Historic Towns of New England

“If any of the savages pretend right of inheritance to all or any part of the lands granted in our Patent, we pray you endeavour to purchase their title, that we may avoid the least scruple of intrusion.”

Great pains were taken to establish just and humane relations with the red man. One of the objects of the company was the conversion of the Indians to the Gospel of Christ. Among the wise measures of the day it was forbidden to sell them muskets, ammunition or liquor, and they were permitted to enter the settlement at certain stated times only, for purposes of trade or treaty. As a nation, our treatment of the Indian has been so barbarous that this sagacious and Christian policy of the first Puritans calls for the highest praise and reveals another valuable trait in the heroic character of the Fathers.

That first winter at Naumkeag was a severe test of the fortitude of the Puritans. They suffered from lack of sufficient food and adequate shelter, and many died from disease. In their great need Governor Endicott wrote to Governor Bradford and asked that a physician be sent to them from the Plymouth settlement. Soon Dr. Fuller came and not only ministered to the sick, but in many conversations with Endicott and his companions doubtless prepared the way for their adoption of the Congregational or Independent form of church. The Pilgrims had withdrawn from the Church of England, averse to its ritual and discipline, and were known as Separatists. Even before their arrival at Plymouth they instituted the Congregational form of worship and discipline which they had already practised in England and Holland. But the Puritans at Naumkeag had intended to reform and not to give up the Anglican liturgy to which they were attached by tradition and sentiment. The Episcopal or the Congregational order of service was a momentous issue in these formative months and it is significant that on Dr. Fuller’s return to Plymouth Endicott wrote to Bradford: “I am by him satisfied, touching your judgement of the outward form of God’s worship; it is, as far as I can yet gather, no other than is warranted by the evidence of truth.”

In the following spring four hundred immigrants and four Non-conformist clergymen, among them Francis Higginson and Samuel Skelton, arrived and steps were then taken for the formal organization of the church. In the contract the English company made with the Rev. Francis Higginson there is another evidence of its generous and enlightened policy. He was to receive £30 for his outfit, £10 for books and £30 per annum for three years. In addition, the company was to find him a house, food, and wood for that period, to transport himself and family, and to bring them back to England at the expiration of the time if it should then be his wish. He was also to have one hundred acres of land, and if he died his wife and children were to be maintained while on the plantation.

At this time the Indian name Naumkeag was given up and the settlement took its present name of Salem, an abbreviation of Jerusalem and meaning, as every one knows, Peace. The important event was the organization of the church. Services had been held during the winter, perhaps in that “faire house” of the Governors, and doubtless the whole or parts of the Anglican liturgy had been used. A radical change now occurred. After suitable preparation by prayer and fasting the ministers were examined to test their fitness for the office, and then by a written ballot, the first use of the ballot in this country, Samuel Skelton was elected pastor and Francis Higginson teacher or assistant pastor. Then Mr. Higginson and “three or four of the gravest members of the church” laid their hands upon the head of Mr. Skelton, and with appropriate prayer installed him as minister of this first Puritan (as distinguished from the Pilgrim) church in America. Afterwards, by a similar imposition of hands and prayer by Mr. Skelton, Mr. Higginson was installed as teacher. The Plymouth church had been invited to send delegates, and as one of them Governor Bradford came, delayed by a storm, but in time to offer the right hand of fellowship. Thirty names were signed to the following covenant and the First Church of Salem was organized: “We covenant with the Lord and with one another, and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all His ways, according as He is pleased to reveal Himself unto us in His blessed word of truth.” The deed was done. The Congregational creed and polity were adopted and the church that for more than two centuries dominated New England thought and life was established in Salem.

For several years the youthful church met in a private house. But in 1634 the colonists were ready to build the “meeting-house” and the small, bare edifice, built of logs and boasting a thatched roof and stone chimney, was soon erected. “A poor thing, but mine own,” the Puritan might have said as he recalled the venerable and beautiful cathedrals of the mother-country. But the Puritan doubtless never quoted Shakespeare. It is more probable that he thought of the tabernacle with which the chosen people journeyed in the wilderness, long before Solomon’s temple crowned Mount Moriah, and rejoiced that the House of the Lord was at last set up in their midst. The sinewy oak timbers of this ancient building, within modern roof and walls, still remain, one of the most impressive monuments of this ancient town. Its size, 20 x 17 feet, makes one somewhat skeptical of the familiar statement that everybody went to church in the good old times. But I doubt not that both floor and gallery were well filled Sundays and at the great Thursday lecture, although on both days the preacher had the privilege, to modern divines denied, of reversing his hour-glass after the sand had run out and, secure of his congregation, deliberately proceeding to his “Finally, Brethren.” On one side sat the men, on the other the women and small children, each in his proper place, determined by wealth or public office. Even in that religious age four men, it appears, were appointed to prevent the boys from running downstairs before the Benediction was pronounced, while the constable, armed with a long pole tipped with a fox’s tail, was always at hand to rouse the drowsy or inattentive. There was at each service a collection. Only church-members could vote at the town-meetings, held at first in the new meeting-house, but every householder was taxed for the support of the church.

In 1630, John Winthrop, the newly appointed Governor of the Colony, accompanied by several hundred persons, came to Salem. Disappointed in the place, they soon moved to Charlestown, and there established the seat of government. From that date Salem took the second place in the Colony, but always maintained, then as now, an independent, public-spirited life.

Hither came, in 1634, Roger Williams, after the vicissitudes in those days experienced by an original and outspoken man. After the death of Mr. Higginson, he became the minister of the First Church. The original timbers of his dwelling-house, dating from 1635, are still to be seen, more ancient than the ancient roof and walls that cover them, and reveal faded characters of the Puritan palimpsest. A double interest attaches to this venerable building, since as the residence of Judge Corwin tradition has made it the scene of some of the preliminary examinations in the witch trials. But the wanderings of Roger Williams were not yet ended. His attacks upon the authority of the magistrates as well as his controversies with the ministers brought him under the condemnation of the General Court. Though the Salem church resisted, it was obliged to part with its minister who quitted Massachusetts under sentence of banishment, to become the Founder of Rhode Island. A remarkable man was Roger Williams, of great gifts and singular purity of conscience, but his inflexible spirit, opposed to the theocratic rule of ministers and magistrates, was wisely set at constructive work in another colony.

This was the eventful age of Puritanism in the mother-country and in the colonies. All that we read of the austere piety and social restraints of the Puritan theocracy is found in this period from 1629 to 1700. Much might be said of the growth of Salem in population and wealth and influence in this century, but there is no time to tell the story in a single chapter. We come at once to the close of the century when the old town earned an unenviable notoriety by the tragic affair known as the Witchcraft Delusion.

We must think of Salem in 1692 as a town of 1700 inhabitants, in a delightful situation on Massachusetts Bay, almost encircled by sea-water, while at the west stretched away the vast forest, broken here and there by large plantations or farms which it was the policy of the Governor to grant to those who would undertake the pioneer work of cultivation. These farms, widely scattered, were known as Salem Village, and at a place a few miles from Salem, now known as Danvers Centre, there was a little group of farmhouses surrounding a church, of which the Rev. Samuel Parris was minister. In this family were two slaves, John and Tituba, whom he had brought from the West Indies, and two children, his daughter Elizabeth, nine years old, and his niece Abigail Williams, eleven years of age. In the winter of 1691-92 these children startled the neighborhood by their unaccountable performances, creeping under tables, assuming strange and painful attitudes, and uttering inarticulate cries. At times they fell into convulsions and uttered piercing shrieks. Dr. Griggs, the local physician, declared the children bewitched, and this explanation was soon after confirmed by a council of the ministers held at Mr. Parris’s house.

Absurd as such an explanation seems to us, it must be remembered that, with rare exceptions, every one at that time believed in witchcraft. It found an apparent confirmation in the text, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus xxii., 18), and the great legal authorities of England, Bacon, Blackstone, Coke, Selden, and Matthew Hale, had given decisions implying the fact of witchcraft and indicating the various degrees of guilt. It was easier to accept this explanation since executions for this crime had already taken place at Charlestown, Dorchester, Cambridge, Hartford and Springfield. Governor Winthrop, Governor Bradstreet and Governor Endicott had each sentenced a witch to death. Governor Endicott had pronounced judgment upon a person so important as Mistress Ann Hibbins, widow of a rich merchant and the sister of Governor Bellingham, familiar to us all in the pages of The Scarlet Letter. A few years before, Cotton Mather, the distinguished young divine of Boston, had published a work affirming his belief in witchcraft and detailing his study of some bewitched children in Charlestown, one of whom he had taken into his own family the better to observe.

It is not surprising, therefore, that these young girls, instead of being punished for mischievous conduct or treated for nervous derangement, were pitied as the victims of some malevolent persons and urged to name their tormentors. Encouraged by the verdict of physician and ministers, countenanced by Mr. Parris and the church-members, these “afflicted children,” as they and some other girls and women similarly affected in the village were now called, began their accusations. The first persons mentioned were Tituba, the Indian slave, Goody Osborn, a bedridden woman whose mind was affected by many troubles, physical and mental, and Sarah Good, a friendless, forlorn creature, looked upon as a vagrant.

In March, 1692, the first examinations were held in the meeting-house in Salem Village, John Hawthorne, ancestor of the novelist, and Jonathan Corwin acting as magistrates. The accused did not receive fair treatment – their guilt was assumed from the first, no counsel was allowed, the judges even bullied them to force a confession. The evidence against them, as in all the following cases, was “spectral evidence,” as it was called. It consisted of the assertions of the children that they were tortured whenever the accused looked at them, choked, pinched, beaten, or pricked with the pins which they produced from their mouths or clothing, and in one instance, at least, stabbed by a knife the broken blade of which was shown by the “afflicted child.” In one or two cases the children were convicted of deception, as in the case of the broken knife-blade. A young man present testified that he had broken the knife himself and had thrown away the useless blade in the presence of the accusing girl. But with merely a reprimand from the judge and the injunction not to tell lies, the girls were permitted to make their monstrous charges against the men and women who stood amazed, indignant, helpless, before accusations they could only deny, not refute.

In this first trial Tituba confessed that under threats from Satan, who had most often appeared to her as a man in black accompanied by a yellow bird, she had tortured the girls, and named as her accomplices the two women, Good and Osborn. After the trial, which took place a little later in Salem, Tituba was sent to the Boston jail, where she remained until the delusion was over. She was then sold to pay the expenses of her imprisonment, and is lost to history. The other women were sent to the Salem jail, which they left only for their execution the following July.

The community felt a sense of relief after the confession of Tituba and the imprisonment of the other women. It was hoped Satan’s power was checked. But on the contrary the power of the devil was to be shown in a far more impressive manner. The “afflicted children” continued to suffer and soon began to accuse men and women of unimpeachable lives. Within a few months several hundred people in Salem, Andover and Boston were arrested and thrown into the jails at Salem, Ipswich, Cambridge and Boston. As Governor Hutchinson, an historian of the time, stated, the only way to prevent an accusation was to become an accuser. The state of affairs resembled the Reign of Terror in France a century later, when men of property and position lived in fear of being regarded as “a suspect.”

For the thrilling story of these trials and their wretched victims the student should turn to Mr. Upham’s authoritative and popular volumes upon Salem Witchcraft. The reader can never forget the tragic fate of the venerable Rebecca Nurse, George Burroughs, a former clergyman of the church in Salem Village, and the other victims. Here we can review only the trial of the Corey family, a fitting climax to this scene of horror.

Two weeks after the trial of Tituba and her companions, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Martha Corey, aged sixty, the third wife of Giles Corey, a well-known citizen. She was a woman of unusual strength of character and from the first denounced the witchcraft excitement, trying to persuade her husband who believed all the monstrous stories, not to attend the hearings or in any way countenance the proceedings. Perhaps it was her well-known opinion that directed suspicion to her. At her trial the usual performance was enacted. The girls fell on the floor, uttered piercing shrieks, cried out upon their victim. “There is a man whispering in her ear!” one of them suddenly called out. “What does he say to you?” the judge demanded of Martha Corey, accepting without any demur this “spectral evidence.” “We must not believe all these distracted children say,” was her sensible answer. But good sense did not preside at the witch trials. She was convicted and not long afterward executed. Her husband’s evidence went against her and is worth noting as fairly representative of much of the testimony that convicted the nineteen victims of this delusion:

“One evening I was sitting by the fire when my wife asked me to go to bed. I told her I would go to prayer, and when I went to prayer I could not utter my desires with any sense, not open my mouth to speak. After a little space I did according to my measure attend the duty. Some time last week I fetched an ox well out of the woods about noon, and he laying down in the yard, I went to raise him to yoke him, but he could not rise, but dragged his hinder parts as if he had been hip shot, but after did rise. I had a cat some time last week strongly taken on the sudden, and did make me think she would have died presently. My wife bid me knock her in the head, but I did not and since she is well. My wife hath been wont to sit up after I went to bed, and I have perceived her to kneel down as if she were at prayer, but heard nothing.”

It is hard to believe that such statements, most probable events interpreted in the least probable manner, should have had any judicial value whatever. Yet it is precisely such a mixture of superstition and stupid speculation about unusual or even daily incidents that was regularly brought forward and made to tell against the accused.

Soon after his wife’s arrest Giles Corey himself was arrested, taken from his mill and brought before the judges of the special court, appointed by Governor Phipps but held in Salem, to hear the witch trials. Again the accusing girls went through their performance, again the judges assumed the guilt of the accused, and tried to browbeat a confession from him. But in the interval between his arrest and trial this old man of eighty had had abundant leisure for reflection. He was sure not only of his own innocence but of his wife’s as well, and it must have been a bitter thought that his own testimony had helped convict her. Partly as an atonement for this offense and partly to save his property for his children, which he could not have done if he had been convicted of witchcraft, after pleading “not guilty” he remained mute, refusing to add the necessary technical words that he would be tried “by God and his country.” Deaf alike to the entreaties of his friends and the threats of the Court, he was condemned to the torture of peine forte et dure, the one instance when this old English penalty for contumacy was enforced in New England. According to the law the aged man was laid on his back, a board was placed on his body with as great a weight upon it as he could endure, while his sole diet consisted of a few morsels of bread one day and a draught of water the alternate day, until death put an end to his sufferings.

The execution of eight persons on Gallows Hill three days later, September 22, were the last to occur in the Colony. Accusations were still made, trials were held, more people were thrown into jail. But there were no more executions, and the next spring there was, according to Hutchinson, such a jail delivery as was never seen before.

“The smith filed off the chains he forged,
The jail bolts backward fell;
And youth and hoary age came forth
Like souls escaped from hell.”

The tragedy was at an end. It lasted about six months, from the first accusations in March until the last executions in September. Nineteen persons had been hanged, and one man pressed to death. There is no foundation for the statement that witches were burned. No one was ever burned in New England for witchcraft or any other crime. But hundreds of innocent men and women were thrown into jail or obliged to flee to some place of concealment, their homes were broken up, their property injured, while they suffered great anxiety for themselves and friends.

It was an epidemic of mad, superstitious fear, bitterly to be regretted, and a stain upon the high civilization of the Bay Colony. It is associated with Salem, but several circumstances are to be taken into consideration. First of all, note the fact that while the victims were residents of Essex County, of Salem and vicinity, and the trials were held in Salem, yet the special court that tried them was appointed by the Governor; the Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony, Stoughton, presided; and Boston ministers, notably Cotton Mather, the influential minister of the North Church, were interested observers. Boston as well as Salem is responsible for the tragedy. In the second place, remember that this dramatic event with all its frightful consequences led to a more rational understanding of the phenomena of witchcraft. By a natural revulsion of feeling future charges of witchcraft were regarded with suspicion, “spectral evidence” was disallowed, and there were no more executions for this crime in New England.

Various explanations of the conduct of the “afflicted children” have been offered. One writer has suggested that they began their proceedings in jest but, partly from fear of punishment if they confessed, partly from an exaggerated sense of their own importance, they continued to make charges against men and women whom they heard their elders mention as probable witches. In that little settlement there were property disputes, a church quarrel, jealousies, rivalries, and much misunderstanding, which had their influence. Another writer lays stress upon “hypnotic influence” and believes these young girls and nervous women were improperly influenced by malevolent persons, probably John and Tituba the Indian slaves. But a more natural explanation is that they were the victims of hystero-epilepsy, a nervous disease not so well understood in the past as to-day, which has at times convulsed the orderly life of a school or convent, and even a whole community. Then, too, the belief in witchcraft was general. Striking coincidences, personal eccentricities, unusual events and mysterious diseases seemed to find an easy explanation in an unholy compact with the devil. A witticism attributed to Judge Sewall, one of the judges in these trials, may help us to understand the common panic: “We know who’s who but not which is witch.” That was the difficulty. At a time when every one believed in witchcraft it was easy to suspect one’s neighbor. It was a characteristic superstition of the century and should be classed with the barbarous punishments and religious intolerance of the age.

Eventually, justice, so far as possible, was done to the survivors. The Legislature voted pecuniary compensations and the church excommunications were rescinded. Ann Putnam, one of the more prominent of the “afflicted children,” confessed her error and prayed for divine forgiveness. Rev. Samuel Parris offered an explanation that might be considered an apology. Judge Sewall, noblest of all the civil and ecclesiastical authorities implicated in this tragedy, stood up in the great congregation, Fast Day, in the South Church, Boston, and acknowledged his error in accepting “spectral evidence.”

“Spell and charm had power no more,
The spectres ceased to roam,
And scattered households knelt again
Around the hearths of home.”

Salem grew in wealth and population slowly but substantially. In 1765 there were only 4469 inhabitants. With the rest of the Colony she was putting forth her strength in the French-Indian wars and also resisting what she termed the usurpations of the Royalist governors or English Parliament. It was a public-spirited as well as high-spirited life. Soldiers and bounties and supplies were generously furnished for the wars. Pirates were captured or driven from the coast. A valuable commerce was developed, churches were built and schools increased. In 1768 the Essex Gazette was founded, with the motto, “Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci,” – a motto that measures the social changes from the time of Endicott and Williams.

The citizens of Salem were not wanting in patriotism or courage in the years immediately preceding the Revolution. They met in the old town-house to protest against the Stamp Act, to denounce the tax on tea and the closing of Boston port, and in 1774, in defiance of General Gage, to elect delegates to the First Continental Congress about to meet in Concord. As early as 1767 a committee had been appointed “to draft a subscription paper for promoting industry, economy and manufactures in Salem, and thereby prevent the unnecessary importation of European commodities which threaten the country with poverty and ruin.” The report of the committee was not accepted but the movement was characteristic of the attitude of Salem.

A just claim is made that the first armed resistance to the British government was made in Salem at the North Bridge, Sunday, February 26, 1775, when the citizens assembled and took their stand on the north bank of the river to prevent Colonel Leslie and his three hundred soldiers from marching into North Fields in search of cannon supposed to be concealed there. The British officer thought of firing upon the citizens who, after crossing the bridge, had raised the draw and now stood massed on the opposite bank. But a townsman, Captain John Felt, said to the irate officer who had looked for an unimpeded march, “If you do fire you will all be dead men.” His prompt utterance appears to have restrained the firing. Tradition says that there was a struggle to capture some boats, one of which at least was scuttled. After an hour and a half of delay, in which time Rev. Mr. Barnard of the North Church was conspicuous for his moderate counsels, the vexed and defeated Colonel Leslie promised that if the draw were lowered and he were permitted to march his men over it a distance of thirty rods, he would then wheel about and leave the town, an agreement fairly carried out. A commemorative stone marks this place and significant event at the beginning of the Revolution.

The years from 1760 to the War of 1812 were the period of commercial prestige. At the beginning of the Revolution Washington turned to the coast towns for a navy, and Salem answered by furnishing at least 158 privateers. Many were the prizes brought into the harbor as the war continued, and, as a result of this seamanship, an immense impetus was given to ship-building and the development of foreign commerce. This may be called the romantic era in the life of the venerable town. At the close of the war the town could boast of its great merchants and adventurous captains whose vessels were found in every port. Where did they not go, these vessels owned by Derby, Gray, Forrester, Crowninshield, and many another well-known merchant!

Under the stern rule of Endicott the old Puritan town had banished Quakers and Baptists and Episcopalians, but in the early years of this century her sons were intimate with Buddhist and Mohammedan and Parsee merchants. In 1785 “Lord” Derby, as Hawthorne called him, sent out the Grand Turk which, nearly two years later, brought back the first cargo direct from Canton to New England. At this time it is with peculiar interest we read that in 1796 this same “Lord” Derby sent the Astrea to Manila, which returned the following year with a cargo of sugar, pepper and indigo upon which duties of over $24,000 were paid. That was the time when a sailing-vessel after a long voyage might enter the harbor any day, and therefore the boys of the town lay on the rocks at the Neck, eager to sight the incoming ship, and earn some pocket-money for their welcome news. Significant is the motto on the present city seal: Divitis Indiæ usque ad ultimum sinum. They were a hardy race – these Vikings of New England – bold, self-reliant, shrewd, prosperous, equally ready to fight or trade, as occasion might demand. The sailors of that day were the native sons of Salem, sturdy citizens, often well-to-do, who might have an “adventure” of several hundred dollars aboard to invest in tea or sugar or indigo. At fourteen or fifteen the Salem boy went out in the cabin of his father’s vessel, at twenty he was captain, at forty he had retired and in his stately mansion enjoyed the wealth and leisure he had bravely and quickly earned. In 1816 Cleopatra’s Barge, a vessel of 190 tons burden, was launched in the harbor, and George Crowninshield went yachting in the Mediterranean in this luxurious vessel, – perhaps the first American pleasure yacht, as much admired in Europe as in New England. Many are the traditions of this romantic and prosperous era. Many are the famous names of merchants and sailors – men of great wealth and public spirit, mighty in time of war and influential in affairs of state, as Colonel Timothy Pickering, and Benjamin W. Crowninshield, esteemed at home and abroad for their enlightened, progressive, humane, public-spirited services to town and State.

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

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

But of all the distinguished sons of Salem no one makes so eloquent an appeal to the popular heart as Nathaniel Hawthorne. Visitors are particularly interested in the places associated with his life and romances. Of these there are many, for the novelist lived at one time or another in half a dozen Salem houses, while several are identified with his stories. To appreciate Hawthorne one should read him here, in the old Puritan town with its ancient houses, several of which date from the seventeenth century, its commemorative tablets, ancient tombstones, family names, and the collections of the Essex Institute. With magic pen he traced the greatness and the littleness of the Puritan age, its austere piety, its intolerance, its stern repression of the lighter side of human nature, its moral grandeur and its gloomy splendor. He did for our past what Walter Scott did for the past of the mother-country. Another “Wizard of the North,” he breathed the breath of life into the dry and dusty materials of history; he summoned the great dead again to live and move among us.

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

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

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

BOSTON

THE TRIMOUNTAIN CITY

By THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

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

The original Boston, as founded by Governor John Winthrop in 1639, was established on a rocky, three-hilled peninsula, in whose thickets wolves and bears were yet harbored, and which was known variously as Shawmut and Trimountain. The settlement itself was a sort of afterthought, being taken as a substitute for Charlestown, where a temporary abode had been founded by Winthrop’s party. There had been much illness there, and so Mr. Blackstone, or Blaxtone, who had for seven years been settled on the peninsula, urged the transfer of the little colony. The whole tongue of land then comprised but 783 acres – an area a little less than that originally allotted to Central Park in New York. Boston now includes 23,661 acres – about thirty times the original extent of the peninsula. It has a population of about 500,000 – the State Census of 1895 showing 496,920 inhabitants. By the United States Census of 1890 it had 448,477, and was then the sixth in population among American cities, being surpassed by New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and St. Louis; and the union of New York and Brooklyn probably making it now the fifth. In 1880 it ranked fifth, St. Louis having since outstripped it. In 1870 it was only seventh, both St. Louis and Baltimore then preceding it. As with most American cities, this growth has been partly due to the annexing of suburbs; but during the last fifteen years there has been no such annexation, showing the increase to be genuine and intrinsic. The transformation in other ways has, however, been more astonishing than the growth. Of the original three hills, one only is now noticeable by the stranger. I myself can remember Boston, in my college days, as a pear-shaped peninsula, two miles by one, attached to the mainland by a neck a mile long and only a few yards wide, sometimes actually covered by the meeting of the tide-waters from both sides. The water also almost touched Charles Street, where the Public Garden now is, and it rolled over the flats and inlets called the Back Bay, where the costliest houses of the city now stand.

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

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

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

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