Three Episodes of Massachusetts History. The settlement of Boston Bay. The Antinomian controversy. A study of Church and Town Government

Front matter

THREE EPISODES OF MASSACHUSETTS HISTORY THE SETTLEMENT OF BOSTON BAY THE ANTINOMIAN CONTROVERSY A STUDY OF CHURCH AND TOWN GOVERNMENT BY CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS VOLUME II BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY (STbc ftfoersibe press, Cambnboe Copyright, 1892, By CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. All rights reserved. SECOND EDITION. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., XT. S. A. Eloctrotyped and triuted by H. 0. Uoughtou & Co. CONTENTS OF VOL. II. THE ANTINOMIAN CONTROVERSY. Continued. CHAPTER PAGE X. The Fate of the Outcasts 533 XI. "And Shem and Japheth took a Garment and COVERED THE NAKEDNESS OF THEIR FATHER " . 559 A STUDY OF CHURCH AND TOWN GOVERNMENT. I. Old Braintree 581 II. The Braintree North Precinct Chcrch . . 590 III. Land Titles and the Town Commons . . 646 IV. The Highways 666 V. Dwellings and Modes of Life .... 680 VI.

Population and Wealth 689 VII. Social Life 699 VHI. The Vicious, the Poor and the Insane . . 722 IX. The Meeting-house 732 X. The Church, and Church Discipline . . . 747 XI. The Training-field and the School-house . 764 XII. Intemperance and Immorality .... 783 XIII. Health, Reading, Diversions .... 800 XIV. Town-meetings 810 XV. Colonial Wars and Town Contentions . . 827 XVI. The Revolutionary Epoch 838 XVII. Exhaustion 889 XVIII. Recuperation 899 XIX. The Era of Change 922 XX. The Quincy School System CONTENTS OF VOL. II. XXI. The Alien Infusion 944 XXH. The Rebellion . 961 XXIII. Town-meetings again 965 XXIV. A Long Battle won 975 XXV. "The King is dead! Long live the King! " . 980 INDEX . .

CHAPTER X. THE FATE OF THE OUTCASTS.

Chapter I. Old Braintree

On the 18th of November, 1637, according to the calendar now in use, sentence of banishment was passed on John Wheelwright; and, before the 1st of Decem ber, the preacher at " the Mount " had forever left his people there, and was on his way to New Hampshire. The character and extent of the settlements on the shores of Boston Bay south of the Neponset, at that time, have already been referred to. Practically, the region was still a forest wilderness of swamp, salt marsh and upland. There was as yet no road from Boston to Plymouth, for the path to the latter place — in trying to follow which Phinehas Pratt had lost his way thirteen years before ' — began at Wessagus set, and such little intercourse as there was between those dwelling at Wessagusset and at Boston was by boat across the bay. The Indiau trail did not follow the shore, nor could it be called a path, for the eye of the trained woodsman was needed to detect its devious way as it wound about the head-waters of tidal inlets and circled the uplands in search of fords, or 1 Supra, 86-8.

OLD BRAINTREE. 1623-34. those points where alone it was possible to cross the swamps. While a forlorn remnant of the Massachu setts, the stricken survivors of plague and small-pox, haunted the forest, between the Neponset and the Mon atoquit there were absolutely no white inhabitants. First Morton and the Merry-Mount company had been rooted out by the magistrates, who afterwards hunted Gardiner into the wilderness ; and, so far as those two earliest attempts at settlement were con cerned, axe and fire had done the work of obliteration with all possible thoroughness, as Alderman, the pio neer settler at Hingham, found when, in 1634, having had occasion to be in Boston, he undertook to return home by trail instead of by boat. His experience has already been referred to,1 and it was even more severe than that of Phinehas Pratt eleven years earlier ; for, losing his way, Alderman, during three days and nights, wandered through woods and swamps without falling in with a habitation, either house or wigwam, or a human being, white or red.

Then, at last, exhausted and starved, with torn clothing and bruised body, he struggled out of the wilderness to find himself in Seituate. The Neponset was the southern limit of the Massachusetts settlement, and the region beyond it remained a wilderness, through which, and beneath the dense tangle of the primeval forest, the sluggish streams that had their sources among the Blue Hills worked their slow way by clogged and crooked channels into the coast-indentin« tidal creeks, whose wide margins of spongy salt-marsh were submerged at times of flood. Of the original settlers thereabouts, — the " old planters," as they were called, — the widow of David 1 Supra, 337, 364. 1634. "THE MOUNT." Thomson only had been left, dwelling with her in fant son and a few servants on the farm cleared and cultivated by her husband at the very point where Miles Standish and his party landed, when, thirteen years before, they first visited Boston Bay.

Refer ence has also been made to the order of the General Court of May, 1634, that Boston, being " too small to contain many," should have a convenient enlarge ment at Mount Wollaston.1 In the following Septem ber the " enlargement " was formally approved, and on the 8th of December a grant of land was made to " Mr. Willson the Pastor." The Rev. John Wilson of the first church of Boston was therefore the earliest landowner under the Massachusetts charter in what subsequently became, and for a century and a half remained, the township of Braintree. Two years later still further large assignments were made, and the en tire bay-front from the Squantum headland to the mouth of the Monatoquit opposite Wessagusset passed into the hands of three men, Atherton Hough, Wil liam Coddington and Edmund Quincy.

Thus the region immediately south of the Neponset constituted an exception to the well-defined general policy under which the earlier land allotments were made in Massachusetts. That policy, — a distinct negation of the feudalism which Gorges had sought to transplant,2 — unquestionably looked as a whole to a careful husbanding of resources in the interest of all ; to a methodical occupation of territory ; to an avoid ance of even the beginnings of great accumulations of landed property : so that, during the twenty-five years 1 Supra, 365. 2 Egleston, The Land System of the New England Colonies, 26-7 Johns Hopkins University Studies, OLD BRAINTREE. 1636-7. which immediately followed the settlement, but little more than a hundred special grants were made, the largest of which was 3,200 acres, while most of them did not exceed 250 acres.

Yet while this wise and far-sighted policy was fol lowed in the colony as a whole, in the case of " the Mount," nearly the whole of the bay-front, as has been seen, was allotted to three men, while three others secured a large portion of the adjacent upland ; and great tracts, one of them of 3,000 acres and another of 2,000, were set aside and devoted to special purposes : and this deviation from the general scheme became, as will presently be seen, the cause of subse quent grave complications. Although in December, 1636, a committee, at the head of which was Winthrop, was appointed " to Consider of the Mount Woolistone businesse, and for the ripening thereof how there may be a Town there " with the consent of Boston, " the Mount " still seems at that time to have been looked upon as a remote, out lying dependency, to be reached conveniently enough by boat in summer, but in winter practically inacces sible.

A little over one month before the Winthrop committee was appointed, on the of £°'T°b„"er, it will be remembered John Wheelwright had been " granted unto for the preparing for a church gathering " there. It was evidently intended to incorporate a town at once ; and little doubt exists that the body of immigrants who during the summer of 1637 came, as Win throp says, " out of England from Mr. Brierly his church," would have joined the flock to which Wheel wright ministered, and consequently become freehold ers of the proposed new town, had they not been con fronted at landing with that alien law, the purpose 1637-40. ALLOTMENTS. 585 and operation of which has already been described.1 They were consequently obliged to find a place for settlement elsewhere, and outside the Massachusetts jurisdiction.

Naturally, amid the complications and fierce quar rels of 1637, nothing was done by the committee of December 10th in the " ripening " way ; nor, for the next three years, was anything more heard of the pro ject of a new church and another town south of the Neponset. It lay in abeyance, awaiting the advent of quieter times. During the interval the dwellers at and about Mount Wollaston would seem to have been poor people, the " servants" as they were described of the large landholders ; for there is no reason to suppose that any person of note or substance had yet actually made his home there, though several such unquestion ably cultivated farms upon which they erected dwel lings for their servants, and barns and outbuildings to shelter their stock. During the subsequent years to 1640 other large allotments, of from 100 to 400 acres, were made to non-residents, exceptional grants well calculated to foster a race of landed gentry, but adding little either to the population or the prosperity of the region.

But large grants were no longer the rule. Another system was all this time being pursued to wards " the common people," as they were called, who were coming over to New England in crowds. The custom was to allot such, irrespective of sex or age, but grouping them in families, four acres a head ; and in the case of Boston the smaller allotments were made largely at the Mount, twenty-six such being recorded in 1638, and fifteen more in 1639. Prior to the incorporation of Braintree in 1 Supra, 458-60. 1639. OLD BRAINTREE. May, 1640, one hundred and five such allotments in all had been parcelled out to families, numbering 565 persons, showing that the average family, including probably servants as well as children, was be tween five and six persons. But though these allotments are recorded, it cannot be inferred that all those to whom they were made actually settled at the Mount.

On the contrary, the names of only a small portion of them are at a somewhat later period to be found in the town and parish records, and the natural inference is that many received their allot ments in one place, and, in those days of abundant land, preferred to settle elsewhere. Nevertheless, a certain portion of these poorer people did go out and build dwellings south of the Neponset ; and at last a decisive movement was made towards the establishment of an independent church there. The " Chapel of Ease " arrangement, as it of necessity involved dependence on a mother church, no longer sufficed for the spiritual needs of a growing population. The region had also stood an unoccupied gap of heathendom long enough ; for the Dorchester church, on the north, went back to June, 1630, while the societies of Weymouth and Hingham, on the south, dated respectively from July and Septem ber, 1635.

Without, therefore, waiting for a formal adjustment of all questions with Boston, on the 16th of September, 1639, those dwelling at the Mount, in the words of Governor Winthrop, " gathered a church after the usual manner, and chose one Mr. Tomson, a very gracious, sincere man, and Mr. Flynt, a godly man also, their ministers." In the case of the church at Braintree, the signatures of six persons, besides those of the pastor and teacher, were affixed to the 1640. IN CORPORA TION. 587 covenant. Drawn up in the simple but not unim pressive form then in common use, by virtue of it those entering into the compact — " poor unworthy creatures, who have sometime lived without Christ and without God in the world " — promised there after " to worship the Lord in spirit and truth, and to walk in brotherly love and the duties thereof according to the will of the gospel."

In witness of which, they made public profession of faith in pres ence of those assembled, and gave to one another the right hand of fellowship. The church at Braintree was the fifteenth which had been gathered in the province of Massachusetts Bay during the ten years of its settlement. The incorporation of the town followed hard upon the gathering of the church, for, at the following session of the General Court, that of May, 1640, the " petition of the inhabitants of Mount Wollaston was acceded to, and it was granted them to be a town, to be called Braintree ; " though no well-authen ticated or wholly satisfactory reason for the choice of this name has ever been given, nor is there any bond of connection apparent between the Suffolk Braintree, of New England, and the Essex Brain tree, of Old England.

The vote incorporating Brain tree contained detailed reference to an agreement which had been effected between certain represen tatives of those dwelling at the Mount and the au thorities of Boston. The vested interests of the lat ter place in the former had again been asserted, and the question thus raised proved one not easy to settle. There had evidently been much bickering. Appeal ing to the " enlargement " vote of 1634, it was con tended on the one side that Boston and the Boston 1640. OLD BRAINTREE. church would, through the incorporation of the new town, be shorn of their proportions ; while on the other side a growing population asserted their natural rights. The result was a compromise, the terms of which are by no means free from ambiguity. Under it all the lands in the new township seem to have been released from a liability to taxation as a part of Boston, and also from future county taxes, upon the payment to Boston of a trifle over a shilling an acre on the land " formerly granted to divers men of Boston upon expectation they should have con tinued still with us," and three shillings an acre for every acre that had been, or thereafter should be, granted to any others not inhabitants of Boston.

In other words, the actual settlers in Braintree were to pay into the Boston treasury a sum of money on their holdings in commutation. At the same time further large allotments at the Mount were made, including five hundred acres "for the use of the Canoneere of Boston Wheresoever he is, or shall be, in the service thereof, from time to time," and " two thousand acres to be sett apart for the use of (Boston) in the most Convenient place unallotted." This agreement was made on the 11th of January, 1639, some five months before the General Court acted on the petition to incorporate; and when the court did act, it made a further proviso that, if the in habitants of the newly-created town failed to fulfil the covenant they had entered into, it should be in the power of Boston to recover its dues by action against the Braintree people, collectively or individually.

That the burden thus imposed on Braintree was an unusual and most oppressive one does not need to be said. It was the case of a poor, struggling community being 1640. THE EARLIEST TAX-LEVY. compelled to buy out alien vested interests in the soil, which ought never to have existed. Accordingly, at a later time it proved a fruitful source of heart-burn ings and litigation. Nevertheless the arrangement, favorable or otherwise, seems to have been the best it was possible to effect at the time, and under it Brain tree came into existence as an independent political community on what is now the 23d of May, 1640. Those dwelling in the new town were also made to realize at once that political privileges carried with them corresponding obligations, for by the same court they were assessed twenty-five pounds in a total levy of twelve hundred pounds.

In payment of this levy old silver plate was to be received at five shillings the ounce, " good old Indian corn, being clean and mer chantable," at five shillings the bushel, summer wheat at seven shillings, and rye at six shillings. In which of these several staples the whole or any portion of this earliest tax levy was paid, nowhere appears ; but that it was paid admits of no doubt, and at the next session of the General Court, held in Boston on the 7th day of the following October, William Cheese borough and Stephen Kinsley appeared, and took their seats as the first representatives of Braintree.

Chapter II. The Braintree North Precinct Church

The original Braintree settlement was along the shore of the bay, and on the upland and in the valleys adjacent thereto. Only by slow degrees did population work its way back among the hills and interior valleys. In 1708 the church of Braintree was divided, and the original settlement became the North Precinct. In 1792 this North Precinct was set off from the rest of the town, and became Quincy. Until 1708, therefore, the original Braintree church was the one church of the town ; from 1708 to 1792 it was the North Precinct church ; from 1792 to 1820 it was the Quincy church. The revised constitution of Massachusetts went into effect in 1820, and under its provisions a complete separation of church from state took place : but the habits of the people were fixed, and several years elapsed before this change in the or ganic law began to produce its full results ; x for people went on attending divine worship in the meeting-house of their fathers, and in Quincy it was ten years yet before another meeting-house was built.

Accordingly, 1 So fixed was the belief that obligatory support of a church was essential to its continued existence that the late Judge Story voiced a very common sentiment when, at the time the amended constitution took effect, he expressed the opinion that in twenty-five years there would not be a church open in Massachusetts in which the old religious services would be held. 1639-1828. THE COLONIAL PERIOD. 591 the sole church of the Braintree of 1639 was still, until 1830, the sole church of Quincy. The society had then worshipped in four successive buildings, the last of which was in 1830 almost new, having been finished only two years before. • Built of stone, it was called a " temple," and it replaced an old New England meeting-house which for ninety-six years had stood on the training-field in the centre of the town.

Thus, when this meeting-house of 1732 was re moved in 1828, the visible emblem which connected the modern with the colonial town may be said to have disappeared. The connecting link between two chains was broken. The period, therefore, of one hundred and eighty-nine years which elapsed after the gathering of the First Church of Braintree, and before the pulling down and moving away of the third meeting-house in Quincy, must historically be considered by itself. It was not the less one and the same period because during it the colonies were severed from Great Britain, and Quincy was severed from Braintree. These were both mere political changes, scarcely affecting to a degree outwardly perceptible the occupations of the people who lived at what in 1635 was known as the Mount, or their modes of life and thought, or their social and material condition.

The real elements of change in all these respects were not political; nor had they begun to make their presence felt when the eighteenth century came to its close. Thirty years later it was no longer so. The original Granite railway was built in Quincy in 1826 ; the first Massachusetts railroad company was incorporated in 1830. These events marked epochs. They from top to bottom altered in America, as in Europe, — and at " the Mount " as in Massachusetts, 1640-1830. — that which French and Indian wars, and wars of independence, and church and municipal divisions, had affected scarcely at all. The long period from 1640 to 1830 was therefore with the Massachusetts towns the primitive period, — that of formation. Though it led directly to the pres ent, it had little in common with the present.

Never theless, during that period five generations lived on the soil, and were buried in it ; and concerning these there was, as a rule, little more to record. A simple, laborious, unaggressive race, they were born and died, — each following generation much the same as the generation which preceded it. Wealth and population increased slowly. With vessels of the same build, they fished familiar seas ; with similar utensils, they culti vated the same fields. Dwelling in houses built on an identical plan, they preserved the old domestic and social customs. The outer world made itself little felt in the remote village community ; and the village com munity in noway influenced the outer world. Few ele ments of change existed, and accordingly little change took place. The Quincy of 1830 was only the Brain tree of 1640, a little more thickly peopled and a little more prosperous.

The social and material conditions of the town dur ing this period of one hundred and ninety years will be treated in another chapter. Meanwhile the year 1830 brought the early theological period to a close. Up to that time the life of the church and the life of the town were interwoven, and until 1824 parish and town were legally one ; so the history of the church, as being the more ancient of the two, precedes that of the town. In September, 1739, the Rev. John Hancock, father 1637. THE FIRST MEETING-HOUSE. of the patriot and then the North Precinct minister, preached two centennial sermons in the new meeting house removed in 1828, but which then was new. In one of these sermons he said, — " This is the third house, in which we are now worshipping, that we and our fathers have built for the public worship of God."

There is reason to suppose that the second of these three houses was built in the year 1666, as the quaint old weather-vane which surmounted it, still in existence, bears that date. Of the first Braintree meeting-house, there remains no detailed account or de scription. Completed, and in use, before the mouth of May, 1641, a familiar, recognized landmark, standing near the end of a short bridge even then referred to as " old," this house " for the public worship of God" was probably built during the summer of the year 1637 for the use and under the supervision of John Wheelwright. Possibly it may have been even older, and already serving as the " Chapel of Ease " at Mount Wollaston on that day of fast at the end of May, 1637, when Vane and Coddington, to empha size their dissent from the methods of their opponents, ignored the Boston assembly, and went " to keep the day at the Mount with Mr. Wheelwright."

It may well, therefore, have been that the Fast-day services of 1637, on what now is reckoned as the 3d of June, were the first ever solemnized within those newly erected walls, standing that day fresh from the hands of the builders ; while Vane was there to lend dignity aud interest to the event, as well as give public evi dence of his sympathy with the preacher. If such perchance was the case, a new interest attaches to those walls, and to the church which within them, a little later on, began its organized life. John Wheelwright, 1639. the schoolmate and friend of Cromwell, the proscribed in two continents, there preached that day in presence of young Harry Vane, moving steadily and fatefully forward from the chair of state in Boston to the block on Tower-hill. Whether this was so or not, that first church edi fice stood in 1640 on rising ground just south of the place where the principal travelled way of the little settlement — the way which a few years later became a part of the colonial coast-road connecting Boston and Plymouth — crossed a brook, then and subsequently known as the Town River.

At the time the first meeting-house was built, the road could have been hardly more than a well-beaten trail, for it was not formally laid out until at least seven years later, in 1648. The brook, which for some distance higher up had forced its way through a well-nigh impenetrable tangle from which the larger forest animals had hardly vanished and which yet swarmed with reptile life, here flowed over a hard gravel bottom between two converging bits of upland. It was a fording place, — a natural point of crossing. For that reason the meeting-house was put there. It was a point con venient for those living on both sides of the water course. The meeting-house stood in the open, and when the " country highway " from Weymouth to Dorches ter was formally laid out, in 1648, it here diverged, passing the building at both its ends, for it faced east and west.

The divergiug ways then shortly turned and joined again. At no great distance from the front of the meeting-house, looking westward, lay the tangled bottom through which the Town River slug gishly crept. Beyond this, and half a mile or so 1642. REV. WILLIAM TOMPSON. out reason the support of two ministers. In any event the society seemed not unwilling to allow Mr. Tomp son to seek other fields of usefulness, and in 1642 his brother ministers selected him with two others to go forth on a strange sort of missionary service among the Church of England heathen of Virginia ; for a cry had come up from "many well-disposed people, . . . to the elders here, bewailing their sad condition for want of the means of salvation, and earnestly en treating a supply of faithful ministers, whom, upon experience of their gifts and godliness, they might call to office."

So far from turning a deaf ear to this call, the Massachusetts elders "accounted it no small honor that God had put upon his poor churches here, that other parts of the world should seek to us for help in this kind ; " and so, the letters from Vir ginia having been " openly read in Boston upon a lecture-day, the elders met, and set a day apart to seek God in it." This done, they made choice for the work in hand of three of their number " who might most likely be spared ; " and among the three was Mr. Tompson, his church having two ministers. Accordingly, on the of October, 1642, Mr. Tomp son set out for Taunton, the first stage on the way to Virginia, in company with the Rev. John Knowles of Watertown, " a godly man and a prime scholar," who only, besides himself, accepted the call. Their journey was over what now is a familiar route, for they were " to meet the bark at Narragan sett ; " in other words, they were to go to Norfolk, in Vh-ginia, by way of Newport and New York, or Aquidneck and New Amsterdam, as those places were then called.

The " bark " res erred to was probably one of the sloops or ketches of those days, — little one 1642-3. 596 THE BRAINTREE CHURCH. and two masted crafts used in the coasting trade, — and George Fox has described how, thirty years later, he made the same voyage from Newport to New York, coming to anchor one night before Fisher's Island, where " there fell abundance of rain, and our sloop being open, we were exceeding wet." It was nearly three months before the missionaries reached their destination ; for at first they were wind-bound in Nar ragansett Bay, and then, in passing through Hell- Gate, their boat was swept upon the rocks and so damaged that they barely succeeded in reaching the shore. Cotton Mather says of Tompson in this emergency, — " Upon a ledge of craggy rocks near stav'd, His Bible in his bosom thrusting, sav'd ; The Bible, the best of cordial of his heart, 'Come floods, come flames,' cry'd he, 'we'll never part.' The shipwrecked missionaries received " slender en tertainment " at the hands of Governor William Kieft, the Dutch commandant at New Amsterdam, who had no fondness for New Englanders ; but Isaac Allerton, formerly of Plymouth though then of New Haven, chanced to be there, and exerted himself greatly on behalf of his countrymen.

Through his assistance an other pinnace was procured, and in the dead of win ter the three ministers set sail for Virginia. They encountered much foul weather, and the difficulty and danger through which they reached their destination caused them to entertain grave " question whether their call were of God or not." Once in Virginia, they were " bestowed in several places " where they " found loving and liberal entertainment ; " and the change to another and less rigorous climate seems to have proved most beneficial to Mr. Tompson, who 1643. DANIEL GOOKINS. 597 wrote back to his friends that he was better in health and spirits than at any time since he came over from England. But Virginia has never proved a fruitful field for New England workers, whether religious or political, and the civil authorities there now looked askance at this earnest attempt at propagandism.

Accordingly they soon put a stop to the public preaching of the newcomers, on the ground that they did not conform to the orders of the Church of England. Yet, if we can believe the report made on their return by the missionaries, the people, " their hearts being much in fluenced with an earnest desire after the gospel," con tinued to resort to them in private houses ; seeing which, the rulers " did in a sense drive them out, having made an order that all such as would not conform to the discipline of the English Church should depart the country by such a day." The summer of 1643 accordingly found Mr. Tomp son and his associates back with their New England flocks ; nor can their Virginia labors have been ac counted fruitful, inasmuch as they seem to have made but a single convert. He, Daniel Gookins by name, followed his teachers back to Massachusetts, where at a later day he became a man of note; so that as Cotton Mather tunefully expressed it, " by Tompson's pains, Christ and New England a dear Gookins gains.