Two men of Taunton, in the course of human events, 1731-1829

Front matter

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Contents

GREETING v

PREAMBLE i

AT FIRST THE INFANT 17

Chapter I T^he Old Colony Background Won it by the axe and harrow

Held it by the axe and sword, Bred a race with brawn and marrow,

From no alien over-lord.

Gained the right to guide and govern,

Then with labor strong and free Forged the land, a shield of Empire

Silver Sea to Silver Sea.

D. S. Scott.

THE Stalwart Pilgrim fathers, wading through the curling surf from their shallop (a "bow-shoote" distance) to the welcome sands at the point of Cape Cod, and bearing in their arms the loyal Pilgrim mothers, coming ashore to do their belated washing, make a homely and amusing, but very significant, picture of the landing of our Mayflower ancestors. The presence of those women betokens that the sea-worn home-seekers had come to stay — to breed a new race which should perpetuate their vital principles as an abiding influence in the land. The genesis of this new provincial type, now known throughout the world as the "Down East Yankee," was in this Old Colony, and on Cape Cod — a "Clam Yankee," the Dixie folks call him.

Those descendants of Norman and Saxon brought sturdy bodies, evolved by long warfare against other races, and a moral fibre nerved by religious conviction and stiffened by persecution. Their most conspicuous quality was courage — not so much courage to come (for in time of persecution, the line of least resistance is to migrate), but courage to stay in this new country, to put the plough into this stubborn soil and not turn back with their returning ship. It is this "staying quality" which ccxnpels our reverence.

Hunger brought them hither — soul-hunger for the worship of God according to their light. With heroic strength of mind they held tenaciously to their Nicene Creed, and rebelled against formalism and ecclesiastical pomp; tolerated no intermediary between themselves and their Maker; recognized two sources of power — God and the Devil ; thought it difficult to tally a happy life with a virtuous one; guided their lives by the King James Version (loath to question its teachings); and considered piety the chief end of man.^ They felt they had crossed the ocean in fulfilment of some divine revelation of human progress. The beckoning finger of Cape Cod was a providential guide to this location.

^ John D. Long has pointed out that they were not all "saints"; the varied elements of human nature cropped out in the first shipload.

Peculiar characteristics differentiate this Old Colony Yankee from the rest of mankind. The natural features of a country are said to mould its inhabitants. In this Old Colony there are no mountains, great rivers, waterfalls, or prairies. The four indigenous factors influencing them were: the surrounding sea, the fickle climate, the stingy soil, and the gloomy wilderness concealing treacherous neighbors.

The sea invites exploration, demands a wide horizon, inspires expectancy and curiosity. The capricious climate is a test of physical quality, with its range of weather from arctic to tropic on short notice, and compels the Yankee in self-protection to become a close observer of nature, and may explain his remarkable propensity for guessing. To fortify his constitution against these mercurial changes, he discovered that hard cider and Jamaica rum were agreeable accessories, driving out fever in summer and warming his stomach in winter; and incidentally of value in bargaining with red men or in prolonging the pastoral call. The Yankee was not always a good match for John Barleycorn. He was sometimes trundled home in a wheelbarrow from the muster; after an installation festival, ministers were known to be gently tucked in bed by kind-hearted parishioners; gin-sling, toddy, flip, and punch gave Saturday a Donnybrook finish; in Taunton, the store-town of the Old Colony, was a shed on Jockey Lane known as the "Morgue," where maudlin victims snored off their week-end sprees.^

Damp weather produced pulmonary complaints. The demise of the New England winter was accompanied by a train of ailments. Wells stagnant in summer bred autumn fevers, which carried oif the little ones. Salt meats and heavy foods produced lank, dyspeptic bodies. "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you what you are," says a Frenchman. Diet determines mental and moral capacity. Vegetarianism was an unknown virtue. Pies of mince-meat, pumpkin, apple, chicken, clam, and rhubarb were a mainstay, interlarded with "Injun" pudding, doughnuts, sausages, hogs-head cheese, "b'iled dinner," codhsh-balls, johnny-cakes, baked beans, succotash, and pandowdy.

From the soil they acquired a quality called "grit."

"Winning by inches, Holding by clinches, Slow to contention, but slower to quit;

Now and then failing, Never once quailing,

Let us thank God for our Saxon grit."

1 There were then, in proportion to the population, five times as many resorts in Taunton, licensed to sell liquors, as there are to-day. The public conscience did not look upon this drinking habit as an enormous sin.

Inland it was so rocky that they declared the ballast from the Ark went overboard there during the Flood ; toward the shore it was so sandy, some one remarked, that the farmers might be judged insane, like the feigning Ulysses when he ploughed the seashore at Ithaca; down on the Cape the thin garment of soil was sadly "out at heels and elbows." In places the turf was sown thick with arrowheads and domestic mementoes of the vanishing Indian.

How to deal with the aborigines was a vexatious problem. The newly arrived white men found themselves between two fires; Canonicus in the Rhode Island territory was hostile to Massasoit in southern Massachusetts. The red men dwelling in this corner of the Atlantic seaboard were hardly more developed than the beavers building their dams along the rivers, the deer that migrated in families through the forests, or the colonies of crows holding caucus in the treetops. The Indian had made little advancement beyond the making of a bark canoe to cross the ponds; pointing his arrows with flint and eagle claws; baking clams in seaweed; fertilizing corn with fish; and curing skins of moose or wild cat to provide clothing and shelter. Along comes the white man, who proceeds to subjugate the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water, as vassals to do his work. He cuts down the primeval timber and fashions comfortable dwelling-houses (often with gambrel roof, in memory of the Pilgrims' sojourn in Holland); he harnesses the rivers to make nails, boards, and cider; he taxes the wind to turn sails for grinding corn into meal; he digs and smelts bog-ore into rude implements. With patient labor he converts the forests into pastures, the pastures into cattle, the cattle into beef, the beef into brawny arms to fell more forests and drive his enemies from the earth. These discoveries the red children of the forest had not dreamed of; even as those pioneers had no vision of our modern electric servants and aerial conveyances.

The red men were, for the most part, treated contemptuously by the white men as treacherous vermin. King Philip was persecuted with barbaric ferocity; the head of the Princess Weetamoe was displayed on a spontoon in Taunton to terrify Indian captives; Annawan, after his capture by the daring Captain Church, was taken to Plymouth and executed, in spite of Church's promise that his life should be spared if he surrendered without resistance. Yet there was some show of justice. Governor Bradford proudly recorded that every foot of the Old Colony had been paid for, though the Indians often sold their lands for a mess of pottage. Several white men were once hanged for the murder of an Indian, but we imag-

[24 1 ine these white men were "undesirable citizens" of the tiny republic. There was an attempt to Christianize the savages. Coadjutors with Eliot

— Bourne and Treat, of the Cape, Mayhew, of Martha's Vineyard, and Danforth, of Taunton

— were measurably successful, leading a large number of converts into semi-civilization, teaching them to get a poor living by farming and whaHng — the latter a not uncongenial sport. But praying Indians were a decadent race, and at Mashpee, Eastham, and Assawampsett aroused aknost as much suspicion as their unregenerate brothers. Having little regard for property rights, they walked into town and took what they needed without apology. Many became slaves; one, named " Quock," was long in the family of Ephraim Leonard. Miscegenation with the imported blacks produced a less savage but no less fierce-looking type of man. The Indians were more capable of adopting the white man's vices than his virtues. "Fire-water," first offered them on their meeting with Governor Carver, was much to their liking and contributed toward accelerating King Philip's War a few years later. Algonquins circled in the rear of the seaside settlements " like the scythe of death ready to mow them down at any moment." Scalping-knife and tomahawk brought dread alarm to young and old. Often the valiant housewife sat in the crotch of a tree with loaded flintlock to protect her husband's scalp as he hoed the growing corn.i

Sixty years of contention with the Indianhaunted wilderness made the Yankee wary, alert, rugged, strong, and skeptical. Tramping the woods and hills, laying stone walls criss-cross over the fields, hewing timbers, and swinging the flail, lengthened his arms and legs and evolved the prototype of Uncle Sam. He became homyhanded; and close-fisted as well, carefully storing away in the chimney whatever "pieces of eight" came to him in days when trade was mostly by barter. He held little reverence for the " slothful servant"; indeed, a canny pursuit of the "root of all evil" came to be his leading trait in the eyes of the British nation.

On this tall, sun-browned, strong-jawed yeoman, whittling with his jack-knife notions of all sorts; salt-witted, self-contained, standing on his rights, content if not molested, — put a coonskin cap, galligaskins, cowhide boots, a quid of pig-tail in his cheek, and a picturesque buckskin coat con-

* These Algonquins first used the word "Yankee." Having no "1" in their language, they could come no nearer to pronouncing the word "English" than "Yengeesh," which became corrupted into "Yankee." A towering, gigantic, iron statue of King Philip, with uplifted tomahawk and full savage regalia, should be erected on the summit of Mount Hope as a memorial tribute of the Yankee to the former tenants of this land, and an object lesson in history.

cealing the patch on his trousers, and you have a characteristic type of the dramatis persona of our stage when "Farmer George" became king. Up before sunrise, he toadied to no man; felt himself equal to princes; was acquisitive of property (often "land-poor"); he sat patiently through Fast Day sermons, and after candlelight played checkers and "Old Sledge" on a hogshead at the "store." All the King's horses and all the King's men could not drive him. He was filled with bitter resentment at foreign oppression. Holy water and papal bulls were special objects of his hatred. The Pope and the Devil were religiously burned on Guy Fawkes's Day.^ His nasal twang and drawl were aggravated by humming Watts's hymns.

These Old Colony farmers, foresters, and fishermen came together at town meetings, church gatherings, barn-raisings, auctions, turkey suppers, clambakes, and spelling-bees. They bred sheep, goats, swine, cattle; planted flax, wheat, turnips, corn, beans, and pumpkins ; tanned skins for boots; spun wool for their shirts; trimmed furs into caps, coats, and mittens; and became a self-reliant community. Ingenuity, thrift, and energy marked them. The sick, the insane, the

^ Thomas Coram, of England, thought that the citizens of Taunton might never become enough civilized to appreciate an Episcopal church.

deformed, the feeble-minded, and the decrepit were not segregated, but were a charge to the family, where their appearance may have dulled the edge of sympathy. It was a day of family government, family amusement, family religion.

Thomas Paine, in 1776, observed that a good portion of the first-Imported virtue was Inherited by the Revolutionary patriots. The standard of morality and high ideals was maintained among a learned ministry, to the third and fourth generations, who knew not the Holland life or the graves of their English forbears. Constant reading of King James's Bible had developed the "New England conscience" always ready to fly "to the cause which needs assistance" or at "the wrong which needs resistance." These ministers, collegetrained, self-searching, faithful servants of the Lord, compelled attendance on their lengthy sermons; and were careful to shape public opinion and to see that every child was taught to read, revere, and understand the Bible. But the common alma mater was the great University of the Back Woods. In their wild environment, the lack of higher education tended to produce a diff"erent race. Culture gave way to practical knowledge.

The Pilgrims have been called the cream of the Puritans. Although the Mayflower company came from northern England, succeeding immigration was largely from southwestern England. Often a shipload of immigrants would become the nucleus of a town named after their pastor's home. So we find Barnstable, Bristol, Dartmouth, Falmouth, Norton, Plympton, Taunton, Tiverton, Truro, Somerset, Swansea, Wareham, Yarmouth were names well loved by those old-country folk. The Pilgrim beliefs and customs predominated. Many were descendants of the Leyden church membership. Every town had its Congregational minister to support. Men ostracized through religious controversy had sought shelter in the Plymouth Colony, each ready to defend his creed. Those who sought to quibble on theology could be " accommodated " in discussing the Halfway Covenant, the fate of infants unbaptized, the Inner Light, Vicarious Atonement, Foreordination, the use of the fiddle in church music, and whether the communion bread could be digested in the material body. Baptists settled at Rehoboth, Swansea, and Bristol; Quakers increased at Dartmouth. Heresy of the Old World became orthodoxy in the New. Calvinism was the backbone of the religious thought. Protracted fasts and vigils produced visions and weird revelations; but the " Witchcraft Delusion" never carried the natives completely off their mental centre. During the periodical "revivals," the excitement rose to the pitch of throwing off coats, screaming in ecstatic prayer, and committing other strange antics in the name of a calm and gentle Christ; but mental equilibrium was restored before such inhuman excesses were committed as at Boston and Salem. Godly and ungodly mingled together. "Home missionaries" were kept alive and active, by unregenerates who went fishing Sunday, cheated in "hoss" trades, chewed tobacco, swore on small provocation, smuggled, played cards for shillings, and too often came under the Circean spell of new rum and hard cider.

The third and fourth generations, risen from the soil, were a robust, toddy-drinking race, of animal nature, ever ready for a fight, whether with the red man or in a foolhardy expedition to capture the citadel at Louisburg, where, the story goes, they chased the flying cannon balls of the enemy to fire them back again before they became cold. The " unregenerates " had been taught by the genius loci to take their fun in boisterous horseplay. Saturday afternoons, the rustic ploughjogger from Bearhole, Slab Ridge, Tea rail, Hockamock, Rocky Woods, Great Meadow Hill, Happy Hollow, or Squawbetty, hitched up "Old Dobbin" and drove "daoun to Ta'nt'n" with his brown jug under the seat. If it was summer, he stuck antlers of indigo weed above his horse's ears to keep off hungry flies, and the "yaller dog " trotted under the wagon on which poultry may have found a lodging for the night. If it was winter, he rode in a pung, with moth-eaten w^olf robe flying tails over its back, and the dog curled about his master's kip boots. During the afternoon he swapped "hosses," had a trotting-match, cock-fight, dogfight, or raffle; and tumbled about the Green in bacchanalian single combat in settlement of old scores; then rode home singing convivial songs, and flinging melon-rinds, lobster-claws, or oystershells along the way.

At Bristol, the prosperous seaport town, slaves, brought from Africa and Guinea, were sold by slave-traders coming down from Boston. A brisk trade with the Carolinas, New York, and the West Indies was carried on by Taunton, Somerset, Bristol, Dartmouth, and Yarmouth. The building of vessels was a main source of wealth; sloops of thirty tons made their way up the rivers and inlets, with cargoes of wheat from the Hudson, rice and potatoes from the Carolinas, and sugar and molasses from the West Indies. When the fierce " northeasters " rocked the houses and lashed the surf along the shore, prayers went up at many firesides for the absent sailor-boy at sea. Iron was forged from bog-ore; bricks were made from claypits ; furs were a source of revenue to every farmer's boy, who sent the polecat's skin across the sea, to be worn in France as ermine. Bears and wolves ranged the swamps, and the forests were tenanted by otter, mink, wild cats, and raccoons, as well as rabbits, chucks, and chipmucks. As late as 1790 wolves were flooded out of a Raynham swamp by a ditch from Taunton River. Wellfleet and New Bedford were catching whales, though whale fishing was not at its best until the early nineteenth century. The wealth of the seas was always a large part of the income of Old Colony settlers. Codfish and mackerel were important exports; "codfish aristocracy" came to be a term of reproach.

Taunton was settled from Somerset and Devonshire Counties of England. Some Welsh from Swansea had given the old name to their new home. Kidnapped Acadians were heartlessly set down near Lakeville and elsewhere by Colonel Winslow. In Bridgewater were ironworkers among whom the Leonards were foremost. They were an everyday lot of people, with big families, plain wooden houses, well-filled barns, and many stone walls, which testify to generations of lumbago. Few had means to live without constant toil. There was a little aristocracy — the Winslows at Plymouth, the Edsons at Bridgewater, the Leonards at Taunton. Troy — now the busy city of Fall River — was but a scattered hamlet. Money was the rarest commodity among the earlier colonists; they had not enough to pay five hundred pounds for their royal charter. Once their credit was saved by the accidental meeting of some Englishmen wrecked on the coast, who brought a little ready cash. The Boston Puritans, increased in wealth by the continual arrival of immigrants, grew haughty and intolerant to the extent of hanging witches and Quakers; whereas the Plymouth Pilgrims, in the humility which comes from poverty, welcomed Roger Williams, exiled from Salem and Boston, and bore with Quaker peculiarities. We may remember, however, to its credit, that while the Province of Massachusetts was under British law, capital offences were fewer than in England, and were not so harshly punished. At Boston, men believed in freedom; but to think and do as the Bostonians did — that was freedom. In Plymouth Colony, they were so poor that if one behaved " tolable well," he could enjoy full liberty.

Through these years the Yankee had been working out his salvation with native shrewdness. Opinions were hardening in his head on the question of civil freedom and human rights. Ever looking for a new idea, he sat whittling in the barn door, chewing tobacco and pondering right and wrong, until he concluded that the town ought not to be taxed to pay the minister, that Church and State were separate institutions, and that there should be no taxation without representation in Parliament.

Both Paine and Leonard descended from these stout-hearted Anglo-Saxon pioneers, who, cut off from Old-World influence, started anew upon their interpretation of the Scriptures and human experience, retaining the kernel but discarding the husk of English government, along with what seemed to them the accumulated wrongs and fallacies of Lords and Bishops. Preserving a sacred reverence for their old homes, they studied to make this new government simple, direct, substantial, founded on duty, and reliance upon God. The corner stone was the Bible. The town meeting was developed and perfected, — a democracy where rich and poor could meet together in equality. After a century and a half of brave labor in pursuit of such ideals, they had almost forgotten England, and felt qualified to set up for themselves. "Freedom to worship God" was the watch-cry in 1620 at Plymouth; "Liberty and Union" the motto on the flag at Taunton in

1775.

Thomas Paine, great-grandfather of Robert

Treat Paine, had been a fisherman on Cape Cod, and Thomas Leonard, great-grandfather of Daniel Leonard, had dug valuable ore from the bosom of the Old Colony. After the colony was divided into counties, the two men sat together as Deputies at Plymouth in 1689. Thomas Leonard was appointed a justice to hold the Court of Common Pleas in Bristol County, and James Paine, son of

Thomas and grandfather of our Robert, became a justice in Barnstable County.

Francis BayHes, in his scholarly memoirs, says of the Plymouth Colony citizens :

. . . That curse of all small and independent communities, political ambition, found no place amongst them. The higher offices were not sought, but the services of such as were fit to sustain them were demanded, as the right of the people, and they were accepted, not for the sake of distinction, emolument, or pleasure, but from the sense of duty. Fearful of the loss of reputation, men underwent the severe and painful duties which such offices required. Where there was no strife for position, no temptation in the shape of emolument, and no passion for official distinction, small was the danger of feuds and factions.

Then, if we find Thomas, George, and Ephraim Leonard, Thomas and James Paine holding high office, we may know they were men "fit to sustain them."

Democratic Plymouth was much aggrieved to be amalgamated in 1692 with the aristocratic Massachusetts Bay Colony. This conjunction destroyed the political consequence of Plymouth, and the claims of the elder but humbler colony were little regarded. At that time the population of the Old Colony was 13,000, including reds, whites, and blacks; by 1775, the whites had increased to 26,656, and there were about 600 each of blacks and reds.

At the outbreak of the Revolution, the Old Colony was politically divided. The eastern county, Plymouth, had many sympathizers with England, as had also Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, while Bristol County was largely Whig. Two eminent leaders of these factions were our heroes, Leonard and Paine, who played their parts in Taunton because of a blunder made by Charles II. The patent of 1629, from the Plymouth Council of London to the Plymouth Colony, granted jurisdiction over the land from Cape Cod to Narragansett River as the western boundary. The charter of 1663, to Rhode Island, from Charles II, granted title to the land three miles to the eastward of Narragansett River. Thus there was a strip of land, three miles wide, lying east of this river, which had been granted to two colonies. People from Rhode Island, mostly Baptists, had settled this strip, but were under Plymouth rule and sent delegates to the Plymouth General Court, They recognized the sovereignty of Plymouth, but the royal confirmation of the title to the land (granted by the Plymouth Council of London to the Pilgrims) was given to Rhode Island. When Massachusetts effected the coalition with Plymouth, Rhode Island pressed her claim to the disputed land, but was unsuccessful at that time.

In 1685, Plymouth Colony had been divided, like Gaul, into three parts, — one named Bristol County after a prosperous seaport town in the disputed territory. At this Bristol, the courts were held, and thither went Ephraim Leonard, James Paine, and other "common-sense lawyers" to adjust local differences. The natives there considered themselves a part of Massachusetts, but Rhode Island (at her best pinched for territory) was jealous, and a dispute began about this strip of land. The two colonies could not agree, and at length, in 1741, George II appointed a commission of three — one member from the Province of Nova Scotia, one from New York, and one from New Jersey — to settle this boundary question. Massachusetts had been a wayward child to the mother government; her case was prejudiced, and the commissioners recognized Rhode Island's claim as valid.

In 1746, Rhode Island claimed all Fall River and Assonet as far as Somerset; her claim was granted in part. A line about three miles east of Narragansett Bay was made the boundary. Massachusetts, in her indignation, refused to pay her half of the surveying costs, which caused further litigation. This territory ceded to Rhode Island included Tiverton, Westport, and the shire town of Bristol; hence the remaining Bristol County in Massachusetts contained neither the town of Bristol nor a court-house. Taunton, an inland town, had grown to be much larger than Bristol; was thriving, and central in the dismembered county; and consequently became the location of a new court-house in 1747. Samuel White, the leading lawyer in Taunton, was appointed King's Attorney, rather than Ephraim or George Leonard, who were old residents of Norton. When this transfer was legally made, the inhabitants of Bristol were loath to part with the records, and tradition says they were secured for Taunton by strategy of George Leonard and other lawyers.

After Taunton became the shire town, many justices gathered there in the days when law was growing in importance as an attractive calling for energetic, clear-headed, ambitious young men. Thus Paine and Leonard were naturally drawn to the court-house, and no one can fully grasp the story of the Old Colony who is not familiar with the career of these two men who focussed much history in their lives, in those stirring times when questions of the Prerogative of the Crown versus local rights were finally decided.

Chapter II A Brahmin Pedigree His tribe were God Almighty's gentlemen

Dryden

SAFE behind the "clenched fist of Massachusetts," the Pilgrim fathers boldly drafted the "Mayflower Compact" in rebuke of the despotism of Church and State, now left beyond the seas. This Compact and the Declaration of Independence are two preeminent documents which have inspired the American people to deeds of courage, freedom, and glory. Among the signatures to the covenant drafted by the liberty-seeking immigrants in Provincetown Harbor is that of Stephen Hopkins. After the Pilgrims had founded Plymouth, this Hopkins went with Edward Winslow on an exploring expedition — the first white persons to leave a description of the Indian resort known as Cohannet, which lies in the shoulder blade of the defiant Cape. Cohannet, a few years later, received from English settlers the name of Taunton. Our Paine, living in Taunton and descended from Stephen Hopkins, was the sole resident of Plymouth Colony among the signers of the Declaration.^

* From the adjoining plantation of Rhode Island came another signer with tremulous autograph directly descended from the same Stephen Hopkins.

As the Epic of the Leonard family is strongly colored with iron, so through the Epic of the Paine family runs a distinct theological thread. To use the phrase of Holmes,^ Robert was of "Brahmin ancestry." By easy genealogical leaps, we come down his line from one clergyman to another. His father, Thomas, was minister at Weymouth; his grandmother on his mother's side had married two ministers, Mr. Esterbrook first, and later, Rev. Samuel Treat. Paine's maternal great-grandfather. Rev. Samuel Willard, was pastor of the Old South Church in Boston; and was acting president of Harvard College from 1701 to 1707; his paternal great-great-grandfather was Rev. Anthony Thatcher. Besides being a scion of the clergy, his pedigree discloses an added strain of blue blood in the names of Robert Treat, Governor of Connecticut, and Major Willard, another famous Indian fighter.

The pioneer, Thomas Paine, came to America in 1622, bringing a son, Thomas, then ten years old, who had lost an eye at archery practice in England. This Thomas, Junior, lived on Cape Cod until his ninety-fourth year, preserving his remaining eye intact from Indian arrows through King Philip's War. He married Mary, daughter of Nicholas Snow, whose wife was daughter of Stephen Hopkins. The elder immigrant, Thomas,

^ Elsie Venner.

settled at Yarmouth, but his one-eyed son moved to Eastham, and was parent of seven sons, from one of whom, John, was descended the wandering playwright, John Howard Payne, who touched all hearts with his tender song: "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home."^

James, the sixth son of Thomas Paine, went up to Barnstable, was appointed justice, accumulated property and lands, married Bethiah Thatcher, and erected a substantial farmhouse, carefully tarring the mortise-holes against decay. This ancestral resort was the boyhood delight of our Robert, who sailed, an unhappy voyager, across the bay from Boston each summer to visit his Aunt Mary Freeman, who had Inherited the estate. Bethiah was the fourth child of Colonel John Thatcher, and granddaughter of Rev. Anthony Thatcher, who holds a place In history because of his frightful shipwreck on an Island dotting the point of Cape Ann, and known to this day as "Thatcher's Woe." 2

* This song-writer thought the name looked more "select" spelled with a "y," an opinion embraced by others of the family. Among the numerous spellings of the Signer's name, on bills contracted at the Continental Congress, is one sent to "Mr. Traitpain," which intimates that he was hailed by his familiar cronies as "Treat."

2 The spar of land was granted to him by the colony on account of his "providential rescue." He had set sail with his family from Cape Cod for Cape Ann in 1635, when a storm drove the ship on the rocks. He and his wife reached shore, but

John Thatcher, father of Bethiah, was married in 1 66 1 to Rebecca Winslow, and while on the way to Falmouth with his bride, he stopped for the night at the house of Colonel Gorham at Barnstable. During the merry conversation with the newly-married couple (so the story goes), a baby girl, a few days old, was introduced, and the night of her birth mentioned to Mr. Thatcher, who observed that it was on the very night he was married. Taking the infant in his arms, he presented her to his bride, saying: "Here, my dear, is a little lady born on the same night we were married; I wish you would kiss her, for I intend to have her for my second wife." "I will, my dear, but I hope it will be long before your intention is fulfilled." Then, taking the babe, the bride kissed it heartily and returned it to the nurse's hands. The jesting prediction was eventually verified. Mr. Thatcher's wife died, and the child, arrived at the age of twenty-three, actually became his second wife.