Historic Towns of New England

Accordingly, on the 28th day of October, 1636, Sir Harry Vane – Milton’s “Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old” – being the Governor, the General Court of the colony passed the following memorable vote: “The Court agrees to give £400 towards a school or college – whereof £200 shall be paid the next year and £200 when the work is finished.” In the following year this vote was supplemented by a further order that the college “is ordered to be at Newtowne, and that Newtowne shall henceforth be called Cambridge.” This is the significant act that marks the distinction between the Puritan colony and all pioneer settlements based on material foundations. For a like spirit under like circumstances history will be searched in vain. Never were the bases of such a structure laid by a community of men so poor, and under such sullen and averted stars. The colony was nothing but a handful of settlers barely clinging to the wind-swept coast; it was feeble and insignificant, in danger from Indians on the one hand and foreign foes on the other; it was in throes of dissension on the matter of heresy which threatened to divide it permanently, yet so resolved were the people that “the Commonwealth be furnished with knowing and understanding men and the churches with an able ministry,” that they voted the entire annual income of the colony to establish a place of learning. Said Lowell:

“This act is second in real import to none that has happened in the Western hemisphere. The material growth of the colonies would have brought about their political separation from the mother country in the fulness of time, but the founding of the first college here saved New England from becoming a mere geographical expression. It did more, it insured our intellectual independence of the old world. That independence has been long in coming, but the chief names of those who have hastened its coming are written on the roll of Harvard College.”

But even the self-sacrificing zeal of the colonists would have been almost unavailing had it not been for the coming to Massachusetts at this time of a young Puritan minister, another graduate of Emanuel, upon whom death had already set his seal. Says the chronicler:

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

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

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

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

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

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

But if these ancient records seem uninviting, let the visitor turn to the annals of the stirring time of the Revolution. General Gage called Harvard College “that nest of sedition.” In that nest were hatched John Hancock, James Otis, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Joseph Warren and many another of the patriot leaders. The town was the abode of many of the leading Tory families, but as early as 1765 the town-meeting voted “that (with all humility) it is the opinion of the town that the inhabitants of this Province have a legal claim to all the natural, inherent, constitutional rights of Englishmen and – that the Stamp Act is an infraction upon these rights.” And after an argument on the merits of the question it was further ordered “that this vote be recorded in the Town Book, that the children yet unborn may see the desire their ancestors had for their freedom and happiness.” For the next ten years there is scarcely a proceeding in the preliminary debates and contests that led up to open revolution that is not illustrated in the resolutions recorded by the Cambridge town clerk. Vote followed vote, as the restrictive measures of Parliament irritated the townsmen, till at the town-meeting of 1773 it was resolved “that this town – is ready on the shortest notice, to join with the town of Boston and other towns, in any measures that may be thought proper, to deliver ourselves and posterity from slavery.” The 2d of September, 1774, just escaped the historic importance of April 19th in the next year. On that day several thousand men gathered on Cambridge Common and proceeded in orderly fashion to force the resignation of two of His Majesty’s privy councillors, and then, marching up Brattle Street to the house of the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province, Thomas Oliver – the house that was afterwards the home in succession of Elbridge Gerry, Rev. Charles Lowell and his son James Russell Lowell – they extorted from him, too, a pledge to resign. “My house in Cambridge,” he wrote, “being surrounded by about four thousand men, I sign my name – Thomas Oliver.” Both the first and second of the Provincial Congresses met in Cambridge, and at last the running battle of April 19, 1775, swept through the borders of the town. Twenty-six Americans were killed within the boundaries of Cambridge, six of them citizens of the place, and the American militia who followed the British retreat from Concord on that momentous evening lay on their arms at last on Cambridge Common.

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

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

For fifty years after the Revolutionary epoch, Cambridge was a country town of quiet habits, its only distinguishing characteristic being the scholastic and literary atmosphere that hung about the college. It was a good place to be born in, and it was surely good to live in the place where Everett and Quincy ruled the academic world; where Longfellow wrote his poetry, and Palfrey his history, and Sparks his biographies; where Washington Allston painted and Margaret Fuller dreamed; where William Story and Richard Dana and Lowell and Holmes and the rest walked to church and stopped to gossip with the neighbors at the post-office.

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

To these happy descriptions we may now add the accounts of Colonel Higginson’s boyhood in his Cheerful Yesterdays, and Dr. Holmes’s loving story of his birthplace in the Poet at the Breakfast Table.

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

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

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

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

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

CONCORD

FIRST IN MANY FIELDS

By FRANK B. SANBORN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The second historic lesson of Concord is like unto the first, – but more startling and brilliant. It was the lesson of Revolution, which has been thoroughly learned since 1775. The embattled farmers who, at yonder bridge, were conservative revolutionists, and as far from anarchy as from atheism. In the instructions given by this town to its representative in 1774, – or rather, in a report made in town-meeting, January 20th of that year, in view of

“Fired the shot heard round the world,”

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