Part 4

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

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

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

“To the Constable of Weymouth

“You are hereby required in his Majestys name forthwith to distrain upon the Estate of Joseph Poole to the value of five shillings which is for the breach of town order for entertaining of Sarah Downing one week contrary to town order, and so from week to week as long as the said Joseph Poole shall entertaine the said Sarah Downing.

“Dated Aprill 30ᵗʰ 1684. Signed in the name and by the order of the Selectmen.

“SAMUEL WHITE.”[60]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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