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Title: Historical Papers, Part 3, From Volume VI.,
       The Works of Whittier: Old Portraits and Modern Sketches
       

Author: John Greenleaf Whittier

Release Date: December 2005  [EBook #9593]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on October 25, 2003]


Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, HISTORICAL PAPERS ***




This eBook was produced by David Widger  [widger@cecomet.net]





                             HISTORICAL PAPERS

                                   BY

                          JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER



CONTENTS:

HISTORICAL PAPERS.
     DANIEL O'CONNELL
     ENGLAND UNDER JAMES II.
     THE BORDER WAR OF 1708
     THE GREAT IPSWICH FRIGHT
     THE BOY CAPTIVES
     THE BLACK MEN IN THE REVOLUTION AND WAR OF 1812
     THE SCOTTISH REFORMERS
     THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH
     GOVERNOR ENDICOTT
     JOHN WINTHROP




                          HISTORICAL PAPERS


DANIEL O'CONNELL.

     In February, 1839, Henry Clay delivered a speech in the United
     States Senate, which was intended to smooth away the difficulties
     which his moderate opposition to the encroachments of slavery had
     erected in his path to the presidency.  His calumniation of
     O'Connell called out the following summary of the career of the
     great Irish patriot.  It was published originally in the
     Pennsylvania Freeman of Philadelphia, April 25, 1839.

Perhaps the most unlucky portion of the unlucky speech of Henry Clay on
the slavery question is that in which an attempt is made to hold up to
scorn and contempt the great Liberator of Ireland.  We say an attempt,
for who will say it has succeeded?  Who feels contempt for O'Connell?
Surely not the slaveholder?  From Henry Clay, surrounded by his slave-
gang at Ashland, to the most miserable and squalid slave-driver and small
breeder of human cattle in Virginia and Maryland who can spell the name
of O'Connell in his newspaper, these republican brokers in blood fear and
hate the eloquent Irishman.  But their contempt, forsooth!  Talk of the
sheep-stealer's contempt for the officer of justice who nails his ears to
the pillory, or sets the branding iron on his forehead!

After denouncing the abolitionists for gratuitously republishing the
advertisements for runaway slaves, the Kentucky orator says:--

"And like a notorious agitator upon another theatre, they would hunt down
and proscribe from the pale of civilized society the inhabitants of that
entire section.  Allow me, Mr. President, to say that whilst I recognize
in the justly wounded feelings of the Minister of the United States at
the Court of St. James much to excuse the notice which he was provoked to
take of that agitator, in my humble opinion he would better have
consulted the dignity of his station and of his country in treating him
with contemptuous silence.  He would exclude us from European society, he
who himself, can only obtain a contraband admission, and is received with
scornful repugnance into it!  If he be no more desirous of our society
than we are of his, he may rest assured that a state of perpetual non-
intercourse will exist between us.  Yes, sir, I think the American
Minister would best have pursued the dictates of true dignity by
regarding the language of the member of the British House of Commons as
the malignant ravings of the plunderer of his own country, and the
libeller of a foreign and kindred people."

The recoil of this attack "followed hard upon" the tones of
congratulation and triumph of partisan editors at the consummate skill
and dexterity with which their candidate for the presidency had absolved
himself from the suspicion of abolitionism, and by a master-stroke of
policy secured the confidence of the slaveholding section of the
Union.  But the late Whig defeat in New York has put an end to these
premature rejoicings.  "The speech of Mr. Clay in reference to the Irish
agitator has been made use of against us with no small success," say the
New York papers.  "They failed," says the Daily Evening Star, "to
convince the Irish voters that Daniel O'Connell was the 'plunderer of his
country,' or that there was an excuse for thus denouncing him."

The defeat of the Whigs of New York and the cause of it have excited no
small degree of alarm among the adherents of the Kentucky orator.  In
this city, the delicate _Philadelphia Gazette_ comes magnanimously to the
aid of Henry Clay,--

               "A tom-tit twittering on an eagle's back."

The learned editor gives it as his opinion that Daniel O'Connell is a
"political beggar," a "disorganizing apostate;" talks in its pretty way
of the man's "impudence" and "falsehoods" and "cowardice," etc.; and
finally, with a modesty and gravity which we cannot but admire, assures
us that "his weakness of mind is almost beyond calculation!"

We have heard it rumored during the past week, among some of the self-
constituted organs of the Clay party in this city, that at a late meeting
in Chestnut Street a committee was appointed to collect, collate, and
publish the correspondence between Andrew Stevenson and O'Connell, and so
much of the latter's speeches and writings as relate to American slavery,
for the purpose of convincing the countrymen of O'Connell of the justice,
propriety, and, in view of the aggravated circumstances of the case,
moderation and forbearance of Henry Clay when speaking of a man who has
had the impudence to intermeddle with the "patriarchal institutions" of
our country, and with the "domestic relations" of Kentucky and Virginia
slave-traders.

We wait impatiently for the fruits of the labors of this sagacious
committee.  We should like to see those eloquent and thrilling appeals to
the sense of shame and justice and honor of America republished.  We
should like to see if any Irishman, not wholly recreant to the interests
and welfare of the Green Island of his birth, will in consequence of this
publication give his vote to the slanderer of Ireland's best and noblest
champion.

But who is Daniel O'Connell?  "A demagogue--a ruffian agitator!"  say the
Tory journals of Great Britain, quaking meantime with awe and
apprehension before the tremendous moral and political power which he is
wielding,--a power at this instant mightier than that of any potentate of
Europe.  "A blackguard"--a fellow who "obtains contraband admission into
European society"--a "malignant libeller"--a "plunderer of his country"--
a man whose "wind should be stopped," say the American slaveholders, and
their apologists, Clay, Stevenson, Hamilton, and the Philadelphia
Gazette, and the Democratic Whig Association.

But who is Daniel O'Connell?  Ireland now does justice to him, the world
will do so hereafter.  No individual of the present age has done more for
human liberty.  His labors to effect the peaceable deliverance of his own
oppressed countrymen, and to open to the nations of Europe a new and
purer and holier pathway to freedom unstained with blood and unmoistened
by tears, and his mighty instrumentality in the abolition of British
colonial slavery, have left their impress upon the age.  They will be
remembered and felt beneficially long after the miserable slanders of
Tory envy and malignity at home, and the clamors of slaveholders abroad,
detected in their guilt, and writhing in the gaze of Christendom, shall
have perished forever,--when the Clays and Calhouns, the Peels and
Wellingtons, the opponents of reform in Great Britain and the enemies of
slave emancipation in the United States, shall be numbered with those who
in all ages, to use the words of the eloquent Lamartine, have "sinned
against the Holy Ghost in opposing the improvement of things,--in an
egotistical and stupid attempt to draw back the moral and social world
which God and nature are urging forward."

The character and services of O'Connell have never been fully appreciated
in this country.  Engrossed in our own peculiar interests, and in the
plenitude of our self-esteem; believing that "we are the people, and that
wisdom will perish with us," that all patriotism and liberality of
feeling are confined to our own territory, we have not followed the
untitled Barrister of Derrynane Abbey, step by step, through the
development of one of the noblest experiments ever made for the cause
of liberty and the welfare of man.

The revolution which O'Connell has already partially effected in his
native land, and which, from the evident signs of cooperation in England
and Scotland, seems not far from its entire accomplishment, will form a
new era in the history of the civilized world.  Heretofore the patriot
has relied more upon physical than moral means for the regeneration of
his country and its redemption from oppression.  His revolutions, however
pure in principle, have ended in practical crime.  The great truth was
yet to be learned that brute force is incompatible with a pure love of
freedom, inasmuch as it is in itself an odious species of tyranny--the
relic of an age of slavery and barbarism--the common argument of
despotism--a game

              "which, were their subjects wise,
               Kings would not play at."

But the revolution in which O'Connell is engaged, although directed
against the oppression of centuries, relies with just confidence upon the
united moral energies of the people: a moral victory of reason over
prejudice, of justice over oppression; the triumph of intellectual energy
where the brute appeal to arms had miserably failed; the vindication of
man's eternal rights, not by the sword fleshed in human hearts, but by
weapons tempered in the armory of Heaven with truth and mercy and love.

Nor is it a visionary idea, or the untried theory of an enthusiast, this
triumphant reliance upon moral and intellectual power for the reform of
political abuses, for the overthrowing of tyranny and the pulling down of
the strongholds of arbitrary power.  The emancipation of the Catholic of
Great Britain from the thrall of a century, in 1829, prepared the way for
the bloodless triumph of English reform in 1832.  The Catholic
Association was the germ of those political unions which compelled, by
their mighty yet peaceful influence, the King of England to yield
submissively to the supremacy of the people.

     [The celebrated Mr. Attwood has been called the "father of political
     unions."  In a speech delivered by his brother, C. Attwood, Esq., at
     the Sunderland Reform Meeting, September 10, 1832, I find the
     following admission: "Gentlemen, the first political union was the
     Roman Catholic Association of Ireland, and the true founder and
     father of political unions is Daniel O'Connell."]

Both of these remarkable events, these revolutions shaking nations to
their centre, yet polluted with no blood and sullied by no crime, were
effected by the salutary agitations of the public mind, first set in
motion by the masterspirit of O'Connell, and spreading from around him to
every portion of the British empire like the undulations from the
disturbed centre of a lake.

The Catholic question has been but imperfectly understood in this
country.  Many have allowed their just disapprobation of the Catholic
religion to degenerate into a most unwarrantable prejudice against its
conscientious followers.  The cruel persecutions of the dissenters from
the Romish Church, the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day, the horrors of
the Inquisition, the crusades against the Albigenses and the simple
dwellers of the Vaudois valleys, have been regarded as atrocities
peculiar to the believers in papal infallibility, and the necessary
consequences of their doctrines; and hence they have looked upon the
constitutional agitation of the Irish Catholics for relief from grieveous
disabilities and unjust distinctions as a struggle merely for supremacy
or power.

Strange, that the truth to which all history so strongly testifies should
thus be overlooked,--the undeniable truth that religious bigotry and
intolerance have been confined to no single sect; that the persecuted of
one century have been the persecutors of another.  In our own country,
it would be well for us to remember that at the very time when in New
England the Catholic, the Quaker, and the Baptist were banished on pain
of death, and where some even suffered that dreadful penalty, in Catholic
Maryland, under the Catholic Lord Baltimore, perfect liberty of
conscience was established, and Papist and Protestant went quietly
through the same streets to their respective altars.

At the commencement of O'Connell's labors for emancipation he found the
people of Ireland divided into three great classes,--the Protestant or
Church party, the Dissenters, and the Catholics: the Church party
constituting about one tenth of the population, yet holding in possession
the government and a great proportion of the landed property of Ireland,
controlling church and state and law and revenue, the army, navy,
magistracy, and corporations, the entire patronage of the country,
holding their property and power by the favor of England, and
consequently wholly devoted to her interest; the Dissenters, probably
twice as numerous as the Church party, mostly engaged in trade and
manufactures,--sustained by their own talents and industry, Irish in
feeling, partaking in no small degree of the oppression of their Catholic
brethren, and among the first to resist that oppression in 1782; the
Catholics constituting at least two thirds of the whole population, and
almost the entire peasantry of the country, forming a large proportion
of the mercantile interest, yet nearly excluded from the possession of
landed property by the tyrannous operation of the penal laws.  Justly has
a celebrated Irish patriot (Theobald Wolfe Tone) spoken of these laws as
"an execrable and infamous code, framed with the art and malice of demons
to plunder and degrade and brutalize the Catholics of Ireland.  There was
no disgrace, no injustice, no disqualification, moral, political, or
religious, civil or military, which it has not heaped upon them."

The following facts relative to the disabilities under which the
Catholics of the United Kingdom labored previous to the emancipation of
1829 will serve to show in some measure the oppressive operation of those
laws which placed the foot of one tenth of the population of Ireland upon
the necks of the remainder.

A Catholic peer could not sit in the House of Peers, nor a Catholic
commoner in the House of Commons.  A Catholic could not be Lord
Chancellor, or Keeper, or Commissioner of the Great Seal; Master or
Keeper of the Rolls; Justice of the King's Bench or of the Common Pleas;
Baron of the Exchequer; Attorney or Solicitor General; King's Sergeant at
Law; Member of the King's Council; Master in Chancery, nor Chairman of
Sessions for the County of Dublin.  He could not be the Recorder of a
city or town; an advocate in the spiritual courts; Sheriff of a county,
city, or town; Sub-Sheriff; Lord Lieutenant, Lord Deputy, or other
governor of Ireland; Lord High Treasurer; Governor of a county; Privy
Councillor; Postmaster General; Chancellor of the Exchequer or Secretary
of State; Vice Treasurer, Cashier of the Exchequer; Keeper of the Privy
Seal or Auditor General; Provost or Fellow of Dublin University; nor Lord
Mayor or Alderman of a corporate city or town. He could not be a member
of a parish vestry, nor bequeath any sum of money or any lands for the
maintenance of a clergyman, or for the support of a chapel or a school;
and in corporate towns he was excluded from the grand juries.

O'Connell commenced his labors for emancipation with the strong
conviction that nothing short of the united exertions of the Irish people
could overthrow the power of the existing government, and that a union of
action could only be obtained by the establishment of something like
equality between the different religious parties. Discarding all other
than peaceful means for the accomplishment of his purpose, he placed
himself and his followers beyond the cognizance of unjust and oppressive
laws.  Wherever he poured the oil of his eloquence upon the maddened
spirits of his wronged and insulted countrymen, the mercenary soldiery
found no longer an excuse for violence; and calm, firm, and united, the
Catholic Association remained secure in the moral strength of its pure
and peaceful purpose, amid the bayonets of a Tory administration.  His
influence was felt in all parts of the island.  Wherever an unlawful
association existed, his great legal knowledge enabled him at once to
detect its character, and, by urging its dissolution, to snatch its
deluded members from the ready fangs of their enemies.  In his presence
the Catholic and the Protestant shook hands together, and the wild Irish
clansman forgot his feuds.  He taught the party in power, and who
trembled at the dangers around them, that security and peace could only
be obtained by justice and kindness.  He entreated his oppressed Catholic
brethren to lay aside their weapons, and with pure hearts and naked hands
to stand firmly together in the calm but determined energy of men, too
humane for deeds of violence, yet too mighty for the patient endurance of
wrong.

The spirit of the olden time was awakened, of the day when Flood
thundered and Curran lightened; the light which shone for a moment in the
darkness of Ireland's century of wrong burned upwards clearly and
steadily from all its ancient altars.  Shoulder to shoulder gathered
around him the patriot spirits of his nation,--men unbribed by the golden
spoils of governmental patronage Shiel with his ardent eloquence, O'Dwyer
and Walsh, and Grattan and O'Connor, and Steel, the Protestant agitator,
wearing around him the emblem of national reconciliation, of the reunion
of Catholic and Protestant,--the sash of blended orange and green, soiled
and defaced by his patriotic errands, stained with the smoke of cabins,
and the night rains and rust of weapons, and the mountain mist, and the
droppings of the wild woods of Clare.  He united in one mighty and
resistless mass the broken and discordant factions, whose desultory
struggles against tyranny had hitherto only added strength to its
fetters, and infused into that mass his own lofty principles of action,
until the solemn tones of expostulation and entreaty, bursting at once
from the full heart of Ireland, were caught up by England and echoed back
from Scotland, and the language of justice and humanity was wrung from
the reluctant lips of the cold and remorseless oppressor of his native
land, at once its disgrace and glory,--the conqueror of Napoleon; and, in
the words of his own Curran, the chains of the Catholic fell from around
him, and he stood forth redeemed and disenthralled by the irresistible
genius of Universal Emancipation.

On the passage of the bill for Catholic emancipation, O'Connell took his
seat in the British Parliament.  The eyes of millions were upon him.
Ireland--betrayed so often by those in whom she had placed her
confidence; brooding in sorrowful remembrance over the noble names and
brilliant reputations sullied by treachery and corruption, the long and
dark catalogue of her recreant sons, who, allured by British gold and
British patronage, had sacrificed on the altar of their ambition Irish
pride and Irish independence, and lifted their parricidal arms against
their sorrowing mother, "crownless and voiceless in her woe"--now hung
with breathless eagerness over the ordeal to which her last great
champion was subjected.

The crisis in O'Connell's destiny had come.

The glitter of the golden bribe was in his eye; the sound of titled
magnificence was in his ear; the choice was before him to sit high among
the honorable, the titled, and the powerful, or to take his humble seat
in the hall of St. Stephen's as the Irish demagogue, the agitator, the
Kerry representative.  He did not hesitate in his choice.  On the first
occasion that offered he told the story of Ireland's wrongs, and demanded
justice in the name of his suffering constituents.  He had put his hand
to the plough of reform, and he could not relinquish his hold, for his
heart was with it.

Determined to give the Whig administration no excuse for neglecting the
redress of Irish grievances, he entered heart and soul into the great
measure of English reform, and his zeal, tact, and eloquence contributed
not a little to its success.  Yet even his friends speak of his first
efforts in the House of Commons as failures.  The Irish accent; the harsh
avowal of purposes smacking of rebellion; the eccentricities and flowery
luxuriance of an eloquence nursed in the fervid atmosphere of Ireland
suddenly transplanted to the cold and commonplace one of St. Stephen's;
the great and illiberal prejudices against him scarcely abated from what
they were when, as the member from Clare, he was mobbed on his way to
London, for a time opposed a barrier to the influence of his talents and
patriotism.  But he triumphed at last: the mob-orator of Clare and Kerry,
the declaimer in the Dublin Rooms of the Political and Trades' Union,
became one of the most attractive and popular speakers of the British
Parliament; one whose aid has been courted and whose rebuke has been
feared by the ablest of England's representatives.  Amid the sneers of
derision and the clamor of hate and prejudice he has triumphed,--on that
very arena so fatal to Irish eloquence and Irish fame, where even Grattan
failed to sustain himself, and the impetuous spirit of Flood was stricken
down.

No subject in which Ireland was not directly interested has received a
greater share of O'Connell's attention than that of the abolition of
colonial slavery.  Utterly detesting tyranny of all kinds, he poured
forth his eloquent soul in stern reprobation of a system full at once of
pride and misery and oppression, and darkened with blood.  His speech on
the motion of Thomas Fowell Buxton for the immediate emancipation of the
slaves gave a new tone to the discussion of the question.  He entered
into no petty pecuniary details; no miserable computation of the
shillings and pence vested in beings fashioned in the image of God.  He
did not talk of the expediency of continuing the evil because it had
grown monstrous.  To use his own words, he considered "slavery a crime to
be abolished; not merely an evil to be palliated."  He left Sir Robert
Peel and the Tories to eulogize the characters and defend the interests
of the planters, in common with those of a tithe-reaping priesthood,
building their houses by oppression and their chambers by wrong, and
spoke of the negro's interest, the negro's claim to justice; demanding
sympathy for the plundered as well as the plunderers, for the slave as
well as his master.  He trampled as dust under his feet the blasphemy
that obedience to the law of eternal justice is a principle to be
acknowledged in theory only, because unsafe in practice.  He would,
he said, enter into no compromise with slavery.  He cared not what cast
or creed or color it might assume, whether personal or political,
intellectual or spiritual; he was for its total, immediate abolition.  He
was for justice,--justice in the name of humanity and according to the
righteous law of the living God.

Ardently admiring our free institutions, and constantly pointing to our
glorious political exaltation as an incentive to the perseverance of his
own countrymen in their struggle against oppression, he has yet omitted
no opportunity of rebuking our inexcusable slave system.  An enthusiastic
admirer of Jefferson, he has often regretted that his practice should
have so illy accorded with his noble sentiments on the subject of
slavery, which so fully coincided with his own.  In truth, wherever man
has been oppressed by his fellow-man, O'Connell's sympathy has been
directed: to Italy, chained above the very grave of her ancient
liberties; to the republics of Southern America; to Greece, dashing the
foot of the indolent Ottoman from her neck; to France and Belgium; and
last, not least, to Poland, driven from her cherished nationality, and
dragged, like his own Ireland, bleeding and violated, to the deadly
embrace of her oppressor.  American slavery but shares in his common
denunciation of all tyranny; its victims but partake of his common pity
for the oppressed and persecuted and the trodden down.

In this hasty and imperfect sketch we cannot enter into the details of
that cruel disregard of Irish rights which was manifested by a Reformed
Parliament, convoked, to use the language of William IV., "to ascertain
the sense of the people."  It is perhaps enough to say that O'Connell's
indignant refusal to receive as full justice the measure of reform meted
out to Ireland was fully justified by the facts of the case.  The Irish
Reform Bill gave Ireland, with one third of the entire population of the
United Kingdoms, only one sixth of the Parliamentary delegation.  It
diminished instead of increasing the number of voters; in the towns and
cities it created a high and aristocratic franchise; in many boroughs it
established so narrow a basis of franchise as to render them liable to
corruption and abuse as the rotten boroughs of the old system.  It threw
no new power into the hands of the people; and with no little justice has
O'Connell himself termed it an act to restore to power the Orange
ascendancy in Ireland, and to enable a faction to trample with impunity
on the friends of reform and constitutional freedom. [Letters to the
Reformers of Great Britain, No. 1.]

In May, 1832, O'Connell commenced the publication of his celebrated
_Letters to the Reformers of Great Britain_.  Like Tallien, before the
French convention, he "rent away the veil" which Hume and Atwood had only
partially lifted.  He held up before the people of Great Britain the new
indignities which had been added to the long catalogue of Ireland's
wrongs; he appealed to their justice, their honor, their duty, for
redress, and cast down before the Whig administration the gauntlet of his
country's defiance and scorn.  There is a fine burst of indignant Irish
feeling in the concluding paragraphs of his fourth letter:--

"I have demonstrated the contumelious injuries inflicted upon us by this
Reform Bill.  My letters are long before the public.  They have been
unrefuted, uncontradicted in any of their details.  And with this case of
atrocious injustice to Ireland placed before the reformers of Great
Britain, what assistance, what sympathy, do we receive?  Why, I have got
some half dozen drivelling letters from political unions and political
characters, asking me whether I advise them to petition or bestir
themselves in our behalf!

"Reformers of Great Britain! I do not ask you either to petition or be
silent.  I do not ask you to petition or to do any other act in favor of
the Irish.  You will consult your own feelings of justice and generosity,
unprovoked by any advice or entreaty of mine.

"For my own part, I never despaired of Ireland; I do not, I will not,
I cannot, despair of my beloved country.  She has, in my view, obtained
freedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself.  She has shaken
off the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out its
folly and its falsehoods.  She can, and she will, obtain for herself
justice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at British
neglect and ingratitude, there is no sound of despair in that sigh, nor
any want of moral energy on her part to attain her own rights by
peaceable and legal means."

The tithe system, unutterably odious and full of all injustice, had
prepared the way for this expression of feeling on the part of the
people.  Ireland had never, in any period of her history, bowed her neck
peaceably to the ecclesiastical yoke.  From the Canon of Cashel, prepared
by English deputies in the twelfth century, decreeing for the first time
that tithes should be paid in Ireland, down to the present moment, the
Church in her borders has relied solely upon the strong arm of the law,
and literally reaped its tithes with the sword.  The decree of the Dublin
Synod, under Archbishop Comyn, in 1185, could only be enforced within the
pale of the English settlement.  The attempts of Henry VIII. also failed.
Without the pale all endeavors to collect tithes were met by stern
opposition.  And although from the time of William III. the tithe system
has been established in Ireland, yet at no period has it been regarded
otherwise than as a system of legalized robbery by seven eighths of the
people.  An examination of this system cannot fail to excite our wonder,
not that it has been thus regarded, but that it has been so long endured
by any people on the face of the earth, least of all by Irishmen.  Tithes
to the amount of L1,000,000 are annually wrung from impoverished Ireland,
in support of a clergy who can only number about one sixteenth of her
population as their hearers; and wrung, too, in an undue proportion, from
the Catholic counties. [See Dr. Doyle's Evidence before Hon. E. G.
Stanley.]  In the southern and middle counties, almost entirely inhabited
by the Catholic peasantry, every thing they possess is subject to the
tithe: the cow is seized in the hovel, the potato in the barrel, the coat
even on the poor man's back. [Speech of T. Reynolds, Esq., at an anti-
tithe meeting.]  The revenues of five of the dignitaries of the Irish
Church Establishment are as follows: the Primacy L140,000; Derry
L120,000; Kilmore L100,000; Clogher L100,000; Waterford L70,000.  Compare
these enormous sums with that paid by Scotland for the maintenance of the
Church, namely L270,000.  Yet that Church has 2,000,000 souls under its
care, while that of Ireland has not above 500,000.  Nor are these
princely livings expended in Ireland by their possessors.  The bishoprics
of Cloyne and Meath have been long held by absentees,--by men who know no
more of their flocks than the non-resident owner of a West India
plantation did of the miserable negroes, the fruits of whose thankless
labor were annually transmitted to him.  Out of 1289 benefited clergymen
in Ireland, between five and six hundred are non-residents, spending in
Bath and London, or in making the fashionable tour of the Continent, the
wealth forced from the Catholic peasant and the Protestant dissenter by
the bayonets of the military.  Scorching and terrible was the sarcasm of
Grattan applied to these locusts of the Church: "A beastly and pompous
priesthood, political potentates and Christian pastors, full of false
zeal, full of worldly pride, and full of gluttony, empty of the true
religion, to their flocks oppressive, to their inferior clergy brutal, to
their king abject, and to their God impudent and familiar,--they stand on
the altar as a stepping-stone to the throne, glorying in the ear of
princes, whom they poison with crooked principles and heated advice; a
faction against their king when they are not his slaves,--ever the dirt
under his feet or a poniard to his heart."

For the evils of absenteeism, the non-residence of the wealthy
landholders, draining from a starving country the very necessaries of
life, a remedy is sought in a repeal of the union, and the provisions of
a domestic parliament.  In O'Connell's view, a restoration of such a
parliament can alone afford that adequate protection to the national
industry so loudly demanded by thousands of unemployed laborers, starving
amid the ruins of deserted manufactories.  During the brief period of
partial Irish liberty which followed the pacific revolution of '82, the
manufactures of the country revived and flourished; and the smile of
contented industry was visible all over the land.  In 1797 there were
15,000 silk-weavers in the city of Dublin alone.  There are now but 400.
Such is the practical effect of the Union, of that suicidal act of the
Irish Parliament which yielded up in a moment of treachery and terror the
dearest interests of the country to the legislation of an English
Parliament and the tender mercies of Castlereagh,--of that Castlereagh
who, when accused by Grattan of spending L15,000 in purchasing votes for
the Union, replied with the rare audacity of high-handed iniquity, "We
did spend L15,000, and we would have spent L15,000,000 if necessary to
carry the Union; "that Castlereagh who, when 707,000 Irishmen petitioned
against the Union and 300,000 for it, maintained that the latter
constituted the majority!  Well has it been said that the deep vengeance
which Ireland owed him was inflicted by the great criminal upon himself.
The nation which he sold and plundered saw him make with his own hand the
fearful retribution.  The great body of the Irish people never assented
to the Union.  The following extract from a speech of Earl (then Mr.)
Grey, in 1800, upon the Union question, will show what means were made
use of to drag Ireland, while yet mourning over her slaughtered children,
to the marriage altar with England: "If the Parliament of Ireland had
been left to itself, untempted and unawed, it would without hesitation
have rejected the resolutions.  Out of the 300 members, 120 strenuously
opposed the measure, 162 voted for it: of these, 116 were placemen; some
of them were English generals on the staff, without a foot of ground in
Ireland, and completely dependent on government."  "Let us reflect upon
the arts made use of since the last session of the Irish Parliament to
pack a majority, for Union, in the House of Commons.  All persons holding
offices under government, if they hesitated to vote as directed, were
stripped of all their employments.  A bill framed for preserving the
purity of Parliament was likewise abused, and no less than 63 seats were
vacated by their holders having received nominal offices."

The signs of the times are most favorable to the success of the Irish
Liberator.  The tremendous power of the English political unions is
beginning to develop itself in favor of Ireland.  A deep sympathy is
evinced for her sufferings, and a general determination to espouse her
cause.  Brute force cannot put down the peaceable and legal agitation of
the question of her rights and interests.  The spirit of the age forbids
it.  The agitation will go on, for it is spreading among men who, to use
the words of the eloquent Shiel, while looking out upon the ocean, and
gazing upon the shore, which Nature has guarded with so many of her
bulwarks, can hear the language of Repeal muttered in the dashing of the
very waves which separate them from Great Britain by a barrier of God's
own creation.  Another bloodless victory, we trust, awaits O'Connell,--a
victory worthy of his heart and intellect, unstained by one drop of human
blood, unmoistened by a solitary tear.

Ireland will be redeemed and disenthralled, not perhaps by a repeal of
the Union, but by the accomplishment of such a thorough reform in the
government and policy of Great Britain as shall render a repeal
unnecessary and impolitic.

The sentiments of O'Connell in regard to the means of effecting his
object of political reform are distinctly impressed upon all his appeals
to the people.  In his letter of December, 1832, to the Dublin Trades
Union, he says: "The Repealers must not have our cause stained with
blood.  Far indeed from it.  We can, and ought to, carry the repeal only
in the total absence of offence against the laws of man or crime in the
sight of God.  The best revolution which was ever effected could not be
worth one drop of human blood."  In his speech at the public dinner given
him by--the citizens of Cork, we find a yet more earnest avowal of
pacific principles.  "It may be stated," said he, "to countervail our
efforts, that this struggle will involve the destruction of life and
property; that it will overturn the framework of civil society, and give
an undue and fearful influence to one rank to the ruin of all others.
These are awful considerations, truly, if risked.  I am one of those who
have always believed that any political change is too dearly purchased by
a single drop of blood, and who think that any political superstructure
based upon other opinion is like the sand-supported fabric,--beautiful in
the brief hour of sunshine, but the moment one drop of rain touches the
arid basis melting away in wreck and ruin!  I am an accountable being; I
have a soul and a God to answer to, in another and better world, for my
thoughts and actions in this.  I disclaim here any act of mine which
would sport with the lives of my fellow-creatures, any amelioration of
our social condition which must be purchased by their blood.  And here,
in the face of God and of our common country, I protest that if I did not
sincerely and firmly believe that the amelioration I desire could be
effected without violence, without any change in the relative scale of
ranks in the present social condition of Ireland, except that change
which all must desire, making each better than it was before, and
cementing all in one solid irresistible mass, I would at once give up the
struggle which I have always kept with tyranny.  I would withdraw from
the contest which I have hitherto waged with those who would perpetuate
our thraldom.  I would not for one moment dare to venture for that which
in costing one human life would cost infinitely too dear.  But it will
cost no such price.  Have we not had within my memory two great political
revolutions?  And had we them not without bloodshed or violence to the
social compact?  Have we not arrived at a period when physical force and
military power yield to moral and intellectual energy.  Has not the time
of 'Cedant arma togae' come for us and the other nations of the earth?"

Let us trust that the prediction of O'Connell will be verified; that
reason and intellect are destined, under God, to do that for the nations
of the earth which the physical force of centuries and the red sacrifice
of a thousand battle-fields have failed to accomplish.  Glorious beyond
all others will be the day when "nation shall no more rise up against
nation;" when, as a necessary consequence of the universal acknowledgment
of the rights of man, it shall no longer be in the power of an individual
to drag millions into strife, for the unholy gratification of personal
prejudice and passion.  The reformed governments of Great Britain and
France, resting, as they do, upon a popular basis, are already tending to
this consummation, for the people have suffered too much from the warlike
ambition of their former masters not to have learned that the gains of
peaceful industry are better than the wages of human butchery.

Among the great names of Ireland--alike conspicuous, yet widely
dissimilar--stand Wellington and O'Connell.  The one smote down the
modern Alexander upon Waterloo's field of death, but the page of his
reputation is dim with the tears of the widow and the orphan, and dark
with the stain of blood.  The other, armed only with the weapons of truth
and reason, has triumphed over the oppression of centuries, and opened a
peaceful pathway to the Temple of Freedom, through which its Goddess may
be seen, no longer propitiated with human sacrifices, like some foul idol
of the East, but clothed in Christian attributes, and smiling in the
beauty of holiness upon the pure hearts and peaceful hands of its
votaries.  The bloodless victories of the latter have all the sublimity
with none of the criminality which attaches itself to the triumphs of the
former.  To thunder high truths in the deafened ear of nations, to rouse
the better spirit of the age, to soothe the malignant passions of.
assembled and maddened men, to throw open the temple doors of justice to
the abused, enslaved, and persecuted, to unravel the mysteries of guilt,
and hold up the workers of iniquity in the severe light of truth stripped
of their disguise and covered with the confusion of their own vileness,--
these are victories more glorious than any which have ever reddened the
earth with carnage:--

         "They ask a spirit of more exalted pitch,
          And courage tempered with a holier fire."

Of the more recent efforts of O'Connell we need not speak, for no one can
read the English periodicals and papers without perceiving that O'Connell
is, at this moment, the leading politician, the master mind of the
British empire.  Attempts have been made to prejudice the American mind
against him by a republication on this side of the water of the false and
foul slanders of his Tory enemies, in reference to what is called the
"O'Connell rent," a sum placed annually in his hands by a grateful
people, and which he has devoted scrupulously to the great object of
Ireland's political redemption.  He has acquired no riches by his
political efforts his heart and soul and mind and strength have been
directed to his suffering country and the cause of universal freedom.
For this he has deservedly a place in the heart and affections of every
son of Ireland.  One million of ransomed slaves in the British
dependencies will teach their children to repeat the name of O'Connell
with that of Wilberforce and Clarkson.  And when the stain and caste of
slavery shall have passed from our own country, he will be regarded as
our friend and benefactor, whose faithful rebukes and warnings and
eloquent appeals to our pride of character, borne to us across the
Atlantic, touched the guilty sensitiveness of the national conscience,
and through shame prepared the way for repentance.







ENGLAND UNDER JAMES II.

     A review of the first two volumes of Macaulay's _History of England
     from the Accession of James II_.

In accordance with the labor-saving spirit of the age, we have in these
volumes an admirable example of history made easy.  Had they been
published in his time, they might have found favor in the eyes of the
poet Gray, who declared that his ideal of happiness was "to lie on a sofa
and read eternal new romances."

The style is that which lends such a charm to the author's essays,--
brilliant, epigrammatic, vigorous.  Indeed, herein lies the fault of the
work, when viewed as a mere detail of historical facts.  Its sparkling
rhetoric is not the safest medium of truth to the simple-minded inquirer.
A discriminating and able critic has done the author no injustice in
saying that, in attempting to give effect and vividness to his thoughts
and diction, he is often overstrained and extravagant, and that his
epigrammatic style seems better fitted for the glitter of paradox than
the sober guise of truth.  The intelligent and well-informed reader of
the volume before us will find himself at times compelled to reverse the
decisions of the author, and deliver some unfortunate personage, sect, or
class from the pillory of his rhetoric and the merciless pelting of his
ridicule.  There is a want of the repose and quiet which we look for in
a narrative of events long passed away; we rise from the perusal of the
book pleased and excited, but with not so clear a conception of the
actual realities of which it treats as would be desirable.  We cannot
help feeling that the author has been somewhat over-scrupulous in
avoiding the dulness of plain detail, and the dryness of dates, names,
and statistics.  The freedom, flowing diction, and sweeping generality of
the reviewer and essayist are maintained throughout; and, with one
remarkable exception, the _History of England_ might be divided into
papers of magazine length, and published, without any violence to
propriety, as a continuation of the author's labors in that department of
literature in which he confessedly stands without a rival,--historical
review.

That exception is, however, no unimportant one.  In our view, it is the
crowning excellence of the first volume,--its distinctive feature and
principal attraction.  We refer to the third chapter of the volume, from
page 260 to page 398,--the description of the condition of England at the
period of the accession of James II.  We know of nothing like it in the
entire range of historical literature.  The veil is lifted up from the
England of a century and a half ago; its geographical, industrial,
social, and moral condition is revealed; and, as the panorama passes
before us of lonely heaths, fortified farm-houses, bands of robbers,
rude country squires doling out the odds and ends of their coarse fare
to clerical dependents,--rough roads, serviceable only for horseback
travelling,--towns with unlighted streets, reeking with filth and offal,
--and prisons, damp, loathsome, infected with disease, and swarming with
vermin,--we are filled with wonder at the contrast which it presents to
the England of our day.  We no longer sigh for "the good old days."  The
most confirmed grumbler is compelled to admit that, bad as things now
are, they were far worse a few generations back.  Macaulay, in this
elaborate and carefully prepared chapter, has done a good service to
humanity in disabusing well-intentioned ignorance of the melancholy
notion that the world is growing worse, and in putting to silence the
cant of blind, unreasoning conservatism.

In 1685 the entire population of England our author estimates at from
five millions to five millions five hundred thousand.  Of the eight
hundred thousand families at that period, one half had animal food twice
a week.  The other half ate it not at all, or at most not oftener than
once a week.  Wheaten, loaves were only seen at the tables of the
comparatively wealthy.  Rye, barley, and oats were the food of the vast
majority.  The average wages of workingmen was at least one half less
than is paid in England for the same service at the present day.  One
fifth of the people were paupers, or recipients of parish relief.
Clothing and bedding were scarce and dear.  Education was almost unknown
to the vast majority.  The houses and shops were not numbered in the
cities, for porters, coachmen, and errand-runners could not read.  The
shopkeeper distinguished his place of business by painted signs and
graven images.  Oxford and Cambridge Universities were little better than
modern grammar and Latin school in a provincial village.  The country
magistrate used on the bench language too coarse, brutal, and vulgar for
a modern tap-room.  Fine gentlemen in London vied with each other in the
lowest ribaldry and the grossest profanity.  The poets of the time, from
Dryden to Durfey, ministered to the popular licentiousness.  The most
shameless indecency polluted their pages.  The theatre and the brothel
were in strict unison.  The Church winked at the vice which opposed
itself to the austere morality or hypocrisy of Puritanism.  The superior
clergy, with a few noble exceptions, were self-seekers and courtiers; the
inferior were idle, ignorant hangerson upon blaspheming squires and
knights of the shire.  The domestic chaplain, of all men living, held the
most unenviable position.  "If he was permitted to dine with the family,
he was expected to content himself with the plainest fare.  He might fill
himself with the corned beef and carrots; but as soon as the tarts and
cheese-cakes made their appearance he quitted his seat, and stood aloof
till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great part
of which he had been excluded."

Beyond the Trent the country seems at this period to have been in a state
of barbarism.  The parishes kept bloodhounds for the purpose of hunting
freebooters.  The farm-houses were fortified and guarded.  So dangerous
was the country that persons about travelling thither made their wills.
Judges and lawyers only ventured therein, escorted by a strong guard of
armed men.

The natural resources of the island were undeveloped.  The tin mines of
Cornwall, which two thousand years before attracted the ships of the
merchant princes of Tyre beyond the Pillars of Hercules, were indeed
worked to a considerable extent; but the copper mines, which now yield
annually fifteen thousand tons, were entirely neglected.  Rock salt was
known to exist, but was not used to any considerable extent; and only a
partial supply of salt by evaporation was obtained.  The coal and iron of
England are at this time the stable foundations of her industrial and
commercial greatness.  But in 1685 the great part of the iron used was
imported.  Only about ten thousand tons were annually cast.  Now eight
hundred thousand is the average annual production.  Equally great has
been the increase in coal mining.  "Coal," says Macaulay, "though very
little used in any species of manufacture, was already the ordinary fuel
in some districts which were fortunate enough to possess large beds, and
in the capital, which could easily be supplied by water carriage.  It
seems reasonable to believe that at least one half of the quantity then
extracted from the pits was consumed in London.  The, consumption of
London seemed to the writers of that age enormous, and was often
mentioned by them as a proof of the greatness of the imperial city.  They
scarcely hoped to be believed when they affirmed that two hundred and
eighty thousand chaldrons--that is to say, about three hundred and fifty
thousand tons-were, in the last year of the reign of Charles II., brought
to the Thames.  At present near three millions and a half of tons are
required yearly by the metropolis; and the whole annual produce cannot,
on the most moderate computation, be estimated at less than twenty
millions of tons."

After thus passing in survey the England of our ancestors five or six
generations back, the author closes his chapter with some eloquent
remarks upon the progress of society.  Contrasting the hardness and
coarseness of the age of which he treats with the softer and more humane
features of our own, he says: "Nowhere could be found that sensitive and
restless compassion which has in our time extended powerful protection to
the factory child, the Hindoo widow, to the negro slave; which pries into
the stores and water-casks of every emigrant ship; which winces at every
lash laid on the back of a drunken soldier; which will not suffer the
thief in the hulks to be ill fed or overworked; and which has repeatedly
endeavored to save the life even of the murderer.  The more we study the
annals of the past, the more shall we rejoice that we live in a merciful
age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even when
deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty.  Every
class, doubtless, has gained largely by this great moral change; but the
class which has gained most is the poorest, the most dependent, and the
most defenceless."

The history itself properly commences at the close of this chapter.
Opening with the deathscene of the dissolute Charles II., it presents a
series of brilliant pictures of the events succeeding: The miserable fate
of Oates and Dangerfield, the perjured inventors of the Popish Plot; the
trial of Baxter by the infamous Jeffreys; the ill-starred attempt of the
Duke of Monmouth; the battle of Sedgemoor, and the dreadful atrocities of
the king's soldiers, and the horrible perversion of justice by the king's
chief judge in the "Bloody Assizes;" the barbarous hunting of the Scotch
Dissenters by Claverbouse; the melancholy fate of the brave and noble
Duke of Argyle,--are described with graphic power unknown to Smollett or
Hume.  Personal portraits are sketched with a bold freedom which at times
startles us.  The "old familiar faces," as we have seen them through the
dust of a century and a half, start before us with lifelike distinctness
of outline and coloring.  Some of them disappoint us; like the ghost of
Hamlet's father, they come in a "questionable shape."  Thus, for
instance, in his sketch of William Penn, the historian takes issue with
the world on his character, and labors through many pages of disingenuous
innuendoes and distortion of facts to transform the saint of history into
a pliant courtier.

The second volume details the follies and misfortunes, the decline and
fall, of the last of the Stuarts.  All the art of the author's splendid
rhetoric is employed in awakening, by turns, the indignation and contempt
of the reader in contemplating the character of the wrong-headed king.
In portraying that character, he has brought into exercise all those
powers of invective and merciless ridicule which give such a savage
relish to his delineation of Barrere.  To preserve the consistency of
this character, he denies the king any credit for whatever was really
beneficent and praiseworthy in his government.  He holds up the royal
delinquent in only two lights: the one representing him as a tyrant
towards his people; the other as the abject slave of foreign priests,--
a man at once hateful and ludicrous, of whom it is difficult to speak
without an execration or a sneer.

The events which preceded the revolution of 1688; the undisguised
adherence of the king to the Church of Rome; the partial toleration of
the despised Quakers and Anabaptists; the gradual relaxation of the
severity of the penal laws against Papists and Dissenters, preparing the
way for the royal proclamation of entire liberty of conscience throughout
the British realm, allowing the crop-eared Puritan and the Papist priest
to build conventicles and mass houses under the very eaves of the palaces
of Oxford and Canterbury; the mining and countermining of Jesuits and
prelates, are detailed with impartial minuteness.  The secret springs of
the great movements of the time are laid bare; the mean and paltry
instrumentalities are seen at work in the under world of corruption,
prejudice, and falsehood.  No one, save a blind, unreasoning partisan of
Catholicism or Episcopacy, can contemplate this chapter in English
history without a feeling of disgust.  However it may have been overruled
for good by that Providence which takes the wise in their own craftiness,
the revolution of 1688, in itself considered, affords just as little
cause for self-congratulation on the part of Protestants as the
substitution of the supremacy of the crowned Bluebeard, Henry VIII., for
that of the Pope, in the English Church.  It had little in common with
the revolution of 1642.  The field of its action was the closet of
selfish intrigue,--the stalls of discontented prelates,--the chambers of
the wanton and adulteress,--the confessional of a weak prince, whose
mind, originally narrow, had been cramped closer still by the strait-
jacket of religious bigotry and superstition.  The age of nobility and
heroism had well-nigh passed away.  The pious fervor, the self-denial,
and the strict morality of the Puritanism of the days of Cromwell, and
the blunt honesty and chivalrous loyalty of the Cavaliers, had both
measurably given place to the corrupting influences of the licentious and
infidel court of Charles II.; and to the arrogance, intolerance, and
shameless self-seeking of a prelacy which, in its day of triumph and
revenge, had more than justified the terrible denunciations and scathing
gibes of Milton.

Both Catholic and Protestant writers have misrepresented James II.  He
deserves neither the execrations of the one nor the eulogies of the
other.  The candid historian must admit that he was, after all, a better
man than his brother Charles II.  He was a sincere and bigoted Catholic,
and was undoubtedly honest in the declaration, which he made in that
unlucky letter which Burnet ferreted out on the Continent, that he was
prepared to make large steps to build up the Catholic Church in England,
and, if necessary, to become a martyr in her cause.  He was proud,
austere, and self-willed.  In the treatment of his enemies he partook of
the cruel temper of his time.  He was at once ascetic and sensual,
alternating between the hair-shirt of penance and the embraces of
Catharine Sedley.  His situation was one of the most difficult and
embarrassing which can be conceived of.  He was at once a bigoted Papist
and a Protestant pope.  He hated the French domination to which his
brother had submitted; yet his pride as sovereign was subordinated to his
allegiance to Rome and a superstitious veneration for the wily priests
with which Louis XIV. surrounded him.  As the head of Anglican heretics,
he was compelled to submit to conditions galling alike to the sovereign
and the man.  He found, on his accession, the terrible penal laws against
the Papists in full force; the hangman's knife was yet warm with its
ghastly butcher-work of quartering and disembowelling suspected Jesuits
and victims of the lie of Titus Oates; the Tower of London had scarcely
ceased to echo the groans of Catholic confessors stretched on the rack by
Protestant inquisitors.  He was torn by conflicting interests and
spiritual and political contradictions.  The prelates of the Established
Church must share the responsibility of many of the worst acts of the
early part of his reign.  Oxford sent up its lawned deputations to mingle
the voice of adulation with the groans of tortured Covenanters, and
fawning ecclesiastics burned the incense of irreverent flattery under the
nostrils of the Lord's anointed, while the blessed air of England was
tainted by the carcasses of the ill-fated followers of Monmouth, rotting
on a thousand gibbets.  While Jeffreys was threatening Baxter and his
Presbyterian friends with the pillory and whipping-post; while Quakers
and Baptists were only spared from extermination as game preserves for
the sport of clerical hunters; while the prisons were thronged with the
heads of some fifteen thousand beggared families, and Dissenters of every
name and degree were chased from one hiding-place to another, like David
among the cliffs of Ziph and the rocks of the wild goats,--the
thanksgivings and congratulations of prelacy arose in an unbroken strain
of laudation from all the episcopal palaces of England.  What mattered it
to men, in whose hearts, to use the language of John Milton, "the sour
leaven of human traditions, mixed with the poisonous dregs of hypocrisy,
lay basking in the sunny warmth of wealth and promotion, hatching
Antichrist," that the privileges of Englishmen and the rights secured by
the great charter were violated and trodden under foot, so long as
usurpation enured to their own benefit?  But when King James issued his
Declaration of Indulgence, and stretched his prerogative on the side of
tolerance and charity, the zeal of the prelates for preserving the
integrity of the British constitution and the limiting of the royal power
flamed up into rebellion.  They forswore themselves without scruple: the
disciples of Laud, the asserters of kingly infallibility and divine
right, talked of usurped power and English rights in the strain of the
very schismatics whom they had persecuted to the death.  There is no
reason to believe that James supposed that, in issuing his declaration
suspending the penal laws, he had transcended the rightful prerogative of
his throne.  The power which he exercised had been used by his
predecessors for far less worthy purposes, and with the approbation of
many of the very men who now opposed him.  His ostensible object,
expressed in language which even those who condemn his policy cannot but
admire, was a laudable and noble one.  "We trust," said he, "that it will
not be vain that we have resolved to use our utmost endeavors to
establish liberty of conscience on such just and equal foundations as
will render it unalterable, and secure to all people the free exercise of
their religion, by which future ages may reap the benefit of what is so
undoubtedly the general good of the whole kingdom."  Whatever may have
been the motive of this declaration,--even admitting the suspicions of
his enemies to have been true, that he advocated universal toleration as
the only means of restoring Roman Catholics to all the rights and
privileges of which the penal laws deprived them,--it would seem that
there could have been no very serious objection on the part of real
friends of religious toleration to the taking of him at his word and
placing Englishmen of every sect on an equality before the law.  The
Catholics were in a very small minority, scarcely at that time as
numerous as the Quakers and Anabaptists.  The army, the navy, and nine
tenths of the people of England were Protestants.  Real danger,
therefore, from a simple act of justice towards their Catholic fellow-
citizens, the people of England had no ground for apprehending.  But the
great truth, which is even now but imperfectly recognized throughout
Christendom, that religious opinions rest between man and his Maker, and
not between man and the magistrate, and that the domain of conscience is
sacred, was almost unknown to the statesmen and schoolmen of the
seventeenth century.  Milton--ultra liberal as he was--excepted the
Catholics from his plan of toleration.  Locke, yielding to the prejudices
of the time, took the same ground.  The enlightened latitudinarian
ministers of the Established Church--men whose talents and Christian
charity redeem in some measure the character of that Church in the day of
its greatest power and basest apostasy--stopped short of universal
toleration.  The Presbyterians excluded Quakers, Baptists, and Papists
from the pale of their charity.  With the single exception of the sect of
which William Penn was a conspicuous member, the idea of complete and
impartial toleration was novel and unwelcome to all sects and classes of
the English people.  Hence it was that the very men whose liberties and
estates had been secured by the declaration, and who were thereby
permitted to hold their meetings in peace and quietness, used their newly
acquired freedom in denouncing the king, because the same key which had
opened their prison doors had also liberated the Papists and the Quakers.
Baxter's severe and painful spirit could not rejoice in an act which had,
indeed, restored him to personal freedom, but which had, in his view,
also offended Heaven, and strengthened the powers of Antichrist by
extending the same favor to Jesuits and Ranters.  Bunyan disliked the
Quakers next to the Papists; and it greatly lessened his satisfaction at
his release from Bedford jail that it had been brought about by the
influence of the former at the court of a Catholic prince.  Dissenters
forgot the wrongs and persecutions which they had experienced at the
hands of the prelacy, and joined the bishops in opposition to the
declaration.  They almost magnified into Christian confessors the
prelates who remonstrated against the indulgence, and actually plotted
against the king for restoring them to liberty of person and conscience.
The nightmare fear of Popery overcame their love of religious liberty;
and they meekly offered their necks to the yoke of prelacy as the only
security against the heavier one of Papist supremacy.  In a far different
manner the cleareyed and plain-spoken John Milton met the claims and
demands of the hierarchy in his time.  "They entreat us," said he, "that
we be not weary of the insupportable grievances that our shoulders have
hitherto cracked under; they beseech us that we think them fit to be our
justices of peace, our lords, our highest officers of state.  They pray
us that it would please us to let them still haul us and wrong us with
their bandogs and pursuivants; and that it would please the Parliament
that they may yet have the whipping, fleecing, and flaying of us in their
diabolical courts, to tear the flesh from our bones, and into our wide
wounds, instead of balm, to pour in the oil of tartar, vitriol, and
mercury.  Surely a right, reasonable, innocent, and soft-hearted
petition!  O the relenting bowels of the fathers!"

Considering the prominent part acted by William Penn in the reign of
James II., and his active and influential support of the obnoxious
declaration which precipitated the revolution of 1688, it could hardly
have been otherwise than that his character should suffer from the
unworthy suspicions and prejudices of his contemporaries.  His views of
religious toleration were too far in advance of the age to be received
with favor.  They were of necessity misunderstood and misrepresented.
All his life he had been urging them with the earnestness of one whose
convictions were the result, not so much of human reason as of what he
regarded as divine illumination.  What the council of James yielded upon
grounds of state policy he defended on those of religious obligation.
He had suffered in person and estate for the exercise of his religion.
He had travelled over Holland and Germany, pleading with those in
authority for universal toleration and charity.  On a sudden, on the
accession of James, the friend of himself and his family, he found
himself the most influential untitled citizen in the British realm.
He had free access to the royal ear.  Asking nothing for himself or his
relatives, he demanded only that the good people of England should be no
longer despoiled of liberty and estate for their religious opinions.
James, as a Catholic, had in some sort a common interest with his
dissenting subjects, and the declaration was for their common relief.
Penn, conscious of the rectitude of his own motives and thoroughly
convinced of the Christian duty of toleration, welcomed that declaration
as the precursor of the golden age of liberty and love and good-will to
men.  He was not the man to distrust the motives of an act so fully in
accordance with his lifelong aspirations and prayers.  He was charitable
to a fault: his faith in his fellow-men was often stronger than a clearer
insight of their characters would have justified.  He saw the errors of
the king, and deplored them; he denounced Jeffreys as a butcher who had
been let loose by the priests; and pitied the king, who was, he thought,
swayed by evil counsels.  He remonstrated against the interference of the
king with Magdalen College; and reproved and rebuked the hopes and aims
of the more zealous and hot-headed Catholics, advising them to be content
with simple toleration.  But the constitution of his mind fitted him
rather for the commendation of the good than the denunciation of the bad.
He had little in common with the bold and austere spirit of the Puritan
reformers.  He disliked their violence and harshness; while, on the other
hand, he was attracted and pleased by the gentle disposition and mild
counsels of Locke, and Tillotson, and the latitudinarians of the English
Church.  He was the intimate personal and political friend of Algernon
Sydney; sympathized with his republican theories, and shared his
abhorrence of tyranny, civil and ecclesiastical.  He found in him a man
after his own heart,--genial, generous, and loving; faithful to duty and
the instincts of humanity; a true Christian gentleman.  His sense of
gratitude was strong, and his personal friendships sometimes clouded his
judgment.  In giving his support to the measures of James in behalf of
liberty of conscience, it must be admitted that he acted in consistency
with his principles and professions.  To have taken ground against them,
he must have given the lie to his declarations from his youth upward.  He
could not disown and deny his own favorite doctrine because it came from
the lips of a Catholic king and his Jesuit advisers; and in thus rising
above the prejudices of his time, and appealing to the reason and
humanity of the people of England in favor of a cordial indorsement on
the part of Parliament of the principles of the declaration, he believed
that he was subserving the best interests of his beloved country and
fulfilling the solemn obligations of religious duty.  The downfall of
James exposed Penn to peril and obloquy.  Perjured informers endeavored
to swear away his life; and, although nothing could be proved against him
beyond the fact that he had steadily supported the great measure of
toleration, he was compelled to live secluded in his private lodgings in
London for two or three years, with a proclamation for his arrest hanging
over his head.  At length, the principal informer against him having been
found guilty of perjury, the government warrant was withdrawn; and Lords
Sidney, Rochester, and Somers, and the Duke of Buckingham, publicly bore
testimony that nothing had been urged against him save by impostors, and
that "they had known him, some of them, for thirty years, and had never
known him to do an ill thing, but many good offices."  It is a matter of
regret that one professing to hold the impartial pen of history should
have given the sanction of his authority to the slanderous and false
imputations of such a man as Burnet, who has never been regarded as an
authentic chronicler.  The pantheon of history should not be lightly
disturbed.  A good man's character is the world's common legacy; and
humanity is not so rich in models of purity and goodness as to be able to
sacrifice such a reputation as that of William Penn to the point of an
antithesis or the effect of a paradox.

     Gilbert Burnet, in liberality as a politician and tolerance as a
     Churchman, was far in advance of his order and time.  It is true
     that he shut out the Catholics from the pale of his charity and
     barely tolerated the Dissenters.  The idea of entire religious
     liberty and equality shocked even his moderate degree of
     sensitiveness.  He met Penn at the court of the Prince of Orange,
     and, after a long and fruitless effort to convince the Dissenter
     that the penal laws against the Catholics should be enforced, and
     allegiance to the Established Church continue the condition of
     qualification for offices of trust and honor, and that he and his
     friends should rest contented with simple toleration, he became
     irritated by the inflexible adherence of Penn to the principle of
     entire religious freedom.  One of the most worthy sons of the
     Episcopal Church, Thomas Clarkson, alluding to this discussion, says
     "Burnet never mentioned him (Penn) afterwards but coldly or
     sneeringly, or in a way to lower him in the estimation of the
     reader, whenever he had occasion to speak of him in his History of
     his Own Times."

     He was a man of strong prejudices; he lived in the midst of
     revolutions, plots, and intrigues; he saw much of the worst side of
     human nature; and he candidly admits, in the preface to his great
     work, that he was inclined to think generally the worst of men and
     parties, and that the reader should make allowance for this
     inclination, although he had honestly tried to give the truth.  Dr.
     King, of Oxford, in his Anecdotes of his Own Times, p. 185, says:
     "I knew Burnet: he was a furious party-man, and easily imposed upon
     by any lying spirit of his faction; but he was a better pastor than
     any man who is now seated on the bishops' bench."  The Tory writers
     --Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and others--have undoubtedly exaggerated
     the defects of Burnet's narrative; while, on the other hand, his
     Whig commentators have excused them on the ground of his avowed and
     fierce partisanship.  Dr. Johnson, in his blunt way, says: "I do not
     believe Burnet intentionally lied; but he was so much prejudiced
     that he took no pains to find out the truth."  On the contrary, Sir
     James Mackintosh, in the Edinburgh Review, speaks of the Bishop as
     an honest writer, seldom substantially erroneous, though often
     inaccurate in points of detail; and Macaulay, who has quite too
     closely followed him in his history, defends him as at least quite
     as accurate as his contemporary writers, and says that, "in his
     moral character, as in his intellectual, great blemishes were more
     than compensated by great excellences."






THE BORDER WAR OF 1708.

The picturesque site of the now large village of Haverhill, on the
Merrimac River, was occupied a century and a half ago by some thirty
dwellings, scattered at unequal distances along the two principal roads,
one of which, running parallel with the river, intersected the other,
which ascended the hill northwardly and lost itself in the dark woods.
The log huts of the first settlers had at that time given place to
comparatively spacious and commodious habitations, framed and covered
with sawed boards, and cloven clapboards, or shingles.  They were, many
of them, two stories in front, with the roof sloping off behind to a
single one; the windows few and small, and frequently so fitted as to be
opened with difficulty, and affording but a scanty supply of light and
air.  Two or three of the best constructed were occupied as garrisons,
where, in addition to the family, small companies of soldiers were
quartered.  On the high grounds rising from the river stood the mansions
of the well-defined aristocracy of the little settlement,--larger and
more imposing, with projecting upper stories and carved cornices.  On the
front of one of these, over the elaborately wrought entablature of the
doorway, might be seen the armorial bearings of the honored family of
Saltonstall.  Its hospitable door was now closed; no guests filled its
spacious hall or partook of the rich delicacies of its ample larder.
Death had been there; its venerable and respected occupant had just been
borne by his peers in rank and station to the neighboring graveyard.
Learned, affable, intrepid, a sturdy asserter of the rights and liberties
of the Province, and so far in advance of his time as to refuse to yield
to the terrible witchcraft delusion, vacating his seat on the bench and
openly expressing his disapprobation of the violent and sanguinary
proceedings of the court, wise in council and prompt in action,--not his
own townsmen alone, but the people of the entire Province, had reason to
mourn the loss of Nathaniel Saltonstall.

Four years before the events of which we are about to speak, the Indian
allies of the French in Canada suddenly made their appearance in the
westerly part of the settlement.  At the close of a midwinter day six
savages rushed into the open gate of a garrison-house owned by one
Bradley, who appears to have been absent at the time.  A sentinel,
stationed in the house, discharged his musket, killing the foremost
Indian, and was himself instantly shot down.  The mistress of the house,
a spirited young woman, was making soap in a large kettle over the fire.
--She seized her ladle and dashed the boiling liquid in the faces of the
assailants, scalding one of them severely, and was only captured after
such a resistance as can scarcely be conceived of by the delicately
framed and tenderly nurtured occupants of the places of our great-
grandmothers.  After plundering the house, the Indians started on their
long winter march for Canada.  Tradition says that some thirteen persons,
probably women and children, were killed outright at the garrison.
Goodwife Bradley and four others were spared as prisoners.  The ground
was covered with deep snow, and the captives were compelled to carry
heavy burdens of their plundered household-stuffs; while for many days in
succession they had no other sustenance than bits of hide, ground-nuts,
the bark of trees, and the roots of wild onions, and lilies.  In this
situation, in the cold, wintry forest, and unattended, the unhappy young
woman gave birth to a child.  Its cries irritated the savages, who
cruelly treated it and threatened its life.  To the entreaties of the
mother they replied, that they would spare it on the condition that it
should be baptized after their fashion.  She gave the little innocent
into their hands, when with mock solemnity they made the sign of the
cross upon its forehead, by gashing it with their knives, and afterwards
barbarously put it to death before the eyes of its mother, seeming to
regard the whole matter as an excellent piece of sport.  Nothing so
strongly excited the risibilities of these grim barbarians as the tears
and cries of their victims, extorted by physical or mental agony.
Capricious alike in their cruelties and their kindnesses, they treated
some of their captives with forbearance and consideration and tormented
others apparently without cause.  One man, on his way to Canada, was
killed because they did not like his looks, "he was so sour;" another,
because he was "old and good for nothing."  One of their own number, who
was suffering greatly from the effects of the scalding soap, was derided
and mocked as a "fool who had let a squaw whip him;" while on the other
hand the energy and spirit manifested by Goodwife Bradley in her defence
was a constant theme of admiration, and gained her so much respect among
her captors as to protect her from personal injury or insult.  On her
arrival in Canada she was sold to a French farmer, by whom she was kindly
treated.

In the mean time her husband made every exertion in his power to
ascertain her fate, and early in the next year learned that she was a
slave in Canada.  He immediately set off through the wilderness on foot,
accompanied only by his dog, who drew a small sled, upon which he carried
some provisions for his sustenance, and a bag of snuff, which the
Governor of the Province gave him as a present to the Governor of Canada.
After encountering almost incredible hardships and dangers with a
perseverance which shows how well he appreciated the good qualities of
his stolen helpmate, he reached Montreal and betook himself to the
Governor's residence.  Travel-worn, ragged, and wasted with cold and
hunger, he was ushered into the presence of M. Vaudreuil.  The courtly
Frenchman civilly received the gift of the bag of snuff, listened to the
poor fellow's story, and put him in a way to redeem his wife without
difficulty.  The joy of the latter on seeing her husband in the strange
land of her captivity may well be imagined.  They returned by water,
landing at Boston early in the summer.

There is a tradition that this was not the goodwife's first experience of
Indian captivity.  The late Dr. Abiel Abbott, in his manuscript of Judith
Whiting's _Recollections of the Indian Wars_, states that she had
previously been a prisoner, probably before her marriage.  After her
return she lived quietly at the garrison-house until the summer of the
next year.  One bright moonlit-night a party of Indians were seen
silently and cautiously approaching.  The only occupants of the garrison
at that time were Bradley, his wife and children, and a servant.  The
three adults armed themselves with muskets, and prepared to defend
themselves.  Goodwife Bradley, supposing the Indians had come with the
intention of again capturing her, encouraged her husband to fight to the
last, declaring that she had rather die on her own hearth than fall into
their hands.  The Indians rushed upon the garrison, and assailed the
thick oaken door, which they forced partly open, when a well-aimed shot
from Goodwife Bradley laid the foremost dead on the threshold.  The loss
of their leader so disheartened them that they made a hasty retreat.

The year 1707 passed away without any attack upon the exposed frontier
settlement.  A feeling of comparative security succeeded to the almost
sleepless anxiety and terror of the inhabitants; and they were beginning
to congratulate each other upon the termination of their long and bitter
trials.  But the end was not yet.

Early in the spring of 1708, the principal tribes of Indians in alliance
with the French held a great council, and agreed to furnish three hundred
warriors for an expedition to the English frontier.

They were joined by one hundred French Canadians and several volunteers,
consisting of officers of the French army, and younger sons of the
nobility, adventurous and unscrupulous.  The Sieur de Chaillons, and
Hertel de Rouville, distinguished as a partisan in former expeditions,
cruel and unsparing as his Indian allies, commanded the French troops;
the Indians, marshalled under their several chiefs, obeyed the general
orders of La Perriere.  A Catholic priest accompanied them.  De Ronville,
with the French troops and a portion of the Indians, took the route by
the River St. Francois about the middle of summer.  La Perriere, with the
French Mohawks, crossed Lake Champlain.  The place of rendezvous was Lake
Nickisipigue.  On the way a Huron accidentally killed one of his
companions; whereupon the tribe insisted on halting and holding a
council.  It was gravely decided that this accident was an evil omen, and
that the expedition would prove disastrous; and, in spite of the
endeavors of the French officers, the whole band deserted.  Next the
Mohawks became dissatisfied, and refused to proceed.  To the entreaties
and promises of their French allies they replied that an infectious
disease had broken out among them, and that, if they remained, it would
spread through the whole army.  The French partisans were not deceived by
a falsehood so transparent; but they were in no condition to enforce
obedience; and, with bitter execrations and reproaches, they saw the
Mohawks turn back on their warpath.  The diminished army pressed on to
Nickisipigue, in the expectation of meeting, agreeably to their promise,
the Norridgewock and Penobscot Indians.  They found the place deserted,
and, after waiting for some days, were forced to the conclusion that the
Eastern tribes had broken their pledge of cooperation.  Under these
circumstances a council was held; and the original design of the
expedition, namely, the destruction of the whole line of frontier towns,
beginning with Portsmouth, was abandoned.  They had still a sufficient
force for the surprise of a single settlement; and Haverhill, on the
Merrimac, was selected for conquest.

In the mean time, intelligence of the expedition, greatly exaggerated in
point of numbers and object, had reached Boston, and Governor Dudley had
despatched troops to the more exposed out posts of the Provinces of
Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  Forty men, under the command of Major
Turner and Captains Price and Gardner, were stationed at Haverhill in the
different garrison-houses.  At first a good degree of vigilance was
manifested; but, as days and weeks passed without any alarm, the
inhabitants relapsed into their old habits; and some even began to
believe that the rumored descent of the Indians was only a pretext for
quartering upon them two-score of lazy, rollicking soldiers, who
certainly seemed more expert in making love to their daughters, and
drinking their best ale and cider, than in patrolling the woods or
putting the garrisons into a defensible state.  The grain and hay harvest
ended without disturbance; the men worked in their fields, and the women
pursued their household avocations, without any very serious apprehension
of danger.

Among the inhabitants of the village was an eccentric, ne'er-do-well
fellow, named Keezar, who led a wandering, unsettled life, oscillating,
like a crazy pendulum, between Haverhill and Amesbury.  He had a
smattering of a variety of trades, was a famous wrestler, and for a mug
of ale would leap over an ox-cart with the unspilled beverage in his
hand.  On one occasion, when at supper, his wife complained that she had
no tin dishes; and, as there were none to be obtained nearer than Boston,
he started on foot in the evening, travelled through the woods to the
city, and returned with his ware by sunrise the next morning, passing
over a distance of between sixty and seventy miles.  The tradition of his
strange habits, feats of strength, and wicked practical jokes is still
common in his native town.  On the morning of the 29th of the eighth
month he was engaged in taking home his horse, which, according to his
custom, he had turned into his neighbor's rich clover field the evening
previous.  By the gray light of dawn he saw a long file of men marching
silently towards the town.  He hurried back to the village and gave the
alarm by firing a gun.  Previous to this, however, a young man belonging
to a neighboring town, who had been spending the night with a young woman
of the village, had met the advance of the war-party, and, turning back
in extreme terror and confusion, thought only of the safety of his
betrothed, and passed silently through a considerable part of the village
to her dwelling.  After he had effectually concealed her he ran out to
give the alarm.  But it was too late.  Keezar's gun was answered by the
terrific yells, whistling, and whooping of the Indians.  House after
house was assailed and captured.  Men, women, and children were
massacred.  The minister of the town was killed by a shot through his
door.  Two of his children were saved by the courage and sagacity of his
negro slave Hagar.  She carried them into the cellar and covered them
with tubs, and then crouched behind a barrel of meat just in time to
escape the vigilant eyes of the enemy, who entered the cellar and
plundered it.  She saw them pass and repass the tubs under which the
children lay and take meat from the very barrel which concealed herself.
Three soldiers were quartered in the house; but they made no defence, and
were killed while begging for quarter.

The wife of Thomas Hartshorne, after her husband and three sons had
fallen, took her younger children into the cellar, leaving an infant on a
bed in the garret, fearful that its cries would betray her place of
concealment if she took it with her.  The Indians entered the garret and
tossed the child out of the window upon a pile of clapboards, where it
was afterwards found stunned and insensible.  It recovered, nevertheless,
and became a man of remarkable strength and stature; and it used to be a
standing joke with his friends that he had been stinted by the Indians
when they threw him out of the window.  Goodwife Swan, armed with a long
spit, successfully defended her door against two Indians.  While the
massacre went on, the priest who accompanied the expedition, with some of
the French officers, went into the meeting-house, the walls of which were
afterwards found written over with chalk.  At sunrise, Major Turner, with
a portion of his soldiers, entered the village; and the enemy made a
rapid retreat, carrying with them seventeen, prisoners.  They were
pursued and overtaken just as they were entering the woods; and a severe
skirmish took place, in which the rescue of some of the prisoners was
effected.  Thirty of the enemy were left dead on the field, including the
infamous Hertel de Rouville.  On the part of the villagers, Captains Ayer
and Wainwright and Lieutenant Johnson, with thirteen others, were killed.
The intense heat of the weather made it necessary to bury the dead on the
same day.  They were laid side by side in a long trench in the burial-
ground.  The body of the venerated and lamented minister, with those of
his wife and child, sleep in another part of the burial-ground, where may
still be seen a rude monument with its almost llegible inscription:--

"_Clauditur hoc tumulo corpus Reverendi pii doctique viri D. Benjamin
Rolfe, ecclesiae Christi quae est in Haverhill pastoris fidelissimi; qui
domi suae ab hostibus barbare trucidatus.  A laboribus suis requievit
mane diei sacrae quietis, Aug. XXIX, anno Dom. MDCCVIII.  AEtatis suae
XLVI_."

Of the prisoners taken, some escaped during the skirmish, and two or
three were sent back by the French officers, with a message to the
English soldiers, that, if they pursued the party on their retreat to
Canada, the other prisoners should be put to death.  One of them, a
soldier stationed in Captain Wainwright's garrison, on his return four
years after, published an account of his captivity.  He was compelled to
carry a heavy pack, and was led by an Indian by a cord round his neck.
The whole party suffered terribly from hunger.  On reaching Canada the
Indians shaved one side of his head, and greased the other, and painted
his face.  At a fort nine miles from Montreal a council was held in order
to decide his fate; and he had the unenviable privilege of listening to a
protracted discussion upon the expediency of burning him.  The fire was
already kindled, and the poor fellow was preparing to meet his doom with
firmness, when it was announced to him that his life was spared.  This
result of the council by no means satisfied the women and boys, who had
anticipated rare sport in the roasting of a white man and a heretic.  One
squaw assailed him with a knife and cut off one of his fingers; another
beat him with a pole.  The Indians spent the night in dancing and
singing, compelling their prisoner to go round the ring with them.  In
the morning one of their orators made a long speech to him, and formally
delivered him over to an old squaw, who took him to her wigwam and
treated him kindly.  Two or three of the young women who were carried
away captive married Frenchmen in Canada and never returned.  Instances
of this kind were by no means rare during the Indian wars.  The simple
manners, gayety, and social habits of the French colonists among whom the
captives were dispersed seem to have been peculiarly fascinating to the
daughters of the grave and severe Puritans.

At the beginning of the present century, Judith Whiting was the solitary
survivor of all who witnessed the inroad of the French and Indians in
1708.  She was eight years of age at the time of the attack, and her
memory of it to the last was distinct and vivid.  Upon her old brain,
from whence a great portion of the records of the intervening years had
been obliterated, that terrible picture, traced with fire and blood,
retained its sharp outlines and baleful colors.





THE GREAT IPSWICH FRIGHT.

               "The Frere into the dark gazed forth;
               The sounds went onward towards the north
               The murmur of tongues, the tramp and tread
               Of a mighty army to battle led."
                                       BALLAD OF THE CID.



Life's tragedy and comedy are never far apart.  The ludicrous and the
sublime, the grotesque and the pathetic, jostle each other on the stage;
the jester, with his cap and bells, struts alongside of the hero; the
lord mayor's pageant loses itself in the mob around Punch and Judy; the
pomp and circumstance of war become mirth-provoking in a militia muster;
and the majesty of the law is ridiculous in the mock dignity of a
justice's court.  The laughing philosopher of old looked on one side of
life and his weeping contemporary on the other; but he who has an eye to
both must often experience that contrariety of feeling which Sterne
compares to "the contest in the moist eyelids of an April morning,
whether to laugh or cry."

The circumstance we are about to relate, may serve as an illustration of
the way in which the woof of comedy interweaves with the warp of tragedy.
It occurred in the early stages of the American Revolution, and is part
and parcel of its history in the northeastern section of Massachusetts.

About midway between Salem and the ancient town of Newburyport, the
traveller on the Eastern Railroad sees on the right, between him and the
sea, a tall church-spire, rising above a semicircle of brown roofs and
venerable elms; to which a long scalloping range of hills, sweeping off
to the seaside, forms a green background.  This is Ipswich, the ancient
Agawam; one of those steady, conservative villages, of which a few are
still left in New England, wherein a contemporary of Cotton Mather and
Governor Endicott, were he permitted to revisit the scenes of his painful
probation, would scarcely feel himself a stranger.  Law and Gospel,
embodied in an orthodox steeple and a court-house, occupy the steep,
rocky eminence in its midst; below runs the small river under its
picturesque stone bridge; and beyond is the famous female seminary, where
Andover theological students are wont to take unto themselves wives of
the daughters of the Puritans.  An air of comfort and quiet broods over
the whole town.  Yellow moss clings to the seaward sides of the roofs;
one's eyes are not endangered by the intense glare of painted shingles
and clapboards.  The smoke of hospitable kitchens curls up through the
overshadowing elms from huge-throated chimneys, whose hearth-stones have
been worn by the feet of many generations.  The tavern was once renowned
throughout New England, and it is still a creditable hostelry.  During
court time it is crowded with jocose lawyers, anxious clients, sleepy
jurors, and miscellaneous hangers on; disinterested gentlemen, who have
no particular business of their own in court, but who regularly attend
its sessions, weighing evidence, deciding upon the merits of a lawyer's
plea or a judge's charge, getting up extempore trials upon the piazza or
in the bar-room of cases still involved in the glorious uncertainty of
the law in the court-house, proffering gratuitous legal advice to
irascible plaintiffs and desponding defendants, and in various other ways
seeing that the Commonwealth receives no detriment.  In the autumn old
sportsmen make the tavern their headquarters while scouring the marshes
for sea-birds; and slim young gentlemen from the city return thither with
empty game-bags, as guiltless in respect to the snipes and wagtails as
Winkle was in the matter of the rooks, after his shooting excursion at
Dingle Dell.  Twice, nay, three times, a year, since third parties have
been in fashion, the delegates of the political churches assemble in
Ipswich to pass patriotic resolutions, and designate the candidates whom
the good people of Essex County, with implicit faith in the wisdom of the
selection, are expected to vote for.  For the rest there are pleasant
walks and drives around the picturesque village.  The people are noted
for their hospitality; in summer the sea-wind blows cool over its healthy
hills, and, take it for all in all, there is not a better preserved or
pleasanter specimen of a Puritan town remaining in the ancient
Commonwealth.

The 21st of April, 1775, witnessed an awful commotion in the little
village of Ipswich.  Old men, and boys, (the middle-aged had marched to
Lexington some days before) and all the women in the place who were not
bedridden or sick, came rushing as with one accord to the green in front
of the meeting-house.  A rumor, which no one attempted to trace or
authenticate, spread from lip to lip that the British regulars had landed
on the coast and were marching upon the town.  A scene of indescribable
terror and confusion followed.  Defence was out of the question, as the
young and able-bodied men of the entire region round about had marched to
Cambridge and Lexington.  The news of the battle at the latter place,
exaggerated in all its details, had been just received; terrible stories
of the atrocities committed by the dreaded "regulars" had been related;
and it was believed that nothing short of a general extermination of the
patriots--men, women, and children--was contemplated by the British
commander.--Almost simultaneously the people of Beverly, a village a few
miles distant, were smitten with the same terror.  How the rumor was
communicated no one could tell.  It was there believed that the enemy had
fallen upon Ipswich, and massacred the inhabitants without regard to age
or sex.

It was about the middle of the afternoon of this day that the people of
Newbury, ten miles farther north, assembled in an informal meeting, at
the town-house to hear accounts from the Lexington fight, and to consider
what action was necessary in consequence of that event.  Parson Carey was
about opening the meeting with prayer when hurried hoof-beats sounded up
the street, and a messenger, loose-haired and panting for breath, rushed
up the staircase.  "Turn out, turn out, for God's sake," he cried, "or
you will be all killed!  The regulars are marching onus; they are at
Ipswich now, cutting and slashing all before them!"  Universal
consternation was the immediate result of this fearful announcement;
Parson Carey's prayer died on his lips; the congregation dispersed over
the town, carrying to every house the tidings that the regulars had come.
Men on horseback went galloping up and down the streets, shouting the
alarm.  Women and children echoed it from every corner.  The panic became
irresistible, uncontrollable.  Cries were heard that the dreaded invaders
had reached Oldtown Bridge, a little distance from the village, and that
they were killing all whom they encountered.  Flight was resolved upon.
All the horses and vehicles in the town were put in requisition; men,
women, and children hurried as for life towards the north.  Some threw
their silver and pewter ware and other valuables into wells.  Large
numbers crossed the Merrimac, and spent the night in the deserted houses
of Salisbury, whose inhabitants, stricken by the strange terror, had fled
into New Hampshire, to take up their lodgings in dwellings also abandoned
by their owners.  A few individuals refused to fly with the multitude;
some, unable to move by reason of sickness, were left behind by their
relatives.  One old gentleman, whose excessive corpulence rendered
retreat on his part impossible, made a virtue of necessity; and, seating
himself in his doorway with his loaded king's arm, upbraided his more
nimble neighbors, advising them to do as he did, and "stop and shoot the
devils."  Many ludicrous instances of the intensity of the terror might
be related.  One man got his family into a boat to go to Ram Island for
safety.  He imagined he was pursued by the enemy through the dusk of the
evening, and was annoyed by the crying of an infant in the after part of
the boat.  "Do throw that squalling brat overboard," he called to his
wife, "or we shall be all discovered and killed!"  A poor woman ran four
or five miles up the river, and stopped to take breath and nurse her
child, when she found to her great horror that she had brought off the
cat instead of the baby!

All through that memorable night the terror swept onward towards the
north with a speed which seems almost miraculous, producing everywhere
the same results.  At midnight a horseman, clad only in shirt and
breeches, dashed by our grandfather's door, in Haverhill, twenty miles up
the river.  "Turn out!  Get a musket!  Turn out!" he shouted; "the
regulars are landing on Plum Island!"  "I'm glad of it," responded the
old gentleman from his chamber window; "I wish they were all there, and
obliged to stay there."  When it is understood that Plum Island is little
more than a naked sand-ridge, the benevolence of this wish can be readily
appreciated.

All the boats on the river were constantly employed for several hours in
conveying across the terrified fugitives.  Through "the dead waste and
middle of the night" they fled over the border into New Hampshire.  Some
feared to take the frequented roads, and wandered over wooded hills and
through swamps where the snows of the late winter had scarcely melted.
They heard the tramp and outcry of those behind them, and fancied that
the sounds were made by pursuing enemies.  Fast as they fled, the terror,
by some unaccountable means, outstripped them.  They found houses
deserted and streets strewn with household stuffs, abandoned in the hurry
of escape.  Towards morning, however, the tide partially turned.  Grown
men began to feel ashamed of their fears.  The old Anglo-Saxon hardihood
paused and looked the terror in its face.  Single or in small parties,
armed with such weapons as they found at hand,--among which long poles,
sharpened and charred at the end, were conspicuous,--they began to
retrace their steps.  In the mean time such of the good people of Ipswich
as were unable or unwilling to leave their homes became convinced that
the terrible rumor which had nearly depopulated their settlement was
unfounded.

Among those who had there awaited the onslaught of the regulars was a
young man from Exeter, New Hampshire.  Becoming satisfied that the whole
matter was a delusion, he mounted his horse and followed after the
retreating multitude, undeceiving all whom he overtook.  Late at night
he reached Newburyport, greatly to the relief of its sleepless
inhabitants, and hurried across the river, proclaiming as he rode the
welcome tidings.  The sun rose upon haggard and jaded fugitives, worn
with excitement and fatigue, slowly returning homeward, their
satisfaction at the absence of danger somewhat moderated by an unpleasant
consciousness of the ludicrous scenes of their premature night flitting.

Any inference which might be drawn from the foregoing narrative
derogatory to the character of the people of New England at that day, on
the score of courage, would be essentially erroneous.  It is true, they
were not the men to court danger or rashly throw away their lives for the
mere glory of the sacrifice.  They had always a prudent and wholesome
regard to their own comfort and safety; they justly looked upon sound
heads and limbs as better than broken ones; life was to them too serious
and important, and their hard-gained property too valuable, to be lightly
hazarded.  They never attempted to cheat themselves by under-estimating
the difficulty to be encountered, or shutting their eyes to its probable
consequences.  Cautious, wary, schooled in the subtle strategy of Indian
warfare, where self-preservation is by no means a secondary object, they
had little in common with the reckless enthusiasm of their French allies,
or the stolid indifference of the fighting machines of the British
regular army.  When danger could no longer be avoided, they met it with
firmness and iron endurance, but with a very vivid appreciation of its
magnitude.  Indeed, it must be admitted by all who are familiar with the
history of our fathers that the element of fear held an important place
among their characteristics.  It exaggerated all the dangers of their
earthly pilgrimage, and peopled the future with shapes of evil.  Their
fear of Satan invested him with some of the attributes of Omnipotence,
and almost reached the point of reverence.  The slightest shock of an
earthquake filled all hearts with terror.  Stout men trembled by their
hearths with dread of some paralytic old woman supposed to be a witch.
And when they believed themselves called upon to grapple with these
terrors and endure the afflictions of their allotment, they brought to
the trial a capability of suffering undiminished by the chloroform of
modern philosophy.  They were heroic in endurance.  Panics like the one
we have described might bow and sway them like reeds in the wind; but
they stood up like the oaks of their own forests beneath the thunder and
the hail of actual calamity.

It was certainly lucky for the good people of Essex County that no wicked
wag of a Tory undertook to immortalize in rhyme their ridiculous hegira,
as Judge Hopkinson did the famous Battle of the Kegs in Philadelphia.
Like the more recent Madawaska war in Maine, the great Chepatchet
demonstration in Rhode Island, and the "Sauk fuss" of Wisconsin, it
remains to this day "unsyllabled, unsung;" and the fast-fading memory of
age alone preserves the unwritten history of the great Ipswich fright.





POPE NIGHT.

               "Lay up the fagots neat and trim;
               Pile 'em up higher;
               Set 'em afire!
               The Pope roasts us, and we 'll roast him!"
                                     Old Song.

The recent attempt of the Romish Church to reestablish its hierarchy in
Great Britain, with the new cardinal, Dr. Wiseman, at its head, seems to
have revived an old popular custom, a grim piece of Protestant sport,
which, since the days of Lord George Gordon and the "No Popery" mob, had
very generally fallen into disuse.  On the 5th of the eleventh month of
this present year all England was traversed by processions and lighted up
with bonfires, in commemoration of the detection of the "gunpowder plot"
of Guy Fawkes and the Papists in 1605.  Popes, bishops, and cardinals, in
straw and pasteboard, were paraded through the streets and burned amid
the shouts of the populace, a great portion of whom would have doubtless
been quite as ready to do the same pleasant little office for the Bishop
of Exeter or his Grace of Canterbury, if they could have carted about and
burned in effigy a Protestant hierarchy as safely as a Catholic one.

In this country, where every sect takes its own way, undisturbed by legal
restrictions, each ecclesiastical tub balancing itself as it best may on
its own bottom, and where bishops Catholic and bishops Episcopal, bishops
Methodist and bishops Mormon, jostle each other in our thoroughfares, it
is not to be expected that we should trouble ourselves with the matter at
issue between the rival hierarchies on the other side of the water.  It
is a very pretty quarrel, however, and good must come out of it, as it
cannot fail to attract popular attention to the shallowness of the
spiritual pretensions of both parties, and lead to the conclusion that a
hierarchy of any sort has very little in common with the fishermen and
tent-makers of the New Testament.

Pope Night--the anniversary of the discovery of the Papal incendiary Guy
Fawkes, booted and spurred, ready to touch fire to his powder-train under
the Parliament House--was celebrated by the early settlers of New
England, and doubtless afforded a good deal of relief to the younger
plants of grace in the Puritan vineyard.  In those solemn old days, the
recurrence of the powder-plot anniversary, with its processions, hideous
images of the Pope and Guy Fawkes, its liberal potations of strong
waters, and its blazing bonfires reddening the wild November hills, must
have been looked forward to with no slight degree of pleasure.  For one
night, at least, the cramped and smothered fun and mischief of the
younger generation were permitted to revel in the wild extravagance
of a Roman saturnalia or the Christmas holidays of a slave plantation.
Bigotry--frowning upon the May-pole, with its flower wreaths and sportive
revellers, and counting the steps of the dancers as so many steps towards
perdition--recognized in the grim farce of Guy Fawkes's anniversary
something of its own lineaments, smiled complacently upon the riotous
young actors, and opened its close purse to furnish tar-barrels to roast
the Pope, and strong water to moisten the throats of his noisy judges and
executioners.

Up to the time of the Revolution the powder plot was duly commemorated
throughout New England.  At that period the celebration of it was
discountenanced, and in many places prohibited, on the ground that it was
insulting to our Catholic allies from France.  In Coffin's History of
Newbury it is stated that, in 1774, the town authorities of Newburyport
ordered "that no effigies be carried about or exhibited only in the
daytime."  The last public celebration in that town was in the following
year.  Long before the close of the last century the exhibitions of Pope
Night had entirely ceased throughout the country, with, as far as we can
learn, a solitary exception.  The stranger who chances to be travelling
on the road between Newburyport and Haverhill, on the night of the 5th of
November, may well fancy that an invasion is threatened from the sea, or
that an insurrection is going on inland; for from all the high hills
overlooking the river tall fires are seen blazing redly against the cold,
dark, autumnal sky, surrounded by groups of young men and boys busily
engaged in urging them with fresh fuel into intenser activity.  To feed
these bonfires, everything combustible which could be begged or stolen
from the neighboring villages, farm-houses, and fences is put in
requisition.  Old tar-tubs, purloined from the shipbuilders of the
river-side, and flour and lard barrels from the village-traders, are
stored away for days, and perhaps weeks, in the woods or in the rain-
gullies of the hills, in preparation for Pope Night.  From the earliest
settlement of the towns of Amesbury and Salisbury, the night of the
powder plot has been thus celebrated, with unbroken regularity, down to
the present time.  The event which it once commemorated is probably now
unknown to most of the juvenile actors.  The symbol lives on from
generation to generation after the significance is lost; and we have seen
the children of our Catholic neighbors as busy as their Protestant
playmates in collecting, "by hook or by crook," the materials for Pope-
Night bonfires.  We remember, on one occasion, walking out with a gifted
and learned Catholic friend to witness the fine effect of the
illumination on the hills, and his hearty appreciation of its picturesque
and wild beauty,--the busy groups in the strong relief of the fires, and
the play and corruscation of the changeful lights on the bare, brown
hills, naked trees, and autumn clouds.

In addition to the bonfires on the hills, there was formerly a procession
in the streets, bearing grotesque images of the Pope, his cardinals and
friars; and behind them Satan himself, a monster with huge ox-horns on
his head, and a long tail, brandishing his pitchfork and goading them
onward.  The Pope was generally furnished with a movable head, which
could be turned round, thrown back, or made to bow, like that of a china-
ware mandarin.  An aged inhabitant of the neighborhood has furnished us
with some fragments of the songs sung on such occasions, probably the
same which our British ancestors trolled forth around their bonfires two
centuries ago:--

                    "The fifth of November,
                    As you well remember,
                    Was gunpowder treason and plot;
                    And where is the reason
                    That gunpowder treason
                    Should ever be forgot?"

          "When James the First the sceptre swayed,
          This hellish powder plot was laid;
          They placed the powder down below,
          All for Old England's overthrow.
          Lucky the man, and happy the day,
          That caught Guy Fawkes in the middle of his play!"

          "Hark! our bell goes jink, jink, jink;
          Pray, madam, pray, sir, give us something to drink;
          Pray, madam, pray, sir, if you'll something give,
          We'll burn the dog, and not let him live.
          We'll burn the dog without his head,
          And then you'll say the dog is dead."

               "Look here! from Rome The Pope has come,
               That fiery serpent dire;
               Here's the Pope that we have got,
               The old promoter of the plot;
               We'll stick a pitchfork in his back,
               And throw him in the fire!"

There is a slight savor of a Smithfield roasting about these lines, such
as regaled the senses of the Virgin Queen or Bloody Mary, which entirely
reconciles us to their disuse at the present time.

It should be the fervent prayer of all good men that the evil spirit of
religious hatred and intolerance, which on the one hand prompted the
gunpowder plot, and which on the other has ever since made it the
occasion of reproach and persecution of an entire sect of professing
Christians, may be no longer perpetuated.  In the matter of exclusiveness
and intolerance, none of the older sects can safely reproach each other;
and it becomes all to hope and labor for the coming of that day when the
hymns of Cowper and the Confessions of Augustine, the humane philosophy
of Channing and the devout meditations of Thomas a Kempis, the simple
essays of Woolman and the glowing periods of Bossuet, shall be regarded
as the offspring of one spirit and one faith,--lights of a common altar,
and precious stones in the temple of the one universal Church.





THE BOY CAPTIVES.

AN INCIDENT OF THE INDIAN WAR OF 1695.

The township of Haverhill, even as late as the close of the seventeenth
century, was a frontier settlement, occupying an advanced position in the
great wilderness, which, unbroken by the clearing of a white man,
extended from the Merrimac River to the French villages on the St.
Francois.  A tract of twelve miles on the river and three or four
northwardly was occupied by scattered settlers, while in the centre of
the town a compact village had grown up.  In the immediate vicinity there
were but few Indians, and these generally peaceful and inoffensive.  On
the breaking out of the Narragansett war, the inhabitants had erected
fortifications and taken other measures for defence; but, with the
possible exception of one man who was found slain in the woods in 1676,
none of the inhabitants were molested; and it was not until about the
year 1689 that the safety of the settlement was seriously threatened.
Three persons were killed in that year.  In 1690 six garrisons were
established in different parts of the town, with a small company of
soldiers attached to each.  Two of these houses are still standing.  They
were built of brick, two stories high, with a single outside door, so
small and narrow that but one person could enter at a time; the windows
few, and only about two and a half feet long by eighteen inches with
thick diamond glass secured with lead, and crossed inside with bars of
iron.  The basement had but two rooms, and the chamber was entered by a
ladder instead of stairs; so that the inmates, if driven thither, could
cut off communication with the rooms below.  Many private houses were
strengthened and fortified.  We remember one familiar to our boyhood,--
a venerable old building of wood, with brick between the weather boards
and ceiling, with a massive balustrade over the door, constructed of oak
timber and plank, with holes through the latter for firing upon
assailants.  The door opened upon a stone-paved hall, or entry, leading
into the huge single room of the basement, which was lighted by two small
windows, the ceiling black with the smoke of a century and a half; a huge
fireplace, calculated for eight-feet wood, occupying one entire side;
while, overhead, suspended from the timbers, or on shelves fastened to
them, were household stores, farming utensils, fishing-rods, guns,
bunches of herbs gathered perhaps a century ago, strings of dried apples
and pumpkins, links of mottled sausages, spareribs, and flitches of
bacon; the firelight of an evening dimly revealing the checked woollen
coverlet of the bed in one far-off corner, while in another "the pewter
plates on the dresser Caught and reflected the flame as shields of armies
the sunshine."

Tradition has preserved many incidents of life in the garrisons.  In
times of unusual peril the settlers generally resorted at night to the
fortified houses, taking thither their flocks and herds and such
household valuables as were most likely to strike the fancy or minister
to the comfort or vanity of the heathen marauders.  False alarms were
frequent.  The smoke of a distant fire, the bark of a dog in the deep
woods, a stump or bush taking in the uncertain light of stars and moon
the appearance of a man, were sufficient to spread alarm through the
entire settlement, and to cause the armed men of the garrison to pass
whole nights in sleepless watching.  It is said that at Haselton's
garrison-house the sentinel on duty saw, as he thought, an Indian inside
of the paling which surrounded the building, and apparently seeking to
gain an entrance.  He promptly raised his musket and fired at the
intruder, alarming thereby the entire garrison.  The women and children
left their beds, and the men seized their guns and commenced firing on
the suspicious object; but it seemed to bear a charmed life, and remained
unharmed.  As the morning dawned, however, the mystery was solved by the
discovery of a black quilted petticoat hanging on the clothes-line,
completely riddled with balls.

As a matter of course, under circumstances of perpetual alarm and
frequent peril, the duty of cultivating their fields, and gathering their
harvests, and working at their mechanical avocations was dangerous and
difficult to the settlers.  One instance will serve as an illustration.
At the garrison-house of Thomas Dustin, the husband of the far-famed Mary
Dustin, (who, while a captive of the Indians, and maddened by the murder
of her infant child, killed and scalped, with the assistance of a young
boy, the entire band of her captors, ten in number,) the business of
brick-making was carried on.  The pits where the clay was found were only
a few rods from the house; yet no man ventured to bring the clay to the
yard within the enclosure without the attendance of a file of soldiers.
An anecdote relating to this garrison has been handed down to the present
tune.  Among its inmates were two young cousins, Joseph and Mary
Whittaker; the latter a merry, handsome girl, relieving the tedium of
garrison duty with her light-hearted mirthfulness, and

               "Making a sunshine in that shady place."

Joseph, in the intervals of his labors in the double capacity of brick-
maker and man-at-arms, was assiduous in his attentions to his fair
cousin, who was not inclined to encourage him.  Growing desperate, he
threatened one evening to throw himself into the garrison well.  His
threat only called forth the laughter of his mistress; and, bidding her
farewell, he proceeded to put it in execution.  On reaching the well he
stumbled over a log; whereupon, animated by a happy idea, he dropped the
wood into the water instead of himself, and, hiding behind the curb,
awaited the result.  Mary, who had been listening at the door, and who
had not believed her lover capable of so rash an act, heard the sudden
plunge of the wooden Joseph.  She ran to the well, and, leaning over the
curb and peering down the dark opening, cried out, in tones of anguish
and remorse, "O Joseph, if you're in the land of the living, I 'll have
you!"  "I'll take ye at your word," answered Joseph, springing up from
his hiding-place, and avenging himself for her coyness and coldness by a
hearty embrace.

Our own paternal ancestor, owing to religious scruples in the matter of
taking arms even for defence of life and property, refused to leave his
undefended house and enter the garrison.  The Indians frequently came to
his house; and the family more than once in the night heard them
whispering under the windows, and saw them put their copper faces to the
glass to take a view of the apartments.  Strange as it may seen, they
never offered any injury or insult to the inmates.

In 1695 the township was many times molested by Indians, and several
persons were killed and wounded.  Early in the fall a small party made
their appearance in the northerly part of the town, where, finding two
boys at work in an open field, they managed to surprise and capture them,
and, without committing further violence, retreated through the woods to
their homes on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee.  Isaac Bradley, aged
fifteen, was a small but active and vigorous boy; his companion in
captivity, Joseph Whittaker, was only eleven, yet quite as large in size,
and heavier in his movements.  After a hard and painful journey they
arrived at the lake, and were placed in an Indian family, consisting of a
man and squaw and two or three children.  Here they soon acquired a
sufficient knowledge of the Indian tongue to enable them to learn from
the conversation carried on in their presence that it was designed to
take them to Canada in the spring.  This discovery was a painful one.
Canada, the land of Papist priests and bloody Indians, was the especial
terror of the New England settlers, and the anathema maranatha of Puritan
pulpits.  Thither the Indians usually hurried their captives, where they
compelled them to work in their villages or sold them to the French
planters.  Escape from thence through a deep wilderness, and across lakes
and mountains and almost impassable rivers, without food or guide, was
regarded as an impossibility.  The poor boys, terrified by the prospect
of being carried still farther from their home and friends, began to
dream of escaping from their masters before they started for Canada.  It
was now winter; it would have been little short of madness to have chosen
for flight that season of bitter cold and deep snows.  Owing to exposure
and want of proper food and clothing, Isaac, the eldest of the boys, was
seized with a violent fever, from which he slowly recovered in the course
of the winter.  His Indian mistress was as kind to him as her
circumstances permitted,--procuring medicinal herbs and roots for her
patient, and tenderly watching over him in the long winter nights.
Spring came at length; the snows melted; and the ice was broken up on the
lake.  The Indians began to make preparations for journeying to Canada;
and Isaac, who had during his sickness devised a plan of escape, saw that
the time of putting it in execution had come.  On the evening before he
was to make the attempt he for the first time informed his younger
companion of his design, and told him, if he intended to accompany him,
he must be awake at the time appointed.  The boys lay down as usual in
the wigwam, in the midst of the family.  Joseph soon fell asleep; but
Isaac, fully sensible of the danger and difficulty of the enterprise
before him, lay awake, watchful for his opportunity.  About midnight he
rose, cautiously stepping over the sleeping forms of the family, and
securing, as he went, his Indian master's flint, steel, and tinder, and a
small quantity of dry moose-meat and cornbread.  He then carefully
awakened his companion, who, starting up, forgetful of the cause of his
disturbance, asked aloud, "What do you want?"  The savages began to stir;
and Isaac, trembling with fear of detection, lay down again and pretended
to be asleep.  After waiting a while he again rose, satisfied, from the
heavy breathing of the Indians, that they were all sleeping; and fearing
to awaken Joseph a second time, lest he should again hazard all by his
thoughtlessness, he crept softly out of the wigwam.  He had proceeded but
a few rods when he heard footsteps behind him; and, supposing himself
pursued, he hurried into the woods, casting a glance backward.  What was
his joy to see his young companion running after him!  They hastened on
in a southerly direction as nearly as they could determine, hoping to
reach their distant home.  When daylight appeared they found a large
hollow log, into which they crept for concealment, wisely judging that
they would be hotly pursued by their Indian captors.

Their sagacity was by no means at fault.  The Indians, missing their
prisoners in the morning, started off in pursuit with their dogs.  As the
young boys lay in the log they could hear the whistle of the Indians and
the barking of dogs upon their track.  It was a trying moment; and even
the stout heart of the elder boy sank within him as the dogs came up to
the log and set up a loud bark of discovery.  But his presence of mind
saved him.  He spoke in a low tone to the dogs, who, recognizing his
familiar voice, wagged their tails with delight and ceased barking.  He
then threw to them the morsel of moose-meat he had taken from the wigwam.
While the dogs were thus diverted the Indians made their appearance.  The
boys heard the light, stealthy sound of their moccasins on the leaves.
They passed close to the log; and the dogs, having devoured their moose-
meat, trotted after their masters.  Through a crevice in the log the boys
looked after them and saw them disappear in the thick woods.  They
remained in their covert until night, when they started again on their
long journey, taking a new route to avoid the Indians.  At daybreak they
again concealed themselves, but travelled the next night and day without
resting.  By this time they had consumed all the bread which they had
taken, and were fainting from hunger and weariness.  Just at the close of
the third day they were providentially enabled to kill a pigeon and a
small tortoise, a part of which they ate raw, not daring to make a fire,
which might attract the watchful eyes of savages.  On the sixth day they
struck upon an old Indian path, and, following it until night, came
suddenly upon a camp of the enemy.  Deep in the heart of the forest,
under the shelter of a ridge of land heavily timbered, a great fire of
logs and brushwood was burning; and around it the Indians sat, eating
their moose-meat and smoking their pipes.

The poor fugitives, starving, weary, and chilled by the cold spring
blasts, gazed down upon the ample fire; and the savory meats which the
squaws were cooking by it, but felt no temptation to purchase warmth and
food by surrendering themselves to captivity.  Death in the forest seemed
preferable.  They turned and fled back upon their track, expecting every
moment to hear the yells of pursuers.  The morning found them seated on
the bank of a small stream, their feet torn and bleeding, and their
bodies emaciated.  The elder, as a last effort, made search for roots,
and fortunately discovered a few ground-nuts, (glicine apios) which
served to refresh in some degree himself and his still weaker companion.
As they stood together by the stream, hesitating and almost despairing,
it occurred to Isaac that the rivulet might lead to a larger stream of
water, and that to the sea and the white settlements near it; and he
resolved to follow it.  They again began their painful march; the day
passed, and the night once more overtook them.  When the eighth morning
dawned, the younger of the boys found himself unable to rise from his bed
of leaves.  Isaac endeavored to encourage him, dug roots, and procured
water for him; but the poor lad was utterly exhausted.  He had no longer
heart or hope.  The elder boy laid him on leaves and dry grass at the
foot of a tree, and with a heavy heart bade him farewell.  Alone he
slowly and painfully proceeded down the stream, now greatly increased in
size by tributary rivulets.  On the top of a hill, he climbed with
difficulty into a tree, and saw in the distance what seemed to be a
clearing and a newly raised frame building.  Hopeful and rejoicing, he
turned back to his young companion, told him what he had seen, and, after
chafing his limbs awhile, got him upon his feet.  Sometimes supporting
him, and at others carrying him on his back, the heroic boy staggered
towards the clearing.  On reaching it he found it deserted, and was
obliged to continue his journey.  Towards night signs of civilization
began to appear,--the heavy, continuous roar of water was heard; and,
presently emerging from the forest, he saw a great river dashing in white
foam down precipitous rocks, and on its bank the gray walls of a huge
stone building, with flankers, palisades, and moat, over which the
British flag was flying.  This was the famous Saco Fort, built by
Governor Phips two years before, just below the falls of the Saco River.
The soldiers of the garrison gave the poor fellows a kindly welcome.
Joseph, who was scarcely alive, lay for a long time sick in the fort; but
Isaac soon regained his strength, and set out for his home in Haverhill,
which he had the good fortune to arrive at in safety.

Amidst the stirring excitements of the present day, when every thrill of
the electric wire conveys a new subject for thought or action to a
generation as eager as the ancient Athenians for some new thing, simple
legends of the past like that which we have transcribed have undoubtedly
lost in a great degree their interest.  The lore of the fireside is
becoming obsolete, and with the octogenarian few who still linger among
us will perish the unwritten history of border life in New England.






THE BLACK MEN IN THE REVOLUTION AND WAR OF 1812.

The return of the festival of our national independence has called our
attention to a matter which has been very carefully kept out of sight by
orators and toast-drinkers.  We allude to the participation of colored
men in the great struggle for American freedom.  It is not in accordance
with our taste or our principles to eulogize the shedders of blood even
in a cause of acknowledged justice; but when we see a whole nation doing
honor to the memories of one class of its defenders to the total neglect
of another class, who had the misfortune to be of darker complexion, we
cannot forego the satisfaction of inviting notice to certain historical
facts which for the last half century have been quietly elbowed aside,
as no more deserving of a place in patriotic recollection than the
descendants of the men to whom the facts in question relate have to a
place in a Fourth of July procession.

Of the services and sufferings of the colored soldiers of the Revolution
no attempt has, to our knowledge, been made to preserve a record.  They
have had no historian.  With here and there an exception, they have all
passed away; and only some faint tradition of their campaigns under
Washington and Greene and Lafayette, and of their cruisings under Decatur
and Barry, lingers among their, descendants.  Yet enough is known to show
that the free colored men of the United States bore their full proportion
of the sacrifices and trials of the Revolutionary War.

The late Governor Eustis, of Massachusetts,--the pride and boast of the
democracy of the East, himself an active participant in the war, and
therefore a most competent witness,--Governor Morrill, of New Hampshire,
Judge Hemphill, of Pennsylvania, and other members of Congress, in the
debate on the question of admitting Missouri as a slave State into the
Union, bore emphatic testimony to the efficiency and heroism of the black
troops.  Hon. Calvin Goddard, of Connecticut, states that in the little
circle of his residence he was instrumental in securing, under the act of
1818, the pensions of nineteen colored soldiers.  "I cannot," he says,
"refrain from mentioning one aged black man, Primus Babcock, who proudly
presented to me an honorable discharge from service during the war, dated
at the close of it, wholly in the handwriting of George Washington; nor
can I forget the expression of his feelings when informed, after his
discharge had been sent to the War Department, that it could not be
returned.  At his request it was written for, as he seemed inclined to
spurn the pension and reclaim the discharge."  There is a touching
anecdote related of Baron Stenben on the occasion of the disbandment of
the American army.  A black soldier, with his wounds unhealed, utterly
destitute, stood on the wharf just as a vessel bound for his distant home
was getting under way.  The poor fellow gazed at the vessel with tears in
his eyes, and gave himself up to despair.  The warm-hearted foreigner
witnessed his emotion, and, inquiring into the cause of it, took his last
dollar from his purse and gave it to him, with tears of sympathy
trickling down his cheeks.  Overwhelmed with gratitude, the poor wounded
soldier hailed the sloop and was received on board.  As it moved out from
the wharf, he cried back to his noble friend on shore, "God Almighty
bless you, Master Baron!"

"In Rhode Island," says Governor Eustis in his able speech against
slavery in Missouri, 12th of twelfth month, 1820, "the blacks formed an
entire regiment, and they discharged their duty with zeal and fidelity.
The gallant defence of Red Bank, in which the black regiment bore a part,
is among the proofs of their valor."  In this contest it will be
recollected that four hundred men met and repulsed, after a terrible and
sanguinary struggle, fifteen hundred Hessian troops, headed by Count
Donop.  The glory of the defence of Red Bank, which has been pronounced
one of the most heroic actions of the war, belongs in reality to black
men; yet who now hears them spoken of in connection with it?  Among the
traits which distinguished the black regiment was devotion to their
officers.  In the attack made upon the American lines near Croton River
on the 13th of the fifth month, 1781, Colonel Greene, the commander of
the regiment, was cut down and mortally wounded; but the sabres of the
enemy only reached him through the bodies of his faithful guard of
blacks, who hovered over him to protect him, every one of whom was
killed.  The late Dr. Harris, of Dunbarton, New Hampshire, a
Revolutionary veteran, stated, in a speech at Francistown, New Hampshire,
some years ago, that on one occasion the regiment to which he was
attached was commanded to defend an important position, which the enemy
thrice assailed, and from which they were as often repulsed.  "There
was," said the venerable speaker, "a regiment of blacks in the same
situation,--a regiment of negroes fighting for our liberty and
independence, not a white man among them but the officers,--in the same
dangerous and responsible position.  Had they been unfaithful or given
way before the enemy, all would have been lost.  Three times in
succession were they attacked with most desperate fury by well-
disciplined and veteran troops; and three times did they successfully
repel the assault, and thus preserve an army.  They fought thus through
the war.  They were brave and hardy troops."

In the debate in the New York Convention of 1821 for amending the
Constitution of the State, on the question of extending the right of
suffrage to the blacks, Dr. Clarke, the delegate from Delaware County,
and other members, made honorable mention of the services of the colored
troops in the Revolutionary army.

The late James Forten, of Philadelphia, well known as a colored man of
wealth, intelligence, and philanthropy, enlisted in the American navy
under Captain Decatur, of the Royal Louis, was taken prisoner during his
second cruise, and, with nineteen other colored men, confined on board
the horrible Jersey prison-ship; All the vessels in the American service
at that period were partly manned by blacks.  The old citizens of
Philadelphia to this day remember the fact that, when the troops of the
North marched through the city, one or more colored companies were
attached to nearly all the regiments.

Governor Eustis, in the speech before quoted, states that the free
colored soldiers entered the ranks with the whites.  The time of those
who were slaves was purchased of their masters, and they were induced to
enter the service in consequence of a law of Congress by which, on
condition of their serving in the ranks during the war, they were made
freemen.  This hope of liberty inspired them with courage to oppose their
breasts to the Hessian bayonet at Red Bank, and enabled them to endure
with fortitude the cold and famine of Valley Forge.  The anecdote of the
slave of General Sullivan, of New Hampshire, is well known.  When his
master told him that they were on the point of starting for the army, to
fight for liberty, he shrewdly suggested that it would be a great
satisfaction to know that he was indeed going to fight for his liberty.
Struck with the reasonableness and justice of this suggestion, General
Sullivan at once gave him his freedom.

The late Tristam Burgess, of Rhode Island, in a speech in Congress, first
month, 1828, said "At the commencement of the Revolutionary War, Rhode
Island had a number of slaves.  A regiment of them were enlisted into the
Continental service, and no braver men met the enemy in battle; but not
one of them was permitted to be a soldier until he had first been made a
freeman."

The celebrated Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, in his speech on the
Missouri question, and in defence of the slave representation of the
South, made the following admissions:--

"They (the colored people) were in numerous instances the pioneers, and
in all the laborers, of our armies.  To their hands were owing the
greatest part of the fortifications raised for the protection of the
country.  Fort Moultrie gave, at an early period of the inexperienced and
untried valor of our citizens, immortality to the American arms; and in
the Northern States numerous bodies of them were enrolled, and fought
side by side with the whites at the battles of the Revolution."

Let us now look forward thirty or forty years, to the last war with Great
Britain, and see whether the whites enjoyed a monopoly of patriotism at
that time.

Martindale, of New York, in Congress, 22d of first month, 1828, said:
"Slaves, or negroes who had been slaves, were enlisted as soldiers in the
war of the Revolution; and I myself saw a battalion of them, as fine,
martial-looking men as I ever saw, attached to the Northern army in the
last war, on its march from Plattsburg to Sackett's Harbor."

Hon. Charles Miner, of Pennsylvania, in Congress, second month, 7th,
1828, said: "The African race make excellent soldiers.  Large numbers of
them were with Perry, and helped to gain the brilliant victory of Lake
Erie.  A whole battalion of them were distinguished for their orderly
appearance."

Dr. Clarke, in the convention which revised the Constitution of New York
in 1821, speaking of the colored inhabitants of the State, said:--

"In your late war they contributed largely towards some of your most
splendid victories.  On Lakes Erie and Champlain, where your fleets
triumphed over a foe superior in numbers and engines of death, they were
manned in a large proportion with men of color.  And in this very house,
in the fall of 1814, a bill passed, receiving the approbation of all the
branches of your government, authorizing the governor to accept the
services of a corps of two thousand free people of color.  Sir, these
were times which tried men's souls.  In these times it was no sporting
matter to bear arms.  These were times when a man who shouldered his
musket did not know but he bared his bosom to receive a death-wound from
the enemy ere he laid it aside; and in these times these people were
found as ready and as willing to volunteer in your service as any other.
They were not compelled to go; they were not drafted.  No; your pride had
placed them beyond your compulsory power.  But there was no necessity for
its exercise; they were volunteers,--yes, sir, volunteers to defend that
very country from the inroads and ravages of a ruthless and vindictive
foe which had treated them with insult, degradation, and slavery."

On the capture of Washington by the British forces, it was judged
expedient to fortify, without delay, the principal towns and cities
exposed to similar attacks.  The Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia
waited upon three of the principal colored citizens, namely, James
Forten, Bishop Allen, and Absalom Jones, soliciting the aid of the people
of color in erecting suitable defences for the city.  Accordingly,
twenty-five hundred colored then assembled in the State-House yard, and
from thence marched to Gray's Ferry, where they labored for two days
almost without intermission.  Their labors were so faithful and efficient
that a vote of thanks was tendered them by the committee.  A battalion of
colored troops was at the same time organized in the city under an
officer of the United States army; and they were on the point of marching
to the frontier when peace was proclaimed.

General Jackson's proclamations to the free colored inhabitants of
Louisiana are well known.  In his first, inviting them to take up arms,
he said:--

"As sons of freedom, you are now called on to defend our most inestimable
blessings.  As Americans, your country looks with confidence to her
adopted children for a valorous support.  As fathers, husbands, and
brothers, you are summoned to rally round the standard of the eagle, to
defend all which is dear in existence."

The second proclamation is one of the highest compliments ever paid by a
military chief to his soldiers:--

"TO THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR.

"Soldiers! when on the banks of the Mobile I called you to take up arms,
inviting you to partake the perils and glory of your white fellow-
citizens, I expected much from you; for I was not ignorant that you
possessed qualities most formidable to an invading enemy.  I knew with
what fortitude you could endure hunger, and thirst, and all the fatigues
of a campaign.  I knew well how you loved your native country, and that
you, as well as ourselves, had to defend what man holds most dear,--his
parents, wife, children, and property.  You have done more than I
expected.  In addition to the previous qualities I before knew you to
possess, I found among you a noble enthusiasm, which leads to the
performance of great things.

"Soldiers! the President of the United States shall hear how praiseworthy
was your conduct in the hour of danger, and the Representatives of the
American people will give you the praise your exploits entitle you to.
Your general anticipates them in applauding your noble ardor."

It will thus be seen that whatever honor belongs to the "heroes of the
Revolution" and the volunteers in "the second war for independence" is to
be divided between the white and the colored man.  We have dwelt upon
this subject at length, not because it accords with our principles or
feelings, for it is scarcely necessary for us to say that we are one of
those who hold that

                    "Peace hath her victories
                    No less renowned than war,"

and certainly far more desirable and useful; but because, in popular
estimation, the patriotism which dares and does on the battle-field takes
a higher place than the quiet exercise of the duties of peaceful
citizenship; and we are willing that colored soldiers, with their
descendants, should have the benefit, if possible, of a public sentiment
which has so extravagantly lauded their white companions in arms.  If
pulpits must be desecrated by eulogies of the patriotism of bloodshed, we
see no reason why black defenders of their country in the war for liberty
should not receive honorable mention as well as white invaders of a
neighboring republic who have volunteered in a war for plunder and
slavery extension.  For the latter class of "heroes" we have very little
respect.  The patriotism of too many of them forcibly reminds us of Dr.
Johnson's definition of that much-abused term "Patriotism, sir!  'T is
the last refuge of a scoundrel."

"What right, I demand," said an American orator some years ago, "have the
children of Africa to a homestead in the white man's country?"  The
answer will in part be found in the facts which we have presented.  Their
right, like that of their white fellow-citizens, dates back to the dread
arbitrament of battle.  Their bones whiten every stricken field of the
Revolution; their feet tracked with blood the snows of Jersey; their toil
built up every fortification south of the Potomac; they shared the famine
and nakedness of Valley Forge and the pestilential horrors of the old
Jersey prisonship.  Have they, then, no claim to an equal participation
in the blessings which have grown out of the national independence for
which they fought?  Is it just, is it magnanimous, is it safe, even, to
starve the patriotism of such a people, to cast their hearts out of the
treasury of the Republic, and to convert them, by political
disfranchisement and social oppression, into enemies?





THE SCOTTISH REFORMERS.

     "The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small;
     Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He
     all."
                         FRIEDRICH VON LOGAU.

The great impulse of the French Revolution was not confined by
geographical boundaries.  Flashing hope into the dark places of the
earth, far down among the poor and long oppressed, or startling the
oppressor in his guarded chambers like that mountain of fire which fell
into the sea at the sound of the apocalyptic trumpet, it agitated the
world.

The arguments of Condorcet, the battle-words of Mirabeau, the fierce zeal
of St. Just, the iron energy of Danton, the caustic wit of Camille
Desmoulins, and the sweet eloquence of Vergniaud found echoes in all
lands, and nowhere more readily than in Great Britain, the ancient foe
and rival of France.  The celebrated Dr. Price, of London, and the still
more distinguished Priestley, of Birmingham, spoke out boldly in defence
of the great principles of the Revolution.  A London club of reformers,
reckoning among its members such men as Sir William Jones, Earl Grey,
Samuel Whitbread, and Sir James Mackintosh, was established for the
purpose of disseminating liberal appeals and arguments throughout the
United Kingdom.

In Scotland an auxiliary society was formed, under the name of Friends of
the People.  Thomas Muir, young in years, yet an elder in the Scottish
kirk, a successful advocate at the bar, talented, affable, eloquent, and
distinguished for the purity of his life and his enthusiasm in the cause
of freedom, was its principal originator.  In the twelfth month of 1792 a
convention of reformers was held at Edinburgh.  The government became
alarmed, and a warrant was issued for the arrest of Muir.  He escaped to
France; but soon after, venturing to return to his native land, was
recognized and imprisoned.  He was tried upon the charge of lending books
of republican tendency, and reading an address from Theobald Wolfe Tone
and the United Irishmen before the society of which he was a member.  He
defended himself in a long and eloquent address, which concluded in the
following manly strain:--

"What, then, has been my crime?  Not the lending to a relation a copy of
Thomas Paine's works,--not the giving away to another a few numbers of an
innocent and constitutional publication; but my crime is, for having
dared to be, according to the measure of my feeble abilities, a strenuous
and an active advocate for an equal representation of the people in the
House of the people,--for having dared to accomplish a measure by legal
means which was to diminish the weight of their taxes and to put an end
to the profusion of their blood.  Gentlemen, from my infancy to this
moment I have devoted myself to the cause of the people.  It is a good
cause: it will ultimately prevail,--it will finally triumph."

He was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, and was removed to
the Edinburgh jail, from thence to the hulks, and lastly to the
transport-ship, containing eighty-three convicts, which conveyed him to
Botany Bay.

The next victim was Palmer, a learned and highly accomplished Unitarian
minister in Dundee.  He was greatly beloved and respected as a polished
gentleman and sincere friend of the people.  He was charged with
circulating a republican tract, and was sentenced to seven years'
transportation.

But the Friends of the People were not quelled by this summary punishment
of two of their devoted leaders.  In the tenth month, 1793, delegates
were called together from various towns in Scotland, as well as from
Birmingham, Sheffield, and other places in England.  Gerrald and Margarot
were sent up by the London society.  After a brief sitting, the
convention was dispersed by the public authorities.  Its sessions were
opened and closed with prayer, and the speeches of its members manifested
the pious enthusiasm of the old Cameronians and Parliament-men of the
times of Cromwell.  Many of the dissenting clergy were present.  William
Skirving, the most determined of the band, had been educated for the
ministry, and was a sincerely religious man.  Joseph Gerrald was a young
man of brilliant talents and exemplary character.  When the sheriff
entered the hall to disperse the friends of liberty, Gerrald knelt in
prayer.  His remarkable words were taken down by a reporter on the spot.
There is nothing in modern history to compare with this supplication,
unless it be that of Sir Henry Vane, a kindred martyr, at the foot of the
scaffold, just before his execution.  It is the prayer of universal
humanity, which God will yet hear and answer.

"O thou Governor of the universe, we rejoice that, at all times and in
all circumstances, we have liberty to approach Thy throne, and that we
are assured that no sacrifice is more acceptable to Thee than that which
is made for the relief of the oppressed.  In this moment of trial and
persecution we pray that Thou wouldst be our defender, our counsellor,
and our guide.  Oh, be Thou a pillar of fire to us, as Thou wast to our
fathers of old, to enlighten and direct us; and to our enemies a pillar
of cloud, and darkness, and confusion.

"Thou art Thyself the great Patron of liberty.  Thy service is perfect
freedom.  Prosper, we beseech Thee, every endeavor which we make to
promote Thy cause; for we consider the cause of truth, or every cause
which tends to promote the happiness of Thy creatures, as Thy cause.

"O thou merciful Father of mankind, enable us, for Thy name's sake, to
endure persecution with fortitude; and may we believe that all trials and
tribulations of life which we endure shall work together for good to them
that love Thee; and grant that the greater the evil, and the longer it
may be continued, the greater good, in Thy holy and adorable providence,
may be produced therefrom.  And this we beg, not for our own merits, but
through the merits of Him who is hereafter to judge the world in
righteousness and mercy."

He ceased, and the sheriff, who had been temporarily overawed by the
extraordinary scene, enforced the warrant, and the meeting was broken up.
The delegates descended to the street in silence,--Arthur's Seat and
Salisbury Crags glooming in the distance and night,--an immense and
agitated multitude waiting around, over which tossed the flaring
flambeaux of the sheriff's train.  Gerrald, who was already under arrest,
as he descended, spoke aloud, "Behold the funeral torches of Liberty!"

Skirving and several others were immediately arrested.  They were tried
in the first month, 1794, and sentenced, as Muir and Palmer had
previously been, to transportation.  Their conduct throughout was worthy
of their great and holy cause.  Gerrald's defence was that of freedom
rather than his own.  Forgetting himself, he spoke out manfully and
earnestly for the poor, the oppressed, the overtaxed, and starving
millions of his countrymen.  That some idea may be formed of this noble
plea for liberty, I give an extract from the concluding paragraphs:--

"True religion, like all free governments, appeals to the understanding
for its support, and not to the sword.  All systems, whether civil or
moral, can only be durable in proportion as they are founded on truth and
calculated to promote the good of mankind.  This will account to us why
governments suited to the great energies of man have always outlived the
perishable things which despotism has erected.  Yes, this will account to
us why the stream of Time, which is continually washing away the
dissoluble fabrics of superstitions and impostures, passes without injury
by the adamant of Christianity.

"Those who are versed in the history of their country, in the history of
the human race, must know that rigorous state prosecutions have always
preceded the era of convulsion; and this era, I fear, will be accelerated
by the folly and madness of our rulers.  If the people are discontented,
the proper mode of quieting their discontent is, not by instituting
rigorous and sanguinary prosecutions, but by redressing their wrongs and
conciliating their affections.  Courts of justice, indeed, may be called
in to the aid of ministerial vengeance; but if once the purity of their
proceedings is suspected, they will cease to be objects of reverence to
the nation; they will degenerate into empty and expensive pageantry, and
become the partial instruments of vexatious oppression.  Whatever may
become of me, my principles will last forever.  Individuals may perish;
but truth is eternal.  The rude blasts of tyranny may blow from every
quarter; but freedom is that hardy plant which will survive the tempest
and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil.

"Gentlemen, I am in your hands.  About my life I feel not the slightest
anxiety: if it would promote the cause, I would cheerfully make the
sacrifice; for if I perish on an occasion like the present, out of my
ashes will arise a flame to consume the tyrants and oppressors of my
country."

Years have passed, and the generation which knew the persecuted reformers
has given place to another.  And now, half a century after William
Skirving, as he rose to receive his sentence, declared to his judges,
"You may condemn us as felons, but your sentence shall yet be reversed by
the people," the names of these men are once more familiar to British
lips.  The sentence has been reversed; the prophecy of Skirving has
become history.  On the 21st of the eighth month, 1853, the corner-stone
of a monument to the memory of the Scottish martyrs--for which
subscriptions had been received from such men as Lord Holland, the Dukes
of Bedford and Norfolk; and the Earls of Essex and Leicester--was laid
with imposing ceremonies in the beautiful burial-place of Calton Hill,
Edinburgh, by the veteran reformer and tribune of the people, Joseph
Hume, M. P.  After delivering an appropriate address, the aged radical
closed the impressive scene by reading the prayer of Joseph Gerrald.  At
the banquet which afterwards took place, and which was presided over by
John Dunlop, Esq., addresses were made by the president and Dr. Ritchie,
and by William Skirving, of Kirkaldy, son of the martyr.  The Complete
Suffrage Association of Edinburgh, to the number of five hundred, walked
in procession to Calton Hill, and in the open air proclaimed unmolested
the very principles for which the martyrs of the past century had
suffered.

The account of this tribute to the memory of departed worth cannot fail
to awaken in generous hearts emotions of gratitude towards Him who has
thus signally vindicated His truth, showing that the triumph of the
oppressor is but for a season, and that even in this world a lie cannot
live forever.  Well and truly did George Fox say in his last days,

                    "The truth is above all."

Will it be said, however, that this tribute comes too late; that it
cannot solace those brave hearts which, slowly broken by the long agony
of colonial servitude, are now cold in strange graves?  It is, indeed, a
striking illustration of the truth that he who would benefit his fellow-
man must "walk by faith," sowing his seed in the morning, and in the
evening withholding not his hand; knowing only this, that in God's good
time the harvest shall spring up and ripen, if not for himself, yet for
others, who, as they bind the full sheaves and gather in the heavy
clusters, may perchance remember him with gratitude and set up stones of
memorial on the fields of his toil and sacrifices.  We may regret that in
this stage of the spirit's life the sincere and self-denying worker is
not always permitted to partake of the fruits of his toil or receive the
honors of a benefactor.  We hear his good evil spoken of, and his noblest
sacrifices counted as naught; we see him not only assailed by the wicked,
but discountenanced and shunned by the timidly good, followed on his hot
and dusty pathway by the execrations of the hounding mob and the
contemptuous pity of the worldly wise and prudent; and when at last the
horizon of Time shuts down between him and ourselves, and the places
which have known him know him no more forever, we are almost ready to say
with the regal voluptuary of old,  This also is vanity and a great evil;
"for what hath a man of all his labor and of the vexation of his heart
wherein he hath labored under the sun?"  But is this the end?  Has God's
universe no wider limits than the circle of the blue wall which shuts in
our nestling-place?  Has life's infancy only been provided for, and
beyond this poor nursery-chamber of Time is there no playground for the
soul's youth, no broad fields for its manhood?  Perchance, could we but
lift the curtains of the narrow pinfold wherein we dwell, we might see
that our poor friend and brother whose fate we have thus deplored has by
no means lost the reward of his labors, but that in new fields of duty he
is cheered even by the tardy recognition of the value of his services in
the old.  The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward
and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same
waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad
by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers,
perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of
Time.  Who shall say that the mournful and repentant love with which the
benefactors of our race are at length regarded may not be to them, in
their new condition of being, sweet and grateful as the perfume of long-
forgotten flowers, or that our harvest-hymns of rejoicing may not reach
the ears of those who in weakness and suffering scattered the seeds of
blessing?

The history of the Edinburgh reformers is no new one; it is that of all
who seek to benefit their age by rebuking its popular crimes and exposing
its cherished errors.  The truths which they told were not believed, and
for that very reason were the more needed; for it is evermore the case
that the right word when first uttered is an unpopular and denied one.
Hence he who undertakes to tread the thorny pathway of reform--who,
smitten with the love of truth and justice, or indignant in view of wrong
and insolent oppression, is rashly inclined to throw himself at once into
that great conflict which the Persian seer not untruly represented as a
war between light and darkness--would do well to count the cost in the
outset.  If he can live for Truth alone, and, cut off from the general
sympathy, regard her service as its "own exceeding great reward;" if he
can bear to be counted a fanatic and crazy visionary; if, in all good
nature, he is ready to receive from the very objects of his solicitude
abuse and obloquy in return for disinterested and self-sacrificing
efforts for their welfare; if, with his purest motives misunderstood and
his best actions perverted and distorted into crimes, he can still hold
on his way and patiently abide the hour when "the whirligig of Time shall
bring about its revenges;" if, on the whole, he is prepared to be looked
upon as a sort of moral outlaw or social heretic, under good society's
interdict of food and fire; and if he is well assured that he can,
through all this, preserve his cheerfulness and faith in man,--let him
gird up his loins and go forward in God's name.  He is fitted for his
vocation; he has watched all night by his armor.  Whatever his trial may
be, he is prepared; he may even be happily disappointed in respect to it;
flowers of unexpected refreshing may overhang the hedges of his strait
and narrow way; but it remains to be true that he who serves his
contemporaries in faithfulness and sincerity must expect no wages from
their gratitude; for, as has been well said, there is, after all, but one
way of doing the world good, and unhappily that way the world does not
like; for it consists in telling it the very thing which it does not wish
to hear.

Unhappily, in the case of the reformer, his most dangerous foes are those
of his own household.  True, the world's garden has become a desert and
needs renovation; but is his own little nook weedless?  Sin abounds
without; but is his own heart pure?  While smiting down the giants and
dragons which beset the outward world, are there no evil guests sitting
by his own hearth-stone?  Ambition, envy, self-righteousness, impatience,
dogmatism, and pride of opinion stand at his door-way ready to enter
whenever he leaves it unguarded.  Then, too, there is no small danger of
failing to discriminate between a rational philanthropy, with its
adaptation of means to ends, and that spiritual knight-errantry which
undertakes the championship of every novel project of reform, scouring
the world in search of distressed schemes held in durance by common sense
and vagaries happily spellbound by ridicule.  He must learn that,
although the most needful truth may be unpopular, it does not follow that
unpopularity is a proof of the truth of his doctrines or the expediency
of his measures.  He must have the liberality to admit that it is barely
possible for the public on some points to be right and himself wrong, and
that the blessing invoked upon those who suffer for righteousness is not
available to such as court persecution and invite contempt; for folly has
its martyrs as well as wisdom; and he who has nothing better to show of
himself than the scars and bruises which the popular foot has left upon
him is not even sure of winning the honors of martyrdom as some
compensation for the loss of dignity and self-respect involved in the
exhibition of its pains.  To the reformer, in an especial manner, comes
home the truth that whoso ruleth his own spirit is greater than he who
taketh a city.  Patience, hope, charity, watchfulness unto prayer,--how
needful are all these to his success!  Without them he is in danger of
ingloriously giving up his contest with error and prejudice at the first
repulse; or, with that spiteful philanthropy which we sometimes witness,
taking a sick world by the nose, like a spoiled child, and endeavoring to
force down its throat the long-rejected nostrums prepared for its relief.

What then?  Shall we, in view of these things, call back young, generous
spirits just entering upon the perilous pathway?  God forbid!  Welcome,
thrice welcome, rather.  Let them go forward, not unwarned of the dangers
nor unreminded of the pleasures which belong to the service of humanity.
Great is the consciousness of right.  Sweet is the answer of a good
conscience.  He who pays his whole-hearted homage to truth and duty, who
swears his lifelong fealty on their altars, and rises up a Nazarite
consecrated to their holy service, is not without his solace and
enjoyment when, to the eyes of others, he seems the most lonely and
miserable.  He breathes an atmosphere which the multitude know not of;
"a serene heaven which they cannot discern rests over him, glorious in
its purity and stillness."  Nor is he altogether without kindly human
sympathies.  All generous and earnest hearts which are brought in contact
with his own beat evenly with it.  All that is good, and truthful, and
lovely in man, whenever and wherever it truly recognizes him, must sooner
or later acknowledge his claim to love and reverence.  His faith
overcomes all things.  The future unrolls itself before him, with its
waving harvest-fields springing up from the seed he is scattering; and he
looks forward to the close of life with the calm confidence of one who
feels that he has not lived idle and useless, but with hopeful heart and
strong arm has labored with God and Nature for the best.

And not in vain.  In the economy of God, no effort, however small, put
forth for the right cause, fails of its effect.  No voice, however
feeble, lifted up for truth, ever dies amidst the confused noises of
time.  Through discords of sin and sorrow, pain and wrong, it rises a
deathless melody, whose notes of wailing are hereafter to be changed to
those of triumph as they blend with the great harmony of a reconciled
universe.  The language of a transatlantic reformer to his friends is
then as true as it is hopeful and cheering: "Triumph is certain.  We have
espoused no losing cause.  In the body we may not join our shout with the
victors; but in spirit we may even now.  There is but an interval of time
between us and the success at which we aim.  In all other respects the
links of the chain are complete.  Identifying ourselves with immortal and
immutable principles, we share both their immortality and immutability.
The vow which unites us with truth makes futurity present with us.  Our
being resolves itself into an everlasting now.  It is not so correct to
say that we shall be victorious as that we are so.  When we will in
unison with the supreme Mind, the characteristics of His will become, in
some sort, those of ours.  What He has willed is virtually done.  It may
take ages to unfold itself; but the germ of its whole history is wrapped
up in His determination.  When we make His will ours, which we do when we
aim at truth, that upon which we are resolved is done, decided, born.
Life is in it.  It is; and the future is but the development of its
being.  Ours, therefore, is a perpetual triumph.  Our deeds are, all of
them, component elements of success." [Miall's Essays; Nonconformist,
Vol. iv.]





THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH.

From a letter on the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the landing
of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, December 22, 1870.

No one can appreciate more highly than myself the noble qualities of the
men and women of the Mayflower.  It is not of them that I, a descendant
of the "sect called Quakers," have reason to complain in the matter of
persecution.  A generation which came after them, with less piety and
more bigotry, is especially responsible for the little unpleasantness
referred to; and the sufferers from it scarcely need any present
championship.  They certainly did not wait altogether for the revenges of
posterity.  If they lost their ears, it is satisfactory to remember that
they made those of their mutilators tingle with a rhetoric more sharp
than polite.

A worthy New England deacon once described a brother in the church as a
very good man Godward, but rather hard man-ward.  It cannot be denied
that some very satisfactory steps have been taken in the latter
direction, at least, since the days of the Pilgrims.  Our age is tolerant
of creed and dogma, broader in its sympathies, more keenly sensitive to
temporal need, and, practically recognizing the brotherhood of the race,
wherever a cry of suffering is heard its response is quick and generous.
It has abolished slavery, and is lifting woman from world-old degradation
to equality with man before the law.  Our criminal codes no longer embody
the maxim of barbarism, "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," but
have regard not only for the safety of the community, but to the reform
and well-being of the criminal.  All the more, however, for this amiable
tenderness do we need the counterpoise of a strong sense of justice.
With our sympathy for the wrong-doer we need the old Puritan and Quaker
hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a
righteous abhorrence of sin.  All the more for the sweet humanities and
Christian liberalism which, in drawing men nearer to each other, are
increasing the sum of social influences for good or evil, we need the
bracing atmosphere, healthful, if austere, of the old moralities.
Individual and social duties are quite as imperative now as when they
were minutely specified in statute-books and enforced by penalties no
longer admissible.  It is well that stocks, whipping-post, and ducking-
stool are now only matters of tradition; but the honest reprobation of
vice and crime which they symbolized should by no means perish with them.
The true life of a nation is in its personal morality, and no excellence
of constitution and laws can avail much if the people lack purity and
integrity.  Culture, art, refinement, care for our own comfort and that
of others, are all well, but truth, honor, reverence, and fidelity to
duty are indispensable.

The Pilgrims were right in affirming the paramount authority of the law
of God.  If they erred in seeking that authoritative law, and passed over
the Sermon on the Mount for the stern Hebraisms of Moses; if they
hesitated in view of the largeness of Christian liberty; if they seemed
unwilling to accept the sweetness and light of the good tidings, let us
not forget that it was the mistake of men who feared more than they dared
to hope, whose estimate of the exceeding awfulness of sin caused them to
dwell upon God's vengeance rather than his compassion; and whose dread of
evil was so great that, in shutting their hearts against it, they
sometimes shut out the good.  It is well for us if we have learned to
listen to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes; but there are crises in
all lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" or the
Decalogue which the founders wrote on the gate-posts of their
commonwealth.

Let us then be thankful for the assurances which the last few years have
afforded us that:

              "The Pilgrim spirit is not dead,
               But walks in noon's broad light."

We have seen it in the faith and trust which no circumstances could
shake, in heroic self-sacrifice, in entire consecration to duty.  The
fathers have lived in their sons.  Have we not all known the Winthrops
and Brewsters, the Saltonstalls and Sewalls, of old times, in
gubernatorial chairs, in legislative halls, around winter camp-fires, in
the slow martyrdoms of prison and hospital?  The great struggle through
which we have passed has taught us how much we owe to the men and women
of the Plymouth Colony,--the noblest ancestry that ever a people looked
back to with love and reverence.  Honor, then, to the Pilgrims! Let their
memory be green forever!





GOVERNOR ENDICOTT.

I am sorry that I cannot respond in person to the invitation of the Essex
Institute to its commemorative festival on the 18th.  I especially regret
it, because, though a member of the Society of Friends, and, as such,
regarding with abhorrence the severe persecution of the sect under the
administration of Governor Endicott, I am not unmindful of the otherwise
noble qualities and worthy record of the great Puritan, whose misfortune
it was to live in an age which regarded religious toleration as a crime.
He was the victim of the merciless logic of his creed.  He honestly
thought that every convert to Quakerism became by virtue of that
conversion a child of perdition; and, as the head of the Commonwealth,
responsible for the spiritual as well as temporal welfare of its
inhabitants, he felt it his duty to whip, banish, and hang heretics to
save his people from perilous heresy.

The extravagance of some of the early Quakers has been grossly
exaggerated.  Their conduct will compare in this respect favorably with
that of the first Anabaptists and Independents; but it must be admitted
that many of them manifested a good deal of that wild enthusiasm which
has always been the result of persecution and the denial of the rights of
conscience and worship.  Their pertinacious defiance of laws enacted
against them, and their fierce denunciations of priests and magistrates,
must have been particularly aggravating to a man as proud and high
tempered as John Endicott.  He had that free-tongued neighbor of his,
Edward Wharton, smartly whipped at the cart-tail about once a month, but
it may be questioned whether the governor's ears did not suffer as much
under Wharton's biting sarcasm and "free speech" as the latter's back did
from the magisterial whip.

Time has proved that the Quakers had the best of the controversy; and
their descendants can well afford to forget and forgive an error which
the Puritan governor shared with the generation in which he lived.

WEST OSSIPEE, N. H., 14th 9th Month, 1878.





JOHN WINTHROP.

On the anniversary of his landing at Salem.

I see by the call of the Essex Institute that some probability is
suggested that I may furnish a poem for the occasion of its meeting at
The Willows on the 22d.  I would be glad to make the implied probability
a fact, but I find it difficult to put my thoughts into metrical form,
and there will be little need of it, as I understand a lady of Essex
County, who adds to her modern culture and rare poetical gifts the best
spirit of her Puritan ancestry, has lent the interest of her verse to the
occasion.

It was a happy thought of the Institute to select for its first meeting
of the season the day and the place of the landing of the great and good
governor, and permit me to say, as thy father's old friend, that its
choice for orator, of the son of him whose genius, statesmanship, and
eloquence honored the place of his birth, has been equally happy.  As I
look over the list of the excellent worthies of the first emigrations, I
find no one who, in all respects, occupies a nobler place in the early
colonial history of Massachusetts than John Winthrop.  Like Vane and
Milton, he was a gentleman as well as a Puritan, a cultured and
enlightened statesman as well as a God-fearing Christian.  It was not
under his long and wise chief magistracy that religious bigotry and
intolerance hung and tortured their victims, and the terrible delusion of
witchcraft darkened the sun at noonday over Essex.  If he had not quite
reached the point where, to use the words of Sir Thomas More, he could
"hear heresies talked and yet let the heretics alone," he was in charity
and forbearance far in advance of his generation.

I am sorry that I must miss an occasion of so much interest.  I hope you
will not lack the presence of the distinguished citizen who inherits the
best qualities of his honored ancestor, and who, as a statesman, scholar,
and patriot, has added new lustre to the name of Winthrop.

DANVERS, 6th Month, 19, 1880.





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