more unsightly than itself, protruded its ugliness amidst the open fields upon which the cattle grazed or the ripening harvest waved. Weymouth was not settled, as were many other towns, with a view to village life, while out-lying farms stretched away to the outskirts of the township,—here every free-holder seems to have dwelt upon his land. The church and the burying-ground were the natural centres of the olden town, but no village then or now has ever gathered about them. Even as late as 1780 there were but about some two hundred houses in all scattered over the whole surface of Weymouth, and these were of the plainest, simplest sort.[66]

The men and women who dwelt in them were in great degree cut off from the whole outer world;—at least we would think so now. The roads were few and bad; the chief one, still known as Queen Ann’s turnpike, is said to have received its name, not from the sovereign of the loyal colonies, but from the hostess of a little “four corner” inn upon it, who was always known by that royal title.[67] Queen Ann’s turnpike was the direct road between Boston and Plymouth, but the time of which I speak was long before the stage-coach era, and the Weymouth man, whom business called to Boston, went by water, or drove or walked there over Milton Hill and Roxbury Neck. Nor was that journey to Boston then devoid of danger. Early in the last century, for instance, it is traditionally stated that a party, including two of the principal citizens of Weymouth, while returning home by water from Boston, were overtaken by a snow-storm and wrecked on one of the islands in the bay; all perished, it is said, save Captain Alexander Nash and a negro servant, through whose devotion his life was saved.[68] If the tradition be true it should be added that Captain Nash’s descendants in the present century have repaid the debt due to their ancestor’s slave by long and eminent services in the emancipation of his race. But the story at least illustrates the distance then existing between Boston and Weymouth,[69]—a distance greater for every practical purpose than that now existing between Weymouth and New York.

Between Old Spain and Quincy Point, or Wessagusset and Mount Wollaston as they then were called, a ferry was authorized as early as 1635, and the rate of ferriage was fixed at a penny for each person and at threepence for each horse; two years later this rate was raised and the ferryman of the day was licensed to keep a house of call. But so far as the whole great outer world was concerned, the earlier dwellers in Weymouth were, through four generations, what we should consider as entombed alive. There was no newspaper,—there was no system of public transportation,—there was no regular post,—between the colonies themselves there was little occasion for intercourse, and Europe was months removed. Those freemen who were elected deputies attended the sessions of the General Court; and now and then the clergyman or the magistrate took part in some solemn conclave of his brethren at the capital or in a neighboring town. Of the young men, a few went with the fishing fleet to Cape Sable, or sailed on trading voyages to the West Indies or to Spain, thus catching glimpses of the outer world; but it may well be questioned whether any Weymouth-born woman ever laid eyes on the shores of the mother country during the first hundred and sixty years of the settlement of the town.

The men and women of those five generations were a poor, hard-working, sombre race,—rising early and working late,—laboriously earning their bread by the sweat of their brows. There were no labor reformers then. The men worked in the fields, the women in the house: the first tended the flocks, or planted and gathered the harvest;—the last busied themselves in the dairy and the kitchen, or at the spinning-wheel and the wash-tub. It is a tradition of the daughter of Parson Smith that with her own hands she scrubbed the floor of her bed-room the afternoon before her eldest son, John Quincy Adams, was born. There was no nonsense at least about that people; every one had work to do, and no one, gentle or simple, was above his work.

For years there was a single school in the town, and the teacher was annually engaged by a vote in the town-meeting.[70] Subsequently his teaching was divided, the north precinct receiving eight months of his time and the south four; but this arrangement not proving satisfactory, the money raised for support of schools was finally divided between the precincts in proportion to their tax, and they were left to apply it each in its own way. But for us it is most curious to see through all these years how small were the expenses of the town and how large a proportion of the annual tax was applied to education.
In the last century, before the War of Independence destroyed all measure of value, £120 ($420) of the old tenor, so called, was the average annual levy, and of this five-sixths went to the support of the schools. Expenditures on other accounts were necessarily very small. Until the year 1760 the highways were repaired by the labor of the people of the town, who, for this purpose appear to have been equally assessed. As, however, the disparity in wealth became greater and this burden heavier, the system was changed, and in 1760 every person paying a poll-tax was called on for a day’s labor, which was assessed at 2s. 1d. (35 cents), and those who also paid property taxes were further called on for as many additional days’ labor as 2s. 1d. were contained in the amount of their property tax.[71] The sparsely settled character of the town obviated all necessity of a fire department, though an entry in the records as early as 1651 gives a curious glimpse into the habits and dangers of a community before the blessed invention of lucifer matches. An order was then made by the selectmen, in consideration of “the great loss and damage that many & many a time doth fall out in this Towne by fire,” and because “no effort has been made to restrayne the carringe abroad of fiery sticks ... in mens hands, which is exceeding dangerous especially when the wind is high,”—in view of these facts the town fathers, under a penalty of twenty shillings for each offence, proceeded to forbid any one between March and November from transporting “any fire from one place to another than in a pot or other vessell fit for such a purpose and close covered.”[72] Until the present century, however, this ordinance seems to have been regarded as sufficient protection against the dangers of conflagration, thus cutting off that heavy item of modern town expenses; while, so far as salaries were concerned, volumes are contained in the following clause with which the vote of 1651, defining the duties and powers of the selectmen, closed;—“Sixthly—Wee willingly grant they shall have their Dynners uppon the Towne’s charge when they meet about the Towns affayres.”[73]

The town government of those days was, indeed, the simplest government conceivable. There were the clergyman (for parish and town were one), the school-master, the selectmen, the deputy, the constable and the pound-keeper. In the earliest days it was even simpler yet than this, for frequent meetings of the whole town were called. But even then it was speedily found that this led to abuses,[74] and, in 1651, a system of two regular town meetings in each year was adopted, and the powers of the selectmen were specifically defined.[75] The continuous record of these meetings through more than a century, at once reveals the slow, unconscious growth of a great political system, and supplies the amplest evidence of the sameness of a colonial village life. To the student in the science of government these volumes of the Weymouth town records are replete with interest. In them the growth of a system from the root up may be studied. As an observing man turns over the ill-spelt, almost illegible pages, they grow luminous in their bearing on many of the most distressing problems of the age. As Gibbon, from an experience among the yeoman militia of England, derived a certain comprehension of the legionaries of Rome,—so the early records of the New England towns make it most manifest to us why the horrors of 1793, and the later excesses of the Commune, are possible in France, and why nothing other than a republic is now possible in New England. In these records we see parliamentary institutions stripped of their non-essentials and reduced to first principles;—we see that the New England town-meeting democracy was the purest and simplest government of the people, for the people, which the world has yet produced. Here is a perfect equality, controlled by an almost iron law of usage. Year after year every question of common concernment is settled in general town-meeting by a vote of the majority, after a free and full discussion, conducted in perfect deference to a rude parliamentary law. The greater number rules, but the minority ever asserts its rights, which are always freely conceded. The protests of the contra dicentes make a part of the records; the final appeal is made to the courts of law; the idea of an ultimate resort to force is never even suggested, much less discussed. Thus, through our town records, we are made to realize that republican government is in New England a product of the soil and not an exotic,—in France it is a graft; with us it is the stem. The growth of this germ from the town-meeting to the General Court, from the General Court to the Continental Congress, and from that to the Government of the United States, and thence back to the great cardinal fact of force,—all this is for others to trace. Meanwhile, here to-day, we stand on a record of two hundred and fifty years of pure democracy,—the deep, underlying tap-root of whatever is good in America. And indeed that record relates not to great things. It tells us of the daily life of our fathers. It deals not with theories, but with practical issues. The earlier generations did not realize that they were evolving a system, when they made regulations for the preservation of the town timber and the use of its common grounds; to check the roving propensities of its hogs, and to prescribe the liberty of the rams or the number of the parish bulls. Yet such was the fact, and the whole developed system of our National Government of to-day may be read in little in the Weymouth town records of over a century past. To-day’s jealousy of the foreign producer is there evinced towards those inhabiting the neighboring towns,—they must not partake of the privileges of Weymouth. The protective system began with the beginning. In the earlier days bounties are offered for the ears of wolves, but later, as the wilderness is subdued, these are dropped from the record and the crow and the blackbird are proscribed in their place. Now and again we find the town entering on some system of encouragement to a new branch of industry, making a grant of land therefor;[76] but the herring fishery and the passage of the alewives into Great Pond have left, perhaps, the deepest mark on the town records. The annual passage of the fish up the Back River was an event in the life of Weymouth, exciting the liveliest interest in old and young. For this really great boon the town was indebted to Adam Cushing, one of its prominent citizens in the provincial times. Mr. Cushing died in the year of the great sickness, 1751, and seems to have been a truly remarkable man. About 1730 he bethought himself of bringing some herring, during the spawning season, over from Taunton River to the Great Pond. He did so, himself superintending the work of transportation, and seeing to it that fresh water was properly supplied to the fish. It would seem, therefore, that through him Weymouth may claim a place of one hundred and forty years’ standing in the interesting history of pisciculture in Massachusetts.[77]

These records also reveal to us very clearly what a singularly conservative race our ancestors were,—in this respect how different from their children. They clung very close to authority, to tradition and to precedent. The conditions by which they were surrounded changed but slowly, and they themselves changed more slowly yet. What volumes, for instance, in this respect, are contained in this single fact:—in 1651 the town, in six brief articles, defined the powers of its selectmen, and more than sixty years later, in 1712, I find the following entry in the records: “Voted the Selectmen the same power they had granted in the year 1651.”[78] Again, to cite another example: Weymouth then, as now, had among its citizens a James Humphrey, and, under date of March 12th, 1781, I find this entry: “Voted—That the thanks of the Town be given to the Honᵇˡᵉ James Humphrey Esqʳ. for his faithful services as a selectman in the Town for more than forty years past.” Unlike so many of her sister towns, the Weymouth of to-day has never, even yet, learned enough of the science of true republican government to “rotate” its town officials. When they have had a man who was willing to serve them well and faithfully, they have actually kept him in office. The James Humphrey of the last century served the town “over forty years”; the James Humphrey of this has already served it nearly twenty-five.

I do not know if it indeed was so, but to me the very nature of the New England world seems to have been less cheerful in those earlier days than now. Not only was life less joyous, but nature wore a harsher front. I have spoken of the great sickness of 1751, and how it desolated Weymouth; but epidemics seem to have been far more prevalent during the last century than in this. The fearful scourge of the small-pox has left its pit-marks on every page of early New England history, and when, in 1775, a chronic dysentery prevailed to such an extent that three, four and even five children were lost in single families, a Weymouth woman writing from the midst of the general distress could only say “the dread upon the minds of the people of catching the distemper is almost as great as if it were the small-pox.”[79] Yet in 1735 the diphtheria raged, as well as in 1751. Their winters also seem to have been longer, their snows deeper, their frosts more severe than ours. In 1717 there was a great snow-storm, famous in New England annals. The country was buried under huge drifts, which swept over fences and houses, reducing the whole colony to one white, glittering desert. Weymouth disappeared with the rest, and the event was of sufficient importance to cause a memorandum of it to be inserted in the records.[80] In other years we hear of the harbor freezing over in November; and on the 26th of March, 1785, the winter’s snow, though much reduced, lay still on a level with the fences, nor was it till April 7th that the ice broke up in the Fore River.[81] I doubt whether any man now living has witnessed a like occurrence.

A severer climate and harsher visitations seem strictly in keeping with the character of the people. The religious element which led to the settlement of New England still strongly asserted itself in the life and customs of the colony. Wealth had hardly yet begun to exercise its subtle influence upon it. Indeed, though almost all were prosperous there was little of what can properly be called wealth in the community, but there was equally little poverty. The people lived in rude abundance, and I do not believe that during the first hundred years of the history of Weymouth as many persons received public aid of the town. Certainly the method of dealing with pauperism, where it occasionally appears in the records, was primitive in the extreme, and scarcely commends itself to modern theories.[82] But as a rule there appears to have been a strikingly equal division of such property as the people had, which lay almost wholly in their cattle and their lands; accumulation had scarcely begun.

We are always accustomed to regard the past as a better and purer time than the present,—there is a vague, traditional simplicity and innocence hanging about it almost Arcadian in character. I can find no ground on which to base this pleasant fancy. Taken altogether I do not believe that the morals of Weymouth or of her sister towns were on the average as good in the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth. The people were sterner and graver,—the law and the magistrate were more severe, but human nature was the same and would have vent. There was, I am inclined to think, more hypocrisy in those days than now, but I have seen nothing which has led me to believe that the women were more chaste, or that the men were more temperate, or that, in proportion to population, fewer or less degrading crimes were perpetrated. Certainly the earlier generations were as a race not so charitable as their descendants, and less of a spirit of kindly Christianity prevailed among them. But in those days enjoyment itself was almost a crime, and every pleasure was thought to be a lure of the devil and close upon the boundary line to guilt. Holidays, accordingly, were few and far between. The May-pole disappeared with the wild Morton of Merry Mount. During the colonial period, election or training day was what the Fourth of July is to us,—the great anniversary of the year, on which the whole community came as near to unbending as it knew how. Thanksgiving and the annual fast were both church days; Guy Fawkes’ day was notorious for its noisy revels; Sunday was devoted to nominal rest and veritable exhortation. On that day, every one not an infant attended church, and the infants were left alone at home.[83] From Saturday evening to Monday morning all labor ceased,—the voices of the children were hushed,—the blinds were drawn, and a quiet, which was not rest, pervaded the town. The lecture and the sermon were the events of the week,—they supplied the place of the theatre, the novel and the newspaper,—they were listened to and discussed and commented upon by old and young,—and, so far as my investigations have enabled me to judge, the stiffest of orthodoxy was ever preached from the Weymouth pulpit.

In the early days, however, the clergy of New England were an aristocracy,—almost a caste. Not, of course, an aristocracy of wealth, but of education, tradition and faith,—a veritable priesthood in fact. The tie between the pastor and his people partook almost of the nature of the wedding bond; there was a sanctity about it; it was well-nigh indissoluble. But in its earliest period Weymouth was not fortunate in these relations. Prior to 1635 the plantation was too poor and too small in numbers to maintain a church, but that year one was gathered, being the eleventh of the colony.[84] Of Mr. Hull, the first authentic pastor, it can only be said that he preached in Weymouth for several years, and then his connection with the church was dissolved. There seems indeed at this time to have been a serious schism in the infant settlement, for, while Mr. Hull arrived in 1635 and preached his farewell sermon in May, 1639, yet as early as January, 1638, the elders of Boston had come to Weymouth, and had there demonstrated the efficacy of prayer by effecting a reconciliation between one Mr. Jenner and his people. The reconciliation seems to have been but temporary, for, after representing the town as deputy in the General Court in 1640, in 1641 Mr. Jenner removed to Saco. Meanwhile, in 1637, the Rev. Mr. Lenthall also appears upon the Weymouth stage, bringing with him the pestilential doctrines of Mrs. Hutchinson in regard to justification before faith and other equally incomprehensible theses, which came so near working the destruction of the infant colony. A movement was started inviting Mr. Lenthall to settle and organize a new church. It was apparently making rapid headway when the magistrates of the colony energetically interfered to put a stop to it. In March, 1638, Mr. Lenthall accordingly, with some of his leading supporters, was summoned to appear before the General Court, and made to see good reason why, with expressions of deep contrition, he should make a retraction of his heresies in writing and in open court. Upon this, he was, with some opposition, dismissed without a fine, but only on condition that he was to make a similar public recantation in Weymouth, and should also be on hand when the next General Court assembled. His followers did not escape so easily; one of them was heavily fined, another was disfranchised, a third, having no means wherewith to pay a fine, was publicly whipped, and a fourth, “because of his novel disposition,” received a significant intimation to the effect that the General Court “were weary of him, unless he reform.” Shortly after this miscarriage, features in which are unpleasantly suggestive of inquisitorial proceedings in other lands, the Rev. Mr. Lenthall seems to have left Weymouth, for he is next heard of in Rhode Island, that blessed asylum for the persecuted of Massachusetts.[85]

Mr. Lenthall, however, represented only a schism in the Weymouth church; Mr. Jenner was the minister in the line of true succession. He retired to Maine in 1640 and was succeeded in his pastorate by Mr. Newman, who at last brought with him peace to the distracted church. He must have been a very superior man,—able, learned and faithful. Educated at Oxford, he had preached many years in England before coming to this country in 1638. He then spent some time in Dorchester, and was subsequently invited to Weymouth, where he settled and remained until he migrated with the larger portion of his people to Rehoboth. He is the real author of the Concordance to the Bible which goes under Cruden’s name; for it was he who prepared the basis of the work, which was subsequently finished and published at Cambridge.[86]

The Weymouth church had now had three preachers in nine years, but the day of short pastorates was over. The Rev. Thomas Thacher was ordained as the successor of Mr. Newman in 1644, and there remained, beloved and respected of his people, for twenty years. Then marrying a second time, and his parish being unable to afford him a sufficient maintenance,[87] he moved to Boston, the home of his wife, and in him Weymouth lost at once its spiritual and its medical adviser, for Mr. Thacher was a skillful physician as well as a learned divine. Subsequently, in 1669, he became the first pastor of the Old South Church, in Boston, in which position he died, in 1678, leaving behind him a race of descendants whose names are familiar through a century of colonial annals.

To Mr. Thacher’s pastorate of twenty years succeeded the fifty-one years of the learned and exemplary Samuel Torrey, the trusted adviser of the magistrates of his day, the intimate friend of all its leading divines, thrice invited to preach the election sermon, twice called to the presidency of Harvard College. Mr. Torrey enjoyed a very remarkable gift of prayer, so that it is told of him that upon the occasion of a public fast, in 1696, after all the other exercises, he prayed for two hours, and that so acceptably that his auditors, when towards the close he hinted at some new and agreeable fields of thought, could not help wishing him to enlarge upon them.[88] He died deeply lamented, at the age of seventy-six, in the year 1707.

Peter Thacher succeeded Mr. Torrey in the year of the latter’s death, and continued in his ministry eleven years; being followed, in 1719, by Thomas Paine, whose connection with the church continued until dissolved, at his own request, in 1734. He then retired to Boston, where he ended his life, and his body was brought back to Weymouth for burial beside his children. He was the father and the grandfather of those Robert Treat Paines, the line of which is continued to the present day.

In 1734 the Rev. William Smith was settled as the eighth successive pastor of the first church, and so continued for forty-nine years, and until after the close of the colonial period. Mr. Smith was beloved and respected through his long ministry by his people, but to posterity he is chiefly known as the father of her who proved to be the most famous child of Weymouth. The familiar anecdote of Parson Smith’s sermons on the marriages of his two daughters does not need to be repeated here.[89] Whether the good old pastor did or did not prepare the wedding discourse for Abigail’s benefit from so very unsavory a text as that “John came neither eating nor drinking, and men say he hath a devil,” we cannot now tell; the anecdote rests on tradition alone. Let us hope, however, that he did, for he lived to see his daughter’s choice justified in the eyes of the most doubting of his parishioners; though he had himself already been thirteen years in his grave when, on the 8th of February, 1797, that daughter wrote to her husband in these solemn words, breathing the full spirit of the dead divine: “You have this day to declare yourself head of a nation. ‘And now, O Lord, my God, thou hast made thy servant ruler over the people. Give unto him an understanding heart, that he may know how to go out and come in before this great people; that he may discern between good and bad. For who is able to judge this thy so great a people?’... My thoughts and my meditation are with you, though personally absent; and my petitions to Heaven are, that ‘the things which make for peace may not be hidden from your eyes.’”[90]

But it is necessary to go back to the year 1765, when the long, monotonous quiet of over a century was to be broken for Weymouth and all her sister towns by the deep though distant mutterings of an impending war. The first notes of the struggle then break sharply in on the peaceful sameness of the town records like the blast of a trumpet. The Stamp Act had been passed, and the August riots had taken place in Boston. Mr. Oliver had been forced to resign his office, and the house of the Lieutenant-Governor had been sacked. The odious act was to take effect on the 1st of November, and a special session of the General Court had been called to take into consideration the course it was incumbent on the colony to pursue. The representative of Weymouth in those days was James Humphrey, Esq. Under these circumstances a meeting of the freemen was held on the 16th of October, at which Dr. Cotton Tufts was chosen Moderator, and a ringing address of instructions to Master Humphrey, as he was called, was voted and entered at length upon the records. The spirit of the ancient town was up, and its voice emitted no uncertain sound. Cotton Tufts was at that time thirty-four years of age. He was fully imbued with the patriotic spirit of the day, and was, in his own vicinage, a leading man. It is to his pen that the papers now entered on the town records are in all probability to be credited.[91]

Presently the government of the mother country somewhat receded from its position, and, during the loyal reaction which ensued, a draft of a measure indemnifying the sufferers in the August riots was submitted to the General Court. A special town meeting was held on September 1, 1766, and the town refused to give its assent to the payment of damages out of the public treasury. But another meeting was held on the 1st of December, when written instructions were entered at length on the records, again embodying the full rebel spirit of the day, but this time, and under strict conditions, authorizing Master Humphrey to vote for the proposed compensation.

In 1768 came the news that the British regiments were ordered to Boston. A committee of the Boston town meeting, called in consequence of this announcement, waited on Governor Bernard with a request, among other things, that the General Court should be convened. Meeting with a refusal, the Boston people took the matter into their own hands, and instructed their selectmen to invite, by circular letter, all the towns in the colony to send representatives to assemble in convention, at Boston, on the 22d of September. Over one hundred towns complied with this bold invitation, thus overriding the royal governor, and convening an assembly which, though it sat but four days, and carefully avoided any claim to a legal existence, was, in everything but in name, a house of representatives. In this convention sat James Humphrey, under instructions to be there from the town of Weymouth.

More than five years now passed away during which the controversy between the mother country and the colonies was continually approaching a crisis, but they left no mark on the records of Weymouth. Then arose the question as to the tax on tea. Early in December, 1773, the famous town meeting had been held in Faneuil Hall, at which the resolve was passed, “that if any person or persons shall hereafter import tea from Great Britain, or if any master or masters of any vessel or vessels in Great Britain shall take the same on board to be transported to this place, until the unrighteous act shall be repealed, he, or they, shall be deemed by this body an enemy to his country, and we will prevent the landing and sale of the same, and the payment of any duty thereon, and will effect the return thereof to the place from whence it shall come.”[92] Copies of this resolve were sent to all the sea-port towns in the Province. A few days later, on the night of December 16th, the celebrated tea-party took place in the Old South Church and on the wharves of Boston. In response to the resolve a special town meeting was held in Weymouth on Monday, January 3d, 1774, at which it was resolved by a very large majority, after some debate, that the inhabitants of the town would neither purchase nor make use of any teas, excepting such as they might happen then to have on hand, until Parliament repealed the odious duty upon it. On the 28th of September the town again met and chose a representative to the General Court, which convened at Salem on the 5th of October; no other instructions were given to him than those adopted by Boston for its own representatives, copies of which had been freely circulated.

A committee had been appointed at a town meeting held in July to procure signatures to the Joseph Warren “Solemn League and Covenant,” which had been sent forth by the Boston committee of correspondence on the 5th of June. This measure was subsequently adopted by the Congress then sitting at Philadelphia, and recommended under the name of a Continental Association. So, on the 23d of December, 1774, at the close of the evening lecture, the roll of the inhabitants of Weymouth was called, and each man voted yea or nay on the question of the approval of the association. The two precincts voted separately; in each one hundred and twenty-three names were called, beginning with the two clergymen; in the first precinct, one hundred and thirteen answered to their names, of whom one hundred and nine voted “yea”; in the second precinct, out of one hundred and three voting, not one responded “nay.” On the 30th of January the town again met and voted “To bare the constables of 1773 harmless in not carrying their money to Haryson Gray,” he being the royalist treasurer of the Province; and further directed that the funds on hand should be turned over to the town treasurer. On the 9th of March this vote was reconsidered, and the money was directed to be paid to Henry Gardner of Stow, who now represented the patriot exchequer. At this meeting, too, the question was agitated of raising a company of minute-men, but the motion to that effect was not then carried. On the 27th of the same month, however, another town meeting was held and the action of the previous meeting was reconsidered, the town voting to raise a company of fifty-three men, who were to receive one shilling a week each for four weeks, and were to be drilled two half days a week. Upon the 2d of May another town meeting was held, and upon the 9th yet another. The affairs at Lexington and Concord had now taken place, and the greatest anxiety prevailed through all the towns in the vicinity of Boston. They were ever looking for similar enterprises. So at the first of these two meetings provision was made for a military guard of fifteen men, and at the second a committee of correspondence was organized, at the head of which were placed Dr. Tufts and Colonel Lovell. Twelve days later, early on Sunday, the 21st of May, the news was brought to the town that three sloops and a cutter had, during the previous night, come down from Boston and had anchored at the mouth of the Fore River. A landing was momentarily expected, and it was even reported to have taken place, and that three hundred soldiers were advancing on the town. Three alarm guns were fired, the bells were rung and the drums beat to arms. The panic and confusion were very great and worth recording, for it is the only time in the long history of the town that Weymouth has ever had cause to fear that a civilized and disciplined foe was at her threshold. Every house below the present North Weymouth station was deserted by the women and children. Mr. Smith’s family fled from the old parsonage, and Dr. Tufts’ wife being ill at the time, had a bed thrown into a cart, and, putting herself upon it, was driven to Bridgewater as a place of security; and, indeed, tradition says that other ladies of Weymouth gave evidence that morning of an abundant vitality, and displayed truly remarkable powers of locomotion. Meanwhile Dr. Tufts himself was busy serving out rations and supplying ammunition to the minute-men, who poured rapidly in from Hingham and Randolph and Braintree and all the neighboring towns, until nearly 2,000 of them were on the ground. Then it was discovered that the enemy were only foraging, and were engaged in removing hay from Grape Island. By the time they had secured about three tons, the minute-men had brought a sloop and lighter round from Hingham on which they put out for the island, whereupon the enemy decamped.[93] It was a mere alarm in which no one was hurt, but it showed the spirit of the town even though it only resulted in the destruction of the hay, which doubtless Gen. Ward’s army needed, and which, had they been older soldiers, the minute-men would have brought away instead of burning.

Towards the middle of July again, a small party, among whom was Captain Goold of the Weymouth company, with twenty-five of his men, went out from the Moon Head and burned a house and a barn full of hay on Long Island. On this occasion they had a sharp skirmish, for the British men-of-war lying in the harbor sent out their cutters to intercept the party. They all, however, got back safely except one man of the covering force on Moon Head, who was killed by a cannon-ball. That night a sloop of war dropped down to the Fore River, but attempted nothing beyond creating another alarm. And this experience from time to time was repeated, until at last, in the spring of 1775, Boston was evacuated; and upon the 14th of June following, in consequence of military movements on the islands in the harbor, the last remnant of the British fleet put to sea, and the towns bordering on the bay were thereafter allowed to rest in peace.

During the year 1775 ten town meetings had been held in Weymouth, and seven were held in 1776. And now we enter on a new phase of the struggle for independence. For us, with our recollections of the war of the rebellion still fresh in our memories, it is most curious to read these ancient records,—to observe how closely history repeats itself. We well remember the fierce, self-sacrificing patriotism of 1861,—how the country was all alive with eagerness, how money was poured forth like water, and how regiments enlisted faster than they could be put into the field. We remember how this lasted through a short six months, and how we then began to realize what war meant. Then bounties began to be paid,—then enlistments grew more difficult just in proportion as the call for men became more pressing,—then values were unsettled, prices rose, the feverish glow of excitement faded away, and stern-visaged war gradually assumed her whole hateful front. We generally, too, are apt to imagine that the earlier days were less selfish, more self-sacrificing, more harmonious than our own. The records tell a different story. The declaration of Independence had only just been ventured upon,—it was not yet entered upon the records of Weymouth, “there to remain as a perpetual memorial,”—when on the 15th of July, 1776, a town meeting was held to secure the enlistment of ten men for the continental army, that being the quota of the town. It was voted to raise £130, in order to give each recruit a town bounty of £13 in addition to the state bounty of £7,—making a bounty of £20 to each man. It was also voted to allow the citizens of Weymouth two days in which to enlist, after which a committee of two was to go forth in search of recruits elsewhere. But before the 22d of the month eight men more were called for, and so at its adjourned meeting the town had to increase its appropriation to £234, a portion of which sum was borrowed of Captain James White for one year,—being the earliest record of a Weymouth town debt.[94]

To the Weymouth of that day these eighteen men were the equivalent of about one hundred and thirty now; and they were raised to take part in the unfortunate Canada campaign under Arnold and Montgomery. How many of them ever returned we cannot tell, but the weary sons of Weymouth in 1776 doubtless found final resting-places in the wilds of Maine or beneath the snows of Canada, as more recently they found them in the swamps of the Chickahominy or beneath the torrid sun of Louisiana. By December of that year twenty-two more men went into the continental service, under Lieutenant Kingman; and now the bounty was three pounds per month for three months.[95] It was shortly before this time that a Weymouth-born woman, writing from the next town of Braintree, thus described the aspect of affairs: “I am sorry to see a spirit so venal prevailing everywhere. When our men were drawn out for Canada a very large bounty was given them; and now another call is made upon us, no one will go without a large bounty, though only for two months, and each town seems to think its honor engaged out-bidding the others. The province pay is forty shillings. In addition to that this town voted to make it up six pounds. They then draw out the persons most unlikely to go, and they are obliged to give three pounds to hire a man. Some pay the whole fine, ten pounds. Forty men are now drafted from this town. More than one-half, from sixteen to fifty, are now in the service. This method of conducting will create a general uneasiness in the Continental army. I hardly think you can be sensible how much we are thinned in this province.”[96]

And now a new difficulty, with which our generation has been sadly familiar, was added to the heavy load under which the unfledged nationality was compelled to stagger. The value of its paper currency had hitherto been sustained; but at last, in the face of ever-increasing new issues, it began to depreciate, and by the close of the year 1776 it had fallen one-sixth in value. In vain does Congress enact that whoever pays or receives the currency at a rate less than its nominal value shall not only be accounted a public enemy, but shall forfeit the amount involved in such unpatriotic transaction. In defiance of law prices steadily rise. In January, 1777, the Legislature of Massachusetts went even further, and passed a measure entitled “An Act to prevent Monopoly and Oppression.” Under this the selectmen of Weymouth, aided by a committee of their townsmen, proceeded to fix a tariff of prices at which articles were to be sold. It is a sad record. The effort was, of course, a futile one, but it was made; and there it stands “as a perpetual memorial,” beginning with Indian corn and ending with cedar-posts, a monument of the wretched expedients to which sensible men will resort in troublous and unsettled times.

The call was now for three-year men, and the town bounty was eight pounds per annum. But some of the enlisted men had deserted, under the discouragement of the Long Island reverses, and none the less they claimed their bounties. The action of the town meeting seems to have been hardly consistent with the usually received ideas of military discipline, for it was voted to pay “those who deserted and came home before their times were up” four pounds apiece, on the report of a committee, to which the town added a further sum of forty shillings. But the whole story is told in the following extract from the record of May 21st, 1777: “Voted that Col. Solomon Lovell, Lieut. E. Cushing & Deaⁿ Samuel Blancher be a Committee to go out of Town to Hire men for the Contenential army for the Term of three years,—and that they be directed to git them as Cheep as they can,—and that noe one of them be allowed to give more than Thirty pounds for a man without the advise of another of the committee.”

Throughout the long war the people would not consent to a draft. They resorted to every expedient and makeshift, but they could not bring themselves to the one single expedient by which only can war be made decisive. In September, 1777, a draft was suggested,[97] but the idea met with no favor: again recourse was had to bounties, which were now £100 in lawful money, or forty shillings a month in produce at prices which ruled before the war.

The year 1779 must, however, have been much the gloomiest year of all to Weymouth, for it was in this year that the State of Massachusetts undertook the unfortunate Penobscot expedition. The land forces were commanded by the brave and popular Solomon Lovell, and naturally must have numbered in their ranks many Weymouth men. It encountered only disaster and loss, and added heavily to the already grievous burdens of the war. The commander of the naval contingent was court-martialled, but no question was made as to General Lovell’s conduct. Meanwhile prices were rising, and now $4,500 was voted, wherewith to raise nine men. It had also become very evident that the tariff of prices fixed by the selectmen and the committee of the town, two years and a half before, was somewhat out of date, as, its provisions to the contrary notwithstanding, butcher’s meat was now a dollar a pound, corn twenty-five dollars per bushel and labor eight dollars per day. Still the good people were not discouraged, but a new committee was set to work, and again, by a large majority, a tariff of prices was established; but at the same town meeting which adopted it $9,000 was voted to procure recruits. Indeed, the figures now become colossal, and in September, 1780, the town votes £5,000 for the support of schools and £15,000 “to pay the three months men, if wanted for that purpose, if not, for other town charges.” Nor was this all. The new State government was now organized, and John Hancock had been elected Governor, receiving, in Weymouth, twenty-nine votes to eleven for James Bowdoin; but one of the first acts of the Legislature was to allot among the various towns a quota of beef to be supplied as well as men, so the year 1780 closes with these two melancholy entries in the records of this poor little town, casting forty votes at the annual election:—

“Voted to raise one hundred and thirty thousand dollars of the old currency to procure the beef set on the town by the General Court.”

“Voted to give fifty hard dollars a year for any one or more men that shall engage for this town for three year in the Continental Servis.”